What artist wouldn't want to know that 90 percent of her fans are concentrated in Altoona, for example? What artist wouldn't want to be able to send a message to all of the fans who've downloaded his MP3s...
So none of you have a problem with your privacy being violated, so long as it's being done by a starving artist?
Your baseless accusation demonstrates my thesis beautifully.
I like "edgy" art at times, and believe it has a place, but not necessarily in everybody's living room. That's up to them to decide, and all Katz seems to be saying is that he's angry that people prefer pop schlock to his definition of "real art."
as controversial, profane, sexual or other "controversial" cultural offerings from books to movies to music are eliminated or pushed to the margins so that safer products can be mass-marketed.
ROTFL! "Safe" products have always been what are mass-marketed. Have you ever considered that your beloved masses enjoy "safe" things? Even prefer them? Companies push whatever sells.
Not everybody is like you, Katz. Just because you like long boring movies where people just sit around in a room asking "Why?" doesn't mean everybody else does, too.
Is to replace clumsy humans with robots that don't complain, need bathroom breaks, or rat their employers out to OSHA.
Anything which makes human hands marginally more expensive means some company(ies) will choose to automate a line, and X-dozen working people will lose their jobs. Then the unions will moan. Yet one more reason to replace people...
-cwk, who will agree not to sue his employer in exchange for a 10% raise. Otherwise, who knows...
It stands to reason that if the forked features are better, then in the long term that fork will succeed. Forking is not necessarily bad, and the right to do it is arguably one of the core strengths of OSS.
The biggest risk of fragmentation comes not from start-ups building vaporware and me-too distros with forked kernels, but somebody the size of Red Hat putting together a proprietary API that is great for developing apps but closed-source.
IMHO, neither phenomenon is a risk to Linux today, because no single player has the power to dictate terms to the market. If anybody tried to, they'd get laughed out of town.
Now don't get me wrong, I think Apache is great and I run a site on it, and have steered others away from IIS/ASP to Apache/PHP, but...
What I'd really like to see is a count of servers by how many boxes run them. My site is on one machine with 150 others, so that's 150 for Apache. Meanwhile, the web startup I work for has fifteen clustered machines running IIS/SQL7 and that counts as one seat NT.
Obviously both sides are inflated by the virtual seats, but I get the sense that Apache benefits more from these numbers than MS...
I hate sites and services that limit the length of the password I can use. It's like saying "There are better locks out there, but you can't use them."
If you use a sentence or sequence of words strung together, it makes it fairly hard to guess randomly (Use Bartlett's instead of dictionary for cracking?), but I suspect that most people could remember "hereslooking@youkid99000" eaiser than they could remember "hl@yk99k", even though the security levels are comparable. (Is that true?)
I just use an obscure latin phrase that I memorized for a fraternity ritual, and my ATM card pin number. It's XX chars long, but very easy for me to remember.
Microsoft et. al. don't go after piracy nearly as hard as they could because a degree of piracy can actually help, so long as it is kept under control.
How many people out there have MS Office on their computer at home that they installed from a cd they borrowed from work? Chances are they'd never pay +$300 for a legal copy. But the fact that they use Office helps to ensure its dominance, because "everybody uses it."
Those of you who are over 18 will remember when all software came on floppies and was often copy-protected. There's a reason that isn't the case anymore.
Of course, piracy can really gut a small vendor who can't afford to let 10-30% of his business just float away. That's when the moral side of the issue definitely means something.
Remember for a moment, too, that government regulation has more than once produced not competition, but monopoly. AT&T, the railroads, local utilities, cable TV.
The whole broadband market is so in its infancy that it's way too early to stifle this. If AT&T becomes enough of a threat to the architecture of the net, then dump the cable modem and buy DSL.
I hate articles like this one... That seem to think that one aspect of Linux can cause us to lose the "war" with Windows
Well, the Web is the killer app of the late '90s. It's pretty much impossible to imagine selling a desktop machine w/o a decent browser.
Windows is all smoke and mirrors (marketing).
Windows might be deeply flawed but it has consistently delivered the best mixture of price, performance, and support for the 90% of machines out there that use some flavor of it. And yeah, it has a Hell of a good marketing department behind it too, as every successful product must.
Linux is an product that is actually well made and capable of delivering on its promises.
As far as I'm concerned, Linux is still more of a movement than a product. If all that energy can be properly channeled, then we may end up with something.
So maybe now that it's Hollywood getting caught on the short end of the stick, we'll start seeing laws being re-written in a way not so favorable to manufacturers of crappy software.
On the other hand, this fight's a little like they used to say about the Iran-Iraq war: Whay can't both sides lose?
Why is it that NC's have to "win" or "lose?" Anybody who thinks that only one type of computing device will dominate in the future is a fool.
Computing in the future will see many platforms, with multiple OS's running on them. Developers and power users will still buy standalone desktops, while basic home users will get all they need from web-enabled game consoles.
Network computers could be a great thing in many business settings where tens or hundreds of people use identical systems. Maybe the Linux/Netscape/Oracle vision isn't quite right, but the fact is the current model won't work forever.
Microsoft will start bleeding when the cost of ownership starts rising faster than employee productivity. By some measures this has already happened for many people and shops, and will spread. No marketing or FUD will stop that tidal wave, only a radical adjustment on Microsoft's part which leads to a better, more maintainable product.
Every time I read about software patents, I see lots of "worst-case" scenarios of what could happen, theoretically.
But does anyone know of any cases where ridiculous software patents (like Amazon's 1-click shopping patent) have actually been defended successfully, and someone has really suffered as a result?
My suspicion is that a lot of these companies doing the patenting are doing it because they're afraid someone else will patent their stuff first, and charge them money for their own ideas.
The rate of innovation in software is such that most patents would seem to be moot within 1-3 years. Could this be the case, or do such "method" patents make the scope so wide that a patent on, say, MS Word 3.0 would cover StarOffice somehow? Ick.
When I look at the processes by which open standards like Apache, HTTP and HTML are created, I often wonder whether the need for "consensus" trumps the need to innovate quickly.
Hegemony and control are valuable when time-to-market becomes a key concern. This does not necessarily produce a good product but it might produce a winner in the marketplace. Open Source seems great at building revolutionary new ideas (slowly) but not so good at responding to the sort of fast-moving changes Tim O'Reilly suggests are underway. Does anybody agree?
You're all worried about communicating with the so-called "average user" here. I personally doubt that this person even knows what Solaris is, and if they do, only because they own stock in Sun.
The potential for real misinformation here is very low because it will be off the public's radar screen by Monday afternoon. -cwk.
Slashdot Mirror
So none of you have a problem with your privacy being violated, so long as it's being done by a starving artist?
-cwk.
Really? In what ways do you see this manifested? I have heard this charge levelled many times, and have yet to hear a good defense of it.
as long as I can still get to see my iranian pseudo-documentaries I am told that A Taste of Cherries was quite good.
-cwk.
Your baseless accusation demonstrates my thesis beautifully.
I like "edgy" art at times, and believe it has a place, but not necessarily in everybody's living room. That's up to them to decide, and all Katz seems to be saying is that he's angry that people prefer pop schlock to his definition of "real art."
-cwk.
ROTFL!
"Safe" products have always been what are mass-marketed. Have you ever considered that your beloved masses enjoy "safe" things? Even prefer them? Companies push whatever sells.
Not everybody is like you, Katz. Just because you like long boring movies where people just sit around in a room asking "Why?" doesn't mean everybody else does, too.
-cwk.
Is to replace clumsy humans with robots that don't complain, need bathroom breaks, or rat their employers out to OSHA.
Anything which makes human hands marginally more expensive means some company(ies) will choose to automate a line, and X-dozen working people will lose their jobs. Then the unions will moan. Yet one more reason to replace people...
-cwk, who will agree not to sue his employer in exchange for a 10% raise. Otherwise, who knows...
It stands to reason that if the forked features are better, then in the long term that fork will succeed. Forking is not necessarily bad, and the right to do it is arguably one of the core strengths of OSS.
The biggest risk of fragmentation comes not from start-ups building vaporware and me-too distros with forked kernels, but somebody the size of Red Hat putting together a proprietary API that is great for developing apps but closed-source.
IMHO, neither phenomenon is a risk to Linux today, because no single player has the power to dictate terms to the market. If anybody tried to, they'd get laughed out of town.
-Sansbury
Now don't get me wrong, I think Apache is great and I run a site on it, and have steered others away from IIS/ASP to Apache/PHP, but...
What I'd really like to see is a count of servers by how many boxes run them. My site is on one machine with 150 others, so that's 150 for Apache. Meanwhile, the web startup I work for has fifteen clustered machines running IIS/SQL7 and that counts as one seat NT.
Obviously both sides are inflated by the virtual seats, but I get the sense that Apache benefits more from these numbers than MS...
-cwk.
I hate sites and services that limit the length of the password I can use. It's like saying "There are better locks out there, but you can't use them."
If you use a sentence or sequence of words strung together, it makes it fairly hard to guess randomly (Use Bartlett's instead of dictionary for cracking?), but I suspect that most people could remember "hereslooking@youkid99000" eaiser than they could remember "hl@yk99k", even though the security levels are comparable. (Is that true?)
I just use an obscure latin phrase that I memorized for a fraternity ritual, and my ATM card pin number. It's XX chars long, but very easy for me to remember.
-cwk.
Microsoft et. al. don't go after piracy nearly as hard as they could because a degree of piracy can actually help, so long as it is kept under control.
How many people out there have MS Office on their computer at home that they installed from a cd they borrowed from work? Chances are they'd never pay +$300 for a legal copy. But the fact that they use Office helps to ensure its dominance, because "everybody uses it."
Those of you who are over 18 will remember when all software came on floppies and was often copy-protected. There's a reason that isn't the case anymore.
Of course, piracy can really gut a small vendor who can't afford to let 10-30% of his business just float away. That's when the moral side of the issue definitely means something.
-cwk.
The lawsuit alleges that the defendants have harmed more than 500,000 consumers by depriving them of the right to choose their high-speed ISPs...
You have a right to buy or not buy the damned service. GOD!
Extortion is extortion, whether the people doing it have big pinkie rings or law degrees.
-cwk.
Remember for a moment, too, that government regulation has more than once produced not competition, but monopoly. AT&T, the railroads, local utilities, cable TV.
The whole broadband market is so in its infancy that it's way too early to stifle this. If AT&T becomes enough of a threat to the architecture of the net, then dump the cable modem and buy DSL.
-cwk
Well, the Web is the killer app of the late '90s. It's pretty much impossible to imagine selling a desktop machine w/o a decent browser.
Windows is all smoke and mirrors (marketing).
Windows might be deeply flawed but it has consistently delivered the best mixture of price, performance, and support for the 90% of machines out there that use some flavor of it. And yeah, it has a Hell of a good marketing department behind it too, as every successful product must.
Linux is an product that is actually well made and capable of delivering on its promises.
As far as I'm concerned, Linux is still more of a movement than a product. If all that energy can be properly channeled, then we may end up with something.
-cwk.
So maybe now that it's Hollywood getting caught on the short end of the stick, we'll start seeing laws being re-written in a way not so favorable to manufacturers of crappy software.
On the other hand, this fight's a little like they used to say about the Iran-Iraq war: Whay can't both sides lose?
-cwk.
Computing in the future will see many platforms, with multiple OS's running on them. Developers and power users will still buy standalone desktops, while basic home users will get all they need from web-enabled game consoles.
Network computers could be a great thing in many business settings where tens or hundreds of people use identical systems. Maybe the Linux/Netscape/Oracle vision isn't quite right, but the fact is the current model won't work forever.
Microsoft will start bleeding when the cost of ownership starts rising faster than employee productivity. By some measures this has already happened for many people and shops, and will spread. No marketing or FUD will stop that tidal wave, only a radical adjustment on Microsoft's part which leads to a better, more maintainable product.
And isn't that what we all want anyway?
-cwk.
But does anyone know of any cases where ridiculous software patents (like Amazon's 1-click shopping patent) have actually been defended successfully, and someone has really suffered as a result?
My suspicion is that a lot of these companies doing the patenting are doing it because they're afraid someone else will patent their stuff first, and charge them money for their own ideas.
The rate of innovation in software is such that most patents would seem to be moot within 1-3 years. Could this be the case, or do such "method" patents make the scope so wide that a patent on, say, MS Word 3.0 would cover StarOffice somehow? Ick.
-cwk.
What about giving owners three months to prove use, and then making them post a $1000 escrow until they can prove use?
While I agree with the anti-regulatory sentiments of many, I can't stand the squatters. They're nothing but parasites and serve no useful purpose.
Hegemony and control are valuable when time-to-market becomes a key concern. This does not necessarily produce a good product but it might produce a winner in the marketplace. Open Source seems great at building revolutionary new ideas (slowly) but not so good at responding to the sort of fast-moving changes Tim O'Reilly suggests are underway. Does anybody agree?
Colin Kingsbury
cwkingsbury@rcn.com
The potential for real misinformation here is very low because it will be off the public's radar screen by Monday afternoon. -cwk.