Slashdot needs some way of collecting good posts like this (not necessarily directly replies to the topic but just good little essays worth reading in their own right) and letting people who may not necessarily be interested in the top-level topic read them.
perhaps some kind of "search all threads for comments moderated to level 5", or some kind of moderation flag (like the "funny" tag) for something like "classic" that can be searched for also...
This is the "news for nerds" web site. Is there a single nerd on the entire planet for whom the W2K launch today was actually news? Is there anybody calling themself a nerd who DIDN'T know it was coming, and what to expect?
It differed from the 95 launch in that the celebrity spokesbeing switched from Jay Leno to Patrick Stewart, and the music switched from the rolling stones to Santana. Gates gave a speech. Big name media outlets fawned. Ooh. Wow. Call the presses.
"Windows 2000 produced a media event at address BLAH. Please reboot your machine."
It went golden months ago, which was announced. The "news" here was that an existing product started showing up in stores. Wow, big news.
The reason people make tools for Linux and Sun boxes is that even though NT hosts are way easier to crack, they reboot so often any programs left running on them probably won't stay there very long...
Besides, what bragging value is there in cracking an NT box? It's like breaking into Central Park...
Take a low-power processor (crusoe or strongarm), add an IBM microdrive (340 megs the size of a quarter), and a DRAM with a couple dozen megs of memory. Now add in PCS cell phone/modem functionality (tiny microphone, transmitter/receiver with the antenna in the wristband part). And of course a rechargeable lithium battery of some kind to power the whole mess. (If you can get enough power to keep it running all day, you can recharge it at night while you sleep.)
For the software, install a stripped down Linux kernel, some speech recognition and speech synthesis software.
Viola, you have a PC on your wrist that can make cell phone calls, act like a pager, or download your email and read it out loud to you, all voice controlled. (With Infra-red sending capabilities if you can fit it in somewhere.)
And an LCD on the front to tell you what time it is, of course.:)
>you seem to have the impression that the current >regulations would remain. That is incorrect. >I say remove the entire current government, it >performs mostly useless functions anyways.
That's hilarious. Really. When Thomas Jefferson said that a revolution every few years was a good thing, I'm sure he had you personally in mind.
Go look up the phrase "armchair quarterbacking". Then go watch the movie 1776, and the Ken Burns documentary series on the Civil War.
In the mean time, I'm not entirely sure what chemicals you've been sniffing, but please don't share them with anyone else.
>Wrong, it simply requires that he continue to >spend the money, to use it.
As in investing it in stock and running the day to day activities of a corporation? That's how most rich people ARE rich. (It's not cash. Michael Dell doesn't have billions of dollars of cash lying around. He may not even have very many millions. He has a whole lot of Dell stock. To spend it, he has to sell chunks of his company to other people. If he lost too much of it, then he wouldn't be in control of it anymore, he wouldn't be running it.)
I write an article about how what the DVD idiots are doing is profoundly unenforceable, and one of the responses I get is that we should pass a law requiring all rich people to move to another country if they want to stay rich.
Why?
>No one is suggesting that once the person reaches >25 million they must STOP.
Case in point: Suppose I want to build my own colony on mars. I dedicate my entire life to this from age 18. I start my own company, etc etc.
A space shuttle costs (pulling a figure out of a hat) 100 million dollars. The colony itself would take maybe 5 billion. So I can't ever have enough money to even START to fund this.
Imagine if Ford has hit $25 million and quit before he ever came out with the Model T. If you can never go any higher than where you are now (enforced by law), there's no reason to try.
This system has been tried before in Russia, you know. It didn't work there either. Telling the cream-of-the-crop corporate types they can't accumulate money anymore is like telling the cream-of-the-crop programmers (Linus, Alan, etc) that they've submitted too many code patches and they should give somebody else a chance to get their name into the kernel list.
It's been at least 15 years since I've read it but I was pretty darn certain at the time that the thing was an over-the-top parody of the pro-military position. (To tell the truth I remember a lot more about "Podkayne of Mars", which I liked more at the time.)
In any case, a morality tale about the proper role of the military in society (for or against) was turned into "Melrose Space".
>I propose democracy, and a wealth limit. A high >one, say $25million (US).
So people like Michael Dell just have to up and retire when his assets hit $25 million, and Dell computers would have to be liquidated. No company run by its founder can grow beyond $25 million in value. The guy who founded "Virgin airways" should never have had a chance to found "virgin games" or any of the dozens of other companies.
And of course the people who have proven themselves successful at creating and running profitable companies should by no means be allowed to continue doing it. All companies should lose money, or at best break even.
Like most simple utopian strategies, this betrays a profound a vivid lack of understanding of the situation. (Communism, case in point.)
>What DECSS theoretically makes possible is >decryption of a DVD into a series of unencrypted >MPEGS, which would then be considerably easier to >distribute. You don't even need deCSS to do that. A friend of mine has a program that samples the output from a DVD player going to the screen and makes an MPEG out of that. (A bit like making an MP3 from an encrypted audio source by running a wire from the audio out jack to the audio in jack. Last I heard he still couldn't get it to work because he had his DVD player and his hard drive on the same IDE bus and the IDE bandwidth saturation made the playback skip, had to swap some hardware around. Strangely enough, this isn't illegal because he owns the DVDs he's making copies of, and they're for his own use in his upstairs machines that don't have a DVD player. It's just "space shifting".)
The point is, copying DVDs into Video CDs has been around for months. As far as I know, nobody's bothered to write a program to use deCSS to do it
A) because other tools already exist to do so without it.
B) because nobody involved with the deCSS source code as of yet has been even remotely interested in piracy.
Bad PR is a definite effect of this kind of idiocy, yes.:)
Quite possibly the most tangible result as far as corporations are concerned. You have to speak their language to get their attention: Hit them in the marketing department and they start to notice. Bad publicity can drive away even more customers than an outright boycott.
Again, not by being bomb throwing radicals but by being reasonable. "Hi, I've got a legitimate gripe." Being honest, open, and vocal about the problem in a way that other people just might sympathize with. THAT is the kind of thing that scares people on the boards of directors of whatever.
They do a cost benefit analysis of this sort of thing, you know. The befit from being evil bastards is the possibility of lots of moolah. The cost is that our customers are almost certain to become extremely loyal to our competition and don't ever want to speek to us again. Hmmm, now let me think...
>I don't think this is exactly true. Some pirates >(although probably not many) actually *do* pirate >for philosophical reasons. For example, many
True, but not enough to make an economic difference. Strange as it seems, geeks may be a majority of the people MAKING software, but not the majority of the people using or buying it.
>Another point is that people are cheap. Even if >the TV show was $0.25 per half hour, people would >still make copies for their friends and trade >shows around, maximizing the return on their >$0.25 investment. I mean, people steal candy
Again: true, but not enough to make a real economic difference. (Or else stores wouldn't carry so many candy bars.)
It's entirely possible that 25 cents/half hour is still too much money. I threw out a number that seemed reasonable. Flat rate is a much more viable option (if less palatable to the producers who are still thinking in terms of selling products rather than charging for services. Sort of a transitional thing, as it were.)
Sure you CAN keep the video on your computer. (Making that hard to do so only encourages people to do it for the challenge.) But if downloading it again is effectively free (as long as you have the service), why bother?
And passing along selected programs to your friends only encourages them to get the service because now they know what they're missing. Sure, some people are cheap enough to do that kind of thing forever, but they wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
>passing off the TV shows to your friends would >also be "as easy as breathing". Which would you >rather do: breathe for free? or for $0.25?
Forget the 25 cents, I was thinking that for $40/month (same price as cable TV is now, seemed like a good starting cost for the service assuming it's capable of replacing cable TV entirely (not just what's no now is selectable, but everything that's ever been on). At that rate, you'd have to view 80 hours of programming a month before you passed the flat rate. But you're probably right, putting ANY price on individual shows encourages people to think of them in terms of money rather than in terms of "why clutter my hard drive with this when I can get it again for free as long as I have this service?"
A good pay service can compete with a bad free. (This is why busses and airlines and such exist when the vast majority of us are perfectly capable of walking.) And a -GREAT- service can even compete with an acceptable free.
A service like this video thing might even be supportable via advertising, although that's a slippery slope. (Then people would be motivated to cut out the commercials and distribute the advertising-free videos. Might still be workable anyway, but it's a more complicated model. And there's a LOT of cash requried to constantly add massive storage space to store all that old video and keep it all online for whoever wants to see it. Even with the price of storage going way down all the time, I don't know if advertising would be enough any time in the forseeable future...)
I'm not saying this is THE model. I'm saying this is -A- model.
>That Verdana font that you are using it *really* >tough to read on an X-Window machine. You will >have a tough time getting anybody that uses Linux >as a desktop to go to your site.
I make an annual pilgramige to Fool HQ (most of the time I telecommute) and there are more NT machines there than you an possibly imagine. They have a site license from Microsoft.
Microsoft markets itself to its investors at LEAST as much as it markets itself to its customers. It's really hard to convince an investing web site to take any sort of objective stance towards MS because "they've made so much money, they must be wonderful". Let's see, they have to have a better product because they charge more and have exclusive distribution contracts over which they've been in federal antitrust court on and off since 1994... Makes perfect sense.
Sigh...
Rob
(Their message boards run on Active Server Pages. When the load gets high, they flake out. Guess how they solve this problem? Of course: buy more servers to keep the load down! Well, there's a great first response to scalability problems.)
>if they realize that they'll piss off millions of >customers by furthering these ridiculous >lawsuits, they might back down, saving us all a >lot of trouble, and legal bills.
It's not just that. This point didn't make it into the article (space constraints and trying not to alienate a financial audience with hints of socialism) but what we're all doing with the deCSS program is massive, widespread civil disobedience.
We quote gandhi for a reason: he wasn't trying to get anybody to grant him a favor, he was simply ignoring them and orchestrating widespread "business as usual" under the new model until the defenders of the status quo acknowledged the inevitable.
Martin Luther King Jr. did the same thing. Passive, nonviolent (AC flamers take note) resistance. This is what we're doing, it doesn't hurt anyone, and you can't stop us anyway. We write and use open source because now that the PC has completely commotidized all the hardware, the next obvious step is to do the same thing to all the software. Commoditization happens as markets mature. This is capitalism. Scribes had trouble competing when movable type came around. It wasn't a conspiracy, it was competition.
In the long run, if we can't get it for free, we'll have to pay for it. If we CAN get it for free, charging for it won't be able to compete no matter what the law says. Saying there will be no movies without charging admission is like saying there will be no television without charging admission. No books without cover prices: ever seen an editor's slush pile? As for free magzines, tried web surfing lately? No music without a record contract, then what's all that garbage at mp3.com? Or the live band in a bar?
There's a HUGE market for filtering through the garbage to find the 1% that's worth keeping. That's what the record companies USED to do. That's what the movie companies sort of do filtering through screenplay slush piles. That's what Red Hat (and a zillion others) try to do with Linux. And these service companies can find the best writers/singers/actors and hire them, to keep a steady supply of good material on hand. Customers come to them not because they can't go elsewhere but because what this company produces is good enough to pay for. Exactly the way Red Hat employs Alan Cox. Contratulations, it's a service industry.
Forcing people to pay for things isn't capitalism. Providing something they ARE willing to pay for is capitalism. Deal with it.
>a few years ago these guys were ignored by TPTB, >but they are read by financial people now. they >get quoted in financial circles the way slashdot >gets quoted (and is unoformly read by) the tech >journalists.
Don't make the mistake of thinking The Motley Fool is a monolithic entity. Or any news/commentary organization, for that matter. The first my editor had heard about the situation either way was when I sent him the article.
I try to bring issues like this to the financial community for the same reason people write documentation. Just because WE know something doesn't mean everybody does, and the ones who don't already know it are often the ones most in need of being told about it.
The thing about the GPL is it says you can't distribute the binary and then keep the source code seperate. You can't put any additional restrictions on the distribution of the source that aren't on distribution of the binary. Sure you can make a binary for internal use only, which seems to be what people are getting upset about. but that's a seperate issue. You can force recipients to sign a contract that says they won't redistribute, but A) that restriction is not based on copyright, it's part of contract law. B) the recipient still has to get the source, C) once the source leaks the originator can't prevent further distribution, only punish the one who leaked it for breach of contract (if they can find them). And of course it's entirely possible to sue to open the thing back up anyway without leaking based on the contract's restrictions being a violation of the license. Lawyers can wrangle all they want, but this kind of thing simply wouldn't hold up in the real world. Microsoft couldn't use it to make "MS Linux" because every single customer would A) have to sign a contract saying they wouldn't redistribute anything (an unsigned contract is amazingly weak, things like licenses take their legal force from the fact you start WITHOUT the rights they grant you, so if you make a fuss you're more likely to lose than gain), B) still have to receive the source code anyway. Rob
I dunno, I got my last 3 jobs online. And each time it took about a week from deciding I wanted a new job to accepting an offer.
Then again, I have plenty of confidence about my ability to program. I'm darn good, I work hard, I learn fast, and not only do I know it, I can demonstrate it. I can also work in groups and actually enjoy documenting things and working with other people (one of my hobbies is teaching night courses at a community college). And I look good in a suit and have a resume ranging from full-time at IBM to being as head programmer at a java start-up. I've even done consulting, because a contract that ends after 6 months isn't a problem. (They usually want to renew. I usually don't, there tends to be a reason they're willing to pay outside contractors exorbitant fees to do whatever it is, and it's not because the job is fun...)
I have no confidence about women, though. I don't understand the social role I'm expected to play to seek out and find them, and waiting for them to approach me doesn't work either. I'm told I'm supposed to go find THEM. This could explain why I've been approached by five (count 'em, five) homosexual men over the past few years, but no women. (They're always very polite about it when I tell them I'm straight, but the cumulative imbalance here went beyond annoying a long time ago.)
Of course it doesn't help that I've gradually become terminally shy around women I find remotely attractive, but after using the fun and supportive environment of high school to develop social skills, who wouldn't be? I just don't know the criteria I'm supposed to be judged by. I can't go "I can do this" because I honestly don't know, and if you approach something expecting failure, you get it.
The fact that I work killer hours in an industry that's 95% male (judging by my co-workers, my fellow students in grad school, and the students I teach "intro to java" to) doesn't help. You want to get REALLY shy around women, try going months at a time without even speaking to any. (IBM is the official 50 year old balding fat white man corporation of the 2000 olympics. I left in part because I was about 25 years too young to fit in, but the gender ratio hasn't changed much elsewhere in the high-tech industry.)
I've HEARD of geek girls, but I'm not sure I believe in them. Why would a woman waste her entire adolescence sitting in front of a small box figuring out how to get it to whirr and blink it's lights? Don't they like to actually speak to other human beings occasionally? Thought I read that somewhere...:)
I'm told women are 51% of the population, but this is could have something to do with the fact they live a lot longer than men. Down around my age, it seems to be decidedly the other way.
>I'm starting to get really tired of the press >paying the most attention to the hotheads and >ignoring reasonable voices.
Welcome to journalism. This has nothing to do with slashdot or the internet, they do that everywhere.
Thirty people sitting in a small room quietly deciding policy for the next thousand years is boring, but some nut throwing a molitov cocktail in times square to promote vegetable rights, that's NEWS!
We do it too, you know. Al gore once said in an interview that he invented "the internet" instead of "the term 'information superhighway'" and we descended on the guy with torches and pitchforks. We have a disquieting fondness for flamewars.
After a while, you learn to ignore it or take it to email. Most of the time, anyway.
Java's failure to take over the world wasn't the result of speed, versioning, or hype. Those were contributing factors, but not the cause.
The cause is that we didn't want to subject ourselves to yet another abusive monopoly. Sun wanted to "rescue" us from Microsoft the way Microsoft "rescued" us from monopolistic IBM, and for those of you who remember back to the visicalc days, it's exactly the same way IBM rescued us from the tyrrany of Apple's monopoly. Bit of a pattern there.
When Sun was going "Don't worry, we'll submit it to ISO" we were willing to give it a try, but when it became clear they were just stringing us along, we balked. Sun didn't want to destroy Microsoft's monopoly, it wanted to capture it. And we, as consumers, were sick of being pushed around and bled dry.
About the time enthusiasm in Java was being replaced by disgust at Sun's proto-monopolistic rumblings, the world looked around for an alternative and rediscovered Linux, and it was EXACTLY what we wanted. A system that COULD NOT result in a single monopoly. Those of us trying to USE the thing could go about our business in peace without forced upgrades, and those of us trying to make money on the thing could compete on a level playing field.
And we went "ooh", and pounced, and there was much rejoicing. 99% of us can't be bothered to mess with source code, but as anti-monopoly insurance Open Source and the GPL are pure gold.
This doesn't mean Java isn't a valuable tool. I still write Java programs in my day job. It's just that we won't bet our future on it, because it comes with Sun's strings attached. Sun may not be Microsoft now, but back in the early 80's Microsoft wasn't Microsoft, either. Power corrupts, absolute power is kind of neat, and all that...
Rob
Re:SCO might be worse press in the short-run that
on
SCO Talks About Linux
·
· Score: 1
Actually, SCO has already missed its opportunity to be the first one to die. SGI's IRIX beat it to the punch. TRU-64 is also showing signs of strain since the death of Alpha NT, since Linux is now the default OS for that platform and Linux supports TRU-64 binaries. With compaq downsizing, it's really easy to move TRU-64 developers over to Linux basically by giving them new business cards and a box of O'Reilly books...
Not from Debian's point of view. Their products do not contain any restrictions on what use can be made on them, and any such restriction on a package automatically keeps it out of a distribution. Even saying that brazilian yak farmers can't use the CD to shingle their roof is by definition an unacceptable restriction on usage.
The GPL does impose one obligation on the distribution of modified versions of the program, specifically that you must distribute the source code to the modified version or you have no right to distribute the binary. But this restriction is accepted (after some debate) for pragmatic reasons, and because its intent is to preserve freedom rather than take it away. And most importantly, because it's not a restriction on how the product can be used, or how the unmodified product can be distributed, and it ultimately does not prevent distribution of the modified product. (The QT license has similar distribution restrictions, saying modifications have to be seperated into patch files. They grumbled a bit about that one too, but again pragmatism won out.)
In all other respects you're free to use and distribute Debian any way you want, within the bounds of your local laws. You two year old can play with it in her room. You can take it apart and learn how it works. You can start a communist insurgency with it, or put up a home page about yak farming. And you can make money with it, even put it at the heart of a multinational corporation's billion dollar project if it's a good tool to use there.
The Unisys patent infringes on some uses of the product, specifically the right to use the software for commercial purposes. This is considered unacceptable, not merely uncomfortable, and pragmatism won't budge them here. All the "but it's a great product" arguments in the world won't convince the Debian developers if the end result is that the product is discriminatory about who gets to use it and how.
There are a lot of things geeks like me admire about you, but the one part of your life where it spills over into sheer envy involves your wife, Hobbit. How'd you meet her? (I assume you had to be awake during the day at least once? And possibly even in or through the Big Blue Room at least briefly...?)
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot needs some way of collecting good posts like this (not necessarily directly replies to the topic but just good little essays worth reading in their own right) and letting people who may not necessarily be interested in the top-level topic read them.
perhaps some kind of "search all threads for comments moderated to level 5", or some kind of moderation flag (like the "funny" tag) for something like "classic" that can be searched for also...
Just a thought...
Rob
Beats having to wait to get access to the code until the High Priest okays it.
Rob
It differed from the 95 launch in that the celebrity spokesbeing switched from Jay Leno to Patrick Stewart, and the music switched from the rolling stones to Santana. Gates gave a speech. Big name media outlets fawned. Ooh. Wow. Call the presses.
"Windows 2000 produced a media event at address BLAH. Please reboot your machine."
It went golden months ago, which was announced. The "news" here was that an existing product started showing up in stores. Wow, big news.
Rob
>and not doing so was a conscious effort on his
>part.
As far as I can tell, he's never consciously put words in a poster's mouth in the entire history of slashdot.
He appends comments at the end all the time, of course. But they're clearly deliniated.
Besides, what bragging value is there in cracking an NT box? It's like breaking into Central Park...
For the software, install a stripped down Linux kernel, some speech recognition and speech synthesis software.
Viola, you have a PC on your wrist that can make cell phone calls, act like a pager, or download your email and read it out loud to you, all voice controlled. (With Infra-red sending capabilities if you can fit it in somewhere.)
And an LCD on the front to tell you what time it is, of course. :)
Rob
>regulations would remain. That is incorrect.
>I say remove the entire current government, it
>performs mostly useless functions anyways.
That's hilarious. Really. When Thomas Jefferson said that a revolution every few years was a good thing, I'm sure he had you personally in mind.
Go look up the phrase "armchair quarterbacking". Then go watch the movie 1776, and the Ken Burns documentary series on the Civil War.
In the mean time, I'm not entirely sure what chemicals you've been sniffing, but please don't share them with anyone else.
Rob
>spend the money, to use it.
As in investing it in stock and running the day to day activities of a corporation? That's how most rich people ARE rich. (It's not cash. Michael Dell doesn't have billions of dollars of cash lying around. He may not even have very many millions. He has a whole lot of Dell stock. To spend it, he has to sell chunks of his company to other people. If he lost too much of it, then he wouldn't be in control of it anymore, he wouldn't be running it.)
I write an article about how what the DVD idiots are doing is profoundly unenforceable, and one of the responses I get is that we should pass a law requiring all rich people to move to another country if they want to stay rich.
Why?
>No one is suggesting that once the person reaches
>25 million they must STOP.
Case in point: Suppose I want to build my own colony on mars. I dedicate my entire life to this from age 18. I start my own company, etc etc.
A space shuttle costs (pulling a figure out of a hat) 100 million dollars. The colony itself would take maybe 5 billion. So I can't ever have enough money to even START to fund this.
Imagine if Ford has hit $25 million and quit before he ever came out with the Model T. If you can never go any higher than where you are now (enforced by law), there's no reason to try.
This system has been tried before in Russia, you know. It didn't work there either. Telling the cream-of-the-crop corporate types they can't accumulate money anymore is like telling the cream-of-the-crop programmers (Linus, Alan, etc) that they've submitted too many code patches and they should give somebody else a chance to get their name into the kernel list.
Rob
In any case, a morality tale about the proper role of the military in society (for or against) was turned into "Melrose Space".
Rob
>one, say $25million (US).
So people like Michael Dell just have to up and retire when his assets hit $25 million, and Dell computers would have to be liquidated. No company run by its founder can grow beyond $25 million in value. The guy who founded "Virgin airways" should never have had a chance to found "virgin games" or any of the dozens of other companies.
And of course the people who have proven themselves successful at creating and running profitable companies should by no means be allowed to continue doing it. All companies should lose money, or at best break even.
Like most simple utopian strategies, this betrays a profound a vivid lack of understanding of the situation. (Communism, case in point.)
Rob
The point is, copying DVDs into Video CDs has been around for months. As far as I know, nobody's bothered to write a program to use deCSS to do it
A) because other tools already exist to do so without it.
B) because nobody involved with the deCSS source code as of yet has been even remotely interested in piracy.
Rob
Quite possibly the most tangible result as far as corporations are concerned. You have to speak their language to get their attention: Hit them in the marketing department and they start to notice. Bad publicity can drive away even more customers than an outright boycott.
Again, not by being bomb throwing radicals but by being reasonable. "Hi, I've got a legitimate gripe." Being honest, open, and vocal about the problem in a way that other people just might sympathize with. THAT is the kind of thing that scares people on the boards of directors of whatever.
They do a cost benefit analysis of this sort of thing, you know. The befit from being evil bastards is the possibility of lots of moolah. The cost is that our customers are almost certain to become extremely loyal to our competition and don't ever want to speek to us again. Hmmm, now let me think...
Rob
>(although probably not many) actually *do* pirate
>for philosophical reasons. For example, many
True, but not enough to make an economic difference. Strange as it seems, geeks may be a majority of the people MAKING software, but not the majority of the people using or buying it.
>Another point is that people are cheap. Even if
>the TV show was $0.25 per half hour, people would
>still make copies for their friends and trade
>shows around, maximizing the return on their
>$0.25 investment. I mean, people steal candy
Again: true, but not enough to make a real economic difference. (Or else stores wouldn't carry so many candy bars.)
It's entirely possible that 25 cents/half hour is still too much money. I threw out a number that seemed reasonable. Flat rate is a much more viable option (if less palatable to the producers who are still thinking in terms of selling products rather than charging for services. Sort of a transitional thing, as it were.)
Sure you CAN keep the video on your computer. (Making that hard to do so only encourages people to do it for the challenge.) But if downloading it again is effectively free (as long as you have the service), why bother?
And passing along selected programs to your friends only encourages them to get the service because now they know what they're missing. Sure, some people are cheap enough to do that kind of thing forever, but they wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
>passing off the TV shows to your friends would
>also be "as easy as breathing". Which would you
>rather do: breathe for free? or for $0.25?
Forget the 25 cents, I was thinking that for $40/month (same price as cable TV is now, seemed like a good starting cost for the service assuming it's capable of replacing cable TV entirely (not just what's no now is selectable, but everything that's ever been on). At that rate, you'd have to view 80 hours of programming a month before you passed the flat rate. But you're probably right, putting ANY price on individual shows encourages people to think of them in terms of money rather than in terms of "why clutter my hard drive with this when I can get it again for free as long as I have this service?"
A good pay service can compete with a bad free. (This is why busses and airlines and such exist when the vast majority of us are perfectly capable of walking.) And a -GREAT- service can even compete with an acceptable free.
A service like this video thing might even be supportable via advertising, although that's a slippery slope. (Then people would be motivated to cut out the commercials and distribute the advertising-free videos. Might still be workable anyway, but it's a more complicated model. And there's a LOT of cash requried to constantly add massive storage space to store all that old video and keep it all online for whoever wants to see it. Even with the price of storage going way down all the time, I don't know if advertising would be enough any time in the forseeable future...)
I'm not saying this is THE model. I'm saying this is -A- model.
Rob
>tough to read on an X-Window machine. You will
>have a tough time getting anybody that uses Linux
>as a desktop to go to your site.
I make an annual pilgramige to Fool HQ (most of the time I telecommute) and there are more NT machines there than you an possibly imagine. They have a site license from Microsoft.
Microsoft markets itself to its investors at LEAST as much as it markets itself to its customers. It's really hard to convince an investing web site to take any sort of objective stance towards MS because "they've made so much money, they must be wonderful". Let's see, they have to have a better product because they charge more and have exclusive distribution contracts over which they've been in federal antitrust court on and off since 1994... Makes perfect sense.
Sigh...
Rob
(Their message boards run on Active Server Pages. When the load gets high, they flake out. Guess how they solve this problem? Of course: buy more servers to keep the load down! Well, there's a great first response to scalability problems.)
>customers by furthering these ridiculous
>lawsuits, they might back down, saving us all a
>lot of trouble, and legal bills.
It's not just that. This point didn't make it into the article (space constraints and trying not to alienate a financial audience with hints of socialism) but what we're all doing with the deCSS program is massive, widespread civil disobedience.
We quote gandhi for a reason: he wasn't trying to get anybody to grant him a favor, he was simply ignoring them and orchestrating widespread "business as usual" under the new model until the defenders of the status quo acknowledged the inevitable.
Martin Luther King Jr. did the same thing. Passive, nonviolent (AC flamers take note) resistance. This is what we're doing, it doesn't hurt anyone, and you can't stop us anyway. We write and use open source because now that the PC has completely commotidized all the hardware, the next obvious step is to do the same thing to all the software. Commoditization happens as markets mature. This is capitalism. Scribes had trouble competing when movable type came around. It wasn't a conspiracy, it was competition.
In the long run, if we can't get it for free, we'll have to pay for it. If we CAN get it for free, charging for it won't be able to compete no matter what the law says. Saying there will be no movies without charging admission is like saying there will be no television without charging admission. No books without cover prices: ever seen an editor's slush pile? As for free magzines, tried web surfing lately? No music without a record contract, then what's all that garbage at mp3.com? Or the live band in a bar?
There's a HUGE market for filtering through the garbage to find the 1% that's worth keeping. That's what the record companies USED to do. That's what the movie companies sort of do filtering through screenplay slush piles. That's what Red Hat (and a zillion others) try to do with Linux. And these service companies can find the best writers/singers/actors and hire them, to keep a steady supply of good material on hand. Customers come to them not because they can't go elsewhere but because what this company produces is good enough to pay for. Exactly the way Red Hat employs Alan Cox. Contratulations, it's a service industry.
Forcing people to pay for things isn't capitalism. Providing something they ARE willing to pay for is capitalism. Deal with it.
Rob
>but they are read by financial people now. they
>get quoted in financial circles the way slashdot
>gets quoted (and is unoformly read by) the tech
>journalists.
-I- have author-i-tai?
*Shudder*. Stop scaring me like that!
Rob (TMFOak)
I try to bring issues like this to the financial community for the same reason people write documentation. Just because WE know something doesn't mean everybody does, and the ones who don't already know it are often the ones most in need of being told about it.
Rob
The thing about the GPL is it says you can't distribute the binary and then keep the source code seperate. You can't put any additional restrictions on the distribution of the source that aren't on distribution of the binary. Sure you can make a binary for internal use only, which seems to be what people are getting upset about. but that's a seperate issue. You can force recipients to sign a contract that says they won't redistribute, but A) that restriction is not based on copyright, it's part of contract law. B) the recipient still has to get the source, C) once the source leaks the originator can't prevent further distribution, only punish the one who leaked it for breach of contract (if they can find them). And of course it's entirely possible to sue to open the thing back up anyway without leaking based on the contract's restrictions being a violation of the license. Lawyers can wrangle all they want, but this kind of thing simply wouldn't hold up in the real world. Microsoft couldn't use it to make "MS Linux" because every single customer would A) have to sign a contract saying they wouldn't redistribute anything (an unsigned contract is amazingly weak, things like licenses take their legal force from the fact you start WITHOUT the rights they grant you, so if you make a fuss you're more likely to lose than gain), B) still have to receive the source code anyway. Rob
Then again, I have plenty of confidence about my ability to program. I'm darn good, I work hard, I learn fast, and not only do I know it, I can demonstrate it. I can also work in groups and actually enjoy documenting things and working with other people (one of my hobbies is teaching night courses at a community college). And I look good in a suit and have a resume ranging from full-time at IBM to being as head programmer at a java start-up. I've even done consulting, because a contract that ends after 6 months isn't a problem. (They usually want to renew. I usually don't, there tends to be a reason they're willing to pay outside contractors exorbitant fees to do whatever it is, and it's not because the job is fun...)
I have no confidence about women, though. I don't understand the social role I'm expected to play to seek out and find them, and waiting for them to approach me doesn't work either. I'm told I'm supposed to go find THEM. This could explain why I've been approached by five (count 'em, five) homosexual men over the past few years, but no women. (They're always very polite about it when I tell them I'm straight, but the cumulative imbalance here went beyond annoying a long time ago.)
Of course it doesn't help that I've gradually become terminally shy around women I find remotely attractive, but after using the fun and supportive environment of high school to develop social skills, who wouldn't be? I just don't know the criteria I'm supposed to be judged by. I can't go "I can do this" because I honestly don't know, and if you approach something expecting failure, you get it.
The fact that I work killer hours in an industry that's 95% male (judging by my co-workers, my fellow students in grad school, and the students I teach "intro to java" to) doesn't help. You want to get REALLY shy around women, try going months at a time without even speaking to any. (IBM is the official 50 year old balding fat white man corporation of the 2000 olympics. I left in part because I was about 25 years too young to fit in, but the gender ratio hasn't changed much elsewhere in the high-tech industry.)
I've HEARD of geek girls, but I'm not sure I believe in them. Why would a woman waste her entire adolescence sitting in front of a small box figuring out how to get it to whirr and blink it's lights? Don't they like to actually speak to other human beings occasionally? Thought I read that somewhere... :)
I'm told women are 51% of the population, but this is could have something to do with the fact they live a lot longer than men. Down around my age, it seems to be decidedly the other way.
I'll stop now.
>paying the most attention to the hotheads and
>ignoring reasonable voices.
Welcome to journalism. This has nothing to do with slashdot or the internet, they do that everywhere.
Thirty people sitting in a small room quietly deciding policy for the next thousand years is boring, but some nut throwing a molitov cocktail in times square to promote vegetable rights, that's NEWS!
We do it too, you know. Al gore once said in an interview that he invented "the internet" instead of "the term 'information superhighway'" and we descended on the guy with torches and pitchforks. We have a disquieting fondness for flamewars.
After a while, you learn to ignore it or take it to email. Most of the time, anyway.
What the #*%&(#% were they doing BEFORE?
The cause is that we didn't want to subject ourselves to yet another abusive monopoly. Sun wanted to "rescue" us from Microsoft the way Microsoft "rescued" us from monopolistic IBM, and for those of you who remember back to the visicalc days, it's exactly the same way IBM rescued us from the tyrrany of Apple's monopoly. Bit of a pattern there.
When Sun was going "Don't worry, we'll submit it to ISO" we were willing to give it a try, but when it became clear they were just stringing us along, we balked. Sun didn't want to destroy Microsoft's monopoly, it wanted to capture it. And we, as consumers, were sick of being pushed around and bled dry.
About the time enthusiasm in Java was being replaced by disgust at Sun's proto-monopolistic rumblings, the world looked around for an alternative and rediscovered Linux, and it was EXACTLY what we wanted. A system that COULD NOT result in a single monopoly. Those of us trying to USE the thing could go about our business in peace without forced upgrades, and those of us trying to make money on the thing could compete on a level playing field.
And we went "ooh", and pounced, and there was much rejoicing. 99% of us can't be bothered to mess with source code, but as anti-monopoly insurance Open Source and the GPL are pure gold.
This doesn't mean Java isn't a valuable tool. I still write Java programs in my day job. It's just that we won't bet our future on it, because it comes with Sun's strings attached. Sun may not be Microsoft now, but back in the early 80's Microsoft wasn't Microsoft, either. Power corrupts, absolute power is kind of neat, and all that...
Rob
Actually, SCO has already missed its opportunity to be the first one to die. SGI's IRIX beat it to the punch. TRU-64 is also showing signs of strain since the death of Alpha NT, since Linux is now the default OS for that platform and Linux supports TRU-64 binaries. With compaq downsizing, it's really easy to move TRU-64 developers over to Linux basically by giving them new business cards and a box of O'Reilly books...
Not from Debian's point of view. Their products do not contain any restrictions on what use can be made on them, and any such restriction on a package automatically keeps it out of a distribution. Even saying that brazilian yak farmers can't use the CD to shingle their roof is by definition an unacceptable restriction on usage.
The GPL does impose one obligation on the distribution of modified versions of the program, specifically that you must distribute the source code to the modified version or you have no right to distribute the binary. But this restriction is accepted (after some debate) for pragmatic reasons, and because its intent is to preserve freedom rather than take it away. And most importantly, because it's not a restriction on how the product can be used, or how the unmodified product can be distributed, and it ultimately does not prevent distribution of the modified product. (The QT license has similar distribution restrictions, saying modifications have to be seperated into patch files. They grumbled a bit about that one too, but again pragmatism won out.)
In all other respects you're free to use and distribute Debian any way you want, within the bounds of your local laws. You two year old can play with it in her room. You can take it apart and learn how it works. You can start a communist insurgency with it, or put up a home page about yak farming. And you can make money with it, even put it at the heart of a multinational corporation's billion dollar project if it's a good tool to use there.
The Unisys patent infringes on some uses of the product, specifically the right to use the software for commercial purposes. This is considered unacceptable, not merely uncomfortable, and pragmatism won't budge them here. All the "but it's a great product" arguments in the world won't convince the Debian developers if the end result is that the product is discriminatory about who gets to use it and how.
There are a lot of things geeks like me admire about you, but the one part of your life where it spills over into sheer envy involves your wife, Hobbit. How'd you meet her? (I assume you had to be awake during the day at least once? And possibly even in or through the Big Blue Room at least briefly...?)