Actually, just such a device figures prominently in the steampunk novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and (I believe) Neal Stephenson
In the book, they are movie-screen sized devices with wooden block "pixels" made of bits of polygonal wood with each face painted a different color. By rotating the block so that a given face faced the audience, the pixel color was changed.
I suppose that one could take a cue from the Wooden Mirror at SIGGRAPH, and rotate the block in the X-axis (with top lighting) to vary the intensity of the color of each pixel.
Anyway, the whole system (in the book), being driven by thousands of little rods that need constant lubrication, are very sensitive to dust, and generate a lot of heat, is represented as being a little flaky. There's a schene where a character is making what amounts to a PowerPoint presentation in front of one of these screens, and there are a series of glitches in his program.
This is one of those ideas that is based on strong science, but where the devil is in the engineering
The Northern Belle is long gone. We floated it down the river almost a year ago.
The main casino is completely new. Lots of pretty lights, loud sounds, and a waterfall too.
And we don't have muggers lying in wait outside the casino, like the Detroit casinos do.
Heh. The first time I crossed the border into Detroit, the Customs officer asked me if I had any firearms. When I said "No" he said "Good God man! Here, take mine!":)
Gee guys, how about bringing the show to Windsor, Ontario next time through?
- We're right across the river from Detroit - We've got this kick-ass casino, for those into flaunting probability - 78% less gunfire than our cross-border neighbour! - That world-famous kernel hacker Kid Rock may drop by - Cuban cigars for everyone!
Seriously though, it'd be good to have a Linux Happening in my back yard for a change.
If Napster in indeed shut down today, there's going to be a huge wave of kiddies looking for a replacement - RIGHT NOW! And it's probably safe to say that a large number of them will be trying out Gnutella.
I've heard that Gnutella has setup/configuration/usibility issues - not suprising, in that most Free Software starts out with "it works!", moves to "it works well!", and finally arrives at "it's easy to use!" much later on.
If that truly is the case, then the Gnutella folks are about to be deluged with support requests from kiddies to lazy, too clueless, or too impatient to read and undertsand the app. After the, ohh, ten thousandth "plz h3lp m3 instal ur k001 program nootella" message, I think there will be a rash of code hacking to make the app easier to set up and use.
Which, incidently, removes what the RIAA calls the biggest deterrent to using Gnutella (ease of use).
The irony here is hillarious - by shutting down the for-profit Napster - which might have been extorted into paying royalties of some sort - the RIAA is going to provide the sudden surge in user base for Gnutella, which they won't be able to touch!
It's amazing that Jack Valenti and friends can still walk, with the way they keep shooting their own feet all the time.
I will switch to Evolution - no matter how flaky and unstable it might be - if it supports seamless and invisible PGP encryption.
Here's what I want:
1) Store all my mail PGP encrypted in the mail file. If I get unencrypted mail, then encrypt it BEFORE it hits the hard disk.
2) When I start the program, prompt me for my pass phrase, and cache it for this session or for a user-definable timeout period.
3) PGP sign all outgoing mail
4) Add public keys to my keyring as seamlessly and invisibly as possible.
5) If I send mail to someon for whom I have a public key, encrypt it BY DEFAULT.
The biggest problem with using mail encryption is that the interface is such a pain in the ass. If Evolution hides all the dirty details, then I can start encrypting my mail on a regular basis - and if the encryption support is really good and enabled BY DEFAULT, then we get the "fax machine effect".
So now, faced with Dick's signs that point out their insecure security, Dick's neighbors will stop putting their house keys in easily located places, and the net security level goes up.
They might not be too happy with Dick, but their house is now secure.
Better REAL security than false illusions of security.
A.TGZ extension is a Microsoft-ed, three-letter-extension version of the old and traditional Uniz.tar.gz extension sequence, indicating a group of files collected together with tar, and then compressed with gzip.
While there are some nice features about components, like anything else it's possible to have too much of a good thing.
Taken to extremes - like our good friends in Redmond - you wind up with many, many applications depending on a large number of common components, with (here's the kicker) at times incompatible APIs. Need BeltchWord 5.0 and FlatuanceDraw 6.2? Can't do that if they each want different versions of the same component.
And then you get situations where an application upgrades a component that the OS/Window Manager depends on.... version control lunacy.
I believe this is called "DLL Hell" in Windows circles.
No thanks Miguel. I like and use GNOME, and I look forward to useful things like a common GNOME printing model, but I also very much indeed like the current UNIX way of doing things with regards to the window manager, X, and the kernel.
Some may see 20 years of development as "stagnant" but I see 20 years of continuous evolution. Cockroaches haven't changed much in 20 million years, because they don't have to - they're pretty damned efficiant as shipped.
Alan Cox diving under a rock?
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
·
· Score: 2
I see from Alan's diary entry that he's going into a maintainence mode of sorts:
- he's stopping work on the 2.3/4 kernel - he's going to continue maintaining the 2.2 kernel, but, - he's heavily filtering his mail, so that only people who contact him regularly can reach him
This seems a little extreme....
Maybe he's just taking a little break while he rebuilds his new (old) house, but I can't help but wonder if everyone's favourite Swansea hacker isn't feeling a little burnt out these days.
I've been using the binary-only OSS sound drivers for the last couple of years, and it's been a serious Pain in the Ass.
- you have to download and re-install the drivers every time you change kernel versions - this means you can't upgrade a kernel (or upgrade, and lose sound for a while) until the binary-only release for your version is available - you better have the same libc as the sound drivers, or Bad Things Happen - if Opensound ever goes away, then no more driver support for me!*
I'd much rather have the source, and I'd rather that source become part of the official kernel distribution, where I can count on it being compatible with my system under all circumstances.
Or to put it another way, distributing binary-only drivers means you are now in the Linux tech support business, where your drivers must keep pace with kernel development. Release driver source, and it's likely that someone else will do the maintainence for you - at least as far as API changes etc. go.
*OK, bad example, there are now working proper source drivers for my soundcard in the kernel, so I do have an alternative these days. For increasingly obscure or convoluted tech though (video cards) reverse engineering open source drivers may not be as feasable. If the company providing binary-only drivers decides to stop doing so, you're pretty well screwed come kernel recompile time.
...they release a fast, stable, and reasonably bug-free Linux version of Corel Draw.
Once that happens, the cash cow has arrived.
But if it's clunky, flaky, bloated, and slow, then we're in for another round of "We're not dead yet!"
Note for those who view Corel's involvement with WINE as evidence of a high probablility of "bloated and slow" - there are two ways to use WINE: The first is "not an emulator mode", where a WINE process runs a native Windows binary and handles all the OS calls - this is more likely than not to be sub-optimal. The second is to compile Windows source code against libwine, which is a native-Linux shared object that provides the Windows API.
The first method is a massive (if nifty) hack, and I'd never expect to see any real production application depending on it. The second method is more like building a toolkit app, like a Motif of GTK app - only in this case, the toolkit is the Windows API. If Corel is building Corel Draw for Linux based on the libwine method, the results are likely to be pretty good.
Even better would be a native GTK version of Corel Draw, but a libwine version is completely acceptable, assuming acceptable libwine performance. Running Draw under WINE "emulation" though, is not acceptable, at least not to me.
Let's say you have designed a spacecraft that can fly to Mars and set up a colony. You've got some colonists who understand that it's a one-way trip and are willing to try anyways, and you've managed to knit funding somehow.
For the sake of argument, let's say your ship weighs as much as a fully-loaded 767-300 - that's all the fuel, life support systems, and colony equipment. You've got 412,000 pounds of spacecraft to lift into orbit.
At the current price of $10,000 per lb, it's going to cost you $4,120,000,000 to get that sucker into orbit. That's 4.12 BILLION. That's totally excluding the cost of the spaceship itself. Not even Bill Gates can afford this.
Now at $600 per pound, the cost to get into orbit is a mere $247,200,000 Still hardly chump change, but much more reasonable. On a billion-dollar budget, you'd still have three-quarters left to actually build the spacecraft. At this price point, a Bill Gates or a Ted Turner could actually afford to fund the project - and I bet Ted would do it. "The Real World" set on a spacecraft going to Mars would be a ratings monster, and might even make money.
But at the current $10k/lb price point - no way in hell can anyone outside of governments afford to play the game.
If BDR had a table with a BDR CD on it - a physical, plastic and aluminum disk that cost money to produce - and someone walked off with it, they your analogy holds.
But if BDR is singing on a street corner, and someone records the song instead of buying the CD, nothing has been "lost" There's nothing there to steal. BDR owns the pile of CDs on his table, but he doesn't own the air, nore does he have any right to try and prevent the recording - either made from the air around him, or from a CD already sold.
Before I start in - well done on the article. Well written, well thought out, and little wry gems like "Baptist Death Ray is a more refined taste" were a nice touch.
It's also nice to see you here, in the comments section, were we can go ahead and wrestle a little. I'm suitably impressed enough to download a song or two that you've provided, and check your music out. (There is, indeed, no such thing as Bad Publicity;)
There are, however, two very serious flaws in your argument:
1) Treating music as a "product" that can be sold or stolen.
2) The right of a musician to make a living making music.
I'm sure you've heard all the arguments before, but for our studio audience, let's review. Music is fundimentally a SERVICE industry. You show up, you do your thing, the air vibrates, and people exposed to those vibrations either enjoy it or not. The trick there is that nobody else can make the air vibrate the same way you do, so there is a rarity there. Assuming a certain level of quality, there is value in having you vibrate the air for people.
Now if someone happens to have a recording device handy, and they record these vibrations for later playback, what POSSIBLE claim do you have on them? Do you own the air? Do you own their ears? Their memories?
Now it just so happens that the labels have made a huge industry out of selling prepackaged recordings, and they've done so in a way that screws the artists royally. If I were in your position, if I went to a recording studio where I knew my vibrations were being recorded for later resale, then I'd demand a pretty damn hefty fee for my time - because that's what you're being compensated for, your TIME - up front. That the music industry does not work that way sucks, but don't blame the world for your complicity in a broken business model.
This is the crux - as a musician, you provide a service, which takes time. You get paid for that time, but you have no right to expect any compensation beyond what you charge for your time.
Think of it this way - a programmer, working at a bank, writes a new accounting package that streamlines the process somehow and saves the bank 1 billion dollars over the course of a year. The bank, in essence, made 1 billion off the fruits of this programmer's effort - but does the programmer have any claim to that money? Of course not.
Which leads into the "how can a musician make a living?" question. Well, where does it say that musicians have some sort of right to make livings as musicians? I drive race cars in my spare time. (www.wincom.net/trog/) I'd KILL to make a living as a full-time, professional race car driver, of whom there are maybe 1000 in the entire world. In the meantime, I pay, and I pay, and I pay, and I pay, working towards that eventual goal that I might maybe one day achieve (but probably won't) And I gladly take help from any sponsor willing to throw a bone my way. (Wanna sponsor a race car? I'm cheap!)
It's the same way with any other exclusive, limited-access profession. Ask any Olympic athelete, especially that guy over there with the bronze medal in javelin.
IF you can make a living at it - great for you! Wonderful! (really, I mean that. I wish success on everybody with a dream) But don't expect that success to come easy, don't expect that success to be even _possible_, and don't expect to gain that success by exploiting a broken, bogus, and flat-out WRONG concept like "intellectual property". Once them vibrations leave your lips (or your speakers, or whatever) you have no more claim on them. THAT is the reality you are facing. If you can make a living in that reality, cool. If not, well, then frankly Other Careers Beckon.
I don't mean to sound harsh - I empathize with your plight more than this post might indicate. But the world is a harsh place and denial gets you nowhere.
Good luck. I'm going to check out your website later, and if I like what I hear, I may buy your CD. Not because I see the CD as "product" that I want to "own", but because I understand that my PATRONAGE is required if you are to be able to continue making music. Important word, that. "Patron". Another word for "sponsor", a word I'm very intimately concerned with. You're lucky - ever person who chooses to buy your CD, t-shirts, or whatever, becomes a sort of "micro-patron", whereas I'm limited by the surface area on my car.
Y'all read the previous post, and see how our AC socially engineers two separate people - first a HaX0r in an IRC channel to get an exploit, and then a poor dumb luser to action it.
Which goes to show that it's often easier and more productive to attack the people on the system, rather than the system itself.
(We'll ignore the thorny issue of genetics-as-IP for the moment)
As I recall, large chunks (if not the majority) of our DNA is really junk information, stuff that doesn't really _do_ anything. Sorta like the bit-rot that accumulates on hard drives after a couple of years of use. That fragment over there used to be part of a tarball I deleted, that over there was part of my mail spool, and so on. Areas that once held information, but are now marked as "free blocks" and so unused.
It wouldn't suprise me to find little chunks of "how to grow a tail" or "how to put bright blue pigment in your buttocks" in human DNA.
So from the point of view of someone hoping to make money off the annotation process, you've got to hope you annotate something that's actually part of the program, instead of "how to grow gills and scales" or some such.
That strikes me as a lottery, not a business model.
BTW, can somebody in the know comment on how the annotation process works? How do you know what gene [foo] does without actually flipping it and watching the results? Do we have a good enough understanding of the inner workings of DNA that we could model it, and simulate flipping the bits?
I'm one of those former hard-core Amigans. I've owned every model of Amiga ever made (except the A600 - bleah!) at some point in my life.
I switched to Linux in 1997, and I've never looked back. Linux on a P233 so totally kicked my A4000 "super system"'s ass on every criteria I could think of to judge it. And I get source!
If you want to play "what if" imagine if Chicken Lips had open-sourced AmigaDOS around 1991 or so... the world would be very different.
Oh well, lost opportunities, spilled milk. The Amiga is DEAD boys. Dead as a coffin-nail. It used to be avant-guarde to be an Amiga user, now it's just sad.
I, for one, sure hope the Supremes take the case, and do so quickly.
Microsoft hasn't demonstrated that it is willing to play nice in the interim, so the sooner this is delt with, the sooner the bad behaviour can be stopped - and that is the whole point, isn't it?
I'd sure like to live in a world where the big bully isn't constantly trying to co-opt standards, disrupt interoperability, and generally screw users for the sake of its own profit.
While I understand what you're trying to say, and I sympathise with your position, the elemental root of the problem is the association between "software" and "product".
Software isn't a manufacturing industry, it's a service industry. Programmers are more akin to mechanics than to assembly line workers.
Doesn't it seem odd to you to attempt to sell anything that costs nothing to duplicate, is easily duplicated, and easily distributed once duplicated? It's as flawed an idea as, say, basing one's national currency on blank white 8.5x11 inch paper.
Or in other words "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Well, then don't do that!"
Of course, the common complaint against this idea is "I'm a programmer! How do I feed my kids if I can't sell software?" And the answer is - most programmers don't work in the for-sale software industry as it sits today! The vast majority are employed by banks, hospitals, manufacturing companies, and so on as in-house problem solvers. The for-sale software provider is (statistically speaking) a minor player, and a bit of an abberation.
If you are a for-sale software programmer, and you are losing sales to "pirates" (I actually prefer the term "librarians" myself) well, it's YOU who are shoveling your money out the door. Why do that?
Besides the environmentally friendly interface, there's something else here that needs changing. This page has been set up as kind of an "adoption agency" for unmaintained projects - as if natural selection was somehow bad.
A much more useful nice for this sort of page would be more like a code/project archive or library - a place to steal code, get ideas, and act as a sort of museum for software.
My image of Courtney Love isn't the most, uh, "together" of persons. "Babe with Issues" as the saying goes.
But holy shit, does she ever understand her industry, and she understands what Napster means to artists way better than anyone else I've ever heard (read) speak.
She's way, way higher in Clue Level than ol' Lars, lemme tell you. Suprisingly intelligent and insightful, given her media image.
If you belong to the "Napster is Wrong! Piracy!" crowd, go read the article all the way through. Ruminate for a second that all her arguments are based on **direct observation**, and see if you don't change your mind.
And if you think that the RIAA is nasty to people outside their industry, just wait 'till you see what they do to "family"
Hidden in this article is one of the most powerful memes I've seen yetwith regars to the free distribution of what some would call "intellectual property":
Those aren't "pirates" stealing copyrighted works, they are, in fact, LIBRARIANS, working in the world's biggest, massively-distributed, online library!
Microsoft and Billy Gates may be in a state of denial, but I sure ain't - it's over guys. Microsoft now has a Court Order ***ordering *** it to (amongst other things) split in two.
Everything laid out in that order is *going to happen* and the Court is going to see it enforced. They aren't going to win on appeal, they aren't going to be able to drag their feet, and they aren't going to get a last-second pardon from the Governor.
Slashdot Mirror
In the book, they are movie-screen sized devices with wooden block "pixels" made of bits of polygonal wood with each face painted a different color. By rotating the block so that a given face faced the audience, the pixel color was changed.
I suppose that one could take a cue from the Wooden Mirror at SIGGRAPH, and rotate the block in the X-axis (with top lighting) to vary the intensity of the color of each pixel.
Anyway, the whole system (in the book), being driven by thousands of little rods that need constant lubrication, are very sensitive to dust, and generate a lot of heat, is represented as being a little flaky. There's a schene where a character is making what amounts to a PowerPoint presentation in front of one of these screens, and there are a series of glitches in his program.
This is one of those ideas that is based on strong science, but where the devil is in the engineering
The Northern Belle is long gone. We floated it down the river almost a year ago.
:)
The main casino is completely new. Lots of pretty lights, loud sounds, and a waterfall too.
And we don't have muggers lying in wait outside the casino, like the Detroit casinos do.
Heh. The first time I crossed the border into Detroit, the Customs officer asked me if I had any firearms. When I said "No" he said "Good God man! Here, take mine!"
Gee guys, how about bringing the show to Windsor, Ontario next time through?
- We're right across the river from Detroit
- We've got this kick-ass casino, for those into flaunting probability
- 78% less gunfire than our cross-border neighbour!
- That world-famous kernel hacker Kid Rock may drop by
- Cuban cigars for everyone!
Seriously though, it'd be good to have a Linux Happening in my back yard for a change.
Please?
DG
If Napster in indeed shut down today, there's going to be a huge wave of kiddies looking for a replacement - RIGHT NOW! And it's probably safe to say that a large number of them will be trying out Gnutella.
I've heard that Gnutella has setup/configuration/usibility issues - not suprising, in that most Free Software starts out with "it works!", moves to "it works well!", and finally arrives at "it's easy to use!" much later on.
If that truly is the case, then the Gnutella folks are about to be deluged with support requests from kiddies to lazy, too clueless, or too impatient to read and undertsand the app. After the, ohh, ten thousandth "plz h3lp m3 instal ur k001 program nootella" message, I think there will be a rash of code hacking to make the app easier to set up and use.
Which, incidently, removes what the RIAA calls the biggest deterrent to using Gnutella (ease of use).
The irony here is hillarious - by shutting down the for-profit Napster - which might have been extorted into paying royalties of some sort - the RIAA is going to provide the sudden surge in user base for Gnutella, which they won't be able to touch!
It's amazing that Jack Valenti and friends can still walk, with the way they keep shooting their own feet all the time.
I will switch to Evolution - no matter how flaky and unstable it might be - if it supports seamless and invisible PGP encryption.
Here's what I want:
1) Store all my mail PGP encrypted in the mail file. If I get unencrypted mail, then encrypt it BEFORE it hits the hard disk.
2) When I start the program, prompt me for my pass phrase, and cache it for this session or for a user-definable timeout period.
3) PGP sign all outgoing mail
4) Add public keys to my keyring as seamlessly and invisibly as possible.
5) If I send mail to someon for whom I have a public key, encrypt it BY DEFAULT.
The biggest problem with using mail encryption is that the interface is such a pain in the ass. If Evolution hides all the dirty details, then I can start encrypting my mail on a regular basis - and if the encryption support is really good and enabled BY DEFAULT, then we get the "fax machine effect".
Are you listening, Evolution developers?
So now, faced with Dick's signs that point out their insecure security, Dick's neighbors will stop putting their house keys in easily located places, and the net security level goes up.
They might not be too happy with Dick, but their house is now secure.
Better REAL security than false illusions of security.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Slashdot;
$sd = Slashdot->new('00/07/26/1317255');
@expression = ("expression", "of", "form", "a", "is", "code", "My");
$agree = 0;
if (! $agree) {
foreach $word (reverse @expression) {
print "$word ";
}
if ($sd->usertype($sd->post(27)->getuser()) eq 'dumbass') {
print "dumbass";
}
print "!\n";
}
A .TGZ extension is a Microsoft-ed, three-letter-extension version of the old and traditional Uniz .tar.gz extension sequence, indicating a group of files collected together with tar, and then compressed with gzip.
To view the files, reverse the process.
While there are some nice features about components, like anything else it's possible to have too much of a good thing.
Taken to extremes - like our good friends in Redmond - you wind up with many, many applications depending on a large number of common components, with (here's the kicker) at times incompatible APIs. Need BeltchWord 5.0 and FlatuanceDraw 6.2? Can't do that if they each want different versions of the same component.
And then you get situations where an application upgrades a component that the OS/Window Manager depends on.... version control lunacy.
I believe this is called "DLL Hell" in Windows circles.
No thanks Miguel. I like and use GNOME, and I look forward to useful things like a common GNOME printing model, but I also very much indeed like the current UNIX way of doing things with regards to the window manager, X, and the kernel.
Some may see 20 years of development as "stagnant" but I see 20 years of continuous evolution. Cockroaches haven't changed much in 20 million years, because they don't have to - they're pretty damned efficiant as shipped.
I see from Alan's diary entry that he's going into a maintainence mode of sorts:
- he's stopping work on the 2.3/4 kernel
- he's going to continue maintaining the 2.2 kernel, but,
- he's heavily filtering his mail, so that only people who contact him regularly can reach him
This seems a little extreme....
Maybe he's just taking a little break while he rebuilds his new (old) house, but I can't help but wonder if everyone's favourite Swansea hacker isn't feeling a little burnt out these days.
Hey Alan, you out there? Is anything wrong?
I've been using the binary-only OSS sound drivers for the last couple of years, and it's been a serious Pain in the Ass.
- you have to download and re-install the drivers every time you change kernel versions
- this means you can't upgrade a kernel (or upgrade, and lose sound for a while) until the binary-only release for your version is available
- you better have the same libc as the sound drivers, or Bad Things Happen
- if Opensound ever goes away, then no more driver support for me!*
I'd much rather have the source, and I'd rather that source become part of the official kernel distribution, where I can count on it being compatible with my system under all circumstances.
Or to put it another way, distributing binary-only drivers means you are now in the Linux tech support business, where your drivers must keep pace with kernel development. Release driver source, and it's likely that someone else will do the maintainence for you - at least as far as API changes etc. go.
*OK, bad example, there are now working proper source drivers for my soundcard in the kernel, so I do have an alternative these days. For increasingly obscure or convoluted tech though (video cards) reverse engineering open source drivers may not be as feasable. If the company providing binary-only drivers decides to stop doing so, you're pretty well screwed come kernel recompile time.
...they release a fast, stable, and reasonably bug-free Linux version of Corel Draw.
Once that happens, the cash cow has arrived.
But if it's clunky, flaky, bloated, and slow, then we're in for another round of "We're not dead yet!"
Note for those who view Corel's involvement with WINE as evidence of a high probablility of "bloated and slow" - there are two ways to use WINE: The first is "not an emulator mode", where a WINE process runs a native Windows binary and handles all the OS calls - this is more likely than not to be sub-optimal. The second is to compile Windows source code against libwine, which is a native-Linux shared object that provides the Windows API.
The first method is a massive (if nifty) hack, and I'd never expect to see any real production application depending on it. The second method is more like building a toolkit app, like a Motif of GTK app - only in this case, the toolkit is the Windows API. If Corel is building Corel Draw for Linux based on the libwine method, the results are likely to be pretty good.
Even better would be a native GTK version of Corel Draw, but a libwine version is completely acceptable, assuming acceptable libwine performance. Running Draw under WINE "emulation" though, is not acceptable, at least not to me.
Corel, are you listening?
Let's say you have designed a spacecraft that can fly to Mars and set up a colony. You've got some colonists who understand that it's a one-way trip and are willing to try anyways, and you've managed to knit funding somehow.
For the sake of argument, let's say your ship weighs as much as a fully-loaded 767-300 - that's all the fuel, life support systems, and colony equipment. You've got 412,000 pounds of spacecraft to lift into orbit.
At the current price of $10,000 per lb, it's going to cost you $4,120,000,000 to get that sucker into orbit. That's 4.12 BILLION. That's totally excluding the cost of the spaceship itself. Not even Bill Gates can afford this.
Now at $600 per pound, the cost to get into orbit is a mere $247,200,000 Still hardly chump change, but much more reasonable. On a billion-dollar budget, you'd still have three-quarters left to actually build the spacecraft. At this price point, a Bill Gates or a Ted Turner could actually afford to fund the project - and I bet Ted would do it. "The Real World" set on a spacecraft going to Mars would be a ratings monster, and might even make money.
But at the current $10k/lb price point - no way in hell can anyone outside of governments afford to play the game.
If BDR had a table with a BDR CD on it - a physical, plastic and aluminum disk that cost money to produce - and someone walked off with it, they your analogy holds.
But if BDR is singing on a street corner, and someone records the song instead of buying the CD, nothing has been "lost" There's nothing there to steal. BDR owns the pile of CDs on his table, but he doesn't own the air, nore does he have any right to try and prevent the recording - either made from the air around him, or from a CD already sold.
Before I start in - well done on the article. Well written, well thought out, and little wry gems like "Baptist Death Ray is a more refined taste" were a nice touch.
;)
It's also nice to see you here, in the comments section, were we can go ahead and wrestle a little. I'm suitably impressed enough to download a song or two that you've provided, and check your music out. (There is, indeed, no such thing as Bad Publicity
There are, however, two very serious flaws in your argument:
1) Treating music as a "product" that can be sold or stolen.
2) The right of a musician to make a living making music.
I'm sure you've heard all the arguments before, but for our studio audience, let's review. Music is fundimentally a SERVICE industry. You show up, you do your thing, the air vibrates, and people exposed to those vibrations either enjoy it or not. The trick there is that nobody else can make the air vibrate the same way you do, so there is a rarity there. Assuming a certain level of quality, there is value in having you vibrate the air for people.
Now if someone happens to have a recording device handy, and they record these vibrations for later playback, what POSSIBLE claim do you have on them? Do you own the air? Do you own their ears? Their memories?
Now it just so happens that the labels have made a huge industry out of selling prepackaged recordings, and they've done so in a way that screws the artists royally. If I were in your position, if I went to a recording studio where I knew my vibrations were being recorded for later resale, then I'd demand a pretty damn hefty fee for my time - because that's what you're being compensated for, your TIME - up front. That the music industry does not work that way sucks, but don't blame the world for your complicity in a broken business model.
This is the crux - as a musician, you provide a service, which takes time. You get paid for that time, but you have no right to expect any compensation beyond what you charge for your time.
Think of it this way - a programmer, working at a bank, writes a new accounting package that streamlines the process somehow and saves the bank 1 billion dollars over the course of a year. The bank, in essence, made 1 billion off the fruits of this programmer's effort - but does the programmer have any claim to that money? Of course not.
Which leads into the "how can a musician make a living?" question. Well, where does it say that musicians have some sort of right to make livings as musicians? I drive race cars in my spare time. (www.wincom.net/trog/) I'd KILL to make a living as a full-time, professional race car driver, of whom there are maybe 1000 in the entire world. In the meantime, I pay, and I pay, and I pay, and I pay, working towards that eventual goal that I might maybe one day achieve (but probably won't) And I gladly take help from any sponsor willing to throw a bone my way. (Wanna sponsor a race car? I'm cheap!)
It's the same way with any other exclusive, limited-access profession. Ask any Olympic athelete, especially that guy over there with the bronze medal in javelin.
IF you can make a living at it - great for you! Wonderful! (really, I mean that. I wish success on everybody with a dream) But don't expect that success to come easy, don't expect that success to be even _possible_, and don't expect to gain that success by exploiting a broken, bogus, and flat-out WRONG concept like "intellectual property". Once them vibrations leave your lips (or your speakers, or whatever) you have no more claim on them. THAT is the reality you are facing. If you can make a living in that reality, cool. If not, well, then frankly Other Careers Beckon.
I don't mean to sound harsh - I empathize with your plight more than this post might indicate. But the world is a harsh place and denial gets you nowhere.
Good luck. I'm going to check out your website later, and if I like what I hear, I may buy your CD. Not because I see the CD as "product" that I want to "own", but because I understand that my PATRONAGE is required if you are to be able to continue making music. Important word, that. "Patron". Another word for "sponsor", a word I'm very intimately concerned with. You're lucky - ever person who chooses to buy your CD, t-shirts, or whatever, becomes a sort of "micro-patron", whereas I'm limited by the surface area on my car.
Sometimes an AC comes along and posts a real gem.
Y'all read the previous post, and see how our AC socially engineers two separate people - first a HaX0r in an IRC channel to get an exploit, and then a poor dumb luser to action it.
Which goes to show that it's often easier and more productive to attack the people on the system, rather than the system itself.
Well done AC!
(We'll ignore the thorny issue of genetics-as-IP for the moment)
As I recall, large chunks (if not the majority) of our DNA is really junk information, stuff that doesn't really _do_ anything. Sorta like the bit-rot that accumulates on hard drives after a couple of years of use. That fragment over there used to be part of a tarball I deleted, that over there was part of my mail spool, and so on. Areas that once held information, but are now marked as "free blocks" and so unused.
It wouldn't suprise me to find little chunks of "how to grow a tail" or "how to put bright blue pigment in your buttocks" in human DNA.
So from the point of view of someone hoping to make money off the annotation process, you've got to hope you annotate something that's actually part of the program, instead of "how to grow gills and scales" or some such.
That strikes me as a lottery, not a business model.
BTW, can somebody in the know comment on how the annotation process works? How do you know what gene [foo] does without actually flipping it and watching the results? Do we have a good enough understanding of the inner workings of DNA that we could model it, and simulate flipping the bits?
The only thing I really miss from my Amiga is Lightwave. And I have the PC V5.0, but WINE won't run it.
Have NewTek commented on plans to do Lightwave for Linux?
I'm one of those former hard-core Amigans. I've owned every model of Amiga ever made (except the A600 - bleah!) at some point in my life.
I switched to Linux in 1997, and I've never looked back. Linux on a P233 so totally kicked my A4000 "super system"'s ass on every criteria I could think of to judge it. And I get source!
If you want to play "what if" imagine if Chicken Lips had open-sourced AmigaDOS around 1991 or so... the world would be very different.
Oh well, lost opportunities, spilled milk. The Amiga is DEAD boys. Dead as a coffin-nail. It used to be avant-guarde to be an Amiga user, now it's just sad.
I, for one, sure hope the Supremes take the case, and do so quickly.
Microsoft hasn't demonstrated that it is willing to play nice in the interim, so the sooner this is delt with, the sooner the bad behaviour can be stopped - and that is the whole point, isn't it?
I'd sure like to live in a world where the big bully isn't constantly trying to co-opt standards, disrupt interoperability, and generally screw users for the sake of its own profit.
A little swift justice here would be just indeed.
While I understand what you're trying to say, and I sympathise with your position, the elemental root of the problem is the association between "software" and "product".
Software isn't a manufacturing industry, it's a service industry. Programmers are more akin to mechanics than to assembly line workers.
Doesn't it seem odd to you to attempt to sell anything that costs nothing to duplicate, is easily duplicated, and easily distributed once duplicated? It's as flawed an idea as, say, basing one's national currency on blank white 8.5x11 inch paper.
Or in other words "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Well, then don't do that!"
Of course, the common complaint against this idea is "I'm a programmer! How do I feed my kids if I can't sell software?" And the answer is - most programmers don't work in the for-sale software industry as it sits today! The vast majority are employed by banks, hospitals, manufacturing companies, and so on as in-house problem solvers. The for-sale software provider is (statistically speaking) a minor player, and a bit of an abberation.
If you are a for-sale software programmer, and you are losing sales to "pirates" (I actually prefer the term "librarians" myself) well, it's YOU who are shoveling your money out the door. Why do that?
Besides the environmentally friendly interface, there's something else here that needs changing. This page has been set up as kind of an "adoption agency" for unmaintained projects - as if natural selection was somehow bad.
A much more useful nice for this sort of page would be more like a code/project archive or library - a place to steal code, get ideas, and act as a sort of museum for software.
My image of Courtney Love isn't the most, uh, "together" of persons. "Babe with Issues" as the saying goes.
But holy shit, does she ever understand her industry, and she understands what Napster means to artists way better than anyone else I've ever heard (read) speak.
She's way, way higher in Clue Level than ol' Lars, lemme tell you. Suprisingly intelligent and insightful, given her media image.
If you belong to the "Napster is Wrong! Piracy!" crowd, go read the article all the way through. Ruminate for a second that all her arguments are based on **direct observation**, and see if you don't change your mind.
And if you think that the RIAA is nasty to people outside their industry, just wait 'till you see what they do to "family"
Go Courtney!
Hidden in this article is one of the most powerful memes I've seen yetwith regars to the free distribution of what some would call "intellectual property":
Those aren't "pirates" stealing copyrighted works, they are, in fact, LIBRARIANS, working in the world's biggest, massively-distributed, online library!
Holy Paradigm Shift Batman!
Microsoft and Billy Gates may be in a state of denial, but I sure ain't - it's over guys. Microsoft now has a Court Order ***ordering *** it to (amongst other things) split in two.
Everything laid out in that order is *going to happen* and the Court is going to see it enforced. They aren't going to win on appeal, they aren't going to be able to drag their feet, and they aren't going to get a last-second pardon from the Governor.
Stick a fork in 'em, they're done.
Uhh, you all sold your stock today, right?