Not only is the zune being considered a complete failure if you were unlucky enough to receive
one, either as a give or the way a virgin receives pregnancy, you can now find away around microsoft’s long hard um drming. Relish in this first victory, I doubt this will be the end of the battle.
With christmas around the corner and over consumption around the bend its always nice to be the weird cheap skate in the family. But sometimes you can actually be the cool weird cheapskate to help with this comes make magazine opensource gift guide. What better way to spice up that old eggnog recipe than with some opensource beer. Also note that not all the gifts are for the cheap skate at heart, many will require you to rip apart some old electronics for those precious LED lights. The free ones almost all require some good elbow grease.
What does it mean to make something under a creative commons license? Is a nice way to get your name out there? A way of finding a following and then turn around and make your next media the profit maker? or can there be a middle ground. make it profitable but make it free. . . profitably free, there’s an oxymoron for you. But just like jumbo shrimp its damn good eatin.
Brazilian film-maker Oona Castro recently received funding from the Brazilian government to make a movie. The budget was small something around 200grand. Castro turned around and made the movie, then licensed it under a creative commons. He released the movie simultaneously in theaters and through p2p networks, with alternate endings. The result a larger audience for the movie. Not only that but Castro asked fans to work on their own endings.
Sounds like a winning combo, to tell you the truth I can’t see the same crowd going to the cinema being interested in watching the film on their computer anyway. I don’t think I’d ever be able to convince my mom to watch a movie on a PC, just as I have friends that I can’t convince to pay for a movie. Sorry MPAA I’d can’t get my boyscout badge by divulging their names though.
Well not really… So you just invested 600 U.S. dollars on a shiny new PS3. did you know it runs off of linux? considering that the ps2 sold well over 100million units world wide if its predecessor can do equal amounts as I’m sure sony is hoping for thats a good about of penetration for linux in an indirect sort of way. PS3 Linux. Now I hope to see some good home-brew games come from this.
So I decided to try to walk the walk after talking so much about open source. I loaded up a laptop, an old amd 700 with about 300 MB of memory, with ubuntu the dapper drake version. Well technically i didn’t even load it up myself. i asked my brother who works at a computer repair store if he happened upon any free old laptops as he usually does, he replied yes, and after telling him i planned to load ubuntu on it he said he already had one with that, so i took it. I say this because I believe its important to the story and because I’m just that honest. So any way new computer and OS in hand I set out to learn a thing or two about this release which is praised not only for its ease of use but for the way Ubuntu is set up to always and forever remain free.
The first thing I noticed off the bat was the extremely user friendly GUI, usually pronounced gooey for those non code literate, thats Graphical user interface. Anyway the GUI resembles windows visually. A nice thing considering I’m not a fan of the mac icon tray that many really love. anyway I think its important to have something familiar for those who think linux = command line. I’m in no way claiming that linux isn’t command line because ooooh it sure is.
Getting to know the terminal was both a pain and quite fun. It’s a pain because as I learn, and the way i learn is through slow emulation of example and constant error, I slowly just want to move to my desktop and be content with windows. However its fun because you are actually having to think instead of being lazy and pushing around a cursor. And yes there are several things that are fully GUI compatible, many debian files are click operable. However a good amount of things require the use of the terminal.
To tie this together with moving opensource to the main stream I like to take a second to realize that linux may never fully be accepted by normal PC users but Ubuntu and the software used in the daper drake release give hope to the small flicker that one day a user friendly linux OS may surface. More on this later.
So there are only so many hours in a day, people can’t spend all their time watching Youtube. Some day they will need something that isn’t so closed. I recently closed my youtube account, yes i was one of those jerks with a video of their friends being defamed on the internet. I had a video of a friend being kicked in the balls. let me put this incontext. I first found youtube and found it a bastion of hilarity and weird stuff. I posted a video of a friend dressed as Megaman, a semi-popular old school game character. Well it got some hits, we laughed. Then another friend wanted to challenge my friend to hit count war. So i uploaded a video of him being nailed in the junk.
Well before I knew it that video had 15,000 hits, the megaman cosplay had maybe 900. Anyway it had been awhile since i check on it when i got an email from Youtube saying that the ball kick had been removed for content. Unsure of why this happened, the email didn’t explain much, and there was no way for me to contest the discision, I was attacked by the man and so in response I took down my entire catalogue.
This is just the set up. This made me realize why the opensource movement is so important. Not for the monetary reason but the community aspect. Youtube has developed a false sense of many a thing. First is its fake sense of community. Sure you can video battle your nemisis from the east coast in a tap dance contest, but where do you turn when youtube takes down the video. Wanna complain to the makers, eh they care… they just made a cool billion off their community selling your videos to google.
What do you do when they use your video on a commercial, promotion. Take it. Promblems are furthered when you think of youtube as the prime example of web 2.0… wait its not… its just a poser, the avril lavigne of web 2.0. Go to youtube right now and try to download your own video…. can’t do it… didn’t think so… go post your youtube video on a friends myspace.. … like the bulging youtube ad you’ve just grown in your pants? Sure its integrated to a point, but these walls that are created have too much of the staunchness of web 1.0. Islands in a sea of creativity, huge money exchanges and the consumer will loose.
So where to turn, of course there are options out there for opensource distribution but there really needs to be a place to dump all this stuff like youtube, but without the walls. Someplace that embraces it’s community and gives them a voice. Without their community youtube would never be worth the price google paid for it. It’s a real shame the creators didn’t realize this.
I told my story only to show that I may be biased, but i hope that I have made some valid points that I was already becoming concerned with and then the sale occurred right after my complaint and it all seemed to pile up.
..haha overly used joke
No I didn’t find a dead squirrel and keep it in my freezer, later to be revived with my special … reanimator serum… um where was I…Oh yes Ice weasel was what I’m discussing. Ice weasel is a new GNU product. Basically they’ve taken the code from fire fox.. get it fire = element = ice; fox = mammal? = weasel, and turned it completely ‘free’. the folks at gnu.org actually explain the naming better. Anywho its taken the opensource code of firefox and stripped it of its naughty unfree clothing. Though Firefox’s code is free it turns out that the logo and several programs it has integrated are anything but free, and now there is a completely free version avaible, enter the weasel of ice.
Where does this leave us, the end user? Split between an ethical cause and the accessibility of firefox. Well at this point Ice weasel is still being developed so there may be more reason later than merely slight ethics. If Iceweasel provides what it hopes it will allow communities the ability to really use the source code for their own good. So there may be enough people interested to really add some nice additions to the app.
It always seemed to me that scientific information was hidden far beyond the reach of normal man. Every time i wanted to look up the angular velocity of the sun I had to run to the library battle the dewey decimal system and sift through the formula and abstracts on the formula before I found the data.
This said I would hate to be a scientific researcher conducting my own study without the help of a vast resource of knowledge, freely avaible. And not just of those printed three years ago and acquired by the library. I can then truly appreciate the idea of using the commons license to scientific data. The movites of these 45 or so scientists seem to be pure. I hope something can come of this. I’d had to see all those astronomers digging through dewey’s decimals any more than need be.
I recently read an interesting story about an open source voice recognition program. Not only is this a terrific idea I think it stirs ideas of what else could be accomplished via open source.
This Open Source Speech Recognition Engine collects voice recording and their transciptions, and converts them into a sort of usable data for recognition. Why is it so important that this is open source? first being open source those submitting are equally benifited as those creating the project. This is because as soon as the voice data is compiled into the program it is made avaible to the public for free. The user has givin input into a project that benifits them also. Usually if a company like microsoft was making such a program there would be a worker boss relationship, with a monetary exchange. however thanks to open source this is more of a community good. It may seem like that error that pops up when windows crashes to some. “please submit this error so that we can make windows better.” However in the case of windows you are submitting to make the product that you purchased better… or make the next product that you will have to buy better. however with open source you benifit the product that you receive, and in turn the technology benifits. The user determines how the technology works.
What are the possibilities of this outside the realm of this project. I could imagine user submitted data for all sorts of projects with social importance. Data collected for pictures of your town to be compiled into a full 3 dimensional representation of the town.
Or perhaps something more useful as user submitted data to a program that could tell you average walk times to and from certain areas around a college campus.
I think the most important thing here is that this user input into a program can help the program to reach further than that of a commercial prouduct. A commercial product is limited by its budget and there for can only collect data in proportion to revenue. Where as this open source alternative while dependant on having people willingly submit, is not bound by monetary balance.
The debate wages. Does digital rights management software fringe upon destroying the distribution of open source and creative commons products? It’s not a simple question and its easy to see the problem on either side.
On the one hand everyone and and their chihuahua in the corporate music/film/media industry wants a way to protect their product once it turns digital. Enter DRM’s many people are aware of DRM’s in the form of MP3’s with time restrictions or burn restrictions, and share restrictions, this is traditionally all been software based, normally embedded into the MP3 and recognized by software programs as Licensed ect. Wiki for a more precise description. These ensure that millions of copies of the digital file cannot be made of Paris Hilton’s new cd, and forced upon 12 years olds under the guise of something good for free. In this Case the DRM is actually permissable. It is only applied to works known to be held under copyright law.
However things are begining to change. The Corporate media industry is unhappy that there is a way to work around this, being software, it takes only a skilled software expert to …. work around the DRM, or just merely making mp3’s of the cds. So they have decided to go a level deeper into this protection and place the restricting ability into the hardware. A perfect example is the zune, which has the built in feature that when a friend sends you a song to listen to it is a play for 3 days or 3 plays no matter what. even if your friend sent you a song that he has himself created it must follow these restrictions.
Obviously a problem for music that falls under different laws than copyright laws. Say for instance creative commons. The problem is that it would be difficult for these new DRM’s to really tell if the song was created by steve your old roomate or led zepplin and just reconfigured to appear to be Steve’s creation.
So who is right? Is it ok to block all content on the premise that everyone is just trying to get a loop hole added to a solid system that attempts eliminates piracy. Or is it inherently wrong to block all content based on cynicism.
At least one website seems to vehemently against this idea. Defective By design.
I wasn’t able to find a pro DRM site.. ..