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General purpose computing seems to be going fine… ? Copyright also seems to be going fine. This article seemed to paint a much bleaker future than actually ev

General purpose computing seems to be going fine… ? Copyright also seems to be going fine. This article seemed to paint a much bleaker future than actually eventuated

masswerk 4y ago
Let's say, it struck peripherals (e.g., printers) much harder…
dghlsakjg 4y ago
I would argue otherwise. 15 years ago, if you were computing you were almost certainly using a general purpose computer. Phones were more locked down, but they also were basically just for texting and calling, and could never serve as a primary device. Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  Yup. Content was typically owned in physical form as a DVD or CD (maybe mp3?) and wasn’t subject to disappearing because a company went bankrupt or merely changed license agreements (stuff that happens now even for “bought” items). We’ve also abstracted away everything from files, for long enough that the idea of not streaming something but playing it locally is becoming more and more niche. Same for applications, which have gone more and more to web based subscription models. Default is closed, now.
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    Yup. I taught a basic HTML course for grade school age kids this winter. I had to start with how to make a file and folder and what the desktop was, etc. Basically, the issue was that their computing experience was all platform based. Everything for them was click a link, use the browser, walled google-classroom gardens, etc.
    - causi 4y ago
      When I was a kid, the younger you were the more computer-savvy you were. I figured it was due to being exposed to computers earlier in life, and I thought that in the future young people would be tech geniuses from growing up immersed in the internet. I was a fool.
  - dingleberry420 4y ago
    It's insane, really. Many of my friends have no idea what to do when I send them an .mp3 or an .mp4 file if it doesn't instantly embed as a media player in their chat application of choice. For them, the only way to share images or videos is by uploading it to a commercial, ad-infested, sharing site. By catering to the lowest common denominator we are creating a tech-illiterate society. This is on all of us who dumb down our features to make sure the users can understand.
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      Dumbing down or intentionally making it hard. Apple is intentionally hostile to sharing files and makes it very hard. Improved slightly in recent IOS versions, but still super hard. You can’t just email yourself mp3s and Play them like normal music on your phone, you have to use a third party app or a PC or something to transfer them to iTunes.
      - Arrath 4y ago
        Which is endlessly infuriating to me. Whether its dumbing down or making it hard, the decrease in usability is a consistent hinderance.
    - nunez 4y ago
      _RapidGator, MegaUpload, and Mediafire angrily enter the chat_ in all seriousness, there really are very few reasons for sharing audio files these days. The only ones I can think of are: - finding a work that is not online (like a specific live record or like 85% of early 80s hardcore that hasn't been remastered), - pirating (which music streaming services has made ubiquitous for 99.95% of people who consume music; thanks, Sean Parker!), or - audiophiles buying $10,000 balanced headphone cables with gold TRS jacks (because mics don't belong in headphones, _obviously_)who only listen to test tracks in FLAC format (who don't have newer iPhones anyway) as far as i remember, iPhones were able to play loose audio files, but you couldn't catalogue them into iTunes, which was annoying given that iPhoneOS (only 2010's kids remember this) didn't have a built-in file manager. moreover, most of those files came compressed (_Mediafire's anger intensifies_), and iPhones didn't have a publically-usable extraction utility, which made working with them a huge chore. I think the MP3 player in its earliest form was a concession that we lived with (because it was easier than dealing with jackets of CDs and anti-skip sucking) that was absolutely destined for a streaming-only world (because my gut says that MOST people never wanted to get into the audio collection business; they only want to listen to their favorite songs from their glory days in college)
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  15 years ago the default was to consume content from TVs, which at the time typically had minimal computing power, although many people used them along with locked-down devices such as TiVo. I don't have any idea what kind of poll you could build to answer this question, but my bet would be that people spend about as much time on a general-purpose computer as they did in 2007, and the increase in phone and tablet usage reflects a computerization of previously free time.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  This exactly. Mobiles are now the standard general purpose computers and they're all locked down. We don't really own our devices anymore nor our data :(
  - foobarian 4y ago
    Speak for yourself there buddy. :-) More seriously, I wonder if we should look at the raw numbers. Before, perhaps all the people who use a mobile as a general purpose computer did not even have a computer. And likewise maybe more people have a PC-type device than before, but still represent a smaller fraction. I take heart in this. Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement
    - vladvasiliu 4y ago
      > And likewise maybe more people have a PC-type device than before, but still represent a smaller fraction. I take heart in this. I also question this whenever I see that "people mostly use locked-down devices now". But I don't have any numbers; honestly it wouldn't surprise me to be wrong. > Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-datacenter in their house – and therefore there being more computers out there – doesn't mean that there are more distinct people whose main computing device is a general-purpose computer. To me, the people interested in the home lab movement are those who already were interested in doing "more" with computers, as opposed to just "consuming recommended content". I know it's my case and I do it now because computers are cheaper, and it's easier to find quiet ones.
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
        > Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-datacenter in their house – and therefore there being more computers out there – doesn't mean that there are more distinct people whose main computing device is a general-purpose computer. I've always done this even when I didn't have a lot of money. Server hardware has always been cheap because most of its audience won't even think about buying it secondhand, they will only buy new with warranty and 4hr support. I got $400 fibre channel cards for $10 because literally nobody wants them and companies throw out perfectly good cards when the warranty expires. It's a joke. In the early 2000's I had Sun Fire and Netra's. I had an HP 9000 HP-UX box with 1GB (in the day when that was a ridiculous amount of memory). These days I have HPs. A home lab has always been within reach. In fact I find it harder now due to energy consumption, as energy was always cheap.
- pca006132 4y ago
  Sadly a lot of people prefer this over an open environment, as locked down environments usually work out of the box, consuming recommended information is easier than searching by yourself. Centralization brings convenience at the expense of freedom, but it is much easier for us to feel convenience (or being frustrated by something inconvenient) than to understand the importance of freedom.
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    I'm not sure if people prefer it, or that they are strongly steered towards that environment. My apple watch is super cool from a hardware perspective, but so locked down that I can't use it in the ways that I would like to. For example, it has a barometric pressure sensor, but I/my apps can't directly read the sensor data, instead a filtered update is pushed to the app approximately every 1.5 seconds. Why? I know the sensor is capable of reading at 20+ hz.
    - pca006132 4y ago
      Well, some of my friends prefer Apple's walled garden because they think the applications there are better than open source ones, and consider policies requiring Apple to allow third-party app store as dangerous to users...
      - drewcoo 4y ago
        I think the parent's point was that they might think that way because of Apple marketing, not any kind of innate preference.
    - oneplane 4y ago
      There can be many 'why'-answers for such a context. While we can see 'a sensor' with some properties like data format, refresh rate etc. that sensor is a mere 'implementation' of a desired functionality of a product design. It used to be that the designed feature or function would be very close to the implementation, but that really hasn't been the case for a very long time. People aren't buying "a large bank of memory addresses" but rather "a device that contains pictures", for lack of a better example. With the watch a customer isn't actually buying a package of sensors, ARM-cores, BMS, Lithium-Ion battery, and display, but they are buying the experience of having a device that tells the time, notifies them if something happens and can track some aspects of their life so they have an overview of it later (be it for turning their life into a game or simply tracking their energy use/consumption). And then all of that for at least an entire day. Why would the implementation of the feature result in a sensor that can be polled at a high frequency but is actually only pushed at a lower frequency? It's anyone's guess but here is my guess: The sensor has its own specs but those are set in isolation and might differ based on implementation inside a casing, so they only way to get true data would be to have some form of calibration or offset where a low-power CPU core for sensor tasks just gets the raw values and applies the offset/calibration. Next, there is power consumption where they might have found the perfect balanced duty-cycle between data that has had enough time to cool down and be useful as well as power requirements for the sensor core and the sensor itself. So they have some sort of RT OS doing reading, processing etc. on a low-power core at a lower interval to get a 1% battery life increase. Do that for 10 sensors and suddenly it's worth it. It's quite an investment to have a team of people dive into the hardware, firmware and application development to do all that, so it's likely not a matter of "how can we spend a multi-million R&D chunk on making the hardware less useful", but rather some "how do we make millions of mass produced devices use a little bit less power" concept. This is also where the push vs. pull comes from, instead of having every application do some interrupt or scheduling, you just ask to be part of a list of observers and when the data changes you get notified. Much more efficient, and if everyone has to do that, there is a much smaller chance of the user experience suddenly changing and support personnel (phone, in-store) getting complaints about something they can't fix because some third party app did it.
- a4isms 4y ago
  > The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed. Yes, but 15 years ago far fewer people did far less with computing devices of any kind than they do today. Imagine if, for example, I made this argument: "In 1992, the default for using a personal computer was to both create and consume information, e.g. writing and reading email, writing and reading documents. Today the default is to just consume information, e.g. YouTube, TikTok, AppleTV." That would be true, but not because of locking devices down. It would be true in because in the last thirty years, the industry had expanded the number of users and their use cases by orders of magnitude. The people who sent and received emails are still sending and receiving emails. Same for the people writing and reading documents. But all those people are also now watching TV and YouTube and TikTok on computers instead of analogue televisions in their recreational time AROUND the documents and emails. And there are many, many people who just want to consume content for every "maker" generating content of any type, whether it be programs, documents, videos, music, whatever. How many people are involved in the construction and operation of the Webb telescope? How many people just want to see pictures of what it sees? Makers are a small proportion of humanity, and even for makers, making is a small proportion of our use cases for tech.
  - a4isms 4y ago
    The next thing then becomes, "Why can't we use GP computers for consuming all this content?" And the tongue-in-cheek answer is, "Because Linux." Optimizing a device for makers often makes it sub-optimal for consumers. I am a bassist. But I listen to music far more than I play music, and I have no interest in constructing a player-bass like a player-piano. For when I listen to music, closed-source "information appliance" ecosystems beat open-source general-purpose ecosystems. I maintain quite a bit of general-purpose computing ways to manage music, but honestly, it's more because I have an aversion to corporate control than any thought that it's easier to be in complete control. Joel Spolsky wrote that the key feature of Napster wasn't that music was free, it was that you could type the name of a song and listen to it right away. The challenge for us as technologists pursuing a free future is that information appliances do this better than general-purpose ecosystems.
    - jancsika 4y ago
- corrral 4y ago
  > Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed. I love having the choice. Most of the time I want the locked-down thing. A bunch of extra "freedom" I'm not actually using is just a hassle and liability when all I wanna do is take and crop some photos, or do some writing, or whatever. Now we have that option, and then also general-purpose computers are so cheap and widely available that you can easily score decent ones for free. Far from being some computing apocalypse, the situation now is excellent. Computers were a barely-tolerated near-failure for most normal use cases, but now there are options that don't suck for normal people wanting to do normal things. And general-purpose computing is more accessible than ever. Maybe some Dark Age of Computing still lurks, but it's not happened yet, and things have only gotten better so far. IMO the worst thing about the current computing era are the handful of Web monopolies and the way "AI"/machine-learning has mostly enabled systems working against us rather than creating agents working entirely on our behalf.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
you aren't paying attention
throw0101a 4y ago
> Copyright also seems to be going fine. Unless copyright terms get shorter, they are not "fine". Even the status quo is not "fine". Life+50 years (or more) is ridiculously long: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work. The novel Nightmare Alley was published in 1946, and the author died in 1962: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel) There's no reason why it should (AFAICT) still be under copyright such that royalties need to be paid to, e.g., turn it into a movie: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(2021_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(2021_film)
- izacus 4y ago
  > If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work. Can we get something straight? In vast majority of cases it's the massive content industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. Artists get tiny peanuts or even less if they weren't known enough to fight corporate lawyers of their own publisher. "Poor artists recouping their life work" is a nice PR message from publisher corporations to defend status quo though.
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > In vast majority of cases it's the massive content industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. If Sony/Tri-Star hasn't re-couped the cost of making Terminator 2 by now… * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_film Or: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_music * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1991_books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1991_books
- randombits0 4y ago
  Not to take you two steps back but copyright doesn’t really apply well to software to begin with. Consider this: Copyright applies only to creative expressions. Purely functional expressions are not copyrightable. That means that software is the embodiment of both creative and functional expressions that are commingled. They are so mixed together by the time the buyer gets it, there is no simple way of separating the two. That weakens the strength of copyright over the whole. It also misleads folks into believing everything about software is protected, even silly things like header files or trivial functions. Because these purely functional expressions are so highly intertwined with the rest, folks just assume they have a legitimate copyright over them! Even judges get this wrong! So software isn’t inherently copyrightable except for it any creative expressions it contains. What counts as creative expression? Traditionally, it didn’t take very much creative expression to be copyrightable. A screen design is copyrightable. A color scheme could be copyrightable. Code that saves a file after applying whatever edits the user has made is NOT copyrightable, as it is a purely functional expression. But what if I came up with a cool/fast way of finding primes and coded it into C. I created it. It is unique in the entire world! It took many hours to come up with. Certainly I should be able to protect my work, right? No. Mathematical algorithms are not creative expressions but purely functional expressions. It doesn’t matter how long it took to create or how the algorithm was discovered. But what about the code to implement the expression? The code is the expression of the algorithm. There may be a bit of creativity in the code, but we are back to functional expression as opposed to creative expression. Where’s the line? It’s fuzzy enough considering it in the abstract but impossible to consider given only the executable software itself. Personally, I think software should have it’s own copyright protections, unique from other written works. What that should look like and how it should work is an open question that should be discussed. Remember, the purpose of copyright is not to enrich the author. The purpose is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” If any copyright scheme fails to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”, it is not serving the public as intended.
andy81 4y ago
Many people's only computer is locked to programs from a single source owned by the operating system developer, and adware impossible to remove without defating the device's security. Where downloading apps from another source is possible, multiple levels of popups are triggered with warning messages optimised through A/B testing to minimise clickthrough rates. Widewine and similar hardware DRM are now standard. General purpose computing is still alive, but it's taken serious hits.

General purpose computing seems to be going fine… ? Copyright also seems to be going fine. This article seemed to paint a much bleaker future than actually eventuated

masswerk 4y ago

Let's say, it struck peripherals (e.g., printers) much harder…

dghlsakjg 4y ago

I would argue otherwise. 15 years ago, if you were computing you were almost certainly using a general purpose computer. Phones were more locked down, but they also were basically just for texting and calling, and could never serve as a primary device. Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.

Robotbeat 4y ago
Yup. Content was typically owned in physical form as a DVD or CD (maybe mp3?) and wasn’t subject to disappearing because a company went bankrupt or merely changed license agreements (stuff that happens now even for “bought” items). We’ve also abstracted away everything from files, for long enough that the idea of not streaming something but playing it locally is becoming more and more niche. Same for applications, which have gone more and more to web based subscription models. Default is closed, now.
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  Yup. I taught a basic HTML course for grade school age kids this winter. I had to start with how to make a file and folder and what the desktop was, etc. Basically, the issue was that their computing experience was all platform based. Everything for them was click a link, use the browser, walled google-classroom gardens, etc.
  - causi 4y ago
    When I was a kid, the younger you were the more computer-savvy you were. I figured it was due to being exposed to computers earlier in life, and I thought that in the future young people would be tech geniuses from growing up immersed in the internet. I was a fool.
- dingleberry420 4y ago
  It's insane, really. Many of my friends have no idea what to do when I send them an .mp3 or an .mp4 file if it doesn't instantly embed as a media player in their chat application of choice. For them, the only way to share images or videos is by uploading it to a commercial, ad-infested, sharing site. By catering to the lowest common denominator we are creating a tech-illiterate society. This is on all of us who dumb down our features to make sure the users can understand.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    Dumbing down or intentionally making it hard. Apple is intentionally hostile to sharing files and makes it very hard. Improved slightly in recent IOS versions, but still super hard. You can’t just email yourself mp3s and Play them like normal music on your phone, you have to use a third party app or a PC or something to transfer them to iTunes.
    - Arrath 4y ago
      Which is endlessly infuriating to me. Whether its dumbing down or making it hard, the decrease in usability is a consistent hinderance.
  - nunez 4y ago
    _RapidGator, MegaUpload, and Mediafire angrily enter the chat_ in all seriousness, there really are very few reasons for sharing audio files these days. The only ones I can think of are: - finding a work that is not online (like a specific live record or like 85% of early 80s hardcore that hasn't been remastered), - pirating (which music streaming services has made ubiquitous for 99.95% of people who consume music; thanks, Sean Parker!), or - audiophiles buying $10,000 balanced headphone cables with gold TRS jacks (because mics don't belong in headphones, _obviously_)who only listen to test tracks in FLAC format (who don't have newer iPhones anyway) as far as i remember, iPhones were able to play loose audio files, but you couldn't catalogue them into iTunes, which was annoying given that iPhoneOS (only 2010's kids remember this) didn't have a built-in file manager. moreover, most of those files came compressed (_Mediafire's anger intensifies_), and iPhones didn't have a publically-usable extraction utility, which made working with them a huge chore. I think the MP3 player in its earliest form was a concession that we lived with (because it was easier than dealing with jackets of CDs and anti-skip sucking) that was absolutely destined for a streaming-only world (because my gut says that MOST people never wanted to get into the audio collection business; they only want to listen to their favorite songs from their glory days in college)
SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
15 years ago the default was to consume content from TVs, which at the time typically had minimal computing power, although many people used them along with locked-down devices such as TiVo. I don't have any idea what kind of poll you could build to answer this question, but my bet would be that people spend about as much time on a general-purpose computer as they did in 2007, and the increase in phone and tablet usage reflects a computerization of previously free time.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
This exactly. Mobiles are now the standard general purpose computers and they're all locked down. We don't really own our devices anymore nor our data :(
- foobarian 4y ago
  Speak for yourself there buddy. :-) More seriously, I wonder if we should look at the raw numbers. Before, perhaps all the people who use a mobile as a general purpose computer did not even have a computer. And likewise maybe more people have a PC-type device than before, but still represent a smaller fraction. I take heart in this. Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    > And likewise maybe more people have a PC-type device than before, but still represent a smaller fraction. I take heart in this. I also question this whenever I see that "people mostly use locked-down devices now". But I don't have any numbers; honestly it wouldn't surprise me to be wrong. > Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-datacenter in their house – and therefore there being more computers out there – doesn't mean that there are more distinct people whose main computing device is a general-purpose computer. To me, the people interested in the home lab movement are those who already were interested in doing "more" with computers, as opposed to just "consuming recommended content". I know it's my case and I do it now because computers are cheaper, and it's easier to find quiet ones.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      > Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-datacenter in their house – and therefore there being more computers out there – doesn't mean that there are more distinct people whose main computing device is a general-purpose computer. I've always done this even when I didn't have a lot of money. Server hardware has always been cheap because most of its audience won't even think about buying it secondhand, they will only buy new with warranty and 4hr support. I got $400 fibre channel cards for $10 because literally nobody wants them and companies throw out perfectly good cards when the warranty expires. It's a joke. In the early 2000's I had Sun Fire and Netra's. I had an HP 9000 HP-UX box with 1GB (in the day when that was a ridiculous amount of memory). These days I have HPs. A home lab has always been within reach. In fact I find it harder now due to energy consumption, as energy was always cheap.
pca006132 4y ago
Sadly a lot of people prefer this over an open environment, as locked down environments usually work out of the box, consuming recommended information is easier than searching by yourself. Centralization brings convenience at the expense of freedom, but it is much easier for us to feel convenience (or being frustrated by something inconvenient) than to understand the importance of freedom.
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  I'm not sure if people prefer it, or that they are strongly steered towards that environment. My apple watch is super cool from a hardware perspective, but so locked down that I can't use it in the ways that I would like to. For example, it has a barometric pressure sensor, but I/my apps can't directly read the sensor data, instead a filtered update is pushed to the app approximately every 1.5 seconds. Why? I know the sensor is capable of reading at 20+ hz.
  - pca006132 4y ago
    Well, some of my friends prefer Apple's walled garden because they think the applications there are better than open source ones, and consider policies requiring Apple to allow third-party app store as dangerous to users...
    - drewcoo 4y ago
      I think the parent's point was that they might think that way because of Apple marketing, not any kind of innate preference.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    There can be many 'why'-answers for such a context. While we can see 'a sensor' with some properties like data format, refresh rate etc. that sensor is a mere 'implementation' of a desired functionality of a product design. It used to be that the designed feature or function would be very close to the implementation, but that really hasn't been the case for a very long time. People aren't buying "a large bank of memory addresses" but rather "a device that contains pictures", for lack of a better example. With the watch a customer isn't actually buying a package of sensors, ARM-cores, BMS, Lithium-Ion battery, and display, but they are buying the experience of having a device that tells the time, notifies them if something happens and can track some aspects of their life so they have an overview of it later (be it for turning their life into a game or simply tracking their energy use/consumption). And then all of that for at least an entire day. Why would the implementation of the feature result in a sensor that can be polled at a high frequency but is actually only pushed at a lower frequency? It's anyone's guess but here is my guess: The sensor has its own specs but those are set in isolation and might differ based on implementation inside a casing, so they only way to get true data would be to have some form of calibration or offset where a low-power CPU core for sensor tasks just gets the raw values and applies the offset/calibration. Next, there is power consumption where they might have found the perfect balanced duty-cycle between data that has had enough time to cool down and be useful as well as power requirements for the sensor core and the sensor itself. So they have some sort of RT OS doing reading, processing etc. on a low-power core at a lower interval to get a 1% battery life increase. Do that for 10 sensors and suddenly it's worth it. It's quite an investment to have a team of people dive into the hardware, firmware and application development to do all that, so it's likely not a matter of "how can we spend a multi-million R&D chunk on making the hardware less useful", but rather some "how do we make millions of mass produced devices use a little bit less power" concept. This is also where the push vs. pull comes from, instead of having every application do some interrupt or scheduling, you just ask to be part of a list of observers and when the data changes you get notified. Much more efficient, and if everyone has to do that, there is a much smaller chance of the user experience suddenly changing and support personnel (phone, in-store) getting complaints about something they can't fix because some third party app did it.
a4isms 4y ago
> The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed. Yes, but 15 years ago far fewer people did far less with computing devices of any kind than they do today. Imagine if, for example, I made this argument: "In 1992, the default for using a personal computer was to both create and consume information, e.g. writing and reading email, writing and reading documents. Today the default is to just consume information, e.g. YouTube, TikTok, AppleTV." That would be true, but not because of locking devices down. It would be true in because in the last thirty years, the industry had expanded the number of users and their use cases by orders of magnitude. The people who sent and received emails are still sending and receiving emails. Same for the people writing and reading documents. But all those people are also now watching TV and YouTube and TikTok on computers instead of analogue televisions in their recreational time AROUND the documents and emails. And there are many, many people who just want to consume content for every "maker" generating content of any type, whether it be programs, documents, videos, music, whatever. How many people are involved in the construction and operation of the Webb telescope? How many people just want to see pictures of what it sees? Makers are a small proportion of humanity, and even for makers, making is a small proportion of our use cases for tech.
- a4isms 4y ago
  The next thing then becomes, "Why can't we use GP computers for consuming all this content?" And the tongue-in-cheek answer is, "Because Linux." Optimizing a device for makers often makes it sub-optimal for consumers. I am a bassist. But I listen to music far more than I play music, and I have no interest in constructing a player-bass like a player-piano. For when I listen to music, closed-source "information appliance" ecosystems beat open-source general-purpose ecosystems. I maintain quite a bit of general-purpose computing ways to manage music, but honestly, it's more because I have an aversion to corporate control than any thought that it's easier to be in complete control. Joel Spolsky wrote that the key feature of Napster wasn't that music was free, it was that you could type the name of a song and listen to it right away. The challenge for us as technologists pursuing a free future is that information appliances do this better than general-purpose ecosystems.
  - jancsika 4y ago
corrral 4y ago
> Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed. I love having the choice. Most of the time I want the locked-down thing. A bunch of extra "freedom" I'm not actually using is just a hassle and liability when all I wanna do is take and crop some photos, or do some writing, or whatever. Now we have that option, and then also general-purpose computers are so cheap and widely available that you can easily score decent ones for free. Far from being some computing apocalypse, the situation now is excellent. Computers were a barely-tolerated near-failure for most normal use cases, but now there are options that don't suck for normal people wanting to do normal things. And general-purpose computing is more accessible than ever. Maybe some Dark Age of Computing still lurks, but it's not happened yet, and things have only gotten better so far. IMO the worst thing about the current computing era are the handful of Web monopolies and the way "AI"/machine-learning has mostly enabled systems working against us rather than creating agents working entirely on our behalf.

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago

you aren't paying attention

throw0101a 4y ago

> Copyright also seems to be going fine. Unless copyright terms get shorter, they are not "fine". Even the status quo is not "fine". Life+50 years (or more) is ridiculously long: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work. The novel Nightmare Alley was published in 1946, and the author died in 1962: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel) There's no reason why it should (AFAICT) still be under copyright such that royalties need to be paid to, e.g., turn it into a movie: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(2021_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(2021_film)

izacus 4y ago
> If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work. Can we get something straight? In vast majority of cases it's the massive content industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. Artists get tiny peanuts or even less if they weren't known enough to fight corporate lawyers of their own publisher. "Poor artists recouping their life work" is a nice PR message from publisher corporations to defend status quo though.
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > In vast majority of cases it's the massive content industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. If Sony/Tri-Star hasn't re-couped the cost of making Terminator 2 by now… * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_film Or: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_music * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1991_books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1991_books
randombits0 4y ago
Not to take you two steps back but copyright doesn’t really apply well to software to begin with. Consider this: Copyright applies only to creative expressions. Purely functional expressions are not copyrightable. That means that software is the embodiment of both creative and functional expressions that are commingled. They are so mixed together by the time the buyer gets it, there is no simple way of separating the two. That weakens the strength of copyright over the whole. It also misleads folks into believing everything about software is protected, even silly things like header files or trivial functions. Because these purely functional expressions are so highly intertwined with the rest, folks just assume they have a legitimate copyright over them! Even judges get this wrong! So software isn’t inherently copyrightable except for it any creative expressions it contains. What counts as creative expression? Traditionally, it didn’t take very much creative expression to be copyrightable. A screen design is copyrightable. A color scheme could be copyrightable. Code that saves a file after applying whatever edits the user has made is NOT copyrightable, as it is a purely functional expression. But what if I came up with a cool/fast way of finding primes and coded it into C. I created it. It is unique in the entire world! It took many hours to come up with. Certainly I should be able to protect my work, right? No. Mathematical algorithms are not creative expressions but purely functional expressions. It doesn’t matter how long it took to create or how the algorithm was discovered. But what about the code to implement the expression? The code is the expression of the algorithm. There may be a bit of creativity in the code, but we are back to functional expression as opposed to creative expression. Where’s the line? It’s fuzzy enough considering it in the abstract but impossible to consider given only the executable software itself. Personally, I think software should have it’s own copyright protections, unique from other written works. What that should look like and how it should work is an open question that should be discussed. Remember, the purpose of copyright is not to enrich the author. The purpose is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” If any copyright scheme fails to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”, it is not serving the public as intended.

andy81 4y ago

Many people's only computer is locked to programs from a single source owned by the operating system developer, and adware impossible to remove without defating the device's security. Where downloading apps from another source is possible, multiple levels of popups are triggered with warning messages optimised through A/B testing to minimise clickthrough rates. Widewine and similar hardware DRM are now standard. General purpose computing is still alive, but it's taken serious hits.