Month: January 1999

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Mona and Copyright

The Mona Lisa is not copyrighted. It is in the public domain. You can copy it all you want.

Except that… well, a picture of the Mona Lisa is copyrighted. So you can’t take a picture out of an art book and put it up on your web page. How would they know? They would analyze your copy and look for faults. If your faults are the same as the photographer’s faults, he can sue you. But first he’d have to admit, I think, that he was a lousy photographer.

If you took a picture of someone painting a copy of the Mona Lisa, you could be in trouble: his painting of the Mona Lisa is copyrighted, even if it’s an exact copy. You’d have to black out his picture. But then, you still have a picture of him. Can he sue your for violating his personal copyright of his own face? I don’t think so.

What if you took a picture of someone’s picture of a painting of someone else’s pictures? Sure, maybe he’s got a copyright on his picture of the painting, but what right does he have to take that picture of the painting of other paintings? Does he have permission from the artists who did the paintings in the painting? I’ll bet he doesn’t. So if he sues you, maybe you can find the descendents of the artists and sue him.

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Lament for Geoworks

Does it surprise you to know that Windows is only about 9 years old? That it was released in 1990?

That version of Windows, of course, was called 3.0. There was a Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0, but they were so pathetically, mind-numbingly bad that nobody even tried to use it. Windows 3.0 was different. It was merely incomprehensibly bad. But it was made by Microsoft, the company that gave us Dos 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2, and 3.3, and 4.0, of course, and 5.0 (the best dos ever), and 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2. And Bill Gates, at the press conference announcing the conception of Windows, warned that other graphical user interfaces wouldn’t be compatible with future versions of dos.

In 1990, nobody could have believed that Windows would be so late, so bad, and so slow. Everybody thought that in a year or so, we’d all be happily clicking and dragging around on our IBM compatibles in Microsoft Windows.

Geoworks was released in 1990, and it ran great. It was a true graphical user interface with a remarkably functional core, and real multi-tasking. It ran happily on 2 MB of RAM and required very little disk space.

Just as it was set to take the world by storm, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft was almost ready to roll out it’s own version, Windows, in just a few months.

Geoworks was destroyed, crushed by the announcement. Software developers switched to Windows, so third party applications dried up. Even worse, the investors pounded Geoworks’ stock until it was pretty well wiped out.

It took five years for a truly functional Windows to emerge (Windows 95) and, even then, it still wasn’t as reliable as Geoworks was in 1990. I run both Windows 98 and Windows NT on my desktop. They are both pieces of garbage, to put it bluntly. They are bloated, slow, bug-ridden, and annoying. Why do I use them? Because I make my living with computers. Everybody wants Office 97 and Quake and all the other Windows applications. I get paid to try to solve all the problems that shouldn’t exist.

There are other operating systems: Linux, BeOs, OS/2, but few applications that run on them. These other OS’s are strong, reliable, and fast, but Microsoft beat them off with sticks and stones. That is the legacy of Microsoft’s strong-arm tactics over the last 9 years. The result has been disastrous, though few people seem aware of it. The loss of productivity due to problems with Windows must be phenomenal.

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The Forbidden Lion King

In 1995 the Virginia-based American Life League urged a recall of “The Lion King,” arguing that in one scene rising clouds of dust spelled the word “sex.” – New York Times, January 7, 1999

Whoa! Baby! Quick, children, cover your eyes!

American Life League? Who are these people? Where are the little holes in the ground that they hide in whenever someone talks seriously about art and life and bodily functions? American Life League? Let me guess: they want a return to “traditional” values, emphasizing nation, God, and family, and hard work.

Just to feel better about myself, I think I will take a piece of cardboard and write the word “sex” on it and show it to my children tonight, just to see what happens.

Look out!

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Turtle on the Highway

I was driving down a country side-road today, from Hwy 8 south of Cambridge to Hwy 6, when I saw a commotion ahead of me in the opposite lane. A car had pulled over and a man was standing in the middle of the road near a grayish lump. Several cars had stopped behind him.

I thought at first that some raccoon had been injured by a car, and he was stopping to decide whether to put it out of its misery or call the humane society or something. But no, as I passed carefully, I could see that it was a large snapping turtle, and it was very alive indeed, and trying to cross the road.

It reminded me of a situation a few years ago on the 401. As we were driving east to Toronto, we spied a mallard duck and six or seven chicks headed across the median, single file, waddling with audacious determination. They had obviously already crossed half of a very busy four-lane highway and were headed for the other half, which was loaded with traffic. We couldn’t imagine that all of them would make it safely, and in fact, the mother duck looked a little hysterical but stubborn, if it is possible for a duck to look hysterical. I pictured a great 18-wheeler swerving to avoid the ducks and plowing into a mini-van.

What could you do? Even if we had stopped, could we have rescued them? We might have frightened them right into the path of the oncoming traffic.

But this turtle was on a quiet county side-road. Three cars were stopped, waiting for it to safely cross. I’ll bet the drivers of those cars felt quite virtuous. And probably a little amused: in the process of building that country road in the first place, thousands of turtles, frogs, ducks, and other wildlife were mercilessly slaughtered, crushed or buried by bulldozers and trucks, habitat destroyed, migration paths blocked, food chain disrupted. And now we all kindly stop so a single snapper can travel from the swamp on one side of the road to the swamp on the other side. Quite likely, when he gets there, he’ll find that the food chain there is just as perplexing.