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Digital Music's 2001 Winners and Losers
An Anonymous Coward writes: "MP3 Newswire is running two articles that contain their top 8 MP3 winners for 2001 as well as those who top the loser category. So who is this year's #1 winner? The legal industry for all the billable hours they got to roll up thanks to RIAA and MPAA lawsuits. It's a pretty interesting read and the two articles solicit reader opinions on other potential contenders. I can think of Dmitri Sklyarov right off the bat, but I admit I'm not sure if he won for getting the charges dropped or lost for getting arrested in the first place. Rolling Stone has also run their own digital music winners and losers list for 2001."
Dmitri Sklyarov had nothing to do with digital music--he was arrested for a DMCA violation in cracking Adobe's ebooks. Get it right.
This "draconian" license ensures that authors will maintain due rights to the code that they have spent many hours creating. The "lost hard work" that you are crying the blues about is the same reason they use and enforce this license to begin with.
Tell me this, small suit, how would you feel if you worked for weeks(/months/years) on a massive project; checking over every line and passing it through betas, ensuring that its quality would be valid for the people. You release it and find that several people have taken your source and modified it proprietarily for their own binary projects.
Here's a clue for you-- the GPL was not written for you business types to literally steal code from under contributors, it was built for an open, non-commercial model in which code is shared freely and returned as freely as gained.
Before you make these idiotic troll posts, I suggest you think about the target audience of the license you spend so much effort making these naive and misinformed posts about.
Thank you for your "draconian" time.
Shouldn't we have been on the loser's list somewhere?
The article mentions 8 winners and 8 losers, not 2001 of them.
From the article:
"Fair or not, RIAA president Hillary Rosen and Osama Bin Laden are interchangeable in the eyes of many Net savvy consumers."
Since when did Hillary Rosen kill 5,000 people? Or is she just a mass murderer in her spare time? She's definitely not a saint, and she definitely has greedy corporate interests in mind instead of consumers and artists, but she's nowhere near the scale of evil that Osama Bin Laden is!
Please don't compare someone who has killed members of his own species to someone who is trying to run a profitable business (no matter what you think of that business.)
--
Turn on my friend Paul's lights and spy on his life!
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
This "draconian" license ensures that authors will maintain due rights to the code that they have spent many hours creating.
What are you, a comedian? That's precisely the function of copyright, something you silly people are supposed to be against but are actually its firmest defenders in practice, providing it suits your very narrow range of selfish purposes.
Do not but albums from corperate record lables. For one, the music is dry and usually tasteless (with some exceptions) but mainly because you just support them. Buy from indie lables such as dischord, kill rockstars or who ever. go to the ultimate band list (www.ubl.com) and find YOUR own music. We don't have to buy their stuff....the indie music fight has been going on longer then the open source movement, get into it!
"Allez Cusine!"
Personally I consider MP3 itself to be a loser. It is owned and controlled by a cartel (Fraunhaugher and Thomson Multimedia) and people have to pay out their asses to use it. That is what prompted me to take a moral stance and rerip my entire ~160 cd collection into Ogg Vorbis (350k!). And yes, I know about the threats made against the Ogg project by Thomson......
Seriously folks.... why are so many people still using MP3? It can't hold a candle to Ogg Vorbis or even Windows Media. It isn't open, it doesn't sound nearly as good as it has been hyped to, it produces files that are much bigger than an equivalent Ogg or WMA and well..... it's just lame now.
Here's an example of what I mean if you don't believe me:
I have a 350k Ogg of Prisoner of Society by The Living End that takes up 9.07mb on my hdd and the same song as a 320k MP3 takes up 10.5mb!
Now we have some new technologies:
If I want to hear great new music, what should I do. Right now, even with the second list, I am stuck with the set up of the first list. If I am an artist (I am not...) And I want to get paid for my work, I also am stuck with the first list.
As I see it the week link in the chain is promotion. Slashdot is a wonderful community. We have a list of quickies for the day. How about a weekly feature which posts Free(libre) music. Set it up like the Interviews where each person posts a link to an MP3/Ogg/tar.gz/bz2 file and then the top five/ten rated posts get listed and sent out to the sites that promote music.
Yes It will democratize music, with all that it implies. I don't think there is any way to get around it. Niche music like free jazz will probably not be very popular...but we may be surprized with some of the crossovers.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
It will be interesting to see whether the consumer will be the final winner or loser. I think it's our right to benefit from the more efficient distribution medium that is the internet. We shall see...
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
So who is this year's #1 winner? The legal industry for all the billable hours they got to roll up thanks to RIAA and MPAA lawsuits.
If the law is so complex that you need a degree to understand it, and so full of holes that you can hire someone to win for you just by finding them.. then isn't something wrong? if an OS had similar problems - loopholes/bugs then no-one would take it ser...... oh, yeah, now i get it...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
...While some of us would be inclined to agree with your opinions on MP3, I cannot (and will not) support anything GPL until RMS is no longer a factor in its promotion or philosophy.
Honest to god, I'm not trolling. I just find some of his views so counterproductive that I figure I can wait to fully support free software until (and "if", of course) the free software community starts to feel similarly.
(posted anonymously for political reasons)
This is simply untrue - FUD. You can compile closed/proprietary stuff with GPL'ed tools. It's the code that's protected, not the use of the tools.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
"Fair or not, RIAA president Hillary Rosen and Osama Bin Laden are interchangeable in the eyes of many Net savvy consumers."
This type of comparison, especially when made in major news publications, is just stupidity. Drawing an analogy between people who do/have done entirely different "bad" things is just inane. I find it hard to believe that this kind of "reporting" can get past the people who look over the publications of Mp3.com and even harder to believe that some people actually agree with the assertion.
Can you mod that post up higher than 5?
I'm just saying...
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
We don't have to put up with fascist government officials attempting to enforce their "Big Brother" policies. We don't have to put up with the looming threats of our enforcement agencies writing virii to remove our privacy.
They both fanatically believe what they say.
AC comments get piped to
You can still find Xolox out there, you need a small "patch" to allow it to continue working. Being that it uses the gnutella-net, it's steady as she goes, Cap'n! :)
Trolling is a art,
of slashdotting:
Winners
Losers
Don't kill me tho, I'm on crappy cable.
The 'news for nerds' part I've got. But the 'stuff that matters?' I haven't seen that around this pretentious url for months.
3. Apple iPod
Less than half the size and weight of the Nomad Jukebox plus a firewire connection that can fill the player's 6GB hard drive in only 10 minutes.
This quote is from the article and yet, a quick search of Apple's website yields the following:
"iPod:
High capacity: The 5GB hard disk drive can store up to 1,000 songs.
This "article" on mp3.com is really lacking in the accuracy department.
And probably the worst quote from the article:
"Fair or not, RIAA president Hillary Rosen and Osama Bin Laden are interchangeable in the eyes of many Net savvy consumers."
This stuff is just dismal.
Please don't compare someone who has killed members of his own species to someone who is trying to run a profitable business (no matter what you think of that business.)
I agree that you cannot really compare Rosen, Valenti & Co. to the likes of Bin Laden, certainly the urgency of stopping the latter is much greater do to the immediate threat his evil poses to peoples lives - but we still need to be aware that they to represent a deep evil, and a long term threat to the our freedom as a people that is in many ways more scary then that of religious fundamentalists for the simple reason that is is not as certain to fail.
It is easy to paint these people as simply being the ugly side of capitalism - after all it is at the nature of our system that people, and corporations, act in their own best interest, even when they are everything but utilitarian - but it is not that simple. They are not just ruthless capitalists trying to squeeze some money out of us - and what they are attacking is not just our wallets, but our fundamental freedom and self determination in the digital age.
The future that the corporate overlords from whoom our friends Rosen, Valenti and Co. are lackeys have dreamed up a is one where all the information that people access and process is completely controlled by machines loyal not to their users - but to those very corporations. They are working toward establishing a world where the machines which will continue to grow more and more intimately integrated into our very identity and existance are not tools for freedom but chains of bondage - where the promise of unlimited communication becomes instead a reality where our lives have been invaded by machines that control every word we say and hear. And in the name of "security" and "anti-piracy" they are hijacking the governments that are supposed to guard our freedom to force this world down our throats whether we want it or not.
The threat of an information age where the machines we use to access information are not controlled by ourselves, but rather control us, is a distopia beyond the imaginations of the most paranoid technophobes. The road they are trying to lead us down, and for which the resistance is small, is one of the most profoundly dangerous threats to the very meaning of being human that we have every faced - in very real terms, these are people who are selling out humanity to an unholy union of corporations and machines.
Let us not forget that evil wears many faces.
Musicnet.com and Pressplay.com were such jokes. They wanted people to pay monthly fees for less-than-cd-quality songs, and then one wouldn't allow them to even burn the downloads, while the other limited you as to what you can burn and can't. How stupid can you get?
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
My thoughts exactly and the thought of million of other people. This goes without saying that the consumer, given enough information and will, CAN have the last word and win, these people often forget the one BASIC rule of consuming... you're SUPPOSED TO DELIVER A GOOD to the customer, you're supposed to SELL something that a consumer WANTS. If something better comes out, people will naturally go to the better offering, which can be any or a mix of variable such as quality features and price. We don't see FORD trying to force us to use 1980 car technology, if they see competition doing something good that adds value, they copy it or try to better it, and they also INNOVATE, you know, that buzzword. What did the RIAA do since 20 years on the technology side, aside from sitting in their pile of money and INNOVATING RESTRICTIONS instead of giving the CONSUMER a better experience, by investing cash in better audio system, heck with all the money they've got, we could have had digital radio STANDARD in north american cars by now! but no, they had to act like old close-minded people that are affraid of change. As a consumer, I don't have to PAY for their incompetence nor their buisness mistakes. I have NOTHING against monopoly or big corporation, as long as they deliver and they make me, the consumer, feel satisfied with the merchandise and if they screw me, well they could at least be clever enough so that I don't notice and still be happy with the merchandise content/quality I've purchased.
We're far from a victory, but it's going somewhere, we're still in the part of public awareness, people are starting to realize that, the napster case and subsequent stories about how the industry is ripping off artists were even stuff found in my local newspaper, which was surprising (usually that stuff stays on the net and doesn't cross media, like the dimitry case for example). Anyways, they won't be able to keep it up, they can stick a zillion protection scheme, raise the price as much as they want to, when they're gonna render the medium useless, people will simply switch medium... like it's the case right now. A lot of us, non-rich, non-marketting, non-ceo, non-buisness people saw decent audio compression comming, if they didn't, well too bad... that kind of retarded reaction usually KILL companies, they should be grateful that they are loaded enough to survive such a blattant mistake, and put their energy on a new buisness model that is a PLUS to the consumer, instead of putting fences everywhere to prefent their cash cow from jumping off their property.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Look at how you resort to profanity- a shear sign of your intelligence to all! You've struck a nerve with me as I did with you. I can point out far more errors in your own writing than I can my own, as well; I invite anyone here to help me in that aspect! While I apologize if my signature seemed negative, I never intended to demoralize you. Step up to the plate, my puerile friend, and speak intelligently; not barbarically. I've honestly heard enough already of me "please stop, get the facts straight, you are childishly making false comments" and you replying with simple-minded statements overflowing with profanity and false comments. Happy new year!
Personally, I think the post should have got a 2, 3 at tops. The point is good, but the writing is a bit fluid (fluid like diarrhea, if you will) and unfocused.
In Canada, I enjoy watching your American DirecTV and DishNetwork for free, legally. I also enjoy copying my friends CDs, legally.
Do you? No, you aren't Canadian.
I suppose you could be Mexican, which, of course, makes you as American as anyone else on Cops.
To people developing products based on their technology, maybe. To the average musician who wants to put their own music on their website? NO. The implications were at one point that could happen, in Jan 2001, but Thomson and Fraunhaugher decided not to persue it. Had they done so, a musician would have had to pay approx. $2000 to license the technology to play or stream MP3s from their own website. Regardless of their motives, they are assisting the independent musicians and consumers. While expanding the customer base due to the recognition factor.
The reason that so many people are still using MP3 over Ogg is the same one as why 33 Million subscribe to AOL. It works for them. Besides, Ogg hasn't gotten the kind of publicity that MP3 has. Ogg.com is Olson's GreenHouse Gardens website. I know musicians who use whatever it takes to get their music heard Real, MP3, WMA, even wav files. Seriously though until someone comes along with a player/ripper that operates as part of the users current media player, doesn't take a quasi-genius to set up, then it's going to remain so. Make it as easy as AOL to set up, and the world will beat a path to your door. (at least that's the hope)
There is at least one thing that I can think of that blows away even Ogg and that's called a CD. or a 16 bit 44.1K Wav file. ANY filetype using compression will not sound as good as the original, not that what you get isn't acceptable, just as FM radio is "acceptable". But if you want to talk sound quality, talk wav or CD.
Excuse me, but you are incorrect. Please visit GNU's website for a fuller explanation and rationale behind the GNU licenses.
I think you are confusing using the product of such tools with using such tools. It is basically like the difference between the GPL and the LGPL, only you seem to think the GPL is even more restrictive!
Hey - shut your cock, Mr "Crimp" Daddy.
I believe a big winner should be digital media manufatures. I have spent more money storing MP3's than on playing them. I bought a bigger hard drive to store all the MP3's I ripped from my CD collection. I upgraded the flash memory card on my MP3 player, not to mention the huge stacks of blank CDR discs for making CD's from downloaded MP3's and to play in my Aiwa MP3 car stereo.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Excuse me, but you are incorrect. Please visit GNU's website [gnu.org] for a fuller explanation and rationale behind the GNU licenses.
In an adverserial system of justice, one must vist two web sites. Each site will oppose the other's interpretations in a matter of law. One then asks a judge (not an anonymous slashdolt) to render judgement on which interpretation will prevail. "YOU ARE WRONG!! THE FSF SEZ..." isnt a remotely enforceable mechanism to settle these disputes, understand?
Also the bit about releasing anything compiled with GCC is absolute bullshit.. You're only required to make your stuff GPL'd if you used some GPL code in it, or statically linked in GPL libraries. Hell, even MS hasn't tried to pass off this big of a lie yet!!
Here's a test; get hold of some Windows source code (MS allows small amounts out, EG some of WinCE is readily available) and hack it around a bit until you have a useful program. Statically link in some of the windows DLL's even. Now ask your lawyers if they expect any "legal problems" when you try to sell the resulting binaries.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Like the RIAA, the FCC is also a winner/loser in 2001. Why?
Pre-2001: With some friendly advice from monster media companies like Clear Channel, the FCC ended ownership controls on radio stations.
The Commission claimed that ending controls would be OK, because Internet radio and other fancy-pants technologies would be levellers that would allow anyone into broadcasting. So Clear Channel & the rest promptly gobbled up the radio stations and turned our airwaves into a cultural wasteland.
End of 2001: The FCC remains strangely silent as the RIAA and their ilk work on chasing the amateur, non-profit (read college radio),and independent webcasters out of the market. Meanwhile, the rest of the digital broadcasting market is nowhere. So much for the FCC's BS about the diversity and the promise of the Internet & other technologies!
End result: If the FCC is a sly and cunning pawn of corporate America, it's a definite winner. This cunning political squeeze play has given Clear Channel and the other big media companies control over digital and analog broadcasting for almost nothing! And the RIAA is pretty darn happy too.
On the other hand, if the FCC is a guardian of the public interest, it's one hell of a loser. Talk about a patsy! They let the media giants take over the American airwaves and stand around with their thumbs in their mouths while the same megacorps usurp the digital realm as well!
Whether the FCC full of frauds or fools, it certainly succeeeded at something in 2001.
Deep in the ocean are treasures beyond compare; but if you seek safety, it is on the shore.
Who must continually suck at the bitter fountain of filth spewed by the RIAA, as it gently chokes the life from every alternative source of music in existence. Never mind the entities involved; when you pay more than ten dollars for a CD, you are being screwed. And not only are you being screwed, but the artists themselves are being screwed.
... well, imagine music as a sort of cheddar cheese. And picture the average music listener as a ... a cheese afficianado. Now, say that this cheese costs about four dollars a pound to make, and that you could, if all cheese was supplied directly, pay about six dollars per pound of delicious cheese. Everyone's happy, the cheesemakers get paid a decent living, and the better their cheese is, the more they sell.
Think of it this way. Imagine music as
But WAIT!
Hold on!
Now, all of a sudden, some middleman named Zagat the Great steps in and starts telling people which cheese is the best. And, to top it off, he starts packaging that cheese in special wrappers. Of course, to make sure everything's good for him, Mr. Zagat the Great then ups the price to about sixteen dollars per pound, taking eleven and a half dollars for himself and leaving only half a dollar for the cheese maker. Everyone who wants to sell lots of cheese must go to Mr. Zagat, but in exchange for being famous the cheesemakers get very little in return. Anyone who wants to sell the popular cheeses and thus become profitable, must also suck up to Mr. Zagat, even though Mr. Zagat isn't doing anything to make the cheese. He's just supplying wrapping paper.
To make matters worse, the cheese eaters of the world now have to pay nearly three times the price they used to! And why? Because Mr. Zagat refuses to let anyone else sell the good cheeses! Of course, there are some special places, like Thailand and maybe Hong Kong, where you can by the very same cheese for about five dollars a pound, but Mr. Zagat dismisses that as inferior quality. Secretly, though, he starts funneling inferior cheeses into his own stocks, because now that he controls the entire cheese kingdom, he can decide what is paid for what, without giving a flip about competition or quality.
All of a sudden, some people discover some form of "magic that allows them to exchange the cheese freely among themselves, without paying Mr. Zagat's outrageous prices and the like. Of course, everyone who consumes is happy with this. But Mr. Zagat is not, since it threatens his grip on the cheese industry. So he wipes out anyone who uses the "magic" and declares them to be unethical.
Soon, though, some people suggest a compromise. People can pay a dollar and a half per quarter-pound of cheese, and thus pick what cheese they like, and how much of each cheese to receive via the "magic." But Mr. Zagat says that's entirely wrong too, unless he can tell you where to eat it and what things to eat along with it. That way, he'll at least still have cultural control over the things you do and use, and thus sustain his presence within the economy.
Naturally, that's stupid. So people resort to ferrying cheese in secret, all as Mr. Zagat wails away at the "unfairness" of him not getting his 200%.
Never mind the brazen and utterly ruthless manner in which he foists second-rate cheese onto the world with a wide grin, knowing that no one can oppose him so long as he controls the sources.
Now, who in the seven names of Sega's failed game consoles could say that the world is a better place because of Mr. Zagat?
Yeah, that's right. No one but him.
And that's why the consumer is the real loser.
Thanks so much for bringing this up! Both articles claim that Radio is a loser, and I couldn't agree more. You've pinpointed the exact reason why that is, but most people ignore it, and it's really sad. The radio waves were a hell of a lot more dynamic even three or four years ago, but they've become as dried up and dull as PressPlay or its ilk.
This is a clear case of consumers losing, and I think it's the big reason why people have flocked online to get their music, rather than listen to the radio. It's strange though, because most everyone I know doesn't download as much new stuff as old stuff that they've enjoyed hearing for years.
If you're going to be fed something that you didn't choose, it'd better damn well be great and exciting! If it's not, it's better to eat the stuff that you want to eat, even if it is the same old thing.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
now here's something you won't often see on /.:
Whoops. I was wrong. I wasn't aware that the people behind Ogg had chosen a more sensible license. My bad for not doing some really basic research.
Apologies to the original poster.
Hmm. Well in that case, meet me around the back of Randy's at quarter to five. I'll bring the goats - and do make sure you have an adequate supply of candlewax this time!
Victory? what is victory? to be able to get all the "Free" music many want to steal. The industry is bad so I the consumer should just take what I want.. Gimmie a break. Napster Took from Artists and gave NOTHING back to them. Maybe a few bands got some publicity, but that don't pay the rent.
The industry is failing because it doesn't give people what they want, we don't want more Boy bands or Britany. There is some good stuff coming out on major labels, although its hard to find. The homogonization of radio hasn't helped the music listening experience any.
Someone/ somehow is gonna figure out how to give the consumer the music they want without it being stolen freely. Its hard to make people pay for things they've gotten used to getting for free though.
Look the RIAA is looking out for its best interest.. Not artist's (Thus the RI is (R)ecording (I)ndustry...) .
ASCAP is supposed to look out for recording artists and writers.. I'm not a member so what/how they're doing remains to be seen. The site is good though, they explain how your supposed to make money in music for younger members. They even have a searchable database with which you can look up who wrote and performed any song..but I digress.
The Matrix has you, consumers.
My life's goal is to get a score of +3!
We could but that would also be a beat to mush topic. Most of the technology used in the conversion was implimented a few years ago, as the foreign exchange markets switched over, all the individual european currencies have acted as if they were Euros already. The final step is to actually replace the currency that individuals carry with them for day to day purchases. While there will be some new things, such as vending machines, this is just the final step in what has been a fairly smooth changover.
www.Xolox.nl says they're down; afraid of the layers and their big money backers.
...but
After typing "Xolox" into MyNapster's search box, I get at least 5 places to download v113.
The layers are fucked. The web is becomming a place where those who are willing to play by the lawyers rules live and P2P appears to becomming where the rest of us live/go to find/provide what we want.
My *only* worry is that of untrusted code, but compartmentalization and virtual machines are a better answer than removing the anonymity that allows P2P to be a blissful lawyer free zone.
(Score: -1, Offtopic)
IANAL, obviously
Your choice, and your loss. You might, however, read Section 0, Paragraph 2 of the GPL. It is often overlooked:
The output of gcc is not a derivative work (or "work based on the Program") - it is assembly language, with certain strings in it like "compiled by gcc 2.xx", but bears very little resemblance to any actual gcc code. Similar arguments apply to binutils (the assembler and linker). [Obviously, if you compile gcc with itself, you'll get a derivative work of gcc ... but not because you used gcc to compile it!]
But wait! I hear you say. Doesn't gcc come with a runtime library which every program links to? Way ahead of you, bro. From the comments at the top of libgcc1.c:
Then later, in case you missed it the first time:
Similar disclaimers appear in other files that might be construed as "GPL-tainting the output" of a program - the bison templates, for example. I can only conclude that the intent of the FSF is not only quite clear (only to cover distribution of their software, not to restrict use of it) but legally unambiguous.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
I understand - and in fact I agree. The legal weight of a license is more important than the intent, because any number of circumstances can change the intent of a copyright holder. (Most commonly, the copyright changes hands for one reason or another, and the new owner feels differently than the old.)
That's why I based my post on quotes from the license texts, rather than on quotes from commentators. I still don't see how a lawyer could conclude that the output of gcc is covered by the GPL - unless either
a) he has a very shallow understanding of technical issues and is confused by the difference between a program and its output, or
b) he didn't read the auxilliary license texts such as that found in libgcc1.c to cover the corner case of the runtime library ... or
c) "derivative work" really does have such a loose definition under copyright law as to include the assembly language output of gcc, which is not copied verbatim out of any gcc source, even instruction-by-instruction, but calculated on the fly ... or
d) he is being overly cautious to cover his backside
I'm guessing (d). Well, whatever, go ahead and don't use gcc in-house if you truly think your counsel knows the issues. It's what you pay him for, after all. I think he's overly paranoid, but I don't have a problem with paranoia - it's quite useful sometimes.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and your lover one day may be your killer the next. So its time we acknowledge our corporate and even political allies -- if only temporarily, and on this specific issue -- in the fight against the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA for our rights regarding fair use (and beyond) of intellectual property. This is simply about interests. Right and wrong are for the most part relative -- for some things, such as murder and rape, there is a clear right and wrong. For others, such as intellectual property, all is relative and a matter of your viewpoint. It is in our interests that we be able to trade any files we want freely.
So, here's a listof our two allies and the reasons they're our allies. They consist of the audio-hardware industry (i.e., MP3-player makers), the computer hardware industry (i.e., computer OEMs such as Gateway, Dell, IBM, etc etc), and the Hard-drive industry (which is in kept very profitable largely due to people who want to store 80GB of mp3s or wmas).
1. SonicBlue (RioVolt), Archos (Jukebox HD), Intel (Concert Audio), Apple (iPod), TDK (Mojo), and other makers of MP3-players. They are basically immune from any of the RIAA/MPAA's ridiculous attempts to pin responsibility on the makers of a product for the users actions with that product (as, I believe, if the constitution is upheld, so will software developers eventually be). It is not in their interest at all that music be solidly protected and not traded online -- in fact, this is against their interests. The MP3-player business depends on the trading of music files over the internet. Without the swapping of millions of mp3, wma, and ogg files over Morpheus and LimeWire, the companies that make MP3-players are out of business (if that's their only product) or out of one profitable market (if that's one of their products). These companies most likely will fight and fight hard on our side and against the MPAA/RIAA. Right now, most of them are keeping hands off, because business is fine for them, and we are fighting their indirect legal battle for them. But should the restriction of trading threaten their business, they'll step in.
2. Gateway, Dell, IBM, Compaq, Apple, HP, and other OEMs. Part of what supplies their business is the online world of trading. People buy computers expecting to be able to use them to trade sound and video files, and to store enormous amounts of these files on them. Without that ability, their sales will drop, as their products will be less useful. If protections are build directly into the hardware, sales will really take a hit, as people will be more likely to stick with their current systems.
3. Makers of hard drives. The fact that MP3s and WMAs are small for the amount of information they contain hasn't stopped people from obtaining huge amounts of them in GB.
These are three relatively obvious allies that I thought of off the top of my head. There may be many more. Indeed, our allies in one cause -- i.e., MP3-makers in the cause against the RIAA -- may be our foes in another (i.e., the right to modify their firmware software and distribute the modifications). However, that is not relevant. You use and rally people and organizations where they help you; where they don't, you fight against them. It is up to us to figure out who should be our allies for for obvious profit-margin reasons and alert them to the reality of how their interest lies in supporting us.
In response to this, please feel free to comment on any of the 3 allies I mentioned and add some of your own.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
...but do not count out big business yet. Seems to me that consumers and their interests do NOT always win. For example:
:)
- I can only choose one cable company, so support phone wait times are up to 6 hours!
- I can only choose one local phone carrier, so I pay rather a lot for that too
- I buy a movie in Hong Kong (where I work often): and I cannot watch it at home. (Okay, I admit, thans to vlc on my Linux box, I can!)
- Living as I do in Camada, I have essentially one option for most air travel (Air Canada), so it is very expensive and service is not good.
- If I want medical care, I get into a political morass... where my patient interests are about last on the list of priorities.
Meaning, while the current P2P sitiation gives rise to some hope, we could otoh very well go back to being controlled by corporate interests, with no freedom to copy music, play it where we want, etc. I would say it's 50-50 right now: will the current free model survive?
Meanwhile I'd better start Morpheus and download what I can while I can.
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
Berto
and it keeps coming down...
If anything, I find these prices to be even more outrageous than the RIAA's - arguably, these musicians will see a larger cut of the revenues than they would with the RIAA. But few of them use this to their advantage by reducing the prices of their CDs and truly making their product more appealing. Instead, they take advantage of a buying public that is used to paying outrageous prices for CDs by charging their own outrageous prices.
I'm sorry but if this is the alternative to the RIAA, I'll stick with used CD shops and P2P. Just because the artists are getting screwed by the RIAA doesn't mean they are on the side of the consumer.
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
Your post has quite a few troll-alert phrases, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt (sometimes).
For future reference, gcc 2.95.3 probably generates better code than 3.1 (certainly better than 3.0). What makes 3.x so special is that C++ support has improved and is stabilising. The C backend still has to catch up a bit.
Certainly it's not a good idea to compile the kernel with gcc 3.1 - because 2.95.x is what people mostly test with, and kernel bugs only shown by specific versions of gcc have definitely been known to happen before. (I understand this is also true of a lot of closed-source software - devel houses have to keep old versions of compilers around to support old versions of their software.)
Hmmm, that could be a problem. I don't run big enough servers to have noticed, but many people have complained that the 2.4.x series of kernels took a long time to stabilise - until very recently most people recommended 2.2.19 or 2.2.20 if you really wanted stability. I believe 2.4.16 is a fairly solid kernel, but it's been a long, strange trip.
Also, swap requirements are a little weird. I guess 2.4.17 has a fix that makes the kernel require less of it, but the VM design was not optimised for low swap usage, so it's probably good to overestimate.
Pure FUD - either you are a classic troll or you are very misinformed. Memory protection has been in Linux for about 10 years (i.e. since version 0.01). SMP has been supported for about 5 years, and has been scaling better and better with time. Journaled filesystems have been a little long in coming, but there are four separate ones available today - reiserfs, ext3fs, jfs and xfs. (The latter two are only available externally as patches.) Both reiserfs and ext3fs are said to be quite stable these days, although reiserfs has a history of being declared stable just before annoying bugs are found, so I personally would avoid it for now.
Not that more is better, but remember that Windows 2000 comes with only one journaled filesystem (NTFS).
I'm guessing, if that's the case, that something on the Linux boxes was seriously misconfigured. The 2.4.9 kernel compiled with gcc 3.1 and possibly with insufficient swap might have been a contributing factor. Also, unlike Windows 2000, Linux has a lot of things you can tune for performance, and it may not perform optimally out-of-the-box. YMMV. (If you don't wish to mess with such things, stick with Windows. I'm serious - there's nothing wrong with that.)
You could have misconfigured your kernel before building it, come to that. Running IDE drives without UltraDMA support, for example, or turning on 64GB memory support when you have less than 1GB of memory....
So that's the reason so many shops have huge servers running Solaris, AIX, VM/CMS, IRIX, OpenVMS, MVE, etc?
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Since when did Hillary Rosen kill 5,000 people?
I think that was about the same time when Napster users engaged in burning ships and murdering sailors.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Very simple. It tried Ogg Vorbis and found that it required more computing power both to encode and play back and yet the sound quality was WORSE than the equivalent size MP3 file. I listened to both and found MP3 to sound better. Given all that, why in the world would I choose to use Ogg Vorbis?
--- What?
It hurts ... oh ... it pains me so much!
Humm, derivative works...let's see, Internet Explorer is integrated into windows.
Integration in calculus is a form of derivation.
So does this mean any "integrated" platform made from scratch is still a "derivative" work?
(snicker)
Ok. Ok. I'll lay off the crack pipe.
{Rod Serling voice} There's a sin() up ahead
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Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
No, but I'd love to screw half a dog. Either end is fine.
I'm not licking a jizz-covered corpse, dude! You are sicker than I thought!