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Attempts To Stop Music Sharing Pointless?
job0 writes "An interesting paper (Word document) has been submitted by some Microsoft employees (although they are careful to state that that the views are theirs and not necessarily Microsoft's) to the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management stating that attempts by the record industry to stop music copying will fail simply because a) the growth and availability of affordable broadband and cheap data storage devices and b )ability of users to circumvent any DRM measures means that the number of people willing to swap is growing and will soon outstrip attempts to shut them down. The paper goes to suggest that the record industry should concentrate their efforts on trying music cheaper and easier to get hold off. I wonder if Hilary and friends have had a read. The BBC is also carrying the story." (OpenOffice has no problem with the paper, btw.)
"(OpenOffice has no problem with the paper, btw.)"
.doc's in the past with OpenOffice :-P
Thanks for clarifying that, considering the fact i've opened hundreds of
Are you doubting OpenOffice?
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
MS Word's not even good enough for that. I used to do all my homework at home using LaTeX, then either print it out at home or take it to school as a PDF and print it on the laser printers there. Well, one day I forgot about something and had to start it at school the morning it was due, using MS Word. Copied it to a floppy (2 for redundancy, and it's good I did, 'cause floppies leak data like a strainer leaks water), went to class, opened it up on a different computer, and lo and behold, everything broke. Fonts were different sizes, frames moved around, etc.
And in case the guy I'm involved in an IE vs Mozilla discussion with follows me here, let's look at MS Word's load time and memory usage. Pathetic. Plus the fact that MS Office, like Mozilla, likes to shove itself into RAM on boot, taking what little RAM the typical consumer PC has. And people scoff at Emacs; at least it leaves things where I put them. Not to mention you can't even paste a text snippet into Word without it reformatting out the wazoo, absolutely broken style tools, inane word-by-word selection model (thanks to IE too for that one), etc.
Never again. I decided I'd rather turn something in a day late than waste my day trying to clean up after MS Word. I'll take LaTeX, Lout, an SGML or XML DTD, or some other markup language-based tool any day. Unambiguous, completely portable, and with absolutely no system requirements to edit.
I'd like to note that the difficulty arose when trying to import an MS Word document with strange quote marks. I don't hear anyone talking about problems importing OpenOffice-exported documents into MS Word.
I'd also like to raise the question of why people are sending out MS Word documents as the primary distribution format. It's like me sending out a .tex file instead of a .dvi, .ps, or .pdf. It's only readable by people lucky enough to have the same software as me, but with the added disadvantage that things will go all haywire if the reader has a different printer driver, version of MS Word, etc.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
It's 10-15 million of us against 3-4,000 of them. Enough said! But....I admit too that I still buy cd's (stick THAT in yer pipe and smoke it Hillary!!). It's usually Best Buy's $8.99 deals on modern releases such as White Stripes and other neat bands, MAINLY because I make CD's for a living and I know that they only cost around 35 CENTS to make each one !!!