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Tim O'Reilly Interview
s4 news machine writes "The UK webcaster stage4 has published a lengthy interview with Tim O'Reilly in which he talks about why DRM will fail, Macromedia Central and the rise of webservices, and that Microsoft should have been broken up."
So when will we see /. Hacks ???
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I thought Microsoft was broken up? Or did they somehow manage to get out of it using their pecuniary might?
Bash script for FP whores
What would work is to LIMIT !!! their share of the MARKET as a penalty and allow competition to unfold. If you need evidence of breaking up a monopoly failures , look at the baby bells.
That should be http://www.stage4.co.uk/ - three Ws, not two.
Tim O'Reilly interview: Digital Rights Management is a Non-starter
First posted on 27/07/03
By mrspin
At last year's Apple World Wide Developer Conference (2002) I was lucky enough to attend a very informative talk by Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Publishing) in which he spelt out his theory of watching 'alpha geeks' in order to spot future trends and how web services, open standards and always on connectivity mean that the internet is replacing the desktop operating system. Just over a year on from that talk, Tim was kind enough to answer a few of our questions here on stage4.
We are going through a major paradigm shift in terms of the distribution of music and other digital content. What is your view on the future relevance of DRM technologies, Peer2Peer networks, and traditional media companies?
In the end, I think that DRM is a non-starter, at least as currently conceived. It's baffling to me that the content industries don't look at the experience of the software industry in the 80's, when copy protection on software was widely tried, and just as widely rejected by consumers. As science fiction writer William Gibson said, "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." The software industry was the first to face the issue that bits are easily copyable. It was also the first to try to create artificial boundaries to that copying. But because copy protection greatly inconvenienced customers, it slowed the adoption of any software that used it. We're seeing exactly the same thing now with music, where copy protection schemes have caused consumers to reject the crippled offerings of the commercial online music services.
And it's just foolish, because we have many counter examples of free services being replaced by higher quality paid services. A good example is the ISP industry. In the late 80's, many of us in the computer industry got our email and usenet news via a cooperative dialup network called UUCP. Users agreed to have their computers call each other at specified times to exchange mail and news; it took about 3 days for a message to propagate from one end of the network to another. But as soon as Uunet, the best connected site on the usenet, started to offer higher quality commercial connectivity, the free uucpnet vanished in a matter of months. And of course, once Uunet switched to offering TCP/IP networking, the commercial internet was born.
This isn't to say that some mild access controls might not be appropriate. For example, ISPs require you to have a subscription account, and to identify yourself by logging in. But there are no cumbersome controls on what you can do after that point.
For this reason, I believe that the content industries will flourish online once they stop fighting their users and start offering them what they want at a price they think is fair. That's the way it works in every other field of commerce! And we're already seeing this with Apple's music service, the closest yet to a system that users feel is fair and usable. As soon as Apple rolls it out on Windows (or as soon as competing vendors learn the lessons Apple is teaching), we're going to see a whole new ballgame.
And as the content industries are discovering, existing copyright law is quite enough legal protection for them to put a stop to the most serious of copyright infringers. This is much the same lesson learned by software vendors.
I'm also quite clear that the question isn't whether P2P networks will spell the end of media companies. The question is whether the companies that succeed on the new medium will be upstarts or existing players. We saw this same dynamic on the web, where folks like Yahoo! and Gooogle and MSN, and even AOL despite its troubles, built substantial businesses because they learned the rules of the new medium rather than trying to force users into their old business models.
I strongly believe that publishing, as a role, is driven by the sheer math involved in millions of potential producers reaching hundreds of mi
He thinks the experience of software protection in the 1980's shows DRM will fail.
Not so. In the 80's, software publishers were attempting to do DRM on open systems. Not open in the sense of open source, but open in the sense of being hackable.
The work underway now is to make systems closed, so that DRM *will* be technically doable. It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of. It just has to be good enough to keep consumer behavior in check.
If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.
It's baffling to me that the content industries don't look at the experience of the software industry in the 80's, when copy protection on software was widely tried, and just as widely rejected by consumers.
I can see it now....
Clippy: "I see you are trying to play that new Brittany Spears CD! Please turn to page 12 of the CD insert, 3rd paragraph down, and tell me what the 3rd word is before I'll let you play it"
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Well, I've just joined the Macromedia board of directors, so that may tell you something about the importance I place on Macromedia. It's important for Flash to become more open and more standard
Try getting to the dreamweaver exchange with opera or without flash installed on IE. Just because I bought dreamweaver doesn't mean I'm with the flash program. Seems Macromedia are going that Microsoft route trying to jam flash down my throat as a requirement for support. Macromedia seems more and more willing to play proprietary.
P.S. Dreamweaver improved much more as a cold fusion target, than any of the other languages.
... in his field of vision
From the interview:
"That being said, the net does lead to a breakdown of national boundaries and legal systems, and there's going to be some interesting adaptation over the years, as we move inexorably to a global cyberculture."
a "one ring to rule them all" OS
My guess is we have a fair number of people around here cut from the same cloth.
But then he suggests Air Guitar by Dave Hickey and Moneyball by Michael Lewis.
Maybe he was just trying to help the interview reader relate?
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Mr. O'Reilly, what do you see in the future of technical publishing? I know a lot of hackers swear by traditional "dead tree" volumes, but it also seems like your company's competitively priced electronic publishing program is off to a rearing start. Do you foresee an end to paper technical books? How do WiFi and tablets fit into the future of technology publishing?
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
It's so plainly correct.
The moment the music industry(and even Hollywood) realize that _YES_ they should provide a legitime way to gather entertaiment content from the web, but _NO_, DRM should not be a part of it(at least not in the way they intend to do it at the moment) the next step will be made.
I'm a poor student, but I *will* pay some fee(consider that it should be significantly lower than the price of a DVD for example) as long as there's no even a slightest notion of DRM protection in what I get.
Anyway, I also think that he IS right, but to conclude: NEVER gonna happen. He forgets that in his example both: corporations and consumers have had the same interest, and DRM looks like the first time when that's not the case....
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
the worst thing they could do to microsoft is make it a regulated public utility. Of course that would cause so much fear in the business world we would have an even worse economy.
My goodness, regurgitate the story...posted above... draw the same conclusion and get modded insightful? Please read the stories before you use your mod points!
The guy could publish a volume on his slashdot interviews alone.
Reading that article was like going to the oracle and partaking of pure knowledge. Tim O'Reilly has the brains to shape the future. I'd vote for him for just about any public office. He has a global-centric, practical approach to business, economics and his words make a lot of sense.
I'm suprised that he's not on the Microsoft board of directors to help them see what's coming down the pike.
He mentions SETI-like applications that do not depend on a single piece of hardware, but do depend on connectivity to other devices. The idea of an Internet OS is very interesting. In a few years we won't be booting up to an os, we'll be booting up to Slashdot to get the posting fix.
Huzzah!
DRM will fail eventually, it's up to the Big vendors to get it in quickly so that anti-DRM groups won't have time to involve the consumers.
We can counter DRM by lobbying our governments, but we also deaden it's affect when we decide that we will only use software when we can:
0. look into it's workings
1. recompile it to make sure we're being shown the real code
2. alter it if we don't like what it does, and
3. distribute altered versions so that these freedoms benefit everyone, not just programmers.
We must behave as a community. We will win, but the sooner we start working on it, the less we'll have to fight.
Ciaran O'Riordan
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
In my opinion, as good as (or even better than) the interview itself was an article by Tim O'Reilly that he linked to in one of his answers: Piracy is Progressive Taxation". He has some excellent insights into piracy, and makes several very good points and some interesting comparisons. One of his main points is that free services have been historically replaced by higher quality paid services (ISPs being a prime example). Well worth the read.
Sola Scriptura * Sola Gratia * Sola Fide * Solus Christus * Soli Deo Gloria
I'm interested in seeing what O'reilly can do with running Sun (and others!?) developer community sites. Imagine an MSDN or TechNet that's organized enough to find what you need on! Of course, MS would never swallow its pride and let O'reilly do that.
... Cookbook series. I'm a big fan of learning from well-developed samples. O hwell, maybe he can make Flash scripting something more fun and worth playing with.
I was also hoping to hear that there would be more in the
Seastead this.
that was so disgusting!!!
you should go and kill yourself for making un-suspecting, high-bandwidth users experience that!!!
We haven't seen them yet, but I bet pretty soon we'll see PC's for sale that can only run Windows (this will be enforced by hardware) - don't know how that will affect the music business, but I am sure this is a card that Microsoft is waiting to play at the right time to make even more money.
P.S. In one of the questions in the article it says "should of" - isn't that, like, really bad English...?
grisha.org
Stick with the PC and it will all be good in the 'hood. Help the marketplace decide by not investing in stupid-ass closed architectures.
sulli
RTFJ.
.....we should not bother buying one.....we're all supposed to be smart enough to make our own......;oPPPPPP
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
That's just frightening.
You must be new to /., aren't you...
I work at a company which is extraordinarily pro-linux for a commercial enterprise; and yet all of our developers (100%) run Windows at their desk; because it's fundamentally impossible (STILL) to run a business any other way. Not even the most linux-loving among us can practically use it for his desktop O/S.
We use linux on the servers every chance we get; but there is No Reasonable Alternative To Windows On The Desktop.
Look outside the echo chamber, and Microsoft is still very much a monopoly.
I know this has been covered, but Boromir (of Company of the Ring a.k.a The Nine Walkers fame) was the brother of Faramir, and the son of Denethor II. See here
These was another fellow with the name Boromir from Gondor, but he was the son of Steward Denethor I. Neither Boromir's became king of Gondor--they were of the line of Stewards since the last of the kingly line was killed. See the The Encyclopedia of Arda
I love how he says what a lot of us are saying, but people give it credence when he says it. Regardless, I LOVE THIS MAN.
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
"
There's some revisionist history happening in that article. UUNET didn't cause UUCPnet to disappear. It was around for a looooong time after UUNET got started.
The Effects of DRM WILL effect the common man. He will be trapped into the scheme where he doesn't own anything and is utterly powerless.
These are the same people that cant stop the VCR from flashing 12:00.
They make up the majority of the market.
WE will get around it, but the majority wont, thus DRM will succeed in general and destroy a lot of things we take for granted now, like free speech and privacy..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I hope the content companies don't thrive online. I look forward to seeing them die off. Four years ago I thought that if they switched to something like what iTunes is now that they would make wads more cash, and music fans would be far better off. But they've done too much wrong for there to be any way out.
However, the end of the content companies will not be the end of art or music. There will always be art and music as long as people want to create and be entertained. But instead of content companies that own you the artist body and soul, they will be publicists and advertisement companies that work for you. They will also be much smaller with no monopoly power.
Artists will eventually realize that through a system like iTunes they can cut out the RIAA and take the lion's share of the price of a download themselves. Services like Kazaa will help fans who are too risk averse find out about new music for free, and a number of them will probably opt to spend the money they would once have spent on CDs on concert tickets and merchandise instead. So that too will benefit artists.
And without a cartel brainwashing the public into thinking Britney Spears is good music, there will be a lot more diversity and a lot more creativity out there. I believe that if we can beat back the RIAA and their employees in Congress there's a new cultural golden age out there waiting for us.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
How does a crappy operating system make so much money ?
Someone, please scan all O'Reilly's books, convert them to PDFs and put them on Kazaa/Gnutella/What-have-you.
:0)
We'll see if the song he sings so enthusiastically changes then.
All politicians turn to the dark side of money. It's a fact of life and an exploitation of human nature. After all, we are all animals. Some are just more civilized than others.
Life is not for the lazy.
Analogies to Microsoft is too easy.
So I take it that you would be having orgasms if his name were Tim Carville?
3W3 4R3 T3H 4W50M3!!!
That and the Tweens can only buy so many carppy disks.
I went to battle MC Escher, but drew a blank
No matter what Tim O'Reilly says, ive always had a soft spot for him. In 1993 I was sitting in a train going from London to Heathrow and I was wearing a Legion of Doom T-shirt.
:)
This is 1993, so your mom wasn't on Internet yet.
This guy starts talking to me, asking me if Im involved in Internet pointing at my shirt. So I say I am, co-founder of a dutch ISP (XS4ALL) and involved with Hacktic, a dutch hacker crew. He says he's Tim O'Reilly. _THE_? Yeah..
He was quite cool to talk to, and he gave me a sendmail shirt. Later he mailed me saying his kids loved it that someone recognised their dad
Ok, enough about the good old days,
Cor
This is a good point. I remember a game in the 1980s for the Atari 800 that I cracked by changing a couple of bytes on the floppy (replaced with 6502 machine-language NOP instructions) that made it skip the copy-protection mechanism. I needed to do that so I could have a fair use floppy disk backup of the game that I purchased. I don't think copy protection will ever work. Better to try to market your product in a way that makes it hard to resist buying, like value-added features that you can only get by purchasing the product.
If the US can harvest top talent from around the world by providing H1B visas, we should. Having the big brains of the world here in the US would only strengthen our economy. Sure, they would take someone's job in the short-term, but they could help spur innovations to strengthen our companies which would increase the number of people they need to employ. OTH, companies _could_ hire an Indian guy with a H1B to manage the 20 programmers they've outsourced to India. Shit. Nevermind. Mod parent down...
not really, i just never read slashdot comments b/c they are a black hole of .... .... ... ... ...
uh.. where was I?
oh yea, time. slashdot is a black hole of time...
It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of
But it does, or else it won't keep consumer behavior in check. It is enough for one Chinese hacker or one Bulgarian hobbist to break the protection once, the networks do the rest: in the wonderful digital world we live in, once broken, forever broken, everywhere. I can't replicate a shoplifting, but I can program a code-breaking software that will break a given protection everytime.The whole point is that Joe Clueless Consumer does not have to be a crypto expert, just a Web amateur capable o downloading the "codec" that will play everything again. And Joe C. Consumer will...
>Consumers will reject excessively onerous DRM.
Sure, but look at the mess that windows XP activation is. It randomly goes off at work and even something as trivial as a NIC change makes it go into "piracy mode." Hell, all they need to do now is make the speakers yell out, "Step away from the box, this is in unlicensed version of windows," and their journey to the dark side will be complete.
Users are locked into Microsoft - equipment, mindshare, software, etc - so they really don't have a choice.
If the government stood up to the obvious monopolies and cartels like Microsoft (tried - failed) or the RIAA and MPAA then it would be a different story, but right now we're going to do as we're told. Its either that, no content, or losing your life savings because you dared to download Police Academy 6.
PS - the cover animals are 'based on' public domain lithographs from the 1800s.
So when will we see /. Hacks ???
I just quoted one.
WAY OFF dude....
READ the ARTICLE:
Correction: "...Rather, this is a customized, limited production unit that has been specially modified by the manufacturer."
So we can't build our own.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Moderaters be warned : this is some sort of digest of the previous comments. I see great things in the future for this bot!
I will create an add-in box that captures audio output from a PC or a DRM enabled device, and redirect it back to my pc's audio encoding system as
Slashdot.. Land of nerds, trolls, and FlameBait..
"They will tell you why capitalism will fail, why the war in Afghanistan will be won and why the capitalist pig-dogs will be fed to the dogs of the proletariat".
movies these days are hidoeously expensive to produce and even more expensive to promote.
suppose they wanted to recieve the same profits from you seeing it in a theater once on a DVD sale. how much ould it cost? lets say they make $3 off every one who walked into a theater and they would like to make the same off each DVD.
The cost of production on a DVD is higher than a cd and they generaly contain a lot of high quality printing and packaging so the price per unit may be as high as $2. This gives us a sitting on the ware house floor price of $5 a copy doable and afforadable, but we have to ship it to thestore and as much as we pretend that this isn't a major pain it is and its expensive. This jacks its price to around $7 for popular titles that get shipped in bulk or 10 for unpopular titles. We drop it on the floor of our local mega store who doubles the price to cover their costs and the costs of the shit that gets stolen. So now we sit at around 14 to 20 bucks a DVD which really is pretty reasonable when you think that
1 you arely watch these things alone
2 you watch them as often as you would like
3 they frequently have features (that I enjoy) that add to the value of the DVD.
Now you want to do this over the net.
they still want their $3
band width I have heard prices around $.50 per gig so for 6 gigs (aprox dvd size) we need $3 more
and we need to process your credit card another 30-75 cents depending on the bank.
I come up with a minimum over the internet price of around $6.50.
Its cheaper than a dvd but you get nothing you can touch
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
Please mod up kthxbye.
It takes little analysis to show that widespread VCR availability actually helped Hollywood, sold pallets of blank tapes, etc.
Now, I want to know what intellectual barrier stands between all of the suits and that truth.
All I can guess is that the suits really only care about the 'tactical' cash they can make, and turn a blind eye to the 'strategic' thugging they give themselves by being so stupid.
OTOH, given the quality vacuum that is the US entertainment industry, it the difference between crap and DRM-wrapped-crap is beneath notice.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
a lengthy interview
It was short to medium length. The submitter must have a short attention span. Damn kids these days.
When I was a kids we had to read "War & Peace" in 3 hours, uphill, both ways!
"every time you go to the lavatory it is vitally important to get a receipt"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Dude, that is so dude, dude. Dude, like dude dude dude, dude. And then dude.
He might want to name his first volume "Slashdot In a Nutshell"
Oh, I see. Bill O'Riley is a pontificating wanker, while you are an insightful purveyor of truth. Sigh.
I'll bet you, being a complete git, pronounce "faux" as "fox" too.
Rock on delmoi pud snap.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Why push macromedia into opening flash when we already have a better, more capable, fully open, w3c recommended substitute?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
...God kills a kitten.
:)
Er, no, that's not it.
Every time you buy an XBox, Microsoft loses money. They make it back on game licenses. So if you buy one, stick Linux on it, and don't buy any games, you're actually doing them (Microsoft) a disservice, as well as getting a PC at below wholesale price.
Of course, this requires a certain amount of restraint in not purchasing games.
This may be a dumb question, but what made Tim O'Reilly such an expert on matters such as what should be done with Microsoft. I don't know too much about the matter, but I just don't know if he knows all this stuff. Please post with some good info on Tim O'Reilly.
I don't know, they both like to shoot fish in a barrel don't they?
Best part:
"What do you think should of happened to Microsoft? Are they a threat to the open standards nature of the web?
I think it would have been great for Microsoft to have been broken up into an operating system company and an applications company. It would have ended up...."
Incorrect usage of "of" instead of "have" in the question. O'Reilly's answer starts with an unusual number of "haves." Coincidence? Or subtle joke?
This isn't to say that some mild access controls might not be appropriate. For example, ISPs require you to have a subscription account, and to identify yourself by logging in. But there are no cumbersome controls on what you can do after that point.
Tim, I guess you're not on Comcast, huh?
Government Intervention. Of any kind, just do something, Anything! Free Redmond!
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Just so you know you'll be going to hell to look at that for the rest of your life...you know that don't you.. You sick bastard
But their names escape me. The government if I am not mistaken tried to break them up too for no results. Rockefeller might have been on that action too. What an absolute EVIL person. Related to Bill Gates?
"I mean, the audience isn't supposed to even have lines."
- Jeffrey Tambor as Hank Kingsley
The Larry Sanders Show
have the Os separated from the computer that OEM's sell. Have only a certain number of the OS in circulation to the vendors. Why would this be difficult. We put limits on alot of Foreign made products .
pranked
If they lose money on every XBox purchased, then obviously they're trying to make money back on games. Hence, if you buy an XBox and no games, then MS has *less* money than it would have if you had not bought the XBox at all -- and you have a really cheap computer.
:)
Selling in volume doesn't work if you're losing money on every sale. That right there is simple economics.
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s`________|_____________|________\|_______|_____s
e_\_______|_/_______/__\\\___--___\\_______:____e
x__\______\/____--~~__________~--__|_\_____|____x
*___\______\_-~____________________~-_\____|____*
g____\______\_________.--------.______\|___|____g
o______\_____\______//_________(_(__>_\___|_____o
a_______\___.__C____)_________(_(____>_|__/_____a
t_______/\_|___C_____)/_MADE\_(_____>_|_/_______t
s______/_/\|___C_____)__WITH |__(___>_/__\______s
e_____|___(____C_____)__A MAC/__//__/_/_____\___e
x_____|____\__|_____\\_________//_(__/_______|__x
*____|_\____\____)___`----___--'_____________|__*
g____|__\______________\_______/____________/_|_g
o___|______________/____|_____|__\____________|_o
a___|_____________|____/__MY___\__\___________|_a
t___|__________/_/____|__KARMA__|__\___________|t
s___|_________/_/______\__/\___/____|__________|s
e__|_________/_/________|____|_______|_________|e
x__|__________|_________|____|_______|_________|x
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*
It was 7:00 AM, and I was in the middle of eating breakfast. Four strips of bacon, and some rather ugly looking eggs. My glance went to my frying pan. I used it for many normal things, of course. I had even used it to cook the breakfast I was eating. But there was also another thing, that I wanted to use the frying pan for.
I had dreamed of that pan, for many years now. It had such rounded curves, such a smooth handle. Every day, seeing the grease drip on it's lubricated body. Every day, feeling it, touching it. I could almost hear it calling for me. I was getting a chubby, just thinking about it. Then, I knew, today was the day. I had to make my move.
I got up from my chair, and walked over to it. I could see it was still dripping with grease, and bacon fat. It was so utterly greasy. I hoisted it up, then started moving my tongue all about it. Moving it up the front, up the back. Running it over the handle. The pan started going over my body. It was rubbing it's greasy body all over, begging me for more.
I began to unbutton my shirt, as I erotically mouth fucked it. I removed my shirt, as it started teasing my chest. It suddenly went lower, gliding over my pants, making the fabric between it, and my throbbing manhood wet with white, creamy grease. I lowered my pants, kicking them off, my stone hard cock begging to be released. But, I wanted to pleasure the pan first.
I then began to rub my pink tongue around the pans handle, tongue tickling it. I started moving my mouth over it, sliding the pan in and out, Making it wet with my saliva, motioning my tongue in circles around it. I slid it deeper in, consuming every bit I could, faster and deeper. Sucking so hard, as my head bobbed back and forth. I could feel it rumble with excitment. If pans have orgasms, it was having one. I mouth fucked it 'till it finished its massive orgasm.
I knew it wanted to please me. I managed my underwear over my huge unit. It went directly to my anus, smoothing it's saliva ridden handle over it, lubing it up for penetration. It went in gently at first, a little bit at a time, a little further each shove. I started lightly moaning. It kept shoving, moving with more force, and speed. I started groaning a bit, I wanted all of it in me. It started getting quite powerful, and my anus finally gave way, and swallowed it whole. I rode it out, groaning louder, with each push. It felt so good, I knew I was close to orgasm, I could feel my balls tremble with delight. But, without no
Warning
Unless you're the kind of person who would like to see someone else's posterior in great detail (and have related nightmares and flashbacks for years to follow), do not click on that goat link.
I was once a victim of an apparently friendly "the stuff you want is here"-type message that went straight to that site. Boy, was I glad that nobody else was in the room at the time (and wasn't I disappointed that I wasn't elsewhere too). The whole incident taught me one important lesson - look at the address before you click that link - especially on Slashdot.
Don't click on the link. Especially if you've got your girlfriend, friends and/or family around. Or if you're at work. Especially if you like your job. Don't say I didn't warn you.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
For more info on O'Reilly's far-out views on technology, be sure to catch him at the upcoming Accelerating Change Conference 2003 in September at Stanford. Other speakers will include Ray Kurzweil, John Koza, Howard Bloom, Eric Drexler, Robert Wright, and many, many others. There aren't many conferences that can manage this kind of big-picture analysis of trends in accelerating change.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but that page has the worst formatting I've ever seen. Trying to read an interview isn't worth it when there are 5 words per line and then 80% of the monitor to either side is white space.
HOPE is fucking British.
There is an immense commercial piracy business with money to R&D these things. And their livinghood depends on it...
It's not at all clear which is the case in the case of XBox. Can you point to evidence showing that the direct hardware cost to Microsoft (not the equivalent retail price of white box parts!) is greater than the wholesale price?
sulli
RTFJ.
Microsoft's last remaining stranglehold on the business desktop is the outlook/exchange integration. The protocol that is used is closed. Ximian Evolution advertises that it can function with exchange, but (AFAIK) it does so by faking an HTTP session with IIS (and you must enable web email logins for Evolution to work).
Windows is entrenched in well over 90% of desktop installations. While OpenOffice is giving the business community some serious ammo in license negotiations with Microsoft, very few (none?) of the Fortune 500 are dumping Office (let alone Win32) - yet.
You may assert that any business has the ability to choose a Linux desktop, but this choice will only be made when Linux is both far cheaper and far more user-friendly than now - to justify the pain that an enterprise would feel going cold turkey from the MS crack addiction.
The market is sick of MS tactics - it is interesting to watch MS being contained in the cell phone industry, for example. But that doesn't mean that MS could disappear tomorrow, or that Linux is a completely viable desktop, and that certainly doesn't mean that the MS-Linux playing field is either level or fair.
Let's say you have two music download systems, offerred by record labels.
One, has strict DRM. Let's say this DRM system is well implemented, and reasonably easy to use. The user still has to do things like keep in mind how many copies they are allowed to make, and a complex set of rules that they are locked into.
Company Two has no DRM. You can do whatever the technology lets you. The law still applies.. but they don't care.
Who's got a cheaper cost? Which system is easier to use?
The software companies found that the digital protections were time and money wasted, because ultimately, it didn't matter, and those that didnt' waste time and effort on copy protection just had more money to spend.
Note: Token protection that offers some level of discouragement for joe average DOES have value.. even if in ta theoretical world it provides no security.
Another example:
DAT - Minidisc -vs- CDRom.
The reason minidisc and dat players never took off in the americas was becuase they were REQURIED BY LAW to have DRM built in.
microsoft distorted markets and forced software makers to abandon alternatives. Putting quotas on sales of a Criminally pushed product would be no prob for me. Remember, they did wrong.
they are meant to stop illegal trade. Just like Microsoft does. Why do people have a hard time dealing with this?
It's "you're". "YOU'RE"! It's a contraction! AAaaiiighh!!! Get it right, you nitwit!
Get a life.
There are no less than 12 references to all things Apple in the article, and he also said:
"As you know, Mac OS X: The Missing Manual has been one of the bestselling computer books of the past couple of years, and O'Reilly's biggest seller since The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, the book that launched the consumer internet revolution."
which is quite remarkable given that OS X is such a young technology and remains a minority platform even in the supposedly tiny and dwindling Mac universe. Maybe the 5% market share is another myth.
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So why does everybody want DRM to fail?
I'm serious - DRM's just a tool - a cryptographic application. Why not stop seeing it as an enemy and absorb and adopt it as a tool? Just like strong crypto - we're less worried about how evil governments and corporations are able to communicate in secret because we can ALL communicate in secret.
Why not see if you can get a DRM system to digitally enforce GPL rights - making it impossible to distribute code incorporating GPL'd code without licensing it under the GPL? Why not use it to enforce protection of creative commons, and the contribution of works to the public domain?
DRM could actually be a mechanism for making consumers aware of precisely what rights a creator of a work is willing to grant them - creating a market where consumers can choose to consume freely licensed products.
Isn't DRM only as evil as the licenses it's used to enforce?
there are limits to freedom. We can't buy heroin, military weapons, and PRODUCTS from certain countries that we have an embargo on and also we do trade quotas on countries that dump like Chinese Steel for example.
1) If there's a company that is willing to invest money in a black box solution, there will always be plenty of hackers chomping at the bit to break it.
2) If consumers dislike being strong-armed, they will move away, even if the move is extremely slow. Internet filesharing and Linux are two examples of this. Game cracking programs are as well.
The human mind cannot stand to be oppressed or contained and will always fight to break free. This instance is like a black market. "If there is a market, someone will fill it."
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
The public can go and buy Microsoft but it would be at alot higher prices if quotas were in place on their OS.
We don't have the right to buy anything we want when we have government checks and balances to protect the market place and public. Example, Dumping of Products to put other out of business ,dangerous drug(legal,illegal),weapons, countries embargoed(terrorist nations).
Microsoft wouldn't have 99% of the market if they didn't put their competitors out of business and forced software makers to abandon porting to other operating systems and also force their way onto our new computers and CHARGE us even though we may not want it.
peace. , out.
cutting their share of the market is the best alternative than to break a company in half. Ask Rockefeller.
end of discussion .
peace......out !!