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."

Comments

Still waiting...

[TopShelf]

So when will we see /. Hacks ???

Re:Still waiting...

[larry bagina]

There IS an ORA book on running weblogs with SLASH (and no, the cover animal is not a goat).

Re:Still waiting...

[krysith]

Attempted sig hack!

Let's see if it works.

Sorry for any annoyance this may cause...

Re:Still waiting...

[krysith]

Interesting results. I wonder if it looks the same to everyone else out there as it does to me. Whenever I change my sig, the post updates to the new sig.

I was trying to post with a sig under 120 characters, containing more than 50 carriage returns. Just to see what would happen. I didn't expect to have the sig update every time I changed it. FYI, from my point of view, the sig appeared in the post without the carriage returns, although it appeared correctly on my preferences page. Saving the preferences page would clip the sig to the 120 character max length.

Of course, if I were serious about this, I could take a glance at the slashcode. But this was just for fun, and I don't feel like downloading the tarball to look at the docs.

Re:Still waiting...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Man, that must be the only time a post with a direct link to goatse.cx got modded up.

You, sir, are a genius. I take my hat off to you.

Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[zymano]

Breaking up Monopolies NEVER works.

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.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[amerinese]

The breakup of AT&T in the 80s was not so much of a failure as much as an imperfect success. Certainly in the long-distance markets, competition from MCI and Sprint, and since the late 90s any generic startup, brought insanely low prices for long distance calls. I would argue that it is still unknown how there can be healthy competition in the local phone access markets, although perhaps the rise of VoIP and broadband access will lead to alternatives. I guess this is obvious, but if Microsoft were not a monopoly, then one thing that might happen is Linux support for Office and Outlook. It may also lead them to provide more open format programs so that the MS OS company would want to foster more competition and better quality programs running on top of it, and the MS Office company would want to do the same on the OS side.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[Anonymous Coward]

MS isn't near breaking up anyway, in fact they're getting bigger and diversifying!

"Would you like a fries license with that"

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[Tumbleweed]

The only real solution to the MS monopoly is to force them to completely open their APIs and, especially, their file formats. Then anyone who wants to compete truly can, and the end user isn't stuck with their data held hostage in a proprietary format.

Too simple a fix for the legal geniuses to figure out, I guess.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[zymano]

Quotas. Limits on amount sold to Retailers. Something like that. Managed trade to UNDO a CRIME.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[baryon351]

"Would you like a fries license with that"

I don't get it

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[Anonymous Coward]

WordPefect had near-monopoly numbers in the old days and it didn't stop people from switching to MS Word. I'll bet most legacy documents were never converted, since most of them were never edited again.

MS's main advantage is not closed file formats but rather the average user's lack of interest in learning a new tool unless it's significantly better than what they're currently using.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about my right to go to the store and buy whatever I want?

BTW, I never bought the whole "windows mindshare monopoly" bullshit anyways. People have always had a choice, and it happens to have been MSFT.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[Tumbleweed]

But at least then there would be a choice, and no excuse.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[justMichael]

The font is the same as Microsoft's and if you look at the end you can see the little notch in the "d" which I believe is a hold over from the hyphen...

Basically he is saying that Microsoft will absorb McDonalds and you will no longer "buy" food you will license it.

I wouldn't want to be on that license audit team...

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[corgicorgi]

The only real solution to the MS monopoly is to force them to completely open their APIs

Therein lies the problem. How do you force MS to release their APIs? The antitrust lawsuit is not about Windows and it applications. It is legal for a company to not release its technologies behind its products. It's MS's business tactics that's concerning the antitrust laws. For example, MS might tell a PC distributor, "If you ship your PC with netscape installed, your Windows license will cost you more." These are the types of business models that are keeping MS monopoly and crossing antitrust laws.

MS will not release any code or API unless it finds revenue in doing so. The court can't really tell them to release anything. And the lawyers know the battle is not just in finding a solution, but also winning the legal battle and enforcing the solution. So far they have failed in the legal battle. There's little they can do. MS will have to be challenged in the business and consumer arena.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree. Look at Standard Oil. That was broken up. What happened was that Rockefeller owned controlling stock in each one. However, they were broken up thus they must've been in competition with one another right.

These people (e.g. Bill Gates) made a monopoly out of a small business. Breaking them up won't solve the problem. These people are geniuses when it comes to business, and I for one believe that breaking up Microsoft or any Monopoly is a counter-productive method that makes it easier for a Monopolistic businessman to maintain their presumed broken company (e.g. The Standard Oil break up I mentioned above.)

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[Tumbleweed]

> How do you force MS to release their APIs?

When there is a monopoly, a barrier to entry is created in the industry. To ease that barrier while still being fair to the monopoly company, one has to create a custom solution. In the case of MS and the software industry as a whole, any real solution is likely to be unique. How do you force MS to release their APIs? The same way you'd legally force any company to do anything. Crippling penalties until compliance is achieved.

I think the closed file formats is the bigger issue, anyway. "Out innovating" MS by making MS-compatible products only helps MS's platform dominance in the long run, and makes MS products more likely to be purchased by people who use MS platforms. The data is the key - when it's financially unfeasible to move your data to another vendor's tools, it doesn't matter if there are viable alternative products or not. MS _should_ be allowed to bundle whatever they want with their products; they just shouldn't be allowed to lock their customers into their products forever.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[jazman_777]

WordPefect had near-monopoly numbers in the old days and it didn't stop people from switching to MS Word. I'll bet most legacy documents were never converted, since most of them were never edited again.

MS's main advantage is not closed file formats but rather the average user's lack of interest in learning a new tool unless it's significantly better than what they're currently using.

So people changed from WordPerfect to Word, but otherwise are too uninterested in changing? Or was Word so much better than WordPerfect? If so, why not change?

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[Tumbleweed]

An API is different from 'code.' Their APIs are 'supposedly' documented, but we all know they're not, really. That should change, and testing procedures should be made to make sure their own software runs on their own published APIs. If it doesn't, fine them $1 billion US every month their software isn't in compliance. That'd change their tune right quick. :)

And again, I'm much more concerned with the closed file formats than with the APIs. I just think the data should be freed from its shackles!

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[timeOday]

If you need evidence of breaking up a monopoly failures , look at the baby bells.

Here's a very interesting little article on the AT&T breakup. Some tidbits:

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger argued strenuously in 1981 that the Justice Dept. should drop its suit against AT&T because the military needed a single, integrated communications network.

Oh, man, that is choice. "Establishment politician goes to bat for Big Business, citing national security concerns." Pull the other one.

Arno A. Penzias, a Nobel laureate at Bell Laboratories, testified that the world-class labs would become a ''sinking ship'' if AT&T were broken up.

Score one for the Nobel laureate, except that he recanted:

Penzias [now] says the breakup got Bell Labs focused on customers: ''They still create jewels, but more of them are made into jewelry,''

Hmm, sounds like he still works at Lucent. Except the article is from 1999, so now he's probably unemployed.

But curiously that article makes no mention of telephone costs. Here's a graph showing that telephone costs have fallen (well, risen quite a bit slower than general inflation). I imagine most of that benefit is in long distance.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[Nos.]

How do you propose their share of the market be limited?

Customer: I'd like to buy a copy of Windows XP
Sales: Sorry, you'll have to wait until someone buys a Mac or installs linux
Customer: What?
Sales: Well, you see, Microsoft can only have xx% of the market. Until they lose a bit, we can't sell any copis of XP
Customer: What?

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[cyb97]

They didn't really have much of a choice... After a few releases of WordPerfect for Windows it didn't really hold together... Word adapted much better to the new windowed system than WordPerfect...

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[zedmelon]

As much as I wish this would happen, it never will. There is too much incongruity between free enterprise/capitalism and any methods that would limit MicroCrap's legally-gained lion's share of the market.

In a way, the public is partially to blame since you can't sell billions and billions of a crappy product without the "billions served" actually BUYING them. However, like AOL, MS is a marketing MACHINE.

And as long as ethics are still grey areas in the courts, Microsoft's business practices will remain legal, and Billy will remain untouchable.

...unless you're carrying a pie.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[vsprintf]

What would work is to LIMIT !!! their share of the MARKET as a penalty and allow competition to unfold.

Right. You're suddenly going to tell 30% or 40% of desktop users they can no longer use MS and have to find something else. How are you going to pick the lusers? Lottery? What are you going to do when they *pirate* MS software and reinstall it because it's all they know? While many of us here might find the idea amusing, the actual chances of that happening are indistinguishable from zero. Even though MS is a convicted monopolist still under probation, the federal government continually buys ever more of its software from MS. Even the DHS (S for SECURITY) admitted that it gave a huge contract to MS because of expediancy, not security. Your idea is well-intentioned but DOA.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[vsprintf]

WordPefect had near-monopoly numbers in the old days and it didn't stop people from switching to MS Word. I'll bet most legacy documents were never converted, since most of them were never edited again.

MS's main advantage is not closed file formats but rather the average user's lack of interest in learning a new tool unless it's significantly better than what they're currently using.

MS undercut WordPerfect's price with Word. That is why users switched, even though WordPerfect was better. Word was cra^H^H^Halmost useable at the time. Now look at the price for MS Word, after the competition was eliminated. It didn't have anything to do with better tools. As always with MS, it's about marketing.

Re:Microsoft shouldn't have been broken up.

[Gizzmonic]

There's no way to ethically limit marketshare. Despite what certain types around here might think, consumers determine the marketshare of a company. If you don't buy Product A from Company Foo, Company Foo's marketshare is going to be nothing. If you buy Product A, Company Foo's marketshare increases, naturally.

Here's how you break up Microsoft:

Break them into 3 or more companies with all the rights to Microsoft's product line. They all have equal access to everything, and thus, competition is reborn. These new companies will have to be watched, of course, to make sure they don't "share notes," but each would have to actually compete to win competitors.

Proofreading

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be http://www.stage4.co.uk/ - three Ws, not two.

Re:Proofreading

[WIAKywbfatw]

Proofreading?

You're new here aren't you?

Repost of the interview - it's already Slashbotted

[Anonymous Coward]

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

DRM viability

[Anonymous Cowdog]

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.

Re:DRM viability

[*weasel]

the data that gets sent to a drm system will be saved, cracked and distributed to open systems.
it's not an if. one could fairly easily save packets into a file stream on a modified proxy and then work on cracking the encryption; and even barring that, technical reasons have yet to bridge the analog gap (if its presented on a tube or piped to a speaker - it will be captured and reencoded.)

copy protected data -will- fail, unless the prices fall, or the features rise (or a combination) to the point that customers will look past it. (dvd's are vastly more copy-protected than vhs, and they were adopted - for very good reasons).

and even then - data will continue to be pirated. but most people won't bother, because pirating lowers the features, and increases the time, effort and hassle to the point that just buying it is a better solution.

palladium's only hope for adoption, is in possible restrictions on running unsigned code.

but ms is busier cozy-ing up to the media companies than worrying about what the customer wants.

Re:DRM viability

[rgmoore]

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.

OTOH, the software protection schemes of the 1980's were dealing with comparatively primitive approaches to distributing the deprotected software. Today it's not enough to prevent most people from being able to bypass the DRM. You have to do that and make the system so that the few people who can bypass the DRM can't pass it out to the rest of the world using a system like Napster. That means either locking down systems to the point that they can't run anything that isn't signed (which kills backward compatibility among other problems) or playing whack-a-mole with file "sharing" systems. The first is unlikely to happen because of consumer resistence, and the second is technically very, very difficult.

Re:DRM viability

[RevMike]

If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.

Don't you remember having to keep a box next to each PC with the disks for that PC's copy of Lotus 1-2-3, since if the software needed to be updated, you couldn't use any copy, but the actual disk that was used to install it?

Consumers will reject excessively onerous DRM.

Re:DRM viability

[GreenCrackBaby]

He also claimed that the "DRM" of the 80s failed due to consumer rejection, and, I believe, was trying to point out that maybe if the RIAA and MPAA would take example of this, they'd realize they're already heading too far down the same path.

Closed system or not, if the customer doesn't like it, they aren't going to buy it. I don't see a different between a code wheel and a closed-DRM system. Both will make the consumer go: "WTF!"

Re:DRM viability

[Daniel Dvorkin]

IMO, it's a political issue, not a technical one. Any DRM system, whether it operates at the level of the file, the disk, or the whole OS, is hackable. But the difference between then and now is that software manufactures weren't getting Congress to pass laws that made it likely you'd spend more time in prison for cracking copy protection than you would for committing murder. Now that the entertainment industry is trying to do just that -- and, in large part succeeding -- the software industry's 80's experiences may just not be that relevant.

Re:DRM viability

[Cyno]

dvd's are vastly more copy-protected than vhs, and they were adopted - for very good reasons

Yeah, they're easier to copy.

Re:DRM viability

[TheFrood]

If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.

Which, if you read the article, is exactly what O'Reilly is predicting.

TheFrood

Re:DRM viability

[ichimunki]

dvd's are vastly more copy-protected than vhs

No. They aren't. CSS doesn't prevent copying. It controls access to the content. That's why it's the "Content Scrambling System" and not "Copying Something Something". You can copy a DVD a million times if you want. No problem. But for every single one of those million copies you will need a key to unscramble the content. Until DeCSS came along, the only place the keys existed was licensed DVD players and DVD playing software.

Re:DRM viability

[Josh Booth]

Why is it that DVD's are so easy to copy but so hard to decode or change? The encryption is only on the information and no information is embedded into the DVD media that says "This DVD is magic and can be played". You can easily "cp /dev/dvd dvd.iso" and then "cdrecord dvd.iso", assuming that you have a DVD[+-]R drive. But is impossible to play the DVD on a system that has no closed-source CSS decoder (so you don't break the DMCA) or change the content that you payed for, even if you don't plan on distributing. So, I'm not legally able to play my DVD's on GNU/Linux for no reason at all! Does that make sense?

</rant>

Re:DRM viability

[ithicine]

palladium's only hope for adoption, is in possible restrictions on running unsigned code.

Even if palladium restricted unsigned code, it should be very easy to slip hidden code intended to break DRM into a seemingly valid package waiting to get signed. The only way to prevent this is to inspect the source code, but obviously, this approach would never work. Anyone who's traced program execution knows this is time consuming work; to exhaustively audit all software packages is simply impossible. It's like airport security; MS makes everyone go through a security check to get into the airport. The longer the check, the greater the security, and the more frustrated everyone gets with the wait. But it all goes for naught when someone does get past the security. Okay, it's oversimplified, but you get the idea. That doesn't even include the fact that the security people have a conflict of interest; they'll be keeping anyone they want from "catching their flight", so to speak.

How in the world do you go about deciding whether to sign code or not? I don't see any practical way to achieve this kind of security.

Re:DRM viability

[abe ferlman]

It just has to be good enough to keep consumer behavior in check.

This is kind of like Larry Lessig's point too- if information wants to be free, it doesn't want it all that badly.

Re:DRM viability

[rsclient]

In two different places I've worked the "DRM" was ripped out, not because it didn't work (it did), but because customers hated it. Somehow, when you charge someone $50k for software, they expect to be treated a bit more nicely!

Re:DRM viability

[dnoyeb]

The code is not signed by the user but the publisher.

Java does this now. The issue is who is certifying your ability to sign. Today in Java their are ONLY 2. Verisign and thawte (which I hear is 1 nowadays). So you either pay your $200+/year or you get no certificate to sign with. not running unsigned code is trivial. Getting a certificate from verisign will require your full identification so that if your program starts breaking into peoples systems, they will know exactly who to call.

How they plan on preventing the end user from running code not certified/signed by themselves is beyond me. The enthusiast Motherboard manufacturers will always bake in a method around this. Which will get them higher sales. No way around it.

Re:DRM viability

[Asprin]

I'm trying to make sure that I'm not being a jerk, but I went and re-read the article, and you aren't even close to reporting his stated position accurately. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that your stated position agrees with his: it's not that copy protection didn't work, it's that it hurt sales more than it was worth.

To wit:

"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."

Re:DRM viability

[Anonymous Cowdog]

The industry will keep jiggering the protection schemes until it finds something that consumers will accept. My point is, this is technologically achievable. O'Reilly doesn't seem to think so, and holds out the 80's as an example. But the 80's are not an adequate characterization of what is happening today and in the future: networked, secure, and in many cases closed systems that can get fixes via over-the-air updates.

Case in point: my cell phone. Recently an over-the-air update removed several applications from the phone. This same technique can be used to update security mechanisms, even if they are cracked.

The cell carriers make plenty of money selling ring tones. Nobody has cracked the format for ring tones on my cell phone yet. The same model will work for music and other content once devices are more secure.

DRM would never work on today's PCs, though. I think there are many people (in the entertainment industry, for example) who think the PC was a regrettable mistake that should now be fixed by replacing it with a more controlled, less user-programmable, platform. They might not be able to do that at this point, but they will try with other devices. PCs will not go away, but other devices will become more and more central to people's lives. If DRM can be made to succeed on those devices, it will be viable.

Re:DRM viability

[WNight]

The reason DRM is a fools game is because you can't plug the analog hole. Eventually you need to display the data and someone with fairly high-quality recording gear can copy it. The copy won't be protected, so they can distribute it.

The answer to this is supposedly watermarks, but they won't work.

If your watermark checker is available to people, as in, part of a system that decides if this analog movie you're trying to play is supposed to be played, it can be examined (even just as a series of yes/no answers to slight media changes) and the protection removed.

If you're talking about hidden watermarks that exist the track the user, people will just buy music with cash. Or with stolen credit cards. Nobody is going to fill out a detailed form full of personal information and present ID to buy music or a movie, so you're going to get quite a few essentially anonymous purchases. And then there's the issue of someone stealing a legal disc and player from the rightful owner.

Their DRM can't stand up to a world of motivated hackers and the internet and international mail-order will allow any cracks to be distributed around the world, quickly.

If you think XBox modchips are big business, wait until a tenth of the world has a computer with an identical "fritz" chip in it.

DRM is just going to piss of the legitimate customers and everyone else will ignore it.

Re:DRM viability

[WNight]

Right, all you need is an movie playing application where the "Fair Use" number of screenshots allowed per movie has either been given a high limit, or the code to enforce it has been hobbled, or where there's a genuine bug. And that's just what would be trivially easy to sneak through.

Re:DRM viability

[danila]

A very good point. It seems that the DRM is a solution to a problem completely different from what the music/movie/software industries are facing today. The digital distribution (both unauthorised and authorised) in the 80s was in its infancy. It was too difficult to distribute the software (music and movies used traditional venues) and as a result one leaked copy could only reach a limited audience. Therefore it was ok to "copy-protect" every copy imperfectly.

Today one copy can be distributed to every Internet user. We can see how one leaked copy (cam) of Finding Nemo is distributed all over the net. But the problem is that if this copy wasn't made, someoone would do it in another theater. With thousands of theaters and millions of customers, you simply can't "protect" your data. No "copy-restriction" or DRM is 99.9999% perfect.

That's why I don't really see the point of today's DRM efforts. The majority of American broadband users download music and many also download movies and software. There is no way that it can be stopped with DRM.

Some results can be achieved with non-standard media and proprietary software (like in older consoles), but not with music/movies/PC software. The industries can concentrate on fighting P2P systems and users, while also improving their own Internet services. DRM doesn't enter the equation at all.

P.S. An interesting thing that we have a chance to observe is the coming development of e-text piracy systems. Some eBooks are swapped on the P2P networks (and in other channels) already, but the traffic and the selection are still miniscule. It would be interesting to see what will speed up the development and how it will happen, from technological, social and economic point of view.

Re:DRM viability

[Cyno]

Yep. But I believe the libdvdcss library does not use the hacked key that was included with DeCSS. So the library itself is not illegal and infringement from usage might be illegal only if you don't own the DVD you are trying to play.

I don't know all the details, but I believe its legal to play DVDs on GNU/Linux. If that is true then it is also to rip and reencode them, too, since they all use the same libraries. The only thing the MPAA can get you for is decrypting their DVD. But that would be a hard case to make against someone who rightfully purchased the media. Might even be enough to get their precious DMCA thrown out as the bad law it is. But I won't hold my breath.

Re:Uh?

[gilesjuk]

Microsoft broken up? if they were to try to do that it would take another 8 years of court battles.

It won't happen under Bush that's for sure.

Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[GreenCrackBaby]

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"

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for reminding me of the reason I spent so much hard-earned cash photocopying game manuals in the early nineties.

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[AntiOrganic]

Just enter "joshua". It works for everything.

Ah, Spear of Destiny.

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[Lord_Dweomer]

Except these days it would be more like...

Clippy: "I see you're trying to play the new Brittany Spears CD! Please look in to the retinal scanner, and place your thumb into the DNA Sampler so that the RIAA can verify that you have been authorized for a 'One Time Listening License' for the price of $19.99.

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[arth1]

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"

*** Error - Input doesn't compute.
There's no way to fill 12 pages with content about Britney Spears, especially not TEXT.

I'm more concerned about the effect DRM will have on *public* rights, including fair use and archiving. How is the Library of Congress going to store the data for future use when the DRM authentication server and key generator no longer exists in 2045? It's hard enough converting old 8" floppies to newer media, but this is going to kill any kind of public archives.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[feldsteins]

For that price they should be sampling my DNA through a different means entirely. Different. Entirely. "Please insert your *#*&$ into the vaccuum tube..."

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[Josh Booth]

WOOHOO!! My name is the magic word for everything!!

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[tbradshaw]

boob

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[unsinged int]

I lost my instruction book for one of those games once and decided I was going to find my own way to play without asking for another book. This was in the early 90s. With a lot of those old programs, the words from the book were stored in a memory buffer that was not cleared when the program exited. So even on a non-multitasking OS like DOS, you could quit the program, followed by running another program that just searched main memory and dumped the entire list of words. Then you just made yourself a table and proceeded with a dictionary attack against the program. Takes a while to get going, but eventually you find out answers to the most common questions and can stop.

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[Lord_Dweomer]

" For that price they should be sampling my DNA through a different means entirely. Different. Entirely. "Please insert your *#*&$ into the vaccuum tube...""

Wow, thats IT! Thats the big killer app for the RIAA. Screw music. Just sell a suction peripheral, pay them, and they show pictures of Brittney Spears on the screen, most of us probably wouldn't even want to listen to the music either!

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[moncyb]

I'm more concerned about the effect DRM will have on *public* rights, including fair use and archiving.

Don't forget free speech. If you need a certified DRM key to publish anything, then you have to ask company X for one. If they don't like what you say, they'll send a rejection certificate. Free speech goes out the window. Some insist DRM won't work this way, but with DRM mentality, it'll have to be done because otherwise "them durn pyrates will steal everything."

Same for writing your own programs. Palladium (aka NGSCB or whatever) will have this from the beginning (for "secure" content anyway). If anyone can create a program which reads a DRM file, anyone can copy that data without "rights management."

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[forgotmypassword]

Ahh, but I had a game,

"Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender" by Microprose

which would seem to load the game, but would actually load the terrible death scene of your head exploding in outerspace because you didn't seal the cracked windshield. On a single speed CD-ROM, this would make a dictionary attack very slow.

I swear to god that this was a real game, please don't mod me as a goat troll.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/data/117 18 .html

Re:Page 24, third paragraph, 2nd word?

[WNight]

This is why copyright should be an either/or kind of thing. If you want copyright, you rely on the courts to police copying. If you go with DRM you release it into the public domain, if people can crack the protection.

Failing that, which would never happen, you should at least have to give an archivable, unprotected, copy to LoC in order to get copyright protection on a published work.

Macromedia and Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Macromedia and Flash

[mblase]

Macromedia seems more and more willing to play proprietary.

Honestly, part of the problem is the browsers. A lot of the magic of Flash involves being able to connect it to the HTML page using JavaScript. Unfortunately, Mozilla (and, I believe, Opera) are either unable or unwilling to support the JS-Flash bridge that Netscape 4 and IE handle seamlessly.

Re:Macromedia and Flash

[Mr. McGibby]

run arbitrary code on your system

Arbitrary code? This is the first valid argument against flash I have seen. Can you back it up?

Re:Macromedia and Flash

[xgarb]

Even when you get it running it's AWFUL!! Much slower and more difficult to navigate then the old site. I want my right click menu!

______________________

Hmm, a Gibson and Tolkein fan and an expert

[zptdooda]

... 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?

excellent

[Boromir son of Faram]

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?

Re:excellent

[Cancel]

Let's try this again, since another attempt was modded (perhaps justly) as Troll:

This isn't a damn Slashdot interview. The interview has already been done, and they are not soliciting questions.

Has it really gotten so bad that even reading the submission summary is considered harmful?

Re:excellent

[prichardson]

ok, i was really harsh there, i deserve my moderations, oh well, i think this is the first time i've been modded to -1 before it doesn't matter anyway. on slashdot karma easy to get

So right on some points...

[botzi]

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.

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....

Re:So right on some points...

[Nucleon500]

Thank you. I also can't wait to pay for fast downloads of good music in a completely DRM-free (and preferable patent-free) format. And I really think it can happen.

RIAA has lied to us about what they use DRM for, and too many people believe it. DRM absolutely does not combat piracy in any way, shape, or form. Piracy will always be possible, and at present it's pretty easy. DRM is about limiting fair use, and nothing more. What RIAA is only now slowly learning is that limiting fair use doesn't sell. iTunes has shown that the fewer restrictions there are, the more people will buy.

Eventually someone will convince RIAA to let them sell DRM-free files, and eventually the RIAA will agree. They have absolutely nothing to lose.

Re:So right on some points...

[AaronStJ]

Thank you. I also can't wait to pay for fast downloads of good music in a completely DRM-free (and preferable patent-free) format. And I really think it can happen.

Try emusic.com. It's not patent free, but you do get plain old mp3s. completely DRM free.

Re:So right on some points...

[Nucleon500]

Hmm, that's very intersting. Although for some reason they have a proprietary download manager (statically linked to wxWindows), it does work on my i686 Linux. Aside from that, it's great. Hopefully they can make deals with more labels. I think I'll email them about Vorbis, but even without that, I'm considering signing up. Perhaps the industry needs some positive reinforcement.

Re:So right on some points...

[AaronStJ]

Yeah, I'm not sure why exactly they use the download manager. But it's not like the manager is a big pain in the ass or anything (at least, not in Windows). I've been very happy with emusic, although it would be nice if more labels joined. It doesn't seem likely that the big boys would join, but emusic already has some of the heavy hitters form teh indie world, like Matador and Epitaph. It's a pretty sweet deal.

the truth

[radiumhahn]

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.

Re:the truth

[JohnsonWax]

Right.

You give industry a choice:

1) MS becomes a utility (as I agree they should given the current conditions)
2) Support breaking them up, thereby changing the current conditions.

Re:Uh?

[Feztaa]

No, you're thinking of AT&T. Microsoft's punishment was that they weren't allowed to break the law anymore.

Not that it stopped them, unfortunately.

again? geesh...

[0x12d3]

The guy could publish a volume on his slashdot interviews alone.

Tim O'Reily for President

[_Sambo]

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!

Free Software eats the foundations of DRM

[ciaran_o_riordan]

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

Excellent link in the interview

[The Masked Fruitcake]

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.

Developer Communities

[Felonius Thunk]

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.

I was also hoping to hear that there would be more in the ... 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.

Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs!

[Baldrson]

An article from Tim O'Reilly's IT Career Center quotes the CATO Institute as saying:

H-1B workers create jobs for Americans by enabling the creation of new products and spurring innovation. High-tech industry executives estimate that a new H-1B engineer will typically create demand for an additional 3 to 5 American workers.

So, Tim, when will we be getting paid enough to buy our own Segways?

Re:Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs!

[Anonymous Coward]

H1B is better than paying some schmuck in India -- but only because the H1B needs to buy goods and services in the US, pay taxes, etc. so at most 25% of H1B's salary might get shipped back to his thrid world.

When outsourced to a service center, most of the money leaves our economy for good.

Re:Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs!

[isoga]

I don't understand the lash against H1-B visa holders (I'm one myself) - The argument I keep hearing is that they are cheaper than US workers and thus drive down the wage for US tech workers. In my experience this just isnt the case.

Here in the NY / NJ area I know about 20 H1-B visa holders and we're are all paid very well. It's definitely not cheaper to hire us than to hire US workers. We're hired because we have great skills that are difficult to find in the US. (Try foreign language skills and international experience)

On top of that, we have to lead a precarious life, whereby if we lose our jobs, our lives are then transplanted half way across the World with little warning.

dave

Re:Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs!

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of that, we have to lead a precarious life, whereby if we lose our jobs, our lives are then transplanted half way across the World with little warning. ...and isn't that the point? You guys are owned! There'll be no talk of unions from you! and no wage increases to match new skills! what, you won't work mandatory OT? Back to India with ya!

Re:Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs!

[calethix]

"High-tech industry executives estimate that a new H-1B engineer will typically create demand for an additional 3 to 5 American workers."

hrm, let's see..
1 person to toast the buns
1 person to cook the meat
1 person to assemble the sandwhich
1 person to take the order

yup, I guess that's 3-5 jobs :)

Re:Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs!

[isoga]

....and the other H1-B Bugaboo...why does everyone think all H1-Bs are Indian?? How many Indians called 'dave' have you met?

dave

Re:Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs!

[isoga]

Well, FWIW, there are at least 10 british H1-Bs in NYC

Re:Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs!

[theLOUDroom]

That's really funny.

First you state that you aren't cheaper than US workers. Then you state that you have to live with a proverbial gun to your head.

That's why you're cheaper! It's simple economics, you have less bargaining power therefore you have to take less money.


I'm against H1-B Visas precisely because of the "you loose your job, you get sent back to XXXXX".

If we really need more type X workers than we have, there should be no issue with them staying here. A certain amount of turnover is normal. If we really needed them, they should be able to find a new job pretty easily. Deporting them would be bad for both them and us.

If we don't need more type X workers, we shouldn't be allowing companies to bring in people from poor countries and make them work for substandard wages under threat of deportation. It's bad for both sides of the globe.

I'm not against you, I'm against the program by which you came here. It artifically lowers wages for both foreign and domestic workers.

I'm not trying to be mean-spirited by saying your statement was really funny, but you really should reconsider your statement.

Re:Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs!

[isoga]

You didnt pay attention to my first point - At least among the H1-Bs I know, we are all paid equal salaries to our US counterparts. If a company is doing otherwise, then they are sleezebags. As I said, I havent seen evidence of this happening.

Re:Tim O'Reilly: H-1Bs Create American Jobs!

[vsprintf]

I don't understand the lash against H1-B visa holders (I'm one myself) - The argument I keep hearing is that they are cheaper than US workers and thus drive down the wage for US tech workers. In my experience this just isnt the case.

I can't speak for your experience. Perhaps you work for a rare, honest American company. Do a Google on "matloff h-1b". That should bring you up to speed on the evidence.

We're hired because we have great skills that are difficult to find in the US. (Try foreign language skills and international experience)

Yeah, the messiah complex, we hear that over and over again, how the H-1Bs saved American IT. There are no Americans with international experience. There are no Americans who can do math, etc., ad nauseum. The truth is you are just adding to the bonus for the American CEO because (s)he replaced American workers with cheaper labor.

On top of that, we have to lead a precarious life, whereby if we lose our jobs, our lives are then transplanted half way across the World with little warning.

Why is that an issue? First, the H-1B is supposed to be a NON-IMMIGRANT visa for TEMPORARY workers. Second, the INS is not enforcing regulations in any case and is instead basically ignoring the rules. Americans who are out of work have to battle with so-called "guest workers" for jobs in this country. The reality is that which you left unsaid: the H-1B visa is really a planned back-door to a green card or immigrant status, and you don't like it when the winks and nods are questioned.

DRM won't fail completely

[semanticgap]

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...?

Re:DRM won't fail completely

[IWorkForMorons]

There will be a market for non-crippled hardware, don't worry about that. There's no way in hell I'd buy an MS-only (P)iece of (C)rap. For one...I don't buy, I build. Second, I dual-boot. No hardware should tell me I'm not allowed to do that. And if it does, then I don't buy. Simple as that.

Too bad people like me are in the minority though...

Re:DRM won't fail completely

[SwissCheese]

Sort of like the old WinModems? I haven't seen one of these in awhile, so I assume people figured out they were junk.

Re:DRM won't fail completely

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't been to Wal-Mart lately? They sell 'em everywhere. Pretty much every modem under $40 is still a software driven winmodem. They just don't suck as much now because processors are actually fast enough to not boot you off when you scroll on webpages (brings back memories...)

Re:DRM won't fail completely

[kwerle]

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.

Wakey, wakey.

They're called XBoxes, and "only" run a modified windows.

Now they run linux (and various other stuff) as well, though M$ wishes they didn't.

Re:DRM won't fail completely

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a PC, it's a game console, they just share a lot of tech.

Now they run linux (and various other stuff) as well, though M$ wishes they didn't.

If you'd been watching more closely, you'd notice it's curious how little MSFT gives a shit about Xbox mods. The more units they sell the more ammo they have to fight for developers.

They aren't nearly as rabid as Sony or Nintendo when it comes to hunting down people selling modchips/piracy devices.

Re:DRM won't fail completely

[moncyb]

It's not a PC, it's a game console,

Why do people think there is a difference? A game console is just a specialized personal computer. If Microsoft did a port, they could sell a version of Office or Internet Explorer for the Xbox. It's only called a "game console" because developers usually only write games for the device. It's not as if the CPU uses special "game only" opcodes.

Re:DRM won't fail completely

[Audity]

I bet pretty soon we'll see PC's for sale that can only run Windows (this will be enforced by hardware)

I think as long as there's someone around to modify hardware so it won't run linux, there will be someone around to modify linux so it will run on said hardware. Xbox is a nice example.

Re:DRM won't fail completely

[kwerle]

It's not a PC, it's a game console, they just share a lot of tech.

It turns out that modern game consoles are Personal Computers. Just as modern handhelds are portable computers. At the very least, they are certainly all turing complete. Hell, how do you call any device that runs linux "not a computer?" And if it's a computer but not a mainframe, what does that make it?

Whatever.

If you'd been watching more closely, you'd notice it's curious how little MSFT gives a shit about Xbox mods. The more units they sell the more ammo they have to fight for developers.

They aren't nearly as rabid as Sony or Nintendo when it comes to hunting down people selling modchips/piracy devices.

As you practically say, they almost certainly would be if the xbox was as successful as they'd hope'd it'd be. What's more, Sony seems to have blessed linux on the PlayStation2.

Finally, none of this takes away from the fact that M$ has tried to ship a fully DRM-confined computer.

So don't buy closed systems.

[sulli]

And fanboys, listen up: quit buying XBoxes to put Linux on them! You know that's just your excuse to /. so you can feel ok about subscribing to XBox Live.

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.

Re:So don't buy closed systems.

[Xerithane]

And fanboys, listen up: quit buying XBoxes to put Linux on them! You know that's just your excuse to /. so you can feel ok about subscribing to XBox Live.

I totally agree with this, but I still want one. I want to play Apex racing. It's something I enjoy. Racing games just have a nice little sweet spot in my heart, and the PC just falls short because you either have NFS or Nascar games. There is nothing as involved as Apex racing (or Auto Modelista) for the PC.

So what am I going to do? Buy an Xbox, and Apex racing. Then I hope they don't recover the cost of the XBox with me buying just one game (or another really good racing game that comes out.) That's why it won't work, because of people like me who don't care enough about the evil DRM (I think some DRM can be good, but I'm not arguing that here and now) to not buy what we want. It's a trade-off of ideals vs. benefit. The ideals I stand for aren't in major jeopardy by buying an X-Box.

I hate it, but it's just the way it goes. Unless you can point to a PC racing game that has the same depth as Gran Turismo and Apex Racing, the XBox gets my purchase.

Re:So don't buy closed systems.

[DenOfEarth]

I was about to reply the exact same thing, except mention the upcoming Project Gotham game that makes me excited instead of Apex racing (are they comparable?). I care about DRM issues, but I also like to enjoy my time. Microsoft, with its Xbox, is providing reasonable enough entertainment value for the money, so why shouldn't I buy it? For Moral reasons?

Re:So don't buy closed systems.

[Simulant]

I finally broke down and bought a PS2 just because good PC arcade racers (Wipeout!) are rare (last good one was NFS Porsche Unleashed) and lightgun games are nonexistent on the PC. But you know... I was horrified by the lo-res graphics... even with component video out. To much time playing Q3,UT03, BF1942 at hi-res I guess. I have both PS2 & PC versions of Midnight Club 2 and now play the PC version exlusively because it's so much easier on the eyes. Tried a VGA adapter but it doesn't work very well. X-box better?

Re:So don't buy closed systems.

[Merk]

I suppose you wouldn't consider buying an X-Box and acquiring the game through a means that doesn't give MS money? If downloading and burning it isn't your thing, you could probably buy a used company. This way MS doesn't get any more money from you since the original buyer already paid...

Re:So don't buy closed systems.

[Xerithane]

I suppose you wouldn't consider buying an X-Box and acquiring the game through a means that doesn't give MS money? If downloading and burning it isn't your thing, you could probably buy a used company. This way MS doesn't get any more money from you since the original buyer already paid...

I actually only buy used CDs, and if the MPAA starts suing their end-users I'll only buy used DVDs as well. The fact remains that I am feeding into the "Consumer buying XBox" category. I support a gaming store and increase their XBox sales. This means, that as a consumer, I voted that the XBox is ok.

If I buy CDs, I also will only buy from the local stores. I haven't bought a CD in ages though, as netradio has my attention :)

Re:So don't buy closed systems.

[hankaholic]

Normally I agree with your comments, but I have to wonder --

What's the point in not buying an XBox if you honestly want the benefits of buying them?

Consumers have gotten up and shown that they don't want more media consolidation, and it looks like Congress is listening. They only listen to prevent hordes of angry voters putting them out of office, but that's how it works in these United States.

What would be more effective would be buying an XBox, and writing your congress(wo)?man to express your opinions regarding systems which are artificially closed.

Explain how important "fair use" is to you, and encourage others to do the same. Tell your congresspuppet that you feel that products which contain anti-circumvention technology does more to remove your fair use rights than it does to protect the businessperson. Mention the XBox, perhaps even cite the 1992 Sega ruling, and throw in current examples of artificial product lock-in with respect to the printer cartridge industry for good measure.

Write your congresspuppet, and write them often. Encourage others to write them. Tell them you are sick of seeing your fair use rights taken away in the name of "digital rights". Tell them that you feel that the existing copyright law adequately covers businesses, and that you feel that "digital" copyright laws are an infringement upon your consumer rights.

Remember, puppets don't understand issues -- they just move in the direction of the hardest tugs. Tug their strings, and encourage others to do the same.

If the XBox provides a service that you want, buy it! You're not hurting MS in any way that they'll ever notice by not purchasing one.

Re:So don't buy closed systems.

[WNight]

There are some fairly good rally racing games for the PC. Colin McRae Rally 2 was pretty sweet. I'm haven't seen the current crop, but I bet they're pretty sweet.

I don't like console games because of the design philosophy I see in them. They're all about making you jump through hoops to play the little bit of fun game at the end. They give you a dinky car, on a dinky course, and you have to win a championship to open up the next tier of cars, and then another championship to get slightly better tracks, etc. (CMR2 did this, but at least it let you cheat and didn't try to penalize you for it.)

I like playing PC games where most of them either present a fun game from the beginning, or have a way of jumping into the cool stuff at the end. (For example, you can't play a championship with the coolest car until you unlock it, but you can play a single race with any car on any track.)

I don't have tons of time for gaming anymore. I want to be able to sit down and play the game I just spent $60 buying and have fun *now*, not twenty gruelling hours from now.

Re:Asking the wrong question dude.....

[botzi]

.....we should not bother buying one.....we're all supposed to be smart enough to make our own......;oPPPPPP

Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

Microsoft has many advantages, but far from a lock on the future. The days of their operating system monopoly are over. They've been saying this, and working furiously to enter new markets, but no one but them seems to realize that this isn't just legal posturing but an accurate representation of the new world we're all facing.

What a load of crap. Try walking into any big company and suggesting that you should be able to run linux on your desk.

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.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[molarmass192]

It really depends on what you're doing with your machines at work. I gave Win2K the boot in 2001 in favor of Linux. The 1 missing link I needed (a Nortel VPN client for Linux) was finally brought to Linux by Netlock and that was the end of that. IT gave me some push back but all it took was a "Don't worry, I won't call you guys with any Linux specific issues". The first bit required some adjustment since some tools I used had to be "replaced" but all in all, I'm more productive now and that's the way it should be. Now if equivalents for the tools you use aren't available, you've still got a barrier to switching.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[deander2]

ummm... actually developer jobs (like mine) are some of the easiest jobs to convert to OSS on the desktop.

and i love working w/ linux! :-P

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[xThinkx]

"What a load of crap. Try walking into any big company and suggesting that you should be able to run linux on your desk. " I won't name names, but I work for an EXTREMELY large (and profitable) company as a developer. My first day one of the first questions they asked me was "Do you want a windows box, linux box, or Mac?". Just cause your company won't do it, don't assume others won't either.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

In order for there to be enough of a viable alternative to Windows for the statement "Microsoft is not a monopoly" to be true in any useful sense, almost every company in software development would have to easily and practically support internal users on the alternative(s).

Because for every one of us developers, there are a thousand people whose job requires Microsoft Office. If even development shops only occasionally support linux at the desk, it is foolish to claim anything other than monopoly status for MS.

In other words, if the alternatives are not good enough for most developers to use at their job; there's no way the secretaries of the world could do it.

In our case, by the way, it's a combination of office tools and support requirements by our internal IT guy, who, by the way, loves linux as much as anybody here. But there's only one of him where there should be two or three; and a 100% Windows shop is easier than a mixed shop for an already overworked IT staffperson.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[bogie]

"because it's fundamentally impossible (STILL) to run a business any other way"

Why? Because your developers are 100% Windows users and can't live without it? How does that prove anything?

According to you, your company represents every single company in the world and no other possibility exists. How is that possible?

Linux has been a viable desktop for years now. It all depends on what your using it for. But then since your company doesn't use it as a desktop nobody else possibly can. What strange logic.

"but there is No Reasonable Alternative To Windows On The Desktop"

Again with the proclamations. You know saying something over and over doesn't mean its going to come true right? Well since its already been proven that some companies do in fact run linux I'd say you don't really have a leg to stand on here. The point is that your not wrong when you say most companies use windows, but your dead wrong to suggest that it's not possible to survive without it.

Also btw in case you hadn't heard there is a little thing called OSX.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[lordcorusa]

Hmmm. Modded at 5, insightful? Well, even though I agree with the basic premise, that MS is effectively a monopoly, I will still disagree with your specific assertion. Let me give a little anecdotal evidence, and since I'm not giving out sensitive information, I will name names =)

In the last three years I have worked primarily for two large companies. At Raytheon's (enormous defense/aerospace contractor) Mt Laurel New Jersey facility everyone used Solaris desktops. A Windows terminal server was maintained for up to 5 simaltaneous users, but was rarely used.

At Thomson Scientific/ISI in Philadephia, Windows is required to be on employees' machines, however employees may install whatever other OS they want on the machine, although User Services will of course no longer support the machine. In my year and a half there, I never had to boot into Windows to do anything.

So while I grant you that the majority of businesses require you to tolerate Windows, you can find places where Windows is not run if you know where/how to look. I have hit 2 for 2 so far. I have not used Windows in any significant way in more than 2 years, and I am happier for it!

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[div_2n]

It might not be but it smells like a troll. Nonetheless I will take a bite.

I run Linux at home all day long every single day for both work and play. The biggest problems I run into are some web pages that do active content written specifically for IE. Not such a big deal really.

It absolutely IS an alternative on the desktop to Windows. I think what you are trying to say is that for many users it can't operate as a replacement because software XYZ can't run on Linux and the user HAS to have that for whatever reason.

I like to think of this as a percentage of people capable of switching to Linux. I firmly believe that there exists a certain percentage of people that could move to Linux and not be lacking functionality at all. While that percentage is NOT 100% or possibly even 10% it is definitely growing.

Besides, you would be surprised at the reactions of people when I tell them about Linux. "It is free??? I can't run most games or Microsoft software? Big deal as long as there is something I can use instead. There is? THAT'S FREE TOO??? How do I get it?"

I actually wrote down some websites for this woman to read about Linux and a few for downloading. She wouldn't know the difference between Firewire and USB but she understood free loud and clear.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[rstovall]

What a load of crap. Try walking into any big company and suggesting that you should be able to run linux on your desk.

I work for one of the 4 largest telecoms in the US, and there are quite a few developers here, (including myself) who do use linux on our desktops, and our portables. Not common for the end users yet, and not all developers, but many and more each month.

Perhaps you should check out your definition of "extraordinarily pro-linux".... it seems a bit flawed to me.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[rute20740]

The company I work for doesn't have a single PC running Windows. Everyone here either runs some distribution of Linux or Mac OSX.

We've been operating this way without a hitch for many years. Mostly, the developers and sys admins run Linux, and the rest are on OSX.

We have seen no reason to run Windows, and no hinderance in our ability to work effectively as a result.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Azghoul]

You are nuts.

I am using RH9 on my desktop RIGHT NOW. To claim that what I am doing is "fundamentally impossible" is just foolish.

Perhaps the mega-corps can't do it now, but that's as much office politics, policies and management issues than technical or monopolistic ones.

Also, just to drive home the point, go look up how many of us work in SMALL companies compared with the number working in LARGE companies. Small wins.

"No Reasonable Alternative" is just horse shit. OpenOffice and Gnumeric allow me to communicate in every way with my co-workers.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Kismet]

What a load of crap. Try walking into any big company and suggesting that you should be able to run linux on your desk.

It's not uncommon to see Linux or even FreeBSD on business desktops. I worked on a technical team that used 90% Linux and 10% FreeBSD. This was in 1998.

Ok, ok, it wasn't a "big company", and it was mostly just my team. But it is out there.

In 2000 I took a tour of a mid-sized manufacturing company called Action Target. They were 100% Linux on the desktop, running a system called Wyatt-ERP. This handled everything from AR to call tracking, and integrated with their phone system to boot. They had a little win 98 box in a closet, in case there was need to convert a Word document.

Linux is certainly an increasingly viable desktop platform, particularly for small and medium sized businesses, and it is definitely getting used.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[calethix]

"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."

What is it that you're developing? Windows applications in VB? I could see where that might be a little tricky on Linux.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Jim Hall]

What a load of crap. Try walking into any big company and suggesting that you should be able to run linux on your desk.

The fact that I work at a big-10 university has something to do with this, I'm sure, but I'm running RH9 on my laptop right now. Why is that important to you? Because I'm a manager, not a programmer. And I find RH9 to be very productive and useful for me. Granted, I manage the staff who admin our UNIX servers (Linux, AIX, Solaris) but no one manages my laptop for me.

On top of that, I gave a presentation just last week to our CIO, our Deputy CIOs, and several Directors about letting departments roll out Linux on the desktop. And no one choked up a lung or anything. We run Windows and Mac here ... allowing a University-acceptable distro (Red Hat) into our environment is just managing your diversity.

Companies and organizations don't have to have 100% the same desktop for every user to keep costs down .. it's all about managing the diversity on the desktop.

Mod parent down as trolling, please.

-jh

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Dan Ost]

I would agree that Microsoft still has a monopoly on consumer desktops, but
in my department, Windows desktops are limited to mostly admin, business types,
and a couple developers.I would imagine that the majority of the rest of the
company (Fortune 150ish) runs windows, but it isn't dictated to us.

Most of what we develop is platform agnostic and so we're seeing more and
more Linux boxes running in the field since they are cheaper to build, easier
to remotely maintain, and rock solid.

This is how the Microsoft monopoly is being eroded: good engineering creates
products that are platform agnostic, the platform is chosen that best meets
requirements, and often enough that platform isn't Windows.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

Why? Because your developers are 100% Windows users and can't live without it? How does that prove anything? According to you, your company represents every single company in the world and no other possibility exists. How is that possible?

I assert that if a company where people would want to use linux (and our end-product is in java) still can't make it happen; that it is unlikely that MOST companies are able to support linux at their developers desk. Not all. But to claim that most can make it happen from a practical perspective seems to me, with experience at many different companies, to be foolish.

Note: Possible does not equal practical. Think about that before you post again.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

I'd assert that if the percentage of people that must run Windows for WHATEVER reason (IS; real hardware issues; app X which must be run; whatever) is large enough, that it is foolhardy to then claim that Microsoft is "not a monopoly"; and that was the only point being made.

That percentage of people is very very large; and therefore Microsoft does have a monopoly.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

Actually, this is a small company. 45 people.

The point is that maintaining, with one guy, a network which simultaneously supports sales people; secretaries; executives; and programmers - basically mandates Windows. Not because the developers need Windows; but because the others must have it; and because in order for one guy to manage everything; the rest of us get dragged along (if I can't read the CFO's spreadsheet; I'm in big trouble. if I make the IT guy lose a day because of my linux-related network issue; I'm in big trouble).

By the way, most of this can be boiled down to problems with Windows not playing well with others; which, again, is a hallmark of... monopoly.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

Java. Try again; you've just made an ass out of you and me.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

I've worked in that kind of environment too; but it's (mostly) limited to companies large enough to have a large IT staff. (IBM, for instance, would roll enough of their own network infrastructure that the "drag-along" issues of Windows were mostly avoided, so you could run almost anything you wanted at your desk).

However, I've been assured by a gentleman in this thread that most people work in small companies (an assertion with which I agree); and at a small company, if the CEO's desktop system and a programmer's desktop system fight for the one IT guy's attention, which one do you think is going to win?

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

The fact that I work at a big-10 university has something to do with this, I'm sure, but I'm running RH9 on my laptop right now. Why is that important to you? Because I'm a manager, not a programmer. And I find RH9 to be very productive and useful for me. Granted, I manage the staff who admin our UNIX servers (Linux, AIX, Solaris) but no one manages my laptop for me.

Academia? Check.

Managing unix admins? Check.

Representative of exactly one millionth of the market? Check.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

I agree; but the "don't worry, I won't call you guys with any Linux specific issues" usually only works with 1 guy, if you can trust him. I think the IS people here would tell you if you gave them a chance that trusting the users too much can really bite you.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

If Windows is required to be on the machine, then you've just paid Microsoft for a license; and you've just supported the position that Microsoft is a monopoly.

Thanks for your assistance.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[molarmass192]

Well, it was longer than a one sentence conversation. The support issue was their sticking point. Once I made it clear that I wouldn't file tickets with them on Linux specific problems, IT got out of the loop and it was between my manager and I from then on. Point is it can be done, but it depends primarily on what you do with the machine.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Azghoul]

I think you're reading too much into the term monopoly... I hate MS as much as the next guy, and you're right, in order for things to work in a company with 1 IT guy, he'll likely have to go windows... but there's absolutely no monopoly power telling him he can't standardize on linux!

Right now, 2004, there is no monopoly. At the time MS did the things they got "fact found" on, they probably were. But the market fixed that little problem, it's just a matter of time now companies to move out from their shadow.

Simple, silly example: I standardized my small company (only 20 peeps in 2 offices) on Netscape and Netscape Mail instead of IE/Outlook. It was easy enough.

Ergo, it can be done, and for your spreadsheet, try Gnumeric, it's been grand for me. Ooffice if you have a boss like me who's stupid about sending around powerpoints...

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

If I was the IT department at most companies (assumed here: typical companies treat IT like the red-headed stepchild; and we're talking about TypicalCompany), I would have required that you give up the ability to file _all_ tickets; because, honestly, I (the IT guy) don't know you from Adam; I have no idea if you're a L33T genius or a bonehead; and at TypicalCompany, any extra time I have to spend on your linux-specific issue (even if caused by Windows playing poorly) gets me in big trouble with my boss.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

I think you're reading too much into the term monopoly... I hate MS as much as the next guy, and you're right, in order for things to work in a company with 1 IT guy, he'll likely have to go windows... but there's absolutely no monopoly power telling him he can't standardize on linux!

That's ridiculous. If he standardized on linux, and remember, he's the only IT guy at the company, then the CEO, COO, secretary, and salespeople would have to use linux; and if you think that's even remotely feasible today, you're smoking a particularly potent brand of crack. Right now, 2004, there is no monopoly. At the time MS did the things they got "fact found" on, they probably were. But the market fixed that little problem, it's just a matter of time now companies to move out from their shadow.

The market fixed that little problem? What company in the market fixed it? What commercial competitors to Microsoft Windows exist? Note: linux is not a market solution to this problem.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Darby]

What a load of crap. Try walking into any big company and suggesting that you should be able to run linux on your desk.

That's what I did. I said I want to set up a dual boot. They said will a 120G drive be ok for that?
I said that's kind of overkill, can I get something smaller? They said that's the smallest we can get.
I said 120G it is.

Not even the most linux-loving among us can practically use it for his desktop O/S.

B.S.

Now, we are using Citrix on Windows. The Linux Citrix client works great so I can check my email and calendar (outlook) while I can actually get my development work done faster and more easily with a Linux desktop.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Azghoul]

"ridiculous"? Hardly. If the boss decided he didn't want MS solutions, he could easily and quickly order his IT guy to install Linux on every machine in that office. There's no market force (monopoly or otherwise) that would stop him from doing so.

Yes, the market fixed the problem. Of course you can't go uprooting huge organizations and installing something else right now. But that has ONLY to do with the cost of doing so, not any force that MS is using against such companies.

New companies certainly have the choice: there is no real barrier to installing something other than MS. I know a number of companies (graphics-related, usually printing) who use Macs almost exclusively.

Now, perhaps you can explain how Linux is not a market solution? Perhaps you mean the OS itself, which obviously is true. Companies like RH and Suse and IBM are the market solutions. How can you argue that they are not competitors to MS?

It used to be that many companies used unix terminals to do data entry and accounting, or VAX systems. They switched over once, what's to prevent them from switching again? Money, obviously. But that's a purely internal business decision. There is no monopoly in OS's.

Any conclusion other than that is simply missing the point of what a monopoly truly is (go read a definition if you're still confused), or an emotional anti-MS rant. The latter I can certainly understand, I hate them as much as anyone...

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Azghoul]

Aside from the point that the IT obviously isn't the guy who makes the final decision on what software will be used in-house, can you explain to me exactly what is impossible about the scenario?

CEO: What does he use that cannot be implemented under Linux? OpenOffice handles most things I can think of (obviously, I'm no CEO, so I surely don't know). Last I checked, though, businesses worked well without MS 15 years ago.

COO: What does he do that's different? Inventory control? There have been Unix-based systems for that kind of thing for ages. I used to help install them using some kind of Concentric Unix thing 10 years ago (i knew very little back then).

Secretary: You may not have been there, but secretaries used to use Wordstar on DOS terminals. And Wordperfect for DOS was outstanding. What, precisely, is not feasible? They can't play solitaire? Pretty desktop pictures? Mail merge can be done in ways other than clicking a button in Word.

Salespeople: Contact managers? Yeah, you're right, you need MS to handle that.

I have no idea what you mean when you claim that it's not "even remotely feasible". Because that's absurd.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

Hate to break it to you, but if you're using Citrix on Windows, you're "using Windows". Thus, you are support for, not against, the position that Microsoft is still effectively a requirement in most corporations.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

Yes, the market fixed the problem.

Again, what company (commercial) are you talking about here? It's trivially easy to say that the existence of linux proves that Microsoft isn't a monopoly; but it's also trivially false.

The facts that support MS' monopoly definition are that you can't practically and reliably get corporate-level PCs without Windows (even today); and that in most corporations you must run Windows to be able to do your job; even if that job is programming.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

If you work in a company where your IT guy can get the CEO to run an O/S that doesn't come from Microsoft, you work in paradise.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Azghoul]

Sorry to be this pedantic, and it's interesting having this conversation but you're getting farther afield here. Here's the definition I just copied from dictionary.com:

monopoly n. pl. monopolies

1. Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service: "Monopoly frequently... arises from government support or from collusive agreements among individuals" (Milton Friedman).
2. Law. A right granted by a government giving exclusive control over a specified commercial activity to a single party.
3.
1. A company or group having exclusive control over a commercial activity.
2. A commodity or service so controlled.
4.
1. Exclusive possession or control: arrogantly claims to have a monopoly on the truth.
2. Something that is exclusively possessed or controlled: showed that scientific achievement is not a male monopoly.

Can you explain to me where, in there, MS's Operating Systems are today? Whether or not I'm able to convince my CEO to use MS has nothing to do with MS as a monopoly or not.

MS does not have exclusive control or access to any market. They have monopolistic tendencies, sure, but they are surely not a monopoly...

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

The fact that most corporations mandate usage of Windows is a side-effect; a symptom; and an indicator of MS's monopoly status; not proof thereof. But it is a useful correlation to analyze; because in a competitive OS market, that behavior would not exist.

MS is a monopoly because no commercial competitor exists. Linux improvements are typically not made to satisfy the demands of the end-user market (but for other, certainly valid reasons); just as how the last N changes in Netscape were not made for end-users but for the benefit of AOL.

A free "competitor" does not disprove a monopoly. In fact, it shows how desperate people are to escape the monopoly.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Azghoul]

Correlation does not imply causation.

Companies currently jump on the MS bandwagon because of internal inertia, choice, or ignorance. Neither of those three is caused by MS as a monopoly or not.

Explain to me how Apple, RH, and IBM are not competitors. People are free to choose any OS they want: To claim otherwise is demonstrably false. If MS were a monopoly those choices would not exist at all.

Commercial competitors DO exist for MS, and this is the second of my posts that has mentioned a few of them. Whether not they are the same size as MS does not matter (what matters is that Company X, no matter /it's/ size, could choose to go with Apple or IBM's Linux - see Munich for details). Whether or not a specific percentage of the user base chooses them does not matter. The fact is, they exist, disproving the MS = monopoly hypothesis.

I expect I won't change your mind, and you won't change mine. Either way, I'm adding you to my fan base (big whip, I know :)) just for the decent discussion. Thanks. :)

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Rorgg]

If EverQuest ran on Linux I'd switch my home PC tonight and never look back.

Not that I'm (twitch) addicted (twitch) or anything...

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Darby]

Hate to break it to you, but if you're using Citrix on Windows, you're "using Windows". Thus, you are support for, not against, the position that Microsoft is still effectively a requirement in most corporations.

You're not "breaking" anything to me.

You'll note I said, "Now, we are using Citrix on Windows.", Indicating that I am aware that this isn't a perfect example.
It certainly isn't an example of my corporation having any requirement to use windows, they just do.
I could use the web access and drop Citrix, but they have already paid for 3 windows licenses for me. One that came with the machine, one they put on the machine over the original one and one to use Citrix.

This is merely a lack of comprehension on the part of my employers that they're being raped.
I have no need to use any MS products to do my job more efficiently than my coworkers who only know windows.

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[doinky]

but they have already paid for 3 windows licenses for me. One that came with the machine, one they put on the machine over the original one and one to use Citrix.

So your employers paid for 3 copies of Windows, and yet you think Microsoft does not have monopoly power?

Re:Microsoft "not a monopoly"

[Darby]

So your employers paid for 3 copies of Windows, and yet you think Microsoft does not have monopoly power?

No, I know that they have monopoly power.
My point is that I also know that that monopoly is built upon a farce.
There isn't a need for windows in a lot of cases.
I'm not aware of anything MS makes that isn't available through some other vendor, OSS or otherwise.
Most people are terrified of computers and of change which adds to the inertia.

Your assertion was that it isn't possible to go to your employer and say, "I want to install Linux".

I refuted that with one piece of anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

I play a card game called Magic, and made a database of all the cards using the text files Wizards of the Coast have on their website and some perl to clean the lists up since they have no freaking consistency between the lists of card sets. I dumped it and imported it at work once I had my Linux box set up.

Now, this is about as simple a database as you can have. I mean it's one table.
I put a web front end on it so you can search for certain characteristics and get results with pictures of the cards using perl via CGI.
Real simple stuff if you know anything at all about this stuff.
I showed it to our lead architect who plays as well.
He thought it was cool, and asked what I was using to run it. (MySQL, Perl, Apache)
I asked him if he wanted a copy and told him it was bog standard. The only thing specific was perl. Bare bones SQL and CGI will import fine into the associated MS products, so there wouldn't be any effort involved.
He was like, "Well, I've thought about looking at that open stuff but I sold my soul to MS".

I mean that's just nutty given that he is bright and good with computers, programming, architecture and all that.

The point is that that is the kind of environment I'm working in but once I had been there for a little while and showed my value I just had to ask and I did receive.

It's been one week, and already I'll work with one of the other developers at my desk doing the same (more or less) tasks that they've been doing for years and they'll keep going whoa, how did you do that, cripes that takes me forever etc. etc.

This man is great

[xThinkx]

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.

Re:This man is great

[Blob Pet]

Mr. O'Reilly, run away as fast as you can.

some revisionist history here...

[deanj]

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.

Re:Uh?

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

Hah, who needs to send robots to Mars to look for life when we have an obvious martian in out midst (or at the very least someone who has lived on Mars for the past four years).

And I for one welcome out new Martian masters!

DRM will effect the common users regardless

[nurb432]

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..

Re:DRM will effect the common users regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

These are the same people that cant stop the VCR from flashing 12:00

If you offered them a vhs tape which when inserted set the clock, then their vcr wouldn't flash 12:00. Can't be done with vhs tapes, but can with software.

If script kiddies have taught us anything, it is that a bunch of technically clueless people can wield technically savvy tools.

Re:DRM will effect the common users regardless

[byolinux]

Excuse me, are you saying that 12:00 doohickey does something?

Re:DRM will effect the common users regardless

[Azghoul]

Those are the people who, by their current inaction, disinterest and lack of education (on the matters at hand), demonstrate a distinct lack of interest in free speech and privacy anyway.

So they likely won't really care when DRM constricts them. Sure, they may say, "Gee, how come I can't make my own CDs" but then a new reality show will come on NBC and they'll move on.

In the meantime, those of us who ARE interested in such things as privacy and free speech will continue to fight the good fight, continue to get our non-copy-protected info and hardware, and life will cruise along like it does right now, more or less.

Re:DRM will effect the common users regardless

[vsprintf]

Excuse me, are you saying that 12:00 doohickey does something?

Do what I did; just unplug the stupid thing. It won't play DVDs anyway. If you have kids, chances are there's a peanut-butter sandwich inside it, and you don't want to disturb it anyway. The upside is that you no longer have that flashing thing adding to the utility bills.

Personally,

[Phoenix666]

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.

Re:Personally,

[ex-songwriter]

Well, there is actually nothing standing in the way of artists recording their own work and hanging out a digital shingle (web site, free MP3s), as it were. There never has been. Of course, there's really not much cheese down that hole. P2P and cheap recording technology have been around for long enough to have produced a rash of tremendous, popular acts, if that was all it actually takes. Yet artists still struggle to secure a contract to record for the majors because they can spend the few million dollars it takes to break them. I hate to be a killjoy, but P2P probably won't do much to change that fact or those figures. After all, very few acts are discovered via P2P; the majority of songs downloaded are recent, popular works released by major labels. As for brainwashing by the cartel--there are no victims, only volunteers.

100 % proof Microsoft is a MONOPOLY.

[zymano]

How does a crappy operating system make so much money ?

Re:100 % proof Microsoft is a MONOPOLY.

[ratfynk]

You hit it right on the button 40% profit margins are an impossibility unless you are getting away with paying off a lot of political grease! That is unheard of in any other business sector. It is a .net result of the ability of MS to effectively control business information exchange with their software. All the low paying entry level jobs that I see posted usually include the ability to run a windows computer with ms office products. O'Rielly is right the company should have been split up, so were a few judicial people, (that are now out of work) that suggested the Ma bell standard oil like remedy. Too late we have allowed it to happen and the MS/Intel cartel will just drive everbody else out of info exchange.

Re:100 % proof Microsoft is a MONOPOLY.

[JonathanBoyd]

There were days when Apple had 40%+ margins on their hardware. It's entirely possible to do, as long as people are willing to pay the price.

Dark side

[DigiShaman]

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.

We put quotas on STEEL that Foreign......

[zymano]

countries dump in here at reduced prices to drive domestics out of business.

Analogies to Microsoft is too easy.

Re:We put quotas on STEEL that Foreign......

[Hnidan]

And that analogy might apply if some other company was selling Windows.

I think it's safe to say that there would be considerable backlash against the American Government if they made it illegal for a computer store to sell any piece of software to someone who was willing to pay for it.

Oh wait, I forgot about the DMCA...
Foolish Americans.

Re:We put quotas on STEEL that Foreign......

[zymano]

i wouldn't mind. Microsoft put restrictions on what Software can work on other operating systems by using their marketshare as leverage. Os/2,Digital Dos, Linux as examples.

Re:We put quotas on STEEL that Foreign......

[JonathanBoyd]

IIRC, there was a big row about that a few months ago because under world trade agreements, you're not allowed to do that. Basically, free trade is okay as long as it benefits the US. As soon as someone else starts benefitting, in come the quotas. Typical Bush, though I wouldn't be too surprised at anybody doing it. Everyone wants to protect their own, quite understandably. If you sign up to agreements though, you should go along with them. Anyway, quotas on Microsoft would be wrong. People should be free to buy Windows if they want. How about a massive fine instead? A fine in the billions. Then use the fine to buy Macs, train Linux admins, fund non-windows software development, etc. Much more. Or refuse to renew government contracts once they expire. Not hugely realistic, but it would hurt,

Re:We put quotas on STEEL that Foreign......

[JonathanBoyd]

They don't stop you from buying it though. What if the government shut down all Linux developers and incinerated the ftp servers with the ISOs?

Re:"DRM will fail" my ass!

[chromatic]

See the CD Bookshelves which are in open formats but don't use DRM. That doesn't mean they're not copyrighted, though. You're expected to do the right thing but you're not forced to do it.

Tim O'Reilly

[corbosman]

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

Good Point

[tds67]

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.

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.

MOD PARENT UP

[enomar]

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...

Re:Do the goatse!

[gordon1986]

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 must resist all attachs, and then some

[Pac]

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...

Re:It must resist all attachs, and then some

[Anonymous Cowdog]

Classy way to deal with my typo :-).

>Joe Clueless Consumer does not have to be a crypto expert, just a Web amateur capable o downloading the "codec"

To do that, Joe must have a machine that allows downloading and installation of the codec. Too bad for Joe, his machine will probably have mechanisms to prevent and even retroactively fix security problems.

Close the system, and the game is over. You don't have to close all the systems, just the ones available to consumers. So, there emerges "trusted" computing (that can be trusted by content providers, not by the owner of the device). Don't assume the computer you can buy today is the computer being envisioned for tomorrow.

The need for backwards compatibility (raised by someone else) is a good point, but it goes away if you change the platform, for example from a PC to a generic entertainment or educational device. Think "device", not "PC".

Re:It must resist all attachs, and then some

[Linux Ate My Dog!]

It is not gonna be the hacker that breaks it, in the case of mobile-phone DRM. Phone DRM is will be deployed very soon, and for real, quite sophisiticated, and it will be huge.

And it will be broken soon by rogue manufacturers who know consumers will pay more for phones that let them do what they want.

Re:"DRM will fail" my ass!

[HeyLaughingBoy]

What would that prove? That his sales would increase? I, and I imagine most of his target customers, would just use that to preview books that otherwise we wouldn't want to risk buying and not like. Most people with the money to afford books they need prefer physical copies and don't want to be bothered using up toner/ink & paper to end up with poorly bound imitations of a professionally done volume. Look at the success of Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java & Thinking in C++, both available free on his website. I can't remember how many people I've told to go to the site to read the volumes online to see if they like them. I don't know a single person who uses the website/downloads as their primary copy and I do know other people who have purchased the published versions based on his online content.
I wish all booksellers would have content online. Even if it's just every other chapter. I'd buy a lot more books then.

Only if you have a choice

[gad_zuki!]

>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.

Re:Whos Tim O'Reilly

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot. Most janitors/posters/etc. can't write a coherent paragraph. If all Mr O'Reilly did was run the HOWTO through the MS Word spell checker, it would be an improvement.

PS - the cover animals are 'based on' public domain lithographs from the 1800s.

well...

[mblase]

So when will we see /. Hacks ???

I just quoted one.

Re:Asking the wrong question dude.....

[linuxrunner]

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.

My answer to DRM on audio publishing

[CoyoteGuy]

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 .mp3 and burn the fricken cd.

What pice is fair?

[Nf1nk]

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

Re:What pice is fair?

[Mantrid]

I agree, DVD's are a good price these days. Some stuff comes in a bit high at $25 Cdn, but if you're patient you can get it for $20. Plus there are a crap load of older movies for anywhere from $8 to $20. Of course they can make some extra gravy selling SE versions for the hardcore fans.

I personally have no problems with DVD pricing these days either.

"One ring to rule them all" OS

[brandido]

I liked how O'Reilly managed to compare Microsoft to Mordor and Mill Gates to Sauron with a rather deft comment:

The question is what kind of operating system it will be -- a "one ring to rule them all" OS like Windows, or a "small pieces loosely joined" OS like Linux and the existing suite of internet and web technologies.

It is an accurate representation, as Windows does provide a more rigid framework, yet allows for so many more interpretations!

The VCR example

[smittyoneeach]

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.

Re:Old rhetorics

[Toby Studabaker]

You got it in one.

The so called open source movement is nothing but a neo-communist resurgence in disguise.

not that lengthy

[geekd]

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!

Re:not that lengthy

[Pegasus377]

in the snow... and it was 40 below zero

obhhgg:

[Thud457]

"every time you go to the lavatory it is vitally important to get a receipt"

iTunes vs Rhapsody

[isomeme]

Quoth Tim:

...Apple's music service, the closest yet to a system that users feel is fair and usable.

I've been using Listen Rhapsody for many months, and find it eminently fair, extremely usable, and generally kick-ass. I stream what I want to hear on a whim, and can burn most tracks for the same price as iTunes if I need a portable copy. Why are people treating iTunes as something new when Rhapsody has been doing it successfully for a year or more?

Re:iTunes vs Rhapsody

[stratjakt]

Why did people treat the iPod as something new when more capable devices (like Creative's Nomad) had been out for a year or more?

It's the same reason people in the fashion world act like Calvin Klein invented underpants - it's a trendy brand name.

Re:iTunes vs Rhapsody

[Simulant]

Archos plug from happy customer. Still best bang for buck. Especially with Rock Box.

Re:iTunes vs Rhapsody

[Merk]

Um... size? Size does matter, and for portable music players smaller is better. A Nomad is 140 x 127 x 38mm, an iPod is 103 x 60 x 18mm. On other words, a Nomad is portable CD player size, and an iPod is pack-of-cards size. One can go easily in any pocket, the other can't. I consider the iPod capable of fitting in my pocket, something I can't say for the Nomad. Am I missing something important here?

Re:iTunes vs Rhapsody

[MightyYar]

Quoth isomeme:

Why are people treating iTunes as something new when Rhapsody has been doing it successfully for a year or more?

I know that for me, the fact that there is no monthly fee is key. It's very convenient to pay as I play. If I go away on vacation I don't "loose" my monthly payment, and I don't feel cheated if I don't get a chance to listen to enough music one month. The way it is intertwined with iTunes and the iPod is also very slick.

Speaking of the iPod, stratjakt added this:

Why did people treat the iPod as something new when more capable devices (like Creative's Nomad) had been out for a year or more?

No one that has used both devices would make that statement. The iPod was just under that size threshold that made it handy. The Nomad was bulky enough to make it turn a lot of people off. Also, the Nomad had serious feature creep that made it more complicated to use. The iPod captured the very essence of what makes something simple to use. Finally, an iPod felt substantial and solid in your hand, whereas the Nomad felt plasticy and had a garrish design that looked like it is was meant to appeal to the MTV crowd, when they aren't the ones likely to have $400 burning a hole in their pocket.

Re:iTunes vs Rhapsody

[isomeme]

I know that for me, the fact that there is no monthly fee is key. It's very convenient to pay as I play. If I go away on vacation I don't "loose" my monthly payment, and I don't feel cheated if I don't get a chance to listen to enough music one month.

Fair point. For me, the ten buck a month charge for Rhapsody is below my financial radar; I spend more on that having one Thai lunch or buying two magazines. And my listening mode is mostly using their streaming system rather than burning, so I figure I usually get my ten bucks worth within a day or two and everything else is icing. People more interested in mobility, especially using the iPod, are obviously going to like iTunes better.

Re:iTunes vs Rhapsody

[MightyYar]

For me, the ten buck a month charge for Rhapsody is below my financial radar; I spend more on that having one Thai lunch or buying two magazines.

Great, now I feel cheap :)

You are right, for someone tied to a desk all day the streaming services are great. Why would you want to download and sort all the songs anyway, right? Personally, my IT department gets cross when I stream music to my PC... :p

Napster

[DrewCapu]

"Now, the fruits of Shawn Fanning's innovation will go to others, as the music industry slowly gets over its heebie-jeebies."

But I thought that Seth Green was the real Napster!

Re:Napster

[Slack3r78]

Before this gets modded offtopic, it's an Italian Job reference. Meaning, if you needed this explanation, go see the movie. :)

SVG

[Hatta]

Why push macromedia into opening flash when we already have a better, more capable, fully open, w3c recommended substitute?

Re:SVG

[mblase]

Why push macromedia into opening flash when we already have a better, more capable, fully open, w3c recommended substitute?

One word: ActionScript. SVG interactivity has a long way to go before it can touch the kind of interactions Flash can have.

Re:SVG

[smallpaul]

What of ActionScript is not available in JavaScript+SMIL?

Re:"DRM will fail" my ass!

[IWorkForMorons]

I've downloaded and used the Thinking In Java book while I was a lowly college student, before it became part of the program. I thought it was great considering I was broke through most of college. But of course, when I started working and took my first Java course, guess which book I bought...

Every time you buy an XBox...

[Lendrick]

...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. :)

Re:Every time you buy an XBox...

[groomed]

Sigh. It's not true. What do you think loses Microsoft more money: an X-Box that doesn't get sold or an X-Box that does get sold?

It _might_ be possible that Microsoft loses money on the X-Box, but I'd wager that only a tiny part of that is on hardware costs. The rest is to amortize R&D, marketing, administrative support, etc.

Re:Every time you buy an XBox...

[hankaholic]

Cite proof.

Chances are, even if you're correct on paper, Microsoft is still selling X-Boxes above their variable costs, and is recovering fixed costs with each sale.

Re:"DRM will fail" my ass!

[turnstyle]

Actually, the Bookshelf series seems to demonstrate that O'Reilly thinks selling unbundled PDFs would be bad for business, presumably out of a concern that they would wind up on P2P networks.

Each CD in the Bookshelf series costs about $100 and includes roughly five books.

It seems that the same demand for unbundled, non-DRM'd MP3 files should apply to e-books as well.

Just another 2 cents...

Re:"DRM will fail" my ass!

[JavaJoint]

Been to Safari?

I have a 15 slot subscription, and keep some books in there for several months. It's a very useful service, and has a wide range of titles from many publishers.

Although I could buy hard copies of all of books that have come and gone through my Safari account, it would financially stupid @ $35 - $50 per book. It's also nice to be able to go anywhere and have access to all of those books.

The Solution is...

[jazman_777]

Government Intervention. Of any kind, just do something, Anything! Free Redmond!

Re:Uh?

[Slack3r78]

Actual, the initial judgement did call for the OS and other parts of MS to be broken into two seperate companies, but the court of appeals overturned that judgement, deciding that "bad Billy, bad!!" was a more appropriate punishment instead.

Re:Uh?

[cyb97]

So everybody else is allowed to break the law ?

Excellent. Lets mention the Railroad Tycoons too

[zymano]

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?

First

[zymano]

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 .

Re:"DRM will fail" my ass!

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Thanks for the Safari reference. Hadn't explored the O'Reilly site enough to have found it before.

Generally speaking, if I need a book, I'd prefer to purchase a bound paper volume. It's just easier to read. Ideally, it would also come with a CD rom so I could search for certain text, etc.

As I think more deeply about this, I wonder how my views would change if I had a flat, light, high-resolution reader that removed the requirement for a paper volume, as it would more closely approximate how I read books (i.e., no desktop/hot, heavy laptop needed). Then "free" online versions start to look more appealing.

In the end, though, I think Tim O is right. I'd end up just paying for the publisher's electronic copies to save time & effort. I have a grand total of 3 songs and a few games I got off Kazaa. Two of the songs I plan on buying the CDs for in part cause the MP3 encoding sucks, & in part because I just want more by those artists. The third is just a song I had an urge to hear one night and lost interest in immediately. The games are from the Commander Keen series because after reading the Masters of Doom (heard about on /.) book about Carmack and id, I wanted to see what the game looked like.
My point is that even though I can get music and software (and porn :0) free from Kazaa, my time is valuable enough that it's cheaper for me to just go to known places where I can pay money and get exactly what I need with minimal effort and time expenditure. So, even if as the OP said, O'Reilly's copyrighted works were free on Kazaa, and I could read them on a paper-like screen, I'd just buy them legally. Were I still a poor undergraduate, my priorities would probably be a lot different.

How does this work out, then?

[Lendrick]

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. :)

Re:How does this work out, then?

[rifter]

Do you think manufacturers just sit around waiting for your call to manufacture something?

Let's say MS manufactures 100,000 XBoxes at a cost of $300 per unit. That's $30 million MS spends to make their XBoxes. If you buy one and $200 goes to MS, that is $200 less money that MS loses.

They already spent the 30 mil whether you buy one or not. Plus your purchase lowers their inventory costs.

You could argue that if everyone buys an XBox and not the games, they will keep producing XBoxes and continue to lose money. But that doesn't wash because they will eventually stop if they continue to lose money, regardless of the revenue.

Not only that, but the more they manufacture the lower the cost of manufacturing more xboxes becomes.

Warning/disclaimer

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

Re:Warning/disclaimer

[Jonner]

Indeed; it should be in the Slashdot FAQ or something, right up there with: "Don't eat the yellow snow."

O'Reilly Speaks at ACC '03

[gui noir]

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.

Re:Uh?

[vsprintf]

So everybody else is allowed to break the law ?

Everyone else with $40 Billion is allowed to break the law. There are standards, you know -- can't have just any old riffraff admitted to the club.

Not only them

[Pac]

There is an immense commercial piracy business with money to R&D these things. And their livinghood depends on it...

Simple economics

[sulli]

If the cost of goods is greater than the retail price (negative gross margin for XBox), then you're correct. However, if the fully loaded cost including R&D is greater than the retail price but the gross margin is positive, then you're incorrect, and MS is better off selling it even as a doorstop.

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?

Try booking a conference room with Sendmail.

[emil]

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.

Missing the point.

[mindstrm]

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.

Re:Missing the point.

[Azghoul]

I think your giving DAT/minidisc too much credit. I, for one, never heard of them until years after CDs were "in place".

I never had the choice, but maybe I just missed the boat on that one.

I just think people will use whatever gets marketed like crazy, has some "cool" feature that the other ones don't. I doubt highly that DRM / copy protection will really be that big a deal to most people...

why

[zymano]

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.

Re:why

[JonathanBoyd]

Because your way, you punish not just Microsoft, but also consumers. There are other ways to punish them that won't punish consumers. There are plenty of people who want to use Microsoft and quite a few who need to. You can't suddenly turn round and tell them they can't buy Windows/Office/whatever. People should have the freedom to use whatever software solution they want, which means freedom to use Microsoft.

quotas are limits

[zymano]

they are meant to stop illegal trade. Just like Microsoft does. Why do people have a hard time dealing with this?

Re:quotas are limits

[JonathanBoyd]

No, quotas are setting a limit on how much can be traded. Before a quota is introduced, there is nothing illegal about the amount sold above what would be the quota level. IT only becomes illegal once you've brought in the quota. Quotas don't stop illegal trade; they make a certain level illegal. Why do some OS advocates have such a hard time understnading that freedom means allowing people to buy Microsoft products if they want to?

And there was nothing illegal about the European steel that quotas were being put on. It jsut happened to be selling better than US stell (presumably because it was cheaper), so to protect American interests, quotas and tarrifs were brought in.

Tim is a huge Apple fan

[afantee]

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.

Re:again? geesh...

[Lord_Dweomer]

I have had this suspicion that he just does these interview thingies just so he gets posted on Slashdot and gets to read what everybody says about him. I know I'd do it!

DRM's just a tool, right?

[aziraphale]

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?

remember

[zymano]

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.

Re:remember

[JonathanBoyd]

The US doesn't have an embargo on products from the US. Windows is not a weapon. It is not a dangerous drug. There is nothing illegal about the product itself, therefore there is no reason to make the product unavailable. It is the actions of the company which are in question, so the punishment should be directed at the company.

Re:remember

[zymano]

We put restrictions on the Bell phone company. The oil companies that tried to control prices. The Silver companies that tried to manipulate the markets(hunts,one owns the Kc Chiefs). These businesses broke laws and were dealt with. The way the government punished some of them was stupid. They needed their market share cut down . Quotas.

Microsoft is a destructive monopoly . The remedy was not right.

Re:remember

[JonathanBoyd]

In which cases did they use quotas? And why do you feel that was fair on the consumer? How is it a better option than masive fines? Do you believe that all monopolies, regardless of how they act, should be cut down? If a monopoly is misbehaving, surely it is better to change its ways and then let the market dictate its size, rather than placing artificial limitations on it and reducing consumer freedom in the process?

Rules learned

[Dalcius]

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."

Distorting

[zymano]

manipulating the market so only there is one winner is not how things are done in the U.S.

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.

Re:Distorting

[JonathanBoyd]

The public can go and buy Microsoft but it would be at alot higher prices if quotas were in place on their OS.

No, if there were quotas, the public wouldn't be able to buy Microsoft. That's the point of the quotas.

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).

Microsfot doesn't dump Windows. It isn't an illgal product. It idn't dangerous. It is not funding terrorism. It is simply a very successful product in part due to some dubious business practises, but there is no reason why people should not be allowed to buy it. It is not a threat to people in of itself. Change the business practises of the company or fine it, but don't remove the product if people want it.

Microsoft wouldn't have 99% of the market

Microsoft doesn't have 99% of the market. You're being overly dramatic.

if they didn't put their competitors out of business and forced software makers to abandon porting to other operating systems

They used dodgy business tactics and abused their monopoly position (being a monopoly is not a crime in of itself), but that only justifies action against the company, not action against the consumer.

and also force their way onto our new computers and CHARGE us even though we may not want it.

Blame the people who bundle Windows with their computers. There are computers available with other OSes. I'm only a student, but I've owned several computers and never had to pay Microsoft for anything.

Re:Distorting

[zymano]

quotas means limits on how many distributions can be sold. Your wrong. it does not mean ban. look it up.

Microsoft has 99% of the desktop market and a good percentage of servers os and growing.

Microsoft negotiates deals with the OEMS. One computer company wanted to add another operating system to their computer and Microsoft stopped them.

do a little research please. Your gullible.

Re:Distorting

[JonathanBoyd]

quotas means limits on how many distributions can be sold. Your wrong. it does not mean ban. look it up.

I never said it means ban. I only said it means that beyond a certian limit, no-one will be able to buy it, which means that some people who want or need to use it won't be able to for no good reason other than you couldn't think of a more appropriate punishment.

Microsoft has 99% of the desktop market and a good percentage of servers os and growing.

No it doesn't. Please state your sources before you make silly claims. The Mac desktop share is at least 5% and Linux is probably somewhere in that vicinity, but a lot of Linux machines will have Windows installed as well. And as for growing server market...

Microsoft negotiates deals with the OEMS. One computer company wanted to add another operating system to their computer and Microsoft stopped them.

No, Microsoft didn't stick a gun to their head and force them to not do it. They simply refused, IIRC, to allow them to bundle Windows if they were also going to bundle another OS. Which is fair enough. The OEM had a choice between Windows and the competing OS and chose Windows. Blame them.

Re:Distorting

[zymano]

microsoft has more than 90% of the desktop market. Look it up.

Re:Distorting

[JonathanBoyd]

Your claim, you provide the evidence. And the original claim I objeced to was that they had 99%.

Re:Uh?

[schon]

Microsoft's punishment was that they weren't allowed to break the law anymore.

No, actually, MS's punishment was that they weren't allowed to break the law for 5 years.

And if they did break the law within those 5 years, then they wouldn't be allowed to break the law for 7 years.

cut their share

[zymano]

cutting their share of the market is the best alternative than to break a company in half. Ask Rockefeller.

Re:cut their share

[JonathanBoyd]

You haven't given a reason why it's better than letting the market decide. Monopolies are not inherently evil. It's only when they abuse their position that there's a problem. Massive fines and threat of more if they don't behave, or giving compensation to their competitors (perhaps using the fines as a source) would be a good incentive for them to behave, while helping the competition and leaving the public free to choose which they product they want to use. Fine them 10 billion, spend half financing open source initiatives with Linux and give the other half to Apple and see what happens. Or use the fines to buy computers with Mac OS X or Linux on and give them away to schools, charities, government departments, small businesses, etc. In what way qould quotas be superior to these suggestions?

son

[zymano]

you want to bicker over a few percectages. lol.........

end of discussion .

peace......out !!

Re:son

[JonathanBoyd]

No, but it was an example of your tendency to inflate the situation out of proportion. Comparing Windows with trade of illegal weapons would be another. You were being sensationalist and I was calling you on it. You've also failed to address the points I brought up and failed to answer my questions, so this discussion barely even began.