You know, it's easy to read into this and turn this into a flame war against the current OLPC Execs, but the reality is that this was probably a better solution in the long term of getting the machines into the hands of the needy children.
After all, the former head of Microsoft is a well known advocate of African public health and education. It's possible that aligning the OLPC Foundation with Microsoft also would align them with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which would be a perfect avenue to get the machines out to the people that actually need it.
If the former exec left because he didn't want to "be associated with the devil", that's pretty bad. And certainly goes against the aim of the machine to begin with.
I think people need to be less about "THIS MACHINE NEEDS TO BE OPEN SOURCE!" and more about providing help to the kids in Africa, clearly something that isn't doable with the direction they were taking.
While I know many of you seem to think that Hollywood would really fuck this up, I have belief that Spielberg could pull the movie off.
Despite what you may think about his movies in the past, he is quite prolific and a much better producer than someone such as Uwe Boll.
If he truly likes the story, he'll stay to the original. It's possible that even Oshii could come onboard for this, which would make it a highly anticipated film.
That said, if they are to remake it, they need to do something with the plot of the movie. The first movie was actually not that great plot-wise and left you having to watch it multiple times to really get an idea or understanding about what's going on.
Maybe that sort of thing works in the fanboy/fangirl world where people want to read and write their own adaptations, but I don't think it will go over well with the American audience in general.
That said, I wouldn't mind seeing an Akira remake as well which adheres closer to the storyline of the manga.
I don't know about anyone else here, but I have never in my life clicked on an ad I have found on a website to purchase an item. And the 'ad bubble' will fall, which is why I find it funny that people seem to cling to it.
It's an empty revenue stream. Do you think advertisements on a website really sell a product more? Honestly not. I know of nobody that pays attention to them. Even moreso when the ad is in your face like "CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE ONE THIS!" or "HERE HAVE A SEIZURE WHILE TRYING TO HIT THIS MONKEY!"
Where the real revenue stream will come from is having solid content that people are willing to pay for. People don't buy from newegg because they see newegg adverts smeered all over the place. In fact, newegg doesn't even advertise on TV (though they might have a few times but it's not generally known to the public) yet they make so much money.
Back to the topic at hand, though. Simple fact:
1. I will never buy a product I see in a video game. 2. I don't want a video game wasting my bandwidth and gaming cycles to load an advertisement dynamically while I'm trying to frag someone because I'm never going to buy the stupid item in the first place. 3. I'd rather my games and fantasy worlds use "joke" versions of popular brands because it makes them funnier, laughing at some of the ways they label brands (Youtoob in South Park vs. Youtube).
I'm also that guy that walks into Best Buy that knows what he wants and is in and out. I don't buy their replacement plans, I don't buy their 5000 accessories. I want an item and I want just what I want.
Whose fault is it that Windows architecture suffers from viruses and worms. Microsoft and only Microsoft. Whose fault is it that an Apache webserver is successfully defaced. The answer is depends. Because you don't know what was vulnerable. Was perl, PHP, or even the OS? Remember Apache runs on Windows too. On the portion that lists Apache being at the top, it didn't say Apache/Linux. It's just Apache. It could have been Apache/Win, Apache/OS X, etc. Actually, the list specifically lists Linux at being the top of the list. You don't compare "Apache" to Windows. You compare Apache to "IIS". It reports that Linux was the OS of choice at the top of website defacements for 2007.
Your comments are precisely what I was targetting with my response.
Microsoft and only Microsoft Not true. There are many implementation details that come across as users. You do not have to operate a service under a system account security context anymore than you have to run a process as root in Linux. While it is default for Windows services to operate as such, it is configurable by the user otherwise by checking the service properties.
You fail to make an argument that counters precisely what I said, you only fuel the reason I stated it.
You know it comes across as interesting that whenever statistics come out that show that "Windows had more worms and viruses this year than Linux or MacOSX!" people use that as fuel to the fire to continually denounce Windows as a bad platform, Microsoft is the devil, Microsoft is evil, and any other number of ways of putting down Windows to make themselves feel better.
Then a statistic that comes out that shows Linux/Apache at the top of a security vulnerability list, and it's immediately "Oh it's the users! They don't know how to implement the platform properly! It's the scripting language they used! These numbers are meaningless without marketshare values!"
What we have as facts when it comes to security vulnerabilities:
1. When more people use it, there is a tendency to have more security vulnerabilities since more eyes are scrutinizing what is or isn't possible with that platform.
2. No matter which platform, it is only as secure as the person's implementation. If they don't know how to configure the system properly, it doesn't matter in the end.
So why all the hate against Microsoft for their products if these same problems affect all platforms?
First off I'll start with the point at hand. It's glad to see a judge rule in favor of the consumers for once, but this is certainly only a minor battle that is a part of a larger war. Just remember the precedent set here could involve further detriment down the line whereas since the *AA's cannot get users on "making available", they'll just lobby for changes to the law that allow them to prove that you were doing what they thought you were doing.
That said, of course we all know it is stupid, but there is a legitimate place for "recording companies" as distribution companies as well. While arguably they have abused their position, they are certainly helpful in their actual form.
Face it, not every music star out there is also a lawyer nor are they a computer technology junky. You need a spot for them to distribute music, and preferably they'll want someone else to manage the business side of their work. It's easy, it's safe, and they generally made some good pay off of it.
Not too many artists cared because what do they mind as long as they get to do what they enjoy and not have to deal with any of the fluff?
It's like saying we all could just build our houses ourselves and save tons of money but instead ask a builder to do it because they specialize in doing that sort of thing.
Now, to the specific case at hand. "Making Available" really depends. I do not enjoy the comments that proclaim ignorance on behalf of the end user as a valid defense. People are not "ignorant" to what Kazaa, Bearshare, Napster, and all of those tools do. The reality is that people do not use Kazaa to legitimately share linux ISOs. It's not known in the community for open source software distribution either. Exercise a little common sense here. When someone hears Kazaa, you immediately think pirated music and movies.
That said, Kazaa and said applications also include wizards that walk you through sharing your files.
The fact of the matter is there is a deeper fundamental "problem" in the sense that people don't want to pay for a specific form of entertainment. Music is something we take for granted. It's sound, it's recordable, sharable, and something we hear every day. We have a favorite song and we want to find it.
The real question is how do you get people to pay for it? The fact is that not everyone who wants said song is willing to pay for it. I don't care if the cost is $0.50. If you give them the choice between FREE and $0.50 per song from the author directly, there is still a vast majority of people out there that will take the free option.
What we need are better distribution methods, cultural education to help people become more accustomed to wanting to help others out. Right now we're in a culture of "Screw you I need to get where I am and I'll step over you to get there." Until that changes, authors have full rights to use technology to make sure that they are getting just compensated for their work.
If you're willing to take something for free from them, why aren't they able to take something from you in return?
Just some food for thought...
I know a lot of people on here are IT Professionals, but judging from some of these comments--quite a few are not.
IE vs. Firefox in a corporate environment is significantly different from IE vs. FF in a home user environment. Under a corporate environment (assuming a couple of hundred employees or more), you're already in control via things like proxy servers, top end firewalls, group policy management, and a host of other solutions for network security.
At the end of the day, you might also be migrating to Sharepoint which doesn't get along too well with FF (I've been with 2 companies now using Sharepoint Portal Server heavily).
IE comes with all default rollouts of the system, as well.
At the end of the day, IE is a much better choice than Firefox, and I've known this for quite a while. Anyone who denies such things is just a fanatic.
PS: ActiveX can be forcefully disabled for users in a business environment if needed.
PPS: See also: Network Access Protection/Network Access Control
This case brings up more questions than it does answers, unfortunately.
For one, it brings up long standing technical questions.
First and foremost: Any computer security expert in the IT field knows not to trust IP addresses as a valid form of authentication. However, it is used in a lot of cases such as: Forum security, IRC security, and so forth. But this doesn't exclude the fact that when you accept a VPN connection you just don't automatically assume it's from who they say they are.
So reasonably speaking in the IT field this is not a valid form of identification. We've built entire infrastructures around security and most of them aren't based on IP. However, on a fully controlled environment an IP address is a valid way to identify a person. That is, if you work as an IT administrator and you're seeing gay porn downloaded to a computer used by an executive, it's reasonable to assume that it's him who's doing it.
The big question is: Should it have been let to slide because of this? True security experts know that you need more layers than just an IP address, but at the same time those of us who have used the internet for a long time can reasonably assume when a person is a person?
In this case, it's unreasonable to assume that someone was "spoofing" her IP. She could have been part of a botnet, but this makes things more hairy.
My solution to this: Release a bot to the internet that connections to p2p networks and distributes files. Make it a huge worm. Such cases like this could never go to trial and would grind the RIAA's arguments in the dust.
Oh, and the reason why they were able to extort so much money--the RIAA approached it from a distribution end, not from a downloader end. If they approached it as saying she just "downloaded" the music, it's reasonable to assume the jury would have come up with a more realistic figure. But since it was approached from a standpoint that she was a distributor and not just a downloader, it becomes more expensive.
The rules do not violate the constitution in the sense that the constitution defines any sort of rules over private enterprise within the United States. For this, I am well understanding. However, where we run into a problem is the evolution of power of the private enterprise since the Industrial Revolution, well over a century after the Constitution was written.
Essentially, what I am saying is that The Constitution as it is written does not apply to modern times. "The System", that is the bureaucracy that maintains and runs the United States, which goes beyond just government, has grown so large and so complex that government truly plays a fairly limited role in the day to day operations of the United States. That is, the government has essentially become more obselete than it used to be.
The reality of the situation for us is very dire indeed.
Government cannot prevent freedom of speech. Government cannot prevent public displays. Government cannot search you without reason. You have a right to an attorney (a representative of law) and to a trial to determine guilt.
These are all basic things that we have as a result of the Constitution. All of these rights granted to us through the government are not granted to us through private enterprise.
If you enter a business to protest their dealings you may be arrested. If a business has the suspicion that you are a thief they may hold you without cause and make accusations and decide whether or not you may return to be a patron. You do not have a right to a trial nor to an attorney by a private enterprise with regards to their laws.
Essentially what has happened is that "private enterprises" have grown so large, so vast, and so expansive, so all powerful (See the RIAA, the MPAA, and other cartels) that essentially they have become above the law and in more control. When people see the RIAA and MPAA on slashdot, they see the groups as one giant entity. They do not recognize the groups independently as BMG, Elektra, UMG, and so forth.
What is happening is that we are seeing a limited number of companies become more powerful than the government.
What exactly is freedom? Where do we get it from? How is it deprived? What defines government versus business? There are plenty of limits on freedoms that aren't written into law, some with harsher consequences than laws. Is it truly a freedom if all places honor the same "rule"?
If one is under 17 and enters a movie theater in the US, is it really freedom to see a movie if all movie theaters prevent that 17 year old from seeing a certain movie? There is no law written by the government that prevents that 17 year old from seeing the movie.
I'm interested to see what definitions you provide? Because the reality is that there are rules in place that are not laws that put far stricter restraints on freedoms than any law can ever do in the United States.
Why? Because private enterprises are not bound by the constitution.
While I agree there is something weird going on, I think Microsoft's biggest mistake with Vista has been killing performance for the higher end users while attempting to make the system more usable for lower end users. The reason being is that their lower end users make up an absolutely vast majority of their user base, NOT the technical users (even though we dominate the media outlets).
Look at all of the changes they have made and clearly it is visible:
1. Superfetch - A feature that uses all of your available ram as sort of a paging system for many applications that you run. The net effect of this ability is that switching between applications results in fast access to all of the smaller applications that you load. The side effect to this is that when you use an application that wants to make use of all of your ram or even a larger chunk of it, Windows needs to dump that ram to the hard drive (or usb key). Which then whenever you load an application that continually uses a lot of ram, you end up with HD writes in locations that should not generate them (middle of game loads, etc)
2. Network/Audio IO. Clearly it has always been traditionally a problem where audio and video performance degrades and stutters on one's system as a result of the system doing some of the most useless tasks. Clearly Microsoft decided to set a higher priority to the "perceivable" functions rather than the imperceivable ones such as the networking speed. I would imagine they did this since a vast majority of users (I like that saying) don't actually use their network for sharing files but rather use it to browse the internet. Even in a high bandwidth internet connection 20-30-40-100mbits is not noticeable when all you're doing is browsing a webpage. You're sooner going to run into the speed at which that data can be moved down the line which such small amounts of data being moved.
Microsoft's mistake here was ignoring the power users of their OS in favor of a system that helps their lower end users. Now, there isn't necessarily a problem with that. At least from the marketing standpoint (and those guys, weee, they love to ignore power users). The fact is that these users make up the vast majority of the OS so Microsoft decided to cater a lot of its internal functions to making their experience better. The fact really is that they could care less either way. The only reason most of them even consider their computer slow is after the thing gets ravaged by trojans, spyware, and other nasties. At that point they're just told to upgrade their ram.
However, there are upsides on a technical note to this functionality that I do like that they tried to tackle. For as long as we can remember in the IT industry we've always done the "scheduling a task". Whether you use cron or Task Scheduler, there is a vast majority of usage out of this. Everything from Virus scans, spyware scans, defragmenting, backup jobs, clearing out old and useless files, clearing logs, parsing logs, updating the system, etc. These tasks, these intensive tasks, have almost always had to be scheduled overnight as a result of user perception during the daylight hours. Interestingly enough, you waste say 8 hours of electricity to perform a 1 hour task. What Microsoft attempted to do with Vista is to try and tackle this "scheduling" problem and make it so that the system can do these functions "in real time" without a noticeable perception to the user. You can have virus and spyware scans run in the background without affecting the user input. This opens the freedom to schedule such tasks during the day while someone is on the computer. Freeing up electricity and opening up the door to a far better scheduling flexibility than you used to have.
You can't knock them entirely for trying to tackle that problem.
Renhoek:
Your complaints extend beyond the scope of the article. Your complaints are with the general Entertainment Industry's decision as a whole, not Microsoft's products.
The scope of the article that this guy was saying is that regular consumers that are not playing "Premium" Content are having their own self-made content flagged as premium and as such being "downscaled".
My point to prove was that Windows Vista does not automatically block nor downgrade HD resolution content that doesn't have the protection schemes in place.
Actually,
If you do a bit more reading into the article rather than the comment the OP posted regarding "alternative codecs", the article states that *ANY* HD content that Vista uses that doesn't follow the protection path results in a lower quality playback.
Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in quality when sent to high-quality outputs, so users are seeing status codes that say "graphics OPM resolution too high." Gutmann calls this "probably the most bizarre status code ever."
While Microsoft's intent is to protect commercial content, home movies are increasingly being shot in high definition, Gutmann said. Many users are finding they can't play any content if it's considered "premium."
And yet further quotes from the BS machine
Separately, all the extra encryption required to meet Vista's content protection standards means some computer components can never enter power-saving mode, he said. Thus, when you play a movie your CPU keeps running at full steam, he said. The extra power demands make it hard to reduce electricity usage.
Clearly this man does not understand the concept of cool n quiet, but chances are your CPU is doing full work anyway unless you're using legitimate playback software and hardware, in which case a modern 8 series graphics card (G84-based, not G80) will utilize the GPU anyway and drop CPU usage back. However, this does not occur for alternative players and codecs such as VLC.
You know, if you're going to make such wild claims about something you at least should have the ability to back them up. How can this guy be considered a big shot if he puts out blithering bullshit such as this?
For the record, I assure you of the following:
1. You can play HD content on Windows Vista w/o DRM in full HD resolution. This includes: a. AVI/DIVX/XVID/X264/VC-1/WMV/QT 720P/720I/1080P/1080I videos
2. You can record your own HD videos from various utilities and have them play in Vista fine. With my tests I have done Fraps, and I assure you the resolution is *never* downscaled. (Keep in mind, PCs have been doing HD resolution for years)
3. The only downscaling that could occur is if you attempt to play legally purchased, legally licensed content obtained with all of the proper reasons but one of your devices does not meet the HDCP standard. This includes: a. Blu-ray/HD-DVD movies that you legally purchase in the store that have the downscaling bit enabled.
Now, yes--I agree, the stuff is assenine. The downscaling or non-playback or whatever it does is only affecting the non-pirates. There are more than enough movies on the internet to download in all sorts of resolutions and formats for playback. Matroska containers seem to be the dominant format at the moment.
What I'm trying to point out here is that this man's assertion is a load of rubbish. I think people should at least USE the product they are criticizing before doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, it's easy to read into this and turn this into a flame war against the current OLPC Execs, but the reality is that this was probably a better solution in the long term of getting the machines into the hands of the needy children.
After all, the former head of Microsoft is a well known advocate of African public health and education. It's possible that aligning the OLPC Foundation with Microsoft also would align them with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which would be a perfect avenue to get the machines out to the people that actually need it.
If the former exec left because he didn't want to "be associated with the devil", that's pretty bad. And certainly goes against the aim of the machine to begin with.
I think people need to be less about "THIS MACHINE NEEDS TO BE OPEN SOURCE!" and more about providing help to the kids in Africa, clearly something that isn't doable with the direction they were taking.
While I know many of you seem to think that Hollywood would really fuck this up, I have belief that Spielberg could pull the movie off.
Despite what you may think about his movies in the past, he is quite prolific and a much better producer than someone such as Uwe Boll.
If he truly likes the story, he'll stay to the original. It's possible that even Oshii could come onboard for this, which would make it a highly anticipated film.
That said, if they are to remake it, they need to do something with the plot of the movie. The first movie was actually not that great plot-wise and left you having to watch it multiple times to really get an idea or understanding about what's going on.
Maybe that sort of thing works in the fanboy/fangirl world where people want to read and write their own adaptations, but I don't think it will go over well with the American audience in general.
That said, I wouldn't mind seeing an Akira remake as well which adheres closer to the storyline of the manga.
I don't know about anyone else here, but I have never in my life clicked on an ad I have found on a website to purchase an item. And the 'ad bubble' will fall, which is why I find it funny that people seem to cling to it.
It's an empty revenue stream. Do you think advertisements on a website really sell a product more? Honestly not. I know of nobody that pays attention to them. Even moreso when the ad is in your face like "CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE ONE THIS!" or "HERE HAVE A SEIZURE WHILE TRYING TO HIT THIS MONKEY!"
Where the real revenue stream will come from is having solid content that people are willing to pay for. People don't buy from newegg because they see newegg adverts smeered all over the place. In fact, newegg doesn't even advertise on TV (though they might have a few times but it's not generally known to the public) yet they make so much money.
Back to the topic at hand, though. Simple fact:
1. I will never buy a product I see in a video game.
2. I don't want a video game wasting my bandwidth and gaming cycles to load an advertisement dynamically while I'm trying to frag someone because I'm never going to buy the stupid item in the first place.
3. I'd rather my games and fantasy worlds use "joke" versions of popular brands because it makes them funnier, laughing at some of the ways they label brands (Youtoob in South Park vs. Youtube).
I'm also that guy that walks into Best Buy that knows what he wants and is in and out. I don't buy their replacement plans, I don't buy their 5000 accessories. I want an item and I want just what I want.
You know it comes across as interesting that whenever statistics come out that show that "Windows had more worms and viruses this year than Linux or MacOSX!" people use that as fuel to the fire to continually denounce Windows as a bad platform, Microsoft is the devil, Microsoft is evil, and any other number of ways of putting down Windows to make themselves feel better.
Then a statistic that comes out that shows Linux/Apache at the top of a security vulnerability list, and it's immediately "Oh it's the users! They don't know how to implement the platform properly! It's the scripting language they used! These numbers are meaningless without marketshare values!"
What we have as facts when it comes to security vulnerabilities:
1. When more people use it, there is a tendency to have more security vulnerabilities since more eyes are scrutinizing what is or isn't possible with that platform.
2. No matter which platform, it is only as secure as the person's implementation. If they don't know how to configure the system properly, it doesn't matter in the end.
So why all the hate against Microsoft for their products if these same problems affect all platforms?
First off I'll start with the point at hand. It's glad to see a judge rule in favor of the consumers for once, but this is certainly only a minor battle that is a part of a larger war. Just remember the precedent set here could involve further detriment down the line whereas since the *AA's cannot get users on "making available", they'll just lobby for changes to the law that allow them to prove that you were doing what they thought you were doing. That said, of course we all know it is stupid, but there is a legitimate place for "recording companies" as distribution companies as well. While arguably they have abused their position, they are certainly helpful in their actual form. Face it, not every music star out there is also a lawyer nor are they a computer technology junky. You need a spot for them to distribute music, and preferably they'll want someone else to manage the business side of their work. It's easy, it's safe, and they generally made some good pay off of it. Not too many artists cared because what do they mind as long as they get to do what they enjoy and not have to deal with any of the fluff? It's like saying we all could just build our houses ourselves and save tons of money but instead ask a builder to do it because they specialize in doing that sort of thing. Now, to the specific case at hand. "Making Available" really depends. I do not enjoy the comments that proclaim ignorance on behalf of the end user as a valid defense. People are not "ignorant" to what Kazaa, Bearshare, Napster, and all of those tools do. The reality is that people do not use Kazaa to legitimately share linux ISOs. It's not known in the community for open source software distribution either. Exercise a little common sense here. When someone hears Kazaa, you immediately think pirated music and movies. That said, Kazaa and said applications also include wizards that walk you through sharing your files. The fact of the matter is there is a deeper fundamental "problem" in the sense that people don't want to pay for a specific form of entertainment. Music is something we take for granted. It's sound, it's recordable, sharable, and something we hear every day. We have a favorite song and we want to find it. The real question is how do you get people to pay for it? The fact is that not everyone who wants said song is willing to pay for it. I don't care if the cost is $0.50. If you give them the choice between FREE and $0.50 per song from the author directly, there is still a vast majority of people out there that will take the free option. What we need are better distribution methods, cultural education to help people become more accustomed to wanting to help others out. Right now we're in a culture of "Screw you I need to get where I am and I'll step over you to get there." Until that changes, authors have full rights to use technology to make sure that they are getting just compensated for their work. If you're willing to take something for free from them, why aren't they able to take something from you in return? Just some food for thought...
I know a lot of people on here are IT Professionals, but judging from some of these comments--quite a few are not.
IE vs. Firefox in a corporate environment is significantly different from IE vs. FF in a home user environment. Under a corporate environment (assuming a couple of hundred employees or more), you're already in control via things like proxy servers, top end firewalls, group policy management, and a host of other solutions for network security.
At the end of the day, you might also be migrating to Sharepoint which doesn't get along too well with FF (I've been with 2 companies now using Sharepoint Portal Server heavily).
IE comes with all default rollouts of the system, as well.
At the end of the day, IE is a much better choice than Firefox, and I've known this for quite a while. Anyone who denies such things is just a fanatic.
PS: ActiveX can be forcefully disabled for users in a business environment if needed.
PPS: See also: Network Access Protection/Network Access Control
This case brings up more questions than it does answers, unfortunately. For one, it brings up long standing technical questions. First and foremost: Any computer security expert in the IT field knows not to trust IP addresses as a valid form of authentication. However, it is used in a lot of cases such as: Forum security, IRC security, and so forth. But this doesn't exclude the fact that when you accept a VPN connection you just don't automatically assume it's from who they say they are. So reasonably speaking in the IT field this is not a valid form of identification. We've built entire infrastructures around security and most of them aren't based on IP. However, on a fully controlled environment an IP address is a valid way to identify a person. That is, if you work as an IT administrator and you're seeing gay porn downloaded to a computer used by an executive, it's reasonable to assume that it's him who's doing it. The big question is: Should it have been let to slide because of this? True security experts know that you need more layers than just an IP address, but at the same time those of us who have used the internet for a long time can reasonably assume when a person is a person? In this case, it's unreasonable to assume that someone was "spoofing" her IP. She could have been part of a botnet, but this makes things more hairy. My solution to this: Release a bot to the internet that connections to p2p networks and distributes files. Make it a huge worm. Such cases like this could never go to trial and would grind the RIAA's arguments in the dust. Oh, and the reason why they were able to extort so much money--the RIAA approached it from a distribution end, not from a downloader end. If they approached it as saying she just "downloaded" the music, it's reasonable to assume the jury would have come up with a more realistic figure. But since it was approached from a standpoint that she was a distributor and not just a downloader, it becomes more expensive.
The rules do not violate the constitution in the sense that the constitution defines any sort of rules over private enterprise within the United States. For this, I am well understanding. However, where we run into a problem is the evolution of power of the private enterprise since the Industrial Revolution, well over a century after the Constitution was written.
Essentially, what I am saying is that The Constitution as it is written does not apply to modern times. "The System", that is the bureaucracy that maintains and runs the United States, which goes beyond just government, has grown so large and so complex that government truly plays a fairly limited role in the day to day operations of the United States. That is, the government has essentially become more obselete than it used to be.
The reality of the situation for us is very dire indeed.
Government cannot prevent freedom of speech.
Government cannot prevent public displays.
Government cannot search you without reason.
You have a right to an attorney (a representative of law) and to a trial to determine guilt.
These are all basic things that we have as a result of the Constitution. All of these rights granted to us through the government are not granted to us through private enterprise.
If you enter a business to protest their dealings you may be arrested.
If a business has the suspicion that you are a thief they may hold you without cause and make accusations and decide whether or not you may return to be a patron.
You do not have a right to a trial nor to an attorney by a private enterprise with regards to their laws.
Essentially what has happened is that "private enterprises" have grown so large, so vast, and so expansive, so all powerful (See the RIAA, the MPAA, and other cartels) that essentially they have become above the law and in more control. When people see the RIAA and MPAA on slashdot, they see the groups as one giant entity. They do not recognize the groups independently as BMG, Elektra, UMG, and so forth.
What is happening is that we are seeing a limited number of companies become more powerful than the government.
What exactly is freedom? Where do we get it from? How is it deprived? What defines government versus business? There are plenty of limits on freedoms that aren't written into law, some with harsher consequences than laws. Is it truly a freedom if all places honor the same "rule"? If one is under 17 and enters a movie theater in the US, is it really freedom to see a movie if all movie theaters prevent that 17 year old from seeing a certain movie? There is no law written by the government that prevents that 17 year old from seeing the movie. I'm interested to see what definitions you provide? Because the reality is that there are rules in place that are not laws that put far stricter restraints on freedoms than any law can ever do in the United States. Why? Because private enterprises are not bound by the constitution.
If private businesses were allowed to make their own rules: http://www.solarnavigator.net/geography/geography_images/New_york_old_timer_structural_steel_worker_empire_state_building.jpg Private Businesses that were forced by the government to adopt safety standards: http://www.parallaxfilm.com/sky_hkworkers.jpg Which would you rather be?
I've had no problem using Vista to obtain a DHCP IP address on my Linksys WRT54G v6.
While I agree there is something weird going on, I think Microsoft's biggest mistake with Vista has been killing performance for the higher end users while attempting to make the system more usable for lower end users. The reason being is that their lower end users make up an absolutely vast majority of their user base, NOT the technical users (even though we dominate the media outlets).
Look at all of the changes they have made and clearly it is visible:
1. Superfetch - A feature that uses all of your available ram as sort of a paging system for many applications that you run. The net effect of this ability is that switching between applications results in fast access to all of the smaller applications that you load. The side effect to this is that when you use an application that wants to make use of all of your ram or even a larger chunk of it, Windows needs to dump that ram to the hard drive (or usb key). Which then whenever you load an application that continually uses a lot of ram, you end up with HD writes in locations that should not generate them (middle of game loads, etc)
2. Network/Audio IO. Clearly it has always been traditionally a problem where audio and video performance degrades and stutters on one's system as a result of the system doing some of the most useless tasks. Clearly Microsoft decided to set a higher priority to the "perceivable" functions rather than the imperceivable ones such as the networking speed. I would imagine they did this since a vast majority of users (I like that saying) don't actually use their network for sharing files but rather use it to browse the internet. Even in a high bandwidth internet connection 20-30-40-100mbits is not noticeable when all you're doing is browsing a webpage. You're sooner going to run into the speed at which that data can be moved down the line which such small amounts of data being moved.
Microsoft's mistake here was ignoring the power users of their OS in favor of a system that helps their lower end users. Now, there isn't necessarily a problem with that. At least from the marketing standpoint (and those guys, weee, they love to ignore power users). The fact is that these users make up the vast majority of the OS so Microsoft decided to cater a lot of its internal functions to making their experience better. The fact really is that they could care less either way. The only reason most of them even consider their computer slow is after the thing gets ravaged by trojans, spyware, and other nasties. At that point they're just told to upgrade their ram.
However, there are upsides on a technical note to this functionality that I do like that they tried to tackle. For as long as we can remember in the IT industry we've always done the "scheduling a task". Whether you use cron or Task Scheduler, there is a vast majority of usage out of this. Everything from Virus scans, spyware scans, defragmenting, backup jobs, clearing out old and useless files, clearing logs, parsing logs, updating the system, etc. These tasks, these intensive tasks, have almost always had to be scheduled overnight as a result of user perception during the daylight hours. Interestingly enough, you waste say 8 hours of electricity to perform a 1 hour task. What Microsoft attempted to do with Vista is to try and tackle this "scheduling" problem and make it so that the system can do these functions "in real time" without a noticeable perception to the user. You can have virus and spyware scans run in the background without affecting the user input. This opens the freedom to schedule such tasks during the day while someone is on the computer. Freeing up electricity and opening up the door to a far better scheduling flexibility than you used to have.
You can't knock them entirely for trying to tackle that problem.
Renhoek: Your complaints extend beyond the scope of the article. Your complaints are with the general Entertainment Industry's decision as a whole, not Microsoft's products. The scope of the article that this guy was saying is that regular consumers that are not playing "Premium" Content are having their own self-made content flagged as premium and as such being "downscaled". My point to prove was that Windows Vista does not automatically block nor downgrade HD resolution content that doesn't have the protection schemes in place.
You know, if you're going to make such wild claims about something you at least should have the ability to back them up. How can this guy be considered a big shot if he puts out blithering bullshit such as this?
For the record, I assure you of the following:
1. You can play HD content on Windows Vista w/o DRM in full HD resolution. This includes:
a. AVI/DIVX/XVID/X264/VC-1/WMV/QT 720P/720I/1080P/1080I videos
2. You can record your own HD videos from various utilities and have them play in Vista fine. With my tests I have done Fraps, and I assure you the resolution is *never* downscaled. (Keep in mind, PCs have been doing HD resolution for years)
3. The only downscaling that could occur is if you attempt to play legally purchased, legally licensed content obtained with all of the proper reasons but one of your devices does not meet the HDCP standard. This includes:
a. Blu-ray/HD-DVD movies that you legally purchase in the store that have the downscaling bit enabled.
Now, yes--I agree, the stuff is assenine. The downscaling or non-playback or whatever it does is only affecting the non-pirates. There are more than enough movies on the internet to download in all sorts of resolutions and formats for playback. Matroska containers seem to be the dominant format at the moment.
What I'm trying to point out here is that this man's assertion is a load of rubbish. I think people should at least USE the product they are criticizing before doing so.