My biggest fan, the AC stalker, once again invites me into the stink of suing public school systems:
We've talked about this before [slashdot.org]. You can stop now. Thanks.
and refers to a silly post that misrepresents what I said, adds nothing substantial and totally misses the point. You can't say Philadelphia and Los Angeles were not sued by the BSA, that such despicable practices are not part of non free software in general or that public school system don't live under the same licensing cloud everyone else using non free software is under. The raft of arrogant demands non free software companies make is infamous and expensive. Not only do users of the worst kind of that software have to keep track of all the stuff they actually buy, they have no way of keeping their users from installing software behind their back. The BSA then goes the extra mile with anonymous phone lines, where disgruntled employees can call and fink on their former employers for the software they installed themselves! This triggers expensive, court ordered audits. Public schools are targets of the same tactics, as a quick Google search shows. My favorite is this one.
That kind of anti-social behavior is what the non free software model leads to. If they don't "protect" their precious binaries there, what becomes of them? Companies like Microsoft have spent millions of dollars trying to convince people that the world should be that way, but it has not worked. People are repulsed by it.
ok, we have established that there are some people, who will blame a company for trying to uphold their copyright and the license, under which they distribute their software.
The license, the method of "protection" and the business model itself are anti-social and abusive. The license grants M$ the "right" to inspect your system, delete files and ultimately to turn your machine off. They don't care if they turn off legitimate users, and foolishly think people will put up with it all. That protection is so important to them that they have spent billions of dollars on propaganda and organizations like the BSA. They have stooped so low as to sue public schools to protect their precious binaries. The end result of this wasteful intimidation is a third rate product, which will now turn itself off if it's not connected to the internet offering all your thoughts, plans and hard work to it's owners. The only thing that keeps them from writing into the license that all your ideas belong to them is their ability to take them without the effort.
They want a world in which everyone pays M$. No computer will be sold without money going to them and no computer will work that does not run their software exactly as they say it will run. Those are their goals.
OSS software is like the water that's seeped into the rock.
There are plenty of big dumb companies who will be happy to license your ability to use and improve free software. M$ and IBM and other companies pushing for software patents will be happy to claim ownership of everyones' hard work. That's what this is really about, isn't it?
All of the Open Source software will be written outside of the US where US patent law doesn't hold.
Also, no one in the US would be able to use free software without paying a fee to some big dumb company. The cost to the US economy for this will dwarf even Perens' 140 billion dollar estimate of the cost of defending the Linux kernel alone.
Their purpose is to keep the peace and peacefully prevent crime where they can.
The patrol itself will do more to prevent drive by abuse of networks than any silly leaflet or knock on the door. If they want to protect their citizens, they need to keep on driving. They might also stop the real crimes someone else pointed out.
In fact, the knock on the door is more than a waste. It makes it look like person living there has done something wrong. The only time police show up at the front door is when something bad has happened or you have not paid a bill. Try telling your neighbors the police visit was over an open access point.
As always, the real threat comes through the internet connection and a crappy OS. "Password protecting" your wireless will only make it harder for your friends to use your network. If you have a reasonable OS, your friends and neighbors should be able to use your network without a problem.
You must assume in this day and age that if your computers will become infected with undetectable malware within a relatively short time of normal internet connectivity. Accepting this then, the only truly safe way to compute today is to keep your boot/OS/application drive from being writable. Baring this, the next best step is to re-image your drive from non-writable media daily.
Windoze has a half life of 12 minutes but other OS don't. Can you name a Linux, BSD or even a Mac worm that's managed to escape a laboratory? Computers outside the windows world only have to worry about dedicated attacks by people who know what they are doing. Yes, intrusion detection helps at that level.
There are problems with running from non writable media. The first is that you will never get security updates, so any know exploit is going to get you every time you boot. Also, wiping your binaries won't do you much good if the hacker has put the rootkit into the files you keep.
I wish p2p would include some sort of payment system.
P2P does have a built in payment option, you send money to the artist. No really, if you feel guilty about time and format shifting, just send the artist money. Write a check and put it in the mail if you can't make it to a show where you can fill the tip jar.
Basically a Gnu_iTunes.
The GPL'd iTunes is Amarok. It plays music. You don't need or want DRM and neither do the artists.
Simon argues that we need to shift away from a "right to use" model in software, and toward a value model - targeted "bundles of value" to specific vertical market segments.
What on Earth does that mean? Another Matt you point to, says a little more, but I'm still confused by the concept and how you can make it practical. It looks like you don't get free software at all. Indeed, there seems to be little difference between your "bundles of value" and the way Sun has always done things. Perhaps you can enlighten me.
The "right to use" is freedom zero for me. Who on earth are you to tell me how I'm going to use "your" software on my computer? It seems like a given. Of course, it's not really a given if I can't modify your software to suit my needs. Once it suits my own needs, I might want to share that with my friends. What good is something I can't use to help others? Being able to share my improvements without your permission is also part of doing what I want with the software. Without these other three freedoms, I might as well be stuck with a binary file which I can only use as you intended. Getting people to pay you for development of code that suits your customers is all fine and good, but using that service to put restrictions on the user is not. How restrictive are your bundles really?
Now for practicality. How are you going to sell restrictive software when people are making less restrictive software for every purpose? Sun is famous for quality, I won't knock that. The problem for you is that free software is getting better all the time and for good reason. If I write a piece of software, I have little to gain by keeping it to myself and everything to gain by using publically available gpl'ed code as a base. Once I've made it work, I really don't mind posting it up and the copyleft is that little bit richer. After six years of free software restrictions as insignificant as an "I agree" button are odious,
There is no upgrade path from one version of MEPIS to the next.
Well, that's what happens when you mix in non free stuff like Macromedia flash, Real Player, Nvidia drivers, NDis wrappers, Vonage clients, etc. Non free is brittle. It might be less brittle than the Windoze world, but it will never be as easy as the free world.
Free packages in Mepis upgrade with about as much grace as you can expect. Just last week, I upgraded Kontact from a 2003 edition to Etch. This worked out OK through apt-get outside of X. It got all the KDE goodies, xorg and other dependencies and just worked when it was done. There was one hang up, but the system itself told me what magic phrase to type.
There appears to be a very weak mechanism for collecting community know-how as to how to configure the system to "just work" on a particular platform.
Nuts. Mepis is one of the easiest distributions to install. If it works off the CD, it will work off your hard drive and Mepis works with more hardware than anything else I've ever tried.
Mepis is still a great distribution to install for someone when you don't want to spend a lot of time. It demonstrates what free software can do. The problems it has are the problems of non free software in general and those rear their head far less often on a Mepis system than they do on less free platforms. In short, don't give up a useful tool just because one person says some stupid things.
Warren can and will fix this little source code problem and this little non issue will fade away without trace. The chances are that some co operative solution will be easiest. Distributions which use the same package unmodified can get together to share the cost and expense of keeping the source code available.
Actually MusicBrainz does a reasonable job for music. It would be very stupid to apply such a thing to law enforcement. Like you said, the false positives would eat all sorts of resources. Worse though, is going to be the ISP effort required to make a hash of every photo sent by email or uploaded to a web site. AOL, M$ and Time Warner don't want you sharing anyway so they could care less. This is just one more attack on the world of ends. The big media companies never liked the internet and want it to be much more like broadcast TV. What better way than to cry kiddie porn?
The proprietariness of the worldwide cellphone network has allowed the companies behind it to expands service into corners and crevices "the internet" can only dream of occupying, all the while getting more affordable... enabling more and poorer people to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by modern telecommunications.
The dream is on the way, thank you. As $100 laptops start shipping, your cellphone network is going to look expensive. Those laptops, of course, will also get cheaper and cheaper.
You don't need secrets to make a communications network. Really, secrets are the exact opposite of communications. A lack of control is bad, any way you look at it. Governments and companies that impose such things on their customers should be ashamed of themselves. As gadgets with networking get cheaper, they will be routed around like the damaged goods they are.
Taking the position that these tradeoffs shouldn't exist is all well and good, but expecting people to take you seriously is something else.
Those tradoffs should not exist at a state university. If they want to kick people out doing some real harm, that's OK. Kicking people out for publishing a web page is pure bullshit. Policing it is going to be a real waste of time and money.
If you want me to take YOU seriously, justify the expense in some real terms. No, telling me that the company you work for sucks is not an adequate justification. Nor are the silly things rich people can do or the fact you work for a living (or at least pretend to work for a living).
Face it, at best Kent State's Administrators are a bunch of pussies. At worst, they are a bunch of greed heads worried about revenue from "exclusive" interviews.
Did the government force you to buy windows? Did the police give you an ultimatum? Microsoft? Anyone?
I managed to personally avoid the M$ tax for about six years. Then I went back to school and had to pay a "tech fee", half of which goes into providing an "atmosphere of software abundance," which is mostly the same crap that comes with any major brand PC. Most people don't know enough to get that far.
The US government proved and convicted M$ of anti-competitive practices, which indeed constitute force for anyone buying a new computer. Their failure to rectify the situation is a tacit endorsement. So yes, I have been forced to pay the Windoze tax by my government.
It is a donation when you have no choice or intention to use said crappy software. Of the hundreds of dollars each of us has given in this way, what fraction has gone to this foundation and then what fraction of that is actually spent on worthwhile projects? Pennies, no doubt. This should not really make anyone feel better about paying the M$ Tax when they buy a new computer, pay their student tech fees or any other monopoly rent extortion.
He's done some evil things, but it came out all right in the end because he's donating practically all his winnings to charity
His "winnings" represent an insignificant fraction of the financial, legal, and professional harm he's caused. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted supporting the Microsoft monopoly. Horrific laws have been passed in support of non free software which threaten America's core values. Finally, Microsoft has directly and indirectly harmed the reputation of the entire computing industry. We shall see if Gates gives away his billions or not, but the harm will linger long after he's gone and perhaps longer than his foundation.
Bill Gate's share of Microsoft's wealth is a fraction of the net earnings, which in turn are only a fraction of the revenues and those revenues represent only a fraction of the cost of the Microsoft Monopoly. His company, at his bidding, suppressed less costly software but purchase cost is only the beginning. There's also the cost of accounting for the crazy licenses his company created and maintaining sub par software. His software not only takes about five times the manpower to keep working, a whole industry has sprung up around it's flaws, anti-virus, backups, upgrades and so on. Under those circumstances, the efficiencies he promissed companies never materialized and the cost of paperwork at most companies remained flat. Bitten this way once, most of the "partner" companies never made the move to Windows XP. These same costs, due to vendor intimidation have been born and passed on by private and government agencies from power and light to public schools.
The money wasted on IT at many companies is only the beginning of the harm he's done to the reputation of the computing industry. Through tireless marketing and FUD, he has damaged the reputation of all computer professionals, even going so far as to smear the reputations of those who would point out even the most trivial of money saving alternatives such as Open Office on Microsoft instead of Office. Much of the public now thinks of M$'s "sharp" business practices as normal industry ethics. What's worse is they are encouraged to act the same way - to fink on their friends and employers, to make diabolical contracts that screw the other guy, to tell any lie you have to if it will make a sale and to harm your "competitor" aka your peers as a matter of normal business.
I don't need to say much about the DMCA and other nasty laws that have been passed. They are all part of valuing money above your neighbor.
It will take decades for the harm Mr. Gates has done to subside.
I'm at a loss here.... You're saying my "list of expensive and time consuming ways to get music" included such "costly" things as checking out music for FREE from a local library, or listening to someone's live piano performance when you're out in public someplace? If you ask me, the only insulting thing is making the assumption that people aren't capable of exploring any new options for music unless the mainstream radio stations start playing it for them.
I'm not sure what you lost. Going to the library is time consuming. Going to a club is also time consuming. They are both worth while and people obviously do it. That misses the point that MUSICIANS are clamoring to put their music in front of people but CAN'T outside a few "target" cities. At the same time ordinary people would love to have a better choice in music. The industry that's supposed to connect these two demands has failed miserably. They did so intentionally and they have been circumvented. The average person can carry around about ten times as much music the average radio station can broadcast - the game is over.
why commercial radio keeps working with such narrow ranges of music.
Commercial radio is not working, it's going under. The air waves have been bought out by conglomerates and they are finding their investment very expensive. You and them can stick your heads in the sand and pretend it will all work out, but it won't.
I had an old unused Pentium II machine running Windows 95. I reformatted the hard drive, installed DSLinux and used it as a file server/CVS repository. It had some glitches but essentially it's like having a new low end PC for free.
If you have a laptop, you have a computer you want to use for more than a server. DSL is just the right thing if you have low RAM. If you have 128 or more MB of RAM, just run Mepis or Debian Sarge.
I wonder if the DSL project can be forked to create a "Damn small server" project, so anyone can set it up on an old machine, enable some services, hide it in a corner, and use SSH/VNC to administer it.
I don't think it's at all "insulting" to analyze the situation the way I have.... People have *many* opportunities to explore and hear all sorts of music. If they stay locked into a very narrow view of what's "good", that's by their own choice. [list of expensive and time consuming ways to get music].
Essentially, what you are saying is that the RIAA way is good enough for everyone. What your recommended was an insulting test, which would reveal how poorly the RIAA works and trying to convince your friends that they really don't want any thing better based on that. You might as well wear a T-Shirt that says, "Look how smart I am and how dull your are."
People want variety, it's that simple. The case was effectively proved by MP3.com and others who were shut down by people who don't like competition.
Actually, I like having all of my stuff in one place...
Me too, I also like being able to get to it easily. I have a mail archive behind a firewall for stuff I don't need to access often. Current mail is done through my school's IMAP, which also makes archiving as easy as drag and drop. The rest of my PIM stuff has been moving toward my cable box, thanks to KDE's solid sftp PIM hooks.
KDE's awesome Kontact has really presented an easy way to share your stuff with yourself and others. The version currently in Etch atomizes everything, so you can join resources from multiple places coherently. This makes atomizing your own resources much easier. I'm moving to smaller calendars and address books, which are easier to maintain and put on different devices or get via network. Yes, I keep a local copy on my laptop, just in case I don't have a network connection, but the master copy sits on the cable box. This way, all of my machines have the same, up to date information without sync hassles whenever they are on a network, all via ssh. If I want to share with someone else, Kontact will export it's formats or html on demand. If, for some reason, you have something private mark it that way and it won't be exported by accident. It makes me cringe to remember Outlook's horrible old single file for everything format.
the "general public" doesn't seem to REALLY want as much variety as they pay lip-service to wanting.... , ask [a friend] if they can name 20 or 30 bands (or even songs!) that they wish their favorite station would add to their playlist. My guess is, most people will be able to name maybe 3-5 and then draw a blank... or else their list will consist of music very similar to what's already being played.
The poor service your friends receive is not indicate narrow tastes. You can't discover what you like if you are never exposed to it and the way the RIAA world works, you will never be exposed to much outside a few "target" audience cities. To really get a feel for how broad people's tastes are, you have to understand what's wrong and what others have done to fix the problem. The way you are looking at it is insulting and does your friends a big disservice.
First, why radio music sucks so hard. The RIAA charges so much for the few songs they let radio stations play that the average station can only have a thousand or two songs on hand, and they have to be vetted carefully. How are they vetted? From sales in "target" cities. Most radio stations won't take any risks with anything but sales prooven music. Notice the catch was the high price to begin with. Between the $500,000 FCC license fee and RIAA music fee's the broadcaster does not have much choice either. As downhill battle points out, the money is NOT going to the artists. Yeah, the result can narrow your friends music tastes - appreciation comes from experience and the rude are well.... rude.
Now what's been done that's different? Plenty! and that's what the article is all about, though they seem to have forgotten all about the pioneers. Exposure is easy when you share your playlists. Napster, MP3.com and anyone who got into online content distribution in the 90's understood this. People's tastes are much much broader than the old RIAA model could ever support - that's why they killed all the early music services and are desperate to take over the entire internet and your personal computer. Decentralized distribution will put power and money back into artist's hands and local labels. The Big Three Music Publishers are fighting for their lives.
Don't believe that people's tastes really broaden when they are given choices and guidance? Ask the people at net flicks how many of the entire 60,000 DVD library is rented out on any given day. Think 1,000? You are off by factor of three... and an order magnitude. That's right, more than half of the catalog is rented every day! People's demand for variety is something physical distribution can not keep up with.
The technology under the hood is totally irrelevant from a business profitability point of view. Hotmail did not run on Windows at first either. Over time, Microsoft ported it over.... It might take five years, but who cares?
I can smell the money burning when I hear stupid shit like that. The arrogance is stunning. Have you seen the contradiction in your thinking from the above parsing yet?
Who cares? The customer cares, you idiots! They are not going to hang around for five years worth of buggy service. That's Microsoft, though, their precious marketing image is always more important to them than actual service or.... the customer. Yahoo appropriately stands for "You Always Have Other Options."
Slashdot Mirror
We've talked about this before [slashdot.org]. You can stop now. Thanks.
and refers to a silly post that misrepresents what I said, adds nothing substantial and totally misses the point. You can't say Philadelphia and Los Angeles were not sued by the BSA, that such despicable practices are not part of non free software in general or that public school system don't live under the same licensing cloud everyone else using non free software is under. The raft of arrogant demands non free software companies make is infamous and expensive. Not only do users of the worst kind of that software have to keep track of all the stuff they actually buy, they have no way of keeping their users from installing software behind their back. The BSA then goes the extra mile with anonymous phone lines, where disgruntled employees can call and fink on their former employers for the software they installed themselves! This triggers expensive, court ordered audits. Public schools are targets of the same tactics, as a quick Google search shows. My favorite is this one.
That kind of anti-social behavior is what the non free software model leads to. If they don't "protect" their precious binaries there, what becomes of them? Companies like Microsoft have spent millions of dollars trying to convince people that the world should be that way, but it has not worked. People are repulsed by it.
Cheap but not free, like the GIMP. So, let's try what you just did with five thousand dollars worth of software.
Woops, now it's just a cartoon that's already been colored. Well, you get the idea.
The license, the method of "protection" and the business model itself are anti-social and abusive. The license grants M$ the "right" to inspect your system, delete files and ultimately to turn your machine off. They don't care if they turn off legitimate users, and foolishly think people will put up with it all. That protection is so important to them that they have spent billions of dollars on propaganda and organizations like the BSA. They have stooped so low as to sue public schools to protect their precious binaries. The end result of this wasteful intimidation is a third rate product, which will now turn itself off if it's not connected to the internet offering all your thoughts, plans and hard work to it's owners. The only thing that keeps them from writing into the license that all your ideas belong to them is their ability to take them without the effort.
They want a world in which everyone pays M$. No computer will be sold without money going to them and no computer will work that does not run their software exactly as they say it will run. Those are their goals.
Why not just boot Knoppix or some other CD with a driver that does not suck?
There are plenty of big dumb companies who will be happy to license your ability to use and improve free software. M$ and IBM and other companies pushing for software patents will be happy to claim ownership of everyones' hard work. That's what this is really about, isn't it?
Also, no one in the US would be able to use free software without paying a fee to some big dumb company. The cost to the US economy for this will dwarf even Perens' 140 billion dollar estimate of the cost of defending the Linux kernel alone.
If you don't think M$ deserves a slap, you have no sense of justice.
Q: How do Microsoft Programmers sleep at night? A: On a pile of money.
Is that because he's afraid Bill Gates will take it back?
Their purpose is to keep the peace and peacefully prevent crime where they can.
The patrol itself will do more to prevent drive by abuse of networks than any silly leaflet or knock on the door. If they want to protect their citizens, they need to keep on driving. They might also stop the real crimes someone else pointed out.
In fact, the knock on the door is more than a waste. It makes it look like person living there has done something wrong. The only time police show up at the front door is when something bad has happened or you have not paid a bill. Try telling your neighbors the police visit was over an open access point.
As always, the real threat comes through the internet connection and a crappy OS. "Password protecting" your wireless will only make it harder for your friends to use your network. If you have a reasonable OS, your friends and neighbors should be able to use your network without a problem.
Windoze has a half life of 12 minutes but other OS don't. Can you name a Linux, BSD or even a Mac worm that's managed to escape a laboratory? Computers outside the windows world only have to worry about dedicated attacks by people who know what they are doing. Yes, intrusion detection helps at that level.
There are problems with running from non writable media. The first is that you will never get security updates, so any know exploit is going to get you every time you boot. Also, wiping your binaries won't do you much good if the hacker has put the rootkit into the files you keep.
I wish p2p would include some sort of payment system.
P2P does have a built in payment option, you send money to the artist. No really, if you feel guilty about time and format shifting, just send the artist money. Write a check and put it in the mail if you can't make it to a show where you can fill the tip jar.
Basically a Gnu_iTunes.
The GPL'd iTunes is Amarok. It plays music. You don't need or want DRM and neither do the artists.
Simon argues that we need to shift away from a "right to use" model in software, and toward a value model - targeted "bundles of value" to specific vertical market segments.
What on Earth does that mean? Another Matt you point to, says a little more, but I'm still confused by the concept and how you can make it practical. It looks like you don't get free software at all. Indeed, there seems to be little difference between your "bundles of value" and the way Sun has always done things. Perhaps you can enlighten me.
The "right to use" is freedom zero for me. Who on earth are you to tell me how I'm going to use "your" software on my computer? It seems like a given. Of course, it's not really a given if I can't modify your software to suit my needs. Once it suits my own needs, I might want to share that with my friends. What good is something I can't use to help others? Being able to share my improvements without your permission is also part of doing what I want with the software. Without these other three freedoms, I might as well be stuck with a binary file which I can only use as you intended. Getting people to pay you for development of code that suits your customers is all fine and good, but using that service to put restrictions on the user is not. How restrictive are your bundles really?
Now for practicality. How are you going to sell restrictive software when people are making less restrictive software for every purpose? Sun is famous for quality, I won't knock that. The problem for you is that free software is getting better all the time and for good reason. If I write a piece of software, I have little to gain by keeping it to myself and everything to gain by using publically available gpl'ed code as a base. Once I've made it work, I really don't mind posting it up and the copyleft is that little bit richer. After six years of free software restrictions as insignificant as an "I agree" button are odious,
There is no upgrade path from one version of MEPIS to the next.
Well, that's what happens when you mix in non free stuff like Macromedia flash, Real Player, Nvidia drivers, NDis wrappers, Vonage clients, etc. Non free is brittle. It might be less brittle than the Windoze world, but it will never be as easy as the free world.
Free packages in Mepis upgrade with about as much grace as you can expect. Just last week, I upgraded Kontact from a 2003 edition to Etch. This worked out OK through apt-get outside of X. It got all the KDE goodies, xorg and other dependencies and just worked when it was done. There was one hang up, but the system itself told me what magic phrase to type.
There appears to be a very weak mechanism for collecting community know-how as to how to configure the system to "just work" on a particular platform.
Nuts. Mepis is one of the easiest distributions to install. If it works off the CD, it will work off your hard drive and Mepis works with more hardware than anything else I've ever tried.
Mepis is still a great distribution to install for someone when you don't want to spend a lot of time. It demonstrates what free software can do. The problems it has are the problems of non free software in general and those rear their head far less often on a Mepis system than they do on less free platforms. In short, don't give up a useful tool just because one person says some stupid things.
Warren can and will fix this little source code problem and this little non issue will fade away without trace. The chances are that some co operative solution will be easiest. Distributions which use the same package unmodified can get together to share the cost and expense of keeping the source code available.
The proprietariness of the worldwide cellphone network has allowed the companies behind it to expands service into corners and crevices "the internet" can only dream of occupying, all the while getting more affordable... enabling more and poorer people to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by modern telecommunications.
The dream is on the way, thank you. As $100 laptops start shipping, your cellphone network is going to look expensive. Those laptops, of course, will also get cheaper and cheaper.
You don't need secrets to make a communications network. Really, secrets are the exact opposite of communications. A lack of control is bad, any way you look at it. Governments and companies that impose such things on their customers should be ashamed of themselves. As gadgets with networking get cheaper, they will be routed around like the damaged goods they are.
Taking the position that these tradeoffs shouldn't exist is all well and good, but expecting people to take you seriously is something else.
Those tradoffs should not exist at a state university. If they want to kick people out doing some real harm, that's OK. Kicking people out for publishing a web page is pure bullshit. Policing it is going to be a real waste of time and money.
If you want me to take YOU seriously, justify the expense in some real terms. No, telling me that the company you work for sucks is not an adequate justification. Nor are the silly things rich people can do or the fact you work for a living (or at least pretend to work for a living).
Face it, at best Kent State's Administrators are a bunch of pussies. At worst, they are a bunch of greed heads worried about revenue from "exclusive" interviews.
I managed to personally avoid the M$ tax for about six years. Then I went back to school and had to pay a "tech fee", half of which goes into providing an "atmosphere of software abundance," which is mostly the same crap that comes with any major brand PC. Most people don't know enough to get that far.
The US government proved and convicted M$ of anti-competitive practices, which indeed constitute force for anyone buying a new computer. Their failure to rectify the situation is a tacit endorsement. So yes, I have been forced to pay the Windoze tax by my government.
Purchase != Donation.
It is a donation when you have no choice or intention to use said crappy software. Of the hundreds of dollars each of us has given in this way, what fraction has gone to this foundation and then what fraction of that is actually spent on worthwhile projects? Pennies, no doubt. This should not really make anyone feel better about paying the M$ Tax when they buy a new computer, pay their student tech fees or any other monopoly rent extortion.
He's done some evil things, but it came out all right in the end because he's donating practically all his winnings to charity
His "winnings" represent an insignificant fraction of the financial, legal, and professional harm he's caused. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted supporting the Microsoft monopoly. Horrific laws have been passed in support of non free software which threaten America's core values. Finally, Microsoft has directly and indirectly harmed the reputation of the entire computing industry. We shall see if Gates gives away his billions or not, but the harm will linger long after he's gone and perhaps longer than his foundation.
Bill Gate's share of Microsoft's wealth is a fraction of the net earnings, which in turn are only a fraction of the revenues and those revenues represent only a fraction of the cost of the Microsoft Monopoly. His company, at his bidding, suppressed less costly software but purchase cost is only the beginning. There's also the cost of accounting for the crazy licenses his company created and maintaining sub par software. His software not only takes about five times the manpower to keep working, a whole industry has sprung up around it's flaws, anti-virus, backups, upgrades and so on. Under those circumstances, the efficiencies he promissed companies never materialized and the cost of paperwork at most companies remained flat. Bitten this way once, most of the "partner" companies never made the move to Windows XP. These same costs, due to vendor intimidation have been born and passed on by private and government agencies from power and light to public schools.
The money wasted on IT at many companies is only the beginning of the harm he's done to the reputation of the computing industry. Through tireless marketing and FUD, he has damaged the reputation of all computer professionals, even going so far as to smear the reputations of those who would point out even the most trivial of money saving alternatives such as Open Office on Microsoft instead of Office. Much of the public now thinks of M$'s "sharp" business practices as normal industry ethics. What's worse is they are encouraged to act the same way - to fink on their friends and employers, to make diabolical contracts that screw the other guy, to tell any lie you have to if it will make a sale and to harm your "competitor" aka your peers as a matter of normal business.
I don't need to say much about the DMCA and other nasty laws that have been passed. They are all part of valuing money above your neighbor.
It will take decades for the harm Mr. Gates has done to subside.
I'm at a loss here.... You're saying my "list of expensive and time consuming ways to get music" included such "costly" things as checking out music for FREE from a local library, or listening to someone's live piano performance when you're out in public someplace? If you ask me, the only insulting thing is making the assumption that people aren't capable of exploring any new options for music unless the mainstream radio stations start playing it for them.
I'm not sure what you lost. Going to the library is time consuming. Going to a club is also time consuming. They are both worth while and people obviously do it. That misses the point that MUSICIANS are clamoring to put their music in front of people but CAN'T outside a few "target" cities. At the same time ordinary people would love to have a better choice in music. The industry that's supposed to connect these two demands has failed miserably. They did so intentionally and they have been circumvented. The average person can carry around about ten times as much music the average radio station can broadcast - the game is over.
why commercial radio keeps working with such narrow ranges of music.
Commercial radio is not working, it's going under. The air waves have been bought out by conglomerates and they are finding their investment very expensive. You and them can stick your heads in the sand and pretend it will all work out, but it won't.
If you have a laptop, you have a computer you want to use for more than a server. DSL is just the right thing if you have low RAM. If you have 128 or more MB of RAM, just run Mepis or Debian Sarge.
I wonder if the DSL project can be forked to create a "Damn small server" project, so anyone can set it up on an old machine, enable some services, hide it in a corner, and use SSH/VNC to administer it.
Have you looked at Smoothwall yet?
I don't think it's at all "insulting" to analyze the situation the way I have. ... People have *many* opportunities to explore and hear all sorts of music. If they stay locked into a very narrow view of what's "good", that's by their own choice. [list of expensive and time consuming ways to get music].
Essentially, what you are saying is that the RIAA way is good enough for everyone. What your recommended was an insulting test, which would reveal how poorly the RIAA works and trying to convince your friends that they really don't want any thing better based on that. You might as well wear a T-Shirt that says, "Look how smart I am and how dull your are."
People want variety, it's that simple. The case was effectively proved by MP3.com and others who were shut down by people who don't like competition.
Actually, I like having all of my stuff in one place...
Me too, I also like being able to get to it easily. I have a mail archive behind a firewall for stuff I don't need to access often. Current mail is done through my school's IMAP, which also makes archiving as easy as drag and drop. The rest of my PIM stuff has been moving toward my cable box, thanks to KDE's solid sftp PIM hooks.
KDE's awesome Kontact has really presented an easy way to share your stuff with yourself and others. The version currently in Etch atomizes everything, so you can join resources from multiple places coherently. This makes atomizing your own resources much easier. I'm moving to smaller calendars and address books, which are easier to maintain and put on different devices or get via network. Yes, I keep a local copy on my laptop, just in case I don't have a network connection, but the master copy sits on the cable box. This way, all of my machines have the same, up to date information without sync hassles whenever they are on a network, all via ssh. If I want to share with someone else, Kontact will export it's formats or html on demand. If, for some reason, you have something private mark it that way and it won't be exported by accident. It makes me cringe to remember Outlook's horrible old single file for everything format.
the "general public" doesn't seem to REALLY want as much variety as they pay lip-service to wanting. ... , ask [a friend] if they can name 20 or 30 bands (or even songs!) that they wish their favorite station would add to their playlist. My guess is, most people will be able to name maybe 3-5 and then draw a blank... or else their list will consist of music very similar to what's already being played.
The poor service your friends receive is not indicate narrow tastes. You can't discover what you like if you are never exposed to it and the way the RIAA world works, you will never be exposed to much outside a few "target" audience cities. To really get a feel for how broad people's tastes are, you have to understand what's wrong and what others have done to fix the problem. The way you are looking at it is insulting and does your friends a big disservice.
First, why radio music sucks so hard. The RIAA charges so much for the few songs they let radio stations play that the average station can only have a thousand or two songs on hand, and they have to be vetted carefully. How are they vetted? From sales in "target" cities. Most radio stations won't take any risks with anything but sales prooven music. Notice the catch was the high price to begin with. Between the $500,000 FCC license fee and RIAA music fee's the broadcaster does not have much choice either. As downhill battle points out, the money is NOT going to the artists. Yeah, the result can narrow your friends music tastes - appreciation comes from experience and the rude are well .... rude.
Now what's been done that's different? Plenty! and that's what the article is all about, though they seem to have forgotten all about the pioneers. Exposure is easy when you share your playlists. Napster, MP3.com and anyone who got into online content distribution in the 90's understood this. People's tastes are much much broader than the old RIAA model could ever support - that's why they killed all the early music services and are desperate to take over the entire internet and your personal computer. Decentralized distribution will put power and money back into artist's hands and local labels. The Big Three Music Publishers are fighting for their lives.
Don't believe that people's tastes really broaden when they are given choices and guidance? Ask the people at net flicks how many of the entire 60,000 DVD library is rented out on any given day. Think 1,000? You are off by factor of three ... and an order magnitude. That's right, more than half of the catalog is rented every day! People's demand for variety is something physical distribution can not keep up with.
The technology under the hood is totally irrelevant from a business profitability point of view. Hotmail did not run on Windows at first either. Over time, Microsoft ported it over. ... It might take five years, but who cares?
I can smell the money burning when I hear stupid shit like that. The arrogance is stunning. Have you seen the contradiction in your thinking from the above parsing yet?
Who cares? The customer cares, you idiots! They are not going to hang around for five years worth of buggy service. That's Microsoft, though, their precious marketing image is always more important to them than actual service or .... the customer. Yahoo appropriately stands for "You Always Have Other Options."