I like the argument where he says VB is good because MFC sucks. Ha, ha! That sold me. I've never seen a VB interface that looked, "professional" because Windows itself no longer looks that way.
If he built a successful business around a piece of software, the chances are good he's smart enough to listen to rational arguments. So don't be irrational by kicking in your heels and saying "no! no! no!" unless you really enjoy job hunting.
They guy is a nutcase. He's hiring people to rewrite everything and falling into the same trap. Obviously, he's wasting his time and money.
Avoid his NDA, and keep looking for the next job. This one won't last long anyway.
If minors are prohibited, how does one prove one is an adult, and perhaps more importantly, does the information required to prove one is an adult...
They are going to try to make sites like Wikipedia hard to use, that's the point. Big publishers like the NYT probably don't like the fact that more people visit Wikipedia than them by a large margin. The old TV and radio empire is striking back. They can't compete so they are going to make laws to protect themselves. Netcraft Site Ranking, today wikipedia is 28th and they NYT is 57th. Between my local paper, BBC, Google News and Wikipedia, I don't need Fox, CNN, M$NBC, CBS, ABC and their ilk. Well, those old companies do find daily rotten fillers.
Windows Live OneCare works continuously, automatically, and quietly in the background on your PC, ever vigilant against threats but never in the way, allowing you to have fun and be more productive.
I've seen this before... oh yes, the off button. It is very quiet and just what Vista needs to be save and secure.
Of course, you could just use an OS that requires neither "protection" nor subscription fees.
The iPod is successful partly due to marketing, but also because it Just Works for the average user.
No, it just works better than anything else that's easily available. It does not take too much probing to find annoying flaws in IPod and ITunes that are solved in programs like Amarok.
People don't care about Ogg Vorbis. People don't care about DRM if they don't notice it (and if you use an iPod along with iTunes and regular CDs, you realistically don't unless you're trying to give songs to your friends).
Hmmm, what could be more natural than plugging your IPod into someone else's computer? Remember tape swapping? IPod brings a nasty surprise by erasing all of it's contents when you try to SHARE. Getting your music back is a painful operation, not simply a button press. This punishment of sharing, evil on it's own, will also punish people who lose their music due to other failures.
There are many other annoyances which users of ITunes do notice. The most significant is not being able to sort by Artist and Album in a collapsible tree. Anyone with more than a few dozen albums will have lots of scrolling to do. Others are less important but almost as annoying as a whole.
For some reason, all other players fail on one count or another.
The main reason other players fail is Microsoft. WMP is a well documented dissaster of DRM and poor quality software. Even when other players include their own interface, they all want in on the Works for Sure, Napster/Purge M$ DRM service d'jour. Absent M$ and DRM crap, these players work well enough, especially if the user only bothers with CDs as you suggested.
Someone just starting out would do well to use free software for their entertainment.
Rip with Konqueror's audiocd: function. With too lame, ogg is a concern only for those who care about freedom and saving 10-20% of storage space. Correct lables, flac, ogg and mp3 encoding has never been easier. ABCDE provides more robust ripping from the command line if you want that. Record analog with Krec, Krecord, Audacity or Gramofile. Use Rockbox for your iPod or iRiver portable device. Get your new music off the web. The Internet Archive [archive.org] has more than 30,000 concerts by artists that want you to share. Most players have built in stream sources. Play and organize your music with Amarok. It's all the goodness of iTunes with none of the annoyances.
The main obstacle to free software adoption for music is FUD and a false sense of dependence on M$ formats for "work". The free software user is less likely to have pirated crap because no one needs that crap anymore.
I think he wants to have the music sorted by artist name and then within each artist block the songs are also sorted alphabetically by album name. While it's true that iTunes can't do this, I can't imagine it's a feature there's tremendous demand for.
The person who complained wanted the list to be a collapsible tree. He hated having to scroll through everything and liked how Amarok did things.
This NCS analysis supports the SWG's finding that viruses and worms prevalent across the Internet at the time of the outage did not have any significant impact on power generation and delivery systems.
Their definition of "significant" should be examined, but that's not the conclusion I was quoting. It was entirely possible that the systems were overloaded by network traffic and that's what caused them to not trigger miss alarms. That's why the issue was investigated. Whether or not that would constitute a "significant" impact or not is something only the report writers can answer. What's not denied by the above is that critical communications between operators and management were impeded. The lack of human operators to get what they needed is a significant problem.
This is not some opinion I pulled out of my ass. Schneier came up with it and the accident report does little to refute his notions. Specifically (pages 50 and 51), the number one cause of the accident is "inadequate system understanding". Remote terminals then the main system failed along with it's alarms. As Schneier noted the report states:
14:54 EDT. However, for over an hour no one in FEs control room grasped that their computer systems were not operating properly, even though
FEs Information Technology support staff knew
of the problems and were working to solve them
You can take it back further to the first failures of the State Estimators due to network communications problems. It was this problem that had IT people fooling with the system to begin with. Later, the alarm system stalled. I imagine both of these problems can be traced back to the blaster worm then tearing through corporate networks the world over. They did not get their contingency planning systems back till 16:04 (p49). The report, for one reason or another, does not mention the exact reason for the SE failures so all we have is strong coincidence.
For the second time in two weeks, I've had to correct you when you blamed an operating system you don't like for errors in somebody else's software.
Your compulsions and ideas are entirely your own, but I'm flattered by your close attention to my writing.
Your analysis is thorough and well though out, but you missed one very clear contradiction. The author claims are smart enough to know what's good for them but says it's wrong to tell people why DRM is bad.
Neil should step up to the plate and tell us all how the DRM in Vista is not a threat. He can't but that's really what he tried to argue.
I used to be fairly moderate in all this. I thought Lessig's book made some really good points, and I thought "there's a nice middle ground, it's only fair that the artists protect their rights....
Lessing opposes DRM and sees it as a subversion of reasonable laws. His method is to demand accountability and freedom. He wants artist intentions to be obvious, but he does not want to force this by technological means and more than he would outlaw pointy objects because someone could use them for murder. DRM puts lawmaking and policy into the hands of those who control DRM and takes it away from government and the people.
As an example of this subversion consider the defacto perpetual copyright that scrambled content provides. Your laws require content to enter the public domain after 70 years or so. Scrambled content and media obsolescence thwart that entirely. The kinds of DRM that Vista has for you are much stronger and have the same kind of result.
Moderate DRM opposition turns out to be complete opposition. Lessing backs the FSF and Defective by Design, as you might see by visiting his blog. There is no software freedom under someone else's dongle.
Why shouldn't DRM'd software be written and sold, as long as the transaction is voluntary?
Both you and the author have mistaken computers and media for free markets. The author tells us:
Clearly, despite DRM's widely discussed inadequacies and regular aggravations, more than a few consumers are willing to put up with it when the price is right. That's just basic free-market economics.... [customers will flock] -- to non-DRM competitors such as eMusic, perhaps, or even to plain old-fashioned CDs. For DRM to fail in the entertainment industry, all that needs to happen is for customers to choose not to buy it, which in turn should convince artists not to use it.
The immediate threat is DMCA style laws which mandate DRM. It should be obvious to you and Neil that no one will have a choice if that happens. You should also realize that it will happen if you smugly tell people they will still have choices and be comfortable when such laws are passed. The infamous "broadcast flag" is the tip of the iceburg which must be fought now so you and I will continue to have free hardware in the future. Technological restrictions and bad laws gave us a world where three music publishers had a monopoly on public broadcast. DRM will be much worse than that.
Even without further rotten laws, the computer market is not free as the Microsoft anti-trust trial so magnificently proved. Not much has changed since then. Google and Dell are making a few daring deals that like a Netscape deja vu. Rather than showing freedom, this only shows how locked in the vendors really are. The M$ tax is firmly entrenched and has even been pushed out onto universities and schools through student fees - those with the time to avoid it are often taxed twice!
No one wants DRM. He touts iTunes as evidence that people can live with DRM and at the same time boasts about the nascent creative commons and free media movements. He fails to mention WMP, which shows that people really want nothing to do with the terms the RIAA would like to force on you. CC and free music should be a clue to him that artists and customers crave a choice. The artists are willing to take risks to have that choice. Customers are eating it up. It's really what people want.
Vista will sneak in far more than people know. XP and WMP are already less than people want. Vista will be worse and it will extend that sorry lack of choice out by hardware. That's what this protest was all about. There's nothing wrong with the FSF saying that DRM is bad and that no one but big publishers really want it. They are right as usual.
If the market is to work, people have to be informed. That's not going to happen if we sit on our asses and listen to our iPods and think that everything is OK. At it's best, it's not OK. People are not stupid. Given the right information, they will indeed avoid Vista and DRM.
Yes, universally used DRM will eliminate free software and form a basis for universal censorship and information control. Even the author agrees to that, but he thinks that something else can and will happen all by itself and we don't need these "political" people. It's very easy to see how wrong he is.
The threat is as real as the pressure M$, the BSA, the RIAA, the MPAA, book publishers and news publishers can put on device and law makers. How many "normal" people will chose software freedom over "popular" music and movies? Look at the way the RIAA ran music shops: RIAA exclusive or no RIAA at all! It's not that people are stupid, it's that the choice they will be given is unacceptable: let us control anything that's a media player or you don't get any media. Right now, while the big publishers are behaving and few people know about alternative media, it's easy for people to get trapped by convenience. If nothing is done now, lawmakers might remove all choice by mandating DRM in all devices. Then the nascent free media movement can be crushed and the radio empires will survive their technical obsolescence and be able to push down restrictions analog media never had.
Caroline Benner is a fellow at the University of Washingtons Institute for International Policy. From 2001 to 2003, Ms. Benner was a consultant with the geopolitical policy and strategy group at Microsoft.
9/11 demonstrated to the world that there were indeed many well organized terrorists wanting to harm US citizens and how venerable rescue efforts were to disruption of communications.
The overlap of functionality between NT and Linux is, really, quite small. There aren't many cases for which Linux is a good solution, where NT could also be (and vice versa).
Ah yes, this is only because the number of cases where NT is a "good solution" is tiny and vanishes in importance when compared to both Unix and GNU? Next thing you will tell me that NT and it's derivatives are a useful desktop or widely deployed server platform.
Microsoft kills what it buys and owns and Vista shows they can't develop their way out of it.
When the term "intellectual property" is itself not clearly defined, and software patents - a key component of the so-called "IP" - are not treated equally by all nations.... why should we over-simplify this matter? China's supposed violations of s/w patents, licenses and trademarks have no bearing on the legislation being debated.
Mentioning DRM is also key. China is hinting at the other WIPO issues by targeting DRM evasion. Simply enforcing copyright will cost them a small fortune both in lost productivity and direct enforcement costs. DRM, on the other hand, is not a matter of copyright at all. It's an extra legal enforcement of copyright that relies on bogus and patents and trade secret laws often justified in the name of copyright and the starving artists the big publishers routinely abuse. Mentioning DRM promisses all of the diverse agenda the WIPO crowd would like to push. China is promissing to play ball with it's fellow pigopolists. Don't expect to see slave labor made ogg players anytime soon. With China playing ball with M$, the RIAA, MPAA etc, the fix is really in and only pigopolist approved hardware will be available. IP is an issue of control and that's something China understands very well.
iTunes is free. You can go and download it now from http://www.apple.com/itunes [apple.com], without spending a single penny to Apple.
It's costless if you happen to already have an expensive OS and an expensive portable music player. It's never been free software, which is why it's annoying the people who use it.
[your friends are stupid]... You, sir, are an idiot.... an idiot who is spouting FUD. Care to continue along this vein?
No, I think I've wasted enough time talking to you. My consolation is that you have wasted far more.
Moving an OS is a good idea in theory but having to re-learn different ways of doing things,when people are busy with normal everyday life can be a chore for most, especially when you are intimidated by the machine your trying to learn.
You are not doing your users any favors. M$ is going to push the cosmetic changes on them anyway but nothing else will change for them.
Is Windoze really worth the never ending exploits and all that entails? How many times can people put up with software reinstalls only to watch hopelessly as the same pop up advertisements mysteriously appear and already poor performance steadily degrades to useless?
Now is the time to move. In the next year or so, Microsoft will release the biggest cosmetic changes to their software ever. You could buy all new hardware for the pleasure of this learning experience, or download a CD and install some software that just works. The free solution has been stable and annoyance free for eight years or so, while the M$ people have boasted the same but never delivered. The middle road, in price and freedom is Mac. I've never had to spend the money to find out if it's worth while.
Moving away from Windoze has been great in more than theory for me.
Their reputation as an anti-virus provider used to be second to none, now after bloated software and software bugs a lot of people are having second thoughts.... I refuse to use Symantec products anymore and to my clients I strongly recommend them change products when their license is up for renewal.... Most uneducated people I do work for think of all anti-virus as "Nortons" and are amazed at how much their system performance improves when I replace it with something else.
Why don't you really educate your clients by recommending a lean, performance improving OS that does not require an antivirus checker? That way, you can follow IBM, Lowes, Chrysler and others who must be very happy they no longer put up with bloated garbage.
Slashdot Mirror
They guy is a nutcase. He's hiring people to rewrite everything and falling into the same trap. Obviously, he's wasting his time and money.
Avoid his NDA, and keep looking for the next job. This one won't last long anyway.
You can tell the difference?
click ..... the dAMN THING BROKE AGAIN! ARRRRG!
slap -=SMACK=- tinkle
ahhh, that feels better.
Once in a blue moon, something other than a wire will fail.
And only a few special companies would be able to lease your site to you.
Some people can't wait until running and contributing to wikipedia or slashdot is as difficult as porn is. Total Suck.
They are going to try to make sites like Wikipedia hard to use, that's the point. Big publishers like the NYT probably don't like the fact that more people visit Wikipedia than them by a large margin. The old TV and radio empire is striking back. They can't compete so they are going to make laws to protect themselves. Netcraft Site Ranking, today wikipedia is 28th and they NYT is 57th. Between my local paper, BBC, Google News and Wikipedia, I don't need Fox, CNN, M$NBC, CBS, ABC and their ilk. Well, those old companies do find daily rotten fillers.
Say no to this nonsense.
I've seen this before ... oh yes, the off button. It is very quiet and just what Vista needs to be save and secure.
Of course, you could just use an OS that requires neither "protection" nor subscription fees.
No, it just works better than anything else that's easily available. It does not take too much probing to find annoying flaws in IPod and ITunes that are solved in programs like Amarok.
People don't care about Ogg Vorbis. People don't care about DRM if they don't notice it (and if you use an iPod along with iTunes and regular CDs, you realistically don't unless you're trying to give songs to your friends).
Hmmm, what could be more natural than plugging your IPod into someone else's computer? Remember tape swapping? IPod brings a nasty surprise by erasing all of it's contents when you try to SHARE. Getting your music back is a painful operation, not simply a button press. This punishment of sharing, evil on it's own, will also punish people who lose their music due to other failures.
There are many other annoyances which users of ITunes do notice. The most significant is not being able to sort by Artist and Album in a collapsible tree. Anyone with more than a few dozen albums will have lots of scrolling to do. Others are less important but almost as annoying as a whole.
For some reason, all other players fail on one count or another.
The main reason other players fail is Microsoft. WMP is a well documented dissaster of DRM and poor quality software. Even when other players include their own interface, they all want in on the Works for Sure, Napster/Purge M$ DRM service d'jour. Absent M$ and DRM crap, these players work well enough, especially if the user only bothers with CDs as you suggested.
Someone just starting out would do well to use free software for their entertainment. Rip with Konqueror's audiocd: function. With too lame, ogg is a concern only for those who care about freedom and saving 10-20% of storage space. Correct lables, flac, ogg and mp3 encoding has never been easier. ABCDE provides more robust ripping from the command line if you want that. Record analog with Krec, Krecord, Audacity or Gramofile. Use Rockbox for your iPod or iRiver portable device. Get your new music off the web. The Internet Archive [archive.org] has more than 30,000 concerts by artists that want you to share. Most players have built in stream sources. Play and organize your music with Amarok. It's all the goodness of iTunes with none of the annoyances.
The main obstacle to free software adoption for music is FUD and a false sense of dependence on M$ formats for "work". The free software user is less likely to have pirated crap because no one needs that crap anymore.
The person who complained wanted the list to be a collapsible tree. He hated having to scroll through everything and liked how Amarok did things.
This NCS analysis supports the SWG's finding that viruses and worms prevalent across the Internet at the time of the outage did not have any significant impact on power generation and delivery systems.
Their definition of "significant" should be examined, but that's not the conclusion I was quoting. It was entirely possible that the systems were overloaded by network traffic and that's what caused them to not trigger miss alarms. That's why the issue was investigated. Whether or not that would constitute a "significant" impact or not is something only the report writers can answer. What's not denied by the above is that critical communications between operators and management were impeded. The lack of human operators to get what they needed is a significant problem.
This is not some opinion I pulled out of my ass. Schneier came up with it and the accident report does little to refute his notions. Specifically (pages 50 and 51), the number one cause of the accident is "inadequate system understanding". Remote terminals then the main system failed along with it's alarms. As Schneier noted the report states:
14:54 EDT. However, for over an hour no one in FEs control room grasped that their computer systems were not operating properly, even though FEs Information Technology support staff knew of the problems and were working to solve them
You can take it back further to the first failures of the State Estimators due to network communications problems. It was this problem that had IT people fooling with the system to begin with. Later, the alarm system stalled. I imagine both of these problems can be traced back to the blaster worm then tearing through corporate networks the world over. They did not get their contingency planning systems back till 16:04 (p49). The report, for one reason or another, does not mention the exact reason for the SE failures so all we have is strong coincidence.
For the second time in two weeks, I've had to correct you when you blamed an operating system you don't like for errors in somebody else's software.
Your compulsions and ideas are entirely your own, but I'm flattered by your close attention to my writing.
Neil should step up to the plate and tell us all how the DRM in Vista is not a threat. He can't but that's really what he tried to argue.
Lessing opposes DRM and sees it as a subversion of reasonable laws. His method is to demand accountability and freedom. He wants artist intentions to be obvious, but he does not want to force this by technological means and more than he would outlaw pointy objects because someone could use them for murder. DRM puts lawmaking and policy into the hands of those who control DRM and takes it away from government and the people.
As an example of this subversion consider the defacto perpetual copyright that scrambled content provides. Your laws require content to enter the public domain after 70 years or so. Scrambled content and media obsolescence thwart that entirely. The kinds of DRM that Vista has for you are much stronger and have the same kind of result.
Moderate DRM opposition turns out to be complete opposition. Lessing backs the FSF and Defective by Design, as you might see by visiting his blog. There is no software freedom under someone else's dongle.
Both you and the author have mistaken computers and media for free markets. The author tells us:
Clearly, despite DRM's widely discussed inadequacies and regular aggravations, more than a few consumers are willing to put up with it when the price is right. That's just basic free-market economics. ... [customers will flock] -- to non-DRM competitors such as eMusic, perhaps, or even to plain old-fashioned CDs. For DRM to fail in the entertainment industry, all that needs to happen is for customers to choose not to buy it, which in turn should convince artists not to use it.
The immediate threat is DMCA style laws which mandate DRM. It should be obvious to you and Neil that no one will have a choice if that happens. You should also realize that it will happen if you smugly tell people they will still have choices and be comfortable when such laws are passed. The infamous "broadcast flag" is the tip of the iceburg which must be fought now so you and I will continue to have free hardware in the future. Technological restrictions and bad laws gave us a world where three music publishers had a monopoly on public broadcast. DRM will be much worse than that.
Even without further rotten laws, the computer market is not free as the Microsoft anti-trust trial so magnificently proved. Not much has changed since then. Google and Dell are making a few daring deals that like a Netscape deja vu. Rather than showing freedom, this only shows how locked in the vendors really are. The M$ tax is firmly entrenched and has even been pushed out onto universities and schools through student fees - those with the time to avoid it are often taxed twice!
No one wants DRM. He touts iTunes as evidence that people can live with DRM and at the same time boasts about the nascent creative commons and free media movements. He fails to mention WMP, which shows that people really want nothing to do with the terms the RIAA would like to force on you. CC and free music should be a clue to him that artists and customers crave a choice. The artists are willing to take risks to have that choice. Customers are eating it up. It's really what people want.
Vista will sneak in far more than people know. XP and WMP are already less than people want. Vista will be worse and it will extend that sorry lack of choice out by hardware. That's what this protest was all about. There's nothing wrong with the FSF saying that DRM is bad and that no one but big publishers really want it. They are right as usual.
If the market is to work, people have to be informed. That's not going to happen if we sit on our asses and listen to our iPods and think that everything is OK. At it's best, it's not OK. People are not stupid. Given the right information, they will indeed avoid Vista and DRM.
Yes, universally used DRM will eliminate free software and form a basis for universal censorship and information control. Even the author agrees to that, but he thinks that something else can and will happen all by itself and we don't need these "political" people. It's very easy to see how wrong he is.
The threat is as real as the pressure M$, the BSA, the RIAA, the MPAA, book publishers and news publishers can put on device and law makers. How many "normal" people will chose software freedom over "popular" music and movies? Look at the way the RIAA ran music shops: RIAA exclusive or no RIAA at all! It's not that people are stupid, it's that the choice they will be given is unacceptable: let us control anything that's a media player or you don't get any media. Right now, while the big publishers are behaving and few people know about alternative media, it's easy for people to get trapped by convenience. If nothing is done now, lawmakers might remove all choice by mandating DRM in all devices. Then the nascent free media movement can be crushed and the radio empires will survive their technical obsolescence and be able to push down restrictions analog media never had.
Caroline Benner is a fellow at the University of Washingtons Institute for International Policy. From 2001 to 2003, Ms. Benner was a consultant with the geopolitical policy and strategy group at Microsoft.
Just what does a software company need a Geopolitical Policy and Strategy Group for anyway? Gobal FUD? Creepy, and she's got a long history of M$ apologies and FUD to her name. Let's review,
Knoppix and OpenAFS.
Tell me how well it works.
Ah yes, this is only because the number of cases where NT is a "good solution" is tiny and vanishes in importance when compared to both Unix and GNU? Next thing you will tell me that NT and it's derivatives are a useful desktop or widely deployed server platform.
Microsoft kills what it buys and owns and Vista shows they can't develop their way out of it.
WIPO and the big dumb publishers who established it have oversimplified things for you and the dear submitter. They are the people who invented the meaningless term IP. If you follow the article links, you see that Hu himself acts like he's under the same 40,000 foot high cloud.
Mentioning DRM is also key. China is hinting at the other WIPO issues by targeting DRM evasion. Simply enforcing copyright will cost them a small fortune both in lost productivity and direct enforcement costs. DRM, on the other hand, is not a matter of copyright at all. It's an extra legal enforcement of copyright that relies on bogus and patents and trade secret laws often justified in the name of copyright and the starving artists the big publishers routinely abuse. Mentioning DRM promisses all of the diverse agenda the WIPO crowd would like to push. China is promissing to play ball with it's fellow pigopolists. Don't expect to see slave labor made ogg players anytime soon. With China playing ball with M$, the RIAA, MPAA etc, the fix is really in and only pigopolist approved hardware will be available. IP is an issue of control and that's something China understands very well.
We shall see if they really mean it.
I'd like one that just works out of the box, thank you.
It's costless if you happen to already have an expensive OS and an expensive portable music player. It's never been free software, which is why it's annoying the people who use it.
[your friends are stupid] ... You, sir, are an idiot. ... an idiot who is spouting FUD. Care to continue along this vein?
No, I think I've wasted enough time talking to you. My consolation is that you have wasted far more.
You are not doing your users any favors. M$ is going to push the cosmetic changes on them anyway but nothing else will change for them.
Is Windoze really worth the never ending exploits and all that entails? How many times can people put up with software reinstalls only to watch hopelessly as the same pop up advertisements mysteriously appear and already poor performance steadily degrades to useless?
Now is the time to move. In the next year or so, Microsoft will release the biggest cosmetic changes to their software ever. You could buy all new hardware for the pleasure of this learning experience, or download a CD and install some software that just works. The free solution has been stable and annoyance free for eight years or so, while the M$ people have boasted the same but never delivered. The middle road, in price and freedom is Mac. I've never had to spend the money to find out if it's worth while.
Moving away from Windoze has been great in more than theory for me.
Who in their right mind still uses Windoze?
Why don't you really educate your clients by recommending a lean, performance improving OS that does not require an antivirus checker? That way, you can follow IBM, Lowes, Chrysler and others who must be very happy they no longer put up with bloated garbage.