I can't believe MS is really afraid of a religious-right boycott, especially when they're still the darlings of the other side of the Republican party (the economic right).
I, too, doubt that Microsoft is much afraid of a religious boycott motivated by their support for gay rights legislation.
However, a boycott isn't the only way that a large church in Redmond could inconvenience Microsoft. Imagine if the church membership included or had influence over local officials responsible for zoning decisions, planning permits, road construction and maintenance, and/or other functions of local government in Redmond and/or King County. How much inconvenience do you think you could cause Microsoft, and what concessions might Microsoft be willing to make to ensure smooth sailing the next time they need to build a new office building or condemn a bit of land that belongs to someone else?
Hopefully that's not their motivation -- it would reflect poorly of Microsoft and even more poorly on the church if that was the way things were working. But it wouldn't even be close to the first time such a thing had happened. Local politics is often a full-contact sport..
On the other hand, I've seen my brother crash OpenOffice.org multiple times by cutting and pasting from IE.
Really[?] I just [t]ried it from firefox and IE and both worked.
Because as we all know, if it doesn't happen every time it's not a real bug, right?
When music is a threat to your business plan..
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EZTree Shuts Down
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Is a site that shares old Stevie Nicks, Frank Sinatra, and Ian Hunter live shows really that much of a threat to the music industry?
Quite probably. History has shown us that if you allow people access to really good music it makes them far less willing to buy what the record industry these days is selling.
History is much less clear on what happens when you allow people access to unreleased Frank Sinatra, Stevie Nicks, and Ian Hunter bootlegs, but they don't dare take that chance, do they?
The whole "what happens if they go bankrupt" argument is a giant waste of breath, because nobody in his right mind relies on encoded files. That's just dumb. The first thing everybody who buys music on line does is burn that music to CD.
Granted I'm not a major iTunes consumer, but that's not the first thing I do when I buy music on-line and I'd be willing to wager heavily that it's not the first thing most people do, let alone "everybody."
What customers exactly? If you were Adaptec, would you write drivers for your hardware in Windows, a platform you're programmers are very experienced with and caters to the 90% marketshare, or write drivers for the niche 5% MacOS X or 5% other *nix market?
A re-read of the article might be in order, along with a scan of the other responses. I haven't yet run into a post demanding that Adaptec develop and release open-source OpenBSD (or Linux, or MacOS, or whatever you please) drivers for its hardware -- that's not what we're talking about at all.
If we accept the claims made in the article, Adaptec won't even release the technical information necessary for people to write their own. That's what the argument is about.
Everyone on here expects companies to spend millions in development and bend over backwards for their own purposes. We have to be realistic here and realize that we have to make it worth it for companies like Adaptec to support Linux or in this case, OpenBSD. Adaptec isn't interested in OpenBSD because it's not in their best financial interest, despite their best intentions.
Actually, nobody seems to expect that. Unquestionably a fair number of people would be happy if it happened, but nobody expects it. What people do expect is for Adaptec to release comprehensive technical specifications for their cards to interested parties, a practice that used to be commonplace among hardware makers but has been in lamentable decline for some time now. Releasing the tech specs would benefit not only OpenBSD developers but Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, and others, and while your assertion is correct that Windows has a >90% market share on the desktop, it's somewhat of a non-sequitur considering we're talking about drivers for a RAID controller that's more likely to go into a server machine. Windows still dominates in that market, as well, but not to the extent that it does on the desktop. By releasing the necessary specs and letting the open source community write drivers that work with their hardware Adaptec could, at very little cost to themselves, expand their potential customer base by 10-20%. Why won't they?
I work for a small publicly-owned ISP serving an island in Southeast Alaska and we're currently selecting vendors for our own IPTV offering. Many, many small telcos all over the country are in the same initial stages of IPTV projects -- either evaluating or getting ready to make the leap.
Most of the hardware we've been looking at uses MPEG2 encoding but in the near future the standard is likely to be either MPEG4 or some form of WMV. Microsoft has been aggressively pushing its video codecs and they seem to be gaining traction in the marketplace. However, they're not gaining as much acceptance as they otherwise might in the video world because at this point their reputation precedes them.
To a small player like us their previous behavior in other markets is more than a little alarming. A Comcast- or SBC-sized provider presumably might have some amount of leverage with Microsoft but what kind of consideration can you expect when you're a tiny little speck on the map in a place few people even know exists? Choosing a proprietary Microsoft standard over a reasonably open industry standard could leave you at Microsoft's mercy and, well, they're not known for mercy, are they?
Personally I would rather see it this way; if your car is doing something bad, then it should be stopped and not allowed on the road until it's fixed. IE leaking oil on the road, lots of smoke coming out of it, or parts falling off.
It's not quite clear from context: did you mean "IE" to represent "id est" or "Internet Explorer"?
I still can't fathom WHY Microsoft doesn't have something like this builtin to XP. My mom bought a Dell and a neighbor has had to clean the thing 3 times in the past 6 months! I'm embarassed now that I didn't push her towards a Apple now, but I only run Mac and Linux at home, and had no idea how bad the spyware issue is for Windows.
Really, this is an OS problem, and MS should provide a solution, you shouldn't have to rely on 3rd party providers to fix a shortcoming of the OS!
No disrespect intended towards your mother, but it's at least as much a user education issue as it is an operating system issue (and actually I feel I'm understating the user responsibility considerably with that statement.)
There are some systemic problems with Windows, particularly the Windows/IE combination, that allow spyware to flourish -- the lack of a way for a common user to get a good idea what's running on their system besides MS-installed OS files, for example, or the multitude of places that auto-starting spyware can hide its startup away from the user's notice. But in the end the people who have spyware problems are almost universally the people who clicked on a link from an unknown source that promised them something cool (or more often than not, something astonishingly lame by more educated users' standards..) If your momand other users like her could be trained not to click on "Click here to install our FREE animated weather-forecasting dancing baby!" when she doesn't know anything about the source of the offer, 90% of the problem would go away overnight.
I mean, really... do we NEED to track every little thing someone does? How about a national database for tracking when everyone uses the restroom. We could put little sensors on all toilets to track how often they're flushed!
Since then, I have invested some money in the computer by buying a 5500/225 logic board for US$30.00, maxed out the RAM for US$40.00 or so, got a cheap USB PCI card for my USB multibutton/scrollwheel mouse, and the big wad of cash, US$150.00, went for the Sonnet 400Mhz G3 processor card.
D'oh! How could you fall for the classic "the first hit is free" ploy? It's the oldest trick in the book.
In point of fact one of the functions of the RIAA is to insure that the artist's First Amendment rights get assigned to the record labels. This is now done automatically, by law (since a sound recording has now been defined as a work for hire by the label). The artist is left with no more First Amendment rights to his own works than any random bum on the street.
You know, it seems as though you earnestly believe what you have written and are very certain about it, but given that you don't even seem to know what the First Amendment covers, why should we give any credence whatsoever to your legal opinion?
Intellectual property rights and First Amendment rights are only tangentially related and you're confusing the two..
Re:incorporate zahn's books
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Star Wars TV Show
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Except it's California. If Kerry doesn't take the state easily, that's a red flag to investigate
I know that the Bush v. Kerry battle is the main event on the political calendar this year but it's important for people to remember that we have three branches of government in this country, two of them elected, and it's just as important who controls the other two. (And that's just at the federal level! State and local races matter, too!)
Both federal legislative houses are fairly evenly divided and the Senate in particular is completely up for grabs. But a few closely contested House seats that get swung the wrong way while everyone's eye is on the big show could have a huge effect, too..
I don't believe the tinfoil hats are called for just yet, but please try to remember that there's more than one election taking place this fall.
> > Unlike Apple's iPod, on which DRM is an optional consequence, Microsoft requires that you re-encode all video using DRM-encumbered technology.
That would be really interesting, if it were true. Jackass.
I actually own one of these things, and I can say 100% that you don't HAVE to re-encode your music to a DRM enabled format.
Look, I don't know whether the original poster's claim is true or not, but..
If you read what he's actually written, as opposed to what you assumed he wrote, you'll see his comment is specifically about video, whereas your reply mentions only audio. In short, you're discrediting a claim that he didn't make and calling him a jackass to boot.
Calm down, take a deep breath, and read the whole sentence, mmmmkay?
So you think the state should create laws arbitrarily and without regard to right and wrong?
Did I say that? I thought not..
Laws are not created to enforce all right and all wrong. HOWEVER, things that are illegal are so because they are "wrong" are they not?
Isn't that what we're discussing here? If so, it's kind of a shortcut to assume your conclusion. Is it morally wrong to sing a song without permission or use too much of another artist's work within your own?
In other words, all illegal activity is wrong, but not all wrong activity is illegal. You have the relationship backwards I think...
I doubt that many people will argue against a claim that there needs to be a considerable amount of correlation between what is immoral and what is illegal but legality and morality are really not the same thing and it's dangerous to conflate them as the upthread post to which I was responding did. This should be obvious to most Slashdot readers, as most of us hold differing opinions about what should be permitted than the currently empowered administration of moralists. Ashcroft appears to believe that law and morality should be more closely bound together and it's one of the things that many of us here object to.
In the end I see morality as an individual matter and legality as a social one. If we can all agree on what's legal/illegal we can have a stable and reasonably free society without having to all share the same beliefs about what's moral/immoral. I happen to think that's an important goal. Given, based on your statements, that you probably disagree with me about many other things it doesn't seem likely we're going to agree completely about morality, does it? In light of that doesn't it seem like a good idea to you for morality and legality to remain separate so that there can be a societal code we can agree on?
Statistically speaking McVeigh was an anamoly and including his case in the database would not significantly alter the fact that most known terrorists are middle eastern.
Except for the ones who are Basque (ETA), or Irish (IRA), or Chechen (you didn't think that was a part of "the middle east" just because it's majority Muslim, did you?), or Japanese (Aum Shinrikyo), or Filipino (Abu Sayyaf), or Tamil (Liberation Tigers), or Colombian (FARC), or Peruvian (Sendero Luminoso), or Italian (Red Brigades) or.. geez, do you really want me to go on or is it time to admit that you're dangerously ignorant about this subject?
Really, though, it's beside the point because even if we accept your premise that all the terrorists who count are shifty-eyed, swarthy-skinned "middle easterners" who look and dress like they're at a casting call for bad guys in the latest Hollywood action movie, screening 100% of these menacing bogeymen wouldn't increase your safety if it meant not screening the other passengers on the plane. Under the "go bother the swarthy people" plan you favor, all a terrorist cell would have to do would be to find a single amoral person willing to accept, say, a million dollars in exchange for smuggling a few forbidden weapons through security and handing them off to your cartoon-caricature terrorists on the other side of the security checkpoint.. How do you feel about excluding "safe" groups from screening now?
Ideally, the law should codify what is right and wrong, in as many cases as possible (there will always be exceptions). So while it should not depend on the law, it should certainly be reflected by the law.
Do you really want the state deciding for you what's right and wrong? Most people would say no to that.
Many of us believe that rather than attempt to be the arbiter of what's right and wrong, a more appropriate role for the law is to attempt to establish a reasonably stable and just baseline for society and to allow people's decisions about what's right and wrong to be informed by their own sense of morality and society's notions of propriety.
Re:The silver lining in the falling sky...
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P2P Bits
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Oh yeah? Name one time since the revolutionary war that people "realize that we've stumbled into Regulations Hell, and...demand a repeal of all of these stupid laws."
someone will probably beat me to this, but the obvious example would be Prohibition, no? that one actually required the repeal of a constitutional amendment!
Maybe because their onboard LAN ports suck. I know mine does. You know what the MAC address of my SiS onboard Ethernet was?
Wait, wait, don't tell me..
00-00-00-00-00-00
Honestly that was going to be my first guess.. These days I'm working for a tiny, understaffed island ISP that provides DSL service. We recently discovered this problem independently -- wish I'd known about this a week ago. We've been getting trouble tickets from customers who can get DHCP leases from our server but seemingly couldn't communicate otherwise. It took us a while to think of checking their MAC addresses but it turned out that one of the two computer stores in town has been selling these cheap clones based on low-quality motherboards with onboard SiS NICs. When we had a power outage last week at least five or six of our customers' boards lost their MAC address information and reverted to 00:00:00:00:00:00. Voila, instant arp-table confusion with five or six of these suckers on the net at once..
Arrrrggghh! As far as we can tell the store has sold a *bunch* of these machines, so we can probably expect several of these problems to develop every time there's another power outage..
> Since your odds are almost 50%, you could keep betting 2x until you win.
Just hope that you don't start off betting $1 and have a losing streak of 10 times. Unless you happen to have a float of about a million dollars once it reaches 2^10.
Stay out of the casino until you sharpen your mental arithmetic skills -- they're no place to be making order-of-magnitude errors in your off-the-cuff calculations.
2 ^ 10 = 1024. 2 ^ 20 = 1024 x 1024 = approximately 1,000,000.
Slashdot Mirror
However, a boycott isn't the only way that a large church in Redmond could inconvenience Microsoft. Imagine if the church membership included or had influence over local officials responsible for zoning decisions, planning permits, road construction and maintenance, and/or other functions of local government in Redmond and/or King County. How much inconvenience do you think you could cause Microsoft, and what concessions might Microsoft be willing to make to ensure smooth sailing the next time they need to build a new office building or condemn a bit of land that belongs to someone else?
Hopefully that's not their motivation -- it would reflect poorly of Microsoft and even more poorly on the church if that was the way things were working. But it wouldn't even be close to the first time such a thing had happened. Local politics is often a full-contact sport..
This can only mean one thing.. They've decided to join forces against their common enemy -- the consumer..
History is much less clear on what happens when you allow people access to unreleased Frank Sinatra, Stevie Nicks, and Ian Hunter bootlegs, but they don't dare take that chance, do they?
If we accept the claims made in the article, Adaptec won't even release the technical information necessary for people to write their own. That's what the argument is about.
Actually, nobody seems to expect that. Unquestionably a fair number of people would be happy if it happened, but nobody expects it. What people do expect is for Adaptec to release comprehensive technical specifications for their cards to interested parties, a practice that used to be commonplace among hardware makers but has been in lamentable decline for some time now. Releasing the tech specs would benefit not only OpenBSD developers but Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, and others, and while your assertion is correct that Windows has a >90% market share on the desktop, it's somewhat of a non-sequitur considering we're talking about drivers for a RAID controller that's more likely to go into a server machine. Windows still dominates in that market, as well, but not to the extent that it does on the desktop. By releasing the necessary specs and letting the open source community write drivers that work with their hardware Adaptec could, at very little cost to themselves, expand their potential customer base by 10-20%. Why won't they?
I work for a small publicly-owned ISP serving an island in Southeast Alaska and we're currently selecting vendors for our own IPTV offering. Many, many small telcos all over the country are in the same initial stages of IPTV projects -- either evaluating or getting ready to make the leap.
Most of the hardware we've been looking at uses MPEG2 encoding but in the near future the standard is likely to be either MPEG4 or some form of WMV. Microsoft has been aggressively pushing its video codecs and they seem to be gaining traction in the marketplace. However, they're not gaining as much acceptance as they otherwise might in the video world because at this point their reputation precedes them.
To a small player like us their previous behavior in other markets is more than a little alarming. A Comcast- or SBC-sized provider presumably might have some amount of leverage with Microsoft but what kind of consideration can you expect when you're a tiny little speck on the map in a place few people even know exists? Choosing a proprietary Microsoft standard over a reasonably open industry standard could leave you at Microsoft's mercy and, well, they're not known for mercy, are they?
It's not quite clear from context: did you mean "IE" to represent "id est" or "Internet Explorer"?
There are some systemic problems with Windows, particularly the Windows/IE combination, that allow spyware to flourish -- the lack of a way for a common user to get a good idea what's running on their system besides MS-installed OS files, for example, or the multitude of places that auto-starting spyware can hide its startup away from the user's notice. But in the end the people who have spyware problems are almost universally the people who clicked on a link from an unknown source that promised them something cool (or more often than not, something astonishingly lame by more educated users' standards..) If your momand other users like her could be trained not to click on "Click here to install our FREE animated weather-forecasting dancing baby!" when she doesn't know anything about the source of the offer, 90% of the problem would go away overnight.
We could call it "No Behind Left Behind."
D'oh! How could you fall for the classic "the first hit is free" ploy? It's the oldest trick in the book.
You know, it seems as though you earnestly believe what you have written and are very certain about it, but given that you don't even seem to know what the First Amendment covers, why should we give any credence whatsoever to your legal opinion?
Intellectual property rights and First Amendment rights are only tangentially related and you're confusing the two..
Both federal legislative houses are fairly evenly divided and the Senate in particular is completely up for grabs. But a few closely contested House seats that get swung the wrong way while everyone's eye is on the big show could have a huge effect, too..
I don't believe the tinfoil hats are called for just yet, but please try to remember that there's more than one election taking place this fall.
Look, I don't know whether the original poster's claim is true or not, but..
If you read what he's actually written, as opposed to what you assumed he wrote, you'll see his comment is specifically about video, whereas your reply mentions only audio. In short, you're discrediting a claim that he didn't make and calling him a jackass to boot.
Calm down, take a deep breath, and read the whole sentence, mmmmkay?
I doubt that many people will argue against a claim that there needs to be a considerable amount of correlation between what is immoral and what is illegal but legality and morality are really not the same thing and it's dangerous to conflate them as the upthread post to which I was responding did. This should be obvious to most Slashdot readers, as most of us hold differing opinions about what should be permitted than the currently empowered administration of moralists. Ashcroft appears to believe that law and morality should be more closely bound together and it's one of the things that many of us here object to.
In the end I see morality as an individual matter and legality as a social one. If we can all agree on what's legal/illegal we can have a stable and reasonably free society without having to all share the same beliefs about what's moral/immoral. I happen to think that's an important goal. Given, based on your statements, that you probably disagree with me about many other things it doesn't seem likely we're going to agree completely about morality, does it? In light of that doesn't it seem like a good idea to you for morality and legality to remain separate so that there can be a societal code we can agree on?
Really, though, it's beside the point because even if we accept your premise that all the terrorists who count are shifty-eyed, swarthy-skinned "middle easterners" who look and dress like they're at a casting call for bad guys in the latest Hollywood action movie, screening 100% of these menacing bogeymen wouldn't increase your safety if it meant not screening the other passengers on the plane. Under the "go bother the swarthy people" plan you favor, all a terrorist cell would have to do would be to find a single amoral person willing to accept, say, a million dollars in exchange for smuggling a few forbidden weapons through security and handing them off to your cartoon-caricature terrorists on the other side of the security checkpoint.. How do you feel about excluding "safe" groups from screening now?
Do you really want the state deciding for you what's right and wrong? Most people would say no to that.
Many of us believe that rather than attempt to be the arbiter of what's right and wrong, a more appropriate role for the law is to attempt to establish a reasonably stable and just baseline for society and to allow people's decisions about what's right and wrong to be informed by their own sense of morality and society's notions of propriety.
someone will probably beat me to this, but the obvious example would be Prohibition, no? that one actually required the repeal of a constitutional amendment!
Most convenient, I can certainly understand, but #2 was cheaper than #4? Sign me up!
Arrrrggghh! As far as we can tell the store has sold a *bunch* of these machines, so we can probably expect several of these problems to develop every time there's another power outage..
Stay out of the casino until you sharpen your mental arithmetic skills -- they're no place to be making order-of-magnitude errors in your off-the-cuff calculations.
2 ^ 10 = 1024.
2 ^ 20 = 1024 x 1024 = approximately 1,000,000.