In general they are not talking about the garage band / indie label stuff, they're talking about the majority of the garbage produced in recording studios by professionals and broadcasted over radio chains like Clear Channel... and sold at your retail record stores.
The advent of lower cost technology has had no particular impact on the mass music market. It only impacts musicians outside the system and the people (hopefuly, that's us who knows how to find them, and of course, that's the core of the RIAA's attacks on alternative methods for music distribution.
Until the virtual monopoly infrastructure breaks down, there isn't any way that it can.
The only question is how long before the owners of these record labels stop accepting PIRACY!!! as an excuse for their declining revenue performance, and when this happens, we can look forward to a flood of both good (and bad) new music and old music, because the smart investors who will buy the record label catalogs and contracts at 10 cents on the dollar (what else do they have to offer that's worth buying?) will know how to make everything available for sale, not just what'll fit the shelves of a record store.
The keys to profit in the future major label record market are:
Knowing how to make money off the musician who sells 10K records a year while making sure that musician makes a good living as well.
Making every single record that label has ever made available for purchase. A record that you can't buy makes a label no money. You want to buy your favorite album from your youth (unless you're under 21), right now, you can't, even if you're willing to pay list.
Leveraging digital technology including Internet Radio and P2P for lower-cost promotion, and doing the kind of promo quality that the average garage musician can't hope to match.
as part of a motherboard set was shipped to me with a small tube of thermal grease. I put on a thin coat and installed the chip, and I spent a few extra bucks for a better fan.
Presumably, the reseller tried it the AMD way and found itself getting too many burned up chips back.
So they require phase change pads and stock fans?
Sounds like they're more interested in selling replacement CPUs than making customers happy. Maybe they've got an Intel mole who comes up with bright ideas like this.
Too bad VIA floating point performance isn't that hot... because their chips don't require a whole lot in the way of cooling. Yes, suspecting that there's a relationship between these two facts has occurred to me.
If I'd been buying for a server, I would have bought the VIA chip. I went with the Duron because I do graphics on this thing once in a while and big bitmaps run. . . slowly.
They should have let people decide for themselves how to respond to the spammers. One need not respond to spam with spam.
Perhaps some of the readers might have only had physical injury or substantial property damage to the spammers.
The techdirt people should also remember that spammers are in the most literal sense, enemies of all humanity and we are entitled to know who our enemies are and where to find them.
Don't buy them. Intel has just given you a reason to buy from anybody else.
You'll probably get better price-performance from AMD anyway. I've been using AMDs since the 286 generation... running a Duron now. I've had zero problems attributable to a non-Intel processor, though I did have to install a patch for the K6-350.
If you don't need good floating-point performance, check into VIA... last I heard, they run so cool they don't need cooling fans, either.
Sometimes there's no option other than to buy from thugs, but in the x86 market, you've got two other choices. How many do you need?
If you think it necessary to buy from "industry dominant vendors" who set the "standards", what are you doing here?
We're doing our CDs via SwiftCD, our T-shirts and other merchandise via Cafepress. We may add a vendor or two later.
MP3 sound samples (full songs) you can download off our site.
All we did was upload (we snailmailed the CD for replication) our info, all we have to do with fulfillment is wait for them to send the checks. They handle the credit card stuff and create the goods on demand. The prices are a bit high, but creating stuff on a one-off basis is expensive even with everything basically automated.
I mean using a 'bot' for physical handling and as many as it takes. (15K for an image of a 70T storage... so load up a truck when the backup is done)
I've had to do 2 restores from tape and BOTH were fubared, DVD-R is probably far more stable and there's even the chance that DVD drives will still be available in 10 years or so.
How hard is it to build an electronic voting machine around a PC? It presents the ballot in the form of multiple choice forms, records the results when the voter hits the VOTE button, prints the ballot choices on a POS-style printer inside the machine that's only used at recounts, uses a second printer to give the voter an "I Voted!" tag.
I could have done this 15 years ago with BASIC on a C-64 and a DIY cartridge port to interface with physical hardware. The majority of people here could do one without difficulty with a PC.
Given control of the voting machine record format, how hard would it be to write software to tabulate the results? This is well within the scope of a computer science class project or even a textbook exercise for second year programming students, and the results should be at least as reliable as the "high-priced professional equipment" Sequoia and ES&S sell.
So the burden of proof that there are "important trade secrets" in voting machine or vote tabulation software, or that the software available for audit even by government organizations is the same actually used in elections is on the people who are buying this shit on our behalf or selling it. It's for them to prove that their "black boxes" provide an honest count and it's OK to use the law to forbid the public from inspecting the contents of these "black boxes" Neither party has even pretended to meet it.
My default assumption is that anyone who uses the word "proprietary" and "our" to describe their voting technology has either the intent to commit voting fraud or to be an accessory to it, and the results of any election done with it are inherently suspect.
1 geek point for the answer to the question "Which CEO of a voting machine company went from that job to the Senate to the surprise of a great many people, including pollsters?"
You want an Open Source voting tech project? Start one. You won't need the greatest and hottest programmers to make this work. But don't expect any US jurisdiction to adopt it. There is no reason to believe that the "black boxes" from political allies of Bush using campaign contributions to market locally won't become universal.
As long as the mass media doesn't start asking the right questions about honest counts in elections, the public will never know. Given that the TV industry is composed of FCC-licensed broadcast stations, I don't think this issue will show up on TV news anytime in the foreseeable future.
Control over enough voting machines makes subtle manipulations possible, a few votes in one precinct and a few votes in another adds up to candidates chosen by whoever controls the machines in a "close race"
Things are getting to the point where only the uninformed automatically believe in the integrity of US elections.
So where is US democracy?
For those of you who'd like to take a shot at Open Source election tech, I suggest using html pages for the ballots and using Opera in/kiosk mode to display them. This separates ballot design from the actual programming.
I think even the most partisan Republicans agree with me the people who designed the Florida "butterfly ballots" shouldn't be allowed within miles of the actual software used to run a voting machine and count your votes.
this kind of situation may actually be advantageous when you think about it So because mean old John Ashcroft makes you wet yourself, vote fraud is OK? Spoken like a true Democrat.
-ccm
If our voting is done using secret black boxes built by a company owned by friends of George Bush, Ashcroft will stay AG even if you and he are the only two Americans who voted for him. It's people like you who make people think Republican and tard are synonyms.
Find out why a computer science professor who has forgotten more about computers than you are capable of learning leads the opposition to electronic voting machines with audit trails existing only in your imagination here.
Let me see here, they reject electronic voting due to fraud.. so what do they support, the fraud free special hanging chads when using paper ballots (in Florida)?
It's not like many of us vote anyway..
That's strange, a lot of you whine about things like the DMCA and CBDTPA and Patriot Act II.
Of course, if you don't understand why election fraud matters, you might as well stay home on election day instead of providing another vote for the people who make laws like DMCA.
What needs to be done in general is a NRA/AARP style high tech end users political advocacy organization to make sure that state and Federal legislators consider our interests before that of Hollywood content providers to make sure this kind of legislation dies in committee before it ever gets a chance to pass.
What needs to be done specifically in this case is... you know as well as I do that no major IT shop in any affected state can obey all of this law and continue to operate. Gather evidence against state government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and the cable operators themselves and when there's enough of it, file a taxpayers' suit for the purpose of making the state AGs enforce the law. Evidence will be as close as the e-mail headers from organizations in violation, at least enough for subpoena purposes.
When state-level elected officials find out that their e-mail, website, and payroll processing for their own paychecks is offline and that their CIO is behind bars, perhaps they'll decide that there are things more important than campaign contributions from Hollywood.
What will be done?
A lot of whining by the US online crowd, just like all the other times bad Internet law has come up. EFF and all the other organizations with non-profit status can in general only effectively intervene when a law is in fact unconstitutional. Unfortunately, just because a law is likely to fuck up high-tech industry doesn't make it necessarily unconstitutional.
I don't think the status of these laws or bills matters all that much anymore. If these laws are taken off the books, the replacement measures will be rewritten in such a way that they will apply only to end users, not to corporations / businesses. . . the barrier to freedom of use will effectively be the ability to afford your own T1 or something like that.
The only way to make sure that legislation like this doesn't happen is to make sure that the politicians owe us enough favors that they'll ask us before making computer/Net related legislation. The only way to do this is to outbid Hollywood for them. The high-tech community has blown its opportunities to do this, first when doing this was easy, and now when the bad guys have legal momentum on their side. There was a time when a few people willing to spend a few megabucks on getting a political operation capable of becoming a mass-action advocacy and lobbying organization could have easily managed this. Unfortunately, the time to do this was when it was still possible to start a national-level PAC and get the paperwork done required to make it legal to collect money on behalf of candidates soon enough to make it possible to affect the 2004 elections. The window for that closed months ago.
Face it, game's over, people. Effective political action on our behalf is not going to happen and we might as well face the fact and figure out how we want to deal with this at an individual level.
The cumulative impact of laws like this simply mean that technology innovation will have to happen outside the USA. If you want to be a technology innovator, figure out where you want to move to and what language you need to learn to function there.
The best time to join a refugee movement / "brain drain" is before it starts, so you can bitch with the rest of the locals in whatever foriegn country you're in about the cheap high-tech labor coming in from America because by the time people realize en masse that the recovery is happening, but not here, you're established as a local who just happened to be born in America.
How about calling it "900t"? An anonymous reader writes "As previously reported, mozilla.org's Phoenix browser has been renamed to Firebird. This hasn't pleased supporters of the Firebird relational database project. In an Australian LinuxWorld article, one of their administrators calls the name change "one of the dirtiest deeds I've seen in open source so far." In a MozillaZine article, the same person accused mozilla.org of "theft" and "corporate bullying". They don't explain how it was different when they picked a name that was already used by a BBS, financial software manufacturer, Fenix IDE and games company. Meanwhile, IBPhoenix, an organisation that supports the development of the Firebird
I'd like to suggest that all Open Source disputes over program names be settled through trial by combat in the old English tradition.
If this works, perhaps this method can be used to settle all trade name disputes.
Alternately, a version of this adapted to the programmer community can be tried.
Set up a server on a static IP. One side tries to keep it running, the other side tries to h4ck it down, who defends and who attacks settled by coin flip.
While on the surface, this appears to be as inappropriate a choice as hiring an openly declared Nazi as Ambassador to Israel and sending in in a uniform with swastika to the US Embassy, I think this was intended to send a message as to the Bush Administration's regard for its subjects' privacy.
In other words, nobody can say we weren't warned. We have been informed as to what to expect. They are being honest for a change.
So why hasn't anyone documented violations by the MI State Government IT operations... or Ford, or GM, etc. and publically demanded that the organizations be called to account and filed felony criminal complaints against CIOs with the misfortune to be running IT operations in MI?
If the MI state government is forced to unplug the law or their computers, they'll go for the law. While it might hurt individual legislators in terms of future campaign contributions from companies that bought these laws, I'm pretty sure that restrictions on operations (hint: IP masquerading given IPv4 address limitations, VPN, etc.) involved with literal super-DMCA compliance means the state government is out of business. Which is exactly where it belongs.
So if you don't like the law (especially if you're in MI)... do something about it.
You're new here, aren't you? Anything that goes against the DNC talking points is regarded by the moderators as thoughtcrime. It's doubleplusungood and is to be modded into oblivion. Correct thought (defined as an echo of whatever Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi are saying) is rewarded.
Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi supported both the DMCA and the Patriot Act and everybody knows it. This includes the moderators. If it were one of my mod point days, I would simply have marked you as a troll because we don't have a Tard label to apply yet.
A great many of us are sysadmins / students / employees at the places where these things are used, more work at places where the vendor is trying to unload this crap. The rest of us know people who are in that position and have enough regard for your technical opinions to check them out for themselves.
It appears from the PowerPoint (get it while Google still has it) that the system is irredeemably fubared and that only an idiot would use it either to handle money or for access control.
Don't bother complaining to the company. Let them find out for themselves that everyone likely to be asked to provide an opinion on the worth of their products has flunked them.
Get the word out that they are not only selling the equivalent of papier-mache door locks as steel, but trying to hide this fact from potential customers by suing whistleblowers into oblivion.
Who knows of better off-the-shelf alternatives using real crypto-based authentication? Open Source would be preferable, but anything better will do.
I think this is a good response to anybody who tries to sue or jail people to provide the obscurity in which crap "security" solutions can prosper, i.e. where only the bad guys know there's a problem.
An internet company in the experimental stages is best off locating next to cheap bandwidth. Anyone who wants to do cheap experimentation on new products that suck up bandwidth should do the same.
I expect that the new centers of commercial growth are going to be the new technology centers that citiLEC Internet access distribution will make possible.
Silicon Valley had their chance to do this and blew it.
The fact that this is going to make life more convenient for the town's citizens, force competition for cable TV meaning lower prices based on experiences from other citiLEC communities is... probably of more interest to the community than a shot at becoming a techology center.
It's a win-win deal for everybody except incumbent cable / telco providers.
I suggest a setup where access is resold to ISPs as it was in the citiLEC in the Pacific Northwest, check the slashdot thread for more info.
The major music labels are all in financial trouble. Why bother with a bidding war with Apple when there are several other companies which might be open to reason in the forms of a billion or so in cash?
The other point is that the time for Apple to do this is as soon as MS puts money on the table.
If they start a bidding war with MS and lose this drastically increases the value of the other 4 of the big 5 to the point where the major investors will be able to put up with bad (for tech industry and users) policy decisions of the current label CEOs even if the companies continue to bleed red ink. Remember what investors put up with in the dot.com era?
Incidentally, MS can either outbid Apple or pay far more than they think the company is worth simply in order to bleed Apple white. Money they waste outbidding MS for a property that's declining in value would be better spent on another artist catalogue, perhaps a more listenable one.
The current Universal Record investors and MS are the only ones which profit from a bidding war.
Apple and MS, each with their own labels competing in the music business might be a very, very interesting thing. Imagine "new music from Microsoft".
However, I think both companies are betting "we can do a lot more with this material than these fuckheads can". My guess is that they're buying the catalogues and current artist contracts, and the people who will still be working there will be working infrastructure. The recording engineer jobs and the webserver sysadmin jobs are safe.
Major computer company owned music corporations are going to look a lot like ordinary corporations. Profit margins should go up even in the face of the current profit stream. Artists will get standard contracts much like developer contracts are, and the auditing will be corporate quality. Maybe long-term contracts will include profit sharing in the parent company as well as royalties and standard health and benefit packages.
They can stream 100 music channels from their own content
I don't think the traditional management practices and the traditional "overheads" will be tolerated. Burying the producer's coke bills as "entertainment"
Which I have no trouble with, these guys can afford to pay for their own partying.
This is a rare case where "do the right thing" might be drastically more profitable with the
All of what you're saying is irrelevant to the home user who can't get in-person help from a Linux ubergeek when anything out of the ordinary goes wrong with the install or the peripheral set is the least bit unusual.
The installations you discuss where things work for end users are done by professionals with in-house technical support.
Assuming reasonably current (let's say P2-400 or later) machines, only MS seriously disputes that an enterprise-wide install of Linux of an ordinary office productivity environment onto locked-down machines can't be made to work and work very well.
Just about anyone can install Windows 98SE by simply loading the CD and going with defaults, and chances are, just about everything will work.
In the Linux environment, "It Just Works" is an empty promise. I've been working with my dual boot setup for months and it still can't find the parallel port printer or scanner, the printer is connected through a Startech parallel port card that features Red Hat 7.3 Linux compatility. I'm running Red Hat 8.0 and it does NOT run despite serious attempts by tech support to assist.
While I think these problems will be solved, I think this will only happen because IBM and HP, etc. will spend the money needed to pay professional programmers to write the improved installation software. Since their other choice is being 0wn3d by MS, the billions will be spent.
From the "blame the victim" crap I see here, the Open Source community has neither the interest or I suspect, the technical ability to make a Linux install work on the average as well as a install of a pre-XP Windows OS. All I'm asking is... something that can be installed by a reasonably knowledgable user (I could use a Linux command line before I started, and I'm using nano instead of vi just like always) install, more or less usual environment, no assistance.
Not laziness. I'd say based on this that they delivered exactly the "objective" results they were paid to get. If a MP3 jukebox maker had paid them, they would have said that piracy should be requred by law.
We can't take IDC seriously as a source of analysis or accurate information anymore. Remember this when you see them cited as sources in articles...
IDC is just another public relations tool. Pay them and specify the results, they'll come up with a way to spin or invent "the facts".
Slashdot Mirror
The advent of lower cost technology has had no particular impact on the mass music market. It only impacts musicians outside the system and the people (hopefuly, that's us who knows how to find them, and of course, that's the core of the RIAA's attacks on alternative methods for music distribution.
Until the virtual monopoly infrastructure breaks down, there isn't any way that it can.
The only question is how long before the owners of these record labels stop accepting PIRACY!!! as an excuse for their declining revenue performance, and when this happens, we can look forward to a flood of both good (and bad) new music and old music, because the smart investors who will buy the record label catalogs and contracts at 10 cents on the dollar (what else do they have to offer that's worth buying?) will know how to make everything available for sale, not just what'll fit the shelves of a record store.
The keys to profit in the future major label record market are:
Presumably, the reseller tried it the AMD way and found itself getting too many burned up chips back.
So they require phase change pads and stock fans?
Sounds like they're more interested in selling replacement CPUs than making customers happy. Maybe they've got an Intel mole who comes up with bright ideas like this.
Too bad VIA floating point performance isn't that hot... because their chips don't require a whole lot in the way of cooling. Yes, suspecting that there's a relationship between these two facts has occurred to me.
If I'd been buying for a server, I would have bought the VIA chip. I went with the Duron because I do graphics on this thing once in a while and big bitmaps run. . . slowly.
Perhaps some of the readers might have only had physical injury or substantial property damage to the spammers.
The techdirt people should also remember that spammers are in the most literal sense, enemies of all humanity and we are entitled to know who our enemies are and where to find them.
And so it did, but the above link is clickable.
You'll probably get better price-performance from AMD anyway. I've been using AMDs since the 286 generation... running a Duron now. I've had zero problems attributable to a non-Intel processor, though I did have to install a patch for the K6-350.
If you don't need good floating-point performance, check into VIA... last I heard, they run so cool they don't need cooling fans, either.
Sometimes there's no option other than to buy from thugs, but in the x86 market, you've got two other choices. How many do you need?
If you think it necessary to buy from "industry dominant vendors" who set the "standards", what are you doing here?
Command line with the most commonly used commands in a menu on the bottom of the screen. Easy.
Just google for: nano text editor
A.Lizard
MP3 sound samples (full songs) you can download off our site.
All we did was upload (we snailmailed the CD for replication) our info, all we have to do with fulfillment is wait for them to send the checks. They handle the credit card stuff and create the goods on demand. The prices are a bit high, but creating stuff on a one-off basis is expensive even with everything basically automated.
Check out our site... it's in the sig below.
I've had to do 2 restores from tape and BOTH were fubared, DVD-R is probably far more stable and there's even the chance that DVD drives will still be available in 10 years or so.
I could have done this 15 years ago with BASIC on a C-64 and a DIY cartridge port to interface with physical hardware. The majority of people here could do one without difficulty with a PC.
Given control of the voting machine record format, how hard would it be to write software to tabulate the results? This is well within the scope of a computer science class project or even a textbook exercise for second year programming students, and the results should be at least as reliable as the "high-priced professional equipment" Sequoia and ES&S sell.
So the burden of proof that there are "important trade secrets" in voting machine or vote tabulation software, or that the software available for audit even by government organizations is the same actually used in elections is on the people who are buying this shit on our behalf or selling it. It's for them to prove that their "black boxes" provide an honest count and it's OK to use the law to forbid the public from inspecting the contents of these "black boxes" Neither party has even pretended to meet it.
My default assumption is that anyone who uses the word "proprietary" and "our" to describe their voting technology has either the intent to commit voting fraud or to be an accessory to it, and the results of any election done with it are inherently suspect.
1 geek point for the answer to the question "Which CEO of a voting machine company went from that job to the Senate to the surprise of a great many people, including pollsters?"
You want an Open Source voting tech project? Start one. You won't need the greatest and hottest programmers to make this work. But don't expect any US jurisdiction to adopt it. There is no reason to believe that the "black boxes" from political allies of Bush using campaign contributions to market locally won't become universal.
As long as the mass media doesn't start asking the right questions about honest counts in elections, the public will never know. Given that the TV industry is composed of FCC-licensed broadcast stations, I don't think this issue will show up on TV news anytime in the foreseeable future.
Control over enough voting machines makes subtle manipulations possible, a few votes in one precinct and a few votes in another adds up to candidates chosen by whoever controls the machines in a "close race"
Things are getting to the point where only the uninformed automatically believe in the integrity of US elections.
So where is US democracy?
For those of you who'd like to take a shot at Open Source election tech, I suggest using html pages for the ballots and using Opera in /kiosk mode to display them. This separates ballot design from the actual programming.
I think even the most partisan Republicans agree with me the people who designed the Florida "butterfly ballots" shouldn't be allowed within miles of the actual software used to run a voting machine and count your votes.
-ccm
If our voting is done using secret black boxes built by a company owned by friends of George Bush, Ashcroft will stay AG even if you and he are the only two Americans who voted for him. It's people like you who make people think Republican and tard are synonyms.
Find out why a computer science professor who has forgotten more about computers than you are capable of learning leads the opposition to electronic voting machines with audit trails existing only in your imagination here.
It's not like many of us vote anyway..
That's strange, a lot of you whine about things like the DMCA and CBDTPA and Patriot Act II.
Of course, if you don't understand why election fraud matters, you might as well stay home on election day instead of providing another vote for the people who make laws like DMCA.
What needs to be done specifically in this case is... you know as well as I do that no major IT shop in any affected state can obey all of this law and continue to operate. Gather evidence against state government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and the cable operators themselves and when there's enough of it, file a taxpayers' suit for the purpose of making the state AGs enforce the law. Evidence will be as close as the e-mail headers from organizations in violation, at least enough for subpoena purposes.
When state-level elected officials find out that their e-mail, website, and payroll processing for their own paychecks is offline and that their CIO is behind bars, perhaps they'll decide that there are things more important than campaign contributions from Hollywood.
What will be done?
A lot of whining by the US online crowd, just like all the other times bad Internet law has come up. EFF and all the other organizations with non-profit status can in general only effectively intervene when a law is in fact unconstitutional. Unfortunately, just because a law is likely to fuck up high-tech industry doesn't make it necessarily unconstitutional.
I don't think the status of these laws or bills matters all that much anymore. If these laws are taken off the books, the replacement measures will be rewritten in such a way that they will apply only to end users, not to corporations / businesses. . . the barrier to freedom of use will effectively be the ability to afford your own T1 or something like that.
The only way to make sure that legislation like this doesn't happen is to make sure that the politicians owe us enough favors that they'll ask us before making computer/Net related legislation. The only way to do this is to outbid Hollywood for them. The high-tech community has blown its opportunities to do this, first when doing this was easy, and now when the bad guys have legal momentum on their side. There was a time when a few people willing to spend a few megabucks on getting a political operation capable of becoming a mass-action advocacy and lobbying organization could have easily managed this. Unfortunately, the time to do this was when it was still possible to start a national-level PAC and get the paperwork done required to make it legal to collect money on behalf of candidates soon enough to make it possible to affect the 2004 elections. The window for that closed months ago.
Face it, game's over, people. Effective political action on our behalf is not going to happen and we might as well face the fact and figure out how we want to deal with this at an individual level.
The cumulative impact of laws like this simply mean that technology innovation will have to happen outside the USA. If you want to be a technology innovator, figure out where you want to move to and what language you need to learn to function there.
The best time to join a refugee movement / "brain drain" is before it starts, so you can bitch with the rest of the locals in whatever foriegn country you're in about the cheap high-tech labor coming in from America because by the time people realize en masse that the recovery is happening, but not here, you're established as a local who just happened to be born in America.
How about calling it "900t"? An anonymous reader writes "As previously reported, mozilla.org's Phoenix browser has been renamed to Firebird. This hasn't pleased supporters of the Firebird relational database project. In an Australian LinuxWorld article, one of their administrators calls the name change "one of the dirtiest deeds I've seen in open source so far." In a MozillaZine article, the same person accused mozilla.org of "theft" and "corporate bullying". They don't explain how it was different when they picked a name that was already used by a BBS, financial software manufacturer, Fenix IDE and games company. Meanwhile, IBPhoenix, an organisation that supports the development of the Firebird
I'd like to suggest that all Open Source disputes over program names be settled through trial by combat in the old English tradition.
If this works, perhaps this method can be used to settle all trade name disputes.
Alternately, a version of this adapted to the programmer community can be tried.
Set up a server on a static IP. One side tries to keep it running, the other side tries to h4ck it down, who defends and who attacks settled by coin flip.
How does the PR business pay?
I think that's already been done.
In other words, nobody can say we weren't warned. We have been informed as to what to expect. They are being honest for a change.
If the MI state government is forced to unplug the law or their computers, they'll go for the law. While it might hurt individual legislators in terms of future campaign contributions from companies that bought these laws, I'm pretty sure that restrictions on operations (hint: IP masquerading given IPv4 address limitations, VPN, etc.) involved with literal super-DMCA compliance means the state government is out of business. Which is exactly where it belongs.
So if you don't like the law (especially if you're in MI)... do something about it.
Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi supported both the DMCA and the Patriot Act and everybody knows it. This includes the moderators. If it were one of my mod point days, I would simply have marked you as a troll because we don't have a Tard label to apply yet.
It appears from the PowerPoint (get it while Google still has it) that the system is irredeemably fubared and that only an idiot would use it either to handle money or for access control.
Don't bother complaining to the company. Let them find out for themselves that everyone likely to be asked to provide an opinion on the worth of their products has flunked them.
Get the word out that they are not only selling the equivalent of papier-mache door locks as steel, but trying to hide this fact from potential customers by suing whistleblowers into oblivion.
Who knows of better off-the-shelf alternatives using real crypto-based authentication? Open Source would be preferable, but anything better will do.
I think this is a good response to anybody who tries to sue or jail people to provide the obscurity in which crap "security" solutions can prosper, i.e. where only the bad guys know there's a problem.
I expect that the new centers of commercial growth are going to be the new technology centers that citiLEC Internet access distribution will make possible.
Silicon Valley had their chance to do this and blew it.
The fact that this is going to make life more convenient for the town's citizens, force competition for cable TV meaning lower prices based on experiences from other citiLEC communities is... probably of more interest to the community than a shot at becoming a techology center.
It's a win-win deal for everybody except incumbent cable / telco providers.
I suggest a setup where access is resold to ISPs as it was in the citiLEC in the Pacific Northwest, check the slashdot thread for more info.
The other point is that the time for Apple to do this is as soon as MS puts money on the table.
If they start a bidding war with MS and lose this drastically increases the value of the other 4 of the big 5 to the point where the major investors will be able to put up with bad (for tech industry and users) policy decisions of the current label CEOs even if the companies continue to bleed red ink. Remember what investors put up with in the dot.com era?
Incidentally, MS can either outbid Apple or pay far more than they think the company is worth simply in order to bleed Apple white. Money they waste outbidding MS for a property that's declining in value would be better spent on another artist catalogue, perhaps a more listenable one.
The current Universal Record investors and MS are the only ones which profit from a bidding war.
Apple and MS, each with their own labels competing in the music business might be a very, very interesting thing. Imagine "new music from Microsoft".
However, I think both companies are betting "we can do a lot more with this material than these fuckheads can". My guess is that they're buying the catalogues and current artist contracts, and the people who will still be working there will be working infrastructure. The recording engineer jobs and the webserver sysadmin jobs are safe.
Major computer company owned music corporations are going to look a lot like ordinary corporations. Profit margins should go up even in the face of the current profit stream. Artists will get standard contracts much like developer contracts are, and the auditing will be corporate quality. Maybe long-term contracts will include profit sharing in the parent company as well as royalties and standard health and benefit packages.
They can stream 100 music channels from their own content
I don't think the traditional management practices and the traditional "overheads" will be tolerated. Burying the producer's coke bills as "entertainment" Which I have no trouble with, these guys can afford to pay for their own partying.
This is a rare case where "do the right thing" might be drastically more profitable with the
Though there is something of a visceral horror
The installations you discuss where things work for end users are done by professionals with in-house technical support.
Assuming reasonably current (let's say P2-400 or later) machines, only MS seriously disputes that an enterprise-wide install of Linux of an ordinary office productivity environment onto locked-down machines can't be made to work and work very well.
Just about anyone can install Windows 98SE by simply loading the CD and going with defaults, and chances are, just about everything will work.
In the Linux environment, "It Just Works" is an empty promise. I've been working with my dual boot setup for months and it still can't find the parallel port printer or scanner, the printer is connected through a Startech parallel port card that features Red Hat 7.3 Linux compatility. I'm running Red Hat 8.0 and it does NOT run despite serious attempts by tech support to assist.
While I think these problems will be solved, I think this will only happen because IBM and HP, etc. will spend the money needed to pay professional programmers to write the improved installation software. Since their other choice is being 0wn3d by MS, the billions will be spent.
From the "blame the victim" crap I see here, the Open Source community has neither the interest or I suspect, the technical ability to make a Linux install work on the average as well as a install of a pre-XP Windows OS. All I'm asking is... something that can be installed by a reasonably knowledgable user (I could use a Linux command line before I started, and I'm using nano instead of vi just like always) install, more or less usual environment, no assistance.
We can't take IDC seriously as a source of analysis or accurate information anymore. Remember this when you see them cited as sources in articles...
IDC is just another public relations tool. Pay them and specify the results, they'll come up with a way to spin or invent "the facts".
I don't think they expected to be caught at this.
That's the part we all want to see.