Vista may be used but it isn't liked. For anyone who didn't get it on new (expensive and over-powered) hardware Vista is unusable and even when it is usable its nothing more then an over-bloated XP pack with some DRM and a fancy skin thrown on. If you Google Windows Vista, the 9th result is BadVista which is a site run by the FSF that has links to 3rd party news stories about how Vista is failing. The other top 8 results are what you would expect, MS's website, Wikipedia, a few PC websites and a blog about the developers of Vista. Sure some people are going to get Vista via OEM editions and by their curiosity, many will "downgrade" to XP, check out Linux, and explore other operating systems. Office 2007, no one who is a casual PC user wants it, it runs/slightly/ slower then previous editions and manages to have a confusing user interface that is nothing like previous versions, that plus a high price tag is driving people towards Open Office for home/school use. The biggest mistake MS made with Vista is making it new, the OS is no longer a given, this has made people look to Mac and Linux platforms, the MS monopoly is slowly dissolving.
No, but if there is any rule with technology that all devices almost always follows is that the more advanced something is the higher probability that it will break, fail or malfunction. If say there is a "great refrigerator worm" you can either protect yourself from it therefore not needing to spend an extra $300 on a new fridge, or not get scammed by people who are selling "fridge antivirus" that protect you from all the "threats to your refrigerator's well-being" that really doesn't do much. Not to mention with all the RFID and people getting so paranoid with it, whats to say that there won't be a service to remove the/harmless/ RFID tags from products that will cost as much as the product, if you know how to code you can possibly disable it via the OS in the embedded device or know how it works and figure that it isn't a big threat, much as how cookies were thought to be "the end to all privacy online" and people took cookies to be viruses and trojans yet to a programmer they were simply harmless text files that got blown out of proportion by the media.
Learn to code, how to defeat the technology, how to be smarter then the "smart" devices. All this stuff isn't so scary once you learn how it works and how to disable it.
I expect that all the new "smart devices" will create a class division within developed countries, those who can program and those who can't. We already have part of it with Best Buy and other computer retailers trying to sell you at least $300 in extra hardware/software/support even though you don't need it yet the uninformed take the bait and end up spending money they don't need. Also, the same thing is happening with computer repair and support, if you don't know whats wrong tech support is more than willing to test every combination and then charge you for the privilege of fixing it along with any other thing that/might/ be wrong.
Make sure that Amazon though doesn't have a patent of a link from another website to it's website to advertise a product or else they might sue you for patent infringement!
Hasn't anyone noticed how (us programmers) refer to programming as "writing" software not "inventing" software? Or how we "write" code not "invent" code? Software shouldn't be patented much as books aren't, software builds on each other much as books do.
And how much innovation has happened in the last 10 years? Sure processors have gotten faster, internet connections have gone from Dial-Up to cable yet everything else is the same. Look at the latest MS OS, Vista, it hasn't done anything more than 95 did save for use a whole lot more resources and got a decent enough kernel. Look at OS-X, sure it looks new and such but its based on Unix which has been around for a good while now. Most employed programmers don't innovate or change the tech industry they just find better ways to do simple things such as a company-wide backup, more security, ETC. Today it doesn't seem like the next OS is going to change the world, nor does web 2.0 seem like a revolution, technology is basically the same just a bit improved then 10 years ago.
DRM is going to cause a headache for the normal music-fan who wants your music. Your best bet is probably to put a few videos on YouTube and get the content going. Then on your independent web site sell a few CDs and such, just make sure to get all your bases covered. iTunes and eMusic and such might give you a few bucks but I am not sure about licensing issues and how much of the $.99 you get. Just keep a large amount of your digital music in different formats, FLAC, OGG, MP3. Also, remember if you are good enough, people will pay for merchandise too which can be almost pure profit if you buy in bulk. But then again, I am not in music so take my advice with a grain of salt, but my advice is to distribute as much media as possible in as many possible formats, even the strange ones.
The internet is what totally messed the labels up. It used to be that an artist needed a label in order to go beyond the garage and to actually playing concerts. Now all that artist has to do is burn a few CDs, distribute them, make a few videos on YouTube, and have a MySpace and they will attract fans, if they are good enough the fans will buy merchandise and they can make money that way (works in a similar way to Homestar Runner where merchandise sales make 100% of the income no ads, and everything is free). Musicians will still write songs without much pay the same way that authors will write and programmers will code.
But who is to say that the RIAA has solid evidence? They aren't used to people fighting back effectively, if they can only prove that he went to a specific site, there is lack of evidence. The RIAA has never made very solid cases and if he wins this he could inspire others to do the same.
Without DRM, digital music can eaily be played on almost any media player. You now have opened up media rather then just iPods, to generic MP3 players, Windows systems, Linux systems, OS X systems, FreeBSD systems, and more. That is something that hasn't happened yet is a standard non-patented format for storing music, OGG would be likely but with it not being native on most MP3 players and Windows (and OS X too?) and MP3 is patent restricted and therefore rarely playable (legally) on Linux, FreeBSD and other systems. MP3 players also suffer with the patent fee, they could be cheaper without it. All DRM does is make people not want to download "legal" media, the main pro of "piracy" was that you can download it in just about any format you wanted, for free and it would easily work with just about every device that you had while the "legal" ones would not. Digital music will never catch up to CDs if "piracy" is always the better option. I am not advocating suing anyone but seriously, when you iTunes downloads work with you iPod/iTunes and nothing else, the MP3 download from a tracker site is a better deal as it will work on that $25 MP3 player you got, your computer (any OS) along with your iPod and phone, ETC. It isn't just DRM that was killing digital music it was the lack of a standard format. In the CD age (before the Sony rootkits and the like) your CD would work in any computer with a CD drive, any CD player be it the $25 off brand one or your $2000 stereo system. When we get that, digital music will begin selling otherwise, who wants expensive media that works with 1 brand of products and nothing else.
If that is true... he is doomed. However my guess is the RIAA still can't produce enough evidence save say a BT tracker site so if he gets the EFF he still might win.
The thing though is, when you stand up to bullies (like the *AA) generally unless they have a very very solid case, they will back down. Unless they can link his specific IP to his computer that he specifically downloaded files he can use several excuses, not to mention he can probably get the EFF on his side who have very good lawyers to stop this kind of thing. And even if he does lose, he can manage to set some precedent that will allow the EFF to attack the RIAA on a technicality.
I know that 5, 10, 20 years from now I would still be able to open the files, though I have no idea why I would want to.
Or so you think. It seems that every MS "standard" is nothing more then just a memory dump of the product in question. For all we know, MS could release an Office 2007 Service Pack 1 that changes the format however could ignore all data on CDs/Flash drives when they update all the files. It doesn't help that chances are you are going to have to buy an Office 2009 to use the new OOXML format to even open newer OOXML files. The problem is MS is a company and a large one that doesn't care about stabbing its customers in the back to make a buck.
Before Firefox started getting popular in the middle-late age of IE6 the web was stagnant, very little innovation that people could see was being done with MS finally killing off Netscape, yes there was progress but in the grand area of things most code had to be checked on like 3-4 browsers to make sure it could render (IE5, IE6, Opera and Netscape/Firefox) correctly. Now, with Firefox/Safari/Konqueror/Opera all being mostly standards-compliant very little testing needs to be done except with IE5-7. I would call it the worst age of the internet from a developers standpoint, with non-standards following browsers being the norm.
There are a few things wrong with your statement. KDE 4 isn't an operating system the way that OS X is. KDE is a desktop environment on top of the X windows system which is a program that allows Unix-like systems to display GUIs. OS X has their own X windows system however it isn't x11 which is the standard for just about any other Unix system such as Linux. Also, no OS is going to be as tightly integrated as OS X is with apple controlling the hardware that it is run on and therefore lacks driver problems that Linux/Windows would have. Also, OS X is based on BSD-Unix, BSD-Unix and Apple's modifications are open-source and you can download them (I believe it is called Darwin for the Apple modifications) and install them and just about do whatever you want with them. The OS X GUI however, is proprietary and is essentially what you pay for when you buy OS X. Even core OS X programs such as Safari are based on open source programs, such as Safari being based off of Konqueror and Apple has released their modifications back into Konqueror in the 4.0 release of KDE. So no, KDE will never become an operating system, and it has far different goals as a GUI then OS X does with KDE being more for the "power users" and showing all the "scary options" that OS X hides from the user. So until we can get Kubuntu pre-installed Linux with KDE will be far far different then OS X.
Next time I see a senator wanting copyright reform I will be sure to vote for them. However almost none will state their stance on the issue. Writing to them doesn't ever seem to get a clear answer and most are swayed by what the **AA says. So far no congressman has really ever been a solid freedom supporter.
DRM can be broken quite simply. DRM isn't the real evil, software patents and DMCA-style laws that prevent you from breaking it is the problem. I can see documents stored in digital form being unreadable in 75-100 years due to a lack of standards used and DMCA-style laws though, just think about all those floppy disks with all those documents from '95 made on some application and today are just about unreadable, also data from obsolete storage formats are heading the same way.
First infrastructure. The cables are expensive, not to mention the hours it would take just to get a neighborhood linked to it. Secondly, deals with different housing units, apartments or dorms are sometimes one cable/phone/internet provider only making it nearly impossible to run your ISP to them. Thirdly bandwidth its cheap to add when you have the infrastructure down but until then, its quite expensive. If your an established company that got grants from the government to help add your phone service, its not too hard to add dial-up to them, and later DSL. From there you have the money to add high-speed internet. But for a new ISP to add them, it would be more cable and wire and besides the physical cost, the rights to the property would be hard to get approval. Why is it so expensive? Its a basic monopoly, its hard to get AT&T service where there is comcast, comcast where there is time-warner, and the local ISP where there is time-warner. Take out competition and everything becomes more expensive, just look at the OS market for an example.
First, most indy bands are rather unheard of, Pink Floyd has been around for a very long time, most people know Pink Floyd while fewer people know most indy bands, that's why most of them are indy. I am not saying that people don't download RIAA music, its a fact, however it seems that with any loss the RIAA receives it isn't because of bad music but pirates.
In the age of records and tapes, most people didn't know about most indy bands, the internet has changed that. It used to be that the only way to go from the garage to people in other towns recognizing you was to get signed by a record company. While indy bands have been around for ages, it is only in the recent years of the internet and high-bandwidth connections that the record company is no longer needed to get them noticed. If P2P and MP3 didn't exist today, then I think that many bands wouldn't be noticed. There are only so many radio stations and they can only play so many songs without the internet today, there would be much less money to be made.
What I mean by winning is that the RIAA realizes that they can't go suing people with little evidence with assumptions of them sharing music. Not to mention the absurd amount of money they charge $1,000 per song and up!?! It also would mean copyright reform, where fair use is protected in the digital age, no DRM and no software patents. By winning, the RIAA's reign of terror would be over with little hindrance of legal P2P technologies.
I wasn't saying anything about OSX's quality. I was merely stating that I can't go put OSX on my normal PC and expect it to work right, while I can put Linux/Windows on there and it will work. I was referring too how there are very very few OSes that have significant marketshare that will run on existing hardware.
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Vista may be used but it isn't liked. For anyone who didn't get it on new (expensive and over-powered) hardware Vista is unusable and even when it is usable its nothing more then an over-bloated XP pack with some DRM and a fancy skin thrown on. If you Google Windows Vista, the 9th result is BadVista which is a site run by the FSF that has links to 3rd party news stories about how Vista is failing. The other top 8 results are what you would expect, MS's website, Wikipedia, a few PC websites and a blog about the developers of Vista. Sure some people are going to get Vista via OEM editions and by their curiosity, many will "downgrade" to XP, check out Linux, and explore other operating systems. Office 2007, no one who is a casual PC user wants it, it runs /slightly/ slower then previous editions and manages to have a confusing user interface that is nothing like previous versions, that plus a high price tag is driving people towards Open Office for home/school use. The biggest mistake MS made with Vista is making it new, the OS is no longer a given, this has made people look to Mac and Linux platforms, the MS monopoly is slowly dissolving.
No, but if there is any rule with technology that all devices almost always follows is that the more advanced something is the higher probability that it will break, fail or malfunction. If say there is a "great refrigerator worm" you can either protect yourself from it therefore not needing to spend an extra $300 on a new fridge, or not get scammed by people who are selling "fridge antivirus" that protect you from all the "threats to your refrigerator's well-being" that really doesn't do much. Not to mention with all the RFID and people getting so paranoid with it, whats to say that there won't be a service to remove the /harmless/ RFID tags from products that will cost as much as the product, if you know how to code you can possibly disable it via the OS in the embedded device or know how it works and figure that it isn't a big threat, much as how cookies were thought to be "the end to all privacy online" and people took cookies to be viruses and trojans yet to a programmer they were simply harmless text files that got blown out of proportion by the media.
Learn to code, how to defeat the technology, how to be smarter then the "smart" devices. All this stuff isn't so scary once you learn how it works and how to disable it.
I expect that all the new "smart devices" will create a class division within developed countries, those who can program and those who can't. We already have part of it with Best Buy and other computer retailers trying to sell you at least $300 in extra hardware/software/support even though you don't need it yet the uninformed take the bait and end up spending money they don't need. Also, the same thing is happening with computer repair and support, if you don't know whats wrong tech support is more than willing to test every combination and then charge you for the privilege of fixing it along with any other thing that /might/ be wrong.
Make sure that Amazon though doesn't have a patent of a link from another website to it's website to advertise a product or else they might sue you for patent infringement!
Hasn't anyone noticed how (us programmers) refer to programming as "writing" software not "inventing" software? Or how we "write" code not "invent" code? Software shouldn't be patented much as books aren't, software builds on each other much as books do.
while the patent office should get more money.
So for that reason alone that is going to make the patent office patent more things to get more money whether it should be patented or not.
And how much innovation has happened in the last 10 years? Sure processors have gotten faster, internet connections have gone from Dial-Up to cable yet everything else is the same. Look at the latest MS OS, Vista, it hasn't done anything more than 95 did save for use a whole lot more resources and got a decent enough kernel. Look at OS-X, sure it looks new and such but its based on Unix which has been around for a good while now. Most employed programmers don't innovate or change the tech industry they just find better ways to do simple things such as a company-wide backup, more security, ETC. Today it doesn't seem like the next OS is going to change the world, nor does web 2.0 seem like a revolution, technology is basically the same just a bit improved then 10 years ago.
The same thing is done on Windows everyday via keyloggers/spyware yet it is still the most used OS.
I guess thats right, what year do they expire? 2009 or 10?
DRM is going to cause a headache for the normal music-fan who wants your music. Your best bet is probably to put a few videos on YouTube and get the content going. Then on your independent web site sell a few CDs and such, just make sure to get all your bases covered. iTunes and eMusic and such might give you a few bucks but I am not sure about licensing issues and how much of the $.99 you get. Just keep a large amount of your digital music in different formats, FLAC, OGG, MP3. Also, remember if you are good enough, people will pay for merchandise too which can be almost pure profit if you buy in bulk. But then again, I am not in music so take my advice with a grain of salt, but my advice is to distribute as much media as possible in as many possible formats, even the strange ones.
The internet is what totally messed the labels up. It used to be that an artist needed a label in order to go beyond the garage and to actually playing concerts. Now all that artist has to do is burn a few CDs, distribute them, make a few videos on YouTube, and have a MySpace and they will attract fans, if they are good enough the fans will buy merchandise and they can make money that way (works in a similar way to Homestar Runner where merchandise sales make 100% of the income no ads, and everything is free). Musicians will still write songs without much pay the same way that authors will write and programmers will code.
But who is to say that the RIAA has solid evidence? They aren't used to people fighting back effectively, if they can only prove that he went to a specific site, there is lack of evidence. The RIAA has never made very solid cases and if he wins this he could inspire others to do the same.
Without DRM, digital music can eaily be played on almost any media player. You now have opened up media rather then just iPods, to generic MP3 players, Windows systems, Linux systems, OS X systems, FreeBSD systems, and more. That is something that hasn't happened yet is a standard non-patented format for storing music, OGG would be likely but with it not being native on most MP3 players and Windows (and OS X too?) and MP3 is patent restricted and therefore rarely playable (legally) on Linux, FreeBSD and other systems. MP3 players also suffer with the patent fee, they could be cheaper without it. All DRM does is make people not want to download "legal" media, the main pro of "piracy" was that you can download it in just about any format you wanted, for free and it would easily work with just about every device that you had while the "legal" ones would not. Digital music will never catch up to CDs if "piracy" is always the better option. I am not advocating suing anyone but seriously, when you iTunes downloads work with you iPod/iTunes and nothing else, the MP3 download from a tracker site is a better deal as it will work on that $25 MP3 player you got, your computer (any OS) along with your iPod and phone, ETC. It isn't just DRM that was killing digital music it was the lack of a standard format. In the CD age (before the Sony rootkits and the like) your CD would work in any computer with a CD drive, any CD player be it the $25 off brand one or your $2000 stereo system. When we get that, digital music will begin selling otherwise, who wants expensive media that works with 1 brand of products and nothing else.
If that is true... he is doomed. However my guess is the RIAA still can't produce enough evidence save say a BT tracker site so if he gets the EFF he still might win.
The thing though is, when you stand up to bullies (like the *AA) generally unless they have a very very solid case, they will back down. Unless they can link his specific IP to his computer that he specifically downloaded files he can use several excuses, not to mention he can probably get the EFF on his side who have very good lawyers to stop this kind of thing. And even if he does lose, he can manage to set some precedent that will allow the EFF to attack the RIAA on a technicality.
I know that 5, 10, 20 years from now I would still be able to open the files, though I have no idea why I would want to.
Or so you think. It seems that every MS "standard" is nothing more then just a memory dump of the product in question. For all we know, MS could release an Office 2007 Service Pack 1 that changes the format however could ignore all data on CDs/Flash drives when they update all the files. It doesn't help that chances are you are going to have to buy an Office 2009 to use the new OOXML format to even open newer OOXML files. The problem is MS is a company and a large one that doesn't care about stabbing its customers in the back to make a buck.
Before Firefox started getting popular in the middle-late age of IE6 the web was stagnant, very little innovation that people could see was being done with MS finally killing off Netscape, yes there was progress but in the grand area of things most code had to be checked on like 3-4 browsers to make sure it could render (IE5, IE6, Opera and Netscape/Firefox) correctly. Now, with Firefox/Safari/Konqueror/Opera all being mostly standards-compliant very little testing needs to be done except with IE5-7. I would call it the worst age of the internet from a developers standpoint, with non-standards following browsers being the norm.
There are a few things wrong with your statement. KDE 4 isn't an operating system the way that OS X is. KDE is a desktop environment on top of the X windows system which is a program that allows Unix-like systems to display GUIs. OS X has their own X windows system however it isn't x11 which is the standard for just about any other Unix system such as Linux. Also, no OS is going to be as tightly integrated as OS X is with apple controlling the hardware that it is run on and therefore lacks driver problems that Linux/Windows would have. Also, OS X is based on BSD-Unix, BSD-Unix and Apple's modifications are open-source and you can download them (I believe it is called Darwin for the Apple modifications) and install them and just about do whatever you want with them. The OS X GUI however, is proprietary and is essentially what you pay for when you buy OS X. Even core OS X programs such as Safari are based on open source programs, such as Safari being based off of Konqueror and Apple has released their modifications back into Konqueror in the 4.0 release of KDE. So no, KDE will never become an operating system, and it has far different goals as a GUI then OS X does with KDE being more for the "power users" and showing all the "scary options" that OS X hides from the user. So until we can get Kubuntu pre-installed Linux with KDE will be far far different then OS X.
Next time I see a senator wanting copyright reform I will be sure to vote for them. However almost none will state their stance on the issue. Writing to them doesn't ever seem to get a clear answer and most are swayed by what the **AA says. So far no congressman has really ever been a solid freedom supporter.
DRM can be broken quite simply. DRM isn't the real evil, software patents and DMCA-style laws that prevent you from breaking it is the problem. I can see documents stored in digital form being unreadable in 75-100 years due to a lack of standards used and DMCA-style laws though, just think about all those floppy disks with all those documents from '95 made on some application and today are just about unreadable, also data from obsolete storage formats are heading the same way.
No, cheap firmware. Even simple routers can be quite secure with decent fimware however most ship with really a really bad OS.
First infrastructure. The cables are expensive, not to mention the hours it would take just to get a neighborhood linked to it. Secondly, deals with different housing units, apartments or dorms are sometimes one cable/phone/internet provider only making it nearly impossible to run your ISP to them. Thirdly bandwidth its cheap to add when you have the infrastructure down but until then, its quite expensive. If your an established company that got grants from the government to help add your phone service, its not too hard to add dial-up to them, and later DSL. From there you have the money to add high-speed internet. But for a new ISP to add them, it would be more cable and wire and besides the physical cost, the rights to the property would be hard to get approval. Why is it so expensive? Its a basic monopoly, its hard to get AT&T service where there is comcast, comcast where there is time-warner, and the local ISP where there is time-warner. Take out competition and everything becomes more expensive, just look at the OS market for an example.
First, most indy bands are rather unheard of, Pink Floyd has been around for a very long time, most people know Pink Floyd while fewer people know most indy bands, that's why most of them are indy. I am not saying that people don't download RIAA music, its a fact, however it seems that with any loss the RIAA receives it isn't because of bad music but pirates.
In the age of records and tapes, most people didn't know about most indy bands, the internet has changed that. It used to be that the only way to go from the garage to people in other towns recognizing you was to get signed by a record company. While indy bands have been around for ages, it is only in the recent years of the internet and high-bandwidth connections that the record company is no longer needed to get them noticed. If P2P and MP3 didn't exist today, then I think that many bands wouldn't be noticed. There are only so many radio stations and they can only play so many songs without the internet today, there would be much less money to be made.
What I mean by winning is that the RIAA realizes that they can't go suing people with little evidence with assumptions of them sharing music. Not to mention the absurd amount of money they charge $1,000 per song and up!?! It also would mean copyright reform, where fair use is protected in the digital age, no DRM and no software patents. By winning, the RIAA's reign of terror would be over with little hindrance of legal P2P technologies.
I wasn't saying anything about OSX's quality. I was merely stating that I can't go put OSX on my normal PC and expect it to work right, while I can put Linux/Windows on there and it will work. I was referring too how there are very very few OSes that have significant marketshare that will run on existing hardware.