Can we classify P2P networks as Good and record companies as bad?
Answer: Yes.
People on (most) P2P networks are sharing this music (they're thieves).
People are just doing what they do. People want to listen to music. P2P provides it at acceptable cost vs. the RIAA.
People used to enjoy free music on this thing called Radio. But that has been corrupted, and it seems to not be enjoyed so much.
I think they're both bad....
Did you know that not watching television commercials is stealing. The people who skip the commercials, and the people who make them: I think they're both bad.
They are not thieves. They are copyright infringers. This is not the same thing as if I take your television set.
Thieves? Yep, I'm depriving the artist of a few cents, and the record company executives of a new sports car. I feel so baaaad!
The RIAA is a victim of their own monopoly pricing. (Or more properly cartel or perhaps oligarchy, I'm not an econ major.) They are the victim of their own making every bit as much as Microsoft is with Open Source. On at least two occaisions the RIAA has gotten into trouble for price fixing.
Open source in its modern form probably would have never emerged if a thriving competitive rich software environment existed with reasonable prices, as is the case with computer hardware. Do you think Napster would have emerged if everyone was happily buying reasonably priced music without any arm twisting? (No "album filler".)
(OT: I have a friend who laments how open source hurts Microsoft. I just tell him that Open Source is of Microsoft's own making.)
The people are revolting. The Boston tea party! Those thieves! Stealing the king's tea and dumping it into the river. Refusing to pay the tax. Refusing to comply and be subjugated. Changing culture to do away with tea drinking, and do away with "tea time" in America. The gall!
They are worse then thieves. They are terrorists! They took up arms against the king's soldiers.
Maybe everything isn't quite as black and white as seen through idealistic niave eyes.
Naaah! Nevermind.
P2P users are thieves, not copyright infringers, and should get the full punishment of any thief. Or maybe it is good that the crime of copyright infringement should have a much stiffer jail time than, say robbing a convenience store, after all copyright infringers are thieves of the worst kind!
They didn't want Napster to stop trading all music
Ah, but they did want Napster to stop trading all music. I remember on CNet when I saw a major setback in their case when the Judge said that they needed to provide a list of all copyrighted materials that Napster should be blocking. (I'm not discussing here the merits of trying to block selected content.) They weren't able to just close Napster down, because it did have non-infringing uses. If their copyrights were being violated, then they needed to produce a list of the infringed upon works. This was a major setback, and not what they were asking for.
A few years earlier, they sued Dimond for the Rio mp3 player. Stop all playing of sounds on a new type of device, just because it could be used to infringe copyrights. For the same reason this failed.
They also tried to get rid of audio home recording. Remember even back in the 1970's when they started putting these scary sounding copyright warnings on record albums? They didn't want you even copying to a cassette tape.
They want Napster to stop trading all music, because then you would have a way to listen to music that they don't approve of. (This may sound insane, but it is a plausible conclusion from the facts.)
As long as it sycns with my main apps, what would the problem be? I can ditch it and sync to another PDA OS in hours.
Someone could have made this same argument with Microsoft back in the early 1980's. But nobody recognized the danger.
Imagine. Hypothetically. Palm OS increases market share to nearly 100%. Then they get greedy. They decide that the license alone should cost $70, and that the price should be increased by $10 per year.
Sure, you can ditch one handheld for another. You still pay the PalmOS tax. This scenerio is so similar to the current Microsoft + OEM love slaves that I cannot begin to list the analogies. In fact, I should use the word identical instead of similar.
If I could get the Palm OS from multiple sources, AND the hardware from multiple sources, then I wouldn't mind. I might not mind even if it were NOT open source. No single vendor could hold me hostage. They could not discontinue Palm OS 6 and force me to Palm OS 7 by using incompatibility tricks ala. MS Office. (Hey, some people still run the Linux 2.0 kernel.) A collusion of vendors could still hold me hostage, but price fixing is much easier to proove.
So far, my concerns are all hypothetical. Thank goodness.
As of today, I use and enjoy my Handspring device.
Finally, I would suppose that the API set for Palm OS is much smaller and better organized than the Windows API, and therefore a WINE-like emulator would be doable on top of another core OS should Palm ever turn nasty.
You can disallow copy-n-paste in a pdf document you create. Of course, you can copy the image and OCR the page back, but this is very annoying.
If I get your PDF document today, I can subvert any restrictions you put on it.
(if it is pixels, I can OCR it. If it is text, I can use some non-Adobe software to extract the text.)
There is a reason why I can subvert it. The reason is because the data can be accessed by non-trusted software. I can use pdf2ps or other tools to manipulate the PDF.
Under Palladium, the trust begins in the hardware. The only way a OS is trusted is if it is signed, and the hardware recognizes it as trusted. Once the trusted OS is running, it can distinguish beteen trusted and non-trusted software. Non-trusted software cannot open restricted content, such as your hypothetical PDF.
I might be able to move the PDF file to a non-trusted system for terrorists, such as Linux, but the best I can do is try to brute-force the encrypted content.
If Palladium, TCPA is everywhere, then the sheep won't notice, because it will seem easy to transfer files around, e-mail attach them, etc. Just like the sheep won't mind copy protected CD's being everywhere. A whole new generation will just accept this. Just as there is a whole new generation of shills who sing the virtues of Microsoft, and who probably wern't even born when the IBM PC was released.
I wonder how Palladium is supposed to stop cut-n-paste though...
Surely you jest. Given that the software controlling a box can be trusted to do the vendor's bidding, they could do anything, including stopping cut-n-paste.
If a document, say, Haloween XI, is available only in Word 2005 Palladium Edition, and the document is marked, "only allow copy/paste if License XY288273JJw8999 is in place", then you can bet they darn well will stop cut & paste. In fact, they could allow copy, and selectively enable paste. Even in non-Palladium applications. The "untrusted" app must make system service calls to obtain the contents of the clipboard, which would come back as:
TEXT/PLAIN
Sorry, you do not have the proper license to paste this content.
Heck, they could even stop screen snapshots. Certian rectangular regions of the screen could just be blacked out in the screen snapshot. Only a trusted signed app could gain access to the raw unblocked pixels. The app would not be signed as trusted unless it withstood scrutiny to ensure that it didn't leak protected content. (i.e. a hypothetical Photoshop Palladium Edition might be able to edit a raw screen snapshot, but only if it preserved the licensing conditions of those raw pixels, and didn't allow viewing, copy, paste, etc. unless the condition "only allow copy/paste if License XY288273JJw8999 is in place". If Phosothop saved protected content, then only another "trusted" application could open it. That application could edit it, but would still enforce the license restriction of the content, now in the form of pixels. A non-trusted OCR program, for instance, could not open the document. The OS simply wouldn't allow it. But a trusted OCR program, duley signed, would enforce the digital rights restrictions and transfer them to the saved OCR'ed text file. (If it didn't then the OCR program would never have gotten "trusted" status under Palladium.)
I hope this information is useful and answers your original doubts that Palladium could stop cut & paste.
Basically there is a trusted and untrusted side of the fence. Once data exists on the trusted side, only trusted applications can manipulate that data. The data itself carries tags (or scripts?) that enforce the digital rights restrictions. If Microsoft were to develop a really flexible design for expressing the digital rights restrictions, then a piece of data could be tagged such as: "do not allow people with green hair to read this content.".
Actually, Microsoft does produce a quality product
Only now do they produce some quality products. This can be attributed to the fact that they have buckets of money to pour into development. Money that can be extorted from other market segments that have no choice but to buy.
You don't think Microsoft spend $150 million improving IE just to give it away out of the goodness of their hearts? ($150 million according to trial testimony.)
You don't think, a few years ago, Microsoft was giving away Microsoft Money for free out of the goodness of their hearts? (Prior to giving up on the idea of killing Quicken and then trying to buy them instead.)
These are the classic tricks of the monopolist.
You can give away products for free, subsidizing them from customers who are locked in to something else you make.
You can develop quality products, after many poor releases that would have killed any other non-monopoly. Microsoft can afford as many screwed up releases as necessary to develop quality products. It simply doesn't matter. After some number of years, they'll get it right, and a whole new generation of Microsoft shills will appear to trumpet the goodness that is Microsoft.
Lets face it, Linux has a long time to beat out Microsoft in Workstation land
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people were saying that anybody, including Microsoft has a long time to beat out IBM in PC land. Now we have commodity hardware, and Microsoft, not IBM, makes all the profits. And it didn't take very long either. By 1985/6 the war was over. Things can have a way of snowballing. Microsoft seems to be very much on the defensive.
You mentioned support and service. Modern Linux distros are getting pretty darned good if you hadn't noticed. Now both Red Hat has announced their intentions to go after the desktop. SuSe, and others, too.
for companies that want to be able to hire any random Joe for pennies and not have to document every step of their network, Microsoft is more or less the only choice.
Trained chimpanzees for admins? No documentation? Sounds like either:
A recipe for disaster
nothing custom or innovative being done (In which case, the same reasoning would apply to Linux, install out of the box, nothing custom.)
This is why Microsoft has the edge, it's EASY
This is why Microsoft has the edge: It's a MONOPOLY!
With an already segmented market!
(Segmentation is another monopolist trick. Take an identical product, and at no cost, or tiny cose, turn it into multiple market segments. Hence, XP Home, XP Embedded, XP Pro, XP Advanced Server, XP DataCenter, XP Media PC, etc. Got competition in one segment? Crush it, subsidizing it by charging the other segments.)
No source code. This doesn't seem to be a practical problem for development, but it leads to...
The risk of being locked into a proprietary platform. Don't like the direction things are going? Tough. Shut up and keep consuming content like the other proles.
Being at the mercy of one OS vendor. They might play nice today, but there are no guarantees.
Palm has huge marketshare concentrated into a single OS vendor with multiple competing hardware vendors. Could we end up with a Microsoft like stranglehold? "Sorry, I have to run PalmOS, because everyone else does."
Yes, it is really usable. It is well designed for low end hardware of ten years ago, and thus really efficient on today's hardware. I love running PalmOS. I intend to buy at least one more PalmOS machine. But I keep feeling uneasy about the above.
If I open a TCP connection to you and send 100 packets, and then packet 50 gets lost, you may have packets 51-99 sitting in buffers on your end, but your receiving application does not see them until packet 50 is finally received, and then given to the application first. (How's that for a run on sentence!) Packets 51-99 are delayed. The entire audio stream of packets 51-99 was delayed by however much time it took to get packet 50 reliably delivered.
That's the problem. That is why good audio/video streaming protocols use UDP. It is much more important that the packet get their now rather than that it is guaranteed to get there. Dropping packet 50 out of of those 100 packets doesn't delay packets 51-99, and you just a minor brief silence in the audio. Barely perceptible. (How many milliseconds of sound is 1500 bytes anyway?)
For some (l)users, their background picture is very important...
And with good reason. The background picture they downloaded and installed may very well be the biggest single piece of work effort that they have invested in their Windows computer. They, rightly so, want to preserve the investment of time and effort that they have put into their PC.
Go shop elsewhere than Dell and you'll see you're free to buy what you want.
Talk about bullshit.
Where would you suggest?
been buying computers since the days of XTs and I never bought one with an MS OS installed.
What did you buy?
DR-DOS sucked and was very slow
By the time DR-DOS came along, the MS-DOS was already the only thing left standing of any significance.
Prior to the IBM-PC and MS-DOS, you may recall that the industry was thriving with different systems and competition. There was a definite need for some standardization, but nobody dominated the entire industry.
OEM's were required to PAY for a copy of MS-DOS with every machine. Long before Windows.
By the time Windows appeared, the damage was done. There WERE other operating systems in the 1983, 1984 timeframe. I remember seeing some novel originals. A unix port. The p-System. Superior ports of CP/M. Operating systems with true multi-tasking.
I'm a longtime Apple fan myself. Apple has made so many business blunders, they should not even still be in business. Any old time Mac fanatic can, if they will, tell you of the countless blunders on Apple's part. The list is exceedingly long.
The only business model Microsoft knows is how to leverage a monopoly. I don't honestly believe they really know how to compete in an open market. They never have had to. (Maybe the present day is beginning to be an exception.)
Microsoft could leverage their carefully created MS-DOS monopoly to shift people to Windows. Then Excel over the predominant Lotus 123. Stories abound of "the dos is not done until Lotus won't run". Well you're likely to switch to Excel Lotus crashes under each subsequent release of dos.
Word started out as a horrible product. Easily beaten by competition. The one thing that a monopoly can do that no other business can do is to just stick it out. Keep improving the product. Most companies that put out a lousy product go out of business. A monopoly can subsidize their development by charging artificially high prices in the market segments where customers simply have no choice but to pay.
Monopolies can give products away to eliminate competitors. MS recognized Netscape as a threat. So they bunhdle IE. Now why would a company invest $150 million into development of something they never expect to sell, and then bundle it for free. Of course, the reason is now well known. All of the internal e-mail came out in the trial. (I followed it carefully daily several years back.)
But it is okay if you still believe that Microsoft got to where they are because their produts were so good that people made a choice to select superior Microsoft products.
What ever happened to the "let the best software win" viewpoint? If non Microsoft software is "better enough", then it will win. No business would sacrefice profit out of some sentimental attachment to Microsoft products.
This is so flawed I don't know where to begin.
Yeah, Microosft, whatever happened to let the best software win?
Were you involved with computers during the mid 1980's? People who just recently arrived on the scene seem to think that Microsoft got to where they are by making superior products.
People don't choose Microsoft because it is the best. They get it because they have no real choice.
Order a new PC. You get to choose what kind of monitor you want. Choose what video card you want. Choose how large a hard drive you want. How much RAM. Some OEM's let you make more choices than others. But one choice they don't let you make is what OS to run. (You can have any OS you want as long as you pay Microsoft.)
This was especially true during the early days. Even if you wanted a competing OS, and there WERE competing OSes for awhile during the early 80's, you still had to pay Microsoft for their OS, even if it was not installed on your new box. This is because of Microsoft's exclusive arrangements with manufacturers. This is how you build a monopoly. By eliminating choices. In 1995, Microsoft finally signed a consent decree with the DOJ promising to stop this practice. Too little, too late.
Once you are an established monopoly, you can charge anything you want. Nothing else to compare prices to. Microsoft's price has gone only one direction. Now that you are raking in the money, you can pour buckets of money into development in order to finally develop good products.
Then a whole new niave generation comes along which thinks that people choose Microsoft because it is best.
Same reason that Microsoft can't do whatever the hell it wants with its own Operating System.
Google is not a monopoly. Google does not bundle products that you do not want with products that you must have. Google does not manipulate hardware OEM's so that they cannot afford to offer any competitor's product.
Google is not a monopoly: you can use any search engine you want. They are all equally accessible.
Operating systems are not equally accessible. With extremely few exceptions, if you buy a PC, you must pay Microsoft, whether you want it or not. Not so with Google.
Imagine how useful a capability it would be if the popup messages could contain HTML, JavaScript and Flash. Even better, what if you couldn't turn it off.
In the movie Minority Report, your eye is scanned for your identity everywhere you go. In the movie Gattaca, your dna is sampled frequently.
Really, all you would have to do is have a surgical implant like a pacemaker and then touch the metal plate of a scanning device everywhere you go. No eye scanning. No fuzzy facial or fingerprint scans. No puncturing the skin. Just touch a metal plate as you walk past. You are positively identified everywhere you go. Completely unobtrusive.
An innovation like this would be welcomed by all right-thinking people because it would save us from the hasstle of always hearing "Your papers please!". No more forgetting your papers, or having to drop your baggage to find them. Let Microsoft integrate it with Passport, and it would be good for the economy. The birth tax would be universal. The EULA could be printed on microfice on the metal casing of the implant. (An infant couldn't understand it anyway.) Finally, the implant could administer shocks to punish wrong thinking.
Shoot Osama and Saddam. Point the gun at the lawyer and say that if he doesn't get you out of any potential difficulties related to the other two shootings that he will be next.
Okay, so suppose I have reformatted and restore my music files. Then I go to follow your procedure --- Ooops! I needed to back up some important data (the licenses) BEFORE I reformatted. Too bad.
You know, problems like this, users not knowing that they first need to perform some essential step before doing something else irreversible, used to be common many years ago. The reason computers are now so "friendly" is because they tend to prevent you from getting yourself into such situations, or give you adequate warning.
We could prevent the problem by just not having DRM. Or why not incorporate the "license" into the music file so that when the music file is copied anywhere, any number of times, it will still play. (Of course, this means music can be freely copied like today, so why bother with all the extra implementation.) OR, give you adequate warning. Warn you before you use Media Player what kind of restrictions you are getting yourself into. Media Player should make it clear that if I rip music files from my own CD's, that I can't play them anywhere else like users of competitive systems can.
FTP: exclusively non-theft. (Whatever that means.)
HTTP: exclusively non-theft. (Whatever that means.)
Usenet: exclusively non-theft.
OpenNap: almost exclusively theft.
I'm making assumptions about what you mean by "theft".
Do you mean out of print obscure non-mainstream music that you'll never hear on mainstream radio stations? Yep. My tastes are very particular. Honest. No doubt some of what I listen to is available for sale in your local christian bookstore.
Do you ever photocopy copyrighted material, say in a public or university library, without buying the book?
Do you read articles in magazines on the rack without buying? Or parts of books in a bookstore?
Do you ever download or collect pr0n? (Almost exclusively copyright violations.)
Do you run Windows? Do you have ANY pirated software? Is your system absolutely pure as the driven snow? Any non-paid for shareware?
I run exclusively Mac and Linux at home. No pirated sofware on Linux. Zero. My Mac has mostly fallen into disuse and what pirate software I once had is long gone. A nice feeling to be piracy free for years now. Some of the biggest pirates I know are Windows users.
As for p2p, what counts as "theft"? What I would call theft is what the RIAA members do to artists and consumers, and what Microsoft does. But this debate has been had over and over before. Nobody is going to convince anyone else. Oh, and I have bought more than my fair share of books (see bookshelf) and CD's and vinyl before that.
My point still stands. You did not address it at all. P2P is just a tool. P2P did not introduce the concept of piracy. It just made it convenient. The fact that it is widespread is a social phenomena. Why? The answer to why says a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
How about five years in prison for propsing/implementing a copying/p2p technology? Or the threat of a huge $100000 fine?
This won't stop it.
Can you say the word "prohibition"?
Can we classify P2P networks as Good and record companies as bad?
Answer: Yes.
People on (most) P2P networks are sharing this music (they're thieves).
People are just doing what they do. People want to listen to music. P2P provides it at acceptable cost vs. the RIAA.
People used to enjoy free music on this thing called Radio. But that has been corrupted, and it seems to not be enjoyed so much.
I think they're both bad....
Did you know that not watching television commercials is stealing. The people who skip the commercials, and the people who make them: I think they're both bad.
They are not thieves. They are copyright infringers. This is not the same thing as if I take your television set.
Thieves? Yep, I'm depriving the artist of a few cents, and the record company executives of a new sports car. I feel so baaaad!
The RIAA is a victim of their own monopoly pricing. (Or more properly cartel or perhaps oligarchy, I'm not an econ major.) They are the victim of their own making every bit as much as Microsoft is with Open Source. On at least two occaisions the RIAA has gotten into trouble for price fixing.
Open source in its modern form probably would have never emerged if a thriving competitive rich software environment existed with reasonable prices, as is the case with computer hardware. Do you think Napster would have emerged if everyone was happily buying reasonably priced music without any arm twisting? (No "album filler".)
(OT: I have a friend who laments how open source hurts Microsoft. I just tell him that Open Source is of Microsoft's own making.)
The people are revolting. The Boston tea party! Those thieves! Stealing the king's tea and dumping it into the river. Refusing to pay the tax. Refusing to comply and be subjugated. Changing culture to do away with tea drinking, and do away with "tea time" in America. The gall!
They are worse then thieves. They are terrorists! They took up arms against the king's soldiers.
Maybe everything isn't quite as black and white as seen through idealistic niave eyes.
Naaah! Nevermind.
P2P users are thieves, not copyright infringers, and should get the full punishment of any thief. Or maybe it is good that the crime of copyright infringement should have a much stiffer jail time than, say robbing a convenience store, after all copyright infringers are thieves of the worst kind!
They need to embrace the Internet, and include it in their business model in a much larger way
They need to embrace Palladium enabled brain implants, and include it in their business model in a much larger way.
This is exactly what happens now in the free software community, so often maligned as idealists and communists and whatever else...
You forgot terrorists. Get with the times.
They didn't want Napster to stop trading all music
Ah, but they did want Napster to stop trading all music. I remember on CNet when I saw a major setback in their case when the Judge said that they needed to provide a list of all copyrighted materials that Napster should be blocking. (I'm not discussing here the merits of trying to block selected content.) They weren't able to just close Napster down, because it did have non-infringing uses. If their copyrights were being violated, then they needed to produce a list of the infringed upon works. This was a major setback, and not what they were asking for.
A few years earlier, they sued Dimond for the Rio mp3 player. Stop all playing of sounds on a new type of device, just because it could be used to infringe copyrights. For the same reason this failed.
They also tried to get rid of audio home recording. Remember even back in the 1970's when they started putting these scary sounding copyright warnings on record albums? They didn't want you even copying to a cassette tape.
They want Napster to stop trading all music, because then you would have a way to listen to music that they don't approve of. (This may sound insane, but it is a plausible conclusion from the facts.)
"Land of the free" indeed. You guys need a new slogan.
Comrad, you need to report to a re-education camp.
As long as it sycns with my main apps, what would the problem be? I can ditch it and sync to another PDA OS in hours.
Someone could have made this same argument with Microsoft back in the early 1980's. But nobody recognized the danger.
Imagine. Hypothetically. Palm OS increases market share to nearly 100%. Then they get greedy. They decide that the license alone should cost $70, and that the price should be increased by $10 per year.
Sure, you can ditch one handheld for another. You still pay the PalmOS tax. This scenerio is so similar to the current Microsoft + OEM love slaves that I cannot begin to list the analogies. In fact, I should use the word identical instead of similar.
If I could get the Palm OS from multiple sources, AND the hardware from multiple sources, then I wouldn't mind. I might not mind even if it were NOT open source. No single vendor could hold me hostage. They could not discontinue Palm OS 6 and force me to Palm OS 7 by using incompatibility tricks ala. MS Office. (Hey, some people still run the Linux 2.0 kernel.) A collusion of vendors could still hold me hostage, but price fixing is much easier to proove.
So far, my concerns are all hypothetical. Thank goodness.
As of today, I use and enjoy my Handspring device.
Finally, I would suppose that the API set for Palm OS is much smaller and better organized than the Windows API, and therefore a WINE-like emulator would be doable on top of another core OS should Palm ever turn nasty.
You can disallow copy-n-paste in a pdf document you create. Of course, you can copy the image and OCR the page back, but this is very annoying.
If I get your PDF document today, I can subvert any restrictions you put on it.
(if it is pixels, I can OCR it. If it is text, I can use some non-Adobe software to extract the text.)
There is a reason why I can subvert it. The reason is because the data can be accessed by non-trusted software. I can use pdf2ps or other tools to manipulate the PDF.
Under Palladium, the trust begins in the hardware. The only way a OS is trusted is if it is signed, and the hardware recognizes it as trusted. Once the trusted OS is running, it can distinguish beteen trusted and non-trusted software. Non-trusted software cannot open restricted content, such as your hypothetical PDF.
I might be able to move the PDF file to a non-trusted system for terrorists, such as Linux, but the best I can do is try to brute-force the encrypted content.
If Palladium, TCPA is everywhere, then the sheep won't notice, because it will seem easy to transfer files around, e-mail attach them, etc. Just like the sheep won't mind copy protected CD's being everywhere. A whole new generation will just accept this. Just as there is a whole new generation of shills who sing the virtues of Microsoft, and who probably wern't even born when the IBM PC was released.
Rosen or Clinton?
Rosen of course.
Larry Rosen and Hil-Larry Rosen.
Surely you jest. Given that the software controlling a box can be trusted to do the vendor's bidding, they could do anything, including stopping cut-n-paste.
If a document, say, Haloween XI, is available only in Word 2005 Palladium Edition, and the document is marked, "only allow copy/paste if License XY288273JJw8999 is in place", then you can bet they darn well will stop cut & paste. In fact, they could allow copy, and selectively enable paste. Even in non-Palladium applications. The "untrusted" app must make system service calls to obtain the contents of the clipboard, which would come back as:
Heck, they could even stop screen snapshots. Certian rectangular regions of the screen could just be blacked out in the screen snapshot. Only a trusted signed app could gain access to the raw unblocked pixels. The app would not be signed as trusted unless it withstood scrutiny to ensure that it didn't leak protected content. (i.e. a hypothetical Photoshop Palladium Edition might be able to edit a raw screen snapshot, but only if it preserved the licensing conditions of those raw pixels, and didn't allow viewing, copy, paste, etc. unless the condition "only allow copy/paste if License XY288273JJw8999 is in place". If Phosothop saved protected content, then only another "trusted" application could open it. That application could edit it, but would still enforce the license restriction of the content, now in the form of pixels. A non-trusted OCR program, for instance, could not open the document. The OS simply wouldn't allow it. But a trusted OCR program, duley signed, would enforce the digital rights restrictions and transfer them to the saved OCR'ed text file. (If it didn't then the OCR program would never have gotten "trusted" status under Palladium.)
I hope this information is useful and answers your original doubts that Palladium could stop cut & paste.
Basically there is a trusted and untrusted side of the fence. Once data exists on the trusted side, only trusted applications can manipulate that data. The data itself carries tags (or scripts?) that enforce the digital rights restrictions. If Microsoft were to develop a really flexible design for expressing the digital rights restrictions, then a piece of data could be tagged such as: "do not allow people with green hair to read this content.".
Only now do they produce some quality products. This can be attributed to the fact that they have buckets of money to pour into development. Money that can be extorted from other market segments that have no choice but to buy.
You don't think Microsoft spend $150 million improving IE just to give it away out of the goodness of their hearts? ($150 million according to trial testimony.)
You don't think, a few years ago, Microsoft was giving away Microsoft Money for free out of the goodness of their hearts? (Prior to giving up on the idea of killing Quicken and then trying to buy them instead.)
These are the classic tricks of the monopolist.
- You can give away products for free, subsidizing them from customers who are locked in to something else you make.
- You can develop quality products, after many poor releases that would have killed any other non-monopoly. Microsoft can afford as many screwed up releases as necessary to develop quality products. It simply doesn't matter. After some number of years, they'll get it right, and a whole new generation of Microsoft shills will appear to trumpet the goodness that is Microsoft.
Lets face it, Linux has a long time to beat out Microsoft in Workstation landA long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people were saying that anybody, including Microsoft has a long time to beat out IBM in PC land. Now we have commodity hardware, and Microsoft, not IBM, makes all the profits. And it didn't take very long either. By 1985/6 the war was over. Things can have a way of snowballing. Microsoft seems to be very much on the defensive.
You mentioned support and service. Modern Linux distros are getting pretty darned good if you hadn't noticed. Now both Red Hat has announced their intentions to go after the desktop. SuSe, and others, too.
for companies that want to be able to hire any random Joe for pennies and not have to document every step of their network, Microsoft is more or less the only choice.
Trained chimpanzees for admins? No documentation? Sounds like either:
- A recipe for disaster
- nothing custom or innovative being done (In which case, the same reasoning would apply to Linux, install out of the box, nothing custom.)
This is why Microsoft has the edge, it's EASYThis is why Microsoft has the edge: It's a MONOPOLY!
With an already segmented market!
(Segmentation is another monopolist trick. Take an identical product, and at no cost, or tiny cose, turn it into multiple market segments. Hence, XP Home, XP Embedded, XP Pro, XP Advanced Server, XP DataCenter, XP Media PC, etc. Got competition in one segment? Crush it, subsidizing it by charging the other segments.)
It is really usable.
What's wrong is
- No source code. This doesn't seem to be a practical problem for development, but it leads to...
- The risk of being locked into a proprietary platform. Don't like the direction things are going? Tough. Shut up and keep consuming content like the other proles.
- Being at the mercy of one OS vendor. They might play nice today, but there are no guarantees.
- Palm has huge marketshare concentrated into a single OS vendor with multiple competing hardware vendors. Could we end up with a Microsoft like stranglehold? "Sorry, I have to run PalmOS, because everyone else does."
Yes, it is really usable. It is well designed for low end hardware of ten years ago, and thus really efficient on today's hardware. I love running PalmOS. I intend to buy at least one more PalmOS machine. But I keep feeling uneasy about the above.If I open a TCP connection to you and send 100 packets, and then packet 50 gets lost, you may have packets 51-99 sitting in buffers on your end, but your receiving application does not see them until packet 50 is finally received, and then given to the application first. (How's that for a run on sentence!) Packets 51-99 are delayed. The entire audio stream of packets 51-99 was delayed by however much time it took to get packet 50 reliably delivered.
That's the problem. That is why good audio/video streaming protocols use UDP. It is much more important that the packet get their now rather than that it is guaranteed to get there. Dropping packet 50 out of of those 100 packets doesn't delay packets 51-99, and you just a minor brief silence in the audio. Barely perceptible. (How many milliseconds of sound is 1500 bytes anyway?)
For some (l)users, their background picture is very important...
And with good reason. The background picture they downloaded and installed may very well be the biggest single piece of work effort that they have invested in their Windows computer. They, rightly so, want to preserve the investment of time and effort that they have put into their PC.
Go shop elsewhere than Dell and you'll see you're free to buy what you want.
Talk about bullshit.
Where would you suggest?
been buying computers since the days of XTs and I never bought one with an MS OS installed.
What did you buy?
DR-DOS sucked and was very slow
By the time DR-DOS came along, the MS-DOS was already the only thing left standing of any significance.
Prior to the IBM-PC and MS-DOS, you may recall that the industry was thriving with different systems and competition. There was a definite need for some standardization, but nobody dominated the entire industry.
OEM's were required to PAY for a copy of MS-DOS with every machine. Long before Windows.
By the time Windows appeared, the damage was done. There WERE other operating systems in the 1983, 1984 timeframe. I remember seeing some novel originals. A unix port. The p-System. Superior ports of CP/M. Operating systems with true multi-tasking.
I'm a longtime Apple fan myself. Apple has made so many business blunders, they should not even still be in business. Any old time Mac fanatic can, if they will, tell you of the countless blunders on Apple's part. The list is exceedingly long.
The only business model Microsoft knows is how to leverage a monopoly. I don't honestly believe they really know how to compete in an open market. They never have had to. (Maybe the present day is beginning to be an exception.)
Microsoft could leverage their carefully created MS-DOS monopoly to shift people to Windows. Then Excel over the predominant Lotus 123. Stories abound of "the dos is not done until Lotus won't run". Well you're likely to switch to Excel Lotus crashes under each subsequent release of dos.
Word started out as a horrible product. Easily beaten by competition. The one thing that a monopoly can do that no other business can do is to just stick it out. Keep improving the product. Most companies that put out a lousy product go out of business. A monopoly can subsidize their development by charging artificially high prices in the market segments where customers simply have no choice but to pay.
Monopolies can give products away to eliminate competitors. MS recognized Netscape as a threat. So they bunhdle IE. Now why would a company invest $150 million into development of something they never expect to sell, and then bundle it for free. Of course, the reason is now well known. All of the internal e-mail came out in the trial. (I followed it carefully daily several years back.)
But it is okay if you still believe that Microsoft got to where they are because their produts were so good that people made a choice to select superior Microsoft products.
What ever happened to the "let the best software win" viewpoint? If non Microsoft software is "better enough", then it will win. No business would sacrefice profit out of some sentimental attachment to Microsoft products.
This is so flawed I don't know where to begin.
Yeah, Microosft, whatever happened to let the best software win?
Were you involved with computers during the mid 1980's? People who just recently arrived on the scene seem to think that Microsoft got to where they are by making superior products.
People don't choose Microsoft because it is the best. They get it because they have no real choice.
Order a new PC. You get to choose what kind of monitor you want. Choose what video card you want. Choose how large a hard drive you want. How much RAM. Some OEM's let you make more choices than others. But one choice they don't let you make is what OS to run. (You can have any OS you want as long as you pay Microsoft.)
This was especially true during the early days. Even if you wanted a competing OS, and there WERE competing OSes for awhile during the early 80's, you still had to pay Microsoft for their OS, even if it was not installed on your new box. This is because of Microsoft's exclusive arrangements with manufacturers. This is how you build a monopoly. By eliminating choices. In 1995, Microsoft finally signed a consent decree with the DOJ promising to stop this practice. Too little, too late.
Once you are an established monopoly, you can charge anything you want. Nothing else to compare prices to. Microsoft's price has gone only one direction. Now that you are raking in the money, you can pour buckets of money into development in order to finally develop good products.
Then a whole new niave generation comes along which thinks that people choose Microsoft because it is best.
No, because it means no black helicopters circling.
Same reason that Microsoft can't do whatever the hell it wants with its own Operating System.
Google is not a monopoly. Google does not bundle products that you do not want with products that you must have. Google does not manipulate hardware OEM's so that they cannot afford to offer any competitor's product.
Google is not a monopoly: you can use any search engine you want. They are all equally accessible.
Operating systems are not equally accessible. With extremely few exceptions, if you buy a PC, you must pay Microsoft, whether you want it or not. Not so with Google.
I have an idea for Microsoft innovation.
Imagine how useful a capability it would be if the popup messages could contain HTML, JavaScript and Flash. Even better, what if you couldn't turn it off.
Once suitable hardware is available, will Palladium have support for brain implants?
Followup question:
If my implant wears out and is replaced will I loose all my memories if I don't first transfer my license files from the old implant to the new one?
In the movie Minority Report, your eye is scanned for your identity everywhere you go. In the movie Gattaca, your dna is sampled frequently.
Really, all you would have to do is have a surgical implant like a pacemaker and then touch the metal plate of a scanning device everywhere you go. No eye scanning. No fuzzy facial or fingerprint scans. No puncturing the skin. Just touch a metal plate as you walk past. You are positively identified everywhere you go. Completely unobtrusive.
An innovation like this would be welcomed by all right-thinking people because it would save us from the hasstle of always hearing "Your papers please!". No more forgetting your papers, or having to drop your baggage to find them. Let Microsoft integrate it with Passport, and it would be good for the economy. The birth tax would be universal. The EULA could be printed on microfice on the metal casing of the implant. (An infant couldn't understand it anyway.) Finally, the implant could administer shocks to punish wrong thinking.
(Need I say something for the humor impaired?)
Shoot Osama and Saddam. Point the gun at the lawyer and say that if he doesn't get you out of any potential difficulties related to the other two shootings that he will be next.
Okay, so suppose I have reformatted and restore my music files. Then I go to follow your procedure --- Ooops! I needed to back up some important data (the licenses) BEFORE I reformatted. Too bad.
You know, problems like this, users not knowing that they first need to perform some essential step before doing something else irreversible, used to be common many years ago. The reason computers are now so "friendly" is because they tend to prevent you from getting yourself into such situations, or give you adequate warning.
We could prevent the problem by just not having DRM. Or why not incorporate the "license" into the music file so that when the music file is copied anywhere, any number of times, it will still play. (Of course, this means music can be freely copied like today, so why bother with all the extra implementation.) OR, give you adequate warning. Warn you before you use Media Player what kind of restrictions you are getting yourself into. Media Player should make it clear that if I rip music files from my own CD's, that I can't play them anywhere else like users of competitive systems can.
- FTP: exclusively non-theft. (Whatever that means.)
- HTTP: exclusively non-theft. (Whatever that means.)
- Usenet: exclusively non-theft.
- OpenNap: almost exclusively theft.
I'm making assumptions about what you mean by "theft".Do you mean out of print obscure non-mainstream music that you'll never hear on mainstream radio stations? Yep. My tastes are very particular. Honest. No doubt some of what I listen to is available for sale in your local christian bookstore.
Do you ever photocopy copyrighted material, say in a public or university library, without buying the book?
Do you read articles in magazines on the rack without buying? Or parts of books in a bookstore?
Do you ever download or collect pr0n? (Almost exclusively copyright violations.)
Do you run Windows? Do you have ANY pirated software? Is your system absolutely pure as the driven snow? Any non-paid for shareware?
I run exclusively Mac and Linux at home. No pirated sofware on Linux. Zero. My Mac has mostly fallen into disuse and what pirate software I once had is long gone. A nice feeling to be piracy free for years now. Some of the biggest pirates I know are Windows users.
As for p2p, what counts as "theft"? What I would call theft is what the RIAA members do to artists and consumers, and what Microsoft does. But this debate has been had over and over before. Nobody is going to convince anyone else. Oh, and I have bought more than my fair share of books (see bookshelf) and CD's and vinyl before that.
My point still stands. You did not address it at all. P2P is just a tool. P2P did not introduce the concept of piracy. It just made it convenient. The fact that it is widespread is a social phenomena. Why? The answer to why says a lot.