I specifically use my computer to mix my own music. I have several thousands dollars invested in high end sound cards, mixers, etc.
My concern is a very simple one -- if I wish to mix my own music on Vista, will it be DRM free, or will simply using that OS taint my final release? The last thing I need is one of my two listeners not being able to play my cd or mp3s.
Sometimes stories like this get me thinking in odd, heartless ways.
If this condition has a genetic cause (not saying it does or doesn't, mind you) . . . then don't we make our species weaker by treating it and allowing those kids who would have died to grow up and reproduce?
Sure, in this one case it might only be a few thousand kids a year, but add up all the diseases and conditions that have genetic links that we are treating successfully with modern medicine . . . while the short-term gain of having a large number of people survive who would otherwise die (and of course, not having the impact of those deaths on their families and communities ) is obviously a major gain -- what is the long term implication for our species' ability to survive?
Consumers are tired of the commercial bombardment. And many of us are already paying to watch TV -- through payments to the cable company or to the satellite company. From the consumer's point of view, we're paying for the show, and then the viewing experience is degraded with non-content.
TV networks are in dire need of a better marketing model that better serves the consummer of their product.
The availability of this technology is a threat to the existence of less innovative networks. And it should be. Creative destruction is a good thing.
At most companies, the CIO would not let it happen because of the political fall-out that woudl ensue, not because they wouldn't recognize that other people have good ideas as well.
The fact that Netflix is allowing customer data out of their control (albiet sanitized data) is a major step that many company's would never take out of reasons not related to the technology at all.
And most CEO's don't challenge those internal assumptions not because of a lack of business sense, but again, because of political savy. The higher you go in a company, the greater the importance of poltiical acumen. It's not even mostly about business. It's mostly about political positioning.
Folks can argue all day long that it SHOULDN'T be about that, but in the real world it is. And frankly, good CEO's and good CIO's need to survive year to year too ...
In 2001 I started using LEGAL on-line streaming music services (like Rhapsody).
I have bought maybe a dozen CD's since then.
While I have downloaded music from Napster (when it was presumed legal) as well as places like EMusic and Apple, I have never used an illegal service.
I have no problem believing that computer ownership is linked to decreased CD sales. However, I don't accept that that link means illegal file-sharing.
Aside from the funding issue, there is a very real issue from the point of view of an instructor.
Anyone who has ever presented material to a class knows that the audience does effect how well the information is presented. For professors who aren't in fact trained actors playing to hte camera, and who have learned how to present to a class largely without any formal training in what they are doing as lecturers, radically reducing attendance to a few or even no students will effect how they present the material, and most likely that effect will be negative.
This means that the students skipping the class are also harming the education of those who continue to attend.
My son attends a "Charter" school -- one of the best schools in one of the best school districts in our state. It's not a perfect school, but it is good enough that there's no real reason to look to private schools until the high school years.
This year they opened a computer lab filled with brand new high end Dell computers. I was really excited to see what they'd use them for.
Sadly, the majority of use thus far is not for teaching programming skills, or exploring how computers work, but for "research" (read surfing the web) and homework (read surfing the web and using cut-n-paste).
In order to meet state requirements for computer education, they are also teaching classes on how to use powerpoint.
What amazes me is that in no other field would a professional teacher consider the teaching of a specific application as sufficient substitution for actual knoweldge of a subject. Being able to successfully grow a tomato plant in the greenhouse might be extra credit, but it doesn't get you through the biology exam. You can't present your tomato plant as proof that you understand the Krebs cycle. I know of no math class where so long as you can use a calculator you get an 'A' (though I've heard horror stories, so maybe that's not a good example!) You don't pass a creative writting course by demonstrating an ability to watch a movie adaptation of a creative written work.
What happened to teaching something about computers?
When I was in middle school, we built an Altair 8800. We learned programming, and even produced a project as a class that we got to code into the local university's Burroughs PLP.
The news every week is about how the USA isn't making enough engineers, mathematicians and scientists. And here nearly every school has all these computers that instead of using to teach these critical subjects and to develop skills and abilities that will lead to fixing that gap instead resort to teaching an application.
It's pathetic. And frankly, mind-numbingly stupid behavior on the parts of the schools.
One reason I can't stand most public school systems is because too many educators think about their assignments in terms of media instead of in terms of content.
The average person locks their front door and goes to bed feeling secure.
They also probably have several windows, glass patio doors, and the like at easy-access level around their home. Most don't have bars on them.
Even those that do have bars probably live in framed out housing, where going through a wall is a trivial feat for a determened intruder with a simple sledgehammer.
But the reality is that locks are deamed necessary because they keep out the casual intruder. The person who will enter only if there is not the most minimal level of effort required to do so.
Beyond that, they are not a security device. They serve that one, minimal function well, but that's all they do.
For instances where a lock is actually protecting something of value, it is usually only one aspect of a much more sophisticated security system. In those instances, the lock serves as an authentication device "this person has a key, therefore they are authorized," and could just as easily be replaced by any other type of authentication system. As again, it can't provide protection on it's own.
That's something that any good locksmith will tell you -- if they can install it, they can bypass it. And so can any other person with access to the right tools and knowledge.
". . . I don't beleive I did anything wrong. I'm sure that's going to be a common refrain in this new era of untrusting software and companies. Ah well."
No, not "ah well."
Customers have a legitimate expectation to be treated as if they are wanted and valued not as if they are a threat to the enterprise for using the product they purchased.
Companies that treat their customers as criminals instead of as their reason for being in business will find themselves at a severe competative disadvantage. Such actions will hurt companies who engage in them, in big and small ways.
WGA has already resulted in several lawsuits. Those court proceedings are sapping resources from Microsoft. There is time being spent by developers and software architects in helping lawyers prepare court cases instead of doing the more important parts of their job. Those resources aren't being used to fix bugs, develop new features, or in any way serve current or future customers.
That hurts the both the consumer and the stockholder.
It amazes me that there are banks out there don't do code reviews and pen-test to prevent simplistic attacks like this prior to rolling something into production?
God lord!
We require 3 layers of data validation (as part of the web interface, as part of the middle-ware layer, and within the database as triggered stored procedures for updates and inserts.)
The biggest problem is there is buy in by PROGRAMMERS (the professionals who are suppossed to know better) that the TOOL MATTERS.
This is simply not true.
Study after study has shown that when talking about anything that matters (does the delivered solution resolve the problem, is the cost of delivery of a working solution in line with the intial budget estimate, TOC, etc.) the tool is irrelivant to the discussion.
What is relivant is if the system is architected well. Is the problem fully and completely defined? Does the scope remain stable over the development cycle (be it 2 week extreme thing or 5 year traditional thing) and is everyone coding to the same target? Is there a good communication plan in place for the project? Are all the developers using the same methodology and coding standards? Is there sufficient Q/A as part of the project plan to actually find the bugs that matter?
All of those, and many other items, matter.
But the very first discussion most programmers AND PHB's have when they decide to embark on a project isn't about problem definition, it's all about what tool to use.
Some day people will figure out that not only doesn't the tool matter, but that choosing an older tool means you can make use of deeper experience pools as well, which in some cases may be far more beneficial than being able to hire the cheapest programmers because everyone only has 1 year or less experience in the language because it's only a 1 year old language . . . (not to mention the problem young tools tend to have in terms of their own bugs and issues compared to older toold).
Gah -- bad sentance structure makes me sound like an idiot:
Yes I know what firewalls do.
When I wrote "with a good up-to-date virus/spyware scanner and firewall which prevents unauthorized registry changes" the "which" is refering to the virus/spyware scanning not the firewall.
Saying that the most common malware only effects Windows, therefore Macs are more secure is simply bad reasoning.
What matters is rate of contact and rate of infection after contact.
A well configured Windows machine, with a good up-to-date virus/spyware scanner and firewall which prevents unauthorized registry changes is pretty hard to actually infect.
I'm sure that "out of the box" Macs are better. But it's not "out of the box" that I care about. My concern is level of security during actual operation.
I have no problem believing that Macs are more resistant to malware, but this measure doesn't show that to necessarily be the case.
When Norwest Bank bought Wells Fargo Bank, the company kept the name Wells Fargo. Even though Norwest was the larger business. Norwest was in more states. Norwest had more customers.
But Wells Fargo had a brand and image that would take an amazing amount of time and money to match.
Larry isn't so dumb as to not know the value of a solid brand name. Oracle has some perception problems in the Open Source world. Novell is viewed as one of the good guys. Oracle needs a brand with geeky goodness associated with it, and Novell will provide that.
Debian or Ubuntu or whatever other distro that no one outside of the Slashdot community has ever heard of won't go nearly as far.
Because you will always have access to an analog output at some point in the signal chain.
Sure, it might take a soldering iron and a few resistors to get to it, but you will be able to get to it. There's simply no way around that simple fact.
Moreover, since the Digital-to-analog conversion will require that everything required to decode the digital signal be present in the system, the raw digital signal sans DRM will be either present or capable of being reconstructed. Again, you might have to solder something to your board, but it will be doable.
Geeks with EE degrees aren't going to cease being interested in tinkering just because the USA makes it illegal to do so.
Standard languages are fine if you have a complete set of languages to cover problem domains.
People rarely take the time to do this right.
Since all languages aren't created equal, it creates big problems pretty quickly. For example, if you have Unix cron jobs writtin in BASH do you have to rewrite them into another language?
What about systems with Scheme extentions?
What about problems that are simply better solved in a procedural language instead of a functinal language?
A good language standardization policy can be a benefit to a company, but a good policy will limit you to perhaps a dozen different languages for the problem domains you'll face. If you try and compress it beyond this you'll create as many or more inefficiencies as you eliminate.
The point of domain name hierarchy, as ICANN has forgotten, was to organize information into identifyable categories to make it easier for people to find what they want.
Now, I will grant that with the advent of search engines, this is far less of an issue than it was 20 years ago.
Still, the domain name conventions are NOT about corporations "extending their branding." It's about organizing the ip space into human-readable and human-understandable segments. Single letter domain names do nothing to further that purpose.
It's a bad idea not because of any technical limitations but merely because it is bowing to corporate pressures in the governance of the last arena in the world where people have more power than the companies.
Slashdot Mirror
I specifically use my computer to mix my own music. I have several thousands dollars invested in high end sound cards, mixers, etc.
My concern is a very simple one -- if I wish to mix my own music on Vista, will it be DRM free, or will simply using that OS taint my final release? The last thing I need is one of my two listeners not being able to play my cd or mp3s.
Sometimes stories like this get me thinking in odd, heartless ways.
If this condition has a genetic cause (not saying it does or doesn't, mind you) . . . then don't we make our species weaker by treating it and allowing those kids who would have died to grow up and reproduce?
Sure, in this one case it might only be a few thousand kids a year, but add up all the diseases and conditions that have genetic links that we are treating successfully with modern medicine . . . while the short-term gain of having a large number of people survive who would otherwise die (and of course, not having the impact of those deaths on their families and communities ) is obviously a major gain -- what is the long term implication for our species' ability to survive?
You're not wrong, but you miss the point.
Consumers are tired of the commercial bombardment. And many of us are already paying to watch TV -- through payments to the cable company or to the satellite company. From the consumer's point of view, we're paying for the show, and then the viewing experience is degraded with non-content.
TV networks are in dire need of a better marketing model that better serves the consummer of their product.
The availability of this technology is a threat to the existence of less innovative networks. And it should be. Creative destruction is a good thing.
So the reason you're not claiming your million dollar prize is 'cause you're too busy, right?
At most companies, the CIO would not let it happen because of the political fall-out that woudl ensue, not because they wouldn't recognize that other people have good ideas as well.
..
The fact that Netflix is allowing customer data out of their control (albiet sanitized data) is a major step that many company's would never take out of reasons not related to the technology at all.
And most CEO's don't challenge those internal assumptions not because of a lack of business sense, but again, because of political savy. The higher you go in a company, the greater the importance of poltiical acumen. It's not even mostly about business. It's mostly about political positioning.
Folks can argue all day long that it SHOULDN'T be about that, but in the real world it is. And frankly, good CEO's and good CIO's need to survive year to year too .
I am a huge fan of music.
I used to buy dozens of CD's a month.
In 2001 I started using LEGAL on-line streaming music services (like Rhapsody).
I have bought maybe a dozen CD's since then.
While I have downloaded music from Napster (when it was presumed legal) as well as places like EMusic and Apple, I have never used an illegal service.
I have no problem believing that computer ownership is linked to decreased CD sales. However, I don't accept that that link means illegal file-sharing.
Aside from the funding issue, there is a very real issue from the point of view of an instructor.
Anyone who has ever presented material to a class knows that the audience does effect how well the information is presented. For professors who aren't in fact trained actors playing to hte camera, and who have learned how to present to a class largely without any formal training in what they are doing as lecturers, radically reducing attendance to a few or even no students will effect how they present the material, and most likely that effect will be negative.
This means that the students skipping the class are also harming the education of those who continue to attend.
Some of us are old enough to remember when "penmanship" was a required subject, and you had to pass it in order to go to the next grade.
Sloppy handwritting is the result of lazy instructors allowing lazier students to get by with sloppy handwritting.
My son attends a "Charter" school -- one of the best schools in one of the best school districts in our state. It's not a perfect school, but it is good enough that there's no real reason to look to private schools until the high school years.
This year they opened a computer lab filled with brand new high end Dell computers. I was really excited to see what they'd use them for.
Sadly, the majority of use thus far is not for teaching programming skills, or exploring how computers work, but for "research" (read surfing the web) and homework (read surfing the web and using cut-n-paste).
In order to meet state requirements for computer education, they are also teaching classes on how to use powerpoint.
What amazes me is that in no other field would a professional teacher consider the teaching of a specific application as sufficient substitution for actual knoweldge of a subject. Being able to successfully grow a tomato plant in the greenhouse might be extra credit, but it doesn't get you through the biology exam. You can't present your tomato plant as proof that you understand the Krebs cycle. I know of no math class where so long as you can use a calculator you get an 'A' (though I've heard horror stories, so maybe that's not a good example!) You don't pass a creative writting course by demonstrating an ability to watch a movie adaptation of a creative written work.
What happened to teaching something about computers?
When I was in middle school, we built an Altair 8800. We learned programming, and even produced a project as a class that we got to code into the local university's Burroughs PLP.
The news every week is about how the USA isn't making enough engineers, mathematicians and scientists. And here nearly every school has all these computers that instead of using to teach these critical subjects and to develop skills and abilities that will lead to fixing that gap instead resort to teaching an application.
It's pathetic. And frankly, mind-numbingly stupid behavior on the parts of the schools.
One reason I can't stand most public school systems is because too many educators think about their assignments in terms of media instead of in terms of content.
That depends what's in the safe.
Had it contained gold bricks, or gems, there wouldn't be much of an issue.
The average person locks their front door and goes to bed feeling secure.
They also probably have several windows, glass patio doors, and the like at easy-access level around their home. Most don't have bars on them.
Even those that do have bars probably live in framed out housing, where going through a wall is a trivial feat for a determened intruder with a simple sledgehammer.
But the reality is that locks are deamed necessary because they keep out the casual intruder. The person who will enter only if there is not the most minimal level of effort required to do so.
Beyond that, they are not a security device. They serve that one, minimal function well, but that's all they do.
For instances where a lock is actually protecting something of value, it is usually only one aspect of a much more sophisticated security system. In those instances, the lock serves as an authentication device "this person has a key, therefore they are authorized," and could just as easily be replaced by any other type of authentication system. As again, it can't provide protection on it's own.
That's something that any good locksmith will tell you -- if they can install it, they can bypass it. And so can any other person with access to the right tools and knowledge.
Jobs is an idiot for thinking the issue is that Creative got the patent so early.
At issue here is that merely taking centuries old data organization methods and implimenting them into an electronic gizmo is NOT worthy of a patent.
Hierarchical indexing has been around since the middle ages.
It is not necessary, however, to allow root login access. You could require everyone to sudo to it. I'm not sure what this gains, but it's possible.
Every game that I want to run works under Sony and Nintendo?
Sorry, bzzzzzzzt.
MMPORPG's for example, simply aren't available on those platforms in anywhere close to the PC versions.
For many many people that simply is not true.
Most companies of any size have at least one software package that performs some business critical function that requires Windows.
Lots of home computer users own their computers to play games that aren't available for alternative OS's and which don't operate properly under WINE.
". . . I don't beleive I did anything wrong. I'm sure that's going to be a common refrain in this new era of untrusting software and companies. Ah well."
No, not "ah well."
Customers have a legitimate expectation to be treated as if they are wanted and valued not as if they are a threat to the enterprise for using the product they purchased.
Companies that treat their customers as criminals instead of as their reason for being in business will find themselves at a severe competative disadvantage. Such actions will hurt companies who engage in them, in big and small ways.
WGA has already resulted in several lawsuits. Those court proceedings are sapping resources from Microsoft. There is time being spent by developers and software architects in helping lawyers prepare court cases instead of doing the more important parts of their job. Those resources aren't being used to fix bugs, develop new features, or in any way serve current or future customers.
That hurts the both the consumer and the stockholder.
It amazes me that there are banks out there don't do code reviews and pen-test to prevent simplistic attacks like this prior to rolling something into production?
God lord!
We require 3 layers of data validation (as part of the web interface, as part of the middle-ware layer, and within the database as triggered stored procedures for updates and inserts.)
Not doing this SHOULD be criminal in my mind.
The biggest problem is there is buy in by PROGRAMMERS (the professionals who are suppossed to know better) that the TOOL MATTERS.
This is simply not true.
Study after study has shown that when talking about anything that matters (does the delivered solution resolve the problem, is the cost of delivery of a working solution in line with the intial budget estimate, TOC, etc.) the tool is irrelivant to the discussion.
What is relivant is if the system is architected well. Is the problem fully and completely defined? Does the scope remain stable over the development cycle (be it 2 week extreme thing or 5 year traditional thing) and is everyone coding to the same target? Is there a good communication plan in place for the project? Are all the developers using the same methodology and coding standards? Is there sufficient Q/A as part of the project plan to actually find the bugs that matter?
All of those, and many other items, matter.
But the very first discussion most programmers AND PHB's have when they decide to embark on a project isn't about problem definition, it's all about what tool to use.
Some day people will figure out that not only doesn't the tool matter, but that choosing an older tool means you can make use of deeper experience pools as well, which in some cases may be far more beneficial than being able to hire the cheapest programmers because everyone only has 1 year or less experience in the language because it's only a 1 year old language . . . (not to mention the problem young tools tend to have in terms of their own bugs and issues compared to older toold).
Gah -- bad sentance structure makes me sound like an idiot:
Yes I know what firewalls do.
When I wrote "with a good up-to-date virus/spyware scanner and firewall which prevents unauthorized registry changes" the "which" is refering to the virus/spyware scanning not the firewall.
Not that this'll actually teach me to poof-read.
Saying that the most common malware only effects Windows, therefore Macs are more secure is simply bad reasoning.
What matters is rate of contact and rate of infection after contact.
A well configured Windows machine, with a good up-to-date virus/spyware scanner and firewall which prevents unauthorized registry changes is pretty hard to actually infect.
I'm sure that "out of the box" Macs are better. But it's not "out of the box" that I care about. My concern is level of security during actual operation.
I have no problem believing that Macs are more resistant to malware, but this measure doesn't show that to necessarily be the case.
When Norwest Bank bought Wells Fargo Bank, the company kept the name Wells Fargo. Even though Norwest was the larger business. Norwest was in more states. Norwest had more customers.
But Wells Fargo had a brand and image that would take an amazing amount of time and money to match.
Larry isn't so dumb as to not know the value of a solid brand name. Oracle has some perception problems in the Open Source world. Novell is viewed as one of the good guys. Oracle needs a brand with geeky goodness associated with it, and Novell will provide that.
Debian or Ubuntu or whatever other distro that no one outside of the Slashdot community has ever heard of won't go nearly as far.
DRM will never work.
Why?
Because you will always have access to an analog output at some point in the signal chain.
Sure, it might take a soldering iron and a few resistors to get to it, but you will be able to get to it. There's simply no way around that simple fact.
Moreover, since the Digital-to-analog conversion will require that everything required to decode the digital signal be present in the system, the raw digital signal sans DRM will be either present or capable of being reconstructed. Again, you might have to solder something to your board, but it will be doable.
Geeks with EE degrees aren't going to cease being interested in tinkering just because the USA makes it illegal to do so.
Standard languages are fine if you have a complete set of languages to cover problem domains.
People rarely take the time to do this right.
Since all languages aren't created equal, it creates big problems pretty quickly. For example, if you have Unix cron jobs writtin in BASH do you have to rewrite them into another language?
What about systems with Scheme extentions?
What about problems that are simply better solved in a procedural language instead of a functinal language?
A good language standardization policy can be a benefit to a company, but a good policy will limit you to perhaps a dozen different languages for the problem domains you'll face. If you try and compress it beyond this you'll create as many or more inefficiencies as you eliminate.
The point of domain name hierarchy, as ICANN has forgotten, was to organize information into identifyable categories to make it easier for people to find what they want.
Now, I will grant that with the advent of search engines, this is far less of an issue than it was 20 years ago.
Still, the domain name conventions are NOT about corporations "extending their branding." It's about organizing the ip space into human-readable and human-understandable segments. Single letter domain names do nothing to further that purpose.
It's a bad idea not because of any technical limitations but merely because it is bowing to corporate pressures in the governance of the last arena in the world where people have more power than the companies.