Hiring the guy that created VMS to recreate it in desktop form is hardly terribly innovative.
Unix is doing very well as a modern desktop platform these days for similar reasons. It's a solid well tested foundation with some genuine engineering behind it.
Microsoft's main problems have always been applications and userland libraries and services. The best kernel ever won't protect you from running total nonsense on top of it. The ghost of DOS still lives on.
Can I ignore Google if I want and not be subjected to some sort of computing version of buying an farm in Amish country and cutting myself off from the world? If I can, then the comparison is completely bogus.
The difference between an (abusive) monopoly and a market leader is that I can ignore the market leader.
Where's the tie in? Where's the vendor lock? Apple is a far better candidate for "the new Microsoft" in this regard.
Yup. When I saw "genome copying error" I immediately thought "mutation". Someone it trying to make the basic normal process of mutation sound more exciting than it actually is.
Yeah, some mutation is responsible for human intelligence.
Any bright middle schooler could have told you that.
You can breed a colony of mice from 2 progenitors and eventually you will see this "mutation" in action.
Before the Internet we had home copying technology, TV, and Radio. Each of these was an effective and legal means of "payment avoidance". The Internet really didn't change anything. It just brought things out in the open. It made what was going on before more visible.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if it's radio, MTV, the college record store, Napster, or Pandora. The ultimate effect is the same.
All of this piracy talk is just a big fat red herring to distract from the industry's real problem. They no longer have a means to force us to buy stuff over again. Digital is a terminal format that can last indefinitely.
The OP has precisely captured WHY it is a bad idea to continue pushing for more and more absurd laws. The OP also captured WHY it's a bad idea to do something just because the law allows you to.
It damages respect for the law and your own good will with the people you want to sell things too.
It's much harder to sell something if people have other options and view you as a total ass.
The social costs of draconian copyright enforcement is simply not acceptable. It is also highly unlikely that any draconian enforcement mechanism will either be sufficiently effective.
There are simply more important things than movies and bad pop songs.
Corporate rights aren't the only thing to consider here.
When I was in college (and poor) I bought used music from a number of off-campus music stores that catered to poor college students. Used albums could be purchased for as little as $1.
You simply don't need Napster to engage in "payment avoidance".
Are you going to suggest that we overturn the First Sale doctrine next?
> Funny how slashdotters in general applaud Microsoft for completely throwing out the concept of menus
Since when? You sir are simply on crack.
We freely criticize Microsoft for the same kind of UI consistency shenanigans that we are currently eviscerating Ubuntu for. We did so even before Microsoft decided to release it's own Unity style atrocity.
The proof is in the pudding. Does all of that rhetoric actually translate into any actual real world results. In these situations a few isolated SCOTUS decisions or L1 papers about what the law is supposed to do are remarkably irrelevant.
What matters is what happens at the PTO and in the courts with patents in general.
You're trying to pretend that a media purchase in 2012 needs to be an inherently temporary one when recent history clearly demonstrates that such needs not to be the case. You are advocating the purchase of products that are priced as long lasting archival copies as if they are supposed to be very temporary rentals.
That's a very bad and abusive shift in the consumer mentality.
If something is "only temporary", it better be dirt cheap.
The only thing keeping an eBook from being as durable as a real one is DRM. There are 20 year old eBooks already. There's no good reason that today's product can't last 20 years too.
> Don't know about you, but I'm fine with my media purchases having a usable lifespan of ~10-20 years
You're an idiot. Hopefully you won't ruin it for the rest of us.
There is no good reason to expect ANY media to have an artificially limited lifespan. This is true even of physical media that degrades due to the limitations of physics. To tolerate an artificially short life span on pure data is simply assinine and begging for corporate abuse.
Single vendor encryption platforms are problematic regardless of how you try to spin it. They allow a single crappy vendor to dominate the market and ignore technological change.
At least DVD and BD encryption allow for multiple competing hardware vendors to compete for our money and mind share.
That's only necessary if you are forced to change your password frequently.
Then you're stuck with coming up with new passwords all the time and something that you will actually remember. (assuming you don't just start writing them down)
Even if you do keep it up to date, you could get potentially "owned" by someone. That's why it's a better idea to be more proactive and keep track of likely attacks and black list the attackers.
It also helps not to leave things in a state where they can be exploited to begin with.
> but finding the algorithm to know when its a real finger and not accidentally touching is patent able.
disputable
> no one is stopping samsung and others from doing the same thing to find their own algorithm
Chances are, they already have. It's just the Apple now "owns" the approach regardless of how it was derived. It doesn't matter if I read it in the patent, or if I was able to "re-invent" it myself.
The patent was likely never consulted because of the whole "treble damages" problem. So it is likely that the patent is competely worthless and unecessary.
Your perverse idea of how patents should work allows the first person to file to steal the intellectual work from the rest of the market.
The "ray of sanity" is allowing the user to decide.
You don't need to be a jerk. You don't need to be a megalomaniac.
Being both of those things just makes it obvious you are a threat to the community at large. You shouldn't do that before you have gotten yourself fully entrenched. An appropriate smack down is much more likely to be effective.
Look up the curriculum required for this certification. It's a joke. It's the very essence of underwater basket weaving. You could get more out of a weekend seminar.
You could take the one meaningful text book in the entire relevant BA program and just study that and be as competent as anyone with a "license".
If anything, being subject to indoctrination of the current establishment in these matters is a hinderance rather than a help. You're better off NOT being licensed and having a broader perspective on these matters.
> Declan McCullagh doesn't understand the way the First Amendment works in this country. It doesn't protect you from prosecution if you go into a bank and say, "This is a stickup."
That is armed robbery.
Now it's up to you to conflate unlicensed nutritional advice from "someone who's been there" with armed robbery.
This is a neglected area of study with a poor track record that often gets viewed as a joke by laymen. So treating it as a protected class profession is beyond absurd.
I have been doing HW accelerated BluRay playback in Linux for 3 or 4 years now. I do this on lowly Atoms because the GPU does all of the work.
"decoding" bluray is not the problem.
Decrypting bluray is the problem.
Ironically enough, if you have enough of a CPU to play back BluRay then you also have a good enough CPU to adequately deal with how terribly horribly bad Flash is at video playback.
I still run the original CivCTP on my 64bit Ubuntu install. Alpha Centuari runs fine too. While it would be nice if I could utilize Steam to replace them with something newer (namely Civ5). It's by no means a requirement.
Slashdot Mirror
Hiring the guy that created VMS to recreate it in desktop form is hardly terribly innovative.
Unix is doing very well as a modern desktop platform these days for similar reasons. It's a solid well tested foundation with some genuine engineering behind it.
Microsoft's main problems have always been applications and userland libraries and services. The best kernel ever won't protect you from running total nonsense on top of it. The ghost of DOS still lives on.
You're forgetting the advertising budget for the Super Bowl commercials.
Can I ignore Google if I want and not be subjected to some sort of computing version of buying an farm in Amish country and cutting myself off from the world? If I can, then the comparison is completely bogus.
The difference between an (abusive) monopoly and a market leader is that I can ignore the market leader.
Where's the tie in? Where's the vendor lock? Apple is a far better candidate for "the new Microsoft" in this regard.
Yup. When I saw "genome copying error" I immediately thought "mutation". Someone it trying to make the basic normal process of mutation sound more exciting than it actually is.
Yeah, some mutation is responsible for human intelligence.
Any bright middle schooler could have told you that.
You can breed a colony of mice from 2 progenitors and eventually you will see this "mutation" in action.
Before the Internet we had home copying technology, TV, and Radio. Each of these was an effective and legal means of "payment avoidance". The Internet really didn't change anything. It just brought things out in the open. It made what was going on before more visible.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if it's radio, MTV, the college record store, Napster, or Pandora. The ultimate effect is the same.
All of this piracy talk is just a big fat red herring to distract from the industry's real problem. They no longer have a means to force us to buy stuff over again. Digital is a terminal format that can last indefinitely.
They don't get to sell me "Destroyer" again.
That's where they're really hurting.
Your remarks are an obvious absurdity.
The OP has precisely captured WHY it is a bad idea to continue pushing for more and more absurd laws. The OP also captured WHY it's a bad idea to do something just because the law allows you to.
It damages respect for the law and your own good will with the people you want to sell things too.
It's much harder to sell something if people have other options and view you as a total ass.
The social costs of draconian copyright enforcement is simply not acceptable. It is also highly unlikely that any draconian enforcement mechanism will either be sufficiently effective.
There are simply more important things than movies and bad pop songs.
Corporate rights aren't the only thing to consider here.
When I was in college (and poor) I bought used music from a number of off-campus music stores that catered to poor college students. Used albums could be purchased for as little as $1.
You simply don't need Napster to engage in "payment avoidance".
Are you going to suggest that we overturn the First Sale doctrine next?
> Funny how slashdotters in general applaud Microsoft for completely throwing out the concept of menus
Since when? You sir are simply on crack.
We freely criticize Microsoft for the same kind of UI consistency shenanigans that we are currently eviscerating Ubuntu for. We did so even before Microsoft decided to release it's own Unity style atrocity.
The proof is in the pudding. Does all of that rhetoric actually translate into any actual real world results. In these situations a few isolated SCOTUS decisions or L1 papers about what the law is supposed to do are remarkably irrelevant.
What matters is what happens at the PTO and in the courts with patents in general.
No it doesn't make sense.
You're trying to pretend that a media purchase in 2012 needs to be an inherently temporary one when recent history clearly demonstrates that such needs not to be the case. You are advocating the purchase of products that are priced as long lasting archival copies as if they are supposed to be very temporary rentals.
That's a very bad and abusive shift in the consumer mentality.
If something is "only temporary", it better be dirt cheap.
The only thing keeping an eBook from being as durable as a real one is DRM. There are 20 year old eBooks already. There's no good reason that today's product can't last 20 years too.
> Don't know about you, but I'm fine with my media purchases having a usable lifespan of ~10-20 years
You're an idiot. Hopefully you won't ruin it for the rest of us.
There is no good reason to expect ANY media to have an artificially limited lifespan. This is true even of physical media that degrades due to the limitations of physics. To tolerate an artificially short life span on pure data is simply assinine and begging for corporate abuse.
You are begging for corporate abuse.
Count me out of your little S&M fantasy.
Sounds like MS-DOS.
Single vendor encryption platforms are problematic regardless of how you try to spin it. They allow a single crappy vendor to dominate the market and ignore technological change.
At least DVD and BD encryption allow for multiple competing hardware vendors to compete for our money and mind share.
Better the "end of quality writing" than the end of personal liberties.
My personal property rights matter too.
That's only necessary if you are forced to change your password frequently.
Then you're stuck with coming up with new passwords all the time and something that you will actually remember. (assuming you don't just start writing them down)
Even if you do keep it up to date, you could get potentially "owned" by someone. That's why it's a better idea to be more proactive and keep track of likely attacks and black list the attackers.
It also helps not to leave things in a state where they can be exploited to begin with.
It does on any reasonably well managed corporate machine.
Why can't that be the default in the consumer OEM copy?
Although the service in question likely has no business being anywhere it can be exploited anyways.
> but finding the algorithm to know when its a real finger and not accidentally touching is patent able.
disputable
> no one is stopping samsung and others from doing the same thing to find their own algorithm
Chances are, they already have. It's just the Apple now "owns" the approach regardless of how it was derived. It doesn't matter if I read it in the patent, or if I was able to "re-invent" it myself.
The patent was likely never consulted because of the whole "treble damages" problem. So it is likely that the patent is competely worthless and unecessary.
Your perverse idea of how patents should work allows the first person to file to steal the intellectual work from the rest of the market.
The "ray of sanity" is allowing the user to decide.
You don't need to be a jerk. You don't need to be a megalomaniac.
Being both of those things just makes it obvious you are a threat to the community at large. You shouldn't do that before you have gotten yourself fully entrenched. An appropriate smack down is much more likely to be effective.
They don't invent things that deserve a 20 year monopoly and a legal right to run everyone else out of business.
It's still a bogus line.
Look up the curriculum required for this certification. It's a joke. It's the very essence of underwater basket weaving. You could get more out of a weekend seminar.
You could take the one meaningful text book in the entire relevant BA program and just study that and be as competent as anyone with a "license".
If anything, being subject to indoctrination of the current establishment in these matters is a hinderance rather than a help. You're better off NOT being licensed and having a broader perspective on these matters.
Yes. A funeral is a private thing. If you aren't invited then you are trespassing and can be treated as such.
It's a shame you couldn't just use trespassing laws.
> Declan McCullagh doesn't understand the way the First Amendment works in this country. It doesn't protect you from prosecution if you go into a bank and say, "This is a stickup."
That is armed robbery.
Now it's up to you to conflate unlicensed nutritional advice from "someone who's been there" with armed robbery.
This is a neglected area of study with a poor track record that often gets viewed as a joke by laymen. So treating it as a protected class profession is beyond absurd.
I have been doing HW accelerated BluRay playback in Linux for 3 or 4 years now. I do this on lowly Atoms because the GPU does all of the work.
"decoding" bluray is not the problem.
Decrypting bluray is the problem.
Ironically enough, if you have enough of a CPU to play back BluRay then you also have a good enough CPU to adequately deal with how terribly horribly bad Flash is at video playback.
You're late to the party.
I still run the original CivCTP on my 64bit Ubuntu install. Alpha Centuari runs fine too. While it would be nice if I could utilize Steam to replace them with something newer (namely Civ5). It's by no means a requirement.