"If they don't want this crap surrounding their entertainment, they can stop pirating"
So they targeted the people who actually buy the music? Isn't that backwards? They took the customers willing to pay for their music, and trashed their computers, and spied on their listening habits. The people who simply downloaded the tracks were treated much better, as their computers were fine, and their habits were not tracked.
"If there's anything Microsoft doesn't want, it's to get caught up in more antitrust lawsuits."
Well, the last round had no apparent impact on MS, so I'm guessing they no longer believe anti-trust to be an issue any longer. That threat left the station 7 years ago when the current administration took office.
I've always felt that big companies love complex standards precisely because they are so difficult. They always seem to be designed lock out small competitors and allow the incumbents to control the market more effectively. OOXML is kind of like that, except that it seems primarily to lock the world into a standard that, almost by definition, only Microsoft can implement.
It seems to me that when companies need to cooperate, they find a way to do it by creating their own standards independent of standards bodies. By the same token, when companies want to make sure some new upstart doesn't get a foothold in the market, they go to an existing standards body that is pretty exclusionary to newcomers. And all this standard does is raise the cost of admission to competing in the document market.
You can't just write a word processor anymore in your basement with hard work and ingenuity; nope, you need a team of developers just to interpret the standard to read and write files.
"When I'm paying you for a service, I expect you to fix a problem "
When I'm paying you for software, I expect it to interoperate just like Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98SE, Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows For Workgroups 3.11, Mac OS 9, Mac OS 10.x, Linux (all variants), Solaris (all versions), HP/UX (all versions), BSD (all variants and versions).
The only pattern I see here is that everything works here with the exception of Vista, and for that, you seem to hold the ISP accountable. I mean, I get what you're saying, but at a certain point, you've got to hold Microsoft a *little* accountable seeing as they're the only operating system known that doesn't work in this situation properly.
It's not worth it anymore when you can use two free products: iTunes and VLC Media player. Those two products are good enough that you probably don't need anything else. And if you do, WinAMP is there to pick up the slack.
There are parts of Nero that are still useful though... Nerovision is a quick and dirty way to make a decent DVD out of a random video file.
And the core of Nero, the burning tool, is still the best commercial product around.
And of course, the thing rarely crashes, unlike Roxio, who manages in release after release to make a product that crashes when you try pretty much anything. I don't know why people buy it the the 2nd time.
The hardest science classes I took at a university, zoology, were all multiple choice tests, and they were wicked hard. Remember that a multiple choice test can be constructed in such a way to make sure you really understand the material. It just requires a professor who is knowledgeable and has a bit of a sadistic streak in him/her.
"The judge knows the technology better than you know law."
I would judge it about the same. The main difference is I realize I don't know law, but the judge refuses to believe she doesn't even know a tiny bit about computers.
What would be sensible and correct is if the judge said "Gee, start logging the IP address". If the judge can't be that specific, then she deserves what she asks for, the same as if a lawyer asks for a very specific thing in a deposition, that's what you give them.
If the judge said "give me the contents of RAM", give her the contents of RAM. It is what she asked for, and just like legal language, the technology language must be very specific.
"How many of you all think it's actually impossible to log a number that is in RAM?"
I don't know. It depends what operating system and if you own the source code to the program. For example, if you want to make Microsoft's IIS server log something they don't currently log, how would you do this?
On the other hand, even if you have the source code, what if you don't have the technical skills to update the source to meet the order?
Most things are possible. It's possible to send a man to the moon. But not very practical in 2007. By the same token, if these people turn on logging and it doesn't give the MPAA what they want, well.... then what? This sounds like a determined MPAA combined with a techno-illiterate judge. Never a good combination.
Because it's a wink saying "I know you computer guys have it there somewhere! Cough it up!".
The judge is just stupid. You could go on and on about how stupid it is, but the judge is just stupid and that's enough. No need to explore further.
So the answer is to give them something stupid. Produce a core dump once an hour and send it over. If the judge asks for an interpretation, insist truthfully that is completely interpreted as much as they can do. Invite the plaintiff to hire experts; they're the ones complaining after all.
The judge is stupid. They'll feel comfortable with a stupid answer like that so it's unlikely they'll complain. Answer truthfully and give the judge literally what they ask.
"I have an insurance contract that I pay yearly for maintenance and repair of all my major household appliances that covers my A/C, stove, fridge, washer, water heater, and dryer."
I have that for some things, but here's the downside to that...
If any of those things break, I have to take off a day of work. And most things are not covered by the warranty. So if I have to take off a day of work to wait for a repair person, I might as well do it myself, because it's cheaper and things get fixed to my satisfaction rather than an insurance company's satisfaction.
I think software is the same way. There is an appeal in many ways, to paying for the service. But what happens when a vendor upgrades software before you want them to, or you have to schedule downtime to accommodate the vendor. I'm not this is a bad idea; I'm just pointing out that there are significant structural issues with software as a service that need to be addressed.
This reminds me of the classic way program managers attack problems; they don't think about what the problem really is, nor do they care. They were given a problem to solve, and they take the shortest (easiest/cheapest) path to fix it.
The *symptom* is that Vista will glitch multimedia playback under certain circumstances.
The *issue* is that multimedia is too costly on system resources.
The *answer* is to streamline the way that Vista processes multimedia. A dual core Intel processor with 2 gig of memory should handle gig ethernet file copying, playing blu-ray disks, serve as a network router, and render video all at the same time. The idea that handling interrupts from a network card causes MP3's to glitch should be a cause of concern to both Microsoft and it's customers.
Perversely though, Microsoft took exactly the opposite approach... since multimedia is so slow, they handled it by starving everything else and giving even more CPU time to multimedia. Which solves the symptom, but doesn't actually touch on the issue. I think the real fear is the DRM layers that are built into Vista are at the root of this problem. If so, it's going to take a helluva service pack to make Vista as good as promised.
"Dude if you're pushing 200 gig to 300 gig a month band useage it's time to look into T1 lines or dump the torrent."
A T1 line offers significantly less bandwidth than the lowest tier of Verizon FIOS service. The only thing a T1 gets you is dedicated bandwidth with an SLA.
I would think you'd be better off switching away from Comcast, if possible.
"The media (CD-Rs/DVD-Rs/HDDs/etc) costs alone are mind-boggling, not to mention the nuisance of having to burn 3 dvds every single day,"
DVD-R's are about 25 cents apiece when purchased in bulk. If you watch for sales, they're closer to 10-15 cents apiece. CD-R's are a about 1/2 that price.
Burning a DVD? That takes what.... 8 minutes? A CD can be burned in about 3-4 minutes.
I don't think costs and time are significant barriers here.
The real question remains... as more and more business will deal with downloadable video, how can these relatively small caps remain? Or how will comcast stay in business once people are downloading 8-12 movies a month from providers? That could easily push the "average" user to 50-100GB per month.
"But, the practice of tuning the system such that audio playback is constant and stutter-free by sidelining other components is VERY common in system design."
It is, but when you have 2 cores, 4 GB of memory, and loads of spare CPU time, and the last version of the operating system didn't suffer from this problem, it's legitimate to call Microsoft to task.
What is the benefit to the end user of Vista? The behavior is suspicious, considering Microsoft had 1/2 a decade to work on this thing.
"GPS is one-way from satellite to receiver, so there are no privacy concerns."
So you would have no issue with your insurance company putting a GPS tracker into your car? Of course it's only 1 way, but the idea is that you can retrieve the log. That's where the privacy issues come into play.
Still doesn't make sense, unless you mean that the sample with the greatest difference between the lowest volume and the highest volume is greatest. Just because something has a lowest high volume, that doesn't mean the dynamic range is larger.
All I'm saying is you need to know both high volume and low volume to make a judgment about the dynamic range. Knowing just one doesn't tell you anything.
It's like satellite radio. People claim it's "CD Quality", when it's not as good as FM radio.
If you listen to music on satellite radio (And Sirius is far worse than XM), it sounds like bad shortwave, with voices and music phase shifting. Saxophones on Sirius are unlistenable, which makes Jazz problematic.
And people forget how good FM could be (and used to be). Until recently, we had an FM classical station WGMS which didn't compress too much, and when you listened to it, it was wonderful. I mean, you could actually listen to it critically on a good stereo.
What people forget (and people will hate me for saying this), when utilized properly, CD's are really very good. There are a lot of good bands out there today (and people will hate me for saying that as well), that I can't listen to very much because the dynamic range (or lack thereof) makes it seem flat and uninteresting. It's like your brain is saying "the music is good", but your heart is saying "hit the skip button".
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"If they don't want this crap surrounding their entertainment, they can stop pirating"
So they targeted the people who actually buy the music? Isn't that backwards? They took the customers willing to pay for their music, and trashed their computers, and spied on their listening habits. The people who simply downloaded the tracks were treated much better, as their computers were fine, and their habits were not tracked.
This is what most people call an "idiot test".
"If there's anything Microsoft doesn't want, it's to get caught up in more antitrust lawsuits."
Well, the last round had no apparent impact on MS, so I'm guessing they no longer believe anti-trust to be an issue any longer. That threat left the station 7 years ago when the current administration took office.
I've always felt that big companies love complex standards precisely because they are so difficult. They always seem to be designed lock out small competitors and allow the incumbents to control the market more effectively. OOXML is kind of like that, except that it seems primarily to lock the world into a standard that, almost by definition, only Microsoft can implement.
It seems to me that when companies need to cooperate, they find a way to do it by creating their own standards independent of standards bodies. By the same token, when companies want to make sure some new upstart doesn't get a foothold in the market, they go to an existing standards body that is pretty exclusionary to newcomers. And all this standard does is raise the cost of admission to competing in the document market.
You can't just write a word processor anymore in your basement with hard work and ingenuity; nope, you need a team of developers just to interpret the standard to read and write files.
"When I hear people like Bill Maher profess that they are libertarians I shutter. "
That's quite a picture you're conjuring up...
"When I'm paying you for a service, I expect you to fix a problem "
When I'm paying you for software, I expect it to interoperate just like Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98SE, Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows For Workgroups 3.11, Mac OS 9, Mac OS 10.x, Linux (all variants), Solaris (all versions), HP/UX (all versions), BSD (all variants and versions).
The only pattern I see here is that everything works here with the exception of Vista, and for that, you seem to hold the ISP accountable. I mean, I get what you're saying, but at a certain point, you've got to hold Microsoft a *little* accountable seeing as they're the only operating system known that doesn't work in this situation properly.
It's not worth it anymore when you can use two free products: iTunes and VLC Media player. Those two products are good enough that you probably don't need anything else. And if you do, WinAMP is there to pick up the slack.
There are parts of Nero that are still useful though... Nerovision is a quick and dirty way to make a decent DVD out of a random video file.
And the core of Nero, the burning tool, is still the best commercial product around.
And of course, the thing rarely crashes, unlike Roxio, who manages in release after release to make a product that crashes when you try pretty much anything. I don't know why people buy it the the 2nd time.
The hardest science classes I took at a university, zoology, were all multiple choice tests, and they were wicked hard. Remember that a multiple choice test can be constructed in such a way to make sure you really understand the material. It just requires a professor who is knowledgeable and has a bit of a sadistic streak in him/her.
Thank you Professor Dietz, wherever you are.
"It's a good thing you're not their lawyer, or you'd get them in a lot of trouble."
Undoubtedly. Just as it's a good thing the judge is not a computer science person, or she might end up writing, oh, I don't know... Microsoft Vista.
"The judge knows the technology better than you know law."
I would judge it about the same. The main difference is I realize I don't know law, but the judge refuses to believe she doesn't even know a tiny bit about computers.
What would be sensible and correct is if the judge said "Gee, start logging the IP address". If the judge can't be that specific, then she deserves what she asks for, the same as if a lawyer asks for a very specific thing in a deposition, that's what you give them.
If the judge said "give me the contents of RAM", give her the contents of RAM. It is what she asked for, and just like legal language, the technology language must be very specific.
Your comments are silly, but even if there's a grain of truth, you aren't any worse off than you are today.
"How many of you all think it's actually impossible to log a number that is in RAM?"
I don't know. It depends what operating system and if you own the source code to the program. For example, if you want to make Microsoft's IIS server log something they don't currently log, how would you do this?
On the other hand, even if you have the source code, what if you don't have the technical skills to update the source to meet the order?
Most things are possible. It's possible to send a man to the moon. But not very practical in 2007. By the same token, if these people turn on logging and it doesn't give the MPAA what they want, well.... then what? This sounds like a determined MPAA combined with a techno-illiterate judge. Never a good combination.
"What's so hard about that?"
Because it's a wink saying "I know you computer guys have it there somewhere! Cough it up!".
The judge is just stupid. You could go on and on about how stupid it is, but the judge is just stupid and that's enough. No need to explore further.
So the answer is to give them something stupid. Produce a core dump once an hour and send it over. If the judge asks for an interpretation, insist truthfully that is completely interpreted as much as they can do. Invite the plaintiff to hire experts; they're the ones complaining after all.
The judge is stupid. They'll feel comfortable with a stupid answer like that so it's unlikely they'll complain. Answer truthfully and give the judge literally what they ask.
"I have an insurance contract that I pay yearly for maintenance and repair of all my major household appliances that covers my A/C, stove, fridge, washer, water heater, and dryer."
I have that for some things, but here's the downside to that...
If any of those things break, I have to take off a day of work. And most things are not covered by the warranty. So if I have to take off a day of work to wait for a repair person, I might as well do it myself, because it's cheaper and things get fixed to my satisfaction rather than an insurance company's satisfaction.
I think software is the same way. There is an appeal in many ways, to paying for the service. But what happens when a vendor upgrades software before you want them to, or you have to schedule downtime to accommodate the vendor. I'm not this is a bad idea; I'm just pointing out that there are significant structural issues with software as a service that need to be addressed.
This reminds me of the classic way program managers attack problems; they don't think about what the problem really is, nor do they care. They were given a problem to solve, and they take the shortest (easiest/cheapest) path to fix it.
The *symptom* is that Vista will glitch multimedia playback under certain circumstances.
The *issue* is that multimedia is too costly on system resources.
The *answer* is to streamline the way that Vista processes multimedia. A dual core Intel processor with 2 gig of memory should handle gig ethernet file copying, playing blu-ray disks, serve as a network router, and render video all at the same time. The idea that handling interrupts from a network card causes MP3's to glitch should be a cause of concern to both Microsoft and it's customers.
Perversely though, Microsoft took exactly the opposite approach... since multimedia is so slow, they handled it by starving everything else and giving even more CPU time to multimedia. Which solves the symptom, but doesn't actually touch on the issue. I think the real fear is the DRM layers that are built into Vista are at the root of this problem. If so, it's going to take a helluva service pack to make Vista as good as promised.
"Yeah. So, how is DirectX support on Linux?"
If microsoft keeps pushing DirectX 10, it won't really matter.
"Dude if you're pushing 200 gig to 300 gig a month band useage it's time to look into T1 lines or dump the torrent."
A T1 line offers significantly less bandwidth than the lowest tier of Verizon FIOS service. The only thing a T1 gets you is dedicated bandwidth with an SLA.
I would think you'd be better off switching away from Comcast, if possible.
"The media (CD-Rs/DVD-Rs/HDDs/etc) costs alone are mind-boggling, not to mention the nuisance of having to burn 3 dvds every single day,"
DVD-R's are about 25 cents apiece when purchased in bulk. If you watch for sales, they're closer to 10-15 cents apiece. CD-R's are a about 1/2 that price.
Burning a DVD? That takes what.... 8 minutes? A CD can be burned in about 3-4 minutes.
I don't think costs and time are significant barriers here.
The real question remains... as more and more business will deal with downloadable video, how can these relatively small caps remain? Or how will comcast stay in business once people are downloading 8-12 movies a month from providers? That could easily push the "average" user to 50-100GB per month.
"But, the practice of tuning the system such that audio playback is constant and stutter-free by sidelining other components is VERY common in system design."
It is, but when you have 2 cores, 4 GB of memory, and loads of spare CPU time, and the last version of the operating system didn't suffer from this problem, it's legitimate to call Microsoft to task.
What is the benefit to the end user of Vista? The behavior is suspicious, considering Microsoft had 1/2 a decade to work on this thing.
"GPS is one-way from satellite to receiver, so there are no privacy concerns."
So you would have no issue with your insurance company putting a GPS tracker into your car? Of course it's only 1 way, but the idea is that you can retrieve the log. That's where the privacy issues come into play.
Still doesn't make sense, unless you mean that the sample with the greatest difference between the lowest volume and the highest volume is greatest. Just because something has a lowest high volume, that doesn't mean the dynamic range is larger.
All I'm saying is you need to know both high volume and low volume to make a judgment about the dynamic range. Knowing just one doesn't tell you anything.
He was always a problem.
It's like satellite radio. People claim it's "CD Quality", when it's not as good as FM radio.
If you listen to music on satellite radio (And Sirius is far worse than XM), it sounds like bad shortwave, with voices and music phase shifting. Saxophones on Sirius are unlistenable, which makes Jazz problematic.
And people forget how good FM could be (and used to be). Until recently, we had an FM classical station WGMS which didn't compress too much, and when you listened to it, it was wonderful. I mean, you could actually listen to it critically on a good stereo.
What people forget (and people will hate me for saying this), when utilized properly, CD's are really very good. There are a lot of good bands out there today (and people will hate me for saying that as well), that I can't listen to very much because the dynamic range (or lack thereof) makes it seem flat and uninteresting. It's like your brain is saying "the music is good", but your heart is saying "hit the skip button".
"the low-volume will contain much greater dynamic range and will sound much better."
y namic+range&i=42193,00.asp
http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=d
Dynamic range, by definition, is the difference between the low volume and high volume.
"where the pseudo scientist calls Pivar a crackpot"
o ff&defl=en&q=define:crackpot&sa=X&oi=glossary_defi nition&ct=title
That would be slightly interesting if true. However, he does not make any comment about his being a crackpot. Although, technically, you could argue is a crackpot according to the dictionary. However, even if he did make this statement, this definition would seem to fit:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&c2coff=1&safe=