"the problem is someone with the brains to be a good PC repair person has the ability to make *MORE* money than anyone will pay for PC repair."
Bingo. And it's made worse by the fact that everybody has a PC and because they installed MS Office they think they're a PC genius and therefore, the job is simple and it's not worth much.
Meanwhile, nobody can afford decent computer help because the guys working at these companies are either (a) just starting and really good and will quit in 2 months for a better job paying more(b) be clueless and worth there forever and do horrible things to computers because they're just not very bright (because if they were really bright and good, see (a) above).
The chickens finally came home to roost for MS with their "registry".
The primary reason they invented the registry was to allow software vendors to hide data about their program. Some of it had previously been in.ini files and was legit in the sense that it contained stateful information (i.e. previous window size & position, recently opened files), but it also contained info about licensing and registration which is/was fine. But instead of coming up with a standard installation for these programs, what MS gave everybody was a bunch of API calls to read and write the registry and didn't actually monitor people too closely.
Well, people can and did write everywhere they could in the registry to hide some inner function of their program, and what we have now is a mess. If you give a program the ability to access the registry, they can affect system parameters, other programs...anything. And if they try to fix this in Vista, they'll break even more stuff, so we'll have that little legacy running around forever.
All because they wouldn't use tried and tested methods of saving information. MS was too smart for everybody else, and now we have to install windows every year or so to clear the crap out of the registry because the OS lacks the facility to monitor changes made by applications, sandbox them, and then forcibily remove registry changes at installation.
I'd love to hear the "genius" who thought this was an improvement over a text file, because he/she is the only one.
The problems is (a) if you're a media or software company, you view these as "good" consequence (b) if you're a member of congress, you're routinely told America's financial health is dependant on the strong protection of IP, so you don't see any problem with this (c) hardly anybody has any direct consequence because of DMCA, so they don't see the problem.
So in the face of all that intertia, no one really cares about the extreme cases. I'm guessing the cutover to HDTV in the U.S. (a.k.a. "The Disaster") will generate a lot of problems and make cause a backlash, but right now, it's hard to see anyone in charge or in authority speaking out against the law, and there is almost zero groudswell against it.
You'll see that crime as a absolute number peaked in the early 90's and has been going down. In fact, despite a 20% greater population, the absolute crime numbers are about where they were in the mid 80's. If you scale according to population, crime rates are down to where they were in the early 60's (if not mid 50's).
This is probably due to a lot of factors, one of which is the aging of the population in general.
Nonetheless, serious crime has been on a downward trend in the U.S. for about 15 years.
"I do not think there was a single device with single media that allowed you to do this until tivo."
Well, every series 2 Tivo can work with 2 hard drives.
And if you remember, Go Video made a start by selling a 2 tape deck that allowed you to not only dub but.... watch one tape while taping with the other tape.
Do you notice that Sony seems to hate their customers lately?
Seriously, I can't think of anything that Sony has done that could be seen either as pro-consumer or respectful of their customers in the last 5-10 years.
The Rootkit fiasco is pretty telling when the president of sony not only didn't apologize but seemed arrogant about it's use... "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Where was the "We'd like to apologize to our customers for this breach of trust..." kind of speech? Heck, he still thinks that copying music to an iPod is ripping him off! Sony seems to hate their customers because they won't behave the way Sony wants them to.
"Pretty Shiny" isn't enough to overcome how Sony treats their customers on a daily basis.
If Sony wanted to make UMD's popular, they would have included for free a copy of UMD movies with every DVD purchase. Do that for a year or two until they get people interested in the format. Then come out with stand-alone UMD players to connect to TV sets. Agressively market the design (i.e. give it away for almost nothing) for 3rd party players.
Instead, they came up with a format that was only playable on an overpriced game system then charged $20-25 for UMD disks that could be purchased on DVD for $12-15. I got the impression Sony felt they had invested big in the PSP and the business plan said it was going to pay off in 18 months and by-gosh, they were going to make it pay off in 18 months even if it meant absurd revenue predictions from UMD format licensing. Which meant that companies had to add $5 more per disk retail to pay Sony for licensing.
But you know, given that this is Sony, they'll blame *piracy* for the demise of UMD. The thought process will go like this....
"Hmmm, UMD failed because people were ripping DVD movies and putting them on a memory stick. What we *should* have done was to make the PSP so that it was incapable of playing a movie from a memory stick. Also, we should ask the U.S. Congress for laws that will throw people in jail for ripping movies from their DVD. Those dirty pirates."
"I didn't spend money on a decent hifi to waste my time listening to poorly compressed music on it. "
I'm kind of a nut about sound quality and what I will say is that if you use 256kb/s mp3's you'll have great sound quality. And the iPod does support lossless audio, so you can go with that.
I don't really have an issue with the MD format, except that it's all but dead, and mp3 is just supported everywhere. Yes, most people encrypt their mp3's poorly, but it's just the 90% rule in action.
"but they did help to come up with the compact disc."
Philips seems to come up with good formats... compact cassette, CD to name two. But both of those were essentially a collaboration between the two companies.
However, neither has had much success lately, as both Philips and Sony favored the MMCD format until Lou Gerstner (IBM) convinced them to join Toshiba. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD#History
"I don't blame Diebold for not wanting some 3rd party yahoo breaking seals on their machines."
Well, I understand what you're saying. But they're not Diebold's machines any more than this PC is not Microsoft's PC. That's an important distinction.
"But they can't point to a documented, legitimate qualification process to allay their customer's valid concerns."
Exactly right. Moreover, they have no *re-certification* process. Think about what will happen to these machines. The election is over. They are taken to the county warehouse. You pull them out 1 year later. How do I certify they haven't been tampered with? Some seal on the door??????? Or do you have to pay a special technician to come out for 3-4 weeks per machine to cerify each machine?
"This is lousy engineering of the kind that pervades traditional IT"
Perhaps. But Diebold seems to figure out how to do it right when banks insist they do it right, but here they chose not to do it that way. Curious? Sure seems it.
"Then the election board is going to have to pay $40,000 for Deibold to send in someone who will attach some alligator clips somewhere run something that flashes lights, and generally run some dog and pony show before deciding whether the machines are in fact sabotaged, just damaged, or just fine."
Here's where this particular lie is exposed:
1) How can a single voting machine even cost $40K? I want to see the parts breakdown on *that*.
2) Wouldn't you want all the machines recertified before each election? I mean, if they're sitting in warehouse someplace between elections, who knows who poked at them? So each machine costs $40K to use every election?
3) And if this is all T&M, lets assume a generous hourly rate of $250/hour and the guy is staying in a $500 a night hotel. That means this takes about 3 full weeks to certify a machine!
Does anybody understand the implications of Diebold claiming $40K worth of damages here?
Sure, no doubt. But when I'm unraring a big file (4G), my PC will go to 80%+ CPU utilization, or when I'm burning a DVD, I'll go to the same. In theory, neither of these is CPU intensive.
Or when you copy a couple gig to a network drive, windows is pretty well locked up for a long time.
I don't understand any of that. It looks to me as if the CPU is responsible for I/O, but that doesn't make any sense.
On windows, hardly anybody pegs the CPU meter from pure processing alone.
What does seem to happen is the CPU goes to 100% and the PC becomes unresponsive during I/O operations which has never made sense to me, unless either Intel MB's or Windows XP is fundamentally flawed.
"That's just a lie. If someone at the activation place told you that, call back. They were misinformed."
OEM windows is not activated, but it is tied to the machine you bought it on. In fact, it's microsoft's view that you cannot legally put it on another machine, even if you junk the existing one. They now force OEM's to essentially do something like BIOS locking that Windows XP disks. If you take a Windows XP disk that comes with an HP computer and try to install it on a homebuilt, it won't install. It will tell you that it's not an HP computer.
You're right, but is that message getting through? I think not.
It's like the the old Far Side cartoon with the owner yelling at the dog. The only thing the dog understands is one thing. The rest is just noise.
So Greenspan may be saying in effect "Intellectual property is important to protect, but we must balance that against the economic cost"
What congress hears is "Intelllectual property is important to protect, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah".
Unless that message is changed to "We need to rethink what we've done with the DMCA", the only message congress will hear is the supporters of strong DMCA type laws telling congress those laws are critical to the country's economic well being. And unless something changes, congress doesn't care if the RIAA throws 1,000 grandmothers in jail. They don't care, because it has no impact on the people giving them money, and people voting for them have yet to show they care.
I think things will have to get a lot worse before they'll get better.
In the end, this won't make a bit of difference in the U.S. until it costs corporations money.
Look at patents. People knowledgable about patents and software have almost universally criticized software & business method patents, but the only reason congress and the patent office is starting to look at it is because its costing big corporations money.
You see, the trouble is, when you have people like Alan Greespan saying more copyrights and patents are vital to the U.S.'s economic growth, when congress perceives the entertainment industry as being the growth engine for the U.S. economy, then its tough for congress to vote against these kinds of laws.
Until these same companies feel a pinch from the DMCA, it doesn't matter what the real impact of the law is, it's the message that's carried by the press, by the fed chairman, by the heads of industry such as Bill Gates that will determine the fate of the DMCA.
Microsoft used a PDF. I'll bet that must've burned to use a PDF instead of the more industry standard CHM or open-source implementation of the MS-Word file format.
In any event, if you read MS's response, they seem to disagree less with his conclusions than object to the way he reached them. In fact, I flipped through the entire document and didn't find any disagreement with the conclusions.
MS is too smart for me. In fact, I think MS is sometimes too smart for their own good. Maybe they should have just documented everything properly. That seems like less work than the amount of work they've put into complaining about the process.
Even if you overcame the technical hurdles, there are other problems... if I want to sell my DRM'd songs to someone else, in theory, this is easy. I'm un-authorized and the buyer is authorized. But in fact, the record companies don't do this and consider it a *feature* that I can't transfer ownership.
I frankly think they'd be better off with digital signatures of songs that didn't prevent any amount of copying. Because most people wouldn't be willing to put a song on the P2P network if it had their name and address embedded in the file. But again, one of the "features" of DRM is that it does limit my legitimate use and allows the record companies to control how and when I listen to my songs.
That's why DRM will never really work with the public at large. It makes something simple (listen to a CD, loan it to a friend, rip it to use on iPod) into something complicated with rules that never existed before.
"Don't count on anything coming out until you get the official press release. And don't be surprised that those movies are not released for a long time if HD-DVD acceptance is lukewarm or colder."
But if you're a movie studio, why not release on whatever platform anybody wants? It's not like Warner has to buy a pressing plant. What is the economic argument for not having lots of movies available in HDDVD, BlueRay, or whatever format somebody wants to sell?
Slashdot Mirror
"the problem is someone with the brains to be a good PC repair person has the ability to make *MORE* money than anyone will pay for PC repair."
Bingo. And it's made worse by the fact that everybody has a PC and because they installed MS Office they think they're a PC genius and therefore, the job is simple and it's not worth much.
Meanwhile, nobody can afford decent computer help because the guys working at these companies are either (a) just starting and really good and will quit in 2 months for a better job paying more(b) be clueless and worth there forever and do horrible things to computers because they're just not very bright (because if they were really bright and good, see (a) above).
The chickens finally came home to roost for MS with their "registry".
.ini files and was legit in the sense that it contained stateful information (i.e. previous window size & position, recently opened files), but it also contained info about licensing and registration which is/was fine. But instead of coming up with a standard installation for these programs, what MS gave everybody was a bunch of API calls to read and write the registry and didn't actually monitor people too closely.
The primary reason they invented the registry was to allow software vendors to hide data about their program. Some of it had previously been in
Well, people can and did write everywhere they could in the registry to hide some inner function of their program, and what we have now is a mess. If you give a program the ability to access the registry, they can affect system parameters, other programs...anything. And if they try to fix this in Vista, they'll break even more stuff, so we'll have that little legacy running around forever.
All because they wouldn't use tried and tested methods of saving information. MS was too smart for everybody else, and now we have to install windows every year or so to clear the crap out of the registry because the OS lacks the facility to monitor changes made by applications, sandbox them, and then forcibily remove registry changes at installation.
I'd love to hear the "genius" who thought this was an improvement over a text file, because he/she is the only one.
The problems is (a) if you're a media or software company, you view these as "good" consequence (b) if you're a member of congress, you're routinely told America's financial health is dependant on the strong protection of IP, so you don't see any problem with this (c) hardly anybody has any direct consequence because of DMCA, so they don't see the problem.
So in the face of all that intertia, no one really cares about the extreme cases. I'm guessing the cutover to HDTV in the U.S. (a.k.a. "The Disaster") will generate a lot of problems and make cause a backlash, but right now, it's hard to see anyone in charge or in authority speaking out against the law, and there is almost zero groudswell against it.
If you take a look here:
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
You'll see that crime as a absolute number peaked in the early 90's and has been going down. In fact, despite a 20% greater population, the absolute crime numbers are about where they were in the mid 80's. If you scale according to population, crime rates are down to where they were in the early 60's (if not mid 50's).
This is probably due to a lot of factors, one of which is the aging of the population in general.
Nonetheless, serious crime has been on a downward trend in the U.S. for about 15 years.
"if they wanted to write a good new OS, they could do it"
No offense, but if history is your guide, we have 20 years to say they can't.
"The kids who posted this without thinking how it would affect his life are the ones who should be learning from this."
Yeah, what they should have learned is this:
"Make sure they can't trace it back to you"
"I do not think there was a single device with single media that allowed you to do this until tivo."
Well, every series 2 Tivo can work with 2 hard drives.
And if you remember, Go Video made a start by selling a 2 tape deck that allowed you to not only dub but.... watch one tape while taping with the other tape.
So, I think this is prior art.
And yes, I own a Tivo.
"Betamax? Still the top choice for many professional video applications."
No, Betamax was never the choice for professional video applications.
You might be thinking of Betacam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam) which is similar to Betamax, but it not compatible.
Do you notice that Sony seems to hate their customers lately?
Seriously, I can't think of anything that Sony has done that could be seen either as pro-consumer or respectful of their customers in the last 5-10 years.
The Rootkit fiasco is pretty telling when the president of sony not only didn't apologize but seemed arrogant about it's use... "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Where was the "We'd like to apologize to our customers for this breach of trust..." kind of speech? Heck, he still thinks that copying music to an iPod is ripping him off! Sony seems to hate their customers because they won't behave the way Sony wants them to.
"Pretty Shiny" isn't enough to overcome how Sony treats their customers on a daily basis.
If Sony wanted to make UMD's popular, they would have included for free a copy of UMD movies with every DVD purchase. Do that for a year or two until they get people interested in the format. Then come out with stand-alone UMD players to connect to TV sets. Agressively market the design (i.e. give it away for almost nothing) for 3rd party players.
Instead, they came up with a format that was only playable on an overpriced game system then charged $20-25 for UMD disks that could be purchased on DVD for $12-15. I got the impression Sony felt they had invested big in the PSP and the business plan said it was going to pay off in 18 months and by-gosh, they were going to make it pay off in 18 months even if it meant absurd revenue predictions from UMD format licensing. Which meant that companies had to add $5 more per disk retail to pay Sony for licensing.
But you know, given that this is Sony, they'll blame *piracy* for the demise of UMD. The thought process will go like this....
"Hmmm, UMD failed because people were ripping DVD movies and putting them on a memory stick. What we *should* have done was to make the PSP so that it was incapable of playing a movie from a memory stick. Also, we should ask the U.S. Congress for laws that will throw people in jail for ripping movies from their DVD. Those dirty pirates."
"I didn't spend money on a decent hifi to waste my time listening to poorly compressed music on it. "
I'm kind of a nut about sound quality and what I will say is that if you use 256kb/s mp3's you'll have great sound quality. And the iPod does support lossless audio, so you can go with that.
I don't really have an issue with the MD format, except that it's all but dead, and mp3 is just supported everywhere. Yes, most people encrypt their mp3's poorly, but it's just the 90% rule in action.
"but they did help to come up with the compact disc."
Philips seems to come up with good formats... compact cassette, CD to name two. But both of those were essentially a collaboration between the two companies.
However, neither has had much success lately, as both Philips and Sony favored the MMCD format until Lou Gerstner (IBM) convinced them to join Toshiba. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD#History
"I don't blame Diebold for not wanting some 3rd party yahoo breaking seals on their machines."
Well, I understand what you're saying. But they're not Diebold's machines any more than this PC is not Microsoft's PC. That's an important distinction.
"But they can't point to a documented, legitimate qualification process to allay their customer's valid concerns."
Exactly right. Moreover, they have no *re-certification* process. Think about what will happen to these machines. The election is over. They are taken to the county warehouse. You pull them out 1 year later. How do I certify they haven't been tampered with? Some seal on the door??????? Or do you have to pay a special technician to come out for 3-4 weeks per machine to cerify each machine?
"This is lousy engineering of the kind that pervades traditional IT"
Perhaps. But Diebold seems to figure out how to do it right when banks insist they do it right, but here they chose not to do it that way. Curious? Sure seems it.
"Then the election board is going to have to pay $40,000 for Deibold to send in someone who will attach some alligator clips somewhere run something that flashes lights, and generally run some dog and pony show before deciding whether the machines are in fact sabotaged, just damaged, or just fine."
Here's where this particular lie is exposed:
1) How can a single voting machine even cost $40K? I want to see the parts breakdown on *that*.
2) Wouldn't you want all the machines recertified before each election? I mean, if they're sitting in warehouse someplace between elections, who knows who poked at them? So each machine costs $40K to use every election?
3) And if this is all T&M, lets assume a generous hourly rate of $250/hour and the guy is staying in a $500 a night hotel. That means this takes about 3 full weeks to certify a machine!
Does anybody understand the implications of Diebold claiming $40K worth of damages here?
Sure, no doubt. But when I'm unraring a big file (4G), my PC will go to 80%+ CPU utilization, or when I'm burning a DVD, I'll go to the same. In theory, neither of these is CPU intensive.
Or when you copy a couple gig to a network drive, windows is pretty well locked up for a long time.
I don't understand any of that. It looks to me as if the CPU is responsible for I/O, but that doesn't make any sense.
On windows, hardly anybody pegs the CPU meter from pure processing alone.
What does seem to happen is the CPU goes to 100% and the PC becomes unresponsive during I/O operations which has never made sense to me, unless either Intel MB's or Windows XP is fundamentally flawed.
"even with America as a rouge superpower"
We look good in blush, for a superpower, that is.
"He's soave"
I assure you he is French, not Italian.
"That's just a lie. If someone at the activation place told you that, call back. They were misinformed."
OEM windows is not activated, but it is tied to the machine you bought it on. In fact, it's microsoft's view that you cannot legally put it on another machine, even if you junk the existing one. They now force OEM's to essentially do something like BIOS locking that Windows XP disks. If you take a Windows XP disk that comes with an HP computer and try to install it on a homebuilt, it won't install. It will tell you that it's not an HP computer.
Try it if you don't believe it.
You're right, but is that message getting through? I think not.
It's like the the old Far Side cartoon with the owner yelling at the dog. The only thing the dog understands is one thing. The rest is just noise.
So Greenspan may be saying in effect "Intellectual property is important to protect, but we must balance that against the economic cost"
What congress hears is "Intelllectual property is important to protect, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah".
Unless that message is changed to "We need to rethink what we've done with the DMCA", the only message congress will hear is the supporters of strong DMCA type laws telling congress those laws are critical to the country's economic well being. And unless something changes, congress doesn't care if the RIAA throws 1,000 grandmothers in jail. They don't care, because it has no impact on the people giving them money, and people voting for them have yet to show they care.
I think things will have to get a lot worse before they'll get better.
In the end, this won't make a bit of difference in the U.S. until it costs corporations money.
2 003/20030404/default.htm/ greenspan-33.html
Look at patents. People knowledgable about patents and software have almost universally criticized software & business method patents, but the only reason congress and the patent office is starting to look at it is because its costing big corporations money.
You see, the trouble is, when you have people like Alan Greespan saying more copyrights and patents are vital to the U.S.'s economic growth, when congress perceives the entertainment industry as being the growth engine for the U.S. economy, then its tough for congress to vote against these kinds of laws.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/BoardDocs/Speeches/
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/march3
Until these same companies feel a pinch from the DMCA, it doesn't matter what the real impact of the law is, it's the message that's carried by the press, by the fed chairman, by the heads of industry such as Bill Gates that will determine the fate of the DMCA.
Microsoft used a PDF. I'll bet that must've burned to use a PDF instead of the more industry standard CHM or open-source implementation of the MS-Word file format.
In any event, if you read MS's response, they seem to disagree less with his conclusions than object to the way he reached them. In fact, I flipped through the entire document and didn't find any disagreement with the conclusions.
MS is too smart for me. In fact, I think MS is sometimes too smart for their own good. Maybe they should have just documented everything properly. That seems like less work than the amount of work they've put into complaining about the process.
"Verizon Wireless does. Just ask them nicely."
Does locking or unlocking do any good on Verizon Wireless? Their phones only work on their network.
Even if you overcame the technical hurdles, there are other problems... if I want to sell my DRM'd songs to someone else, in theory, this is easy. I'm un-authorized and the buyer is authorized. But in fact, the record companies don't do this and consider it a *feature* that I can't transfer ownership.
I frankly think they'd be better off with digital signatures of songs that didn't prevent any amount of copying. Because most people wouldn't be willing to put a song on the P2P network if it had their name and address embedded in the file. But again, one of the "features" of DRM is that it does limit my legitimate use and allows the record companies to control how and when I listen to my songs.
That's why DRM will never really work with the public at large. It makes something simple (listen to a CD, loan it to a friend, rip it to use on iPod) into something complicated with rules that never existed before.
"Don't count on anything coming out until you get the official press release. And don't be surprised that those movies are not released for a long time if HD-DVD acceptance is lukewarm or colder."
But if you're a movie studio, why not release on whatever platform anybody wants? It's not like Warner has to buy a pressing plant. What is the economic argument for not having lots of movies available in HDDVD, BlueRay, or whatever format somebody wants to sell?