"No, ISA was under a government-mandated Reasonable And Non-Discrimatory hardware license program which dated from the minicomputer wars of the 1970s."
I'll just disagree in a friendly way with you.
When MCA came out it was covered with dozens of patents and it had to be licensed. However, a condition of licensing was that you had to agree to pay back royalties on ISA on every PC you ever shipped. I recall that for the most part, IBM was simply looking for other companies to acknowledge that ISA was owned by IBM and didn't in fact look for back royalties.
As a result, nobody licensed MCA with two exceptions... one was Tandy, the other one escapes my mind at the moment.
In fact Wikipedia seems to agree with me (for what it's worth):
"A final problem was that IBM had lost control of the hardware market for PCs. Anyone could create an ISA card and plug it into any ISA bus-equiped computer. While it was thought that by creating a new standard, IBM would regain control via the required licencing. As patents can take 3 years or more, only those relating to ISA could be licensed when MCA announced. Patents on important Micro Channel features, such as Plug and Play automatic configuration, were not granted to IBM until after PCI had replaced MCA in the marketplace."
"Lots of high end warble and other compression artifacts."
Listen to anything with a solo saxophone on Sirius. Whatever they do to it makes it sound like an old cassette deck with tons of wow and flutter. Something about the alto sax that is just the bane of the compression they use.
The only thing that makes it worth it is that between the FCC and corporate radio, they've almost completely killed any semblance of interesting radio out there. Satellite radio for all its bad sound at least has something worth listening to.
I don't have a problem with authors and musicians making a living on their works, but I don't see where copyright was meant to be an annuity down through the generations.
At best, copyright was meant to give a person enough to encourage them to be more creative because it allows them the means to live and work as a creative person. We all benefit.
But what benefit is there to society that Elvis's daughter makes money from his songs? I don't mean that in the socialist sense, I simply mean that copyright is not a natural law. Its a device of law that people decided society was better off giving authors a limited monopoly to prevent unauthorized copying. Therefore, you can't make the argument that there is somehow a natural law that establishes ownership of a creative work for all time.
Neither Sirius nor XM broadcast in anything approaching CD quality. At best, some of the stations are broadcast in what is equal to 128kb/s mp3 or aac. Most channels are roughly FM quality.
Second, the fact that this is broadcast digitally is irrelevant; there is no access to the digital stream, so by the time you can record the music, it's already analog. Therefore, this is really nothing more than recording radio.
Can you make digital copies of this analog stream (re-read my last paragraph)? Yes. But then, you can do that with FM radio as well.
Let's be clear about this. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANALOG AND SATELLITE RADIO EXCEPT THAT FOR NOW THE MUSIC CHANNELS DON'T HAVE COMMERCIALS.
The RIAA appears to be using the words "digital" in a way to evoke fear of piracy. It's so transparent that you'd have to be really naive to believe anything about the RIAA's position.
"But either way there is less demand for the dollar, so gold goes up."
Actually, there isn't a link between the two. But don't take my word for it; look into periods when the dollar has declined. Like, well, now. Do a graph of gold prices over time normalized for inflation before you invest.
"Also, gold was $35/oz in 1970 - so who says it didn't take off"
It was fixed by the government at $35/oz, and as I recall, it was illegal for americans to own gold bullion before this time, so keep that in mind when cmoparing. Incidentally, people would buy krugerands at the time if they wanted to invest in gold.
"because the US economy/dollar is in serious troubble and the price of precious metals is going to completely explode"
I'll make two comments on this, since this is in the realm of predictions:
1) You've made several predictions in one sentence, and once doesn't follow from the other. The U.S. economy may be in trouble. But that doesn't mean the dollar will change significantly. However, even if the U.S. economy does poorly, and the dollar tanks, that may not have significant impact on gold/silver/platinum prices.
2) People have been making this prediction about precious metals pretty much forever (and usually they're precious metal speculators). Or as long as there has been an "economy". It hasn't happened yet. In fact, I can't think of a time in the last 200 years when this kind of prediction has been true on any kind of widespread basis. During Reagan's first term, this same predicion was widespread because Reagan used massive deficit, government spending as a way to stimulate the economy. Nixon and Johnson used inflation as a way of paying for the Vietname war. In neither case did gold rise significantly in price adjusted via the dollar.
Now, you may be right, but what you're really predicting is that the economy falls apart, businesses will all fail, and there won't be any way to purchase goods and services because those businesses will have all failed. If that's the case, don't buy precious metals, but goods and store them. Do you think people who lived in New Orleans during the flood would rather have 2 pounds of gold or a decent generator and a couple hundred gallons of gas? How about a few hundred pounds of rice?
Or, if you're worried about massive inflation, get a mortgage on a house. If inflation runs wild, you'll pay for your house inflated dollars, and you'll essentially get your house for free. Of course, see my previous advice. I'd buy a gun as well, because looters will probably be stealing and burning everything in sight.
P.S. your mention of factor #2 "the dollar survived the inflation of the 80's becuase there wasn't a lot of debt" is utter nonsense. Reagan ran up the deficit and federal debt massively to attempt to jump start the economy. That's because the interest rates in the late 70's reached 16% as the fed tried to use high interest as a way of reigning in inflation. We had inflation because Nixon in the late 60's and early 70's printed a lot of money to pay for the Vietnam war. So I'd say we've been through pretty tough times in the late 70's and early 80's and gold never really took off.
I know they have that now, but they didn't at the time.
Worse, I don't trust Symantec to really remove their software. Why doesn't uninstall remove the software? Why do I need to uninstall then run "really uninstall" to really uninstall it?
I remember a couple years ago when I still bought and used Norton/Symantec anti-virus; it kept claiming my subscription ran out and wouldn't update the definitions. So I uninstalled and reinstalled. Same problem. After doing some searching, I realized it had installed itself all over the registry and wouldn't get out. It took a good 2 hours of hand-editing to remove all traces of Symantec from my registry.
So much for "uninstall".
Which is why I never use their stuff anymore. Truth be told, I don't think they've done anything good since. Well. Since Peter Norton still loosened his tie and programmed for a living.
I can't think of any software of theirs that I would consider putting on a system, so I can't say I'm surprised by stuff like this.
"Disbelieve whatever the President says and believe whatever his enemies say"
That's the trouble when you lie sometimes. Not only do people disbelieve you all the time, they start believing your enemies. Which is why its a bad idea to lie in the long run.
"Seriously, the people doing this study actually think that your typical driver facing a panic situation somehow had the foresight to remember some verbal instruction back from a high school driver's ed class about "Cadence Breaking" before ABS was a standard feature?"
The only reason this stuff was taught in driver's ed class was because the teacher was the baseball coach who learned from his father back in the 20's about "cadence braking". It's a bad idea; you need to understand how to properly modulate the brakes right to the point of wheel lock...
Which explains a truism about driving... it can't be taught, it can only be learned (for the most part). If you don't really care about driving; its simply a way to get from point A to point B, you'll never be any good at it because you won't care to learn the best way to steer, brake and accelerate.
To use an analogy that most slashdot readers can relate to... most people buy a PC aren't terribly aware of how it works and don't have much idea what to do when it doesn't work as expected. Driving is pretty much the same way.
"I'm one of those people that doesn't have too much trouble with the Patriot act's purpose and typical use"
I have a problem in that it was sold to the congress as a way of fighting terrorism, but in fact is used as an excuse to do warrentless wiretaps domestically without judicial oversight.
In fact, as it turns out, the "Patriot" act has nothing to do with terrorism.
I have a problem with any law that mentions that you can be subject to investigation *and not be allowed tell anyone about it*. It flies directly in the face of a founding principle of this country, which is the right to face your accuser in a public forum.
All the government has to do is say "terrorism" and everybody falls all over themselves to give up hard fought civil rights.
"So are you suggesting no change at all, or are you suggesting we get rid of the patent system altogether?"
Isn't this a false choice? I mean, the solution isn't limited to: (a) do nothing (b) get rid of patents.
It could be something as simple as:
Roll patent laws back to about 1960. Software is not patentable, regardless of the medium that it's fixed in. Business methods are not patentable, regardless of the medium that it's used or fixed in.
I think that solves the problem nicely. And if I've missed something, I'll add another sentence or two.
I'm not sure gold is that needed is it? What process in the world requires gold and can't use a substitute? I know its a good conductor, but so it copper. I knows its very maleable, but I don't think there's an application for gold that can't be done by something else (in an industrial sense).
Its main value seems to come from the fact that everybody thinks its valuable for jewelry. So its valuable because people think its valuable.
My issue with the gold-bug people is that they all seem to predict emminent collapse of the dollar as long as I've been alive (which is more than 40 years), and yet gold has never risen particularly, even when the dollar was doing poorly. In fact most precious metals seem to be a bad investment; even when silver rose in the late 70's, it was mainly due to manipulation by the Hunt brothers.
I think you buy gold if you find it pretty. Otherwise, buy land or a house in a fast appreciating market... if hyperinflation takes place, you're covered, and better still, the mortgage you have will be worth less while the value of the investment rises.
I'm waiting for a couple of big-name artists to realize if they sold their albums in mp3 format for $3-4 a pop directly to their customers, they'd have more money than they know what to do with.
Once there is one successful musician, the dam will break.
Well, I can't actually use those backups because I understand all the consoles reject non-original disks. So I can backup all I want; I just can't use those backups for any purpose.
"Try watching something filmed in the 30's on TCM"
I think the difference was that entertainment used to be geared towards adults because kids (i.e. under 18) had no money. So your audience was people who worked and had some money to spend on entertainment. Today, I think most films are geared towards an under-30 crowd which has a big impact on film-making. For example, a movie this past fall "Domino" was virtually unwatchable because of the handheld camera thing (I thought that went away when MTV stopped showing videos?), but younger people said they liked it, so perhaps its generational.
I know another poster in response thinks that anything before about 1980 was poorly acted and that Humphrey Bogart was "experiementing" (which is funny, really), but I'm reminded of looking through some book reviews over at Amazon of some classic science fiction (i.e. Dune, The Foundation trilogy, etc), and most of the younger readers just hate the stuff. They view it the way I probably view reading Jules Vernes... done under protest.
Slashdot Mirror
"Also, that Wikipedia article is rather incoherent in tone, so I wouldn't take anything in there as factual proof of anything."
Fair enough, and that's why I was recalling more on my readings at the time.
I have all the Byte's on CD ROM around here...I should probably dig them out. If I get ambitious I'll look through them.
"No, ISA was under a government-mandated Reasonable And Non-Discrimatory hardware license program which dated from the minicomputer wars of the 1970s."
e cture (Marketshare Issues):
I'll just disagree in a friendly way with you.
When MCA came out it was covered with dozens of patents and it had to be licensed. However, a condition of licensing was that you had to agree to pay back royalties on ISA on every PC you ever shipped. I recall that for the most part, IBM was simply looking for other companies to acknowledge that ISA was owned by IBM and didn't in fact look for back royalties.
As a result, nobody licensed MCA with two exceptions... one was Tandy, the other one escapes my mind at the moment.
In fact Wikipedia seems to agree with me (for what it's worth):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_archit
"A final problem was that IBM had lost control of the hardware market for PCs. Anyone could create an ISA card and plug it into any ISA bus-equiped computer. While it was thought that by creating a new standard, IBM would regain control via the required licencing. As patents can take 3 years or more, only those relating to ISA could be licensed when MCA announced. Patents on important Micro Channel features, such as Plug and Play automatic configuration, were not granted to IBM until after PCI had replaced MCA in the marketplace."
"Lots of high end warble and other compression artifacts."
Listen to anything with a solo saxophone on Sirius. Whatever they do to it makes it sound like an old cassette deck with tons of wow and flutter. Something about the alto sax that is just the bane of the compression they use.
The only thing that makes it worth it is that between the FCC and corporate radio, they've almost completely killed any semblance of interesting radio out there. Satellite radio for all its bad sound at least has something worth listening to.
"our livelihood and our families' annuity. "
But it's not.
I don't have a problem with authors and musicians making a living on their works, but I don't see where copyright was meant to be an annuity down through the generations.
At best, copyright was meant to give a person enough to encourage them to be more creative because it allows them the means to live and work as a creative person. We all benefit.
But what benefit is there to society that Elvis's daughter makes money from his songs? I don't mean that in the socialist sense, I simply mean that copyright is not a natural law. Its a device of law that people decided society was better off giving authors a limited monopoly to prevent unauthorized copying. Therefore, you can't make the argument that there is somehow a natural law that establishes ownership of a creative work for all time.
First of all, and this is important:
Neither Sirius nor XM broadcast in anything approaching CD quality. At best, some of the stations are broadcast in what is equal to 128kb/s mp3 or aac. Most channels are roughly FM quality.
Second, the fact that this is broadcast digitally is irrelevant; there is no access to the digital stream, so by the time you can record the music, it's already analog. Therefore, this is really nothing more than recording radio.
Can you make digital copies of this analog stream (re-read my last paragraph)? Yes. But then, you can do that with FM radio as well.
Let's be clear about this. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANALOG AND SATELLITE RADIO EXCEPT THAT FOR NOW THE MUSIC CHANNELS DON'T HAVE COMMERCIALS.
The RIAA appears to be using the words "digital" in a way to evoke fear of piracy. It's so transparent that you'd have to be really naive to believe anything about the RIAA's position.
"But either way there is less demand for the dollar, so gold goes up."
x ?type=ousiv&storyID=2006-01-12T193135Z_01_SCH27030 3_RTRIDST_0_BUSINESSPRO-MARKETS-GOLD-DOLLAR-DC.XML
t
Actually, there isn't a link between the two. But don't take my word for it; look into periods when the dollar has declined. Like, well, now. Do a graph of gold prices over time normalized for inflation before you invest.
Also, take a look here:
http://today.reuters.com/business/newsArticle.asp
"Also, gold was $35/oz in 1970 - so who says it didn't take off"
It was fixed by the government at $35/oz, and as I recall, it was illegal for americans to own gold bullion before this time, so keep that in mind when cmoparing. Incidentally, people would buy krugerands at the time if they wanted to invest in gold.
Its also worth reading this wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investmen
"because the US economy/dollar is in serious troubble and the price of precious metals is going to completely explode"
I'll make two comments on this, since this is in the realm of predictions:
1) You've made several predictions in one sentence, and once doesn't follow from the other. The U.S. economy may be in trouble. But that doesn't mean the dollar will change significantly. However, even if the U.S. economy does poorly, and the dollar tanks, that may not have significant impact on gold/silver/platinum prices.
2) People have been making this prediction about precious metals pretty much forever (and usually they're precious metal speculators). Or as long as there has been an "economy". It hasn't happened yet. In fact, I can't think of a time in the last 200 years when this kind of prediction has been true on any kind of widespread basis. During Reagan's first term, this same predicion was widespread because Reagan used massive deficit, government spending as a way to stimulate the economy. Nixon and Johnson used inflation as a way of paying for the Vietname war. In neither case did gold rise significantly in price adjusted via the dollar.
Now, you may be right, but what you're really predicting is that the economy falls apart, businesses will all fail, and there won't be any way to purchase goods and services because those businesses will have all failed. If that's the case, don't buy precious metals, but goods and store them. Do you think people who lived in New Orleans during the flood would rather have 2 pounds of gold or a decent generator and a couple hundred gallons of gas? How about a few hundred pounds of rice?
Or, if you're worried about massive inflation, get a mortgage on a house. If inflation runs wild, you'll pay for your house inflated dollars, and you'll essentially get your house for free. Of course, see my previous advice. I'd buy a gun as well, because looters will probably be stealing and burning everything in sight.
P.S. your mention of factor #2 "the dollar survived the inflation of the 80's becuase there wasn't a lot of debt" is utter nonsense. Reagan ran up the deficit and federal debt massively to attempt to jump start the economy. That's because the interest rates in the late 70's reached 16% as the fed tried to use high interest as a way of reigning in inflation. We had inflation because Nixon in the late 60's and early 70's printed a lot of money to pay for the Vietnam war. So I'd say we've been through pretty tough times in the late 70's and early 80's and gold never really took off.
I know they have that now, but they didn't at the time.
Worse, I don't trust Symantec to really remove their software. Why doesn't uninstall remove the software? Why do I need to uninstall then run "really uninstall" to really uninstall it?
The alternative, of course is to:
JUST HAVE NORTON UNINSTALL LIKE A REGULAR PROGRAM!!!!
Just what is Symantec hiding that they won't let you just get rid of their stuff when you uninstall?
I remember a couple years ago when I still bought and used Norton/Symantec anti-virus; it kept claiming my subscription ran out and wouldn't update the definitions. So I uninstalled and reinstalled. Same problem. After doing some searching, I realized it had installed itself all over the registry and wouldn't get out. It took a good 2 hours of hand-editing to remove all traces of Symantec from my registry.
So much for "uninstall".
Which is why I never use their stuff anymore. Truth be told, I don't think they've done anything good since. Well. Since Peter Norton still loosened his tie and programmed for a living.
I can't think of any software of theirs that I would consider putting on a system, so I can't say I'm surprised by stuff like this.
"Disbelieve whatever the President says and believe whatever his enemies say"
That's the trouble when you lie sometimes. Not only do people disbelieve you all the time, they start believing your enemies. Which is why its a bad idea to lie in the long run.
"Seriously, the people doing this study actually think that your typical driver facing a panic situation somehow had the foresight to remember some verbal instruction back from a high school driver's ed class about "Cadence Breaking" before ABS was a standard feature?"
The only reason this stuff was taught in driver's ed class was because the teacher was the baseball coach who learned from his father back in the 20's about "cadence braking". It's a bad idea; you need to understand how to properly modulate the brakes right to the point of wheel lock...
Which explains a truism about driving... it can't be taught, it can only be learned (for the most part). If you don't really care about driving; its simply a way to get from point A to point B, you'll never be any good at it because you won't care to learn the best way to steer, brake and accelerate.
To use an analogy that most slashdot readers can relate to... most people buy a PC aren't terribly aware of how it works and don't have much idea what to do when it doesn't work as expected. Driving is pretty much the same way.
"you are also being payed to work..."
Not at home after work.
"I'm one of those people that doesn't have too much trouble with the Patriot act's purpose and typical use"
I have a problem in that it was sold to the congress as a way of fighting terrorism, but in fact is used as an excuse to do warrentless wiretaps domestically without judicial oversight.
In fact, as it turns out, the "Patriot" act has nothing to do with terrorism.
I have a problem with any law that mentions that you can be subject to investigation *and not be allowed tell anyone about it*. It flies directly in the face of a founding principle of this country, which is the right to face your accuser in a public forum.
All the government has to do is say "terrorism" and everybody falls all over themselves to give up hard fought civil rights.
"When your boss tells you to shut up and get back to work, is he infringing your right of free expression?"
He is if he calls me at home after work.
What car sold today only weighs 1600 pounds?
I suggest adding another 1000 pounds for a more realistic view of today's cars. They're gotten a lot heavier in the past 10-15 years.
"But they're cool, I admit."
What makes them so cool?
"So are you suggesting no change at all, or are you suggesting we get rid of the patent system altogether?"
Isn't this a false choice? I mean, the solution isn't limited to: (a) do nothing (b) get rid of patents.
It could be something as simple as:
Roll patent laws back to about 1960. Software is not patentable, regardless of the medium that it's fixed in. Business methods are not patentable, regardless of the medium that it's used or fixed in.
I think that solves the problem nicely. And if I've missed something, I'll add another sentence or two.
"as a much-needy industrial metal,"
I'm not sure gold is that needed is it? What process in the world requires gold and can't use a substitute? I know its a good conductor, but so it copper. I knows its very maleable, but I don't think there's an application for gold that can't be done by something else (in an industrial sense).
Its main value seems to come from the fact that everybody thinks its valuable for jewelry. So its valuable because people think its valuable.
My issue with the gold-bug people is that they all seem to predict emminent collapse of the dollar as long as I've been alive (which is more than 40 years), and yet gold has never risen particularly, even when the dollar was doing poorly. In fact most precious metals seem to be a bad investment; even when silver rose in the late 70's, it was mainly due to manipulation by the Hunt brothers.
I think you buy gold if you find it pretty. Otherwise, buy land or a house in a fast appreciating market... if hyperinflation takes place, you're covered, and better still, the mortgage you have will be worth less while the value of the investment rises.
Perhaps. But all I see on the site is him selling his CD's for $18; I don't see him selling mp3's for a few cents.
I'm waiting for a couple of big-name artists to realize if they sold their albums in mp3 format for $3-4 a pop directly to their customers, they'd have more money than they know what to do with.
Once there is one successful musician, the dam will break.
"VHS wasn't DRM'd"
Hello? McFly? A call from Mr. Macrovision for you...
Well, I can't actually use those backups because I understand all the consoles reject non-original disks. So I can backup all I want; I just can't use those backups for any purpose.
Is that they've got to convince people to switch.
As sony has found out, asking people to give up a non-DRM format for something with DRM is a tough sell (as in SACD replacing Audio CD).
"Try watching something filmed in the 30's on TCM"
I think the difference was that entertainment used to be geared towards adults because kids (i.e. under 18) had no money. So your audience was people who worked and had some money to spend on entertainment. Today, I think most films are geared towards an under-30 crowd which has a big impact on film-making. For example, a movie this past fall "Domino" was virtually unwatchable because of the handheld camera thing (I thought that went away when MTV stopped showing videos?), but younger people said they liked it, so perhaps its generational.
I know another poster in response thinks that anything before about 1980 was poorly acted and that Humphrey Bogart was "experiementing" (which is funny, really), but I'm reminded of looking through some book reviews over at Amazon of some classic science fiction (i.e. Dune, The Foundation trilogy, etc), and most of the younger readers just hate the stuff. They view it the way I probably view reading Jules Vernes... done under protest.
Oh well!