I still drink coffee out of my decade+ old mug. Today, a picture: http://imgur.com/mecnS
Cheers, CmdrTaco. I spent many years reading, learning, debating, asking, and clicking on slashdot, though it's been a while since it was my "home" on the web. But it was that for a long time. Thanks for everything, thanks for giving nerds and geeks a place to come for new and links and online community. Best of luck wherever you go from here.
Re:Compromises like this won't work long-term.
on
RIAA to DoS Pirates?
·
· Score: 1
what you said is what i would have said if i knew anything about marketing or business models, or, well, just about anything. the analogy with the publishing industry is excellent - but don't forget how much crap you see walking down the SFF aisle:)
thanks. i was going to say that but i didn't know the past tense of 'stamp'. i was going to say 'pressed' but that didn't seem right either. also i probably got the past tense of 'burned' wrong as well.
what's funny is that they have been found in court (by they i mean the RIAA) as conspiring to artificially keep prices high, by basically forming groups (like the RIAA) and acting as a single monopolistic entity.
yet, like microsoft, that didn't change a thing. in fact, they probably raised prices the next day:)
I mean, the wide distribution of porn on the internet for reasonable prices sure hasn't make alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.* go away, now has it?
no, but how much money have porn websites made in the past year? TONS. and alt.* is mostly SPAM and other assorted crap. the porn sites offer much easier access to more and better stuff than alt.*, and they are making a killing.
maybe we should just stop buying music altogether.
that's the thing. i would hope most of us have already done that, and that is what scares the RIAA. we have better, cheaper, easier access to music than they are willing to provide us. and naturally we are choosing these better, cheaper, easier ways of getting to the music. and they have no idea how to battle with that. (cluestick: offer better, cheaper, easier ways of getting to the music, knuckleheads!).
Boycott the music industry.
I wish it were possible, but the companies involved in the RIAA have their fingers in so much, you might as well try to boycott public streets driving from NY to LA. electronics, food, transportation, television, etc, etc. The RIAA are getting money from just about everywhere, which is why they can afford to spend big bucks trying to screw their own customers.
the RIAA talks on and on about 'fighting piracy', etc, etc. they think the way to fight privacy is to break CD standards with 'security' measures, and issue DOS against users suspected in trafficking their 'property'.
my suggestion is that these two strategies have never worked, and will never work, so maybe, just MAYBE they should try something new, something that has a chance to work.
let me explain.
they should look at the reasons piracy exists and see what they can do about them. (1) CDs are too expensive, (2) CDs are usually one or two good songs mixed with a lot of crap, and (3) downloading a song is SOOO much easier than fighting traffic to and from some shopping mall or waiting 3-5 days for shipping.
(1) CDs are too expensive. LOWER THE PRICE OF CDs. Why does it cost 15 bucks for a burnt piece of plastic, which is debatably more valuable than a 50 cent blank piece of plastic? Bring the price down to 9.99 and a large chunk of piracy goes away.
(2) CDs are usually one or two good songs mixed with a lot of crap. I don't really know what to do about this one. How about stop manufacturing boy bands and nurture the real artists out there?
(3) downloading a song is SOOO much easier than fighting traffic to and from some shopping mall or waiting 3-5 days for shipping. Either build great new perfect highways between everyone's house and the mall, or build a store next to everyone's house, or perhaps (please) provide individual songs for download at a VERY reasonable price in a format i can use (a) on my computer, (b) in my RIO, (c) burned to a CD for my car.
Fix it, or watch your empires crumble. You can't fight piracy with technology.
TNN is no longer 'the nashville network'. they are trying to 'reinvent' themselves as 'the national network'. so instead of 'dukes of hazzard' they are showing 'star trek'.
all my files are ripped to ogg 192 kbits. the sound is excellent, and it takes about 60-65 MB per album, depending on number of songs and song length, etc. i listen on some fairly nice stereo headphones at work, and a medium-range stereo at home with a nice 'whoofer', and the sound is great.
check out the sites i linked to (if not/.ed). all kinds of technical specs, etc. also, you don't really 'flash' drives like this - you are probably thinking of CMOS or write-only images, etc. these are full-fledged read-write ide drives. i run bsd and linux servers on them. i suppose you could run any OS you wanted, as i said they are just IDE drives with flash memory inside instead of spinning magnetic platters.
i have been very pleased with my sandisk flashdrives. basically they are IDE-interface drives with flash memory instead of spinning platters. 0 ms seek time is nice, so is -silent- and -very very low power- storage. not to mention if you don't have to treat it like an egg.
the sandisk flashdrives have sizes from very small (4 MB) to big enough for your MP3s (2 GB). of course they get expensive at the high end:) best things about them are (1) can get them semi-cheap from ebay and (2) standard IDE interface.
PBS had a show last night which talked about the US recent military actions on behalf of muslims in kosovo and bosnia. remember those? the whole 'genetic cleansing' crap which was sweeping the eastern bloc and literally translated to 'kill all the muslims'. the US and the UN fought at great expense to stop the genocides of milosevic, etc, toward muslims.
Yet in the middle east, muslims cheer 'death to america' while burning down buildings.
that's right, there is no point to this post, just rambling in fear of ww3.
i won't bother posting the ASCII character list, but there are (AFAIK) 256 ASCII characters, with codes from 0-255 (00000000-11111111), meaning an 8-bit letter code (1 byte). in your sig you use #22825, #32, #19979, #32, #28961, #32, and #19978. since #32 is the space, this means you are using #22825, #19979, #28961, and #19978. not a single one of those is ASCII. those are UTF-8 character codes. UTF-8 is a variable length multibyte character encoding, suitable for storage and transmission of unicode (read: extended character sets beyond your usual illiterate barely-speaks-english-let-alone-another-language script kiddy).
half of the arguments for plain text come from people who communicate solely in ASCII (even a small subset of ASCII at that). heck, you can even use ASCII for german, spanish, etc, languages, and currency representations for yen, etc. it is when you start talking about arabic and chinese and japanese full character sets where ASCII makes no sense.
notice i didn't say 'only when' because as the internet is a global entity, one hopes we have moved beyond the notion that ASCII is sufficient for any but the most trivial tasks.
of course, UTF-8 has its problems, but it beats the heck out of ASCII if you want to try to have a meaningful discussion with someone from another country (esp. middle/far east) who either does not speak or read english, or has something to express for which ASCII cannot suffice.
you know, that's a good point. it's funny that we cry and bitch and moan because instead of letting us fight technology (CSS) with technology (DeCSS), the government passes a law.
here, because the end result is SPAM or annoying pop-ups, suddenly we start cheering, instead of demanding that we be allowed to police ourselves when it comes to technology? the great answer is corporations shouldn't have protection against technology, but our mail inboxes and browser windows should?
btw, it was the FTC, not the FCC (redundant, i know, i've seen it pointed out a few times already).
I'm still waiting for the RIAA and MPAA to go after the software and hardware makers next...
REUTERS - In a landmark case, Sony Corporation (SONY) won a USD $50M lawsuit against Sony Corporation (SONY) for violations of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
The lawsuit accused SONY of producing hardward and software, including but not limited to CD-ROM, Hi Fidelity car and home stereo equipment, and DVD players capable of being used to play standard CDs, thus allowing hackers to rob SONY of billions in CD sales by buying their CDs and then playing them in their computers or car stereos.
"Those stupid bastards," said Sony VP of CD-ROM and HiFi Audio equiment John Smith. "What were they thinking?"
"This will teach hardware and software makers that they will be held responsible if their products are being used illegally," said Sony VP of Music and Movies Fred Barber. "This sends a clear message: break your hardware before shipping or we're gonna get you. If you ship a functional product, you're going to pay!"
i think dmitri would tell you that this is not a US only problem. ask the boy who was arrested in Europe for his part with the DVD decryption debacle if US corporations can't screw up your life if they feel like it, no matter where you are.
the article claims that the software is for the 99 percent of the customers which aren't 'hackers'. i would guess that more than 1 percent of the customers would try to pay the CD in a CD-ROM or DVD, etc. although it's hard for me to think about such things, as almost everyone i know has a computer.
but, having said that, even my parents use their computer to play CDs now. my wife's grandparents use their computer to play CDs. these are not 'hackers'.
perhaps if the BSD people had used the GPL apple would either (1) have much of OS X under the GPL or (2) be dead for not using the BSD people's work out of fear of 'infection'.
but i guess that's why we have BSD v. GPL flamewars.
i think you're right, but that doesn't stop a lot of these companies from TRYING to use websites to make money. eventually those who don't get it will either learn or go away.
Slashdot Mirror
I still drink coffee out of my decade+ old mug. Today, a picture: http://imgur.com/mecnS
Cheers, CmdrTaco. I spent many years reading, learning, debating, asking, and clicking on slashdot, though it's been a while since it was my "home" on the web. But it was that for a long time. Thanks for everything, thanks for giving nerds and geeks a place to come for new and links and online community. Best of luck wherever you go from here.
what you said is what i would have said if i knew anything about marketing or business models, or, well, just about anything. the analogy with the publishing industry is excellent - but don't forget how much crap you see walking down the SFF aisle :)
thanks. i was going to say that but i didn't know the past tense of 'stamp'. i was going to say 'pressed' but that didn't seem right either. also i probably got the past tense of 'burned' wrong as well.
what's funny is that they have been found in court (by they i mean the RIAA) as conspiring to artificially keep prices high, by basically forming groups (like the RIAA) and acting as a single monopolistic entity.
:)
yet, like microsoft, that didn't change a thing. in fact, they probably raised prices the next day
-sam
no, but how much money have porn websites made in the past year? TONS. and alt.* is mostly SPAM and other assorted crap. the porn sites offer much easier access to more and better stuff than alt.*, and they are making a killing.
where exactly did i say i was stealing anything?
-samthat's the thing. i would hope most of us have already done that, and that is what scares the RIAA. we have better, cheaper, easier access to music than they are willing to provide us. and naturally we are choosing these better, cheaper, easier ways of getting to the music. and they have no idea how to battle with that. (cluestick: offer better, cheaper, easier ways of getting to the music, knuckleheads!).
I wish it were possible, but the companies involved in the RIAA have their fingers in so much, you might as well try to boycott public streets driving from NY to LA. electronics, food, transportation, television, etc, etc. The RIAA are getting money from just about everywhere, which is why they can afford to spend big bucks trying to screw their own customers.
-samthe RIAA talks on and on about 'fighting piracy', etc, etc. they think the way to fight privacy is to break CD standards with 'security' measures, and issue DOS against users suspected in trafficking their 'property'.
my suggestion is that these two strategies have never worked, and will never work, so maybe, just MAYBE they should try something new, something that has a chance to work.
let me explain.
they should look at the reasons piracy exists and see what they can do about them. (1) CDs are too expensive, (2) CDs are usually one or two good songs mixed with a lot of crap, and (3) downloading a song is SOOO much easier than fighting traffic to and from some shopping mall or waiting 3-5 days for shipping.
(1) CDs are too expensive. LOWER THE PRICE OF CDs. Why does it cost 15 bucks for a burnt piece of plastic, which is debatably more valuable than a 50 cent blank piece of plastic? Bring the price down to 9.99 and a large chunk of piracy goes away.
(2) CDs are usually one or two good songs mixed with a lot of crap. I don't really know what to do about this one. How about stop manufacturing boy bands and nurture the real artists out there?
(3) downloading a song is SOOO much easier than fighting traffic to and from some shopping mall or waiting 3-5 days for shipping. Either build great new perfect highways between everyone's house and the mall, or build a store next to everyone's house, or perhaps (please) provide individual songs for download at a VERY reasonable price in a format i can use (a) on my computer, (b) in my RIO, (c) burned to a CD for my car.
Fix it, or watch your empires crumble. You can't fight piracy with technology.
TNN is no longer 'the nashville network'. they are trying to 'reinvent' themselves as 'the national network'. so instead of 'dukes of hazzard' they are showing 'star trek'.
-sam
all my files are ripped to ogg 192 kbits. the sound is excellent, and it takes about 60-65 MB per album, depending on number of songs and song length, etc. i listen on some fairly nice stereo headphones at work, and a medium-range stereo at home with a nice 'whoofer', and the sound is great.
-sam
check out the sites i linked to (if not /.ed). all kinds of technical specs, etc. also, you don't really 'flash' drives like this - you are probably thinking of CMOS or write-only images, etc. these are full-fledged read-write ide drives. i run bsd and linux servers on them. i suppose you could run any OS you wanted, as i said they are just IDE drives with flash memory inside instead of spinning magnetic platters.
i have been very pleased with my sandisk flashdrives. basically they are IDE-interface drives with flash memory instead of spinning platters. 0 ms seek time is nice, so is -silent- and -very very low power- storage. not to mention if you don't have to treat it like an egg.
i've used both the flashdrive from sandisk, and the IDE flash drives from simpletech.
the sandisk flashdrives have sizes from very small (4 MB) to big enough for your MP3s (2 GB). of course they get expensive at the high end :) best things about them are (1) can get them semi-cheap from ebay and (2) standard IDE interface.
-samspeaking of Bosnia, but from a different angle...
PBS had a show last night which talked about the US recent military actions on behalf of muslims in kosovo and bosnia. remember those? the whole 'genetic cleansing' crap which was sweeping the eastern bloc and literally translated to 'kill all the muslims'. the US and the UN fought at great expense to stop the genocides of milosevic, etc, toward muslims.
Yet in the middle east, muslims cheer 'death to america' while burning down buildings.
that's right, there is no point to this post, just rambling in fear of ww3.
-sam
i won't bother posting the ASCII character list, but there are (AFAIK) 256 ASCII characters, with codes from 0-255 (00000000-11111111), meaning an 8-bit letter code (1 byte). in your sig you use #22825, #32, #19979, #32, #28961, #32, and #19978. since #32 is the space, this means you are using #22825, #19979, #28961, and #19978. not a single one of those is ASCII. those are UTF-8 character codes. UTF-8 is a variable length multibyte character encoding, suitable for storage and transmission of unicode (read: extended character sets beyond your usual illiterate barely-speaks-english-let-alone-another-language script kiddy).
half of the arguments for plain text come from people who communicate solely in ASCII (even a small subset of ASCII at that). heck, you can even use ASCII for german, spanish, etc, languages, and currency representations for yen, etc. it is when you start talking about arabic and chinese and japanese full character sets where ASCII makes no sense.
notice i didn't say 'only when' because as the internet is a global entity, one hopes we have moved beyond the notion that ASCII is sufficient for any but the most trivial tasks.
of course, UTF-8 has its problems, but it beats the heck out of ASCII if you want to try to have a meaningful discussion with someone from another country (esp. middle/far east) who either does not speak or read english, or has something to express for which ASCII cannot suffice.
-sam
because then Joe Bob, COO, has to remember 5 different password instead of having to remember to bring his fingers along with him to each meeting.
-sam
you know, that's a good point. it's funny that we cry and bitch and moan because instead of letting us fight technology (CSS) with technology (DeCSS), the government passes a law.
here, because the end result is SPAM or annoying pop-ups, suddenly we start cheering, instead of demanding that we be allowed to police ourselves when it comes to technology? the great answer is corporations shouldn't have protection against technology, but our mail inboxes and browser windows should?
btw, it was the FTC, not the FCC (redundant, i know, i've seen it pointed out a few times already).
-sam
i doubt my wife will be figuring out how to read the firewall logs any time soon.
not that she's incapable, but as far as she cares, the server room is 'the place where if i go in, the internet stops working!'.
-sam
would people build giant walls around their huts if there were no predators or warring tribes nearby?
the reason people build walls is to keep undesirable things OUT, and/or keep desirable things IN which they are afraid will go OUT.
so if there was no fear of people taking value OUT, the companies would not be spending millions trying to build walls to keep those things IN.
-sam
1. you have the right to not buy any CD recorded by an artist you think sucks.
2. you have the right to not buy any CD sold by a company you think sucks.
-sam
REUTERS - In a landmark case, Sony Corporation (SONY) won a USD $50M lawsuit against Sony Corporation (SONY) for violations of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
The lawsuit accused SONY of producing hardward and software, including but not limited to CD-ROM, Hi Fidelity car and home stereo equipment, and DVD players capable of being used to play standard CDs, thus allowing hackers to rob SONY of billions in CD sales by buying their CDs and then playing them in their computers or car stereos.
"Those stupid bastards," said Sony VP of CD-ROM and HiFi Audio equiment John Smith. "What were they thinking?"
"This will teach hardware and software makers that they will be held responsible if their products are being used illegally," said Sony VP of Music and Movies Fred Barber. "This sends a clear message: break your hardware before shipping or we're gonna get you. If you ship a functional product, you're going to pay!"
-sami think dmitri would tell you that this is not a US only problem. ask the boy who was arrested in Europe for his part with the DVD decryption debacle if US corporations can't screw up your life if they feel like it, no matter where you are.
-samthe article claims that the software is for the 99 percent of the customers which aren't 'hackers'. i would guess that more than 1 percent of the customers would try to pay the CD in a CD-ROM or DVD, etc. although it's hard for me to think about such things, as almost everyone i know has a computer.
but, having said that, even my parents use their computer to play CDs now. my wife's grandparents use their computer to play CDs. these are not 'hackers'.
-sam
or whatever color it is. they fought and won a court order which says that their distinctive color cannot be used in any other soda brand.
perhaps if the BSD people had used the GPL apple would either (1) have much of OS X under the GPL or (2) be dead for not using the BSD people's work out of fear of 'infection'.
but i guess that's why we have BSD v. GPL flamewars.
-sam
i think you're right, but that doesn't stop a lot of these companies from TRYING to use websites to make money. eventually those who don't get it will either learn or go away.
-sam