Chances are, this guy just chose the wrong party to blog for. The Bush administration has been "for us or against" us for a long time. There's good reason the phrases "war on science" and "war on integrity" are common. It's easy to make fun when it's not you that has to go 180 days without pay. Think about it for a while and you might come to more reasonable options, like a warning.
This is bigger than YouTube and that's what Google is talking about when they mention the DMCA safe harbor.
YouTube is just one site but it's already bigger than Viacom will ever be. The world should be filled with sites like YouTube and nicer. I'd like to see YouTube embrace Ogg Theora format and make it easier to download videos. YouTube might not do that but a competitor may. A free internet looks more like that than it looks like NBC or Viacom.
Most people think DRM is a bit much for entertainment. Scrambled movies? Taking away people's life savings and houses over pop music? It's all nuts but it's big business to a handfull of companies and their owners.
The same logic can and is being applied to other publications on the web. Imagine newspapers and magazines published with DRM for subscribers. BBC has started down that path as did the Society of Automotive Engineers. MIT told SAE where to stick their DRM and SAE backed down but others will try. The future of publication is far from decided.
It's about money and control. M$ loves it because clients will only work on non free platforms, so competition can be locked out forever. This is what Vista's extensive DRM and Silverlight are all about and why Mono will never really work. Big publishers want pay per play and control of information. Of the two, they think control is more valuable because it channels people away from competitors. They can't eliminate alternate sources of news and entertainment without help from companies like M$, but M$ is only too eager to help.
We are really at a critical point. Society can reject digital restrictions now. The failure of Vista is a good sign but the increased popularity of Apple is a bad one. No one should have the kind of media control non free software creates. Hardware vendor's embrace of free software encouraging because it shows they don't want to be dominated by software makers. Business is starting to realize that DRM will concentrate power too effectively for their own good. People hate it because they hate pay per play and restricted media.
That's an interesting idea, anytime money changes hands in a copy it can be taxed. Advertisers can be taxed a portion of their revenue and sales taxes can be levied on any kind of sale.
The problem then is making sure it goes to the creator. Sound Exchange is an example of how not to do this because it's more like the monopoly given to a private interest that you worry about. Sales taxes are typically used for infrastructure and that might not be a bad way to spend what the RIAA has been squandering on payolla, whores and coke. Creators have a better chance of getting paid by a state office than they do now.
Bankers have been saved without relief for debtors (another source). It's a good idea to prevent a general collapse because we use a fiat currency but leaving thousands of people ruined won't do enough. Trickle down has made a lot of executives very rich while leveling US manufacturing and consolidating all other commerce. The people responsible for the predatory lending crisis deserve to be treated like criminals. Many of the debtors are the victims of some very shady deals, which include intentionally inflating the value of property in cooperation with lenders. There's a lot of scandal here from top to bottom.
Those of you who think you can make a buck off a police state would do well to remember learn the fate of Fritz Thyssen. He was an industrialist and early supporter of Adolf Hitler, in part financed by Prescott Bush. He made plenty of money re arming Germany and he approved of racial purity laws. By the time he realized the Nazis believed all of the crazy things they said, it was too late for him to do anything about it. He was thrown into a concentration camp and was lucky to survive the wars he did not approve of. If you don't think the Neocons are just as crazy as the Nazis you have not been listening to them long enough.
A confession by a man who's quitting is usually reliable. When someone at PC Magazine says he's sorry for hyping Vista and that it really sucks, you know that Vista really sucks for a lot of people.
His figures may be correct. Slow sales are the only way to explain M$'s drop in proffit when it's so hard to buy anything but an expensive version of Vista so you can "downgrade" to XP like a lot of people do. Just a while back, he was crowing about how people were buying nothing but the expensive versions of Vista.
The hardware has become a lot cheaper for vendors to be making money. You can make money selling laptops for $700 when they cost you less than $100 to make. Shelves are packed with $350 laptops right now, which implies a cost to the retailer of $175 or massive losses. There should be a lot more sales than there are for that kind of thing to happen.
So to me the 45% of computers sold to business claim sounds really strange anyhow you look at it.
That seems to be the issue this thread is all about. It's amazing how quickly that post was knocked down to -1. Everyone else says Ballmer is full of beans too.
Who's this message directed at? The last people he's going to fool are corporate users. Home users continue to avoid buying new computers because what they have is working just fine. Even if he could convince them to go buy, they have a giant selection of $500 and less Vista failure laptops to chose from if they don't just buy a $300 EEE PC with GNU/Linux.
Indymedia has a good article about this. The protester, ironically, was objecting to "Fair Play", which is essentially harassment of any and all perceived foes. The citation identifies him and now he faces the same retaliation he objected to.
Next time buy a $40 card that works. You only defeat yourself when you give money to a card maker that is not playing nice. I'm glad people write software for nasty hardware but I'm not about to waste months waiting for it. There are too many good cards and too little time to fool with the bad ones.
when you can have Konqueror, which is the real deal anyway?
Apple's big selling point is it's software but that will go away when vendors embrace free software. Vista is making a lot of crispy critters and that won't last much longer. People are willing to pay for software that works.
Comparing Linux to the Windows Kernel and concluding there's no difference between them ignores a decade of operational experience. A "study" that concludes otherwise is wrong. Most people working on Linux would consider it flamebait.
If you think 14,000 pages of yesterdays "secrets" delivered by court order are enough to make things work with today's M$ formats, you have been sleeping for the last 25 years.
This whole discussion is crazy because KDE (and desktop) and Gnome both have free groupware stacks. There is no "hole" in the stack, there's just a hole in the submitter's knowledge.
Evangalism is war, eh? OLPCNews hijacked the OLPC name and is run by Intel employees who did not disclose themselves or their work while they smeared the whole project. It's a forum controlled by people hostile to the device and everything they say is suspect. The arguments for and against this are well made in the comments to the SVS article. Their giddy coverage of OLPC's supposed problems is more of the same, a dishonest smear job.
Yes, they would sell you access to what you own.
on
Sony to Buy Gracenote
·
· Score: 1
That is the crime but it's more Gracenote's than Sony's. The CDDB was created by it's users and Gracenote has no right to treat it like an exclusively owned resource. The database itself is everyone's property and the free alternatives, of course, will be easier to use and better kept. Gracenote's new deal with Sony is a low point but one that was entirely predictable when they started acting like they owned the CDDB. Sony should be ashamed of this too unless they turn it back into an unrestricted resource.
Slashdot Mirror
Chances are, this guy just chose the wrong party to blog for. The Bush administration has been "for us or against" us for a long time. There's good reason the phrases "war on science" and "war on integrity" are common. It's easy to make fun when it's not you that has to go 180 days without pay. Think about it for a while and you might come to more reasonable options, like a warning.
This is bigger than YouTube and that's what Google is talking about when they mention the DMCA safe harbor.
YouTube is just one site but it's already bigger than Viacom will ever be. The world should be filled with sites like YouTube and nicer. I'd like to see YouTube embrace Ogg Theora format and make it easier to download videos. YouTube might not do that but a competitor may. A free internet looks more like that than it looks like NBC or Viacom.
The DOJ jumped in to approve of everything the RIAA won in that case. It's sickening, but it is probably closer to the average public opinion than Slashdot is. We live in a country that basks in hateful, idiotic talk radio. Most of that toxic sludge is directed and purposeful.
SCO has a patent of judicial extortion that should sink this little problem. Microsoft will unleash them in five minutes.
Most people think DRM is a bit much for entertainment. Scrambled movies? Taking away people's life savings and houses over pop music? It's all nuts but it's big business to a handfull of companies and their owners.
The same logic can and is being applied to other publications on the web. Imagine newspapers and magazines published with DRM for subscribers. BBC has started down that path as did the Society of Automotive Engineers. MIT told SAE where to stick their DRM and SAE backed down but others will try. The future of publication is far from decided.
It's about money and control. M$ loves it because clients will only work on non free platforms, so competition can be locked out forever. This is what Vista's extensive DRM and Silverlight are all about and why Mono will never really work. Big publishers want pay per play and control of information. Of the two, they think control is more valuable because it channels people away from competitors. They can't eliminate alternate sources of news and entertainment without help from companies like M$, but M$ is only too eager to help.
We are really at a critical point. Society can reject digital restrictions now. The failure of Vista is a good sign but the increased popularity of Apple is a bad one. No one should have the kind of media control non free software creates. Hardware vendor's embrace of free software encouraging because it shows they don't want to be dominated by software makers. Business is starting to realize that DRM will concentrate power too effectively for their own good. People hate it because they hate pay per play and restricted media.
Software patents are one small but important piece of the IP Empire which demands universally oppressive laws.
The list goes on and on but it has one common theme, your rights mean nothing, shut up and get back to work for the man.
That's an interesting idea, anytime money changes hands in a copy it can be taxed. Advertisers can be taxed a portion of their revenue and sales taxes can be levied on any kind of sale.
The problem then is making sure it goes to the creator. Sound Exchange is an example of how not to do this because it's more like the monopoly given to a private interest that you worry about. Sales taxes are typically used for infrastructure and that might not be a bad way to spend what the RIAA has been squandering on payolla, whores and coke. Creators have a better chance of getting paid by a state office than they do now.
So you just take it for granted that they specialized in MPAA content?
The more you learn about the RIAA, the more sense a simple FU makes.
Bankers have been saved without relief for debtors (another source). It's a good idea to prevent a general collapse because we use a fiat currency but leaving thousands of people ruined won't do enough. Trickle down has made a lot of executives very rich while leveling US manufacturing and consolidating all other commerce. The people responsible for the predatory lending crisis deserve to be treated like criminals. Many of the debtors are the victims of some very shady deals, which include intentionally inflating the value of property in cooperation with lenders. There's a lot of scandal here from top to bottom.
Those of you who think you can make a buck off a police state would do well to remember learn the fate of Fritz Thyssen. He was an industrialist and early supporter of Adolf Hitler, in part financed by Prescott Bush. He made plenty of money re arming Germany and he approved of racial purity laws. By the time he realized the Nazis believed all of the crazy things they said, it was too late for him to do anything about it. He was thrown into a concentration camp and was lucky to survive the wars he did not approve of. If you don't think the Neocons are just as crazy as the Nazis you have not been listening to them long enough.
A confession by a man who's quitting is usually reliable. When someone at PC Magazine says he's sorry for hyping Vista and that it really sucks, you know that Vista really sucks for a lot of people.
His figures may be correct. Slow sales are the only way to explain M$'s drop in proffit when it's so hard to buy anything but an expensive version of Vista so you can "downgrade" to XP like a lot of people do. Just a while back, he was crowing about how people were buying nothing but the expensive versions of Vista.
The hardware has become a lot cheaper for vendors to be making money. You can make money selling laptops for $700 when they cost you less than $100 to make. Shelves are packed with $350 laptops right now, which implies a cost to the retailer of $175 or massive losses. There should be a lot more sales than there are for that kind of thing to happen.
That seems to be the issue this thread is all about. It's amazing how quickly that post was knocked down to -1. Everyone else says Ballmer is full of beans too.
I don't think he's fooling anyone.
Even Time magazine has notice Microsoft is "an Empire in rapid decline".
Who's this message directed at? The last people he's going to fool are corporate users. Home users continue to avoid buying new computers because what they have is working just fine. Even if he could convince them to go buy, they have a giant selection of $500 and less Vista failure laptops to chose from if they don't just buy a $300 EEE PC with GNU/Linux.
I wish they would clean up their emissions. Too bad there's no financial incentive or laws to force that.
Indymedia has a good article about this. The protester, ironically, was objecting to "Fair Play", which is essentially harassment of any and all perceived foes. The citation identifies him and now he faces the same retaliation he objected to.
Next time buy a $40 card that works. You only defeat yourself when you give money to a card maker that is not playing nice. I'm glad people write software for nasty hardware but I'm not about to waste months waiting for it. There are too many good cards and too little time to fool with the bad ones.
when you can have Konqueror, which is the real deal anyway?
Apple's big selling point is it's software but that will go away when vendors embrace free software. Vista is making a lot of crispy critters and that won't last much longer. People are willing to pay for software that works.
Comparing Linux to the Windows Kernel and concluding there's no difference between them ignores a decade of operational experience. A "study" that concludes otherwise is wrong. Most people working on Linux would consider it flamebait.
Go ahead and mod yourself up.
If you think 14,000 pages of yesterdays "secrets" delivered by court order are enough to make things work with today's M$ formats, you have been sleeping for the last 25 years.
This whole discussion is crazy because KDE (and desktop) and Gnome both have free groupware stacks. There is no "hole" in the stack, there's just a hole in the submitter's knowledge.
Evangalism is war, eh? OLPCNews hijacked the OLPC name and is run by Intel employees who did not disclose themselves or their work while they smeared the whole project. It's a forum controlled by people hostile to the device and everything they say is suspect. The arguments for and against this are well made in the comments to the SVS article. Their giddy coverage of OLPC's supposed problems is more of the same, a dishonest smear job.
That is the crime but it's more Gracenote's than Sony's. The CDDB was created by it's users and Gracenote has no right to treat it like an exclusively owned resource. The database itself is everyone's property and the free alternatives, of course, will be easier to use and better kept. Gracenote's new deal with Sony is a low point but one that was entirely predictable when they started acting like they owned the CDDB. Sony should be ashamed of this too unless they turn it back into an unrestricted resource.
How much better would Vista have been without DRM?