The only reason that IE is there is because it gets them onto the windows desktop. Sort of like a "lesser of two evils" thing akin to our elections, really. If they didn't support MS by integrating IE into their client, they themselves wouldn't have access to nearly as large of a potential client base. That seems to be the only reason they've stayed committed to IE thus far.
<I>The problem with your analogy is that Mac Office and PC Office are seperate things. The original poster wasn't asking for a copy of Abbey Road, he wanted the same intellectual property that he had on vinyl on CD media.</i>
The the extent that Mac and PC office are different products, so are the vinyl, cassette and CD releases of music. They all have different part numbers, upc numbers, etc...
The vinyl version of the white album is the version of the white album meant to be played on record players. The compact disc version of the album is the release meant for cd players. Just as the release of Office 97 is the release of office meant for PC's, where as Office 98 is the release of office meant to be ran on Macintoshes.
<I> While it's true we do pay a nominal fee for the replacement media, relative to the price of the software its trivial.</I>
I'm betting that your media cost is still higher than the cost of most music CD's, though... As much as a rip off music might seem to be, it's nothing compared to what most software companies get away with, yet there isn't nearly as much noise made about that anywhere.
Just an afterthought... Since my examples were physical property versus intellectual property... When you buy a map and they add streets, you aren't entitled to a new map. Nor if you buy a hard cover book and later decide that you'd like the paper pack edition. Or if you buy a dictionary one year, you don't qualify for an upgrade price when they release a new one a few years later.
You don't NEED to go buy the CD. You could just get a new record player. You bought and paid for the right to listen to the music on any record player of your choice. Microsoft may give you a discount when upgrading from Office 97 to Office 2000, but if you own Office 97 and want to use Office 98 on your Mac, you need to pay full price.
Same goes for movies. You bought the regular version. No one is forcing your hand to buy the directors cut, that's a choice that you're making. You need responsibly weigh the merits of buying something you already own versus the benefits of seeing a couple editted out scenes or maybe some interviews. If you decide that $19.99 is cheap enough to justify the purchase, that's your decision.
I think software is the only industry that has an "upgrade" price as the defacto standard. Some car dealers will accept trade in's, while others won't. If you buy a refridgerator and a few years later the manufacturer updates the model with a differently shaped ice cube maker, you're not automatically entitled to that since you own the first version of the refridgerator.
Past that... Stick to your vinyl. Get a new record player and fight the disappearance of records... Plenty of bands still release on vinyl, and more probably would if they saw compelling reasons to do so...
Re:RIAA/MPAA: 1 - Freedom 0
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 1
actually, i couldn't care less. Rather, i'm actually quite happy by it. I hate the entire premise of those "peer to peer" services. They're nothing more than theft, in my eyes. Take from the creator and don't pay for what they're trying to sell... Makes no sense, the "it's only a buch of 1's and 0's" argument.
Yahoo can probably find a much larger audience than the authors and therefore sell access to the content to you for cheaper than you could buy it from the creators.
Will you still want to pay the creators? Or will you try to devise a way to pay them less than they're currently getting from Yahoo in the name of liberation?
Who needs other search engines when you got google.
More choices are better choices. I'm a big google fan and don't actually use Yahoo, except for Backgammon and Hearts, but i'd be saddened if one day all the search engines died off and all that was left standing was google.
plus, their manufacturing process doesn't seem to be all that great, since once they were able to produce chips with a longer pipeline, they couldn't get their yields much past 5-10%
The only reason that Apple ships a dual cpu system is because motorolla hasn't been able to up the G4's clock speed in over a year... Someone at apple said "Hey, they've got 1 GHz chips, we only have 500 MHz. But, if we put two in, we can say it's 1 GHz."
Seriously. It's all marketting hype. Apple's dual G4's are mostly useless until OS X 1.0 ships...
They can keep issuing updated DLL's so that programs dependant on them won't run under WINE, but since Plex86 and VMware don't emulate anything but the hardware (if you're running windows in them, you're running Microsoft's code).
As long as Plex and VMware can faithfully present an x86 machine and support hardware to whatever guest OS is being installed, there really shouldn't be much issue, i'm thinking.
Kind of a waste of time, if say you have one machine on your desk and you want to say... preview what the web pages you created in VMware will looklike across a lot of platforms without deploying them to the production server. Run apache. Run VMware. Run dreamweaver...
Seriously. I hate dual booting, because whenever i leave one OS and get into the other, i realize that there was something else i needed to do in the last OS.
Maybe it's just that i'm too distractable, but bouncing back and forth really messes with my train of though...
Alas... I cna't get VMware to see my network either...
Re:RIAA/MPAA: 1 - Freedom 0
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Obviously, slashdotters do, since they moan about the passing of Scour and Napster, and the lack of scalability of Gnutella...
Re:RIAA/MPAA: 1 - Freedom 0
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 1
It'd be one thing if Napster and Scour had been simple search engines that let people share their files with one another. But it's another when Napster was created and initially publicized as being a service which let people download music for free. Shawn Fanning was on record as saying that the reason he created it was because it was so hard for him to find reliable sites from which to get music he wanted. 90% of Napsters users copied and posted copyrighted files. And when people complained about that, rather than saying "let's see what we can do to prevent the misuse of our service" instead Napster took a fighting stance.
As for Scour. Their home page openly advertised copyrighted movies as being available through their service.
Yes, filesharing on it's own isn't bad. People can just share papers they've written, photos they've taken, or music they've created. But that wasn't the case with the forerunners. And they've probably ruined it as ever being a viable model for a business to base their strategy around. Most news reports that people see equate file sharing = theft.
Re:RIAA/MPAA: 1 - Freedom 0
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 1
But they can seek to stop commercial organizations from attempting to do so. It's one thing when it's just hundreds of thousands of faceless users copying files from one to another. It's a whole other thing when a company tries to stand in the middle with hopes of making a dime off of them. Filesharing won't stop, but copyright holders will (and IMHO should) stop others from profiteering off of their works.
Because if they did, they should have seen something like that coming. For that matter, every company makes it's money off the hard work of developers, open source or not. Redhat, Debian, et al make money off of developers. So do Microsoft, etc...
But in the end, that's the whole thinga about opensource. You develop, people can take your work and make changes to it. In AOL/Netscapes case, they decided to try to make some money off of a free product. End of story...
Well, actually since the entire gist of Jon Katz's article was bout online registration and voting, and since the comment i responded to didn't actually say "this is not in reference to...", i supposed that it was in reference to the Katz article.
IMHO, computerized voting booths are just as bad as online voting. It should stay mechanical, because then, when problems do arise, we can do a recount of the ballots, rather than if say a memory card got corrupted, we'd never know the difference, or if we did know the difference there still would be no trail for us to follow to figure out what the outcome should have been.
Implentations of the RSA encryption in netscape have been cracked.
Pseudo random number generators have been cracked.
Microsofts been cracked.
The Army has been cracked.
SDMI has been cracked.
Come to think of it, what hasn't been cracked?
Those are all next to nothing compared to putting a new president in power (IMHO). The moment we are able to cast ballots on line is going to be the most insane moment of our existance. I would trust that nobody could make it 100% secure, and if it's not able to be 100% secure, then it's possible that a single hacker could sway way more than just the votes of one precint.
We could end up with Max Headroom as president. Or worse yet, Sadam Hussein might mysteriously lead us, thanks to few million dollars worth of bribes to the citizens designing and implementing the voting system.
I think that paper ballots are much less easy to corrupt on the grander scale. We just need to simplify simplify simplify. On Nov 7, we should only be casting votes for President, Senator and Congress. Forget about all the other ballot questions and initiatives, etc. Mandate a single voting form for all states, with varying data depending on the state (senator and congressman).
If that was the case, then that's what candidates would do anyhow. With so many states in the midwest having 4 or 6 EC votes, they really don't have that much impact on elections.
And any system that can make the 2nd place runner up winner is rather flawed, wouldn't you say?
The EC makes votes count less, and keeps canditates form campaigning at all in states which they know they won't do well in, because the votes a state hands out are on an all or nothing basis. There's no incentive for a canditate to try to get 50,000 votes out of a state that the majority of citizen won't go for him, because if they don't get the majority of votes, they get nothing.
If we don't get rid of the EC altogether after this election, we really need to move to make each vote independant of one another. So a candidate would have to fight for votes in every county. And mandate that electors vote according to the "will of the people" rather than being allowed (in some states) to disregard the citizens votes and cast their ballot however they choose.
EC: Get rid of it altogether, or at least reform the hell out of it.
I think the difference is that Napster is specialized where as Ebay is not. If napster had deals with most of the artists involved okaying their distribution of their music, then the law would not have come down on them nearly as hard if it was found that only 5% of the music available through their service was in violation of copyright.
Likewise, if eBay wasn't eBay, but eBootlegs.com, theye'd probably be in very hot water from the get-go, since they'ed be more directly encouraging such sales, rather than their more passive nature of just selling what people want to sell and not giving anything high priority.
I'm sure that argument can be flushed down the toilet, once they go through all those internal emails... Given the microsoft case, and shawn fannings reasons for starting napster, unless they've gone through and erased all their backups, something interesting is sure to be waiting to be found in there.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason that IE is there is because it gets them onto the windows desktop. Sort of like a "lesser of two evils" thing akin to our elections, really. If they didn't support MS by integrating IE into their client, they themselves wouldn't have access to nearly as large of a potential client base. That seems to be the only reason they've stayed committed to IE thus far.
<I>The problem with your analogy is that Mac Office and PC Office are seperate things. The original poster wasn't asking for a copy of Abbey Road, he wanted the same intellectual property that he had on vinyl on CD media.</i>
The the extent that Mac and PC office are different products, so are the vinyl, cassette and CD releases of music. They all have different part numbers, upc numbers, etc...
The vinyl version of the white album is the version of the white album meant to be played on record players. The compact disc version of the album is the release meant for cd players. Just as the release of Office 97 is the release of office meant for PC's, where as Office 98 is the release of office meant to be ran on Macintoshes.
<I> While it's true we do pay a nominal fee for the replacement media, relative to the price of the software its trivial.</I>
I'm betting that your media cost is still higher than the cost of most music CD's, though... As much as a rip off music might seem to be, it's nothing compared to what most software companies get away with, yet there isn't nearly as much noise made about that anywhere.
Just an afterthought... Since my examples were physical property versus intellectual property... When you buy a map and they add streets, you aren't entitled to a new map. Nor if you buy a hard cover book and later decide that you'd like the paper pack edition. Or if you buy a dictionary one year, you don't qualify for an upgrade price when they release a new one a few years later.
You don't NEED to go buy the CD. You could just get a new record player. You bought and paid for the right to listen to the music on any record player of your choice. Microsoft may give you a discount when upgrading from Office 97 to Office 2000, but if you own Office 97 and want to use Office 98 on your Mac, you need to pay full price.
Same goes for movies. You bought the regular version. No one is forcing your hand to buy the directors cut, that's a choice that you're making. You need responsibly weigh the merits of buying something you already own versus the benefits of seeing a couple editted out scenes or maybe some interviews. If you decide that $19.99 is cheap enough to justify the purchase, that's your decision.
I think software is the only industry that has an "upgrade" price as the defacto standard. Some car dealers will accept trade in's, while others won't. If you buy a refridgerator and a few years later the manufacturer updates the model with a differently shaped ice cube maker, you're not automatically entitled to that since you own the first version of the refridgerator.
Past that... Stick to your vinyl. Get a new record player and fight the disappearance of records... Plenty of bands still release on vinyl, and more probably would if they saw compelling reasons to do so...
i was talking in reference to search engines...
actually, i couldn't care less. Rather, i'm actually quite happy by it. I hate the entire premise of those "peer to peer" services. They're nothing more than theft, in my eyes. Take from the creator and don't pay for what they're trying to sell... Makes no sense, the "it's only a buch of 1's and 0's" argument.
Yahoo can probably find a much larger audience than the authors and therefore sell access to the content to you for cheaper than you could buy it from the creators.
Will you still want to pay the creators? Or will you try to devise a way to pay them less than they're currently getting from Yahoo in the name of liberation?
Who needs other search engines when you got google.
More choices are better choices. I'm a big google fan and don't actually use Yahoo, except for Backgammon and Hearts, but i'd be saddened if one day all the search engines died off and all that was left standing was google.
too short of a pipeline.
plus, their manufacturing process doesn't seem to be all that great, since once they were able to produce chips with a longer pipeline, they couldn't get their yields much past 5-10%
The only reason that Apple ships a dual cpu system is because motorolla hasn't been able to up the G4's clock speed in over a year... Someone at apple said "Hey, they've got 1 GHz chips, we only have 500 MHz. But, if we put two in, we can say it's 1 GHz."
Seriously. It's all marketting hype. Apple's dual G4's are mostly useless until OS X 1.0 ships...
Forever...
They can keep issuing updated DLL's so that programs dependant on them won't run under WINE, but since Plex86 and VMware don't emulate anything but the hardware (if you're running windows in them, you're running Microsoft's code).
As long as Plex and VMware can faithfully present an x86 machine and support hardware to whatever guest OS is being installed, there really shouldn't be much issue, i'm thinking.
ermm... which doc says they'll sabotage your machine? Seriously, i'd like to know...
Kind of a waste of time, if say you have one machine on your desk and you want to say... preview what the web pages you created in VMware will looklike across a lot of platforms without deploying them to the production server. Run apache. Run VMware. Run dreamweaver...
Seriously. I hate dual booting, because whenever i leave one OS and get into the other, i realize that there was something else i needed to do in the last OS.
Maybe it's just that i'm too distractable, but bouncing back and forth really messes with my train of though...
Alas... I cna't get VMware to see my network either...
Obviously, slashdotters do, since they moan about the passing of Scour and Napster, and the lack of scalability of Gnutella...
It'd be one thing if Napster and Scour had been simple search engines that let people share their files with one another. But it's another when Napster was created and initially publicized as being a service which let people download music for free. Shawn Fanning was on record as saying that the reason he created it was because it was so hard for him to find reliable sites from which to get music he wanted. 90% of Napsters users copied and posted copyrighted files. And when people complained about that, rather than saying "let's see what we can do to prevent the misuse of our service" instead Napster took a fighting stance.
As for Scour. Their home page openly advertised copyrighted movies as being available through their service.
Yes, filesharing on it's own isn't bad. People can just share papers they've written, photos they've taken, or music they've created. But that wasn't the case with the forerunners. And they've probably ruined it as ever being a viable model for a business to base their strategy around. Most news reports that people see equate file sharing = theft.
But they can seek to stop commercial organizations from attempting to do so. It's one thing when it's just hundreds of thousands of faceless users copying files from one to another. It's a whole other thing when a company tries to stand in the middle with hopes of making a dime off of them. Filesharing won't stop, but copyright holders will (and IMHO should) stop others from profiteering off of their works.
The commercialization of the Internet has even caught that old vanguard Netscape. Sad, and shame.
Ermmm... They started the whole commercialization/breaking of the internet in the first place, remember?
Because if they did, they should have seen something like that coming. For that matter, every company makes it's money off the hard work of developers, open source or not. Redhat, Debian, et al make money off of developers. So do Microsoft, etc...
But in the end, that's the whole thinga about opensource. You develop, people can take your work and make changes to it. In AOL/Netscapes case, they decided to try to make some money off of a free product. End of story...
And what do you do for work, pray tell?
Well, actually since the entire gist of Jon Katz's article was bout online registration and voting, and since the comment i responded to didn't actually say "this is not in reference to...", i supposed that it was in reference to the Katz article.
IMHO, computerized voting booths are just as bad as online voting. It should stay mechanical, because then, when problems do arise, we can do a recount of the ballots, rather than if say a memory card got corrupted, we'd never know the difference, or if we did know the difference there still would be no trail for us to follow to figure out what the outcome should have been.
Implentations of PGP have been cracked.
Implentations of the RSA encryption in netscape have been cracked.
Pseudo random number generators have been cracked.
Microsofts been cracked.
The Army has been cracked.
SDMI has been cracked.
Come to think of it, what hasn't been cracked?
Those are all next to nothing compared to putting a new president in power (IMHO). The moment we are able to cast ballots on line is going to be the most insane moment of our existance. I would trust that nobody could make it 100% secure, and if it's not able to be 100% secure, then it's possible that a single hacker could sway way more than just the votes of one precint.
We could end up with Max Headroom as president. Or worse yet, Sadam Hussein might mysteriously lead us, thanks to few million dollars worth of bribes to the citizens designing and implementing the voting system.
I think that paper ballots are much less easy to corrupt on the grander scale. We just need to simplify simplify simplify. On Nov 7, we should only be casting votes for President, Senator and Congress. Forget about all the other ballot questions and initiatives, etc. Mandate a single voting form for all states, with varying data depending on the state (senator and congressman).
If that was the case, then that's what candidates would do anyhow. With so many states in the midwest having 4 or 6 EC votes, they really don't have that much impact on elections.
And any system that can make the 2nd place runner up winner is rather flawed, wouldn't you say?
The EC makes votes count less, and keeps canditates form campaigning at all in states which they know they won't do well in, because the votes a state hands out are on an all or nothing basis. There's no incentive for a canditate to try to get 50,000 votes out of a state that the majority of citizen won't go for him, because if they don't get the majority of votes, they get nothing.
If we don't get rid of the EC altogether after this election, we really need to move to make each vote independant of one another. So a candidate would have to fight for votes in every county. And mandate that electors vote according to the "will of the people" rather than being allowed (in some states) to disregard the citizens votes and cast their ballot however they choose.
EC: Get rid of it altogether, or at least reform the hell out of it.
I think the difference is that Napster is specialized where as Ebay is not. If napster had deals with most of the artists involved okaying their distribution of their music, then the law would not have come down on them nearly as hard if it was found that only 5% of the music available through their service was in violation of copyright.
Likewise, if eBay wasn't eBay, but eBootlegs.com, theye'd probably be in very hot water from the get-go, since they'ed be more directly encouraging such sales, rather than their more passive nature of just selling what people want to sell and not giving anything high priority.
I'm sure that argument can be flushed down the toilet, once they go through all those internal emails... Given the microsoft case, and shawn fannings reasons for starting napster, unless they've gone through and erased all their backups, something interesting is sure to be waiting to be found in there.