Nothing new; DRM is still destined to failure.
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"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
No matter how much you pad a wall, people still stop when they run into it. Consumer backlash against these products hasn't hit full force yet, but it will.
Consumers define a market, not the other way around. When people start getting crippled hardware that doesn't do what they want it to, companies will pay the price.
Moreover, once media companies lose legislative support for DRM enforcement (and this will happen, although it may take the judicial system a while), tech companies won't have any more reason to implement this sort of consumer-unfriendly crap.
We need to remember that the judicial branch of the government is always slow to react, but that it does react -- and more often than not, it will favor the rights of the consumer over the rights of industry. A very convincing argument could be made (and will be, in the next couple years) to the Supreme Court challenging something as unconstitutional as the DMCA, or mandatory DRM. When Hollywood does get slapped in the face by the courts -- and I'm confident they will -- all of this nonsense will fade into the past, and a new wave of technological innovation will be allowed to continue.
This sort of situation has come up in the past, and the American system has resolved it. If this weren't the case, we would have no VCRs, no cassette tapes, and certainly no MP3 players. But we do. It's only a matter of time before we can continue the developmental trend uninhibited.
As repulsive as they may be, sweatshop conditions are hardly worse than what things were like in America and Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Working in a factory, where there is at least _some_ form of corporate management and _some_ capacity to improve on its own conditions, is far better than the alternatives: earn money at makeshift factories (like the ones shown in this article), or earn a fraction of that money working on a farm.
Of course, as long as the Communists are in power in China, farming will remain unprofitable and the vast numbers of poor people will be forced to do things like this to scrape together a living.
There's probably a huge market in recycled computer materials, especially with the enormous surplus of junk that exists today.
This could be a boon to the Chinese economy, if it's done properly. A company sets up a factory where workers are properly trained and equipped to safely take apart computer junk and separate the useful leftovers from the true crud. Whatever can be resold, is, whatever can't, is disposed of properly -- and with no intrinsic value remaining, people won't be encouraged to pick through the scraps and inhale fumes.
Declan's comments seem to revolve around two major points:
1. It does not seem very likely or reasonable to a lot of people (including Mr. McCullagh) that a researcher would be sued under this law if they published research that could be used to violate copyrights.
2. It does not seem very likely or reasonable that a researcher who does not publish any source code could be sued at all.
The fallacy of these arguments is that they assume corporations won't TRY. It's true that a judge could very well slap away a lawsuit against Edward Felten, but Felten still had to deal with the stress and anxiety of being threatened. Perhaps he would have opted to settle, rather than take the case to court, and in doing so set a dangerous precedent for the future.
It seems to me like this sort of opinion is irresponsibly optimistic. Laws containing gaping loopholes that could conceivably be used to threaten freedom of speech cannot be excused by the fact that we don't think it will happen. Such political quiescence is what allows legislative problems to deteriorate into constitutional crises.
I've always lamented PGP's de-evolution from a robust security tool to an antiquated piece of crap. Network Associates certainly has not spent due time in maintaining and improving PGP, and to their own loss. Now that businesses are paying serious attention to network security, it's the ideal market for a company like PGP Corporation.
It's going to be a stretch for Toho to prove what it needs to prove: that Mozilla is infringing on a trademark. The words 'Godzilla' are not used anywhere, and the logo is of a different shape and color than Godzilla (it looks more like a T-Rex than anything else). The suffix 'zilla' and the presence of a reptilian image is not enough to shut down a software project. If it were a movie, however, this would be a different issue.
I'm not a lawyer, though, so anyone with a legal education and a better angle on the subject, feel free to correct.
Companies come out with competing DRM technologies. The industry will become clogged with this stuff, because they all think they're going to get rich if they make _their_ DRM the industry standard.
Meanwhile, as DRM-enabled hardware starts making its way onto the market, consumers become aware of what's going on. News.com, NYT, WSJ, all the major media outlets start talking about how these new technology devices won't let you do things your old ones did. We're not just talking about PCs anymore, but DVD players, CD players, MP3 players, televisions, everything.
Consumers say, "Screw that, I don't want disabled junk." A year or two passes, the market for DRM-enabled technology is totally saturated, and nobody's buying. People hold on to their old stuff. Sales plummet. Whoops.
Meanwhile, pirates continue to find ways to circumvent copyrights. Sales keep dropping. The Supreme Court eventually shoots down key parts of the DMCA--and the DMCA is so screwy, this isn't a matter of if, but when--and suddenly we're allowed to _legally_ circumvent copyrights. Bye-bye DRM.
Honestly, I don't think this sort of technology has any chance for long-term survival. All the advertising might and political influence in the world cannot defeat a marketplace full of frustrated consumers.
The author makes a very good point: whether we have the freedom to use crypto or not, crypto software itself hasn't come very far in the past few years.
So what can we do about it? Could Peek-a-Booty or the Six/Four protocol be used as springboards into more user-friendly crypto applications? Are there any other free/OSS projects to bring crypto to the masses? (Because God knows your average user couldn't figure out PGP or GPG if his life depended on it.)
Ballmer, speaking Monday at Microsoft's Fusion 2002 partner conference in Los Angeles, said in this new competitive landscape, the software giant relies even more heavily on the expertise, contacts and value-added-services of its business partners to compete effectively against the Linux threat.
Translation: They know more people, have more customers, and throw more money at their sales force.
Not a great long-term strategy, if you ask me -- relying on your existing bulk to carry you through. Many companies have been shot out of the water because they thought they had more momentum than they did.
It looks like this is something relatively simple (on a conceptual level), very flexible, and has a lot to offer businesses that need to interoperate without selling their soul to an unnamed software giant.
There also seems to be a lot of big names standing behind the Liberty Alliance, which gives it so much more clout in the business world than it could ever achieve through just good design.
I wrote Rep. Boucher a while back to tell him how pleased I am that a Congressman is finally standing up for consumer's fair use rights. While some have argued in the past that explicitly defining 'fair use' may open up some loopholes later down the road, as technology progresses, leaving it undefined right now makes it legal for the recording industry to continue to sandbag its customers.
However, I've taken a look at what Boucher is proposing, and it's ambitious. It covers a lot of ground. Admittedly, these are topics that do need to be addressed, but the more you cram into one piece of legislation, the more ammunition you give its opponents. I worry that a select few pieces of this bill might face such strong opposition that the bill itself gets plowed into the dirt.
Of course, I'm just being rationally pessimistic. I truly hope this goes through; it will be a step in the right direction.
Re:This is what they should do, but still won't wo
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RIAA to Sue You Now
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· Score: 2
That bit about knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions has little to do with this discussion. I'm talking simple economics; you can't make money selling a product when just one copy of the product can be duplicated and redistributed at virtually no cost. But first:
Then you'd better hang on tight to your favorite music and movies. Because there won't be much more of 'em.
I'm aware of this, and it does worry me. Realize I'm not an advocate of piracy. I pay for my movies. I pay for my software. I think the people who put their hearts and souls into their work deserve to get paid. But for every person who shares my adoration for spending money, there are a hundred people who would rather be freeloaders. So I do worry about where music and video will be in thirty years.
Of course, I think your line of argument is full of shit, so I'm really not all that nervous.
You should be. Like I said before, there are many freeloaders in the world. Even if the American government starts policing copyright laws the same way they hunt drug trafficking, there are still hundreds of millions of people in the rest of the world's nations who would just as soon pirate their music. Why pay to buy music from a foreign corporation when you can just download everything from the Internet?
Now, if you can actually provide an argument to the contrary, by all means, enlighten me. Otherwise, save the dirty talk for your blow-up doll.
This is what they should do, but still won't work.
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RIAA to Sue You Now
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity. I think this is part of the reason P2P networking has not been used to come up with more innovative technologies. Also, independent artists -- who could benefit immensely from distributing their music through P2P instead of through recording companies -- have been reluctant to embrace P2P as a truly new way of doing business.
So this might be good. Granted, the RIAA won't _stop_ prosecuting P2P networks, but at least they'll be shifting some of the blame to the people who actually use these networks for illegal activity.
But it won't help them. People like free music, and they'll fight tooth and nail when you try to take it away from them. Imagine the public backlash they'll have when they trace some huge fileswapper, have the Feds bust down their doors, only to find that their suspect is a 15-year-old whose father works at a university and whose mother is a nurse. They'll have to arrest someone, and no matter who they do, they'll be setting themselves up for negative publicity. Online file-sharers will be galvanized to the "cause" of free music, and the RIAA's troubles will continue to pile up.
Companies like the RIAA and the MPAA are going to go out of business. Period. When people have the ability to make an infinite number of copies of your product, at virtually no cost, you can't make money anymore. It's as simple as that.
OpenSSH is by far the best SSH implementation available; the fact that it's freeware is a horrible reason not to use it. Explain to your employers that for a fee (and probably a smaller fee than most corporations would want) the OpenSSH team would most likely provide your company with expert support and services.
Don't to roll over and allow your firm to adopt a second-rate (and more expensive) security product simply because they don't trust open source. The answer to your problem, as uncomfortable a situation as it may be, is to try to inform the higher-ups of why they're misguided (without losing your job;D).
One of the chief reasons they're developing Longhorn is to further integrate the operating system (and the applications that run on it) with their network services, MSN. You can see how they tested certain parts of this strategy in XP -- Windows Messenger, for example, or the streaming audio features in Media Player -- and they're going to continue the trend. This is where Windows is headed. It's going to be as much of a media outlet and a web portal as it will be an operating system.
This, in and of itself, is a wonderful idea. I always thought integrating the web browser with the desktop interface was a brilliant move, and I wish to God that Netscape had come up with a way to do it first. I have the same sort of feelings about Longhorn: it looks like it could be the next really big thing in the development of computing, but the fact that Microsoft is at the wheels makes me very nervous.
Microsoft is going to make it easier for 'a soccer mom to set up a simple website', for business users to 'arrange conference calls and online meetings', and so forth. The truth is, people can do all these things now -- but not through the operating system. They can only do it through a wide range of third-party vendors, which adds an extra level of complexity. But it's this level of complexity that allows for competition; once Windows allows you to automagically post web pages to MSN, where will Angelfire or Geocities go? When Windows lets you remotely control your PC without any technical know-how, what happens to PCanywhere? The list goes on, and as Microsoft tightens integration with MSN, a plethora of what used to be highly competitive industries will fall the same way Netscape did when IE became a bundled component.
This is the next step in Microsoft's strategy, and it's a very good strategy indeed. People are sick of having to install software, or browse the web, before they can do what they want to do. The average computer user wants to be able to do everything from one place, and Microsoft knows just what that place will be: your MSN-powered Longhorn desktop.
The saddest part is, I'll probably end up using it anyways.
Moby was overplayed, overhyped, and his first single from 18 ("We Are All Made Of Stars") was hardly anything breathtaking or original. People simply don't have as much enthusiasm for Moby as they did when he released Play.
DVD burners will go the same way as CD burners. There may be a bit more competition over formats (since it's a lot more obvious how much of a cash cow DVD burning is going to be for corporations), but eventually they will become fairly inexpensive. Give it at least six more months, if not a year or so, before you consider making DVD burners part of your company's storage strategy.
You know, I'm very impressed that you're responding to peoples' critiques of your article. I wish more journalism worked this way -- write something, see how people react, then engage them in debate.
I can understand your reasons for leaving out a detailed description of OSS, but it would still seem relevant enough to be worth mentioning. Wouldn't it?
As for my other complaint, I was being hyperbolic to overstate my point. I guess it backfired. I'm not that pessimistic.
Perhaps I didn't make what I was trying to say clear enough. I'm not even talking about logic bugs; I'm talking about sloppy programming.
Recently I took a course in assembly language at my university, and we were graded solely on performance. Nothing on style, nothing on technique, just how fast your program ran. It was competitive enough, too, that style went out the window -- people would write the most god-awful code imaginable just because it ran faster, and they learned to take that attitude automatically. Whatever works, works, regardless of the consequences.
Now, granted, most schools do teach their beginners about the merits of style, and some (like mine) even grade the introductory C++ classes on how well they comment their code. Sometimes higher-level classes will give you a higher grade for having good style and structure, but I don't think teachers require it as much as they should. I see a lot of CS majors graduate with the idea that any shortcut is acceptable as long as it produces the desired effect; they wouldn't even consider for a moment that they needed to re-think a badly designed project, they'd just find ways to work around its flaws.
That, I believe, is what the article was referring to as well, and that's what really causes problems for software -- not logic bugs, but just plain old sloppiness.
"If it doesn't spit out an error message, it must be done correctly, right?"
Well, that IS how they teach people to do it in college...
I'm disappointed that this article didn't mention open source even once. The process of writing an open source project is much different from that of a proprietary piece of software, and (as far as I'm concerned) the open source method is much better equipped to deal with things like sloppy code. But to the average computer idiot who reads MSNBC, this article makes it seem like all software systems are going to kill U.S. Marines and crash ambulances into each other.
I've been wondering about this Click-n-Run thing they've got going, where you click a web link to install software packages (like Apache) on your computer. Some you have to pay for, some are free. One of the requirements, they say, is that you are running the browser that came with Lindows -- presumably because there is some sort of extension they've put on to support it.
Now, doesn't this seem terribly insecure to anyone else? Allowing web pages to install software onto your computer is the sort of thing Windows does, and Linux doesn't, and I'm happy for that distinction. Does anyone (any Lindows insiders, maybe?) have any more info on this?
I'm glad to see an academic who is confident enough to be able to say, "I may have been wrong; I don't know." These days such professors are becoming a scarcity.
He makes a very good point, too; you would expect CD sales to noticeably decline if people were using MP3s as a replacement for CDs. But they're not. The average computer illiterate still finds it difficult to turn an MP3 collection (which, more often than not, is a jumbled mess of files spanning a several directories) into CDs, because they just don't know how to sort them or how to keep track of them. So they keep the MP3s on their computer and buy the CDs for their Discman.
Many (including myself) have bought a CD because they found a few tracks online, but couldn't get good copies of all of them, and they wanted all the songs in the original order. Other people are still buying CDs, but they're buying the ones they can't find online. I know many people who buy into the whole ultra-pop-star fad, but don't buy those albums because they're so easily available online. Instead, they buy music they like that they couldn't find online--and in the end, it's those artists who need to be bought the most.
But the truth is that nobody can tell how much downloaded music is affecting record sales. It's hard to get the recording industry to ever release detailed statistics on what they sell, and when they do release information there are always doubts as to its validity. (They do have to make the shareholders happy, after all.)
Normally I'd rant and rave about how file-sharing is going to be the death (or the rebirth) of the music industry, but I think at this point people have started to realize that on their own. Now it's just a matter of buying popcorn, sitting back, and enjoying the show, because over the next decade or two we'll get to see some of the biggest and richest corporations in the world die a fiery death.
I realize this probably won't get read too much, since I'm around the 500th person to post, but here goes.
Cable companies don't compete with each other except at the national level. Anyone who wants to argue with this need only look at any place in the country, even the Northeast, and ask how many cable providers there really are for a given area--a handful at best.
When companies don't compete, they stagnate; there is less incentive to be efficient, to give good service, and as a whole the companies begin to do stupid things. Right now, these cable companies have caught their nuts in a vice grip because they overestimated how much they could spend on their networks without going in the hole; now they want to backtrack on flat-rate because they're not making money.
I think the most probable outcome is that in the move from flat-rate to pay-as-you-go, the cable companies screw up. They don't price competitively enough (because they want to recoup their losses) and they alienate a significant portion of their membership, who will turn to other things (like DSL) for connectivity, or just scrap the whole thing and move back to modems. This would happen in a relatively short period of time, and after a short while these companies will start having to either charge MORE for their service (and lose more customers) or sell off their assets. If that happens, you can expect to see a range of smaller cable companies pop up who are better prepared to handle their own service areas.
These companies have no real incentive to work well, and they're starting to pay for their own ineptitude. Providing they don't get hit first by legislation or by antitrust suits or by new technology, it's only a matter of time before they crumble, and when they do, it won't be long before market forces enable someone else to take the reins.
Blogging is journalism, but not always acceptable
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Blogging for Dummies?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That a journalist's work has to first pass through the scrutiny of his peers and his editors is a key factor in assuring the quality of published information. Blogging might be journalism, but it's Rambo-style -- one man for himself, whatever he writes, gets published. When you're talking about something like the BBC, CNN, or the Wall Street Journal, letting reporters publish on-the-fly might give individuals too much control over what sort of information makes it to the public.
Now with the Internet growing as a major distribution point for news, perhaps the future will bring us a merger of 'traditional' journalism and web logs: real-time news that, while still going through the standard editing channels, is published as soon as it's put in. The idea of releasing news each day may fade away from the Internet entirely, leaving us with news sources that publish news as soon as it happens.
It'd be one more (small) step towards a truly networked form of human civilization.
Slashdot Mirror
No matter how much you pad a wall, people still stop when they run into it. Consumer backlash against these products hasn't hit full force yet, but it will.
Consumers define a market, not the other way around. When people start getting crippled hardware that doesn't do what they want it to, companies will pay the price.
Moreover, once media companies lose legislative support for DRM enforcement (and this will happen, although it may take the judicial system a while), tech companies won't have any more reason to implement this sort of consumer-unfriendly crap.
We need to remember that the judicial branch of the government is always slow to react, but that it does react -- and more often than not, it will favor the rights of the consumer over the rights of industry. A very convincing argument could be made (and will be, in the next couple years) to the Supreme Court challenging something as unconstitutional as the DMCA, or mandatory DRM. When Hollywood does get slapped in the face by the courts -- and I'm confident they will -- all of this nonsense will fade into the past, and a new wave of technological innovation will be allowed to continue.
This sort of situation has come up in the past, and the American system has resolved it. If this weren't the case, we would have no VCRs, no cassette tapes, and certainly no MP3 players. But we do. It's only a matter of time before we can continue the developmental trend uninhibited.
As repulsive as they may be, sweatshop conditions are hardly worse than what things were like in America and Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Working in a factory, where there is at least _some_ form of corporate management and _some_ capacity to improve on its own conditions, is far better than the alternatives: earn money at makeshift factories (like the ones shown in this article), or earn a fraction of that money working on a farm.
Of course, as long as the Communists are in power in China, farming will remain unprofitable and the vast numbers of poor people will be forced to do things like this to scrape together a living.
There's probably a huge market in recycled computer materials, especially with the enormous surplus of junk that exists today.
This could be a boon to the Chinese economy, if it's done properly. A company sets up a factory where workers are properly trained and equipped to safely take apart computer junk and separate the useful leftovers from the true crud. Whatever can be resold, is, whatever can't, is disposed of properly -- and with no intrinsic value remaining, people won't be encouraged to pick through the scraps and inhale fumes.
Declan's comments seem to revolve around two major points:
1. It does not seem very likely or reasonable to a lot of people (including Mr. McCullagh) that a researcher would be sued under this law if they published research that could be used to violate copyrights.
2. It does not seem very likely or reasonable that a researcher who does not publish any source code could be sued at all.
The fallacy of these arguments is that they assume corporations won't TRY. It's true that a judge could very well slap away a lawsuit against Edward Felten, but Felten still had to deal with the stress and anxiety of being threatened. Perhaps he would have opted to settle, rather than take the case to court, and in doing so set a dangerous precedent for the future.
It seems to me like this sort of opinion is irresponsibly optimistic. Laws containing gaping loopholes that could conceivably be used to threaten freedom of speech cannot be excused by the fact that we don't think it will happen. Such political quiescence is what allows legislative problems to deteriorate into constitutional crises.
I've always lamented PGP's de-evolution from a robust security tool to an antiquated piece of crap. Network Associates certainly has not spent due time in maintaining and improving PGP, and to their own loss. Now that businesses are paying serious attention to network security, it's the ideal market for a company like PGP Corporation.
It's going to be a stretch for Toho to prove what it needs to prove: that Mozilla is infringing on a trademark. The words 'Godzilla' are not used anywhere, and the logo is of a different shape and color than Godzilla (it looks more like a T-Rex than anything else). The suffix 'zilla' and the presence of a reptilian image is not enough to shut down a software project. If it were a movie, however, this would be a different issue.
I'm not a lawyer, though, so anyone with a legal education and a better angle on the subject, feel free to correct.
Companies come out with competing DRM technologies. The industry will become clogged with this stuff, because they all think they're going to get rich if they make _their_ DRM the industry standard.
Meanwhile, as DRM-enabled hardware starts making its way onto the market, consumers become aware of what's going on. News.com, NYT, WSJ, all the major media outlets start talking about how these new technology devices won't let you do things your old ones did. We're not just talking about PCs anymore, but DVD players, CD players, MP3 players, televisions, everything.
Consumers say, "Screw that, I don't want disabled junk." A year or two passes, the market for DRM-enabled technology is totally saturated, and nobody's buying. People hold on to their old stuff. Sales plummet. Whoops.
Meanwhile, pirates continue to find ways to circumvent copyrights. Sales keep dropping. The Supreme Court eventually shoots down key parts of the DMCA--and the DMCA is so screwy, this isn't a matter of if, but when--and suddenly we're allowed to _legally_ circumvent copyrights. Bye-bye DRM.
Honestly, I don't think this sort of technology has any chance for long-term survival. All the advertising might and political influence in the world cannot defeat a marketplace full of frustrated consumers.
The author makes a very good point: whether we have the freedom to use crypto or not, crypto software itself hasn't come very far in the past few years.
So what can we do about it? Could Peek-a-Booty or the Six/Four protocol be used as springboards into more user-friendly crypto applications? Are there any other free/OSS projects to bring crypto to the masses? (Because God knows your average user couldn't figure out PGP or GPG if his life depended on it.)
Ballmer, speaking Monday at Microsoft's Fusion 2002 partner conference in Los Angeles, said in this new competitive landscape, the software giant relies even more heavily on the expertise, contacts and value-added-services of its business partners to compete effectively against the Linux threat.
Translation: They know more people, have more customers, and throw more money at their sales force.
Not a great long-term strategy, if you ask me -- relying on your existing bulk to carry you through. Many companies have been shot out of the water because they thought they had more momentum than they did.
It looks like this is something relatively simple (on a conceptual level), very flexible, and has a lot to offer businesses that need to interoperate without selling their soul to an unnamed software giant.
There also seems to be a lot of big names standing behind the Liberty Alliance, which gives it so much more clout in the business world than it could ever achieve through just good design.
I wrote Rep. Boucher a while back to tell him how pleased I am that a Congressman is finally standing up for consumer's fair use rights. While some have argued in the past that explicitly defining 'fair use' may open up some loopholes later down the road, as technology progresses, leaving it undefined right now makes it legal for the recording industry to continue to sandbag its customers.
However, I've taken a look at what Boucher is proposing, and it's ambitious. It covers a lot of ground. Admittedly, these are topics that do need to be addressed, but the more you cram into one piece of legislation, the more ammunition you give its opponents. I worry that a select few pieces of this bill might face such strong opposition that the bill itself gets plowed into the dirt.
Of course, I'm just being rationally pessimistic. I truly hope this goes through; it will be a step in the right direction.
That bit about knee-jerk reactions and unlikely political opinions has little to do with this discussion. I'm talking simple economics; you can't make money selling a product when just one copy of the product can be duplicated and redistributed at virtually no cost. But first:
Then you'd better hang on tight to your favorite music and movies. Because there won't be much more of 'em.
I'm aware of this, and it does worry me. Realize I'm not an advocate of piracy. I pay for my movies. I pay for my software. I think the people who put their hearts and souls into their work deserve to get paid. But for every person who shares my adoration for spending money, there are a hundred people who would rather be freeloaders. So I do worry about where music and video will be in thirty years.
Of course, I think your line of argument is full of shit, so I'm really not all that nervous.
You should be. Like I said before, there are many freeloaders in the world. Even if the American government starts policing copyright laws the same way they hunt drug trafficking, there are still hundreds of millions of people in the rest of the world's nations who would just as soon pirate their music. Why pay to buy music from a foreign corporation when you can just download everything from the Internet?
Now, if you can actually provide an argument to the contrary, by all means, enlighten me. Otherwise, save the dirty talk for your blow-up doll.
The RIAA has tried (successfully) to paint P2P networks as festering cesspools of piracy and other sorts of illegal activity. I think this is part of the reason P2P networking has not been used to come up with more innovative technologies. Also, independent artists -- who could benefit immensely from distributing their music through P2P instead of through recording companies -- have been reluctant to embrace P2P as a truly new way of doing business.
So this might be good. Granted, the RIAA won't _stop_ prosecuting P2P networks, but at least they'll be shifting some of the blame to the people who actually use these networks for illegal activity.
But it won't help them. People like free music, and they'll fight tooth and nail when you try to take it away from them. Imagine the public backlash they'll have when they trace some huge fileswapper, have the Feds bust down their doors, only to find that their suspect is a 15-year-old whose father works at a university and whose mother is a nurse. They'll have to arrest someone, and no matter who they do, they'll be setting themselves up for negative publicity. Online file-sharers will be galvanized to the "cause" of free music, and the RIAA's troubles will continue to pile up.
Companies like the RIAA and the MPAA are going to go out of business. Period. When people have the ability to make an infinite number of copies of your product, at virtually no cost, you can't make money anymore. It's as simple as that.
OpenSSH is by far the best SSH implementation available; the fact that it's freeware is a horrible reason not to use it. Explain to your employers that for a fee (and probably a smaller fee than most corporations would want) the OpenSSH team would most likely provide your company with expert support and services.
;D).
Don't to roll over and allow your firm to adopt a second-rate (and more expensive) security product simply because they don't trust open source. The answer to your problem, as uncomfortable a situation as it may be, is to try to inform the higher-ups of why they're misguided (without losing your job
One of the chief reasons they're developing Longhorn is to further integrate the operating system (and the applications that run on it) with their network services, MSN. You can see how they tested certain parts of this strategy in XP -- Windows Messenger, for example, or the streaming audio features in Media Player -- and they're going to continue the trend. This is where Windows is headed. It's going to be as much of a media outlet and a web portal as it will be an operating system.
This, in and of itself, is a wonderful idea. I always thought integrating the web browser with the desktop interface was a brilliant move, and I wish to God that Netscape had come up with a way to do it first. I have the same sort of feelings about Longhorn: it looks like it could be the next really big thing in the development of computing, but the fact that Microsoft is at the wheels makes me very nervous.
Microsoft is going to make it easier for 'a soccer mom to set up a simple website', for business users to 'arrange conference calls and online meetings', and so forth. The truth is, people can do all these things now -- but not through the operating system. They can only do it through a wide range of third-party vendors, which adds an extra level of complexity. But it's this level of complexity that allows for competition; once Windows allows you to automagically post web pages to MSN, where will Angelfire or Geocities go? When Windows lets you remotely control your PC without any technical know-how, what happens to PCanywhere? The list goes on, and as Microsoft tightens integration with MSN, a plethora of what used to be highly competitive industries will fall the same way Netscape did when IE became a bundled component.
This is the next step in Microsoft's strategy, and it's a very good strategy indeed. People are sick of having to install software, or browse the web, before they can do what they want to do. The average computer user wants to be able to do everything from one place, and Microsoft knows just what that place will be: your MSN-powered Longhorn desktop.
The saddest part is, I'll probably end up using it anyways.
Moby was overplayed, overhyped, and his first single from 18 ("We Are All Made Of Stars") was hardly anything breathtaking or original. People simply don't have as much enthusiasm for Moby as they did when he released Play.
DVD burners will go the same way as CD burners. There may be a bit more competition over formats (since it's a lot more obvious how much of a cash cow DVD burning is going to be for corporations), but eventually they will become fairly inexpensive. Give it at least six more months, if not a year or so, before you consider making DVD burners part of your company's storage strategy.
You know, I'm very impressed that you're responding to peoples' critiques of your article. I wish more journalism worked this way -- write something, see how people react, then engage them in debate. I can understand your reasons for leaving out a detailed description of OSS, but it would still seem relevant enough to be worth mentioning. Wouldn't it? As for my other complaint, I was being hyperbolic to overstate my point. I guess it backfired. I'm not that pessimistic.
Perhaps I didn't make what I was trying to say clear enough. I'm not even talking about logic bugs; I'm talking about sloppy programming.
Recently I took a course in assembly language at my university, and we were graded solely on performance. Nothing on style, nothing on technique, just how fast your program ran. It was competitive enough, too, that style went out the window -- people would write the most god-awful code imaginable just because it ran faster, and they learned to take that attitude automatically. Whatever works, works, regardless of the consequences.
Now, granted, most schools do teach their beginners about the merits of style, and some (like mine) even grade the introductory C++ classes on how well they comment their code. Sometimes higher-level classes will give you a higher grade for having good style and structure, but I don't think teachers require it as much as they should. I see a lot of CS majors graduate with the idea that any shortcut is acceptable as long as it produces the desired effect; they wouldn't even consider for a moment that they needed to re-think a badly designed project, they'd just find ways to work around its flaws.
That, I believe, is what the article was referring to as well, and that's what really causes problems for software -- not logic bugs, but just plain old sloppiness.
"If it doesn't spit out an error message, it must be done correctly, right?"
Well, that IS how they teach people to do it in college...
I'm disappointed that this article didn't mention open source even once. The process of writing an open source project is much different from that of a proprietary piece of software, and (as far as I'm concerned) the open source method is much better equipped to deal with things like sloppy code. But to the average computer idiot who reads MSNBC, this article makes it seem like all software systems are going to kill U.S. Marines and crash ambulances into each other.
I've been wondering about this Click-n-Run thing they've got going, where you click a web link to install software packages (like Apache) on your computer. Some you have to pay for, some are free. One of the requirements, they say, is that you are running the browser that came with Lindows -- presumably because there is some sort of extension they've put on to support it.
Now, doesn't this seem terribly insecure to anyone else? Allowing web pages to install software onto your computer is the sort of thing Windows does, and Linux doesn't, and I'm happy for that distinction. Does anyone (any Lindows insiders, maybe?) have any more info on this?
...the business plan for every single video game company over the next five years. Final Fantasy XI? Neverwinter Nights?
:)
I'd love to play around with this BrendanLand thing, but I don't see a Linux version anywhere.
(First post?)
I'm glad to see an academic who is confident enough to be able to say, "I may have been wrong; I don't know." These days such professors are becoming a scarcity.
He makes a very good point, too; you would expect CD sales to noticeably decline if people were using MP3s as a replacement for CDs. But they're not. The average computer illiterate still finds it difficult to turn an MP3 collection (which, more often than not, is a jumbled mess of files spanning a several directories) into CDs, because they just don't know how to sort them or how to keep track of them. So they keep the MP3s on their computer and buy the CDs for their Discman.
Many (including myself) have bought a CD because they found a few tracks online, but couldn't get good copies of all of them, and they wanted all the songs in the original order. Other people are still buying CDs, but they're buying the ones they can't find online. I know many people who buy into the whole ultra-pop-star fad, but don't buy those albums because they're so easily available online. Instead, they buy music they like that they couldn't find online--and in the end, it's those artists who need to be bought the most.
But the truth is that nobody can tell how much downloaded music is affecting record sales. It's hard to get the recording industry to ever release detailed statistics on what they sell, and when they do release information there are always doubts as to its validity. (They do have to make the shareholders happy, after all.)
Normally I'd rant and rave about how file-sharing is going to be the death (or the rebirth) of the music industry, but I think at this point people have started to realize that on their own. Now it's just a matter of buying popcorn, sitting back, and enjoying the show, because over the next decade or two we'll get to see some of the biggest and richest corporations in the world die a fiery death.
I realize this probably won't get read too much, since I'm around the 500th person to post, but here goes.
Cable companies don't compete with each other except at the national level. Anyone who wants to argue with this need only look at any place in the country, even the Northeast, and ask how many cable providers there really are for a given area--a handful at best.
When companies don't compete, they stagnate; there is less incentive to be efficient, to give good service, and as a whole the companies begin to do stupid things. Right now, these cable companies have caught their nuts in a vice grip because they overestimated how much they could spend on their networks without going in the hole; now they want to backtrack on flat-rate because they're not making money.
I think the most probable outcome is that in the move from flat-rate to pay-as-you-go, the cable companies screw up. They don't price competitively enough (because they want to recoup their losses) and they alienate a significant portion of their membership, who will turn to other things (like DSL) for connectivity, or just scrap the whole thing and move back to modems. This would happen in a relatively short period of time, and after a short while these companies will start having to either charge MORE for their service (and lose more customers) or sell off their assets. If that happens, you can expect to see a range of smaller cable companies pop up who are better prepared to handle their own service areas.
These companies have no real incentive to work well, and they're starting to pay for their own ineptitude. Providing they don't get hit first by legislation or by antitrust suits or by new technology, it's only a matter of time before they crumble, and when they do, it won't be long before market forces enable someone else to take the reins.
That a journalist's work has to first pass through the scrutiny of his peers and his editors is a key factor in assuring the quality of published information. Blogging might be journalism, but it's Rambo-style -- one man for himself, whatever he writes, gets published. When you're talking about something like the BBC, CNN, or the Wall Street Journal, letting reporters publish on-the-fly might give individuals too much control over what sort of information makes it to the public.
Now with the Internet growing as a major distribution point for news, perhaps the future will bring us a merger of 'traditional' journalism and web logs: real-time news that, while still going through the standard editing channels, is published as soon as it's put in. The idea of releasing news each day may fade away from the Internet entirely, leaving us with news sources that publish news as soon as it happens. It'd be one more (small) step towards a truly networked form of human civilization.