It's not spyware. The only time this will reveal your behaviour is if you distribute - which is illegal. And if you're distributing - you deserve to get pinged for it.
There's 2 camps in the anti-drm crowd it seems. Those who genuinely want "Fair use" and the scumbag pirates who are part of the reason we have drm in the first place...
... this is "DRM" done fairly. It doesn't restrict "fair use", but enables some level of enforcement of copyright.
If you're only using the music you paid for, for personal use (ie, copying to your own devices) no one else will ever see it.
If you're distributing music without license to all and sundry on a massive scale, you deserve to get pinged by the watermark id - it's not "invasion of privacy" if you're distributing things illegally on a massive scale.
If you don't agree with copyright, don't use copyright material...
I do agree with your point that only servers need a real IP, however i would suggest that "servers" are going to explode in popularity in the next few years, as more and more home devices start getting network enabled. If you want to be able to control anything in your house whilst not at your house, via the internet, you'll need at least one IP per household even if you NAT everything behind it.
Also to allow route tables to maintain some level of sanity, you're not going to be able to spread the IPs exactly where you want them in a 100% efficient manner - so we don't *really* have anywhere near the 4 billion or so IPs to play with.
At our current level of internet address requirements it's probably not going to be an issue for a few years at least - I just don't think that level of usage is going to remain as low as it currently is....
How ever, all Linux users know of the pain of leaving the well trodden path. Before you know it there are many ways of setting the same thing, and often you end up just editing a text configuration file because the dialogs don't agree! I'm ok with that, give me text files over a registry any day. I like that I can read what the options and set them directly. BUT Now I'm no MS fan boy (I'm a RiscOS refugee), but I think that is a bit much to ask for of the average user.
Really, windows is fairly similar in that respect - to really get into tweaking/tuning/fixing it, you need to break out registry editor, group policy, etc.
99.9% of windows users could switch/get by with an installshield type application installer (which already exists for linux in the form of GUI/X based.deb or.rpm package managers), a browser, and an office suite.
For the 0.1% of techs left fixing the shit they break, dealing with linux/*nix is much less painful in my opinion...
What i want, to make me switch permanently is this:
Reliable codec support. This means that the open-source community needs to be at the cutting edge of codec development - not reimplementing tech that has already been pushed out in a proprietry format - otherwise the proprietry format will get the market first. Ogg is heading in the right direction, but i fear it could be too little, too late
Better transgaming/cedega support for old Windows games. I really want Falcon 4: Allied force to work:D
That's mostly it. If you pick hardware carefully you can generally get a fully functioning system these days; sometimes even with less hassle than Windows.
Thats only 12 or so texts an hour. Which is once every 5 minutes. Not a lot at all when you think about it. Considering most kids have 50+ contacts in their phone...... sending 5000+ messages a month is nothing.
OK so we have established you have an impossibly short attention span, don't do any form of sport, don't sleep much and don't have a job to pay for any of the shit (and if you do, and i was your boss, i'd fire you for being constantly on your phone and not doing your job).
If you're at school, you're obviously not paying attention in class...
It *is* a lot when you think about it - don't you have other things to do than send SMS on your phone (school, job, boy/girlfriend, actually doing stuff other than send SMS with your friends)?
Why would an experienced, informed person agree to pay such rates? Only through error or inattention, I suspect.
What's your point? It's not verizon's fault if people don't read what they're agreeing to.
I don't care if the average american reads at a 9th grade level, an 8th grade level, or a 5th grade level. It's not rocket science - and since the age of 6 or so I recall being told about "always reading the fine print".
Once you start removing the responsibility of paying for purchases from the customer via the legal process, the whole concept of "trade" breaks down.
I mean, applying your removal of responsibility of payment for use - i could walk into a supermarket, open and consume a carton of milk, and then cry "oh i never knew it cost $1.60!" and try and weasel my way out of paying for it.
Take a recent case of consumer liability arising from cellphone theft: a Canadian women fought a $14,000 bill from Rogers Wireless, after her son's phone was stolen. It turns out, too, that Rogers easily flagged the suspicous activity, but intentionally let the bill run. She exposed the malfeasance after a little investigative journalism which is all well documented (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGA M.20051219.wxcellphone19/BNStory/National/). It all happened in 3 weeks while she was on vacation. Can't see yourself there?
No, i can't see myself there. If an item that allows the generation of potentially unlimited expense disappears from your possession, it's just plain retarded to not do something about it to mitigate the potential for loss. Lose your wallet? You cancel your cards, pronto. Lose your phone? Same deal. This woman had ample opportunity to prevent the expense being incurred, but failed to act. How is this the fault of the phone company? If they had been notified you can be damn sure they would have canned the account/SIM card...
Society is continually heading towards a total lack of taking responsibility for an one's actions, and it makes me sick....
Here's a life tip (you mention a few posts down that you're 15) - if a problem can be solved by either legislation, or those affected pulling their finger out, option 2 is generally the more acceptable way about going about it.
Legislation is just simply not required to solve this problem. All that is required is either the parents to be parents and make the kid pay her debt off, or take the phone off this particular kid. There are plenty of people out there who manage just fine in controlling their spending habits thanks. The rest of society does not need to be inconvenienced due to the in-action of a couple of parents.
Once you start down the slippery slope of banning *potentially* non-beneficial stuff in our lives - where do you stop? Sex can transmit STDs, do we ban it from society for non-procreational purposes? Big Macs will eventually kill you if thats all you eat. Do we ban those too? What about coca cola? Ice-cream? TV? The internet? etc...
Erm... 16 bits to 32 bits didn't take long in hardware, but it took from about ~1980 (8086 XT with DOS) to 1996/2000 (NT4/2k/decent linux dist) in terms of "defact standard" software. 15 years. Sure, the amiga, mac and ST were fully 32 bit years before that, but they didn't grab the bulk of the market.
People who *buy* microsoft OSes typically buy hardware on a regular basis. Vista won't be "end of life" for at least 5 years if the track record of Win2k/WinXP is anything to go by.
In 5 years time, your current PC will have either expired, or those who are interested in buying Microsoft's latest and greatest will have upgraded at *least* once.
I doubt you'll be able to buy non-64 bit capable x86 within 12-18 months, if not already (haven't checked).
Given that an Imac has quite severe RAM expansion limits, my bet is that it wouldn't be usable for Vista+1 in any case, even if it will run on a 32 bit cpu.
As to why do consumers need 64 bit? For the most part, they don't. Really, most tasks you can get done with a Pentium 2 and Linux/Windows 98/etc. As developments in manufacturing tech advance though, the cost of manufacturing 64 bit parts drops rapidly towards the cost of producing 32, or 16, or 8 bit parts.
Or, you can look at it this way... PCs are too slow. Really, if you want to be picky about it - *any* time i have to spend waiting for disk access, rendering, compression, etc is wasted time I'll never get back.
There's little demand for 64 bit cpus today, because there's simply a lack of 64 bit software to make them relevant yet.
I was earning a living between 1996 and 2001 running open-source software in a commercial environment (ISP).
Much of the software *development* comes from people in similar fields - during that time I made a few bug reports for squid, but for the most part the software was already good enough for what I wanted it to do (other's in similar fields had done the development already)...
Sure, their products are "good enough" for the average joe to do the average workload in his average job.
Sure, their products are full of features that seemingly cover all bases - until you try to do something that Microsoft either doesn't want you to do, or didn't foresee you trying to do. Then you're screwed. They're by no means cutting edge in terms of getting jobs done.
Linux has religious nuts raving about it because the features it provides are driven by real-world needs, and not a spec-sheet full of tickboxes determined by the marketing dept.
Also, the unix/linux way focuses on providing many small apps that can be linked together through pipes and used as building blocks to perform tasks that even the original programmer may not have envisioned. Try doing that sort of thing with Windows. The Microsoft way is to sell you one big monolithic app. If it doesn't do what you want, you pay the upgrade fee for that feature next year.
Apple has religious nuts because it generally "just works", looks pretty and now also has many of the unix nuts behind it as well (with the underlying Darwin platform).
And to top it off.... virtually *everyone* has been supremely pissed at Windows/Microsoft before due to the dreaded BSOD, viruses, spyware, etc. Having a machine hosed by spyware tends to leave a bitter taste in one's mouth.
Sure, there are solutions to those problems, but the difference between say Linux and Microsoft in that respect is that Windows will supposedly install and work correctly up until the point where it breaks/becomes unmaintainable (example: Exchange message stores, SQL memory leaks, etc). Linux (generally) either doesn't work from the outset (you don't waste as much time betting the farm on it), or does what you expect it to do for the most part.
Those are my thoughts, after dealing with Microsoft stuff since the early 90s, and Linux/free software since the mid 90s.
Note: I use what works for the task at hand. For my home desktop PC, those tasks are gaming, light web browsing and connecting to work. Hence, it usually runs Vista at the moment. Check my posting history, i've been sticking up for vista a bit lately, but will certainly acknowledge it's shortcomings with regards to "stuff microsoft doesn't want you to do" like any other microsoft product. I've put around 60+ Linux/FreeBSD machines into production in various environments, and as far as administration goes, I much prefer to admin Linux/BSD than Active Directory/Exchange, etc.
Ignoring security/reliability for the moment, to use the old car analogy... Microsoft is like the Toyota Corolla of the software world. Gets you from a to b with a minimum of fuss, but doesn't do anything particularly well. If you want to use it for something it's not designed for (eg drag racing) it's just not going to work very well.
OS/X is like a Honda Accord Euro. Slightly more powerful, more luxurious, etc.
Linux/BSD is like a Toyota Supra. Fairly bulletproof, can be tweaked for extreme performance, but if you want to use it to get groceries in then it's just not going to work very well. Also, getting those extreme levels of performance require a little more work and specialised knowledge - out of the box it's not that special... and like any highly modified car, can be temperamental when something isn't quite right - with no manufacturer warranty:D
I agree, and in fact have driver issues with getting my old onboard sound to work with Vista on my Pentium 2.4.
However... none of that really matters.
I was never in the market for Vista on that machine anyway (and it will be getting an install of Ubuntu or Fedora at some point - just using it as a media centre). As far as economics go, old machines are largely irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
There's 2 camps in the anti-drm crowd it seems. Those who genuinely want "Fair use" and the scumbag pirates who are part of the reason we have drm in the first place...
If you're only using the music you paid for, for personal use (ie, copying to your own devices) no one else will ever see it.
If you're distributing music without license to all and sundry on a massive scale, you deserve to get pinged by the watermark id - it's not "invasion of privacy" if you're distributing things illegally on a massive scale.
If you don't agree with copyright, don't use copyright material...
All you need is 1 IP per household and the current available IPv4 address space is going to be used up pretty quick.
25 years ago computers were nowhere near as prelevant as they are today. This trend will hold true for network devices as well i would wager...
Also to allow route tables to maintain some level of sanity, you're not going to be able to spread the IPs exactly where you want them in a 100% efficient manner - so we don't *really* have anywhere near the 4 billion or so IPs to play with.
At our current level of internet address requirements it's probably not going to be an issue for a few years at least - I just don't think that level of usage is going to remain as low as it currently is....
Really, windows is fairly similar in that respect - to really get into tweaking/tuning/fixing it, you need to break out registry editor, group policy, etc.
99.9% of windows users could switch/get by with an installshield type application installer (which already exists for linux in the form of GUI/X based .deb or .rpm package managers), a browser, and an office suite.
For the 0.1% of techs left fixing the shit they break, dealing with linux/*nix is much less painful in my opinion...
What i want, to make me switch permanently is this:
That's mostly it. If you pick hardware carefully you can generally get a fully functioning system these days; sometimes even with less hassle than Windows.
And, in doing nothing, the only people they are inconveniencing is themselves. Not a problem, in my opinion. :)
OK so we have established you have an impossibly short attention span, don't do any form of sport, don't sleep much and don't have a job to pay for any of the shit (and if you do, and i was your boss, i'd fire you for being constantly on your phone and not doing your job).
If you're at school, you're obviously not paying attention in class...
It *is* a lot when you think about it - don't you have other things to do than send SMS on your phone (school, job, boy/girlfriend, actually doing stuff other than send SMS with your friends)?
What's your point? It's not verizon's fault if people don't read what they're agreeing to.
I don't care if the average american reads at a 9th grade level, an 8th grade level, or a 5th grade level. It's not rocket science - and since the age of 6 or so I recall being told about "always reading the fine print".
Once you start removing the responsibility of paying for purchases from the customer via the legal process, the whole concept of "trade" breaks down.
I mean, applying your removal of responsibility of payment for use - i could walk into a supermarket, open and consume a carton of milk, and then cry "oh i never knew it cost $1.60!" and try and weasel my way out of paying for it.
No, i can't see myself there. If an item that allows the generation of potentially unlimited expense disappears from your possession, it's just plain retarded to not do something about it to mitigate the potential for loss. Lose your wallet? You cancel your cards, pronto. Lose your phone? Same deal. This woman had ample opportunity to prevent the expense being incurred, but failed to act. How is this the fault of the phone company? If they had been notified you can be damn sure they would have canned the account/SIM card...
Society is continually heading towards a total lack of taking responsibility for an one's actions, and it makes me sick....
Legislation is just simply not required to solve this problem. All that is required is either the parents to be parents and make the kid pay her debt off, or take the phone off this particular kid. There are plenty of people out there who manage just fine in controlling their spending habits thanks. The rest of society does not need to be inconvenienced due to the in-action of a couple of parents.
Once you start down the slippery slope of banning *potentially* non-beneficial stuff in our lives - where do you stop? Sex can transmit STDs, do we ban it from society for non-procreational purposes? Big Macs will eventually kill you if thats all you eat. Do we ban those too? What about coca cola? Ice-cream? TV? The internet? etc...
Pentium Pro onwards supports 36 bit addressing in 32 bit protected mode.
Erm... 16 bits to 32 bits didn't take long in hardware, but it took from about ~1980 (8086 XT with DOS) to 1996/2000 (NT4/2k/decent linux dist) in terms of "defact standard" software. 15 years. Sure, the amiga, mac and ST were fully 32 bit years before that, but they didn't grab the bulk of the market.
Err... by imac, i meant "mac mini"...
People who *buy* microsoft OSes typically buy hardware on a regular basis. Vista won't be "end of life" for at least 5 years if the track record of Win2k/WinXP is anything to go by.
In 5 years time, your current PC will have either expired, or those who are interested in buying Microsoft's latest and greatest will have upgraded at *least* once.
I doubt you'll be able to buy non-64 bit capable x86 within 12-18 months, if not already (haven't checked).
Given that an Imac has quite severe RAM expansion limits, my bet is that it wouldn't be usable for Vista+1 in any case, even if it will run on a 32 bit cpu.
As to why do consumers need 64 bit? For the most part, they don't. Really, most tasks you can get done with a Pentium 2 and Linux/Windows 98/etc. As developments in manufacturing tech advance though, the cost of manufacturing 64 bit parts drops rapidly towards the cost of producing 32, or 16, or 8 bit parts.
Or, you can look at it this way... PCs are too slow. Really, if you want to be picky about it - *any* time i have to spend waiting for disk access, rendering, compression, etc is wasted time I'll never get back.
There's little demand for 64 bit cpus today, because there's simply a lack of 64 bit software to make them relevant yet.
Now, i am proficient in C, pascal and have written a few things in x86 assembly... but what about the other 99% of the population?
Lol. Just why do I have a vision of the old game "Lemmings" in my head? :D
Sound strategy. Who's going to pay for the court costs?
Much of the software *development* comes from people in similar fields - during that time I made a few bug reports for squid, but for the most part the software was already good enough for what I wanted it to do (other's in similar fields had done the development already)...
Sure, their products are "good enough" for the average joe to do the average workload in his average job.
Sure, their products are full of features that seemingly cover all bases - until you try to do something that Microsoft either doesn't want you to do, or didn't foresee you trying to do. Then you're screwed. They're by no means cutting edge in terms of getting jobs done.
Linux has religious nuts raving about it because the features it provides are driven by real-world needs, and not a spec-sheet full of tickboxes determined by the marketing dept.
Also, the unix/linux way focuses on providing many small apps that can be linked together through pipes and used as building blocks to perform tasks that even the original programmer may not have envisioned. Try doing that sort of thing with Windows. The Microsoft way is to sell you one big monolithic app. If it doesn't do what you want, you pay the upgrade fee for that feature next year.
Apple has religious nuts because it generally "just works", looks pretty and now also has many of the unix nuts behind it as well (with the underlying Darwin platform).
And to top it off.... virtually *everyone* has been supremely pissed at Windows/Microsoft before due to the dreaded BSOD, viruses, spyware, etc. Having a machine hosed by spyware tends to leave a bitter taste in one's mouth.
Sure, there are solutions to those problems, but the difference between say Linux and Microsoft in that respect is that Windows will supposedly install and work correctly up until the point where it breaks/becomes unmaintainable (example: Exchange message stores, SQL memory leaks, etc). Linux (generally) either doesn't work from the outset (you don't waste as much time betting the farm on it), or does what you expect it to do for the most part.
Those are my thoughts, after dealing with Microsoft stuff since the early 90s, and Linux/free software since the mid 90s.
Note: I use what works for the task at hand. For my home desktop PC, those tasks are gaming, light web browsing and connecting to work. Hence, it usually runs Vista at the moment. Check my posting history, i've been sticking up for vista a bit lately, but will certainly acknowledge it's shortcomings with regards to "stuff microsoft doesn't want you to do" like any other microsoft product. I've put around 60+ Linux/FreeBSD machines into production in various environments, and as far as administration goes, I much prefer to admin Linux/BSD than Active Directory/Exchange, etc.
Ignoring security/reliability for the moment, to use the old car analogy... Microsoft is like the Toyota Corolla of the software world. Gets you from a to b with a minimum of fuss, but doesn't do anything particularly well. If you want to use it for something it's not designed for (eg drag racing) it's just not going to work very well.
OS/X is like a Honda Accord Euro. Slightly more powerful, more luxurious, etc.
Linux/BSD is like a Toyota Supra. Fairly bulletproof, can be tweaked for extreme performance, but if you want to use it to get groceries in then it's just not going to work very well. Also, getting those extreme levels of performance require a little more work and specialised knowledge - out of the box it's not that special... and like any highly modified car, can be temperamental when something isn't quite right - with no manufacturer warranty :D
apt-get clean
However... none of that really matters.
I was never in the market for Vista on that machine anyway (and it will be getting an install of Ubuntu or Fedora at some point - just using it as a media centre). As far as economics go, old machines are largely irrelevant.
DRM doesn't *enable* anything, and no matter what they call it, enough average Joes have been burnt enough by it to know better now.
I hear it's scheduled to enter service in 2011-2012?
Must be a driver issue - my 2002 vintage Pentium 4 with 1gig of ram sits basically idle just like it does with XP, out of the box.
Bah, don't bring logic into this!