$400 worth of stuff? C'mon, Samsung has a generic TV tuner board that handles all the input, output and tuning controls; the actual display adapter is just that, something to provide the specific hardware to drive the display. It's a modular design, it has to be to make any money selling TVs.
Even if its not a physically modular system and is a custom board for that application its like a lot of non-custom components that are re-used from other TVs or designs. Nothing here isn't used on other TVs with the possible exception of the display driver hardware, which is likely to be specific to this flavor of panel.
I'd grant them about $150 for the extra parts to make a good TV -- larger cabinet (includes speakers), the speakers themselves, the remote control, and any extra scan conversion hardware.
I do see the other $500 for just gimmick value.
I browsed Crutchfield's page for laughs and I notice that all the LCD TVs are now just nudging to the $1k levels at the 15" size. When they hit $500 on sale it could make an amusing replacement for a standard display, since most provide a VGA input.
This guy and I used to have conversations about the USSR during the early 80s, wondering if we could ever tell if the picture we were given of the US/USSR situation wasn't actually the reverse of what most USians believed; USSR being "free" and the US being the tyrannical dicatatorship.
It creeped me out a little thinking that maybe it was all a vast conspiracy.
I was flipping through a Crutchfield catalog and noticed that Samsung 15" TVs are like $1200, but a 15" monitor is under $400.
What gives? I can't believe that speakers and a tuner add $800 to the retail cost. Viewsonic sell a box that let you put NTSC on a VGA display for $100, another $20 buys you a set of speakers.
I keep waiting for the price to come way down, but it never seems to. I'm wondering if maybe the whole "flat panel TV" mystique enables them to charge way more for what would sell like hotcakes at $450 or so. I'd put one in my kitchen straightaway.
Re:How to bring this up with your boss??
on
Ask Donald Becker
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· Score: 2
There are a lot of briliant programmers and engineers that started their own companies and quickly drove them strait into the shitter because they didn't know a damn thing about business.
They lacked two things: Knowledge of business (pricing, finance, and marketing) and management expertise.
My big gripe is the management is overwhelmingly overloaded with people who have ONLY a marketing background. Somewhere in the secret anteroom of the management initiation center is a granite obelisk that says that marketing == management.
I think if business spent more time educating non-marketing people in the ways of management, we'd have better management. Too often how it actually happens is someone "rises" in the ranks of marketing and is considered "a manager". Like excess queens in an ant hill, they tend to move to senior management positions outside of their marketing expertise and then you have a real disconnect between line management (immediate supervisors) who have expertise and the senior managers who don't.
There's also the thinking that management in and of itself is enough of a skill that you can "run" something without knowing very much about it (eg, no experience in mining, but can run a mine). I think this is folly and leads to over-reliance on people with expertise.
if most web designers where following the rules made by ignorant and non artistic people web would be boring place...
If most designers focused on usability as much as they focus on "artistic merit", the web would be a lot more legible.
I'm all for cutting edge design, but most web sites have an application function that gets lost in teeny-tiny type, hard-to-read color combinations and excessively busy animation.
Nope. I know from friends and relatives that red hair is also found among North Indians (especially among Kashmiris),
Aren't many northern Indians decendants of an Aryan people from central Europe who might be genetically similar to northern Europeans? It would explain why many Indians have caucasian facial features, even though they have dark hair and dark skin tone.
Or is this just BS I misremember from history?
Re:How to bring this up with your boss??
on
Ask Donald Becker
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I would think the first step would be to recognize that the people in management aren't pinheads.
Thanks for pointing that out. To clear things up, some are shitheads, waterheads, airheads and buttheads. Let's remember that there's a diversity of stupidity and a uniformity of idiocy in management.
I think it's BS too, but couldn't "technical competance" include the management experience involved in running a public service system like this?
I'm sure that anyone who could figure out BIND 4.x code could figure out how to do that, but someone may be judging their ability to run an organization, not write software.
Those awfully expensive Micro$oft courses do a la-la job of telling you what the software can do, but leave out entirely *how the software works*, which is exactly what serious admins need to know.
I've always wondered why people don't offer more in-depth courses that cover more than just remedial networking-101 and basic dialog box entry, since the "official" curricula is so empty. The answer is probably twofold:
Most people are taking the classes for bad reasons: to pass the MS cert tests, to get out of work for a few days or because of work requirement. They're not actually interested in how it works.
-or-
Even scarier, it's because nobody (outside of 500 or so developers, MS employees and other who aren't telling) REALLY knows how it works! 15 years of weird coding, new features, parallel development paths, diverse coding groups, ad nauseum have rendered an OS and system that simply is too byzantine to be understandable by anyone. It's like a fractal design -- the closer you get, the more detail is revealed, which brings you closer, to more detail...
Then the next step will be using force/intimidation to scare techs at mobile phone cos to activate "unknown" cell phones. The precedence for this being organized crime's use of hijacked or unofficial phone lines, usually by having a polite conversation with phone co employees about how good their children look and how nice it would be if they kept looking good.
I wonder if Windows' security problems aren't as much the fault of the everything-but-the-sink integration and legacy support, and abysmal documentation as they are inexperienced and unknowledgable administrators.
A lot of the IIS exploits are built around "integration features" turned on by default and not well (at all?) documented. How do you disable what you don't know exists? And that's just IIS -- there's more hidden surprises buried in the OS known by hard-core developers and MS only.
Third party resources? You can't say "take a class" -- I've *taken* MS curricula before and its not a whole lot better than the online documentation. A typical 30 hour (4 day) class has about 2 hours of stuff you'd be unlikely to sort out through the UI and docs. Books? Usually no better than the online docs and often *worse*, and that's if you can manage to wade through a sea of 'em to find one that's not just screenshots of the online docs!
My experience with Linux and (predominately) FreeBSD is that while the UI of these OS's is often less untuitive, the documentation, even man pages, while dense is far closer to complete than Windows and there's a lot less hidden "gotchas". One of the great things about textual config files is that most sample configs, especially with stuff like Apache, Squid, etc is that the configuration docs are integrated with the config. You just can't do that well with Windows, which is moot anyway, since MS *doesn't* do it with their default configs.
My point is that while its fun (and often fair) to blame clueless admins, they're also admining a system that seems to try very hard to defy people who want to learn -- Just Click Here And It'll All Be OK. If they could learn and understand the operation of the system(s) and their archtecture they'd get a lot smarter. MS makes it hard to do this so people don't.
What prevents the defrauders from using stolen credit cards, or cancelling their credit card before ebay runs the charge? Certainly people defrauding buyers would have no compunction about doing the same to credit card vendors.
The purpose is to minimize fraud, not totally eliminate it. Even escrowed cash transactions are subject to counterfeiting, and at a certain point practicality and vulnerability dovetail -- you can't have a perfect transaction.
The credit card scheme also puts EBay into dealing with buyer's fraud...people who claim that they never received a given piece of merchandise.
Easy! Demonstrate proof of shipping. If you ship some way that doesn't provide proof of delivery, you can't claim shipment received. If you can claim shipment (UPS record, etc), there's not a leg for the buyer to stand on claiming fraud.
If Hollywood adopts a similar approach to content distribution on the internet they will likely have people lining up to pay $8.00 for the privelege of downloading unencumbered DivX encodings of their latest movies
I keep waiting for someone to realize that yes, selling unencumbered movies for $8 WILL increase the number of pirates. However, it would be dwarfed by the number of people willing to pay for it.
Look at the movie rental industry as history; Hollywood was terrified that any idiot could rent a movie for $2 that sold for $75; piracy was feared. When they calmed down and realized that people found it less burdensome to pay $2 vs. screwing around with black market copies, they had a new outlet that dwarfed the old one.
I can only think that the Hollywood heavies, spurred on by Valenti, can't seem to give up the fantasy of pay per use and the logarithmic increase in revenues it would bring. Anything that doesn't further that goal is seen as enhancing piracy somehow.
It'd be nice if Ebay would run an escrow service, but that would be expensive.
An intermediate solution would be Ebay sellers being required to submit a credit card and a charge authorization equal to their auction's estimated price. Buyers who claimed fraud would get the money the seller put up to Ebay up front. This would be the equivilent of a surity bond.
Another option would be for Ebay to certify escrow houses and modify their terms of service so that any buyer, may, at their discretion, demand the payment and goods be delivered via certified escrow service. Seller pays all shipping to the escrow service, buyer pays all other costs.
Er, you CAN copy off the iPod. You just have to do it yourself, you can't have it automatically happen.
Errm. The parent post I replied to said that copying off the iPod is a huge hassle and requires legwork to get the songs back into normal format (eg, "some band - some song.mp3"). It "can" be done, and the software makes every attempt to thwart you from doing it are two different things.
Furthermore, what's this talk about "automatically"? The iPod starts dumping all its music or grabbing all the music it finds without any user intervention?
Considering that most of us have a single PC that is our "main PC," their move makes sense. Plus it ensures that if you DO move an MP3 illegally, YOU'RE doing it, not Apple.
Now we're getting down to brass tacks. Apple isn't doing anything, the user does everything. Apple supplies ripping tools and PCs, why doesn't that make them liable for all other forms of copying? Why would moving an MP3 from Computer A to iPod B be "legal" but from iPod B to Computer B be "illegal"? As long as A, B, and C are all owned outright by the same person, it just sounds like fair use to me, as fair as watching a video tape I made in the VCR in the kitchen, the bedroom or the living room.
I can't believe some of the crap I've read in this story. "Apple does DRM right." "Of course you can't copy MP3s off the iPod." "It encourages fair use."
Tell me, oh Jobsians, what exactly is is non-fair-use about me stuffing an iPod with MP3s, taking it to work and copying them off to my work PC? Fair use means to me playing in my car, my house, my work, or any other place that has a machine I can play music I bought.
Forcing a "no copy off the iPod" is such an annoying bunch of BS that has nothing to do with encouraging fair use, although its kind of funny/pathetic to watch all the kneejerk Mac apologists *rush* to defend something so idiotic.
The RIAA has been rebuffing Microsoft's "secure digital media" initiatives for *years*. They know what Microsoft does to its business "partners" and it scares them, along with the wholly known stupidity of becoming reliant on one company that will supply the DRM system and then "manage it" to maximize their own business needs (more features to Windows, less to other players).
Microsoft is simply strong-arming them with this; the idea is to put Hollywood on notice that its Microsoft DRM or none at all. There is no *way* that BillG and STEVE! Ballmer would EVER allow Microsoft to become reliant on either an open standard they have to compete on and ESPECIALLY a proprietary system owned by someone else to do DRM for what many consider to be "the next killer app" for PCs.
They figure that if they make enough noise about unencrypted (copyable, sharable) video being available to consumers, Hollywood will run scared to MS begging to "partner" with MS on DRM, thus ensuring MS a place in their profit stream.
Any fantasies that this is about anything other than Microsoft locking itself into every consumer audio and video device made from now until 2030 they are fooling themselves.
Here's the problem. Elections never end. Even after you win the November vote, you *have* to keep the election machinery oiled as well as start stockpiling cash *now* to meet the spending needs of the next session. What's a senate campaign cost? $2M average, $20M in places like NYC and Cal?
These kinds of costs (war chests, constant campaigning) are expensive. So you have to constantly solicit donors, aka special interests to get the money. They expect legislative concierge service, which they get.
I don't see any way out because the supply of congressional seats is limited to 535 total (100 sentate, 435 house), and we all know how supply-demand works. I'd guess the best thing to do would be to add 3 new senators per state and double the number of house reps. More seats = more representation @ lower cost.
Of course this would be a procedural nightmare in the congress, which could be worse than the problem it solves, but it would dilute the amount of money spent and increase representation.
ISP's are businesses. The cost of allowing a person to host a website at home is two-fold, at least with typical cable modem deployments.
1. The cost of bandwidth
Total bullshit, the bandwidth is already being paid for. All DSL connections and many cable connections have hard throughput limits. The assumption that "a server" uses more bandwidth implies that someone's hosting a high-traffic site that pegs the user's bandwidth 24/7. Almost all aren't like that, they're "Welcome to Jane's Kittycat Photo Page" or something with low-use, low-impact inbound connects. Most generic in-home usage uses as much bandwidth as my hosted servers.
2. The cost of decreased customer satisfaction resulting from worms finding their way onto the servers people host.
I'm missing something. If I'm running a server, it gets a worm I lose satisfaction with the *provider* because I'm infected? Huh? Or are you saying that other customers get pissed because I'm infected? Either way it's total bullshit -- I get a zillion SQLsnake worm connects a day, NONE come from my providers nets, all come from elsewhere.
Again, two total bullshit claims that amount to zero ISP costs. Bandwidth costs are built-in and typically capped anyway and "infected servers" which cost the ISPs nothing and for which they have no control over most infected servers anyway, because they exist anyway.
Thanks for playing. Cable ISPs want a cable-tv like experience, not a data network. DSL providers just want to charge 200% premiums for a non-extra service that costs them nothing. Bans on servers are just stupid, control-freak rules that amount to NO savings.
What I don't get about outsourcing is how its less expensive, especially at the operational level.
Based on the zillions of meetings we've had with the honchos, on-site help desk functionality is manditory. OK, how is it *cheaper* to have someone else come in and piss of the users than to hire someone to do it as an employee?
An outsourced employee's wage is likely on par with their niche, so you're paying that *AND* you're paying the rather large markup that the outsourcing company charges.
I can believe that an outsourced employee might in special circumstances bring higher level of technical knowledge, but that's seldom valuable in an operational situation, usually in a planning or roll-out situation.
My understanding from the conversations I've had with PHBs is that outsourcing was a big deal in the mid-90s, but a lot of places got burned. The savings weren't that great and the opportunity costs were high. Has that kind of thinking changed?
My guess is that raids have actually happened and are evidence-gathering parties backed by a subpeona.
I'd guess that they happen two ways: Either as criminal investigations or civil investigations. I don't think most courts would conclude that running a few extra copies of an app counts as criminal piracy, it would instead count as a civil action.
In the case of a *criminal* action, I'd imagine law enforcement just shows up and starts kicking ass. You don't get a chance to even defend yourself up front.
In the case of a *civil* action, I'd guess that you'd have to be pretty dumb, uncooperative and naive, since the BSA would likely send lots of letters, maybe a summons and a judge may demand that a plaintiff go to extraordinary measures to ensure that the defendant in a civil suit is made aware of what's going on prior to the use of the court's law enforcement power to collect evidence for a civil lawsuit.
Only *after* you ignore a zillion registered letters from companies with long names and nice, embossed letterheads, ditch the process-servers and stop answering your phone would a "surprise" raid be likely to happen for civil cases.
I'd be interested if anyone else knows differently about civil raids. It'd be REALLY scary to find out that you can file a civil suit and get a judge to use police powers to do a surprise raid, especially over an issue like license compliance.
I can see where a civil plaintiff may convince a judge that the defendents past actions may lead them to destroy evidence, but Some Random Otherwise Law Abiding Business, Inc??
Organized crime? just because an infinitessimal number of "organized criminals" (just where the hell are the disorganized criminals? [yes yes, GAOL]) might use crypto to secure thier telephones doesnt mean that the vast majority of people should be denied access, or given access only to cripple ware.
Ever actually listen to or read the transcripts of American mafia conversations from FBi wiretaps? Even when they're in the same ("secure") room, it's hard to figure out what the fuck they're even *saying* let alone what kind of scheme they might be up to.
"Them guys that was gonna do that thing for them-"
"Wait, what thing? That one thing over there or the other thing we was talking about the other day?"
"Yeah, that one"
"Well, they had some problems with those other guys"
"What kind of problems?"
"Some guys from over there was having more problems like the kind we had that one time over in Jersey"
"OK now?"
"Yeah, I think so. Fuhgettabboutit."
Even without encryption the conversations are so obtuse as to be nearly meaningless without *years* of surveillance, undercover infiltration, etc. I'd guess where they hate encryption isn't in terms of intercepts, but the big charges that really cripple them are tax/fraud/money laundering, and encrypted records prevent a lot of those charges from sticking.
Remember, I can create a self signed certificate for www.abcd.com just as easy as the real owner of www.abcd.com.
Right. And you can get a real CA signed certificate from many CAs for abcd.com, too, with about (or as little) deception as hijacking DNS if you're willing to do a little Jim Rockford-style deception.
I think the point is that it's trust -- just because a third party is *appearing* to vouch for the authenticity of abcd.com doesn't mean something creepy hasn't happened -- but you have to *trust* that everything's OK. It's like seeing the BBB sticker in a window. Doesn't mean they're not going to rip you off...
I guess that's the dig most people here have with it, it's nothing special, nothing new, it's just a regular source-based* distribution.
*How many ways are there to interpret this?
Let's see. There's "we built the binaries from source, you can't see it", "source is available", "source is installed with binaries", "binaries built with the source at install" and "no binaries, no tools, just the source". That's what, 5 possible ways to interpret it?
I'd guess they're in the second-to-last category, although when I did run linux I always wondered why there wasn't a distro with an install option that actually built the to-be-installed binaries from source at install time, or at least the kernel. It would have solved *some* of the problems of trying to build a universal kernel that supported everything out of the box.
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$400 worth of stuff? C'mon, Samsung has a generic TV tuner board that handles all the input, output and tuning controls; the actual display adapter is just that, something to provide the specific hardware to drive the display. It's a modular design, it has to be to make any money selling TVs.
Even if its not a physically modular system and is a custom board for that application its like a lot of non-custom components that are re-used from other TVs or designs. Nothing here isn't used on other TVs with the possible exception of the display driver hardware, which is likely to be specific to this flavor of panel.
I'd grant them about $150 for the extra parts to make a good TV -- larger cabinet (includes speakers), the speakers themselves, the remote control, and any extra scan conversion hardware.
I do see the other $500 for just gimmick value.
I browsed Crutchfield's page for laughs and I notice that all the LCD TVs are now just nudging to the $1k levels at the 15" size. When they hit $500 on sale it could make an amusing replacement for a standard display, since most provide a VGA input.
This guy and I used to have conversations about the USSR during the early 80s, wondering if we could ever tell if the picture we were given of the US/USSR situation wasn't actually the reverse of what most USians believed; USSR being "free" and the US being the tyrannical dicatatorship.
It creeped me out a little thinking that maybe it was all a vast conspiracy.
I was flipping through a Crutchfield catalog and noticed that Samsung 15" TVs are like $1200, but a 15" monitor is under $400.
What gives? I can't believe that speakers and a tuner add $800 to the retail cost. Viewsonic sell a box that let you put NTSC on a VGA display for $100, another $20 buys you a set of speakers.
I keep waiting for the price to come way down, but it never seems to. I'm wondering if maybe the whole "flat panel TV" mystique enables them to charge way more for what would sell like hotcakes at $450 or so. I'd put one in my kitchen straightaway.
There are a lot of briliant programmers and engineers that started their own companies and quickly drove them strait into the shitter because they didn't know a damn thing about business.
They lacked two things: Knowledge of business (pricing, finance, and marketing) and management expertise.
My big gripe is the management is overwhelmingly overloaded with people who have ONLY a marketing background. Somewhere in the secret anteroom of the management initiation center is a granite obelisk that says that marketing == management.
I think if business spent more time educating non-marketing people in the ways of management, we'd have better management. Too often how it actually happens is someone "rises" in the ranks of marketing and is considered "a manager". Like excess queens in an ant hill, they tend to move to senior management positions outside of their marketing expertise and then you have a real disconnect between line management (immediate supervisors) who have expertise and the senior managers who don't.
There's also the thinking that management in and of itself is enough of a skill that you can "run" something without knowing very much about it (eg, no experience in mining, but can run a mine). I think this is folly and leads to over-reliance on people with expertise.
if most web designers where following the rules made by ignorant and non artistic people web would be boring place...
If most designers focused on usability as much as they focus on "artistic merit", the web would be a lot more legible.
I'm all for cutting edge design, but most web sites have an application function that gets lost in teeny-tiny type, hard-to-read color combinations and excessively busy animation.
Nope. I know from friends and relatives that red hair is also found among North Indians (especially among Kashmiris),
Aren't many northern Indians decendants of an Aryan people from central Europe who might be genetically similar to northern Europeans? It would explain why many Indians have caucasian facial features, even though they have dark hair and dark skin tone.
Or is this just BS I misremember from history?
I would think the first step would be to recognize that the people in management aren't pinheads.
Thanks for pointing that out. To clear things up, some are shitheads, waterheads, airheads and buttheads. Let's remember that there's a diversity of stupidity and a uniformity of idiocy in management.
I think it's BS too, but couldn't "technical competance" include the management experience involved in running a public service system like this?
I'm sure that anyone who could figure out BIND 4.x code could figure out how to do that, but someone may be judging their ability to run an organization, not write software.
Those awfully expensive Micro$oft courses do a la-la job of telling you what the software can do, but leave out entirely *how the software works*, which is exactly what serious admins need to know.
I've always wondered why people don't offer more in-depth courses that cover more than just remedial networking-101 and basic dialog box entry, since the "official" curricula is so empty. The answer is probably twofold:
Most people are taking the classes for bad reasons: to pass the MS cert tests, to get out of work for a few days or because of work requirement. They're not actually interested in how it works.
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Even scarier, it's because nobody (outside of 500 or so developers, MS employees and other who aren't telling) REALLY knows how it works! 15 years of weird coding, new features, parallel development paths, diverse coding groups, ad nauseum have rendered an OS and system that simply is too byzantine to be understandable by anyone. It's like a fractal design -- the closer you get, the more detail is revealed, which brings you closer, to more detail...
Then the next step will be using force/intimidation to scare techs at mobile phone cos to activate "unknown" cell phones. The precedence for this being organized crime's use of hijacked or unofficial phone lines, usually by having a polite conversation with phone co employees about how good their children look and how nice it would be if they kept looking good.
I wonder if Windows' security problems aren't as much the fault of the everything-but-the-sink integration and legacy support, and abysmal documentation as they are inexperienced and unknowledgable administrators.
A lot of the IIS exploits are built around "integration features" turned on by default and not well (at all?) documented. How do you disable what you don't know exists? And that's just IIS -- there's more hidden surprises buried in the OS known by hard-core developers and MS only.
Third party resources? You can't say "take a class" -- I've *taken* MS curricula before and its not a whole lot better than the online documentation. A typical 30 hour (4 day) class has about 2 hours of stuff you'd be unlikely to sort out through the UI and docs. Books? Usually no better than the online docs and often *worse*, and that's if you can manage to wade through a sea of 'em to find one that's not just screenshots of the online docs!
My experience with Linux and (predominately) FreeBSD is that while the UI of these OS's is often less untuitive, the documentation, even man pages, while dense is far closer to complete than Windows and there's a lot less hidden "gotchas". One of the great things about textual config files is that most sample configs, especially with stuff like Apache, Squid, etc is that the configuration docs are integrated with the config. You just can't do that well with Windows, which is moot anyway, since MS *doesn't* do it with their default configs.
My point is that while its fun (and often fair) to blame clueless admins, they're also admining a system that seems to try very hard to defy people who want to learn -- Just Click Here And It'll All Be OK. If they could learn and understand the operation of the system(s) and their archtecture they'd get a lot smarter. MS makes it hard to do this so people don't.
What prevents the defrauders from using stolen credit cards, or cancelling their credit card before ebay runs the charge? Certainly people defrauding buyers would have no compunction about doing the same to credit card vendors.
The purpose is to minimize fraud, not totally eliminate it. Even escrowed cash transactions are subject to counterfeiting, and at a certain point practicality and vulnerability dovetail -- you can't have a perfect transaction.
The credit card scheme also puts EBay into dealing with buyer's fraud...people who claim that they never received a given piece of merchandise.
Easy! Demonstrate proof of shipping. If you ship some way that doesn't provide proof of delivery, you can't claim shipment received. If you can claim shipment (UPS record, etc), there's not a leg for the buyer to stand on claiming fraud.
If Hollywood adopts a similar approach to content distribution on the internet they will likely have people lining up to pay $8.00 for the privelege of downloading unencumbered DivX encodings of their latest movies
I keep waiting for someone to realize that yes, selling unencumbered movies for $8 WILL increase the number of pirates. However, it would be dwarfed by the number of people willing to pay for it.
Look at the movie rental industry as history; Hollywood was terrified that any idiot could rent a movie for $2 that sold for $75; piracy was feared. When they calmed down and realized that people found it less burdensome to pay $2 vs. screwing around with black market copies, they had a new outlet that dwarfed the old one.
I can only think that the Hollywood heavies, spurred on by Valenti, can't seem to give up the fantasy of pay per use and the logarithmic increase in revenues it would bring. Anything that doesn't further that goal is seen as enhancing piracy somehow.
It'd be nice if Ebay would run an escrow service, but that would be expensive.
An intermediate solution would be Ebay sellers being required to submit a credit card and a charge authorization equal to their auction's estimated price. Buyers who claimed fraud would get the money the seller put up to Ebay up front. This would be the equivilent of a surity bond.
Another option would be for Ebay to certify escrow houses and modify their terms of service so that any buyer, may, at their discretion, demand the payment and goods be delivered via certified escrow service. Seller pays all shipping to the escrow service, buyer pays all other costs.
Er, you CAN copy off the iPod. You just have to do it yourself, you can't have it automatically happen.
Errm. The parent post I replied to said that copying off the iPod is a huge hassle and requires legwork to get the songs back into normal format (eg, "some band - some song.mp3"). It "can" be done, and the software makes every attempt to thwart you from doing it are two different things.
Furthermore, what's this talk about "automatically"? The iPod starts dumping all its music or grabbing all the music it finds without any user intervention?
Considering that most of us have a single PC that is our "main PC," their move makes sense. Plus it ensures that if you DO move an MP3 illegally, YOU'RE doing it, not Apple.
Now we're getting down to brass tacks. Apple isn't doing anything, the user does everything. Apple supplies ripping tools and PCs, why doesn't that make them liable for all other forms of copying? Why would moving an MP3 from Computer A to iPod B be "legal" but from iPod B to Computer B be "illegal"? As long as A, B, and C are all owned outright by the same person, it just sounds like fair use to me, as fair as watching a video tape I made in the VCR in the kitchen, the bedroom or the living room.
I can't believe some of the crap I've read in this story. "Apple does DRM right." "Of course you can't copy MP3s off the iPod." "It encourages fair use."
Tell me, oh Jobsians, what exactly is is non-fair-use about me stuffing an iPod with MP3s, taking it to work and copying them off to my work PC? Fair use means to me playing in my car, my house, my work, or any other place that has a machine I can play music I bought.
Forcing a "no copy off the iPod" is such an annoying bunch of BS that has nothing to do with encouraging fair use, although its kind of funny/pathetic to watch all the kneejerk Mac apologists *rush* to defend something so idiotic.
The RIAA has been rebuffing Microsoft's "secure digital media" initiatives for *years*. They know what Microsoft does to its business "partners" and it scares them, along with the wholly known stupidity of becoming reliant on one company that will supply the DRM system and then "manage it" to maximize their own business needs (more features to Windows, less to other players).
Microsoft is simply strong-arming them with this; the idea is to put Hollywood on notice that its Microsoft DRM or none at all. There is no *way* that BillG and STEVE! Ballmer would EVER allow Microsoft to become reliant on either an open standard they have to compete on and ESPECIALLY a proprietary system owned by someone else to do DRM for what many consider to be "the next killer app" for PCs.
They figure that if they make enough noise about unencrypted (copyable, sharable) video being available to consumers, Hollywood will run scared to MS begging to "partner" with MS on DRM, thus ensuring MS a place in their profit stream.
Any fantasies that this is about anything other than Microsoft locking itself into every consumer audio and video device made from now until 2030 they are fooling themselves.
Here's the problem. Elections never end. Even after you win the November vote, you *have* to keep the election machinery oiled as well as start stockpiling cash *now* to meet the spending needs of the next session. What's a senate campaign cost? $2M average, $20M in places like NYC and Cal?
These kinds of costs (war chests, constant campaigning) are expensive. So you have to constantly solicit donors, aka special interests to get the money. They expect legislative concierge service, which they get.
I don't see any way out because the supply of congressional seats is limited to 535 total (100 sentate, 435 house), and we all know how supply-demand works. I'd guess the best thing to do would be to add 3 new senators per state and double the number of house reps. More seats = more representation @ lower cost.
Of course this would be a procedural nightmare in the congress, which could be worse than the problem it solves, but it would dilute the amount of money spent and increase representation.
ISP's are businesses. The cost of allowing a person to host a website at home is two-fold, at least with typical cable modem deployments. 1. The cost of bandwidth
Total bullshit, the bandwidth is already being paid for. All DSL connections and many cable connections have hard throughput limits. The assumption that "a server" uses more bandwidth implies that someone's hosting a high-traffic site that pegs the user's bandwidth 24/7. Almost all aren't like that, they're "Welcome to Jane's Kittycat Photo Page" or something with low-use, low-impact inbound connects. Most generic in-home usage uses as much bandwidth as my hosted servers. 2. The cost of decreased customer satisfaction resulting from worms finding their way onto the servers people host.
I'm missing something. If I'm running a server, it gets a worm I lose satisfaction with the *provider* because I'm infected? Huh? Or are you saying that other customers get pissed because I'm infected? Either way it's total bullshit -- I get a zillion SQLsnake worm connects a day, NONE come from my providers nets, all come from elsewhere.
Again, two total bullshit claims that amount to zero ISP costs. Bandwidth costs are built-in and typically capped anyway and "infected servers" which cost the ISPs nothing and for which they have no control over most infected servers anyway, because they exist anyway.
Thanks for playing. Cable ISPs want a cable-tv like experience, not a data network. DSL providers just want to charge 200% premiums for a non-extra service that costs them nothing. Bans on servers are just stupid, control-freak rules that amount to NO savings.
Libertarians are Republicans that like getting high and watching porn.
Greens are Democrats that can't get a trade union job or don't work at all.
Where I live there's almost always some wingnut racist biker running for president. That's who I vote for.
What I don't get about outsourcing is how its less expensive, especially at the operational level.
Based on the zillions of meetings we've had with the honchos, on-site help desk functionality is manditory. OK, how is it *cheaper* to have someone else come in and piss of the users than to hire someone to do it as an employee?
An outsourced employee's wage is likely on par with their niche, so you're paying that *AND* you're paying the rather large markup that the outsourcing company charges.
I can believe that an outsourced employee might in special circumstances bring higher level of technical knowledge, but that's seldom valuable in an operational situation, usually in a planning or roll-out situation.
My understanding from the conversations I've had with PHBs is that outsourcing was a big deal in the mid-90s, but a lot of places got burned. The savings weren't that great and the opportunity costs were high. Has that kind of thinking changed?
My guess is that raids have actually happened and are evidence-gathering parties backed by a subpeona.
I'd guess that they happen two ways: Either as criminal investigations or civil investigations. I don't think most courts would conclude that running a few extra copies of an app counts as criminal piracy, it would instead count as a civil action.
In the case of a *criminal* action, I'd imagine law enforcement just shows up and starts kicking ass. You don't get a chance to even defend yourself up front.
In the case of a *civil* action, I'd guess that you'd have to be pretty dumb, uncooperative and naive, since the BSA would likely send lots of letters, maybe a summons and a judge may demand that a plaintiff go to extraordinary measures to ensure that the defendant in a civil suit is made aware of what's going on prior to the use of the court's law enforcement power to collect evidence for a civil lawsuit.
Only *after* you ignore a zillion registered letters from companies with long names and nice, embossed letterheads, ditch the process-servers and stop answering your phone would a "surprise" raid be likely to happen for civil cases.
I'd be interested if anyone else knows differently about civil raids. It'd be REALLY scary to find out that you can file a civil suit and get a judge to use police powers to do a surprise raid, especially over an issue like license compliance.
I can see where a civil plaintiff may convince a judge that the defendents past actions may lead them to destroy evidence, but Some Random Otherwise Law Abiding Business, Inc??
Organized crime? just because an infinitessimal number of "organized criminals" (just where the hell are the disorganized criminals? [yes yes, GAOL]) might use crypto to secure thier telephones doesnt mean that the vast majority of people should be denied access, or given access only to cripple ware.
Ever actually listen to or read the transcripts of American mafia conversations from FBi wiretaps? Even when they're in the same ("secure") room, it's hard to figure out what the fuck they're even *saying* let alone what kind of scheme they might be up to.
"Them guys that was gonna do that thing for them-"
"Wait, what thing? That one thing over there or the other thing we was talking about the other day?"
"Yeah, that one"
"Well, they had some problems with those other guys"
"What kind of problems?"
"Some guys from over there was having more problems like the kind we had that one time over in Jersey"
"OK now?"
"Yeah, I think so. Fuhgettabboutit."
Even without encryption the conversations are so obtuse as to be nearly meaningless without *years* of surveillance, undercover infiltration, etc. I'd guess where they hate encryption isn't in terms of intercepts, but the big charges that really cripple them are tax/fraud/money laundering, and encrypted records prevent a lot of those charges from sticking.
Remember, I can create a self signed certificate for www.abcd.com just as easy as the real owner of www.abcd.com.
Right. And you can get a real CA signed certificate from many CAs for abcd.com, too, with about (or as little) deception as hijacking DNS if you're willing to do a little Jim Rockford-style deception.
I think the point is that it's trust -- just because a third party is *appearing* to vouch for the authenticity of abcd.com doesn't mean something creepy hasn't happened -- but you have to *trust* that everything's OK. It's like seeing the BBB sticker in a window. Doesn't mean they're not going to rip you off...
I guess that's the dig most people here have with it, it's nothing special, nothing new, it's just a regular source-based* distribution.
*How many ways are there to interpret this?
Let's see. There's "we built the binaries from source, you can't see it", "source is available", "source is installed with binaries", "binaries built with the source at install" and "no binaries, no tools, just the source". That's what, 5 possible ways to interpret it?
I'd guess they're in the second-to-last category, although when I did run linux I always wondered why there wasn't a distro with an install option that actually built the to-be-installed binaries from source at install time, or at least the kernel. It would have solved *some* of the problems of trying to build a universal kernel that supported everything out of the box.