What just kills me about the recording industry's whining about a drop in domestic (US) sales is that the whole thing is blamed on piracy.
What about the quality of the music that's being released? Did Universal, BMG, Sony, et al ever stop to wonder if part of the problem is that they're churning out bands that are carbon copies of each other? Do we really need more "boy bands" or breathy, heartbroken beauty queens? It's just like TV...as soon as Survivor became a hit, every network had to have a clone...but now that the market is saturated, ratings are terrible.
Oh, and what about the economy? I'll bet that if you're one of the million or so high tech workers who doesn't have a job anymore, buying the latest Brittany Spears CD is probably way down on your list, below, say groceries!
Piracy is always an easy card to play, and not just for the music industry. It's a whole lot easier it blame some kid with a ripper, a burner and a fast Internet connection for destroying their market than it is to realize that the industry itself, by churning out disc after disc of bubble gum flavored dreck, is killing itself.
I guess it's nice that the students get the computers, but, at the risk of igniting the Apple vs. PC flame, I don't think that the iBook is much of a choice. I'll trot out the same argument that I use whenever I chat with my local primary and secondary educators about computers in the classrooms: While Apple computers are great machines and can do a lot of things very well, most of the world relies on PCs to do their work. What is the sense in providing children with an education on a piece of hardware that they will probably never see outside of their classroom (or maybe their home)?
Now I'll back that up with what I think is a better argument against the purchase of these systems: Wouldn't the money be better spent on things like teachers' salaries, improvements to the classrooms, programs that promote the learning of basic subjects like math, science, reading, etc.? While I'll be the first to line up with those who say that throwing money at education isn't necessarily the best solution (take a look at California's test scores), if the money is going to be spent, I think that it ought to be spent where it will make the most difference.
Let's also consider the issue of support for these computers. Who's going to take care of them when they get dropped, when the screen cracks, when software gets deleted, when the network connection isn't working...I could go on and on. Is the teacher going to fix the computer? The student? Does the school system have to hire network administrators? A whole new IT department?
While I think that knowing how to use a computer has become an important part of American life, somehow I think that too many people have decided that computers are some sort of panacea for the classroom. I disagree. I think that an extra $38 million spent on education in a state the size of Maine could provide a significantly greater return by creating new and exciting programs designed to captivate and encourage children to learn. And establishing ongoing programs like these provides a benefit to more than just four years' worth of students...the kids who follow will benefit, too.
Put simply, I'd say that while this program sure has a great gee-whiz factor, in the end, I suspect that it won't amount to anything.
Clearly the DMCA is a horribly flawed law, but in the end it didn't prevent Professor Felton from publishing his work. He did publish and the judge dismissed the suit because of that very fact.
After reading the lawsuit and early reports of the dismissal, it seems to me that the suit alleged that RIAA used the DMCA to prevent Felton from publishing his work. Unfortunately in this case, he did end up publishing, so it seems that the judge really didn't have any choice but to throw it out.
I think that this would have been a better case if Professor Felton would have been prosecuted under the DMCA. I think that he would have had an excellent chance to then show that the DMCA is unconstitutional. In this case, however, the judge was bound to be rather narrowly focused and the question finally came down to whether or not the DMCA prevented Felton from publishing. He published, therefor it makes his case pretty weak.
I have no doubt that a similar situation will arise and a researcher will be prosecuted for publishing "protected" material. When that happens, I'm sure that the DMCA will fall.
Now I'm not looking to download any illegal music from the Internet. I simply want to listen to my CD collection on the train to work or while working out. And there is freely downloadable music out there. If I were to download a song at work or a friend's house, put it in my MP3 player I then wouldn't be able to transfer it back to my PC at home to add to my collection. Where is 'fair use' when the artist is giving away their music for free? And I don't have the link, but what of the recent surges in so called 'secure' CD's that one can't rip into MP3's? Where is the 'fair use' there? Or are we supposed to purchase multiple copies of the same music in different formats?"
Uh oh, Fair Use rears its ugly head! Actually, it's pretty funny (I think) that the people who put up the greatest fuss about home copying of broadcasts are the ones who are reaping the greatest benefits! When VCRs first became a consumer commodity, the television and movie studios were aghast at the potential for lost revenues and maybe even going out of business. Obviously that didn't happen, but it did take a US Supreme Court ruling to clarify the issue.
Unfortunately, like a lot of legal issues, it has become muddied in interpretation by laymen (even me!) There is no "right" to fair use. And no company is required to make sure that the media that they provide is copyable. I can't copy my Titanica DVD to a VCR because of the Macrovision copy protection. The manufacturer of the DVD wasn't obligated to provide a mechanism for me to copy it just in case I couldn't watch it on my DVD player.
I'm not saying that SDMI is a good thing, though. I think that it's just further evidence that the recording industry is unable to adapt to take advantage of new technologies and new ways of doing business. They're no different than the television industry 25 years ago, except that their customers are a little more savvy and have more resources available to them.
I guess, after all of this flailing about, what I'm really saying is that if you want to make a case for copying songs, free or not, you'd better not use fair use as a platform. Fair use merely gives you a legal defense for making copies for your personal use of media that you already hold a license to, but it doesn't mean that licensor has to make the media copyable.
Flame away, I guess, but I still have to ask who has been harmed? I haven't. I use Linux for my day to day work and Windows 2000 for the few things that I can't do with Linux. I haven't bought a pre-built computer for several years, so I haven't had to wrangle over whether or not I'm going to pay for a copy of Windows.
I guess my point is that even though I don't agree with the business tactics that Microsoft has taken, even though I think that Windows XP is overpriced for what you get, I believe that there are alternatives out there.
Here's the hard part: to get what you really want takes a little work. So I built my own computers and installed my own operating systems. And I can honestly say that Microsoft hasn't harmed me, hasn't stifled my innovation and basically has had little to no impact on me.
My personal opinion is that much of the Microsoft bashing goes on for a few reasons:
1. You're jealous of Bill Gates because he made a lot of money.
2. Microsoft is a big (relatively speaking) company and big companies are easy to hate.
3. Microsoft aggressively protects its intellectual property interests.
It seems to me that only the third reason *might* be a position to argue from, except that, from a legal perspective, MUST protect their IP interests.
As far as the "innovation" issue, I'd say that's a red herring. Innovation, at least in the sense that most people bandy the word around, really doesn't exist. Very little work in any industry is innovative, regardless of what the marketing flacks might say. For the last several years almost every "new" product or idea has really been nothing more than an evolutionary improvement on existing work. Now that's not a bad thing...it really is how new products get introduced. But I don't think it's appropriate to say that Microsoft stifles innovation...the very complexity of many of the "things" that we use today really limits true innovation.
And just as a bonus...for everyone who rails at companies who (mis)use US patent laws to protect their patently obvious software developments, remember that the antitrust laws that Microsoft was accused of violating were put in place to combat the excesses of the railroad barons of the 19th century...just as poor an application of the law to the Microsoft situation as the application of patent law to software and "methods". Read your history!
And finally...the "Windows tax" isn't necessarily a Microsoft invention. Consider the economies of scale. I was part of management for a major computer manufacturer and one of the decisions that we had to make regarded the shipment of systems with no OS or a custom OS installed. From a cost perspective, it simply was too expensive to delete Windows from our configurations and create a special process for the small number of orders that required no OS. It wasn't a contract requirement, it wasn't Microsoft leaning on us to ship Windows, it was economics plain and simple. To knock $40 off the cost of a system and ship with no OS cost well over $40 to implement on such a small volume of computers. Want to blame somebody on the "Windows tax"? It's the corporate bottom line. Oh, and the company is still in business. And, in a sea of red ink, actually made a profit last quarter.
The problem isn't just that so many digital formats use lossy compression...it's also that the quality of the playback electronics just isn't up to audiophile snuff.
I can most definitely tell the difference between my $700 CD player and my $900 computer playing through my stereo system. Now, I'll admit that for an awful lot of people, it doesn't matter, and that's OK, but to me, it does.
Even the Linn product makes sonic sacrifices in the name of convenience, but obviously a take-no-prisoners audiophile isn't going to buy one.
It's time to get rid of CDs. Vorbis (or, *sigh*, MP3) or even wav/aiff, combined with HTTP or FTP can do that. And by getting rid of the middlemen, You can either reduce the price (thereby increasing units sold) or make a greater profit per unit.
I guess that's OK for the masses who could give a hoot about the quality of sound that they listen to, but I care! After spending a small fortune on high end audio equipment, the last thing I want to do is take a backwards step in my source material.
Music from my computer doesn't even come close to matching the fidelity of music from my dedicated stereo system. Yes, I have a computer connected to it so that I can have hours of MP3's (ripped from CDs that I purchased) playing in the background, but when I sit down in front of the speakers to actually focus on the music to the exclusion of anything else, you can bet that the audible differences between Ogg Vorbis, high bitrate MP3 and anything else coming from that computer and the output of my CD, SACD and turntable are like night and day. The computer, even with a relatively good Sound Blaster Audigy card, just can't compete.
Another, even more insidious problem, is that the course that you advocate pretty much eliminates the availability of music to anyone who doesn't have a computer and a broadband connection to the Internet.
When I listen to music, I want to hear everything that the artist performed. Digitally compressed formats, while convenient, mask much of the detail that makes a high end audio listening session the incredibly enjoyable experience that it is.
Much as many people would like to say otherwise, the US government is fairly decentralized. The federal government doesn't play a large role in our day-to-day lives, not on the scale as most European governments do.
In the US, most of the real action happens on the city, county and state levels. So the problem becomes one of ability and funding. For example, I live in Boise, Idaho, a reasonably tech-savvy oasis in the Intermountain West, and while I think that the local governments would love to have more of an Internet presence than they do, they also have to deal with the fact that there are other projects to fund.
The Internet is cool and a lot of people use it, but on the local level dollars are hard to come by and most local governments are going to look a lot harder at repairing the roads and fixing the school's roof than they are at enabling online payment of property taxes.
The Internet isn't as ubiquitous as many of us think, and until it is, I don't think that we'll see it used with the sort of universality that the telephone or the Postal Service is used.
Wasn't it a Founding Father who said `the Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance'?
Nope, it wasn't. The quote has been commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and probably others, but, in fact, was uttered:
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
by Wendell Phillips, who paraphrased John Philpot Curran, who said, "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance."
Phillips' quote came in an 1852 speech to the Massacheusetts Antislavery Society. Curran's was from his Speech upon the Right of Election made in 1790.
Nonetheless, the quote, regardless of who made it, is well worth remembering.
I love my HP48GX...you couldn't get me to give it up for the world. I've loved the calculators (and purchased them) since I bought my first HP25C about 20 years ago.
I have to say, though, that the HP49 is some kind of utter nightmare. It's as if HP turned its back on all of the good things that evolved over the years and decided that Texas Instruments was the holy grail or something. While the calculator is quite powerful, I find that it's useability is just horrendous and the calculator is actually slower than both the HP49GX and the TI92Plus. In fact, nobody that I know in academia or in engineering gives the 49 a passing glance.
Nonetheless, everyone is entitled to a mistake, I guess. On the other hand, HP has made a significant marketing mistake by not grabbing the hearts and minds of students. Texas Instruments is the king in that regard, if only because of their academic program that gives teachers calculators free of charge based on the number of TI calculators that their students use.
Amazingly, Hewlett Packard has the single largest corporate site in their organization here in Boise, Idaho, yet you'll find that the dominant calculator in use (by far) at the local university is the TI. Why? Because TI gives calculators to the faculty free of charge if their students use enough of them. What is the dominant brand of calculator in the university's bookstore? Yep, TI. And this is from a university that has the 7th best public engineering program in the nation. And is just 10 miles from a huge HP campus. Go figure.
Still, I'll be sad to see them go. But I wouldn't blame Fiorina for the loss...I think it's been a long time coming.
I'm sure that the article is a good one, but whoever put the page together must have gone to the JeffK school of web design. Black text on dark background == completely unreadable page.
Sorry, no college will teach you how to be a (insert career name here) in just a few years. What you should expect, though, is to graduate with a few basic tools to allow you to learn to be successful in your field as long as you have the desire and the drive to do the learning.
I'm an electrical engineer. I design memory modules. Virtually nothing that I learned in 4 1/2 years of college applies directly to my field except for a few basic electrical principles that I didn't have to go to college to learn. On the other hand, that time in college gave me the ability to think on my own, draw accurate conclusions from limited data and to hold my own in a relatively technical conversation with my peers. The time was well spent just for that.
I suspect that if you raise your concerns with your professors, you'll find out that they won't claim that a college education, well rounded or not, will send you out into the world fully trained to do whatever it is that you want to do. But it will give you a solid foundation with which to start. And that's not so bad.
Oh, and one thing that I think everyone should be able to do is spell. "Forrest" only has one "r" in it.
No one would own (or lease) a car if the contract said, "You must not sell this
car, in the event this car is no longer used, send it to the nearest junkyard.", so
why is this true for software?
It's true for software because the buying public has come to accept it as a condition for using the software licenses that they purchase. Obviously cars aren't software, particularly since when you buy a car, you buy the car. In a way, of course, a lease is like a license to use the car and, I suppose, the lessor could put that language in the contract, but the buying public wouldn't accept it. The bottom line is the subject line.
I realize that this is painting with an extraordinarily broad brush, but based on my years of experience as a politically active geek, I've found that generally other geeks are long on words and short on action.
We all "know" what's wrong with the system, but when the rubber hits the road, very few are willing to take the time, energy and money to try to make a difference.
Now, in all fairness, the US population in general isn't particularly different from our subpopulation, it's just that we've found a different outlet for talking about what's wrong and what should be fixed...instead of meeting at the barbershop or the bar, we have online outlets. But even though the forum has changed, the result is still the same. All words, no action.
At the risk of horribly slashing at my karma, I ask the question that I always ask in this case:
Why aren't you talking to a lawyer?
Man, whatever you see here, don't take a word of it as reliable until you take all of your information to a lawyer. In fact, you'll probably find that the campus offers free legal service. Bundle up your papers, trundle down to the lawyer's office and forget that you ever asked what you asked here.
I've noticed that a lot of audiophiles will say just about anything to a budget audio listener to justify the huge amounts of money that they spend to support their habit.
I've also noticed that Linux zealots will say just about anything to a Windows user to justify the huge amounts of inconvenience that they go through to support their habit.
One man's passion is another man's wretched excess.
Lucky for me I own Conrad-Johnson audio equipment AND use Linux!
Sure, it's a good idea...a straight line beats a 90 degree angle most of the time, but I think that the real breakthrough in this case is the potential for Simplex to make a lot of money in licensing fees to radically redesign the tools that we use to design and manufacture chips.
Since the architecture isn't going to change on the top layers, where most of the action is, the improvements become incremental. It would be nice, though, to be able to shorten long interconnect runs, especially with capacitance becoming a significant issue now. But I wonder if the significant cost to replace existing design and manufacturing tools is worth the seemingly small gains that the technology offers.
Step 2: The lawyer will probably tell you that given the financial state of UGO, you might as well take what you can get and learn a good lesson about what happens when you participate in a business maodel that is doomed to fail from the start.
By the way, I'm a partner in a large website and we make a little bit of money from banner ads. But we recognized pretty early on that the whole banner ad business was smoke and mirrors and my partner and I decided that if we were going to have any revenues that we would depend on that they would have to come from somewhere else. Also, we've searched out the best deals on web hosting, even to the point of putting some of our repetitively viewed files on a non-bandwidth limited DSL connection. It works...we have no out of pocket expenses and when all is said and done, we even clear a few bucks at the end of the month.
I think that if you look at the kinds of web sites that are flailing around in the banner ad crash, you'll see that they're often birds of a feather with little to differentiate themselves. And since their operators have hitched themselves to a (rapidly) falling star, they are faced with the fact that they are either going to go out of business, find a business model that works, or cease to be a "business" and turn back into what many of them used to be: a hobby.
There's not a lot of difference between the tightening of the high-tech industry and the demise of web site after web site. Those that are unsteady to begin with are going to go away and the industry is going to consolidate into a few successful businesses and many "successful" hobbies. And guess what? There's nothing wrong with that! It's the way that capitalism works.
If this project succeeds in morphing from vaporware into hardware, I really don't think that it will be successful against the twin juggernauts of Microsoft and Sony. In fact, I wonder how many sales Microsoft has taken from Sony? At least one...me.
Nokia is a pretty darned big company doing what it does, but in the US what it doesn't do is a whole lot with computers. It has decent name recognition in cell phones, but its other computer-related offering, monitors, doesn't garner much attention.
Obviously Microsoft is going to spend a bundle on promoting the Xbox. I doubt that even if Nokia came up with a higher performing system they could make any kind of a dent in Microsoft's sales. After all, if performance made a difference, then we'd all be watching Betamax instead of VHS and listening to DAT instead of cassettes.
Marketing is king...name recognition drives marketing and Microsoft has that in spades.
Who complains about the stuff that Microsoft bundles with Windows? Microsoft's competition and, well, Linux zealots. OK, not just Linux zealots, but those of that ilk. Mind you, I'm not saying that being a zealot is a bad thing, nor am I saying that Microsoft is doing the "right" thing.
One thing is clear, though. Microsoft is in business to make money. If you are naive enough to ask them to start unbundling the operating system, then I think that it's appropriate to start looking at what the competition bundles as well.
Take a gander through any distribution of Linux. You'll probably see even more functionality in a standard RedHat installation than you will in Windows 98. Yet Corel isn't cursing at RedHat because they've chosen to install a "free" office suite instead of making users purchase an alternative. You don't see the folks at Opera cursing RedHat because Netscape is part of the OS bundle. You don't see MetroX complaining because XFree is part of the distro.
And yet, there's a huge uproar because Microsoft elects to include these sorts of things (and less) in their Windows OS's. This shouldn't catch anyone by surprise. Microsoft's aim has always been to maintain a chokehold on the operating system market, and guess what? That's not illegal!
In fact, the very thing that caused the entire DOJ vs. Microsoft case was that Netscape claimed that they were going out of business because Microsoft was bundling a browser for free. Yet the only difference between Microsoft and Netscape was in the way they gave the browser away. And now Netscape is a part of the AOL/Time Warner conglomerate that is cast in the same mold as Microsoft.
Even Jim Clark knew that when he created Netscape that he had a limited amount of time to be successful. He took that as a normal part of being in the software business, and anyone who is involved in software to that degree would be foolish to not be so aware.
I'm a Linux and BSD user myself. I also use Windows because there are tasks that each OS is best suited for. I cannot honestly say that, as a consumer, I have been injured by anything that Microsoft has done in the past. The same holds true for virtually every Linux distribution that I've tried. So the harm, in my mind, is not to me the consumer, but perhaps to some software company that failed to look in the rearview mirror to see what was coming up behind them.
I firmly believe that the entire us vs. Microsoft tempest boils down to the fact that a bunch of people got rich by aggressively pursuing their business plan and everyone else is jealous. Sure, maybe that's painting with a broad brush, but there is a ring of truth to it.
Forgive me for being so harsh, but I think it's true. I stopped watching the show after a couple of seasons of Voyager. I saw maybe a quarter of the DS9's. I did see most of TNG, but it really got hard to stomach toward the end.
Why? Because they started making Roddenberry Star Trek episodes. The original series was not what Roddenberry envisioned when he pitched the show. What we have now is, more or less, what he wanted: sort of a weekly review of the major political/philosophical issue of the day, but placed in a different environment, with some sort of solution generated in an hour.
Admittedly, the issues covered and the solutions generated lately have been...well...really syrupy and of a horribly socialistic vein.
Do you remember why we really liked the original series? Why we still like it today? Because it wasn't about technology, it wasn't about really cool special effects. It wasn't about aliens with weird noses.
It was about a few good friends and the adventures that they had. It was like a cross of swashbuckling and the wild west. It was a lot of fun with (usually) just a hint of a social message.
Fast forward to today: a ton of philosophy, a bit of Marxism, a social message with all the subtlety of a fist to the nose, and horrendous writing.
My feeling is that unless the franchise takes a dramatically different tack, this iteration of Star Trek will be the last. Or if not the last, it should be the last.
Creepy? Well of course it wasn't creepy! Neither was the first movie. They weren't supposed to be creepy.
I guess that it's possible that when somebody told Jon Katz that the movie was "campy" he though that they said "creepy" and then was disappointed.
On the other hand, I suspect that this is a little more like the usual dreck that Katz dishes out: poorly researched, full of errors and simply trading on the "reputation" that a few folks at/. seem to think that he earned with his "Hellmouth" series.
My opinion? Katz can't write articles that are in line with the (admittedly high) expectations of this audience. It's like Scientific American asking Art Bell to write an article on extraterrestrial exploration. While Katz's writing can be funny from the point of view of the poor schmuck that thinks that he's saying something grand and erudite, yet is only showing his own ignorance and self importance, it's really painful to read. I don't care for stories about those same schmucks who get used by those around them for some kind of cynical, cruel entertainment, but I guess that's what the/. management must be doing.
Maybe someday the/. gang will realize the cruelty of their actions towards Katz and replace him with somebody who has at least a little bit of journalistic ability.
(Psst...just in case JK is reading this, the last bit was sarcasm...look it up.)
Clearly Microsoft issues forth a lot of rhetoric on the subject of being a technology and innovation leader, and by raising the BS flag, I certainly agree with Linus that something is fundamentally awry with their position.
On the other hand, it's important to note that when Linus points out the great discoveries made by the men that he listed, he's making a list of individuals whose work was done primarily with public institutions...schools, foundations or institutions. Even men like da Vinci, who did work privately, worked with the goal of simply publishing his (scientific) work.
Fast forward a few hundred years...
If a private company dumps a load of money into research and development, they deserve the opportunity to get something back for it. Patents are a way for them to recover their expenses, try to make some money (because in a capitalist society, they have that right) and give us the opportunity to use their ideas.
In fact, I would submit that good old fashioned science is still being done for the public good in those very places that science has always been done: colleges and universities and in national laboratories. The IP patents that we complain so bitterly about are really only incremental improvements in existing technology, rarely breakthrough developments.
It is good for the economy to charge, not only for intellectual property, but for any property. Trade is how the economy grows. The Microsoft comment is flawed in that it assumes that if charging for IP is good then not charging for it is bad. I'd say it's pretty clear that that is an unsupportable position. But the other extreme, that everything should be free isn't much more supportable either.
I think that Moore's "Law" is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. For 30 years or so, it's been a pretty reasonable estimate of the performance of the industry, but it's exponential in nature, so that means that at some point, the number of transistors on a device is just going to become too big. And that point is within a few years.
The.13 micron processes that are state of the art right now are actually pretty big compared to what would be required in a few years, at least by Moore's Law. The problem is that technologies are lagging behind the "Law". A prime example is in lithography. Commercially practical sub-.1 micron lithography doesn't exist. Extreme UV hopes to drive device sizes down to as low as.04 microns, but it's still very experimental, even in its 4th year of development.
Not to belittle Gordon Moore and his "Law", but I think that it's about to give out. Of course, what we call Moore's Law was really nothing more than an off the cuff remark by an "important person", so by following it, the semiconductor industry has validated it.
Anyway, I don't think that it matters whether or not the industry follows it...after all, what we're really after is faster, better devices. And if it's possible to get there without following Moore's Law, then what's the difference? I think that's where we're headed.
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What about the quality of the music that's being released? Did Universal, BMG, Sony, et al ever stop to wonder if part of the problem is that they're churning out bands that are carbon copies of each other? Do we really need more "boy bands" or breathy, heartbroken beauty queens? It's just like TV...as soon as Survivor became a hit, every network had to have a clone...but now that the market is saturated, ratings are terrible.
Oh, and what about the economy? I'll bet that if you're one of the million or so high tech workers who doesn't have a job anymore, buying the latest Brittany Spears CD is probably way down on your list, below, say groceries!
Piracy is always an easy card to play, and not just for the music industry. It's a whole lot easier it blame some kid with a ripper, a burner and a fast Internet connection for destroying their market than it is to realize that the industry itself, by churning out disc after disc of bubble gum flavored dreck, is killing itself.
-h-
Now I'll back that up with what I think is a better argument against the purchase of these systems: Wouldn't the money be better spent on things like teachers' salaries, improvements to the classrooms, programs that promote the learning of basic subjects like math, science, reading, etc.? While I'll be the first to line up with those who say that throwing money at education isn't necessarily the best solution (take a look at California's test scores), if the money is going to be spent, I think that it ought to be spent where it will make the most difference.
Let's also consider the issue of support for these computers. Who's going to take care of them when they get dropped, when the screen cracks, when software gets deleted, when the network connection isn't working...I could go on and on. Is the teacher going to fix the computer? The student? Does the school system have to hire network administrators? A whole new IT department?
While I think that knowing how to use a computer has become an important part of American life, somehow I think that too many people have decided that computers are some sort of panacea for the classroom. I disagree. I think that an extra $38 million spent on education in a state the size of Maine could provide a significantly greater return by creating new and exciting programs designed to captivate and encourage children to learn. And establishing ongoing programs like these provides a benefit to more than just four years' worth of students...the kids who follow will benefit, too.
Put simply, I'd say that while this program sure has a great gee-whiz factor, in the end, I suspect that it won't amount to anything.
-h-
-h-
After reading the lawsuit and early reports of the dismissal, it seems to me that the suit alleged that RIAA used the DMCA to prevent Felton from publishing his work. Unfortunately in this case, he did end up publishing, so it seems that the judge really didn't have any choice but to throw it out.
I think that this would have been a better case if Professor Felton would have been prosecuted under the DMCA. I think that he would have had an excellent chance to then show that the DMCA is unconstitutional. In this case, however, the judge was bound to be rather narrowly focused and the question finally came down to whether or not the DMCA prevented Felton from publishing. He published, therefor it makes his case pretty weak.
I have no doubt that a similar situation will arise and a researcher will be prosecuted for publishing "protected" material. When that happens, I'm sure that the DMCA will fall.
-h-
Uh oh, Fair Use rears its ugly head! Actually, it's pretty funny (I think) that the people who put up the greatest fuss about home copying of broadcasts are the ones who are reaping the greatest benefits! When VCRs first became a consumer commodity, the television and movie studios were aghast at the potential for lost revenues and maybe even going out of business. Obviously that didn't happen, but it did take a US Supreme Court ruling to clarify the issue.
Unfortunately, like a lot of legal issues, it has become muddied in interpretation by laymen (even me!) There is no "right" to fair use. And no company is required to make sure that the media that they provide is copyable. I can't copy my Titanica DVD to a VCR because of the Macrovision copy protection. The manufacturer of the DVD wasn't obligated to provide a mechanism for me to copy it just in case I couldn't watch it on my DVD player.
I'm not saying that SDMI is a good thing, though. I think that it's just further evidence that the recording industry is unable to adapt to take advantage of new technologies and new ways of doing business. They're no different than the television industry 25 years ago, except that their customers are a little more savvy and have more resources available to them.
I guess, after all of this flailing about, what I'm really saying is that if you want to make a case for copying songs, free or not, you'd better not use fair use as a platform. Fair use merely gives you a legal defense for making copies for your personal use of media that you already hold a license to, but it doesn't mean that licensor has to make the media copyable.
-h-
I guess my point is that even though I don't agree with the business tactics that Microsoft has taken, even though I think that Windows XP is overpriced for what you get, I believe that there are alternatives out there.
Here's the hard part: to get what you really want takes a little work. So I built my own computers and installed my own operating systems. And I can honestly say that Microsoft hasn't harmed me, hasn't stifled my innovation and basically has had little to no impact on me.
My personal opinion is that much of the Microsoft bashing goes on for a few reasons:
1. You're jealous of Bill Gates because he made a lot of money.
2. Microsoft is a big (relatively speaking) company and big companies are easy to hate.
3. Microsoft aggressively protects its intellectual property interests.
It seems to me that only the third reason *might* be a position to argue from, except that, from a legal perspective, MUST protect their IP interests.
As far as the "innovation" issue, I'd say that's a red herring. Innovation, at least in the sense that most people bandy the word around, really doesn't exist. Very little work in any industry is innovative, regardless of what the marketing flacks might say. For the last several years almost every "new" product or idea has really been nothing more than an evolutionary improvement on existing work. Now that's not a bad thing...it really is how new products get introduced. But I don't think it's appropriate to say that Microsoft stifles innovation...the very complexity of many of the "things" that we use today really limits true innovation.
And just as a bonus...for everyone who rails at companies who (mis)use US patent laws to protect their patently obvious software developments, remember that the antitrust laws that Microsoft was accused of violating were put in place to combat the excesses of the railroad barons of the 19th century...just as poor an application of the law to the Microsoft situation as the application of patent law to software and "methods". Read your history!
And finally...the "Windows tax" isn't necessarily a Microsoft invention. Consider the economies of scale. I was part of management for a major computer manufacturer and one of the decisions that we had to make regarded the shipment of systems with no OS or a custom OS installed. From a cost perspective, it simply was too expensive to delete Windows from our configurations and create a special process for the small number of orders that required no OS. It wasn't a contract requirement, it wasn't Microsoft leaning on us to ship Windows, it was economics plain and simple. To knock $40 off the cost of a system and ship with no OS cost well over $40 to implement on such a small volume of computers. Want to blame somebody on the "Windows tax"? It's the corporate bottom line. Oh, and the company is still in business. And, in a sea of red ink, actually made a profit last quarter.
-h-
I can most definitely tell the difference between my $700 CD player and my $900 computer playing through my stereo system. Now, I'll admit that for an awful lot of people, it doesn't matter, and that's OK, but to me, it does.
Even the Linn product makes sonic sacrifices in the name of convenience, but obviously a take-no-prisoners audiophile isn't going to buy one.
-h-
I guess that's OK for the masses who could give a hoot about the quality of sound that they listen to, but I care! After spending a small fortune on high end audio equipment, the last thing I want to do is take a backwards step in my source material.
Music from my computer doesn't even come close to matching the fidelity of music from my dedicated stereo system. Yes, I have a computer connected to it so that I can have hours of MP3's (ripped from CDs that I purchased) playing in the background, but when I sit down in front of the speakers to actually focus on the music to the exclusion of anything else, you can bet that the audible differences between Ogg Vorbis, high bitrate MP3 and anything else coming from that computer and the output of my CD, SACD and turntable are like night and day. The computer, even with a relatively good Sound Blaster Audigy card, just can't compete.
Another, even more insidious problem, is that the course that you advocate pretty much eliminates the availability of music to anyone who doesn't have a computer and a broadband connection to the Internet.
When I listen to music, I want to hear everything that the artist performed. Digitally compressed formats, while convenient, mask much of the detail that makes a high end audio listening session the incredibly enjoyable experience that it is.
-h-
In the US, most of the real action happens on the city, county and state levels. So the problem becomes one of ability and funding. For example, I live in Boise, Idaho, a reasonably tech-savvy oasis in the Intermountain West, and while I think that the local governments would love to have more of an Internet presence than they do, they also have to deal with the fact that there are other projects to fund.
The Internet is cool and a lot of people use it, but on the local level dollars are hard to come by and most local governments are going to look a lot harder at repairing the roads and fixing the school's roof than they are at enabling online payment of property taxes.
The Internet isn't as ubiquitous as many of us think, and until it is, I don't think that we'll see it used with the sort of universality that the telephone or the Postal Service is used.
But I'm sure it'll happen someday...
-h-
Nope, it wasn't. The quote has been commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and probably others, but, in fact, was uttered:
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
by Wendell Phillips, who paraphrased John Philpot Curran, who said, "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance."
Phillips' quote came in an 1852 speech to the Massacheusetts Antislavery Society. Curran's was from his Speech upon the Right of Election made in 1790.
Nonetheless, the quote, regardless of who made it, is well worth remembering.
-h-
I have to say, though, that the HP49 is some kind of utter nightmare. It's as if HP turned its back on all of the good things that evolved over the years and decided that Texas Instruments was the holy grail or something. While the calculator is quite powerful, I find that it's useability is just horrendous and the calculator is actually slower than both the HP49GX and the TI92Plus. In fact, nobody that I know in academia or in engineering gives the 49 a passing glance.
Nonetheless, everyone is entitled to a mistake, I guess. On the other hand, HP has made a significant marketing mistake by not grabbing the hearts and minds of students. Texas Instruments is the king in that regard, if only because of their academic program that gives teachers calculators free of charge based on the number of TI calculators that their students use.
Amazingly, Hewlett Packard has the single largest corporate site in their organization here in Boise, Idaho, yet you'll find that the dominant calculator in use (by far) at the local university is the TI. Why? Because TI gives calculators to the faculty free of charge if their students use enough of them. What is the dominant brand of calculator in the university's bookstore? Yep, TI. And this is from a university that has the 7th best public engineering program in the nation. And is just 10 miles from a huge HP campus. Go figure.
Still, I'll be sad to see them go. But I wouldn't blame Fiorina for the loss...I think it's been a long time coming.
-h-
-h-
I'm an electrical engineer. I design memory modules. Virtually nothing that I learned in 4 1/2 years of college applies directly to my field except for a few basic electrical principles that I didn't have to go to college to learn. On the other hand, that time in college gave me the ability to think on my own, draw accurate conclusions from limited data and to hold my own in a relatively technical conversation with my peers. The time was well spent just for that.
I suspect that if you raise your concerns with your professors, you'll find out that they won't claim that a college education, well rounded or not, will send you out into the world fully trained to do whatever it is that you want to do. But it will give you a solid foundation with which to start. And that's not so bad.
Oh, and one thing that I think everyone should be able to do is spell. "Forrest" only has one "r" in it.
-h-
car, in the event this car is no longer used, send it to the nearest junkyard.", so
why is this true for software?
It's true for software because the buying public has come to accept it as a condition for using the software licenses that they purchase. Obviously cars aren't software, particularly since when you buy a car, you buy the car. In a way, of course, a lease is like a license to use the car and, I suppose, the lessor could put that language in the contract, but the buying public wouldn't accept it. The bottom line is the subject line.
-h-
We all "know" what's wrong with the system, but when the rubber hits the road, very few are willing to take the time, energy and money to try to make a difference.
Now, in all fairness, the US population in general isn't particularly different from our subpopulation, it's just that we've found a different outlet for talking about what's wrong and what should be fixed...instead of meeting at the barbershop or the bar, we have online outlets. But even though the forum has changed, the result is still the same. All words, no action.
-h-
Why aren't you talking to a lawyer?
Man, whatever you see here, don't take a word of it as reliable until you take all of your information to a lawyer. In fact, you'll probably find that the campus offers free legal service. Bundle up your papers, trundle down to the lawyer's office and forget that you ever asked what you asked here.
-h-
I've also noticed that Linux zealots will say just about anything to a Windows user to justify the huge amounts of inconvenience that they go through to support their habit.
One man's passion is another man's wretched excess.
Lucky for me I own Conrad-Johnson audio equipment AND use Linux!
-h-
Since the architecture isn't going to change on the top layers, where most of the action is, the improvements become incremental. It would be nice, though, to be able to shorten long interconnect runs, especially with capacitance becoming a significant issue now. But I wonder if the significant cost to replace existing design and manufacturing tools is worth the seemingly small gains that the technology offers.
-h-
By the way, I'm a partner in a large website and we make a little bit of money from banner ads. But we recognized pretty early on that the whole banner ad business was smoke and mirrors and my partner and I decided that if we were going to have any revenues that we would depend on that they would have to come from somewhere else. Also, we've searched out the best deals on web hosting, even to the point of putting some of our repetitively viewed files on a non-bandwidth limited DSL connection. It works...we have no out of pocket expenses and when all is said and done, we even clear a few bucks at the end of the month.
I think that if you look at the kinds of web sites that are flailing around in the banner ad crash, you'll see that they're often birds of a feather with little to differentiate themselves. And since their operators have hitched themselves to a (rapidly) falling star, they are faced with the fact that they are either going to go out of business, find a business model that works, or cease to be a "business" and turn back into what many of them used to be: a hobby.
There's not a lot of difference between the tightening of the high-tech industry and the demise of web site after web site. Those that are unsteady to begin with are going to go away and the industry is going to consolidate into a few successful businesses and many "successful" hobbies. And guess what? There's nothing wrong with that! It's the way that capitalism works.
-h-
Nokia is a pretty darned big company doing what it does, but in the US what it doesn't do is a whole lot with computers. It has decent name recognition in cell phones, but its other computer-related offering, monitors, doesn't garner much attention.
Obviously Microsoft is going to spend a bundle on promoting the Xbox. I doubt that even if Nokia came up with a higher performing system they could make any kind of a dent in Microsoft's sales. After all, if performance made a difference, then we'd all be watching Betamax instead of VHS and listening to DAT instead of cassettes.
Marketing is king...name recognition drives marketing and Microsoft has that in spades.
Bummer.
-h-
One thing is clear, though. Microsoft is in business to make money. If you are naive enough to ask them to start unbundling the operating system, then I think that it's appropriate to start looking at what the competition bundles as well.
Take a gander through any distribution of Linux. You'll probably see even more functionality in a standard RedHat installation than you will in Windows 98. Yet Corel isn't cursing at RedHat because they've chosen to install a "free" office suite instead of making users purchase an alternative. You don't see the folks at Opera cursing RedHat because Netscape is part of the OS bundle. You don't see MetroX complaining because XFree is part of the distro.
And yet, there's a huge uproar because Microsoft elects to include these sorts of things (and less) in their Windows OS's. This shouldn't catch anyone by surprise. Microsoft's aim has always been to maintain a chokehold on the operating system market, and guess what? That's not illegal!
In fact, the very thing that caused the entire DOJ vs. Microsoft case was that Netscape claimed that they were going out of business because Microsoft was bundling a browser for free. Yet the only difference between Microsoft and Netscape was in the way they gave the browser away. And now Netscape is a part of the AOL/Time Warner conglomerate that is cast in the same mold as Microsoft.
Even Jim Clark knew that when he created Netscape that he had a limited amount of time to be successful. He took that as a normal part of being in the software business, and anyone who is involved in software to that degree would be foolish to not be so aware.
I'm a Linux and BSD user myself. I also use Windows because there are tasks that each OS is best suited for. I cannot honestly say that, as a consumer, I have been injured by anything that Microsoft has done in the past. The same holds true for virtually every Linux distribution that I've tried. So the harm, in my mind, is not to me the consumer, but perhaps to some software company that failed to look in the rearview mirror to see what was coming up behind them.
I firmly believe that the entire us vs. Microsoft tempest boils down to the fact that a bunch of people got rich by aggressively pursuing their business plan and everyone else is jealous. Sure, maybe that's painting with a broad brush, but there is a ring of truth to it.
-h-
Why? Because they started making Roddenberry Star Trek episodes. The original series was not what Roddenberry envisioned when he pitched the show. What we have now is, more or less, what he wanted: sort of a weekly review of the major political/philosophical issue of the day, but placed in a different environment, with some sort of solution generated in an hour.
Admittedly, the issues covered and the solutions generated lately have been...well...really syrupy and of a horribly socialistic vein.
Do you remember why we really liked the original series? Why we still like it today? Because it wasn't about technology, it wasn't about really cool special effects. It wasn't about aliens with weird noses.
It was about a few good friends and the adventures that they had. It was like a cross of swashbuckling and the wild west. It was a lot of fun with (usually) just a hint of a social message.
Fast forward to today: a ton of philosophy, a bit of Marxism, a social message with all the subtlety of a fist to the nose, and horrendous writing.
My feeling is that unless the franchise takes a dramatically different tack, this iteration of Star Trek will be the last. Or if not the last, it should be the last.
-h-
I guess that it's possible that when somebody told Jon Katz that the movie was "campy" he though that they said "creepy" and then was disappointed.
On the other hand, I suspect that this is a little more like the usual dreck that Katz dishes out: poorly researched, full of errors and simply trading on the "reputation" that a few folks at /. seem to think that he earned with his "Hellmouth" series.
My opinion? Katz can't write articles that are in line with the (admittedly high) expectations of this audience. It's like Scientific American asking Art Bell to write an article on extraterrestrial exploration. While Katz's writing can be funny from the point of view of the poor schmuck that thinks that he's saying something grand and erudite, yet is only showing his own ignorance and self importance, it's really painful to read. I don't care for stories about those same schmucks who get used by those around them for some kind of cynical, cruel entertainment, but I guess that's what the /. management must be doing.
Maybe someday the /. gang will realize the cruelty of their actions towards Katz and replace him with somebody who has at least a little bit of journalistic ability.
(Psst...just in case JK is reading this, the last bit was sarcasm...look it up.)
-h-
On the other hand, it's important to note that when Linus points out the great discoveries made by the men that he listed, he's making a list of individuals whose work was done primarily with public institutions...schools, foundations or institutions. Even men like da Vinci, who did work privately, worked with the goal of simply publishing his (scientific) work.
Fast forward a few hundred years...
If a private company dumps a load of money into research and development, they deserve the opportunity to get something back for it. Patents are a way for them to recover their expenses, try to make some money (because in a capitalist society, they have that right) and give us the opportunity to use their ideas.
In fact, I would submit that good old fashioned science is still being done for the public good in those very places that science has always been done: colleges and universities and in national laboratories. The IP patents that we complain so bitterly about are really only incremental improvements in existing technology, rarely breakthrough developments.
It is good for the economy to charge, not only for intellectual property, but for any property. Trade is how the economy grows. The Microsoft comment is flawed in that it assumes that if charging for IP is good then not charging for it is bad. I'd say it's pretty clear that that is an unsupportable position. But the other extreme, that everything should be free isn't much more supportable either.
-h-
The .13 micron processes that are state of the art right now are actually pretty big compared to what would be required in a few years, at least by Moore's Law. The problem is that technologies are lagging behind the "Law". A prime example is in lithography. Commercially practical sub-.1 micron lithography doesn't exist. Extreme UV hopes to drive device sizes down to as low as .04 microns, but it's still very experimental, even in its 4th year of development.
Not to belittle Gordon Moore and his "Law", but I think that it's about to give out. Of course, what we call Moore's Law was really nothing more than an off the cuff remark by an "important person", so by following it, the semiconductor industry has validated it.
Anyway, I don't think that it matters whether or not the industry follows it...after all, what we're really after is faster, better devices. And if it's possible to get there without following Moore's Law, then what's the difference? I think that's where we're headed.
-h-