Sometime in the Windows Media Player 7 or 8 era I decided to start ripping my legally purchased (or licensed?) collection of CDs for listening while at my computer. I did not share these files with any one else nor did I listen to it in two places simultaneously. At the time the default media encoder produced rips with DRM.
I then made the poor choice of upgrading from Win2k to XP with no expectation that it would have any effect on the hours I spent ripping my collection to my computer for my use. Perhaps it is the price of stupidity, but my online collection was rendered immediately useless because WMP decided I was on a new computer and therefore had stolen my rips from myself.
I have been a very satisfied user of iTunes/iTMS and have spent considerable money purchasing from iTMS. Under iTunes Advanced menu there is an item "Deauthorize Computer...". I fear even selecting this item and unwittingly invalidating hundreds of USD in iTMS purchases. I also have no idea what will happen should I decide to upgrade my CPU, add a drive, or even change the IP address of my machine. Or, perish the thought, have to reload XP because I have the poor taste to run Outlook or IE. Suffice to say, all of my iTMS purchases have been burned to CD-R because I'm not quite that stupid.
So here is one legitimate user who wants to not run afoul of the RIAA who may end up with direct losses because I don't have control over my purchased product.
So if virus abetting tools are outlawed then I imagine that the Sale, Possesion, or Manufacture of Office would be punishable by no less than 10 years' imprisonment or fine no less than $100,000.
Having encountered Color Kinetics prior to this article, I was impressed with their elegant use of somewhat standard concepts to make something that hadn't been made before. It ain't rocket science but neither are many patents (e.g. paper clip design) that no one thinks are abusive.
Plus, their consumer products are loads of fun. I have no connection with Color Kinetics.
IANAL but, even if true, in what way did Linus Torvalds benefit from infringement? What in the world would SCO hope to recover? Red Hat's revenue? That's pretty hard to take out of Torvalds' pocket.
Based on the last 8,000 years of history, people have come to assume that there is something necessary and self-evident about government. Katz' article falls into the trap of presuming that governments have some sort of logical primacy that corporations do not share. Unfortunately there is no feature of the natural world or the political geography that prevents corporatism from overshadowing or even supplanting the traditional role of government.
Indeed, it is becomming increasingly difficult to distinguish between corporations and nations as we enter the new millenium. For example, think of that great nation-state from antiquity: Greece. Greece's approximate GDP in 1998 was $143B produced by about 10M citizens; contrast this with General Motors which had $189B of revenue last year with corporate assets nearly twice that of the annual output of our Hellenic friends. GM employs 0.38M people directly with "more than 260 major subsidiaries, joint ventures, and affiliates around the world".
If one were to judge from bumper stickers, it seems clear that people feel far more strongly about their car company than they do their country. Think of it: GM gives me a job, Disney provides me with a fasimilie of culture, WAL-MART provides me with all my stuff, what has my country done for me lately?
My recommendation? The United States Government better get themselves one hell of a PR firm if they want to survive.
I've come late to the discussion, but it seems that there is a much more pragmatic explanation to the existence of a CPU ID register.
I believe that Intel begin putting CPU IDs in when (literal) highway robbery of processors was running rampant. It was noted at the time that gram for gram these things were more valuable than gold and less contraband than cocaine. When a greymarket vendor starts selling Intel CPUs real cheap it really helps the constables to be able to track them back to a "vanished" shipment. Thus, Intel would have added serial numbers for the much more mundane purpose of protecting their own shipments. Dell has now begun shipping "stealh" boxes that don't say DELL all over them (translation: steal me, I'm a computer) for much the same reason that my daughter just received a non-descript shipment from "TRU" which contained a gift from a well know national toy vendor.
As people have noted, the export of the CPU ID might make enterprise asset tracking easier, but I think the more parsimonious explanation fits better. Of course I could research the relevant history, but it's much more fun to pull it out of memory.
In some particularly "consumer" oriented software like winamp, it is often impossible to create an interface that is even visible. I run my screen at resolutions of 1600x1200 and greater. Because of the lack of convention exhibited by winamp, I cannot get the current track information to even be readable. Moreover, the skins are merely chrome and seemingly cannot change the wretched layout of the base application. This is quite unfortunate because the core functions of the program (that is, playing music) are done quite well.
Finally, haven't we learned anything from the bad web pages of days past? Pause the playing in winamp and the single most visible feature, the track time, begins to blink. I had paused the playback because I didn't want to pay attention to the player and now it forces my eye to come take a look. And while I'm on a rant, since when has the exact second of music that I'm listening to become the most salient feature of the interface? In my winamp window I find that I'm listening to "Funkadelic - Good Thought," with half of the title truncated, but I well informed that I've stopped at 7:12 (blink, blink, what, no milliseconds?) and that this particular stretch of music is encoded at 160kbps and 44kHz and that it is in stereo (no, not, mono that word is greyed out). I've got a volume slider that I know is a volume slider only because the volume changes when I move it, I've got a similarly unlabled balance slider for all of those critical balance changes that I always need to apply while listening. And finally, I'm happy to report that the "shuffle" button is twice as big as the "play" button, because, of course, you use it twice as often. Here's an improved winamp skin in only one line of ascii:
Funkadelic - Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts |< || >|
too bad I can't really make this a skin. If I want to "pause" the music then I press pause; if I want to "stop" the music then I can exit the application. I added the "forward track" and "backward track" as convinient chrome. If I want encoding details, I can pop a menu; if I want to shuffle, same thing.
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Sometime in the Windows Media Player 7 or 8 era I decided to start ripping my legally purchased (or licensed?) collection of CDs for listening while at my computer. I did not share these files with any one else nor did I listen to it in two places simultaneously. At the time the default media encoder produced rips with DRM.
I then made the poor choice of upgrading from Win2k to XP with no expectation that it would have any effect on the hours I spent ripping my collection to my computer for my use. Perhaps it is the price of stupidity, but my online collection was rendered immediately useless because WMP decided I was on a new computer and therefore had stolen my rips from myself.
I have been a very satisfied user of iTunes/iTMS and have spent considerable money purchasing from iTMS. Under iTunes Advanced menu there is an item "Deauthorize Computer...". I fear even selecting this item and unwittingly invalidating hundreds of USD in iTMS purchases. I also have no idea what will happen should I decide to upgrade my CPU, add a drive, or even change the IP address of my machine. Or, perish the thought, have to reload XP because I have the poor taste to run Outlook or IE. Suffice to say, all of my iTMS purchases have been burned to CD-R because I'm not quite that stupid.
So here is one legitimate user who wants to not run afoul of the RIAA who may end up with direct losses because I don't have control over my purchased product.
So if virus abetting tools are outlawed then I imagine that the Sale, Possesion, or Manufacture of Office would be punishable by no less than 10 years' imprisonment or fine no less than $100,000.
Having encountered Color Kinetics prior to this article, I was impressed with their elegant use of somewhat standard concepts to make something that hadn't been made before. It ain't rocket science but neither are many patents (e.g. paper clip design) that no one thinks are abusive.
Plus, their consumer products are loads of fun. I have no connection with Color Kinetics.
IANAL but, even if true, in what way did Linus Torvalds benefit from infringement? What in the world would SCO hope to recover? Red Hat's revenue? That's pretty hard to take out of Torvalds' pocket.
I can't believe I got sucked into this silliness.
Indeed, it is becomming increasingly difficult to distinguish between corporations and nations as we enter the new millenium. For example, think of that great nation-state from antiquity: Greece. Greece's approximate GDP in 1998 was $143B produced by about 10M citizens; contrast this with General Motors which had $189B of revenue last year with corporate assets nearly twice that of the annual output of our Hellenic friends. GM employs 0.38M people directly with "more than 260 major subsidiaries, joint ventures, and affiliates around the world".
If one were to judge from bumper stickers, it seems clear that people feel far more strongly about their car company than they do their country. Think of it: GM gives me a job, Disney provides me with a fasimilie of culture, WAL-MART provides me with all my stuff, what has my country done for me lately?
My recommendation? The United States Government better get themselves one hell of a PR firm if they want to survive.
I believe that Intel begin putting CPU IDs in when (literal) highway robbery of processors was running rampant. It was noted at the time that gram for gram these things were more valuable than gold and less contraband than cocaine. When a greymarket vendor starts selling Intel CPUs real cheap it really helps the constables to be able to track them back to a "vanished" shipment. Thus, Intel would have added serial numbers for the much more mundane purpose of protecting their own shipments. Dell has now begun shipping "stealh" boxes that don't say DELL all over them (translation: steal me, I'm a computer) for much the same reason that my daughter just received a non-descript shipment from "TRU" which contained a gift from a well know national toy vendor.
As people have noted, the export of the CPU ID might make enterprise asset tracking easier, but I think the more parsimonious explanation fits better. Of course I could research the relevant history, but it's much more fun to pull it out of memory.
Finally, haven't we learned anything from the bad web pages of days past? Pause the playing in winamp and the single most visible feature, the track time, begins to blink. I had paused the playback because I didn't want to pay attention to the player and now it forces my eye to come take a look. And while I'm on a rant, since when has the exact second of music that I'm listening to become the most salient feature of the interface? In my winamp window I find that I'm listening to "Funkadelic - Good Thought," with half of the title truncated, but I well informed that I've stopped at 7:12 (blink, blink, what, no milliseconds?) and that this particular stretch of music is encoded at 160kbps and 44kHz and that it is in stereo (no, not, mono that word is greyed out). I've got a volume slider that I know is a volume slider only because the volume changes when I move it, I've got a similarly unlabled balance slider for all of those critical balance changes that I always need to apply while listening. And finally, I'm happy to report that the "shuffle" button is twice as big as the "play" button, because, of course, you use it twice as often. Here's an improved winamp skin in only one line of ascii:
too bad I can't really make this a skin. If I want to "pause" the music then I press pause; if I want to "stop" the music then I can exit the application. I added the "forward track" and "backward track" as convinient chrome. If I want encoding details, I can pop a menu; if I want to shuffle, same thing.Okay, I think I've gotten that off my chest.