If Nvidia were found to be violating the GPL, they'd probably fight like hell to let the reparations be just ceasing distribution of the "infringing" work--and they'd probably win. All that would mean, then, is that we'd have no 3d drivers for their cards. Some of us don't mind using the binary drivers.
There's a difference between legal downloads and total downloads. Right now, legal services are only capturing a tiny share of the market. That indicates that the market price for the product has not been set correctly.
Not true. There are any number of reasons why people might download instead of purchase that have nothing to do with price. Lack of a credit card has been cited as a huge reason for teens not using legal, pay-for services much. There have also been takedown notices sent to people distributing ALREADY FREE CONTENT, which implies that there are some reasons for piracy that go beyond money.
And even neglecting all that, the fact is that it's unreasonable to compare illegal downloads with legal ones for the basis of establishing price. It might be something the media cartels choose to do in order to try to drive people to the legal services and away from the illegal ones, but the fact that they have a legal monopoly which is being undermined by the file-sharers is indisputable and skews the apparent "fair market value".
I said: Someone else posted that per-viewer estimates for ad-supported TV are at about $0.54. You need to add $0.34 to your price just to break even. Then you have to worry about bandwidth.
You said: So the content providers (production companies) are selling the content to the networks at a loss, and the networks are then selling the content to my cable company at a loss? That's really nice of them, but I doubt that's a sustainable business model. Which makes more sense: everyone is losing money when my cable company offers me the content for $15/month, or everyone is making money on the transaction? Remember, much of this content can be had for $0 - the major networks broadcast their content - paid for by advertising.
I don't see how one statement follows the other. You've provided no evidence that a TV show could be supported by $0.20 per ep downloads--you're assuming that it can, and basing your reply (that if my numbers were right, they must be losing money) on that unsupported assumption.
I don't know all of the revenue streams for HBO, but they clearly make a profit on their 'limited' audience before they started doing series. My guess is that they use the series to differentiate themselves from the other networks that show the same movies (except for those 2 month exclusives).
Also, HBO shows are notoriously overpriced in the DVD market. Deadwood seaons run for $60-$70 on Amazon (cheaper than when I last looked, but the MSRP is $100) for a/12/ episode season. Carnivale is a couple of years old and still at $70 per short season.
Indie TV is an interesting idea, but I don't think it would fly. More likely we'll see more one-offs, which is not what I look for in TV (I want multiple episodes of consistently written and acted material). It'd be nice to see, though.
To make that statement, you have to know what percentage of downloads is being handled by iTunes. I would be very surprised to hear that even 2-3% of downloads are via services that charge $.99/track.
Last year, Apple had about 80% market share in legal, downloadable music distribution. Even now they're still considered the market leader http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=25572 and it seems unlikely that their market share has dropped down to your 2-3% in a single year.
Radio provides music much more cheaply, as you indicate yourself, below.
Yup. At the cost of known scheduling.
If I can get that show for $.20 today (I can on my cable, even though it's going through a third party), then cutting out the middleman should increase profits for the content providers.
Someone else posted that per-viewer estimates for ad-supported TV are at about $0.54. You need to add $0.34 to your price just to break even. Then you have to worry about bandwidth.
By selling the program directly - bypassing a network and a cable TV provider - the actual content creator can dramatically increase their profit.
And you lose high-cost production shows, big name actors, etc. You need capital to do something like this, and usually that capital os fronted by the networks. Yes, you can do low-budget things with no-name actors, but that's not what the public wants.
So you think you will pay twice for the same content? That's very generous of you! I'd rather subscribe to my shows in a "Netcast aggregator", and watch then whenever I'd like, while only paying for the shows I watch. To each his own.
As I said, I'm paying my cable company for convenience and quality. 90% of the shows I watch are available off-the-air with bad static (horrible compression rates with a DVR) and I only buy DVDs for a handful of shows. I'm paying twice for those, sure, but not for the majority of things, and it keeps me perfectly clear in legal territory rather than in the pseudo-legal territory you're in. Yes, to each his own.
I'm not the parent you replied to, but I will say that I don't pirate and I don't use iTMS due to DRM restrictions. Instead, I have cable with a DVR and for those few shows/movies which I really want to be able to watch any time I damn well feel like it, I get the DVDs.
If I could burn iTMS shows to DVD and watch them in any DVD player or in Linux, I'd definitely buy them. I have no particular interest in "sharing" them with others, but I want to be able to exercise my fair use rights (and first sale) rights on them.
But at $2 per episode, this will never fly. Let's assume that every viewer buys every ep of a particular show. It makes the math easier. I've heard estimates that 1hr dramas cost roughly $1mil per episode (I'm going to roll Apple's profits and costs into this, which does funny things to the numbers, but I'm intentionally oversimplifying). That means that to break even, a downloadable show would have to attract 500,000 viewers. Anything above that is profit, but no one spends $1mil to make $10 bucks. Realistically, the investment in time wouldn't be worth it if the show wasn't getting the company at least $1mil in profits. So up that to 1 million viewers required. And that's for an average popularity show.
But the networks have to realize that there's going to be a huge flux in downloaders. There will be people who share the content (even if it's just by having lots of people over at their house to watch it on the computer). There will be people who stop watching (and attrition will probably be greater than new viewers). And don't forget that even though there won't be scheduling issues for the networks anymore, there are still only so many hours in the day. The networks will still be competing for your time, but they'll also be competing for your money now that you're paying per episode. I watched Season 4 of 24 because there was nothing else on and the show still held a modicum of my interest. If I'd had to pay $2 per episode, I would have dropped it like a bad habit.
All of that has to be taken into consideration, and with the rate of change that big businesses have, I wouldn't count on this model any time in my lifetime.
There's nothing more realistic about $0.10/track versus $0.99/track. ITMS is a phenomenal hit at $0.99. That buck looks like it is definitely within the 'market will bear' curve.
The difference with TV is that it's available much more cheaply through the old distribution channels. If all you care about is music, $10 for an album (or the ability to pick and choose what you purchase) might be worth it. With TV, a given episode will air between 2 and 4 times a year for new shows, and possibly more often for shows in syndication. There is greater scarcity in this case, compared to a popular song which is likely to play more than a dozen times per day per pop-radio station (the free, legal equivalent for music).
Of course, there are problems with this, too. TV shows are scheduled in advance, so people know when they will be on. This mitigates (to some extent) the reduced number of airings. Consider, though, that TV shows are roughly 7-14 times longer than the average song and include video along with the audio. They take longer to prepare for ITMS and require much more bandwidth (well more than twice the bandwidth, compared to just being twice the price).
Something to consider in your math is that you are probably paying for your cable every month, even when there are no new episodes of the shows you watch. For example, Fox isn't airing many new episodes of its shows during the World Seriece due to their baseball coverage. If you were a season purchaser on ITMS, that's a lot of money you aren't spending right now. Same for the summer. Also, if every television show was offered on ITMS, then slumps where there just aren't many good shows on TV would benefit you financially.
All that said, I'm not about to drop cable. The convenience of having the shows right there beats having to download them. DVR makes the scheduling commitment almost meaningless, and (until they start blocking ad-skip) means I watch the shows in the same amount of time as if I had downloaded them from ITMS. And having something on in the background is nice, even if I'm barely paying attention to it (I rarely go to the trouble of popping a DVD into the player if I'm not going to actually watch it).
We've never had a box, but twice we've been asked to record a diary of our television watching habits. This was about 10 years ago. I think they included a $10 check each time.
It's not even about what people are watching, which is the real reason that illicit downloads will never be used as a metric to decide what shows to keep on the air.
It's about money. Pure and simple. Will revenue from iTunes downloads of The Office justify the loss of advertising revenue? If not, they shouldn't be counted (and the network is shooting itself in the foot by offering the downloads). If so, then those downloads should count in whatever equation they use to determine if a show should stay in production.
If the network hasn't adapted to using downloads in their equations, then Nielsen is right. Downloads can only hurt a show's ratings and chances of sticking around. This also means that demographics would come into play--there are bound to be demographic groups that are more likely to download than watch on TV.
Once everyone takes downloads into account, there are still issues. How many downloads make up for the lost advertising revenue (this is important, because advertising has contractual elements that downloads don't--i.e. a bad week for viewership doesn't have the immediate effects that a bad week for downloads has). Similarly, the availablity of older episodes changes things. Advertising is a one-shot trick--once the episode is over, it is impossible to get viewers to watch the ads in that show again (until the reruns, which will have different ads). With downloads, older episodes can still be profitable.
It's all a pretty new thing, and that's really all this is about. I'm sure the networks have some pretty smart people working for them, though. This is probably Nielsen in its death throes as automated ways of providing this information to networks and advertisers means that they are less useful.
Exactly. It seems like they could get more information from downloads than from normal TV watching. In fact, normal TV watching is skewed even more by DVRs (although off-the-shelf models could still allow remote-monitoring, but with commercial-skip, it all goes out the window anyway).
What they can't detect (without some info from the remote device) is how many times the episode was watched. They definitely can't reliably(/automatically) detect is WHO watched it, thus demographics go out the window.
Of course, it's probably likely that the production studios get less per download than they get per viewer through advertising revenue. How that figures into things is an exercise left to the reader.
Nothing, except that it may be illegal for someone to hand you a mod chip. If you want to make the chip yourself, I think it would be hard for you to be convicted.
In both of your cases, the tool is restricted, but is the use therein? Can you not mod your console on your own? My suspicion is that you can (it would be a fair use) but you aren't allowed to distribute such a tool.
I appreciate the help, but I'm not sure how much luck you'll have. I believe the driver was ported to OpenBSD first, and then that code was ported to FreeBSD. A co-worker's testing revealed that the card behaves the same way in OpenBSD, which leads me to believe that the original port from the Linux driver was flawed, thus it's probably not something anyone related to the FreeBSD project ever dealt with (all of this was discovered after I submitted the FreeBSD bug reports). But if you can at least get the driver marked as broken, I'd feel a lot better!:)
Indeed. I chose Intel wireless specifically for this purpose, and I'm rather sad to see people giving it flack for the distribution restrictions.
The crazy part about all of this is that the OS I'm using is BSD. The nic works great on Linux, but whoever ported it to BSD (Theo, I think?) either didn't do it right or somewhere along the way it got screwed up. Now bringing the interface down and back up makes the NIC worthless. Reboot is required to fix it.
I believe the original driver release was for Linux from the manufacturer (the also have a firmware blob for the device). I suppose I could write them for support, but I'm not hopeful.
If it wasn't less trouble to just buy new equipment, that would be a viable solution. In this case, it's not.
Note that I'm not complaining here. I'm mildly irritated that this supposed working device does not, in fact, work. I'd like to see it removed from the hardware compatibility list if no one is willing to fix the problem itself. But I knew what I was getting into using OSS, so I'm certainly not angry.
Indeed. That was my (poorly illustrated) point. If I was paying for support, it would be someone else's problem. Failure to support that hardware device which the webpage claims is supported would probably be breach of contract. With OSS, I'm just screwed if I'm unable to fix it and no one else is willing to.
Granted, with closed source software, there are far fewer people capable of fixing it, but if you've paid for the software and it doesn't work, I feel like you should be able to demand that the manufacturer fix it. At least there should be some entitlement there, whereas with OSS, there is none.
I'm in a similar boat. I've posted several questions and requests even for someone to acknowledge that a particular bug I've discovered exists. I've gotten zero answers. It's frustrating when a project's stopping block is a bug that I can't seem to track down in the code (it's kernel level--I'm simply not that good) and that no one else will acknowledge the existence of. The only good side is that at least I'm not paying for this lack of support!
People who choose business models that do not allow them to save for the future usually make that choice with full foreknowledge. No one forced him to be a writer. But I guess his 'contributions' mitigate that and mean that we should all empty our bank accounts and give him all our money (see? I can exaggerate, too!)
And if you'll read up a few posts, I mention that we really have no reason to believe that poor income is why he's broke right now. I stand by that. I simply refuse to believe that such a prolific author (and here's the surprise twist: I have read a great amount of his fiction and consider it to be amazing. My list is Schrodinger's Cat, Historical Illuminatus, and Illuminatus!) made less than I make after considering COLA and inflation. I make do, saving some money, investing some money, and living within my means.
Now I'm not accusing Bob of making poor financial choices--quite the contrary, I pointed out that his illeness is probably a great drain on his finances. I also pointed out that if I had his health, I'd be in the exact same position, most likely. My entire reason for replying to this particular sub-thread was the assertion that Robert's situation proves that copyright is a lousy way to make a living. Indeed, I wish that I hadn't even brought up the alternate distribution models because Robert's illness itself is probably enough to put him in this situation, even if he made ten-times the amount of money that either of us make.
As for his contribution to civilization, I'll reserve judgement on that until I see whether his works ever become more mainstream. As it is, I see that he's written some great fiction and has some interesting philosophical ideas. He also has a cult following--my suspicion is that less than one-tenth of one percent of people know anything about him whatsoever, much less anything about his ideals. To swing to the other end of the spectrum in this discussion (and hopefully less vehemently and violently than you managed to), I don't believe that Robert Anton Wilson has cause any noticeable change in current society. I see no significant contribution (yet--perhaps one day he will be required reading in grade school--but with the way the world is going, I doubt it).
And again, all of that is far beyond the point that using copyright can certainly be an effective way to make a living.
1) I didn't say a damned word about the Internet in my post. RAW knew the terms of the contracts he signed (or he should have) and could have chosen not to sign them. He could have self-published, self-marketed. This/did/ happen before the Internet.
2) Is the accusation that I haven't read any of his book supposed to be some sort of sleight? The implied tone from the text says 'yes', yet I can't fathom why that would be the case.
Sure, but copyright laws is their tools of choice to explore and suck the most from the artists.
The key word being "tool". A tool is neither inherently evil nor inherently good blahblahblahrhetoricrhetoricrhetoric.
All of this and you're not even saw my other point where I stated that fanfic can be a good starting place, or tool for learning.
That's fine. Lots of fanfic exists and the copyright creators largely ignore it if it's not for profit. It would be nice if they'd give explicit permission, but so far it seems that there is some amount of implicit permission.
I don't know, maybe we should ask that the Grimm brothers or La Fountain, or even Disney.
Yup. I do pose that question. Worse is the hypocricy of Disney, struggling to keep its products out of the public domain while using public-domain works in almost all of their films.
And legal funds are a different beast. Contributing to a legal fund for a cause you believe in can indirectly (or sometimes directly) benefit you. I've contributed to the EFF--not because of any particularly altruistic reason, but because I want to see things change. Giving money to someone fighting the RIAA or accused of patent infringement helps create precedent which supports certain ideals and/or brings things into the public domain. Completely different issue.
Slashdot Mirror
If Nvidia were found to be violating the GPL, they'd probably fight like hell to let the reparations be just ceasing distribution of the "infringing" work--and they'd probably win. All that would mean, then, is that we'd have no 3d drivers for their cards. Some of us don't mind using the binary drivers.
There's a difference between legal downloads and total downloads. Right now, legal services are only capturing a tiny share of the market. That indicates that the market price for the product has not been set correctly.
Not true. There are any number of reasons why people might download instead of purchase that have nothing to do with price. Lack of a credit card has been cited as a huge reason for teens not using legal, pay-for services much. There have also been takedown notices sent to people distributing ALREADY FREE CONTENT, which implies that there are some reasons for piracy that go beyond money.
And even neglecting all that, the fact is that it's unreasonable to compare illegal downloads with legal ones for the basis of establishing price. It might be something the media cartels choose to do in order to try to drive people to the legal services and away from the illegal ones, but the fact that they have a legal monopoly which is being undermined by the file-sharers is indisputable and skews the apparent "fair market value".
I said: Someone else posted that per-viewer estimates for ad-supported TV are at about $0.54. You need to add $0.34 to your price just to break even. Then you have to worry about bandwidth.
You said: So the content providers (production companies) are selling the content to the networks at a loss, and the networks are then selling the content to my cable company at a loss? That's really nice of them, but I doubt that's a sustainable business model. Which makes more sense: everyone is losing money when my cable company offers me the content for $15/month, or everyone is making money on the transaction? Remember, much of this content can be had for $0 - the major networks broadcast their content - paid for by advertising.
I don't see how one statement follows the other. You've provided no evidence that a TV show could be supported by $0.20 per ep downloads--you're assuming that it can, and basing your reply (that if my numbers were right, they must be losing money) on that unsupported assumption.
I don't know all of the revenue streams for HBO, but they clearly make a profit on their 'limited' audience before they started doing series. My guess is that they use the series to differentiate themselves from the other networks that show the same movies (except for those 2 month exclusives).
/12/ episode season. Carnivale is a couple of years old and still at $70 per short season.
Also, HBO shows are notoriously overpriced in the DVD market. Deadwood seaons run for $60-$70 on Amazon (cheaper than when I last looked, but the MSRP is $100) for a
Indie TV is an interesting idea, but I don't think it would fly. More likely we'll see more one-offs, which is not what I look for in TV (I want multiple episodes of consistently written and acted material). It'd be nice to see, though.
To make that statement, you have to know what percentage of downloads is being handled by iTunes. I would be very surprised to hear that even 2-3% of downloads are via services that charge $.99/track.
Last year, Apple had about 80% market share in legal, downloadable music distribution. Even now they're still considered the market leader http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=25572 and it seems unlikely that their market share has dropped down to your 2-3% in a single year.
Radio provides music much more cheaply, as you indicate yourself, below.
Yup. At the cost of known scheduling.
If I can get that show for $.20 today (I can on my cable, even though it's going through a third party), then cutting out the middleman should increase profits for the content providers.
Someone else posted that per-viewer estimates for ad-supported TV are at about $0.54. You need to add $0.34 to your price just to break even. Then you have to worry about bandwidth.
By selling the program directly - bypassing a network and a cable TV provider - the actual content creator can dramatically increase their profit.
And you lose high-cost production shows, big name actors, etc. You need capital to do something like this, and usually that capital os fronted by the networks. Yes, you can do low-budget things with no-name actors, but that's not what the public wants.
So you think you will pay twice for the same content? That's very generous of you! I'd rather subscribe to my shows in a "Netcast aggregator", and watch then whenever I'd like, while only paying for the shows I watch. To each his own.
As I said, I'm paying my cable company for convenience and quality. 90% of the shows I watch are available off-the-air with bad static (horrible compression rates with a DVR) and I only buy DVDs for a handful of shows. I'm paying twice for those, sure, but not for the majority of things, and it keeps me perfectly clear in legal territory rather than in the pseudo-legal territory you're in. Yes, to each his own.
Nice link, thanks!
I'm not the parent you replied to, but I will say that I don't pirate and I don't use iTMS due to DRM restrictions. Instead, I have cable with a DVR and for those few shows/movies which I really want to be able to watch any time I damn well feel like it, I get the DVDs.
If I could burn iTMS shows to DVD and watch them in any DVD player or in Linux, I'd definitely buy them. I have no particular interest in "sharing" them with others, but I want to be able to exercise my fair use rights (and first sale) rights on them.
But at $2 per episode, this will never fly. Let's assume that every viewer buys every ep of a particular show. It makes the math easier. I've heard estimates that 1hr dramas cost roughly $1mil per episode (I'm going to roll Apple's profits and costs into this, which does funny things to the numbers, but I'm intentionally oversimplifying). That means that to break even, a downloadable show would have to attract 500,000 viewers. Anything above that is profit, but no one spends $1mil to make $10 bucks. Realistically, the investment in time wouldn't be worth it if the show wasn't getting the company at least $1mil in profits. So up that to 1 million viewers required. And that's for an average popularity show.
But the networks have to realize that there's going to be a huge flux in downloaders. There will be people who share the content (even if it's just by having lots of people over at their house to watch it on the computer). There will be people who stop watching (and attrition will probably be greater than new viewers). And don't forget that even though there won't be scheduling issues for the networks anymore, there are still only so many hours in the day. The networks will still be competing for your time, but they'll also be competing for your money now that you're paying per episode. I watched Season 4 of 24 because there was nothing else on and the show still held a modicum of my interest. If I'd had to pay $2 per episode, I would have dropped it like a bad habit.
All of that has to be taken into consideration, and with the rate of change that big businesses have, I wouldn't count on this model any time in my lifetime.
There's nothing more realistic about $0.10/track versus $0.99/track. ITMS is a phenomenal hit at $0.99. That buck looks like it is definitely within the 'market will bear' curve.
The difference with TV is that it's available much more cheaply through the old distribution channels. If all you care about is music, $10 for an album (or the ability to pick and choose what you purchase) might be worth it. With TV, a given episode will air between 2 and 4 times a year for new shows, and possibly more often for shows in syndication. There is greater scarcity in this case, compared to a popular song which is likely to play more than a dozen times per day per pop-radio station (the free, legal equivalent for music).
Of course, there are problems with this, too. TV shows are scheduled in advance, so people know when they will be on. This mitigates (to some extent) the reduced number of airings. Consider, though, that TV shows are roughly 7-14 times longer than the average song and include video along with the audio. They take longer to prepare for ITMS and require much more bandwidth (well more than twice the bandwidth, compared to just being twice the price).
Something to consider in your math is that you are probably paying for your cable every month, even when there are no new episodes of the shows you watch. For example, Fox isn't airing many new episodes of its shows during the World Seriece due to their baseball coverage. If you were a season purchaser on ITMS, that's a lot of money you aren't spending right now. Same for the summer. Also, if every television show was offered on ITMS, then slumps where there just aren't many good shows on TV would benefit you financially.
All that said, I'm not about to drop cable. The convenience of having the shows right there beats having to download them. DVR makes the scheduling commitment almost meaningless, and (until they start blocking ad-skip) means I watch the shows in the same amount of time as if I had downloaded them from ITMS. And having something on in the background is nice, even if I'm barely paying attention to it (I rarely go to the trouble of popping a DVD into the player if I'm not going to actually watch it).
We've never had a box, but twice we've been asked to record a diary of our television watching habits. This was about 10 years ago. I think they included a $10 check each time.
It's not even about what people are watching, which is the real reason that illicit downloads will never be used as a metric to decide what shows to keep on the air.
It's about money. Pure and simple. Will revenue from iTunes downloads of The Office justify the loss of advertising revenue? If not, they shouldn't be counted (and the network is shooting itself in the foot by offering the downloads). If so, then those downloads should count in whatever equation they use to determine if a show should stay in production.
If the network hasn't adapted to using downloads in their equations, then Nielsen is right. Downloads can only hurt a show's ratings and chances of sticking around. This also means that demographics would come into play--there are bound to be demographic groups that are more likely to download than watch on TV.
Once everyone takes downloads into account, there are still issues. How many downloads make up for the lost advertising revenue (this is important, because advertising has contractual elements that downloads don't--i.e. a bad week for viewership doesn't have the immediate effects that a bad week for downloads has). Similarly, the availablity of older episodes changes things. Advertising is a one-shot trick--once the episode is over, it is impossible to get viewers to watch the ads in that show again (until the reruns, which will have different ads). With downloads, older episodes can still be profitable.
It's all a pretty new thing, and that's really all this is about. I'm sure the networks have some pretty smart people working for them, though. This is probably Nielsen in its death throes as automated ways of providing this information to networks and advertisers means that they are less useful.
Exactly. It seems like they could get more information from downloads than from normal TV watching. In fact, normal TV watching is skewed even more by DVRs (although off-the-shelf models could still allow remote-monitoring, but with commercial-skip, it all goes out the window anyway).
What they can't detect (without some info from the remote device) is how many times the episode was watched. They definitely can't reliably(/automatically) detect is WHO watched it, thus demographics go out the window.
Of course, it's probably likely that the production studios get less per download than they get per viewer through advertising revenue. How that figures into things is an exercise left to the reader.
Nothing, except that it may be illegal for someone to hand you a mod chip. If you want to make the chip yourself, I think it would be hard for you to be convicted.
In both of your cases, the tool is restricted, but is the use therein? Can you not mod your console on your own? My suspicion is that you can (it would be a fair use) but you aren't allowed to distribute such a tool.
It is FreeBSD, and the driver is if_txp.c.
:)
I appreciate the help, but I'm not sure how much luck you'll have. I believe the driver was ported to OpenBSD first, and then that code was ported to FreeBSD. A co-worker's testing revealed that the card behaves the same way in OpenBSD, which leads me to believe that the original port from the Linux driver was flawed, thus it's probably not something anyone related to the FreeBSD project ever dealt with (all of this was discovered after I submitted the FreeBSD bug reports). But if you can at least get the driver marked as broken, I'd feel a lot better!
Go read some kernel code sometime. There are many more GOTO statements than you think.
Might not have been obvious that I'm quite happy with Intel. The card that's giving me problems is a 3Com.
Indeed. I chose Intel wireless specifically for this purpose, and I'm rather sad to see people giving it flack for the distribution restrictions.
The crazy part about all of this is that the OS I'm using is BSD. The nic works great on Linux, but whoever ported it to BSD (Theo, I think?) either didn't do it right or somewhere along the way it got screwed up. Now bringing the interface down and back up makes the NIC worthless. Reboot is required to fix it.
I believe the original driver release was for Linux from the manufacturer (the also have a firmware blob for the device). I suppose I could write them for support, but I'm not hopeful.
If it wasn't less trouble to just buy new equipment, that would be a viable solution. In this case, it's not.
Note that I'm not complaining here. I'm mildly irritated that this supposed working device does not, in fact, work. I'd like to see it removed from the hardware compatibility list if no one is willing to fix the problem itself. But I knew what I was getting into using OSS, so I'm certainly not angry.
Indeed. That was my (poorly illustrated) point. If I was paying for support, it would be someone else's problem. Failure to support that hardware device which the webpage claims is supported would probably be breach of contract. With OSS, I'm just screwed if I'm unable to fix it and no one else is willing to.
Granted, with closed source software, there are far fewer people capable of fixing it, but if you've paid for the software and it doesn't work, I feel like you should be able to demand that the manufacturer fix it. At least there should be some entitlement there, whereas with OSS, there is none.
I'm in a similar boat. I've posted several questions and requests even for someone to acknowledge that a particular bug I've discovered exists. I've gotten zero answers. It's frustrating when a project's stopping block is a bug that I can't seem to track down in the code (it's kernel level--I'm simply not that good) and that no one else will acknowledge the existence of. The only good side is that at least I'm not paying for this lack of support!
People who choose business models that do not allow them to save for the future usually make that choice with full foreknowledge. No one forced him to be a writer. But I guess his 'contributions' mitigate that and mean that we should all empty our bank accounts and give him all our money (see? I can exaggerate, too!)
And if you'll read up a few posts, I mention that we really have no reason to believe that poor income is why he's broke right now. I stand by that. I simply refuse to believe that such a prolific author (and here's the surprise twist: I have read a great amount of his fiction and consider it to be amazing. My list is Schrodinger's Cat, Historical Illuminatus, and Illuminatus!) made less than I make after considering COLA and inflation. I make do, saving some money, investing some money, and living within my means.
Now I'm not accusing Bob of making poor financial choices--quite the contrary, I pointed out that his illeness is probably a great drain on his finances. I also pointed out that if I had his health, I'd be in the exact same position, most likely. My entire reason for replying to this particular sub-thread was the assertion that Robert's situation proves that copyright is a lousy way to make a living. Indeed, I wish that I hadn't even brought up the alternate distribution models because Robert's illness itself is probably enough to put him in this situation, even if he made ten-times the amount of money that either of us make.
As for his contribution to civilization, I'll reserve judgement on that until I see whether his works ever become more mainstream. As it is, I see that he's written some great fiction and has some interesting philosophical ideas. He also has a cult following--my suspicion is that less than one-tenth of one percent of people know anything about him whatsoever, much less anything about his ideals. To swing to the other end of the spectrum in this discussion (and hopefully less vehemently and violently than you managed to), I don't believe that Robert Anton Wilson has cause any noticeable change in current society. I see no significant contribution (yet--perhaps one day he will be required reading in grade school--but with the way the world is going, I doubt it).
And again, all of that is far beyond the point that using copyright can certainly be an effective way to make a living.
I have to take issue with your reply.
/did/ happen before the Internet.
1) I didn't say a damned word about the Internet in my post. RAW knew the terms of the contracts he signed (or he should have) and could have chosen not to sign them. He could have self-published, self-marketed. This
2) Is the accusation that I haven't read any of his book supposed to be some sort of sleight? The implied tone from the text says 'yes', yet I can't fathom why that would be the case.
Sure, but copyright laws is their tools of choice to explore and suck the most from the artists.
The key word being "tool". A tool is neither inherently evil nor inherently good blahblahblahrhetoricrhetoricrhetoric.
All of this and you're not even saw my other point where I stated that fanfic can be a good starting place, or tool for learning.
That's fine. Lots of fanfic exists and the copyright creators largely ignore it if it's not for profit. It would be nice if they'd give explicit permission, but so far it seems that there is some amount of implicit permission.
I don't know, maybe we should ask that the Grimm brothers or La Fountain, or even Disney.
Yup. I do pose that question. Worse is the hypocricy of Disney, struggling to keep its products out of the public domain while using public-domain works in almost all of their films.
That link doesn't work.
And legal funds are a different beast. Contributing to a legal fund for a cause you believe in can indirectly (or sometimes directly) benefit you. I've contributed to the EFF--not because of any particularly altruistic reason, but because I want to see things change. Giving money to someone fighting the RIAA or accused of patent infringement helps create precedent which supports certain ideals and/or brings things into the public domain. Completely different issue.