Well, Beta couldn't prove any significant advantage to VHS (and VHS had the big advantage of content). However, DVD seems to thriving.
To create a new standard, you have to show clear advantages to the old standard. In this case, digital quality and 24 hour recording time (!) seem pretty significant, particularly if the tapes are the same price.
On the other hand, Yet Another Media Format (YAMF) could have trouble penetrating into the video rental arena, which is where media formats live or die.
Some may find this article interesting... JVC announced a copy protection scheme for D-VHS, presumably similar to DVD (Anyone know more details ?). An excerpt...
WAYNE, N.J., April 10/PRNewswire/ -- Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. (JVC) has developed a new copyright protection system for prerecorded D-VHS content as well as in-home analog and digital recording. The superior copyright protection feature will be included within the D-VHS standard. This new standard makes it possible to develop and produce prerecorded HD (High Definition) video content as well as add momentum to the development of D-VHS hardware products.
That doesn't sound reasonable to me, considering the thing went down at 5-6 times, and you know Sun was out there every time trying to fix it. If it was a simple as "loading the current patches", I think once would have been enough.
Well, the key phrase in your post is "our mail clients", as if there was some board of directors making decisions about what goes into mail clients.
If non-technical users used Unix regularly, I guarantee the power level of mail clients would rise dramatically. At some point, the mail client will detect a script and ask some question like, "This appears to be a program. Many programs contain viruses. Would you like to execute it anyway?" -- somewhat like the warning in Windows, isn't it? But the users will do it anyway.
The point about permissions is a good one, but it is often useful to be able to execute an attachment in an e-mail, and if Linux/Unix ever manages to rise above the micro-level as a desktop OS, these problems will follow.
NT is not my favorite operating system either, but that doesn't mean that you can't make it reliable and secure. First of all, the "recent wave of viruses" having nothing to do with servers (and indeed, the ILOVEYOU virus has little to do with Windows. Linux could be susceptible to a similar type of virus written as a shell script).
You need an example? OK -- eBay. They use a cluster of NT servers for the front end, and Unix for the back-end. You know those big outages they had? It was the Unix part (specifically stuff that came from Sun, not really Unix's fault), not the NT part.
NT is less reliable than Unix, that is true. But a lot of problems can be overcome if you have support contracts from Microsoft and you have redundant clustering.
Many might take issue with the brevity of the replies, but it seems to me that he answered the question pretty straight-up.
The biggest thing I took from this is that SCO doesn't actually know what they're going to do in the future, and that playing an awful lot of the current plan by ear.
Nice that you give the credit to Debian, but *cough* IBM's AIX has had package management since (almost?) the beginning. And I'm sure some mainframe haxhors could probably tell us stories of earlier package management.
Which brings up the question again of whether Open Source has ever innovated anything, but that's another subject.:)
Not unrealistic at all; in fact, that's exactly what some of the proprietary digital formats were trying to push (I don't remember exactly which ones or what the details were). That's why I threw that in, although it was slightly off-topic for the gist of my post.
It's no secret that the music industry would love to change things so you would only license the music, and not own it. In fact, I'm surprised they haven't tried it with CDs. Probably too much legal precedent.
Somehow, you think that my bringing up Hitler I'm somehow endorsing Stalin. I fully agree with you that Stalin was much worse, but at least he confined his slaughter (temporarily, for the most part) within his own borders (I realize that this is a complex point, and very debatable).
I could make the same point about the Cold War and how the Soviet Union would have been far worse if the Western democracies hadn't stepped up. But the point is more easily made by pulling out WW2.
In any case, it's not just public schools that are silent on Stalin. Try most colleges as well; they usually have some Socialistic professors who will defend the "Great Experiment" and avoid the facts about Stalin.
Thus, saying that free speech rights are a result of the protection of the military and the government is getting it backwards.
The military is for outside threats. If you wanted to make a point about the government and federal police, that would make sense.
But governments want you to get it backwards and use the Government Indoctrination Centers (erroneously termed "public" schools by your educratic masters) to pound this idea into every citizen's head.
Yeah, I guess that WW2 history was a bunch of bunk. Hitler was really trying to preserve our rights.
(OT: Even accepting your premise, it is not clear to me that living with fewer rights is worse than living in a world where my free speech was purchased with the kind of weapons he is referring to.)
You may not like the fact that guns have to be used to defend your freedom, but there is no doubt that the people who want to take away your freedom do use guns.
Do you really think everyone should just lay down everytime a maniac comes down the pike who wants to enslave humanity for his own power?
In other words, do you really think the world should have just given itself to Hitler, because it's too high a price to use force in defense? I think the Jews would disagree with you.
Well, I suppose I should say "Without the military of Western democracies,"... Happy? But I think most figured out that I wasn't talking about military dictatorships.
First of all, let me say that I completely support musicians being paid for their work. That said, I am not going to pay $15 for an album when I only want 1 or 2 songs. In the past, that would have meant taping from a friend's copy of the album. Nowadays, I would rather just buy them directly. I want to pay for those songs. Tell me where I can purchase MP3s of your music. And by the way, some proprietary digital format that limits my ability to copy my owned (not licensed) music for my personal use is not acceptable. My question: What are you doing to make the record companies allow me to pay you? Or how about letting me pay you directly?
Jon, you seem to be saying that because your income would be so little affected by free distribution, you don't care if your articles (or even your books) are freely distributed. Well duh!:)
Well, what if you did earn royalties from your books and it was 95% of your income, rather than 10%? Then would it be OK to scan/OCR your books and post them for free on the Internet?
If that happened, your publisher would come down on everyone like a ton of bricks, sounding suspiciously like the music industry. However, would you stand up and say to the world, "I support these people redistributing my books on the Internet, and to hell with the publisher" like you seem to want the musicians to do?
Therefore, painting the ACLU as the Grand Defenders of the Bill of Rights omits a pretty important detail.
Agreed. I think most would agree that occasionally the ACLU does some good, but they are NOT the defenders of rights that they would like people to think. They very carefully pick and choose which rights they will defend, and invent rights where none exist.
On balance, they are far worse than any Microsoft or any DMCA.
And, I might add, the prime example here on Slashdot is the insanity over filtering programs. It's exactly the same -- it's not enough to let people decide for themselves whether they want a filtering program or not, many Slashdotters (including, I believe, many of the people who run this site) think that filtering programs should be illegal somehow.
How about if we use the example of Perl. Have you ever looked at the source code? Perl is a fantastic tool on the outside. It is undocumented crap on the inside.
Granted, Larry Wall is way over 25, but this makes it even more disappointing. He should know better. I respect him as a designer, but not as an engineer.
I'm really glad to see this. In my experience, the great flaw in the OSS model is the quality of the code. Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards.
The OSS community needs to establish some quality standards. Linux code is relatively new, but this is going to bite everyone in the butt as the code gets modified more and more, and software rot starts to rear its ugly head.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of OSS developers are not very old (less than 25), and don't have the perspective to appreciate trying to maintain 10 year old code that has been modified 20 zillion times.
Mark my words: Unless coding standards get real important soon, OSS is going to collapse under its own weight. "As long as it works" is not good enough.
I'm really glad to see this. In my experience, the great flaw in the OSS model is the quality of the code. Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards.
The OSS community needs to establish some quality standards. Linux code is relatively new, but this is going to bite everyone in the butt as the code gets modified more and more, and software rot starts to rear its ugly head.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of OSS developers are not very old (
Mark my words: Unless coding standards get real important soon, OSS is going to collapse under its own weight. "As long as it works" is not good enough.
Well, Stallman is the ultimate example of who I'm talking about (particularly more-harm-than-good from an advocacy perspective), but I wanted to avoid the easy target.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Beta couldn't prove any significant advantage to VHS (and VHS had the big advantage of content). However, DVD seems to thriving.
To create a new standard, you have to show clear advantages to the old standard. In this case, digital quality and 24 hour recording time (!) seem pretty significant, particularly if the tapes are the same price.
On the other hand, Yet Another Media Format (YAMF) could have trouble penetrating into the video rental arena, which is where media formats live or die.
--
Some may find this article interesting... JVC announced a copy protection scheme for D-VHS, presumably similar to DVD (Anyone know more details ?). An excerpt...
WAYNE, N.J., April 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. (JVC) has developed a new copyright protection system for prerecorded D-VHS content as well as in-home analog and digital recording. The superior copyright protection feature will be included within the D-VHS standard. This new standard makes it possible to develop and produce prerecorded HD (High Definition) video content as well as add momentum to the development of D-VHS hardware products.
--
That doesn't sound reasonable to me, considering the thing went down at 5-6 times, and you know Sun was out there every time trying to fix it. If it was a simple as "loading the current patches", I think once would have been enough.
--
What did you want? Him to tell you what toothpaste he uses in the morning? What "personal" information did you want?
Every question that was asked, he gave basically a straight answer. Give me an example of question that you feel he dodged.
--
Well, the key phrase in your post is "our mail clients", as if there was some board of directors making decisions about what goes into mail clients.
If non-technical users used Unix regularly, I guarantee the power level of mail clients would rise dramatically. At some point, the mail client will detect a script and ask some question like, "This appears to be a program. Many programs contain viruses. Would you like to execute it anyway?" -- somewhat like the warning in Windows, isn't it? But the users will do it anyway.
The point about permissions is a good one, but it is often useful to be able to execute an attachment in an e-mail, and if Linux/Unix ever manages to rise above the micro-level as a desktop OS, these problems will follow.
--
NT is not my favorite operating system either, but that doesn't mean that you can't make it reliable and secure. First of all, the "recent wave of viruses" having nothing to do with servers (and indeed, the ILOVEYOU virus has little to do with Windows. Linux could be susceptible to a similar type of virus written as a shell script).
You need an example? OK -- eBay. They use a cluster of NT servers for the front end, and Unix for the back-end. You know those big outages they had? It was the Unix part (specifically stuff that came from Sun, not really Unix's fault), not the NT part.
NT is less reliable than Unix, that is true. But a lot of problems can be overcome if you have support contracts from Microsoft and you have redundant clustering.
--
Many might take issue with the brevity of the replies, but it seems to me that he answered the question pretty straight-up.
The biggest thing I took from this is that SCO doesn't actually know what they're going to do in the future, and that playing an awful lot of the current plan by ear.
--
I know; I was joking. I wanted to see if any old farts would comment on it...
--
Nice that you give the credit to Debian, but *cough* IBM's AIX has had package management since (almost?) the beginning. And I'm sure some mainframe haxhors could probably tell us stories of earlier package management.
Which brings up the question again of whether Open Source has ever innovated anything, but that's another subject. :)
--
MySQL versus PostgreSQL was covered on Slashdot back in August 1999...
http://slashdot.org/askslash dot/99/08/10/0416205.shtml
and LinuxPlanet has an Open Source database comparison.
http://www.linuxplanet.com/lin uxplanet/reviews/204/3
--
Sound too unrealistic?
Not unrealistic at all; in fact, that's exactly what some of the proprietary digital formats were trying to push (I don't remember exactly which ones or what the details were). That's why I threw that in, although it was slightly off-topic for the gist of my post.
It's no secret that the music industry would love to change things so you would only license the music, and not own it. In fact, I'm surprised they haven't tried it with CDs. Probably too much legal precedent.
--
Somehow, you think that my bringing up Hitler I'm somehow endorsing Stalin. I fully agree with you that Stalin was much worse, but at least he confined his slaughter (temporarily, for the most part) within his own borders (I realize that this is a complex point, and very debatable).
I could make the same point about the Cold War and how the Soviet Union would have been far worse if the Western democracies hadn't stepped up. But the point is more easily made by pulling out WW2.
In any case, it's not just public schools that are silent on Stalin. Try most colleges as well; they usually have some Socialistic professors who will defend the "Great Experiment" and avoid the facts about Stalin.
--
Thus, saying that free speech rights are a result of the protection of the military and the government is getting it backwards.
The military is for outside threats. If you wanted to make a point about the government and federal police, that would make sense.
But governments want you to get it backwards and use the Government Indoctrination Centers (erroneously termed "public" schools by your educratic masters) to pound this idea into every citizen's head.
Yeah, I guess that WW2 history was a bunch of bunk. Hitler was really trying to preserve our rights.
--
(OT: Even accepting your premise, it is not clear to me that living with fewer rights is worse than living in a world where my free speech was purchased with the kind of weapons he is referring to.)
You may not like the fact that guns have to be used to defend your freedom, but there is no doubt that the people who want to take away your freedom do use guns.
Do you really think everyone should just lay down everytime a maniac comes down the pike who wants to enslave humanity for his own power?
In other words, do you really think the world should have just given itself to Hitler, because it's too high a price to use force in defense? I think the Jews would disagree with you.
--
Well, I suppose I should say "Without the military of Western democracies,"... Happy? But I think most figured out that I wasn't talking about military dictatorships.
--
First of all, let me say that I completely support musicians being paid for their work. That said, I am not going to pay $15 for an album when I only want 1 or 2 songs. In the past, that would have meant taping from a friend's copy of the album. Nowadays, I would rather just buy them directly. I want to pay for those songs. Tell me where I can purchase MP3s of your music. And by the way, some proprietary digital format that limits my ability to copy my owned (not licensed) music for my personal use is not acceptable. My question: What are you doing to make the record companies allow me to pay you? Or how about letting me pay you directly?
--
Jon, you seem to be saying that because your income would be so little affected by free distribution, you don't care if your articles (or even your books) are freely distributed. Well duh! :)
Well, what if you did earn royalties from your books and it was 95% of your income, rather than 10%? Then would it be OK to scan/OCR your books and post them for free on the Internet?
If that happened, your publisher would come down on everyone like a ton of bricks, sounding suspiciously like the music industry. However, would you stand up and say to the world, "I support these people redistributing my books on the Internet, and to hell with the publisher" like you seem to want the musicians to do?
--
Therefore, painting the ACLU as the Grand Defenders of the Bill of Rights omits a pretty important detail.
Agreed. I think most would agree that occasionally the ACLU does some good, but they are NOT the defenders of rights that they would like people to think. They very carefully pick and choose which rights they will defend, and invent rights where none exist.
On balance, they are far worse than any Microsoft or any DMCA.
--
And, I might add, the prime example here on Slashdot is the insanity over filtering programs. It's exactly the same -- it's not enough to let people decide for themselves whether they want a filtering program or not, many Slashdotters (including, I believe, many of the people who run this site) think that filtering programs should be illegal somehow.
--
What is your problem? What do you care if someone gets Karma points?
You do realize that this guy getting Karma points doesn't take any away from you, right?
Jeez; I think money-envy is stupid, but Karma-envy is just ludicrous.
--
How about if we use the example of Perl. Have you ever looked at the source code? Perl is a fantastic tool on the outside. It is undocumented crap on the inside.
Granted, Larry Wall is way over 25, but this makes it even more disappointing. He should know better. I respect him as a designer, but not as an engineer.
--
I'm really glad to see this. In my experience, the great flaw in the OSS model is the quality of the code. Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards.
The OSS community needs to establish some quality standards. Linux code is relatively new, but this is going to bite everyone in the butt as the code gets modified more and more, and software rot starts to rear its ugly head.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of OSS developers are not very old (less than 25), and don't have the perspective to appreciate trying to maintain 10 year old code that has been modified 20 zillion times.
Mark my words: Unless coding standards get real important soon, OSS is going to collapse under its own weight. "As long as it works" is not good enough.
--
I screwed up and used a bad character. I resubmitted another version. Please make this one go away.
--
I'm really glad to see this. In my experience, the great flaw in the OSS model is the quality of the code. Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards.
The OSS community needs to establish some quality standards. Linux code is relatively new, but this is going to bite everyone in the butt as the code gets modified more and more, and software rot starts to rear its ugly head.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of OSS developers are not very old (
Mark my words: Unless coding standards get real important soon, OSS is going to collapse under its own weight. "As long as it works" is not good enough.
--
Well, Stallman is the ultimate example of who I'm talking about (particularly more-harm-than-good from an advocacy perspective), but I wanted to avoid the easy target. :)
--