They probably think you're running Windowblinds.:P
I can't find it now, but there was a blog post a while back from some fella at Microsoft who had their own internal DRM freak out on him because he was running Windowblinds. Perhaps if you can convince them that this is not random third party software, this is something Microsoft themselves includes...?
(Personally I prefer the NextStep look and feel, except for the daft menus of course... WindowMaker is my X11 window manager of choice)
Funny, I have the opposite experience with my Mac mini. The small size is cute, but the fact that it's completely unexpandable (don't talk to me about external drives, I've got that too) means that less than a year after I bought it, it was having trouble with some software... I'd have replaced the ancient video card in it but, look, there's no option for that!
And this wasn't "high end gaming", this was *Flash web plugins*.
To add insult to injury, making it that small meant they had to cripple the USB bus to limit the power requirements, so it's not even got enough juice to recharge my Shuffle.
So by the time I added an external hub, and an external hard drive, I ended up with something 3 times the size with two extra power cables and two extra power bricks on the floor, and all the mess from the back of my stereo system right there on my desktop.
Yes, something less bulky than a mid-tower is desirable, but the Mac mini style of machine is taking that too bloody far. The NeXT slab or Apple Performa 475 were a much better model... small and thin so they could be treated as part of the desk, like your mini, but easy to upgrade and work on. I don't need 16 slots and 10 drive bays and a 400 watt power supply, but there's no good reason to go so far the other way that the only upgrade path is to buy a whole new computer.
Slashdot seems to have smushed all the browser results together. Bad enough when/. takes down a website, but no it's eliminated any potential validity to the test.
Huge commercial success without any talent other than a listenable voice once ran through the "studio magic" box [...]
If you think that making a small number of people "without any talent other than a listenable voice" into "huge commercial successes" is how the music business should operate, then I'm not sure we have any common ground for communication. I don't think Poole expected to make Radiohead levels of income from his donation jar, and if he'd made a comfortable living from it he'd have been over the moon.
A good business model is simple and robust enough that it's hard to screw up.
All business models are easy to screw up. Most new companies fail within a very few years.
This isn't a matter of blaming companies, it's a matter of recognizing reality.
Just because you have an idea that works well in a theoretical context, and there have been a few success stories, does not mean that it's a good model.
The article wasn't about a business model, it was about why some business models work and others don't. There are many business models that involve giving away one good to promote the sales of other goods that you can sell at a higher margin. "Give away the razor and sell the blades" is a business model, and obviously a successful one, but do you expect to get into that business today, without a lot of effort and luck?
The first lesson this article is trying to impart is that when you have a good that has a high marginal cost of production, and one that has a low marginal cost of production, you are probably not going to succeed if you give away a lot of the ones that cost you a lot to produce, but you may be able to succeed if you can give away the ones that don't cost much to produce to drive the sales of the higher cost one.
The second is that there are many business models that can be based on the fact that some goods have a zero marginal cost of production. If you are going to make a living that way, you need to come up with one of them. But just noticing that a good has a zero marginal cost of production isn't a business model.
But if there's been a comparable success by a band that hasn't already gained its cultural capital and name-recognition through the evils of copyright and corporate promotion, I'd like to know about it.
It's not that things ought to be free because they can be free -- but that things will be free because that's just basic economics. Price gets driven to marginal cost in a competitive market, and the reason it happens is because others do learn to put in place business models that work, and then if you're the lone holdout, people start to ignore you.
This is just the limiting case of the market. This is what destroyed DEC and other big hardware companies that tried to avoid producing cheap computers that would outcompete their high margin ones. People didn't buy the VAX instead of their desktop PDP-11s running stripped down RSX (P/OS, what a perfect name for an OS that was), people bought desktop micros that had processors that might have sucked compared to the LSI-11... but they cost so much less that there was no demand for something in the middle.
So now one of the things that's hurting traditionally marketed music sales is nontraditionally marketed music. The marginal cost of production of music is now nearly zero, therefore if you can make enough money to make it worthwhile to keep selling a small number of CDs at CDBABY based on the free samples you give away at LAST.FM, why wouldn't you? If you can get your music onto iTunes and Amazon for nothing, and get modest sales and the possibility of better sales (look at how Jonathan Coulton's doing, eh?), you're going to do that as well as playing gigs and trying to get the attention of the big labels and all the other stuff that musicians have been doing for years.
And so people like me get our music from last.fm and 3hive.com and Amazon and iTunes and don't bother going to the record store or listening to the radio (which is all the same Clear Channel approved pulp anyway)... because it's getting easier and easier to find out about the people who are making free work for them... mostly free, just enough that's not free to keep the people making the free stuff to keep people like me going "hey, that's good, I'll get their album" now and then...
IMHO, "Once they get their foot in the door..." typifies "slippery slope."
You were advocating that we stay away from the edge of the slope, extending the "slippery slope" metaphor in a different direction. I'm pointing out that we don't KNOW where the edge is... you can stay clear of anything you could possibly imagine being a problem, and still discover that you were on the slope all along.
If there is no difference between a "slippery slope" and a "slippery trapdoor" then you can't stay away from the edge.
I do understand that congress caused the current problems with changes to IP law, but they remain the best path to pursue correction of the problem. [...] I was hoping to catalyze some to action.
What, by arguing that the honest man has nothing to fear?
They could make things a lot harder for the authors of worms, trojans, and virii.
I have yet to see a credible scenario where this would be possible without seriously crippling all manner of legitimate and often necessary activities, such as writing or installing software. Those kinds of restrictions might be OK for a game console or cell phone, but they're unacceptable for a general purpose personal computer.
The only thing that will end piracy of game software is putting games in cartridges that are technically difficult to reproduce and contain elements required by the game itself. You can use TPM and other technical measures to take advantage of the DMCA (like printer manufacturers do) to prevent people selling cloning cartridges. But as long as the game is stored in a file on disk out of it only takes one person to come up with a way to bypass the protection and put a cracked version online and it's "game over".
CSS doesn't even slow down the class of people who were the main copying threat back when CSS was devised in the late '80s and early '90s. Copying and passing around DVDs over computer networks wasn't even on the horizon... people were treating software released on CD instead of floppy as being more protected just because it would take too long to download... and writable discs didn't come out until 1997. CSS doesn't do anything to stop people who can read the data off the DVD and create a new master from it to create counterfeit DVDs (often in the same factories in Asia that were making the originals), and that's what copy protection was about back then.
However... Dr Philipp Slusallek, who demonstrated how even a really slow FPGA implementation of raytracing hardware could kick general purpose processors (whether CPU or GPGPU) butts in 2005, has been working as a "Visiting Professor" at nVidia since October 2007.
They're still playing their cards close to their chest.
This doesn't mean that there are no copyrights or patents. What this means is that the material covered by these are not "property". The property, the copyright or patent, is the temporary monopoly over the distribution of that material, created to provide an incentive for the production of that material. The strength and duration of that monopoly should be based on the resources needed to profit from the production, distribution, and sale of that material.
What is happening is that these costs have been massively reduced, particularly for music.
The capital costs of music production have been cut by the development of good inexpensive digital mixers and sequencers like Garage Band... something that has been going on since the '70s, really, and which really started to take off as early as the late '80s. You still need a studio, and people with the skills to use these tools well, but you don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to create studio quality masters.
Distribution costs have gone down almost to zero.
And sales costs have been reduced, since you don't need to maintain any inventory.
So the costs and risks involved in producing music for mass distribution have gone through the floor, and the industry that has evolved to manage the former high risk is going through a massive shrinkage... and trying to use the copyright laws created in the earlier period of high costs of production to fight one of the side effects of these changes.
But this has nothing to do with "intellectual property".
the solution to "intellectual property" is to recognize that it's a metaphor, and concentrate on the goals of the copyright system rather than treating it as something that's inherently important.
The raw images often have quite a different color than the released images. NASA typically colors their images to match the calculated color of the martian surface, based on other sensor data than just the camera.
But in the higher resolution frame you posted it looks like an artifact. The top few scan lines have noise before and after the one-pixel-wide white area.
it could also be the sunlit side of a larger rock.
In fairness, the Mac of that era lacked memory protection, and that was a much bigger security issue than a lack of sandboxing, so this was not a problem limited to Hypercard.
You don't need memory protection to implement a sandbox. And if you don't have a sandbox it doesn't matter much is you have memory protection or not, as Microsoft has so amply demonstrated over the past decade.
I've never gotten a virus over the internet
Neither have I, but as a network administrator I've had to clean up plenty. One very effective decision during my years at Ferranti/ABB was to ban the use of Internet Explorer and other applications that allowed the use of ActiveX by untrusted content. This was back in 1997, back when the big noise was "Active Desktop"... I looked at that and was appalled by the design, went to our CEO, and talked him into letting me ban IE, Outlook, anything else that used the HTML control. I was told by the head of US IT that for the next five or so years, until they integrated our IT with the overall company and made IE the standard browser, we were the only location not to suffer from virus- and malware- related downtime.
There's nothing like having a contractor begging you to make him an exception to the "no outlook" rule while you're cleaning the viruses out of his system because he got infected through Outlook to make you a believer in sandboxing.
I haven't checked the stats... but I wouldn't be surprised if, now that Microsoft switched to the more restricted Office HTML in Outlook, the number of exploits vis Outlook has been reduced substantially.
As soon as you switch to a system that allows people to present your computer with untrusted executable content the #1 security issue becomes the quality of your sandbox. Things like protected memory and multiuser protection become secondary, because they don't matter until you've already been penetrated and the sandbox is pretty much the only line of defense against that. Because security is like sex... once you're penetrated, you're ****ed.
I'm still waiting for somebody to defend OS 9. I guess you could say it was OK compared to Windows ME, weren't they out about the same time?!?
Mac OS before OS X was, well, bloody awful. It doesn't deserve any defense.
But I need an OS that's under my control from the bottom to the top. Even with Interix and all the open source tools you want, Windows just doesn't cut it for me. UNIX has a simple and clean design from the kernel all the way up, with some horrible exceptions, but every one of those exceptions is also horrible in Windows... with even more Windows-specific nastiness slathered on top of it. Like the Firefox/IE ShellExecute bug. That bug can not exist on UNIX, because there's no ambiguity about how applications split up command lines into arguments... the API passes a list of names, not a string that has to be reparsed by the application.
OS X, it's got closed source stuff in the upper layers, but I can bypass them, and the Cocoa API is amazingly reflective: the API of an Objective C class is documented in the object code. There aren't any secret APIs because if Apple can call it, so can you. And the lower layers... I have the source code. So I get the best of both worlds: an OS that doesn't suck, and applications that don't suck.
Windows definitely has everyone beat on the number of applications, but Win32 is like a swamp. Like one of those radioactive swamps in SF movies with mutant killer seaweed that reaches out of the quicksand and strangles the protagonist's best friend (but clears away his rival for the leading lady). It's so bad that Microsoft has already tried to kill it once, with.NET (but.NET has its own swamp in Winforms), and now they're saying that Windows 7 will only retain it in some kind of legacy mode. We'll see.
From my experience, WHOIS details are mostly used by spammers and scammers.
And spamfighters, since spammers have to have reachable domains for their "customers" to locate them. Even if they disguise them, they still need to have some kind of web presence that the "customers" will find credible, and that provides a hook to locate them.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably think you're running Windowblinds. :P
I can't find it now, but there was a blog post a while back from some fella at Microsoft who had their own internal DRM freak out on him because he was running Windowblinds. Perhaps if you can convince them that this is not random third party software, this is something Microsoft themselves includes...?
(Personally I prefer the NextStep look and feel, except for the daft menus of course... WindowMaker is my X11 window manager of choice)
Funny, I have the opposite experience with my Mac mini. The small size is cute, but the fact that it's completely unexpandable (don't talk to me about external drives, I've got that too) means that less than a year after I bought it, it was having trouble with some software... I'd have replaced the ancient video card in it but, look, there's no option for that!
And this wasn't "high end gaming", this was *Flash web plugins*.
To add insult to injury, making it that small meant they had to cripple the USB bus to limit the power requirements, so it's not even got enough juice to recharge my Shuffle.
So by the time I added an external hub, and an external hard drive, I ended up with something 3 times the size with two extra power cables and two extra power bricks on the floor, and all the mess from the back of my stereo system right there on my desktop.
Yes, something less bulky than a mid-tower is desirable, but the Mac mini style of machine is taking that too bloody far. The NeXT slab or Apple Performa 475 were a much better model... small and thin so they could be treated as part of the desk, like your mini, but easy to upgrade and work on. I don't need 16 slots and 10 drive bays and a 400 watt power supply, but there's no good reason to go so far the other way that the only upgrade path is to buy a whole new computer.
Hint: pay attention to attributions of comments.
Slashdot seems to have smushed all the browser results together. Bad enough when /. takes down a website, but no it's eliminated any potential validity to the test.
Huge commercial success without any talent other than a listenable voice once ran through the "studio magic" box [...]
If you think that making a small number of people "without any talent other than a listenable voice" into "huge commercial successes" is how the music business should operate, then I'm not sure we have any common ground for communication. I don't think Poole expected to make Radiohead levels of income from his donation jar, and if he'd made a comfortable living from it he'd have been over the moon.
Remember when XP came out, and lots of people turned the GUI to windows 2000 mode.
My XP desktop at work is in Classic mode right now.
Jonathan Coulton's total sales are probably less than the catering bill at a single U2 concert.
But are they less than what most "signed" acts get in royalties?
Hint: the latter number is zero.
Another example of a system that isn't a general purpose computer and moreover one that has not actually been subject to viruses.
Cartridges that have no technical measures to prevent copying can be copied. Amazing.
Did you read the whole of my comment, or just the title?
A good business model is simple and robust enough that it's hard to screw up.
All business models are easy to screw up. Most new companies fail within a very few years.
This isn't a matter of blaming companies, it's a matter of recognizing reality.
Just because you have an idea that works well in a theoretical context, and there have been a few success stories, does not mean that it's a good model.
The article wasn't about a business model, it was about why some business models work and others don't. There are many business models that involve giving away one good to promote the sales of other goods that you can sell at a higher margin. "Give away the razor and sell the blades" is a business model, and obviously a successful one, but do you expect to get into that business today, without a lot of effort and luck?
The first lesson this article is trying to impart is that when you have a good that has a high marginal cost of production, and one that has a low marginal cost of production, you are probably not going to succeed if you give away a lot of the ones that cost you a lot to produce, but you may be able to succeed if you can give away the ones that don't cost much to produce to drive the sales of the higher cost one.
The second is that there are many business models that can be based on the fact that some goods have a zero marginal cost of production. If you are going to make a living that way, you need to come up with one of them. But just noticing that a good has a zero marginal cost of production isn't a business model.
But if there's been a comparable success by a band that hasn't already gained its cultural capital and name-recognition through the evils of copyright and corporate promotion, I'd like to know about it.
Jonathan Coulton?
It's not that things ought to be free because they can be free -- but that things will be free because that's just basic economics. Price gets driven to marginal cost in a competitive market, and the reason it happens is because others do learn to put in place business models that work, and then if you're the lone holdout, people start to ignore you.
This is just the limiting case of the market. This is what destroyed DEC and other big hardware companies that tried to avoid producing cheap computers that would outcompete their high margin ones. People didn't buy the VAX instead of their desktop PDP-11s running stripped down RSX (P/OS, what a perfect name for an OS that was), people bought desktop micros that had processors that might have sucked compared to the LSI-11... but they cost so much less that there was no demand for something in the middle.
So now one of the things that's hurting traditionally marketed music sales is nontraditionally marketed music. The marginal cost of production of music is now nearly zero, therefore if you can make enough money to make it worthwhile to keep selling a small number of CDs at CDBABY based on the free samples you give away at LAST.FM, why wouldn't you? If you can get your music onto iTunes and Amazon for nothing, and get modest sales and the possibility of better sales (look at how Jonathan Coulton's doing, eh?), you're going to do that as well as playing gigs and trying to get the attention of the big labels and all the other stuff that musicians have been doing for years.
And so people like me get our music from last.fm and 3hive.com and Amazon and iTunes and don't bother going to the record store or listening to the radio (which is all the same Clear Channel approved pulp anyway)... because it's getting easier and easier to find out about the people who are making free work for them... mostly free, just enough that's not free to keep the people making the free stuff to keep people like me going "hey, that's good, I'll get their album" now and then...
IMHO, "Once they get their foot in the door..." typifies "slippery slope."
You were advocating that we stay away from the edge of the slope, extending the "slippery slope" metaphor in a different direction. I'm pointing out that we don't KNOW where the edge is... you can stay clear of anything you could possibly imagine being a problem, and still discover that you were on the slope all along.
If there is no difference between a "slippery slope" and a "slippery trapdoor" then you can't stay away from the edge.
I do understand that congress caused the current problems with changes to IP law, but they remain the best path to pursue correction of the problem. [...] I was hoping to catalyze some to action.
What, by arguing that the honest man has nothing to fear?
They could make things a lot harder for the authors of worms, trojans, and virii.
I have yet to see a credible scenario where this would be possible without seriously crippling all manner of legitimate and often necessary activities, such as writing or installing software. Those kinds of restrictions might be OK for a game console or cell phone, but they're unacceptable for a general purpose personal computer.
The only thing that will end piracy of game software is putting games in cartridges that are technically difficult to reproduce and contain elements required by the game itself. You can use TPM and other technical measures to take advantage of the DMCA (like printer manufacturers do) to prevent people selling cloning cartridges. But as long as the game is stored in a file on disk out of it only takes one person to come up with a way to bypass the protection and put a cracked version online and it's "game over".
There is not even a TPM chip in many models of Mac.
CSS doesn't even slow down the class of people who were the main copying threat back when CSS was devised in the late '80s and early '90s. Copying and passing around DVDs over computer networks wasn't even on the horizon... people were treating software released on CD instead of floppy as being more protected just because it would take too long to download... and writable discs didn't come out until 1997. CSS doesn't do anything to stop people who can read the data off the DVD and create a new master from it to create counterfeit DVDs (often in the same factories in Asia that were making the originals), and that's what copy protection was about back then.
Nvidia's chief scientist, David Kirk, is really down on raytracing and particularly on dedicated raytracing hardware.
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/raytracing-vs-rasterization.html
However... Dr Philipp Slusallek, who demonstrated how even a really slow FPGA implementation of raytracing hardware could kick general purpose processors (whether CPU or GPGPU) butts in 2005, has been working as a "Visiting Professor" at nVidia since October 2007.
They're still playing their cards close to their chest.
This doesn't mean that there are no copyrights or patents. What this means is that the material covered by these are not "property". The property, the copyright or patent, is the temporary monopoly over the distribution of that material, created to provide an incentive for the production of that material. The strength and duration of that monopoly should be based on the resources needed to profit from the production, distribution, and sale of that material.
What is happening is that these costs have been massively reduced, particularly for music.
The capital costs of music production have been cut by the development of good inexpensive digital mixers and sequencers like Garage Band... something that has been going on since the '70s, really, and which really started to take off as early as the late '80s. You still need a studio, and people with the skills to use these tools well, but you don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to create studio quality masters.
Distribution costs have gone down almost to zero.
And sales costs have been reduced, since you don't need to maintain any inventory.
So the costs and risks involved in producing music for mass distribution have gone through the floor, and the industry that has evolved to manage the former high risk is going through a massive shrinkage... and trying to use the copyright laws created in the earlier period of high costs of production to fight one of the side effects of these changes.
But this has nothing to do with "intellectual property".
the solution to "intellectual property" is to recognize that it's a metaphor, and concentrate on the goals of the copyright system rather than treating it as something that's inherently important.
The raw images often have quite a different color than the released images. NASA typically colors their images to match the calculated color of the martian surface, based on other sensor data than just the camera.
I wrote an article about this in 2004: http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/vision.html
But in the higher resolution frame you posted it looks like an artifact. The top few scan lines have noise before and after the one-pixel-wide white area.
it could also be the sunlit side of a larger rock.
In fairness, the Mac of that era lacked memory protection, and that was a much bigger security issue than a lack of sandboxing, so this was not a problem limited to Hypercard.
You don't need memory protection to implement a sandbox. And if you don't have a sandbox it doesn't matter much is you have memory protection or not, as Microsoft has so amply demonstrated over the past decade.
I've never gotten a virus over the internet
Neither have I, but as a network administrator I've had to clean up plenty. One very effective decision during my years at Ferranti/ABB was to ban the use of Internet Explorer and other applications that allowed the use of ActiveX by untrusted content. This was back in 1997, back when the big noise was "Active Desktop"... I looked at that and was appalled by the design, went to our CEO, and talked him into letting me ban IE, Outlook, anything else that used the HTML control. I was told by the head of US IT that for the next five or so years, until they integrated our IT with the overall company and made IE the standard browser, we were the only location not to suffer from virus- and malware- related downtime.
There's nothing like having a contractor begging you to make him an exception to the "no outlook" rule while you're cleaning the viruses out of his system because he got infected through Outlook to make you a believer in sandboxing.
I haven't checked the stats... but I wouldn't be surprised if, now that Microsoft switched to the more restricted Office HTML in Outlook, the number of exploits vis Outlook has been reduced substantially.
As soon as you switch to a system that allows people to present your computer with untrusted executable content the #1 security issue becomes the quality of your sandbox. Things like protected memory and multiuser protection become secondary, because they don't matter until you've already been penetrated and the sandbox is pretty much the only line of defense against that. Because security is like sex... once you're penetrated, you're ****ed.
My PDA isn't wireless-equipped. At an amusement park it would be no more "work" than a paperback or gameboy. Do they ban them too?
I'm still waiting for somebody to defend OS 9. I guess you could say it was OK compared to Windows ME, weren't they out about the same time?!?
.NET (but .NET has its own swamp in Winforms), and now they're saying that Windows 7 will only retain it in some kind of legacy mode. We'll see.
Mac OS before OS X was, well, bloody awful. It doesn't deserve any defense.
But I need an OS that's under my control from the bottom to the top. Even with Interix and all the open source tools you want, Windows just doesn't cut it for me. UNIX has a simple and clean design from the kernel all the way up, with some horrible exceptions, but every one of those exceptions is also horrible in Windows... with even more Windows-specific nastiness slathered on top of it. Like the Firefox/IE ShellExecute bug. That bug can not exist on UNIX, because there's no ambiguity about how applications split up command lines into arguments... the API passes a list of names, not a string that has to be reparsed by the application.
OS X, it's got closed source stuff in the upper layers, but I can bypass them, and the Cocoa API is amazingly reflective: the API of an Objective C class is documented in the object code. There aren't any secret APIs because if Apple can call it, so can you. And the lower layers... I have the source code. So I get the best of both worlds: an OS that doesn't suck, and applications that don't suck.
Windows definitely has everyone beat on the number of applications, but Win32 is like a swamp. Like one of those radioactive swamps in SF movies with mutant killer seaweed that reaches out of the quicksand and strangles the protagonist's best friend (but clears away his rival for the leading lady). It's so bad that Microsoft has already tried to kill it once, with
From my experience, WHOIS details are mostly used by spammers and scammers.
And spamfighters, since spammers have to have reachable domains for their "customers" to locate them. Even if they disguise them, they still need to have some kind of web presence that the "customers" will find credible, and that provides a hook to locate them.