The kind of copy protection that people put on CDs won't stop that kind of piracy, because someone who has the resources to package music or games by pressing new CDs in a plant in Asia has the resources to pay for a high school script kiddie to crack the software before you make the master.
You need to make the game into an online service to effectively protect it, and if you've done that you don't NEED to protect the game, because the copy of the software itself isn't where you're making your money any more. Look at Second Life: Linden Labs has made the actual software open source under the GPL. They're making their money from fees, like people renting virtual land on the Second Life grid.
Good engineers need to look for how things can fail, too. They need to look for small parts that children may swallow, weak latches that can allow lids to fall open, weak load-bearing structures... how the environment can make their products fail. They need to look for how things can be made to fail, as well, because the hostile human element is always part of the environment... the same factors that make someone a good engineer make them a good security expert.
The problem isn't that good security professionals have a different mindset from good engineers, it's that both good security professionals and good engineers are rarer than people think, and that engineers are not as often held responsible for how their stuff fails when someone gains an advantage by deliberately making them fail.
As in many other areas of life, I try to ask myself, WWFD? What Would Feynman Do?
A fully caching file system that could be layered on top of your network or disk file system. Sun did this for dataless workstations and it worked pretty well.
Another historically interesting ram file system was the Amiga Recoverable RAM Disk. You coudl even boot off it.
Considering they provide the email address and phone number of their media contact in that announcement.
(spoilers) This isn't "Windward II"...
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
She's not an "ultra cool SC agent", she's still in training, and right up to almost the very end she's mostly worried about screwing up and not being able to get back into SC. All the way back to the Shellworld she's seeing SC monitors everywhere... including in the Peace Faction.
Matter is a comedy of errors, with everyone thinking that everyone else was more cool and sophisticated and capable than they really were, trusting the wrong people and the wrong rumors, and skeptical about the wrong ones. The Oct cannoning up was no more a distraction... they were taken by surprise by the Iln as much as anyone... but without it Djan would have arrived thoroughly demilitarized, and likely too late. What the Aultridia were trying to tell Oramen, we never find out... but there's some indications that they knew something about the Iln and that's why they had the monks holding off the dig. Without tyl Loesp none of this would have happened, but he had no idea what was going on and really no clue that anything WAS going on until he got to the Boiling Sea.
Rather than being padded, I was wishing there was MORE background and more material all the way through.
In a lot of ways this reminded me more of Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep than anything I've read by Banks.
If your bank machine messes up, you know by the time of your next statement... at the latest... and if the bank makes an error you've got a good chance of getting your money back.
If your voting machine messes up, you'll probably never know, and there's no way to get your election back.
I don't think you're arguing with me. Instead, you're making the $20 figure seem less attractive to the labels, because they'd lose the CD sales. Don't forget, what Jobs seems to be asking for is $20 surcharge, once, per iPod. Not $20/month.
So everyone downloads 50 gigs of music for their ipod... so what? Then apple and the record companies have still made more than they would have if everyone only downloaded an average of 20 songs per ipod.
Not if you're only surcharging them $20 per iPod. You're making the same amount, and losing sales from other channels even faster than you were before you introduced this program. That's why the $20 figure is naive. Even the $80 figure seems a bit iffy.
You actively think anyone's going to go to a subscription scheme without DRM?
To beat piracy, you must provide better service, not worse. As long as there are Flac torrents out there, I will never buy DRM'd AACs. But when I do find a band I like selling Flac downloads, I buy them.
That's got nothing to do with my point about a subscription scheme. I find bands I like from streams, from old fashioned radio, from samples that bands themselves put online. You don't need a subscription scheme to let people know what bands sound like. You do need to get rid of DRM. Which is why a subscription scheme is a daft idea... it's even more dependent on DRM. Labels are beginning to see that DRM is holding them back, the last thing we want is to give them the idea that it's got a place again.
I did not know that. At least I don't recall running across that in either volume of his autobiography. Do you have a reference? I don't mean to imply I don't believe you, mind, I'm interested in more details.
I read Feynman's autobiography, did you? He specifically made the point that he was a regular drinker for many years until he decided that he was headed for alcoholism and just stopped.
And I believe that a report like this would have inclined him towards quitting drinking sooner.
I like to believe that the people who really understood the reference would come to the same conclusion.
1. There are other players than the iPod that can play MPEG-4 audio (AAC). 2. DRM-free AAC can be played on any player, by converting it to MP3. Yes, there's a loss of quality, but you're starting with a higher quality track (256k AAC) in the first place.
His statement was correct.
If he believed it correct, he didn't do his research.
If he did his research, he was being deliberately misleading.
Since the average iPod owner buys about 20 tracks from the iTunes, Apple wants to make the premium about $20, arguing that it should cover the average consumer's downloads.
I think this is a bit naive (and I don't think it's Steve Jobs): people tend to eat more at a smorgasbord than if they have to pay for each entree, and this effect would be even greater when they have room for thousands of entrees in their digital stomachs.:)
Yeh, I can't imagine this happening without DRM... this would basically be a subscription model. Not only that, but they'd have to add additional restrictions to iTunes to prevent people from burning (or possibly even playing) the music. I really don't think this would be a good thing, over all, it would mean a serious reversion of Apple's DRM policy.
Look at this: Last year, Amazon.com began selling DRM-free songs that can be played on any MP3 player. [...] Not Apple. Want to hear your iTunes songs on the go? You're locked into playing them on your iPod.
Amazon's DRM-free downloads started last September.
Indeed. There's a lot that just doesn't follow in the article, for example: "It's hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It's hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell's Pocket DJ music player."
Microsoft is notorious for driving employees hard. There's a plethora of books like "Microserfs"... there's nothing "touchy-feely" about them. And Bill Gates was also notorious for micromanaging development... often to the final product's detriment. And don't forget, the Macintosh itself started out as an underground project that Jobs opposed at first.
Jobs has good points and bad points. Success doesn't mean that you have to assume the bad points are suddenly good.
Slashdot Mirror
Google for "USPS porn sting" and you'll find a long history of entrapment such as Jacobson v. United States.
The kind of copy protection that people put on CDs won't stop that kind of piracy, because someone who has the resources to package music or games by pressing new CDs in a plant in Asia has the resources to pay for a high school script kiddie to crack the software before you make the master.
You need to make the game into an online service to effectively protect it, and if you've done that you don't NEED to protect the game, because the copy of the software itself isn't where you're making your money any more. Look at Second Life: Linden Labs has made the actual software open source under the GPL. They're making their money from fees, like people renting virtual land on the Second Life grid.
Good engineers need to look for how things can fail, too. They need to look for small parts that children may swallow, weak latches that can allow lids to fall open, weak load-bearing structures... how the environment can make their products fail. They need to look for how things can be made to fail, as well, because the hostile human element is always part of the environment... the same factors that make someone a good engineer make them a good security expert.
The problem isn't that good security professionals have a different mindset from good engineers, it's that both good security professionals and good engineers are rarer than people think, and that engineers are not as often held responsible for how their stuff fails when someone gains an advantage by deliberately making them fail.
As in many other areas of life, I try to ask myself, WWFD? What Would Feynman Do?
A fully caching file system that could be layered on top of your network or disk file system. Sun did this for dataless workstations and it worked pretty well.
Another historically interesting ram file system was the Amiga Recoverable RAM Disk. You coudl even boot off it.
sell harmful products...
Have you listened to some of that stuff?
The actual numbers make sense since according to Silicon Valley Insider, the music industry makes only about $20 in downloads per iPod anyway.
That figure ignores lost sales from people who would never dream of using P2P but will happily download legitimate "free" music instead of buying CDs.
This would explain why I had so much trouble sleeping until I put some tape over the activity light of my external drive.
Considering they provide the email address and phone number of their media contact in that announcement.
She's not an "ultra cool SC agent", she's still in training, and right up to almost the very end she's mostly worried about screwing up and not being able to get back into SC. All the way back to the Shellworld she's seeing SC monitors everywhere... including in the Peace Faction.
Matter is a comedy of errors, with everyone thinking that everyone else was more cool and sophisticated and capable than they really were, trusting the wrong people and the wrong rumors, and skeptical about the wrong ones. The Oct cannoning up was no more a distraction... they were taken by surprise by the Iln as much as anyone... but without it Djan would have arrived thoroughly demilitarized, and likely too late. What the Aultridia were trying to tell Oramen, we never find out... but there's some indications that they knew something about the Iln and that's why they had the monks holding off the dig. Without tyl Loesp none of this would have happened, but he had no idea what was going on and really no clue that anything WAS going on until he got to the Boiling Sea.
Rather than being padded, I was wishing there was MORE background and more material all the way through.
In a lot of ways this reminded me more of Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep than anything I've read by Banks.
If your bank machine messes up, you know by the time of your next statement... at the latest... and if the bank makes an error you've got a good chance of getting your money back.
If your voting machine messes up, you'll probably never know, and there's no way to get your election back.
This sounds like it would be really effective under Jovian conditions, but a round-trip to Pluto's probably a bit cheaper.
You can convert of course, with the usual caveat of quality loss.
Yes. I already mentioned that. that's why I pointed out that they were starting with a much higher quality product: 256k AAC, not 160k MP3.
In your argument, though, it makes no sense - you could ALWAYS convert your itunes DRMed files and "convert" them with the analog hole.
Converting through the analog hole is inconvenient.
Right clicking on your unprotected AAC tracks in iTunes and selecting "Convert Selection to MP3" isn't.
Yes, it's that easy.
I don't think you're arguing with me. Instead, you're making the $20 figure seem less attractive to the labels, because they'd lose the CD sales. Don't forget, what Jobs seems to be asking for is $20 surcharge, once, per iPod. Not $20/month.
So everyone downloads 50 gigs of music for their ipod... so what? Then apple and the record companies have still made more than they would have if everyone only downloaded an average of 20 songs per ipod.
Not if you're only surcharging them $20 per iPod. You're making the same amount, and losing sales from other channels even faster than you were before you introduced this program. That's why the $20 figure is naive. Even the $80 figure seems a bit iffy.
You actively think anyone's going to go to a subscription scheme without DRM?
To beat piracy, you must provide better service, not worse. As long as there are Flac torrents out there, I will never buy DRM'd AACs. But when I do find a band I like selling Flac downloads, I buy them.
That's got nothing to do with my point about a subscription scheme. I find bands I like from streams, from old fashioned radio, from samples that bands themselves put online. You don't need a subscription scheme to let people know what bands sound like. You do need to get rid of DRM. Which is why a subscription scheme is a daft idea... it's even more dependent on DRM. Labels are beginning to see that DRM is holding them back, the last thing we want is to give them the idea that it's got a place again.
I did not know that. At least I don't recall running across that in either volume of his autobiography. Do you have a reference? I don't mean to imply I don't believe you, mind, I'm interested in more details.
I read Feynman's autobiography, did you? He specifically made the point that he was a regular drinker for many years until he decided that he was headed for alcoholism and just stopped.
And I believe that a report like this would have inclined him towards quitting drinking sooner.
I like to believe that the people who really understood the reference would come to the same conclusion.
DRM-free AAC != MP3.
1. There are other players than the iPod that can play MPEG-4 audio (AAC).
2. DRM-free AAC can be played on any player, by converting it to MP3. Yes, there's a loss of quality, but you're starting with a higher quality track (256k AAC) in the first place.
His statement was correct.
If he believed it correct, he didn't do his research.
If he did his research, he was being deliberately misleading.
Since the average iPod owner buys about 20 tracks from the iTunes, Apple wants to make the premium about $20, arguing that it should cover the average consumer's downloads.
:)
I think this is a bit naive (and I don't think it's Steve Jobs): people tend to eat more at a smorgasbord than if they have to pay for each entree, and this effect would be even greater when they have room for thousands of entrees in their digital stomachs.
Yeh, I can't imagine this happening without DRM... this would basically be a subscription model. Not only that, but they'd have to add additional restrictions to iTunes to prevent people from burning (or possibly even playing) the music. I really don't think this would be a good thing, over all, it would mean a serious reversion of Apple's DRM policy.
Look at this: Last year, Amazon.com began selling DRM-free songs that can be played on any MP3 player. [...] Not Apple. Want to hear your iTunes songs on the go? You're locked into playing them on your iPod.
Amazon's DRM-free downloads started last September.
Apple's DRM-free downloads started last April.
Did the author of this piece do ANY research?
"Forget corporate blogs -- Apple doesn't seem to like anyone blogging about the company."
Except for Dave Hyatt?
Apple's more complex than anyone seems willing to admit.
Indeed. There's a lot that just doesn't follow in the article, for example: "It's hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It's hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell's Pocket DJ music player."
Microsoft is notorious for driving employees hard. There's a plethora of books like "Microserfs"... there's nothing "touchy-feely" about them. And Bill Gates was also notorious for micromanaging development... often to the final product's detriment. And don't forget, the Macintosh itself started out as an underground project that Jobs opposed at first.
Jobs has good points and bad points. Success doesn't mean that you have to assume the bad points are suddenly good.
Feynman was *too* fond of drinking, and eventually gave it up completely.
WWFD? Quit, that's WFWD.
Playing bongos and chasing skirts? OK, that's a completely different matter.
That's exactly the incident I was thinking of.