It's not the DRM that makes the iTunes Store popular enough to let Apple stick it to the labels. Not one of the customers of the iTunes Store have bought their music there because they decided the DRM was a must-have feature. The iTunes Store is popular *despite* the DRM.
The nerve of Steve Jobs is incredible. He is asking people to pay again for songs that they already bought!
No, you don't have to buy the music again, you just have to pay the price difference between the new format and the old.
The loyal defenders insisted that when and if a higher quality became necessary and available it would be free for everyone who had already bought it.
I won't say that's a complete fabrication, because no doubt someone somewhere said something like that, but I've certainly never heard that argument raised... so it's at the very least a straw man.
1. Critics have maintained that Apple should allow independent artists to offer their music iTMS without DRM, but the standard response is that this would be technically infeasible.
Complete the sentence: "this would be technically infeasible given their current contracts with the labels." You know, like EMI.
If this is an April Fools prank it's a good one, but if it's not it should have been.
I mean, satellite image archives are not real time, and never have been real time. It wouldn't even occur to me to expect an image in a free satellite archive to be up-to-the-year up-to-date. They're continually updating their archives with higher resolution data, and it would be more amazing if the higher resolution imagery was never older than the lower resolution stuff it's replacing.
I think turnitin improves the world, and is therefore morally OK.
And I do not believe the ends justify the means.
And I do not believe that the means in question are even necessarily required.
I understand that it is difficult to question people you agree with, with institutions that are doing good and important things, but you have to do it. It's one of the things that makes civilization work. Nobody gets a pass.
BTW, google records what you search and visit even if you don't log in. They still have your IP, so they can weakly attach it to you. There is no way to opt-out, except to not use Google.
You can opt out by googling from a public terminal, through a proxy, or from an ISP that NATs your address, or (as you say) not using google... there's no institution demanding you use google as a condition of graduating. You can also opt out from their data collection ahead of time with "robots.txt", or after the fact by notifying them. This was not always true: some years ago when dialup ruled the earth my home system got accidentally spidered by all the major search engines and the resulting attempts to hit my home box instead of my colo blew me off the net. It proved to be very difficult to get in touch with peopl I was lucky, then... I was able to get to a panel at Usenix on search engines and caught most of the principal engineers of these companies and asked them how to get out of their databases. Not all of them were able to do it (Microsoft had distributed a CD with the bogus URL on it), but we were able to get things back on track.
This kind of thing is HOW appropriate behavior gets worked out. By making mistakes and learning from them. Google is learning.
If it takes a lawsuit to get their attention, Turnitin isn't.
The way color graphics on the Apple II worked, some of the bits in video memory shifted the subsequent pixels by half a pixel width, which changed the colors when you were using a color TV or NTSC monitor.
On a monochrome TV or monitor you got to see the pixels shift.
I used this hack to create super-hi-res characters that were more rounded and fully formed than normal hi-res, by carefully taking advantage of the offsets. Some of the characters looked a little odd if you inspected them closely because it was hard to use it without making verticle lines zig-zag, but I was able to hide most of the offsets in serifs. The people seeing it were generally too freaked out about how I was getting super-hi-res to inspect things that closely, unless they'd already figured it out first...
I do think it is possible that this is HP's policy as well and the person screaming to the heavens that running Linux voids your warranty just got a rep on the phone who is too stupid to think of telling them to 'run the recovery cd'.
Shouldn't that be on the checklist?
Any of them could have found out in 10 minutes if they actually saw a box but all they really see are a couple systems when they are first hired and after that they are just expected to be able to support the new products they have never seen.
Shouldn't that be on the checklist?
I mean, they *do* have a checklist they fill out as you go along, an electronic one that that brings up the relevant questions and solutions? They certainly SOUND like they're using something like that when I've talked to them.
They both follow the same model, which is to reinvent the wheel every time, and keep the code secret from the competitors. What they should both fear is a competitor who can always start where the last guy left off.
Apple maybe first, with its locked software and DRM mania.
Yep, you'd never get Jobs saying "Well, there's a lot of smart people at the music companies. The problem is, they're not technology people... And so when the Internet came along, and Napster came along, they didn't know what to make of it... And so they're fairly vulnerable to people telling them technical solutions will work, when they won't... When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content." in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2003.
But those same people don't complain when their searches come out great on Google.
Google: The only copyright issue here is the web index and cache, and that's storing publicly available information that the copyright owner is broadcasting promiscuously. It's also stored for a limited time, they provide a mechanism to opt out, and remove data on request.
Turnitin: They're storing and redistributing unpublished material that the copyright owner is actively protecting, with no time limit, no opt-out mechanism (though since this is unpublished material that should be opt-in), and won't remove data on request. The more-limited redistribution is a mitigating factor, but like the "fair use" doctrine that's not a get-out-of-jail card.
I think Google recording what you search, attaching it to your name, and recording what websites you visit
What part of "they decided it's an invasion of privacy, that they don't need to do it, and are stopping it" did you miss? Also as I pointed out this is not a copyright violation in any case and bringing up privacy issues was muddying the waters.
Google: Not a copyright violation, you're not required to log in to use google, and they're resolving it anyway.
Turnitin: May be a copyright violation (that's for the judge to decide), not optional, and not being addressed.
The point is that it's not a parallel, but even if it were Google's response makes Turnitin look worse, not better.
In other words, you have to install windows to get warranty support and warranty support is a condition of utilizing your hardware warranty.
Fair enough, but everyone does that. I guess it seemed you were drawing more of a parallel with HP than you intended.
Does Sony make it possible to get the machine back to factory configuration so you can do this?
I don't know if HP does, Compaq made it just about impossible at times - when I was doing tech support we had one Compaq that shipped without a restore CD, just a restore partition, and the restore CD they shipped eventually (we needed to retain the drive intact for auditors, so we needed to install on another drive) needed you to burn a DOS floppy to boot from... on a machine with one drive bay.
This wasn't quite the blocker it sounded like... you didn't have to do the restore on the same laptop: all it was doing was initializing the disk and putting the restore partition back. But for a home user who might not have a spare computer or stacks of external floppies and docking stations around the place it might have been.
I would go along with the students, as long as the students pay the RIAA 10^x dollars, where x represent the number of songs in their possession that were not specifically bought on the same media on which the students listen to said music.
1. I don't know where you live, but in the US it's not against the law to "Rip, Mix, and Burn" your own copies of works... so long as you don't redistribute them. If there was any doubt about that Apple wiped it out in 2002... remember the RIAA whining about their "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign? Remember them in the end conceding that it was legal if you didn't give the CD to someone else?
2. Your presumption that every college student has copies of music they are not entitled to is odious.
Before you start pontificating about what's "sauce for the goose", learn to cook.
every time you search in google, they record what you searched for along with plenty of other contextual clues (including what sites you visited).
And even though you're talking about a record that is arguably not your intellectual property in the first place (any more than an inventory of your trash is), Google's already been in hot water for keeping this in a form that's personally identifiable and is changing their policies.
With a standard known good software configuration you can go much further than 'that far' when 'that far' is defined as the diagnostic effectiveness of burn-in diagnostic utilities.
Huh?
"that far" is defined as "the diagnostic effectiveness of whatever HP (or whoever) chooses to put on a diagnostic disk".
I didn't specify that was "burn-in diagnostics". There's no reason it can't be a system restore with a bootable Windows image on it. And don't tell me that a bootable Windows CD isn't possible, that's what the NT/XP/Vista Install CD *is*.
And when someone calls you don't have that, you have a laptop that's acting funny, and you don't know if it's hardware or software. You know it *could* be the software on their hard disk, even IF they have the standard install. If they can't reproduce the problem with the live-cd version of Windows or whatever, then you can tell them "OK, you need to use the diagnostic/system restore disk to restore back to the standard release".
Remember, the message here wasn't "you have to install Windows to get warranty support", it was "you installed Linux, you voided your warranty".
What's with all the lame Second Life articles? There are a lot of other MMOs around that do not suck and they don't get an article every day or two on here.
This is Slashdot (news for nerds), not Gamasutra or an airline magazine. Slashdot's what Dilbert reads, and if you're not Dilbert then you're probably going to hit a lot of boring articles.
SL is interesting to Dilbert because it's deliberately hackable. WoW is interesting to the Pointy-haired Boss because he read that it's "the new golf" and he thinks one of the VPs plays.
If you want Dungeons and Dragons at 80 frames per second, then just ignore the SL articles and remain happy with your were-tauran split-class whatever. I'm going to see if I can make a Steve Ballmer avatar with a "Developers! Deveopers! Developers!" sound clip and jumping-around-on-stage dance animation.
I did. I also comprehended it, which is more than you've managed.
This new architecture includes an on-chip memory controller.
Um, so has every recent microcontroller, from old moldies like the Dragonball up to and including the latest embedded Power PCs. That's a great design for cutting part count and improving integration and reducing system costs, and should make the vector coprocessor even more effective as a compute engine if you're not going off-chip to get it... but it doesn't change the off-chip (or off-socket, depending on whether this is going to be a hybrid chip or not) bandwidth any. I mean... what on earth does that have to do with the fact that the socket has a limited total memory bandwidth, and putting the GPU on-chip chews up the available bandwidth even more than the "integrated graphics" controllers do?
To determine the security of the systems out of the box, he changed almost every system from the out-of-the-box configuration.
He also included classic Mac OS in the test, even though this isn't even installed out of the box on any Mac, and won't run on any Mac shipped in at least three years. Why didn't he include Windows 98 and NT4 in his collection as well?
While there are an enormous variety of operating systems to choose from, only four "core" lineages exist in the mainstream - Windows, OS X, Linux and UNIX.
There's six mainstream lineages left, and they're NT5, 4BSD, Linux, System V, VMS, and whatever IBM's calling their systems architecture this week.
That really isn't a solution either. As a service technician I can tell that maybe 20% of bad hardware will fail a hardware diagnostic.
that's another problem, yes, but it's unrelated to the original assertion that you needed the OEM version of Windows still installed to get that far, which is why HP was supposedly immune to Magnuson-Moss.
Oh yes, a nice fast vector processor on chip is a bonus. Just don't think of it as a GPU unless you're just running Office and SAP and Visual Studio and stuff.
I'd imagine that the bus speeds will be very high on the chip, and so for anything short of gaming, it should be perfectly adequate.
It's not the bus speeds on the chip that I'm concerned with, it's the bus speeds between the chip and memory. You're taking the CPU-memory bus, which is already known to be a critical bottleneck (most of the performance advantage per clock of the Core Solo over the Pentium III is due to the fat Pentium 4 style memory bus) and chewing up most of it for bitmaps... *twice*. This makes Intel's justly maligned GMA950 look good.
Also because it's on the CPU and will likely have a very fast connection, if you're not using its (admittedly limited) power for graphics, you might be able to make use of it as a coprocessor unit more easily and efficiently.
Oh yes, there's definitely an upside. Since you're not going to be using it for grahics you'll be able to use it for other things.
The iPhone is all too likely to be another Newton.
I've used cellphones with touch screens and they are awful. You need tactile feedback, even more than you need it for an MP3 player. A company that's failed to fix... or even give any evidence they're aware of... the tactile feedback problems on the iPod is unlikely to have come up with a great solution for the iPhone.
Wake up man, this is the century of the fruitbat! Use the metric system (named after Compte Nobee Metric, inventor of the steam pantechnicon and the pornograph) like NASA has ever since that Mars probe was lost because they were calculating fuel in hogsheads rather than barrels.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the DRM that makes the iTunes Store popular enough to let Apple stick it to the labels. Not one of the customers of the iTunes Store have bought their music there because they decided the DRM was a must-have feature. The iTunes Store is popular *despite* the DRM.
The nerve of Steve Jobs is incredible. He is asking people to pay again for songs that they already bought!
No, you don't have to buy the music again, you just have to pay the price difference between the new format and the old.
The loyal defenders insisted that when and if a higher quality became necessary and available it would be free for everyone who had already bought it.
I won't say that's a complete fabrication, because no doubt someone somewhere said something like that, but I've certainly never heard that argument raised... so it's at the very least a straw man.
1. Critics have maintained that Apple should allow independent artists to offer their music iTMS without DRM, but the standard response is that this would be technically infeasible.
Complete the sentence: "this would be technically infeasible given their current contracts with the labels." You know, like EMI.
Three alternatives:
(1) Apple wants to soak you for it.
(2) EMI wants to soak you for it.
(3) They both want to soak you for it.
The only thing worse would be a linux plugin for windows.
t ml
Windows Services for UNIX
Microsoft has been using this internally as a "killer app" for converting UNIX sites to Windows by not converting them to Windows for years:
http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.h
If this is an April Fools prank it's a good one, but if it's not it should have been.
I mean, satellite image archives are not real time, and never have been real time. It wouldn't even occur to me to expect an image in a free satellite archive to be up-to-the-year up-to-date. They're continually updating their archives with higher resolution data, and it would be more amazing if the higher resolution imagery was never older than the lower resolution stuff it's replacing.
I think turnitin improves the world, and is therefore morally OK.
And I do not believe the ends justify the means.
And I do not believe that the means in question are even necessarily required.
I understand that it is difficult to question people you agree with, with institutions that are doing good and important things, but you have to do it. It's one of the things that makes civilization work. Nobody gets a pass.
BTW, google records what you search and visit even if you don't log in. They still have your IP, so they can weakly attach it to you. There is no way to opt-out, except to not use Google.
You can opt out by googling from a public terminal, through a proxy, or from an ISP that NATs your address, or (as you say) not using google... there's no institution demanding you use google as a condition of graduating. You can also opt out from their data collection ahead of time with "robots.txt", or after the fact by notifying them. This was not always true: some years ago when dialup ruled the earth my home system got accidentally spidered by all the major search engines and the resulting attempts to hit my home box instead of my colo blew me off the net. It proved to be very difficult to get in touch with peopl I was lucky, then... I was able to get to a panel at Usenix on search engines and caught most of the principal engineers of these companies and asked them how to get out of their databases. Not all of them were able to do it (Microsoft had distributed a CD with the bogus URL on it), but we were able to get things back on track.
This kind of thing is HOW appropriate behavior gets worked out. By making mistakes and learning from them. Google is learning.
If it takes a lawsuit to get their attention, Turnitin isn't.
The way color graphics on the Apple II worked, some of the bits in video memory shifted the subsequent pixels by half a pixel width, which changed the colors when you were using a color TV or NTSC monitor.
On a monochrome TV or monitor you got to see the pixels shift.
I used this hack to create super-hi-res characters that were more rounded and fully formed than normal hi-res, by carefully taking advantage of the offsets. Some of the characters looked a little odd if you inspected them closely because it was hard to use it without making verticle lines zig-zag, but I was able to hide most of the offsets in serifs. The people seeing it were generally too freaked out about how I was getting super-hi-res to inspect things that closely, unless they'd already figured it out first...
I do think it is possible that this is HP's policy as well and the person screaming to the heavens that running Linux voids your warranty just got a rep on the phone who is too stupid to think of telling them to 'run the recovery cd'.
Shouldn't that be on the checklist?
Any of them could have found out in 10 minutes if they actually saw a box but all they really see are a couple systems when they are first hired and after that they are just expected to be able to support the new products they have never seen.
Shouldn't that be on the checklist?
I mean, they *do* have a checklist they fill out as you go along, an electronic one that that brings up the relevant questions and solutions? They certainly SOUND like they're using something like that when I've talked to them.
They both follow the same model, which is to reinvent the wheel every time, and keep the code secret from the competitors. What they should both fear is a competitor who can always start where the last guy left off.
Right on, how about this one?
Apple maybe first, with its locked software and DRM mania.
Yep, you'd never get Jobs saying "Well, there's a lot of smart people at the music companies. The problem is, they're not technology people... And so when the Internet came along, and Napster came along, they didn't know what to make of it... And so they're fairly vulnerable to people telling them technical solutions will work, when they won't... When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content." in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2003.
But those same people don't complain when their searches come out great on Google.
Google: The only copyright issue here is the web index and cache, and that's storing publicly available information that the copyright owner is broadcasting promiscuously. It's also stored for a limited time, they provide a mechanism to opt out, and remove data on request.
Turnitin: They're storing and redistributing unpublished material that the copyright owner is actively protecting, with no time limit, no opt-out mechanism (though since this is unpublished material that should be opt-in), and won't remove data on request. The more-limited redistribution is a mitigating factor, but like the "fair use" doctrine that's not a get-out-of-jail card.
I think Google recording what you search, attaching it to your name, and recording what websites you visit
What part of "they decided it's an invasion of privacy, that they don't need to do it, and are stopping it" did you miss? Also as I pointed out this is not a copyright violation in any case and bringing up privacy issues was muddying the waters.
Google: Not a copyright violation, you're not required to log in to use google, and they're resolving it anyway.
Turnitin: May be a copyright violation (that's for the judge to decide), not optional, and not being addressed.
The point is that it's not a parallel, but even if it were Google's response makes Turnitin look worse, not better.
In other words, you have to install windows to get warranty support and warranty support is a condition of utilizing your hardware warranty.
Fair enough, but everyone does that. I guess it seemed you were drawing more of a parallel with HP than you intended.
Does Sony make it possible to get the machine back to factory configuration so you can do this?
I don't know if HP does, Compaq made it just about impossible at times - when I was doing tech support we had one Compaq that shipped without a restore CD, just a restore partition, and the restore CD they shipped eventually (we needed to retain the drive intact for auditors, so we needed to install on another drive) needed you to burn a DOS floppy to boot from... on a machine with one drive bay.
This wasn't quite the blocker it sounded like... you didn't have to do the restore on the same laptop: all it was doing was initializing the disk and putting the restore partition back. But for a home user who might not have a spare computer or stacks of external floppies and docking stations around the place it might have been.
And it was a great "WTF" moment.
I would go along with the students, as long as the students pay the RIAA 10^x dollars, where x represent the number of songs in their possession that were not specifically bought on the same media on which the students listen to said music.
1. I don't know where you live, but in the US it's not against the law to "Rip, Mix, and Burn" your own copies of works... so long as you don't redistribute them. If there was any doubt about that Apple wiped it out in 2002... remember the RIAA whining about their "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign? Remember them in the end conceding that it was legal if you didn't give the CD to someone else?
2. Your presumption that every college student has copies of music they are not entitled to is odious.
Before you start pontificating about what's "sauce for the goose", learn to cook.
every time you search in google, they record what you searched for along with plenty of other contextual clues (including what sites you visited).
And even though you're talking about a record that is arguably not your intellectual property in the first place (any more than an inventory of your trash is), Google's already been in hot water for keeping this in a form that's personally identifiable and is changing their policies.
With a standard known good software configuration you can go much further than 'that far' when 'that far' is defined as the diagnostic effectiveness of burn-in diagnostic utilities.
Huh?
"that far" is defined as "the diagnostic effectiveness of whatever HP (or whoever) chooses to put on a diagnostic disk".
I didn't specify that was "burn-in diagnostics". There's no reason it can't be a system restore with a bootable Windows image on it. And don't tell me that a bootable Windows CD isn't possible, that's what the NT/XP/Vista Install CD *is*.
And when someone calls you don't have that, you have a laptop that's acting funny, and you don't know if it's hardware or software. You know it *could* be the software on their hard disk, even IF they have the standard install. If they can't reproduce the problem with the live-cd version of Windows or whatever, then you can tell them "OK, you need to use the diagnostic/system restore disk to restore back to the standard release".
Remember, the message here wasn't "you have to install Windows to get warranty support", it was "you installed Linux, you voided your warranty".
What's with all the lame Second Life articles? There are a lot of other MMOs around that do not suck and they don't get an article every day or two on here.
This is Slashdot (news for nerds), not Gamasutra or an airline magazine. Slashdot's what Dilbert reads, and if you're not Dilbert then you're probably going to hit a lot of boring articles.
SL is interesting to Dilbert because it's deliberately hackable. WoW is interesting to the Pointy-haired Boss because he read that it's "the new golf" and he thinks one of the VPs plays.
If you want Dungeons and Dragons at 80 frames per second, then just ignore the SL articles and remain happy with your were-tauran split-class whatever. I'm going to see if I can make a Steve Ballmer avatar with a "Developers! Deveopers! Developers!" sound clip and jumping-around-on-stage dance animation.
Please RTFA
I did. I also comprehended it, which is more than you've managed.
This new architecture includes an on-chip memory controller.
Um, so has every recent microcontroller, from old moldies like the Dragonball up to and including the latest embedded Power PCs. That's a great design for cutting part count and improving integration and reducing system costs, and should make the vector coprocessor even more effective as a compute engine if you're not going off-chip to get it... but it doesn't change the off-chip (or off-socket, depending on whether this is going to be a hybrid chip or not) bandwidth any. I mean... what on earth does that have to do with the fact that the socket has a limited total memory bandwidth, and putting the GPU on-chip chews up the available bandwidth even more than the "integrated graphics" controllers do?
To determine the security of the systems out of the box, he changed almost every system from the out-of-the-box configuration.
He also included classic Mac OS in the test, even though this isn't even installed out of the box on any Mac, and won't run on any Mac shipped in at least three years. Why didn't he include Windows 98 and NT4 in his collection as well?
While there are an enormous variety of operating systems to choose from, only four "core" lineages exist in the mainstream - Windows, OS X, Linux and UNIX.
There's six mainstream lineages left, and they're NT5, 4BSD, Linux, System V, VMS, and whatever IBM's calling their systems architecture this week.
He's obviously a contemporary of the uniquely talented Bergholt Stuttley Johnson.
That really isn't a solution either. As a service technician I can tell that maybe 20% of bad hardware will fail a hardware diagnostic.
that's another problem, yes, but it's unrelated to the original assertion that you needed the OEM version of Windows still installed to get that far, which is why HP was supposedly immune to Magnuson-Moss.
Oh yes, a nice fast vector processor on chip is a bonus. Just don't think of it as a GPU unless you're just running Office and SAP and Visual Studio and stuff.
I'd imagine that the bus speeds will be very high on the chip, and so for anything short of gaming, it should be perfectly adequate.
It's not the bus speeds on the chip that I'm concerned with, it's the bus speeds between the chip and memory. You're taking the CPU-memory bus, which is already known to be a critical bottleneck (most of the performance advantage per clock of the Core Solo over the Pentium III is due to the fat Pentium 4 style memory bus) and chewing up most of it for bitmaps... *twice*. This makes Intel's justly maligned GMA950 look good.
Also because it's on the CPU and will likely have a very fast connection, if you're not using its (admittedly limited) power for graphics, you might be able to make use of it as a coprocessor unit more easily and efficiently.
Oh yes, there's definitely an upside. Since you're not going to be using it for grahics you'll be able to use it for other things.
The iPhone is all too likely to be another Newton.
... or even give any evidence they're aware of ... the tactile feedback problems on the iPod is unlikely to have come up with a great solution for the iPhone.
I've used cellphones with touch screens and they are awful. You need tactile feedback, even more than you need it for an MP3 player. A company that's failed to fix
Call it 432mph and it'll make a lot more sense.
Wake up man, this is the century of the fruitbat! Use the metric system (named after Compte Nobee Metric, inventor of the steam pantechnicon and the pornograph) like NASA has ever since that Mars probe was lost because they were calculating fuel in hogsheads rather than barrels.
Outsource the process to Verisign.