But they do care when things aren't where they expect them.
Which is why it's really strange that both Microsoft and Apple make so many gratuitous changes from one version to the next, because what they're doing is making it harder from them to compete against their own previous versions. As a system administrator, I had people get upset at me when I wouldn't keep Windows 2000 on their new laptop because Windows XP made so many changes.
However, there seem to be more people who don't care about differences in the OS than who do. And that's something that people who are passionate about the system software really need to get, and that's true whether they're Mac *or* Windows enthusiasts.
Your typical secretary knows all about the Start Menu, how MS Office works, how to get onto the network volumes, how to check the printer queue. All that stuff.
You couldn't prove it by me. Hell, an attention-deficit PhD engineer who knows all about writing code to solve systems of linear equations in Fortran or C++ can still come up with bizarre questions about "where did my J drive go" after an upgrade ("I don't know, that's not in the standard load, where did you have it connected?" "Connected?" "What server was it on?" "Server?"). A lot of people in the office - at any level of supposed technical training - never seemed to get past memorizing how to start the six or eight applications that they actually used (whether it was Hummingbird Exceed, SAP, Firefox, or Word).
But change their *applications*, and they go totally NON-linear.
Things like removing the menu bar from Office are about two-the-the-power-of-your-phone-number times more annoying than clicking on a dock icon instead of a desktop icon to get into Office in the first place... because Office is what they're actually interested in using.
But neither of these is even in the top three reasons why Apple can't "take Microsoft on the Desktop". No, the top three reasons are "Applications", "Applications", and (yes) "Applications".
In the workplace, simply not having those applications on the Mac is a much much bigger problem than whether you click on the picture of the printer in the Dock or go to Start->Settings->Printers. And not having Macs in the workplace is the biggest reason why the applications aren't there.
Let's face it, most people really don't care what OS they're running. They don't buy a computer to run an OS, they buy a computer to run applications... be they games, office automation, home accounting, music, movies, anything...
Windows Vista's biggest competition isn't OS X or even OSX *and* Linux, it's Windows XP, Windows 2000, and even the holdouts running Windows 9x and Me (yep, there are quite a few of them). And what the competition is over isn't even customers really, it's developers. Software publishers, programmers, and the like. Because they're the ones writing the software that people buy computers to run, and the people writing the software that people buy the computers to run, write for Windows. Because that's where the money is. Because most of the people who just buy computers to run applications, who buy the applications instead of writing their own or putting something cool together with Applescript or the UNIX shell, are running Windows. Because that's where the applications are.
Microsoft's got more of a problem convincing developers to cut loose the Windows XP (and Windows 2000 and Me) users so that they'll be forced to upgrade to Vista, than they have convincing people not to buy Mac OS X. Because unless OS X gets enough market share that it starts smelling like serious money, it's nothing they really have to worry about.
So while Apple may remain profitable on the margins, none of that profit translates into anything that can "take Microsoft on on the desktop". And most of the article is all about how big and important Apple is *as a business*, which is interesting and useful to keep in mind, but it's an article that really needs a different title... because the one it has is just plain silly.
If you want to realize a business model based on using this content you better have DRM.
The hidden assumption here is that there's specific content that has to be part of the new business model, or the new business model can't happen.
If some content owner doesn't want to be part of the new business model, because they believe that DRM is necessary for the business model to work, then what that means is that the existence of DRM is preventing the new business model from taking off as effectively as it could. Not that it's not happening, mind you, just that the established content owners aren't going to be a part of it for a while. What this does is allow other content owners to take advantage of the new business model before the established content owners realise they're missing out on it.
The online DRM product is of less value to me, but not primarily because it is DRM encumbered but because of other features I want.
Yes, I know, I just said that. The DRM makes the encumbered product less value for money because (a) it makes the product less valuable, and (b) because it makes the product cost more. All you're saying here is that you're discounting the first part. If the online version cost 1/4 as much the CD version, what would the demand be like? Do you think that might open up some new business models? Well, you know what's keeping that from happening?
iTunes and iPod are part and parcel of the same (new) DRM-enabled (successful) business model.
"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.
What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it." -- Steve Jobs
If DRM didn't exist, iTunes and the iPod would be more successful, not less.
DRM doesn't enable this new business model.
DRM is something this new business model has to put up with, in the short term. It's a roadblock on the way to success, and iTunes is only as successful as it is because it bypasses the roadblock with a DRM scheme that they document how to bypass on their website.
Price is set based on what the customer is willing to pay.
Um, you remember that exercise from "Introduction to Economics" where you take the supply curve and the demand curve and you put them together and get the ideal price? Price is based on both supply and demand, and what DRM does is skew the supply curve by artificially increasing the marginal cost of production. This increases the overhead and reduces the profit margin, and reduces the size of the market. Reducing the cost of production increases the profit at the same price, but as more producers take advantage of it the supply curve moves and a new equilibrium price is reached, with a larger market. Depending on the demand curve, the total profit can be much much higher.
Given how little of the market is in online sales, that's an indication that the total sales without the overhead of DRM will be much much higher... and that's without even considering the additional sales from people who don't bother to buy music (or other content) at all. The market that DRM's standing in the way of could well be bigger than the total music business today.
If the current content producers won't go after it, other people will... and are.
If you consider that most content publishers do not distribute electronically because of ineffective or unavailable DRM
That doesn't mean the DRM is required, it means that they believe the DRM is required. That doesn't mean anything except that the usual FUD is working.
I think that point is very debatable. I buy CDs for several reasons [...]
None of which come down to "you are ripping music rather than buying it", they come down to "the online version is less value for money". You're agreeing with my point: the DRM-burdened product costs more for what you get. For eBooks the distinction is even more clear, because Fictionwise sells DRM-burdened and open eBook formats, and the DRM-burdened ones cost many times as much... and there are DRM-burdened and free versions of the same books from Fictionwise and Baen, and again the DRM-burdened versions cost more.
What DRM does, mostly, is increase the cost of the product, and reduce its value. Without preventing the product from getting into the "pirate domain".
people don't buy DRM protected media because it is not as valuable (they can't copy it) yet at the same time DRM doesn't prevent copying at all
That's not what I wrote. DRM-protected media is less valuable because it costs more than similar unprotected products and less convenient to use, not because it is impossible to copy, but because copying imposes an additional inconvenience. DRM-protected media doesn't stop piracy because unless it completely prevents unauthorized copying (and the analog hole isn't going away, all it takes is one person willing to take the effort to make a decent quality copy and the game is over.
Look, DRM-protected music costs almost as much as physical CDs, and DRM-protected eBooks cost almost as much as hardcovers. DRM-free music costs 1/4 to 1/3 the price of DRM-protected music, and DRM-free ebooks cost less than paperbacks. EVEN WHEN the same music is available in both formats (from iTunes and eMusic). EVEN WHEN the same books are available in both formats (from Fictionwise and Baen Books).
Isn't iTunes itself a perfect counter-example to the thesis that DRM cannot enable succesful new business models?
Since iTunes is subsidised by the iPod and only recently stopped operating at a loss... while eMusic is making it without that subsidy... I would say that eMusic is the successful new business model. On the other side, the DRM-driven dedicated eBook-reader business has been trying to take off and failing for years, with Audiobooks tagging along on the edge of the music business the only place that's had any kind of traction... and yet Fictionwises' non-DRM side and Baen Books are thriving.
The idea of DRM is standing in the way of successful business models. The companies that have seen this are the ones that are thriving, even with the crumbs left by the DRM-obsessed publishers.
DRM provides new ways of assuring getting this benefit and thus enables new business models.
DRM doesn't do any such thing. It doesn't assure anything.
1. It makes it more expensive to distribute product, reduces the profits per sale at a given price, and ensures that the products that don't take heroic measures to prevent copying will be cheaper and higher quality.
2. It doesn't prevent online distribution of unauthorised copies.
That's why online music distribution hasn't taken off. NOT because people are ripping music off rather than buying it, but because the online version is worth so much less to the consumer than the DRM-free CD version... even if the CD version is more of a hassle to buy... and putting DRM restrictions on the online version hasn't kept people from ripping it anyway.
3. Not having DRM doesn't prevent producers from being rewarded.
Since DRM doesn't actually do much to prevent unauthorised copies, and providers are still getting rewarded, it seems like DRM isn't what's making it possible for producers to get rewarded after all. In fact, lots of producers are putting their music online in DRM-free formats... if I recall correctly eMusic has been in business longer than iTunes, and lots of people... including some big names... are still publishing music through them. For eBooks, Fictionwise and Baen Books don't seem to be in any trouble.
The new business models are viable without DRM, as proven by the fact that they exist without DRM, therefore DRM isn't what's needed to enable them.
It sure ain't "text" anything.
on
Define - /etc?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Now I haven't personally used anything earlier than 5th Edition, but I can't recall anyone seriously referring to/etc as anything but "etcetera" or "ee tee see", but just to be sure that it didn't start out as an acronym I checked the First Edition manual, and found section 7 full of programs in/etc, including good old/etc/init, as well as the Fortran compiler, the assembler, and the b compiler!
Thus we come to the UNIX warm boot procedure: put 173700 into the switches, push load address and then push start. The alternate switch setting of 73700 that will load warm UNIX is used as a signal to bring up a single user system for special purposes. See/etc/init.
Where we find...
init is invoked inside UNIX as the last step in the boot procedure. It first carries out several housekeeping duties: it must change the modes of the tape files and the RK disk file to 17, because if the system crashed while a tap or rk command was in progress, these files would be inaccessible; it also truncates the file/tmp/utmp, which contains a list of UNIX users, again as a recovery measure in case of a crash. Directory usr is assigned via sys mount as resident on the RK disk. [...]
An interesting tidbit is the list of files installed into the boot disk from tape on a virgin UNIX system:
Thus this is the set of programs available after a cold boot./etc/init and/bin/sh are mandatory./bin/tap and/bin/mkdir are used to load up the file system. The rest of the programs are frosting. As soon as possible, an sdate should be done.
BUGS: The files/bin/mount,/bin/sdate, and/bin/date should be included in the initialization list of maki.
Historically they've simply sucked it up, and let these people continue to leech away, but they've put their foot down.
Historically Microsoft has benefitted from the "pirate domain" because it reduced the demand for alternate operating systems. Why buy DR-DOS, OS-2, or BeOS even when they were cheaper than MS-DOS or Windows when you can get "the real thing" for free?
What exactly are their options?
Continue to let some tiny fraction of their immense profits slip through their fingers rather than risk upsetting the punters enough that switching starts to seem like the soft option.
I would have thought that by now nobody would be shipping systems with telnetd enabled by default.
Pocket PC 2002 isn't supported?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
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· Score: 1
Microsoft has decided that Vista will work only with Pocket PC 2003 and higher.
*boggle*
Just...
*boggle*
I guess microsoft has finally decided they've knocked Palm down far enough they can quit coddling their Pocket PC customers and go back to business as usual.
Picky, picky. OK, "... people who are calling software with restrictions on redistribution of the source code "open source" are simply prevaricating." The point is that you can fix the source improve the source and pass on the source. What restrictions the license may place on distribution of compiled code are a separate issue.
It's not just "varying degrees of openness". The border between "open source" and "not open source" is quite clear. If it's open source, and if you have the source, you're allowed to give me the source - with or without your modifications. If it's open source, there's presumably some place you can get the source (or there's some place you could have gotten the source at some time - there's no open-source library-of-congress style repository), but if there isn't there should be nothing stopping you from setting up your own repository with the copy you have. Qmail is the only actively supported project I know of that really pushes the envelope here, in that you can pass on the modifications but the recipient has to get the unmodified source and re-assemble the thing himself... I would be hard pressed to argue that it's really "open source" because of that.
Binaries are not source. Restrictions on the distribution of binaries are important, sure, but they're a separate issue from whether the thing they're derived from is "open source" or not.
OK, what I was objecting to was this: "Open source runs the gamut from the public domain with no restrictions to "look but don't use" licenses that let you copy the source code, inspect it, but not compile it or use it in any format other than plain-text."
The term "open source" can't be stretched that far. It doesn't include "look but don't use" licenses. It doesn't include the old UNIX academic licenses. It doesn't include custom contract programming. It doesn't even include the old Prentice-Hall license on Minix.
The gray area isn't between GPL and "look but don't use", it's somewhere around DJB's license on qmail, and there's really not much in it. It's not anywhere near broad enough to question the meaningfulness of the term, and people who are calling software with restrictions on redistribution "open source" are simply prevaricating.
I think you made the same point I did - there is a continuum of open-ness.
No. My point is that a product can include source code without in any way, shape, or form being "open source".
Back when "selling software" was a new thing, and even well into the '70s, it was rare to *not* get source to a system you bought, if you spent any significant amount on software, because there weren't any other mechanisms available to ship a highly configurable software package. In some parts of the industry, it's still a bit controversial for a customized system not to include source. This doesn't, in any sense, mean that you get any more rights with the software... in fact the contracts for delivery of such software may well be extremely restrictive.
If distributing source code was all there was, there wouldn't be a term "open source". There wouldn't be any need for a new term to distinguish "open source" distribution of software from any other source code distribution. Applying "open source" to things like VMS is the kind of cynical debating tactic DEC-heads used to use back in the Ken Olsen days to put down UNIX. It's an attempt to muddy the waters... and even Microsoft has given up on that kind of word game. They call their restricted source code distributions "shared source".
If that's not ebnough to convince you, let's look at wher the terms come from.
Even before the term "open source" was devised there was a strong distinction between source code you could redistribute, like the DECUS tapes, and licensed software that happened to be distributed with some kind of source code, like VMS.
If you can't redistribute it, it's a closed source-code distribution.
UNIX illustrates this prefectly. Academic-licensed UNIX was distributed through source code licenses, but it wasn't open source. It was an "open system"... in fact it became the archetypical "open system", but it was an open system whether it included source or not. The copy of Xenix you got from Microsoft in binary form was open in the same sense that the copy of 32V on your CS department's VAX was, even though one was binary-only and the other included source. A system can be "open" or "closed" completely independantly of whether source code was part of the distribution.
These terms, "open source" and "open system", don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in the context of "non-open source" and "non-open systems". Closed source and open source distributions already existed before the term "open source" was devised to describe systems where the source code was open in the same kind of sense that "open systems" were open, and so the term wasn't created out of nothing by Eric Raymond... it was simply a description of a real distinction that already existed.
To argue that "all source is open source" makes "open source" meaningless, yes, but not because "open source" is meaningless, but because "all source is open source" is a fallacy.
Open source runs the gamut from the public domain with no restrictions to "look but don't use" licenses that let you copy the source code, inspect it, but not compile it or use it in any format other than plain-text.
If you can't use it, it's not open source. You could get VMS source code from DEC on fiche, and this was useful, but it's not "open source".
If you can't redistribute it, it's not open source. Many control systems companies have traditionally sold their software in source code format, particularly where that software is heavily customized, but it's not redistributable, it's not "open source".
The more restrictions there are attached to a package, the less open it is, and it doesn't take all that much to take it out of the realm where "open source" is an appropriate term.
Heck, some interpretations of the GPL are already skirting the edge of what it's meaningful to call "open" as it is. Some of the proposals for GPLv3 have crossed the line for me... though last I checked none of them were actually sticking to the drafts.
An OS X "Administrator" account is not like a Windows "Administrator" account. Under OS X, when you provide an administrator account and password to this kind of dialog what it is actually doing is granting you the permissions, at the OS level, to perform the action. Without going through this dialog even an "administrator" doesn't actually have the rights to perform it.
That is, in OS X this dialog is authorizing you to perform the action. If you are already authorized (that is if you were careless enough to run as root - the only real "administrator" account in the Windows sense) you shouldn't be presented with a dialog at all, because it's not asking you to *approve* an action you're already authorized to perform.
The difference between authorization and approval dialogs is obscured by dialogs like the UAC one that are sometimes authorization and sometimes approval dialogs.
But it's an important one. Approval dialogs are never necessary, technically, they're just there to try and give the user a "last chance" to keep a program from doing something that's possibly dangerous and may be irreversible. Whenever they exist, they should be a red flag, and an indication that the program may need to be restructured so the dangerous or irreversible operation doesn't happen.
For example, instead of deleting a file, move it to a location to be deleted later. Give the user the opportunity to look in that location and restore the files.
AND WHEN YOU HAVE DONE THAT, REMOVE THE APPROVAL DIALOG YOU DON'T NEED ANY MORE.
Sorry for shouting, but I still can't believe that someone thinks it's a good idea for Windows to ask you if you want to move a file to the trash.
This wouldn't need a tower system, you could fit this in the volume of the NeXT slab or the Performa 4xx slabs, or a "lunchbox" the size of a "short stack" of minis.
I can't believe people are celebrating the onslaught of the only software giant with more proprietary vendor lock-in and questionable business practices than Microsoft.
I know that one reason I have continued to purchase iPods is that I don't want to lose access to a bunch of my music.
Did you buy a bunch of classical music from the iTMS, or have you really bought into the "quality" myth. I mean, if you cared that much about your music quality why didn't you buy it on CD instead of lossy-encoded AAC? Since you did, what's stopping you from burning and ripping?
I guess I should have gotten a Samsung, but my previous experience led me to Nokia. Guess it's like they say in the ends, "past performance is no guarantee".:p
Slashdot Mirror
But they do care when things aren't where they expect them.
Which is why it's really strange that both Microsoft and Apple make so many gratuitous changes from one version to the next, because what they're doing is making it harder from them to compete against their own previous versions. As a system administrator, I had people get upset at me when I wouldn't keep Windows 2000 on their new laptop because Windows XP made so many changes.
However, there seem to be more people who don't care about differences in the OS than who do. And that's something that people who are passionate about the system software really need to get, and that's true whether they're Mac *or* Windows enthusiasts.
Your typical secretary knows all about the Start Menu, how MS Office works, how to get onto the network volumes, how to check the printer queue. All that stuff.
You couldn't prove it by me. Hell, an attention-deficit PhD engineer who knows all about writing code to solve systems of linear equations in Fortran or C++ can still come up with bizarre questions about "where did my J drive go" after an upgrade ("I don't know, that's not in the standard load, where did you have it connected?" "Connected?" "What server was it on?" "Server?"). A lot of people in the office - at any level of supposed technical training - never seemed to get past memorizing how to start the six or eight applications that they actually used (whether it was Hummingbird Exceed, SAP, Firefox, or Word).
But change their *applications*, and they go totally NON-linear.
Things like removing the menu bar from Office are about two-the-the-power-of-your-phone-number times more annoying than clicking on a dock icon instead of a desktop icon to get into Office in the first place... because Office is what they're actually interested in using.
But neither of these is even in the top three reasons why Apple can't "take Microsoft on the Desktop". No, the top three reasons are "Applications", "Applications", and (yes) "Applications".
In the workplace, simply not having those applications on the Mac is a much much bigger problem than whether you click on the picture of the printer in the Dock or go to Start->Settings->Printers. And not having Macs in the workplace is the biggest reason why the applications aren't there.
Let's face it, most people really don't care what OS they're running. They don't buy a computer to run an OS, they buy a computer to run applications... be they games, office automation, home accounting, music, movies, anything...
Windows Vista's biggest competition isn't OS X or even OSX *and* Linux, it's Windows XP, Windows 2000, and even the holdouts running Windows 9x and Me (yep, there are quite a few of them). And what the competition is over isn't even customers really, it's developers. Software publishers, programmers, and the like. Because they're the ones writing the software that people buy computers to run, and the people writing the software that people buy the computers to run, write for Windows. Because that's where the money is. Because most of the people who just buy computers to run applications, who buy the applications instead of writing their own or putting something cool together with Applescript or the UNIX shell, are running Windows. Because that's where the applications are.
Microsoft's got more of a problem convincing developers to cut loose the Windows XP (and Windows 2000 and Me) users so that they'll be forced to upgrade to Vista, than they have convincing people not to buy Mac OS X. Because unless OS X gets enough market share that it starts smelling like serious money, it's nothing they really have to worry about.
So while Apple may remain profitable on the margins, none of that profit translates into anything that can "take Microsoft on on the desktop". And most of the article is all about how big and important Apple is *as a business*, which is interesting and useful to keep in mind, but it's an article that really needs a different title... because the one it has is just plain silly.
The hidden assumption here is that there's specific content that has to be part of the new business model, or the new business model can't happen.
If some content owner doesn't want to be part of the new business model, because they believe that DRM is necessary for the business model to work, then what that means is that the existence of DRM is preventing the new business model from taking off as effectively as it could. Not that it's not happening, mind you, just that the established content owners aren't going to be a part of it for a while. What this does is allow other content owners to take advantage of the new business model before the established content owners realise they're missing out on it.
The online DRM product is of less value to me, but not primarily because it is DRM encumbered but because of other features I want.
Yes, I know, I just said that. The DRM makes the encumbered product less value for money because (a) it makes the product less valuable, and (b) because it makes the product cost more. All you're saying here is that you're discounting the first part. If the online version cost 1/4 as much the CD version, what would the demand be like? Do you think that might open up some new business models? Well, you know what's keeping that from happening?
iTunes and iPod are part and parcel of the same (new) DRM-enabled (successful) business model.
If DRM didn't exist, iTunes and the iPod would be more successful, not less.
DRM doesn't enable this new business model.
DRM is something this new business model has to put up with, in the short term. It's a roadblock on the way to success, and iTunes is only as successful as it is because it bypasses the roadblock with a DRM scheme that they document how to bypass on their website.
Price is set based on what the customer is willing to pay.
Um, you remember that exercise from "Introduction to Economics" where you take the supply curve and the demand curve and you put them together and get the ideal price? Price is based on both supply and demand, and what DRM does is skew the supply curve by artificially increasing the marginal cost of production. This increases the overhead and reduces the profit margin, and reduces the size of the market. Reducing the cost of production increases the profit at the same price, but as more producers take advantage of it the supply curve moves and a new equilibrium price is reached, with a larger market. Depending on the demand curve, the total profit can be much much higher.
Given how little of the market is in online sales, that's an indication that the total sales without the overhead of DRM will be much much higher... and that's without even considering the additional sales from people who don't bother to buy music (or other content) at all. The market that DRM's standing in the way of could well be bigger than the total music business today.
If the current content producers won't go after it, other people will... and are.
If you consider that most content publishers do not distribute electronically because of ineffective or unavailable DRM
That doesn't mean the DRM is required, it means that they believe the DRM is required. That doesn't mean anything except that the usual FUD is working.
I think that point is very debatable. I buy CDs for several reasons [...]
None of which come down to "you are ripping music rather than buying it", they come down to "the online version is less value for money". You're agreeing with my point: the DRM-burdened product costs more for what you get. For eBooks the distinction is even more clear, because Fictionwise sells DRM-burdened and open eBook formats, and the DRM-burdened ones cost many times as much... and there are DRM-burdened and free versions of the same books from Fictionwise and Baen, and again the DRM-burdened versions cost more.
What DRM does, mostly, is increase the cost of the product, and reduce its value. Without preventing the product from getting into the "pirate domain".
people don't buy DRM protected media because it is not as valuable (they can't copy it) yet at the same time DRM doesn't prevent copying at all
That's not what I wrote. DRM-protected media is less valuable because it costs more than similar unprotected products and less convenient to use, not because it is impossible to copy, but because copying imposes an additional inconvenience. DRM-protected media doesn't stop piracy because unless it completely prevents unauthorized copying (and the analog hole isn't going away, all it takes is one person willing to take the effort to make a decent quality copy and the game is over.
Look, DRM-protected music costs almost as much as physical CDs, and DRM-protected eBooks cost almost as much as hardcovers. DRM-free music costs 1/4 to 1/3 the price of DRM-protected music, and DRM-free ebooks cost less than paperbacks. EVEN WHEN the same music is available in both formats (from iTunes and eMusic). EVEN WHEN the same books are available in both formats (from Fictionwise and Baen Books).
Isn't iTunes itself a perfect counter-example to the thesis that DRM cannot enable succesful new business models?
Since iTunes is subsidised by the iPod and only recently stopped operating at a loss... while eMusic is making it without that subsidy... I would say that eMusic is the successful new business model. On the other side, the DRM-driven dedicated eBook-reader business has been trying to take off and failing for years, with Audiobooks tagging along on the edge of the music business the only place that's had any kind of traction... and yet Fictionwises' non-DRM side and Baen Books are thriving.
The idea of DRM is standing in the way of successful business models. The companies that have seen this are the ones that are thriving, even with the crumbs left by the DRM-obsessed publishers.
DRM provides new ways of assuring getting this benefit and thus enables new business models.
DRM doesn't do any such thing. It doesn't assure anything.
1. It makes it more expensive to distribute product, reduces the profits per sale at a given price, and ensures that the products that don't take heroic measures to prevent copying will be cheaper and higher quality.
2. It doesn't prevent online distribution of unauthorised copies.
That's why online music distribution hasn't taken off. NOT because people are ripping music off rather than buying it, but because the online version is worth so much less to the consumer than the DRM-free CD version... even if the CD version is more of a hassle to buy... and putting DRM restrictions on the online version hasn't kept people from ripping it anyway.
3. Not having DRM doesn't prevent producers from being rewarded.
Since DRM doesn't actually do much to prevent unauthorised copies, and providers are still getting rewarded, it seems like DRM isn't what's making it possible for producers to get rewarded after all. In fact, lots of producers are putting their music online in DRM-free formats... if I recall correctly eMusic has been in business longer than iTunes, and lots of people... including some big names... are still publishing music through them. For eBooks, Fictionwise and Baen Books don't seem to be in any trouble.
The new business models are viable without DRM, as proven by the fact that they exist without DRM, therefore DRM isn't what's needed to enable them.
Where we find...
An interesting tidbit is the list of files installed into the boot disk from tape on a virgin UNIX system:
Historically they've simply sucked it up, and let these people continue to leech away, but they've put their foot down.
Historically Microsoft has benefitted from the "pirate domain" because it reduced the demand for alternate operating systems. Why buy DR-DOS, OS-2, or BeOS even when they were cheaper than MS-DOS or Windows when you can get "the real thing" for free?
What exactly are their options?
Continue to let some tiny fraction of their immense profits slip through their fingers rather than risk upsetting the punters enough that switching starts to seem like the soft option.
I would have thought that by now nobody would be shipping systems with telnetd enabled by default.
Microsoft has decided that Vista will work only with Pocket PC 2003 and higher.
*boggle*
Just...
*boggle*
I guess microsoft has finally decided they've knocked Palm down far enough they can quit coddling their Pocket PC customers and go back to business as usual.
Office 2007 is actually pretty nice...
But is it pretty necessary?
Picky, picky. OK, "... people who are calling software with restrictions on redistribution of the source code "open source" are simply prevaricating." The point is that you can fix the source improve the source and pass on the source. What restrictions the license may place on distribution of compiled code are a separate issue.
It's not just "varying degrees of openness". The border between "open source" and "not open source" is quite clear. If it's open source, and if you have the source, you're allowed to give me the source - with or without your modifications. If it's open source, there's presumably some place you can get the source (or there's some place you could have gotten the source at some time - there's no open-source library-of-congress style repository), but if there isn't there should be nothing stopping you from setting up your own repository with the copy you have. Qmail is the only actively supported project I know of that really pushes the envelope here, in that you can pass on the modifications but the recipient has to get the unmodified source and re-assemble the thing himself... I would be hard pressed to argue that it's really "open source" because of that.
Binaries are not source. Restrictions on the distribution of binaries are important, sure, but they're a separate issue from whether the thing they're derived from is "open source" or not.
Oh, to be sure, the if [ $trust_me ] code in IE is certainly in C and C++.
OK, what I was objecting to was this: "Open source runs the gamut from the public domain with no restrictions to "look but don't use" licenses that let you copy the source code, inspect it, but not compile it or use it in any format other than plain-text."
The term "open source" can't be stretched that far. It doesn't include "look but don't use" licenses. It doesn't include the old UNIX academic licenses. It doesn't include custom contract programming. It doesn't even include the old Prentice-Hall license on Minix.
The gray area isn't between GPL and "look but don't use", it's somewhere around DJB's license on qmail, and there's really not much in it. It's not anywhere near broad enough to question the meaningfulness of the term, and people who are calling software with restrictions on redistribution "open source" are simply prevaricating.
I think you made the same point I did - there is a continuum of open-ness.
No. My point is that a product can include source code without in any way, shape, or form being "open source".
Back when "selling software" was a new thing, and even well into the '70s, it was rare to *not* get source to a system you bought, if you spent any significant amount on software, because there weren't any other mechanisms available to ship a highly configurable software package. In some parts of the industry, it's still a bit controversial for a customized system not to include source. This doesn't, in any sense, mean that you get any more rights with the software... in fact the contracts for delivery of such software may well be extremely restrictive.
If distributing source code was all there was, there wouldn't be a term "open source". There wouldn't be any need for a new term to distinguish "open source" distribution of software from any other source code distribution. Applying "open source" to things like VMS is the kind of cynical debating tactic DEC-heads used to use back in the Ken Olsen days to put down UNIX. It's an attempt to muddy the waters... and even Microsoft has given up on that kind of word game. They call their restricted source code distributions "shared source".
If that's not ebnough to convince you, let's look at wher the terms come from.
Even before the term "open source" was devised there was a strong distinction between source code you could redistribute, like the DECUS tapes, and licensed software that happened to be distributed with some kind of source code, like VMS.
If you can't redistribute it, it's a closed source-code distribution.
UNIX illustrates this prefectly. Academic-licensed UNIX was distributed through source code licenses, but it wasn't open source. It was an "open system"... in fact it became the archetypical "open system", but it was an open system whether it included source or not. The copy of Xenix you got from Microsoft in binary form was open in the same sense that the copy of 32V on your CS department's VAX was, even though one was binary-only and the other included source. A system can be "open" or "closed" completely independantly of whether source code was part of the distribution.
These terms, "open source" and "open system", don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in the context of "non-open source" and "non-open systems". Closed source and open source distributions already existed before the term "open source" was devised to describe systems where the source code was open in the same kind of sense that "open systems" were open, and so the term wasn't created out of nothing by Eric Raymond... it was simply a description of a real distinction that already existed.
To argue that "all source is open source" makes "open source" meaningless, yes, but not because "open source" is meaningless, but because "all source is open source" is a fallacy.
Open source runs the gamut from the public domain with no restrictions to "look but don't use" licenses that let you copy the source code, inspect it, but not compile it or use it in any format other than plain-text.
If you can't use it, it's not open source. You could get VMS source code from DEC on fiche, and this was useful, but it's not "open source".
If you can't redistribute it, it's not open source. Many control systems companies have traditionally sold their software in source code format, particularly where that software is heavily customized, but it's not redistributable, it's not "open source".
The more restrictions there are attached to a package, the less open it is, and it doesn't take all that much to take it out of the realm where "open source" is an appropriate term.
Heck, some interpretations of the GPL are already skirting the edge of what it's meaningful to call "open" as it is. Some of the proposals for GPLv3 have crossed the line for me... though last I checked none of them were actually sticking to the drafts.
Running the control the other direction is actually more interesting.
An OS X "Administrator" account is not like a Windows "Administrator" account. Under OS X, when you provide an administrator account and password to this kind of dialog what it is actually doing is granting you the permissions, at the OS level, to perform the action. Without going through this dialog even an "administrator" doesn't actually have the rights to perform it.
That is, in OS X this dialog is authorizing you to perform the action. If you are already authorized (that is if you were careless enough to run as root - the only real "administrator" account in the Windows sense) you shouldn't be presented with a dialog at all, because it's not asking you to *approve* an action you're already authorized to perform.
The difference between authorization and approval dialogs is obscured by dialogs like the UAC one that are sometimes authorization and sometimes approval dialogs.
But it's an important one. Approval dialogs are never necessary, technically, they're just there to try and give the user a "last chance" to keep a program from doing something that's possibly dangerous and may be irreversible. Whenever they exist, they should be a red flag, and an indication that the program may need to be restructured so the dangerous or irreversible operation doesn't happen.
For example, instead of deleting a file, move it to a location to be deleted later. Give the user the opportunity to look in that location and restore the files.
AND WHEN YOU HAVE DONE THAT, REMOVE THE APPROVAL DIALOG YOU DON'T NEED ANY MORE.
Sorry for shouting, but I still can't believe that someone thinks it's a good idea for Windows to ask you if you want to move a file to the trash.
That's what *you* think. You never had to buy SCO to support Multibus hardware.
Even an "mini-ITX" box would be great.
1 media drive bay.
1-2 3.5" internal drive bays.
2-4 RAM slots.
1-2 PCI-E slots.
Socketed processor.
This wouldn't need a tower system, you could fit this in the volume of the NeXT slab or the Performa 4xx slabs, or a "lunchbox" the size of a "short stack" of minis.
I can't believe people are celebrating the onslaught of the only software giant with more proprietary vendor lock-in and questionable business practices than Microsoft.
I didn't see anything about SCO in that article.
I do agree that the people who make the music, or their agents, do have broad power to do with the music as they please.
By and large it's not 'the people who make the music or their agents' who are pushing DRM, it's the labels.
I know that one reason I have continued to purchase iPods is that I don't want to lose access to a bunch of my music.
Did you buy a bunch of classical music from the iTMS, or have you really bought into the "quality" myth. I mean, if you cared that much about your music quality why didn't you buy it on CD instead of lossy-encoded AAC? Since you did, what's stopping you from burning and ripping?
It seems like the iPhone is going to be one of the more powerful smart phones on the market.
Balderdash.
No SDK means it's one of the least powerful.
Nokia lets you program their high end phones. That makes them a completely different kind of product from the locked-in no-SDK iPhone.
I guess I should have gotten a Samsung, but my previous experience led me to Nokia. Guess it's like they say in the ends, "past performance is no guarantee". :p