Why, friend, I have noted that thieves and honest men may both glance at my house, and never thought the act made a man a thief... but were they able to read how to unlock my door by that glance still I would erect a fence and screen the entranceway.
Does it support WEP-128 so it can be used with at least a minimally secured access point? I don't want to open myself up to wardrivers just to let my kids IM from the backyard.
That's one theory. Personally I think the Intel switch is part of something Jobs has been trying to do since he came back to Apple: kill the classic Mac OS. Remember, he tried back in '97, but he got slapped down by Adobe and so this time he waited until he could get the ISVs on his side. When he got that, and pulled the last OS-9 bootable Mac from the Apple Store... and nobody screamed... then he knew he could pull it off. Changing processors is no problem for his NeXT-derived API, but it's "a little more work" for Carbon, and OS-9 compatible Carbon code won't make the jump at all.
The ironic thing about all the various forms of DRM, copy protection, etc., is that the more intrusive it gets, the more it is going to actually encourage piracy.
Oh, they make a token effort to discourage blatant fair use, enough to convince the labels that they're in charge, but it's really run on the honor system.
It's not a conspiracy. It's marketing, plain and simple.
I might buy that for MIPS and Power PC, except for what happened to Alpha.
To the end user, by and large, things like register size don't really matter; things like large on-die caches and register renaming make the dearth of visible registers a real non-issue.
If that was the case you wouldn't see a performance boost going to 64 bit mode on AMD, because unless you rewrite your application to take advantage of the larger address space and longer words, going to 64-bit is going to cut your performance. Basically, the "64" part of AMD64 is a marketing trick to get people to accept the hit of recompiling for more registers.
Instruction sets do matter. The myth that they don't, that you can always convert your messy instruction set to something nicer internally, is put to a lie by the ease with which Alpha kept right at the head of the performance curve, usually leading the pack, despite being shortchanged in process and R&D.
JIT translation costs, in pipeline stages if nothing else, and long pipelines are a performance killer. Even Intel's figured that out.
There's nothing -ing wrong with the Power PC, the G5's gotten faster faster than the Intel crap has, and the G4 is a damn fine core... it gets at least as good work-per-clock and work-per-watt as anything, it's just hobbled by the crummy 166 MHz bus.
I've been waiting for an e600-based powerbook with on-chip memory controller and 667 MHz memory and dual PCI-E busses for video and the PCMCIA bridge, and RIGHT -ing before it starts sampling Apple has to pull this -ing...
There's no words. Goddamn HP/Intel conspiracy that's systematically kicked the legs out from under every goddamn processor that doesn't suck. And wuldn't you know that the only RISC that held on to the desktop is that psychotic Sparc and its low-heeled register windows AND TINY GODDAMN VISIBLE REGISTER BANK. Ironic, wot?
As far as malware's concerned, there's no difference between buying a new computer and installing a new OS on the old one. You might as well throw away your car when it runs out of gas or needs an oil change.
I suppose if cars cost $400 people would probably do that.
I used to think those stories about newly rich oil sheiks throwing out cars when they needed maintainance were just ethnic jokes, but with allegedly rational and educated people pulling stupid stuff like this, maybe they're not.
Switching to a chip that makes buffer overflow attacks easier because it's got a dense instruction set that lets you avoid string-truncating NULLs? To fight malware?
Episode IV? There's now III episodes before that so much more in need if the MST3K treatment....
Episode I, needs a scene of JarJar being horribly killed.
Episode II, needs a scene of JarJar being horribly killed.
Episode III, that JarJar cameo? That should have been a scene of him being horribly killed.
Episode IV refresh, they could have added a nice shot of a suspiciously Jar-Jar-like silhouette catching a blaster bolt.
Then we need a shot of George Lucas being killed horribly for turning the Jedi into a bunch of stupid steroid^Wmidiclorian-pumped jocks and light-saber ricers.
If you bought it from Fictionwise you surely can download it in a number of different formats.
I tried setting up a Passport account to manage my MSDN membership, back when they first started, but gave up when (at the time, I don't know if it still does) it required Internet Explorer... I asked myself, do I really still need MSDN... and realised that it had been a year since I'd actually used any of it. Went to my boss and she agreed, and we never renewed it. Nice to save a bit of money, wot?
Wow, your experience reminds me of the trip I took to Redmond in 2000. They were showing us how cool the Pocket PC was, only, they couldn't get the email server or clients set up right to work with it. "Wow, this isn't supposed to be rocket science, AND we're all rocket scientists... and it still doesn't work..."
It was a real Kodak moment.
Though I have to say, I was really impressed by the way Microsoft listened to us and really improved the Pocket PC on the next generation. Not enough for me... Palms have proven way more reliable long-term... but they listened a lot better than Palm has.
Anyway, back to the point...
You can buy non-DRMed eBooks, you know. I've only bought ONE DRMed eBook, the other 700 or so have all been unencrypted. And the unencrypted ones are actually cheaper... that just boggles my mind. You mean I get to read it ANYWHERE, print it, cut-and-paste, and I save money as well? Such a deal!
For a reader, I find Mobipocket is pretty good, and it works on both Pocket PC and Palm. And if you do buy encrypted books from Fictionwise they're quite happy to reset your authorizations for you.
did you ever wonder if iTunes DRM was intended to "manage" your rights to use a competing player more than to "manage" the copying of the files?
I don't know about "rights to use a competing player", but they do discourage competing players. Oh, they don't do anything that actually prevents me from using one, but they do put me to a bit of extra work. I mean, I bought my first iPod this year. Before that, I used a generic flash MP3 player, and iTunes said to me, "if you want to use a competing player, you're going to have to take a few extra steps and get rid of this annoying DRM protection". And I said back to it, "that's totally worth the effort".
And it was, because when my old Frankenmac's disk went bad and I had to ask Apple to deauthorise all my computers, I still had all but a little of my music in a form that wasn't DRMed.
Did I care if that's what Apple wants?
Hell no, there was no "do what Apple wants" option in the iTunes preferences. There was, however, an option marked "Import using... MP3 encoder". I cared about that one.
Well, duh. I just got through saying all DRM sucks. If all DRM sucks, then Apple's DRM sucks too.
You can use some tools to UN-DRM your files. I suppose you're gonna say that's not unethical.
Of course it's not unethical. Not only is it not unethical, it's legal. The law explicitly allows you to convert and copy music for your own use.
Can you imagine all the ITMS users making use of this?
Yes. Absolutely. The tools I've seen include some totally point-and-click drag-and-drop user-friendly applications.
Take your shitty low quality low bitrate lossy music, convert it to CD, and re-rip it.
Except for a few classical pieces, and even there usually only when I actually listen to them side by side, I can't tell the difference between the CD version and the MP4/ACC version. And that's why I buy most of my classical pieces on CD and rip them myself.
And their DRM only works with their own players (iTunes sucks - I'm sorry but it truly does!), and their iPods. That's not restrictive?
I wish everyone's DRM only worked on their own players, myself. The best way to make DRM really take off is to have a universal DRM that's painless to set up and use, because not everyone hits the wall that I hit and Gartenberg hit. Not everyone falls afoul of bad laws or needs the protection of the checks and balances in the legal system, not everyone ends up needing their auto insurance, but doesn't it make you feel better that they're there (even as imperfect as they are)?
Weak DRM is the same thing. It still sucks, but the fact that there's a backdoor gives you a way out, and having that backdoor is much better than just having a scheme that sucks a little less in other ways*. Here you are, a rabid opponent of DRM, and you're more willing to put up with it because you've had fewer problems with it. Well, I'm not willing to put up with it at all, so I'll take the DRM that doesn't work over the one that does any day.
* Not that I'm convinced Microsoft's does actually suck less... after all, you have to use Windows to take advantage of it, and that's a whole new level of suck right there.:)
I wonder if this was a deliberate tradeoff, or did they just decide that they had to let people burn CDs and defeating their DRM is the natural result.
I don't know, you'll have to ask Steve that. It could be either...
"Apple strives to protect the rights of both intellectual property owners and consumers alike and believes there is a 'middle path' in digital music distribution which actively discourages the theft of music, while at the same time preserving consumers rights to manage and listen to their legally acquired music on whatever devices they own," -- Steve Jobs, 2002 Grammy Awards.
"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." -- Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview, December 03, 2003
There's no legal, click-wrap contract, or other issues of force or coercion involved here. Apple explicitly permits you to make non-DRMed backups of your music. In fact they encourage it.
If even touching a DRMed format is enough to squick you, if very idea disgusts you, then that's your trip.
But where you see DRM, I see nothing but a facade.
Apple's DRM, in the iTunes Music Store, is hardly there at all. It's "nudge nudge wink wink" DRM, it's "honor system" DRM. They should call it "digital rights hinting". Apple's old "Rip, Mix, Burn" ads pretty much tell you how to remove DRM from their files, if you're not prepared to use any of the widely-available HYMN variants. Just... change the order a little. Yeh, you take a one-time hit in the audio quality... but if you care about audio quality why aren't you buying and ripping CDs instead of lossy-compressed files anyway?
DRM is acceptable when it's just strong enough to remind you that this isn't freely redistributable content, but not strong enough to actually prevent you from breaking it when you need to.
That's what Microsoft doesn't get. That's what Michael Gartenberg doesn't get. Strong DRM will inevitably screw you over. If Apple used strong DRM in iTunes I'd have been really pissed when I ran out of authorizations due to a bad disk that forced me to reinstall my OS a couple of times... because even though Apple was willing to reset all my computers AGAIN, it took a while, and having all my music burned onto audio CDs meant it wasn't actually held hostage by the DRM...
That's why Apple's DRM works. Because it doesn't. If it did, it wouldn't.
I'm not familiar with the Linux kernel or libc, so here's the rest of the sections: curses (BSD code by Ken Arnold), termcap (BSD code), lpr (BSD code), groff and bison (FSF), and UUCP (Dave Taylor).
I guess people are more rational over there. Here people seem to think that because your Powermac was a high end model when you bought it, you should be able to sell it for a high end price... even if it's significantly slower than today's low end.
One that I saw recently, this guy was selling a Dual 450 and a couple of Lisas... $350 each. I couldn't figure if he was charging too much or too little for the Lisas.:)
If I so chose to upgrade to Longhorn, I'd have to buy a whole new videocard and monitor to actually view the OS and any other programs tailor written for it?
You'll probably need a new videocard for Avalon anyway. But... no. Only to view videos that have been marked so that Windows Media Player requires these capabilities to view them.
However, that may be wuite a lot of videos... Microsoft seems to be getting their contaminated format in as the standard for a depressingly large number of new technologies.
Do you really think Apple won't be adopting this too?
That depends on whether the MPAA membership force them to use strong DRM in order for them to run the iTunes Video Store.
They declined to put strong DRM in iTunes for the iTunes Music Store, and seem to have gotten away with it. Remember, Microsoft has already put strong DRM in Windows Media Player: as of WPM 9 it includes NT kernel components that can't even be bypassed by LOCALSYSTEM provileges.
I am a bit concerned about this, since strong DRM is incompatible with an environment where the source code to the low level operating system is available and thus the environment that the DRM components run in can be modified to an arbitrarily fine degree. I can't imagine Apple continuing to update Darwin if they were to impose a strong DRM regime on Mac OS X.
But given that Steve jobs public statements in the past have indicated that he personally understands how pointless DRM is, and that the DRM in iTunes is pretty much run on the honor system, Apple is unlikely to take the lead here. They may be dragged into it, but so long as they continue releasing Darwin updates they probably haven't been dragged hard enough yet.
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Why, friend, I have noted that thieves and honest men may both glance at my house, and never thought the act made a man a thief... but were they able to read how to unlock my door by that glance still I would erect a fence and screen the entranceway.
If you're going to use iTMS music anyway, you might as well use HYMN.
You still need iTunes to use HYMN. Unless something's changed, HYMN needs iTunes to work.
Does it support WEP-128 so it can be used with at least a minimally secured access point? I don't want to open myself up to wardrivers just to let my kids IM from the backyard.
Apple sold out to Intel to get this DRM shit too.
... and nobody screamed ... then he knew he could pull it off. Changing processors is no problem for his NeXT-derived API, but it's "a little more work" for Carbon, and OS-9 compatible Carbon code won't make the jump at all.
That's one theory. Personally I think the Intel switch is part of something Jobs has been trying to do since he came back to Apple: kill the classic Mac OS. Remember, he tried back in '97, but he got slapped down by Adobe and so this time he waited until he could get the ISVs on his side. When he got that, and pulled the last OS-9 bootable Mac from the Apple Store
The ironic thing about all the various forms of DRM, copy protection, etc., is that the more intrusive it gets, the more it is going to actually encourage piracy.
That's one reason iTunes has worked so well. The DRM is so weak that Apple actually tells you an easy way to get rid of it, Mix up new tracks with your existing MP3 collection to make killer compilations. You can burn songs from the iTunes Music Store an unlimited number of times.
Oh, they make a token effort to discourage blatant fair use, enough to convince the labels that they're in charge, but it's really run on the honor system.
G5 went from 2 GHz to 2.7 GHz over 2 years, an improvement of 35%
P4 over the same period went from 3 GHz to 3.8 GHz, an improvement of 26%
It's not a conspiracy. It's marketing, plain and simple.
I might buy that for MIPS and Power PC, except for what happened to Alpha.
To the end user, by and large, things like register size don't really matter; things like large on-die caches and register renaming make the dearth of visible registers a real non-issue.
If that was the case you wouldn't see a performance boost going to 64 bit mode on AMD, because unless you rewrite your application to take advantage of the larger address space and longer words, going to 64-bit is going to cut your performance. Basically, the "64" part of AMD64 is a marketing trick to get people to accept the hit of recompiling for more registers.
Instruction sets do matter. The myth that they don't, that you can always convert your messy instruction set to something nicer internally, is put to a lie by the ease with which Alpha kept right at the head of the performance curve, usually leading the pack, despite being shortchanged in process and R&D.
JIT translation costs, in pipeline stages if nothing else, and long pipelines are a performance killer. Even Intel's figured that out.
There's nothing -ing wrong with the Power PC, the G5's gotten faster faster than the Intel crap has, and the G4 is a damn fine core... it gets at least as good work-per-clock and work-per-watt as anything, it's just hobbled by the crummy 166 MHz bus.
I've been waiting for an e600-based powerbook with on-chip memory controller and 667 MHz memory and dual PCI-E busses for video and the PCMCIA bridge, and RIGHT -ing before it starts sampling Apple has to pull this -ing...
There's no words. Goddamn HP/Intel conspiracy that's systematically kicked the legs out from under every goddamn processor that doesn't suck. And wuldn't you know that the only RISC that held on to the desktop is that psychotic Sparc and its low-heeled register windows AND TINY GODDAMN VISIBLE REGISTER BANK. Ironic, wot?
As far as malware's concerned, there's no difference between buying a new computer and installing a new OS on the old one. You might as well throw away your car when it runs out of gas or needs an oil change.
I suppose if cars cost $400 people would probably do that.
I used to think those stories about newly rich oil sheiks throwing out cars when they needed maintainance were just ethnic jokes, but with allegedly rational and educated people pulling stupid stuff like this, maybe they're not.
Switching to a chip that makes buffer overflow attacks easier because it's got a dense instruction set that lets you avoid string-truncating NULLs? To fight malware?
I don't think so.
Episode IV? There's now III episodes before that so much more in need if the MST3K treatment....
Episode I, needs a scene of JarJar being horribly killed.
Episode II, needs a scene of JarJar being horribly killed.
Episode III, that JarJar cameo? That should have been a scene of him being horribly killed.
Episode IV refresh, they could have added a nice shot of a suspiciously Jar-Jar-like silhouette catching a blaster bolt.
Then we need a shot of George Lucas being killed horribly for turning the Jedi into a bunch of stupid steroid^Wmidiclorian-pumped jocks and light-saber ricers.
If you bought it from Fictionwise you surely can download it in a number of different formats.
I tried setting up a Passport account to manage my MSDN membership, back when they first started, but gave up when (at the time, I don't know if it still does) it required Internet Explorer... I asked myself, do I really still need MSDN... and realised that it had been a year since I'd actually used any of it. Went to my boss and she agreed, and we never renewed it. Nice to save a bit of money, wot?
Are you advocating demands that Apple Records provide free music DVDs to everybody who bought Yellow Submarine on 8 Track?
No, I'm advocating demands that I be allowed to play my casette tapes into my mic input and turn them into track in iTunes.
Hold on, I can do that. In fact I have done that. And it's even legal. Whoa!
If I bought a copy of Ping (book about the duck) and go blind am I entitled to a free copy on tape?
You're entitled to use a reading machine to convert it into an audio format for your personal use.
Wow, your experience reminds me of the trip I took to Redmond in 2000. They were showing us how cool the Pocket PC was, only, they couldn't get the email server or clients set up right to work with it. "Wow, this isn't supposed to be rocket science, AND we're all rocket scientists... and it still doesn't work..."
It was a real Kodak moment.
Though I have to say, I was really impressed by the way Microsoft listened to us and really improved the Pocket PC on the next generation. Not enough for me... Palms have proven way more reliable long-term... but they listened a lot better than Palm has.
Anyway, back to the point...
You can buy non-DRMed eBooks, you know. I've only bought ONE DRMed eBook, the other 700 or so have all been unencrypted. And the unencrypted ones are actually cheaper... that just boggles my mind. You mean I get to read it ANYWHERE, print it, cut-and-paste, and I save money as well? Such a deal!
For a reader, I find Mobipocket is pretty good, and it works on both Pocket PC and Palm. And if you do buy encrypted books from Fictionwise they're quite happy to reset your authorizations for you.
This is not acceptable for something based on laws: if you have to be a criminal for it to work [...]
Isn't it a good thing then, that you don't become a criminal when you copy music to another medium for your own personal use?
The fact that it's actually legal is part of the reason why I describe iTunes as using "weak DRM".
did you ever wonder if iTunes DRM was intended to "manage" your rights to use a competing player more than to "manage" the copying of the files?
I don't know about "rights to use a competing player", but they do discourage competing players. Oh, they don't do anything that actually prevents me from using one, but they do put me to a bit of extra work. I mean, I bought my first iPod this year. Before that, I used a generic flash MP3 player, and iTunes said to me, "if you want to use a competing player, you're going to have to take a few extra steps and get rid of this annoying DRM protection". And I said back to it, "that's totally worth the effort".
And it was, because when my old Frankenmac's disk went bad and I had to ask Apple to deauthorise all my computers, I still had all but a little of my music in a form that wasn't DRMed.
Did I care if that's what Apple wants?
Hell no, there was no "do what Apple wants" option in the iTunes preferences. There was, however, an option marked "Import using... MP3 encoder". I cared about that one.
Apple's DRM sucks
:)
Well, duh. I just got through saying all DRM sucks. If all DRM sucks, then Apple's DRM sucks too.
You can use some tools to UN-DRM your files. I suppose you're gonna say that's not unethical.
Of course it's not unethical. Not only is it not unethical, it's legal. The law explicitly allows you to convert and copy music for your own use.
Can you imagine all the ITMS users making use of this?
Yes. Absolutely. The tools I've seen include some totally point-and-click drag-and-drop user-friendly applications.
Take your shitty low quality low bitrate lossy music, convert it to CD, and re-rip it.
Except for a few classical pieces, and even there usually only when I actually listen to them side by side, I can't tell the difference between the CD version and the MP4/ACC version. And that's why I buy most of my classical pieces on CD and rip them myself.
And their DRM only works with their own players (iTunes sucks - I'm sorry but it truly does!), and their iPods. That's not restrictive?
I wish everyone's DRM only worked on their own players, myself. The best way to make DRM really take off is to have a universal DRM that's painless to set up and use, because not everyone hits the wall that I hit and Gartenberg hit. Not everyone falls afoul of bad laws or needs the protection of the checks and balances in the legal system, not everyone ends up needing their auto insurance, but doesn't it make you feel better that they're there (even as imperfect as they are)?
Weak DRM is the same thing. It still sucks, but the fact that there's a backdoor gives you a way out, and having that backdoor is much better than just having a scheme that sucks a little less in other ways*. Here you are, a rabid opponent of DRM, and you're more willing to put up with it because you've had fewer problems with it. Well, I'm not willing to put up with it at all, so I'll take the DRM that doesn't work over the one that does any day.
* Not that I'm convinced Microsoft's does actually suck less... after all, you have to use Windows to take advantage of it, and that's a whole new level of suck right there.
I don't know, you'll have to ask Steve that. It could be either...
Well, that's your choice.
There's no legal, click-wrap contract, or other issues of force or coercion involved here. Apple explicitly permits you to make non-DRMed backups of your music. In fact they encourage it.
If even touching a DRMed format is enough to squick you, if very idea disgusts you, then that's your trip.
But where you see DRM, I see nothing but a facade.
Apple's DRM, in the iTunes Music Store, is hardly there at all. It's "nudge nudge wink wink" DRM, it's "honor system" DRM. They should call it "digital rights hinting". Apple's old "Rip, Mix, Burn" ads pretty much tell you how to remove DRM from their files, if you're not prepared to use any of the widely-available HYMN variants. Just... change the order a little. Yeh, you take a one-time hit in the audio quality... but if you care about audio quality why aren't you buying and ripping CDs instead of lossy-compressed files anyway?
DRM is acceptable when it's just strong enough to remind you that this isn't freely redistributable content, but not strong enough to actually prevent you from breaking it when you need to.
That's what Microsoft doesn't get. That's what Michael Gartenberg doesn't get. Strong DRM will inevitably screw you over. If Apple used strong DRM in iTunes I'd have been really pissed when I ran out of authorizations due to a bad disk that forced me to reinstall my OS a couple of times... because even though Apple was willing to reset all my computers AGAIN, it took a while, and having all my music burned onto audio CDs meant it wasn't actually held hostage by the DRM...
That's why Apple's DRM works. Because it doesn't. If it did, it wouldn't.
I'm not familiar with the Linux kernel or libc, so here's the rest of the sections: curses (BSD code by Ken Arnold), termcap (BSD code), lpr (BSD code), groff and bison (FSF), and UUCP (Dave Taylor).
I guess people are more rational over there. Here people seem to think that because your Powermac was a high end model when you bought it, you should be able to sell it for a high end price... even if it's significantly slower than today's low end.
:)
One that I saw recently, this guy was selling a Dual 450 and a couple of Lisas... $350 each. I couldn't figure if he was charging too much or too little for the Lisas.
Why don't they just cut to the chase and produce DRM-enabled eyeglasses for us to wear?
Sounds like something from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. "Joo Janta Intellectual Property Sensitive Sunglasses".
If I so chose to upgrade to Longhorn, I'd have to buy a whole new videocard and monitor to actually view the OS and any other programs tailor written for it?
You'll probably need a new videocard for Avalon anyway. But... no. Only to view videos that have been marked so that Windows Media Player requires these capabilities to view them.
However, that may be wuite a lot of videos... Microsoft seems to be getting their contaminated format in as the standard for a depressingly large number of new technologies.
Do you really think Apple won't be adopting this too?
That depends on whether the MPAA membership force them to use strong DRM in order for them to run the iTunes Video Store.
They declined to put strong DRM in iTunes for the iTunes Music Store, and seem to have gotten away with it. Remember, Microsoft has already put strong DRM in Windows Media Player: as of WPM 9 it includes NT kernel components that can't even be bypassed by LOCALSYSTEM provileges.
I am a bit concerned about this, since strong DRM is incompatible with an environment where the source code to the low level operating system is available and thus the environment that the DRM components run in can be modified to an arbitrarily fine degree. I can't imagine Apple continuing to update Darwin if they were to impose a strong DRM regime on Mac OS X.
But given that Steve jobs public statements in the past have indicated that he personally understands how pointless DRM is, and that the DRM in iTunes is pretty much run on the honor system, Apple is unlikely to take the lead here. They may be dragged into it, but so long as they continue releasing Darwin updates they probably haven't been dragged hard enough yet.