Yeah, you're right. Especially with things like DRM and Macrovision, it's a required extra cost that doesn't make their product any better. Even worse, the extra cost is mostly the licensing fees they have to pay the companies, not even the extra hardware itself, whose price steadily drops.
I'll second your defense. It sounds like Word is not crashing, simply exiting abruptly. Yes, there is a difference; a crash is when the code performs an illegal low-level operation, like accessing a bad memory address or dividing an integer by zero, where the OS immediately halts the process, while this sounds like the Word application code having something along the lines of "if having_problems then exit". I really hate it when people refer to a program crashing even though it intentionally exited (even if this was due to detection of a higher-level problem, like a failed invariant).
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.
Not that brain researchers are literally just making gray globs out of Play-Doh, but that doesn't rule out similar errors at a deeper level.
"those in a position of power (police officers, politicians, etc.) should face an even more severe punishment for breaking the law than your Average Joe." Yes! Also unlike your average joe, they chose to put themselves in this position of being held to a higher standard.
I've actually wanted to buy my own case and drive separately, but I wasn't sure that they would be compatible. I stopped keeping track of hard drive interfaces around SCSI I used in the 1995-era Macs, so I'm clueless about the current standards. Wouldn't I run the risk of having a drive with a different interface as what the case uses "internally"? (I'm assuming that hard drives themselves don't have USB interfaces, just the cases, where it's converted to ATA or whatever the current fad is). Thanks for any further info.
"Nice to see some good news out of Fermilab after the CERN debacle" So it would be bad news if an experiment showed something you were hoping you wouldn't get? That isn't science. Science is being happy when your experiment successfully tests the hypothesis, regardless of whether it confirmed it or not. A success is in gathering more data, a failure having the experiment give no useful information.
"The point is, you have to stand up for your rights as a consumer." One way to start is to refer to yourself as a customer, not a consumer. A customer is a person; a consumer is a metaphorical mouth that is always hungry for more and can't say no.
Yeah really, we all know how much more reliable software is compared to currently hard-to-patch hardware. I just can't wait until we have patchable atoms. "Sorry, we've just found that the new-fangled carbon atoms making up all 2032 cars will self-destruct in one week. Please install this new patch, which will take a day to complete transmutation."
Sure it does; it means that space travel is getting closer to being in reach for the average person. Ten years ago I doubt having a trillion dollars made you any more likely to get into space.
"The problem Islam has with the West is that we export our culture. We impact their way of life and embolden the youth to question their authorities." Hmmm, I wonder if they could send some of that "question authorities" product back to the U.S.
But I already pay my virtual taxes to the virtual WOW government on every transaction! They'll have a problem with these "real world" governments trying to horn in on their taxation.
You should be more careful where you post your valuable intellectual property. By putting it here on Slashdot, many people can use it without compensating you for the effort that went into it. You should have saved it on your hard drive and never posted it, or better yet, never even saved it. That would protect it much better!
(yes, this growing meme of IP and constant restriction troubles me too)
"Chances are there is information about you and your family on the Internet that you don't approve of. It's time you do something about it." (from reputationdefender.com)
The current administration must love this site! On a more paradoxical note, I bet there's nothing but positive reviews of this website on the web, at least if they're doing their job correctly.
Why don't you simply add giving credit a requirement in your licensing terms? It doesn't make sense that you'd have this implicit requirement that you don't state, but get in a fit if not met.
Sure, each article is a slightly different take, but I swear there have been at least four previous articles about some kind of invisibility device in the past year, all turning out to really be invisibility in a very restricted sense, i.e. a particular electronic device doesn't "see" the object.
"I don't think it does count as that obvious. If you remember the earliest days of free internet telephony, the biggest limitation (aside from the annoying lag) came from needing both parties to have a computer with an always-on connection (or risk missing calls)."
The reason it wasn't done from the start is that it was a lot cheaper for someone to write some software that allowed voice calls from PC to PC than start a company that maintained an internet-to-POTS bridge for people to go through when calling from PC to regular phone. I'm sure every author of such software had this in mind, but simply couldn't afford to set it up.
It's so fucking obvious that when I heard about internet phone calls, I always said to myself "When they have some kind of bridge to allow calling people on a regular phone, then it'll really be practical. But then you'd have a monthly fee."
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you're right. Especially with things like DRM and Macrovision, it's a required extra cost that doesn't make their product any better. Even worse, the extra cost is mostly the licensing fees they have to pay the companies, not even the extra hardware itself, whose price steadily drops.
I'll second your defense. It sounds like Word is not crashing, simply exiting abruptly. Yes, there is a difference; a crash is when the code performs an illegal low-level operation, like accessing a bad memory address or dividing an integer by zero, where the OS immediately halts the process, while this sounds like the Word application code having something along the lines of "if having_problems then exit". I really hate it when people refer to a program crashing even though it intentionally exited (even if this was due to detection of a higher-level problem, like a failed invariant).
"'Our main concern is with the consumer and not a particular technology,"
Wow, so it's not going to have any DRM bullshit either? Oh, wait, they said consumer, not customer, so they're still treating us as automatons.
Not that brain researchers are literally just making gray globs out of Play-Doh, but that doesn't rule out similar errors at a deeper level.
Even if your PC doesn't have optical digital audio out, I'm sure there are several external D/A convertors that connect to USB.
"those in a position of power (police officers, politicians, etc.) should face an even more severe punishment for breaking the law than your Average Joe."
Yes! Also unlike your average joe, they chose to put themselves in this position of being held to a higher standard.
Profit!!!!
I've actually wanted to buy my own case and drive separately, but I wasn't sure that they would be compatible. I stopped keeping track of hard drive interfaces around SCSI I used in the 1995-era Macs, so I'm clueless about the current standards. Wouldn't I run the risk of having a drive with a different interface as what the case uses "internally"? (I'm assuming that hard drives themselves don't have USB interfaces, just the cases, where it's converted to ATA or whatever the current fad is). Thanks for any further info.
They should have used gmail, then they could have kept them forever! Well, assuming they didn't want them deleted...
"Nice to see some good news out of Fermilab after the CERN debacle"
So it would be bad news if an experiment showed something you were hoping you wouldn't get? That isn't science. Science is being happy when your experiment successfully tests the hypothesis, regardless of whether it confirmed it or not. A success is in gathering more data, a failure having the experiment give no useful information.
"It seems that both is basically security through obscurity, and that has not worked very well in the future."
So tell me.. was Duke Nukem Forever worth the wait?
I don't think their time travel device can go that far into the future yet.
"What they have done is analogous to re-keying a lock that is susceptible to being picked..."
/. and we only allow automotive analogies here. Please rephrase.
I'm sorry, but this is
What they have done is analogous to re-keying a car door's lock that is susceptible to being picked...
"cancellation of computer programming classes"
And the guy's an idiot; you don't need any programming skills to make a MySpace page! (in fact, the less the better)
to give your post a proper subject and instead treat it as the beginning of your comment.
(sorry, peeve of mine)
"The point is, you have to stand up for your rights as a consumer."
One way to start is to refer to yourself as a customer, not a consumer. A customer is a person; a consumer is a metaphorical mouth that is always hungry for more and can't say no.
Yeah really, we all know how much more reliable software is compared to currently hard-to-patch hardware. I just can't wait until we have patchable atoms. "Sorry, we've just found that the new-fangled carbon atoms making up all 2032 cars will self-destruct in one week. Please install this new patch, which will take a day to complete transmutation."
Sure it does; it means that space travel is getting closer to being in reach for the average person. Ten years ago I doubt having a trillion dollars made you any more likely to get into space.
"The problem Islam has with the West is that we export our culture. We impact their way of life and embolden the youth to question their authorities."
Hmmm, I wonder if they could send some of that "question authorities" product back to the U.S.
But I already pay my virtual taxes to the virtual WOW government on every transaction! They'll have a problem with these "real world" governments trying to horn in on their taxation.
You should be more careful where you post your valuable intellectual property. By putting it here on Slashdot, many people can use it without compensating you for the effort that went into it. You should have saved it on your hard drive and never posted it, or better yet, never even saved it. That would protect it much better!
(yes, this growing meme of IP and constant restriction troubles me too)
"Chances are there is information about you and your family on the Internet that you don't approve of. It's time you do something about it." (from reputationdefender.com)
The current administration must love this site! On a more paradoxical note, I bet there's nothing but positive reviews of this website on the web, at least if they're doing their job correctly.
Why don't you simply add giving credit a requirement in your licensing terms? It doesn't make sense that you'd have this implicit requirement that you don't state, but get in a fit if not met.
Sure, each article is a slightly different take, but I swear there have been at least four previous articles about some kind of invisibility device in the past year, all turning out to really be invisibility in a very restricted sense, i.e. a particular electronic device doesn't "see" the object.
"I don't think it does count as that obvious. If you remember the earliest days of free internet telephony, the biggest limitation (aside from the annoying lag) came from needing both parties to have a computer with an always-on connection (or risk missing calls)."
The reason it wasn't done from the start is that it was a lot cheaper for someone to write some software that allowed voice calls from PC to PC than start a company that maintained an internet-to-POTS bridge for people to go through when calling from PC to regular phone. I'm sure every author of such software had this in mind, but simply couldn't afford to set it up.
It's so fucking obvious that when I heard about internet phone calls, I always said to myself "When they have some kind of bridge to allow calling people on a regular phone, then it'll really be practical. But then you'd have a monthly fee."
"[...] the labels themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having quite figured out how to make it pay.'"
You don't make it pay, you offer a service that people pay you for. Hint: DRM is not a service that people want to pay for.