Granted, I dropped out of Engineering school, but my math comes out to about 4%. And you don't have to "rent" a phone while waiting for your battery to be replaced.
As for never needing to replace a battery, my wife and I currently have a pair of LG VX6800 phones from Verizon. About 18 months into their life-span, both of the phones' stand-by time went to less than 14 hours. I had charge my phone twice a day just to be able to use it. After buying two replacement batteries for, you guessed it, $10 a piece, and I'm once again able to go a couple of days without charging. And I never needed a "loaner" while it was in the shop.
It's more like reading books in the store without buying them. You got the content without paying, but the original media is still there to be sold.
No, it's really more like walking into an art gallery with a camera and taking a few snapshots with your digital camera. Sure, they've still got their prints and original to sell, but with your blown-up-printed-on-the-office's-large-format-prin ter copy hanging on your wall, then it's not really stealing.
- Stealth Dave
For what it's worth, I noticed that lots of the MacWorld tests focused on image processing. That's a useful thing to know about, but aren't most of thoses tasks going to be done using special stuff like Altivec or SSE? If that's the case, they're not really good comparisons of the regular performance of the processors.
While I would certainly agree that The Gimp is no replacement for Photoshop, there is a solution: CodeWeaver's Crossover. Need to run Photoshop? CrossOver has you covered. Need absolute compatibility with all of MS Office's obscure document features? Run MS Office with Crossover. Even IE 6 is available, albeit without Java support. Just $40 buys you a whole lot of Windows compatibility that's really easy to use. Just ask some of CodeWeaver's other customers.
How has the switch to LGPL affected contributions to the project, both positively and negatively? When the switch happened, there was a lot of noise from groups like Transgaming who needed to license proprietary technology from third parties, and the formation of the ReWind project. Has there been a noticable effect on contributions to WINE from outside groups as result of the licensing change?
Better than that, when I connected by iBook to my network three months ago, it automatically detected the Epson 875DCS hooked up to my Mandrake 9.0 box, and I was able to start printing immediately! Much easier than the hoops I had to jump through to try and connect to the office SMB printer.
A little history into this young lad's lineage shows that his family has a history of making such breakthrough discoveries. His father, in fact, designed amplifiers for famed rock group Spinal Tap.
Sadly, his father was meeting with the third drummer of Spinal Tap one afternoon and was trampled by a herd of wild elephants before he ever got a chance to patent his auditory inventions.
-- Stealth Dave
Re:How well does it integrate with Dishnetwork?
on
TiVo Series 2 Review
·
· Score: 2
One of the more brilliant features of Tivo is the ability to nearly seamlessly use any (or almost any) cable box or satelite receiver almost as if it was an internal tuner. It does this by transmitting ir remote control to the cable box you are using through a small IR LED attached to the cable box and connected to the back of the Tivo. I have used my Tivo both with a Motorola cable box and my Dish Network system. As for the programming information, the nightly schedule downloads are just as complete for Dish as they are for local cable.
The upside of a DishPVR is the cost (DishPVR is significantly cheaper than Tivo), and that you're recording the digital video stream directly as opposed to recording the analog signal, but I've found that the Tivo's suggestion and other features far outweigh the minute quality difference you get from a direct stream (Tivo comes with very high quality A/V cables). I have several friends who went with DishPVR who now say that they would rather have a Tivo.
As long as we're all getting nostalgic here, let me tell you the story of my first real hacking machine: my HP28s.
Sure, I had an Apple IIc in high school and I did a lot of programming on it, but I didn't do any serious hacking. Not like my HP28s. I wrote all sorts of games and cool stuff for my HP28s: a music program, a poker game with AI (albeit rather limited), and even a couple versions of a Tetris game, all in RPN. Tetris was even fairly playable speedwise after a few revisions. But my crowning achievement as an HP28 hacker was adding an RS232 serial connection running at a whopping 2400bps! Unfortunately, I only ever tested the transmit features which used the IR port because I was afraid to open the case, but another student did get two-way communication going using my code! That was a proud day, let me tell you!
But by then the HP48 had come out, with it's fancy-schmancy built-in serial port (where's the challenge with that?), I dropped out of engineering school to pursue a degree in theatre, and all of the software I wrote is now wasting away on 5-1/4" floppies in a basement somewhere. But I'll never forget all the fun times I had procrastinating my homework by doing "important" research into the inner workings of my HP28. Every once in a while I'll do a Google search to see if any of my hacks have survived on any HP28 archive sites. Ah, the glory days of old!
Thanks for the memories, HP calculater division! You'll be missed!
Let's face it: what damage has the DMCA really done? Why should anyone care about the DMCA?
Russian programmer arrested for violation of US law (DMCA) on foreign soil
College professor threatened with lawsuit if he presents a paper discussing flawed encryption schemes
Norwegian teenage programmer arrested for writing software to watch legally owned movies
U.S. "hacker" web site prevented from linking to sites providing said software
This is just what I came up with off of the top of my head. I'm sure there are other cases that I didn't mention. So in answer to your question, start with the above list and go from there. If you still don't think that the DMCA has done any damage, then have a good slumber in the bed that you've made.
You've fallen victim to one of the classic blunders! The first is never get involved in a land war in Asia against Cowboy Neal! Only slightly less known is this: never assume that a large corporation is in violation of the GPL just because you can't find the source!
IANAL, IANRMS (I Am Not Richard M. Stallman), and other disclaimers, but my understanding is that the GPL only requires that you must make the source available to those you have distributed binaries to. It doesn't *have* to be available for download, it just frequently is. If the source is being withheld from those who have purchased Linux for PS2, then we can start complaining.
And for those comparing which would make a better set-top PC, PS2 or Xbox, I suggest we start a pool for guessing how many minutes after the official Xbox release that someone boots Linux on an Xbox and releases the source, based on a 12:00am EST release on November 15. Negative numbers are acceptable guesses. Given that the hardware is basically an Nvidia nForce chipset, Geforce variant video computer, it really shouldn't take that long.
Maybe this will finally convincemybanks that Mozilla is a real web browser. It's annoying having to switch back to Netscape 4.x to use online banking just because they haven't bothered to test and adjust for Mozilla. And yes, I know what it takes to make a major web site Mozilla compliant. (I was formerly employed by a large rodent.;-) ).
For the sake of argument, let's postulate that there is a town in New Jersey, let's call it "Podunk" (a purely ficticious town; if there really is a Podunk, NJ, then make up another name), where crossing the street against the light is not against the law. If I jay-walk in Podunk, NJ and then go to visit New York, should I be arrested in New York for jay-walking in Podunk?
That's essentially what's happening here. Dimitri jay-walked in Russia and now they're trying to prosecute him here. Yes, it's more complicated than that, but at the same time it's really not once you start looking past the legal smoke-screen. Adobe picked what they thought would be an easy target to show that the DMCA means business, and in my opinion have gotten off pretty easy with their "Oops, you're right, Dimitri shouldn't have been arrested," statement. Regardless of whether or not the DMCA is Constitutional, the fact is that the act being prosecuted was performed well outside the jurisdiction of the United States, and we have no business prosecuting this case at all. But then again, that's the whole problem here: business. But that water's been tread a thousand times over here on/.
Okay, I've spent enough time feeding the trolls. Say goodnight, Gracy.
Oh, but I do own the DVD! This isn't some click-wrapped licensed software package. This is a movie. I own my DVDs just as much as I own my VHS video tapes, music CDs, and books. And by purchasing this copyrighted work, I have a right to use it as I see fit, within certain limits. Among those rights is a right to watch the movie. And as far as I know, there has been no court decision so far that says that I can only watch my movies on players approved by the MPAA. (The DeCSS ruling, still on appeal, would not have gotten as far as it did, IMO, if it were incorporated into a player, even though DeCSS was written to be a part of a player.) I didn't have to sign any agreement saying I won't watch this movie on an unapproved DVD player when I got up to the register at Best Buy. In the end, I don't think that the MPAA could successfully sue anyone distributing an unapproved movie player, DeCSS or no. (By "in the end", I mean that it will never stand up to a Supreme Court decision. If it does, I'm defecting to Canada.)
But this doesn't cover Region Coding, which is listed on the box. Unfortunately for the MPAA (at least until they can buy some more laws), DVDs are *NOT* software; they're data. No matter where I buy the DVDs, or where I watch them, it's still just data. If I have software (i.e. a region-free DVD player) that will allow me to watch a DVD from England in my living room in the United States, there's not a damn thing they can do about it. If that ever changes, there's always the Canada option.
I love AbiWord for reading MS Word documents and writing quick letters, etc. I think it's a great program, and it reads the Microsoft.doc format quite nicely. But one thing that all open source word processors have omitted, including Open Office, is WordPerfect document support! Sure, I can get WordPerfect for Linux, but isn't the point of Open Source that you shouldn't need to be tied to a single proprietary piece of software? Isn't that what the freedom is all about?
For one reason or another, I can't get WordPerfect 8, the personal edition available for download, to install on my Linux box. Perhaps it doesn't like Mandrake 8, maybe it's my own ineptitude (I've been running Linux as my primary OS for about 4 months now), but it just won't cooperate. I wouldn't mind purchasing WP Office 2000 for Linux, but if I can't get WP8 to install, that tells me that WP2000 might suffer from the same problems. Given the average return policy of most software stores (i.e., no returns once it's open), I'm extremely hesitant to spend upwards of $100 on software that may or may not work on my machine. But I've been using Word Perfect for over 12 years now, and need WP file support. Right now, the only way I can get it is by booting my Windows partition and using WP2k for Windows.
So developers, if you're listening, Word support is great, but don't forget about those of us who haven't used Microsoft (at least for word processing) for a long time!
It seems to me that Linux gaming suffers from a serious chicken and egg problem. Game makers don't make Linux games because there isn't enough of a market for them, and when they do port to Linux it's often months after the Window version is released. Consequently, many Linux gamers dual-boot Windows just so they can play games (I'm one of those). We'll buy the Windows game so that we can play it now (we're an impatient bunch). When the Linux port finally comes out, we're hesitant to pay another $45-60 for a game that we already own! The problem is even worse for older games for which the Windows version can be found in the bargain-bin at Best Buy for $5-10, but the Linux version still costs $30-50 online.
One way to combat this chicken/egg syndrome is to offer Linux binaries for download at a nominal price. Someone who bought Unreal Tournament on sale for Windows at $39.95 is far more likely to pay Loki games $10-15 to download a linux binary that is compatible with their Windows CD than they are to buy the full game again at $50. They could even be sold in stores as "Linux Packs" along side the Windows games for those companies that don't feel that a complete Linux CD will bring enough sales. The profit margin on the "Linux Packs" would be smaller, but this could be made up for by writing into the porting contract a clause that gives the porting company a bonux for each "Pack" sold based on the fact that a Windows sale actually went to a Linux buyer.
Now before the flames start, let me answer the first question that's going start the burning: "If you can download the binary, no one will ever sell a Linux-only version!" I don't think that's the case, and here's why. Part of the reason that Linux games aren't being produced is the perceived lack of customers. But as it has been noted in other comments, the numbers from other experiments are often skewed by Linux gamers buying Windows versions of games. By offering Linux binaries for a nominal fee, you not only make it easier for Linux gamers to get Linux games, but the numbers become more accurate. Sales figures can be used to find out how many Linux gamers are buying Windows games. Higher sales numbers of Linux game binaries today could mean more Linux games on the shelves tomorrow.
That's my brilliant idea for the day. Flame away, I'm wearing asbestos underwear! =)
>Why must the Slashdot crowd constantly think of ways to get around protections put in place >to allow content providers to exercise their rights to control their works?
Perhaps it's because the content providers give up that right when the program is broadcast. At least that's what the Supreme Court told us when they made the Beta-max decision all those years ago.
The Beta-max decision was the proverbial genie in the bottle. The courts let that genie out, and ever since then people have been using VCRs to record their favorite shows at 8pm so that they can watch them when they get home from their daughter's dance recital at 10pm. But content providers want you to watch their programs when they want you to for various reasons, among them getting you to watch the commercials rather than fast-forward through them and also for demographic control. Different people watch television at different times, and content programmers use that information to sell commercials demographically.
But now with fundamentally new media technology beginning to come out, media groups such as the MPAA, RIAA, broadcasters and cable providers (sorry, I don't know their acronyms) have learned from their past mistakes about letting things get too far along, and are fighting tooth and nail to keep the VCR genie's big brother, Digital Video, from escaping his bottle. The tools they use are encryption, proprietary formats that require strict licensing agreements (DVD-CCA), and a very big stick called the DMCA.
Of course they don't want to lose control again! Controlling information can make you a lot of money, and big corporations have to make money or they won't be big corporations for very long. But just because they want absolute control over media (and have the tools to enforce it), doesn't mean that they have the right to absolute control.
So when someone figures out how at least some consumers (in this case the tech-savvy crowd) can get back those rights, it's reason enough for a small cheer. Do they have the right to make money with their products? Of course they do. Big studio movies and network television programs wouldn't be made if they couldn't make a profit at it. Do they have the right to control when and where that content gets viewed? Within limits. When you go to see a movie, you're not allowed to take a camcorder in so you can watch it later. But if they beam it into your house or sell it to you on a tape or a disc, they give up some of their control. They can't tell you when, where or how you can watch it; they gave up those rights when the program was broadcast over public airwaves.
So here's to the geeks. Thanks for giving me back my TV. Because it's still my TV, even if it's got an HD in front of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Retail price of Motorola RAZR: $250 (ref: WireFly)
Cost of Motorola-branded replacement Battery: $10
Granted, I dropped out of Engineering school, but my math comes out to about 4%. And you don't have to "rent" a phone while waiting for your battery to be replaced.
As for never needing to replace a battery, my wife and I currently have a pair of LG VX6800 phones from Verizon. About 18 months into their life-span, both of the phones' stand-by time went to less than 14 hours. I had charge my phone twice a day just to be able to use it. After buying two replacement batteries for, you guessed it, $10 a piece, and I'm once again able to go a couple of days without charging. And I never needed a "loaner" while it was in the shop.
Stealth Dave
Sorry, but that trademark has already been awarded.
- Stealth Dave
P.S. - Kudos to the DNF web team for creative use of the <blink> tag!
No, no, no, NO! This is SLASHDOT! The proper response is "Does it run Linux "?
This one goes to eleven
They are if you're a graphic designer.
- Stealth DaveWell, no wonder the time-travel convention was a bust :)
It was tomorrow. The panel guests were really insightful, I had a great time.
- Stealth DaveIf your Aibo is reproducing, then I'm heading for the hills. Call after Skynet's been taken out.
- Stealth Dave
They have.
- Stealth Dave
- Stealth Dave
satisfied CrossOver customer.
How has the switch to LGPL affected contributions to the project, both positively and negatively? When the switch happened, there was a lot of noise from groups like Transgaming who needed to license proprietary technology from third parties, and the formation of the ReWind project. Has there been a noticable effect on contributions to WINE from outside groups as result of the licensing change?
- Stealth Dave
Better than that, when I connected by iBook to my network three months ago, it automatically detected the Epson 875DCS hooked up to my Mandrake 9.0 box, and I was able to start printing immediately! Much easier than the hoops I had to jump through to try and connect to the office SMB printer.
- Stealth Dave
You mean he painted it lime-green and charged you four times the price of a beige paint-job?
- Stealth Dave
Proud owner of an Apple iBook.
A little history into this young lad's lineage shows that his family has a history of making such breakthrough discoveries. His father, in fact, designed amplifiers for famed rock group Spinal Tap.
Sadly, his father was meeting with the third drummer of Spinal Tap one afternoon and was trampled by a herd of wild elephants before he ever got a chance to patent his auditory inventions.
-- Stealth Dave
One of the more brilliant features of Tivo is the ability to nearly seamlessly use any (or almost any) cable box or satelite receiver almost as if it was an internal tuner. It does this by transmitting ir remote control to the cable box you are using through a small IR LED attached to the cable box and connected to the back of the Tivo. I have used my Tivo both with a Motorola cable box and my Dish Network system. As for the programming information, the nightly schedule downloads are just as complete for Dish as they are for local cable.
The upside of a DishPVR is the cost (DishPVR is significantly cheaper than Tivo), and that you're recording the digital video stream directly as opposed to recording the analog signal, but I've found that the Tivo's suggestion and other features far outweigh the minute quality difference you get from a direct stream (Tivo comes with very high quality A/V cables). I have several friends who went with DishPVR who now say that they would rather have a Tivo.
Just the opinion of a satisfied customer.
- Stealth Dave
As long as we're all getting nostalgic here, let me tell you the story of my first real hacking machine: my HP28s.
Sure, I had an Apple IIc in high school and I did a lot of programming on it, but I didn't do any serious hacking. Not like my HP28s. I wrote all sorts of games and cool stuff for my HP28s: a music program, a poker game with AI (albeit rather limited), and even a couple versions of a Tetris game, all in RPN. Tetris was even fairly playable speedwise after a few revisions. But my crowning achievement as an HP28 hacker was adding an RS232 serial connection running at a whopping 2400bps! Unfortunately, I only ever tested the transmit features which used the IR port because I was afraid to open the case, but another student did get two-way communication going using my code! That was a proud day, let me tell you!
But by then the HP48 had come out, with it's fancy-schmancy built-in serial port (where's the challenge with that?), I dropped out of engineering school to pursue a degree in theatre, and all of the software I wrote is now wasting away on 5-1/4" floppies in a basement somewhere. But I'll never forget all the fun times I had procrastinating my homework by doing "important" research into the inner workings of my HP28. Every once in a while I'll do a Google search to see if any of my hacks have survived on any HP28 archive sites. Ah, the glory days of old!
Thanks for the memories, HP calculater division! You'll be missed!
- Stealth Dave
Okay. Time to feed the trolls.
Let's face it: what damage has the DMCA really done? Why should anyone care about the DMCA?
This is just what I came up with off of the top of my head. I'm sure there are other cases that I didn't mention. So in answer to your question, start with the above list and go from there. If you still don't think that the DMCA has done any damage, then have a good slumber in the bed that you've made.
- Stealth Dave
You've fallen victim to one of the classic blunders! The first is never get involved in a land war in Asia against Cowboy Neal! Only slightly less known is this: never assume that a large corporation is in violation of the GPL just because you can't find the source!
IANAL, IANRMS (I Am Not Richard M. Stallman), and other disclaimers, but my understanding is that the GPL only requires that you must make the source available to those you have distributed binaries to. It doesn't *have* to be available for download, it just frequently is. If the source is being withheld from those who have purchased Linux for PS2, then we can start complaining.
And for those comparing which would make a better set-top PC, PS2 or Xbox, I suggest we start a pool for guessing how many minutes after the official Xbox release that someone boots Linux on an Xbox and releases the source, based on a 12:00am EST release on November 15. Negative numbers are acceptable guesses. Given that the hardware is basically an Nvidia nForce chipset, Geforce variant video computer, it really shouldn't take that long.
- Stealth Dave
Maybe this will finally convince my banks that Mozilla is a real web browser. It's annoying having to switch back to Netscape 4.x to use online banking just because they haven't bothered to test and adjust for Mozilla. And yes, I know what it takes to make a major web site Mozilla compliant. (I was formerly employed by a large rodent. ;-) ).
- Stealth Dave
For the sake of argument, let's postulate that there is a town in New Jersey, let's call it "Podunk" (a purely ficticious town; if there really is a Podunk, NJ, then make up another name), where crossing the street against the light is not against the law. If I jay-walk in Podunk, NJ and then go to visit New York, should I be arrested in New York for jay-walking in Podunk?
That's essentially what's happening here. Dimitri jay-walked in Russia and now they're trying to prosecute him here. Yes, it's more complicated than that, but at the same time it's really not once you start looking past the legal smoke-screen. Adobe picked what they thought would be an easy target to show that the DMCA means business, and in my opinion have gotten off pretty easy with their "Oops, you're right, Dimitri shouldn't have been arrested," statement. Regardless of whether or not the DMCA is Constitutional, the fact is that the act being prosecuted was performed well outside the jurisdiction of the United States, and we have no business prosecuting this case at all. But then again, that's the whole problem here: business. But that water's been tread a thousand times over here on /.
Okay, I've spent enough time feeding the trolls. Say goodnight, Gracy.
- Stealth Dave
Oh, but I do own the DVD! This isn't some click-wrapped licensed software package. This is a movie. I own my DVDs just as much as I own my VHS video tapes, music CDs, and books. And by purchasing this copyrighted work, I have a right to use it as I see fit, within certain limits. Among those rights is a right to watch the movie. And as far as I know, there has been no court decision so far that says that I can only watch my movies on players approved by the MPAA. (The DeCSS ruling, still on appeal, would not have gotten as far as it did, IMO, if it were incorporated into a player, even though DeCSS was written to be a part of a player.) I didn't have to sign any agreement saying I won't watch this movie on an unapproved DVD player when I got up to the register at Best Buy. In the end, I don't think that the MPAA could successfully sue anyone distributing an unapproved movie player, DeCSS or no. (By "in the end", I mean that it will never stand up to a Supreme Court decision. If it does, I'm defecting to Canada.)
But this doesn't cover Region Coding, which is listed on the box. Unfortunately for the MPAA (at least until they can buy some more laws), DVDs are *NOT* software; they're data. No matter where I buy the DVDs, or where I watch them, it's still just data. If I have software (i.e. a region-free DVD player) that will allow me to watch a DVD from England in my living room in the United States, there's not a damn thing they can do about it. If that ever changes, there's always the Canada option.
- Stealth Dave
--
I love AbiWord for reading MS Word documents and writing quick letters, etc. I think it's a great program, and it reads the Microsoft .doc format quite nicely. But one thing that all open source word processors have omitted, including Open Office, is WordPerfect document support! Sure, I can get WordPerfect for Linux, but isn't the point of Open Source that you shouldn't need to be tied to a single proprietary piece of software? Isn't that what the freedom is all about?
For one reason or another, I can't get WordPerfect 8, the personal edition available for download, to install on my Linux box. Perhaps it doesn't like Mandrake 8, maybe it's my own ineptitude (I've been running Linux as my primary OS for about 4 months now), but it just won't cooperate. I wouldn't mind purchasing WP Office 2000 for Linux, but if I can't get WP8 to install, that tells me that WP2000 might suffer from the same problems. Given the average return policy of most software stores (i.e., no returns once it's open), I'm extremely hesitant to spend upwards of $100 on software that may or may not work on my machine. But I've been using Word Perfect for over 12 years now, and need WP file support. Right now, the only way I can get it is by booting my Windows partition and using WP2k for Windows.
So developers, if you're listening, Word support is great, but don't forget about those of us who haven't used Microsoft (at least for word processing) for a long time!
- Stealth Dave
--
Thank God they don't do that for kernel patches!
Stealth Dave
--
It seems to me that Linux gaming suffers from a serious chicken and egg problem. Game makers don't make Linux games because there isn't enough of a market for them, and when they do port to Linux it's often months after the Window version is released. Consequently, many Linux gamers dual-boot Windows just so they can play games (I'm one of those). We'll buy the Windows game so that we can play it now (we're an impatient bunch). When the Linux port finally comes out, we're hesitant to pay another $45-60 for a game that we already own! The problem is even worse for older games for which the Windows version can be found in the bargain-bin at Best Buy for $5-10, but the Linux version still costs $30-50 online.
One way to combat this chicken/egg syndrome is to offer Linux binaries for download at a nominal price. Someone who bought Unreal Tournament on sale for Windows at $39.95 is far more likely to pay Loki games $10-15 to download a linux binary that is compatible with their Windows CD than they are to buy the full game again at $50. They could even be sold in stores as "Linux Packs" along side the Windows games for those companies that don't feel that a complete Linux CD will bring enough sales. The profit margin on the "Linux Packs" would be smaller, but this could be made up for by writing into the porting contract a clause that gives the porting company a bonux for each "Pack" sold based on the fact that a Windows sale actually went to a Linux buyer.
Now before the flames start, let me answer the first question that's going start the burning: "If you can download the binary, no one will ever sell a Linux-only version!" I don't think that's the case, and here's why. Part of the reason that Linux games aren't being produced is the perceived lack of customers. But as it has been noted in other comments, the numbers from other experiments are often skewed by Linux gamers buying Windows versions of games. By offering Linux binaries for a nominal fee, you not only make it easier for Linux gamers to get Linux games, but the numbers become more accurate. Sales figures can be used to find out how many Linux gamers are buying Windows games. Higher sales numbers of Linux game binaries today could mean more Linux games on the shelves tomorrow.
That's my brilliant idea for the day. Flame away, I'm wearing asbestos underwear! =)
- Stealth Dave
--
>Why must the Slashdot crowd constantly think of ways to get around protections put in place
>to allow content providers to exercise their rights to control their works?
Perhaps it's because the content providers give up that right when the program is broadcast. At least that's what the Supreme Court told us when they made the Beta-max decision all those years ago.
The Beta-max decision was the proverbial genie in the bottle. The courts let that genie out, and ever since then people have been using VCRs to record their favorite shows at 8pm so that they can watch them when they get home from their daughter's dance recital at 10pm. But content providers want you to watch their programs when they want you to for various reasons, among them getting you to watch the commercials rather than fast-forward through them and also for demographic control. Different people watch television at different times, and content programmers use that information to sell commercials demographically.
But now with fundamentally new media technology beginning to come out, media groups such as the MPAA, RIAA, broadcasters and cable providers (sorry, I don't know their acronyms) have learned from their past mistakes about letting things get too far along, and are fighting tooth and nail to keep the VCR genie's big brother, Digital Video, from escaping his bottle. The tools they use are encryption, proprietary formats that require strict licensing agreements (DVD-CCA), and a very big stick called the DMCA.
Of course they don't want to lose control again! Controlling information can make you a lot of money, and big corporations have to make money or they won't be big corporations for very long. But just because they want absolute control over media (and have the tools to enforce it), doesn't mean that they have the right to absolute control.
So when someone figures out how at least some consumers (in this case the tech-savvy crowd) can get back those rights, it's reason enough for a small cheer. Do they have the right to make money with their products? Of course they do. Big studio movies and network television programs wouldn't be made if they couldn't make a profit at it. Do they have the right to control when and where that content gets viewed? Within limits. When you go to see a movie, you're not allowed to take a camcorder in so you can watch it later. But if they beam it into your house or sell it to you on a tape or a disc, they give up some of their control. They can't tell you when, where or how you can watch it; they gave up those rights when the program was broadcast over public airwaves.
So here's to the geeks. Thanks for giving me back my TV. Because it's still my TV, even if it's got an HD in front of it.
Stick a fork in me. I'm done.
- Stealth Dave
--