Actually, it could be in the public interest that ISPs accidentally misidentify customers when the **AA asks for information.
It allows people to see the **AA for what they really are. They represent corporations and not the interest of the individual artists. I have never heard of any artist being paid extra revenue as a result of money recovered from these prosecutions.
If some online music store allows independents to promote their products without any **AA partner taking the lion's share of the revenue, it would be to the benefit to the whole world. I would much rather buy a track knowing that at least half of that money is going to the real artist. Right now, they perhaps get less than 3% if they are lucky after all the deductions they get charged (WTF with restocking fees and breakages with an internet download?)
Make music cheap enough that it becomes economically impractical to 'pirate' them and the whole piracy thing would die out. To do this and give a much better livelihood to the artist requires that the middle man be cut out.
we have been using them for over two years for some of our users, and have found them to be not so tough. Connectors come loose, screens crack and backlights fail. Thinkpads have proven much more reliable.
Give users something and tell them it is tough and they will break it by being wreckless.
Give users something and tell them it is fragile, there is a good chance they will treat it reasonably.
Better to give a rugged notebook to someone who needs a rugged notebook due to the work that they do and tell them that it is not indestructable and that they should handle it as carefully as their job permits... Then it should last a reasonable amount of time.
I think people are forgetting who are Microsoft's customers.
The end users are not Microsoft's customers. The end users who purchase Windows are very much in the minority - the overwhelming majority of users get their Windows bundled with their PCs. Microsoft's customers are the computer vendors and big media. Microsoft's customers are demanding that content be controlled and that users are given an incentive to buy new hardware.
The sad thing about all this DRM is that the big time pirates don't care and it doesn't affect them one iota.
Why?
Very simply - a CD/DVD duplication service stamps out thousands of CDs. They get an order to make a master and stamp out 20,000 CDs. Just for safety in case there is a sales surge, they actually stamp out 25,000 CDs, so that if the customer wants an urgent extra supply if the product proves popular, they can ship out the extras while they retool to do another production run.
What is to stop a pirate from bribing some technician to stamp out a few more CDs? There is a spoilage rate as not all the CDs manufactured are up to quality - what if a few more were "spoiled" and instead of being immediately shredded, they were diverted to a pirate?
Since when have you seen a good-quality pirate DVD printed on a recordable DVD? They always seem to be manufactured as professionally as the genuine article. Dollars to donuts, they both came out of the same CD duplication service.
If someone acts like an arse in public, should not be surprised to find it posted on a website.
If they don't want anyone to post them doing disgraceful things in public, they should either refrain from doing something which people would find offensive... or if they are a true sociopath, they can always murder all the witnesses before they can post it online.
I would so dearly like to attach a video camera to my car, perhaps with a 30 second buffer, so that when I press the button to record an event, everything up to 30 seconds before the event is also recorded. Would much prefer a good quality video camera so that license plates are clearly visible.
I seem to recall that a few years ago, a man in Japan was fined for speeding based upon video evidence posted online...
I find it difficult to believe that they have found a perfect way to contain hydrogen gas without any loss...
Hydrogen has an annoying habit of losing its only electron and tunnelling through almost any substance and then picking up another electron on the other side. As a lone nucleus, it is many times smaller than the typical size of the atom (nucleus and electron).
Pure hydrogen would leak out... slowly.
AFAIK, the "best" way to contain hydrogen gas with lowest leakage is to put a metal film on a glass container.
Of course, this is not my area of expertise so I may be completely wrong!
IANAMP (I am not a molecular physicist) but I have always wondered if it is possible to "dope" diamonds in a similar way that Silicon is "doped" to cause "holes"...
Silicon and Carbon are both quite similar in the kinds of chemistry that they form...
but didn't the short-lived 2.88Mb 3.5" floppies use perpendicular recording?
(For those too young to remember, in the 1990s, IBM shipped many of their PS/2 machines with 2.88 floppy drives - unfortunately the media was too expensive, more expensive than 2 standard "High Density" 1.44 diskettes - the drives were very expensive, the heads had to support the perpendicular recording mode as well as standard - also IIRC standard controllers and BIOS couldn't support the higher capacity drives. IBM even tried to boost awareness of the newer format by imprinting a tiny "2.88" on to the blue eject buttons)
He is also directly responsible for the first Electric Chair execution.
The victim reportedly fried under AC for over 30 seconds, the AC kept on making his muscles move so they were not sure if he was dead yet.
There is a grim irony in this... AFAIK, modern Electric Chair executions use a small number of high voltage high current DC pulses to kill. Simple and effective.
I wonder how deadly the chemicals in these are compared to normal tubes as well.
Given that normal tubes have a drop of mercury within them (mercury vapour, when excited, emits UV light which the coating converts to visible light), how "safe" are normal tubes?
I must admit - I am personally very surprised that it is only $10bn per annum. I would have expected a figure between $50bn and $100bn per annum. This is taking into account not just the additional cost of having to purchase a monopoly product at a price premium but including all the ancillary "hidden" costs of being relyant upon Microsoft - anti-virus, anti-trojan, anti-spyware, diagnostic tools, repair/upgrade costs, loss of productivity due to downtime, loss of intellectual property due to software failure, indirect loss of life through software failure/errors, costs to industry to hire the hoard of MCSEs to maintain the whole mess.
Yeah.... $50bn-$100bn is IMHO more realistic. Whoever decided upon $10bn is being very optimistic and is obviously trying to portray Microsoft as a beneficial monopoly.
People with brains will realize what is propaganda and check Linux out on their own. Thanks to MS.
Alas, you are assuming that sheep have brains. The overwhelming majority of the people on this planet would prefer sommeone else to do the thinking for them and hand them the answer on a plate.
Microsoft is quite happy to provide an answer and the plate.
I can just see it - telling you it doesn't have the right drivers for your heart and disabling your pulmonary functions.
Don't you mean "telling you it doesn't have the right drivers for your lungs and disabling your pulmonary functions" or "telling you it doesn't have the right drivers for your heart and disabling your cardiac functions"?
Does anyone remember the FireFox film staring Clint Eastwood where his character is a US Air Force test pilot who is on a mission to steal a prototype Russian jet-fighter.
FireFox and FireFox Down are two books by Craig Thomas of which the film is based upon the first book. Both fun to read - I'd reccomend it if you liked the old cold-war inspired novels, although the 2nd book was written after cracks started appearing in the Iron Curtain.
Have you ever seen... or even listened to... the kind of fans IBM has in their BladeCenter?
Two large drum fans - the entire thing sounds like a jet engine when it powers up. It takes it a while before it settles down to a much much slower speed - but I suppose it is surplus cooling capacity which could prove handy to ship a blade which has high heat dissipation needs.
Americans didn't invent the jet engine, the Germans did.
Errm, not exactl correct. The English invented that one too - before the start of WWII. Except that in time-honored English fashion, British industries did not want to put money into untried and novel technologies.
However, the Germans did invent radio-based homing systems... some of the V bombs homed in to radio transmitters which were planted in locations by German spies deployed in England.
As if anyone here cares if the MSRP with Windows bundled is more expensive... as long as we can get the hardware $20 cheaper without that Windows licence.
Wouldn't it be nice to have the WorkplaceShell on GNU/Linux someday? Or even get something like OpenDoc going again. Being stuck with rectangular windows just seems so 1980's. The browser and *nix has shown that small efficient "parts" make a far better, stable, and secure platform
IBM has already released the source code to OpenDOC - I have downloaded it and stored it a couple of years ago. However it relies so heavily on DSOM and the particular features that DSOM offered (metaclasses and distributed class framework) which "modern" CORBA implementations don't have (IBM unsuccessfully tried to propose those features to the CORBA committee) that it cannot be ported without redeveloping SOM all over again. Also, the Bento object storage library is missing... AFAIK, Apple still uses that technology in Mac OS 10.
The source code is interesting - it has has a lot of code common to both the MacOS and OS/2 implementation of OpenDOC...
Search: OS/2 had an integrated search facility built into the WorkPlace Shell which could search through file metadata (Extended Attributes). It didn't have a snazzy name - it was only known by the name of the button... "Find".
Scripting: OS/2 had advanced scripting capabilties - in the form of the REXX language. Again, no snazzy name. It just did it - and it was trivial to integrate REXX support into applications.
Built-in RSS support: RSS didn't exist in 1992. But OS/2 did ship with NewsReader...
Integrated Instant Messaging/Video Chat: Well - the closest thing I can think of is a little IBM EWS utility called Sticky/2 - which is like networked post-it notes...
64-Bit Support: commodity 64bit systems didn't exist in 1992... However, OS/2 Warp for PowerPC (1996) was supposed to provide a 64bit future for OS/2
Who is copying who? Well, it seems that the "star" feature of LongHorn and Tiger were already done up to 10 years ago... Well, I suppose Apple can have some credit - Apple were involved in designing the WorkPlace Shell.
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Actually, it could be in the public interest that ISPs accidentally misidentify customers when the **AA asks for information.
It allows people to see the **AA for what they really are. They represent corporations and not the interest of the individual artists. I have never heard of any artist being paid extra revenue as a result of money recovered from these prosecutions.
If some online music store allows independents to promote their products without any **AA partner taking the lion's share of the revenue, it would be to the benefit to the whole world. I would much rather buy a track knowing that at least half of that money is going to the real artist. Right now, they perhaps get less than 3% if they are lucky after all the deductions they get charged (WTF with restocking fees and breakages with an internet download?)
Make music cheap enough that it becomes economically impractical to 'pirate' them and the whole piracy thing would die out. To do this and give a much better livelihood to the artist requires that the middle man be cut out.
we have been using them for over two years for some of our users, and have found them to be not so tough. Connectors come loose, screens crack and backlights fail. Thinkpads have proven much more reliable.
Give users something and tell them it is tough and they will break it by being wreckless.
Give users something and tell them it is fragile, there is a good chance they will treat it reasonably.
Better to give a rugged notebook to someone who needs a rugged notebook due to the work that they do and tell them that it is not indestructable and that they should handle it as carefully as their job permits... Then it should last a reasonable amount of time.
Just my 2 cents worth.
What would happen if the computer industry priced their products today based on RIAA illogic...
In 1986, My IBM PC 5150 cost $2000 for 4.77MHz of performance.
Adjusted for inflation and applicable linear price increase for the extra MHz:
In 2007, a 2.0GHz computer should cost $1561700.
Yeah, right.
I have been very happy with my Casio fx-7000GB which I have had now for about 15 years.
Does everything I want, even lots of easy to use logical operations on up to 32bit values.
I think people are forgetting who are Microsoft's customers.
The end users are not Microsoft's customers. The end users who purchase Windows are very much in the minority - the overwhelming majority of users get their Windows bundled with their PCs. Microsoft's customers are the computer vendors and big media. Microsoft's customers are demanding that content be controlled and that users are given an incentive to buy new hardware.
The customer always gets what they want.
The smartest criminals are so deft at their art that no one, least of all the police, is aware that a crime has even taken place...
The sad thing about all this DRM is that the big time pirates don't care and it doesn't affect them one iota.
Why?
Very simply - a CD/DVD duplication service stamps out thousands of CDs. They get an order to make a master and stamp out 20,000 CDs. Just for safety in case there is a sales surge, they actually stamp out 25,000 CDs, so that if the customer wants an urgent extra supply if the product proves popular, they can ship out the extras while they retool to do another production run.
What is to stop a pirate from bribing some technician to stamp out a few more CDs? There is a spoilage rate as not all the CDs manufactured are up to quality - what if a few more were "spoiled" and instead of being immediately shredded, they were diverted to a pirate?
Since when have you seen a good-quality pirate DVD printed on a recordable DVD? They always seem to be manufactured as professionally as the genuine article. Dollars to donuts, they both came out of the same CD duplication service.
Just my $0.02 worth's opinion.
What people do in public becomes public property.
If someone acts like an arse in public, should not be surprised to find it posted on a website.
If they don't want anyone to post them doing disgraceful things in public, they should either refrain from doing something which people would find offensive... or if they are a true sociopath, they can always murder all the witnesses before they can post it online.
I would so dearly like to attach a video camera to my car, perhaps with a 30 second buffer, so that when I press the button to record an event, everything up to 30 seconds before the event is also recorded. Would much prefer a good quality video camera so that license plates are clearly visible.
I seem to recall that a few years ago, a man in Japan was fined for speeding based upon video evidence posted online...
I find it difficult to believe that they have found a perfect way to contain hydrogen gas without any loss...
... slowly.
Hydrogen has an annoying habit of losing its only electron and tunnelling through almost any substance and then picking up another electron on the other side. As a lone nucleus, it is many times smaller than the typical size of the atom (nucleus and electron).
Pure hydrogen would leak out
AFAIK, the "best" way to contain hydrogen gas with lowest leakage is to put a metal film on a glass container.
Of course, this is not my area of expertise so I may be completely wrong!
IANAMP (I am not a molecular physicist) but I have always wondered if it is possible to "dope" diamonds in a similar way that Silicon is "doped" to cause "holes"...
Silicon and Carbon are both quite similar in the kinds of chemistry that they form...
Correct me if I am wrong....
but didn't the short-lived 2.88Mb 3.5" floppies use perpendicular recording?
(For those too young to remember, in the 1990s, IBM shipped many of their PS/2 machines with 2.88 floppy drives - unfortunately the media was too expensive, more expensive than 2 standard "High Density" 1.44 diskettes - the drives were very expensive, the heads had to support the perpendicular recording mode as well as standard - also IIRC standard controllers and BIOS couldn't support the higher capacity drives. IBM even tried to boost awareness of the newer format by imprinting a tiny "2.88" on to the blue eject buttons)
Edison didn't just electrocute small animals...
He is also directly responsible for the first Electric Chair execution.
The victim reportedly fried under AC for over 30 seconds, the AC kept on making his muscles move so they were not sure if he was dead yet.
There is a grim irony in this... AFAIK, modern Electric Chair executions use a small number of high voltage high current DC pulses to kill. Simple and effective.
Finally, proof that anything that all political utterances (writing, speech, etc) may have negative information content!
Of course, this is something which we have all suspected for years...
Given that normal tubes have a drop of mercury within them (mercury vapour, when excited, emits UV light which the coating converts to visible light), how "safe" are normal tubes?
I must admit - I am personally very surprised that it is only $10bn per annum. I would have expected a figure between $50bn and $100bn per annum. This is taking into account not just the additional cost of having to purchase a monopoly product at a price premium but including all the ancillary "hidden" costs of being relyant upon Microsoft - anti-virus, anti-trojan, anti-spyware, diagnostic tools, repair/upgrade costs, loss of productivity due to downtime, loss of intellectual property due to software failure, indirect loss of life through software failure/errors, costs to industry to hire the hoard of MCSEs to maintain the whole mess.
Yeah.... $50bn-$100bn is IMHO more realistic. Whoever decided upon $10bn is being very optimistic and is obviously trying to portray Microsoft as a beneficial monopoly.
Alas, you are assuming that sheep have brains. The overwhelming majority of the people on this planet would prefer sommeone else to do the thinking for them and hand them the answer on a plate.
Microsoft is quite happy to provide an answer and the plate.
Don't you mean "telling you it doesn't have the right drivers for your lungs and disabling your pulmonary functions" or "telling you it doesn't have the right drivers for your heart and disabling your cardiac functions"?
Does anyone remember the FireFox film staring Clint Eastwood where his character is a US Air Force test pilot who is on a mission to steal a prototype Russian jet-fighter.
FireFox and FireFox Down are two books by Craig Thomas of which the film is based upon the first book. Both fun to read - I'd reccomend it if you liked the old cold-war inspired novels, although the 2nd book was written after cracks started appearing in the Iron Curtain.
During the mid 1990s was a strange time for OS/2 fans...
The fans *loved* OS/2... the fans *hated* IBM.
Have you ever seen... or even listened to... the kind of fans IBM has in their BladeCenter?
Two large drum fans - the entire thing sounds like a jet engine when it powers up. It takes it a while before it settles down to a much much slower speed - but I suppose it is surplus cooling capacity which could prove handy to ship a blade which has high heat dissipation needs.
If MS won't pay the fine, the EU can impose an import tax on MS software and sales and set it at a level which would equal the daily fine.
This isn't a bad thing - it could potentially double the cost of MS software in Europe and make it less competitive to the alternatives.
Of course, to avoid the tax, MS could distribute their software for free...
Errm, not exactl correct. The English invented that one too - before the start of WWII. Except that in time-honored English fashion, British industries did not want to put money into untried and novel technologies.
However, the Germans did invent radio-based homing systems... some of the V bombs homed in to radio transmitters which were planted in locations by German spies deployed in England.
As if anyone here cares if the MSRP with Windows bundled is more expensive... as long as we can get the hardware $20 cheaper without that Windows licence.
IBM has already released the source code to OpenDOC - I have downloaded it and stored it a couple of years ago. However it relies so heavily on DSOM and the particular features that DSOM offered (metaclasses and distributed class framework) which "modern" CORBA implementations don't have (IBM unsuccessfully tried to propose those features to the CORBA committee) that it cannot be ported without redeveloping SOM all over again. Also, the Bento object storage library is missing... AFAIK, Apple still uses that technology in Mac OS 10.
The source code is interesting - it has has a lot of code common to both the MacOS and OS/2 implementation of OpenDOC...
Who is copying who? Well, it seems that the "star" feature of LongHorn and Tiger were already done up to 10 years ago... Well, I suppose Apple can have some credit - Apple were involved in designing the WorkPlace Shell.