Re:Clueless about the concept
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
The basic problem is that you can't stop piracy, not without taking an axe to every server on the internet. I think that's the basic deal that's being exposed in this whole MP3 thing. Individual sources may start protecting copyright and paying back, but that's not going to cut it. A pirate will pop up, even if just to share MP3 with friends across the net. Take them out, someone else takes their place.
So what's going to happen? I think there have to be changes on the user-end... the technology for distribution is beyond control and I want it to stay that way, it's not the root of the problem.
Listeners have to realize their moral obligation to support the bands they like... that's the real trouble, the people who believe in their right to build up huge collections of complete records and never pay a cent. Buy some band shirts! Get a CD for your car player... I dunno, but there has to be a personal reason to co-operate with the artists.
Wasting money on ads makes Baby Jesus cry
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
Why spend millions on promotion when you could hire one (1) web designer to put all of that online... how about 60000 bucks? These companies need to get web-savvy or die. A lot of designers do too... you're not making posters here people.
I, for one, don't have any interest in big posters at HMV or stupid ads on the TV... it's the SONGS I care about. I've bought 0 CDs based on "X has a new CD out! " and the other 450 on "This song sounds cool / X says this band is great" - which is what the internet and Napster are all about for me.
I think it's a question of changes in media 90 years ago. The technology for piracy has always existed (memory, recording on paper or performing live), but distribution has been a problem for the ancient hacker - geographic limits cuts down on the value of posting information for all to see... it just wasn't worth the time or effort or cost to redistribute materials compared to getting it from the official channel and paying copyright.
If, for example, everyone had to pay by the download (e.g. volume, adjusted for compression technique) you could make getting warez as big a hassle as buying legit. But you would also kill what I feel is the essence of the internet - once you're on, it's free... you can expose yourself to all the information you want.
It's an attempt to bring things as diverse as music and invention into the same legal paradigm as land-ownership. Someone should have seen it was crap from the get-go, but I don't think anyone even gave it a mental test-drive. I ranted about this a while ago.
In essence, you can register yourself as the owner of a certain idea, like the "landlord" owns "land". People wishing to use your idea must act as "serfs" on that "land", paying fees to grow their "crops", until after so much time (e.g. you "die") your "land" is considered public property and anyone can come and "farm" it for free.
Pretty whacked, huh? Time to move that set of laws out of the feudal era... people deserve so much more than that.
The only people who would stop producing ideas are the ones filling the market with "innovation" driven strictly by its profit value - mass market crap, rather than advances in technology and real art, which are both of value even if nobody's paying per-use.
IMO anyone with the skills to innovate will be able to back it up with technical expertise that can't be copied the way their inventions are, and will see more than enough money "performing live" - be it a band, a DJ, a systems engineer.
In effect, the system becomes a meritocracy, and the only people with something to fear are the ones without merit.
...that machines have their own advantages. Parts like wheels and axles just aren't biologically possible. Extensibility, partial disassembly/reassembly and drastic changes in structural & operational paradigm are available in a way not possible with living forms that have a non-discrete structure. An entirely biological paradigm could miss these particular advantages.
I'm also surprised that the climbing problem hasn't been solved with whizzy harpoons / cableguns / grappling hooks / embedded fans or rockets or etc etc. Not that those are incredibly efficient... but they are fun and scalable. You don't see many 200 pound Geckos.
The best portable that ever hit the market was the little TurboGrafx portable. It was cute, but more importantly, it was a real TurboGrafx and you didn't need stupid adapters to play the games. PS1 makes good on the same premise - it's a real playstation and you can use all your existing stuff with it, the added bonus is that you can take it on vacation and still play 2P with your friends back home.
As for too big and too many wires: ever used a portable CD player? If you've been strapping the whole unit to your head and complaining about the dangly wires between earpiece and player, you're using it wrong. If you're going to plug it in, you can put it down too.
They may not need the badnwidth... they certainly can't get it over a control port and celphone. I'm optimistic because:
1) The celphone plugs into the control port. It might be the case that it just relays controller info between the two machines on the 1P/2P port, which sure as hell isn't high-bandwidth warez like a state-update on Asheron's Call or even Warcraft. 2) Developers aren't expecting hardware to "catch up" like they can afford to with PCs. They'll write for what's there.
But this is something worth flying off the handle
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 2
Your "no problems here" speech actually illustrated the big problem that everyone's complaining about: you're stuck getting an appliance rather than a computer and OS. The non-Dell (This-Machine) restriction clearly indicates that you're not free to do use the OS in whatever way you need to - though you pay for it.
And no, you don't have a "recovery CD". It's a dell-specific copy of the OS... a "recovery CD" would only be able to auto-format and auto-reinstall.
Breaking up the company should eliminate a lot of the predator's bite. It suddenly becomes much harder for MS-OS to change their specs every six months with MS-Apps being the only company to stay in synch. I don't think that kind of preferential treatment is legal and it's pretty easy to detect. At the very least, Corel and Netscape and the like would have a fair shot at matching Office and IE in terms of OS integration and overall quality.
Disney argues on MS' behalf. Who'd have thunk it? "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" is as good a description of Disney's (ab)use of cultural tales - every story gets a happy Republican ending etc - as it is of MS' (ab)use of protocols, standards, and market share.
It's a natural law: Users are unfailingly likely to open trojans on themselves regardless of delivery method or quality of disguise. When I helped admin a network, we thought it would be a fun test to send around an email as below. The script would really post a file to some "wall of shame" that we could make available. We felt confident that there would be more than a couple users caught red-handed. Title: This will blow your hard drive away Double-clicking on the following attachment will delete your HD partition and you will lose all information on C: Attach: delete_HD.txt.vbs
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The basic problem is that you can't stop piracy, not without taking an axe to every server on the internet. I think that's the basic deal that's being exposed in this whole MP3 thing. Individual sources may start protecting copyright and paying back, but that's not going to cut it. A pirate will pop up, even if just to share MP3 with friends across the net. Take them out, someone else takes their place.
So what's going to happen? I think there have to be changes on the user-end... the technology for distribution is beyond control and I want it to stay that way, it's not the root of the problem.
Listeners have to realize their moral obligation to support the bands they like... that's the real trouble, the people who believe in their right to build up huge collections of complete records and never pay a cent. Buy some band shirts! Get a CD for your car player... I dunno, but there has to be a personal reason to co-operate with the artists.
Why spend millions on promotion when you could hire one (1) web designer to put all of that online... how about 60000 bucks? These companies need to get web-savvy or die. A lot of designers do too... you're not making posters here people.
I, for one, don't have any interest in big posters at HMV or stupid ads on the TV... it's the SONGS I care about. I've bought 0 CDs based on "X has a new CD out! " and the other 450 on "This song sounds cool / X says this band is great" - which is what the internet and Napster are all about for me.
"What do they think is going to stop this?" asks Chuck. "Baby Jesus? Jesus is going to stop Napster."
I can see the press releases now:
"Metallica claims that downloading MP3s from Napster makes Baby Jesus cry. Millions don't care."
I think it's a question of changes in media 90 years ago. The technology for piracy has always existed (memory, recording on paper or performing live), but distribution has been a problem for the ancient hacker - geographic limits cuts down on the value of posting information for all to see... it just wasn't worth the time or effort or cost to redistribute materials compared to getting it from the official channel and paying copyright.
If, for example, everyone had to pay by the download (e.g. volume, adjusted for compression technique) you could make getting warez as big a hassle as buying legit. But you would also kill what I feel is the essence of the internet - once you're on, it's free... you can expose yourself to all the information you want.
It's an attempt to bring things as diverse as music and invention into the same legal paradigm as land-ownership. Someone should have seen it was crap from the get-go, but I don't think anyone even gave it a mental test-drive. I ranted about this a while ago.
In essence, you can register yourself as the owner of a certain idea, like the "landlord" owns "land". People wishing to use your idea must act as "serfs" on that "land", paying fees to grow their "crops", until after so much time (e.g. you "die") your "land" is considered public property and anyone can come and "farm" it for free.
Pretty whacked, huh? Time to move that set of laws out of the feudal era... people deserve so much more than that.
The only people who would stop producing ideas are the ones filling the market with "innovation" driven strictly by its profit value - mass market crap, rather than advances in technology and real art, which are both of value even if nobody's paying per-use.
IMO anyone with the skills to innovate will be able to back it up with technical expertise that can't be copied the way their inventions are, and will see more than enough money "performing live" - be it a band, a DJ, a systems engineer.
In effect, the system becomes a meritocracy, and the only people with something to fear are the ones without merit.
...that machines have their own advantages. Parts like wheels and axles just aren't biologically possible. Extensibility, partial disassembly/reassembly and drastic changes in structural & operational paradigm are available in a way not possible with living forms that have a non-discrete structure. An entirely biological paradigm could miss these particular advantages.
I'm also surprised that the climbing problem hasn't been solved with whizzy harpoons / cableguns / grappling hooks / embedded fans or rockets or etc etc. Not that those are incredibly efficient... but they are fun and scalable. You don't see many 200 pound Geckos.
The best portable that ever hit the market was the little TurboGrafx portable. It was cute, but more importantly, it was a real TurboGrafx and you didn't need stupid adapters to play the games. PS1 makes good on the same premise - it's a real playstation and you can use all your existing stuff with it, the added bonus is that you can take it on vacation and still play 2P with your friends back home.
As for too big and too many wires: ever used a portable CD player? If you've been strapping the whole unit to your head and complaining about the dangly wires between earpiece and player, you're using it wrong. If you're going to plug it in, you can put it down too.
They may not need the badnwidth... they certainly can't get it over a control port and celphone.
I'm optimistic because:
1) The celphone plugs into the control port. It might be the case that it just relays controller info between the two machines on the 1P/2P port, which sure as hell isn't high-bandwidth warez like a state-update on Asheron's Call or even Warcraft.
2) Developers aren't expecting hardware to "catch up" like they can afford to with PCs. They'll write for what's there.
Your "no problems here" speech actually illustrated the big problem that everyone's complaining about: you're stuck getting an appliance rather than a computer and OS. The non-Dell (This-Machine) restriction clearly indicates that you're not free to do use the OS in whatever way you need to - though you pay for it.
And no, you don't have a "recovery CD". It's a dell-specific copy of the OS... a "recovery CD" would only be able to auto-format and auto-reinstall.
Breaking up the company should eliminate a lot of the predator's bite. It suddenly becomes much harder for MS-OS to change their specs every six months with MS-Apps being the only company to stay in synch. I don't think that kind of preferential treatment is legal and it's pretty easy to detect. At the very least, Corel and Netscape and the like would have a fair shot at matching Office and IE in terms of OS integration and overall quality.
Disney argues on MS' behalf. Who'd have thunk it? "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" is as good a description of Disney's (ab)use of cultural tales - every story gets a happy Republican ending etc - as it is of MS' (ab)use of protocols, standards, and market share.
It's a natural law: Users are unfailingly likely to open trojans on themselves regardless of delivery method or quality of disguise. When I helped admin a network, we thought it would be a fun test to send around an email as below. The script would really post a file to some "wall of shame" that we could make available. We felt confident that there would be more than a couple users caught red-handed. Title: This will blow your hard drive away Double-clicking on the following attachment will delete your HD partition and you will lose all information on C: Attach: delete_HD.txt.vbs