My girlfriend is a surgical resident. When she's not working an all-night shift, she goes to bed at about 8:30 or 9:00 and gets up a 4:00 AM. Some people insist on calling our house at 9:00, 10:00, even 11:00 PM. It's almost always a wrong number, but once it was important. I'd like a system that prevents unauthorized callers from ringing my phone and waking up my girlfriend. She's cranky enough on seven hours' uninterrupted sleep. On less, she's a monster.
Like all technological innovations, this one is the result of some guy trying to impress some girl.
Agreed. I have a Dual 450 from fall 2000 (21 months?) and I'd say it's still worth the money.
I've been in the market for just such a machine. I consider my Mac to be I/O bound, not CPU bound, but I really like the added interactivity you get from having that second CPU in there. I wish Apple would sell a new low-end dual-CPU system, say a dual 800 MHz or something, instead of just restricting the dual-CPU configuration to the fastest and most expensive CPUs.
That said, I'd offer you $700 for your G4 right now.;-) It's nowhere near the purchase price, I'm sure, but after all your machine is nearly two years old. Getting 1/3 of the price you paid for it after two years would be pretty good, I think.
And what would you say if it was indeed possible to make molecular-level backup scans of the physical objects you owned? This will be possible by the end of the century.
What would I say? I'd say you're being silly. You can't make judgments of policy based on fantasy. There's no evidence-- scientific, anecdotal, circumstantial, or otherwise-- to lead to the conclusion that such a system or process will ever exist. So the whole question is pointless.
However, just for fun, I'll go along with you.
You can't create a car out of nothing. So what you're talking about is just a different form of manufacturing; it's not an issue of copying at all. If you want to manufacture your own car to match the precise specifications of the car you bought, that's your own business.
Copying a CD or DVD isn't manufacturing. It's either copying, in the case of a bit-for-bit duplicate, or it's creating a derived work, in the case of making a tape or some MP3s or a VCD or whatever else.
Copying is expressly prohibited by the Copyright Act. You can't reproduce a work unless granted express permission, or unless you hold the copyright. Period.
The Copyright Act also grants the copyright holder exclusive right to make a derivative work from the original.
So making a copy of a CD, or making MP3s out of a CD, is expressly prohibited under the Copyright Act.
"But what about Fair Use?" you say? Fair use is not spelled out in any legislation, but has been created by the judiciary out of the body of case law pertaining to copyright disputes. There are four accepted criteria for determining if a use of a copyrighted work is fair, or if it's a violation.
1. the purpose and character of the use (i.e., was it done to teach kids, or for personal use, or to make money?)
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
3. the amount of the copyrighted work used as a proportion of the whole
4. the effect of the use on the value of the work, or the potential market for the work.
So when you make an MP3 of a song, you're creating a derivative work for personal use (1 point for fair use) from a rightfully protected work (1 point for violation). You're taking the entire song (2 points for violation). If you took a small piece of the song, that would count toward the use being fair. If you took a large part of the song, that would count for violation, but only a little bit. Taking the whole song is clearly on the side of violation. But you're not intending to distribute the MP3 to anybody else (1 point for fair use).
It's a close call, but "space-shifting" a CD into MP3s is probably not protected by fair use. Of course, nobody will care unless an example of such a practice becomes actionable. I doubt that anybody's going to sue you because you dumped a CD into your iPod. But there's no legal justification for opposing copy-protected CDs, either, because preventing digital copying won't prevent the fair use of the works.
So yeah, I'm still "vehemently in favor of not allowing [you] to keep [your] molecules/bits in working order?" Because the method that you propose to use for doing so is harmless enough, but it's expressly forbidden by the Copyright Act, and it's not protected by the doctrine of fair use. In this case, the benefits of copy protected media (reduced shrinkage due to piracy, meaning reduced costs to the public, and also greater availability of goods to the public) outweigh.
No, I have no interest in controlling what people say to me, I have an interest in controlling the use of my property. As I said before, the spammer can say whatever they want to say, and they can even say it to me, but they may NOT use MY equipment to do so.
Okay, but I think you may have missed my point. You really can't exercise that kind of control. It's just not possible. There's no way for you to know what kind of message will be sent until you receive it, which defeats the whole purpose. So the sender is faced with having to secure your permission before sending the message, which is an unreasonable burden.
It just can't work. You may have the right to control how other people use your phone, fax machine, or in box, but you have no practical means to exercise that control. Other than just disconnecting the device or devices entirely, of course.
But hey, you've got a good tactic. If it's something you don't like, call it a bad name.
A more concise definition of "asshole," I've never heard. My hat's off to you. Asshole.
So, go after the/. admins for using a picture of a can of Spam in spam articles. They're certainly much bigger fish than I am.
As I said in my original post, I'm just making a point, here. I'm not "going after" anybody. It's hard to believe, though, that it's too much trouble for you to type "spam" instead of "SPAM."
I do agree that everybody wants to keep their numbers up. I also remember that Apple has billions in the bank. They can take a bad quarter or two.
Did you miss the part of my post where I talked about net margin versus gross revenue?;-) I mean no disrespect. I'm just sarcastically making the point that a couple of bad quarters would be bad for Apple in more and bigger ways than just affecting their cash-on-hand.
On the performance issue, I work with media production companies and media service providers. Post houses, service bureaus, studios, that kind of thing. They're very serious and very loyal Mac users, all. And you know what? They're not complaining about the speed of the workstations Apple is selling. They could, and you'd expect that they would in a heartbeat, but they're simply not. Instead, they want more and better OS X versions of their applications. Adobe has done well with Photoshop and After Effects for OS X, but they're not good enough yet. There are still too many inefficiencies and quirks. Of course, some of these are out of the vendors' hands; Apple has to fix them in the Carbon libraries directly. I wonder how much Jaguar has addressed these things?
My point is that Apple's doing the right thing. They're letting the hardware line grow gradually, so customers get a decent depreciation time on their investment. The Mac you buy today loses half its value in about twelve months. If Apple were to accelerate the pace of new system development, that time would dwindle to six months or even less. In PC-land, on the other hand, you're looking at about a 4 month cycle. That makes it really hard to justify going out and spending $4,000 on a new workstation, given that it's going to lose $2,000 in value before the leaves start to turn.
Buying a Mac is easier to justify, because I know (unless I buy right before a product cycle, say now) that the workstation I buy today will hold its value for 8 to 12 months, easy. This is a good thing, both for Apple and for customers.
Apple's doing it right. Accelerate development on the OS, and keep development of the hardware at a pace fast enough to satisfy actual customer demand, but no faster.
I don't give a crap if I'm not allowed to download an MP3 of a song that I haven't bought. But, if I buy a CD, there is absolutely no reason why I shouldn't be allowed to make a tape/mp3 of it.
Well, now, that depends, doesn't it? Copying the CD to a CDR, bit-for-bit, would be one thing, but making a tape or MP3s from it is something entirely different. Making a tape or an MP3 of a CD is more than just "time/space shifting" (which is a whole different argument). When you make a tape or an MP3 of a CD, you're actually creating a derived work from that CD. It's different from making a copy. Copyright law, on its face, forbids you from making a derived work without permission of the original work's copyright holder. So I think you're on shakier legal ground there than you realize.
The rest of your post is well-written and thoughtful, but it all starts with "legislated DRM is bad" and goes on from there. You're basically making a slippery slope argument, and I don't buy it. Basically, everything would have to go wrong in order for your scenario to come to pass, and I don't think that's likely.
There is just one little point, though, that I disagree with.
Stand behind the DCMA all you want, but when a security exploit has the ability to compromise public systems, to make the discovery and subsequent publication of those issues, whose sole purpose exist in the hopes of eliminating them, illegal, well, we really have our priorities screwed up.
Sounds like you're talking about this week's news of HP using the DMCA to squash news of a security problem in one of the OS's. That little item was reported often, and gotten fundamentally wrong almost as often. The person with whom HP has a complaint was doing more than just discussing the security flaw. He was actually distributing a piece of software that could be used to exploit that flaw. There's a line between talking about security flaws and actually taking advantage of them, and that guy crossed it. DMCA or no DMCA, I think it's reasonable that he should be prevented from distributing his program.
We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE [unsolicited commercial email], although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.
It's not about confusion. It's about respecting the wishes of a third party that has every right to get pissed off over this use of the word "spam."
Naturally, if you want to announce that you "really don't care," nobody can stop you. Of course, that would make you an asshole, so that course of action comes with its own set of problems.
I think this is an issue with two very distinct sides. Apple, on the one hand, desperately needs and wants to keep its customers happy. Practically everything they've done for the past five years has been in an effort keep existing customers happy, or to make new customers. They don't have the luxury of being able gouge anybody.
But on the other hand, Apple has to make money. Second only to making money at all is the issue of maintaining margin. If Apple's net margin last quarter was 30% and this quarter it's 20%, Apple's stock will lose value even if their gross revenues increase. In other words, in order to stay healthy as a company, Apple needs to keep their revenues roughly in balance with their expenses.
Apple gave 10.1 away for free to any customer who could or would walk into an Apple store and pick up a CD. That was an amazing show of good will. It may have also cost Apple a fortune. I don't know, but I'm guessing it wasn't cheap.
Now they need people to pay for things they were expecting to get for free, like.mac and OS 10.2. Do you think they're doing this out of greed or spite? I doubt it. They're doing it to keep their net margin steady. They're doing it to stay healthy as a company.
Right now, if I were (say) Sun, I'd be thinking seriously about buying Apple. I have no idea if Sun has that kind of money, but I'm just saying I'd be thinking about it. Sun's server business is top-notch, but their desktop business is waning. Apple's desktop business kicks ass, and it's getting stronger every day. Apple's potential earnings for the next few years are a lot more than the company is currently worth on paper.
If Apple had a bad quarter or two, their stock price would slip and the sharks would start tasting blood in the water.
So they're keeping their gross margins high-- or trying to, anyway-- at the cost of some customer satisfaction. Apple has repeatedly been assessed in the market as having brand loyalty out the ears, so I'd imagine that few customers, if any, are going to switch to Dell or whatever just because Apple's charging $129 for Jaguar.
Net result: Apple's sales stay pretty much constant, every Mac owner from here to Tupelo, Mississippi buys a retail copy of Jaguar, and Apple keeps their net margins up thanks to the extra revenue. Apple's stock stays strong, and they get to keep doing what they're doing.
I'm no business or financial whiz; I may have some or all of my facts wrong. But if you assume that I'm at least mostly right, in the broad sense, then Apple's recent actions make all the sense in the world.
(Oh, speaking of sense, the whole "odd-number this, even-number that" thing is a dumb idea. Not quite as dumb as the idea that Linux 2.2 and 2.4 is okay to use but Linux 2.3 and 2.5 isn't, but that's a whole other ball of wax.)
You know, this is totally off topic, but it really pisses me off when people jump from the problem of DVD piracy to "our civil liberties are being stripped away!"
Which liberties are in danger, exactly? The liberty to copy DVDs? You never had that liberty, so quite grousing about "losing" it.
I've said this before; my opinion on this subject is no secret. I'm in favor of strong copy protection on media like DVDs and CDs. Vehemently in favor of it. If some jerk hadn't decided to crack CSS-- or, more importantly, if CSS hadn't been so easily cracked (thank you very much, Xing)-- we probably wouldn't have gotten a questionable piece of legislation like the DMCA. Reverse engineering and encryption circumvention is illegal now because people keep doing it! If they would stop, or at least if they weren't so successful at it, the law wouldn't be necessary.
The left-leaning parts of the Slashdot community* often argue in favor of strong crypto, but against copy protection. The irony of this amuses me. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I have the right to encrypt my data to protect it from theft or from prying eyes. Guess what? Movie studios also have the right to encrypt their data for the same purposes.
Now, I know, I just know, that somebody's gonna get up here and make a stink about how they want to make "backup copies" of their CDs and DVDs. You know what? I don't have a "backup copy" of my car. If I wreck my car, I have to either fix it, or if that's not possible, I have to replace it. I don't get a free backup car to keep in my garage just in case I get into a fender-bender. The idea that you should be entitled to make a "backup copy" of a CD or a DVD is just bogus. Take care of your things. If you break them, you can replace them or go without.
I say bring on the absurdly strongly encrypted HD-DVDs. Hell, if the Free Software guys really want to put their money** where their mouths are, they can start a GNU/CSS project or something. Let's put all those big, pro-crypto brains to work on an actual practical application of crypto technology and see where that takes us.
In short: civil liberties, my ass.
* Some would say that I repeat myself here. ** Please ignore the inherent contradiction. It's just a figure of speech.
I'm not going to get into the middle of the free speech issue, but I have to ask this question.
The spammer can say any useless thing he wants to say, but he has NO LICENSE to use MY property to do so. My computer, my fax machine, my cell phone, and any other device that these degenerate free loaders want to use to steal their ad placements, are MINE, and not THEIRS.
Do you believe that you, as the owner of a fax machine, have the right to control what kind of faxes people send you? This has nothing to do with speech, because you're not trying to control what people say. You're merely trying to control what people say to you. Is that a fair statement of your position?
If that's the case-- that you have the right to refuse any message based on content, sender, or other attributes-- then the question naturally arises, how are you supposed to exercise that control? It's not reasonable, as others have already said, that every person sending a fax or an email or a phone call should have to get permission from the recipient first. Among other things, how are you supposed to get permission without making some kind of unsolicited, possibly unwelcome, contact?
So we have a situation in which you have the right to control what comes into your inbox, or your fax machine, or over your phone. But you have absolutely no way to practically exercise that control without putting an undue burden on everybody else.
I don't necessarily disagree with your argument. It's your computer, so I think it's reasonable to think that you should be able to determine what comes into it. I'm just questioning how you would ever exercise that ability.
If you can't exercise the right, then a law prohibiting violating that right is pretty unreasonable, don't you think? The only law that could be both reasonable and effective would be a complete ban on all communication via that method. Anything less either doesn't work (you get the spam anyway, which doesn't solve your problem) or places an unreasonable burden on senders of email (who have to read your mind to know whether their message would be welcome).
I just don't see any way that a law restricting spam can actually result in less spam.
Myself, I would prefer the technological solution. I don't get much spam, mostly because I jealously guard my email address, so I'm okay with hitting the "bounce" button whenever I receive a piece. (Although that usually doesn't work, because my bounce just bounces.)
For my home phone, I would happily adopt a whitelist system, if I could figure out how. Any number that I don't explicitly accept goes straight into my voicemail system. Anybody that really needs to reach me has my private cell phone number; I've given that number to my mom, my girlfriend, my lawyer, and my accountant.
I've been toying with the idea of building a home telephone system using GNU Bayonne, but I just haven't gotten motivated to look into it.
I just want to point out that the Hormel people have been incredibly cool about the use of the word "spam" to describe junk email. They could have been right bastards about it, but instead all they ask is that the public use "spam" to talk about junk email and reserve "SPAM" (all caps) to talk about their food product thing.
So let's avoid calling it SPAM, if for no other reason to just show the Hormel people the respect they deserve.
I also want you to know that this comment may have sounded sarcastic, but it really, really wasn't. Amazingly.
Finally, I at least get to play mind games with telemarketers!
Ah, yes. My personal favorite-- I can't take credit for this, but I don't remember where I first heard the idea-- goes something like this:
Me: Hello?
Bastard: Can I speak with Mr. (absurd mispronunciation of my last name), please?
M: Speaking.
B: Sir, I'm Tim calling from Wanyermoney Enterprises, and--
M: Did you say Tim?
B: Yes, sir, my name's Tim and I'm calling from Wanyermoney--
M: Tim, huh?
B: That's right, sir, and I'm calling to offer--
M: Hey, Tim?
B: Yes, sir?
M: What are you wearing?
At this point, either Tim hangs up or I crack up. The way I see it, they're asking for it.
My girlfriend pulled a good one about a year ago when she saw the caller ID. She picked up the phone all breathless and shaky and screamed, "Oh, god, help me! Oh--" and hung up. I was actually a little afraid that the police were going to show up, but of course they never did. I can only hope that a Bastard got a little shaken up by that one.
That is actually the line that kind of ticked me off, boarders should be placed in logical locations, not just willy nilly.
I agree! Just last month, we had three guests staying in our house. One day, two of them were in the guest bedroom and one slept on the couch in the den. The next day, two slept on the floor of the office and one stayed out all night. The next day, everything changed again!
I agree that boarders should always be placed in logical locations!
I know this isn't quite as hip as quoting The Simpsons, but I for one would like to hear what the Coen brothers have to say on the subject.
Bang! A rifle shot kicks up dust in front of the men.
CHILD'S VOICE Hold it rah chair!
The front of the farm house shows only a harshly shaded front porch and a dark screen door.
The screen door swings open and a child emerges on to the porch and steps down into the sunlight, holding a gun almost bigger than he is. The grimy-faced boy, about eight years old, wears tattered overalls.
You men from the bank?
PETE You Wash's boy?
CHILD Yassir! And Daddy tolt me I'm to shoot whosoever from the bank!
He pokes his rifle at the three men, who raise their hands.
DELMAR Well, we ain't from no bank, young feller.
CHILD Yassir! I'm also suppose to shoot folks servin' papers!
DELMAR Well we ain't got no papers.
CHILD Yassir! I nicked the census man!
DELMAR There's a good boy.
(Proper screenplay formatted foiled by the cotton-pickin' sos-n-sos who wrote the dang-burned lameness filter.)
I'd say that what little real "piracy" there is of DVD's right now (far less than the MPAA claims, I suspect) will dwindle to near nothing in the next couple of years.
Ever been to Malaysia? You can buy new-looking DVDs on street corners for $1 or $2 each. They look totally genuine from the outside, unless you look closely to see that the box art was printed on a color copier or laser printer. Once you open the box, you see that the disc's label isn't silkscreened, but rather printed on a stick-on label on the front of the disc. And pretty much every movie is a 2-disc set, evidently because it's more expensive to burn 2-layer discs.
The movies look pristine, though. These aren't shot-with-a-camcorder movies. They're duplicates of official releases.
And in Asia they're literally everywhere. DVDs, VCDs (those are incredibly popular), VHS, CD. They're everywhere.
I think piracy is just as rampant as the MPAA says it is.
I've had a pet theory for a while, and I'm surprised that nobody else has mentioned it.
I think Lucas is waiting for HD-DVD.
I, for one, would love to see the original trilogy become the reference standard HD-DVDs in 2006 or so. Originals, special editions, I couldn't care less as long as it's 1080/24p with 6-channel sound.
I apologize for not understanding that you were talking about Cocoa there. But it's an overstatement to say that Carbon is just a transition. Carbon apps are first-class citizens in OS X. Cocoa and Carbon are peer APIs.
In the event that a license is not legally binding (i.e. a GPL or BSD style license), the terms revert to the default, which is "All Rights Reserved"
That's not necessarily true. It probably is, but not necessarily.
The current legal standard in the US derives from Bell v. Combined Registry Co. In that case, the court upheld that the criteria for copyright abandonment is a statement of the intent to abandon (which in 1976 included omitting a copyright notice; this is no longer sufficient) and a clear intent to waive copyright. In other words, you have to both say that you're waiving it, and you have to distribute it to somebody under those terms.
So putting the BSD license, which effectively waives your copyright, and distributing the source may be sufficient to indicate an intent on your part to waive your copyright. Even if the license itself is flawed, your copyright has already been waived.
This isn't the case if you're a minor, or if you don't have clear claim to the rights over the source. In other words, if you don't have the copyright, you can't waive the copyright.
They all have to be modified. In order to be fully OS X native, they need to be re-written.
You're overstating the situation. The Carbon API is a subset of the ancient (in computer terms) Mac OS Toolbox APIs. You don't have to "re-write" applications, but you may need to modify them if you were using Toolbox APIs that are not included in Carbon.
There have been many cases of Classic applications being Carbonized without changing any code at all. Granted, those were some fairly small applications, but the point holds just the same.
Rather than just leaving you moderated at -1, I thought I'd speak up and tell you why you're off topic.
The poster wanted to hear about programs for doing scientific calculations. You suggested that he use Excel to build a database. That's pretty far from what he was asking about.
I just hate it when people moderate my comments down and it's not entirely clear why. So I figured I'd speak up, why not.
Slashdot Mirror
My girlfriend is a surgical resident. When she's not working an all-night shift, she goes to bed at about 8:30 or 9:00 and gets up a 4:00 AM. Some people insist on calling our house at 9:00, 10:00, even 11:00 PM. It's almost always a wrong number, but once it was important. I'd like a system that prevents unauthorized callers from ringing my phone and waking up my girlfriend. She's cranky enough on seven hours' uninterrupted sleep. On less, she's a monster.
Like all technological innovations, this one is the result of some guy trying to impress some girl.
No you can't make a backup copy of your car, but that's what car insurance is for.
So if I started offering DVD insurance, you guys would all stop complaining about how the MPAA tries to take away your civil liberties?
Agreed. I have a Dual 450 from fall 2000 (21 months?) and I'd say it's still worth the money.
;-) It's nowhere near the purchase price, I'm sure, but after all your machine is nearly two years old. Getting 1/3 of the price you paid for it after two years would be pretty good, I think.
I've been in the market for just such a machine. I consider my Mac to be I/O bound, not CPU bound, but I really like the added interactivity you get from having that second CPU in there. I wish Apple would sell a new low-end dual-CPU system, say a dual 800 MHz or something, instead of just restricting the dual-CPU configuration to the fastest and most expensive CPUs.
That said, I'd offer you $700 for your G4 right now.
And what would you say if it was indeed possible to make molecular-level backup scans of the physical objects you owned? This will be possible by the end of the century.
What would I say? I'd say you're being silly. You can't make judgments of policy based on fantasy. There's no evidence-- scientific, anecdotal, circumstantial, or otherwise-- to lead to the conclusion that such a system or process will ever exist. So the whole question is pointless.
However, just for fun, I'll go along with you.
You can't create a car out of nothing. So what you're talking about is just a different form of manufacturing; it's not an issue of copying at all. If you want to manufacture your own car to match the precise specifications of the car you bought, that's your own business.
Copying a CD or DVD isn't manufacturing. It's either copying, in the case of a bit-for-bit duplicate, or it's creating a derived work, in the case of making a tape or some MP3s or a VCD or whatever else.
Copying is expressly prohibited by the Copyright Act. You can't reproduce a work unless granted express permission, or unless you hold the copyright. Period.
The Copyright Act also grants the copyright holder exclusive right to make a derivative work from the original.
So making a copy of a CD, or making MP3s out of a CD, is expressly prohibited under the Copyright Act.
"But what about Fair Use?" you say? Fair use is not spelled out in any legislation, but has been created by the judiciary out of the body of case law pertaining to copyright disputes. There are four accepted criteria for determining if a use of a copyrighted work is fair, or if it's a violation.
1. the purpose and character of the use (i.e., was it done to teach kids, or for personal use, or to make money?)
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
3. the amount of the copyrighted work used as a proportion of the whole
4. the effect of the use on the value of the work, or the potential market for the work.
So when you make an MP3 of a song, you're creating a derivative work for personal use (1 point for fair use) from a rightfully protected work (1 point for violation). You're taking the entire song (2 points for violation). If you took a small piece of the song, that would count toward the use being fair. If you took a large part of the song, that would count for violation, but only a little bit. Taking the whole song is clearly on the side of violation. But you're not intending to distribute the MP3 to anybody else (1 point for fair use).
It's a close call, but "space-shifting" a CD into MP3s is probably not protected by fair use. Of course, nobody will care unless an example of such a practice becomes actionable. I doubt that anybody's going to sue you because you dumped a CD into your iPod. But there's no legal justification for opposing copy-protected CDs, either, because preventing digital copying won't prevent the fair use of the works.
So yeah, I'm still "vehemently in favor of not allowing [you] to keep [your] molecules/bits in working order?" Because the method that you propose to use for doing so is harmless enough, but it's expressly forbidden by the Copyright Act, and it's not protected by the doctrine of fair use. In this case, the benefits of copy protected media (reduced shrinkage due to piracy, meaning reduced costs to the public, and also greater availability of goods to the public) outweigh.
No, I have no interest in controlling what people say to me, I have an interest in controlling the use of my property. As I said before, the spammer can say whatever they want to say, and they can even say it to me, but they may NOT use MY equipment to do so.
Okay, but I think you may have missed my point. You really can't exercise that kind of control. It's just not possible. There's no way for you to know what kind of message will be sent until you receive it, which defeats the whole purpose. So the sender is faced with having to secure your permission before sending the message, which is an unreasonable burden.
It just can't work. You may have the right to control how other people use your phone, fax machine, or in box, but you have no practical means to exercise that control. Other than just disconnecting the device or devices entirely, of course.
But hey, you've got a good tactic. If it's something you don't like, call it a bad name.
/. admins for using a picture of a can of Spam in spam articles. They're certainly much bigger fish than I am.
A more concise definition of "asshole," I've never heard. My hat's off to you. Asshole.
So, go after the
As I said in my original post, I'm just making a point, here. I'm not "going after" anybody. It's hard to believe, though, that it's too much trouble for you to type "spam" instead of "SPAM."
I do agree that everybody wants to keep their numbers up. I also remember that Apple has billions in the bank. They can take a bad quarter or two.
;-) I mean no disrespect. I'm just sarcastically making the point that a couple of bad quarters would be bad for Apple in more and bigger ways than just affecting their cash-on-hand.
Did you miss the part of my post where I talked about net margin versus gross revenue?
On the performance issue, I work with media production companies and media service providers. Post houses, service bureaus, studios, that kind of thing. They're very serious and very loyal Mac users, all. And you know what? They're not complaining about the speed of the workstations Apple is selling. They could, and you'd expect that they would in a heartbeat, but they're simply not. Instead, they want more and better OS X versions of their applications. Adobe has done well with Photoshop and After Effects for OS X, but they're not good enough yet. There are still too many inefficiencies and quirks. Of course, some of these are out of the vendors' hands; Apple has to fix them in the Carbon libraries directly. I wonder how much Jaguar has addressed these things?
My point is that Apple's doing the right thing. They're letting the hardware line grow gradually, so customers get a decent depreciation time on their investment. The Mac you buy today loses half its value in about twelve months. If Apple were to accelerate the pace of new system development, that time would dwindle to six months or even less. In PC-land, on the other hand, you're looking at about a 4 month cycle. That makes it really hard to justify going out and spending $4,000 on a new workstation, given that it's going to lose $2,000 in value before the leaves start to turn.
Buying a Mac is easier to justify, because I know (unless I buy right before a product cycle, say now) that the workstation I buy today will hold its value for 8 to 12 months, easy. This is a good thing, both for Apple and for customers.
Apple's doing it right. Accelerate development on the OS, and keep development of the hardware at a pace fast enough to satisfy actual customer demand, but no faster.
I don't give a crap if I'm not allowed to download an MP3 of a song that I haven't bought. But, if I buy a CD, there is absolutely no reason why I shouldn't be allowed to make a tape/mp3 of it.
Well, now, that depends, doesn't it? Copying the CD to a CDR, bit-for-bit, would be one thing, but making a tape or MP3s from it is something entirely different. Making a tape or an MP3 of a CD is more than just "time/space shifting" (which is a whole different argument). When you make a tape or an MP3 of a CD, you're actually creating a derived work from that CD. It's different from making a copy. Copyright law, on its face, forbids you from making a derived work without permission of the original work's copyright holder. So I think you're on shakier legal ground there than you realize.
The rest of your post is well-written and thoughtful, but it all starts with "legislated DRM is bad" and goes on from there. You're basically making a slippery slope argument, and I don't buy it. Basically, everything would have to go wrong in order for your scenario to come to pass, and I don't think that's likely.
There is just one little point, though, that I disagree with.
Stand behind the DCMA all you want, but when a security exploit has the ability to compromise public systems, to make the discovery and subsequent publication of those issues, whose sole purpose exist in the hopes of eliminating them, illegal, well, we really have our priorities screwed up.
Sounds like you're talking about this week's news of HP using the DMCA to squash news of a security problem in one of the OS's. That little item was reported often, and gotten fundamentally wrong almost as often. The person with whom HP has a complaint was doing more than just discussing the security flaw. He was actually distributing a piece of software that could be used to exploit that flaw. There's a line between talking about security flaws and actually taking advantage of them, and that guy crossed it. DMCA or no DMCA, I think it's reasonable that he should be prevented from distributing his program.
Naturally, if you want to announce that you "really don't care," nobody can stop you. Of course, that would make you an asshole, so that course of action comes with its own set of problems.
I think this is an issue with two very distinct sides. Apple, on the one hand, desperately needs and wants to keep its customers happy. Practically everything they've done for the past five years has been in an effort keep existing customers happy, or to make new customers. They don't have the luxury of being able gouge anybody.
.mac and OS 10.2. Do you think they're doing this out of greed or spite? I doubt it. They're doing it to keep their net margin steady. They're doing it to stay healthy as a company.
But on the other hand, Apple has to make money. Second only to making money at all is the issue of maintaining margin. If Apple's net margin last quarter was 30% and this quarter it's 20%, Apple's stock will lose value even if their gross revenues increase. In other words, in order to stay healthy as a company, Apple needs to keep their revenues roughly in balance with their expenses.
Apple gave 10.1 away for free to any customer who could or would walk into an Apple store and pick up a CD. That was an amazing show of good will. It may have also cost Apple a fortune. I don't know, but I'm guessing it wasn't cheap.
Now they need people to pay for things they were expecting to get for free, like
Right now, if I were (say) Sun, I'd be thinking seriously about buying Apple. I have no idea if Sun has that kind of money, but I'm just saying I'd be thinking about it. Sun's server business is top-notch, but their desktop business is waning. Apple's desktop business kicks ass, and it's getting stronger every day. Apple's potential earnings for the next few years are a lot more than the company is currently worth on paper.
If Apple had a bad quarter or two, their stock price would slip and the sharks would start tasting blood in the water.
So they're keeping their gross margins high-- or trying to, anyway-- at the cost of some customer satisfaction. Apple has repeatedly been assessed in the market as having brand loyalty out the ears, so I'd imagine that few customers, if any, are going to switch to Dell or whatever just because Apple's charging $129 for Jaguar.
Net result: Apple's sales stay pretty much constant, every Mac owner from here to Tupelo, Mississippi buys a retail copy of Jaguar, and Apple keeps their net margins up thanks to the extra revenue. Apple's stock stays strong, and they get to keep doing what they're doing.
I'm no business or financial whiz; I may have some or all of my facts wrong. But if you assume that I'm at least mostly right, in the broad sense, then Apple's recent actions make all the sense in the world.
(Oh, speaking of sense, the whole "odd-number this, even-number that" thing is a dumb idea. Not quite as dumb as the idea that Linux 2.2 and 2.4 is okay to use but Linux 2.3 and 2.5 isn't, but that's a whole other ball of wax.)
You know, this is totally off topic, but it really pisses me off when people jump from the problem of DVD piracy to "our civil liberties are being stripped away!"
Which liberties are in danger, exactly? The liberty to copy DVDs? You never had that liberty, so quite grousing about "losing" it.
I've said this before; my opinion on this subject is no secret. I'm in favor of strong copy protection on media like DVDs and CDs. Vehemently in favor of it. If some jerk hadn't decided to crack CSS-- or, more importantly, if CSS hadn't been so easily cracked (thank you very much, Xing)-- we probably wouldn't have gotten a questionable piece of legislation like the DMCA. Reverse engineering and encryption circumvention is illegal now because people keep doing it! If they would stop, or at least if they weren't so successful at it, the law wouldn't be necessary.
The left-leaning parts of the Slashdot community* often argue in favor of strong crypto, but against copy protection. The irony of this amuses me. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I have the right to encrypt my data to protect it from theft or from prying eyes. Guess what? Movie studios also have the right to encrypt their data for the same purposes.
Now, I know, I just know, that somebody's gonna get up here and make a stink about how they want to make "backup copies" of their CDs and DVDs. You know what? I don't have a "backup copy" of my car. If I wreck my car, I have to either fix it, or if that's not possible, I have to replace it. I don't get a free backup car to keep in my garage just in case I get into a fender-bender. The idea that you should be entitled to make a "backup copy" of a CD or a DVD is just bogus. Take care of your things. If you break them, you can replace them or go without.
I say bring on the absurdly strongly encrypted HD-DVDs. Hell, if the Free Software guys really want to put their money** where their mouths are, they can start a GNU/CSS project or something. Let's put all those big, pro-crypto brains to work on an actual practical application of crypto technology and see where that takes us.
In short: civil liberties, my ass.
* Some would say that I repeat myself here.
** Please ignore the inherent contradiction. It's just a figure of speech.
I'm not going to get into the middle of the free speech issue, but I have to ask this question.
The spammer can say any useless thing he wants to say, but he has NO LICENSE to use MY property to do so. My computer, my fax machine, my cell phone, and any other device that these degenerate free loaders want to use to steal their ad placements, are MINE, and not THEIRS.
Do you believe that you, as the owner of a fax machine, have the right to control what kind of faxes people send you? This has nothing to do with speech, because you're not trying to control what people say. You're merely trying to control what people say to you. Is that a fair statement of your position?
If that's the case-- that you have the right to refuse any message based on content, sender, or other attributes-- then the question naturally arises, how are you supposed to exercise that control? It's not reasonable, as others have already said, that every person sending a fax or an email or a phone call should have to get permission from the recipient first. Among other things, how are you supposed to get permission without making some kind of unsolicited, possibly unwelcome, contact?
So we have a situation in which you have the right to control what comes into your inbox, or your fax machine, or over your phone. But you have absolutely no way to practically exercise that control without putting an undue burden on everybody else.
I don't necessarily disagree with your argument. It's your computer, so I think it's reasonable to think that you should be able to determine what comes into it. I'm just questioning how you would ever exercise that ability.
If you can't exercise the right, then a law prohibiting violating that right is pretty unreasonable, don't you think? The only law that could be both reasonable and effective would be a complete ban on all communication via that method. Anything less either doesn't work (you get the spam anyway, which doesn't solve your problem) or places an unreasonable burden on senders of email (who have to read your mind to know whether their message would be welcome).
I just don't see any way that a law restricting spam can actually result in less spam.
Myself, I would prefer the technological solution. I don't get much spam, mostly because I jealously guard my email address, so I'm okay with hitting the "bounce" button whenever I receive a piece. (Although that usually doesn't work, because my bounce just bounces.)
For my home phone, I would happily adopt a whitelist system, if I could figure out how. Any number that I don't explicitly accept goes straight into my voicemail system. Anybody that really needs to reach me has my private cell phone number; I've given that number to my mom, my girlfriend, my lawyer, and my accountant.
I've been toying with the idea of building a home telephone system using GNU Bayonne, but I just haven't gotten motivated to look into it.
When SPAM is outlawed....
I just want to point out that the Hormel people have been incredibly cool about the use of the word "spam" to describe junk email. They could have been right bastards about it, but instead all they ask is that the public use "spam" to talk about junk email and reserve "SPAM" (all caps) to talk about their food product thing.
So let's avoid calling it SPAM, if for no other reason to just show the Hormel people the respect they deserve.
I also want you to know that this comment may have sounded sarcastic, but it really, really wasn't. Amazingly.
Finally, I at least get to play mind games with telemarketers!
Ah, yes. My personal favorite-- I can't take credit for this, but I don't remember where I first heard the idea-- goes something like this:
Me: Hello?
Bastard: Can I speak with Mr. (absurd mispronunciation of my last name), please?
M: Speaking.
B: Sir, I'm Tim calling from Wanyermoney Enterprises, and--
M: Did you say Tim?
B: Yes, sir, my name's Tim and I'm calling from Wanyermoney--
M: Tim, huh?
B: That's right, sir, and I'm calling to offer--
M: Hey, Tim?
B: Yes, sir?
M: What are you wearing?
At this point, either Tim hangs up or I crack up. The way I see it, they're asking for it.
My girlfriend pulled a good one about a year ago when she saw the caller ID. She picked up the phone all breathless and shaky and screamed, "Oh, god, help me! Oh--" and hung up. I was actually a little afraid that the police were going to show up, but of course they never did. I can only hope that a Bastard got a little shaken up by that one.
Make 'em work for it, that's what I say.
I agree! Just last month, we had three guests staying in our house. One day, two of them were in the guest bedroom and one slept on the couch in the den. The next day, two slept on the floor of the office and one stayed out all night. The next day, everything changed again!
I agree that boarders should always be placed in logical locations!
At least get it right.
"My parents moved here from Canada, and they think I'm slow, eh?"
I'd say that what little real "piracy" there is of DVD's right now (far less than the MPAA claims, I suspect) will dwindle to near nothing in the next couple of years.
Ever been to Malaysia? You can buy new-looking DVDs on street corners for $1 or $2 each. They look totally genuine from the outside, unless you look closely to see that the box art was printed on a color copier or laser printer. Once you open the box, you see that the disc's label isn't silkscreened, but rather printed on a stick-on label on the front of the disc. And pretty much every movie is a 2-disc set, evidently because it's more expensive to burn 2-layer discs.
The movies look pristine, though. These aren't shot-with-a-camcorder movies. They're duplicates of official releases.
And in Asia they're literally everywhere. DVDs, VCDs (those are incredibly popular), VHS, CD. They're everywhere.
I think piracy is just as rampant as the MPAA says it is.
I've had a pet theory for a while, and I'm surprised that nobody else has mentioned it.
I think Lucas is waiting for HD-DVD.
I, for one, would love to see the original trilogy become the reference standard HD-DVDs in 2006 or so. Originals, special editions, I couldn't care less as long as it's 1080/24p with 6-channel sound.
Carbon isn't bad by any means, but you don't get all the goodies.
Like what, exactly? We all know that the Carbon libraries were incomplete in 10.0 and 10.1, but what about now?
Hmm. Okay, then, I retract what I said.
I apologize for not understanding that you were talking about Cocoa there. But it's an overstatement to say that Carbon is just a transition. Carbon apps are first-class citizens in OS X. Cocoa and Carbon are peer APIs.
In the event that a license is not legally binding (i.e. a GPL or BSD style license), the terms revert to the default, which is "All Rights Reserved"
That's not necessarily true. It probably is, but not necessarily.
The current legal standard in the US derives from Bell v. Combined Registry Co. In that case, the court upheld that the criteria for copyright abandonment is a statement of the intent to abandon (which in 1976 included omitting a copyright notice; this is no longer sufficient) and a clear intent to waive copyright. In other words, you have to both say that you're waiving it, and you have to distribute it to somebody under those terms.
So putting the BSD license, which effectively waives your copyright, and distributing the source may be sufficient to indicate an intent on your part to waive your copyright. Even if the license itself is flawed, your copyright has already been waived.
This isn't the case if you're a minor, or if you don't have clear claim to the rights over the source. In other words, if you don't have the copyright, you can't waive the copyright.
They all have to be modified. In order to be fully OS X native, they need to be re-written.
You're overstating the situation. The Carbon API is a subset of the ancient (in computer terms) Mac OS Toolbox APIs. You don't have to "re-write" applications, but you may need to modify them if you were using Toolbox APIs that are not included in Carbon.
There have been many cases of Classic applications being Carbonized without changing any code at all. Granted, those were some fairly small applications, but the point holds just the same.
Cool UID, SpatchMonkey.
Rather than just leaving you moderated at -1, I thought I'd speak up and tell you why you're off topic.
The poster wanted to hear about programs for doing scientific calculations. You suggested that he use Excel to build a database. That's pretty far from what he was asking about.
I just hate it when people moderate my comments down and it's not entirely clear why. So I figured I'd speak up, why not.