RealPlayer One is available on Mac OS X now. And I've used the "community-supported" Real Player (which isn't Real One) in the past on Linux without a problem, and don't expect to have a problem this season.
The MLB.com FAQ says that you can use either Real One or Real Player 8. But I imagine its hard to find RealPlayer 8 unless you know exactly where you're looking. I can never find the "community-supported" Linux RealPlayer unless I google Real's site for it...
I like hockey, but I can't watch it until the second round of the playoffs. There's nothing more boring than watching a good hockey team massacre a bad one.
Besides, the hockey team I'm closest to is the Sabres, unfortunately, although after growing up in NYC, I still have a soft spot in my heart for the Rangers...
I listen to the games on Linux. As far as I can tell, the "community supported" RealPlayer isn't a RealOne player, and yet the games work.
I'm on the fence as to whether to subscribe this year. If they changed things so you can't listen to he games on Linux, I ain't subscribing.
Incidentally, I just found out by reading the FAQ that they are offering a $12 package that just includes games from your favorite team. I might just go this route, since I never listen to any other games. To get it, you need to register from your teams' MLB.com website...
Forget video on the web, what really steams me os the fact that they raised the prices of audio on the web again!.
Years ago, the individual radio stations apparently owned the rights to the audio of baseball games, and I listened to them directly from their web site, for free (and heard the local commercials, too...) Then, I think it was about two or three years ago, MLB "found" the Internet and decided it should control all audio broadcasts. Of course, by "control", I mean "Charge $10/yr for what used to be free.".
Last year, they raised the subscription fee to $12/yr. This year, they are apparently raising it to $19.95/yr. And after all that, they still have the local commercials! The commercials are supposedly paying for the broadcast, can't they have them pay for the Internet broadcast too?
I understand that if they provided the service for free, there would be a lot more people using it, and bandwidth isn't free. But did bandwidth costs really go up 100% in the past two or three years? If not, I think a more likely explanation is that Baseball (indeed, all sports) are filled with greedy owners, spoiled players, and weak executives, and that the cost of being a fan will shortly get prohibitive for most people.
We should have a (+1, Mirror) option when we moderate. This way, people can still Karma Whore, which is of course an essential part of the Slashdot Experience, but I can filter these silly redundant posts out in my preferences.
But the DMV is not the manufacturer; it's an important distinction.
You need to register your car with the DMV because it's the law in most (all?) States. The Govermnent is imposing this additional burden on you, supposedly for the public good. It applies to everyone not matter what car they buy. And the Government can do whatever the hell it wants. (Although since government in the U.S. is for the people, by the peoplw, etc., you're really the one taking the car away from yourself...)
Insurance is a similar situation. They are supplying you with a service, which is at least partially based on where you live. If you give them false information, or don't keep information current, they are under no obligation to keep offering you that service.
But the manufacturer doesn't have to know what you do with the car afterwards. I realize that in practice, most cars are registered with the manufacturer, so that the owners can get recall notices when warranted. But there's nothing that says that the manufacturer has the right to take your car back or make it stop working if it isn't registered, or if you can't prove that you didn't steal it.
It's a sterling idea, it's just that some publishers might get aggrieved when they see information on their publications being held by a third party.
How could they possibly have a legal right to complain? How is someone infringing on copyrights by simply acknowledging the existence of a published work? If it's published, it's implied that it was offered for Public Consumption, and referencing the author and title of a particular book should be considered a non-copyrightable fact.
Besides, there are already publically-accessable book lists in many places, on and off line. Amazon has already been cited, but how about your local library? Or the Library of Congress? Do libraries need to get permission to put books in their card catalog?
I'm curious if he recognized how much bandwidth can be eaten up by a project like this. Or if he's looked to see is Amazon has a patent on this. It seems right up their alley...
Later, with the Software Base Station disabled, I untarred the.aa files and imported them into the iTunes on my laptop. Same dialog, same username and password. No network connection
That's interesting. It sounds like it encrypts the files on the fly with your password when you download, and doesn't "phone home" to see if you've copied it to more than one computer. You could archive the files or put them on more than one computer, but you'd have to open it with the same password. This makes sharing in a household viable, but puts a roadblock to sharing the files with the world. Not an insurmountable one, but one that 99% of people won't bother trying to circumvent.
This is the kind of thing I expect from Apple. They realize that someone is going to figure out how to make digital copies and distribute them. People who take these copies likely would never had paid to begin with, and they are breaking the law in doing that -- why shouldn't we just let the law handle them?. Apple's Copy Protection schemes aim to reduce the amount of large-scale sharing while not crippling what legitimate buyers can do with the content.
Perhaps the goal of DRM should not be to make everyone pay all the time, which leads to unreasonable copy-protection schemes that are difficult to deal with and ailenate your customers. The goal should be to make sure it's easy for people who want to be legitimate to pay, and hard for people who do not want to be legitimate to get away with mass copyright infringement.
I'm sure the people at Audible and Apple can see the difference between me and my wife sharing a single E-book or song between our multiple Macs and putting it up on whatever P2P app happens to be popular right now. Let's hope they can convince the record companies of this as well.
Good point. what if you wanted the last track of a CD with a "hidden" track. It could be 30 minutes of silence before the song starts. Is that 99 cents as well?
Not after you pay the royalties to John Cage for that thirty minutes of silence.
I have an iPod, and I like Apple's approach to DRM there: iTunes won't let you copy songs out of the iPod, but leaves the MP3's on your hard drive alone. It's very unobtrusive, and generally doesn't get in the way of my listenting experience. I can still use my MP3's with other players and on other platforms.
I've heard that you can buy books from audible.com using iTunes. Supposedly, the download is encrypted, but you can move it to your iPod at will, and you can make MP3 CD's through iTunes that will play in any MP3 CD player (and, by extension, copied to any other medium). I imagine any Apple Music initiative would work in a similar manner.
If any company is going to make a DRM scheme that protects my rights as well as the copyright holders', I'd bet money it will be Apple.
Why is this article listed under the MS topic? I thought Chairman Mao owned the copyright on the "Source to China", or perhaps Karl Marx. How can Microsoft legally distribute it?
I wish I could moderate article submissions. How can this wrtieup possibly lead to actual discussion? It seems like it was written to inspire the political baiting that is passing for a discussion in this thread...
Also, it's much easier to keep track of licenses for subscription software than for non-subscription software. Even if you lose the original license PO, if you have the most recent license documentation, you can turn the BSA thugs away at the door.
but a subscription based approach is actually better for software, especially OS software. As things stand now, most major OS vendors release new products every few years, with minor updates in the interim. They will generally hold their new features until the next full release, because they want to generate sales. A subscription model gives vendors incentive to not hold new features.
The way I see subscription-based software working is that there's an introductory price (say, $150) for the basic OS and a year of updates. After that year is up, you can choose to continue the subscription at a maintenance rate of $50/yr, or you can stop maintenance and not get any updates. You still have a valid license for the OS, you just can't install any new updates. Once you go off maintenance, you need to pay the full introductory price to get back on.
Everyone wins in this case: OS vendors get a steady stream of income, users of current PC's get timely updates for not much more than they pay now for OS updates, and users of older PC's don't have to pay a yearly tax just to run an outdated OS.
If Apple had pitched.Mac this way, I might have bought it. (With the extra stuff.Mac offers, it would have to cost a little more, of course).
Of course, this plan will never work, because software companies are not looking at subscriptions as a way to charge the same amount but even out their cash flow. They are looking at it as a source of revenue growth. Which means that instead of $150 and $50/yr, which is closer to what they get now ($150 every two or three years for the major OS update) we'll see more like $300 and $20/mo. And that would be bad.
It's far too easy to completely share thousands of multimedia files with millions of people who have no right to do so, and the content owners are persecuted for attempting to enforce their rights via copyright. It's also become clear that there's a large population of people who believe it is acceptable to steal if they can do it without leaving their homes.
If all that content owners were doing is "attempting to enforce their rights", then we wouldn't be having this discussion.
It's really about content owners claiming more rights than they currently have. If I buy a dead-tree book, I can't make copies and sell or distribute them. But I can still make a copy of a page for my own use, or lend or give away the original to a friend. I still control the one physical copy that I have bought. DRM takes these rights away from the consumer. It takes control away from the consumer.
I agree with you that all the people who are mooching need to stop! But I contend that DRM advocates are using the cause of preventing piracy as a smokescreen. Their real goal is to control our behavior to a much higher extent, so that they can separate us from our money quicker. Even if there were no piracy, the push for DRM will not go away, as you suggest. Because Piracy is not the reason for it, it's just the excuse.
I don't know which part of the states you were working in, but around here, public holidays are a lot harder to come by. There are only ten holidays recognized by the Federal Government, and there's no guarantee you'll get those off. If anything, except for Christmas Day, most businesses, and merchants in particular are open on all the holidays, and desperately trying to sell stuff.
Meanwhile, if I remember correctly, you Brits got a day off last year because your Queen is old.;)
Slashdot Mirror
We'd really appreciate it if you bought underwear first.
Isn't it Peter Angelos' job to "block" baseball in DC?
The MLB.com FAQ says that you can use either Real One or Real Player 8. But I imagine its hard to find RealPlayer 8 unless you know exactly where you're looking. I can never find the "community-supported" Linux RealPlayer unless I google Real's site for it...
Besides, the hockey team I'm closest to is the Sabres, unfortunately, although after growing up in NYC, I still have a soft spot in my heart for the Rangers...
I'm on the fence as to whether to subscribe this year. If they changed things so you can't listen to he games on Linux, I ain't subscribing.
Incidentally, I just found out by reading the FAQ that they are offering a $12 package that just includes games from your favorite team. I might just go this route, since I never listen to any other games. To get it, you need to register from your teams' MLB.com website...
Years ago, the individual radio stations apparently owned the rights to the audio of baseball games, and I listened to them directly from their web site, for free (and heard the local commercials, too...) Then, I think it was about two or three years ago, MLB "found" the Internet and decided it should control all audio broadcasts. Of course, by "control", I mean "Charge $10/yr for what used to be free.".
Last year, they raised the subscription fee to $12/yr. This year, they are apparently raising it to $19.95/yr. And after all that, they still have the local commercials! The commercials are supposedly paying for the broadcast, can't they have them pay for the Internet broadcast too?
I understand that if they provided the service for free, there would be a lot more people using it, and bandwidth isn't free. But did bandwidth costs really go up 100% in the past two or three years? If not, I think a more likely explanation is that Baseball (indeed, all sports) are filled with greedy owners, spoiled players, and weak executives, and that the cost of being a fan will shortly get prohibitive for most people.
Krispy Kreme: We Put The "Ugh" In Doughnut!
I always thought it was more like a SUV myself...
Dude, that's great! Mind if I steal that for my sig?
We should have a (+1, Mirror) option when we moderate. This way, people can still Karma Whore, which is of course an essential part of the Slashdot Experience, but I can filter these silly redundant posts out in my preferences.
You need to register your car with the DMV because it's the law in most (all?) States. The Govermnent is imposing this additional burden on you, supposedly for the public good. It applies to everyone not matter what car they buy. And the Government can do whatever the hell it wants. (Although since government in the U.S. is for the people, by the peoplw, etc., you're really the one taking the car away from yourself...)
Insurance is a similar situation. They are supplying you with a service, which is at least partially based on where you live. If you give them false information, or don't keep information current, they are under no obligation to keep offering you that service.
But the manufacturer doesn't have to know what you do with the car afterwards. I realize that in practice, most cars are registered with the manufacturer, so that the owners can get recall notices when warranted. But there's nothing that says that the manufacturer has the right to take your car back or make it stop working if it isn't registered, or if you can't prove that you didn't steal it.
Yeah, but my car doesn't stop working in 30 days if it doesn't get registered with the manufacturer.
How could they possibly have a legal right to complain? How is someone infringing on copyrights by simply acknowledging the existence of a published work? If it's published, it's implied that it was offered for Public Consumption, and referencing the author and title of a particular book should be considered a non-copyrightable fact.
Besides, there are already publically-accessable book lists in many places, on and off line. Amazon has already been cited, but how about your local library? Or the Library of Congress? Do libraries need to get permission to put books in their card catalog?
I'm curious if he recognized how much bandwidth can be eaten up by a project like this. Or if he's looked to see is Amazon has a patent on this. It seems right up their alley...
That's interesting. It sounds like it encrypts the files on the fly with your password when you download, and doesn't "phone home" to see if you've copied it to more than one computer. You could archive the files or put them on more than one computer, but you'd have to open it with the same password. This makes sharing in a household viable, but puts a roadblock to sharing the files with the world. Not an insurmountable one, but one that 99% of people won't bother trying to circumvent.
This is the kind of thing I expect from Apple. They realize that someone is going to figure out how to make digital copies and distribute them. People who take these copies likely would never had paid to begin with, and they are breaking the law in doing that -- why shouldn't we just let the law handle them?. Apple's Copy Protection schemes aim to reduce the amount of large-scale sharing while not crippling what legitimate buyers can do with the content.
Perhaps the goal of DRM should not be to make everyone pay all the time, which leads to unreasonable copy-protection schemes that are difficult to deal with and ailenate your customers. The goal should be to make sure it's easy for people who want to be legitimate to pay, and hard for people who do not want to be legitimate to get away with mass copyright infringement.
I'm sure the people at Audible and Apple can see the difference between me and my wife sharing a single E-book or song between our multiple Macs and putting it up on whatever P2P app happens to be popular right now. Let's hope they can convince the record companies of this as well.
Oh, I love trash!
I love it because it's trash!
Not after you pay the royalties to John Cage for that thirty minutes of silence.
I've heard that you can buy books from audible.com using iTunes. Supposedly, the download is encrypted, but you can move it to your iPod at will, and you can make MP3 CD's through iTunes that will play in any MP3 CD player (and, by extension, copied to any other medium). I imagine any Apple Music initiative would work in a similar manner.
If any company is going to make a DRM scheme that protects my rights as well as the copyright holders', I'd bet money it will be Apple.
In order for it to be an Apple product, it has to be an Insanely Great idea that is overpriced enough to make you think twice before buying it.
This qualifies.
Why is this article listed under the MS topic? I thought Chairman Mao owned the copyright on the "Source to China", or perhaps Karl Marx. How can Microsoft legally distribute it?
I wish I could moderate article submissions. How can this wrtieup possibly lead to actual discussion? It seems like it was written to inspire the political baiting that is passing for a discussion in this thread...
Also, it's much easier to keep track of licenses for subscription software than for non-subscription software. Even if you lose the original license PO, if you have the most recent license documentation, you can turn the BSA thugs away at the door.
The way I see subscription-based software working is that there's an introductory price (say, $150) for the basic OS and a year of updates. After that year is up, you can choose to continue the subscription at a maintenance rate of $50/yr, or you can stop maintenance and not get any updates. You still have a valid license for the OS, you just can't install any new updates. Once you go off maintenance, you need to pay the full introductory price to get back on.
Everyone wins in this case: OS vendors get a steady stream of income, users of current PC's get timely updates for not much more than they pay now for OS updates, and users of older PC's don't have to pay a yearly tax just to run an outdated OS.
If Apple had pitched .Mac this way, I might have bought it. (With the extra stuff .Mac offers, it would have to cost a little more, of course).
Of course, this plan will never work, because software companies are not looking at subscriptions as a way to charge the same amount but even out their cash flow. They are looking at it as a source of revenue growth. Which means that instead of $150 and $50/yr, which is closer to what they get now ($150 every two or three years for the major OS update) we'll see more like $300 and $20/mo. And that would be bad.
Only I can't, 'cause there's no link....
If all that content owners were doing is "attempting to enforce their rights", then we wouldn't be having this discussion.
It's really about content owners claiming more rights than they currently have. If I buy a dead-tree book, I can't make copies and sell or distribute them. But I can still make a copy of a page for my own use, or lend or give away the original to a friend. I still control the one physical copy that I have bought. DRM takes these rights away from the consumer. It takes control away from the consumer.
I agree with you that all the people who are mooching need to stop! But I contend that DRM advocates are using the cause of preventing piracy as a smokescreen. Their real goal is to control our behavior to a much higher extent, so that they can separate us from our money quicker. Even if there were no piracy, the push for DRM will not go away, as you suggest. Because Piracy is not the reason for it, it's just the excuse.
Meanwhile, if I remember correctly, you Brits got a day off last year because your Queen is old. ;)