I've written a fun little program that encrypts mp3 filenames in a searchable manner. Download it here and avoid being spied on by Copyright.net. I just really don't like these guys.
The "ease-of-use" claim for Windows has never made all that much sense to me. It doesn't hold water from two either of the two classes of "users" (as opposed to admins/hackers/developers/hobbyists):
User Type #1: Suzie the Secretary - she runs 5 programs total and was utterly mortified by DOS prompt back in day. She still can't install a piece of shareware if her life depends on it. I've got the perfect setup for her - a drawer in GNOME that contains StarOffice, Netscape, a mail client, XMMS, and GAIM. It's like the Win XP "common tasks" list, except StarOffice won't dissappear if I use AbiWord for a couple days.
User Type #2: Joe the Tinkerer. Joe's job may not be different than Suzie, but he's comfortable doing more things with his machine - he has a shareware program that randomly changes his desktop image every day, and he installed Napster for spare time usage He could swap a PCI card if he had to. Joe used to be somewhat handy with DOS prompt. You give Joe a DOS-to-UNIX cheat sheet, explain the fundamental structure of UNIX directories and "./configue", "make", "make install", and in a couple days he's happy.
What boggles my mind is the CTO who's willing to pay current MS prices. $199 for an Office upgrade?!?! Multiply that by x licenses (and multiply by 0.yy for volume discounts) and you've just dropped many thousands of dollars on a program with a free alternative that's 100% compatible. Ditto for the operating system. Repeat this process every two years, or until replaced with subscription-ware.
When the average corporate user needs only Windows and Office, why not use RedHat and StarOffice instead? Doesn't software cost play any factor in these decisions?
I think this is both true and untrue. Assuming Linux is widely in adopted in some markets I think we'll end up with more distros than that for commercial use. I don't think the Linux market will look like the auto market, with a Big Three distros or something like that. The Linux market will look more like the OEM market, with a couple very large vendors, dozens of second-tier vendors, and more little shops than you can count.
Why? The cost to enter the Linux market is pretty low - you can take somebody else's GPL software, modify it a bit, and make your own distribution at relatively low cost. Then you charge less for support and try to undercut them. Like the OEM market, the Linux market is based completely on a open standard - there are no proprietary secrets needed to bust in and everything you need is readily available. The difference will be in levels of support. I have no hope that my no-name OEM will answer the phone if I call - they might even be out of business by tommorrow, but the price was right. RedHat and other first-tier distributions will offer any level of support you care to buy. Other commercial distros will limit support to a minimum and keep it cheap.
The above post is more than a little paranoid. But the paranoia makes sense, given previous behavior by MS.
Standards "extensions", "copy protection", Allchin's recent comments about the need to "educate" legistalators, the Java breakage, FUD, and all the other standard Microsoft tactics mean that any "support" for anything that MS provides is often a cause for concern.
You don't see a hundred posts about how IBM or Oracle or Sun has nefarious intentions whenever they do anything Linux-related because they don't have the same track record as Microsoft does - none of them are saints, but at they don't center their business on anti-competitive tactics.
Office isn't bad software - I'm waiting for the day after the breakup when Windows and Office are made by different companies - the applications company will want to make software for Linux. Then MS won't be able to leverage its Office monopoly to backup the Windows monopoly and vice-versa. Pray the appeals court sees the light...
I tried the latest version of StarOffice. Saves files as Word docs in formats newer than my copy of Word. It saved me the trouble of buying/acquiring Powerpoint, since the presentation software is an exact ripoff of Powerpoint.
If you're a corporate user, or somebody else who has to pay full price for software, I just can't see how you can justify buying MS Office - it's $599 for a legit copy. The costs to convert to StarOffice would have to be cheaper.
Umm, a great many religions have used this model of of secrecy. Scientology is just the first religion to charge money for secrets.
The Catholic Church had secret orders, certain Jesuits took a secret fourth oath. Islam has like the sufis mystic sects that aren't interested in sharing their knowledge. Juadiasm has kabbalists. The freemasons, as mentioned above, don't care to have their secrets shared with outsiders either. Only a Mormon can enter a Mormon temple once it has been "sealed".
Both the Church of Latter Day Saints and the masons have taken legal action against people who attempt to share their secrets with others. The Catholic Church has largely given up on secrets, but I'm sure that you had a very short life expectancy if you tried to reveal them during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
Scientology is just a modern religion, designed to operate under our economic system, where everything has a price.
I think she has a point. I think RedHat in particular is making extremely rapid progress towards where Linux neeeds to be.
A couple suggestions on how to get into the consumer market:
What needs to happen is that somebody (probably RedHat) needs to include an "simple desktop" option on install. Put Netscape, an email client, and StarOffice in a little box in the bottom of the screen, where you can't miss them. Give the user a one-time list of consumer software that comes with the distro to put in that box too -an MP3 player, whatever.
Next, pull one of Microsoft's great tricks - make migration easy. Imitate all the Windows keyboard shortcuts. Alt-F4 should close the current window, not take me to the fourth desktop. And so on.
From there, the only difference they'll see between Windows and Linux is that when something crashes in Linux the OS never goes down with it...
Our Canadian laws are often directly influenced by lawmakers south of the border. Just because you can't vote for him doesn't mean that you can't encourage him.
Just don't try and give him any money - we kind of frown on foreign campaign contributions here.
Nothing like an anonymous coward to nitpick. The situation is not substantially different, musicians get less than 5%, authors get less than 10%. So Joe Author's paperback sells for $7.99 and he gets $0.80.
Assuming he accepts donations to fund his vocation, (a system where expenses approach $0/sale as sales go to infinity) and every reader is honest and chips in $2, he's made about 150% than he would with a publisher. Publishers are just as inefficient as record companies, they should wake up and figure out how to get content on the Internet ASAP.
At least in the music business. Here's an interesting analysis by, of all people, Courtney Love, on how even the most successful musicians make almost nothing off of their sales - RIAA members pocket well over 95% of the cost.
Let's assume this holds for books too (may or may not). If Harlan Ellison will let me give him 7.5% of the cover price of his stuff at his website, I'd be happy to - he'll get more money that way. I will gladly pay a buck or two direct to the artists for an album - that's more several times more than they get now. But I'm rapidly losing interest in giving a single fucking dime to publishers and recording companies which are trying to eradicate people's fair use rights while paying their artists less than 35c on an $18 CD. If their business model requires that kind of markup, they deserve to die a revenue-hemorraghing death.
Interesting article... too bad the guy left out costs like development costs, paying for the content creation for the site, support, etc... All he looks at are bandwidth costs versus ad revenues.
Actually, my comment on Kuro5hin covered your point already. Read the frickin discussion!
Other than bandwith costs, costs don't grow linearly with the number of subscribers/viewers. I don't have to produce twice as much content if my audience doubles in size, and support costs probably won't double either - they'll increase, but unless the site's code doesn't scale, they shouldn't double. etc....
Of course, income shrinks linearly as you decrease the number of users - probably faster, if you read rusty's comments at Kuroshin. This where lots of dotcoms get screwed. They try and target a small market - but their personnel costs are on-par with a website with a much bigger audience.
Slashdot and Kuro5hin probably have the best business model possible, since they have little or no content creation costs - they expect CNet and ZDNet to provide it (Slashdot) or they expect the users to provide it (Kuro5hin).
The writing is on the wall. All these predatory companies will now have to justify why we must spend all this money on their software without having the source code when there are free and openly specified alternatives.
I wish it would work the way you describe it. But until the DOJ cracks down on anti-competitive "industry associations" like the RIAA, they'll still be ridding the world of fair-use rights.
No one will manufacture user-control free media if they RIAA/MPAA/IDSA/BSA get their way. They'll pay, sue, threaten, or legislate manufacturers into manfucturing only media and hardware with user-control measures built in. Eventually it will be illegal to own any media which is not produced by an authorized producer, which is not does not allow them total control over your actions, and which does not come from a certified manufacturer.
Needless to say, this will tremendously retard advances in computer science, the physical sciences, and many other fields, but the powers that be don't give a fuck.
OK, this guy is the greatest politician, since, well, anybody.
If you're a US citizen, especially from VA, email him, tell him you love him. Congresspeople notice when they get loads of email in support or opposition of their position.
Whatever state you're from, you can make donations to his reelection campaign. The evil double AA's are probably already cutting a check to the GOP in Virginia to get this guy blown out of the water. But if the RIAA and MPAA can buy legistlation, we can too.
Unfortunately, there are millions of people who are "too important" (at least to themselves) to be out of touch for one minute. But it's getting out of hand.
I've seen people in the National Guard who feel the need to take their cell phone out in the field with them - never mind that even if Junior took his first step right then you're not going him till Sunday. Oh, and the phone probably won't work anyway. I just don't get it...
It actually pretty ridiculous. Judges are "government officials", and the Supreme Court has set the libel standad for government officials awfully high - not one has won a libel suit under the current three-pronged standard. She has to prove that the poster had positive knowledge the statements were false, that the post intended to harm her, and that it actually did harm her.
In practice, the only way a govt employee, of any type, can win a libel suit is by proving they are not an "official", i.e. they are a rank-and-file drone and entitled to the same amount of protection as a private citizen. I don't think a judge can be considered a non-official by any sane definition.
This is why Clinton never sued some of the right-wing wacko publications for printing nonsense. Even absurd claims that he murdered Vince Foster or personally gave nuclear secrets to China aren't libelous when we're talking about an elected official.
She probably knows she can't win, she just wants to indentify whoever her political enemies are.
More importantly, would somebody at Slashdot please call AOL and say they would like to be a party to the brief?
Slashdot users could be a prime target for these frivolous lawsuits - we sit here all day and bitch about companies we don't like. It doesn't seem impossible that some company might take very unkindly to Slashdot postings and demand all the information Slashdot has on posters.
Is there anyway we can get a group of big wig tech heads (Stallman, etc.) to ask the Justice Department to investigate the RIAA the same way M$ is being investigated? I mean, making non-standard audio formats to lock smaller labels out (DVD-audio anyone?) and trying to kill our fair use rights is EVIL. It'd be nice if we actual got JUSTICE once instead of just the LAW.
Nitpick - the RIAA is technically a collusive system, not a monopoly - all the players in the market get together and agree to things that would never happen without the communication - their behavior is no different from price-fixing.
Unfortunately, there a couple reasons the RIAA will never see a federal courtroom any time soon:
1) Bush is president. As a rule, Republicans don't bring antitrust suits. Reagan ended the antitrust case against IBM (admittedly there were reasons why this might make sense). With comments already coming from the Bush administration about how they "don't litigate lightly" you won't expect to see them mopping up the floor with megacorps anytime soon.
2) The RIAA is politically aware. Microsoft didn't know what a lobbyist was until they were served half a dozen lawsuits. These boys have already pushed through the DMCA, the Sonny Bono copyright extension, and are now buying even more Republicans to oppose any sane changes to these monstrous laws. If they can purchase copyright extensions, they can purchase an antritrust exemption faster than you can get David Boies on the case.
3) There's no business complaining. Sun, Netscape, AOL, Apple, and dozens of other companies had all seen Microsoft's tricks firsthand. They were battered, but they lived to tell the tale, and lobby Congress and Clinton to do something. It helps if you can show a judge a beaten corporation - they don't give a damn about consumers anymore.
Unfortunately, the RIAA beat its competition out of existence decades ago. There are no corporate victims to parade around, just consumers. If only Clinton's judicial appointments hadn't all been roadblocked....
I take orginal CDs and immediately copy them. The originals go in a CD rack, never to be disturbed unless the duplicate gets damaged. Perfectly good way to protect my investment.
It seems like this is the pattern for all OS releases. I went to a Whistler presentation, and the half of the Q&A session was people asking, "What about this feature?" and the MS guy saying, "In the next next version".
An OS is always an unfinished project, you just periodically release the results every now and then. The trick is figuring out when to release. Linux has placed stability ahead of features, and it's nice to see Apple getting that right too.
1) Take the Gnutella protocol and add some bitstring to the begining. Call it the New Gnutella protocol.
2) Write a New Gnutella client that only accepts data from New Gnutella clients.
3) Add to the New Gnutella license: "By using this system, you agree not to use this system to identify users. You agree not to pursue any legal action against users. You agree to pay a $5,000 penalty to any user privacy whose you violate."
Sure, it would be trivial to reverse-engineer the "security" bitstring, but wait a minute, that's a clear violation of the DMCA.
And you know, there are always two sides on the coin. I had HUGE problems with various Linux distros some time ago on my desktop machine at home. It would freeze every once in a while (maybe every 2-3 hours or so) under X, no matter what I tried. I changed hardware, changed my motherboard, CPU, memory.. no change.. Finally I installed Windows 98 on it and I had no problems. Sure, typically it would be the other way around, but if you have had 100 blue screens of death in one day on a Windows box, remember that there are people who have had similar experiences with other OS's. It's nothing Microsoft specific.
Switch distros. I had several problems with my hardware under RedHat 6.2. So I copied all the data I wanted to keep onto my Windows drive, and started over with Debian. Worked much better, but I still had minor issues with my soundcard. With RedHat 7 I have no problems at all, every piece of hardware works as well or better than under Windows. Total cost to fix problems? Nothing.
This is proof that competition works when it exists. IMHO, the improvement between RedHat 6.2 and RedHat 7 is vastly greater than the improvement between Win95 and Win98. And in much less than 4 years. Sure, the inital release had a lot of bugs, but most of them were fixed faster than Microsoft can issue a press release declaring a bug to be a feature.
This is the beauty of having to fight over market share - distros improve rapidly to avoid being beaten up by the other guy. Not so much the case with Microsoft. They're afraid at how fast Linux has caught up with Windows in all areas. They don't know how to turn out good software quickly. As the useability gap closes they have to be very afraid.
On the other hand, I downloaded the All YOur Base video and tried to play it under Windows. It freezes my whole machine hard - can't even reboot. Straight out of the box, my Windows 98 machine needed a reboot once a day to keep it happy. Can someone tell me where I can download a different version of Windows? I suppose I could shell out loads of money for Win2K but there is no guarantee whatsoever that it will solve my problems. I doubt MS will refund the purchase price when I tell them that my NIC still stops working randomly.
If your a Linux user with problems you can always try something else for relatively little cost when nothing else works. If you're an Windows user you're gonna have to wait for an upgrade (which means upgrading your RAM, HD, etc. to deal with this round of bloat), pay in advance and then hope it resolves your problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I've written a fun little program that encrypts mp3 filenames in a searchable manner. Download it here and avoid being spied on by Copyright.net. I just really don't like these guys.
You may enjoy the license agreement too.
The "ease-of-use" claim for Windows has never made all that much sense to me. It doesn't hold water from two either of the two classes of "users" (as opposed to admins/hackers/developers/hobbyists):
User Type #1: Suzie the Secretary - she runs 5 programs total and was utterly mortified by DOS prompt back in day. She still can't install a piece of shareware if her life depends on it. I've got the perfect setup for her - a drawer in GNOME that contains StarOffice, Netscape, a mail client, XMMS, and GAIM. It's like the Win XP "common tasks" list, except StarOffice won't dissappear if I use AbiWord for a couple days.
User Type #2: Joe the Tinkerer. Joe's job may not be different than Suzie, but he's comfortable doing more things with his machine - he has a shareware program that randomly changes his desktop image every day, and he installed Napster for spare time usage He could swap a PCI card if he had to. Joe used to be somewhat handy with DOS prompt. You give Joe a DOS-to-UNIX cheat sheet, explain the fundamental structure of UNIX directories and "./configue", "make", "make install", and in a couple days he's happy.
What boggles my mind is the CTO who's willing to pay current MS prices. $199 for an Office upgrade?!?! Multiply that by x licenses (and multiply by 0.yy for volume discounts) and you've just dropped many thousands of dollars on a program with a free alternative that's 100% compatible. Ditto for the operating system. Repeat this process every two years, or until replaced with subscription-ware.
When the average corporate user needs only Windows and Office, why not use RedHat and StarOffice instead? Doesn't software cost play any factor in these decisions?
I think this is both true and untrue. Assuming Linux is widely in adopted in some markets I think we'll end up with more distros than that for commercial use. I don't think the Linux market will look like the auto market, with a Big Three distros or something like that. The Linux market will look more like the OEM market, with a couple very large vendors, dozens of second-tier vendors, and more little shops than you can count.
Why? The cost to enter the Linux market is pretty low - you can take somebody else's GPL software, modify it a bit, and make your own distribution at relatively low cost. Then you charge less for support and try to undercut them. Like the OEM market, the Linux market is based completely on a open standard - there are no proprietary secrets needed to bust in and everything you need is readily available. The difference will be in levels of support. I have no hope that my no-name OEM will answer the phone if I call - they might even be out of business by tommorrow, but the price was right. RedHat and other first-tier distributions will offer any level of support you care to buy. Other commercial distros will limit support to a minimum and keep it cheap.
The above post is more than a little paranoid. But the paranoia makes sense, given previous behavior by MS.
Standards "extensions", "copy protection", Allchin's recent comments about the need to "educate" legistalators, the Java breakage, FUD, and all the other standard Microsoft tactics mean that any "support" for anything that MS provides is often a cause for concern.
You don't see a hundred posts about how IBM or Oracle or Sun has nefarious intentions whenever they do anything Linux-related because they don't have the same track record as Microsoft does - none of them are saints, but at they don't center their business on anti-competitive tactics.
Yeah, that's what I thought too.
Office isn't bad software - I'm waiting for the day after the breakup when Windows and Office are made by different companies - the applications company will want to make software for Linux. Then MS won't be able to leverage its Office monopoly to backup the Windows monopoly and vice-versa. Pray the appeals court sees the light...
I tried the latest version of StarOffice. Saves files as Word docs in formats newer than my copy of Word. It saved me the trouble of buying/acquiring Powerpoint, since the presentation software is an exact ripoff of Powerpoint.
If you're a corporate user, or somebody else who has to pay full price for software, I just can't see how you can justify buying MS Office - it's $599 for a legit copy. The costs to convert to StarOffice would have to be cheaper.
Ditto - I submitted it too, as did probably a couple hundred other people. Who was asleep at the wheel?
Umm, a great many religions have used this model of of secrecy. Scientology is just the first religion to charge money for secrets.
The Catholic Church had secret orders, certain Jesuits took a secret fourth oath. Islam has like the sufis mystic sects that aren't interested in sharing their knowledge. Juadiasm has kabbalists. The freemasons, as mentioned above, don't care to have their secrets shared with outsiders either. Only a Mormon can enter a Mormon temple once it has been "sealed".
Both the Church of Latter Day Saints and the masons have taken legal action against people who attempt to share their secrets with others. The Catholic Church has largely given up on secrets, but I'm sure that you had a very short life expectancy if you tried to reveal them during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
Scientology is just a modern religion, designed to operate under our economic system, where everything has a price.
I think she has a point. I think RedHat in particular is making extremely rapid progress towards where Linux neeeds to be.
A couple suggestions on how to get into the consumer market:
What needs to happen is that somebody (probably RedHat) needs to include an "simple desktop" option on install. Put Netscape, an email client, and StarOffice in a little box in the bottom of the screen, where you can't miss them. Give the user a one-time list of consumer software that comes with the distro to put in that box too -an MP3 player, whatever.
Next, pull one of Microsoft's great tricks - make migration easy. Imitate all the Windows keyboard shortcuts. Alt-F4 should close the current window, not take me to the fourth desktop. And so on.
From there, the only difference they'll see between Windows and Linux is that when something crashes in Linux the OS never goes down with it...
Our Canadian laws are often directly influenced by lawmakers south of the border. Just because you can't vote for him doesn't mean that you can't encourage him.
Just don't try and give him any money - we kind of frown on foreign campaign contributions here.
Yeah, pretty much right on.
Nothing like an anonymous coward to nitpick. The situation is not substantially different, musicians get less than 5%, authors get less than 10%. So Joe Author's paperback sells for $7.99 and he gets $0.80.
Assuming he accepts donations to fund his vocation, (a system where expenses approach $0/sale as sales go to infinity) and every reader is honest and chips in $2, he's made about 150% than he would with a publisher. Publishers are just as inefficient as record companies, they should wake up and figure out how to get content on the Internet ASAP.
At least in the music business. Here's an interesting analysis by, of all people, Courtney Love, on how even the most successful musicians make almost nothing off of their sales - RIAA members pocket well over 95% of the cost.
Let's assume this holds for books too (may or may not). If Harlan Ellison will let me give him 7.5% of the cover price of his stuff at his website, I'd be happy to - he'll get more money that way. I will gladly pay a buck or two direct to the artists for an album - that's more several times more than they get now. But I'm rapidly losing interest in giving a single fucking dime to publishers and recording companies which are trying to eradicate people's fair use rights while paying their artists less than 35c on an $18 CD. If their business model requires that kind of markup, they deserve to die a revenue-hemorraghing death.
Interesting article... too bad the guy left out costs like development costs, paying for the content creation for the site, support, etc... All he looks at are bandwidth costs versus ad revenues.
Actually, my comment on Kuro5hin covered your point already. Read the frickin discussion!
Other than bandwith costs, costs don't grow linearly with the number of subscribers/viewers. I don't have to produce twice as much content if my audience doubles in size, and support costs probably won't double either - they'll increase, but unless the site's code doesn't scale, they shouldn't double. etc....
Of course, income shrinks linearly as you decrease the number of users - probably faster, if you read rusty's comments at Kuroshin. This where lots of dotcoms get screwed. They try and target a small market - but their personnel costs are on-par with a website with a much bigger audience.
Slashdot and Kuro5hin probably have the best business model possible, since they have little or no content creation costs - they expect CNet and ZDNet to provide it (Slashdot) or they expect the users to provide it (Kuro5hin).
The writing is on the wall. All these predatory companies will now have to justify why we must spend all this money on their software without having the source code when there are free and openly specified alternatives.
I wish it would work the way you describe it. But until the DOJ cracks down on anti-competitive "industry associations" like the RIAA, they'll still be ridding the world of fair-use rights.
No one will manufacture user-control free media if they RIAA/MPAA/IDSA/BSA get their way. They'll pay, sue, threaten, or legislate manufacturers into manfucturing only media and hardware with user-control measures built in. Eventually it will be illegal to own any media which is not produced by an authorized producer, which is not does not allow them total control over your actions, and which does not come from a certified manufacturer.
Needless to say, this will tremendously retard advances in computer science, the physical sciences, and many other fields, but the powers that be don't give a fuck.
OK, this guy is the greatest politician, since, well, anybody.
If you're a US citizen, especially from VA, email him, tell him you love him. Congresspeople notice when they get loads of email in support or opposition of their position.
Whatever state you're from, you can make donations to his reelection campaign. The evil double AA's are probably already cutting a check to the GOP in Virginia to get this guy blown out of the water. But if the RIAA and MPAA can buy legistlation, we can too.
Unfortunately, there are millions of people who are "too important" (at least to themselves) to be out of touch for one minute. But it's getting out of hand.
I've seen people in the National Guard who feel the need to take their cell phone out in the field with them - never mind that even if Junior took his first step right then you're not going him till Sunday. Oh, and the phone probably won't work anyway. I just don't get it...
I personally would love to see the US allow this, especially in movie theatres and restaurants
Could we install them in all classrooms with more than 50 seats? Please?
It actually pretty ridiculous. Judges are "government officials", and the Supreme Court has set the libel standad for government officials awfully high - not one has won a libel suit under the current three-pronged standard. She has to prove that the poster had positive knowledge the statements were false, that the post intended to harm her, and that it actually did harm her.
In practice, the only way a govt employee, of any type, can win a libel suit is by proving they are not an "official", i.e. they are a rank-and-file drone and entitled to the same amount of protection as a private citizen. I don't think a judge can be considered a non-official by any sane definition.
This is why Clinton never sued some of the right-wing wacko publications for printing nonsense. Even absurd claims that he murdered Vince Foster or personally gave nuclear secrets to China aren't libelous when we're talking about an elected official.
She probably knows she can't win, she just wants to indentify whoever her political enemies are.
More importantly, would somebody at Slashdot please call AOL and say they would like to be a party to the brief?
Slashdot users could be a prime target for these frivolous lawsuits - we sit here all day and bitch about companies we don't like. It doesn't seem impossible that some company might take very unkindly to Slashdot postings and demand all the information Slashdot has on posters.
Is there anyway we can get a group of big wig tech heads (Stallman, etc.) to ask the Justice Department to investigate the RIAA the same way M$ is being investigated? I mean, making non-standard audio formats to lock smaller labels out (DVD-audio anyone?) and trying to kill our fair use rights is EVIL. It'd be nice if we actual got JUSTICE once instead of just the LAW.
Nitpick - the RIAA is technically a collusive system, not a monopoly - all the players in the market get together and agree to things that would never happen without the communication - their behavior is no different from price-fixing.
Unfortunately, there a couple reasons the RIAA will never see a federal courtroom any time soon:
1) Bush is president. As a rule, Republicans don't bring antitrust suits. Reagan ended the antitrust case against IBM (admittedly there were reasons why this might make sense). With comments already coming from the Bush administration about how they "don't litigate lightly" you won't expect to see them mopping up the floor with megacorps anytime soon.
2) The RIAA is politically aware. Microsoft didn't know what a lobbyist was until they were served half a dozen lawsuits. These boys have already pushed through the DMCA, the Sonny Bono copyright extension, and are now buying even more Republicans to oppose any sane changes to these monstrous laws. If they can purchase copyright extensions, they can purchase an antritrust exemption faster than you can get David Boies on the case.
3) There's no business complaining. Sun, Netscape, AOL, Apple, and dozens of other companies had all seen Microsoft's tricks firsthand. They were battered, but they lived to tell the tale, and lobby Congress and Clinton to do something. It helps if you can show a judge a beaten corporation - they don't give a damn about consumers anymore.
Unfortunately, the RIAA beat its competition out of existence decades ago. There are no corporate victims to parade around, just consumers. If only Clinton's judicial appointments hadn't all been roadblocked....
I take orginal CDs and immediately copy them. The originals go in a CD rack, never to be disturbed unless the duplicate gets damaged. Perfectly good way to protect my investment.
It seems like this is the pattern for all OS releases. I went to a Whistler presentation, and the half of the Q&A session was people asking, "What about this feature?" and the MS guy saying, "In the next next version".
An OS is always an unfinished project, you just periodically release the results every now and then. The trick is figuring out when to release. Linux has placed stability ahead of features, and it's nice to see Apple getting that right too.
The quote you're looking for his from Hamlet, and the exact quote is insanely appropriate:
"The engineer hoist by his own petard"
"Petard" is primitive ordnance.
The DMCA includes an exception for law enforcement. You can still download MP3s and watch foregin DVDS while you eat donuts and kill innoncent people.
But the RIAA is not a law enforcement agecny, not yet. They can't break the law in order to find criminal activity.
Try this with Gnutella:
1) Take the Gnutella protocol and add some bitstring to the begining. Call it the New Gnutella protocol.
2) Write a New Gnutella client that only accepts data from New Gnutella clients.
3) Add to the New Gnutella license: "By using this system, you agree not to use this system to identify users. You agree not to pursue any legal action against users. You agree to pay a $5,000 penalty to any user privacy whose you violate."
Sure, it would be trivial to reverse-engineer the "security" bitstring, but wait a minute, that's a clear violation of the DMCA.
And you know, there are always two sides on the coin. I had HUGE problems with various Linux distros some time ago on my desktop machine at home. It would freeze every once in a while (maybe every 2-3 hours or so) under X, no matter what I tried. I changed hardware, changed my motherboard, CPU, memory.. no change.. Finally I installed Windows 98 on it and I had no problems. Sure, typically it would be the other way around, but if you have had 100 blue screens of death in one day on a Windows box, remember that there are people who have had similar experiences with other OS's. It's nothing Microsoft specific.
Switch distros. I had several problems with my hardware under RedHat 6.2. So I copied all the data I wanted to keep onto my Windows drive, and started over with Debian. Worked much better, but I still had minor issues with my soundcard. With RedHat 7 I have no problems at all, every piece of hardware works as well or better than under Windows. Total cost to fix problems? Nothing.
This is proof that competition works when it exists. IMHO, the improvement between RedHat 6.2 and RedHat 7 is vastly greater than the improvement between Win95 and Win98. And in much less than 4 years. Sure, the inital release had a lot of bugs, but most of them were fixed faster than Microsoft can issue a press release declaring a bug to be a feature.
This is the beauty of having to fight over market share - distros improve rapidly to avoid being beaten up by the other guy. Not so much the case with Microsoft. They're afraid at how fast Linux has caught up with Windows in all areas. They don't know how to turn out good software quickly. As the useability gap closes they have to be very afraid.
On the other hand, I downloaded the All YOur Base video and tried to play it under Windows. It freezes my whole machine hard - can't even reboot. Straight out of the box, my Windows 98 machine needed a reboot once a day to keep it happy. Can someone tell me where I can download a different version of Windows? I suppose I could shell out loads of money for Win2K but there is no guarantee whatsoever that it will solve my problems. I doubt MS will refund the purchase price when I tell them that my NIC still stops working randomly.
If your a Linux user with problems you can always try something else for relatively little cost when nothing else works. If you're an Windows user you're gonna have to wait for an upgrade (which means upgrading your RAM, HD, etc. to deal with this round of bloat), pay in advance and then hope it resolves your problems.