[Re: Battery Life] Amazing what a difference two years makes, eh?
Uh, no. Dell (and others) are still selling machines with massive and useless batteries. My point is that you can have one or the other. For anyone gushing over the performance of the Dell, it would help to temper that with it's dismal battery life. For the article to say that 3.5 hours of battery life for the MacBook Pro is disappointing, it seems like a glaring oversight.
I agree... the Mac is still pretty far behind when a 2+ year old box is keeping up with it on it's OWN OS...
That's not really conclusive. That same machine would likely outperform both the Latitude X1 and D610 you mentioned by a similar or greater margin. Are they "far behind", too? The Pentium M and Core Duo are both more efficient chips with higher IPC, but they're running at around half the clock speed of the Pentium 4. The P4 should outperform these systems. The point is that comparing them on performance alone is stupid and misleading.
Also, you seem confused when you say "on it's OWN OS". There is nothing magic about the MacBook Pro that would make Mac OS X run faster on it than on any other compatible hardware. Why would you even think that it would? Could you describe a way in which it might?
It really is the intuitive user interface of Macs that set them apart.
This is an unsupported hack for modifying a specific behavior of a specific revision of a specific model. It doesn't have anything to do with the Mac interface at all. 99.9% of users will never want or need to do this, and for those that do it is pretty simple. In fact, the other reply to my post indicates that there is an even easier way.
The mixing can be performed in hardware on many audio chips.
My impression is that this is generally only one-way. That is, mixing is done in hardware if it's going out to your speakers. Maybe that's not the case, but I think perhaps you don't understand the kind of mixing I was talking about.
The way iChat (and probably other) audio conferencing works is that one system takes the audio from all the others, mixes it, and then sends it back to each of the participants. This way, instead of each participant having to take in 9 audio streams and send out 9 audio streams, and using a ton of bandwidth, they each take in the single pre-mixed audio from the host, and send out only one stream to the host.
I'm sure there are many professions that are very stressful that require people to keep themselves 'sharp' and alert at all times.
The difference here is between "challenge" and stress. There is basically a channel between challenges that are so insignificant as to provoke boredom, and challenges that are overwhelming and produce stress and anxiety. Between those are challenges that we can handle and are rewarding as a result.
People who thrive when working to deadlines do so because it isn't especially stressful, and may in fact be less stressful for them than having no deadlines. It might be exhausting work, but if it were truly stressful they would probably be less productive as a result. It seems from this article that real stress may actually prevent one from learning and keeping sharp, so the image of the perpetually exhausted but highly productive student or worker as a shining example of success in action is wrong more often than not.
1) The Dell weighs 9 pounds. 2) The Dell is roughly the size of my apartment. 3) The Dell is among the ugliest objects in the world. 4) The Dell has an integrated subwoofer. Double-you-tee-eff. 5) The Dell has a 50% higher capacity battery, from which it coaxes less than half the battery life. 6) Comparing the Dell Inspiron 9100 to the MacBook Pro is one of the dumbest things I have ever seen attempted on the internet. 7) ArsTechnica may have jumped the shark.
The fan only spins up, however, once the internal temperature hits a certain threshold, which is probably why you haven't noticed it's there. My Rev. A 12" PowerBook fan runs pretty much constantly.
No longer! Download Silent Night, and use Pacifist to install it. Then reset the PRAM by holding CMD-Opt-P-R when booting until it chimes twice.
Silent Night is just a package containing the original fan drivers for the Rev. A 12" PowerBook. The only real difference is the fan-on/fan-off temperatures, which are significantly higher than the existing drivers. Unfortunately, installing the package alone never seems to work, but using Pacifist does. Resetting the PRAM seems to be necessary, too, though I couldn't explain why.
I've been using this method ever since the update that changed the fan temperatures, without any trouble. The case does get much warmer, of course, but unless you're constantly running a full load, it's unlikely to get unbearably hot.
According to the reviewer, 3.5 hrs. seems to be the highest figure,
Indeed. 3.5 hours was the highest among 3 tests. That graph is especially misleading -- why show 3 values, highest, lowest, and average, when you only ran 3 tests?
That said, while you might get an full hour turning everything off, I don't think I would expect the average to be that much higher. Yonah is relatively low power, but it's not magic. The biggest factor in battery life is still going to be the size of the battery, which on the MacBook Pro is not particularly large.
Re:iChat can do 10-way audio using a G3
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
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· Score: 2, Informative
iChat AV can support 10-way audio conferencing using the now ancient G3 processor.
Not quite. Someone using a G3 can participate in a 10-way conference, but the more intensive task of mixing those 10 audio streams requires (according to the very page you linked to) a 1GHz G4, dual 800 MHz G4, any G5 or Intel Core.
That Skype's requirements are so much higher is still a little curious, even with higher quality.
But it's not technically theft, either. IP theft at best, but really just copyright infringement.
Really, they're both a violation of one party's rights. You may say "just" copyright infringement, but that's probably because you have never exercised your copyright over anything you've created.
Your illegal download in no way prevents someone else from buying the product in question
You misunderstand the reason why theft itself is a bad thing. The point is that it is done without the permission of the rightful owner. Theft isn't "less bad" if what is stolen is not precious.
Are they sure it wasn't the spooky commercials they were playing on late night TV a while back? Those things still give me the creeps.
They can't be as bad as Rhapsody's crack-addled spokesman. He sounds like he's torn between channeling the OxyClean guy and wandering off the stage to shoot himself. If you haven't seen it, it's on Real's press page.
It may be illegal to download TV episodes with BT, but the harm done is no worse than skipping the commercials on a DVR or walking out of the room during commercials.
Except in both of those cases, you're actually paying for the content.
If you leave the commercials in the BT files, there's no harm done to advertisers at all
Indeed, if something that never happens were to happen, things might be different.
"Free" isn't, if you have to spend a lot of time to get "free" free.
This is why I said you can't compete with free on price alone. And the reason I did so is because you said: "The question whether they will buy or copy content can only be answered by its price."
That piracy tends to be more time consuming than buying is an artificial limitation created so that piracy will be more expensive: it is illegal, and therefore cannot be conducted as openly as legal exchanges. As I said before, since the cost is always zero, it is impossible to compete without artificial limitations like copyright law and DRM.
Copyright exists to promote the creation of new art.
Um, yeah. And how does it do that? By granting the creator exclusive rights over his creation. You can't rely on the difficulty of copying the medium to protect the content. That would be saying that it's ok for anybody with a printing press to copy your book. Now, it's well and good if you the creator say it's ok, but the point is that you are given that right as the creator. Without that right, you would quickly be undercut by competitors and have little chance to profit from your work, and thus little incentive to create more. Such piracy is only limited by the cost to copy (i.e. you still have to own a printing press), but that is zero for digital media. Even so, the grandparent post was suggesting that digital piracy could be defeated by lowering prices, which is obviously untrue. The only way to allow the original creator to compete is to make it effectively "more expensive" (i.e. difficult) for the pirate through artificial restrictions such as copyright. Copyright makes it possible to compete with free. QED.
As for competing with free, look up the business case for selling bottled water.
That's a terrible example. Bottled water is all about differentiation and branding and creating the illusion that one water is markedly different from the other. This is nothing like what I was talking about: a scenario in which the product is openly exactly the same, but where the only difference in price. In that scenario, cheaper (free) is always going to be more attractive.
On a free market, people will pay whatever a good is worth to them. This "free market" I speak of can not be regulated by state-imposed monopolies like copyrights, or for that matter, patents because it then ceases to be free.
Uh, I hate to point this out to you, seeing as how you said it yourself, but: Copyright exists to promote the creation of new art. To do so it ensures that the market value of that art is artificially high. How else would it?
Also, you can cry about the loss of the "free market" all you want, but sooner or later you're going to have to realize that it never existed in the first place. The free market is an abstraction. It's an idealized point on one end of the spectrum. It is not a real thing.
Immaterial values can not be treated like physical goods and it's about time we stopped trying.
Nothing you've said leads to this conclusion. Furthermore, it's unclear what (if anything) this has to do with what's being talked about here.
I don't know why you linked to that. It agrees with what I've said far more than anything you've said. Additionally, I never said anything about the length of copyright, which is the point of that post. I am opposed to lengthy copyright terms myself, so I don't understand why you would think that I am not.
Now with digital items, the "media" distrabutors are trying to change the rules of ownership to situation #2 - you own it, but we still control it.
With few exceptions (which I will not defend), they aren't trying to change the rules. They're trying to enforce the ones that already exist. Surely you've heard by now that you never owned the music or movies or books you purchase. You own that copy, yes, but you don't own the content.
I should say that I take exception to some of the existing law, and some of what may become law, but that doesn't mean that I don't believe in intellectual property rights.
The real issue here is one of scarcity vs abundance. Which is more valuable, diamonds or air. Diamonds are scarce, they look pretty, but we could live without them.
Not the best example. The scarcity of diamonds is artificially created by a cartel.
With digital media, there is no longer the inate scarcity associated with physical items. The P2P networks have shown that where there is one copy, you have a million for practically zero cost.
The whole issue of control over digital media is that of trying to create an artifical scarcity, and to maintain an artifical price point on a digital copy.
You're still confusing the medium with the content. I don't have an authoritative knowledge of every DRM system out there, so I'll speak only about iTunes' FairPlay. I can make a million copies of a FairPlay file at zero cost, just as I can with any other file. There is no artificial scarcity there.
The only thing for which there is scarcity is the rights to the content, which are not in abundance in any format. Copyright is an artificial restriction, yes, but one which precedes digital media by a few hundred years. If you disagree with the idea of copyright, that's an entirely different issue.
Blogs aren't going away. We all know it. Let's skip that point.
The idealistic notion that blogs would change the world in fundamental ways is going away. Right on schedule, too.
We've had enough pretentious books and conferences, enough heavily funded bad business models, enough fads, and enough hipster popularity contests. The only people who are going to suffer are those who have had too much invested (emotionally, financially, whatever) in that idealism: People who started blogs just to be cool or seem informed or to make money. People who wrote books saying things that will sound really embarrassingly stupid in five or ten years. People who really believed they would get Howard Dean elected on a wave of energetic typing.
This is, I think, how it should be. It's hard not to get swept up in the Next Big World Changing Thing, even when we can see the cycle repeat itself every few years. So hard that I think it's a fundamental part of our social nature. We want so much to believe that we can only change the world if we are part of some movement, some entity greater than ourselves with more power to affect change than any other force in the world. Invariably that runs into the immovable object of our own individual nature.
Every time around, we as a society and we as individuals learn something. What will it be this time? Time will tell. Maybe it's this: That when given a soapbox and the whole world as an audience, most of us don't have a whole lot to say.
The Blog Era is over. Now we can all look forward to the demise of the "Web 2.0 Era".
Let's get one thing straight here. Downloading TV shows isn't "stealing". Is there a stack of TV shows that gets smaller when I download them?
No, and you're being obtuse to act as though that's what is meant. If you yourself acknowledge that it's illegal, I don't understand why you should chafe at my characterization of it as "stealing". Is there some other term you would prefer? Is "intellectual property theft" to contentious? Or how about simply "copyright violation"?
Furthermore, if I couldn't download the TV shows, I still wouldn't pay for cable.
And? You wouldn't have television at all, so what? All you're saying is that you don't want what is for sale. This doesn't give you any more right to obtain it for free. Have you never had to go without something you wanted?
Imagine for a moment that there were television downloads to your exact specifications available, but at a price, (say) ten times as high as the lower quality DRMed shows on iTunes today. So, $20 a show.
What would you do? BitTorrent would no longer be the only place you can get what you want. You'd get exactly the same content. The only difference would be whether or not you're willing to pay the price, and I hope that it's blindingly obvious that not paying would be screwing the creator.
Now, I also hope it's obvious that $20 is too damn much for a single episode of a TV show. So they give you some cheaper options: $10 for your choice of a low quality version with no DRM or a high-quality version with DRM. Hrm. That's not what you wanted. How about this: $5 for high quality and no DRM...but it's released six months after the air date. No, that won't do. How about...
Repeat ad infinitum.
Sooner or later, you'd have to accept that what you want is not for sale. Your options then are to change your estimation of value or do without. My point in the last comment is that what you're doing is a convenient way of ignoring this. You neither have to lower your expectations (and indeed, can raise them indefinitely) nor do without. As long as you're unconcerned with the legality of piracy, your claim that the entertainment industry could be making money off of you is empty, as they can't offer anything more to you than what you are already getting for free.
And nowhere did I say I had a "right" to download TV shows.
You didn't, I admit. However, I don't think it's such a far out inference as you seem unconcerned with the legality of what you're doing. Perhaps it would be better described as a "sense of entitlement".
You must enjoy very much getting to know people intimately based on a couple of paragraphs in a slashdot thread. Because evidently, you know my motivations behind everything.
You're mistaken. I only claim to know that you're using the exact arguments that have been wrong for several years now, and so any "you" in the preceding comment should be taken as a general "you". Likewise where the "right to download" is concerned -- you may not feel that way, but many others who share your argument do.
Would I even think of removing the locks from my car and hotwire it 'cause it's an inconvenience to carry those keys around? Of course not! Those keys protect my property! Yes, DRM also protects the property of the content provider. But unlike with me, my car and the bum (compared to the content provider, the content and me), the bum has NO right to use my car in whatever way. He did not pay for using it. I did pay to use the content.
In this bizarre rambling you managed to undermine your own argument. I'm quite impressed.
The locks on your car protect your property from theft. In doing so, they are also an inconvenience to you and anyone to whom you lend your car. Would you remove them? No. Why? Because then it could be easily stolen.
The DRM on my content protects my property from theft. In doing so, it is an inconvenience to you and anyone else to whom I license it. Would I remove it? No. Why? Because then it could be easily stolen.
It isn't because I am a cheapskate, but because this is the only place I can get what I want.
No, you're cheap. You say BitTorrent is the only place you can get high-quality DRM-free TV shows, but then where did they come from? Somewhere down the line, someone paid for what you are now stealing. Why aren't you paying for it? Because it's cheaper to invent a justification than to actually buy or not buy what is offered. It's a convenient position. No matter what is for sale, you can always raise your expectations without spending a cent.
You can talk all you want about how much money you would be spending, but it will always be cheaper for you to claim that you have a right to steal because your demand isn't being met.
The question whether they will buy or copy content can only be answered by its price. Make it affordable, make the value match the price and people will rather buy than copy.
This doesn't make any sense. Copying digital content will always be free, and thus impossible to compete with in terms of price alone. This is why copyright exists in the first place. The only ways to make copying something "more expensive", and thus give the content creators the ability to compete are to make it artificially difficult (watermarks, DRM) it to make it illegal.
The story they're trying to give you is "Samsung hired the brains behind the iPod", when really, the story is "Samsung hired a guy who founded the company that provided the OS on the early generation iPod, but who hasn't actually worked for Apple since 1994".
i.e., they want you to think that this means Samsung is going to kill the iPod, when really it just means they're desperate.
The iPod's interface is great, sure, but if it takes hiring this particular guy for them to come up with a better one, that's just sad. The only mention in the article is that the Z5's interface has "transparency effects". I'm sure that's going to make the difference.
Do you think most iTMS buyers really understand this?
No, but it's their responsibility to. If you're trying to say that DRM is terrible (and you are), then you're going to have to give reasons why DRM, and not user ignorance, is terrible.
Legal fineprint exists for Cover-Your-Ass purposes, not consumer education.
Indeed, but I wouldn't call the clearly written screen detailing what you're allowed to do with iTunes tracks that appears when sign up for an account "fine print".
It's kind of hard to criticize a service without actually ever using it.
Actually, it's easier to criticize something without using it. Why face the possibility that you may be partially or completely wrong? You get to gallop your high horse through imaginary scenarios that have little or nothing to do with reality and then invite your audience to project them onto the real world.
It's a bit like drawing devil horns on a picture of someone and basing all of your arguments on that.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, part of the cause of the California condor's decline is humans shooting them for sport.
Obviously the solution then is to engineer condors with the ability to shoot back. I would have expected nature to come up with that one by now.
[Re: Battery Life] Amazing what a difference two years makes, eh?
Uh, no. Dell (and others) are still selling machines with massive and useless batteries. My point is that you can have one or the other. For anyone gushing over the performance of the Dell, it would help to temper that with it's dismal battery life. For the article to say that 3.5 hours of battery life for the MacBook Pro is disappointing, it seems like a glaring oversight.
I agree... the Mac is still pretty far behind when a 2+ year old box is keeping up with it on it's OWN OS...
That's not really conclusive. That same machine would likely outperform both the Latitude X1 and D610 you mentioned by a similar or greater margin. Are they "far behind", too? The Pentium M and Core Duo are both more efficient chips with higher IPC, but they're running at around half the clock speed of the Pentium 4. The P4 should outperform these systems. The point is that comparing them on performance alone is stupid and misleading.
Also, you seem confused when you say "on it's OWN OS". There is nothing magic about the MacBook Pro that would make Mac OS X run faster on it than on any other compatible hardware. Why would you even think that it would? Could you describe a way in which it might?
It really is the intuitive user interface of Macs that set them apart.
This is an unsupported hack for modifying a specific behavior of a specific revision of a specific model. It doesn't have anything to do with the Mac interface at all. 99.9% of users will never want or need to do this, and for those that do it is pretty simple. In fact, the other reply to my post indicates that there is an even easier way.
I thought 911 was the joke...
I'm proud to be one of the six people on Slashdot to get that reference. Good one.
The mixing can be performed in hardware on many audio chips.
My impression is that this is generally only one-way. That is, mixing is done in hardware if it's going out to your speakers. Maybe that's not the case, but I think perhaps you don't understand the kind of mixing I was talking about.
The way iChat (and probably other) audio conferencing works is that one system takes the audio from all the others, mixes it, and then sends it back to each of the participants. This way, instead of each participant having to take in 9 audio streams and send out 9 audio streams, and using a ton of bandwidth, they each take in the single pre-mixed audio from the host, and send out only one stream to the host.
I'm sure there are many professions that are very stressful that require people to keep themselves 'sharp' and alert at all times.
The difference here is between "challenge" and stress. There is basically a channel between challenges that are so insignificant as to provoke boredom, and challenges that are overwhelming and produce stress and anxiety. Between those are challenges that we can handle and are rewarding as a result.
People who thrive when working to deadlines do so because it isn't especially stressful, and may in fact be less stressful for them than having no deadlines. It might be exhausting work, but if it were truly stressful they would probably be less productive as a result. It seems from this article that real stress may actually prevent one from learning and keeping sharp, so the image of the perpetually exhausted but highly productive student or worker as a shining example of success in action is wrong more often than not.
The things I noticed were:
1) The Dell weighs 9 pounds.
2) The Dell is roughly the size of my apartment.
3) The Dell is among the ugliest objects in the world.
4) The Dell has an integrated subwoofer. Double-you-tee-eff.
5) The Dell has a 50% higher capacity battery, from which it coaxes less than half the battery life.
6) Comparing the Dell Inspiron 9100 to the MacBook Pro is one of the dumbest things I have ever seen attempted on the internet.
7) ArsTechnica may have jumped the shark.
The fan only spins up, however, once the internal temperature hits a certain threshold, which is probably why you haven't noticed it's there. My Rev. A 12" PowerBook fan runs pretty much constantly.
No longer! Download Silent Night, and use Pacifist to install it. Then reset the PRAM by holding CMD-Opt-P-R when booting until it chimes twice.
Silent Night is just a package containing the original fan drivers for the Rev. A 12" PowerBook. The only real difference is the fan-on/fan-off temperatures, which are significantly higher than the existing drivers. Unfortunately, installing the package alone never seems to work, but using Pacifist does. Resetting the PRAM seems to be necessary, too, though I couldn't explain why.
I've been using this method ever since the update that changed the fan temperatures, without any trouble. The case does get much warmer, of course, but unless you're constantly running a full load, it's unlikely to get unbearably hot.
According to the reviewer, 3.5 hrs. seems to be the highest figure,
Indeed. 3.5 hours was the highest among 3 tests. That graph is especially misleading -- why show 3 values, highest, lowest, and average, when you only ran 3 tests?
That said, while you might get an full hour turning everything off, I don't think I would expect the average to be that much higher. Yonah is relatively low power, but it's not magic. The biggest factor in battery life is still going to be the size of the battery, which on the MacBook Pro is not particularly large.
iChat AV can support 10-way audio conferencing using the now ancient G3 processor.
Not quite. Someone using a G3 can participate in a 10-way conference, but the more intensive task of mixing those 10 audio streams requires (according to the very page you linked to) a 1GHz G4, dual 800 MHz G4, any G5 or Intel Core.
That Skype's requirements are so much higher is still a little curious, even with higher quality.
But it's not technically theft, either. IP theft at best, but really just copyright infringement.
Really, they're both a violation of one party's rights. You may say "just" copyright infringement, but that's probably because you have never exercised your copyright over anything you've created.
Your illegal download in no way prevents someone else from buying the product in question
You misunderstand the reason why theft itself is a bad thing. The point is that it is done without the permission of the rightful owner. Theft isn't "less bad" if what is stolen is not precious.
Are they sure it wasn't the spooky commercials they were playing on late night TV a while back? Those things still give me the creeps.
They can't be as bad as Rhapsody's crack-addled spokesman. He sounds like he's torn between channeling the OxyClean guy and wandering off the stage to shoot himself. If you haven't seen it, it's on Real's press page.
It may be illegal to download TV episodes with BT, but the harm done is no worse than skipping the commercials on a DVR or walking out of the room during commercials.
Except in both of those cases, you're actually paying for the content.
If you leave the commercials in the BT files, there's no harm done to advertisers at all
Indeed, if something that never happens were to happen, things might be different.
"Free" isn't, if you have to spend a lot of time to get "free" free.
This is why I said you can't compete with free on price alone. And the reason I did so is because you said: "The question whether they will buy or copy content can only be answered by its price."
That piracy tends to be more time consuming than buying is an artificial limitation created so that piracy will be more expensive: it is illegal, and therefore cannot be conducted as openly as legal exchanges. As I said before, since the cost is always zero, it is impossible to compete without artificial limitations like copyright law and DRM.
Copyright exists to promote the creation of new art.
Um, yeah. And how does it do that? By granting the creator exclusive rights over his creation. You can't rely on the difficulty of copying the medium to protect the content. That would be saying that it's ok for anybody with a printing press to copy your book. Now, it's well and good if you the creator say it's ok, but the point is that you are given that right as the creator. Without that right, you would quickly be undercut by competitors and have little chance to profit from your work, and thus little incentive to create more. Such piracy is only limited by the cost to copy (i.e. you still have to own a printing press), but that is zero for digital media. Even so, the grandparent post was suggesting that digital piracy could be defeated by lowering prices, which is obviously untrue. The only way to allow the original creator to compete is to make it effectively "more expensive" (i.e. difficult) for the pirate through artificial restrictions such as copyright. Copyright makes it possible to compete with free. QED.
As for competing with free, look up the business case for selling bottled water.
That's a terrible example. Bottled water is all about differentiation and branding and creating the illusion that one water is markedly different from the other. This is nothing like what I was talking about: a scenario in which the product is openly exactly the same, but where the only difference in price. In that scenario, cheaper (free) is always going to be more attractive.
On a free market, people will pay whatever a good is worth to them. This "free market" I speak of can not be regulated by state-imposed monopolies like copyrights, or for that matter, patents because it then ceases to be free.
Uh, I hate to point this out to you, seeing as how you said it yourself, but: Copyright exists to promote the creation of new art. To do so it ensures that the market value of that art is artificially high. How else would it?
Also, you can cry about the loss of the "free market" all you want, but sooner or later you're going to have to realize that it never existed in the first place. The free market is an abstraction. It's an idealized point on one end of the spectrum. It is not a real thing.
Immaterial values can not be treated like physical goods and it's about time we stopped trying.
Nothing you've said leads to this conclusion. Furthermore, it's unclear what (if anything) this has to do with what's being talked about here.
Best summary. Evar.
I don't know why you linked to that. It agrees with what I've said far more than anything you've said. Additionally, I never said anything about the length of copyright, which is the point of that post. I am opposed to lengthy copyright terms myself, so I don't understand why you would think that I am not.
Now with digital items, the "media" distrabutors are trying to change the rules of ownership to situation #2 - you own it, but we still control it.
With few exceptions (which I will not defend), they aren't trying to change the rules. They're trying to enforce the ones that already exist. Surely you've heard by now that you never owned the music or movies or books you purchase. You own that copy, yes, but you don't own the content.
I should say that I take exception to some of the existing law, and some of what may become law, but that doesn't mean that I don't believe in intellectual property rights.
The real issue here is one of scarcity vs abundance. Which is more valuable, diamonds or air. Diamonds are scarce, they look pretty, but we could live without them.
Not the best example. The scarcity of diamonds is artificially created by a cartel.
With digital media, there is no longer the inate scarcity associated with physical items. The P2P networks have shown that where there is one copy, you have a million for practically zero cost.
The whole issue of control over digital media is that of trying to create an artifical scarcity, and to maintain an artifical price point on a digital copy.
You're still confusing the medium with the content. I don't have an authoritative knowledge of every DRM system out there, so I'll speak only about iTunes' FairPlay. I can make a million copies of a FairPlay file at zero cost, just as I can with any other file. There is no artificial scarcity there.
The only thing for which there is scarcity is the rights to the content, which are not in abundance in any format. Copyright is an artificial restriction, yes, but one which precedes digital media by a few hundred years. If you disagree with the idea of copyright, that's an entirely different issue.
Blogs aren't going away. We all know it. Let's skip that point.
The idealistic notion that blogs would change the world in fundamental ways is going away. Right on schedule, too.
We've had enough pretentious books and conferences, enough heavily funded bad business models, enough fads, and enough hipster popularity contests. The only people who are going to suffer are those who have had too much invested (emotionally, financially, whatever) in that idealism: People who started blogs just to be cool or seem informed or to make money. People who wrote books saying things that will sound really embarrassingly stupid in five or ten years. People who really believed they would get Howard Dean elected on a wave of energetic typing.
This is, I think, how it should be. It's hard not to get swept up in the Next Big World Changing Thing, even when we can see the cycle repeat itself every few years. So hard that I think it's a fundamental part of our social nature. We want so much to believe that we can only change the world if we are part of some movement, some entity greater than ourselves with more power to affect change than any other force in the world. Invariably that runs into the immovable object of our own individual nature.
Every time around, we as a society and we as individuals learn something. What will it be this time? Time will tell. Maybe it's this: That when given a soapbox and the whole world as an audience, most of us don't have a whole lot to say.
The Blog Era is over. Now we can all look forward to the demise of the "Web 2.0 Era".
Let's get one thing straight here. Downloading TV shows isn't "stealing". Is there a stack of TV shows that gets smaller when I download them?
No, and you're being obtuse to act as though that's what is meant. If you yourself acknowledge that it's illegal, I don't understand why you should chafe at my characterization of it as "stealing". Is there some other term you would prefer? Is "intellectual property theft" to contentious? Or how about simply "copyright violation"?
Furthermore, if I couldn't download the TV shows, I still wouldn't pay for cable.
And? You wouldn't have television at all, so what? All you're saying is that you don't want what is for sale. This doesn't give you any more right to obtain it for free. Have you never had to go without something you wanted?
Imagine for a moment that there were television downloads to your exact specifications available, but at a price, (say) ten times as high as the lower quality DRMed shows on iTunes today. So, $20 a show.
What would you do? BitTorrent would no longer be the only place you can get what you want. You'd get exactly the same content. The only difference would be whether or not you're willing to pay the price, and I hope that it's blindingly obvious that not paying would be screwing the creator.
Now, I also hope it's obvious that $20 is too damn much for a single episode of a TV show. So they give you some cheaper options: $10 for your choice of a low quality version with no DRM or a high-quality version with DRM. Hrm. That's not what you wanted. How about this: $5 for high quality and no DRM...but it's released six months after the air date. No, that won't do. How about...
Repeat ad infinitum.
Sooner or later, you'd have to accept that what you want is not for sale. Your options then are to change your estimation of value or do without. My point in the last comment is that what you're doing is a convenient way of ignoring this. You neither have to lower your expectations (and indeed, can raise them indefinitely) nor do without. As long as you're unconcerned with the legality of piracy, your claim that the entertainment industry could be making money off of you is empty, as they can't offer anything more to you than what you are already getting for free.
And nowhere did I say I had a "right" to download TV shows.
You didn't, I admit. However, I don't think it's such a far out inference as you seem unconcerned with the legality of what you're doing. Perhaps it would be better described as a "sense of entitlement".
You must enjoy very much getting to know people intimately based on a couple of paragraphs in a slashdot thread. Because evidently, you know my motivations behind everything.
You're mistaken. I only claim to know that you're using the exact arguments that have been wrong for several years now, and so any "you" in the preceding comment should be taken as a general "you". Likewise where the "right to download" is concerned -- you may not feel that way, but many others who share your argument do.
Would I even think of removing the locks from my car and hotwire it 'cause it's an inconvenience to carry those keys around? Of course not! Those keys protect my property! Yes, DRM also protects the property of the content provider. But unlike with me, my car and the bum (compared to the content provider, the content and me), the bum has NO right to use my car in whatever way. He did not pay for using it. I did pay to use the content.
In this bizarre rambling you managed to undermine your own argument. I'm quite impressed.
The locks on your car protect your property from theft. In doing so, they are also an inconvenience to you and anyone to whom you lend your car. Would you remove them? No. Why? Because then it could be easily stolen.
The DRM on my content protects my property from theft. In doing so, it is an inconvenience to you and anyone else to whom I license it. Would I remove it? No. Why? Because then it could be easily stolen.
It isn't because I am a cheapskate, but because this is the only place I can get what I want.
No, you're cheap. You say BitTorrent is the only place you can get high-quality DRM-free TV shows, but then where did they come from? Somewhere down the line, someone paid for what you are now stealing. Why aren't you paying for it? Because it's cheaper to invent a justification than to actually buy or not buy what is offered. It's a convenient position. No matter what is for sale, you can always raise your expectations without spending a cent.
You can talk all you want about how much money you would be spending, but it will always be cheaper for you to claim that you have a right to steal because your demand isn't being met.
The question whether they will buy or copy content can only be answered by its price. Make it affordable, make the value match the price and people will rather buy than copy.
This doesn't make any sense. Copying digital content will always be free, and thus impossible to compete with in terms of price alone. This is why copyright exists in the first place. The only ways to make copying something "more expensive", and thus give the content creators the ability to compete are to make it artificially difficult (watermarks, DRM) it to make it illegal.
The story they're trying to give you is "Samsung hired the brains behind the iPod", when really, the story is "Samsung hired a guy who founded the company that provided the OS on the early generation iPod, but who hasn't actually worked for Apple since 1994".
i.e., they want you to think that this means Samsung is going to kill the iPod, when really it just means they're desperate.
The iPod's interface is great, sure, but if it takes hiring this particular guy for them to come up with a better one, that's just sad. The only mention in the article is that the Z5's interface has "transparency effects". I'm sure that's going to make the difference.
If Vista doesn't ship with support for Blu-Ray, how is Dell going to sell these to people?
Windows XP doesn't even support DVD playback out of the box, yet people seem to get along just fine with manufacturer-supplied DVD codecs.
Do you think most iTMS buyers really understand this?
No, but it's their responsibility to. If you're trying to say that DRM is terrible (and you are), then you're going to have to give reasons why DRM, and not user ignorance, is terrible.
Legal fineprint exists for Cover-Your-Ass purposes, not consumer education.
Indeed, but I wouldn't call the clearly written screen detailing what you're allowed to do with iTunes tracks that appears when sign up for an account "fine print".
It's kind of hard to criticize a service without actually ever using it.
Actually, it's easier to criticize something without using it. Why face the possibility that you may be partially or completely wrong? You get to gallop your high horse through imaginary scenarios that have little or nothing to do with reality and then invite your audience to project them onto the real world.
It's a bit like drawing devil horns on a picture of someone and basing all of your arguments on that.