We have some third party code in our application from CodeProject. I just have to plug that site for what it's doing to teach especially Windows programmers in all disciplines, from offering useful UI controls and database API's down to assembly language stuff, and usually with licenses so little restrictive that they can often even be used commercially. For example, if you want a well provden library for managing configuration files, you don't need to spend hours reinventing the wheel -- it's most likely already there.
Hmm, if Google's encryption plans are lacking, how about a mountable GDrive in TrueCrypt, popping up as a partition with the traditional encryption methods of TrueCrypt?:-D
:-------D
OK, so that was last part was really unnecessary, but still...!
- About the HDCP/DRM Needing a whole DRM stack just to connect your screen is what I find the most abusive. It's MY display that I BOUGHT legally with MY OWN MONEY. It's MY graphic card that I BOUGHT legally with MY OWN MONEY. I have complete legal ownership of both these items. The protected video/audio pathways are not active if you don't play back DRM'ed material in Vista, so no worries unless you actually care for that junk. But then again, you'd have greater worries. For example, you would likely not even be able to play your media in the first place in e.g. Linux.
They snuck it in under the guise of improved security, when the real purpose is to stop people from making drivers to intercept DRMed data. For proof of this, try watching certain DRMed content in 32-bit Vista with an unsigned driver loaded - it won't let you. How come that the ONLY time you hear geeks want to support and watch DRM'ed content is in these kind of articles?
It's like all screws come loose in your heads and you forget everything about draconian regulations of your fair use rights as you forget about those when you wish to bash Vista for something.
Do you really watch DRM'ed movies? Are you that nutty?
Let's assume you're on Linux too. A fair assumption on Slashdot. Then you can't even play DRM'ed content. Even if you wanted to, you can't even see the "restricted" version Vista presents to you. You'll get nothing unless you had DRM support in Linux installed. But Linux can play unprotected content, including HD material, perfectly. Anywhere. And so can Vista.
Just because you have yet to run into Vista's DRM or that you don't deal much with A/V content that would cause you to notice limitations when using Vista doesn't mean that it isn't a significant issue for many people. It's only an issue if you choose to support DRM though. If you willingly choose to restrain yourself by putting up with it. Vista doesn't restrict playing unprotected material, not even if it's HD quality stuff you play back on your HDTV set. And I for one don't hoard DRM junk in masses, and I can never understand why someone would willingly do so. They'll never own their rights to use their media according to fair use laws, but they do pay money for it? That's the mind boggling part to me, not Vista's feature set.
I have movies which I ripped myself from DVD's I own. They are in.avi format. I can play them everywhere, on Linux, on Mac, on Windows 2000, Windows XP.
Windows Vista says there's a byte error in the file and refuses to play the movie. This is Windows Media Player, same version as the version on XP.
Vista DRM is a little over-zealous. Or maybe Vista itself just is incapable of playing movies. Funny, all movies I get from The Pirate Bay play just fine...? You're just not a 1337 enough ripper to have your stuff work everywhere - admit it!
Seriously, I don't know what's going on. If you didn't DRM protect your file, it should be playable. If not, it sounds like some weird codec issue. I've had no AVI file pop up with your mysterious "byte error", neither have I heard anyone else get it.
It would kind of make sense for them to to try get larger sums of money if they knew how many had downloaded the music. Then it's reasonable to think they could demand quite a bit more than 99 cents per song at least. But it's just that I rarely hear them coming forward with such numbers, and I'm not sure if they even know them, or if they just eavesdrop on the file sharer.
Which do you prefer? Tasers. The problem is that tasers are also used on people that refuse to sign a ticket or otherwise aren't a direct threat to the cop's health. Do you prefer that too? It seems you're dodging the issue here and giving a poor example where tasers are indeed useful. Something still needs to be done about the guidelines for them. If it's just that cops don't follow them, something still needs to be done. Not really about the cops not following them, because then it's already too late and the injuries may already have happened.
Was it the Midi-chlorians, Jar Jar Binks, the actors? Midichlorians were less of a big deal for me, despite trivializing the Force like it did, but I think both the Jar-Jar and the acting sucked pretty much in the prequels. Especially that of a few key actors like Hayden Christensen and Evan McGregor. I was never really a big fan of those in the prequels.
But the original trilogy isn't flawless either, with the aformentioned ewoks that can maybe seen as a part of how George Lucas lost grasp of his universe, at least to an external viewer.
When you're a socialist country, you don't even think of advertising. Argh! The US usage of "socialism" in derogatory form vs the more European term... My country (Sweden) has a long tradition of "socialist" governments and I'm happy for it. Not that I saw an effect on advertisement though.:-p You could gladly have some of ours.;-) Where I wouldn't like to go is to communism.
That's a scientific hypothesis -- this sounds more conclusive from lack observations of dust around nearby stars.
It surprised me they can detect and not detect dust around nearby stars, but still have a hard time doing the same with Earth-sized objects, but maybe the "dimming" of their light is noticeable enough, or should be according to the theories, and the observations don't follow...
Hmm, looks like I misread -- it actually doesn't include "Office", but is just "Live Documents". It would be funny if MS introduced "Windows Live Documents" though, in their Windows Live line of online services.:-p
OfficeLive Documents, also not falling under the trademark name exception where he's using the naming in a different field of business? Should be interesting to see what Microsoft's reaction will be here, if they see it's enough of a threat here to have their lawyers attack him. It's not identical by sharing the Windows Live part of Windows Live, but it looks quite intentionally used to sound confusingly similar to a Microsoft product to me.
Why help any of them? The US data is FREE anyway... 99% of the people who pay for the data just dont realize that. ??? Who's talking about purchasing online maps here?
This is also especially surprising given that MS has earlier claimed that there is a need to adapt to a new era with competition from companies like Google, which release interconnecting online "modules" and being able to serve these in a much more agile fashion than compiling a behemoth with thousands of engineers behind it.
Not that I can really hear of many people actually being big users of all that, especially not among their largest ones -- Windows Live Search, and Windows Live Spaces. Windows Live Mail, sure, but that's just because it was Hotmail, and I think less due to any success here. Actually, when looking at that list, I haven't even heard of a lot of those. MS seem to be doing a terrible job at marketing all those services and making them form a coherent picture that users can orient themselves in. Right now it just looks like a disconnected cloud of services.
Truth is, while holding off Vista might be an idea, what guarantee is there that Windows 7 will be any better. In many ways Vista seems to be a symptom of a failed development process, bad priorities and not understanding their users. When you have five years to developer a product and this is what you get, something is wrong.
Vista is not a total failure, but its not a success either. There are no guarantees, but Windows 7 could be more of a success for the reasons you state above. It's not just speculation that something *did* go wrong during Longhorn/Vista development. The whole project was "reset" a few years into it when they were forced to re-think the core concepts of the OS and among other things, scrap the foundation of many parts on.NET and the WinFS thing. Windows Vista had 3 years of uninterrupted development time. This has not happened to other MS operating systems from what I can recall, which gives one reason to believe it's not a common occurence and that Vista was a development-wise black sheep. MS had to start rushing things in the end because it was taking so mind blowingly long to develop it with the problems they ran into.
Jim Allchin himself (Vista development lead) said the Longhorn development was "crashing into the ground", and we can pretty much see the product of that. The only thing MS could do was to make an as reasonable excuse as possible for the huge 5 years of development time.
http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2004/11/the_mpaa_threat.html
Pursuant to the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C Section 504(c)), statutory damages can be as much as $30,000 per motion picture, and up to $150,000 per motion picture if the infringement is willful. OK, let's assume one *wanted* to get those movies for a "willful infringement". I think that's a fair assumption.:-)
$572,400,000! Ka-ching!
(it's still not on par with the AllofMP3.com lawsuit though [I wonder what happened with that one btw?])
Slashdot Mirror
We have some third party code in our application from CodeProject. I just have to plug that site for what it's doing to teach especially Windows programmers in all disciplines, from offering useful UI controls and database API's down to assembly language stuff, and usually with licenses so little restrictive that they can often even be used commercially. For example, if you want a well provden library for managing configuration files, you don't need to spend hours reinventing the wheel -- it's most likely already there.
OK, so that was last part was really unnecessary, but still...!
Needing a whole DRM stack just to connect your screen is what I find the most abusive.
It's MY display that I BOUGHT legally with MY OWN MONEY.
It's MY graphic card that I BOUGHT legally with MY OWN MONEY.
I have complete legal ownership of both these items. The protected video/audio pathways are not active if you don't play back DRM'ed material in Vista, so no worries unless you actually care for that junk. But then again, you'd have greater worries. For example, you would likely not even be able to play your media in the first place in e.g. Linux.
It's like all screws come loose in your heads and you forget everything about draconian regulations of your fair use rights as you forget about those when you wish to bash Vista for something.
Do you really watch DRM'ed movies? Are you that nutty?
Let's assume you're on Linux too. A fair assumption on Slashdot. Then you can't even play DRM'ed content. Even if you wanted to, you can't even see the "restricted" version Vista presents to you. You'll get nothing unless you had DRM support in Linux installed. But Linux can play unprotected content, including HD material, perfectly. Anywhere. And so can Vista.
Windows Vista says there's a byte error in the file and refuses to play the movie. This is Windows Media Player, same version as the version on XP.
Vista DRM is a little over-zealous. Or maybe Vista itself just is incapable of playing movies. Funny, all movies I get from The Pirate Bay play just fine...?
You're just not a 1337 enough ripper to have your stuff work everywhere - admit it!
Seriously, I don't know what's going on. If you didn't DRM protect your file, it should be playable. If not, it sounds like some weird codec issue. I've had no AVI file pop up with your mysterious "byte error", neither have I heard anyone else get it.
Also, an informed article on this subject:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=429#
Don't pull those jokes, you insensitive clod. Obviously he's just a trekkie like most of us here are anyway.
It would kind of make sense for them to to try get larger sums of money if they knew how many had downloaded the music. Then it's reasonable to think they could demand quite a bit more than 99 cents per song at least. But it's just that I rarely hear them coming forward with such numbers, and I'm not sure if they even know them, or if they just eavesdrop on the file sharer.
If you're the target of the BSA, I don't feel as much remorse...
If you don't have the money to pay for the software your business use, you shouldn't use the software in the first place.
So this is the question at stake here.
-1: Woosh.
Then we would have just as likely have increased its lifespan. :-p
But obviously, it's more fun to focus on the more sensationalist, fearmongering, idea.
But the original trilogy isn't flawless either, with the aformentioned ewoks that can maybe seen as a part of how George Lucas lost grasp of his universe, at least to an external viewer.
That's a scientific hypothesis -- this sounds more conclusive from lack observations of dust around nearby stars.
It surprised me they can detect and not detect dust around nearby stars, but still have a hard time doing the same with Earth-sized objects, but maybe the "dimming" of their light is noticeable enough, or should be according to the theories, and the observations don't follow...
Hmm, looks like I misread -- it actually doesn't include "Office", but is just "Live Documents". It would be funny if MS introduced "Windows Live Documents" though, in their Windows Live line of online services. :-p
Office Live Documents, also not falling under the trademark name exception where he's using the naming in a different field of business? Should be interesting to see what Microsoft's reaction will be here, if they see it's enough of a threat here to have their lawyers attack him. It's not identical by sharing the Windows Live part of Windows Live, but it looks quite intentionally used to sound confusingly similar to a Microsoft product to me.
Just screenshot a map and add a dot where you live in MS Paint? :-)
Imagine when they didn't have the web and online maps.
How did they do then? Communicate over phone? Send a map by postal mail? OMG
But those leaks are up to the affected extension authors to fix.
Yep, or we could simply redefine the length of a second.
Hmm... Why don't we just do that? If we have to adjust things for the definition making things be slightly off on an astronomical scale all the time.
That's a poor comparison because that's not why some want to "hold it off" though.
;-)
We already solve this soon today, so we aren't being stupid like that.
See also the article for this reason to this proposal.
This is also especially surprising given that MS has earlier claimed that there is a need to adapt to a new era with competition from companies like Google, which release interconnecting online "modules" and being able to serve these in a much more agile fashion than compiling a behemoth with thousands of engineers behind it.
Well, I guess that's where Windows Live initiative come into the picture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live
Not that I can really hear of many people actually being big users of all that, especially not among their largest ones -- Windows Live Search, and Windows Live Spaces. Windows Live Mail, sure, but that's just because it was Hotmail, and I think less due to any success here. Actually, when looking at that list, I haven't even heard of a lot of those. MS seem to be doing a terrible job at marketing all those services and making them form a coherent picture that users can orient themselves in. Right now it just looks like a disconnected cloud of services.
Vista is not a total failure, but its not a success either. There are no guarantees, but Windows 7 could be more of a success for the reasons you state above. It's not just speculation that something *did* go wrong during Longhorn/Vista development. The whole project was "reset" a few years into it when they were forced to re-think the core concepts of the OS and among other things, scrap the foundation of many parts on
See also this:
http://net127.com/2005/09/24/battling-google-microsoft-changes-how-it-builds-software/
Jim Allchin himself (Vista development lead) said the Longhorn development was "crashing into the ground", and we can pretty much see the product of that. The only thing MS could do was to make an as reasonable excuse as possible for the huge 5 years of development time.
$572,400,000! Ka-ching!
(it's still not on par with the AllofMP3.com lawsuit though [I wonder what happened with that one btw?])