It's not a personal thing of "is your boss a nice guy". If AOLTW bought RH, Cox would most likely be working under the same people he is now. The difference would be the parent corporation. All this discussion about nice-bosses/mean-bosses is silly... The point here is that the man doesn't want to work for AOL. And, being who he is, he can afford to make statements like that. If the man needed a job, I'm sure he could snap his fingers and get many other linux-friendly companies to line up and make offers.
This issue has nothing to do with copyright laws.
It's about freedom of speech.
(and about those little numbers and barcodes you see at the center of a cd)
The original parent said " a new compressed audio format (which the average consumer can't tell from MP3)". Yes, new players could be (and already are being) developed to play files encoded with some sort of DRM scheme. But consumers will most certainly notice it's a new format when their old several-hundred-dollar player won't play the new file. And they'll probably feel pretty bitter, sort of like when they buy an audio cd only to discover it's actually a sort-of-audio-cd that doesn't play in their dvd player (or macintosh, or playstation, or whatever).
No matter what, copy protection fucks the consumer. And there is no way to quietly slip it by them, which is why Universal has instructed retailers to accept returns cd's in this new broke-ass format.
I saw an episode of the Soprano's the other day where young mobster Christopher tells his girlfriend how the music bussiness used to be mafia controlled.
The sad thing is, it still is. It's just a different mafia. The NEW mafia is so powerfull that they can put a 100% tarrif on exports from a poor country that doesn't want to play the game. Read all about it.
Can anyone say, with a straight face, that it's in the consumer's interest to have every cdr ever burned encoded with the serial number of the cd burner, as well as the plant where the blank was manufactured? Do most people who burn cd's even realize this is the case?
I think the intent is that they have a new compressed audio format (which the average consumer can't tell from MP3) I think the average consumer will notice it's not an mp3 when their old mp3 player won't play it.
and now I gotta respnd to that sig...;-)
Software isn't software without source code. -- NASA
Sounds good on paper, but if the binary products that ship without source aren't software, what are they?
Can I listen to the songs from this CD on my MP3 player?
As with all computer software there may be incompatibilities with some
computer systems.
The CD is designed to play on PCs. The current version of the copy-protection
technology does not allow you to copy files from the CD into MP3 format.
UMG is currently making every effort possible to upgrade our available technology
to add new features and increase playability.
Thats where they lost me. The above (from the linked site) implies that mp3 compatibility is on their todo list. What the fuck would be the point of copy protection if you could still rip to mp3? I really doubt "increased playability" with this technology will ever be extended to mp3, so I can only assume the above statement is there to mislead people. Does anyone know if there are any sort of consumer protection laws that might apply here?
Kind of funny that the napster guy predicted gnutellas death oh-so-long-ago, and now napster is the bad joke that wont die and gnutella is still going strong. Who's laughing now, Mr. Ritter?
Seriously, for $1 or $2 per song I'd probably spend a fortune. ... BUT Nobody who is putting together one of these systems is interested in that. They want to put a bazillion restrictions on me.
I see you're point, but I've got to disagree. I've got only so much money to spend on expanding my music collection, and, considering I'll always be able to get mp3s for free, all of that money goes to buying CDs. Why would I buy an mp3 file, even an unrestricted mp3 file, when I can get it for free?
CDs are tangible shiny objects. When people buy a CD by an artist they like, they get the warm+fuzzy commerce experience. When people buy mp3s they can't get that feeling. They've already tasted the sweet honey of free mp3s, so paying for them just seems backwards.
Mp3 isn't going to replace the CD. I'm quite certain that I buy more CDs now than I did before the mp3 revolution. I've got more music (in mp3 format) than I could ever possibly afford to own on CD, and I only pay for CDs of the stuff I really really like. The thing is, as a direct result of the mp3 revolution, the pool of music that I really really like has grown significantly. It's not rocket science; if people are exposed to more music they'll probably buy more music.
Buying mp3s will never work. The record companies need to back the fuck away and realize that the mp3 thing is already helping them, and they should leave a good thing alone.
Or put another way, it's a lot like the Apple "Ours are just good enough but look really cool!" technique.
So that explains it! People must be buying macs just because they look cool!
I'm sure technological innovations and an all around better computing experience have absolutely nothing to do with it.
--
And if you believe that, I've got a pay-per-download digital music service to sell you...
Content-wise, there's next to nothing. There's a whole load of tracks from
Vitaminic, which is being served into the service by a dozen, maybe more, official
Vitaminic computers. Of course this won't cut it in the paying Napster service,
because anyone can go to Vitaminic's site and find the same songs in MP3 for
free.
why would anybody use one of their 50 monthly download slots to get a.nap file of a song they could just get a legal free mp3 of on the web?
you gotta wonder if obvious questions like these ever came up in the planning stage of this new pay-service. Are they counting on novices not knowing any better?
Seriously, does anybody expect this pay-for-mp3's thing to take off?
Napster now is like a little animal that got hit by a car but refuses to die. There's blood everywhere, and it just keeps flopping around prolonging the inevitable. They're only bringing shame to themselves at this point. It's pathetic.
OK, there's a $799 imac alternative and it ships with linux. Why is there no mention of linux in the little/. blurb? It seems to me that the "linux factor" is the most interesting part of the story, especially to the slashdot audience!
Anyway, the thing sure is priced right, and it runs linux, but I'm still weary of a company who so blatantly rips off other people's hardware designs. Can anyone here look at their picture of the thing and tell me it doesn't look a whole lot like an imac? And didn't apple already sue these people for making a windows-based imac knockoff?
I'm pleased there's a sub $1k consumer pc shipping with linux; I just wish it was coming from a more reputable company.
I don't like seeing x10 ads any more than the next guy, so I set their cookie to block them, but it's not because there's "scantily-clad" women in them.
I'm sure you're email didn't get deleted along with all the "ads are annoying" emails they get every day; it was probably instead deleted along with all the conservative stick-up-the-ass emails they ALSO get everday.
When I saw this on the/. front page, there wern't any comments yet. I immediately clicked the link to yahoo, and I could find no ads presented as news headlines. I'm quite certain yahoo couldn't have pulled it THAT fast.
Half the headline links DO point to non-yahoo sites, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of those sites use those newfangled interrupting ads that make you wait 10 seconds or some crap before the actual page appears. I've seen ads like that break on more than one occasion, and I wouldn't be surprised if thats what caused the fuss.
This technology is still at the "neat trick" stage, at least from my point of view. Hundreds of dollars for 1gb? Riight. I'll stick with more traditional media for now, and hope that in a couple years from now IBM will be making microdrives that I can actually store a decent number of mp3s on.
I think you're wrong about freedom of speech requiring two consenting people, but that's not the point anyway. I never mentioned freedom of speech. We're talking about government regulation on the internet, something that most everybody here is (usually) opposed to.
Until it comes to spam. Then people's principal's go right out the window, and everybody is pro-silly-lawsuits.
Think about it for a minute, and once you get over the novelty of "hehehe those spammers had to pay $500 to some guy in washington" you might just realize that this is a preposterous abuse of our (already very abused) legal system.
(yes, I know this article is about a CA law, but the washington spam rulings are still relavent)
I'd also like to see a legal procecution kit for this. Not all of us have the money to pay an attorney to procecute someone under this statute. If someone, like the EFF, could put together a list of filings or whatnot, individuals could do all the court paperwork themselves.
If anything, the EFF would probably take the spammers side on this one. They support electonric freedom, not government tyranny. And, like it or not, anti-spam laws are in the same catagory as the DMCA and SSCA and all those other badies. They LIMIT freedom. The EFF's function is to oppose stupid crap like this.
If the EFF spent time and resources supporting frivilous lawsuits against spammers, they'd lose a lot of members.
I agree, spam is bad. Nobody likes spam. But it certainly isn't such a problem that we should throw away what little freedom we have left so people can clog up our courts with more stupid lawsuits.
I fully agree. I hate spam too, but not enough to want precident-setting laws passed that ultimately hurt the freedom of the net more than the con artists sending spam. Spam, like so many other things, cannot and will not be stopped by silly government action.
Simmilar logic applies to the microsoft case; sure, they're the bad guys, and it's fun to see them get hurt. But government intervention is a BAD thing, people! We'll never make any progress if we hang on to this double standard of "ra-ra uncle sam when he's hurting the bad guys but fuck the govt when they're after us".
Re:Movies and Pictures mirrored
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
OK that lasted less than a couple minutes...
I didn't realize geocities limited bandwidth THAT much. Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
I spent a while fooling with various IPTables scripts, but finnally settled on the gpl'd shorewall package.
It handles all my iptables configuration, including NAT with port forwarding.
Well, what I don't understand is why they would buy RedHat when you can download the ISOs for free. ;)
Remeber, they're connected to the net though AOL.
You ever try downloading something big over AOL?
It's not a personal thing of "is your boss a nice guy". If AOLTW bought RH, Cox would most likely be working under the same people he is now. The difference would be the parent corporation. All this discussion about nice-bosses/mean-bosses is silly... The point here is that the man doesn't want to work for AOL. And, being who he is, he can afford to make statements like that. If the man needed a job, I'm sure he could snap his fingers and get many other linux-friendly companies to line up and make offers.
I thought concorde's waited until they were offshore to break the sound barrier.
Are concorde's louder when flying at "normal" speeds?
This issue has nothing to do with copyright laws.
It's about freedom of speech.
(and about those little numbers and barcodes you see at the center of a cd)
The original parent said " a new compressed audio format (which the average consumer can't tell from MP3)". Yes, new players could be (and already are being) developed to play files encoded with some sort of DRM scheme. But consumers will most certainly notice it's a new format when their old several-hundred-dollar player won't play the new file. And they'll probably feel pretty bitter, sort of like when they buy an audio cd only to discover it's actually a sort-of-audio-cd that doesn't play in their dvd player (or macintosh, or playstation, or whatever).
No matter what, copy protection fucks the consumer. And there is no way to quietly slip it by them, which is why Universal has instructed retailers to accept returns cd's in this new broke-ass format.
I saw an episode of the Soprano's the other day where young mobster Christopher tells his girlfriend how the music bussiness used to be mafia controlled.
The sad thing is, it still is. It's just a different mafia. The NEW mafia is so powerfull that they can put a 100% tarrif on exports from a poor country that doesn't want to play the game. Read all about it.
Can anyone say, with a straight face, that it's in the consumer's interest to have every cdr ever burned encoded with the serial number of the cd burner, as well as the plant where the blank was manufactured? Do most people who burn cd's even realize this is the case?
Sorry if I'm getting a tad offtopic.
I think the intent is that they have a new compressed audio format (which the average consumer can't tell from MP3)
;-)
I think the average consumer will notice it's not an mp3 when their old mp3 player won't play it.
and now I gotta respnd to that sig...
Software isn't software without source code. -- NASA
Sounds good on paper, but if the binary products that ship without source aren't software, what are they?
Can I listen to the songs from this CD on my MP3 player?
As with all computer software there may be incompatibilities with some
computer systems.
The CD is designed to play on PCs. The current version of the copy-protection
technology does not allow you to copy files from the CD into MP3 format.
UMG is currently making every effort possible to upgrade our available technology
to add new features and increase playability.
Thats where they lost me. The above (from the linked site) implies that mp3 compatibility is on their todo list. What the fuck would be the point of copy protection if you could still rip to mp3? I really doubt "increased playability" with this technology will ever be extended to mp3, so I can only assume the above statement is there to mislead people. Does anyone know if there are any sort of consumer protection laws that might apply here?
Kind of funny that the napster guy predicted gnutellas death oh-so-long-ago, and now napster is the bad joke that wont die and gnutella is still going strong. Who's laughing now, Mr. Ritter?
Seriously, for $1 or $2 per song I'd probably spend a fortune.
...
BUT Nobody who is putting together one of these systems is interested in that. They want to put a bazillion restrictions on me.
I see you're point, but I've got to disagree. I've got only so much money to spend on expanding my music collection, and, considering I'll always be able to get mp3s for free, all of that money goes to buying CDs. Why would I buy an mp3 file, even an unrestricted mp3 file, when I can get it for free?
CDs are tangible shiny objects. When people buy a CD by an artist they like, they get the warm+fuzzy commerce experience. When people buy mp3s they can't get that feeling. They've already tasted the sweet honey of free mp3s, so paying for them just seems backwards.
Mp3 isn't going to replace the CD. I'm quite certain that I buy more CDs now than I did before the mp3 revolution. I've got more music (in mp3 format) than I could ever possibly afford to own on CD, and I only pay for CDs of the stuff I really really like. The thing is, as a direct result of the mp3 revolution, the pool of music that I really really like has grown significantly. It's not rocket science; if people are exposed to more music they'll probably buy more music.
Buying mp3s will never work. The record companies need to back the fuck away and realize that the mp3 thing is already helping them, and they should leave a good thing alone.
Or put another way, it's a lot like the Apple "Ours are just good enough but look really cool!" technique.
So that explains it! People must be buying macs just because they look cool!
I'm sure technological innovations and an all around better computing experience have absolutely nothing to do with it.
--
And if you believe that, I've got a pay-per-download digital music service to sell you...
Content-wise, there's next to nothing. There's a whole load of tracks from
.nap file of a song they could just get a legal free mp3 of on the web?
Vitaminic, which is being served into the service by a dozen, maybe more, official
Vitaminic computers. Of course this won't cut it in the paying Napster service,
because anyone can go to Vitaminic's site and find the same songs in MP3 for
free.
why would anybody use one of their 50 monthly download slots to get a
you gotta wonder if obvious questions like these ever came up in the planning stage of this new pay-service. Are they counting on novices not knowing any better?
Seriously, does anybody expect this pay-for-mp3's thing to take off?
Napster now is like a little animal that got hit by a car but refuses to die. There's blood everywhere, and it just keeps flopping around prolonging the inevitable. They're only bringing shame to themselves at this point. It's pathetic.
Could they just hurry up and die already?
Just when we were starting to like them for that whole red-book thing...
OK, there's a $799 imac alternative and it ships with linux. Why is there no mention of linux in the little /. blurb? It seems to me that the "linux factor" is the most interesting part of the story, especially to the slashdot audience!
Anyway, the thing sure is priced right, and it runs linux, but I'm still weary of a company who so blatantly rips off other people's hardware designs. Can anyone here look at their picture of the thing and tell me it doesn't look a whole lot like an imac? And didn't apple already sue these people for making a windows-based imac knockoff?
I'm pleased there's a sub $1k consumer pc shipping with linux; I just wish it was coming from a more reputable company.
Now, call me a prude if you must
You're a prude.
You got a problem with half dressed women?
I don't like seeing x10 ads any more than the next guy, so I set their cookie to block them, but it's not because there's "scantily-clad" women in them.
I'm sure you're email didn't get deleted along with all the "ads are annoying" emails they get every day; it was probably instead deleted along with all the conservative stick-up-the-ass emails they ALSO get everday.
Or maybe taco got gator installed on his windows box and just doesn't know it yet. ;-)
(hey guys it's a JOKE. Not flamebait. Get a sense of humor!)
When I saw this on the /. front page, there wern't any comments yet. I immediately clicked the link to yahoo, and I could find no ads presented as news headlines. I'm quite certain yahoo couldn't have pulled it THAT fast.
Half the headline links DO point to non-yahoo sites, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of those sites use those newfangled interrupting ads that make you wait 10 seconds or some crap before the actual page appears. I've seen ads like that break on more than one occasion, and I wouldn't be surprised if thats what caused the fuss.
As of right now,
http://www.timecanada.com/ redirects to www.time.com/time/
but the original story remains online at
http://www.timecanada.com/index.adp. Weird.
I've still got my fingers crossed that there's more than just new imacs coming in 8 hours and 45 minutes...
I think it's quite likely thats exactly what happened.
This technology is still at the "neat trick" stage, at least from my point of view. Hundreds of dollars for 1gb? Riight. I'll stick with more traditional media for now, and hope that in a couple years from now IBM will be making microdrives that I can actually store a decent number of mp3s on.
I think you're wrong about freedom of speech requiring two consenting people, but that's not the point anyway. I never mentioned freedom of speech. We're talking about government regulation on the internet, something that most everybody here is (usually) opposed to.
Until it comes to spam. Then people's principal's go right out the window, and everybody is pro-silly-lawsuits.
Think about it for a minute, and once you get over the novelty of "hehehe those spammers had to pay $500 to some guy in washington" you might just realize that this is a preposterous abuse of our (already very abused) legal system.
(yes, I know this article is about a CA law, but the washington spam rulings are still relavent)
I'd also like to see a legal procecution kit for this. Not all of us have the money to pay an attorney to procecute someone under this statute. If someone, like the EFF, could put together a list of filings or whatnot, individuals could do all the court paperwork themselves.
If anything, the EFF would probably take the spammers side on this one. They support electonric freedom, not government tyranny. And, like it or not, anti-spam laws are in the same catagory as the DMCA and SSCA and all those other badies. They LIMIT freedom. The EFF's function is to oppose stupid crap like this.
If the EFF spent time and resources supporting frivilous lawsuits against spammers, they'd lose a lot of members.
I agree, spam is bad. Nobody likes spam. But it certainly isn't such a problem that we should throw away what little freedom we have left so people can clog up our courts with more stupid lawsuits.
I fully agree. I hate spam too, but not enough to want precident-setting laws passed that ultimately hurt the freedom of the net more than the con artists sending spam. Spam, like so many other things, cannot and will not be stopped by silly government action.
Simmilar logic applies to the microsoft case; sure, they're the bad guys, and it's fun to see them get hurt. But government intervention is a BAD thing, people! We'll never make any progress if we hang on to this double standard of "ra-ra uncle sam when he's hurting the bad guys but fuck the govt when they're after us".
OK that lasted less than a couple minutes...
I didn't realize geocities limited bandwidth THAT much. Sorry.