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Orwellian Tech Support
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Chilling, but not really Orwellian. It's more Heller-esque.
In an Orwellian world, you're damned no matter what. In a Heller-esque world, you're only damned so far as you follow the written rules -- if you trump those and follow the ACTUAL rules, you can succeed quite well. Loni is a Milo Minderbinder.
You don't HAVE to have every Dylan show, you know. A lot of them have crummy sound, a tired band, or a boring setlist. Many of the best ones are already available in remastered versions...and some of these are on itunes. There are also a handful of tracks from his set at Carnegie Hall in 1964 that claim to be exclusive to iTunes. They're certainly better than my nth generation tapes, though sadly none of his duets with Joan Baez are on the service.
Just because you design a device doesn't mean you want to build it. Ford makes several concept cars every year at a cost of millions, very few of which make it to market.
In business, it's all about being prepared. When the music scene blows up, they wanted to have an option and not be sitting in development. The scene has blown up, and the explosion came with an Apple logo on it. Making a compatible device was probably prohibitively expensive, or prohibitively risky. So they thanked the iPac music developers very much and made a deal with Apple. Seems like a better idea to me than putting millions of bucks into releasing a subpar unit.
Uh, Napster, LLC, is gone. Roxio just bought their assets, including the name. They combined that with PressPlay, a stupid music service that had at least 2 shitty incarnations before coming out as the new Napster 2.0.
IANAL, but if a company breaks the law and then goes chapter 11, you can't be held accountable for their actions if you buy their liquidated assets. I mean, if I buy one of those fancy, meshy office chairs from the Enron yard sale, you couldn't sue me for sitting in it. Roxio is sitting on the Napster name.
Since HP sells exclusively Windows products, I doubt DRM, WMA or cross-platform compatibility mattered a pair of fettered dingo's kidneys to the board room. I guarantee having an offer from Time Magazine's Inventor of the Year or whatever, the high profile company with the coolest product, the ones who did it FIRST and MOST VISIBLY, meant a lot more.
It was a matter of "what the consumers seem to think is best" vs "a high risk untested service from a start up whose only merit is name recognition." They went with the company that has the better chance of being there next year...and the one with $5bil to work with.
Well, yes and no. Tracks you download from iTunes have DRM, but AAC in and of itself is an industry support subset of the MPEG-4 standard. Think.MP4...which is what some people have been calling it (in fact that was the default extension from my non-Apple AAC transcoder until iTunes came out, now it's.m4a).
WMV, on the other hand, is exclusively owned by Microsoft. It's also available in non-DRM flavors, but is only licensed for use on platforms that have been granted MS' okay. Which are few, basically just Windows and OSX, maybe X-box.
You need licenses for either format, but AAC licenses are available to anybody with available reference implementations. And I think -- think, mind you -- that AAC doesn't require a license for free-as-in-price encoders/decoders written by hobbiests. At the very least, you can get free decoders at www.audiocoding.com, open source of course.
So yeah, AAC's not open like Vorbis. But unlike Vorbis, the industry invested a lot of research into it and actually wants to use it. As such, AAC is heading for the same popularity as MP3, whereas WMV is looking more like, well, ASX. Vorbis will eternally be a hacker's tool because it doesn't have the visibility nor the clout of AAC in the industry...but as it's going to be eternally tweaked, it will no doubt continue to sound better at comparative bitrates.
I'm very proud of your ability to list things, but I'm afraid your categorization skills need a bit work. I can suggest some reputable kindergardens.
You listed many prevntative maintenance items, and many wear items. But not one item that needed to be "tuned up."
Changing oil or replacing a fuel filter is not a tune up. A tune up is something you do as often as possible to keep your car running at maximum efficiency. Preventative maintenance does not benefit from a shortened schedule, so you may as well do it as read in the book.
I mention this, because a lot of people (my father in law being one of them) follow their schedules and yet still take their cars in to be "tuned up." His mechanic is very happy to charge him $200 to replace a few brand fuel filters.
Older cars had three schedules: preventative maintenace, oil change schedules, AND tune up schedules. They are three separate types of maintenance. The last type is not necessary, I never claimed you could run a car 200k miles+ on a single fuel filter. My Beetle has over 300k miles on it and most of that is due to a diligent schedule including a tune up every other weekend in the summer.
Seems to me you're just adding a bigger exhaust to a perfectly fine automobile. If I wanted to use a mouse, highlight text and search and replace to multiple buffers, I wouldn't be using Pine in the first place. I'd be using a graphical tool.
Adding features you ripped off of other products doesn't make your product better. It just makes it more complicated. Microsoft Word?
Holy shit. That is the best article I have ever seen on the subject. I need the action lowered anyway...maybe I'll have them replace the whole damn saddle.
To use an inferior clone of a product just because it is "free" is to shackle one's self with ideology.
I might use a "free" mailreader if it were significantly better (and I do use Thunderbird on Windows). But Pine is a great program, and is a product of education and research, things which I consider more important than the freedom to poke around in source code.
FUCK no. The GPL allows the author to keep his original copyright and resell the work under any license he pleases. This is why many products like MySQL have an available "Commercial License" for people who want to use the code, but don't want to have to release their proprietary works to the community.
If you're using such software, and you don't release your source, the legal ramifications are that you either have to release the source, or buy a license so you don't have to.
The "donations" may well have been in exchange for a license...or at the very least, for assurance from the original copyright holder that he will not pursue further legal action. It's up to him to prosecute, after all.
Word? I've had guitars whose bridges were designed such that, after a certain amount of wear on the second string, you just couldn't tune it any more. It would always be flat or sharp. Drove me up the wall, I'd end a passage on a ringing string and it would sound sour.
My new guitar has that tendency. It's very sensitive to string wear, and the sound starts to give out even before the strings darken. So what I've done is create a sort of string "hand me down" program. I buy my Martin SP Bronzes, play them until I can't tune right anymore, then sell them to my brother for about half price. His Alvarez doesn't hold a tune anyway, so he gets mostly fresh strings on the cheap, and I finance my axe's voracious appetite for strings.
I like Pico. It doesn't bother me with "options"...and unlike vi, Pico tells me how to exit the program right there at the bottom of the screen...no man pages needed!
"Tuning" on a car, as in a "tune up," refers to the adjustment of the fuel and ignition systems to provide maximum efficiency. On mechanical cars, this meant adjusting the carburetor, adjusting the timing, adjusting the ignition points and condensor, etc.
All of these parts are computer controlled, and have been since fuel injection became popular around, well, some time between 1980 and 1990. It's even more efficient that way. And the computer is auto-adjusting -- it senses microscopic knocks and adjusts the mix on the fly. When a computer part fails, it fails obviously, unlike the gradual loss of power you face with a carburetor. I had my Ignition Control Module go on me two weeks ago and it was OBVIOUS...one cylinder just stopped firing (ouch).
So yeah, cars are self tuning. In fact, anybody in the past 10 years who's sold you a "tune up" either did nothing at all to your car, or checked a lot of other things that had nothing to do with what we called a "tune up" before the 80s.
And Ben Franklin wrote a book called Poor Richard's Almanac, whose copyright he defended voraciously.
Freedom refers to personal liberties like speech, religion and assemblage. It does not refer to physical luxuries, like land, coffee or software. Ben Franklin's freedom is quite different from ESR's freedom.
We are talking about a software development philosophy, one which is not at all common in the commercial world. So yes, we need to talk about good guys and bad guys.
Whoa! All sorts of things are "development philosophies." They're not morally tinged. I'm not down with extreme programming, being more of a design patterns guy myself. What's my alignment? Am I chaotic good? Lawful Neutral? It's SOFTWARE.
Unfortunately, it takes far too much time to reveal that actions have consequences.
Because you know, sometimes, they don't have consequences. In thirty years, I won't use a single software program I'm using today. What matters is the program that works best for me RIGHT NOW. Yes, I'm taking a risk by using OSX instead of GNOME, and by using Photoshop insteasd of the Gimp, but that risk is worth the convenience.
I'm sorry, sonny jim, but just because you like Open Source doesn't make it the only choice, nor does it make it a moral decision. Or is everything a moral decision to you...in which case, I wonder how you feel about the Cola Wars.
Uh, Apple invented Firewire. If it's a standard interface now, it's BECAUSE of Apple using it as the defacto connector. The PC world still thought USB 1.1 was fast.
Apple's motherboards are still quite proprietary, as are their monitor connectors and many other parts of the machine. Even their chips, while based on IBM designs, contain proprietary instructions.
market share decreases, their price would go UP Check 1. Apple's market share HAS decreased since the mid 1990s, and yet their price points, even when not adjusted for inflation, have gone down. The cheapest apple laptops used to be in the $2500 range. Now they're at $1100.
expensive computers to maintain Check 2. Not in my experience. I have spent less money maintaing the apple computers in my house than the PCS. In fact, going back to my still running Mac Classic, the only problems I've ever had have been with power supplies and hard drives. The power supplies were always replaced for under $100.
with no applications to run Check 3. The mac currently has an analog for every major PC application. It runs nearly every open source application. And even if Apple dissipated, there would still be development. There is still development for the Amiga.
cannot comunicate easily with others computers Check 4. My macs communicate fine with Linux, fine with Windows. Office suites use the same formats. Internet apps work the same. They all use Samba file and printer sharing. But maybe you use mostly IBM mainframes. I hope so, because the mac works with them too.
It's good to see FUD is alive and well in the PC community. I'd hate to think you guys learned nothing from Microsoft.
Hmm. Maybe you should take this up with my hardware guy, who spent $500 putting a new chip into his old G3. It certainly seemed to go faster, but perhaps it was an illusion caused by swamp gas passing in front of the monitor.
BTW: just because you are able to sink $1000 in your computer every year doesn't mean you are better than those of us who buy a new $2000 mac every two years.
Just because it's in the WSJ doesn't make it true. Do some searches on "Enron" and "2001" and see what you find.
Oh, and some of their editorials aren't even based on reality. Seriously, you look at some of the speculation those cats do, and you start looking for the woman in the red dress.
Dude. It's software. There are no good guys. There are no bad guys. There are just different ways of doing things. Idealism isn't going to get my clients' work done any more efficiently, or make my code run faster, or make my interfaces more intuitive. Smart programmers will make those things happen -- and I'll use whatever product works best.
And I'll remind you that there are TONS of great Open Source projects which utilize the ease and ubiquity of Java -- great utilities from Tomcat to Freenet. There's a number of great open source Java IDEs. Sun is a friend to open source because it is actively mixing closed source tools with open ones, filling in the gaps of each to the benefit of both.
Your claim that Open Source doesn't need friends who actually MAKE MONEY off of what they're doing is foolish. Sun and IBM are paying some of their programmers to write Open Source code. How is that not "befriending" the community?
I'll tell you. Sun and IBM don't have to befriend the community -- they're already members of it.
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Chilling, but not really Orwellian. It's more Heller-esque.
In an Orwellian world, you're damned no matter what. In a Heller-esque world, you're only damned so far as you follow the written rules -- if you trump those and follow the ACTUAL rules, you can succeed quite well. Loni is a Milo Minderbinder.
Unless you live in india. Then, may I suggest monsterphilipines.com?
You don't HAVE to have every Dylan show, you know. A lot of them have crummy sound, a tired band, or a boring setlist. Many of the best ones are already available in remastered versions...and some of these are on itunes. There are also a handful of tracks from his set at Carnegie Hall in 1964 that claim to be exclusive to iTunes. They're certainly better than my nth generation tapes, though sadly none of his duets with Joan Baez are on the service.
Just because you design a device doesn't mean you want to build it. Ford makes several concept cars every year at a cost of millions, very few of which make it to market.
In business, it's all about being prepared. When the music scene blows up, they wanted to have an option and not be sitting in development. The scene has blown up, and the explosion came with an Apple logo on it. Making a compatible device was probably prohibitively expensive, or prohibitively risky. So they thanked the iPac music developers very much and made a deal with Apple. Seems like a better idea to me than putting millions of bucks into releasing a subpar unit.
Uh, Napster, LLC, is gone. Roxio just bought their assets, including the name. They combined that with PressPlay, a stupid music service that had at least 2 shitty incarnations before coming out as the new Napster 2.0.
IANAL, but if a company breaks the law and then goes chapter 11, you can't be held accountable for their actions if you buy their liquidated assets. I mean, if I buy one of those fancy, meshy office chairs from the Enron yard sale, you couldn't sue me for sitting in it. Roxio is sitting on the Napster name.
Since HP sells exclusively Windows products, I doubt DRM, WMA or cross-platform compatibility mattered a pair of fettered dingo's kidneys to the board room. I guarantee having an offer from Time Magazine's Inventor of the Year or whatever, the high profile company with the coolest product, the ones who did it FIRST and MOST VISIBLY, meant a lot more.
It was a matter of "what the consumers seem to think is best" vs "a high risk untested service from a start up whose only merit is name recognition." They went with the company that has the better chance of being there next year...and the one with $5bil to work with.
Well, yes and no. Tracks you download from iTunes have DRM, but AAC in and of itself is an industry support subset of the MPEG-4 standard. Think .MP4...which is what some people have been calling it (in fact that was the default extension from my non-Apple AAC transcoder until iTunes came out, now it's .m4a).
WMV, on the other hand, is exclusively owned by Microsoft. It's also available in non-DRM flavors, but is only licensed for use on platforms that have been granted MS' okay. Which are few, basically just Windows and OSX, maybe X-box.
You need licenses for either format, but AAC licenses are available to anybody with available reference implementations. And I think -- think, mind you -- that AAC doesn't require a license for free-as-in-price encoders/decoders written by hobbiests. At the very least, you can get free decoders at www.audiocoding.com, open source of course.
So yeah, AAC's not open like Vorbis. But unlike Vorbis, the industry invested a lot of research into it and actually wants to use it. As such, AAC is heading for the same popularity as MP3, whereas WMV is looking more like, well, ASX. Vorbis will eternally be a hacker's tool because it doesn't have the visibility nor the clout of AAC in the industry...but as it's going to be eternally tweaked, it will no doubt continue to sound better at comparative bitrates.
I'm very proud of your ability to list things, but I'm afraid your categorization skills need a bit work. I can suggest some reputable kindergardens.
You listed many prevntative maintenance items, and many wear items. But not one item that needed to be "tuned up."
Changing oil or replacing a fuel filter is not a tune up. A tune up is something you do as often as possible to keep your car running at maximum efficiency. Preventative maintenance does not benefit from a shortened schedule, so you may as well do it as read in the book.
I mention this, because a lot of people (my father in law being one of them) follow their schedules and yet still take their cars in to be "tuned up." His mechanic is very happy to charge him $200 to replace a few brand fuel filters.
Older cars had three schedules: preventative maintenace, oil change schedules, AND tune up schedules. They are three separate types of maintenance. The last type is not necessary, I never claimed you could run a car 200k miles+ on a single fuel filter. My Beetle has over 300k miles on it and most of that is due to a diligent schedule including a tune up every other weekend in the summer.
Seems to me you're just adding a bigger exhaust to a perfectly fine automobile. If I wanted to use a mouse, highlight text and search and replace to multiple buffers, I wouldn't be using Pine in the first place. I'd be using a graphical tool.
Adding features you ripped off of other products doesn't make your product better. It just makes it more complicated. Microsoft Word?
Holy shit. That is the best article I have ever seen on the subject. I need the action lowered anyway...maybe I'll have them replace the whole damn saddle.
Better than their original title...the Federated Union of Concerned Kindred Scientests...
I just install PINE.
To use an inferior clone of a product just because it is "free" is to shackle one's self with ideology.
I might use a "free" mailreader if it were significantly better (and I do use Thunderbird on Windows). But Pine is a great program, and is a product of education and research, things which I consider more important than the freedom to poke around in source code.
Otherwise they continue to violate, right?
FUCK no. The GPL allows the author to keep his original copyright and resell the work under any license he pleases. This is why many products like MySQL have an available "Commercial License" for people who want to use the code, but don't want to have to release their proprietary works to the community.
If you're using such software, and you don't release your source, the legal ramifications are that you either have to release the source, or buy a license so you don't have to.
The "donations" may well have been in exchange for a license...or at the very least, for assurance from the original copyright holder that he will not pursue further legal action. It's up to him to prosecute, after all.
doesn't obviate string replacement.
Word? I've had guitars whose bridges were designed such that, after a certain amount of wear on the second string, you just couldn't tune it any more. It would always be flat or sharp. Drove me up the wall, I'd end a passage on a ringing string and it would sound sour.
My new guitar has that tendency. It's very sensitive to string wear, and the sound starts to give out even before the strings darken. So what I've done is create a sort of string "hand me down" program. I buy my Martin SP Bronzes, play them until I can't tune right anymore, then sell them to my brother for about half price. His Alvarez doesn't hold a tune anyway, so he gets mostly fresh strings on the cheap, and I finance my axe's voracious appetite for strings.
Well, let's see here...
...where'd I put that calculator...
Price offered for IPTables on the developer's website...$0...times 4 million devices...
(joking.)
I like Pico. It doesn't bother me with "options"...and unlike vi, Pico tells me how to exit the program right there at the bottom of the screen...no man pages needed!
Uh, cars are self tuning now.
"Tuning" on a car, as in a "tune up," refers to the adjustment of the fuel and ignition systems to provide maximum efficiency. On mechanical cars, this meant adjusting the carburetor, adjusting the timing, adjusting the ignition points and condensor, etc.
All of these parts are computer controlled, and have been since fuel injection became popular around, well, some time between 1980 and 1990. It's even more efficient that way. And the computer is auto-adjusting -- it senses microscopic knocks and adjusts the mix on the fly. When a computer part fails, it fails obviously, unlike the gradual loss of power you face with a carburetor. I had my Ignition Control Module go on me two weeks ago and it was OBVIOUS...one cylinder just stopped firing (ouch).
So yeah, cars are self tuning. In fact, anybody in the past 10 years who's sold you a "tune up" either did nothing at all to your car, or checked a lot of other things that had nothing to do with what we called a "tune up" before the 80s.
And Ben Franklin wrote a book called Poor Richard's Almanac, whose copyright he defended voraciously.
Freedom refers to personal liberties like speech, religion and assemblage. It does not refer to physical luxuries, like land, coffee or software. Ben Franklin's freedom is quite different from ESR's freedom.
We are talking about a software development philosophy, one which is not at all common in the commercial world. So yes, we need to talk about good guys and bad guys.
Whoa! All sorts of things are "development philosophies." They're not morally tinged. I'm not down with extreme programming, being more of a design patterns guy myself. What's my alignment? Am I chaotic good? Lawful Neutral? It's SOFTWARE.
Unfortunately, it takes far too much time to reveal that actions have consequences.
Because you know, sometimes, they don't have consequences. In thirty years, I won't use a single software program I'm using today. What matters is the program that works best for me RIGHT NOW. Yes, I'm taking a risk by using OSX instead of GNOME, and by using Photoshop insteasd of the Gimp, but that risk is worth the convenience.
I'm sorry, sonny jim, but just because you like Open Source doesn't make it the only choice, nor does it make it a moral decision. Or is everything a moral decision to you...in which case, I wonder how you feel about the Cola Wars.
standard interfaces like USB and Firewire
Uh, Apple invented Firewire. If it's a standard interface now, it's BECAUSE of Apple using it as the defacto connector. The PC world still thought USB 1.1 was fast.
Apple's motherboards are still quite proprietary, as are their monitor connectors and many other parts of the machine. Even their chips, while based on IBM designs, contain proprietary instructions.
FUD CHECK:
market share decreases, their price would go UP
Check 1. Apple's market share HAS decreased since the mid 1990s, and yet their price points, even when not adjusted for inflation, have gone down. The cheapest apple laptops used to be in the $2500 range. Now they're at $1100.
expensive computers to maintain
Check 2. Not in my experience. I have spent less money maintaing the apple computers in my house than the PCS. In fact, going back to my still running Mac Classic, the only problems I've ever had have been with power supplies and hard drives. The power supplies were always replaced for under $100.
with no applications to run
Check 3. The mac currently has an analog for every major PC application. It runs nearly every open source application. And even if Apple dissipated, there would still be development. There is still development for the Amiga.
cannot comunicate easily with others computers
Check 4. My macs communicate fine with Linux, fine with Windows. Office suites use the same formats. Internet apps work the same. They all use Samba file and printer sharing. But maybe you use mostly IBM mainframes. I hope so, because the mac works with them too.
It's good to see FUD is alive and well in the PC community. I'd hate to think you guys learned nothing from Microsoft.
Hmm. Maybe you should take this up with my hardware guy, who spent $500 putting a new chip into his old G3. It certainly seemed to go faster, but perhaps it was an illusion caused by swamp gas passing in front of the monitor.
BTW: just because you are able to sink $1000 in your computer every year doesn't mean you are better than those of us who buy a new $2000 mac every two years.
Holy shit, iTunes has Ninja Tune!?!
It does! There's King Geedorah's "Take me to your Leader!"
Time to cash in those pepsicaps!
Just because it's in the WSJ doesn't make it true. Do some searches on "Enron" and "2001" and see what you find.
Oh, and some of their editorials aren't even based on reality. Seriously, you look at some of the speculation those cats do, and you start looking for the woman in the red dress.
Dude. It's software. There are no good guys. There are no bad guys. There are just different ways of doing things. Idealism isn't going to get my clients' work done any more efficiently, or make my code run faster, or make my interfaces more intuitive. Smart programmers will make those things happen -- and I'll use whatever product works best.
And I'll remind you that there are TONS of great Open Source projects which utilize the ease and ubiquity of Java -- great utilities from Tomcat to Freenet. There's a number of great open source Java IDEs. Sun is a friend to open source because it is actively mixing closed source tools with open ones, filling in the gaps of each to the benefit of both.
Your claim that Open Source doesn't need friends who actually MAKE MONEY off of what they're doing is foolish. Sun and IBM are paying some of their programmers to write Open Source code. How is that not "befriending" the community?
I'll tell you. Sun and IBM don't have to befriend the community -- they're already members of it.