I think I'm starting to understand better than when I wrote this. You are complaining about AT&T profit-taking? That's a little different.
But to reply to the comment both you and the person you are replying to vis-a-vis MicroSoft and free-market economics:
It's a bad case. MicroSoft and their products do not exist in a free market. In one sense, they have a monopoly on PC operating systems. This was gained through coercion. This was proven in court. This denies the existence of a free-market. Or, claim that Warp and the rest were viable alternatives. Problem is (again, see coercive contracts) that the government was/is the largest purchaser of computers. By purchasing mostly or only Windows PCs, they have effectively skewed the market.
The MicroSoft problem is (to me) an example of why freer markets are better, and why contract laws need to be more rigid.
(For that matter, so is Enron. They performed an unneccessary service, and got caught with their pants down. The market answered that question pretty quickly. Ditto the dot-bombs and the stock market. When people figured out that the dot-bombs had no chance of making a profit (VA *cough, cough*), the prices went into the toilet. Perfect knowledge is the only way to achieve free market ideals.
I've read your comment, and fail to see where you point out the problems with tiered pricing. So what that people use the cheapest option. For most of them, that is more than enough. Most people don't want P2P software. Most people want to be able to dl from the artist's website. Most people don't care about dl'ing patches and updates. It just confuses them. Hence Code Red, nimda, and the rest of the gang.
Similarly, most people don't want videophones. They like being able to roll over while sleeping one off, clear the phlegm from their throat, and talk. The person on the other end of the line has NO idea how skeezy they look. (If you look at one or two Jetson's episodes, they had special facades to put in front of the videophone for when Jane was still in curlers.) Companies that need teleconferencing have the capabilities. And in any event probably fly someone out anyway.
In most cases, people don't use the high bandwidth because they aren't interested. Besides the occcasional video feed (movie trailers, pron, and naked news), there just isn't demand for it. Except for a few hogs and/or people with improperly set up networks.
In the end, if people do desire these technologies, they will pay the extra bucks. Or let some advertiser foot the bill.
I think you could have made a very good point, but I'm just missing it.
Amen. Sometimes I think that the first experience most slashdotters had with being 'online' was in the 14.4k era. Very few remember the fun of war-dialing and looking for BBSes.
They act like the 'dueling 56k standards' was a big deal. Lemmetellyu, nuthin' like the 9600 fight, or the earlier fights (ever wonder why modems have like 27 different acronyms on the box or in the manual?)
Oh, or remember actually have to know Hayes codes in order to get your modem to talk to a certain other modem?
What is 'my system'? I am responsible for the whole shebang: NT servers, 2k terminal servers, Linux firewalls and web servers, NT desktops, wireless access points.
How can I attack my own systems without attacking someone else's 'intellectual property' or some such BS? I can't. But by the terms of the licenses (even the GPL and BSD, I believe) I can't blame the people I got the software from.
Anyone living in the US, connecting to the US, or who has even heard of the US should not be doing computer security. Anyone who is doing even a reasonable job of it is checking into and poking into the products supplied by vendors. But this is illegal. The vendors can't be blamed. Only you. You can be blamed, but you don't legally have the right to do the thing/s that will make your work effective.
Run. Run and hide.
I said it in a response to a journal on this story (posted yesterday, BTW) but I'll say it again: in a fight between this guy and Ashcroft (which is what this essentially is), Ashcroft will win every time. The only way to get around the problem is to invalidate the disclaimer of warranty of merchantibility of a product. If nothing else, computer software must be fit for a specific purpose. At that point, GM and Walmart become aligned with anti-DMCA forces. Then Microsoft and the Senator from Disney get to see REAL political power.
Reading certain journals shows that VA is seriously in the shitter. Just go to any of the stock quote sites. Bill Gates has enough pocket change to buy the place and shut it down. That should show how little he cares about it.
Witness the recent posting caps placed on people with insufficient karma. Don't be surprised to see the discussion part of this board go all pay real soon. Remember, only front page views matter to them. If that truly is the case, it would be trivial to replace all of this dynamic crap with some static pages updated a dozen times per day.
Methinks thou hast never been strapped to a Japanese multi before. Two minutes on the latest and greatest 1 liter+ bikes from Japan will make you forget all about that trip.
You've misstated the historical cases and made a flawed analysis of comparison to Ogg vs. MP3.
Beta was out and available for quite some time prior to VHS. Late 70's, early 80's, most shops were brimming with Beta tapes. For the early adopters, that was where it was at. When Joe Schmo went into Circuit City and was confronted with a $50 difference in price between machines, he purchased in spite of lack of media available.
Your analysis of the Mac is also incorrect. Early 90's, many models of Mac's (particularly the LC's) were price competitive on a feature standpoint with comparable PCs.
You've dismissed Ogg vs mp3 because those formats aren't sold. You are, again, wrong. They are 'sold' for free. Sold via napster, gnutella, audiogalaxy, etc. etc. etc. They are sold via people who have spent time ripping their cd's. No, they are not sold for money. They are sold for time. While people are stupid, they aren't that stupid. Why should they buy/learn/use a new encoder to save disc space that they aren't worried about or sure about how to calculate? They won't.
Elsewhere, someone mentioned a chicken-egg problem. Why should Sony or Apple (because MS ain't gonna support Ogg) include Ogg support? Even if it costs two cents (Canadian or US) for each unit, how much more revenue will they get? Zero. When your balance sheet numbers are that large, the improved sales due to that 2 cent increase are zero.
I rather hope you're reading this far, as I'm done flaming and, in general, being an ass. What I think would be far more enlightening to me is an answer to these questions:
How many files (either in CD's, or megabytes) is your current mp3 collection? What do you use it for? What is your reason for switching to Ogg?
Let me give you some answers on the opposite side of the question:
I don't know how many songs, but I have around 50-100 cd's (sorry, that's incredibly vague, I know) on my hard drive. I'm too lazy to dig for CD's when I want music. I encode with lame at 192. If I ever finish ripping my collection, I'll use VBR. I have a ton of space left on my hard drive. Why keep mp3? I can play them damned near anywhere. There's more software available (although this is changing and I bet the freeness of the codecs have something to do with it) to manipulate them. There's more software available to play them.
Okay, so I went from talking about the market to two individuals. Still, I'm interested in your answers. Perhaps they could give me some insight as to why I should care or expect this will be anything more than a Cauzin strip reader. (Points to anyone who remembers them:)
Don't need the upmods. All it does is encourage M2 avoiding lamers to mod post '-1 overrated'.
The other trick with mp3's is that I can play them damned near anywhere. I don't need my uber-7ee+ player. I can play them on sister's DVD player, brother's computer, mother's iPod (well, she doesn't have one, but you get the idea).
"What about disc space?" What about it? In a very short time frame, I'll be able to buy a hard drive with enough space for.wav files. Even the portable devices have tons of space (I couldn't listen to 5 gigs of mp3's in a single sitting any time soon).
I actually don't disagree with you about game developers, and said as much in my original comment. That is as far as I see the limited market for ogg going.
Call me crazy, but didn't they already have this 'technology' about 60 years ago? Every episode of M*A*S*H has either Radar or Klinger cranking up a radio before calling Sparky.
And by 'they', I do specifically mean Motorola. Wasn't their start in making walkie-talkie's and other military communications equipment like this wind-up radio?
mp3 is alredy the defacto standard for cd-ripping. Support for Ogg is just too late to matter to anyone except for geeks on this site.
The only company whose support would make any difference is... MicroSoft. If they blessed Ogg, you might see players ship that can handle it. Otherwise, it's just a nerd's pipe dream. If fraunhoffer ever gets serious, maybe you'll see some games and similar things ship with Ogg's instead of mp3's. But this race is already run.
First call would be to my brother. To borrow his AR-15. Second call is to lawyer.
While not a DOD contractor, we ARE a medical company, with scads of patient info. I'm quite certain, given that fact that about 30% of my county's income comes from medical business, the local courts are unlikely to be terribly concerned about the BSA's threats.
Too much to lose. Read my journal for info on where I'm coming from, but I don't have the luxury of being able to be incarcerated to fight a law. Not for this. As someone else mentioned, maybe for Vietnam or something along those lines. But DMCA is nowhere near as egregious.
Most of the classic US protestors of the 60's were middle class kids, whose parents told them to look out for others, do the right thing, etc. Problem is, those protestors' contemporaries didn't teach their kids (me and other 20-30 year olds) the same thing. Or at least without the same fervor. The failures of the protests (culminating in the Kent State massacre) took the wind out of the proverbial sails of protest.
In addition, there have been many laws passed as a response to those protests that make it much harder. If you read some of the other comments, the trick with Mr. Perens is to ONLY break the DMCA. If he breaks some other law, he will be charged with that. Protesting is difficult: you try to denounce (just to pick something) the law against underage drinking, and wind up breaking 12 other laws. The real cause gets lost.
Finally, there is no media interest (at least in the US) in portraying anything outside the status quo as positive. Look at the World Bank meetings that have been disrupted. Rather than examine the reasons for the protests, the message they are attempting to spread, etc. the media covers the disruption, the damage to property, the cultural aspects (oh, look at all the cute kiddies trying to protest) while almost 100% ignoring the message.
I don't think there is any one reason, but there are a million little ones. These are just some of the highlights. But, I think that Kent State has a lot more to do with it than I ever realized, now that I think about it.
Cross-compiled LFS distro has to wait. Debian decided to eat my '/var' partition. Spent a few hours looking for a way to recover other than just reinstalling.
Yes, 'restore from backups' would have been a fantastic idea. Had I ever finished setting up amanda.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I'm starting to understand better than when I wrote this. You are complaining about AT&T profit-taking? That's a little different.
But to reply to the comment both you and the person you are replying to vis-a-vis MicroSoft and free-market economics:
It's a bad case. MicroSoft and their products do not exist in a free market. In one sense, they have a monopoly on PC operating systems. This was gained through coercion. This was proven in court. This denies the existence of a free-market. Or, claim that Warp and the rest were viable alternatives. Problem is (again, see coercive contracts) that the government was/is the largest purchaser of computers. By purchasing mostly or only Windows PCs, they have effectively skewed the market.
The MicroSoft problem is (to me) an example of why freer markets are better, and why contract laws need to be more rigid.
(For that matter, so is Enron. They performed an unneccessary service, and got caught with their pants down. The market answered that question pretty quickly. Ditto the dot-bombs and the stock market. When people figured out that the dot-bombs had no chance of making a profit (VA *cough, cough*), the prices went into the toilet. Perfect knowledge is the only way to achieve free market ideals.
So you're the one who figured out my little charade and tried dl'ing my entire 'Time-Life 80's collection'!!
I've read your comment, and fail to see where you point out the problems with tiered pricing. So what that people use the cheapest option. For most of them, that is more than enough. Most people don't want P2P software. Most people want to be able to dl from the artist's website. Most people don't care about dl'ing patches and updates. It just confuses them. Hence Code Red, nimda, and the rest of the gang.
Similarly, most people don't want videophones. They like being able to roll over while sleeping one off, clear the phlegm from their throat, and talk. The person on the other end of the line has NO idea how skeezy they look. (If you look at one or two Jetson's episodes, they had special facades to put in front of the videophone for when Jane was still in curlers.) Companies that need teleconferencing have the capabilities. And in any event probably fly someone out anyway.
In most cases, people don't use the high bandwidth because they aren't interested. Besides the occcasional video feed (movie trailers, pron, and naked news), there just isn't demand for it. Except for a few hogs and/or people with improperly set up networks.
In the end, if people do desire these technologies, they will pay the extra bucks. Or let some advertiser foot the bill.
I think you could have made a very good point, but I'm just missing it.
Amen. Sometimes I think that the first experience most slashdotters had with being 'online' was in the 14.4k era. Very few remember the fun of war-dialing and looking for BBSes.
They act like the 'dueling 56k standards' was a big deal. Lemmetellyu, nuthin' like the 9600 fight, or the earlier fights (ever wonder why modems have like 27 different acronyms on the box or in the manual?)
Oh, or remember actually have to know Hayes codes in order to get your modem to talk to a certain other modem?
While you were running your mouth, I picked your pocket, stole your sword, and sold it to feed some starving orphans.
That's what being Chaotic Good is all about.
Putz.
What is 'my system'? I am responsible for the whole shebang: NT servers, 2k terminal servers, Linux firewalls and web servers, NT desktops, wireless access points.
How can I attack my own systems without attacking someone else's 'intellectual property' or some such BS? I can't. But by the terms of the licenses (even the GPL and BSD, I believe) I can't blame the people I got the software from.
Anyone living in the US, connecting to the US, or who has even heard of the US should not be doing computer security. Anyone who is doing even a reasonable job of it is checking into and poking into the products supplied by vendors. But this is illegal. The vendors can't be blamed. Only you. You can be blamed, but you don't legally have the right to do the thing/s that will make your work effective.
Run. Run and hide.
I said it in a response to a journal on this story (posted yesterday, BTW) but I'll say it again: in a fight between this guy and Ashcroft (which is what this essentially is), Ashcroft will win every time. The only way to get around the problem is to invalidate the disclaimer of warranty of merchantibility of a product. If nothing else, computer software must be fit for a specific purpose. At that point, GM and Walmart become aligned with anti-DMCA forces. Then Microsoft and the Senator from Disney get to see REAL political power.
Doonesbury was complaining about HWR in Newton's long before Simpsons. Blame the lag time of TV.
Business contacts, okay. Hot women? Don't you have phone numbers for both of them? Or does the TRO prevent that?
Seriously, I like it. It made me laugh.
Amen. The rest of us don't get cut that much slack when doing our JOBS! Why should Taco?
Too easy to compress /dev/null. I'd send /dev/urandom.
I stand corrected/informed.
Reading certain journals shows that VA is seriously in the shitter. Just go to any of the stock quote sites. Bill Gates has enough pocket change to buy the place and shut it down. That should show how little he cares about it.
Witness the recent posting caps placed on people with insufficient karma. Don't be surprised to see the discussion part of this board go all pay real soon. Remember, only front page views matter to them. If that truly is the case, it would be trivial to replace all of this dynamic crap with some static pages updated a dozen times per day.
When one has an email address listed, how are you any more anonymous than anyone else on slashdot? FWIW, at 11:11 EDT, it's listed as:
????@standardalternative.net
(? to replace name in case one of the editors... edits)
But, yes, it is very sad. Sad that professionalism and rationality lose out to childish posing and ranting.
A Jag? Good acceleration?
Methinks thou hast never been strapped to a Japanese multi before. Two minutes on the latest and greatest 1 liter+ bikes from Japan will make you forget all about that trip.
You've misstated the historical cases and made a flawed analysis of comparison to Ogg vs. MP3.
Beta was out and available for quite some time prior to VHS. Late 70's, early 80's, most shops were brimming with Beta tapes. For the early adopters, that was where it was at. When Joe Schmo went into Circuit City and was confronted with a $50 difference in price between machines, he purchased in spite of lack of media available.
Your analysis of the Mac is also incorrect. Early 90's, many models of Mac's (particularly the LC's) were price competitive on a feature standpoint with comparable PCs.
You've dismissed Ogg vs mp3 because those formats aren't sold. You are, again, wrong. They are 'sold' for free. Sold via napster, gnutella, audiogalaxy, etc. etc. etc. They are sold via people who have spent time ripping their cd's. No, they are not sold for money. They are sold for time. While people are stupid, they aren't that stupid. Why should they buy/learn/use a new encoder to save disc space that they aren't worried about or sure about how to calculate? They won't.
Elsewhere, someone mentioned a chicken-egg problem. Why should Sony or Apple (because MS ain't gonna support Ogg) include Ogg support? Even if it costs two cents (Canadian or US) for each unit, how much more revenue will they get? Zero. When your balance sheet numbers are that large, the improved sales due to that 2 cent increase are zero.
I rather hope you're reading this far, as I'm done flaming and, in general, being an ass. What I think would be far more enlightening to me is an answer to these questions:
How many files (either in CD's, or megabytes) is your current mp3 collection?
What do you use it for?
What is your reason for switching to Ogg?
Let me give you some answers on the opposite side of the question:
I don't know how many songs, but I have around 50-100 cd's (sorry, that's incredibly vague, I know) on my hard drive.
I'm too lazy to dig for CD's when I want music.
I encode with lame at 192. If I ever finish ripping my collection, I'll use VBR. I have a ton of space left on my hard drive.
Why keep mp3? I can play them damned near anywhere. There's more software available (although this is changing and I bet the freeness of the codecs have something to do with it) to manipulate them. There's more software available to play them.
Okay, so I went from talking about the market to two individuals. Still, I'm interested in your answers. Perhaps they could give me some insight as to why I should care or expect this will be anything more than a Cauzin strip reader. (Points to anyone who remembers them:)
Don't need the upmods. All it does is encourage M2 avoiding lamers to mod post '-1 overrated'.
.wav files. Even the portable devices have tons of space (I couldn't listen to 5 gigs of mp3's in a single sitting any time soon).
The other trick with mp3's is that I can play them damned near anywhere. I don't need my uber-7ee+ player. I can play them on sister's DVD player, brother's computer, mother's iPod (well, she doesn't have one, but you get the idea).
"What about disc space?" What about it? In a very short time frame, I'll be able to buy a hard drive with enough space for
Technical superiority matters not a whit to the individuals, nor to the 'marketplace' that they comprise.
Beta over VHS, LD over VHS, Mac (and others) over MS OS, MD over CD, etc, etc, etc.
I actually don't disagree with you about game developers, and said as much in my original comment. That is as far as I see the limited market for ogg going.
Call me crazy, but didn't they already have this 'technology' about 60 years ago? Every episode of M*A*S*H has either Radar or Klinger cranking up a radio before calling Sparky.
And by 'they', I do specifically mean Motorola. Wasn't their start in making walkie-talkie's and other military communications equipment like this wind-up radio?
Where's the news?
mp3 is alredy the defacto standard for cd-ripping. Support for Ogg is just too late to matter to anyone except for geeks on this site.
The only company whose support would make any difference is... MicroSoft. If they blessed Ogg, you might see players ship that can handle it. Otherwise, it's just a nerd's pipe dream. If fraunhoffer ever gets serious, maybe you'll see some games and similar things ship with Ogg's instead of mp3's. But this race is already run.
Thanks for the heads up on the journal. Fixed .sig.
And thanks for the link.
First call would be to my brother. To borrow his AR-15. Second call is to lawyer.
While not a DOD contractor, we ARE a medical company, with scads of patient info. I'm quite certain, given that fact that about 30% of my county's income comes from medical business, the local courts are unlikely to be terribly concerned about the BSA's threats.
Too much to lose. Read my journal for info on where I'm coming from, but I don't have the luxury of being able to be incarcerated to fight a law. Not for this. As someone else mentioned, maybe for Vietnam or something along those lines. But DMCA is nowhere near as egregious.
Most of the classic US protestors of the 60's were middle class kids, whose parents told them to look out for others, do the right thing, etc. Problem is, those protestors' contemporaries didn't teach their kids (me and other 20-30 year olds) the same thing. Or at least without the same fervor. The failures of the protests (culminating in the Kent State massacre) took the wind out of the proverbial sails of protest.
In addition, there have been many laws passed as a response to those protests that make it much harder. If you read some of the other comments, the trick with Mr. Perens is to ONLY break the DMCA. If he breaks some other law, he will be charged with that. Protesting is difficult: you try to denounce (just to pick something) the law against underage drinking, and wind up breaking 12 other laws. The real cause gets lost.
Finally, there is no media interest (at least in the US) in portraying anything outside the status quo as positive. Look at the World Bank meetings that have been disrupted. Rather than examine the reasons for the protests, the message they are attempting to spread, etc. the media covers the disruption, the damage to property, the cultural aspects (oh, look at all the cute kiddies trying to protest) while almost 100% ignoring the message.
I don't think there is any one reason, but there are a million little ones. These are just some of the highlights. But, I think that Kent State has a lot more to do with it than I ever realized, now that I think about it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I've been looking for information along these lines for a week or so. I knew things couldn't be perfect with the guy. Again. Thank you.
Cross-compiled LFS distro has to wait. Debian decided to eat my '/var' partition. Spent a few hours looking for a way to recover other than just reinstalling.
Yes, 'restore from backups' would have been a fantastic idea. Had I ever finished setting up amanda.