Given my druthers, I'd rather have a decent online manual to a crappy paper one. The best situation, is, of course, a decent paper manual.
Why hasn't anyone questioned the quality of manuals of late? We're long gone from the thousands of pages of documentation I got on my Apple//e or Mac II. With HOW-TO's and FAQ's, not only do you have the ability these days of rolling your own machine and your own distro, but you are pretty much forced to roll your own documentation. My work machine has several files where I dump emails and Usenet posts to supplement poor documentation.
Tell you what: take the $2 printing cost that your company spends on the paper manual, turn it into higher more/better writers, and give us some decent electronic documentation. (BTW, your company might have the greatest documentation since sliced bread, but I have no idea)
Latest reports on the Apex mailing list are that the newly stocked 600A's have not been modded. The best way to be sure is to buy one and check it out. Last time I checked, Circuit City had an unlimited 30 day return policy. You can return anything for any reason within 30 days (okay, not software). So, get it, see if you can do the mod, and return it on the off chance that you can't.
Yeah, but the chapter on dynamically loadable kernel modules was a bit weak and they spent entirely too much time on cleaning your carburator
Ho, ho, ho. How droll. Obviously spoken by someone who has either not read the book, missed the point, or is trying to make a lame joke. That book would be quite appropriate for people who want to learn to program.
And BTW, having just cleaned 4 20 year old carbs, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Zen and the Art... was at least as useful as my Haynes and Clymers.
I only wish. Occasionally Katz has wrtten an intelligetnt picece, but I fear that this decision is only going to bolster his inane writings even more. Look, it's justification that he's right! I suspect we'll see a trifecta of his garbage next week. His interview with Pinkerton (provided they don't string up his sanctimonious hide), the 'I was right about games!' article, and completed with a 'Hi, I'm a dope, but I have this cool job working for Slashdot and you don't' article.
Better go change my settings quick. Next week is gonna hurt if you don't like Katz.
So, here I am, 20 years later. I have no interest in the occult. I have no urge to physically assault gay people, and I have no bizzare fixation with firearms. Infact, it would scare me to even know someone involved in any of those activities, let alone be a participant in any of those activities myself.
Dude, stop repressing your feelings. You know you want to get a BFG, go to San Francisco or Fire Island, and let it rip, celebrating by killing a cat in the middle of a pentagram.
You don't need regulation for quality pump gas. You need competent courts. If I buy what is marked as 89 octane for $1.50/gal, and I really get only 86 octane, and because of flaws in the pump I only get 2 quarts for $1.50, then I can sue. No need to write new legislation.
Furthermore, more than 50% of the population of the US lives in cities. Therefore any solution that helps those who live in rural areas is a form of welfare. Plus, like the rural electric co-ops, there isn't (or, in my beautiful, non-existant world there isn't:) anything stopping the formation of rural telco co-ops, rural isp co-ops, etc.
If you have the right kind of burner, you can already do a bitwise copy of the disc. No DeCSS needed. If you are putting it on tape or anything else, you just pipe the output of your DVD player into your VCR. I suppose it could help, but there are much cheaper/easier ways to copy DVDs.
Next thing you know, you'll tell us that freon should be illegal because car thieves use it to get rid of the club in a heartbeat.
Kids don't have constitutional rights to the same degree as adults.
However, this likely is a violation of certain rights (especially if Pinkerton cannot show what happens to these records after the kid turns 18) Also, consider the case of those of us who turned 18 before graduating high school. There should be enough of them to form a fat class-action suit against Pinkerton, the governor, and the state of NC. Those 'kids' do have full rights.
My question is how can NC use what Pinkerton collects without following the law. While Pinkerton has some freedom, if NC uses the information, it is held to a higher legal standard.
Ahh, this whole thing is bullshit anyway. The correct thing to do is for the undesireables to get together and spam the hell out of the hotlines. Hopefully there will be web-based reporting, and someone can write a perl-script to flood Pinkerton. Otherwise, I'd suggest a $10 roll of quarters and the pay-phone outside 7-11. The trick is to single out the one kid above reproach (the principal's kid? Better yet, in my high school, the superintendent's kid attended. And in NC, if you are lucky enough to go to school with the niece/nephew/child/grandchild of the governor or one of the Pinkerton scum... Rat 'em out. Keep track of your calls (away from home) and when the shit hits the fan, you'll be ready.)
Not bad, a 50% day for Jon Katz. This rant was as bad as the Pinkerton one was good.
Jon, you and all the other who complain about using '19th century' laws to defeat a '21st century' company are missing the point. A good law stands the test of time. Hence 213 years under the US Constitution. To put it another way, is Linux bad because it emulates a 30 year old operating system? Didn't think so. Quality in any form stands the test of time.
When a company with a greater gross profit than the GDPs of most countries of the world gets out of line, there's only one institution that can take them on: the US government. Were you this annoyed at the IBM case? the AT&T case?
Maybe you live in a post MS world, but I think you missed a further point: this case was about who would control what might become the post-MS world. If MS keeps bundling IIS/ASP with Win2000, if IE comes with every OS except Linux and BSD, if all set top boxes run WinCE, how post-MS is this?
This case has likely prevented MS from being more onerous and simultaneously gave other OSes the breathing room necessary. The decision yesterday DOES matter. It gives a little more breathing room. It will also hopefully kill off some of these miserable dotcom's that never should have gotten any public funding to begin with. BTW, did you happen to notice that RHAT was up in yesterday's trading? So were many blue chips. This decision finally sent a message that it's time to grow up. dotcom's and e-businesses (M$ being the most obvious in the eyes of the public) are still companies. They are hives of wizened mages. They are companies allowed to form for the PUBLIC good. In that respect, they are no different from a coal mine, a train company, an oil company, or an auto maker. And as such, they are subject to the same laws. A corporation is given a certain level of trust by the government. M$ broke that trust, and now it's time to pay the piper. It's the right thing to do. 19th century or 21st century.
Is that they can't put their annoying ad on the desktop in X. Too many different window managers, so how bloated would their binary be by the time they figure out how to add an icon to Ice, BlackBox, Enlightenment, AfterStep, FVWM, etc, etc, etc.
Or maybe they just want to force us onto Darwin. Ha! Like that will happen.
Point two (and really, the entire article) is incorrect. Regulation is not necessary. AT&T and others can only block me from using "illegal" or unallowed equipment on their lines via one of two things:
First, lawsuits. If judges were not morons, they would throw out the cases. Since this isn't the case, we need law to force judges to act right.
Second, by extending monopolies to companies to tear up our yards. In my county, one cable company has the right to provide cable. In return for this monopoly, they provide the county with NOTHING. As a matter of fact, when they recently asked for the county to allow them to charge customers a franchise fee (typically goes back to the local govt) the local government didn't require anything of them. No payment back. No promise to upgrade to digital cable. No promise to wire schools. Nothing. They just said "charge us more".
Anyway, the point is, the only reason regulation is needed now is to correct prior regulation and stupidity. Regulation is always bad. The correct answer (especially to the original author) is to pass a law that repeals prior corporate/governmental stupidity.
Amen. Geez, even at 27, I'm looking at a story that seems to be lost on the young people on/. I remember spending many hundreds of dollars on long distance modem calls to Austin TX (okay, spending my parents money:)
Sadly, I didn't play GURPS or OGRE. Just Car Wars.
Maybe if some of these young kids (18-19:) had had our old hand-crank, acoustic modems, they'd appreciate the current tyranny a bit more.
Obviously, I'm not savvy to the details of the/. purchase, but I'm not sure that it is Rob's site anymore. At least not technically.
Regardless, this story does seem appropriate. And as Rob is still the chief editor (?) of/., it doesn't matter what you or I, or the Troll's think.
However, I do think that story moderation might be in order, if for nothing else that to allow the PTB to assess their audience. That just makes good business sense.
Funny. For most companies, the Slashdot users (and you personally may or may not be this way) get all antsy with mergers. Witness the talks over the AOL/Time Warner merger. Now there is going to be lots of backslapping and high fives.
-- Consolidate the complementary networks of VA (including Linux.com, Sourceforge.net, and Themes.org) and Andover.Net (including Slashdot.org and Freshmeat.net) to create the Internet's leading destination for Open Source developers, with nearly two-thirds of the total traffic of major Open Source sites and putting the combined network in the top 100 web destinations worldwide;
Two thirds of the total open source traffic, discussion, and news will be 'owned' by one company?? This doesn't concern anyone? Sure, CT can claim that he will maintain control, but I'd love to see his contract proving that. Money changes things and people.
This article seems to indicate that advertising is already cropping up as editorial content. How different is this 'story' from this one? Sure, it might be nice to make notice of the live broadcast, but mentioning The Sync both times seems a bit inappropriate.
Now, before getting flamed and moderated, let me explain one thing: I'll give the Slashdot gang the benefit of the doubt. Most of them are younger than me by a couple of years, and I know I'm not fully baked. But I expect they'll have to learn fast. Just as important as actually maintaining independent editorial control (there was a story a few days back that mentioned someone trying to get andover to force a story, but CT et al. said no.) is maintaining the appearance of objectivity.
To that end, perhaps the main page needs to be redesigned with an announcements section that concerns/. specifically. Similarly, if they are going to get help or pay for services for other companies, and they feel these companies deserve mention, put that in a 'supporter' slashbox. It should be a small thing, and would go a long way towards assuaging my concerns.
A forum for these industries to develop the voluntary, open framework for playing, storing and distributing digital music necessary to enable a new market to emerge. SDMI is working on two tracks. The first has already produced a standard, or specification, for portable devices. The longer-term effort is working toward completion of an overall architecture for delivery of digital music in all forms.
What it is not:
SDMI is not producing a single format, technology or design. The SDMI framework allows a variety of competing technologies and download formats to be used within its system.
Sounds almost like the NE1000 technical standard that wasn't originally, but became one. Luckily (I hope) this won't become one.
(My apologies for the HTML. I'm a suit, not a tech)
I'll buy an SDMI enabled MP3 player for the same reason (and at the same time) I bought a DIVX DVD player.
After DIVX tanked, I could buy a top of the line DVD/DIVX player for less than a top of the line DVD only player. (Short story long: I originally bought a middle of the line player from Best Buy. This player mangled the captions, and Samsung had no intention of fixing the problem. They should have a class action against them, BTW. I returned the machine for a replacement. Best Buy had no help and no machines available that day. So I just took the money and left. I would have gone back in a few days, but I had to drive 90 minutes to get to a Best Buy. At about the same time, DIVX got cancelled. I went into Circuit City to gloat, saw a GREAT price on a ProScan (I think that was the brand) and bought it. And made sure the salesman and manager knew that I had bought about $500 worth of electronics at other stores during the DIVX stupidity. That doesn't even count the first DVD player.)
If/when SDMI tanks and gets pulled, if I can get a MP3/SDMI that is fully functional, I'll be happy to do so.
Somebody moderate this up! Now! He's a genius!! He makes very similar arguments that I did in the next message!!!
:)
Seriously, even piping the audio into brains isn't enough. My wife has a cochlear implant. It has an analog input port. Shouldn't be hard to reverse engineer an audio output (Not sure that she'd like me taking a soldering iron to it though:) The only way to be prevent the 'theft' of music (please note the quotation marks) is to pipe the thoughts of the musician to that of the listener. And then how would the RIAA and M$ make a buck? (Not to mention that I don't want to get that intimate with most musicians. Better stop this before I start a Natalie Portman thread:)
BTW, the industry (at least WRT the US market can win. I'm sure they'll try to 'license' music much the way software is licensed, especially if Art. 2B (UCITA) passes. The easiest way to do this would be to encode some code into the music, thus classifying it as software (BTW, what about those mixed discs that have some screensavers and junk like that on them? Are those programs sold or licensed?). Second easiest way is to buy a few judges and get them to ignore existing US copyright law and decades of the application of that law.
I don't think they forgot the 'fair use' clause. I think they looked at this as one way to get around it, and force you to buy a copy of the song for your car, your home, your workplace, your walkman, your second car, your motorcycle, each computer, the bedroom, your kids' bedrooms, etc.
Why sell once when you can sell it ten times? Hell, I imagine the durability of LD and DVD did more to concern Disney than the superiority of the format for making copies. After all, if you can get junior to watch the Lion King 400 times, he's going to burn out the tape (not to mention the VCR:) and it will have to be replaced. Not so DVDs.
First, I hope you aren't married to this machine, and can return it. Doesn't sound like it's working out for you.
Second: can you say DIVX? I knew you could boys and girls (geez, must have been that ad for Mister Rogers I saw on the morning news:) Seriously though, moreso than anything, byzantine purchase and use rules seem to have killed interest in these machines. If your experience(s) are accurate and typical, hopefully SDMI will go into the toilet where it belongs.
(Again, hope you aren't stuck with this. Sounds like it is not a good thing.)
Problem is that M$ makes money from selling licenses to new products, NOT by selling support (who the hell would pay for that support???) So they have to role out Win 95, Win 98, Win NT 4, Win2K, Word 95,97,98,99,2000, etc. If they convince GM (just a name pulled out of my arse) to upgrade their entire operation from Win 95 (or NT 4.0) to Win2k, that's big. And, since you have this new OS, buy these new office apps. Oh, BTW, there's new API's all over the place, but don't worry about that, since you have all new stuff.
Now, to shift gears a bit: M$ has a lock on the office app market. They stop offering Word 2000, and start selling 2001. Unfortunately, you must have Win2k to run it. Your argument would say that the consumer would balk at the idea and continue running Word 2000 on Win 98. But, unfortunately, the marketplace has shown that what will happen is that Joe doofus Consumer will buy both the new OS as well as the new version of Word.
Trust me, I wish things work the way you say. Honestly. At my work, (before I started and also before I 'saw the light') they locked into a program that is M$ only. No clients for anything but. And as they upgrade the system (adding core functionality, BTW) they use the new API's, etc. and force us to upgrade our entire setup. Luckily, they haven't said we'll have to switch to Win2k (yet) as our hardware would turn into a cinder at the requirements.
Now that I am totally off topic (sorry:) if anyone knows of any open source medical records software (and medical billing software) please email me ASAP (ghowell@familyhealthcarepa.com) as we are close to a point at the company where we have an opportunity to jump ship.
Back to the main point: M$ can force new and incompatible API's on the public. Don't support software that only runs on the old stuff (And they don't. Show me one instance where M$ still releases bug fixes on a product that has been discontinued for... three years), force people to upgrade one item, and let that requirement cascade into purchasing other items. There's a reason for the DOJ suit and there's a reason to be afraid of the UCITA.
Slashdot Mirror
Given my druthers, I'd rather have a decent online manual to a crappy paper one. The best situation, is, of course, a decent paper manual.
//e or Mac II. With HOW-TO's and FAQ's, not only do you have the ability these days of rolling your own machine and your own distro, but you are pretty much forced to roll your own documentation. My work machine has several files where I dump emails and Usenet posts to supplement poor documentation.
Why hasn't anyone questioned the quality of manuals of late? We're long gone from the thousands of pages of documentation I got on my Apple
Tell you what: take the $2 printing cost that your company spends on the paper manual, turn it into higher more/better writers, and give us some decent electronic documentation. (BTW, your company might have the greatest documentation since sliced bread, but I have no idea)
Latest reports on the Apex mailing list are that the newly stocked 600A's have not been modded. The best way to be sure is to buy one and check it out. Last time I checked, Circuit City had an unlimited 30 day return policy. You can return anything for any reason within 30 days (okay, not software). So, get it, see if you can do the mod, and return it on the off chance that you can't.
Yeah, but the chapter on dynamically loadable kernel modules was a bit weak and they spent entirely too much time on cleaning your carburator
Ho, ho, ho. How droll. Obviously spoken by someone who has either not read the book, missed the point, or is trying to make a lame joke. That book would be quite appropriate for people who want to learn to program.
And BTW, having just cleaned 4 20 year old carbs, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Zen and the Art... was at least as useful as my Haynes and Clymers.
Freon IS illegal, isn't it?
R-12 requires a license to obtain in the US.
I only wish. Occasionally Katz has wrtten an intelligetnt picece, but I fear that this decision is only going to bolster his inane writings even more. Look, it's justification that he's right! I suspect we'll see a trifecta of his garbage next week. His interview with Pinkerton (provided they don't string up his sanctimonious hide), the 'I was right about games!' article, and completed with a 'Hi, I'm a dope, but I have this cool job working for Slashdot and you don't' article.
Better go change my settings quick. Next week is gonna hurt if you don't like Katz.
You don't need regulation for quality pump gas. You need competent courts. If I buy what is marked as 89 octane for $1.50/gal, and I really get only 86 octane, and because of flaws in the pump I only get 2 quarts for $1.50, then I can sue. No need to write new legislation.
Furthermore, more than 50% of the population of the US lives in cities. Therefore any solution that helps those who live in rural areas is a form of welfare. Plus, like the rural electric co-ops, there isn't (or, in my beautiful, non-existant world there isn't:) anything stopping the formation of rural telco co-ops, rural isp co-ops, etc.
Please explain how DeCSS helps pirate movies?
If you have the right kind of burner, you can already do a bitwise copy of the disc. No DeCSS needed. If you are putting it on tape or anything else, you just pipe the output of your DVD player into your VCR. I suppose it could help, but there are much cheaper/easier ways to copy DVDs.
Next thing you know, you'll tell us that freon should be illegal because car thieves use it to get rid of the club in a heartbeat.
Kids don't have constitutional rights to the same degree as adults.
However, this likely is a violation of certain rights (especially if Pinkerton cannot show what happens to these records after the kid turns 18) Also, consider the case of those of us who turned 18 before graduating high school. There should be enough of them to form a fat class-action suit against Pinkerton, the governor, and the state of NC. Those 'kids' do have full rights.
My question is how can NC use what Pinkerton collects without following the law. While Pinkerton has some freedom, if NC uses the information, it is held to a higher legal standard.
Ahh, this whole thing is bullshit anyway. The correct thing to do is for the undesireables to get together and spam the hell out of the hotlines. Hopefully there will be web-based reporting, and someone can write a perl-script to flood Pinkerton. Otherwise, I'd suggest a $10 roll of quarters and the pay-phone outside 7-11. The trick is to single out the one kid above reproach (the principal's kid? Better yet, in my high school, the superintendent's kid attended. And in NC, if you are lucky enough to go to school with the niece/nephew/child/grandchild of the governor or one of the Pinkerton scum... Rat 'em out. Keep track of your calls (away from home) and when the shit hits the fan, you'll be ready.)
Not bad, a 50% day for Jon Katz. This rant was as bad as the Pinkerton one was good.
Jon, you and all the other who complain about using '19th century' laws to defeat a '21st century' company are missing the point. A good law stands the test of time. Hence 213 years under the US Constitution. To put it another way, is Linux bad because it emulates a 30 year old operating system? Didn't think so. Quality in any form stands the test of time.
When a company with a greater gross profit than the GDPs of most countries of the world gets out of line, there's only one institution that can take them on: the US government. Were you this annoyed at the IBM case? the AT&T case?
Maybe you live in a post MS world, but I think you missed a further point: this case was about who would control what might become the post-MS world. If MS keeps bundling IIS/ASP with Win2000, if IE comes with every OS except Linux and BSD, if all set top boxes run WinCE, how post-MS is this?
This case has likely prevented MS from being more onerous and simultaneously gave other OSes the breathing room necessary. The decision yesterday DOES matter. It gives a little more breathing room. It will also hopefully kill off some of these miserable dotcom's that never should have gotten any public funding to begin with. BTW, did you happen to notice that RHAT was up in yesterday's trading? So were many blue chips. This decision finally sent a message that it's time to grow up. dotcom's and e-businesses (M$ being the most obvious in the eyes of the public) are still companies. They are hives of wizened mages. They are companies allowed to form for the PUBLIC good. In that respect, they are no different from a coal mine, a train company, an oil company, or an auto maker. And as such, they are subject to the same laws. A corporation is given a certain level of trust by the government. M$ broke that trust, and now it's time to pay the piper. It's the right thing to do. 19th century or 21st century.
Is that they can't put their annoying ad on the desktop in X. Too many different window managers, so how bloated would their binary be by the time they figure out how to add an icon to Ice, BlackBox, Enlightenment, AfterStep, FVWM, etc, etc, etc.
Or maybe they just want to force us onto Darwin. Ha! Like that will happen.
Point two (and really, the entire article) is incorrect. Regulation is not necessary. AT&T and others can only block me from using "illegal" or unallowed equipment on their lines via one of two things:
First, lawsuits. If judges were not morons, they would throw out the cases. Since this isn't the case, we need law to force judges to act right.
Second, by extending monopolies to companies to tear up our yards. In my county, one cable company has the right to provide cable. In return for this monopoly, they provide the county with NOTHING. As a matter of fact, when they recently asked for the county to allow them to charge customers a franchise fee (typically goes back to the local govt) the local government didn't require anything of them. No payment back. No promise to upgrade to digital cable. No promise to wire schools. Nothing. They just said "charge us more".
Anyway, the point is, the only reason regulation is needed now is to correct prior regulation and stupidity. Regulation is always bad. The correct answer (especially to the original author) is to pass a law that repeals prior corporate/governmental stupidity.
Also dig the cool menus and the nice, nice sound quality.
Amen. Geez, even at 27, I'm looking at a story that seems to be lost on the young people on /. I remember spending many hundreds of dollars on long distance modem calls to Austin TX (okay, spending my parents money:)
Sadly, I didn't play GURPS or OGRE. Just Car Wars.
Maybe if some of these young kids (18-19:) had had our old hand-crank, acoustic modems, they'd appreciate the current tyranny a bit more.
Obviously, I'm not savvy to the details of the /.
/., it doesn't matter what you or I, or the Troll's think.
purchase, but I'm not sure that it is Rob's site anymore. At least not technically.
Regardless, this story does seem appropriate. And as Rob is still the chief editor (?) of
However, I do think that story moderation might be in order, if for nothing else that to allow the PTB to assess their audience. That just makes good business sense.
That is in fact Defender on the 2600. Got that game for my birthday from my grandparents (I can't imagine how THAT happened:)
Nope. Just inside the head and then inside the cochlea (unless you count the cochlea as 'the ear'. I assume by ear you mean the outer and middle)
I think my point may have been lost: I wouldn't buy an SDMI/MP3 player until AFTER the demise of SDMI.
-- Consolidate the complementary networks of VA (including Linux.com, Sourceforge.net, and Themes.org) and Andover.Net (including Slashdot.org and Freshmeat.net) to create the Internet's leading destination for Open Source developers, with nearly two-thirds of the total traffic of major Open Source sites and putting the combined network in the top 100 web destinations worldwide;
Two thirds of the total open source traffic, discussion, and news will be 'owned' by one company?? This doesn't concern anyone? Sure, CT can claim that he will maintain control, but I'd love to see his contract proving that. Money changes things and people.
This article seems to indicate that advertising is already cropping up as editorial content. How different is this 'story' from this one? Sure, it might be nice to make notice of the live broadcast, but mentioning The Sync both times seems a bit inappropriate.
Now, before getting flamed and moderated, let me explain one thing: I'll give the Slashdot gang the benefit of the doubt. Most of them are younger than me by a couple of years, and I know I'm not fully baked. But I expect they'll have to learn fast. Just as important as actually maintaining independent editorial control (there was a story a few days back that mentioned someone trying to get andover to force a story, but CT et al. said no.) is maintaining the appearance of objectivity.
To that end, perhaps the main page needs to be redesigned with an announcements section that concerns
A forum for these industries to develop the voluntary, open framework for playing, storing and distributing digital music necessary to enable a new market to emerge. SDMI is working on two tracks. The first has already produced a standard, or specification, for portable devices. The longer-term effort is working toward completion of an overall architecture for delivery of digital music in all forms.
What it is not:
SDMI is not producing a single format, technology or design. The SDMI framework allows a variety of competing technologies and download formats to be used within its system.
Sounds almost like the NE1000 technical standard that wasn't originally, but became one. Luckily (I hope) this won't become one.
(My apologies for the HTML. I'm a suit, not a tech)
I'll buy an SDMI enabled MP3 player for the same reason (and at the same time) I bought a DIVX DVD player.
After DIVX tanked, I could buy a top of the line DVD/DIVX player for less than a top of the line DVD only player. (Short story long: I originally bought a middle of the line player from Best Buy. This player mangled the captions, and Samsung had no intention of fixing the problem. They should have a class action against them, BTW. I returned the machine for a replacement. Best Buy had no help and no machines available that day. So I just took the money and left. I would have gone back in a few days, but I had to drive 90 minutes to get to a Best Buy. At about the same time, DIVX got cancelled. I went into Circuit City to gloat, saw a GREAT price on a ProScan (I think that was the brand) and bought it. And made sure the salesman and manager knew that I had bought about $500 worth of electronics at other stores during the DIVX stupidity. That doesn't even count the first DVD player.)
If/when SDMI tanks and gets pulled, if I can get a MP3/SDMI that is fully functional, I'll be happy to do so.
Somebody moderate this up! Now! He's a genius!! He makes very similar arguments that I did in the next message!!!
:)
Seriously, even piping the audio into brains isn't enough. My wife has a cochlear implant. It has an analog input port. Shouldn't be hard to reverse engineer an audio output (Not sure that she'd like me taking a soldering iron to it though:) The only way to be prevent the 'theft' of music (please note the quotation marks) is to pipe the thoughts of the musician to that of the listener. And then how would the RIAA and M$ make a buck? (Not to mention that I don't want to get that intimate with most musicians. Better stop this before I start a Natalie Portman thread:)
BTW, the industry (at least WRT the US market can win. I'm sure they'll try to 'license' music much the way software is licensed, especially if Art. 2B (UCITA) passes. The easiest way to do this would be to encode some code into the music, thus classifying it as software (BTW, what about those mixed discs that have some screensavers and junk like that on them? Are those programs sold or licensed?). Second easiest way is to buy a few judges and get them to ignore existing US copyright law and decades of the application of that law.
I don't think they forgot the 'fair use' clause. I think they looked at this as one way to get around it, and force you to buy a copy of the song for your car, your home, your workplace, your walkman, your second car, your motorcycle, each computer, the bedroom, your kids' bedrooms, etc.
Why sell once when you can sell it ten times? Hell, I imagine the durability of LD and DVD did more to concern Disney than the superiority of the format for making copies. After all, if you can get junior to watch the Lion King 400 times, he's going to burn out the tape (not to mention the VCR:) and it will have to be replaced. Not so DVDs.
First, I hope you aren't married to this machine, and can return it. Doesn't sound like it's working out for you.
Second: can you say DIVX? I knew you could boys and girls (geez, must have been that ad for Mister Rogers I saw on the morning news:) Seriously though, moreso than anything, byzantine purchase and use rules seem to have killed interest in these machines. If your experience(s) are accurate and typical, hopefully SDMI will go into the toilet where it belongs.
(Again, hope you aren't stuck with this. Sounds like it is not a good thing.)
Problem is that M$ makes money from selling licenses to new products, NOT by selling support (who the hell would pay for that support???) So they have to role out Win 95, Win 98, Win NT 4, Win2K, Word 95,97,98,99,2000, etc. If they convince GM (just a name pulled out of my arse) to upgrade their entire operation from Win 95 (or NT 4.0) to Win2k, that's big. And, since you have this new OS, buy these new office apps. Oh, BTW, there's new API's all over the place, but don't worry about that, since you have all new stuff.
Now, to shift gears a bit: M$ has a lock on the office app market. They stop offering Word 2000, and start selling 2001. Unfortunately, you must have Win2k to run it. Your argument would say that the consumer would balk at the idea and continue running Word 2000 on Win 98. But, unfortunately, the marketplace has shown that what will happen is that Joe doofus Consumer will buy both the new OS as well as the new version of Word.
Trust me, I wish things work the way you say. Honestly. At my work, (before I started and also before I 'saw the light') they locked into a program that is M$ only. No clients for anything but. And as they upgrade the system (adding core functionality, BTW) they use the new API's, etc. and force us to upgrade our entire setup. Luckily, they haven't said we'll have to switch to Win2k (yet) as our hardware would turn into a cinder at the requirements.
Now that I am totally off topic (sorry:) if anyone knows of any open source medical records software (and medical billing software) please email me ASAP (ghowell@familyhealthcarepa.com) as we are close to a point at the company where we have an opportunity to jump ship.
Back to the main point: M$ can force new and incompatible API's on the public. Don't support software that only runs on the old stuff (And they don't. Show me one instance where M$ still releases bug fixes on a product that has been discontinued for... three years), force people to upgrade one item, and let that requirement cascade into purchasing other items. There's a reason for the DOJ suit and there's a reason to be afraid of the UCITA.