This letter is so crazy it's hard to believe there's not something else going on. There's no chance that the music industry would endorse anything as a standard that would give MS any leverage in the industry. IMO, they're only allowing music retailers to use WMA because there's no viable alternative for Windows PC's right now (because the real open standard solution - MPEG4 DRM - isn't quite ready yet). When MPEG4 DRM is finished and signed off on, all of the consumer electronics companies and music companies jump right on, and all you'll hear in WMA is the giant sucking sound of everyone leaving.
Microsoft is used to being the dominant player and being able to dictate terms. But in the world of consumer electronics, companies like Sony, Philips, Nokia, etc., don't roll over the way little tech companies do.
"It would take over 500 years to fill a 64 bit filesystem written at 1GB/sec"
This is about the same argument as IPv6 addressing: it's expensive to change the size of the address space, so make it absurdly large because bits of address space are cheap, you enable some interesting unforseen applications, and you put off a forced migration.
While I agree that 128-bit block addressing is overkill for a single computer, once you're going to expand past a 64-bit filesystem, there's not much point in going smaller than a 128-bit fileystem. It's not like you'd save money making it an 80-bit filesystem.
As to your point about the speed of a hard drive vs. the addressible space in the filesystem, keep in mind that filesystems are much larger than disks. For example, it's not that unusual (in cooler UNIX environments) for everyone in a company to work in one large distributed filesystem, which may run across hundreds or thousands of hard drives. Now imagine a building full of people working with very large files (e.g. video production) where you could easily accumulate terabytes of data. Wouldn't it be nice to manage your online, nearline, and offline storage as a system, extremely large filesystem? Or, for real blue-sky thinking, imagine that everyone on the planet uses a single shared, distributed filesystem for everything. Wouldn't it be cool to address _everything_ using a single, consistent scheme no matter where you are. Cool, eh?
MSDN has cost $2,500 per seat for years. I've bought dozens of MSDN seats for developers.
Checking on MS's site, the current pricing ranges from U.S.$2,799 for "universal" down to U.S.$1,199 for "professional". Universal is the bundle that allows you to develop for all OS's in all MS-supported languages, of course.
If you know that the developers will only use one specific compiler, etc., you could buy that one for less, and download specific SDK's, but that's a huge PITA since you can't get it all in one install but have to perform a zillion download and installs. Since this is an open contest, I'd think that they would want to provide the full range of development tools on the machines, comparable to a standard Linux or Mac OS X installation (for a developer, not an end user).
Since it's a one-time contest, perhaps they can get MS to donate the tools?
My point, however, is that for MacOS X (and Linux) the development tools and free and included with the OS, while for NT the tools aren't included at all, and are either expensive or a PITA to acquire. So the argument that "MacOS X requires you to install the development tools from the developer CD" doesn't explain why they're not using MacOS X in this programming contest.
NT's stability has been going downhill since 3.51. Of course, performance and the Windows API compatability layer is better, etc., but they really destabilized the system in order to do it.
Of course, no NT version is anywhere near as stable as OS/2, for what that's worth. I as never a huge OS/2 fan, but I have to admit that that OS was nearly impossible to break, which made it a nice OS for dedicated applications in its day. It's a shame MS pulled the plug on it...
Maximizing windows on the Mac works just fine, but with a different definition than Windows.
Specifically, Apple's belief is that the user should always be in control, not the application or computer, so applications always run within windows that the user knows that he can control, not (except for videogames and media players, and even then only under user control) taking over the full screen. Under MacOS, maximizing a window makes it as large as it needs to be to display the window's contents without taking over more than it needs of the screen, and always leaves the user able to control the window position and size.
Under Windows, maximizing a window always takes over the full screen, obscuring everything else, locking the resize controls, etc.
"My guess is they're not supporting it because the default install of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther doesn't yet include all of the goodies that developers want."
Sounds like a non-issue to me. Anyone who can participate in a geek coding challenge can download and run a Mac installer.
I guess that your claim is technically correct in that the developer tools are a separate install from the base OS, so you have to put in another CD (included with the OS) and run the installer. And if you have the latest developer CD (I get one in the mail every month) you always have the latest dev tools without being brutally forced to download them (for free). Of course, they charge a little for the level of membership that gets you the mailings, but the hardware discount pretty covers that.
Of course, NT doesn't come with any development tools at all, so I guess the NT developers are requred to provide their own tools. Since the standard MSDN tools are $2,500 per machine, I can't imagine that they're pre-installed. Apple's dev tools may require you to run an install, but at least they're free.
Come to think of it, I've never used the version of development tools on any Linux or BSD install -- I always download the latest (stable) versions.
For users, I agree that there aren't massive differences between 10.2 and 10.3. But developers get all updates for free, so they all (that I know personally) run the latest versions, usually one machine running the current release and one machine running the latest pre-release of the next version.
A programming contest that doesn't include MacOS X? Crazy! All of the best engineers I know have been moving to MacOS X as their native platform ever since MacOS X 10.2. It lets you use all those wonderful open source tools, and still have a nice friendly GUI, and work on a beautiful laptop, all at once. It's a thing of beauty.
"If you read the Sybase document that announces this they are interested in hearing from you if you'd like to redistribute this version with an app that you've created. So it's not really that bad."
Yeah, I should have said that you can't redistribute the package *without a license*. Good catch!
"It can only be used internally, so you can't use it in situations where you may have been able to get away with the hardware restrictions on a small external site or (i guess) distributed to clients as part of your product."
This same sort of restriction is fairly common in the "enterprise software" space. All it really means is that you can't bundle the free version invisibly into your application (which is OK), and you can't resell "used software" (which kinda sucks).
This means that your customers have to get their own (free) copy from the primary vendor. Oracle, Sybase, MS, etc., all do this, because they want to have a direct relationship with all of their customers so that they can support them.
The "no reselling" part of the deal is a bummer, though. For example, I worked at a startup that bought a $180K Oracle license, and when the company went the way of most startups (sigh), this provision meant that the Oracle license couldn't be sold to get back some money for the investors. Of course, vendors never approve reselling the license, because they'd rather sell a new license to the buyer.
"Argh.. people who tries to come up with a new 'independent monetary system' seems to not understand two things. 1) Time is money 2) The existing banking system."
There are many cases where you want to run an independent "monetary" system. For example, if you want to use "points" within a community to reward particular behaviors in terms that make sense for the community. So, for example, in one MMORPG called There that gives pointed to builders, awarded by other players based on how much they like what you've created. The points then let you create more in that world, or gain access to more cool stuff. So the points exist only within the virtual world, and are rewarded within that world. And, more traditionally, food manufactureres have printed "points" on their box tops so that buyers who collect enough points (and thus buy that company's food) are rewarded. So you could probably work out a real-world dollar value to these points, but there's no way that that these companies would accept it, because that would (1) devalue the points as a reward for creativity/buying the companies products since anyone could buy them with "mere money", and (2) would subject the company to all sorts of banking-related requirements that are a PITA.
"The success of negative campaigning isn't just the public's fault, either; it's partly because both candidates this time really do suck."
The success of negative campaigning is due in large part to the press being pathetically unwilling to do their job. Instead of determining and reporting the truth, they take the easier route of "he said/she said" reporting where they accurately repeat whatever people say, no matter how absurd. This rewards people who are willing to lie with great authority, because the general public never hears an informed, objective perspective, only two opposing partisans presented as equals.
For example:
"You remember when [Secretary of State] Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons....They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two.* And we'll find more weapons as time goes on, But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." -- George Bush, quoted in the Washingon Post, May 31, 2003
What the US press did not do is investigate the claims, and provide some context. Specifically, they accurately reported what Bush said, but they didn't bother to do the research to determine that, in fact, Bush's statement was not at all representative of what the intelligence community thought of the trailers.
In the UK, where there's some competition in the press (so they have to actually do real work), they did the (trivial) research of actually asking intelligence people whether the claim was true, and determined that:
*At the time of this statement, the U.S. position was that some analysts thought that the trailers could possibly have been used for menufacturing weapons. --Politex, 06.09.03
Note that in the UK, the press researched the issue and reported their results, while in the US the press only reported what Bush said.
So, because the US press is lazy (and/or fearful of being accused of being "unpatriotic" for pointing out when government representatives lie) the result was that the people in the US believed that biological weapons labs had been found in Iraq, when in fact all that was found were helium production trucks used to fill balloons.
Personally, I really like the idea of he said/she said/we said. That is, after reporting accurately what everyone says, they should do their jobs and tell us what's really going on.
"Not only is the DRM specific to a song, it's also tied to a store as well?"
Right, every protected WMA file is tied to a Windows Media Rights Manager instance run by the retailer that provided you the file. It's also tied to a specific PC. So the first time you try to play the file (or when you buy it, if the retailer is smart) the file contacts that MRM server and sends it your GUID, and the server decides whether to issued a certificate to play that file on that computer. So if you bought music from BuyMusic and they go out of business, you can't move it to a new PC, or even make any substantial change to your current PC (pretty much the same rules as XP's registration process).
So, worst case, you upgrade your PC and you have to get permission from a dozen different music retailers to re-authorize your music on your PC.
Kinda like the old DivX locked DVD's, except that instead of being vulnerable to one company going under and rendering the files unplayable, you're vulnerable to any company that you've bought content from going under.
The goal is to have HAVA funding enable the Open Voting Consortium to finish the system in time for the 2006 elections.
Feel free to help out the the project.
"He was unable to get purchased songs from some stores to work on his device. That is not the same as WMP10 being unable to play them. He mentions that you have to download updated software from the stores themselves to be compatible with your device. When I launched WMP10 for the first time, it prompted me to download the update for MusicMatch (which may not have been available when Walt did his review), which I did without a problem."
As I said, I expect that the vendors and MS will get the kinks worked out in their handling of DRM protected WMA music. The main point is that even after they get it all debugged (and all retailers upgraded to issue WMP 10 licenses, so they can sell "tethered downloads", etc.) this technology will still only apply to 20-30% of the music market. The vast majority of digital music sold, and over half of the players sold, won't work with protected WMA's, so I think that in this one case, MS has a real uphill battle...
Yep, I remember when they started requiring ID's -- airlines made a _fortune_ the first month or two as businesses were forced to buy last minute tickets for people. My company flew people between Boston and NYC all the time, and we simply had a stack of cheap, pre-purchased tickets (in a locked box) so that anyone flying could grab a ticket on the way to the airport. Easy and efficient. When the ID rule changed (with no warning, thanks...) we basically had to throw out a box of airplane tickets and start buying same-day tickets for 3x as much.
What I wonder is, how long will we be able to buy bus and train tickets without people checking ID's. Then perhaps go straight to the obvious conclusion of the process -- embed RFID tags in everyone at birth, because only criminals need privacy.
This means that not only is WMP10 incompatible by definition with the vast majority of music sold online (70-80% of all music sold is through the iTunes Music Store, which is in protected AAC format not supported by WMP), it apparently won't play what little music is sold in protected WMA format, either.
Given that WMP10 apparently doesn't play any music ever sold online, I'd say that they have an uphill battle. I'm sure that MS and the MS-based retailers will eventually fix the problems that keeps WMP10 from playing the 20-30% of purchased music in MS-based formats. But since Microsoft's store isn't better than Apple's, and MS-based players aren't better than Apple's, about the only advantage that MS has is the ability to pre-install WMP on every copy of Windows. Of course, since Apple is doing deals with PC manufacturers to pre-install iTunes and iTMS on PC's as well, with any luck the market will at least stay competitive, to the benefit of customers...
"I get the impression McCain is about as impressed with John Kerry as he is with a pile of old dogshit in the road."
Your impression would be wrong. McCain and Kerry have been good friends, and have worked together, for years. Note that McCain didn't say _anything_ negative about Kerry in his speec at the RNC convention (unlike all of the other flaming Kerry-bashing).
"As for the accusations about Kerry in Vietnam, if he would talk about a reason to elect him OTHER than the 4 months he spent there, then maybe other people would dwell less on it as well."
Actually, Kerry was in the Navy for four years. He was on combat duty (which he volunteered for) for four months, which is, I guess I have to point out, much MORE than the average; most soldiers never see active combat duty at all.
And he's explained in quite a bit of detail what he would do if elected. There's plenty of detail on http://www.johnkerry.com/issues/. Admittedly the press would rather play "gotcha" than communicate anything of substance, but voters can educate themselves fairly easily. Heck, you're posting on Slashdot, so I _know_ that you could go read Kerry's position papers.
"They would be discredited, if it wasn't for the various confimations they've gotten."
Pretty much every major media outlet has been pointing out that there's virtually no evidence to support any of their claims.
I'll point out that even before their attacks, Kerry said that it was probably January and not December when he was in Cambodia. The important point, of course, is that american troops were illegally in Cambodia, and now there are recordings of the SBVT person (who claimed that it was impossible for Kerry to sail his boat into Cambodia) telling President Nixon that he did exactly that himself. So while the SBVT's can certainly raise questions, they've not presented any evidence to support any of their accusations, and now appear to basically be a bunch of people who don't like what Kerry is saying, and want to discredit him by rewriting history. Several of them have been caught forging photo's, etc., trying to make Kerry look bad previously, are contradicting their own sworn testimony at the time, etc., so it's all looking pretty embarassingly bad for them to anyone paying attention.
"Just after last month's Democratic National Convention, during which Kerry played up his credential as a decorated Vietnam veteran, the Massachusetts senator was tied with President George W. Bush at 46 percent each among veterans, according to the CBS News Poll." - http://www.turkishpress.com/turkishpress/news.asp? ID=24948
Kerry's support among veterans has dropped recently, with the multi-million dollar ad campaign from the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" -- but one would think that now that the group has been completely discredited the numbers would go back up.
And there's this:
A Shrinking Base: Support for War Wanes Among Military Families Facing Redeployment
By Hanna Rosin, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page C01
HINESVILLE, Ga.
Yes, sir, this is Bush country: Real pit barbecues, yellow ribbons on church doors, wild boar in the woods. Fort Stewart 10 minutes away. And one teenage party loyalist greeting guests for his mother's Party for the President, on National Party for the President Day, a boy with impeccable manners who, when peppered with questions by the adults in the living room, blurts out things such as "Condi Rice speaks, like, three languages!"
So why does hostess Michele Bourque sound as defensive as if she were living in Berkeley?
"There's just so much negativity around," she says, explaining her decision to host this party. "There's not a lot of positive affirmation about why George W. Bush should be president. We just want to let people know, he's not as bad as people think."...
"For the first time I hear officers openly debating against Bush," says Donald Vandergriff, an Army major and a professor at Georgetown University. "They don't want to vote for Bush and they don't want to vote for Kerry. What choices do they have? Zero, basically."...
The people most likely to shift their support from Bush to Kerry are in the reserves and National Guard, says David Segal, a professor at the University of Maryland. "In the past the antiwar movement was rooted in college campuses," he says. "Now the major movement against the war is in reserve families."
The equation is certainly valid -- I don't think that anyone would argue that the cost of administering software shouldn't be part of the TCO. But from having managed experienced teams of sysadmin's running both UNIX and NT systems, I've never seen the costs for administering NT be even close to UNIX. The fundamental issue (IMO, of course) is that UNIX was designed to be an efficient server OS, administered by professionals in large server farms, while NT is really a desktop OS designed to be administered by GUI desktop users. So the GUI tools, registry, etc., that make NT administration for individual boxes a bit easier for junior sysadmin's ends up making it very, very hard to administer large production NT systems.
That being said, I admire the underlying OS in NT -- if you ran the core OS, and removed all of the GUI and Windows API layers, it'd be a very nice, efficient, stable server OS. NT embedded is modular, and could probably be stripped down to be a good server OS, but that's not what MS wants to sell as a server OS.
That's an interesting hypothetical statement. Let's inject some actual data.
Windows not only costs more to purchase, in my experience it also costs for more to administer. I ran a huge farm of servers (hundreds of 4-CPU servers) that could run both NT and UNIX, and it took 4x as many sysadmin's per server to keep the _same_ servers running under NT than UNIX. On top of that, we could tune the UNIX environment to the application far better than NT, so we also got 2x the performance on the same app's under UNIX than NT (so we had to run the same app on 2x as many servers). This meant that in large scale production, we consistently (several years) measured NT as costing 8x as much as UNIX to run. Of course, you also have to factor in NT's relative instability as a server environment (try running ASP's with DLL's), but that hardly helps NT's case.
So let's rephrase your statement as: "There is more to cost than the software. My time is worth at least $50 an hour. And so if I have to muck around with a commercial piece of software more than free it can quickly become even more "expensive" than its free counterpart.
Would you take a commercial car if it cost $1,000 for gas and maintenance?"
W's incoherence isn't simply an artifact of him being under scrutiny. The guy really can't speak coherently except (sometimes) when reading a script. Everyone convering the last couple of Presidents agrees that W just can't think on his feet. This is why his handlers keep him away from unscripted discussions, much less an audience that isn't pre-screened or questions that aren't pre-approved.
I just watched Clinton's interview on the Daily Show last night. Boy did it make me miss the good old days when the President count think coherently and run the country competently, and the most important think critics had to worry about was whether the President lied about getting a blow job, not the fact that he lied in order to invade and conquer a country that wasn't a threat to us, killing tens of thousands of people, wasting several hundred billion dollars, alientating the rest of the planet (thus putting us at greater risk of terrorist attacks), while driving the country into massive debt. It's also not too impressive seeing a guy who got put into the National Guard to avoid any personal risk, then ducked even that minimal service, flinging mud at a war hero who volunteered for the most dangerous military duty in the war, and was awarded a raft of medals, purely because it's politically expedient.
You have a lot more faith in the willpower of college professors than I do. I think that the temptation to pick out embarassing bits for private amusement (which would inevitably leak out) is too strong.
I don't understand why he'd need to change the hardware every six months. Sure, there are new MP3 players, but as long as they've implemented on a model that is sufficient for their work, who cares whether there are newer models out (other than that old models will get cheaper, which is nice).
And the idea of recording an entire day and sampling seems terrible in terms of both privacy and efficiency. If you can record a day's samples in a $75 MP3 flash-based player plus a tiny circuit that randomly presses the record button twice every so often, why bother using a $400 hard-drive based MP3 player, recording an entire day, then copying that day to a desktop computer, then sampling out random tiny bits of the day.
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This letter is so crazy it's hard to believe there's not something else going on. There's no chance that the music industry would endorse anything as a standard that would give MS any leverage in the industry. IMO, they're only allowing music retailers to use WMA because there's no viable alternative for Windows PC's right now (because the real open standard solution - MPEG4 DRM - isn't quite ready yet). When MPEG4 DRM is finished and signed off on, all of the consumer electronics companies and music companies jump right on, and all you'll hear in WMA is the giant sucking sound of everyone leaving.
Microsoft is used to being the dominant player and being able to dictate terms. But in the world of consumer electronics, companies like Sony, Philips, Nokia, etc., don't roll over the way little tech companies do.
"It would take over 500 years to fill a 64 bit filesystem written at 1GB/sec"
This is about the same argument as IPv6 addressing: it's expensive to change the size of the address space, so make it absurdly large because bits of address space are cheap, you enable some interesting unforseen applications, and you put off a forced migration.
While I agree that 128-bit block addressing is overkill for a single computer, once you're going to expand past a 64-bit filesystem, there's not much point in going smaller than a 128-bit fileystem. It's not like you'd save money making it an 80-bit filesystem.
As to your point about the speed of a hard drive vs. the addressible space in the filesystem, keep in mind that filesystems are much larger than disks. For example, it's not that unusual (in cooler UNIX environments) for everyone in a company to work in one large distributed filesystem, which may run across hundreds or thousands of hard drives. Now imagine a building full of people working with very large files (e.g. video production) where you could easily accumulate terabytes of data. Wouldn't it be nice to manage your online, nearline, and offline storage as a system, extremely large filesystem? Or, for real blue-sky thinking, imagine that everyone on the planet uses a single shared, distributed filesystem for everything. Wouldn't it be cool to address _everything_ using a single, consistent scheme no matter where you are. Cool, eh?
Nah, the ultimate filesystem has to be xyzzyfs! Your data magically appears... :-)
MSDN has cost $2,500 per seat for years. I've bought dozens of MSDN seats for developers.
Checking on MS's site, the current pricing ranges from U.S.$2,799 for "universal" down to U.S.$1,199 for "professional". Universal is the bundle that allows you to develop for all OS's in all MS-supported languages, of course.
If you know that the developers will only use one specific compiler, etc., you could buy that one for less, and download specific SDK's, but that's a huge PITA since you can't get it all in one install but have to perform a zillion download and installs. Since this is an open contest, I'd think that they would want to provide the full range of development tools on the machines, comparable to a standard Linux or Mac OS X installation (for a developer, not an end user).
Since it's a one-time contest, perhaps they can get MS to donate the tools?
My point, however, is that for MacOS X (and Linux) the development tools and free and included with the OS, while for NT the tools aren't included at all, and are either expensive or a PITA to acquire. So the argument that "MacOS X requires you to install the development tools from the developer CD" doesn't explain why they're not using MacOS X in this programming contest.
NT's stability has been going downhill since 3.51. Of course, performance and the Windows API compatability layer is better, etc., but they really destabilized the system in order to do it.
Of course, no NT version is anywhere near as stable as OS/2, for what that's worth. I as never a huge OS/2 fan, but I have to admit that that OS was nearly impossible to break, which made it a nice OS for dedicated applications in its day. It's a shame MS pulled the plug on it...
Maximizing windows on the Mac works just fine, but with a different definition than Windows.
Specifically, Apple's belief is that the user should always be in control, not the application or computer, so applications always run within windows that the user knows that he can control, not (except for videogames and media players, and even then only under user control) taking over the full screen. Under MacOS, maximizing a window makes it as large as it needs to be to display the window's contents without taking over more than it needs of the screen, and always leaves the user able to control the window position and size.
Under Windows, maximizing a window always takes over the full screen, obscuring everything else, locking the resize controls, etc.
"My guess is they're not supporting it because the default install of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther doesn't yet include all of the goodies that developers want."
Sounds like a non-issue to me. Anyone who can participate in a geek coding challenge can download and run a Mac installer.
I guess that your claim is technically correct in that the developer tools are a separate install from the base OS, so you have to put in another CD (included with the OS) and run the installer. And if you have the latest developer CD (I get one in the mail every month) you always have the latest dev tools without being brutally forced to download them (for free). Of course, they charge a little for the level of membership that gets you the mailings, but the hardware discount pretty covers that.
Of course, NT doesn't come with any development tools at all, so I guess the NT developers are requred to provide their own tools. Since the standard MSDN tools are $2,500 per machine, I can't imagine that they're pre-installed. Apple's dev tools may require you to run an install, but at least they're free.
Come to think of it, I've never used the version of development tools on any Linux or BSD install -- I always download the latest (stable) versions.
For users, I agree that there aren't massive differences between 10.2 and 10.3. But developers get all updates for free, so they all (that I know personally) run the latest versions, usually one machine running the current release and one machine running the latest pre-release of the next version.
A programming contest that doesn't include MacOS X? Crazy! All of the best engineers I know have been moving to MacOS X as their native platform ever since MacOS X 10.2. It lets you use all those wonderful open source tools, and still have a nice friendly GUI, and work on a beautiful laptop, all at once. It's a thing of beauty.
And Apple's development tools rock!
"If you read the Sybase document that announces this they are interested in hearing from you if you'd like to redistribute this version with an app that you've created. So it's not really that bad."
Yeah, I should have said that you can't redistribute the package *without a license*. Good catch!
"It can only be used internally, so you can't use it in situations where you may have been able to get away with the hardware restrictions on a small external site or (i guess) distributed to clients as part of your product."
This same sort of restriction is fairly common in the "enterprise software" space. All it really means is that you can't bundle the free version invisibly into your application (which is OK), and you can't resell "used software" (which kinda sucks).
This means that your customers have to get their own (free) copy from the primary vendor. Oracle, Sybase, MS, etc., all do this, because they want to have a direct relationship with all of their customers so that they can support them.
The "no reselling" part of the deal is a bummer, though. For example, I worked at a startup that bought a $180K Oracle license, and when the company went the way of most startups (sigh), this provision meant that the Oracle license couldn't be sold to get back some money for the investors. Of course, vendors never approve reselling the license, because they'd rather sell a new license to the buyer.
"Argh.. people who tries to come up with a new 'independent monetary system' seems to not understand two things. 1) Time is money 2) The existing banking system."
There are many cases where you want to run an independent "monetary" system. For example, if you want to use "points" within a community to reward particular behaviors in terms that make sense for the community. So, for example, in one MMORPG called There that gives pointed to builders, awarded by other players based on how much they like what you've created. The points then let you create more in that world, or gain access to more cool stuff. So the points exist only within the virtual world, and are rewarded within that world. And, more traditionally, food manufactureres have printed "points" on their box tops so that buyers who collect enough points (and thus buy that company's food) are rewarded. So you could probably work out a real-world dollar value to these points, but there's no way that that these companies would accept it, because that would (1) devalue the points as a reward for creativity/buying the companies products since anyone could buy them with "mere money", and (2) would subject the company to all sorts of banking-related requirements that are a PITA.
"The success of negative campaigning isn't just the public's fault, either; it's partly because both candidates this time really do suck."
The success of negative campaigning is due in large part to the press being pathetically unwilling to do their job. Instead of determining and reporting the truth, they take the easier route of "he said/she said" reporting where they accurately repeat whatever people say, no matter how absurd. This rewards people who are willing to lie with great authority, because the general public never hears an informed, objective perspective, only two opposing partisans presented as equals.
For example:
"You remember when [Secretary of State] Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons....They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two.* And we'll find more weapons as time goes on, But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." -- George Bush, quoted in the Washingon Post, May 31, 2003
What the US press did not do is investigate the claims, and provide some context. Specifically, they accurately reported what Bush said, but they didn't bother to do the research to determine that, in fact, Bush's statement was not at all representative of what the intelligence community thought of the trailers.
In the UK, where there's some competition in the press (so they have to actually do real work), they did the (trivial) research of actually asking intelligence people whether the claim was true, and determined that:
*At the time of this statement, the U.S. position was that some analysts thought that the trailers could possibly have been used for menufacturing weapons. --Politex, 06.09.03
Note that in the UK, the press researched the issue and reported their results, while in the US the press only reported what Bush said.
So, because the US press is lazy (and/or fearful of being accused of being "unpatriotic" for pointing out when government representatives lie) the result was that the people in the US believed that biological weapons labs had been found in Iraq, when in fact all that was found were helium production trucks used to fill balloons.
Personally, I really like the idea of he said/she said/we said. That is, after reporting accurately what everyone says, they should do their jobs and tell us what's really going on.
"Not only is the DRM specific to a song, it's also tied to a store as well?"
Right, every protected WMA file is tied to a Windows Media Rights Manager instance run by the retailer that provided you the file. It's also tied to a specific PC. So the first time you try to play the file (or when you buy it, if the retailer is smart) the file contacts that MRM server and sends it your GUID, and the server decides whether to issued a certificate to play that file on that computer. So if you bought music from BuyMusic and they go out of business, you can't move it to a new PC, or even make any substantial change to your current PC (pretty much the same rules as XP's registration process).
So, worst case, you upgrade your PC and you have to get permission from a dozen different music retailers to re-authorize your music on your PC.
Kinda like the old DivX locked DVD's, except that instead of being vulnerable to one company going under and rendering the files unplayable, you're vulnerable to any company that you've bought content from going under.
Yes, these things take time. States take years to certify voting systems. The Open Voting Consortium has been at it since November 2000, has a prototype system built, with a web demo and publicly demo'd, which the San Jose Mercury referred to as The touch-screen holy grail.
The goal is to have HAVA funding enable the Open Voting Consortium to finish the system in time for the 2006 elections. Feel free to help out the the project.
"He was unable to get purchased songs from some stores to work on his device. That is not the same as WMP10 being unable to play them. He mentions that you have to download updated software from the stores themselves to be compatible with your device. When I launched WMP10 for the first time, it prompted me to download the update for MusicMatch (which may not have been available when Walt did his review), which I did without a problem."
As I said, I expect that the vendors and MS will get the kinks worked out in their handling of DRM protected WMA music. The main point is that even after they get it all debugged (and all retailers upgraded to issue WMP 10 licenses, so they can sell "tethered downloads", etc.) this technology will still only apply to 20-30% of the music market. The vast majority of digital music sold, and over half of the players sold, won't work with protected WMA's, so I think that in this one case, MS has a real uphill battle...
Yep, I remember when they started requiring ID's -- airlines made a _fortune_ the first month or two as businesses were forced to buy last minute tickets for people. My company flew people between Boston and NYC all the time, and we simply had a stack of cheap, pre-purchased tickets (in a locked box) so that anyone flying could grab a ticket on the way to the airport. Easy and efficient. When the ID rule changed (with no warning, thanks...) we basically had to throw out a box of airplane tickets and start buying same-day tickets for 3x as much.
What I wonder is, how long will we be able to buy bus and train tickets without people checking ID's. Then perhaps go straight to the obvious conclusion of the process -- embed RFID tags in everyone at birth, because only criminals need privacy.
"WMP 10 will work with songs from virtually any other online music store
:)"
I guess "work" has become a very subjective word.
I'll second this. Read Walt Mossberg's WSJ review of the store -- he couldn't get music purchased from other WMP-based stores to play in WMP10.
This means that not only is WMP10 incompatible by definition with the vast majority of music sold online (70-80% of all music sold is through the iTunes Music Store, which is in protected AAC format not supported by WMP), it apparently won't play what little music is sold in protected WMA format, either.
Given that WMP10 apparently doesn't play any music ever sold online, I'd say that they have an uphill battle. I'm sure that MS and the MS-based retailers will eventually fix the problems that keeps WMP10 from playing the 20-30% of purchased music in MS-based formats. But since Microsoft's store isn't better than Apple's, and MS-based players aren't better than Apple's, about the only advantage that MS has is the ability to pre-install WMP on every copy of Windows. Of course, since Apple is doing deals with PC manufacturers to pre-install iTunes and iTMS on PC's as well, with any luck the market will at least stay competitive, to the benefit of customers...
"I get the impression McCain is about as impressed with John Kerry as he is with a pile of old dogshit in the road."
Your impression would be wrong. McCain and Kerry have been good friends, and have worked together, for years. Note that McCain didn't say _anything_ negative about Kerry in his speec at the RNC convention (unlike all of the other flaming Kerry-bashing).
"As for the accusations about Kerry in Vietnam, if he would talk about a reason to elect him OTHER than the 4 months he spent there, then maybe other people would dwell less on it as well."
Actually, Kerry was in the Navy for four years. He was on combat duty (which he volunteered for) for four months, which is, I guess I have to point out, much MORE than the average; most soldiers never see active combat duty at all.
And he's explained in quite a bit of detail what he would do if elected. There's plenty of detail on http://www.johnkerry.com/issues/. Admittedly the press would rather play "gotcha" than communicate anything of substance, but voters can educate themselves fairly easily. Heck, you're posting on Slashdot, so I _know_ that you could go read Kerry's position papers.
"They would be discredited, if it wasn't for the various confimations they've gotten."
Pretty much every major media outlet has been pointing out that there's virtually no evidence to support any of their claims.
I'll point out that even before their attacks, Kerry said that it was probably January and not December when he was in Cambodia. The important point, of course, is that american troops were illegally in Cambodia, and now there are recordings of the SBVT person (who claimed that it was impossible for Kerry to sail his boat into Cambodia) telling President Nixon that he did exactly that himself. So while the SBVT's can certainly raise questions, they've not presented any evidence to support any of their accusations, and now appear to basically be a bunch of people who don't like what Kerry is saying, and want to discredit him by rewriting history. Several of them have been caught forging photo's, etc., trying to make Kerry look bad previously, are contradicting their own sworn testimony at the time, etc., so it's all looking pretty embarassingly bad for them to anyone paying attention.
"Just after last month's Democratic National Convention, during which Kerry played up his credential as a decorated Vietnam veteran, the Massachusetts senator was tied with President George W. Bush at 46 percent each among veterans, according to the CBS News Poll." - http://www.turkishpress.com/turkishpress/news.asp? ID=24948
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1 75 -2004Jul20.html
Kerry's support among veterans has dropped recently, with the multi-million dollar ad campaign from the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" -- but one would think that now that the group has been completely discredited the numbers would go back up.
And there's this:
A Shrinking Base: Support for War Wanes Among Military Families Facing Redeployment
By Hanna Rosin, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page C01
HINESVILLE, Ga.
Yes, sir, this is Bush country: Real pit barbecues, yellow ribbons on church doors, wild boar in the woods. Fort Stewart 10 minutes away. And one teenage party loyalist greeting guests for his mother's Party for the President, on National Party for the President Day, a boy with impeccable manners who, when peppered with questions by the adults in the living room, blurts out things such as "Condi Rice speaks, like, three languages!"
So why does hostess Michele Bourque sound as defensive as if she were living in Berkeley?
"There's just so much negativity around," she says, explaining her decision to host this party. "There's not a lot of positive affirmation about why George W. Bush should be president. We just want to let people know, he's not as bad as people think."
"For the first time I hear officers openly debating against Bush," says Donald Vandergriff, an Army major and a professor at Georgetown University. "They don't want to vote for Bush and they don't want to vote for Kerry. What choices do they have? Zero, basically."
The people most likely to shift their support from Bush to Kerry are in the reserves and National Guard, says David Segal, a professor at the University of Maryland. "In the past the antiwar movement was rooted in college campuses," he says. "Now the major movement against the war is in reserve families."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
The equation is certainly valid -- I don't think that anyone would argue that the cost of administering software shouldn't be part of the TCO. But from having managed experienced teams of sysadmin's running both UNIX and NT systems, I've never seen the costs for administering NT be even close to UNIX. The fundamental issue (IMO, of course) is that UNIX was designed to be an efficient server OS, administered by professionals in large server farms, while NT is really a desktop OS designed to be administered by GUI desktop users. So the GUI tools, registry, etc., that make NT administration for individual boxes a bit easier for junior sysadmin's ends up making it very, very hard to administer large production NT systems.
That being said, I admire the underlying OS in NT -- if you ran the core OS, and removed all of the GUI and Windows API layers, it'd be a very nice, efficient, stable server OS. NT embedded is modular, and could probably be stripped down to be a good server OS, but that's not what MS wants to sell as a server OS.
That's an interesting hypothetical statement. Let's inject some actual data.
Windows not only costs more to purchase, in my experience it also costs for more to administer. I ran a huge farm of servers (hundreds of 4-CPU servers) that could run both NT and UNIX, and it took 4x as many sysadmin's per server to keep the _same_ servers running under NT than UNIX. On top of that, we could tune the UNIX environment to the application far better than NT, so we also got 2x the performance on the same app's under UNIX than NT (so we had to run the same app on 2x as many servers). This meant that in large scale production, we consistently (several years) measured NT as costing 8x as much as UNIX to run. Of course, you also have to factor in NT's relative instability as a server environment (try running ASP's with DLL's), but that hardly helps NT's case.
So let's rephrase your statement as: "There is more to cost than the software. My time is worth at least $50 an hour. And so if I have to muck around with a commercial piece of software more than free it can quickly become even more "expensive" than its free counterpart.
Would you take a commercial car if it cost $1,000 for gas and maintenance?"
There, that's better.
W's incoherence isn't simply an artifact of him being under scrutiny. The guy really can't speak coherently except (sometimes) when reading a script. Everyone convering the last couple of Presidents agrees that W just can't think on his feet. This is why his handlers keep him away from unscripted discussions, much less an audience that isn't pre-screened or questions that aren't pre-approved.
I just watched Clinton's interview on the Daily Show last night. Boy did it make me miss the good old days when the President count think coherently and run the country competently, and the most important think critics had to worry about was whether the President lied about getting a blow job, not the fact that he lied in order to invade and conquer a country that wasn't a threat to us, killing tens of thousands of people, wasting several hundred billion dollars, alientating the rest of the planet (thus putting us at greater risk of terrorist attacks), while driving the country into massive debt. It's also not too impressive seeing a guy who got put into the National Guard to avoid any personal risk, then ducked even that minimal service, flinging mud at a war hero who volunteered for the most dangerous military duty in the war, and was awarded a raft of medals, purely because it's politically expedient.
You have a lot more faith in the willpower of college professors than I do. I think that the temptation to pick out embarassing bits for private amusement (which would inevitably leak out) is too strong.
I don't understand why he'd need to change the hardware every six months. Sure, there are new MP3 players, but as long as they've implemented on a model that is sufficient for their work, who cares whether there are newer models out (other than that old models will get cheaper, which is nice).
And the idea of recording an entire day and sampling seems terrible in terms of both privacy and efficiency. If you can record a day's samples in a $75 MP3 flash-based player plus a tiny circuit that randomly presses the record button twice every so often, why bother using a $400 hard-drive based MP3 player, recording an entire day, then copying that day to a desktop computer, then sampling out random tiny bits of the day.