Yes, it's analog.
Yes, it's noisy.
Thing is, most of the stuff on CD nowadays is pretty much lame. (It's not noise, just not terribly good or innovative- it's pablum...) and the stuff on the LP's and 45's if you don't find it all scratched up is quite good.
"I raised this point in an earlier artcle, and there was some speculation that the copy-protection is actually in the music; that even if I held I mic to a speaker and recorded it the copy-protection would still be there and mp3 encoders would still choke on it.
If it can't be transcoded to MP3 correctly, it will be very audible. If it can't be transcoded to OGG correctly, it will be very audible.
That won't work that way. It's in the music- but it's in the music's track stream so any ordinary player will play it with minimal distortions at best. The human ear is a fincky beast at best and unlike something like MacroVision for video, there's little you're going to be able to do that won't be noticable that will prevent re-recording/encoding of the sound.
Since their official policy is at odds with several State and Federal deceptive practices laws, you can take them to small claims court and win- they have to re-imburse you the money and they eat court costs. If they don't show up, the Judge often hands down a summary judgement in favor of the Plaintiff- which you can then collect upon one way or another.
I don't care how big and uncaring the company is- if they find out that a manager got them involved in any lawsuit that could have been avoided by way of bending/breaking their non-return/non-exchange policies, they'll usually fire the manager on the spot for violating other policies that they hold to be of higher import than the non-return/non-exchange one.
Since the managers know this, they'll usually back down from the official stance when faced with one of these situations and justify it to their manager accordingly.
IBM wants to bury the hatchet in MS' collective head over what they did to them over the years. Just because they derive revenue from MS on the desktop doesn't mean that they derive all their revenue from that. In fact, the desktop's not where they get the big cash from- it's servers and solutions. Guess what? When they're selling lots of Linux answers on Z/Series machines, etc. they're going to be on the Linux bandwagon for a while- one source tree for the customer's apps, many platforms to scale to and expect it all to largely work out of the box.
There were technical reasons for the move from Vinyl LP's and 45's to CD and Compact Casette- and the move was precipitated by that. There's similar technical reasons for the MP3 and similar format players and flash/ROM storage of content. There's nothing that DVD offers (other than superior capacity)- it requires much more precision, it's more heat sensitive, etc. It's a win-lose situation in the case of DVD's; the consumers get a format that's easier to trash than Compact Casette or CD that brings little to the table and the producers will reap money from the consumers that get the new format foisted off onto them.
Most of them are nothing more than a standard DVD-Rom drive in consumer electronics clothes and being driven by an embedded processor instead of a PC. If they fixed DVD playback, they fixed PC playback- or did they fix some of the fancier DVD players and left all the cheaper ones (like Joe Sixpack uses...) broken?
In exchange for the essential monopoly on the distribution of Copyrighted works, the public as a whole have been given certain rights with regards to the disposition and use of those works once we have recieved them. These are called "Fair Use" rights.
Under Fair Use, I may make as many copies of a covered work for my own personal use after I have purchased the rights to use this work. Personal is defined as for your and only your use- as in you can make backup copies of just about anything in question, just in case the original gets destroyed.
Under Fair Use, I may sell any primary copies I have to another individual, so long as I destroy all copies I have that were not licensed to be copied by myself. In other words, if you have a license to make copies (such as the GPL) you may give the primaries or the backups to another individual, but if you do not, you must destroy all backups you have upon the giving of the primary copy to another individual.
Under Fair Use, I may copy non-substantial portions (and in some cases, even substantial ones...) of a covered work for the purposes of the discussion of the covered work, parody, etc.
This is NOT a classic geek view, but rather what the laws have been worded- DMCA and SSSCA seem to be conflicting laws that don't remove the "rights" (as that would draw an outcry real quick) but make them effectively withdrawn.
Right now, there's some substantial discussion that the laws that extend the durations of the Copyright and Patent grants violate the bounds Congress has with respects to this that has been laid out by the Constitution (This is not the Bill of Rights- this is what the Constitution has to say about what Congress can and can't do, and that hasn't been ammended either.). Also of note is that there is substantial discussion as to whether or not the DMCA or the SSSCA, as they currently are written, are legit within the Constitutional boundaries set up by either the Constitution itself or the Bill of Rights.
In acutality, a hi-fidelity recording, when encoded with OGG or MP3 will be virtually indistinguishable from a rip from a CD. There's ways to do it with sound cards so that you can't tell much of any difference.
Once you realize this, it's obvious where things are going to go...
..that allows this sort of thing and I'll bet that it's also restricted to specific players and not all MP3 players for this thing to be effective at "protection" (and even then...).
I largely don't use Windows and I don't plan on booting into it just to get my fair use rights.
I also don't plan on owning anything other than the MP3 players I choose to play content (If I can't get a file so I can burn a CD-R for my MP3 CD player, it's not useful to me in the fair use department...).
I know you were being sarcastic, but that is how those jokers think.
MS' media player doesn't run on my MP3 CD player from Memorex, nor does it run on any of my desktop machines at work or at home. As long as MS has it's attitude (and I've mine about their software) it never will. I don't consider their problems solved. All I'll do is play it from a hi-fidelity CD deck into the analog port on a hi-fidelity sound card and MP3 or OGG encode that recording (If I buy a copy protected CD to keep. I've too much stuff that I use as sound system equipment that this tripe won't play on!)
The MP3 genie has been let out of the bottle and unless someone comes up with a decent format that's NOT inconvienient and doesn't cost the manufacturers a lot of royalties (MP3's royalties on devices isn't bad at all, and OGG's even better in that regard...) then it's just not going to happen. And Joe Sixpack's not going to forego all those nifty $70-300 MP3 players they just bought just to satisfy the media producers without them making it worth his troubles doing it.
It's called misrepresentation of a product, otherwise known as fraud. In this case, the product was labeled with a specific logo, indicating that the contents of the disc in question could be played on a digital audio disc player (The Philips CD-DA logo...)- when, in fact, it couldn't properly be played under those conditions.
If the disc is labeled with the compact disc logo, it's supposed to be compliant with the specification. If it is not compliant (and NONE of the copy protected stuff is...), it's either fraudulently labeled or the disc is defective.
Run this one past them- do they willingly sell defective products? If they don't make the above point to them and see how fast they give your money back to you. They NEVER want the impression of knowingly selling fraudulent or defective products to the consumers. Bad for business and could bring on lawsuits like the one against these people on them.
They could work on it in their spare time like the rest of us. Or, perhaps get hired by the likes of Red Hat, SuSE, MontaVista, or Lineo. Just becuase they're hurting has little to do with Open Source- it has much more to do with the economy being the way it is right now (and will be for some months yet, it seems...)
Ok, you try and get the average person to recompile the kernel to get the latest versions and fixes. You try and get them to install one of three different journalling filesystems. You try and get them to do an install of the latest version of XFree86.
If you can manage to do these, then Mandrake's possibly not a distribution for you. Mandrake's for people that can't do these sorts of things and wants to be free of MS and for people that can that don't want to bother with doing it. To call it an upgrade mill is silly- you DON'T have to buy the distribution if you don't want to (you CAN upgrade it and the whole thing is available via download as the baseline is GPLed in the first place...) It's just easier and in many cases cheaper for someone to purchase the thing off the shelf.
Seems to me that they produce a hell of a lot of things- many things you're not aware of.
The generators and turbines that power all the AC plants in the country...
The refrigeration systems that cool office buildings and the electric motors for just about everything AC powered...
The lightbulbs most people use...
Many of the plastics you use...
Jet Engines on the airliners you fly in...
Many of the household appliances you use...
Furthermore, GE provides all kinds of services...
GE is somewhere over 100 years old and does seem to be doing the opposite (They are worth some 349.14 Billion, bringing in some 12.7 billion over the current share value each year...). Now, you might be claiming that this is the exception, but you left no room for exceptions in your claims.
Frankly speaking, I wouldn't mind a few 50+ year old companies like GE or IBM, thank you very much.
If it's got the fileshare for an entire group of machines, I'll bet you money that it'd be infected almost immediately and anyone else that's hooked to the machine by nature.
All it takes is for the virus to inject itself in the CODE fork of one of several files to "properly" infect a machine and then start randomly infecting everything (Remember, some of the magic of MacOS comes from all files potentially having a CODE resource fork and MacOS acting on the same... Simply inserting a floppy into an unprotected machine can infect the machine in many cases...).
Once that's happened on the fileshare machine, all the other machines are only a matter of time before they're infected too.
Sadly, I DO believe him- it's entirely possible. Just not directly from off the Internet like it is with Windows machines.
On a G3, MacOSX has proven to be slowish (Dog slow, in my not so humble opinion...) compared to Linux. If you don't have apps that are OSX only and have a NewWorld Mac, you will run about as well or better with YDL or one of the other distributions. I'd not say many are moving. The Linux users seem to be staying where they are in my area.
Most companies haven't been thinking in terms of engendering employee loyalty for well over a decade now. I know, I've been in two of the downturns in the economy now- they (corporations) tend only to think of that bottom line. And worse, they think of it in only short-term thoughts. All this bloodletting they're doing to their staff makes them look good on paper, but they just got rid of at least part of the people that were needed to make their projects they have in progress go- they're butchering their medium-term and possibly their long-term profitability to look good in the here and now.
This all came about from the last downturn in the economy some ten years ago when there were...wait for it...mass layoffs not unlike now, etc. The companies showed absolutely no loyalty then- why should the employees show them any loyalty when they're going to keep doing it over and over and over...
Both are theft. No, I'm not condoning either- I'm condemning both. The latter of the two acts mentioned should be made at least as illegal as the first.
There are other transaction server frameworks- many of them scale to larger loads than MTS could ever dream of being able to handle...
Products offered by:
IBM (CICS)
Sybase (EAServer, Jaguar CTS)
Unisys (WebTS)
Compaq (NonStop Java Transaction server)
SAP (ITS)
There's quite a few of them that work rather well- some of them, of course, require new hardware. In the long run, though, which is more crushing- the web site being down for a day or more or spending more than you initially planned fixing the problem?
Unless you get everybody and his dog to upgrade to it, that will matter little in the grand scheme of things. How many of those millions of people that have Windows that fueled the network effect for Windows and software that runs on it actually HAVE a machine XP will run on? How many will be able to afford to plunk down the cash for one, let alone XP? How many businesses are going to step forward like they did before (realize that W2K's not selling like they planned on it...) and upgrade to this with the much more expensive licensing, etc.
Not a lot, when you think about it.
Microsoft has saturated the market that made them a monopoly- either they need something more compelling than XP and Office 2000 (Which effectively dies on you if the OS thinks your hardware has changed- you have to update your license key and if MS thinks you're cheating, they'll charge you again for that software you paid for the privilege to use...).
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Yes, it's analog.
Yes, it's noisy.
Thing is, most of the stuff on CD nowadays is pretty much lame. (It's not noise, just not terribly good or innovative- it's pablum...) and the stuff on the LP's and 45's if you don't find it all scratched up is quite good.
That's what I get for skimming articles while I'm in the middle of a compile...
I AGREE with your premises.
"I raised this point in an earlier artcle, and there was some speculation that the copy-protection is actually in the music; that even if I held I mic to a speaker and recorded it the copy-protection would still be there and mp3 encoders would still choke on it.
If it can't be transcoded to MP3 correctly, it will be very audible. If it can't be transcoded to OGG correctly, it will be very audible.
That won't work that way. It's in the music- but it's in the music's track stream so any ordinary player will play it with minimal distortions at best. The human ear is a fincky beast at best and unlike something like MacroVision for video, there's little you're going to be able to do that won't be noticable that will prevent re-recording/encoding of the sound.
Since their official policy is at odds with several State and Federal deceptive practices laws, you can take them to small claims court and win- they have to re-imburse you the money and they eat court costs. If they don't show up, the Judge often hands down a summary judgement in favor of the Plaintiff- which you can then collect upon one way or another.
I don't care how big and uncaring the company is- if they find out that a manager got them involved in any lawsuit that could have been avoided by way of bending/breaking their non-return/non-exchange policies, they'll usually fire the manager on the spot for violating other policies that they hold to be of higher import than the non-return/non-exchange one.
Since the managers know this, they'll usually back down from the official stance when faced with one of these situations and justify it to their manager accordingly.
IBM wants to bury the hatchet in MS' collective head over what they did to them over the years. Just because they derive revenue from MS on the desktop doesn't mean that they derive all their revenue from that. In fact, the desktop's not where they get the big cash from- it's servers and solutions. Guess what? When they're selling lots of Linux answers on Z/Series machines, etc. they're going to be on the Linux bandwagon for a while- one source tree for the customer's apps, many platforms to scale to and expect it all to largely work out of the box.
This is a dream for IBM.
There were technical reasons for the move from Vinyl LP's and 45's to CD and Compact Casette- and the move was precipitated by that. There's similar technical reasons for the MP3 and similar format players and flash/ROM storage of content. There's nothing that DVD offers (other than superior capacity)- it requires much more precision, it's more heat sensitive, etc. It's a win-lose situation in the case of DVD's; the consumers get a format that's easier to trash than Compact Casette or CD that brings little to the table and the producers will reap money from the consumers that get the new format foisted off onto them.
Most of them are nothing more than a standard DVD-Rom drive in consumer electronics clothes and being driven by an embedded processor instead of a PC. If they fixed DVD playback, they fixed PC playback- or did they fix some of the fancier DVD players and left all the cheaper ones (like Joe Sixpack uses...) broken?
In exchange for the essential monopoly on the distribution of Copyrighted works, the public as a whole have been given certain rights with regards to the disposition and use of those works once we have recieved them. These are called "Fair Use" rights.
Under Fair Use, I may make as many copies of a covered work for my own personal use after I have purchased the rights to use this work. Personal is defined as for your and only your use- as in you can make backup copies of just about anything in question, just in case the original gets destroyed.
Under Fair Use, I may sell any primary copies I have to another individual, so long as I destroy all copies I have that were not licensed to be copied by myself. In other words, if you have a license to make copies (such as the GPL) you may give the primaries or the backups to another individual, but if you do not, you must destroy all backups you have upon the giving of the primary copy to another individual.
Under Fair Use, I may copy non-substantial portions (and in some cases, even substantial ones...) of a covered work for the purposes of the discussion of the covered work, parody, etc.
This is NOT a classic geek view, but rather what the laws have been worded- DMCA and SSSCA seem to be conflicting laws that don't remove the "rights" (as that would draw an outcry real quick) but make them effectively withdrawn.
Right now, there's some substantial discussion that the laws that extend the durations of the Copyright and Patent grants violate the bounds Congress has with respects to this that has been laid out by the Constitution (This is not the Bill of Rights- this is what the Constitution has to say about what Congress can and can't do, and that hasn't been ammended either.). Also of note is that there is substantial discussion as to whether or not the DMCA or the SSSCA, as they currently are written, are legit within the Constitutional boundaries set up by either the Constitution itself or the Bill of Rights.
In acutality, a hi-fidelity recording, when encoded with OGG or MP3 will be virtually indistinguishable from a rip from a CD. There's ways to do it with sound cards so that you can't tell much of any difference.
Once you realize this, it's obvious where things are going to go...
..that allows this sort of thing and I'll bet that it's also restricted to specific players and not all MP3 players for this thing to be effective at "protection" (and even then...).
I largely don't use Windows and I don't plan on booting into it just to get my fair use rights.
I also don't plan on owning anything other than the MP3 players I choose to play content (If I can't get a file so I can burn a CD-R for my MP3 CD player, it's not useful to me in the fair use department...).
I know you were being sarcastic, but that is how those jokers think.
MS' media player doesn't run on my MP3 CD player from Memorex, nor does it run on any of my desktop machines at work or at home. As long as MS has it's attitude (and I've mine about their software) it never will. I don't consider their problems solved. All I'll do is play it from a hi-fidelity CD deck into the analog port on a hi-fidelity sound card and MP3 or OGG encode that recording ( If I buy a copy protected CD to keep. I've too much stuff that I use as sound system equipment that this tripe won't play on!)
The MP3 genie has been let out of the bottle and unless someone comes up with a decent format that's NOT inconvienient and doesn't cost the manufacturers a lot of royalties (MP3's royalties on devices isn't bad at all, and OGG's even better in that regard...) then it's just not going to happen. And Joe Sixpack's not going to forego all those nifty $70-300 MP3 players they just bought just to satisfy the media producers without them making it worth his troubles doing it.
It's called misrepresentation of a product, otherwise known as fraud. In this case, the product was labeled with a specific logo, indicating that the contents of the disc in question could be played on a digital audio disc player (The Philips CD-DA logo...)- when, in fact, it couldn't properly be played under those conditions.
If the disc is labeled with the compact disc logo, it's supposed to be compliant with the specification. If it is not compliant (and NONE of the copy protected stuff is...), it's either fraudulently labeled or the disc is defective.
Run this one past them- do they willingly sell defective products? If they don't make the above point to them and see how fast they give your money back to you. They NEVER want the impression of knowingly selling fraudulent or defective products to the consumers. Bad for business and could bring on lawsuits like the one against these people on them.
...in the IT industry getting sacked. If the top 1% of the industry's getting laid off, that IS news, sadly enough.
They could work on it in their spare time like the rest of us. Or, perhaps get hired by the likes of Red Hat, SuSE, MontaVista, or Lineo. Just becuase they're hurting has little to do with Open Source- it has much more to do with the economy being the way it is right now (and will be for some months yet, it seems...)
Ok, you try and get the average person to recompile the kernel to get the latest versions and fixes. You try and get them to install one of three different journalling filesystems. You try and get them to do an install of the latest version of XFree86.
If you can manage to do these, then Mandrake's possibly not a distribution for you. Mandrake's for people that can't do these sorts of things and wants to be free of MS and for people that can that don't want to bother with doing it. To call it an upgrade mill is silly- you DON'T have to buy the distribution if you don't want to (you CAN upgrade it and the whole thing is available via download as the baseline is GPLed in the first place...) It's just easier and in many cases cheaper for someone to purchase the thing off the shelf.
Seems to me that they produce a hell of a lot of things- many things you're not aware of.
The generators and turbines that power all the AC plants in the country...
The refrigeration systems that cool office buildings and the electric motors for just about everything AC powered...
The lightbulbs most people use...
Many of the plastics you use...
Jet Engines on the airliners you fly in...
Many of the household appliances you use...
Furthermore, GE provides all kinds of services...
GE is somewhere over 100 years old and does seem to be doing the opposite (They are worth some 349.14 Billion, bringing in some 12.7 billion over the current share value each year...). Now, you might be claiming that this is the exception, but you left no room for exceptions in your claims.
Frankly speaking, I wouldn't mind a few 50+ year old companies like GE or IBM, thank you very much.
If it's got the fileshare for an entire group of machines, I'll bet you money that it'd be infected almost immediately and anyone else that's hooked to the machine by nature.
All it takes is for the virus to inject itself in the CODE fork of one of several files to "properly" infect a machine and then start randomly infecting everything (Remember, some of the magic of MacOS comes from all files potentially having a CODE resource fork and MacOS acting on the same... Simply inserting a floppy into an unprotected machine can infect the machine in many cases...).
Once that's happened on the fileshare machine, all the other machines are only a matter of time before they're infected too.
Sadly, I DO believe him- it's entirely possible. Just not directly from off the Internet like it is with Windows machines.
On a G3, MacOSX has proven to be slowish (Dog slow, in my not so humble opinion...) compared to Linux. If you don't have apps that are OSX only and have a NewWorld Mac, you will run about as well or better with YDL or one of the other distributions. I'd not say many are moving. The Linux users seem to be staying where they are in my area.
This thinking came because of the reverse...
Most companies haven't been thinking in terms of engendering employee loyalty for well over a decade now. I know, I've been in two of the downturns in the economy now- they (corporations) tend only to think of that bottom line. And worse, they think of it in only short-term thoughts. All this bloodletting they're doing to their staff makes them look good on paper, but they just got rid of at least part of the people that were needed to make their projects they have in progress go- they're butchering their medium-term and possibly their long-term profitability to look good in the here and now.
This all came about from the last downturn in the economy some ten years ago when there were...wait for it...mass layoffs not unlike now, etc. The companies showed absolutely no loyalty then- why should the employees show them any loyalty when they're going to keep doing it over and over and over...
But the dot-bombs had lots of showy things like cheap, but fancy-looking logoed sunglasses, etc.
And aeron chairs, while they aren't cheap, are definitely showy...
Both are theft. No, I'm not condoning either- I'm condemning both. The latter of the two acts mentioned should be made at least as illegal as the first.
There are other transaction server frameworks- many of them scale to larger loads than MTS could ever dream of being able to handle...
Products offered by:
IBM (CICS)
Sybase (EAServer, Jaguar CTS)
Unisys (WebTS)
Compaq (NonStop Java Transaction server)
SAP (ITS)
There's quite a few of them that work rather well- some of them, of course, require new hardware. In the long run, though, which is more crushing- the web site being down for a day or more or spending more than you initially planned fixing the problem?
According to Mindcraft, Apache is the most widely used webserver- wanna try making that statement again?
Unless you get everybody and his dog to upgrade to it, that will matter little in the grand scheme of things. How many of those millions of people that have Windows that fueled the network effect for Windows and software that runs on it actually HAVE a machine XP will run on? How many will be able to afford to plunk down the cash for one, let alone XP? How many businesses are going to step forward like they did before (realize that W2K's not selling like they planned on it...) and upgrade to this with the much more expensive licensing, etc.
Not a lot, when you think about it.
Microsoft has saturated the market that made them a monopoly- either they need something more compelling than XP and Office 2000 (Which effectively dies on you if the OS thinks your hardware has changed- you have to update your license key and if MS thinks you're cheating, they'll charge you again for that software you paid for the privilege to use...).