If people thought like you we'd still be stuck with DOS, Mac OS 8 and RedHat 5
Or VMS, or bespoke, which is what most of the monitoring and control systems in the nuclear industry runs on. But this was becoming too expensive, and when last I was working in the industry, NT 3.51 had been settled on as their new OS of choice. I thought (and said) at the time that it was insane, but the decision had been made.
The point is that developers supplying this industry (and any other safety critical industry, think air traffic control or hospitals) absolutely have to be able to replicate older systems when they do any fixes or replacements. It's a contractual requirement, and it should be obvious why it makes sense.
As Microsoft moves towards software as a service, that's becoming harder and harder to do, and I shudder to think of the consequences of an applications contractor replacing an NT 3.51 system with an NT 4, Win2k, XP or (god help us).NET system simply because it's too much trouble for them to get their hands an NT 3.51 install, or to source new hardware that NT 3.51 has drivers for. Think 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line. How many 1982 OS's will run on modern commodity hardware?
Ironically, the reason for the move from VMS and proprietary OS's to MS was that the industry was instructed to cut the ties to proprietary solutions for budget reasons (sourcing old hardware to replace broken VMS consoles cost a fortune). So now they're tied to MS, who have a clearly stated obsolescence policy. It's practically guaranteed that 2002 vintage WinXP won't be installable on 2022 hardware. NT is already unsupported, and 2K will be when.NET rolls out. So we're back to the same problems of replicating builds and sourcing old hardware to match the OS.
Was that clear enough? Corporate America is not just cube farms writing documents and browsing Dilbert, it's the very infrastructure of the country. Sections of that infrastructure cannot (or should not!) allow themselves to be railroaded into using systems with built in obselescence, which is why software-as-a-service is going to have a very, very hard sell in those sectors.
Win2k brings new stuff to the plate, which you haven't touched according to your story. F.e. fully automated software installation/controll via AD using easy scripts. Windows.NET server will make this even easier. What you say about it wouldn't be workable is so far off the truth it hurts. Why? Because it has f.e. the checkpoint tech that's also in XP: you can roll back to any state you want: with the registry, with the drivers etc.
I'm not talking about servers, I'm talking about desktops. Desktops get moved around, recycled in different roles, and there's a lot of them, not all of which can run 2K let alone XP or.NET.
Managing 2 OS's, let alone 3 or 4 would increase the workload (and cost to us) of our IT guys. And rolling back an existing install is not the point. The point is that when a bit of my box fries (which it's done once), with half an hour I'm using another box from the same manufacturer (faster CPU, but same components) with a ghost of exactly the install of NT4 6a and apps that I was using ('cause I wasn't dumb enough to screw with my old box), and I and the IT guys know what's on it, and the box doesn't then try and second guess me and upgrade itself. Ever. If I can't get a recycled box with the same hardware, I can get a mostly equivelant (but known) ghost image on a newer box, or (worst case) we can start with a new box, rip whatever it comes pre-installed with, install it up to a known state that's not far off a ghost image in terms of repeatability.
Yes, we can do that with 2K. We can do it with XP - if we're careful. But with.NET and son of.NET, it's going to get harder and harder. I'm not saying we can't do it, I'm saying that it may become more trouble than it's worth, and it will push us into using alternatives.
I should make it clear that I develop and maintain telecomms software that's been in the field for years. When I have to fix a bug in software that was built 5 years ago, I need to replicate the original build environment exactly, no surprises, no enhancements. I previously worked in the nuclear industry, where this was an absolute requirement. We had 20 year old machines in storage that had to be maintained to replicate builds, and a firesafe packed full of complete OS and application tars to wipe these systems and put them in a known state.
Our problem is not one of administrating and updating a network, it's of stopping it being updated. That's a very real need for some developers.
A good analogy is with the notes you can play on a guitar string. You can play the fundamental or various higher harmonics but you can't play the notes in between without changing the length. But you can play various blends of different harmonics
A grinding sound emerges from my brain as I wonder how a universe that emerged from a singularity and which expressed quantized effects from the first instant could be viewed as having a background continuum. There's all those little wavicles starting at one point and making their quantum hops and skips around. At the very, very finest level, isn't there a finite number of positions they can be in? I'm thinking more integer positions than floats.
...I'm using a company machine with WinNT 4.0 SP6a. With a "Windows(R) 2000 Professional 1-2 CPU" sticker on the side. We downgraded it, and for a very good reason.
It does everything that I need to do my job. It does nothing that I don't need. The issues are known. It doesn't require any more patching because it ain't broke, or it's broke in known and acceptable ways. It doesn't require our IT guys to have to ask what version of what OS I'm running, nor to hunt out the right ghost image for that combination of hardware and OS. It can be ghost installed or copied, which is vital for replicating software builds.
Windows 2000 would be a barely acceptable substitute. There are far too many unknowns with WinXP, plus it has that habit of knowing better than you what drivers you really want to use (I need to test beta drivers, for god's sake, give me an "I know what I'm doing" button!).
Windows.NET would be absolutely, utterly unworkable in a business environment, because neither I, nor our IT guys would know what exactly was on the machine, nor would it be possible to replicate that at a later date to reproduce a build exactly.
We cannot and will not upgrade to.NET. Ever. As application support for NT dies away at the same time as Linux support grows, it's looking like a better (corporate!) proposition every day, and not just in the server room.
In one 24 hour period we have had stories on Universal's general screwing of it's customers, the network's reluctance to let us record shows in any shape or fashion, and now Kazaa shutting down pending litigation. What a happy joyous world I live in. How in the FUCK did we get to this point
What point? That there's more content freely available right now than there's ever been in the history of humankind? It's way harsh on Dmitri and Jon Johansson, but as far as the rest of us are concerned, what's the biggie?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's loathesome that content distributors can tell us to our faces that we're all guilty (of whatever new offence they want to buy with "campaign contributions"), but in practical terms, they're fighting a losing battle, and I can show you precedent. The ex-Soviet Union.
Like most truism, this one is actually true: The more they tighten their grip, the more star systems, er, customers, will slip through their fingers.
When they tell us that we're all criminals whatever we do, when they make it harder to play by their rules than to get content via P2P or on a street corner, when they try to dictate demand by controlling supply, they'll create a black market that will supply the genuine demand of you and I and Joe Public. It happened in Russia, with far tighter controls at every level of society than even the RIAA and MPAA combined can buy in the USA. The War on Piracy will be about as successful as the War on Drugs, because they are both a War on The People.
I mean, really, this is bad luck for Kazaa, but Kazaa screwed up by trying to control supply using authorisation servers. They joined the losing side there and then. If Kazaa goes under, another service will pick up the pieces, and the amount of content available will just grow and grow. The losers will be anyone who refuses to supply the demand, the winners will be you, me, Joe, and the lawyers.
Wouldn't you be doing something to defend your business [...] The only power they have is the legal system, and they are forced to utilize it
Hang on a minute while I just choke quietly in the corner. The only power? So, a big business can buy the laws they want through political bribes (aka campaign contributions), can have courts stop just about any activity they like (prima facia, before any guilt has been proven), and then can keep anybody they like in court until the little guy runs out of money and has to settle or starve, and that's the only power they have?
What more do they need? Well, it would be nice if they could get laws passed that effectively allow them to instruct their government to provide paramilitary enforcers to imprison individuals either at home or abroad, but that's beyond the realms of fantasy, surely?
Oh, wait, remind me, why did I buy that "Free Dmitri" T-shirt? How's Jon Johansson doing these days?
Can you imagine getting aboard one of this and smelling a 2 hour old pool of vomit
It's OK, the smell of burning plastic and shorting electrics from where the local yoof have torched it and knifed their way through to the guts will cover it up.
In the final scheme, passengers would use the vandal-proof vehicles
Talk about setting the Cardiff yoof a challenge. Might as well hang a sign on them saying: "Can't break it. Can't break in."
It's a brave experiment. It needs to be tried. But I think it's real future transport designed for mythical future people.
From the slapdowns by the informed set here, I get the feeling that this is showing quantization in the motion of the neutron, which proves about zip about the forces acting on it. I'm not even sure about whether it's the velocity or the acceleration that's quantised, but either way it's only a very tenuous suggestion (at best) that the gravitons acting on it might be quantized.
What strikes me is the comparison with computer models. I used to work on physics engines for games along with a maths geek who was most disgruntled at the dreadful granularity that we had to work with (double precision floats, how primitive!). He was horrified to discover that such engines often use a dt timestep to do things like (v += a * dt), and to be fair, at 30fps, this requires a little fudging to keep orbits circular or whatever.
So articles like this give me a fuzzy flow, because they intimate that reality is granular. More than a double precision float, or a 33ms timestep, sure, but only by degree. If my poor head is getting this right, the universe seems pixellated at a very fine level, so all us games developers need to do to model it accurately is to get our frame rates way up and our dt's way down. There's a goal to aim for.;-)
If they could have severed ties to the Scully/Mulder X-Files and just call the Doggett/Reyes X-Files The Next Generation or something - I'd be happy
That's an excellent point. I watched a couple of the Dogget / Scully episodes, and they felt wrong, kind of like if Star Trek had replaced Kirk with Pike round about episode 60. Not worse, just wrong.
After years of building up a believable (on screen) chemistry, affection and respect between Mulder and Scully, its was totally unbelievable - beyond the suspension of disbelief, I mean - to have Mulder just kind of wander off and Scully to go "No Mulder, stay! [pause] Oh, OK then, bye." After all those life-and-death experiences and saving the world and seeing into the Beyond and all, I know who my loyalties would be to, and it wouldn't be to an FBI who'd treated me like dirt over the same period. It cheapened both characters to have them part ways, and that ruined the show for me.
So yes, a clean break would have worked better. Rather, it couldn't have worked worse. Mulder and Scully could have passed into legend, and a new team could have picked up the baton and seen everything with fresh eyes. As it was, the show chose to take the safer option, and (I think, and the viewing figures agree) blew it badly.
Despite the protestations of everyone involved, X-files was Mulder and Scully. That's not to say that Carter can't go on making shows of the same theme and quality, he just can't call them "X-files" without it feeling creepy and wrong.
The reason Communism failed is that there were other countries which did better and could starve them out. [...] In the past, tyranny required some outside impetus before it died
Not to lapse into flag waving hyperbole, but who were the instigators of the American Revolution emulating?
I choose to think that when you turn the screw too hard, Joe Public will bite back... eventually. In many ways, the popularity of P2P services (not Napster!) shows that the populace is no longer willing to play by the rules that the RIAA/MPAA have set up to protect themselves. If a confrontation is forced through an SSSCA, I think - I hope - that Joe will see it for what it is: a bare faced attempt to apply "guilty until proven innocent" to ever man, woman and child in the USA and (de facto) any country that buys US spec hardware. It may be a gentle revolution when it comes, but I think it will come, if the RIAA/MPAA forces it.
I'm familiar with the true embedded market as my father is an MSEE and has been building embedded devices for aerospace and industrial markets for years.
Ah yes, and embedded engineering knowledge is inherited through RNA! How foolish of me to forget that.
I'm also wondering if you understand the difference between writing a program tha compiles into 16K of RAM, and one that compiles into 200 Megabytes of various executables that all are supposed to work together
Gee whiz, Wonder Boy, I'm not the son of an embedded engineer and all, I only do it for a living, but I reckon I have an inkling. We're using VxWorks, by the way, so there's a single memory space and no concept of separate executables. Ask your daddy about that.
One requires a lot more effort, and if you are expected to sell this at the same price point...
...then it becomes much harder to ensure that 99.95% uptime. Of course it does. But it's not impossible, it just involves a lot of development and testing, at a time when the telecomms market has tanked. There aren't many companies prepared to invest like that in preparation for the upswing. Fortunately, I work for one of them, and we've thrown pretty much everything at this product.
The point is, I think you are being an ass.
Good guess, but I'm a taurean. I won't bother retorting in kind, because we're doing fine on the test sites and are currently ramping up retail manufacture, and the market is going to decide which of us is right and which is wrong.
Go ahead and put the last word in. If it makes it any easier for you, my momma is fat, ugly and promiscuous. But it's still a plain old fact that telecomms switches achieve a 99.95% uptime, and there's no reason other than lack of customer demand why that can't be repeated in some if not all other areas of development.
There is a deep cynicism about managed culture, and this is our modern popular culture. A kind of sovietism that worked
LL has a true gift for langauge. Younger readers may not be aware just how tightly managed the Soviet Union was. The production of everything was strictly controlled by a series of Five Year Plans that attempted to match supply to predicted future demand. By "everything", I mean that the number and colour of toothbrushes that would be produced was planned on a five year basis.
Picture this from the populace's point of view. You go to buy a new toothbrush. You quite fancy an orange one, but all they have is blue. Everyone else is buying blue toothbrushes, so, hey why not? One toothbrush is much like another, right? They're all just cheap mass manufactured plastic that'll be old in six months, so you might as well buy what they've got. You quickly get used to it. In time, you stop even wondering what an orange toothbrush - or a non-Government toothbrush - would be like.
Compare with the US music industry. You go to buy a CD... you see where this is going?
Big labels plan years in advance. They produce acts to fit the niches that they have decided there will be demand for. If there isn't demand for those acts, well tough, that's all there is on the shelves, and they aren't going to change their CD pressing schedules to suit you. That would play merry hell with their smooth profits. They know they're getting your money, because all the artists are just cheap mass manufactured plastic that'll be old in six months, so you might as well buy what they've got. You quickly get used to it. In time, you stop even wondering what an independent artist would be like.
If you don't believe that labels plan that far ahead, look at Mariah Carey. She has a five album 80 million US dollar deal. Despite suffering an "emotional and physical breakdown" and releasing a film and album that both tanked, EMI has not canned her. They can't. They have a Five Year Plan. We will love Mariah, and we will buy her albums, because they will make damn sure that when the next album comes out, they'll have cut a deal to ensure that no big name from any other label will release at the same time, and the advertising will be Mariah, Mariah, Mariah.
Or so they think. The trouble with their Five Year Plans is the same as in the Soviet Union. The people aren't stupid. They know what kind of toothbrush they want. If they can't get that, then they'll take what's available. But when the non-Government toothbrushes become available on street corners, even though it's illegal, they'll buy them, and they'll tell their friends where to get them, and a black or grey market will spring up to supply the genuine demand, and the Five Year Plan is suddenly in disarray because all the cheap plastic government approved toothbrushes are sitting in factories and nobody wants them any more.
At this point, the analogy breaks down because it's comparing sharing with purchasing. The toothbrush analogy is very immediate, but if you want a better history lesson of why monolithic government/industry content control is doomed from the get go even if abominations like the SSSCA are passed, then read about samizdat, and understand that We, the People will find a way.
[we] can only read the info [on Borland's web pages] on one machine.
Which machine would that be? Oh, wait, they mean one machine per person, right?
I thought you were kidding, but by the time I'd read their astonishing copyright notice (on a web page!) I'd already made two copies of the page, on both my firewall proxy and my desktop.
Of course, it's not a problem because I'm not breaking the intent of their copyright, right? Right?
Well, how the hell would I know? That's exactly what it says, and making value judgements or dissembling over whether it's morally right or wrong is exactly what leads down the slippery slope of not giving a damn about copyright at all, because anything you do is liable to be technically contrary to someone's terms. Technically playing a CD when seven or more people can hear it is illegal (in the UK), for example. Even if six of them are walking past your open window...
I despair, I really do. Yet another company that assumes we're all thieves and need to have the difference between right and wrong spelled out to us, accompanied by a stern wagging finger. Oh, it's too much.
Why would you run Napster after your 50 downloads?
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Something that I haven't seen mentioned specifically in a parent post. Why on earth would you leave Napster running and serving tracks after you've sucked down your pathetic 50 per month?
Think about it. The clock ticks past midnight, it's a new month, you've got 50 more tracks to suck. How long does that take you over a decent commection? Two hours?
Then what? You leave Napster running for the other 718 hours of the month, serving up content and pissing off your ISP? Or, more likely, you only turn it on to play the.NAP crap, and you probably disable file sharing while you're doing that, because, hey, you ain't getting anything from the network for the rest of the month, right, and you've paid for what you got (and probably had to throw half of it away), so Napster can damn well use your money to serve it's own content, right? (Try to think like a typical paying netizen rather than a Slashdotter)
One of the strengths of P2P communities is that you can spend a lot of time browsing for stuff, during which time you're part of the community and might as well be serving files as well. But after you've used up your Napster allowance for the month, what's your incentive to keep using (and contributing) to the service at all? You can search for files but not download them? How frustrating would that be?
So they might get a million customers, but at 2 hours use out of 720 a month, they'll have, what, less than 3,000 online at any given time. That's a lot of Britney Spears, but very little Stan Rogers.
My god, picture it. People sitting watching the clock, waiting for it to roll over to the 1st of the month at Napster HQ, when the feeding frenzy begins, knowing that's the only time they've got a chance of getting a good selection of content. Doesn't bear thinking about.
"Funny, my employer already sells embedded systems with explicit warranties, and I'm not licensed or bonded. I just have to write decent software."
How many of these do you sell at CompUSA for $50/each?
And were you mandated by law to do this?
Our latest product is a small telecomms switch aimed at the mom and pop market, and we will be direct selling and are seriously considering trying to get retail outlets to carry our boxes. It's more like $400, but for a telecomms switch, that's giving them away.
We're mandated by many laws, in many difference regions, and have to fulfill the strictest of each. We have to have 100% availability of an analogue telephone line in the event of a power failure, and conform to any number of RF emissions and material laws, for example.
But that's beside the point. In addition to this, we warrant an uptime of 99.95%. That's demanded not by the law but by the market, even by mom and pop (how often do you expect to have to reboot your phone?). If you think that's impossible, the problem is in your attitude, and the attitude of retail purchasers of most software. It can and is done on a daily basis in many parts of the software industry. My god, how many field engineer visits or returns do you think we can afford for a mass market product? We have to ship it bug free.
How many of you have actually read the article?
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No, really, how many people read it and actually analysed what it said?
What's remarkable about the new Napster is how similar it feels to the old one. [...] Napster seems to be largely bug-free [...] The music player built into the software seems good enough
Uh, why should it be remarkable that the pay service should be no worse than the old free one, or any of the many free alternatives now?
The author then contradicts herself by going on to list the negatives, some of which are old, some are clearly New and De-Improved:
broken tracks, cancelled transfers
a complete inability to stream or preview tracks
Everything's all bunched together in various sub-windows and it's all a bit confusing
The option to burn songs to CD or move them to a portable player is noticeably absent...
...As is any option to search for MP3 files alone
It isn't possible to look for tracks under a particular genre
it's having trouble recognizing some of the official.nap files
Napster [doesn't] recognise the files in my MP3 music collection
And of course, the whole damn point of the thing:
Content-wise, there's next to nothing
So, we're saying that it works fairly well, only it doesn't really, but that's to be expected because it's all new technology. But it doesn't do anything. It neither shares nor find MP3's or even.NAP's.
The fact that there's anything positive in this (fairly literate) review makes me think that it's been written by a shill. Note:
that rabid 'pirate as much as you can' atmosphere (which was scary but fun) has disappeared
Perhaps in the early days, but what Napster really achieved was to change attitudes. Napster made it so easy to copy files that it didn't seem wrong to most people. Remember that/. is one of the few places where you'll see people even debating the legality and morality of it. Jane Sharer doesn't even consider it. If it's got a pretty, professional looking client, it must be OK, right? Otherwise The Authorities would put a stop to it, surely.
If the reviewer isn't a shill, she's someone who doesn't realise that a beta should be reviewed as though it is a release candidate, without making allowances for basic lack of functionality (sharing files!) that should have been caught in alpha. One glance at the Kazaa clients should clear that up right away. Filter and search by type, artist, content, sort by file size, bandwidth, download times, user rating, automatic multi-part download from multiple servers at once, pause and resume, search for more servers while you're downloading. My god, if New Napster launches looking like Old Napster, I might as well submit my search requests by snail mail on pieces of papyrus.
If this is the best that anyone has to say about new Napster, they might as well give up pouring more money into it and go buy some stock in manufacturers of blank CD's and flash media, because this is going to tempt nobody away from the Kazaa/Gnutella free-for-all, no matter how many "RIAA Approved!" stickers they slap on it.
Here's why Napster has no chance against Kazaa. I own a bought copy of "Dungeon Keeper 2". Last week, I fancied playing it, but the CD is hidden somewhere among my vast collection. It was - honest to god - easier for me to suck in a ripped version across Kazaa at 500kb/s than to stop what I was doing (developing software), move away from the desktop, find the CD, run the installer (as opposed to unzipping one file), and then have to swap it in and out of the drive simply because the developers assume I'm a thief until I prove otherwise. Is what I did illegal? Probably. Is it immoral? Hardly. Does it make sense? Absolutely!
The paradigm has shifted. It's all about ease of use and personal integrity. I actually do use Fairtunes, and I use it because it's easier than jumping through hoops to get crippled tracks from a label download service, or buying a CD at retail or waiting for one ordered online. Labels deliberately make it hard for us to get or use tracks, because they assume we're thieves, so they have to wrap it all up in (ahem) security. God damn it. If I am a thief, I'm going to rip their pathetic attempts at security right off, and all it'll do is piss me off and make me less inclined to play by their rules in the future. So screw them for their blind ignorance, and screw New Napster too, as it's no different.
A monitored, capped, clunky, hard to use, music-only, proprietary format service which assumes you're guilty until you prove otherwise and which you have to pay for is simply laughable.
Just don't get me started about LEECHES on the new Napster
Let's do start on that. I do allow uploads when I'm filesharing on Kazaa, because I understand that I'm part of a self-sustaining peer community.
But if I were paying for it, I would - as you say - view it as payment for a service, not for access to the community. Under those circumstances, once I've used up pathetic 50 attempts to get the tracks I want in the format I want (which takes me about two hours, say), and probably having to throw at least half of them away, why on earth should I serve content upstream for the other 718 hours of the month, pissing off my cableco ISP and endangering my fast net access?
It occurs to me that I can get access to a superb reliable commercial usenet feed carrying all the binaries groups, with long retention times, no bandwidth caps, and no need to run an ISP angering server for $30 a year. If I'm going to pay for acess to a service that allows me to download and upload content, which one should I go for?
Before anyone cries "Sell Out" put yourself in Shawns shoes
As you claim to be from a label, you should be familiar with the concept of selling rights. Sean chose to sell all rights to his creation, just as most artists choose to sell all rights to their work. You must be aware that touring artists have to license the right to perform "their" back from the labels that own them.
So "he" has no users, "he" has no connection with the brand other than being a face and a name. I respect Sean on a personal level for making it all happen, but to including him in any discussion about Napster now is about as relevant as saying that Cher has any legal or even moral rights in Britney Spear's cover of the label-copyrighted "Beat Goes On".
Removing the limits on liability would not only affect Microsoft, but the GNU GPL. Would you want to be personally responsible for any GPL'ed code you wrote?
If you're a commercial distributor, release binaries and bite the warranty bullet. I work for a company that already gives explicit warranties (99.95% availability) to a demanding market. It's perfectly achievable, you just have to implement a comprehensive automated test harness first. You have no idea how big a difference that makes until you've done it. It means the features take longer to appear to work, but they will generally actually work sooner, because you catch problems earlier in the test/release cycle.
If you're a hobbyist, release only source. Source is (pending appeals and higher court rulings) expressive speech. How do you warranty expressive speech? Your customer then has to choose actively to compile the source herself, at which point she has created the actual software, and has to satisfy herself. In the warranty department, I mean.
The last time I checked, the security testing group at MS consisted of two Norwegian Black rats, a four-year-old, and a blind, deaf, chimpanzee with a drinking habit
Typical anti-MS FUD. When I asked Microsoft PR to verify this, they assured me that the "rats" are in fact Siberian hamsters
[Non-waivable warranties would] definately kill off free software because you'd need to be trained, licensed and bonded in order to write software. Just like engineers who design bridges, etc
Funny, my employer already sells embedded systems with explicit warranties, and I'm not licensed or bonded. I just have to write decent software.
I wonder if there would be a get out for source-only distributions. If source is expressive speech (as some test cases are deciding) then it's pretty hard to warranty that. Also, you then get to say "Hey, you built this software, you provide the warranty protection to yourself."
its not IMPOSSIBLE to get software right. No more difficult than it is to build a car or a housse correctly
A couple of tiny differences...
Building a car is more like pressing CD's. You're thinking of designing a new car. Any idea how many prototypes (independent parts and entire vehicles) get built and thrown away during the design of a new car?
You don't use your paying customers as crash test dummies for your prototypes.
You cannot have a free market economy in which the economy is dominated by a few large players (even if they are publically traded)
I think "publically traded" is largely an irrelevance now. It conjures up images of crowds of shareholder meetings full of mom and pop investors waving their umbrellas and demanding fair play.
As you go on to say, the problem is that a few individuals control all the money/resources/power. The majority of shares in any given company are controlled (maybe not owned, but controlled) by a few individuals, either owned directly or controlled fund managers. Mom and pop are happy to abdicate their moral responsibilities to their fund manager, and just count the profits. It's all about the money. Principle, even legality is irrelevant. Look at Microsoft - a convicted monopolist, and yet the board continues on, because they smile and promise to keep those profits coming, regardless of trifling inconveniences like the government or the courts. They're as much as saying that they'll just ignore any judgement, and that's what the shareholders want to hear, because it means more profit.
And that'll apply to Borland. There's no point emailing them and ranting about rights and principles. The only language they'll hear (now that they've gone Dark Side) is money, and the results of their actions now won't show until next quarter.
So make them listen by speaking their language. Either don't buy their products, or better, buy their products and then return them. When you return them, then you can tell them it's because of the license, because - believe me - that's the only time that they'll care.
Grand total, £93/~$140 without porn, or £119/~$178 with all the porn you can eat. Hey, pretty good compared to the AOL-Time Warner Collective. Although if I've got a cable modem, what am I doing wasting my time (and wrist action) on TV edited soft core garbage?
No, that's unpatriotic. I have to keep the economy bouyant. Of course, after paying $178 a month for every conceivable channel including "premium" content and all the free stuff I can get through the modem, I'd still want to pay another $50 for pay-per-view "premium-premium" content, right? Right?
Or... it's just possible that cableco's are all smoking crack, and we're not as dumb as toast. If so, I expect a lot of marketing droids will have their toes roasted over open fires in the next couple of years.
I know that some of you, for your "safety", want to have a national ID card, national ID number, surveillance cameras, and face recognition everywhere. But isn't there a place, actually otherwise a really nice place, that you could move to? I think it's called "Europe".
You also mention gun laws, and how when it's harder to put one foul-up behind, you tend to get on the slippery slope of social ostracisation and criminality.
In the UK, we already have a single national photocard driver's license (and a clear intention from the incumbent government to bring in a mandatory national ID when it's convenient), security camera absolutely everywhere in urban areas, and a complete ban on handguns since 1997.
The result? Gun crime has risen sharply and mobile phone thefts by and from children are spiralling. You make guns illegal, you criminalise gun owners. Criminals (by definition) don't care about what the law is. You put in place strict measures to catch criminals, you send the thrilling message that the only crime is being caught.
I agree with your point. The tightest controls in the world do one thing and one thing only - they punish you and me, the honest Joe Citizens. They make things slightly harder for criminals, but they also create criminals, and ensure that more people start down that slippery slope of habitually getting away with little "crimes" until they no longer care about the big ones.
A society that assumes guilt until you prove otherwise (with a bit of plastic?) is not one in which I want to live.
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Or VMS, or bespoke, which is what most of the monitoring and control systems in the nuclear industry runs on. But this was becoming too expensive, and when last I was working in the industry, NT 3.51 had been settled on as their new OS of choice. I thought (and said) at the time that it was insane, but the decision had been made.
The point is that developers supplying this industry (and any other safety critical industry, think air traffic control or hospitals) absolutely have to be able to replicate older systems when they do any fixes or replacements. It's a contractual requirement, and it should be obvious why it makes sense.
As Microsoft moves towards software as a service, that's becoming harder and harder to do, and I shudder to think of the consequences of an applications contractor replacing an NT 3.51 system with an NT 4, Win2k, XP or (god help us) .NET system simply because it's too much trouble for them to get their hands an NT 3.51 install, or to source new hardware that NT 3.51 has drivers for. Think 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line. How many 1982 OS's will run on modern commodity hardware?
Ironically, the reason for the move from VMS and proprietary OS's to MS was that the industry was instructed to cut the ties to proprietary solutions for budget reasons (sourcing old hardware to replace broken VMS consoles cost a fortune). So now they're tied to MS, who have a clearly stated obsolescence policy. It's practically guaranteed that 2002 vintage WinXP won't be installable on 2022 hardware. NT is already unsupported, and 2K will be when .NET rolls out. So we're back to the same problems of replicating builds and sourcing old hardware to match the OS.
Was that clear enough? Corporate America is not just cube farms writing documents and browsing Dilbert, it's the very infrastructure of the country. Sections of that infrastructure cannot (or should not!) allow themselves to be railroaded into using systems with built in obselescence, which is why software-as-a-service is going to have a very, very hard sell in those sectors.
I'm not talking about servers, I'm talking about desktops. Desktops get moved around, recycled in different roles, and there's a lot of them, not all of which can run 2K let alone XP or .NET.
Managing 2 OS's, let alone 3 or 4 would increase the workload (and cost to us) of our IT guys. And rolling back an existing install is not the point. The point is that when a bit of my box fries (which it's done once), with half an hour I'm using another box from the same manufacturer (faster CPU, but same components) with a ghost of exactly the install of NT4 6a and apps that I was using ('cause I wasn't dumb enough to screw with my old box), and I and the IT guys know what's on it, and the box doesn't then try and second guess me and upgrade itself. Ever. If I can't get a recycled box with the same hardware, I can get a mostly equivelant (but known) ghost image on a newer box, or (worst case) we can start with a new box, rip whatever it comes pre-installed with, install it up to a known state that's not far off a ghost image in terms of repeatability.
Yes, we can do that with 2K. We can do it with XP - if we're careful. But with .NET and son of .NET, it's going to get harder and harder. I'm not saying we can't do it, I'm saying that it may become more trouble than it's worth, and it will push us into using alternatives.
I should make it clear that I develop and maintain telecomms software that's been in the field for years. When I have to fix a bug in software that was built 5 years ago, I need to replicate the original build environment exactly, no surprises, no enhancements. I previously worked in the nuclear industry, where this was an absolute requirement. We had 20 year old machines in storage that had to be maintained to replicate builds, and a firesafe packed full of complete OS and application tars to wipe these systems and put them in a known state.
Our problem is not one of administrating and updating a network, it's of stopping it being updated. That's a very real need for some developers.
A grinding sound emerges from my brain as I wonder how a universe that emerged from a singularity and which expressed quantized effects from the first instant could be viewed as having a background continuum. There's all those little wavicles starting at one point and making their quantum hops and skips around. At the very, very finest level, isn't there a finite number of positions they can be in? I'm thinking more integer positions than floats.
Sorry, I'm rambling. Don't mind me. ;-)
...I'm using a company machine with WinNT 4.0 SP6a. With a "Windows(R) 2000 Professional 1-2 CPU" sticker on the side. We downgraded it, and for a very good reason.
It does everything that I need to do my job. It does nothing that I don't need. The issues are known. It doesn't require any more patching because it ain't broke, or it's broke in known and acceptable ways. It doesn't require our IT guys to have to ask what version of what OS I'm running, nor to hunt out the right ghost image for that combination of hardware and OS. It can be ghost installed or copied, which is vital for replicating software builds.
Windows 2000 would be a barely acceptable substitute. There are far too many unknowns with WinXP, plus it has that habit of knowing better than you what drivers you really want to use (I need to test beta drivers, for god's sake, give me an "I know what I'm doing" button!).
Windows.NET would be absolutely, utterly unworkable in a business environment, because neither I, nor our IT guys would know what exactly was on the machine, nor would it be possible to replicate that at a later date to reproduce a build exactly.
We cannot and will not upgrade to .NET. Ever. As application support for NT dies away at the same time as Linux support grows, it's looking like a better (corporate!) proposition every day, and not just in the server room.
What point? That there's more content freely available right now than there's ever been in the history of humankind? It's way harsh on Dmitri and Jon Johansson, but as far as the rest of us are concerned, what's the biggie?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's loathesome that content distributors can tell us to our faces that we're all guilty (of whatever new offence they want to buy with "campaign contributions"), but in practical terms, they're fighting a losing battle, and I can show you precedent. The ex-Soviet Union.
Like most truism, this one is actually true: The more they tighten their grip, the more star systems, er, customers, will slip through their fingers.
When they tell us that we're all criminals whatever we do, when they make it harder to play by their rules than to get content via P2P or on a street corner, when they try to dictate demand by controlling supply, they'll create a black market that will supply the genuine demand of you and I and Joe Public. It happened in Russia, with far tighter controls at every level of society than even the RIAA and MPAA combined can buy in the USA. The War on Piracy will be about as successful as the War on Drugs, because they are both a War on The People.
I mean, really, this is bad luck for Kazaa, but Kazaa screwed up by trying to control supply using authorisation servers. They joined the losing side there and then. If Kazaa goes under, another service will pick up the pieces, and the amount of content available will just grow and grow. The losers will be anyone who refuses to supply the demand, the winners will be you, me, Joe, and the lawyers.
Hang on a minute while I just choke quietly in the corner. The only power? So, a big business can buy the laws they want through political bribes (aka campaign contributions), can have courts stop just about any activity they like (prima facia, before any guilt has been proven), and then can keep anybody they like in court until the little guy runs out of money and has to settle or starve, and that's the only power they have?
What more do they need? Well, it would be nice if they could get laws passed that effectively allow them to instruct their government to provide paramilitary enforcers to imprison individuals either at home or abroad, but that's beyond the realms of fantasy, surely?
Oh, wait, remind me, why did I buy that "Free Dmitri" T-shirt? How's Jon Johansson doing these days?
Only the legal system. God help us all.
It's OK, the smell of burning plastic and shorting electrics from where the local yoof have torched it and knifed their way through to the guts will cover it up.
Talk about setting the Cardiff yoof a challenge. Might as well hang a sign on them saying: "Can't break it. Can't break in."
It's a brave experiment. It needs to be tried. But I think it's real future transport designed for mythical future people.
From the slapdowns by the informed set here, I get the feeling that this is showing quantization in the motion of the neutron, which proves about zip about the forces acting on it. I'm not even sure about whether it's the velocity or the acceleration that's quantised, but either way it's only a very tenuous suggestion (at best) that the gravitons acting on it might be quantized.
What strikes me is the comparison with computer models. I used to work on physics engines for games along with a maths geek who was most disgruntled at the dreadful granularity that we had to work with (double precision floats, how primitive!). He was horrified to discover that such engines often use a dt timestep to do things like (v += a * dt), and to be fair, at 30fps, this requires a little fudging to keep orbits circular or whatever.
So articles like this give me a fuzzy flow, because they intimate that reality is granular. More than a double precision float, or a 33ms timestep, sure, but only by degree. If my poor head is getting this right, the universe seems pixellated at a very fine level, so all us games developers need to do to model it accurately is to get our frame rates way up and our dt's way down. There's a goal to aim for. ;-)
That's an excellent point. I watched a couple of the Dogget / Scully episodes, and they felt wrong, kind of like if Star Trek had replaced Kirk with Pike round about episode 60. Not worse, just wrong.
After years of building up a believable (on screen) chemistry, affection and respect between Mulder and Scully, its was totally unbelievable - beyond the suspension of disbelief, I mean - to have Mulder just kind of wander off and Scully to go "No Mulder, stay! [pause] Oh, OK then, bye." After all those life-and-death experiences and saving the world and seeing into the Beyond and all, I know who my loyalties would be to, and it wouldn't be to an FBI who'd treated me like dirt over the same period. It cheapened both characters to have them part ways, and that ruined the show for me.
So yes, a clean break would have worked better. Rather, it couldn't have worked worse. Mulder and Scully could have passed into legend, and a new team could have picked up the baton and seen everything with fresh eyes. As it was, the show chose to take the safer option, and (I think, and the viewing figures agree) blew it badly.
Despite the protestations of everyone involved, X-files was Mulder and Scully. That's not to say that Carter can't go on making shows of the same theme and quality, he just can't call them "X-files" without it feeling creepy and wrong.
Not to lapse into flag waving hyperbole, but who were the instigators of the American Revolution emulating?
I choose to think that when you turn the screw too hard, Joe Public will bite back... eventually. In many ways, the popularity of P2P services (not Napster!) shows that the populace is no longer willing to play by the rules that the RIAA/MPAA have set up to protect themselves. If a confrontation is forced through an SSSCA, I think - I hope - that Joe will see it for what it is: a bare faced attempt to apply "guilty until proven innocent" to ever man, woman and child in the USA and (de facto) any country that buys US spec hardware. It may be a gentle revolution when it comes, but I think it will come, if the RIAA/MPAA forces it.
Ah yes, and embedded engineering knowledge is inherited through RNA! How foolish of me to forget that.
Gee whiz, Wonder Boy, I'm not the son of an embedded engineer and all, I only do it for a living, but I reckon I have an inkling. We're using VxWorks, by the way, so there's a single memory space and no concept of separate executables. Ask your daddy about that.
...then it becomes much harder to ensure that 99.95% uptime. Of course it does. But it's not impossible, it just involves a lot of development and testing, at a time when the telecomms market has tanked. There aren't many companies prepared to invest like that in preparation for the upswing. Fortunately, I work for one of them, and we've thrown pretty much everything at this product.
Good guess, but I'm a taurean. I won't bother retorting in kind, because we're doing fine on the test sites and are currently ramping up retail manufacture, and the market is going to decide which of us is right and which is wrong.
Go ahead and put the last word in. If it makes it any easier for you, my momma is fat, ugly and promiscuous. But it's still a plain old fact that telecomms switches achieve a 99.95% uptime, and there's no reason other than lack of customer demand why that can't be repeated in some if not all other areas of development.
LL has a true gift for langauge. Younger readers may not be aware just how tightly managed the Soviet Union was. The production of everything was strictly controlled by a series of Five Year Plans that attempted to match supply to predicted future demand. By "everything", I mean that the number and colour of toothbrushes that would be produced was planned on a five year basis.
Picture this from the populace's point of view. You go to buy a new toothbrush. You quite fancy an orange one, but all they have is blue. Everyone else is buying blue toothbrushes, so, hey why not? One toothbrush is much like another, right? They're all just cheap mass manufactured plastic that'll be old in six months, so you might as well buy what they've got. You quickly get used to it. In time, you stop even wondering what an orange toothbrush - or a non-Government toothbrush - would be like.
Compare with the US music industry. You go to buy a CD... you see where this is going?
Big labels plan years in advance. They produce acts to fit the niches that they have decided there will be demand for. If there isn't demand for those acts, well tough, that's all there is on the shelves, and they aren't going to change their CD pressing schedules to suit you. That would play merry hell with their smooth profits. They know they're getting your money, because all the artists are just cheap mass manufactured plastic that'll be old in six months, so you might as well buy what they've got. You quickly get used to it. In time, you stop even wondering what an independent artist would be like.
If you don't believe that labels plan that far ahead, look at Mariah Carey. She has a five album 80 million US dollar deal. Despite suffering an "emotional and physical breakdown" and releasing a film and album that both tanked, EMI has not canned her. They can't. They have a Five Year Plan. We will love Mariah, and we will buy her albums, because they will make damn sure that when the next album comes out, they'll have cut a deal to ensure that no big name from any other label will release at the same time, and the advertising will be Mariah, Mariah, Mariah.
Or so they think. The trouble with their Five Year Plans is the same as in the Soviet Union. The people aren't stupid. They know what kind of toothbrush they want. If they can't get that, then they'll take what's available. But when the non-Government toothbrushes become available on street corners, even though it's illegal, they'll buy them, and they'll tell their friends where to get them, and a black or grey market will spring up to supply the genuine demand, and the Five Year Plan is suddenly in disarray because all the cheap plastic government approved toothbrushes are sitting in factories and nobody wants them any more.
At this point, the analogy breaks down because it's comparing sharing with purchasing. The toothbrush analogy is very immediate, but if you want a better history lesson of why monolithic government/industry content control is doomed from the get go even if abominations like the SSSCA are passed, then read about samizdat, and understand that We, the People will find a way.
Which machine would that be? Oh, wait, they mean one machine per person, right?
I thought you were kidding, but by the time I'd read their astonishing copyright notice (on a web page!) I'd already made two copies of the page, on both my firewall proxy and my desktop.
Of course, it's not a problem because I'm not breaking the intent of their copyright, right? Right?
Well, how the hell would I know? That's exactly what it says, and making value judgements or dissembling over whether it's morally right or wrong is exactly what leads down the slippery slope of not giving a damn about copyright at all, because anything you do is liable to be technically contrary to someone's terms. Technically playing a CD when seven or more people can hear it is illegal (in the UK), for example. Even if six of them are walking past your open window...
I despair, I really do. Yet another company that assumes we're all thieves and need to have the difference between right and wrong spelled out to us, accompanied by a stern wagging finger. Oh, it's too much.
Something that I haven't seen mentioned specifically in a parent post. Why on earth would you leave Napster running and serving tracks after you've sucked down your pathetic 50 per month?
Think about it. The clock ticks past midnight, it's a new month, you've got 50 more tracks to suck. How long does that take you over a decent commection? Two hours?
Then what? You leave Napster running for the other 718 hours of the month, serving up content and pissing off your ISP? Or, more likely, you only turn it on to play the .NAP crap, and you probably disable file sharing while you're doing that, because, hey, you ain't getting anything from the network for the rest of the month, right, and you've paid for what you got (and probably had to throw half of it away), so Napster can damn well use your money to serve it's own content, right? (Try to think like a typical paying netizen rather than a Slashdotter)
One of the strengths of P2P communities is that you can spend a lot of time browsing for stuff, during which time you're part of the community and might as well be serving files as well. But after you've used up your Napster allowance for the month, what's your incentive to keep using (and contributing) to the service at all? You can search for files but not download them? How frustrating would that be?
So they might get a million customers, but at 2 hours use out of 720 a month, they'll have, what, less than 3,000 online at any given time. That's a lot of Britney Spears, but very little Stan Rogers.
My god, picture it. People sitting watching the clock, waiting for it to roll over to the 1st of the month at Napster HQ, when the feeding frenzy begins, knowing that's the only time they've got a chance of getting a good selection of content. Doesn't bear thinking about.
How many of these do you sell at CompUSA for $50/each?
And were you mandated by law to do this?
Our latest product is a small telecomms switch aimed at the mom and pop market, and we will be direct selling and are seriously considering trying to get retail outlets to carry our boxes. It's more like $400, but for a telecomms switch, that's giving them away.
We're mandated by many laws, in many difference regions, and have to fulfill the strictest of each. We have to have 100% availability of an analogue telephone line in the event of a power failure, and conform to any number of RF emissions and material laws, for example.
But that's beside the point. In addition to this, we warrant an uptime of 99.95%. That's demanded not by the law but by the market, even by mom and pop (how often do you expect to have to reboot your phone?). If you think that's impossible, the problem is in your attitude, and the attitude of retail purchasers of most software. It can and is done on a daily basis in many parts of the software industry. My god, how many field engineer visits or returns do you think we can afford for a mass market product? We have to ship it bug free.
No, really, how many people read it and actually analysed what it said?
Uh, why should it be remarkable that the pay service should be no worse than the old free one, or any of the many free alternatives now?
The author then contradicts herself by going on to list the negatives, some of which are old, some are clearly New and De-Improved:
And of course, the whole damn point of the thing:
So, we're saying that it works fairly well, only it doesn't really, but that's to be expected because it's all new technology. But it doesn't do anything. It neither shares nor find MP3's or even .NAP's.
The fact that there's anything positive in this (fairly literate) review makes me think that it's been written by a shill. Note:
Perhaps in the early days, but what Napster really achieved was to change attitudes. Napster made it so easy to copy files that it didn't seem wrong to most people. Remember that /. is one of the few places where you'll see people even debating the legality and morality of it. Jane Sharer doesn't even consider it. If it's got a pretty, professional looking client, it must be OK, right? Otherwise The Authorities would put a stop to it, surely.
If the reviewer isn't a shill, she's someone who doesn't realise that a beta should be reviewed as though it is a release candidate, without making allowances for basic lack of functionality (sharing files!) that should have been caught in alpha. One glance at the Kazaa clients should clear that up right away. Filter and search by type, artist, content, sort by file size, bandwidth, download times, user rating, automatic multi-part download from multiple servers at once, pause and resume, search for more servers while you're downloading. My god, if New Napster launches looking like Old Napster, I might as well submit my search requests by snail mail on pieces of papyrus.
If this is the best that anyone has to say about new Napster, they might as well give up pouring more money into it and go buy some stock in manufacturers of blank CD's and flash media, because this is going to tempt nobody away from the Kazaa/Gnutella free-for-all, no matter how many "RIAA Approved!" stickers they slap on it.
Here's why Napster has no chance against Kazaa. I own a bought copy of "Dungeon Keeper 2". Last week, I fancied playing it, but the CD is hidden somewhere among my vast collection. It was - honest to god - easier for me to suck in a ripped version across Kazaa at 500kb/s than to stop what I was doing (developing software), move away from the desktop, find the CD, run the installer (as opposed to unzipping one file), and then have to swap it in and out of the drive simply because the developers assume I'm a thief until I prove otherwise. Is what I did illegal? Probably. Is it immoral? Hardly. Does it make sense? Absolutely!
The paradigm has shifted. It's all about ease of use and personal integrity. I actually do use Fairtunes, and I use it because it's easier than jumping through hoops to get crippled tracks from a label download service, or buying a CD at retail or waiting for one ordered online. Labels deliberately make it hard for us to get or use tracks, because they assume we're thieves, so they have to wrap it all up in (ahem) security. God damn it. If I am a thief, I'm going to rip their pathetic attempts at security right off, and all it'll do is piss me off and make me less inclined to play by their rules in the future. So screw them for their blind ignorance, and screw New Napster too, as it's no different.
A monitored, capped, clunky, hard to use, music-only, proprietary format service which assumes you're guilty until you prove otherwise and which you have to pay for is simply laughable.
Let's do start on that. I do allow uploads when I'm filesharing on Kazaa, because I understand that I'm part of a self-sustaining peer community.
But if I were paying for it, I would - as you say - view it as payment for a service, not for access to the community. Under those circumstances, once I've used up pathetic 50 attempts to get the tracks I want in the format I want (which takes me about two hours, say), and probably having to throw at least half of them away, why on earth should I serve content upstream for the other 718 hours of the month, pissing off my cableco ISP and endangering my fast net access?
It occurs to me that I can get access to a superb reliable commercial usenet feed carrying all the binaries groups, with long retention times, no bandwidth caps, and no need to run an ISP angering server for $30 a year. If I'm going to pay for acess to a service that allows me to download and upload content, which one should I go for?
As you claim to be from a label, you should be familiar with the concept of selling rights. Sean chose to sell all rights to his creation, just as most artists choose to sell all rights to their work. You must be aware that touring artists have to license the right to perform "their" back from the labels that own them.
So "he" has no users, "he" has no connection with the brand other than being a face and a name. I respect Sean on a personal level for making it all happen, but to including him in any discussion about Napster now is about as relevant as saying that Cher has any legal or even moral rights in Britney Spear's cover of the label-copyrighted "Beat Goes On".
If you're a commercial distributor, release binaries and bite the warranty bullet. I work for a company that already gives explicit warranties (99.95% availability) to a demanding market. It's perfectly achievable, you just have to implement a comprehensive automated test harness first. You have no idea how big a difference that makes until you've done it. It means the features take longer to appear to work, but they will generally actually work sooner, because you catch problems earlier in the test/release cycle.
If you're a hobbyist, release only source. Source is (pending appeals and higher court rulings) expressive speech. How do you warranty expressive speech? Your customer then has to choose actively to compile the source herself, at which point she has created the actual software, and has to satisfy herself. In the warranty department, I mean.
Typical anti-MS FUD. When I asked Microsoft PR to verify this, they assured me that the "rats" are in fact Siberian hamsters
Funny, my employer already sells embedded systems with explicit warranties, and I'm not licensed or bonded. I just have to write decent software.
I wonder if there would be a get out for source-only distributions. If source is expressive speech (as some test cases are deciding) then it's pretty hard to warranty that. Also, you then get to say "Hey, you built this software, you provide the warranty protection to yourself."
A couple of tiny differences...
I think "publically traded" is largely an irrelevance now. It conjures up images of crowds of shareholder meetings full of mom and pop investors waving their umbrellas and demanding fair play.
As you go on to say, the problem is that a few individuals control all the money/resources/power. The majority of shares in any given company are controlled (maybe not owned, but controlled) by a few individuals, either owned directly or controlled fund managers. Mom and pop are happy to abdicate their moral responsibilities to their fund manager, and just count the profits. It's all about the money. Principle, even legality is irrelevant. Look at Microsoft - a convicted monopolist, and yet the board continues on, because they smile and promise to keep those profits coming, regardless of trifling inconveniences like the government or the courts. They're as much as saying that they'll just ignore any judgement, and that's what the shareholders want to hear, because it means more profit.
And that'll apply to Borland. There's no point emailing them and ranting about rights and principles. The only language they'll hear (now that they've gone Dark Side) is money, and the results of their actions now won't show until next quarter.
So make them listen by speaking their language. Either don't buy their products, or better, buy their products and then return them. When you return them, then you can tell them it's because of the license, because - believe me - that's the only time that they'll care.
As an FYI, here's how this compares to the UK, where we traditionally get assraped on prices compared to the USA:
For Telewest cable
Grand total, £93/~$140 without porn, or £119/~$178 with all the porn you can eat. Hey, pretty good compared to the AOL-Time Warner Collective. Although if I've got a cable modem, what am I doing wasting my time (and wrist action) on TV edited soft core garbage?
No, that's unpatriotic. I have to keep the economy bouyant. Of course, after paying $178 a month for every conceivable channel including "premium" content and all the free stuff I can get through the modem, I'd still want to pay another $50 for pay-per-view "premium-premium" content, right? Right?
Or... it's just possible that cableco's are all smoking crack, and we're not as dumb as toast. If so, I expect a lot of marketing droids will have their toes roasted over open fires in the next couple of years.
You also mention gun laws, and how when it's harder to put one foul-up behind, you tend to get on the slippery slope of social ostracisation and criminality.
In the UK, we already have a single national photocard driver's license (and a clear intention from the incumbent government to bring in a mandatory national ID when it's convenient), security camera absolutely everywhere in urban areas, and a complete ban on handguns since 1997.
The result? Gun crime has risen sharply and mobile phone thefts by and from children are spiralling. You make guns illegal, you criminalise gun owners. Criminals (by definition) don't care about what the law is. You put in place strict measures to catch criminals, you send the thrilling message that the only crime is being caught.
I agree with your point. The tightest controls in the world do one thing and one thing only - they punish you and me, the honest Joe Citizens. They make things slightly harder for criminals, but they also create criminals, and ensure that more people start down that slippery slope of habitually getting away with little "crimes" until they no longer care about the big ones.
A society that assumes guilt until you prove otherwise (with a bit of plastic?) is not one in which I want to live.