Except the people tend not to buy things if they think they can get away with getting it for free. A friend of mine works at a big record label. They took a band that they thought had a great future, and put up a _high_quality_ mp3 with _no_advert_ for people to download and advertised it to promote the album. Had downloads in the hundreds of thousands. The CD barely sold, but the tracks were quite popular on the P2P networks.
They gave the fans a gift with no strings attached and still got spit upon.
----- We've come up with a much better way of getting that music, thank you very much. -----
So come up with a "much better way" of paying for it.
----- People have been whining about technology taking their jobs away since the invention of the printing press. In the end, the technology *never* goes away and those people find new jobs. -----
So when the good musicians give up and find "new jobs" in something other than music, are you really going to enjoy crappy, lo-fi, amatuer music? Remember MP3.com? The one with the business model of giving away music for free? There were some great gems in there, but far and away, most of it was awful. That's what the future of music without payment sounds like.
Don't you remember what happened to the dog in To Kill a Mockingbird?
I'm not advocating that the people of North Korea should be killed, but that the government must be overthrown one way or the other. (Preferably not through direct US intervention.) The government is a completely corrupt dictatorship/cult of personality that ruthlessly crushes its people, while spending a large portion of what little money it has on the lavish lifestyle of its elite. That's not the type of government that can be reformed over time. It simply needs to be replaced.
Rewarding agressive threats with aid that helps prop up the government for another 10 years, keeping the people subjugated, and encourages other dictators to think that all they have to do to get aid from wealthy countries is to become a threat. Note that this doesn't apply if you happen to have oil or something else that the United States wants.
I ordered the Dell USB keyboard wth hotkeys with a new system without looking closely at it first. Turns out the hot keys are mapped to... web browser functions. Forward, back, reload, stop, home. And aren't remappable. Apparently they are unaware of the existance of the escape key... The others are completely useless - I can hit control-R or alt-(left|right)arrow far more rappidly than I can take my hand out of typing position and hit some hot key. Sigh.
----- Do gunmakers get to decide who you may or may not shoot? Do car manufacturers decide where you are allowed to drive? Do spoon builders decide what you can scoop? Can the cheesemakers tell you what crackers you are allowed to put it on? -----
They sure can. Unless otherwise prohibited by law (for example, there are some rights you legally cannot sign away), a manufacturer can sell what they make with any kind of contract/requirements they want. Basic capitalism will determine whether or not the product lasts - if the buying public feels that the conditions make the product not worth it, it will fail. As a rule, trying to attach strings to a physical product would cause the public to refuse to buy it, so it's rarely done. There are exceptions, however.
For example (sticking to the audio world), there was one manufacturer of concert speakers that required you to sign a contract when you bought them saying that you would only use them with a specific type of power applifyer. This wasn't a matter of nepotism - the amps were made by a different company, but the speakers were designed to work with those exact amps, so using a different amp increased the likelyhood of damage. And, the company felt that the speakers sounded best with those amps. They were cutting edge at the time and the company invested heavily on advertising - if you were using brand-X cut rate amps that didn't sound good, someone who didn't know what was in the amp rack might assume the speakers weren't good. On top of that, you had to agree to have their staff to your first two shows with them to ensure that you deployed them correctly.
Guess what? They still sold quite well. As a further example, witness the spread of "discount" cards in supermarkets. They have attached a condition that you have to surrender a bunch of your rights in order to get a better price.
----- If you want to treat information like a product (which I would argue against anyway) -----
Information is tricky and needs more protection than physical products simply because it is so easy to copy. It falls into a weird space between goods and services. They're also very different from your car/spoon examples, because as a species, we tend to accumulate many different versions of similar products. I tend to buy 5 CDs and 2 books per week because I seek out a variety of them. I have many spoons, but that's only so I can use more than one at a time - except for collectors of spoons, society doesn't interact with spoons in the same way we do with games, movies, books, etc. This constant churn along with the ease of copying creates a dangerous environment for people that create quality information.
In a perfect world, it wouldn't need much protection, because people would recognise that the creation of the data, be it music, software, or writing, costs money to create and those that make it need to survive, and would compensate them for it. The reality is that the vast majority of the people out there will do the cheap and easy thing rather than the "right" thing.
In that perfect world, DRM and copy protection would be a non-issue because it wouldn't be needed. The fact is, good people often get hit with unpleasant stuff because overall, people aren't perfect. I've paid well over $30K in the past decade for car/truck insurance, despite driving hundreds of thousands of miles without a single incident. And yet, I still believe insurance is a good thing because it protects the general public overall. (How it's implimented at this point is another matter...)
Most companies don't just sit down one day and decide to do things to piss off consumers, although many monopolies don't bother to correct problems because the consumers don't have an alternative. Video game companies add copy protection because they've seen sales plummet when they don't. Record companies fight Napster and for DRMed formats because they saw the effect of mp3 piracy on sales. I have a friend who's a fairly high level executive
One of the tennets of freedom is the right for people to be able to decide how what they create should be used. Linus used that right to place Linux under the GPL, Theo uses that freedom to choose the BSD license. Just because you disagree with the license offered with a product does not give you the "freedom" to ignore the license and take the product anyway, nor is the fact that it's impossible to stop file-sharing make it "right." SCO obviously disagrees with the GPL, but how many people here support their claim that they have the "right" to Linux?
If you don't like the terms (be it CD, DRMed file, carved stone tablet), fine, don't buy it. I guarantee that if you choose to look around, there's talented musicians who aren't associated with any major music lable who would love you to listen to their recordings. Musicians' freedom includes choosing what terms they want to distribute their creations under, or selling that right to someone else. If you want to fight the system, respect them and seek out the alternatives, don't gloat about the gigabytes of commercial stuff that the latest product lets you aquire.
Not really. I happen to be one of those people that gets a paycheck before the artist (I do studio and live work - but for small local artists and at reasonable prices). There's so much great music that never gets heard because of distribution problems. Where is the open source micropayment system? Where's the plugins to media players that would help people find new music?
They may or may not exist, but they don't get front page attention on Slashdot. Instead we get something that if it catches on will be used to spread the latest UshLudicKast5 song across campuses, along with a whole bunch of people patting themselves on the back for their "freedom," which largely consists of taking away other people's freedom.
The artists I work with have the right to put whatever conditions they want on their music, or to sell that right to some corporation. Freedom is choosing whether or not to agree to those conditions, not disagreeing with them and taking anyway.
But oh look, I've already been labeled as a troll.
An open source project has been released under the GPL that includes an innovative way to insure that artists and companies are fairly compensated, while keeping prices low and increasing distribution of little known but talented artists.
Oh wait, no. It's just another way for people to keep doing what they've been doing, just a slightly different way. With all the brainpower that exists out there, wouldn't it be nice to see it put toward solving the problems that exist rather than keeping on with the "I want therefore I deserve it for free" attitude that permiates our society?
----- Where was Real when Apple, and most everyone else, was getting stomped into the ground by Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior? Oh, that's right, they were writing Windows software while delaying the release of their Mac clients. -----
They were largely getting stomped into the ground by Microsoft's anticompetative behaviour as well. I work in streaming media, and I assure you, Microsoft has gone out of their way to try to put Real out of business. How much resources do you think a small company has to put toward releasing software for a platform with a very small market share that has a strongly entrenched competing product that's pushed by the maker of the platform?
It's not as if Apple is any better - QuickTime is still quite unstable under Windows, and there's no QT client for Linux.
>It seems to me that Apple has no problem with an agreement with Motorola -- so what did Real do wrong?
Real and Apple have competing media formats. Motorola has no stakes in streaming media. Motorola has no music store, and has a tiny amount of space for MP3s on their licensed devices, meaning that they are no threat at all to iPods. From all the interviews I read, it sounded like Steve Jobs spit in Real's face when they tried to license it.
Back when I had a job that I really enjoyed, despite the fact that I frequently working 16+ hour, physically intensive days, I tended to bounce out of bed after 6 hours of sleep. (Don't worry, I wasn't being abused by the workplace - I had a two or three day workweek). Even at the same age, doing an office job that I was good at but not happy with, after 8 hours I ended up feeling dead and dragging by the time I got home, and only wanted to veg out. So I fully support your theory.
Consumers aren't the target for this product. Most of them don't have the disposable income to buy a computer. The government, on the other hand, does but wasn't willing to spend the full price on XP.
Except that it already did what it's supposed to. Thailand had been making noise about moving its government systems to Linux. Microsoft made the crippled version, and the Thai government already backed down.
Microsoft isn't going after the consumer market, most of whom don't have the disposable income to spend on a computer, period. They wanted the government business and they got it.
Because some of us don't like the way that Steve^WApple has chosen to dictate that a UI should be? Because some of us like to be able to reliably do everything we need to do to maintain a machine via SSH? Because some of us like to maintain similar operating environments between our servers and our desktops (I spend most of my time on OS X in the server version, which has some significant differences in configuration tools, which leaves me fumbling around when I do deal with the desktop version)? Because benchmarks have shown that Linux runs faster than OS X, so Solaris may as well? Dtrace?
Just because OS X happens to fit your hand doesn't mean it fits mine. Linux et al allows me to customize the tool to fit my hand. Steve wants me to change my hand to fit the tool.
What worries me is the possibility that this will turn out to be another CSS. A poorly designed, overly complicated set of rules that everyone impliments a little differently so that people like me have to write horrible, ugly kludges to make it work in everything.
Unless you like plain, boring boxes, doing layout in CSS is a nightmare. And because Moz/Opera/IE5/IE6/Safari/Konq all do things just a little different, trying to make something look the same is a long, time consuming process. There's less room for creative versions of this standard, but it makes me leery.
I get the impression that quite a bit of Apple's recent products that are similar to Unix/Datacenter things are being done by people who look at what other people have done and mimic it without fully understanding why things are done a certain way and get it wrong as a result.
The nightmare of "fix permissions" comes to mind. The fact that a drive may not always be given the same/dev designation. So on and so forth.
There is a free remote desktop application for OS X; I don't like being bound to that for administering my servers. With SSH, no matter where I am, I can generally find some computer with it in a reasonably quick time. I can't stand the OS X interface for a few reasons, so I haven't bothered setting up a Mac as a desktop (I used two G4s as bookends for a little while) and I don't particularly care for my 12", so having to rely on finding a Mac is annoying.
There is a text version of software update. The great thing is that anything that requires a license agreement or the like displays the agreement on the graphic display and hangs the application. Not well designed. I discussed this with an Apple rep who said it might be fixed in Tiger... Come on, I could prolly write the code in an hour or two.
> why bother with Xserve and other server-type techs if that's the case?
I think Apple was/is trying to get into the server type techs, but they also wanted to offer a server platform to sell to Mac houses so small companies could be 100% Mac is they wanted to.
I have three of the G4 series Xserves, and as far as I can tell, the marketing department looked at some rack gear and designed the product, because it's certainly not something that someone who's actually done work in data centers would come up with. (Note: I've not played with the G5s, so they may have fixed some or all of the isses.)
The obsession with making it a 1 rack space unit means that it's significantly longer than some racks (particularly older ones), leaving them sticking out into walkways in tightly arranged centers. (In all fairness, my 1 space dual Opteron is almost as long.) The drives are very easy to accidentally eject by brushing against them. You can lock the drives in, but that also turns off the USB and Firewire inputs. And speaking of which, the lack of PS/2 inputs means that you have to buy very expensive adaptors to make it work with standard KVMs. (Yes, you can buy KVMs with USB, but it's hard to justify doing so if your existing KVM cost ~$35,000.)
If you have the luxury of designing your center around them, it's workable. But most of us live in the real world where you're building on infrastructure that's a decade or more old.
And then there's issues with the OS itself, like the fact that you can't upgrade many things without using a graphic interface (to click through the user agreement). If I can't do everything I need to do through SSH, I'm just not interested.
I spent a few weeks during summer break doing data entry on an early series Thinkpad, and actually got quite good at using the eraser mouse while in the midst of typing. It's one of the reasons that years later, any laptop I buy must have one.
I work for a university and looked at the Real DRM setup this past spring. (I didn't go with it because it was too expensive for our budget.) My department offers online video classes, and I was hoping that the DRM would allow us to offer them via download or on CD/DVD-ROM to students who didn't have a good enough connection to handle streaming files.
We would have had to protect some of the classes because some profs have intellectual property issues with what they're teaching.
The Real DRM is a wrapper that encloses a realmedia file, and has the details of what DRM server has authority over it, and what the restrictions are. The Real client connects to the server (that my department would have owned) when it attempts to play a DRMed file and secures permission to play it. The fact that each company runs their own rights server is what they mean by third party DRM.
Here's exactly what the clause means:
----- DRMs may be able to revoke your ability to use applicable content. RN is not responsible for the operation of the third party DRM in any way, including revocation of your content. -----
Translation: Real cannot control what people using its software do with it. Duh. They give a large amount of control to the entity distributing the media. If my acceptable use policy says that all of your rights will be terminated if we catch you spreading the file to unauthorized persons, we can do that serverside.
----- RN is not responsible for any communications to or from any third party DRM provider, or for the collection or use of information by third party DRMs. -----
Translation: Because the DRM software works by identity, there's a certain amount of data that can be collected. Real is not responsible for that any more than Apache is for people getting info from their webserver.
----- You consent to the communications enabled and/or performed by the DRM, including automatic updating of the DRM without further notice, despite the provisions of AutoUpdate defined in Section 6(c). -----
Real has to be able to update DRM to fix problems. They have an accountability to the users who buy a rather expensive package to maintain some kind of security.
If you don't like it, don't use it. But there's nothing in that clause that indicates it will ever do anything to your mp3s, just secured Real files.
Why would you be sure of that? Charitible donations are deductable. Actual business expenses/failed investments are deductable. Opening the source of something is not.
So, have you ever heard of this thing called Samba? I believe OS X ships with it...
The fact is, OS X is only useful to the majority of users because of open, free standards. TCP/IP, POP, IMAP, FTP, HTTP, etc. Apple wants to keep its hold on the technology - not because it's anything all that advanced that needs to be protected - but to try to control the consumer.
Do you want Microsoft to start going after the Samba team?
Maybe I'm one of those "sysadmin types" who doesn't know better, but if that's your view on perl, you're not using it correctly. Perl is very good at writing software that works with text data. I do projects such as extracting data from html files and tossing it into a database or making custom log file parsers in perl with little effort or time. I _could_ write the same thing in C, C++, or Pascal (still haven't learned Java), but why would I? It would take longer to write and longer to debug. It might execute faster, but that would have very little effect on the way that the tool is used (the last log file parser I wrote can go through 4TB of data transfer log files in about 4 seconds). Could you explain how this is not knowing better?
It's not cool, sexy work, but it's stuff that has to get done. Most people don't get to make really cool applications, we write stuff that handles shifting the data that the world generates around.
That said, I think Graham is wrong in dismissing his "non-geek" languages. Use the right tools for the right project.
Is it really that clear cut? It would seem to me that froogles, while used first, was a clear attempt to capitalize on the google mark. Google is a mispelling that (so far as I know) is unique other than a passing reference in a Douglas Adams book. Given that Froogles is essentially a search engine, albeit on an intentionally limited set of data, I would see this as a clear attempt to use the goodwill that google has generated even though I don't see a lot of chance that the average user would confuse the two.
The logo also appears to be derived from the google logo - there's enough differences to prevent being nailed for it, but if you switched the font to serifs and added the colours, I'd bet that a fair number of people would mistake it at a casual glance.
I'm not saying that I disagree with the court's decision (don't know enough about the case to make a judgement), but I don't think it's black and white.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the people tend not to buy things if they think they can get away with getting it for free. A friend of mine works at a big record label. They took a band that they thought had a great future, and put up a _high_quality_ mp3 with _no_advert_ for people to download and advertised it to promote the album. Had downloads in the hundreds of thousands. The CD barely sold, but the tracks were quite popular on the P2P networks.
They gave the fans a gift with no strings attached and still got spit upon.
-----
We've come up with a much better way of getting that music, thank you very much.
-----
So come up with a "much better way" of paying for it.
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People have been whining about technology taking their jobs away since the invention of the printing press. In the end, the technology *never* goes away and those people find new jobs.
-----
So when the good musicians give up and find "new jobs" in something other than music, are you really going to enjoy crappy, lo-fi, amatuer music? Remember MP3.com? The one with the business model of giving away music for free? There were some great gems in there, but far and away, most of it was awful. That's what the future of music without payment sounds like.
Overworked and doing the job of two and a half people, but with enough of a budget for equipment that I don't have to worry too much?
Don't you remember what happened to the dog in To Kill a Mockingbird?
I'm not advocating that the people of North Korea should be killed, but that the government must be overthrown one way or the other. (Preferably not through direct US intervention.) The government is a completely corrupt dictatorship/cult of personality that ruthlessly crushes its people, while spending a large portion of what little money it has on the lavish lifestyle of its elite. That's not the type of government that can be reformed over time. It simply needs to be replaced.
Rewarding agressive threats with aid that helps prop up the government for another 10 years, keeping the people subjugated, and encourages other dictators to think that all they have to do to get aid from wealthy countries is to become a threat. Note that this doesn't apply if you happen to have oil or something else that the United States wants.
I ordered the Dell USB keyboard wth hotkeys with a new system without looking closely at it first. Turns out the hot keys are mapped to ... web browser functions. Forward, back, reload, stop, home. And aren't remappable. Apparently they are unaware of the existance of the escape key... The others are completely useless - I can hit control-R or alt-(left|right)arrow far more rappidly than I can take my hand out of typing position and hit some hot key. Sigh.
-----
Do gunmakers get to decide who you may or may not shoot? Do car manufacturers decide where you are allowed to drive? Do spoon builders decide what you can scoop? Can the cheesemakers tell you what crackers you are allowed to put it on?
-----
They sure can. Unless otherwise prohibited by law (for example, there are some rights you legally cannot sign away), a manufacturer can sell what they make with any kind of contract/requirements they want. Basic capitalism will determine whether or not the product lasts - if the buying public feels that the conditions make the product not worth it, it will fail. As a rule, trying to attach strings to a physical product would cause the public to refuse to buy it, so it's rarely done. There are exceptions, however.
For example (sticking to the audio world), there was one manufacturer of concert speakers that required you to sign a contract when you bought them saying that you would only use them with a specific type of power applifyer. This wasn't a matter of nepotism - the amps were made by a different company, but the speakers were designed to work with those exact amps, so using a different amp increased the likelyhood of damage. And, the company felt that the speakers sounded best with those amps. They were cutting edge at the time and the company invested heavily on advertising - if you were using brand-X cut rate amps that didn't sound good, someone who didn't know what was in the amp rack might assume the speakers weren't good. On top of that, you had to agree to have their staff to your first two shows with them to ensure that you deployed them correctly.
Guess what? They still sold quite well. As a further example, witness the spread of "discount" cards in supermarkets. They have attached a condition that you have to surrender a bunch of your rights in order to get a better price.
-----
If you want to treat information like a product (which I would argue against anyway)
-----
Information is tricky and needs more protection than physical products simply because it is so easy to copy. It falls into a weird space between goods and services. They're also very different from your car/spoon examples, because as a species, we tend to accumulate many different versions of similar products. I tend to buy 5 CDs and 2 books per week because I seek out a variety of them. I have many spoons, but that's only so I can use more than one at a time - except for collectors of spoons, society doesn't interact with spoons in the same way we do with games, movies, books, etc. This constant churn along with the ease of copying creates a dangerous environment for people that create quality information.
In a perfect world, it wouldn't need much protection, because people would recognise that the creation of the data, be it music, software, or writing, costs money to create and those that make it need to survive, and would compensate them for it. The reality is that the vast majority of the people out there will do the cheap and easy thing rather than the "right" thing.
In that perfect world, DRM and copy protection would be a non-issue because it wouldn't be needed. The fact is, good people often get hit with unpleasant stuff because overall, people aren't perfect. I've paid well over $30K in the past decade for car/truck insurance, despite driving hundreds of thousands of miles without a single incident. And yet, I still believe insurance is a good thing because it protects the general public overall. (How it's implimented at this point is another matter...)
Most companies don't just sit down one day and decide to do things to piss off consumers, although many monopolies don't bother to correct problems because the consumers don't have an alternative. Video game companies add copy protection because they've seen sales plummet when they don't. Record companies fight Napster and for DRMed formats because they saw the effect of mp3 piracy on sales. I have a friend who's a fairly high level executive
One of the tennets of freedom is the right for people to be able to decide how what they create should be used. Linus used that right to place Linux under the GPL, Theo uses that freedom to choose the BSD license. Just because you disagree with the license offered with a product does not give you the "freedom" to ignore the license and take the product anyway, nor is the fact that it's impossible to stop file-sharing make it "right." SCO obviously disagrees with the GPL, but how many people here support their claim that they have the "right" to Linux?
If you don't like the terms (be it CD, DRMed file, carved stone tablet), fine, don't buy it. I guarantee that if you choose to look around, there's talented musicians who aren't associated with any major music lable who would love you to listen to their recordings. Musicians' freedom includes choosing what terms they want to distribute their creations under, or selling that right to someone else. If you want to fight the system, respect them and seek out the alternatives, don't gloat about the gigabytes of commercial stuff that the latest product lets you aquire.
Not really. I happen to be one of those people that gets a paycheck before the artist (I do studio and live work - but for small local artists and at reasonable prices). There's so much great music that never gets heard because of distribution problems. Where is the open source micropayment system? Where's the plugins to media players that would help people find new music?
They may or may not exist, but they don't get front page attention on Slashdot. Instead we get something that if it catches on will be used to spread the latest UshLudicKast5 song across campuses, along with a whole bunch of people patting themselves on the back for their "freedom," which largely consists of taking away other people's freedom.
The artists I work with have the right to put whatever conditions they want on their music, or to sell that right to some corporation. Freedom is choosing whether or not to agree to those conditions, not disagreeing with them and taking anyway.
But oh look, I've already been labeled as a troll.
An open source project has been released under the GPL that includes an innovative way to insure that artists and companies are fairly compensated, while keeping prices low and increasing distribution of little known but talented artists.
Oh wait, no. It's just another way for people to keep doing what they've been doing, just a slightly different way. With all the brainpower that exists out there, wouldn't it be nice to see it put toward solving the problems that exist rather than keeping on with the "I want therefore I deserve it for free" attitude that permiates our society?
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Where was Real when Apple, and most everyone else, was getting stomped into the ground by Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior? Oh, that's right, they were writing Windows software while delaying the release of their Mac clients.
-----
They were largely getting stomped into the ground by Microsoft's anticompetative behaviour as well. I work in streaming media, and I assure you, Microsoft has gone out of their way to try to put Real out of business. How much resources do you think a small company has to put toward releasing software for a platform with a very small market share that has a strongly entrenched competing product that's pushed by the maker of the platform?
It's not as if Apple is any better - QuickTime is still quite unstable under Windows, and there's no QT client for Linux.
>It seems to me that Apple has no problem with an agreement with Motorola -- so what did Real do wrong?
Real and Apple have competing media formats. Motorola has no stakes in streaming media. Motorola has no music store, and has a tiny amount of space for MP3s on their licensed devices, meaning that they are no threat at all to iPods. From all the interviews I read, it sounded like Steve Jobs spit in Real's face when they tried to license it.
Back when I had a job that I really enjoyed, despite the fact that I frequently working 16+ hour, physically intensive days, I tended to bounce out of bed after 6 hours of sleep. (Don't worry, I wasn't being abused by the workplace - I had a two or three day workweek). Even at the same age, doing an office job that I was good at but not happy with, after 8 hours I ended up feeling dead and dragging by the time I got home, and only wanted to veg out. So I fully support your theory.
Consumers aren't the target for this product. Most of them don't have the disposable income to buy a computer. The government, on the other hand, does but wasn't willing to spend the full price on XP.
Except that it already did what it's supposed to. Thailand had been making noise about moving its government systems to Linux. Microsoft made the crippled version, and the Thai government already backed down.
Microsoft isn't going after the consumer market, most of whom don't have the disposable income to spend on a computer, period. They wanted the government business and they got it.
I'd consider it if Linux didn't offer the same capability. For some of us, the unconfigurable, different-just-to-be-different UI is horrible.
Because some of us don't like the way that Steve^WApple has chosen to dictate that a UI should be? Because some of us like to be able to reliably do everything we need to do to maintain a machine via SSH? Because some of us like to maintain similar operating environments between our servers and our desktops (I spend most of my time on OS X in the server version, which has some significant differences in configuration tools, which leaves me fumbling around when I do deal with the desktop version)? Because benchmarks have shown that Linux runs faster than OS X, so Solaris may as well? Dtrace?
Just because OS X happens to fit your hand doesn't mean it fits mine. Linux et al allows me to customize the tool to fit my hand. Steve wants me to change my hand to fit the tool.
Just bec
What worries me is the possibility that this will turn out to be another CSS. A poorly designed, overly complicated set of rules that everyone impliments a little differently so that people like me have to write horrible, ugly kludges to make it work in everything.
Unless you like plain, boring boxes, doing layout in CSS is a nightmare. And because Moz/Opera/IE5/IE6/Safari/Konq all do things just a little different, trying to make something look the same is a long, time consuming process. There's less room for creative versions of this standard, but it makes me leery.
I get the impression that quite a bit of Apple's recent products that are similar to Unix/Datacenter things are being done by people who look at what other people have done and mimic it without fully understanding why things are done a certain way and get it wrong as a result.
/dev designation. So on and so forth.
The nightmare of "fix permissions" comes to mind. The fact that a drive may not always be given the same
There is a free remote desktop application for OS X; I don't like being bound to that for administering my servers. With SSH, no matter where I am, I can generally find some computer with it in a reasonably quick time. I can't stand the OS X interface for a few reasons, so I haven't bothered setting up a Mac as a desktop (I used two G4s as bookends for a little while) and I don't particularly care for my 12", so having to rely on finding a Mac is annoying.
There is a text version of software update. The great thing is that anything that requires a license agreement or the like displays the agreement on the graphic display and hangs the application. Not well designed. I discussed this with an Apple rep who said it might be fixed in Tiger... Come on, I could prolly write the code in an hour or two.
> why bother with Xserve and other server-type techs if that's the case?
I think Apple was/is trying to get into the server type techs, but they also wanted to offer a server platform to sell to Mac houses so small companies could be 100% Mac is they wanted to.
I have three of the G4 series Xserves, and as far as I can tell, the marketing department looked at some rack gear and designed the product, because it's certainly not something that someone who's actually done work in data centers would come up with. (Note: I've not played with the G5s, so they may have fixed some or all of the isses.)
The obsession with making it a 1 rack space unit means that it's significantly longer than some racks (particularly older ones), leaving them sticking out into walkways in tightly arranged centers. (In all fairness, my 1 space dual Opteron is almost as long.) The drives are very easy to accidentally eject by brushing against them. You can lock the drives in, but that also turns off the USB and Firewire inputs. And speaking of which, the lack of PS/2 inputs means that you have to buy very expensive adaptors to make it work with standard KVMs. (Yes, you can buy KVMs with USB, but it's hard to justify doing so if your existing KVM cost ~$35,000.)
If you have the luxury of designing your center around them, it's workable. But most of us live in the real world where you're building on infrastructure that's a decade or more old.
And then there's issues with the OS itself, like the fact that you can't upgrade many things without using a graphic interface (to click through the user agreement). If I can't do everything I need to do through SSH, I'm just not interested.
I spent a few weeks during summer break doing data entry on an early series Thinkpad, and actually got quite good at using the eraser mouse while in the midst of typing. It's one of the reasons that years later, any laptop I buy must have one.
I work for a university and looked at the Real DRM setup this past spring. (I didn't go with it because it was too expensive for our budget.) My department offers online video classes, and I was hoping that the DRM would allow us to offer them via download or on CD/DVD-ROM to students who didn't have a good enough connection to handle streaming files.
We would have had to protect some of the classes because some profs have intellectual property issues with what they're teaching.
The Real DRM is a wrapper that encloses a realmedia file, and has the details of what DRM server has authority over it, and what the restrictions are. The Real client connects to the server (that my department would have owned) when it attempts to play a DRMed file and secures permission to play it. The fact that each company runs their own rights server is what they mean by third party DRM.
Here's exactly what the clause means:
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DRMs may be able to revoke your ability to use applicable content. RN is not responsible for the operation of the third party DRM in any way, including revocation of your content.
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Translation: Real cannot control what people using its software do with it. Duh. They give a large amount of control to the entity distributing the media. If my acceptable use policy says that all of your rights will be terminated if we catch you spreading the file to unauthorized persons, we can do that serverside.
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RN is not responsible for any communications to or from any third party DRM provider, or for the collection or use of information by third party DRMs.
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Translation: Because the DRM software works by identity, there's a certain amount of data that can be collected. Real is not responsible for that any more than Apache is for people getting info from their webserver.
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You consent to the communications enabled and/or performed by the DRM, including automatic updating of the DRM without further notice, despite the provisions of AutoUpdate defined in Section 6(c).
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Real has to be able to update DRM to fix problems. They have an accountability to the users who buy a rather expensive package to maintain some kind of security.
If you don't like it, don't use it. But there's nothing in that clause that indicates it will ever do anything to your mp3s, just secured Real files.
Why would you be sure of that? Charitible donations are deductable. Actual business expenses/failed investments are deductable. Opening the source of something is not.
So, have you ever heard of this thing called Samba? I believe OS X ships with it...
The fact is, OS X is only useful to the majority of users because of open, free standards. TCP/IP, POP, IMAP, FTP, HTTP, etc. Apple wants to keep its hold on the technology - not because it's anything all that advanced that needs to be protected - but to try to control the consumer.
Do you want Microsoft to start going after the Samba team?
Maybe I'm one of those "sysadmin types" who doesn't know better, but if that's your view on perl, you're not using it correctly. Perl is very good at writing software that works with text data. I do projects such as extracting data from html files and tossing it into a database or making custom log file parsers in perl with little effort or time. I _could_ write the same thing in C, C++, or Pascal (still haven't learned Java), but why would I? It would take longer to write and longer to debug. It might execute faster, but that would have very little effect on the way that the tool is used (the last log file parser I wrote can go through 4TB of data transfer log files in about 4 seconds). Could you explain how this is not knowing better?
It's not cool, sexy work, but it's stuff that has to get done. Most people don't get to make really cool applications, we write stuff that handles shifting the data that the world generates around.
That said, I think Graham is wrong in dismissing his "non-geek" languages. Use the right tools for the right project.
Is it really that clear cut? It would seem to me that froogles, while used first, was a clear attempt to capitalize on the google mark. Google is a mispelling that (so far as I know) is unique other than a passing reference in a Douglas Adams book. Given that Froogles is essentially a search engine, albeit on an intentionally limited set of data, I would see this as a clear attempt to use the goodwill that google has generated even though I don't see a lot of chance that the average user would confuse the two.
The logo also appears to be derived from the google logo - there's enough differences to prevent being nailed for it, but if you switched the font to serifs and added the colours, I'd bet that a fair number of people would mistake it at a casual glance.
I'm not saying that I disagree with the court's decision (don't know enough about the case to make a judgement), but I don't think it's black and white.