The MPAA thickheaded? I think that's quite naive... I know a lot of people who think that their video is too old, or they just cant get the settings right to record from their digital satellite decoder.
Of course, the real reason they cant record stuff anymore is because of that little thing called Macrovision.
They tend to get a bit angry for a few minutes when you explain why they cant tape their TV programs, but then it passes and the concentration goes back to watching TV.
There is also the slight problem that should the GFX vendors allow DirectX to be the only standard available they open themselves up to getting the hardware advancement terms dictated to them by MS. Like so many companies in the industry they have learned that letting Microsoft control you doesnt leave you in a very profitable place.
Hmmm, so, now I can (well, apparently I cant) get TV that sucks in HD format. Digital, Widescreen High Definition Suckiness. It sucks, but it sucks in a really technically amazing way? It sucks in more colors, in higher resolution, in a more pleasant format? Sharper, more contrasted suckiness, with really great sound?
How about making the actual content not suck so much?
Because, frankly, I'm not going to spend a dime on getting either a digital TV, or a larger one, or a HD one until I actually find more than one or two things per year I really care to watch.
In the computer age of patents, you wouldnt patent a lightbulb, you'd patent a 'Method of Producing Light By Artificial Means', and simultaneously patenting every method of artificially producing light.
You wouldnt patent a specific way of copying paper, you'd patent 'copying paper', wether done by hand, by photocopier, by taking a photo of the paper or by typesetting it and printing it several times.
Patents no longer cover specific methods of doing things, they cover every way of achieving a specific goal, something never intended by the idea of patenting in the first place.
So, if you were Nokia, what are you going to do when MS triples the price on your desktop licenses, and on any of your MS servers, then goes on and makes it impossible to sync any Nokia phones with any Microsoft products? The objective here is to make all the cellphone manufacturers use the MS OS, so they indirectly can control the industry and make sure that cellphones do not cooperate with any non MS OS, as well as charge per transfer to and from the phones.
Ooops, I think you need to check your reality settings again, because you seem to be commenting on an alternate one.
It is control of OEM channels and predatory illegal monopoly actions that has made Bill Gates a billionare; it has nothing to do with consumer choice.
The strategy for Microsoft will be this; for any mobile phone manufacturer who doesnt agree to use MS software on their cellphones, the price for their desktop OS will suddenly be renegotiated. Oh, and they'd better be prepared for a quick tripling of Exchange licensing fees if they use that.
Then Microsoft will ensure that only cellphones running an MS OS are able to communicate with Exchange calendars and MS messaging products, as well as corporate directories and other areas where they can use their leverage.
Then there will be only MS OS cellphones. At that point they will start charging traffic fees for the phones.
Um, if you've followed the antitrust trial, you'll know that Microsoft was the one that killed OS/2. They threatened other PC manufacturers who shipped OS/2, they played games with IBMS Win '95 rights, as well as coupled the price of Win '95 for IBM to IBM dropping OS/2.
The recording industry forwards an advance to the artist, which is then used for recording and marketing costs, and the artist gets to live on whatever is left (a helluva lot less than what you make on most computer industry jobs). This money is then recouped out of the artists share of the profits (the few cents they get from the record, or in this case out of the 0.00fraction cent they get per download). When an albums sells about half a million records, the artist will begin getting any money at all. Needless to say, artists getting paid doesnt happen very often.
End result for most artists: An interesting adventure in getting screwed that makes them less money than a job asking if people want fries with that.
With the costs for recording and marketing getting much lower with cheaper technology and the net, it's likely that the artists would make very much more money by going independent. You dont have to be independently wealthy anymore.
On the other hand, if you take a longer view on history, the last 100 years is one of the coldest episodes in the last 10000.
In my opinion the greenhouse effect doesnt even begin to explain temperature over a longer period, and as long as nobody in the CO2 camp appears to be able to explain why the temperature was a lot higher when we didnt release any CO2, and has fluctuated far more widely than the current observations through history, I will be inclined to be extremely sceptical of the current claims.
And now they're jumping into enterprice process management and XML content solutions... It's possible that Cowpland wasnt the problem too.
The new strategy of 'investing to capture high-growth emerging markets' sounds suspiciously like 'we're gonna throw our money at any bandwagon we can find'.
Oh, yeah, a rosy future as, maybe, Microsofts 'token' competition. They're still bleeding money, and are only alive because it was worth Microsoft $135M to get them out of producing Linux software.
Corel has written some nice products, but the mass consumer productivity software industry is dead. On one hand you can sell to corporations and the only way you can do that is if your name is Microsoft, or on the other hand you can try selling to endusers, but they're either on the windows or mac platforms making (illegal) copies of MS Office and you'd have to pay them not to, or they're on Linux and have so many free alternatives that you'd again have to pay most of them to use something else. In the end, they could make the best products in the universe and it wont matter because there isnt anyone who will buy them.
So Corel knows this too, and are shifting away from their dead markets, and into 'technical illustrations', 'Enterprise Process Management' and 'XML Content Solutions. Well, for technical illustrations Corel is lowend, and unlikely to reach the profitable customers, and the other two fields are buzzword intensive fields with strong established players where they again arent exactly playing in corporate space.
I cant really imagine what rosy future you see for either consumers or Corel in this situation.
Ooops, 'The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism' appears to be confused on the issue of the right to acquire and possess property versus the right to prevent others from acquireing and possessing property.
Of course, Objectivists always get all confused about this, which makes them sortof a loony fringe of Libertarianism. Most libertarians, I think, agree that the right to move ones fist ends at someone elses nose, but the Objectivists have some serious problems with this concept.
Antitrust cases arent about those who want to acquire property. Antitrust cases are about those who want to prevent others from doing the same.
Oh, with the way things are going, you'll have to give away just as many e-books when you move. They'll probably be locked with some form of encrypted GPS system and licensed to you while present in a specific area. Oh, except you wont really be able to give them away anymore, since then the retina scan wouldnt match anymore.
True, but again, the ones in power are the existing political parties, and they are the ones who have the power to change the legislation... and they dont benefit from changing it.
We can complain all we want about bought politicians, but we cant change those rules, and the existing power structures appear unlikely to want to change it...
And, of course, I do feel that they 'represent' me. I'm included in the demographically researched groups they target for advertising. Well, except, of course, the targetted advertising isnt exactly true, it's just what they say to get elected, so again they arent representing the voters.
That, of course, means there isnt any real point to standing under the current system. You'll have to research the demographics yourself, and end up saying almost exactly the same things to get elected, after which you might as well just take cash, since you wont believe in the things you had to say to get elected anyway.
And how would that benefit the politicians? I'm sorry, but they are the ones in power, and for several decades, the western democracies have been slipping more into a situation where it doesnt really matter who gets elected, because there is nobody representing the voters available for election.
Cooperating politicians in a democracy win over the voters every time. And they've realized that.
Not quite. Most CD players have fairly good audio error correction, while when you rip, you try to rip a perfect copy. The perfect copy will contain willfully engineered flaws that most ordinary cdplayers will gloss over, just because they arent doing the perfect copy thing, but when you play a wav file ripped from the cd, or encode it, you will have the engineered artifacts making it sound like shit.
Of course, you're still right tho. Some ripping software is designed to do the same error correction while ripping as an ordinary CD players, so nothing changes except which rippers are popular.
The whole thing is idiotic. Introducing flaws into digital data that they expect the players to correct, which the ripper can correct just as well, with the only result being the cd's are worse actual quality and wont play on some cd players. Sigh.
It depends on what your definition of tool is. For RMS, any proprietary software is comparable to a tool with a small nuclear charge that will explode one time out of 5 and which he isnt allowed to disarm.
If you have such a viewpoint, then yes, the MS Nuclear Hammer (tm) may be better than someone elses Free Rock (tm) for hitting nails, but RMS is more concerned with not getting blown to his consistuent atoms than using the absolutely best tool.
You will find people in the Opensource camp who are concerned with opensources ability to create better software, and who will agree that the best tool is the best to use. You wont find RMS in that camp however. He is more concerned with the long term consequences of free vs proprietary software.
Personally I'm inclined to agree with RMS, up to a point. No company can be trusted with the basic infrastructure of information technology, because they will all abuse the power it gives them. If I could see a way where we could have a competetive and vibrant industry based around standards, I would be far more lenient, but I dont see that happening; companies are afraid to the death of competing on equal terms. The only solution to that problem remains Free software, which makes RMS a good person to listen to.
Why? The answer is simple. Microsoft does not accept coexistence. It's their way or no way. They control a buisness or they wont be in it.
Of course, naive people think they can stay in the server market and make money there. Or that they will be allowed to exist there. Dream on. Servers running non-MS OS's isnt in Microsoft buisness plan, and as long as they control the desktop... well, whatcha gonna do when MS extends the basic networking protocols so they dont work with Linux, Young? Reverse engineer them? Oops, they just laid down a patent minefield in your way...
If there is no competition for the desktop the whole computer industry will be killed off. You work for MS or you dont work. And anyone using computers at all will be paying their monthly MS tax. That is Microsofts vision and there is no compromise or middle way for them. At all. Ever.
We can be all reasonable and nice, but ask a few of the roadkill where that got them. Ask Mr Jean-Louis 'BeOS is not in competition with MS' Gasse about how well it worked out for him. You can run whatever you want as far as I'm concerned, but as far as Microsoft is concerned you will be watching MS created media on equipment running with MS operating systems, delivered by MS servers, all delivered via MSN.
Nah, they've published these statistics for several years, and every year someone like this article comes along and says 'hey, look, if I cant read and have no idea what these statistics are, I can believe that Windows is more secure than linux'. The statistics are always there, it's just that you dont have anyone making anything of them until you find a really inexperienced new journalist who hasnt seen them before, tried to understand them, or seen the last newbie guy getting them explained to him in a friendly fashion. I think its some sort of initiation rite of passage in security journalism.
SF has, for those with memory, already been through this before, and pointed out that anyone reading the numbers the way WinInformant appears to have done has a problem comprehending these statistics.
The statistics are fairly accurate (altho you do have a point), but they're comparing basic Windows (the product) with Linux (the distributions).
Add Windows, SQL server, some other RDBMS (many linux dists ship with multiple database servers), exchange, some other mailservers, etc until you replicate the functionality in a Linux dist. Then count again.
Those SF statistics arent very useful, and SF has already several times basically said that anyone trying to read them the way that WinInformant seems to have been doing has a fairly faint grasp on reality.
This is pure bullshit, and its even old bullshit. SecurityFocus have themselves claimed so. It's been around before.
This always comes up due to several problems with the statistics:
First, they're comparing Linux distributions with everything from several database servers through webservers, through rsh, ssh, telnet, ftp, compilers, etc to plain Windows. Include IIS, SQL server, shareware telnet servers windows, ftp servers, Outlook, etc and do it again. It is not quite the same thing, nor will your average linux machine have those services running anymore than your average Windows machine. Still, the vulnerabilities are counted if they ship with the CDs.
Second, the 'aggregate' statistics are completely misleading. Those statistics add up every vulnerability in every program that any Linux distribution vendor has seen fit to put on a cd. That is even more farfetched.
If and when we get to the point that more people die due to patent issues than would die from lack of publicly developed treatments, then it's time to just junk the idea of a privately held medical research sector. It's not as if it's impossible to do the research on public funding, and then you can even deduct those costs from public health insurance and other society costs.
The medical industry should be allowed to make money, but not at the cost of human life or human suffering. The companies can benefit society, but they're not irreplacable, and as it is today they're very close to becoming unwelcome parasites.
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The MPAA thickheaded? I think that's quite naive... I know a lot of people who think that their video is too old, or they just cant get the settings right to record from their digital satellite decoder.
Of course, the real reason they cant record stuff anymore is because of that little thing called Macrovision.
They tend to get a bit angry for a few minutes when you explain why they cant tape their TV programs, but then it passes and the concentration goes back to watching TV.
There is also the slight problem that should the GFX vendors allow DirectX to be the only standard available they open themselves up to getting the hardware advancement terms dictated to them by MS. Like so many companies in the industry they have learned that letting Microsoft control you doesnt leave you in a very profitable place.
Hmmm, so, now I can (well, apparently I cant) get TV that sucks in HD format. Digital, Widescreen High Definition Suckiness. It sucks, but it sucks in a really technically amazing way? It sucks in more colors, in higher resolution, in a more pleasant format? Sharper, more contrasted suckiness, with really great sound?
How about making the actual content not suck so much?
Because, frankly, I'm not going to spend a dime on getting either a digital TV, or a larger one, or a HD one until I actually find more than one or two things per year I really care to watch.
Run a webserver on your local machine.
Problem solved.
In the computer age of patents, you wouldnt patent a lightbulb, you'd patent a 'Method of Producing Light By Artificial Means', and simultaneously patenting every method of artificially producing light.
You wouldnt patent a specific way of copying paper, you'd patent 'copying paper', wether done by hand, by photocopier, by taking a photo of the paper or by typesetting it and printing it several times.
Patents no longer cover specific methods of doing things, they cover every way of achieving a specific goal, something never intended by the idea of patenting in the first place.
So, if you were Nokia, what are you going to do when MS triples the price on your desktop licenses, and on any of your MS servers, then goes on and makes it impossible to sync any Nokia phones with any Microsoft products? The objective here is to make all the cellphone manufacturers use the MS OS, so they indirectly can control the industry and make sure that cellphones do not cooperate with any non MS OS, as well as charge per transfer to and from the phones.
File an antitrust suit right away?
Ooops, I think you need to check your reality settings again, because you seem to be commenting on an alternate one.
It is control of OEM channels and predatory illegal monopoly actions that has made Bill Gates a billionare; it has nothing to do with consumer choice.
The strategy for Microsoft will be this; for any mobile phone manufacturer who doesnt agree to use MS software on their cellphones, the price for their desktop OS will suddenly be renegotiated. Oh, and they'd better be prepared for a quick tripling of Exchange licensing fees if they use that.
Then Microsoft will ensure that only cellphones running an MS OS are able to communicate with Exchange calendars and MS messaging products, as well as corporate directories and other areas where they can use their leverage.
Then there will be only MS OS cellphones. At that point they will start charging traffic fees for the phones.
Rinse, repeat, get into toaster buisness.
Um, if you've followed the antitrust trial, you'll know that Microsoft was the one that killed OS/2. They threatened other PC manufacturers who shipped OS/2, they played games with IBMS Win '95 rights, as well as coupled the price of Win '95 for IBM to IBM dropping OS/2.
Guess who pays for it today? The artist.
The recording industry forwards an advance to the artist, which is then used for recording and marketing costs, and the artist gets to live on whatever is left (a helluva lot less than what you make on most computer industry jobs). This money is then recouped out of the artists share of the profits (the few cents they get from the record, or in this case out of the 0.00fraction cent they get per download). When an albums sells about half a million records, the artist will begin getting any money at all. Needless to say, artists getting paid doesnt happen very often.
End result for most artists: An interesting adventure in getting screwed that makes them less money than a job asking if people want fries with that.
With the costs for recording and marketing getting much lower with cheaper technology and the net, it's likely that the artists would make very much more money by going independent. You dont have to be independently wealthy anymore.
In my opinion the greenhouse effect doesnt even begin to explain temperature over a longer period, and as long as nobody in the CO2 camp appears to be able to explain why the temperature was a lot higher when we didnt release any CO2, and has fluctuated far more widely than the current observations through history, I will be inclined to be extremely sceptical of the current claims.
http://www.co2science.org/subject/other/clim_hist_ tenthousand.htm
And here (http://www.co2andclimate.org/Articles/2001/vca44. htm you can see some compelling data linking temperature history to solar activity levels.
And now they're jumping into enterprice process management and XML content solutions... It's possible that Cowpland wasnt the problem too.
The new strategy of 'investing to capture high-growth emerging markets' sounds suspiciously like 'we're gonna throw our money at any bandwagon we can find'.
Oh, yeah, a rosy future as, maybe, Microsofts 'token' competition. They're still bleeding money, and are only alive because it was worth Microsoft $135M to get them out of producing Linux software.
Corel has written some nice products, but the mass consumer productivity software industry is dead. On one hand you can sell to corporations and the only way you can do that is if your name is Microsoft, or on the other hand you can try selling to endusers, but they're either on the windows or mac platforms making (illegal) copies of MS Office and you'd have to pay them not to, or they're on Linux and have so many free alternatives that you'd again have to pay most of them to use something else. In the end, they could make the best products in the universe and it wont matter because there isnt anyone who will buy them.
So Corel knows this too, and are shifting away from their dead markets, and into 'technical illustrations', 'Enterprise Process Management' and 'XML Content Solutions. Well, for technical illustrations Corel is lowend, and unlikely to reach the profitable customers, and the other two fields are buzzword intensive fields with strong established players where they again arent exactly playing in corporate space.
I cant really imagine what rosy future you see for either consumers or Corel in this situation.
Nah, the CMDC are Ayn Rand inspired Objectivists. They have a weak grasp on reality.
Ooops, 'The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism' appears to be confused on the issue of the right to acquire and possess property versus the right to prevent others from acquireing and possessing property.
Of course, Objectivists always get all confused about this, which makes them sortof a loony fringe of Libertarianism. Most libertarians, I think, agree that the right to move ones fist ends at someone elses nose, but the Objectivists have some serious problems with this concept.
Antitrust cases arent about those who want to acquire property. Antitrust cases are about those who want to prevent others from doing the same.
Oh, with the way things are going, you'll have to give away just as many e-books when you move. They'll probably be locked with some form of encrypted GPS system and licensed to you while present in a specific area. Oh, except you wont really be able to give them away anymore, since then the retina scan wouldnt match anymore.
True, but again, the ones in power are the existing political parties, and they are the ones who have the power to change the legislation... and they dont benefit from changing it.
We can complain all we want about bought politicians, but we cant change those rules, and the existing power structures appear unlikely to want to change it...
And, of course, I do feel that they 'represent' me. I'm included in the demographically researched groups they target for advertising. Well, except, of course, the targetted advertising isnt exactly true, it's just what they say to get elected, so again they arent representing the voters.
That, of course, means there isnt any real point to standing under the current system. You'll have to research the demographics yourself, and end up saying almost exactly the same things to get elected, after which you might as well just take cash, since you wont believe in the things you had to say to get elected anyway.
And how would that benefit the politicians? I'm sorry, but they are the ones in power, and for several decades, the western democracies have been slipping more into a situation where it doesnt really matter who gets elected, because there is nobody representing the voters available for election.
Cooperating politicians in a democracy win over the voters every time. And they've realized that.
Not quite. Most CD players have fairly good audio error correction, while when you rip, you try to rip a perfect copy. The perfect copy will contain willfully engineered flaws that most ordinary cdplayers will gloss over, just because they arent doing the perfect copy thing, but when you play a wav file ripped from the cd, or encode it, you will have the engineered artifacts making it sound like shit.
Of course, you're still right tho. Some ripping software is designed to do the same error correction while ripping as an ordinary CD players, so nothing changes except which rippers are popular.
The whole thing is idiotic. Introducing flaws into digital data that they expect the players to correct, which the ripper can correct just as well, with the only result being the cd's are worse actual quality and wont play on some cd players. Sigh.
It depends on what your definition of tool is. For RMS, any proprietary software is comparable to a tool with a small nuclear charge that will explode one time out of 5 and which he isnt allowed to disarm.
If you have such a viewpoint, then yes, the MS Nuclear Hammer (tm) may be better than someone elses Free Rock (tm) for hitting nails, but RMS is more concerned with not getting blown to his consistuent atoms than using the absolutely best tool.
You will find people in the Opensource camp who are concerned with opensources ability to create better software, and who will agree that the best tool is the best to use. You wont find RMS in that camp however. He is more concerned with the long term consequences of free vs proprietary software.
Personally I'm inclined to agree with RMS, up to a point. No company can be trusted with the basic infrastructure of information technology, because they will all abuse the power it gives them. If I could see a way where we could have a competetive and vibrant industry based around standards, I would be far more lenient, but I dont see that happening; companies are afraid to the death of competing on equal terms. The only solution to that problem remains Free software, which makes RMS a good person to listen to.
Why? The answer is simple. Microsoft does not accept coexistence. It's their way or no way. They control a buisness or they wont be in it.
Of course, naive people think they can stay in the server market and make money there. Or that they will be allowed to exist there. Dream on. Servers running non-MS OS's isnt in Microsoft buisness plan, and as long as they control the desktop... well, whatcha gonna do when MS extends the basic networking protocols so they dont work with Linux, Young? Reverse engineer them? Oops, they just laid down a patent minefield in your way...
If there is no competition for the desktop the whole computer industry will be killed off. You work for MS or you dont work. And anyone using computers at all will be paying their monthly MS tax. That is Microsofts vision and there is no compromise or middle way for them. At all. Ever.
We can be all reasonable and nice, but ask a few of the roadkill where that got them. Ask Mr Jean-Louis 'BeOS is not in competition with MS' Gasse about how well it worked out for him. You can run whatever you want as far as I'm concerned, but as far as Microsoft is concerned you will be watching MS created media on equipment running with MS operating systems, delivered by MS servers, all delivered via MSN.
Or you can move to a hut in the woods.
Nah, they've published these statistics for several years, and every year someone like this article comes along and says 'hey, look, if I cant read and have no idea what these statistics are, I can believe that Windows is more secure than linux'. The statistics are always there, it's just that you dont have anyone making anything of them until you find a really inexperienced new journalist who hasnt seen them before, tried to understand them, or seen the last newbie guy getting them explained to him in a friendly fashion. I think its some sort of initiation rite of passage in security journalism.
SF has, for those with memory, already been through this before, and pointed out that anyone reading the numbers the way WinInformant appears to have done has a problem comprehending these statistics.
The statistics are fairly accurate (altho you do have a point), but they're comparing basic Windows (the product) with Linux (the distributions).
Add Windows, SQL server, some other RDBMS (many linux dists ship with multiple database servers), exchange, some other mailservers, etc until you replicate the functionality in a Linux dist. Then count again.
Those SF statistics arent very useful, and SF has already several times basically said that anyone trying to read them the way that WinInformant seems to have been doing has a fairly faint grasp on reality.
This is pure bullshit, and its even old bullshit. SecurityFocus have themselves claimed so. It's been around before.
This always comes up due to several problems with the statistics:
First, they're comparing Linux distributions with everything from several database servers through webservers, through rsh, ssh, telnet, ftp, compilers, etc to plain Windows. Include IIS, SQL server, shareware telnet servers windows, ftp servers, Outlook, etc and do it again. It is not quite the same thing, nor will your average linux machine have those services running anymore than your average Windows machine. Still, the vulnerabilities are counted if they ship with the CDs.
Second, the 'aggregate' statistics are completely misleading. Those statistics add up every vulnerability in every program that any Linux distribution vendor has seen fit to put on a cd. That is even more farfetched.
Sigh.
If and when we get to the point that more people die due to patent issues than would die from lack of publicly developed treatments, then it's time to just junk the idea of a privately held medical research sector. It's not as if it's impossible to do the research on public funding, and then you can even deduct those costs from public health insurance and other society costs.
The medical industry should be allowed to make money, but not at the cost of human life or human suffering. The companies can benefit society, but they're not irreplacable, and as it is today they're very close to becoming unwelcome parasites.