Snake venom is also made from natural enzymes, proteins, fats, and perhaps even a little carbohydrates. Does that mean it's nontoxic? No. All sorts of stuff that is made by natural processes can also be toxic to humans.
It's worth doing for the simple reason that four digital standard definition channels fit into the spectrum space of a single analog channel. And that's with old MPEG2 encoding.
No. I open the shades on all my windows in the living room and then project goatse on the wall for the whole neighborhood. I'm just nice that way. *shrug*
Actually, I have HBOHD and it's worth every penny, if but for Rome and Deadwood alone. The other HD pay channels aren't as good, though I got some chuckles from Weeds on SHOHD. IMO: The best stuff on Cable HD is the Discovery Channel and the National Geographic Channel - though I do tend to DVR stuff and watch it later so I can skip the ads. And, of course the projector is great for DVDs.
I haven't gone to a movie theater since I installed an HD projector in my living room. The entertainment industry is in a death spiral of their own making.
Hey may author a funny comic strip, and more power to him. But his recent forays into defending Intelligent Design on his blog, as well as other poorly thought out posts, has left me wondering just who is he to throw around the epithet "dolt"? Dude should look in the mirror.
Bill Gates would make a terrible President of the United States. Do we really need another Warren Harding or Calvin Coolidge?
Seriously, man, Office on Linux has been a solved problem for many years now.
Try deploying crossover or wine across hundreds of desktops in production. Doing it on your own for a personal machine is not the same as supporting an application professionally. I do not want to waste my staff time on such matters. And neither do my superiors.
I've been there. I remember installing a very early release of wine back in 1994. Been following it ever since then. It's a cool hack, but I wouldn't trust office on wine for our documents, spreadsheets, or power point presentations. I bought a crossover site license two years ago. Didn't work - everyone hated it.
Dude, go with what works. The licensing costs are peanuts compared to staff outlays.
You made it sound like you had professors shouting, "I WANT WORD!"
In fact, many are saying just that. Though Powerpoint is a bigger motivator than Word among the professors.
I'm also still a little confused as to whether or not you're forcing people to move.
Professors do not take direction from me. They herd like cats, not sheep.
But, you had made it sound like YOU were the one orchestrating the huge Mac-fest.
I'm certainly recommending it. I've been supporting UNIX in one way or another since my first industry job, back in 1985. I don't particularly like UNIX, but it does get the job done. And we are a UNIX shop. The Mac is just one more variant.
Maybe you should make sure the users know that Office has run well under Linux for at least 5 years now, so that they don't waste further grant money on buying overpriced white plastic boxes.
These people know *exactly* what they're doing. We have Nobel Prize winners here. Nobody wants to run Office under Linux because we've been there and it sucked. These guys have more important work to do than tinker with an OS, unless they need it for some special purpose - like accelerated data collection. Or optimizing code for Monte Carlo sims.
For us, Linux is a just tool, not a purpose in and of itself.
Oh, we're good enough to support wine (if the users wanted it). No. We're migrating to OS X because users demand it. This is exactly how Linux came into the lab. People just installed it everywhere until it became so unwieldy for users to support on their own that they hired staff to do so. This time, the staff are on top of the migration and planning for it.
We are a university laboratory. Each professor has their own income stream, their own projects, and their own group of postdocs and grad students. Our goal is to make certain the computers they connect to our network are secure, and configured such that they can utilize basic services. And then there's data retention.
My job exists to support scientists conduct science. I am not paid to promote a politico-software philosophy
It is no University you want to "stay the fuck away from." But, honestly, no. I used to be far more open about my full name and personal contact. That is until people started harassing me by calling my office number, posting my business contact info and soliciting harassment from others, etc. So... sorry. Think: well known technical university on the east coast.
Where I work, a University lab, we are migrating from Linux on the desktop to MacOS X. This is principally due to MS Office support; users want it. Badly. If Microsoft kills Office for Mac I predict a wholesale dumping of OS X and a migration back to Linux. Nobody here wants to run Windows, except for a small number of administrators and fiscal professionals who are accustom to MS software. That would really throw a wrench in our plans. We're basing the whole migration on the presumption of Office 2008 for Intel Macs.
Office support is critical for a large number of professionals. Drop it and IMO the Mac will die. Quickly.
It looks to me like we're arguing from the same position.
Your argument is fallacious as well. You argue that a music track is not a physical good, therefore it has no value.
This interpretation was not my intended meaning. My argument is not that the track has no value, but that the added value is created not by the distribution model but by the composers and musicians who create the content. That is, notes (ingredients) do not add value. In this analogy composers and musicians are the chefs who create and cook new meals for restaurant patrons.
The rest of what you say I pretty much agree with. Except that I have no problem with copyright as the founding fathers understood it. We could even debate whether a seven year copyright term is too short. Perhaps it should match the term of a patent. But it should not be nearly unlimited. As it stands now, the term has been extended such that it is now almost as long as half the time the US government has been in existence. That's just nuts.
Uhhh. Why should he bother changing university (and job) over IT email policy? Even if he doesn't like the email service, doesn't run Windows, and won't ever use it - why does that warrant transfer to a new school? Perhaps there are other compelling reasons why he might want to stay. For example, he has a girlfriend there; he has a good relationship with a certain professor who is willing to help his career path; he might lose transfer credits in the process; etc etc etc.
Contrary to what you said, scarce physical resources != ideas about things.
Actually, within the author's argument, yes it does. The 'rearrangement of scarce physical resources' is just another way of saying 'recipe' within this analogy. That is, the value add is not in the ingredients, but in how those ingredients are arranged (mixed and cooked).
He says that it's the ideas themselves which add value to products, not the implementation nor the work involved in bringing those ideas to fruition. He essentially confuses the function of chef - a service and skill set - with the recipe itself. It is the recipe that 'increases the pie overall.' And then he follows this logic through by saying that DRM is opposed to the concept of 'increasing the overall pie' because it assumes a zero sum value add.
I agree with you that this is where the argument by analogy gets so convoluted that it loses all meaning. The ingredients, such as red peppers and beef to be placed in a stew, are not the value add - but then, neither is the stew. It is the chef (and his/her expertise) who adds that value. In this case, one has a thing to sell - the stew - which can be used but once.
And here we have the (obvious) difference between physical things and ephemeral IP, one can be copied, used, and reused indefinitely. The other cannot. Yet copyright law exists to create an artificial duplication boundary for such ephemeral products, ostensibly so that creators will be able to extract economic value from their work as an incentive to create more. DRM, in this model, exists not to limit the 'size of the overall pie' as much as a mechanism to enforce 'economic value extraction' for content creators.
Thus, the problem is not DRM - that is a symptom. The problem is a series of modern changes to copyright law that now do not function to drive value creation, but instead were enacted as political payback to a corporate media cartels. The purpose of copyright law, as defined by our founders (US), has been thwarted over the last several decades.
Subverting DRM will not fix that problem, it will simply make criminals of those who break the law. Best to repeal the bad law.
The fallacy of this argument is that the author equates rearranging scarce physical resources (ideas about things) to create added value (economic growth) with ephemeral nonphysical ideas like music, writing, film, etc. If one follows the logic of this, extracting "added value" of media content would be in controlling its creation and then distribution. Which is exactly what DRM attempts to do.
Music is not a red pepper. Argument by analogy often leads to ridiculous conclusions, as has happened here. The problem with DRM is not in mechanistic enforcement of copyright law, but that copyright law is broken. It has ceased to function as an economic promoter of new ideas and technology, and is instead now a mechanism of monopoly for a corporate cartel. Ending DRM won't fix that problem.
Actually, I was hoping you would "do the work" for every reader, not just me. Then you might get modded to +5, Informative for helping everyone else in the forum. And you would have done a good deed in the process.
I seem to remember that there are alternative firmwares floating out there for various ipod models. Would someone be kind enough to reply with a comprehensive explanation for where to get these alternate firmwares, what's involved in installation, and what benefit us ipod owners can expect?
First in the very early 1990s, I was laid off and wound up selling boots in an army/navy store for a couple of years while the market recovered. At the time I was in my early twenties, so I consider that a reasonable outcome given my experience level and professional abilities at the time. This last downturn, from 2000 onward, I've survived well enough an remained employed in the field.
And based upon those experiences I say that there's a damn good reason people are avoiding computer science and other technical fields. The job market for this skill-set is far too volatile. I know of many people with excellent skills who can't find work. One programmer friend, who is absolutely top notch, can't find work because he is over fifty; pure age discrimination.
University students aren't unable or unwilling to learn technical skills, instead they're making a good long term bet that training up for a skill in a volatile market might well leave them unable to pay-off the mortgage on a good home, pay for their children's college tuition, or any number of other basic middle class expectations.
I would not recommend this career to anyone who wanted to work in industry. For those who love the science in computer science, then get at Ph.D and conduct research as a faculty member at a university. Get tenure. Otherwise, you'll just get screwed.
My 360 is connected via component to an HDTV. My expectation is that the display resolution is not the deciding factor. I'd guess, instead, that CPU and GPU transistor use matters more. The more live transistors, the heavier the electric consumption. And don't forget the optical drive, those draw a lot of power too.
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Snake venom is also made from natural enzymes, proteins, fats, and perhaps even a little carbohydrates. Does that mean it's nontoxic? No. All sorts of stuff that is made by natural processes can also be toxic to humans.
It's worth doing for the simple reason that four digital standard definition channels fit into the spectrum space of a single analog channel. And that's with old MPEG2 encoding.
This is a no-brainer.
And massive securities inflation which led to a crash and then over a decade of economic travesty. Isn't there a better 'middle path'?
So... you would like to go to a restaurant, order a "free" dinner, and then pay $60 for the privilege?
No. I open the shades on all my windows in the living room and then project goatse on the wall for the whole neighborhood. I'm just nice that way. *shrug*
Actually, I have HBOHD and it's worth every penny, if but for Rome and Deadwood alone. The other HD pay channels aren't as good, though I got some chuckles from Weeds on SHOHD. IMO: The best stuff on Cable HD is the Discovery Channel and the National Geographic Channel - though I do tend to DVR stuff and watch it later so I can skip the ads. And, of course the projector is great for DVDs.
I haven't gone to a movie theater since I installed an HD projector in my living room. The entertainment industry is in a death spiral of their own making.
We pay an obscene amount of money for the content, and then pay again in eyeballs for advertising. Anybody feeling screwed yet?
And where did those 'no nothing' policies lead? What was the outcome?
Hey may author a funny comic strip, and more power to him. But his recent forays into defending Intelligent Design on his blog, as well as other poorly thought out posts, has left me wondering just who is he to throw around the epithet "dolt"? Dude should look in the mirror.
Bill Gates would make a terrible President of the United States. Do we really need another Warren Harding or Calvin Coolidge?
Seriously, man, Office on Linux has been a solved problem for many years now.
Try deploying crossover or wine across hundreds of desktops in production. Doing it on your own for a personal machine is not the same as supporting an application professionally. I do not want to waste my staff time on such matters. And neither do my superiors.
I've been there. I remember installing a very early release of wine back in 1994. Been following it ever since then. It's a cool hack, but I wouldn't trust office on wine for our documents, spreadsheets, or power point presentations. I bought a crossover site license two years ago. Didn't work - everyone hated it.
Dude, go with what works. The licensing costs are peanuts compared to staff outlays.
You made it sound like you had professors shouting, "I WANT WORD!"
In fact, many are saying just that. Though Powerpoint is a bigger motivator than Word among the professors.
I'm also still a little confused as to whether or not you're forcing people to move.
Professors do not take direction from me. They herd like cats, not sheep.
But, you had made it sound like YOU were the one orchestrating the huge Mac-fest.
I'm certainly recommending it. I've been supporting UNIX in one way or another since my first industry job, back in 1985. I don't particularly like UNIX, but it does get the job done. And we are a UNIX shop. The Mac is just one more variant.
Maybe you should make sure the users know that Office has run well under Linux for at least 5 years now, so that they don't waste further grant money on buying overpriced white plastic boxes.
These people know *exactly* what they're doing. We have Nobel Prize winners here. Nobody wants to run Office under Linux because we've been there and it sucked. These guys have more important work to do than tinker with an OS, unless they need it for some special purpose - like accelerated data collection. Or optimizing code for Monte Carlo sims.
For us, Linux is a just tool, not a purpose in and of itself.
Oh, we're good enough to support wine (if the users wanted it). No. We're migrating to OS X because users demand it. This is exactly how Linux came into the lab. People just installed it everywhere until it became so unwieldy for users to support on their own that they hired staff to do so. This time, the staff are on top of the migration and planning for it.
We are a university laboratory. Each professor has their own income stream, their own projects, and their own group of postdocs and grad students. Our goal is to make certain the computers they connect to our network are secure, and configured such that they can utilize basic services. And then there's data retention.
My job exists to support scientists conduct science. I am not paid to promote a politico-software philosophy
It is no University you want to "stay the fuck away from." But, honestly, no. I used to be far more open about my full name and personal contact. That is until people started harassing me by calling my office number, posting my business contact info and soliciting harassment from others, etc. So... sorry. Think: well known technical university on the east coast.
Where I work, a University lab, we are migrating from Linux on the desktop to MacOS X. This is principally due to MS Office support; users want it. Badly. If Microsoft kills Office for Mac I predict a wholesale dumping of OS X and a migration back to Linux. Nobody here wants to run Windows, except for a small number of administrators and fiscal professionals who are accustom to MS software. That would really throw a wrench in our plans. We're basing the whole migration on the presumption of Office 2008 for Intel Macs.
Office support is critical for a large number of professionals. Drop it and IMO the Mac will die. Quickly.
It looks to me like we're arguing from the same position.
Your argument is fallacious as well. You argue that a music track is not a physical good, therefore it has no value.
This interpretation was not my intended meaning. My argument is not that the track has no value, but that the added value is created not by the distribution model but by the composers and musicians who create the content. That is, notes (ingredients) do not add value. In this analogy composers and musicians are the chefs who create and cook new meals for restaurant patrons.
The rest of what you say I pretty much agree with. Except that I have no problem with copyright as the founding fathers understood it. We could even debate whether a seven year copyright term is too short. Perhaps it should match the term of a patent. But it should not be nearly unlimited. As it stands now, the term has been extended such that it is now almost as long as half the time the US government has been in existence. That's just nuts.
Uhhh. Why should he bother changing university (and job) over IT email policy? Even if he doesn't like the email service, doesn't run Windows, and won't ever use it - why does that warrant transfer to a new school? Perhaps there are other compelling reasons why he might want to stay. For example, he has a girlfriend there; he has a good relationship with a certain professor who is willing to help his career path; he might lose transfer credits in the process; etc etc etc.
Your suggestion seems a tad excessive, IMO.
Contrary to what you said, scarce physical resources != ideas about things.
Actually, within the author's argument, yes it does. The 'rearrangement of scarce physical resources' is just another way of saying 'recipe' within this analogy. That is, the value add is not in the ingredients, but in how those ingredients are arranged (mixed and cooked).
He says that it's the ideas themselves which add value to products, not the implementation nor the work involved in bringing those ideas to fruition. He essentially confuses the function of chef - a service and skill set - with the recipe itself. It is the recipe that 'increases the pie overall.' And then he follows this logic through by saying that DRM is opposed to the concept of 'increasing the overall pie' because it assumes a zero sum value add.
I agree with you that this is where the argument by analogy gets so convoluted that it loses all meaning. The ingredients, such as red peppers and beef to be placed in a stew, are not the value add - but then, neither is the stew. It is the chef (and his/her expertise) who adds that value. In this case, one has a thing to sell - the stew - which can be used but once.
And here we have the (obvious) difference between physical things and ephemeral IP, one can be copied, used, and reused indefinitely. The other cannot. Yet copyright law exists to create an artificial duplication boundary for such ephemeral products, ostensibly so that creators will be able to extract economic value from their work as an incentive to create more. DRM, in this model, exists not to limit the 'size of the overall pie' as much as a mechanism to enforce 'economic value extraction' for content creators.
Thus, the problem is not DRM - that is a symptom. The problem is a series of modern changes to copyright law that now do not function to drive value creation, but instead were enacted as political payback to a corporate media cartels. The purpose of copyright law, as defined by our founders (US), has been thwarted over the last several decades.
Subverting DRM will not fix that problem, it will simply make criminals of those who break the law. Best to repeal the bad law.
The fallacy of this argument is that the author equates rearranging scarce physical resources (ideas about things) to create added value (economic growth) with ephemeral nonphysical ideas like music, writing, film, etc. If one follows the logic of this, extracting "added value" of media content would be in controlling its creation and then distribution. Which is exactly what DRM attempts to do.
Music is not a red pepper. Argument by analogy often leads to ridiculous conclusions, as has happened here. The problem with DRM is not in mechanistic enforcement of copyright law, but that copyright law is broken. It has ceased to function as an economic promoter of new ideas and technology, and is instead now a mechanism of monopoly for a corporate cartel. Ending DRM won't fix that problem.
Oh noes! Another 4digit UID has squandered precious /. bits! Where will we store it all!?!?!?!
Thank you very much. Are there any compatibility issues with Apple updates? Do I risk bricking my ipod by installing this?
Actually, I was hoping you would "do the work" for every reader, not just me. Then you might get modded to +5, Informative for helping everyone else in the forum. And you would have done a good deed in the process.
I seem to remember that there are alternative firmwares floating out there for various ipod models. Would someone be kind enough to reply with a comprehensive explanation for where to get these alternate firmwares, what's involved in installation, and what benefit us ipod owners can expect?
First in the very early 1990s, I was laid off and wound up selling boots in an army/navy store for a couple of years while the market recovered. At the time I was in my early twenties, so I consider that a reasonable outcome given my experience level and professional abilities at the time. This last downturn, from 2000 onward, I've survived well enough an remained employed in the field.
And based upon those experiences I say that there's a damn good reason people are avoiding computer science and other technical fields. The job market for this skill-set is far too volatile. I know of many people with excellent skills who can't find work. One programmer friend, who is absolutely top notch, can't find work because he is over fifty; pure age discrimination.
University students aren't unable or unwilling to learn technical skills, instead they're making a good long term bet that training up for a skill in a volatile market might well leave them unable to pay-off the mortgage on a good home, pay for their children's college tuition, or any number of other basic middle class expectations.
I would not recommend this career to anyone who wanted to work in industry. For those who love the science in computer science, then get at Ph.D and conduct research as a faculty member at a university. Get tenure. Otherwise, you'll just get screwed.
My 360 is connected via component to an HDTV. My expectation is that the display resolution is not the deciding factor. I'd guess, instead, that CPU and GPU transistor use matters more. The more live transistors, the heavier the electric consumption. And don't forget the optical drive, those draw a lot of power too.