Sakyamuni taught that primordial Ignorance (avidya) produces Desire-to-be (trishna), unsatisfied Desire is the cause of life, and life results in old age, disease and death, i.e., Suffering (dukkha). To overcome Suffering, therefore, it is necessary to escape the Cycle of life and death; to escape the Cycle of life and death, it is necessary to extinguish Desire; and to extinguish Desire, it is necessary to destroy Ignorance.
Curious how Jobs being buddhist, he is responsible for such slavering of desire (according to the above, amongst the 'ignorant') in the products he works to create. I wonder if he tries to reconcile this in some consumerist branch of Buddhism.
Attaining Great Awakening (maha-bodhi), the Buddha Sakyamuni realized four profound insights: namely, that all created phenomena are impermanent; that due to the mutable impermanence of phenomena, all created phenomena must result eventually only in suffering; that there is no independent absolute 'I'; and that the seeker of Truth can transcend created existence and attain, through spiritual practice and mystical contemplation, a supreme state of peace called Nirvana.
Hm it seems doubtful Apple products are actually the path to spiritual awakening.
''... Management offers the following guidance for the full fiscal year ending June 30, 2006:
Revenue is expected to be in the range of $43.7 billion to $44.5 billion....''
$43,700,000,000... where do you think all that money is coming from? Even the money that comes from Office is relying on having Windows on the box in order to run it. Ugh.
If it does happen that Google are planning to fund large scale manufacture of cheap Internet-enabled media-capable devices excluding MSFT, especially if they maintain their traditions of open-ness, that is potentially of massive importance in a world currently full of closed and crypto- locked platforms.
Tabloids already discovered the 'ride it up' and 'ride it down' two bites at the cherry formula. When something is in the news you boost it (with >100 stories on Slashdot for the Xbox 360 recently), and then when that isn't working any more you 'ride it down' with exposes of it taking drugs, naked longlens shots and navel gazing 'why did we love it anyway' stories.
A genuine 'tax' aspect will be coming in the form of the patent rights in the codecs needed to encode to the media.
The kind of closed systems you are worrying about already exist in signed games for consoles and the special optical media needed for PSPs, but isn't credible to take camcorders and HD camcorders out of the public's hands. AFAICT all upcoming AV systems for TV-style use will naturally allow unencrypted content at the highest quality going on.
People are producing free media content at the moment, eg,
it's not such a great leap to imagine that from these small beginnings in a few years one will be able to at least get part of your entertainment needs direct from the Internet to your HD TV without DRM at all. The more restrictive the traditional media the better the chance for growth in the liberally licensed stuff, so I have come to welcome and encourage all this DRM garbage so long as unencrypted content plays by default.
> What I meant is that the HD camcorder will not plug into a > monitor that does not implement this DRM chip, whether or > not the signal is protected.
That seems more possible, but why is that a problem? HD content won't play on a monitor without a HD-compatible chipset either. So long as the DRM chip is transparent by default ie, to media not marked as restrictively licensed, it won't bother me to have it in there. It's like motherboards having Firewire when you don't use Firewire.
There is some kind of implicit or explicit license involved in a consumer buying a typical CD or DVD, because each one comes with a list of "rights" that are "reserved", eg here is what it says on the back cover of my Das Rheingold DVD:
''This programme is under copyright protection and may be shown in private homes only. Any rental, lease, barter deal or repurchase, copying, reproduction or recording as well as public exhibition or similar commercial acts serving the same economic purpose, or their sufferance, unless permitted by the copyright holder or under applicable law, will result in civil and/or criminal action being taken.''
As for DRM killing 'fair use'... yes it's evil and stupid. BUT you have to buy the encumbered junk first. If you decide not to give money to the people treating you like that, then it causes you no problems at all.
> otherwise you can't communicate with anyone else who's in the DRM chain... > At the very least, it requires knowledge of private encryption keys
These displays will work normally until and unless they meet media that demands extra assurances. If you don't plan on getting such media, as far as I heard this whole DRM thing will not trouble you.
> This probably won't be a free service
I hate what is happening with the laws and media lockup as much as anyone, but this is just FUD.
> Despite what they tell us, a working DRM system cannot freely > permit unscreened content from third-party, independent producers
I do not believe this reflects the reality. People are creating their own content more than ever. If you look at DVDs, for example, there again is unencrypted content working compatibly on all readers I know of alongside the encrypted content.
They are after these laws because the encryption system is not waternight, not because it is watertight.
> No. It is highly likely that future devices will NOT play > even non-protected content to a non-DRM display device
What makes you think that this is the case? The laws being mooted involve "Broadcast flags" and so on to indicate protected content that needs the crypto handshake. Do you really think HD camcorders, for example, will be unable to display recorded content at HD resolution?
> See, that's not entirely true. In fact, hardware > has the capability to ignore DRM, which is why the > entertainment industry is always trying to get laws > passed that REQUIRE hardware to consult the DRM in > the content before playing said content.
Considering HDTV-type appliances, and not consoles, the laws I heard about all involve a demand (bit, descriptor or whatever) about DRM encoded in the *media* that must be honoured by the players if present.
Neither the laws nor the DRM apply to media where the DRM demand is absent because the content is liberally licensed. One can say then that the laws are not evil if you will be consuming media without those bits set since all the crypto becomes completely transparent. The content vendors can set that bit if they like and it really flows from Copyright law alone that you must abide by its license or feel the hot breath of law enforcement on your neck. The problem is not that they can now additionally police their license in the players more effectively (tha, eg, Macrovision) but that you wanted their content without wanting to have to abide by the license terms.
If you find the license terms unacceptable them rms has shown the way. In that sense the more locked up and hateful the existing media restrictions become the better.
AIUI all of these gatekeeper DRM technologies only operate when taking media that tells them to operate. So if you buy a HD "DVD" in 2006 it may not output at HD if it doesn't like your pre-crypto HD TV, but if you hook up your HD camera footage to your TV then it will operate correctly at the highest resolution.
Therefore the features ARE in there to please the locked-up content creators, and to get their systems blessed by those content creators so they will allow their content to interface to it and the systems will sell.
That's an important distinction because nothing in these locked up media systems prevents the creation of alternative liberally licensed media: there is no "toll collector" aspect to it I can see.
If you don't like the way the locked-up media is being increasingly locked up, just think "What would rms do?"
In "Radio Free Albemuth" Philip K Dick foresaw an evil 'empire' whose figurehead was 'Ferris Fremont' (not Freemont) exerting a tyrannical Stalinist-cum-Neocon control over the world.
''A nine-hour queue in the cold and wet is just the thing to bring out the British spirit - where else can you make 100 new friends, and then beat the hell out of them.
"Oh yeah, every single one of them!" - Richard Tiah was one of more than 200 die-hard gamers waiting outside London's Oxford Street Game store for the UK launch of Microsoft's next-generation Xbox 360.
Kevin Sage with his new Xbox 360 Kevin Sage was the first to get his hands on the Xbox 360 Richard was one of the first in line, having arrived at 3pm for the midnight opening.
"The atmosphere has been really good", he said. "I've spoken to about 100 people and got their tags, [online gaming names], so I'll be taking them on tonight once I get back."
The 22-year-old police communications officer (tag Pro-enegmatic1) was one of the lucky ones - he had his Xbox pre-ordered and waiting for him in the store.... ''
''Grateful Dead "reversal" on fan-recordings is a smokescreen
Yesterday, I blogged stories about various Grateful Dead spokespeople and band-alumni making promises to reverse their attack on fan-recordings that are hosted at the the Internet Archive (these recordings were made by dedicated fans with the band's explicit blessing, and have been the core of an decades-old evangelical unpaid promotional campaign by Deadheads that has returned a gigantic fortune for the band).
However, it appears that all the talk about "communications SNAFUs" was a smokescreen for a half-assed compromise that leaves the highest-quality recordings available only as streams, meaning that they can no longer be simply downloaded from the Archive and traded on....''
Congratulations are in order to the Xbox 360 PR folks.
A quick search on "360" in Slashdot shows over 150 stories generated in the prime demographic of Slashdot readers.
How we all held our breath for what worldchanging events the Whoragin 360 website "suck in the suckers" campaign might have heralded. And how we were all disappointed -- it was just a PR campain with such vast amounts of money behind it that just for a moment it seemed that a Myst-style tree with Latin -- OMG LATIN -- on it might have held some revelation that would change all our lives!
But no. It was just people in suits selling 'products' for money, same old same old. Customers are just customers, slumped slackjawed consumers that can never contribute, except with their wallet and their time. After a while the customers will evolve into the Eloi while the suit guys are already the Morlocks.
Noting a surfiet of bread, Microsoft cannily decided to provide the circuses.
Once you realize you are looking at a "Psychological Operation" elements of this story like the needless futuristic styling in the posed photograph, the issue of the story to the press before it is decided how the thing will be aimed, and coupling the bogodevice to the very specific usage scenario for it, make more sense. Betcha $10 there's nothing inside that pretty Quake-style weapon casing.
> collecting societies in smaller European countries fear
> that they will lose out to larger rivals, potentially
> restricting the development of new music
LOL... "new music" isn't dependent on collection societies. People driven by the desire to make art create 'new music'. Check out Jamendo or the podsafe stuff or Staccato for tons of great stuff outside the 'business'.
''...The salary structure remained crazy-quilt, and the only general wage increase Disney granted in those years was self-serving: he brought a number of workers up over the forty-dollar-a-week level, at which point, under the Wagner Labor Relations Act, they ceased being entitled to time-and-a-half for overtime." Schickel says that Disney "responded gracelessly to the pressures of his increasingly difficult economic situation." Story conferences became brutal. "An animator working on Fantasia took piano lessons at his own expense" to increase his understanding of music, and when Disney found out about it, he snarled "What are you, some kind of fag?"
As the biggest and most successful animation studio, Disney was an obvious target for the Screen Cartoonists' Guild. There was a layoff which seemed to target members of the Guild selectively, and things reached a boiling point when Disney fired animator Art Babbitt, whom Disney regarded as a "troublemaker." Three days later, on May 29, 1941, the strike began....''
With the reduced majority for Labour from the recent election, UK ID Cards are less likely to be introduced, despite the hormones they inject Home Secretaries with to turn them into rabid ultra-Right skirtniffing beast-creatures.
In a shocking turn of events today the metaslashdotter posts outstripped the real slashdotter posts on a story about a stoned coder who sees dead people. Predicting the surge of "so, do MSFT balls *taste better* than llama balls, Jeff?" comments, metaslashdotters hurried to decry the plebian urge to urinate on MSFT, only to find the story overstocked with metaposts decrying an urge that did not materialize prior to the embarassment of metaposters crying "shame!" on an nonexistant denouncement.
Let's all hope enough plebian posters hating MSFT turn up to balance the metaposter overstock and save the fragile metaposters from the embarassment of being seen to care.
Slashdot Mirror
> Where did you hear that Jobs is a Buddhist? I"m not seeing a
> reference to it on Wikipedia. I saw one link suggesting he is
> Lutheran.
Here is a list of Buddhists on Wikipedia, Ctrl-F in your browser and search for Jobs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buddhists
Google has plenty of references to it including everything2:
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=17468
Sakyamuni taught that primordial Ignorance (avidya) produces Desire-to-be (trishna), unsatisfied Desire is the cause of life, and life results in old age, disease and death, i.e., Suffering (dukkha). To overcome Suffering, therefore, it is necessary to escape the Cycle of life and death; to escape the Cycle of life and death, it is necessary to extinguish Desire; and to extinguish Desire, it is necessary to destroy Ignorance.
u rteen-fundamental-buddhist-tenets.htm
http://www.dharmafellowship.org/library/essays/fo
Curious how Jobs being buddhist, he is responsible for such slavering of desire (according to the above, amongst the 'ignorant') in the products he works to create. I wonder if he tries to reconcile this in some consumerist branch of Buddhism.
Attaining Great Awakening (maha-bodhi), the Buddha Sakyamuni realized four profound insights: namely, that all created phenomena are impermanent; that due to the mutable impermanence of phenomena, all created phenomena must result eventually only in suffering; that there is no independent absolute 'I'; and that the seeker of Truth can transcend created existence and attain, through spiritual practice and mystical contemplation, a supreme state of peace called Nirvana.
Hm it seems doubtful Apple products are actually the path to spiritual awakening.
> Something tells me, between tech support
0 5/10-27Q1EarnPR.mspx
... Management offers the following guidance for the
...''
... where do you think all that money
> and corporate infrastructure, very little
> of that cost is the "microsoft tax".
Maybe you can elaborate on that "something":
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/0ct
''
full fiscal year ending June 30, 2006:
Revenue is expected to be in the range of $43.7 billion
to $44.5 billion.
$43,700,000,000
is coming from? Even the money that comes from Office
is relying on having Windows on the box in order to run
it. Ugh.
If it does happen that Google are planning to fund large
scale manufacture of cheap Internet-enabled media-capable
devices excluding MSFT, especially if they maintain their
traditions of open-ness, that is potentially of massive
importance in a world currently full of closed and crypto-
locked platforms.
"Is Microsoft a monopoly" lol
Tabloids already discovered the 'ride it up' and 'ride it down' two bites at the cherry formula. When something is in the news you boost it (with >100 stories on Slashdot for the Xbox 360 recently), and then when that isn't working any more you 'ride it down' with exposes of it taking drugs, naked longlens shots and navel gazing 'why did we love it anyway' stories.
Let's hope the tabloid format increases sales!
> For example, SSL certificates aren't free, unless they're self-signed
http://www.cacert.org/
Bad example.
A genuine 'tax' aspect will be coming in the form of the patent rights in the codecs needed to encode to the media.
The kind of closed systems you are worrying about already exist in signed games for consoles and the special optical media needed for PSPs, but isn't credible to take camcorders and HD camcorders out of the public's hands. AFAICT all upcoming AV systems for TV-style use will naturally allow unencrypted content at the highest quality going on.
People are producing free media content at the moment, eg,
http://channel101.com/
http://channel102.net/
it's not such a great leap to imagine that from these small beginnings in a few years one will be able to at least get part of your entertainment needs direct from the Internet to your HD TV without DRM at all. The more restrictive the traditional media the better the chance for growth in the liberally licensed stuff, so I have come to welcome and encourage all this DRM garbage so long as unencrypted content plays by default.
> What I meant is that the HD camcorder will not plug into a
> monitor that does not implement this DRM chip, whether or
> not the signal is protected.
That seems more possible, but why is that a problem? HD content won't play on a monitor without a HD-compatible chipset either. So long as the DRM chip is transparent by default ie, to media not marked as restrictively licensed, it won't bother me to have it in there. It's like motherboards having Firewire when you don't use Firewire.
There is some kind of implicit or explicit license involved in a consumer buying a typical CD or DVD, because each one comes with a list of "rights" that are "reserved", eg here is what it says on the back cover of my Das Rheingold DVD:
''This programme is under copyright protection
and may be shown in private homes only.
Any rental, lease, barter deal or repurchase,
copying, reproduction or recording as well as
public exhibition or similar commercial acts
serving the same economic purpose, or their
sufferance, unless permitted by the copyright
holder or under applicable law, will result in
civil and/or criminal action being taken.''
As for DRM killing 'fair use'... yes it's evil and stupid. BUT you have to buy the encumbered junk first. If you decide not to give money to the people treating you like that, then it causes you no problems at all.
> otherwise you can't communicate with anyone else who's in the DRM chain ...
> At the very least, it requires knowledge of private encryption keys
These displays will work normally until and unless they meet media that demands extra assurances. If you don't plan on getting such media, as far as I heard this whole DRM thing will not trouble you.
> This probably won't be a free service
I hate what is happening with the laws and media lockup as much as anyone, but this is just FUD.
> Despite what they tell us, a working DRM system cannot freely
> permit unscreened content from third-party, independent producers
I do not believe this reflects the reality. People are creating their own content more than ever. If you look at DVDs, for example, there again is unencrypted content working compatibly on all readers I know of alongside the encrypted content.
They are after these laws because the encryption system is not waternight, not because it is watertight.
> No. It is highly likely that future devices will NOT play
> even non-protected content to a non-DRM display device
What makes you think that this is the case? The laws being mooted involve "Broadcast flags" and so on to indicate protected content that needs the crypto handshake. Do you really think HD camcorders, for example, will be unable to display recorded content at HD resolution?
> See, that's not entirely true. In fact, hardware
> has the capability to ignore DRM, which is why the
> entertainment industry is always trying to get laws
> passed that REQUIRE hardware to consult the DRM in
> the content before playing said content.
Considering HDTV-type appliances, and not consoles, the laws I heard about all involve a demand (bit, descriptor or whatever) about DRM encoded in the *media* that must be honoured by the players if present.
Neither the laws nor the DRM apply to media where the DRM demand is absent because the content is liberally licensed. One can say then that the laws are not evil if you will be consuming media without those bits set since all the crypto becomes completely transparent. The content vendors can set that bit if they like and it really flows from Copyright law alone that you must abide by its license or feel the hot breath of law enforcement on your neck. The problem is not that they can now additionally police their license in the players more effectively (tha, eg, Macrovision) but that you wanted their content without wanting to have to abide by the license terms.
If you find the license terms unacceptable them rms has shown the way. In that sense the more locked up and hateful the existing media restrictions become the better.
AIUI all of these gatekeeper DRM technologies only operate when taking media that tells them to operate. So if you buy a HD "DVD" in 2006 it may not output at HD if it doesn't like your pre-crypto HD TV, but if you hook up your HD camera footage to your TV then it will operate correctly at the highest resolution.
Therefore the features ARE in there to please the locked-up content creators, and to get their systems blessed by those content creators so they will allow their content to interface to it and the systems will sell.
That's an important distinction because nothing in these locked up media systems prevents the creation of alternative liberally licensed media: there is no "toll collector" aspect to it I can see.
If you don't like the way the locked-up media is being increasingly locked up, just think "What would rms do?"
In "Radio Free Albemuth" Philip K Dick foresaw an evil 'empire' whose figurehead was 'Ferris Fremont' (not Freemont) exerting a tyrannical Stalinist-cum-Neocon control over the world.
... ''
Let's hope for a happy juxtoposition of advertising slogans to save us, because the BBC sure won't this time:
Junket slut:
''A nine-hour queue in the cold and wet is just the thing to bring out the British spirit - where else can you make 100 new friends, and then beat the hell out of them.
"Oh yeah, every single one of them!" - Richard Tiah was one of more than 200 die-hard gamers waiting outside London's Oxford Street Game store for the UK launch of Microsoft's next-generation Xbox 360.
Kevin Sage with his new Xbox 360
Kevin Sage was the first to get his hands on the Xbox 360
Richard was one of the first in line, having arrived at 3pm for the midnight opening.
"The atmosphere has been really good", he said. "I've spoken to about 100 people and got their tags, [online gaming names], so I'll be taking them on tonight once I get back."
The 22-year-old police communications officer (tag Pro-enegmatic1) was one of the lucky ones - he had his Xbox pre-ordered and waiting for him in the store.
''Grateful Dead "reversal" on fan-recordings is a smokescreen
...''
Yesterday, I blogged stories about various Grateful Dead spokespeople and band-alumni making promises to reverse their attack on fan-recordings that are hosted at the the Internet Archive (these recordings were made by dedicated fans with the band's explicit blessing, and have been the core of an decades-old evangelical unpaid promotional campaign by Deadheads that has returned a gigantic fortune for the band).
However, it appears that all the talk about "communications SNAFUs" was a smokescreen for a half-assed compromise that leaves the highest-quality recordings available only as streams, meaning that they can no longer be simply downloaded from the Archive and traded on.
Whole article
Congratulations are in order to the Xbox 360 PR folks.
A quick search on "360" in Slashdot shows over 150 stories generated in the prime demographic of Slashdot readers.
How we all held our breath for what worldchanging events the Whoragin 360 website "suck in the suckers" campaign might have heralded. And how we were all disappointed -- it was just a PR campain with such vast amounts of money behind it that just for a moment it seemed that a Myst-style tree with Latin -- OMG LATIN -- on it might have held some revelation that would change all our lives!
But no. It was just people in suits selling 'products' for money, same old same old. Customers are just customers, slumped slackjawed consumers that can never contribute, except with their wallet and their time. After a while the customers will evolve into the Eloi while the suit guys are already the Morlocks.
Noting a surfiet of bread, Microsoft cannily decided to provide the circuses.
For some reason neither zdnet nor the submitter give a link to the site and article they are talking about:
an openrights.org blog entry.
The page has a cool link to WriteToThem where UK readers at least can quickly find out who their MEP is and how to contact them.
Once you realize you are looking at a "Psychological Operation" elements of this story like the needless futuristic styling in the posed photograph, the issue of the story to the press before it is decided how the thing will be aimed, and coupling the bogodevice to the very specific usage scenario for it, make more sense. Betcha $10 there's nothing inside that pretty Quake-style weapon casing.
Yep... my typo.... Thanks for the debug :-)
> 99 pence
... if you are stupid enough to buy into the DRM turning your 'purchase' into an effective rental.
Actually 79p seems to be the going rate in the UK...
http://www.tescodownloads.com/
If you use GPL software, with the licensing benefits, why not look at the music the same way?
> collecting societies in smaller European countries fear
> that they will lose out to larger rivals, potentially
> restricting the development of new music
LOL... "new music" isn't dependent on collection societies. People driven by the desire to make art create 'new music'. Check out Jamendo or the podsafe stuff or Staccato for tons of great stuff outside the 'business'.
Disney != Google at any time.
i ke
...''
http://www.answers.com/topic/disney-animators-str
''...The salary structure remained crazy-quilt, and the only general wage increase Disney granted in those years was self-serving: he brought a number of workers up over the forty-dollar-a-week level, at which point, under the Wagner Labor Relations Act, they ceased being entitled to time-and-a-half for overtime." Schickel says that Disney "responded gracelessly to the pressures of his increasingly difficult economic situation." Story conferences became brutal. "An animator working on Fantasia took piano lessons at his own expense" to increase his understanding of music, and when Disney found out about it, he snarled "What are you, some kind of fag?"
As the biggest and most successful animation studio, Disney was an obvious target for the Screen Cartoonists' Guild. There was a layoff which seemed to target members of the Guild selectively, and things reached a boiling point when Disney fired animator Art Babbitt, whom Disney regarded as a "troublemaker." Three days later, on May 29, 1941, the strike began.
With the reduced majority for Labour from the recent election, UK ID Cards are less likely to be introduced, despite the hormones they inject Home Secretaries with to turn them into rabid ultra-Right skirtniffing beast-creatures.
Where's the lightswitch?
In a shocking turn of events today the metaslashdotter posts outstripped the real slashdotter posts on a story about a stoned coder who sees dead people. Predicting the surge of "so, do MSFT balls *taste better* than llama balls, Jeff?" comments, metaslashdotters hurried to decry the plebian urge to urinate on MSFT, only to find the story overstocked with metaposts decrying an urge that did not materialize prior to the embarassment of metaposters crying "shame!" on an nonexistant denouncement.
Let's all hope enough plebian posters hating MSFT turn up to balance the metaposter overstock and save the fragile metaposters from the embarassment of being seen to care.
I see. So it's "I've seen attack ships on fire off-the-shoulder Natalie Portman"
Thirty years post college? Sorry - the scar's still there, it's your eyesight that's fading.