If they are to continue to create content. Think about it, the record companies _do_ pay for content to be created, record deals, producing records etc etc.
Only in the sense of the record companies providing a mechanism and venue for that creation. It's the song writers, musicians and singers who actually do the creation...
By extension, the film and television companies are in the same boat.
There is often a more obvious demarkation between production and distribution companies here.
Radical advances in technology can destroy industries. It has happened before. It will happen again. The only way to stop it is to hold back the technology, and that's exactly what they're trying to do.
Except that they are not trying to hold back technology (which would be something like Japan banning all firearms). Instead they want technology to only be used in ways which make doing what they were doing before easier for them only.
Media companies should just resign themselves to the fact that the days of large profits are waning, and instead concentrate on ways of inducing people to buy, rather than copy material - lower prices would help, for a start, but also bonus materials.
But they might not be "top dog" if they did that. They like being top dog, therefor will do anything possible to defend that position. Whilst there are historical precedents for technology advancements rendering an entire section of business obsolete? There don't appear to be any examples of using the law to bend new technology into only working for status quo busines.
Technology has just moved along (like it does) and instead of trying to stop the march of progress media companies have to change there business models to the new market, and not try to maintain the statis quo. CD sales are lower today because time which should have been spent creating a new format to replace CD's was spent lowing production processes and now that industry is screwed.
Or maybe the problem is that they are simply putting the "wrong" music on the CDs. Anyway these companies still appear to be making rather huge profits...
At most, all that is going to happen is someone works out a way to link all the Tivo's together, but isn't that what cable TV is today? just repeats after repreats and WWF.
It's also about who controls what people watch. Viewers would ideally want to choose when they watch, quite likely viewers in the US could also do without having series shown out of order, appearently due to a rating system invented 40 years ago. But the advertising selling model for TV falls over without the broadcaster controlling both timing and geographic distribution.
If you can't work out a way to make money in a medium where consumers are doing all the work,
If anyone can work out a way to effectivly directly pay production companies then television broadcasting could become obsolete.
It never ceases to amaze me how companies who claim to be technology companies, or corporations who adopt technological representations of their media cry when all of a sudden they have to deal with a new set of rules that comes with the new medium.
It's known as "having their cake and eatinig it", publishers want easy to duplicate and distribute media. Since they keep their costs down and boost their profits. Especially if they can persuade the customer to pay more for the new media at the same time. However this can also make unauthorised duplication trivial. So the response appears to be to "supercriminilise" copyright infringment, whereas the only really effective method is to render "piracy" uneconomic. Which would mean cutting profits.
The fact that corporations are lobbying for regulation this strict is a clear admission of failure on their part to be smart enough to add value to a huge demand already presented by end consumers.
Let alone that in a capitalist system it isn't the government's job to protect even the existance of specific commercial entities.
A democracy presupposes that everyone is informed about all the issues, and that their votes count. Currently, people get one vote every few years, and then just about no say for the next several years.
It also assumes a candidate being available to represent every possible issue. (Which is especially a problem in places like the US, where things are dominated by a tiny number of political parties).
Not only that, but much of the time, actually finding out what the issues are ahead of time is hard to do.
It's not unknown for political parties to claim they will do A, but actually do B . Or simply procrastinate on doing A, without actually doing anything. Let alone using outright "doublespeak".
Of course, it requires Cygwin. But, a drop in replacement for something that is proprietary to begin with and comes bundled with all windows version sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn't it.;)
Except that there are a few things which samba will do which the inbuilt WIndows stuff cannot manage. e.g. restricting the avaliability of a share to specific workstations.
I love how Microsoft touts their products as having a lower TCO than Linux, since "anyone" can administer Windows. Do they factor in lost man-hours due to audits?
Or the lost hours of the average user trying to administer Windows. Which includes the system not being adequatly protected from the end user, because they "need" the ability to mess around with critical things.
The word "Piracy" as it is used in the software industry originally was used by authors (that's right...authors) when describing the tactics of publishers who were distributing works that were not okayed by the author first.
How old is this usage, could it possibly date back to Queen Anne? When copyright had been taken away from publishers and assigned to authors for the first time.
Why don't they call it what it is: the act of 'unauthorized copying of copyrighted material'?
Because using the term "piracy" makes it sound far more serious. The term "copyright infringment" is hard for the advertising execs to make sound evil...
That doesn't explain why they are on a holy war against all things GPL.
Because the GPL specifically prevents the code being co-opted as proprietary code. (Unless the proprietary software producer were to get a new licence from the copyright holder or copyright has expired, placing it into the public domain.) Also any derived work of a GPL program must be also under the GPL, this includes intermingling other code into a GPL program. Since Microsoft appear to deliberatly write sphagetti code this would mean that they would have to release just about everything under the GPL.
What do you do when everyone has the software they need? This is the burden Microsoft has had for a while. So they play every trick in the book. Changing file formats -- more restrictive licensing -- regular upgrades -- huge marketing -- and the creation of new technologies. The hope is to obsolete the previous version of software.
You also have BSA "audits" where people can end up paying twice. Because they can't demonstrate to a (highly partisan) party that they have already licenced the software
Problem is that this provides almost zero benefit for the customer. Sure -- every so often someone gets a fringe benefit from a new technology. But usually, people are happy with the software they have now.
It could provide negative benefit. If the new software does the job no better than the old, but contains more bugs, where workarounds are yet to be discovered.
Hard drive: You do not want a bottom-of-the-line hard drive. It's not economical. If the current standard midrange size is 80GB, get an 80GB drive, not a 40GB. The small amount of savings you get for the large loss in space are not worth it.
Only on a standalone system. On a LAN you end up with workstations with lots of useless diskspace or worst provide an incentive for (l)users to store work on the local HDD.
Interesting. MS says that the OEM OS goes with the machine, so if you get rid of a box, you get loose the license. But here you're upgrading, so you still have the same box?
Unless any of these machines are AT cases. In which case they need a new box. Effectivly it's a "grandad's axe" type issue.
With GPL software you can't sell the software itself, the expenses of developing the software must be shifted elsewhere.
You can sell GPL software to anyone you like, at any price you like, just that you must provide the source in accordance with the licence. However if you try and charge excessivly then any customer, who is not a fool, will simply go elsewhere.
(since nobody ever understands what I'm referring to, this thing would have been over years ago if the Israelis knew how to manipulate world opinion like the other countries in the Middle East.
Israel concentrates on manipulating the opinion of one country, the USA.
And Muslims have a long history of destroying everyone else's holy places when they occupy a new land, because their god is the ONLY god. The Jews and Christians don't because their god is the biggest, not the only.)
Rather ignoring the point that the god worshiped by Jewdeism, Christianity and Islam is the same god. Which is part of the problem with the city of Jerusalum.
Which is why #1: I always boot to Windows. They support ONLY Windows and even if I have the modem directly connected to the router to the linux firewall, then used by a Mac, I make it so that the modem is connected to Windows. Why? Because they don't support anything else and to ask for anything else (*nix) is just a waste of their time and mine.
This is actually a symptom of their problem. They are an ISP, they are selling you connectivity, not support for any specific OS. Does your telephone company expect you to plug in a specific brand of phone when you call them?
But the software is usually marketed as being installable and usable by anyone at all.
The former bit really causes problems. With any other piece of technology the concept of installation by (l)users would be dismissed out of hand as self evidently daft. Yet a general purpose computer is quite likely the most complicated machine most people will use. People who might have trouble performing even basic "housekeeping" tasks on a car are suddenly expected to install software and persuade it to coexist with any other software on the same computer.
Third, sometimes the clueless have actually run into the serious bugs that are hard to solve even with skilled geeks on both ends of the line. Not much chance of solving that short of a house call, until some skilled geek calls with the same problem.
Assuming the "skilled geek" could duplicate the problem. They might never try something which was "obviously daft".
Now I'm a lowly DSL/hosting tech support drudge. I have enough basic knowledge to get by at that level, but I haven't the know-how to do much more. My question is, how can it possibly be that Ms. Senior NT Network Administrator acquires this title and position in a world that pays any attention to occupational ability at all?
Most likely they knew all the latest Microsoft jargon and what to click where to get NT to do certain things. But didn't know much about the basic priciples of networking computers or networking protocols.
Do employers mistake an MCSE for a credible credential?
There's been alot of VMS systems that got the boot because of this. Systems that ran, undisturbed, for YEARS at a time, only to be replaced by an NT system that did less, required more admins to maintain them, and crashed on a regular basis!
Wonder if many real TCO studies have been done. Most often when TCO is mentioned it is actually someone oe other's marketing.
She said that she was waiting for the IT manager to help her with a problem. I offered my service to her and she explaind it. The problem: The mouse was on the far right of the mousepad and she needed to move it further to the right. I snickered a bit and explained her that she could pick up the mouse, move it to the left and continue.
So much for the idea of GUIs being initutive:) Wonder if she had been give much, if any, training on the new system.
Sic 'em on -- oh, say, WalMart, or Ross Perot's organization (now there's someone who'd doubtless promptly tell 'em exactly how far away from sunshine to stick themselves!) IOW, someone with serious capital and a big legal contingent already in-house and accustomed to fending off legal shennanigans.
Maybe they can be tricked into attempting to audit the FBI, ATF, CIA or a military base.
Slashdot Mirror
If they are to continue to create content. Think about it, the record companies _do_ pay for content to be created, record deals, producing records etc etc.
Only in the sense of the record companies providing a mechanism and venue for that creation. It's the song writers, musicians and singers who actually do the creation...
By extension, the film and television companies are in the same boat.
There is often a more obvious demarkation between production and distribution companies here.
Radical advances in technology can destroy industries. It has happened before. It will happen again. The only way to stop it is to hold back the technology, and that's exactly what they're trying to do.
Except that they are not trying to hold back technology (which would be something like Japan banning all firearms). Instead they want technology to only be used in ways which make doing what they were doing before easier for them only.
Media companies should just resign themselves to the fact that the days of large profits are waning, and instead concentrate on ways of inducing people to buy, rather than copy material - lower prices would help, for a start, but also bonus materials.
But they might not be "top dog" if they did that. They like being top dog, therefor will do anything possible to defend that position.
Whilst there are historical precedents for technology advancements rendering an entire section of business obsolete? There don't appear to be any examples of using the law to bend new technology into only working for status quo busines.
Technology has just moved along (like it does) and instead of trying to stop the march of progress media companies have to change there business models to the new market, and not try to maintain the statis quo. CD sales are lower today because time which should have been spent creating a new format to replace CD's was spent lowing production processes and now that industry is screwed.
Or maybe the problem is that they are simply putting the "wrong" music on the CDs. Anyway these companies still appear to be making rather huge profits...
At most, all that is going to happen is someone works out a way to link all the Tivo's together, but isn't that what cable TV is today? just repeats after repreats and WWF.
It's also about who controls what people watch. Viewers would ideally want to choose when they watch, quite likely viewers in the US could also do without having series shown out of order, appearently due to a rating system invented 40 years ago. But the advertising selling model for TV falls over without the broadcaster controlling both timing and geographic distribution.
If you can't work out a way to make money in a medium where consumers are doing all the work,
If anyone can work out a way to effectivly directly pay production companies then television broadcasting could become obsolete.
It never ceases to amaze me how companies who claim to be technology companies, or corporations who adopt technological representations of their media cry when all of a sudden they have to deal with a new set of rules that comes with the new medium.
It's known as "having their cake and eatinig it", publishers want easy to duplicate and distribute media. Since they keep their costs down and boost their profits. Especially if they can persuade the customer to pay more for the new media at the same time.
However this can also make unauthorised duplication trivial. So the response appears to be to "supercriminilise" copyright infringment, whereas the only really effective method is to render "piracy" uneconomic. Which would mean cutting profits.
The fact that corporations are lobbying for regulation this strict is a clear admission of failure on their part to be smart enough to add value to a huge demand already presented by end consumers.
Let alone that in a capitalist system it isn't the government's job to protect even the existance of specific commercial entities.
A democracy presupposes that everyone is informed about all the issues, and that their votes count. Currently, people get one vote every few years, and then just about no say for the next several years.
It also assumes a candidate being available to represent every possible issue. (Which is especially a problem in places like the US, where things are dominated by a tiny number of political parties).
Not only that, but much of the time, actually finding out what the issues are ahead of time is hard to do.
It's not unknown for political parties to claim they will do A, but actually do B . Or simply procrastinate on doing A, without actually doing anything. Let alone using outright "doublespeak".
Of course, it requires Cygwin. But, a drop in replacement for something that is proprietary to begin with and comes bundled with all windows version sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn't it. ;)
Except that there are a few things which samba will do which the inbuilt WIndows stuff cannot manage. e.g. restricting the avaliability of a share to specific workstations.
It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to pirate RedHat when I can get it legally from their website.
Actually it would be quite easy to pirate Linux. e.g. build an "appliance" without offering your customers the source code.
I love how Microsoft touts their products as having a lower TCO than Linux, since "anyone" can administer Windows. Do they factor in lost man-hours due to audits?
Or the lost hours of the average user trying to administer Windows. Which includes the system not being adequatly protected from the end user, because they "need" the ability to mess around with critical things.
The word "Piracy" as it is used in the software industry originally was used by authors (that's right...authors) when describing the tactics of publishers who were distributing works that were not okayed by the author first.
How old is this usage, could it possibly date back to Queen Anne? When copyright had been taken away from publishers and assigned to authors for the first time.
Why don't they call it what it is: the act of 'unauthorized copying of copyrighted material'?
Because using the term "piracy" makes it sound far more serious. The term "copyright infringment" is hard for the advertising execs to make sound evil...
That doesn't explain why they are on a holy war against all things GPL.
Because the GPL specifically prevents the code being co-opted as proprietary code. (Unless the proprietary software producer were to get a new licence from the copyright holder or copyright has expired, placing it into the public domain.)
Also any derived work of a GPL program must be also under the GPL, this includes intermingling other code into a GPL program. Since Microsoft appear to deliberatly write sphagetti code this would mean that they would have to release just about everything under the GPL.
What do you do when everyone has the software they need? This is the burden Microsoft has had for a while. So they play every trick in the book. Changing file formats -- more restrictive licensing -- regular upgrades -- huge marketing -- and the creation of new technologies. The hope is to obsolete the previous version of software.
You also have BSA "audits" where people can end up paying twice. Because they can't demonstrate to a (highly partisan) party that they have already licenced the software
Problem is that this provides almost zero benefit for the customer. Sure -- every so often someone gets a fringe benefit from a new technology. But usually, people are happy with the software they have now.
It could provide negative benefit. If the new software does the job no better than the old, but contains more bugs, where workarounds are yet to be discovered.
Find some affordable hard drives and swap them out on the machines that are near capacity.
Assuming that the problem isn't that someone has put junk on, that shouldn't be there in the first place.
Hard drive: You do not want a bottom-of-the-line hard drive. It's not economical. If the current standard midrange size is 80GB, get an 80GB drive, not a 40GB. The small amount of savings you get for the large loss in space are not worth it.
Only on a standalone system. On a LAN you end up with workstations with lots of useless diskspace or worst provide an incentive for (l)users to store work on the local HDD.
Interesting. MS says that the OEM OS goes with the machine, so if you get rid of a box, you get loose the license. But here you're upgrading, so you still have the same box?
Unless any of these machines are AT cases. In which case they need a new box. Effectivly it's a "grandad's axe" type issue.
With GPL software you can't sell the software itself, the expenses of developing the software must be shifted elsewhere.
You can sell GPL software to anyone you like, at any price you like, just that you must provide the source in accordance with the licence. However if you try and charge excessivly then any customer, who is not a fool, will simply go elsewhere.
(since nobody ever understands what I'm referring to, this thing would have been over years ago if the Israelis knew how to manipulate world opinion like the other countries in the Middle East.
Israel concentrates on manipulating the opinion of one country, the USA.
And Muslims have a long history of destroying everyone else's holy places when they occupy a new land, because their god is the ONLY god. The Jews and Christians don't because their god is the biggest, not the only.)
Rather ignoring the point that the god worshiped by Jewdeism, Christianity and Islam is the same god.
Which is part of the problem with the city of Jerusalum.
Which is why #1: I always boot to Windows. They support ONLY Windows and even if I have the modem directly connected to the router to the linux firewall, then used by a Mac, I make it so that the modem is connected to Windows. Why? Because they don't support anything else and to ask for anything else (*nix) is just a waste of their time and mine.
This is actually a symptom of their problem. They are an ISP, they are selling you connectivity, not support for any specific OS. Does your telephone company expect you to plug in a specific brand of phone when you call them?
But the software is usually marketed as being installable and usable by anyone at all.
The former bit really causes problems. With any other piece of technology the concept of installation by (l)users would be dismissed out of hand as self evidently daft. Yet a general purpose computer is quite likely the most complicated machine most people will use. People who might have trouble performing even basic "housekeeping" tasks on a car are suddenly expected to install software and persuade it to coexist with any other software on the same computer.
Third, sometimes the clueless have actually run into the serious bugs that are hard to solve even with skilled geeks on both ends of the line. Not much chance of solving that short of a house call, until some skilled geek calls with the same problem.
Assuming the "skilled geek" could duplicate the problem. They might never try something which was "obviously daft".
Now I'm a lowly DSL/hosting tech support drudge. I have enough basic knowledge to get by at that level, but I haven't the know-how to do much more. My question is, how can it possibly be that Ms. Senior NT Network Administrator acquires this title and position in a world that pays any attention to occupational ability at all?
Most likely they knew all the latest Microsoft jargon and what to click where to get NT to do certain things. But didn't know much about the basic priciples of networking computers or networking protocols.
Do employers mistake an MCSE for a credible credential?
Apparently.
There's been alot of VMS systems that got the boot because of this. Systems that ran, undisturbed, for YEARS at a time, only to be replaced by an NT system that did less, required more admins to maintain them, and crashed on a regular basis!
Wonder if many real TCO studies have been done. Most often when TCO is mentioned it is actually someone oe other's marketing.
The BOZO thing was not calling IBM to repair the machine. OR any of 3 different layers of supports from VARS to after market support.
Or to attempt to recover the data.
She said that she was waiting for the IT manager to help her with a problem. I offered my service to her and she explaind it. The problem: The mouse was on the far right of the mousepad and she needed to move it further to the right. I snickered a bit and explained her that she could pick up the mouse, move it to the left and continue.
:) Wonder if she had been give much, if any, training on the new system.
So much for the idea of GUIs being initutive
Sic 'em on -- oh, say, WalMart, or Ross Perot's organization (now there's someone who'd doubtless promptly tell 'em exactly how far away from sunshine to stick themselves!) IOW, someone with serious capital and a big legal contingent already in-house and accustomed to fending off legal shennanigans.
Maybe they can be tricked into attempting to audit the FBI, ATF, CIA or a military base.