You can claim that piracy is lower for whatever other reasons, but the fact is, tricks like the Windows XP Auth Code do reduce piracy.
No, the authorization code in Windows XP has no effect on "piracy" at all, nor was it ever intended to. Those people who have never bought a copy of Windows have not been stopped. They'll aquire a copy the same as they always have. What the Windows XP authorization scheme attacks is legimate users putting the same copy on multiple machines in the same household - on the family and home office machines. Those people have always bought their copies of Windows, by either getting a legitimate copy with their pre-packaged computer, or by buying it off the shelf. They've been honest. And now their honesty is being punished by this scheme to force them to buy multiple copies of the same operating system. MS already has the entire market - the only way it can keep up it's cancerous growth is to force the same people to buy the same product multiple times.
It was...it was..."MANOS: The Hands Of Fate". Not actually that enjoyable a MST3k, it was more of a legendarily bad movie. Most MST3K episodes are more funny and a lot more watchable.
Uh, maybe you mean "the size of a dreadnaught". A juggernaut is a force, not a unit of size. A dreadnaut is a type of battleship, a thing that is very large indeed. I don't normally get into dictionary nitpicking, but this isn't a misspelling...it's a completely wrong word.
juggernaut(jgr-nôt) n.
Something, such as a belief or institution, that elicits blind and destructive devotion or to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed.
An overwhelming, advancing force that crushes or seems to crush everything in its path: "It doesn't assume that people need necessarily remain passive when confronted by what appears to be the juggernaut of history" (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt).
Juggernaut Used as a title for the Hindu deity Krishna.
dreadnought(drdnôt)
n.
A battleship armed with six or more guns having calibers of 12 inches or more.
To give a better example of how solid the BeOS was for audio: The newest version of the Radar, a 24-channel professional hard-disk recorder was rewritten based on BeOS. Read the specs here. This is a application requiring real-time operation, throughput and totally solid operation. This is not sold as a program running on a computer, with the attendant expectation of crashes. This is a black box that is intended for 24 hour use in a professional recording studio.
Of course what was ACTUALLY traded on Napster and friends? Britney Spears, Backdoor Boys, etc. The usual pop garbage.
No, the irony is that as file trading has been driven further underground, the overground folks have been driven away. Back in Napster's heyday, there were people with obscure tastes putting stuff up. Saturdays and Sundays especially, you'd find the old folks on with their collections of radio shows and you could find totally brilliant stuff from the 20s, 30s and 40s.
But, more important than that, you could see someone getting something and message them. A conversation would start and you'd talk about music. I had a particular album that has never been released on CD and has been out of print for 20 years. I ripped it from LP and people were messaging me thanking me for putting this up, that they hadn't heard it in so long. I met a lot of friends in this way and discovered a lot of new music.
This was person-to-person, rather than just peer-to-peer. Even though Napster sucked (buggy as all get out) it was a great way to meet people and discover stuff. With Gnutella and those type of stuff, you have to know what you're looking for. This pretty much limits people to what they've already been sold. By attacking Napster, the music industry pretty much made sure that only the crappiest stuff would survive. Mediocrity triumphs.
What about the artists expression - If we were really comitted to the ideal of individuals owning their own expression in copyright - most musical acts today would have to pay royalties to previous artists whom most new music is styled after (if not direct rip-off.)
Damn straight! One of the three most outragous copyright lawsuits was Eric Clapton suing Miller Beer. The used one of his songs (paying for the preformance rights) but didn't want to pay a huge amount of money for his actual recording. So they hired someone who sounded like Eric Clapton. Clapton sued and won. (* footnote)
So, this English guy, who has made a career out of imitating black Mississippi Delta bluesmen, sues someone for inmitating a white Englishman initating a black Mississippi delta bluesman.
If that's the case, Eric Clapton owes someone in Mississippi a lot of money.
Just to put this in perspective, imagine the Elvis Presley estate suing every Elvis impersonator.
Note: The other two were: George Harrison being sued by the writers of "He's So Fine" for unconsiously borrowing a three-note melody for "My Sweet Lord"; and Michael Jackson suing some rapper (I forget who) for sampling the single word "beat" from "Beat It" - thereby reducing a "musical performance" to a single word or note. Reductio ad Absurdum, indeed.
Later on she found out that the presumption in the company was that the real Unix wizard-types wear tie-dye or what have you, so she was inadvertantly reinforcing their perception.
Yeah, I know exactly how that is. I was consulting for Forrester Research, one of those opinion companys (unofficial motto: "We only have to be right more than 50% of the time"). There were exactly two of us there who were not driven, tie wearing east coast Yuppies - the server guy (fond of his "Cat In The Hat" hat) and me, the long-haired, t-shirt wearing, myopic fat guy.
I was on the freaking tour! They'd bring these Fortune 500 executive types by where I was working and proudly point out their geek. I gave them geek cred. Later, I helped coach the head of the company when he was on the East Coast team of the Computer Bowl. Sadly, that didn't help as he froze like a deer in the headlights and didn't buzz in with stuff we had covered. Oh well.
When I first got on the Net, it was via an Amiga 1000, dialing from Kansas City to Boston to call The World, the first dial-in ISP at 1200 baud. I then moved to Chicago, where I looked around for an ISP, and joined Chinet. This was run by Randy Suess who, with his friend Ward Christensen (who wrote Xmodem) and they created CBBS which launched in 1978, considered to be the first BBS.
why is it so hard to grasp that maybe they chose n'sync because they didn't want people to make copies of that cd?
The choice doesn't appear random in any way. If they had tried this nonsense with a CD from someone who gets played on "Alternative" or "AAA" stations, they'd have a lot more trouble right out of the box. Every office in the world has people using the CD drive in their computer to play audio CDs. But few Nsync listeners work in offices. Most of them are still in school.
all these elaborate conspiracy theories are kind of ridiculous.
I might agree with you if modern record company executives weren't evil personified. As they typically behave in a manner that would cause Satan to blush with shame, no behavior can be ruled out.
It's not paranoia if they actually are out to get you. The next step is suing individuals sharing songs.
This isn't about ripping CDs and sharing them. It really isn't. This is about building the market for copy-protected digital files. This is about selling you several copies of the same album, one for your home CD player, and WMA file for your portable, a different one for your work computer. This is all about changing the world from "buy it once and listen to it everywhere" to "par per listen".
Quite right. I'll bet a lot of kids in Nsync's "target demographic" (a much more accurate description than "audience" or "listeners") have computers in their rooms, but no other music playing systems. I don't have any kids, but it would make more sense to me to supply them with a PC with a CD drive than with a PC and a seperate stereo. You can't change the skin on a stereo.
This is going to irritate a lot of other people when they start applying this to music that *isn't* disposible. Even high-end audiophiles are ripping to hard disk, using systems like the Linn. They've discovered that digital audio played back from a hard disk and re-clocked is free of the jitter inherent in even the best CD players.
Hell, back in the late 80s and early 90s they used to have the "@-Party" at the World Science Fiction Convention. All you needed was an e-mail address to get in. Even at this convocation of self-selected, very geeky people filling several hotels, all the "internet people" were able to party in one hotel suite. I remember meeting Cliff Stoll (before he went all curmugonly) and ESR was hawking his fresh-off-the-press "The New Hacker's Dictionary".
Someone even put instructions on how to crash the @-Party on one of the (physical) bulletin boards. They had printed things like "yourname@domain.com" and people came up to the door claiming that their e-mail address was yourname@domain.com. They didn't get in.
I complained to the people manning the X-10 booth at CEDIA (Custom Electronics Design & Installation Asssociation - home theater and whole house electronics) convention. I tried telling the booth weasle how hated their ads are, and the smug jerkwad just kept repeating how many million "page views" they kept getting. I told them they could just as effectively get their logo tattooed on frat boys ass cheeks and pay them to drive around mooning people. Or use a soldering iron to burn the logo into a 2" by 4" and run around wacking people in the face with it.
Unclear on the concept does not seem to even come close to describing these morons. We have to do something more.
Commonwealth Edison generates most of it's power via nukes. This annoys a lot of people, but they're trying to take advantage of the gap between how the plants generate energy and the way people use it.
Homer Simpson notwithstanding, they don't hit a giant "off" switch at night. So they have a number of efforts to use the power generating capacity of their plants during the off-peak hours.
One of these is a set of building in downtown Chicago that make ice all night long. During the day, the 33 degree water from the melting ice is distributed to downtown buildings. They get cheaper air conditioning, more rentable floors because they don't need to build chillers and ComEd gets less demand during the day.
Another is to make hyrdogen from water during the evening. There are hydrogen powered buses running on the streets of Chicago today.
Neither of these are very efficient ways of using energy. But it is compared to letting the reactor heat go to waste because people are not demanding it at the moment.
Disclaimer: I'm aware of this because I was paid as a freelancer for an animation of the chilled water system.
The silly part is that the cost of these promotional copies does NOT come out of the record companies share of the royalties, but out of Jackson's.
But it is mega-stupid. I attend the National Association of Broadcasters show every year, and a huge percentage of broadcasters are playing back from hard disk. Actually employing some talking monkey to put the new Jacko single in a CD player every 15 minutes would just cut into profits. Instead, they rip it to a Broadcast WAV file (although, given the amount of compression that is going to be applied at the transmitter, they might as well rip it to a 96k MP3)
This is going to snap back into their faces so hard...
Haven't these audio experts at Nasa heard about baking the tapes? That's standard procedure for any audio or video tapes of that vintage. You put it in a scientific oven (one that maintains a constant temperature, rahter than cycling on and off) at 130 degrees for 4 to 5 hours. That bakes out the liquid and emulsifies the binder. I've been restoring old 1/2" black & white videotapes. They were unplayable without baking and clogged the heads after 30 seconds. After, I was able to play fairly long sections.
If the usual military-industrial suspects were developing robot prototypes and testing them against one another, they would cost the taxpayers $156 million per. But slip Comedy Central a couple of bucks to create a TV show, and folks will dig into their own pockets to build them! What a bunch of saps!
If you already have ethernet cable strung through your house, wouldn't it just make more sense to connect your computer to the network, and then just listen to the mp3 files by connecting a stereo to that computer?
Because not all of us have Panasonic Toughbooks and that's pretty much the only sort of computer I'd want in the kitchen or the crapper. I want these sort of little gadgets all over the house in all sorts of places where it makes no sense to try to place a laptop or monitor.
As Joe Bob Briggs said: I'm surprised I have to explain these things!
My view of Tesla is somewhere in the middle. He was a great genius and a true inventor (unlike that marketeer and lab manager Edison) but towards the end of his life he suffered from mental illness. His obsessive-compulsive disorder is well documented, and any number of examples can be given of great men falling in love with an idea, and losing their self-critical facilities as they age (vis. Linus Pauling's obssession with Vitamin C).
The erronous view of Tesla you attribute to skeptics probably has more to do with his cult's deification of him, rather than his real work. The man himself wrote little about his work other than his patents.
Mod me back down! I was kidding for crying out loud! It was a joke about how every crackpot in the world appears to have chosen Tesla as their "patron saint", in spite of his actually being a very serious scientist who had an immeasurable impact on the world.
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No, the authorization code in Windows XP has no effect on "piracy" at all, nor was it ever intended to. Those people who have never bought a copy of Windows have not been stopped. They'll aquire a copy the same as they always have. What the Windows XP authorization scheme attacks is legimate users putting the same copy on multiple machines in the same household - on the family and home office machines. Those people have always bought their copies of Windows, by either getting a legitimate copy with their pre-packaged computer, or by buying it off the shelf. They've been honest. And now their honesty is being punished by this scheme to force them to buy multiple copies of the same operating system. MS already has the entire market - the only way it can keep up it's cancerous growth is to force the same people to buy the same product multiple times.
It was...it was..."MANOS: The Hands Of Fate". Not actually that enjoyable a MST3k, it was more of a legendarily bad movie. Most MST3K episodes are more funny and a lot more watchable.
Uh, maybe you mean "the size of a dreadnaught". A juggernaut is a force, not a unit of size. A dreadnaut is a type of battleship, a thing that is very large indeed. I don't normally get into dictionary nitpicking, but this isn't a misspelling...it's a completely wrong word.
juggernaut (jgr-nôt)
n.
Something, such as a belief or institution, that elicits blind and destructive devotion or to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed.
An overwhelming, advancing force that crushes or seems to crush everything in its path: "It doesn't assume that people need necessarily remain passive when confronted by what appears to be the juggernaut of history" (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt).
Juggernaut Used as a title for the Hindu deity Krishna.
dreadnought (drdnôt)
n. A battleship armed with six or more guns having calibers of 12 inches or more.
To give a better example of how solid the BeOS was for audio: The newest version of the Radar, a 24-channel professional hard-disk recorder was rewritten based on BeOS. Read the specs here. This is a application requiring real-time operation, throughput and totally solid operation. This is not sold as a program running on a computer, with the attendant expectation of crashes. This is a black box that is intended for 24 hour use in a professional recording studio.
Two problems with this though:
Not surprising, as the 4th was sacrificed on the alter of the drug war.
No, the irony is that as file trading has been driven further underground, the overground folks have been driven away. Back in Napster's heyday, there were people with obscure tastes putting stuff up. Saturdays and Sundays especially, you'd find the old folks on with their collections of radio shows and you could find totally brilliant stuff from the 20s, 30s and 40s.
But, more important than that, you could see someone getting something and message them. A conversation would start and you'd talk about music. I had a particular album that has never been released on CD and has been out of print for 20 years. I ripped it from LP and people were messaging me thanking me for putting this up, that they hadn't heard it in so long. I met a lot of friends in this way and discovered a lot of new music.
This was person-to-person, rather than just peer-to-peer. Even though Napster sucked (buggy as all get out) it was a great way to meet people and discover stuff. With Gnutella and those type of stuff, you have to know what you're looking for. This pretty much limits people to what they've already been sold. By attacking Napster, the music industry pretty much made sure that only the crappiest stuff would survive. Mediocrity triumphs.
Damn straight! One of the three most outragous copyright lawsuits was Eric Clapton suing Miller Beer. The used one of his songs (paying for the preformance rights) but didn't want to pay a huge amount of money for his actual recording. So they hired someone who sounded like Eric Clapton. Clapton sued and won. (* footnote)
So, this English guy, who has made a career out of imitating black Mississippi Delta bluesmen, sues someone for inmitating a white Englishman initating a black Mississippi delta bluesman.
If that's the case, Eric Clapton owes someone in Mississippi a lot of money.
Just to put this in perspective, imagine the Elvis Presley estate suing every Elvis impersonator.
Note: The other two were: George Harrison being sued by the writers of "He's So Fine" for unconsiously borrowing a three-note melody for "My Sweet Lord"; and Michael Jackson suing some rapper (I forget who) for sampling the single word "beat" from "Beat It" - thereby reducing a "musical performance" to a single word or note. Reductio ad Absurdum, indeed.
Yeah, I know exactly how that is. I was consulting for Forrester Research, one of those opinion companys (unofficial motto: "We only have to be right more than 50% of the time"). There were exactly two of us there who were not driven, tie wearing east coast Yuppies - the server guy (fond of his "Cat In The Hat" hat) and me, the long-haired, t-shirt wearing, myopic fat guy.
I was on the freaking tour! They'd bring these Fortune 500 executive types by where I was working and proudly point out their geek. I gave them geek cred. Later, I helped coach the head of the company when he was on the East Coast team of the Computer Bowl. Sadly, that didn't help as he froze like a deer in the headlights and didn't buzz in with stuff we had covered. Oh well.
Nah, my "quirky engineer" archtype is Val Kilmer's "Chris Knight" in "Real Genius".
Nonsense. I had ION and I live on the 3rd floor of an apartment building. I loved it.
When I first got on the Net, it was via an Amiga 1000, dialing from Kansas City to Boston to call The World, the first dial-in ISP at 1200 baud. I then moved to Chicago, where I looked around for an ISP, and joined Chinet. This was run by Randy Suess who, with his friend Ward Christensen (who wrote Xmodem) and they created CBBS which launched in 1978, considered to be the first BBS.
The choice doesn't appear random in any way. If they had tried this nonsense with a CD from someone who gets played on "Alternative" or "AAA" stations, they'd have a lot more trouble right out of the box. Every office in the world has people using the CD drive in their computer to play audio CDs. But few Nsync listeners work in offices. Most of them are still in school.
I might agree with you if modern record company executives weren't evil personified. As they typically behave in a manner that would cause Satan to blush with shame, no behavior can be ruled out.
It's not paranoia if they actually are out to get you. The next step is suing individuals sharing songs.
This isn't about ripping CDs and sharing them. It really isn't. This is about building the market for copy-protected digital files. This is about selling you several copies of the same album, one for your home CD player, and WMA file for your portable, a different one for your work computer. This is all about changing the world from "buy it once and listen to it everywhere" to "par per listen".
Quite right. I'll bet a lot of kids in Nsync's "target demographic" (a much more accurate description than "audience" or "listeners") have computers in their rooms, but no other music playing systems. I don't have any kids, but it would make more sense to me to supply them with a PC with a CD drive than with a PC and a seperate stereo. You can't change the skin on a stereo.
This is going to irritate a lot of other people when they start applying this to music that *isn't* disposible. Even high-end audiophiles are ripping to hard disk, using systems like the Linn. They've discovered that digital audio played back from a hard disk and re-clocked is free of the jitter inherent in even the best CD players.
Hell, back in the late 80s and early 90s they used to have the "@-Party" at the World Science Fiction Convention. All you needed was an e-mail address to get in. Even at this convocation of self-selected, very geeky people filling several hotels, all the "internet people" were able to party in one hotel suite. I remember meeting Cliff Stoll (before he went all curmugonly) and ESR was hawking his fresh-off-the-press "The New Hacker's Dictionary".
Someone even put instructions on how to crash the @-Party on one of the (physical) bulletin boards. They had printed things like "yourname@domain.com" and people came up to the door claiming that their e-mail address was yourname@domain.com. They didn't get in.
I complained to the people manning the X-10 booth at CEDIA (Custom Electronics Design & Installation Asssociation - home theater and whole house electronics) convention. I tried telling the booth weasle how hated their ads are, and the smug jerkwad just kept repeating how many million "page views" they kept getting. I told them they could just as effectively get their logo tattooed on frat boys ass cheeks and pay them to drive around mooning people. Or use a soldering iron to burn the logo into a 2" by 4" and run around wacking people in the face with it.
Unclear on the concept does not seem to even come close to describing these morons. We have to do something more.
Commonwealth Edison generates most of it's power via nukes. This annoys a lot of people, but they're trying to take advantage of the gap between how the plants generate energy and the way people use it.
Homer Simpson notwithstanding, they don't hit a giant "off" switch at night. So they have a number of efforts to use the power generating capacity of their plants during the off-peak hours.
One of these is a set of building in downtown Chicago that make ice all night long. During the day, the 33 degree water from the melting ice is distributed to downtown buildings. They get cheaper air conditioning, more rentable floors because they don't need to build chillers and ComEd gets less demand during the day.
Another is to make hyrdogen from water during the evening. There are hydrogen powered buses running on the streets of Chicago today.
Neither of these are very efficient ways of using energy. But it is compared to letting the reactor heat go to waste because people are not demanding it at the moment.
Disclaimer: I'm aware of this because I was paid as a freelancer for an animation of the chilled water system.
The silly part is that the cost of these promotional copies does NOT come out of the record companies share of the royalties, but out of Jackson's.
But it is mega-stupid. I attend the National Association of Broadcasters show every year, and a huge percentage of broadcasters are playing back from hard disk. Actually employing some talking monkey to put the new Jacko single in a CD player every 15 minutes would just cut into profits. Instead, they rip it to a Broadcast WAV file (although, given the amount of compression that is going to be applied at the transmitter, they might as well rip it to a 96k MP3)
This is going to snap back into their faces so hard...
Haven't these audio experts at Nasa heard about baking the tapes? That's standard procedure for any audio or video tapes of that vintage. You put it in a scientific oven (one that maintains a constant temperature, rahter than cycling on and off) at 130 degrees for 4 to 5 hours. That bakes out the liquid and emulsifies the binder. I've been restoring old 1/2" black & white videotapes. They were unplayable without baking and clogged the heads after 30 seconds. After, I was able to play fairly long sections.
If the usual military-industrial suspects were developing robot prototypes and testing them against one another, they would cost the taxpayers $156 million per. But slip Comedy Central a couple of bucks to create a TV show, and folks will dig into their own pockets to build them! What a bunch of saps!
Enjoy the show folks!
A while back, we saw a method for moving objects around using complex waveforms
It occured to me that this basic idea (at extremely higher frequencies) could be used to move nanoscale structures around.
Because not all of us have Panasonic Toughbooks and that's pretty much the only sort of computer I'd want in the kitchen or the crapper. I want these sort of little gadgets all over the house in all sorts of places where it makes no sense to try to place a laptop or monitor.
As Joe Bob Briggs said: I'm surprised I have to explain these things!
...and mod this guy up, please.
My view of Tesla is somewhere in the middle. He was a great genius and a true inventor (unlike that marketeer and lab manager Edison) but towards the end of his life he suffered from mental illness. His obsessive-compulsive disorder is well documented, and any number of examples can be given of great men falling in love with an idea, and losing their self-critical facilities as they age (vis. Linus Pauling's obssession with Vitamin C).
The erronous view of Tesla you attribute to skeptics probably has more to do with his cult's deification of him, rather than his real work. The man himself wrote little about his work other than his patents.
Mod me back down! I was kidding for crying out loud! It was a joke about how every crackpot in the world appears to have chosen Tesla as their "patron saint", in spite of his actually being a very serious scientist who had an immeasurable impact on the world.
...while reading old notebooks of Nikolas Tesla.