Why does Apple require ISRCs? If it's just a sop to the RIAA, Apple could abandon that requirement if the RIAA decides to break with Apple.
Or is there some more arcane legal reason, to help keep Apple in the clear against copyright infringement somehow? iTunes-downloaded music aren't supposed to be used for airplay anyway.
Would it be possible to mod it so that you could take out the power directly from the alternator? If you take the power via the DC circuit you're losing power through the battery and the inverter.
It may be that the power out of the alternator isn't clean enough to pipe into your house without cleanup that would cost more than the inverter. (I'm not a power guy; I'm just curious.)
Can you imagine the orgiastic frenzy of advertising dollars that could have been made...
Actually, I can't. Can you elaborate? Are you saying that the RIAA would make more money if they didn't charge for their product? How exactly does that work? They make up for it in volume?
On second read I suspect that you're saying that they could attract online advertisers if they gave the music away for free? Perhaps, but I'm not sure you understand how much it costs to produce an album. A friend just produced an album at an incredible discount of $22,000. Even at a dollar a click they'd have to get a LOT of click-throughs.
And it would be harder to tie music to ads. The genius of Google is that they present you ads that may be relevant to you based on your search. That's extremely broad, and inexpensive to produce, because you're buying based on keywords. I can't imagine a similar approach being as effective for music. A plumber is going to advertise whenever people search for plumbing-y music?
Without a doubt they should have been in the online music sales game WAY before they did. But seach engines are a very limited way of driving sales. If you've ever run a web site selling anything you'll know that it takes a hell of a lot more than just building it and waiting for people to come. Ask any band with a myspace account; there are far too many of them, and even the cross-linking ("if you liked this you'll also like...") produces only very limited results.
I'm not happy with their legalistic approach, I can't help but wonder if CD sales were up last year partly because they've been so aggressive about suing people. I'm not happy about the laywers, but I'm not happy with the fact that people are doing illegal things, either. The secret to not getting sued by the RIAA is to pay for your music.
You pooh-pooh its effectiveness, but CD sales are up for the first time in years. As I said in my original post correlation is not causation, but I'm sure at least some people are buying CDs that they'd rather have downloaded except that they now know in very stark terms that it's illegal and will be prosecuted.
Just banging out a song on your guitar in your basement is one thing. Producing an album is different.
A friend of mine just produced an album, and by getting some remarkable deals spent a mere $22,000 on it. That's what it costs to make something album-quality (studio time, engineering, mixing, producing, cover art, mastering, etc.) and doesn't include either the musicians' time (much less rehearsal time) or their instruments. She'd like to make a living doing it, and she's $22,000 in the hole before she's sold a single copy.
So yeah, you better bet she thinks of herself as owning that music. She put in work and spent money; is it unreasonable for her to expect you to make a contribution if you want a copy?
She doesn't just want to be heard; if she wanted that she'd do it in her basement. And she does, but you're not invited into her basement. If other people like it, why shouldn't she be able to charge for it? She'll make some money from playing concerts and selling merchandise, but the CDs cost a lot to make, too, and are clearly valuable enough for some people to pay for them.
Such studies are going to be extremely hard to perform, because there are so many hard-to-measure factors involved. It's well known that there have been fewer CD sales in the last few years, but how much of that is due to P2P, legal song-at-a-time downloads, satellite radio, or just plain crappy music is nearly impossible to sort out. They were up last year, but I can't say if that's due to better music or to RIAA lawsuits scaring some people into buying rather than downloading (or even crappy accounting designed to convince RIAA shareholders that their campaigns are working).
Personally, I put the burden of proof on the music sharers. Given that the people who paid to have the music made have asked them not to do it, "prove to me that I'm costing you money" seems like the wrong way around. (And I'm tangentially involved in a band; I know how expensive it is to get an album made and promoted.)
I do not doubt that at least some CD sales have been lost to P2P. That seems pretty straightforward: at least some poeple who would have bought an album have instead chosen to download it (or part of it) for free. So there's very good reason to believe that at least some money has been lost.
Combine the two (you'd expect file sharing to lower CD sales, and CD sales have fallen), and that's as close to "actually and truthfully show[ing] that this is the case" as you're likely to get. It's not genuine proof, as I'm sure everybody is likely to remind me in their replies, but it seems strong enough to me to put the burden of proof on the shoulders of those who contend that file sharing isn't immoral.
Has it harmed artists? That's even harder to say. How many fewer bands do less-profitable recording labels sign? Even the bands that they do sign receive a negligible sum for actual CD sales, but do people go to concerts or buy merchandise from bands they've downloaded but weren't willing to pay for? I can't even begin to tell you how to measure that. There are so many bands (so, so many) and such a small chance of making any real money off of it that it's nearly impossible to measure how much they've been harmed, helped, or otherwise.
At least one band I know likes it when you download their music; it means you're listening and may even go to a club to see them or buy a tee-shirt. But the fact that many people would download their music anyway, even if they weren't fine with that, bugs the hell out of them.
100 KHz? Really? I don't know much about power distribution, but wouldn't AC at that frequency cause all sorts of interference? And wouldn't you have to stick transformers everywhere to actually use it?
A bit of googling says yeah, people really do 100 khz power supplies, and higher. But I don't understand the advantage.
My dictionary lists "binging" as an acceptable spelling, but it took me a couple of extra parses on this (not least because "gorges" can be a noun as well as a verb.)
I still don't, ya know, CARE, but at least I understand the headline.
They'll stop suing 13 year old girls when the 13 year old girls stop breaking the law.
Which could happen when: 1. Somebody changes the law 2. They DRM everything 3. The 13 year olds are too scared to listen to music 4. The 13 year olds decide that the RIAA music isn't worth listening to in the first place
The story was originally broken by the Washington Post (some sort of registration required, I suspect). They cite an FBI memo. At least at the Post they can spell correctly.
The Post says that many individual agents find this pretty ridiculous and humorous, and most of the body of the article is spent giving various people their say on how relevant the search for porn is. But one thing it does confirm is that this is going after regular porn ("obscenity") and not just the clearly criminal porn.
They're not claiming eminent domain, and the original article doesn't mention it; that's from the summary written by the submitter.
They're claiming instead something called the state secrets privilege, which has nothing to do with property (intellectual or otherwise) but rather with quashing the lawsuit. Eminent domain has to do with real, not intellectual, property, since it is a "taking", and as is incessantly pointed out on Slashdot you can't "take" intellectual property.
What that big state secret is, of course, I can't say, since most of the filings in the case are (duh) secret.
In other words, the government isn't claiming that it has any rights to the patent; it's just claiming that the guy isn't allowed to sue, because that would violate some big state secret.
So they get to use the patent, with no legal right to it, but what kind of right is it that you can't enforce under the law? No right at all. Sound like a totalitarian regime to you? Gold star!
I loved my V60c, and when the screen went I couldn't find anything to replace it that didn't come with a million other features sucking up battery life. So I ditched it, glad to be rid of its stupid break-off antenna (I replaced it nearly a dozen times in its two-year life span).
But when the new phone had to go in for repairs, I briefly re-activated the V60. That was a pleasure.
It's certainly true that root access causes the most headaches, but there's a lot that can be done without root access.
Even with just user-level access, it can erase all of your files or set up a spam relay. It may even be able to set up a keystroke logger or install a modified version of your browser (for you alone) that slurps up your credit card numbers. And it can modify your local.rc files to re-run itself when you boot (and check to see if you've altered them and re-modify them as soon as you're done.)
It's a heck of a lot easier to remove than a root-level exploit (you can log in as root and remove the code, which you can't necessarily do to a rootkit). But even though the lack of root can limit the damage, considerable damage can be done without it.
The solution? Well, partly it would be nice to have the OS provide fine-grained control, so that even if malicious code gets to execute it could be prevented from modifying your files without explicit permission or accessing the Internet to act as a spam relay. But such fine-grained controls are incredibly tedious; they exist in Java but they're rarely used.)
Failing that, the rest of the solution is to be write any program that downloads arbitrary content from the internet very, very carefully.
Really? I find it pretty darn buggy. It crashes frequently; the change-tracking feature is intolerably slow; it often mis-numbers autonumbering; it botches not-terribly-complicated page layouts.
I guess it's all in the features you use. I still use it because the price is right. And "pretty darn buggy" is still "only about as buggy as Microsoft Office."
I'd really like to see a few of the numbers that go into that $6 billion computation. Given that the current contenders for the space elevator are too short by nearly a dozen orders of magnitude, and that's before you start to work out how you get it there, making sure it's safe, and the research issues we haven't even forseen yet.
IEEE Spectrum is a reputable journal, but it still sounds to me like the $6 billion is a fundamental number, i.e. pulled out of his ass.
Sure, I'd call for spending a measley $10 billion in a heartbeat, if I thought it would work. But I'm gonna need a lot more reason to believe it can happen than a microscopic black dot and a number I read on the Internet.
As a Slashdotter said once: build me a 40,000 millimeter bridge across a gulch on a campus, and then we can start to talk about a 40,000 kilometer bridge straight up.
So we're still four orders of magnitude from the point where we can usefully consider the remaining six orders.
Making the music is easy (well, besides hundreds of hours spent playing your guitar until your fingers bleed and singing until they have to remove the nodules from your vocal chords). But getting your album promoted is a huge challenge.
It's not impossible, but it's a huge risk. You travel for many hours to play in half-empty clubs, even more hours on the phone dealing with sleazy club owners who know they have you over a barrel, and put up a lot of money up front to press CDs and create merchandise. I know bands who do this, and most of them will spend all that money and time up front and still never make it. There are an awful lot of independent bands, and each one is fighting to be heard. The one thing you get from the major labels is the massive hype machine.
But they wouldn't deal with the major labels anyway. They'd rather lose on their own terms than win on theirs, because the RIAAs terms (as you point out) are terrible. That hype machine is incredibly expensive, and the artists don't get to use it for free. But don't make it sound like the alternative is as easy as running out to get a CD burner.
I use the Go menu for one very specific things: alt-G, H takes me to my Home page.
Yeah, I could do that with a bookmark. But it just so happens that my home page is My Yahoo. If you type alt-B, M, you don't get taken to a bookmark beginning with M. You get the Manage Bookmarks. It can be adapted, but only by fiddling with chrome (which gets in your way if you want to update releases.)
Yeah, I could simply call the bookmark something else, but basically I find it easy to have alt-G, H work; it's now a habit. Other than that I completely ignore the Go menu.
Well gosh, we may have made parts of the world unliveable for decades to come in the past, but this time we've got the problem licked. You can trust our figures: we've got a vested interest in selling nuke plants!
Sorry for the sarcasm; I'd really like to see something replace our fossil fuel dependencies, and I'm even willing to consider the long-term problems that nuke plants saddle us with in exchange for it.
But many people are deathly afraid of the idea with good reason: when nuke plants fail they fail really, really badly. And the people who are telling us they're safe now told us the same things when they built the first generation of nuke plants.
So what I'm saying is: I'm willing to be convinced, but it'll take a lot of work.
The "killer app" is your new computer. Around 2007 or so when you decide that you're tired of your current box (too many virus attacks, no new games, bits starting to fail, whatever) you'll call up for a new one and it'll come with Vista. XP won't be an option.
Most home users never upgrade their OS; they get a new OS when they get a new computer. Some office environments will upgrade the OS to keep all of the computers in synch, but I suspect far more copies of Windows come with new computers than are sold individually. Especially since the price is so much lower that way.
But if the requirements now make a Mac cheaper, how many people will buy that instead?
And as you say, your current box is pretty damn good. I suspect you'll hold on to it for quite some time unless you find that killer app. But even without it, eventually that computer is going to get replaced. And if you stick with MS, that'll be Vista.
You don't think that email is a sufficient way to spread?
Once the app is running, it can connect to port 25 on any computer it likes, and email itself to everybody in the world. That's the way Windows trojans work and I don't think OS X has any way to stop it. The only advantage OS X has is that if you mail to xjdfher@hotmail.com the odds of it being another OS X user are pretty low. But trojans are patient; what else have they got to do?
(On Windows I use ZoneAlarm which lets me know if a program is unexpectedly trying to use an outgoing port, and I assume Mac has an equivalent available, but I don't believe it's on by default because it's kind of a pain for inexperienced users to manage.)
More than one Windows trojan has gotten plenty of traction that way. Yeah, it involves an intervention on each and every new infection, but the ILoveYou virus spread pretty damn fast.
The most people can come up with are feeble ages-old UNIX/Linux-style rootkits and/or numerous trojans that depend on social engineering.
But isn't that sufficient? Windows users seem perfectly content to click on email attachments labeled "Click here to destroy computer".
I don't use a Mac, and so I'm perfectly willing to believe that the Mac makes you go through some sort of hoops before executing arbitrary attached content. But Windows users seem to be willing to unzip, enter the enclosed password, save the file to disk, and then execute it. I'm hard pressed to imagine what would be "too much". I've always figured that if you mailed them a sledgehammer with instructions to bash their computer, they'd do it. (At least they'd only bash the monitor, figuring it was "the computer".)
As you say, Mac's relatively small market share will continue to protect it for some time. But I imagine that sooner or later somebody will write it just for the hell of it. Then we'll answer the real question that underlies the flame wars: are Mac users smarter than Windows users?
I mean that seriously. In dealings between business and business, and business and consumers, the government is the final authority in disputes. If you can't get somebody to do what the law (or the contract) tells them to do, lawsuits are your recourse.
Most of the time, it never comes to that. The dry cleaner gives you back your shirts; the bank honors your checks; the contractor finishes your house. If that doesn't happen, your final recourse is a lawsuit. Every single business transaction has, at the back, the notion that you could, in extremis, ask the courts to resolve any dispute.
Most people never have to. But then, most people aren't faced with literally tens of thousands (millions, probably) of potential customers making an end-run around their real business model (selling CDs) and getting it for free.
The law suits aren't their business model. Their business model is selling CDs. The law suits are where they go when people break the law and upset their business model.
Look, I hate defending those RIAA**holes. They're being complete jackasses about this, and there are all sorts of recourses they can and should be taking besides suing people. The first step, as with the dry cleaner, the bank, and the roofing contractor, is asking nicely. I'm afraid they're long past that stage. Check this thread and you'll find an awful lot of people who feel that it's their right to download music for free. And as long as the RIAA find they have to turn to the ultimate recourse, they will do so. They'll file lawsuits. Lots of 'em.
Often companies don't realize that they have zombie machines on their network that have been sending e-mail.
Well, you could sign up with some sort of reputation service. Or you could just start with those machines which are spewing port 25 all day, every day. Those are either zombies or people with a LOT of friends.
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Why does Apple require ISRCs? If it's just a sop to the RIAA, Apple could abandon that requirement if the RIAA decides to break with Apple.
Or is there some more arcane legal reason, to help keep Apple in the clear against copyright infringement somehow? iTunes-downloaded music aren't supposed to be used for airplay anyway.
Would it be possible to mod it so that you could take out the power directly from the alternator? If you take the power via the DC circuit you're losing power through the battery and the inverter.
It may be that the power out of the alternator isn't clean enough to pipe into your house without cleanup that would cost more than the inverter. (I'm not a power guy; I'm just curious.)
Hell, I'd still be using my copy of Eudora Lite if my mail provider hadn't switched to some authentication that Eudora didn't support.
Can you imagine the orgiastic frenzy of advertising dollars that could have been made ...
Actually, I can't. Can you elaborate? Are you saying that the RIAA would make more money if they didn't charge for their product? How exactly does that work? They make up for it in volume?
On second read I suspect that you're saying that they could attract online advertisers if they gave the music away for free? Perhaps, but I'm not sure you understand how much it costs to produce an album. A friend just produced an album at an incredible discount of $22,000. Even at a dollar a click they'd have to get a LOT of click-throughs.
And it would be harder to tie music to ads. The genius of Google is that they present you ads that may be relevant to you based on your search. That's extremely broad, and inexpensive to produce, because you're buying based on keywords. I can't imagine a similar approach being as effective for music. A plumber is going to advertise whenever people search for plumbing-y music?
Without a doubt they should have been in the online music sales game WAY before they did. But seach engines are a very limited way of driving sales. If you've ever run a web site selling anything you'll know that it takes a hell of a lot more than just building it and waiting for people to come. Ask any band with a myspace account; there are far too many of them, and even the cross-linking ("if you liked this you'll also like...") produces only very limited results.
I'm not happy with their legalistic approach, I can't help but wonder if CD sales were up last year partly because they've been so aggressive about suing people. I'm not happy about the laywers, but I'm not happy with the fact that people are doing illegal things, either. The secret to not getting sued by the RIAA is to pay for your music.
You pooh-pooh its effectiveness, but CD sales are up for the first time in years. As I said in my original post correlation is not causation, but I'm sure at least some people are buying CDs that they'd rather have downloaded except that they now know in very stark terms that it's illegal and will be prosecuted.
Just banging out a song on your guitar in your basement is one thing. Producing an album is different.
A friend of mine just produced an album, and by getting some remarkable deals spent a mere $22,000 on it. That's what it costs to make something album-quality (studio time, engineering, mixing, producing, cover art, mastering, etc.) and doesn't include either the musicians' time (much less rehearsal time) or their instruments. She'd like to make a living doing it, and she's $22,000 in the hole before she's sold a single copy.
So yeah, you better bet she thinks of herself as owning that music. She put in work and spent money; is it unreasonable for her to expect you to make a contribution if you want a copy?
She doesn't just want to be heard; if she wanted that she'd do it in her basement. And she does, but you're not invited into her basement. If other people like it, why shouldn't she be able to charge for it? She'll make some money from playing concerts and selling merchandise, but the CDs cost a lot to make, too, and are clearly valuable enough for some people to pay for them.
Such studies are going to be extremely hard to perform, because there are so many hard-to-measure factors involved. It's well known that there have been fewer CD sales in the last few years, but how much of that is due to P2P, legal song-at-a-time downloads, satellite radio, or just plain crappy music is nearly impossible to sort out. They were up last year, but I can't say if that's due to better music or to RIAA lawsuits scaring some people into buying rather than downloading (or even crappy accounting designed to convince RIAA shareholders that their campaigns are working).
Personally, I put the burden of proof on the music sharers. Given that the people who paid to have the music made have asked them not to do it, "prove to me that I'm costing you money" seems like the wrong way around. (And I'm tangentially involved in a band; I know how expensive it is to get an album made and promoted.)
I do not doubt that at least some CD sales have been lost to P2P. That seems pretty straightforward: at least some poeple who would have bought an album have instead chosen to download it (or part of it) for free. So there's very good reason to believe that at least some money has been lost.
Combine the two (you'd expect file sharing to lower CD sales, and CD sales have fallen), and that's as close to "actually and truthfully show[ing] that this is the case" as you're likely to get. It's not genuine proof, as I'm sure everybody is likely to remind me in their replies, but it seems strong enough to me to put the burden of proof on the shoulders of those who contend that file sharing isn't immoral.
Has it harmed artists? That's even harder to say. How many fewer bands do less-profitable recording labels sign? Even the bands that they do sign receive a negligible sum for actual CD sales, but do people go to concerts or buy merchandise from bands they've downloaded but weren't willing to pay for? I can't even begin to tell you how to measure that. There are so many bands (so, so many) and such a small chance of making any real money off of it that it's nearly impossible to measure how much they've been harmed, helped, or otherwise.
At least one band I know likes it when you download their music; it means you're listening and may even go to a club to see them or buy a tee-shirt. But the fact that many people would download their music anyway, even if they weren't fine with that, bugs the hell out of them.
100 KHz? Really? I don't know much about power distribution, but wouldn't AC at that frequency cause all sorts of interference? And wouldn't you have to stick transformers everywhere to actually use it?
A bit of googling says yeah, people really do 100 khz power supplies, and higher. But I don't understand the advantage.
I can at least understand it when editors leave in typos out of laziness, but to go out of their way to introduce them seems egregious.
My dictionary lists "binging" as an acceptable spelling, but it took me a couple of extra parses on this (not least because "gorges" can be a noun as well as a verb.)
I still don't, ya know, CARE, but at least I understand the headline.
They'll stop suing 13 year old girls when the 13 year old girls stop breaking the law.
Which could happen when:
1. Somebody changes the law
2. They DRM everything
3. The 13 year olds are too scared to listen to music
4. The 13 year olds decide that the RIAA music isn't worth listening to in the first place
I dunno which happens first.
The story was originally broken by the Washington Post (some sort of registration required, I suspect). They cite an FBI memo. At least at the Post they can spell correctly.
The Post says that many individual agents find this pretty ridiculous and humorous, and most of the body of the article is spent giving various people their say on how relevant the search for porn is. But one thing it does confirm is that this is going after regular porn ("obscenity") and not just the clearly criminal porn.
They're not claiming eminent domain, and the original article doesn't mention it; that's from the summary written by the submitter.
They're claiming instead something called the state secrets privilege, which has nothing to do with property (intellectual or otherwise) but rather with quashing the lawsuit. Eminent domain has to do with real, not intellectual, property, since it is a "taking", and as is incessantly pointed out on Slashdot you can't "take" intellectual property.
What that big state secret is, of course, I can't say, since most of the filings in the case are (duh) secret.
In other words, the government isn't claiming that it has any rights to the patent; it's just claiming that the guy isn't allowed to sue, because that would violate some big state secret.
So they get to use the patent, with no legal right to it, but what kind of right is it that you can't enforce under the law? No right at all. Sound like a totalitarian regime to you? Gold star!
I loved my V60c, and when the screen went I couldn't find anything to replace it that didn't come with a million other features sucking up battery life. So I ditched it, glad to be rid of its stupid break-off antenna (I replaced it nearly a dozen times in its two-year life span).
But when the new phone had to go in for repairs, I briefly re-activated the V60. That was a pleasure.
It's certainly true that root access causes the most headaches, but there's a lot that can be done without root access.
.rc files to re-run itself when you boot (and check to see if you've altered them and re-modify them as soon as you're done.)
Even with just user-level access, it can erase all of your files or set up a spam relay. It may even be able to set up a keystroke logger or install a modified version of your browser (for you alone) that slurps up your credit card numbers. And it can modify your local
It's a heck of a lot easier to remove than a root-level exploit (you can log in as root and remove the code, which you can't necessarily do to a rootkit). But even though the lack of root can limit the damage, considerable damage can be done without it.
The solution? Well, partly it would be nice to have the OS provide fine-grained control, so that even if malicious code gets to execute it could be prevented from modifying your files without explicit permission or accessing the Internet to act as a spam relay. But such fine-grained controls are incredibly tedious; they exist in Java but they're rarely used.)
Failing that, the rest of the solution is to be write any program that downloads arbitrary content from the internet very, very carefully.
Really? I find it pretty darn buggy. It crashes frequently; the change-tracking feature is intolerably slow; it often mis-numbers autonumbering; it botches not-terribly-complicated page layouts.
I guess it's all in the features you use. I still use it because the price is right. And "pretty darn buggy" is still "only about as buggy as Microsoft Office."
I'd really like to see a few of the numbers that go into that $6 billion computation. Given that the current contenders for the space elevator are too short by nearly a dozen orders of magnitude, and that's before you start to work out how you get it there, making sure it's safe, and the research issues we haven't even forseen yet.
IEEE Spectrum is a reputable journal, but it still sounds to me like the $6 billion is a fundamental number, i.e. pulled out of his ass.
Sure, I'd call for spending a measley $10 billion in a heartbeat, if I thought it would work. But I'm gonna need a lot more reason to believe it can happen than a microscopic black dot and a number I read on the Internet.
As a Slashdotter said once: build me a 40,000 millimeter bridge across a gulch on a campus, and then we can start to talk about a 40,000 kilometer bridge straight up.
So we're still four orders of magnitude from the point where we can usefully consider the remaining six orders.
Making the music is easy (well, besides hundreds of hours spent playing your guitar until your fingers bleed and singing until they have to remove the nodules from your vocal chords). But getting your album promoted is a huge challenge.
It's not impossible, but it's a huge risk. You travel for many hours to play in half-empty clubs, even more hours on the phone dealing with sleazy club owners who know they have you over a barrel, and put up a lot of money up front to press CDs and create merchandise. I know bands who do this, and most of them will spend all that money and time up front and still never make it. There are an awful lot of independent bands, and each one is fighting to be heard. The one thing you get from the major labels is the massive hype machine.
But they wouldn't deal with the major labels anyway. They'd rather lose on their own terms than win on theirs, because the RIAAs terms (as you point out) are terrible. That hype machine is incredibly expensive, and the artists don't get to use it for free. But don't make it sound like the alternative is as easy as running out to get a CD burner.
I use the Go menu for one very specific things: alt-G, H takes me to my Home page.
Yeah, I could do that with a bookmark. But it just so happens that my home page is My Yahoo. If you type alt-B, M, you don't get taken to a bookmark beginning with M. You get the Manage Bookmarks. It can be adapted, but only by fiddling with chrome (which gets in your way if you want to update releases.)
Yeah, I could simply call the bookmark something else, but basically I find it easy to have alt-G, H work; it's now a habit. Other than that I completely ignore the Go menu.
Well gosh, we may have made parts of the world unliveable for decades to come in the past, but this time we've got the problem licked. You can trust our figures: we've got a vested interest in selling nuke plants!
Sorry for the sarcasm; I'd really like to see something replace our fossil fuel dependencies, and I'm even willing to consider the long-term problems that nuke plants saddle us with in exchange for it.
But many people are deathly afraid of the idea with good reason: when nuke plants fail they fail really, really badly. And the people who are telling us they're safe now told us the same things when they built the first generation of nuke plants.
So what I'm saying is: I'm willing to be convinced, but it'll take a lot of work.
The "killer app" is your new computer. Around 2007 or so when you decide that you're tired of your current box (too many virus attacks, no new games, bits starting to fail, whatever) you'll call up for a new one and it'll come with Vista. XP won't be an option.
Most home users never upgrade their OS; they get a new OS when they get a new computer. Some office environments will upgrade the OS to keep all of the computers in synch, but I suspect far more copies of Windows come with new computers than are sold individually. Especially since the price is so much lower that way.
But if the requirements now make a Mac cheaper, how many people will buy that instead?
And as you say, your current box is pretty damn good. I suspect you'll hold on to it for quite some time unless you find that killer app. But even without it, eventually that computer is going to get replaced. And if you stick with MS, that'll be Vista.
You don't think that email is a sufficient way to spread?
Once the app is running, it can connect to port 25 on any computer it likes, and email itself to everybody in the world. That's the way Windows trojans work and I don't think OS X has any way to stop it. The only advantage OS X has is that if you mail to xjdfher@hotmail.com the odds of it being another OS X user are pretty low. But trojans are patient; what else have they got to do?
(On Windows I use ZoneAlarm which lets me know if a program is unexpectedly trying to use an outgoing port, and I assume Mac has an equivalent available, but I don't believe it's on by default because it's kind of a pain for inexperienced users to manage.)
More than one Windows trojan has gotten plenty of traction that way. Yeah, it involves an intervention on each and every new infection, but the ILoveYou virus spread pretty damn fast.
The most people can come up with are feeble ages-old UNIX/Linux-style rootkits and/or numerous trojans that depend on social engineering.
But isn't that sufficient? Windows users seem perfectly content to click on email attachments labeled "Click here to destroy computer".
I don't use a Mac, and so I'm perfectly willing to believe that the Mac makes you go through some sort of hoops before executing arbitrary attached content. But Windows users seem to be willing to unzip, enter the enclosed password, save the file to disk, and then execute it. I'm hard pressed to imagine what would be "too much". I've always figured that if you mailed them a sledgehammer with instructions to bash their computer, they'd do it. (At least they'd only bash the monitor, figuring it was "the computer".)
As you say, Mac's relatively small market share will continue to protect it for some time. But I imagine that sooner or later somebody will write it just for the hell of it. Then we'll answer the real question that underlies the flame wars: are Mac users smarter than Windows users?
I mean that seriously. In dealings between business and business, and business and consumers, the government is the final authority in disputes. If you can't get somebody to do what the law (or the contract) tells them to do, lawsuits are your recourse.
Most of the time, it never comes to that. The dry cleaner gives you back your shirts; the bank honors your checks; the contractor finishes your house. If that doesn't happen, your final recourse is a lawsuit. Every single business transaction has, at the back, the notion that you could, in extremis, ask the courts to resolve any dispute.
Most people never have to. But then, most people aren't faced with literally tens of thousands (millions, probably) of potential customers making an end-run around their real business model (selling CDs) and getting it for free.
The law suits aren't their business model. Their business model is selling CDs. The law suits are where they go when people break the law and upset their business model.
Look, I hate defending those RIAA**holes. They're being complete jackasses about this, and there are all sorts of recourses they can and should be taking besides suing people. The first step, as with the dry cleaner, the bank, and the roofing contractor, is asking nicely. I'm afraid they're long past that stage. Check this thread and you'll find an awful lot of people who feel that it's their right to download music for free. And as long as the RIAA find they have to turn to the ultimate recourse, they will do so. They'll file lawsuits. Lots of 'em.
Often companies don't realize that they have zombie machines on their network that have been sending e-mail.
Well, you could sign up with some sort of reputation service. Or you could just start with those machines which are spewing port 25 all day, every day. Those are either zombies or people with a LOT of friends.