What people want...
on
Why Only Music?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't want to steal music, video, software, or anything else really. What I *do* want is a clear resolution to the "problem" that the failing industries of America seem to have created.
When I purchase some bit of media, do I *own* it, like we've all assumed for the last couple of centuries... or have I purchased the *rights* to use the content?
If I OWN the media in question, then it's mine. I can do whatever the hell I want with it, provided that I don't resell it, or try to claim it as my creation. If I buy a screwdriver, I have every right to use it as a hammer -- despite what the Hammer Consortium wants me to do! If I own a CD, then I have every right to turn it into mp3's and stick them on my hard drive using a non Microsoft-Endorsed OS if I like.
If, on the other hand, I'm purchasing the rights to USE the content, then the media is simply a delivery mechanism. I want the RIAA to mail me CD's of all the vinyl records I own, and the MPAA to mail me DVD's of all my video tapes. I'm willing to pay shipping, and a small reasonable fee to cover materials. Oh, and those CD's that got scratched, I want replacements for those too since they were supposed to last for 20 years.
The industry seems to think they can take the best of both worlds, so we don't really own anything at all. THAT is why I don't buy CD's anymore. It's bad enough to spend $15 on a disc which should cost about $7... but to then have it be unusable in half the players out there, and be told that if I rip it to mp3 format I'm considered a thief... one doesn't insult one's customers if one wishes them to remain customers.
I don't see much point to downloading full DVD's over the net... but downloading digitized TV shows that your local cable monopoly refuses to carry is useful, and downloading older rips of things that aren't available is very handy. If Paramount were to make Enterprise available for download at $2 an episode (or thereabouts), I'd be happy to grab it from the source and avoid the variable quality rips, and slow connections... but they don't. I see it as a natural evolution of asking someone to tape a show and mail it to you for the same reasons.
One of the strengths of the various P2P networks, and one which the industry seems to ignore entirely, is the ability to find and preserve rare and out of publication media.
If you log into Kazaa, and search for some rather obscure television or radio shows, you'll probably find them. If you were to then go to the original publisher, you may be told that those items are not available, and that it would cost too much to make them available because of low demand.
Guess what? Making them available via the internet costs someone's time to do the initial rip from analogue to digital, and then the pennies of bandwidth to stick it up for the offering. I know I'd pay a few dollars per episode for some TV shows that I never got to see, and that aren't popular enough to make it to the DVD farm. I'd pay more if someone took the time to clean them up.
What I won't pay for:
DVD box sets which artifically inflate the price after the release. The X-Files originally sold for $80/box, then around the release of season 4, they all jumped to $120! No.
CD's which are antique media, are no longer a standard because of copy-protection, are low quality considering that DVD's are usually 5.1 surround, and have some drug-hazed maniacs sitting on the RIAA board of directors deciding to treat everyone as criminals unless they can prove their innocance... maybe if they include some of what they're smoking in the jewel case???
Replacements for damaged media. CD's were billed as "lasting forever". If they wear out through normal use, I should be able to order a replacement for a minimal fee. I currently can order a replacement for $15.:(
Whichever Presidential candidate declares that they will level the USPTO, fire every employee who has any decision-making ability, and rebuild the patent system from the ground up, gets my vote!
I think this insanity has gone beyond the need for reform... the problems with the system have been obvious for years, and nothing has been done aside from making lots of cash giving out frivilous and blatently invalid patents. The system needs to be overhauled, and the people who let this happen need to be keelhauled.
Even as an end user, if this goes into effect I'll happily pay the exchange rate and overseas shipping just to avoid having to figure out the damn tax implications for buying $300 from one state and $200 from another. We're already taxed on income, the seller is already taxed for the sale as their income... wasn't one of the main reasons we declared independance from England double-taxation???
It's only a matter of time before TRON is subverted by the dark side. Whenever Microsoft gets their claws into something, they eventually either buy it, run it into the ground so their own version can take its place, or steal all the ideas from it and make their own clone of it.
Once enough embedded hardware is out there that requires.NET and other MS services, they'll start asking the TRON people to please extend this so.NET will work more efficiently, and please use this API for these things, and before you know it, all TRON devices will require.NET to function.... or there will be a TRON.NET which works just like normal TRON but is incompatible at the API level. Guess which one most big businesses will be encouraged to buy?
Too bad, it WAS a nice elegant system. I guess my toaster will now require 512M of RAM just like all other MS products...
The CTRL-ALT-DEL key sequence indicates that there is a physically connected keyboard that the keystrokes are coming from.
Is that why it works just fine under VNC? Don't kid yourself, Ctrl-Alt-Delete isn't a single keystroke, nor is it an NMI, it's just three key-down events that the windows event handler pays attention to. While it may disable pure user-mode programs, it's trivial to make a program that will hang onto admin privs if it acquires them (such as the VNC server).
It is true that trojans would need to get permission to run with privs, or find an exploit, but once there they can happily reroute the CSR services through themselves with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete handler none the wiser.
This is great news, as it gives us the chance to have some science fiction on TV that doesn't have to be Yet Another T&A Star Trek Series (TM).
Anyways, good writing will make or break this show. If they're smart (and since it's the BBC instead of some American marketing firm, they might be!) they'll continue the tradition of having DIFFERENT WRITERS do episodes, rather than locking in a team for a whole season and ending up with another Pip and Jane Baker travesty.
Heh, I can't forgive them for what they did to my favorite Doctor (Colin Baker), who is quite a good actor, but had to work with things like "The Happiness Patrol". Perhaps they can go to work writing for Brenan and Braga's new series... Star Trek: Teen Bikini Force!
So, we have yet another non-standard plastic-encased metallic-oxide disc being mis-labelled as a "CD"?
Why is it that I'm not allowed to make a legitimate backup of music or software that I purchase, yet the same company that denies me that right by employing copy-protection won't refund my purchase price, or replace my damaged media free of charge?
They can't have it both ways! Either we are buying the music, in which case we have the right to do whatever we want with it (provided it doesn't violate copyright laws), or we "lease the right to use it", in which case we should be able to demand free replacements, and free delivery media upgrades as formats change over the years. Those two options don't work together, and the RIAA needs to choose. If they can't, we will... and that way won't make them any money.
How one can get much simpler than Google, I don't know... unless M$ is working on the neural interface.
The main reason Google won out over all the other search engines is that the user interface is plain and simple. Their algorithms are very good, but the reason I have it as my default home page is that it loads fast without tons of crap I don't care about. It is the very definition of a tool. M$'s homepage OTOH is more like a giant bin with all sorts of tools tossed in and rusted together, and several vendors pointing at things in the bin and saying how great they are.
But as cool as this is, I still think that in the long-term we're going to see effiecient, mass produced, high powered lasers dominate the outdoor display market and perhaps other display markets as well. But since high powered lasers are still a very long way from cheap at this point, this is a cool near-term solution.
Yep, and you can bet there will be advertising on the moon during our lifetime. Imagine our fearless leader's face up there for state of the union addresses.... I, for one, welcome our new marketing overlords!
Most of the major advances in the modern world came out of military or space-program (military removed one step) research. Even college research facilities have DoD related projects and grants.
Further back, the iron age superceded the bronze age, not because bronze didn't make good cookware or decorative urns... but because bronze swords bent, and bronze shields were heavy.
Yeah, I'm over-simplifying... but why is it that nowadays, any new cool thing is seen as being invented for military or advertising use, but in the "Good Old Days" (TM), everything was done for pure goodness of the heart?
Very true, and there's another problem with most of these 3-D technologies... they assume the viewer has equal vision in both eyes. In my case (and the case of lots of people I would think), this isn't true.
My right eye is FAR stronger than my left, and so in most situations, my brain doesn't use my left eye unless there's peripheral information or confusing depth geometry. Hence, those 3D glasses never work on me, and I suspect this display will appear flat and fuzzy to people with similar uneven vision.
As an aside, has anyone done any research into decoding the impulses from the optic nerve? Not that I'm eagre to have a "jack" in my skull, but if we could decode those, we could inject our own data at that point (popup ads would be painful though!)
Not very long I'd guess. I watched Final Fantasy, and after the first half hour or so, I no longer noticed it was CGI... I could still tell if I paid attention, but I felt that I wasn't watching a CGI thing, but just a movie.
Of course, what I wonder is how long before some sporting event (my bet is Golf) is quietly produced fully in CGI and broadcast with nobody, who wasn't physically on that course on the day in question, the wiser...
As to cheaper... take a look at the salary of a given actor in a big hollywood movie. The Govinator didn't get his campaign funds by just flexing his muscles.... the first investment in creating the software will be huge, but once it can do a reasonable job, it will be far cheaper. If you have doubts, look at video editing today. Once upon a time, you needed tens of thousands of dollars in equipment to do the kinds of cut/paste editing, time syncing, and fades that you can do now on your PC.
In the sixties we had great movies like the Elvis series, or Frankie and Annette or Santa Clause vs the Martians! Gack. Or, worse, the sappy melodrama and atrocious acting of the 40s and 50s.
But... Santa Clause Conquers the Martians was an awesome movie!!! Errrr, at least it was after Mystery Science Theatre got hold of it!:)
Re:I'm not sure how accurate this statement is.
on
MRAM in 2004?
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· Score: 1
Actually, it's not the long boot/login times that annoys me (although I *DO* miss the good ole C64 3 seconds to typing days)... it's the wear and tear on the hardware that power cycling causes that bugs me.
Back in the day, I kept an ailing Amiga system alive for about 6 months by never shutting it off. The monitor had developed a high-voltage leak which arc'd the the frame (yeah, silicone, I was lazy), but the kicker was the $500 100Meg SCSI drive, which had developed sticktion (go Quantuum!). After noticing this and bring it back up with ye olde rubber mallot, I just made sure it never went down and got another 6 months or so out of it before a power failure...
Ever since then, I've been an advocate for just leaving things on whenever possible. Maybe someday before the next ice age, plasma displays and solid-state storage will become fast and cheap enough so I won't have to worry about this anymore.:)
My ISP already does filter several ports for me... and it is very annoying. I have a cable modem (Charter) and they established a policy about "No running servers on a non-expensive-business line", and so they block common server ports like FTP and HTTP. Fine, not a big deal.
However, some corporate monkey heard the word "server" in relation to "mail server" and decided to block SMTP as well. This isn't outgoing SMTP (which might block some spammers), but incoming SMTP!
So, Charter has to waste disk space and resources storing my mail for half an hour, I have to jump through fetchmail hoops to pull it down every half hour, and MY sendmail has to go through ugly masquarading so I can still have working properly addressed mail inside my LAN, but have it get converted to THEIR email address outside since I have no way to point my domain's MX record at my mail server.
Long story, short point. Do you WANT this kind of corporate idiocy as the default for all ISP's? I think a far more reasonable policy is for ISP's to disconnect any customers who send out spam or virii, if they detect them. If the customer calls and asks why they were shut off, give them the answer... their machines are polluted and comprimising the security and operation of the network at large... they should clean them up or pay us $$$ to come do it for them.
You know, *I* would be happy if any one of the linux desktop GUI's (pick one!) just worked as consistanly as Windows. I don't care which one, go ahead... change the damn window buttons, change the menu placement and where things ARE in the menu hierarchy... but at least get things like cut-and-paste to work seamlessly and consistanly between ALL applications!
Everyone seems to be whining about which desktop to pick, as if ANY of them will be a good replacement for the windows gui. Let's concentrate on making them work right first.
Having said that, if there were at least a minimal standard for which menu categories existed, and where one might hope to find simple things like user administration tools, or how to change the friggin desktop background image... that would go a long way towards keeping consistancy.
Product Activation, as with ANY form of anti-piracy mechanism, only makes life more difficult for the legitimate end-user. The crackers will find ways around it, and then all the pirates will have modified copies that don't bother to check. Trying to fight software piracy by technical means is doomed to failure, because thousands of high-school kids with ENORMOUS amounts of free time and energy will always be ahead of even a really good team of specialists working a job.
The only way to "combat" piracy, is to lower the prices of the products to the level the public is actually willing to pay. If the price were more acceptable to the public, more people would buy it just to avoid the hassle of having to setup the hacked copy, and having to find new ones every so often as they get killed by updates or blocked by the update servers.
Consider, a non-upgrade version of M$-Windows XP Pro costs something like $400? Very few people will fork over that much cash, yet they still try to sell it in retail stores. If the price were $100, I suspect the sales figues would go up much more than 4x, which would mean more profit, and a reduced need for pirated copies.
Oh well, like the RIAA, some folks don't really get it. $400 for an OS, or $16 for a CD, it's still overpriced, and it still won't sell.
I have to side against all the anti-M$ people on this one. You're missing the point, and if you're out of college, you missed the point. There are two things you should be learning in college (besides how to drink), and those are how to think, and how to work.
As much as they might like to, Microsoft can't control how we think about abstract problems. If you learn about linked lists using Visual C++, vi and gcc, or pascal and EDT, you are STILL learning about linked lists.
However, it DOES matter what you get exposed to while you're learning the concepts. At my university, programming classes were taught on a VAX/VMS cluster, and on Sun workstations. Learning to code on the Suns gave me skills I use today in my job, where I program under linux. Using the VMS cluster gave me nightmares that will take decades to fade.
I worked for a little while doing Visual BASIC programming, and it wasn't that bad. I tried to learn Visual C++ while I was there, and it stumped me. I know C++. I don't know how to effectively use the interface for that beast, nor all the API calls that I'd use if I coded with it every day. Had I been able to do some of that at university, I'd have a better chance in the Real World (TM).
What most slashdotters forget in their rabid anti-Microsoft raving, is the ancient quote "Know thine enemy". I'd much rather know how to use all the "evil" M$ products, so I can clearly make cases for and against them when the opportunity arises, than to just chant "They're EVIL!" and hope they go away.
Besides, creativity will find a way. If you don't think there are pretty clever windows programmers out there, you haven't looked very hard. And linux would NEVER have become this popular without the M$-Empire to make it stand out.
The proposed rule pushes the definition of communications systems to include local area networks, or LANs, as well as wide area networks, or WANs, which connect computers across distances. Practically any office with two computers will have a local area network...
That brings them under the purview of the proposed rule, which includes computer networks as "substitute communications systems"
I don't see how they can tax LAN's, even if they do classify them as a communication system. I can setup a network of strings with tin cans at each end, and use that instead of telephones in the office.... and the phone company can't charge me for that (even if they'd like to!).
Secondly, the whole point of a tax on communication media is that it uses up a limited resource. If a LAN is configured properly, no traffic on that LAN will cross the firewall boundry to the rest of the internet, so no public resources are being used (except electricity, which is already taxed).
Just a thought... how many homeless people have (or use) their social-security numbers? I would think many of them don't bother to present their SSN when asking the local shelter for soup, so how are they going to be tracked by those numbers?
then Norton Internet Security (kind of important on a windows 2000 box, which doesn't have an integrated firewall)
It never ceases to amaze me how many people nowadays seem to feel that a "firewall" is something that is (or even can be!) integrated into a desktop computer.
Go spend $50 on a router, or scrounge up an old P133 and install linux/bsd/whatever on it... you're FAR better off than relying on any software firewall which sits on top of your buggy windows kernel.
I'm not trying to M$-bash here (although it IS fun), but just pointing out that if your "firewall" runs in software on the machine it's supposed to protect, then it is vulnerable to any attack which can comprimise any aspect of that machine... including the tcp stack itself.
And as for Norton.... the quickest way to make a win2k installation unstable (at least in MY experience) is to install any Norton product. The funniest of the lot is Norton's Crash Guard. My friend installed this thing and went from an occasional blue-screen to about three a day.
So, if this device were integrated into an ergonomic chair, and the local mexican restaurant continued to deliver, would this be the perpetual bowel motion machine gamers have dreamed of?
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I don't want to steal music, video, software, or anything else really. What I *do* want is a clear resolution to the "problem" that the failing industries of America seem to have created.
When I purchase some bit of media, do I *own* it, like we've all assumed for the last couple of centuries... or have I purchased the *rights* to use the content?
If I OWN the media in question, then it's mine. I can do whatever the hell I want with it, provided that I don't resell it, or try to claim it as my creation. If I buy a screwdriver, I have every right to use it as a hammer -- despite what the Hammer Consortium wants me to do! If I own a CD, then I have every right to turn it into mp3's and stick them on my hard drive using a non Microsoft-Endorsed OS if I like.
If, on the other hand, I'm purchasing the rights to USE the content, then the media is simply a delivery mechanism. I want the RIAA to mail me CD's of all the vinyl records I own, and the MPAA to mail me DVD's of all my video tapes. I'm willing to pay shipping, and a small reasonable fee to cover materials. Oh, and those CD's that got scratched, I want replacements for those too since they were supposed to last for 20 years.
The industry seems to think they can take the best of both worlds, so we don't really own anything at all. THAT is why I don't buy CD's anymore. It's bad enough to spend $15 on a disc which should cost about $7... but to then have it be unusable in half the players out there, and be told that if I rip it to mp3 format I'm considered a thief... one doesn't insult one's customers if one wishes them to remain customers.
I don't see much point to downloading full DVD's over the net... but downloading digitized TV shows that your local cable monopoly refuses to carry is useful, and downloading older rips of things that aren't available is very handy. If Paramount were to make Enterprise available for download at $2 an episode (or thereabouts), I'd be happy to grab it from the source and avoid the variable quality rips, and slow connections... but they don't. I see it as a natural evolution of asking someone to tape a show and mail it to you for the same reasons.
How long will people put up with crap like this?
Until after LOTR:ROTK is out, right?
One of the strengths of the various P2P networks, and one which the industry seems to ignore entirely, is the ability to find and preserve rare and out of publication media.
:(
If you log into Kazaa, and search for some rather obscure television or radio shows, you'll probably find them. If you were to then go to the original publisher, you may be told that those items are not available, and that it would cost too much to make them available because of low demand.
Guess what? Making them available via the internet costs someone's time to do the initial rip from analogue to digital, and then the pennies of bandwidth to stick it up for the offering. I know I'd pay a few dollars per episode for some TV shows that I never got to see, and that aren't popular enough to make it to the DVD farm. I'd pay more if someone took the time to clean them up.
What I won't pay for:
DVD box sets which artifically inflate the price after the release. The X-Files originally sold for $80/box, then around the release of season 4, they all jumped to $120! No.
CD's which are antique media, are no longer a standard because of copy-protection, are low quality considering that DVD's are usually 5.1 surround, and have some drug-hazed maniacs sitting on the RIAA board of directors deciding to treat everyone as criminals unless they can prove their innocance... maybe if they include some of what they're smoking in the jewel case???
Replacements for damaged media. CD's were billed as "lasting forever". If they wear out through normal use, I should be able to order a replacement for a minimal fee. I currently can order a replacement for $15.
Whichever Presidential candidate declares that they will level the USPTO, fire every employee who has any decision-making ability, and rebuild the patent system from the ground up, gets my vote!
I think this insanity has gone beyond the need for reform... the problems with the system have been obvious for years, and nothing has been done aside from making lots of cash giving out frivilous and blatently invalid patents. The system needs to be overhauled, and the people who let this happen need to be keelhauled.
Even as an end user, if this goes into effect I'll happily pay the exchange rate and overseas shipping just to avoid having to figure out the damn tax implications for buying $300 from one state and $200 from another. We're already taxed on income, the seller is already taxed for the sale as their income... wasn't one of the main reasons we declared independance from England double-taxation???
It's only a matter of time before TRON is subverted by the dark side. Whenever Microsoft gets their claws into something, they eventually either buy it, run it into the ground so their own version can take its place, or steal all the ideas from it and make their own clone of it.
.NET and other MS services, they'll start asking the TRON people to please extend this so .NET will work more efficiently, and please use this API for these things, and before you know it, all TRON devices will require .NET to function.... or there will be a TRON.NET which works just like normal TRON but is incompatible at the API level. Guess which one most big businesses will be encouraged to buy?
Once enough embedded hardware is out there that requires
Too bad, it WAS a nice elegant system. I guess my toaster will now require 512M of RAM just like all other MS products...
It is true that trojans would need to get permission to run with privs, or find an exploit, but once there they can happily reroute the CSR services through themselves with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete handler none the wiser.
Clouds drift, birds fly, windows break.
This is great news, as it gives us the chance to have some science fiction on TV that doesn't have to be Yet Another T&A Star Trek Series (TM).
Anyways, good writing will make or break this show. If they're smart (and since it's the BBC instead of some American marketing firm, they might be!) they'll continue the tradition of having DIFFERENT WRITERS do episodes, rather than locking in a team for a whole season and ending up with another Pip and Jane Baker travesty.
Heh, I can't forgive them for what they did to my favorite Doctor (Colin Baker), who is quite a good actor, but had to work with things like "The Happiness Patrol". Perhaps they can go to work writing for Brenan and Braga's new series... Star Trek: Teen Bikini Force!
So, we have yet another non-standard plastic-encased metallic-oxide disc being mis-labelled as a "CD"?
Why is it that I'm not allowed to make a legitimate backup of music or software that I purchase, yet the same company that denies me that right by employing copy-protection won't refund my purchase price, or replace my damaged media free of charge?
They can't have it both ways! Either we are buying the music, in which case we have the right to do whatever we want with it (provided it doesn't violate copyright laws), or we "lease the right to use it", in which case we should be able to demand free replacements, and free delivery media upgrades as formats change over the years. Those two options don't work together, and the RIAA needs to choose. If they can't, we will... and that way won't make them any money.
How one can get much simpler than Google, I don't know... unless M$ is working on the neural interface.
The main reason Google won out over all the other search engines is that the user interface is plain and simple. Their algorithms are very good, but the reason I have it as my default home page is that it loads fast without tons of crap I don't care about. It is the very definition of a tool. M$'s homepage OTOH is more like a giant bin with all sorts of tools tossed in and rusted together, and several vendors pointing at things in the bin and saying how great they are.
Ummm, it's always worked that way.
Most of the major advances in the modern world came out of military or space-program (military removed one step) research. Even college research facilities have DoD related projects and grants.
Further back, the iron age superceded the bronze age, not because bronze didn't make good cookware or decorative urns... but because bronze swords bent, and bronze shields were heavy.
Yeah, I'm over-simplifying... but why is it that nowadays, any new cool thing is seen as being invented for military or advertising use, but in the "Good Old Days" (TM), everything was done for pure goodness of the heart?
Very true, and there's another problem with most of these 3-D technologies... they assume the viewer has equal vision in both eyes. In my case (and the case of lots of people I would think), this isn't true.
My right eye is FAR stronger than my left, and so in most situations, my brain doesn't use my left eye unless there's peripheral information or confusing depth geometry. Hence, those 3D glasses never work on me, and I suspect this display will appear flat and fuzzy to people with similar uneven vision.
As an aside, has anyone done any research into decoding the impulses from the optic nerve? Not that I'm eagre to have a "jack" in my skull, but if we could decode those, we could inject our own data at that point (popup ads would be painful though!)
Not very long I'd guess. I watched Final Fantasy, and after the first half hour or so, I no longer noticed it was CGI... I could still tell if I paid attention, but I felt that I wasn't watching a CGI thing, but just a movie.
Of course, what I wonder is how long before some sporting event (my bet is Golf) is quietly produced fully in CGI and broadcast with nobody, who wasn't physically on that course on the day in question, the wiser...
As to cheaper... take a look at the salary of a given actor in a big hollywood movie. The Govinator didn't get his campaign funds by just flexing his muscles.... the first investment in creating the software will be huge, but once it can do a reasonable job, it will be far cheaper. If you have doubts, look at video editing today. Once upon a time, you needed tens of thousands of dollars in equipment to do the kinds of cut/paste editing, time syncing, and fades that you can do now on your PC.
Actually, it's not the long boot/login times that annoys me (although I *DO* miss the good ole C64 3 seconds to typing days)... it's the wear and tear on the hardware that power cycling causes that bugs me.
:)
Back in the day, I kept an ailing Amiga system alive for about 6 months by never shutting it off. The monitor had developed a high-voltage leak which arc'd the the frame (yeah, silicone, I was lazy), but the kicker was the $500 100Meg SCSI drive, which had developed sticktion (go Quantuum!). After noticing this and bring it back up with ye olde rubber mallot, I just made sure it never went down and got another 6 months or so out of it before a power failure...
Ever since then, I've been an advocate for just leaving things on whenever possible. Maybe someday before the next ice age, plasma displays and solid-state storage will become fast and cheap enough so I won't have to worry about this anymore.
My ISP already does filter several ports for me... and it is very annoying. I have a cable modem (Charter) and they established a policy about "No running servers on a non-expensive-business line", and so they block common server ports like FTP and HTTP. Fine, not a big deal.
However, some corporate monkey heard the word "server" in relation to "mail server" and decided to block SMTP as well. This isn't outgoing SMTP (which might block some spammers), but incoming SMTP!
So, Charter has to waste disk space and resources storing my mail for half an hour, I have to jump through fetchmail hoops to pull it down every half hour, and MY sendmail has to go through ugly masquarading so I can still have working properly addressed mail inside my LAN, but have it get converted to THEIR email address outside since I have no way to point my domain's MX record at my mail server.
Long story, short point. Do you WANT this kind of corporate idiocy as the default for all ISP's? I think a far more reasonable policy is for ISP's to disconnect any customers who send out spam or virii, if they detect them. If the customer calls and asks why they were shut off, give them the answer... their machines are polluted and comprimising the security and operation of the network at large... they should clean them up or pay us $$$ to come do it for them.
You know, *I* would be happy if any one of the linux desktop GUI's (pick one!) just worked as consistanly as Windows. I don't care which one, go ahead... change the damn window buttons, change the menu placement and where things ARE in the menu hierarchy... but at least get things like cut-and-paste to work seamlessly and consistanly between ALL applications!
Everyone seems to be whining about which desktop to pick, as if ANY of them will be a good replacement for the windows gui. Let's concentrate on making them work right first.
Having said that, if there were at least a minimal standard for which menu categories existed, and where one might hope to find simple things like user administration tools, or how to change the friggin desktop background image... that would go a long way towards keeping consistancy.
Product Activation, as with ANY form of anti-piracy mechanism, only makes life more difficult for the legitimate end-user. The crackers will find ways around it, and then all the pirates will have modified copies that don't bother to check. Trying to fight software piracy by technical means is doomed to failure, because thousands of high-school kids with ENORMOUS amounts of free time and energy will always be ahead of even a really good team of specialists working a job.
The only way to "combat" piracy, is to lower the prices of the products to the level the public is actually willing to pay. If the price were more acceptable to the public, more people would buy it just to avoid the hassle of having to setup the hacked copy, and having to find new ones every so often as they get killed by updates or blocked by the update servers.
Consider, a non-upgrade version of M$-Windows XP Pro costs something like $400? Very few people will fork over that much cash, yet they still try to sell it in retail stores. If the price were $100, I suspect the sales figues would go up much more than 4x, which would mean more profit, and a reduced need for pirated copies.
Oh well, like the RIAA, some folks don't really get it. $400 for an OS, or $16 for a CD, it's still overpriced, and it still won't sell.
I have to side against all the anti-M$ people on this one. You're missing the point, and if you're out of college, you missed the point. There are two things you should be learning in college (besides how to drink), and those are how to think, and how to work.
As much as they might like to, Microsoft can't control how we think about abstract problems. If you learn about linked lists using Visual C++, vi and gcc, or pascal and EDT, you are STILL learning about linked lists.
However, it DOES matter what you get exposed to while you're learning the concepts. At my university, programming classes were taught on a VAX/VMS cluster, and on Sun workstations. Learning to code on the Suns gave me skills I use today in my job, where I program under linux. Using the VMS cluster gave me nightmares that will take decades to fade.
I worked for a little while doing Visual BASIC programming, and it wasn't that bad. I tried to learn Visual C++ while I was there, and it stumped me. I know C++. I don't know how to effectively use the interface for that beast, nor all the API calls that I'd use if I coded with it every day. Had I been able to do some of that at university, I'd have a better chance in the Real World (TM).
What most slashdotters forget in their rabid anti-Microsoft raving, is the ancient quote "Know thine enemy". I'd much rather know how to use all the "evil" M$ products, so I can clearly make cases for and against them when the opportunity arises, than to just chant "They're EVIL!" and hope they go away.
Besides, creativity will find a way. If you don't think there are pretty clever windows programmers out there, you haven't looked very hard. And linux would NEVER have become this popular without the M$-Empire to make it stand out.
I don't see how they can tax LAN's, even if they do classify them as a communication system. I can setup a network of strings with tin cans at each end, and use that instead of telephones in the office.... and the phone company can't charge me for that (even if they'd like to!).
Secondly, the whole point of a tax on communication media is that it uses up a limited resource. If a LAN is configured properly, no traffic on that LAN will cross the firewall boundry to the rest of the internet, so no public resources are being used (except electricity, which is already taxed).
But if it were in a GRID, then slashdot could link to itself! Yeah, ok.
Just a thought... how many homeless people have (or use) their social-security numbers? I would think many of them don't bother to present their SSN when asking the local shelter for soup, so how are they going to be tracked by those numbers?
Go spend $50 on a router, or scrounge up an old P133 and install linux/bsd/whatever on it... you're FAR better off than relying on any software firewall which sits on top of your buggy windows kernel.
I'm not trying to M$-bash here (although it IS fun), but just pointing out that if your "firewall" runs in software on the machine it's supposed to protect, then it is vulnerable to any attack which can comprimise any aspect of that machine... including the tcp stack itself.
And as for Norton.... the quickest way to make a win2k installation unstable (at least in MY experience) is to install any Norton product. The funniest of the lot is Norton's Crash Guard. My friend installed this thing and went from an occasional blue-screen to about three a day.
So, if this device were integrated into an ergonomic chair, and the local mexican restaurant continued to deliver, would this be the perpetual bowel motion machine gamers have dreamed of?