I didn't say NoSQL was new. I said there was a new generation of NoSQL databases that might serve some projects better, which is true, and even then I was only citing them as another example of alternatives that leave MySQL/MariaDB in limbo where they are unlikely to be a good choice for any new project today, which is the fundamental point that you didn't address at all. Your flamebait post contributes nothing of value to this discussion.
Both WordPress and MySQL are great success stories in terms of popularity and to some extent creating an ecosystem as a result. That doesn't make either of them particularly good technically. The way that WordPress was basically hard-coded to use a specific database is not any other database's fault. It's just another symptom of the questionable architectural decisions underlying it.
Postgres works just fine for backing web sites. I've built some of them myself, and so have plenty of other people I know. It has basically all the same advantages that MySQL used to have, plus numerous technical improvements on every level from everyday query support right up to heavyweight architectural tools.
As for your final points, well, popularity is not the same thing as quality, which is why MySQL has done as well as it has for so long, and just because you didn't bother spending ten seconds on Google before posting, that doesn't mean no-one operating a substantial web site runs Postgres underneath it.
MySQL and spinoffs all occupy an uncomfortable middle ground.
Indeed. As well as SQLite, there is also a new generation of "NoSQL" databases that might serve some projects better. Any way you look at it, MySQL and MariaDB are stuck in a kind of limbo now. They could survive for years on nothing but inertia, but it's hard to see how they would be a good choice for any new project today.
This was the sort of creepy side of employment that I never got on with. Employers limiting use of company resources and monitoring those resources to comply with regulatory obligations is one thing. Employers treating employees as robots instead of humans, with no mechanism for private communication during office hours even if it's for something like calling your doctor during your lunch break, is something that I believe should only happen in cases of genuine need (and there are very few cases where it's impractical to provide even a dedicated private facility independent of company networks etc.). Employers treating employees as full-time robots, with the right to control or monitor what they do outside work in any capacity that doesn't interfere with the reasonable performance of their employment duties, is almost automatically a bridge too far.
The thing I found most worrying about the trend was that a combination of big business control freakery and one-sided "monitor/audit everything" government regulation, even when done with apparently reasonable intentions, seems to be overtaking anything resembling personal privacy and work/life balance, as well as often imposing overheads that the businesses themselves have to cover. This is how we get employers, or even prospective employers, demanding access to things like people's social networks and personal devices in IMHO completely inappropriate ways.
I don't see any solution to this short of legislation with actual teeth, and for those in places where the government culture is dominated by the interests of big business and/or personal privacy is not legally protected to any significant degree (the US being probably the most obvious example today, though it's hardly alone on either score), it's tough to see where that legislation is going to come from. And without it, it's hard to see how BYOD can ever be compatible with onerous regulatory frameworks in a way that doesn't screw the employee.
Churchill also said that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter, so I suspect he really did mean both sides of the quote you mentioned.
Thanks, I'd heard of new potential sources in that area, but I didn't know that any find had been confirmed on that scale. Sorry I can't give you a (+1, Informative).
Now, come on, be fair. There really isn't any good data that fossil fuels are going to run out soon at current usage rates, and renewable energy sources will by nature always cost at least 17x as much. We don't need any more research, all that climate change nonsense has been debunked already.
Also, switching to renewables would cost jobs*, and the sun doesn't have an infinite supply of energy either so if we take too much it will cool and the whole planet will die.
There's no way to know unless you explictly tell them. This is why voting with your wallet sends an ambiguous message, if any at all.
That is a fair point, but I don't think it affects the end result. Whether you "send a message" accurately doesn't really matter, because we're talking about a Darwinian process here: companies that do figure it out, or just make the right lucky guess, will survive, while those that lose custom and can't figure out why will fail. It might help more companies to figure it out if would-be customers who are deterred by DRM sent a message indicating why as well as taking their business elsewhere, but the harsh reality of the business world is that such helpful behaviour is not necessary for the general good in the long run, only for the good of that particular company.
I agree with much of what you say. Despite what some people are reading into my posts here, I'm not actually a big fan of DRM, and in fact my own companies don't currently use anything similar to protect our assets because we don't want to risk upsetting genuine customers.
However, I think this is an emotive subject and a fast-moving field, and as such we should be very wary of arbitrarily prohibiting a certain kind of commercial deal or technological measure that does potentially have reasonable applications. Although it's taken a while, there seems to be growing evidence that the market itself will take care of excessive/abusive schemes once people wise up to them. That goes for everything from DRM schemes that aren't honestly disclosed to the practices with academic journals that you mentioned. So in that sense, I'm more interested in forcing disclosure so people can make informed purchasing decisions than in blanket bans.
I would be the first to agree that those schemes should not have been permitted and people who purchased under them should have been entitled to at least a partial refund to restore equity. Please don't mistake my position that businesses should not be universally banned from using DRM for a position that businesses should not be universally banned from misleading their customers or changing the deal, nor for a position that businesses who do so anyway shouldn't be penalised severely for it.
I have no trouble renting things, but I have to know for how long I can have it. If the time is arbitrary, well, on principle I find that just a sleazy way of doing business.
FWIW, I agree with you completely. Using DRM to sneakily close things down, or pitching something as a sale when it is in practice not permanent and not even guaranteed for any given length of time, is just not playing fair.
It would be nice to think courts would clamp down on such behaviour on general principles, for much the same reasons that the European Court of Justice essentially ruled that Oracle couldn't prevent someone from reselling a software licence when the original deal was already tantamount to a sale. Even in the US, where Vernor vs. Autodesk was overturned by the 9th Circuit on grounds of precedent, the decision seemed to imply some reluctance or even concern about whether the legally correct result was actually the right one. Those cases were about reselling and the first sale principle, but interestingly in the ECJ result it was also specified that if part of the original deal was for Oracle to provide free upgrades to the purchaser then they must also provide the same service to the purchaser of a resold licence. All of this suggests that certainly in Europe and potentially in the US, courts won't necessarily put up with the kinds of trickery we're talking about here.
Still, I would have no problem with imposing legislative rules on suppliers using DRM schemes to require full disclosure of any guaranteed period of service (or the lack of any such guarantee) and all side effects of the DRM (details of any data collected/transmitted, possible interference with normal operation of the system, and the like). As you say, one big problem with the current situation isn't that there is a rental-style arrangement, it's that one party doesn't even know what the arrangement really is when they sign up.
There aren't really Numerous Business Models, unfortunately. There are really only two, sales or rentals.
I suppose that's true, in the sense that permanent or temporary are an exhaustive set of options for how you can have access to a work. However, I would argue that different rental models can be sufficiently distinctive in practice to consider them separately.
For example, direct rental like the Blockbuster-style chains who would lend you a tape/disc overnight for a small fee was successful for a long time, but as prices for purchases have been driven down, the different in cost to rent vs. buy stopped being significant for a lot of people and those stores died out. Meanwhile, in recent years, we've seen some spectacular success stories built on the library model, effectively relying on the fact that even with theoretically unlimited access to numerous works, any given customer is only going to consume at a certain rate, and a viable pricing model exists accordingly.
"Public art" that is permanently available for free is an interesting variation, but I suspect it is best reserved for necessary practical works like, say, educational materials used in schools. For anything that is a matter of taste, I doubt that bureaucrats are better able to judge value than an open market, and there are significant ethical questions about using taxpayers' money for such purposes.
Artificial scarcity is never good for the consumer...ever
Not directly, no. Neither is paying for anything else, but if we took away the obligation to do so, I don't think you'd like the indirect consequences for long.
here are some examples of this that DRM creates
No, those are examples that specific DRM schemes create. I am not arguing that poorly implemented or abusive DRM schemes should be supported. I just think that while legal and economic changes happen more slowly than technological ones, most of the problems you're describing will be dealt with in due course by regular market forces and practical realities, DRM or no. If even a repeat offender like Ubisoft can get the point and tone things down dramatically in response to a spectacular DRM-based screw-up, if even gamers who probably collectively tolerate more DRM-based abuse than any other single group can cause enough grief that their suppliers change their ways, then there is reason to be optimistic. After all, those same gamers are generally positive about Steam despite its DRM, and many of them have commented on forums like this one that it's because Steam's DRM almost always works properly without getting in the way of their enjoyment.
Setting aside the errors in what you've just said (e.g. If I didn't "have a right... to enjoy someone else's work without compensating them at all for their work to create if" I could not enjoy works that the author willingly gave away free copies of)
There's nothing wrong with what I wrote. You don't have a right to do that, you just got given permission by the guy who did the work. Surely as a lawyer you understand the difference?
Even today, the raison d'Ãtre of copyright is the promotion of progress of science, not compensating authors.
Yours might be. Most of the world is not subject to the United States' legal system, however often certain people in the United States seem to forget that.
In any case, you're twisting my words. The point about compensation wasn't that artists had some magical right to compensation no matter what, it was that if a work under copyright is for sale at a price then that's the price you have to pay if you want a copy.
In countries where there is a legitimate government, i.e. one that governs with the consent of the governed, copyright not only need not exist, according to the whim of the people as carried out by the government that serves them, but can be more or less arbitrarily written and rewritten as they see fit, whether authors like it or not. If we collectively choose to copy works without the permission of the author and without the permission of the author, it takes just a simple stroke of the pen to make this totally legal.
Right, but in a few hundreds places around the world no-one has made that stroke of the pen yet, so your entire argument is a straw man.
Indeed, I wholeheartedly support the idea of not granting copyrights to authors for works where the author or a person acting under the author's authority, has encumbered those works with DRM.
I see why some people wholeheartedly support the idea of just shooting all the lawyers, but fortunately for you, not everyone gets what the want.
Regardless, you haven't come anywhere near addressing my original point, which was that there are reasonable alternative arrangements to making a full purchase where DRM isn't an encumbrance in the same way. Are you suggesting that we should abolish all the popular and commercially successful services that have become established in recent years, to the detriment of both their customers and the creative workers they support, even though parties on both sides seem to be quite happy with their arrangements? That also seems a very odd position for a lawyer to take.
I think for this kind of debate to make sense, it's important to separate basic principles like copyright and the use of technological measures to make infringing more difficult from poor or abusive implementations like never-ending copyright and DRM schemes that seriously interfere with legitimate customers.
Sadly, there are plenty of poor or abusive implementations around. Moreover, it is almost certainly impossible to create a perfect DRM scheme using technology in isolation, successfully blocking most/all illegal copying without also potentially impairing legitimate uses. But I don't think it's particularly helpful to rule out any attempt to redress the heavily one-sided general situation that exists with piracy being rampant by singling out a few high-profile screw-ups. As the likes of Steam and DVDs have shown, you can have much more reasonable schemes that very rarely interfere with legitimate users.
Sorry, that's another reference that probably makes sense to you but not to someone from the UK.
In any case, voting with your wallet is just about the most powerful tool any customer has. No-one is going to be in business for long, DRM or not, if they don't offer products the market wants at prices it is willing to pay. And no business is going to be as successful as it could be if it keeps alienating its customer base by imposing unreasonable terms or screwing up a DRM implementation in a way that stops people enjoying their purchases.
There are very, very few creative works that are actually necessities today. Almost all creative works are luxuries, and it won't kill you not to have one if you don't like the terms it's offered on. The idea that no-one will offer creative works on favourable terms if DRM is allowed is about as plausible as the idea that no-one would create any new works at all without copyright. As evidence of this, I would like to cite exhibit A, the iTunes Music Store and its DRM-free music files.
Sorry, I don't quite follow your argument. Given that pay-per-view is going to be cheaper than buying a full copy of a movie -- or it obviously won't be around for long -- if you think most people won't want to watch the same movie more than once, isn't that an argument for pay-per-view models, where the customer will still get what he wants but at a lower price?
I wasn't talking about the risk of being sued, I was talking about the risk of getting something that wasn't, in fact, the same as what you would have bought legitimately. One obvious possibility is that the version you get is poor quality or incomplete. Another is that it comes with helpful extra facilities such as uploading your bank credentials or adding your PC to a botnet.
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I didn't say NoSQL was new. I said there was a new generation of NoSQL databases that might serve some projects better, which is true, and even then I was only citing them as another example of alternatives that leave MySQL/MariaDB in limbo where they are unlikely to be a good choice for any new project today, which is the fundamental point that you didn't address at all. Your flamebait post contributes nothing of value to this discussion.
Well, that statement was just damning enough to sound convincing while still being vague enough that it doesn't really say anything.
I believe the expected response at this point is now: [citation needed].
Postgres was technically inferior in that it failed to include native replication for a long, long time.
And that hasn't been the case since Postgres 9.0, which has been out for several years.
Also, I notice how you sneaked the word "native" in there, conveniently excluding all the external solutions that existed before.
In many ways, WordPress : CMS :: MySQL : Database.
Both WordPress and MySQL are great success stories in terms of popularity and to some extent creating an ecosystem as a result. That doesn't make either of them particularly good technically. The way that WordPress was basically hard-coded to use a specific database is not any other database's fault. It's just another symptom of the questionable architectural decisions underlying it.
Postgres works just fine for backing web sites. I've built some of them myself, and so have plenty of other people I know. It has basically all the same advantages that MySQL used to have, plus numerous technical improvements on every level from everyday query support right up to heavyweight architectural tools.
As for your final points, well, popularity is not the same thing as quality, which is why MySQL has done as well as it has for so long, and just because you didn't bother spending ten seconds on Google before posting, that doesn't mean no-one operating a substantial web site runs Postgres underneath it.
MySQL and spinoffs all occupy an uncomfortable middle ground.
Indeed. As well as SQLite, there is also a new generation of "NoSQL" databases that might serve some projects better. Any way you look at it, MySQL and MariaDB are stuck in a kind of limbo now. They could survive for years on nothing but inertia, but it's hard to see how they would be a good choice for any new project today.
...there is no reason at all to use MySQL 5.5 instead of MariaDB 5.5
Or Postgres, which is better than MySQL in numerous objective/technical ways and has been for years.
This was the sort of creepy side of employment that I never got on with. Employers limiting use of company resources and monitoring those resources to comply with regulatory obligations is one thing. Employers treating employees as robots instead of humans, with no mechanism for private communication during office hours even if it's for something like calling your doctor during your lunch break, is something that I believe should only happen in cases of genuine need (and there are very few cases where it's impractical to provide even a dedicated private facility independent of company networks etc.). Employers treating employees as full-time robots, with the right to control or monitor what they do outside work in any capacity that doesn't interfere with the reasonable performance of their employment duties, is almost automatically a bridge too far.
The thing I found most worrying about the trend was that a combination of big business control freakery and one-sided "monitor/audit everything" government regulation, even when done with apparently reasonable intentions, seems to be overtaking anything resembling personal privacy and work/life balance, as well as often imposing overheads that the businesses themselves have to cover. This is how we get employers, or even prospective employers, demanding access to things like people's social networks and personal devices in IMHO completely inappropriate ways.
I don't see any solution to this short of legislation with actual teeth, and for those in places where the government culture is dominated by the interests of big business and/or personal privacy is not legally protected to any significant degree (the US being probably the most obvious example today, though it's hardly alone on either score), it's tough to see where that legislation is going to come from. And without it, it's hard to see how BYOD can ever be compatible with onerous regulatory frameworks in a way that doesn't screw the employee.
No, really?
Churchill also said that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter, so I suspect he really did mean both sides of the quote you mentioned.
Thanks, I'd heard of new potential sources in that area, but I didn't know that any find had been confirmed on that scale. Sorry I can't give you a (+1, Informative).
Well, I thought it was obvious that I was shooting for a (+1, Funny), so I too was a little disturbed that the first mod was actually a "real" one. :-)
Now, come on, be fair. There really isn't any good data that fossil fuels are going to run out soon at current usage rates, and renewable energy sources will by nature always cost at least 17x as much. We don't need any more research, all that climate change nonsense has been debunked already.
Also, switching to renewables would cost jobs*, and the sun doesn't have an infinite supply of energy either so if we take too much it will cool and the whole planet will die.
* in my state
There's no way to know unless you explictly tell them. This is why voting with your wallet sends an ambiguous message, if any at all.
That is a fair point, but I don't think it affects the end result. Whether you "send a message" accurately doesn't really matter, because we're talking about a Darwinian process here: companies that do figure it out, or just make the right lucky guess, will survive, while those that lose custom and can't figure out why will fail. It might help more companies to figure it out if would-be customers who are deterred by DRM sent a message indicating why as well as taking their business elsewhere, but the harsh reality of the business world is that such helpful behaviour is not necessary for the general good in the long run, only for the good of that particular company.
There's a joke in the business world that sums up your position here: "Yeah, we know we're selling at a loss, but we'll make it up on volume!"
I agree with much of what you say. Despite what some people are reading into my posts here, I'm not actually a big fan of DRM, and in fact my own companies don't currently use anything similar to protect our assets because we don't want to risk upsetting genuine customers.
However, I think this is an emotive subject and a fast-moving field, and as such we should be very wary of arbitrarily prohibiting a certain kind of commercial deal or technological measure that does potentially have reasonable applications. Although it's taken a while, there seems to be growing evidence that the market itself will take care of excessive/abusive schemes once people wise up to them. That goes for everything from DRM schemes that aren't honestly disclosed to the practices with academic journals that you mentioned. So in that sense, I'm more interested in forcing disclosure so people can make informed purchasing decisions than in blanket bans.
I would be the first to agree that those schemes should not have been permitted and people who purchased under them should have been entitled to at least a partial refund to restore equity. Please don't mistake my position that businesses should not be universally banned from using DRM for a position that businesses should not be universally banned from misleading their customers or changing the deal, nor for a position that businesses who do so anyway shouldn't be penalised severely for it.
I have no trouble renting things, but I have to know for how long I can have it. If the time is arbitrary, well, on principle I find that just a sleazy way of doing business.
FWIW, I agree with you completely. Using DRM to sneakily close things down, or pitching something as a sale when it is in practice not permanent and not even guaranteed for any given length of time, is just not playing fair.
It would be nice to think courts would clamp down on such behaviour on general principles, for much the same reasons that the European Court of Justice essentially ruled that Oracle couldn't prevent someone from reselling a software licence when the original deal was already tantamount to a sale. Even in the US, where Vernor vs. Autodesk was overturned by the 9th Circuit on grounds of precedent, the decision seemed to imply some reluctance or even concern about whether the legally correct result was actually the right one. Those cases were about reselling and the first sale principle, but interestingly in the ECJ result it was also specified that if part of the original deal was for Oracle to provide free upgrades to the purchaser then they must also provide the same service to the purchaser of a resold licence. All of this suggests that certainly in Europe and potentially in the US, courts won't necessarily put up with the kinds of trickery we're talking about here.
Still, I would have no problem with imposing legislative rules on suppliers using DRM schemes to require full disclosure of any guaranteed period of service (or the lack of any such guarantee) and all side effects of the DRM (details of any data collected/transmitted, possible interference with normal operation of the system, and the like). As you say, one big problem with the current situation isn't that there is a rental-style arrangement, it's that one party doesn't even know what the arrangement really is when they sign up.
There aren't really Numerous Business Models, unfortunately. There are really only two, sales or rentals.
I suppose that's true, in the sense that permanent or temporary are an exhaustive set of options for how you can have access to a work. However, I would argue that different rental models can be sufficiently distinctive in practice to consider them separately.
For example, direct rental like the Blockbuster-style chains who would lend you a tape/disc overnight for a small fee was successful for a long time, but as prices for purchases have been driven down, the different in cost to rent vs. buy stopped being significant for a lot of people and those stores died out. Meanwhile, in recent years, we've seen some spectacular success stories built on the library model, effectively relying on the fact that even with theoretically unlimited access to numerous works, any given customer is only going to consume at a certain rate, and a viable pricing model exists accordingly.
"Public art" that is permanently available for free is an interesting variation, but I suspect it is best reserved for necessary practical works like, say, educational materials used in schools. For anything that is a matter of taste, I doubt that bureaucrats are better able to judge value than an open market, and there are significant ethical questions about using taxpayers' money for such purposes.
Artificial scarcity is never good for the consumer...ever
Not directly, no. Neither is paying for anything else, but if we took away the obligation to do so, I don't think you'd like the indirect consequences for long.
here are some examples of this that DRM creates
No, those are examples that specific DRM schemes create. I am not arguing that poorly implemented or abusive DRM schemes should be supported. I just think that while legal and economic changes happen more slowly than technological ones, most of the problems you're describing will be dealt with in due course by regular market forces and practical realities, DRM or no. If even a repeat offender like Ubisoft can get the point and tone things down dramatically in response to a spectacular DRM-based screw-up, if even gamers who probably collectively tolerate more DRM-based abuse than any other single group can cause enough grief that their suppliers change their ways, then there is reason to be optimistic. After all, those same gamers are generally positive about Steam despite its DRM, and many of them have commented on forums like this one that it's because Steam's DRM almost always works properly without getting in the way of their enjoyment.
Setting aside the errors in what you've just said (e.g. If I didn't "have a right ... to enjoy someone else's work without compensating them at all for their work to create if" I could not enjoy works that the author willingly gave away free copies of)
There's nothing wrong with what I wrote. You don't have a right to do that, you just got given permission by the guy who did the work. Surely as a lawyer you understand the difference?
Even today, the raison d'Ãtre of copyright is the promotion of progress of science, not compensating authors.
Yours might be. Most of the world is not subject to the United States' legal system, however often certain people in the United States seem to forget that.
In any case, you're twisting my words. The point about compensation wasn't that artists had some magical right to compensation no matter what, it was that if a work under copyright is for sale at a price then that's the price you have to pay if you want a copy.
In countries where there is a legitimate government, i.e. one that governs with the consent of the governed, copyright not only need not exist, according to the whim of the people as carried out by the government that serves them, but can be more or less arbitrarily written and rewritten as they see fit, whether authors like it or not. If we collectively choose to copy works without the permission of the author and without the permission of the author, it takes just a simple stroke of the pen to make this totally legal.
Right, but in a few hundreds places around the world no-one has made that stroke of the pen yet, so your entire argument is a straw man.
Indeed, I wholeheartedly support the idea of not granting copyrights to authors for works where the author or a person acting under the author's authority, has encumbered those works with DRM.
I see why some people wholeheartedly support the idea of just shooting all the lawyers, but fortunately for you, not everyone gets what the want.
Regardless, you haven't come anywhere near addressing my original point, which was that there are reasonable alternative arrangements to making a full purchase where DRM isn't an encumbrance in the same way. Are you suggesting that we should abolish all the popular and commercially successful services that have become established in recent years, to the detriment of both their customers and the creative workers they support, even though parties on both sides seem to be quite happy with their arrangements? That also seems a very odd position for a lawyer to take.
Thanks for the explanation.
I think for this kind of debate to make sense, it's important to separate basic principles like copyright and the use of technological measures to make infringing more difficult from poor or abusive implementations like never-ending copyright and DRM schemes that seriously interfere with legitimate customers.
Sadly, there are plenty of poor or abusive implementations around. Moreover, it is almost certainly impossible to create a perfect DRM scheme using technology in isolation, successfully blocking most/all illegal copying without also potentially impairing legitimate uses. But I don't think it's particularly helpful to rule out any attempt to redress the heavily one-sided general situation that exists with piracy being rampant by singling out a few high-profile screw-ups. As the likes of Steam and DVDs have shown, you can have much more reasonable schemes that very rarely interfere with legitimate users.
Sorry, that's another reference that probably makes sense to you but not to someone from the UK.
In any case, voting with your wallet is just about the most powerful tool any customer has. No-one is going to be in business for long, DRM or not, if they don't offer products the market wants at prices it is willing to pay. And no business is going to be as successful as it could be if it keeps alienating its customer base by imposing unreasonable terms or screwing up a DRM implementation in a way that stops people enjoying their purchases.
There are very, very few creative works that are actually necessities today. Almost all creative works are luxuries, and it won't kill you not to have one if you don't like the terms it's offered on. The idea that no-one will offer creative works on favourable terms if DRM is allowed is about as plausible as the idea that no-one would create any new works at all without copyright. As evidence of this, I would like to cite exhibit A, the iTunes Music Store and its DRM-free music files.
Sorry, I don't quite follow your argument. Given that pay-per-view is going to be cheaper than buying a full copy of a movie -- or it obviously won't be around for long -- if you think most people won't want to watch the same movie more than once, isn't that an argument for pay-per-view models, where the customer will still get what he wants but at a lower price?
I wasn't talking about the risk of being sued, I was talking about the risk of getting something that wasn't, in fact, the same as what you would have bought legitimately. One obvious possibility is that the version you get is poor quality or incomplete. Another is that it comes with helpful extra facilities such as uploading your bank credentials or adding your PC to a botnet.