No, no, no. BeOS failed for a very simple reason. There wasn't enough applications availablle to run on it. Who cares about MS as a threat? What computer company in their right mind is going to bundle an OS that doesn't have a decent browser or office suite and doesn't have any games or applications available?
According to allmusic.com this NSyNC album was released on July 24. There's already a million or so copies out there and they're not protected. Audiogalaxy shows hundreds of copies of the songs in their directory.
Just who is this record company trying to kid? The album's already been ripped and MP3'd to hell and back.
Even if the next group managed to get a 100% copy protected release out, human nature being what it is, ripped copies will leak out from the manufacturing plants or other industry sources - in fact, they already do. It happens all the time with software and the social pressure for free copies of popular bands will be much greater than for computer games.
If you keep blocking the ads, then the advertisers will give up and you will get to pay for the content. It's that simple.
Text only content is simpler. One gets the information one wants, without a bunch of graphics to increase the bandwidth cost. People who provide their information this way don't have mega expenses and can provide good content for nothing. Many do. There's more free (and good) information on a variety of subjects out there than I'll ever have time to look at, and these sites are not going away. Sites with popup windows aren't very likely to be visited twice by me. I've yet to pay an access charge for any site, as there's either a free alternative or the information isn't worth the cost to me.
Here's the number 1 law of advertising - a website is not selling content to people who are paying by viewing advertising. No - they are selling audiences to advertisers. If they do things that tick off their audience, such as pop-up windows, then they run the risk of having less audience to sell. The reason why the ads are more intrusive, and the rate advertisers are paying has dropped is because the advertisers have discovered that the audience isn't as valuable as they thought it was - they don't pay as much attention, and don't react directly to the ads. Now they're trying to make us pay attention in a last gasp effort to have an audience worth paying money for. My guess is it's not working.
Paying for content is probably not workable in most cases, due to print and other media alternatives. And advertisers are not going to pick up the tab. This leaves the field to the amateurs and those professional organizations that can subsidize the cost of their web page with the other segments of their business. (Remember that the N.Y. Times will always advertise one thing no matter what blocking software we use - the N.Y. Times itself.) I think that's a good thing.
It's true that analog has a warmth that digital hasn't achieved yet, but vinyl has a signal to noise ratio that's atrocious for today's standards. (I speak as someone who's got 3,000 records and a turntable.) I'd rather lose a little warthm and gain a purer signal. Also, a lot of the music recorded today is recorded digitally - so, the most genuine way to experience it is digitally. Another way of getting that warmth (which is really a slight distortion of the signal through compression) is by dubbing onto good quality cassette tape.
I also wonder if a new cd or dvd audio format, such as 24 bit/96 khz might make a major difference. I record music with a friend of mine and the guitars have a lot more presence when they're recorded in this format, rather than CD-quality. The future is more likely to see this than a move back to vinyl.
My thoughts on this is that if gas stations were to price gouge, that there's an easy way to put them in their place - don't buy anything but gasoline there. I used to work at a gas station and they don't make money until you buy something in the store, like pop or junk food. The gas is pretty much sold at cost. So, if we were to buy our pop and junk food at stores that didn't sell gas, they'd be in serious trouble.
Fortunately, gas stations in my town were reasonable and didn't jack up their prices on gas that was already in their gas tanks and billed to them. I swear if they'd have gone up to 4 or 5 bucks, they'd have never seen another non-gas dollar from me again, and I'd be very vocal in suggesting others do the same. And yeah, that's another of the ways a free markets works...
Our parents saved the world from nuclear holocoust.
They did? Then why do the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Israelis and who the hell knows who else still have enough bombs to destroy everybody? Wake up - the world isn't saved from this yet and won't be until the bombs are GONE.
(blinks) Didn't this become an outdated view in the 70's when the first PCs came out? This reads like an old science fiction story - the researchers build the world's ultimate computer and ask it if there is a God. The answer - "There is now."
So, what's next? Closet nuclear reactors to power our aircars and furnaces? Jobs where we push one button all day? Treadmills to walk our antenna wired dogs on? What are they going to call this thing anyway - the Jetson OS? Sheesh...
Yeah, it's going to come up forever. It saves the person posting it the actual trouble of thinking up something to say about the issue at hand, or, perhaps, thinking at all. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the viewpoint expressed - I certainly can't see how instituting back doors in crypto is going to be useful at this stage of the ball game. On the other hand, if people can't think of anything else to say but "TTCGUELTOALTSDNLNS", what do they need with encryption? The saying isn't as clearcut as people think - what is "essential" liberty? How long is "temporary" - would it be all right to give up an essential liberty for permanent safety? Is a country that has owns enough nuclear bombs to kill everyone in the world several times over truly concerned with liberty or safety? Isn't Mutually Assured Destruction also Mutually Assured Terrorism? Are we as free and safe as we think we are? Are we concerned as to whether others in the world are as free and safe? Was Mr. Franklin concerned that Indians and blacks in the colonies had neither liberty or safety to the point where he was willing to insist that a new American government that didn't recognize these rights for everyone wasn't legitimate?
No, it's just easier to type "TTCGUELTOALTSDNLNS". See? I've made it even easier!
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
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Do you really think that if it was "illegal" for the terrorists to carry any knife on board the airplane, that FAA rule would have stopped this tragedy?
If it had been enforced by competant and alert security? Probably. It's not just a matter of what laws are passed - it's how they are enforced.
The basic message of Omnifarious' posting is correct. Your statement is similar to another former slashdot arguement, that Columbine supposedly could have been prevented by tougher laws on carrying guns into a school. Right...
It's nothing of the sort. You can argue that people with pens, martial arts skills, etc. could do the same thing, but how many times have they? And no matter how many hand combat skills they have, if they can't get into the cockpit, then they won't get control of the flight. I'm not arguing we do ONE thing - many things have to be done. Banning knives is one of them.
So, you don't like the idea of controlling what people can carry onto flights? You don't think the government should make such rules? Try this argument - those airplanes are private property. Passengers are guests - if the owner of the property wants to ban knives from the airplane, he has every right to, doesn't he?
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
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No amount of 'inconveniencing' will give me the safety I crave.
The universe cares nothing for our "right" to convenience or safety. Or freedom. Life, by its very nature, is a set of comprimises of our principles with forces we cannot control. We can choose, but we cannot control what our choices are. Not being able to take a knife aboard an aircraft seems to be a pitifully small thing to complain about in a cruel world such as this. Don't you think a good way to decrease the motivation to perform these attacks is to make them harder to pull off?
We do not choose linux for nearly as many reasons - but first and foremost in my book is the endless parade of self-serving, imposing, and degrading fanatics that populate the ranks of both slashdot, the Internet and computer community at large.
You were doing quite well in this post until you said that - I choose my OS based on what the programs that are available can do for me. I'm a amateur musician and writer - Beos was little help to me in either field. Linux is not much help in music although it's improving (and yes, I check Dave Phillips' page once a month, so I know what's out there). Windows music software does a lot more and I don't have to hack too much to get it to work. On the negative side, I lose work often enough in Windows through crashes that I've decided to stick to Linux for my writing. Both are useful to me and I intend to keep both - but I'm sticking with Win98, and not upgrading it. On the other hand, I'm running Mandrake 7.2 and if I see new things I like, I might be tempted into an upgrade next year. I don't have to choose one or the other - I choose both.
Oh, dear, he called your analysis silly, didn't he? Look, if free adults want to use their freedom of association to share their work under the OAL, I can't see why you should be critical of this. If someone uses a OAL sample in one of their songs, they have agreed to the license - if they don't like the implications of that, they have no business using the sample. No one's forcing anyone to participate in this idea. It's my impression is that what you're really arguing for is the ability to make things using other people's work without allowing others to do the same. If you don't want to share it, don't take it. No one's stopping you from creating your own, 100% original work and giving or selling it to the world under any terms you choose. I would think carefully before I used the OAL for my own music, as I don't think it would be a good idea for a lot of my work, but I want the freedom to choose it if I think it's appropriate for a certain song.
As a person who has created music and written for many, many years, I feel I have far above average ability in these areas. I don't agree with you that everybody has talent - in fact, there are such things as artistic "superstars", whether they be recognized as such or not. Other than this, I agree with your post - the real artists do it for the art, not the money. One of the reasons that poetry remains our most sincere art is that hardly anyone makes any money off of it. Compare that to some of the musical and literary "talent" turned into burnt offerings at the Temple of Mammon... As Allen Ginsberg said, we don't have to do art all the time and we don't have to make a living at it. And only an idiot starves in a garret because he can't think of some other job to get.
Hmmm. If that's so, then we couldn't even write a simple "Hello, World" program without lots of added junk to make sure no one copies it. This law's even more ridiculous than I thought. Thanks.
Just write the code and put it in the appropriate place(s). (Perhaps loaded as a module?) Make sure that the source code is distributed with generous comments within, explaining how it works, as any good code should. Make sure the binaries are compiled with this code. Red Hat, etc. would then be legally compliant - it wouldn't be their fault if a customer decided to unload the module, remove the code and recompile the kernel, or hack the code itself, would it?
Boycott popular, corporate-owned culture. If the price of having the ocean of swill we call a culture is to have our hardware and software crippled, then it's time to turn our backs on it. Support free and open software, music, books and entertainment. Turn the TV and the radio off. Dare to start a culture where free individuals share their art with one another instead of having some mass media entity bastardize it into mush so it can be shoved down people's throats. If you have to buy something produced by these clowns, buy it used. Are bread and circuses worth our freedom? I suppose they can stop us from "pirating" their goods - but they can't make us watch or listen to them and they can't stop us from creating things on our own and sharing them with each other. If you can't support this boycott totally, do as much as you can and most importantly, support the lone, independant artists who are on the web, giving their work to anyone who is willing to try it out. Every time we do this, we are encouraging the development of art outside the mass media.
It's driven me up a wall several times, whenever I've added or subtracted a hard drive or CD-ROM. If you have one hard drive, the first partition is C:, the second is D:, and so on until you have your CDROM, E:. OK, if you add a second hard drive, C: stays the same, but D: is now the first partition of your second hard drive, E: is the second partition of the first, and the CD-ROM is F:. This results in over half of your programs having to be reinstalled, either because they can't figure out that the CDROM has changed drive letters, or that they're on a different drive letter, or both. It's a major pain. If you add a CDR to your system, it may insist on being E: instead of F:, which bumps your regular CDROM to F: and you get to reinstall all those programs again. There's no way you can just tell the system to use certain drive letters - no, it's going to be the way it is and you just have to deal with it. Oh, yeah, if you wipe one of your partitions to install Linux in, you'll have one less drive letter and so the CDROM letter will change again and... well, it's time to reinstall all that crap again. It's the most asinine partition identification system possible.
In Linux, switching around hardware, the names of the CD-ROMS (hdc1 + hdd1) stay the same, no matter what you do with the hard drives. Now THAT'S logical!
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I've perfected a Beckett operating system which takes forever to boot up. It's called Waiting for GodOS.
No, no, no. BeOS failed for a very simple reason. There wasn't enough applications availablle to run on it. Who cares about MS as a threat? What computer company in their right mind is going to bundle an OS that doesn't have a decent browser or office suite and doesn't have any games or applications available?
According to allmusic.com this NSyNC album was released on July 24. There's already a million or so copies out there and they're not protected. Audiogalaxy shows hundreds of copies of the songs in their directory.
Just who is this record company trying to kid? The album's already been ripped and MP3'd to hell and back.
Even if the next group managed to get a 100% copy protected release out, human nature being what it is, ripped copies will leak out from the manufacturing plants or other industry sources - in fact, they already do. It happens all the time with software and the social pressure for free copies of popular bands will be much greater than for computer games.
yes I do, the situation durring the election was unpresidented.
You're only half right - Bush was presidented and Gore was unpresidented.
... Wait, Pinky. According to my neuron activity monitor, you're not thinking anything at all."
If you keep blocking the ads, then the advertisers will give up and you will get to pay for the content. It's that simple.
Text only content is simpler. One gets the information one wants, without a bunch of graphics to increase the bandwidth cost. People who provide their information this way don't have mega expenses and can provide good content for nothing. Many do. There's more free (and good) information on a variety of subjects out there than I'll ever have time to look at, and these sites are not going away. Sites with popup windows aren't very likely to be visited twice by me. I've yet to pay an access charge for any site, as there's either a free alternative or the information isn't worth the cost to me.
Here's the number 1 law of advertising - a website is not selling content to people who are paying by viewing advertising. No - they are selling audiences to advertisers. If they do things that tick off their audience, such as pop-up windows, then they run the risk of having less audience to sell. The reason why the ads are more intrusive, and the rate advertisers are paying has dropped is because the advertisers have discovered that the audience isn't as valuable as they thought it was - they don't pay as much attention, and don't react directly to the ads. Now they're trying to make us pay attention in a last gasp effort to have an audience worth paying money for. My guess is it's not working.
Paying for content is probably not workable in most cases, due to print and other media alternatives. And advertisers are not going to pick up the tab. This leaves the field to the amateurs and those professional organizations that can subsidize the cost of their web page with the other segments of their business. (Remember that the N.Y. Times will always advertise one thing no matter what blocking software we use - the N.Y. Times itself.) I think that's a good thing.
It's true that analog has a warmth that digital hasn't achieved yet, but vinyl has a signal to noise ratio that's atrocious for today's standards. (I speak as someone who's got 3,000 records and a turntable.) I'd rather lose a little warthm and gain a purer signal. Also, a lot of the music recorded today is recorded digitally - so, the most genuine way to experience it is digitally. Another way of getting that warmth (which is really a slight distortion of the signal through compression) is by dubbing onto good quality cassette tape.
I also wonder if a new cd or dvd audio format, such as 24 bit/96 khz might make a major difference. I record music with a friend of mine and the guitars have a lot more presence when they're recorded in this format, rather than CD-quality. The future is more likely to see this than a move back to vinyl.
I love it so much that I'm going to get 2 or 3!
Perhaps we should pass a law specifically against crashing airplanes into buildings.
...
But what if it's my airplane and my (unoccupied) building? Isn't that a violation of my rights to do with my property as I see fit?
They'll take my joystick from me when they pry it from my cold, dead, fried fingers
My thoughts on this is that if gas stations were to price gouge, that there's an easy way to put them in their place - don't buy anything but gasoline there. I used to work at a gas station and they don't make money until you buy something in the store, like pop or junk food. The gas is pretty much sold at cost. So, if we were to buy our pop and junk food at stores that didn't sell gas, they'd be in serious trouble.
...
Fortunately, gas stations in my town were reasonable and didn't jack up their prices on gas that was already in their gas tanks and billed to them. I swear if they'd have gone up to 4 or 5 bucks, they'd have never seen another non-gas dollar from me again, and I'd be very vocal in suggesting others do the same. And yeah, that's another of the ways a free markets works
Our parents saved the world from nuclear holocoust.
They did? Then why do the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Israelis and who the hell knows who else still have enough bombs to destroy everybody? Wake up - the world isn't saved from this yet and won't be until the bombs are GONE.
(blinks) Didn't this become an outdated view in the 70's when the first PCs came out? This reads like an old science fiction story - the researchers build the world's ultimate computer and ask it if there is a God. The answer - "There is now."
...
So, what's next? Closet nuclear reactors to power our aircars and furnaces? Jobs where we push one button all day? Treadmills to walk our antenna wired dogs on? What are they going to call this thing anyway - the Jetson OS? Sheesh
Yeah, it's going to come up forever. It saves the person posting it the actual trouble of thinking up something to say about the issue at hand, or, perhaps, thinking at all. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the viewpoint expressed - I certainly can't see how instituting back doors in crypto is going to be useful at this stage of the ball game. On the other hand, if people can't think of anything else to say but "TTCGUELTOALTSDNLNS", what do they need with encryption? The saying isn't as clearcut as people think - what is "essential" liberty? How long is "temporary" - would it be all right to give up an essential liberty for permanent safety? Is a country that has owns enough nuclear bombs to kill everyone in the world several times over truly concerned with liberty or safety? Isn't Mutually Assured Destruction also Mutually Assured Terrorism? Are we as free and safe as we think we are? Are we concerned as to whether others in the world are as free and safe? Was Mr. Franklin concerned that Indians and blacks in the colonies had neither liberty or safety to the point where he was willing to insist that a new American government that didn't recognize these rights for everyone wasn't legitimate?
No, it's just easier to type "TTCGUELTOALTSDNLNS". See? I've made it even easier!
Do you really think that if it was "illegal" for the terrorists to carry any knife on board the airplane, that FAA rule would have stopped this tragedy?
If it had been enforced by competant and alert security? Probably. It's not just a matter of what laws are passed - it's how they are enforced.
The basic message of Omnifarious' posting is correct. Your statement is similar to another former slashdot arguement, that Columbine supposedly could have been prevented by tougher laws on carrying guns into a school. Right...
It's nothing of the sort. You can argue that people with pens, martial arts skills, etc. could do the same thing, but how many times have they? And no matter how many hand combat skills they have, if they can't get into the cockpit, then they won't get control of the flight. I'm not arguing we do ONE thing - many things have to be done. Banning knives is one of them.
So, you don't like the idea of controlling what people can carry onto flights? You don't think the government should make such rules? Try this argument - those airplanes are private property. Passengers are guests - if the owner of the property wants to ban knives from the airplane, he has every right to, doesn't he?
No amount of 'inconveniencing' will give me the safety I crave.
The universe cares nothing for our "right" to convenience or safety. Or freedom. Life, by its very nature, is a set of comprimises of our principles with forces we cannot control. We can choose, but we cannot control what our choices are. Not being able to take a knife aboard an aircraft seems to be a pitifully small thing to complain about in a cruel world such as this. Don't you think a good way to decrease the motivation to perform these attacks is to make them harder to pull off?
Sept. 11, 1922 - British mandate of Palestine begins - source - http://www.scopesys.com/cgi/today2.cgi
My condolences to those who have died and their loved ones
We do not choose linux for nearly as many reasons - but first and foremost in my book is the endless parade of self-serving, imposing, and degrading fanatics that populate the ranks of both slashdot, the Internet and computer community at large.
You were doing quite well in this post until you said that - I choose my OS based on what the programs that are available can do for me. I'm a amateur musician and writer - Beos was little help to me in either field. Linux is not much help in music although it's improving (and yes, I check Dave Phillips' page once a month, so I know what's out there). Windows music software does a lot more and I don't have to hack too much to get it to work. On the negative side, I lose work often enough in Windows through crashes that I've decided to stick to Linux for my writing. Both are useful to me and I intend to keep both - but I'm sticking with Win98, and not upgrading it. On the other hand, I'm running Mandrake 7.2 and if I see new things I like, I might be tempted into an upgrade next year. I don't have to choose one or the other - I choose both.
Oh, dear, he called your analysis silly, didn't he? Look, if free adults want to use their freedom of association to share their work under the OAL, I can't see why you should be critical of this. If someone uses a OAL sample in one of their songs, they have agreed to the license - if they don't like the implications of that, they have no business using the sample. No one's forcing anyone to participate in this idea. It's my impression is that what you're really arguing for is the ability to make things using other people's work without allowing others to do the same. If you don't want to share it, don't take it. No one's stopping you from creating your own, 100% original work and giving or selling it to the world under any terms you choose. I would think carefully before I used the OAL for my own music, as I don't think it would be a good idea for a lot of my work, but I want the freedom to choose it if I think it's appropriate for a certain song.
As a person who has created music and written for many, many years, I feel I have far above average ability in these areas. I don't agree with you that everybody has talent - in fact, there are such things as artistic "superstars", whether they be recognized as such or not. Other than this, I agree with your post - the real artists do it for the art, not the money. One of the reasons that poetry remains our most sincere art is that hardly anyone makes any money off of it. Compare that to some of the musical and literary "talent" turned into burnt offerings at the Temple of Mammon ... As Allen Ginsberg said, we don't have to do art all the time and we don't have to make a living at it. And only an idiot starves in a garret because he can't think of some other job to get.
Hmmm. If that's so, then we couldn't even write a simple "Hello, World" program without lots of added junk to make sure no one copies it. This law's even more ridiculous than I thought. Thanks.
Just write the code and put it in the appropriate place(s). (Perhaps loaded as a module?) Make sure that the source code is distributed with generous comments within, explaining how it works, as any good code should. Make sure the binaries are compiled with this code. Red Hat, etc. would then be legally compliant - it wouldn't be their fault if a customer decided to unload the module, remove the code and recompile the kernel, or hack the code itself, would it?
Boycott popular, corporate-owned culture. If the price of having the ocean of swill we call a culture is to have our hardware and software crippled, then it's time to turn our backs on it. Support free and open software, music, books and entertainment. Turn the TV and the radio off. Dare to start a culture where free individuals share their art with one another instead of having some mass media entity bastardize it into mush so it can be shoved down people's throats. If you have to buy something produced by these clowns, buy it used. Are bread and circuses worth our freedom? I suppose they can stop us from "pirating" their goods - but they can't make us watch or listen to them and they can't stop us from creating things on our own and sharing them with each other. If you can't support this boycott totally, do as much as you can and most importantly, support the lone, independant artists who are on the web, giving their work to anyone who is willing to try it out. Every time we do this, we are encouraging the development of art outside the mass media.
We do not have to consume.
... 42. I think rather highly of myself, I know ...
... is the number of the beast with two backs
It's driven me up a wall several times, whenever I've added or subtracted a hard drive or CD-ROM. If you have one hard drive, the first partition is C:, the second is D:, and so on until you have your CDROM, E:. OK, if you add a second hard drive, C: stays the same, but D: is now the first partition of your second hard drive, E: is the second partition of the first, and the CD-ROM is F:. This results in over half of your programs having to be reinstalled, either because they can't figure out that the CDROM has changed drive letters, or that they're on a different drive letter, or both. It's a major pain. If you add a CDR to your system, it may insist on being E: instead of F:, which bumps your regular CDROM to F: and you get to reinstall all those programs again. There's no way you can just tell the system to use certain drive letters - no, it's going to be the way it is and you just have to deal with it. Oh, yeah, if you wipe one of your partitions to install Linux in, you'll have one less drive letter and so the CDROM letter will change again and ... well, it's time to reinstall all that crap again. It's the most asinine partition identification system possible.
In Linux, switching around hardware, the names of the CD-ROMS (hdc1 + hdd1) stay the same, no matter what you do with the hard drives. Now THAT'S logical!