Seems like it would probably be worth staying in business, as long as the fines don't drive their profit into negative numbers.
I suppose at some point you'd get to a shutdown condition where they would be better off liquidating their assets and invest the capital elsewhere, rather than continue to do business under heavy fines, but they would have to be a lot heavier than anything that's considered right now.
In short, I think the Europeans can squeeze Microsoft a lot harder, before they'll decide to take their ball and go home.
Yeah, because nobody in Europe knows how to get around Windows' auto-update features and run it as a pirate copy. Nope; only Americans and Asians know the secrets to that.
All that would happen if Microsoft did something (clearly insane) like that, would be that the European governments would have to invalidate Microsoft's copyrights over Windows, effectively legitimizing pirate copies. People would continue to use Windows, they would simply no longer pay for it.
It would actually be terrible for everyone concerned. A free-as-in-beer Windows would erode one of Linux's major advantages, while also denying Microsoft revenue, and starting a cat-and-mouse incompatibility game between various versions of Windows used in different markets.
In short, such a scenario isn't worth talking about, except as a fun mind game, because it will never happen.
I was talking to a coworker today about running old DOS applications, for people that don't want to or can't learn new software, but have new hardware.
Rather than try to install WordPerfect for DOS on top of an actual modern Windows install, I think it's a whole lot easier these days to install a virtualization system on top of the host OS, and run FreeDOS (or actual MS-DOS, if you can find a copy) on that, to support the old applications. As long as your VM system emulates the 'bare metal' and isn't aimed at only supporting one type of client OS, then this is pretty simple to set up.
I think actually the next time someone in my family complains about how much harder computers are to use today versus ten years ago, I'm going to set up MS-DOS in a VM (I still have a whole set of 3.5" installation floppies somewhere), fullscreen it, and see what they think. Somehow I think perhaps they're viewing the past through rose-colored glasses...but who knows. Maybe they'll prefer the old way.
Aren't the BIOS/firmware revisions specific to various motherboard models?
I always assumed that they were made by Award and Phoenix in conjunction with the mobo/chipset manufacturers, because the BIOS was specific to a particular configuration of parts, and wouldn't be interchangeable.
So if you did write an "open source BIOS," how would you keep it up to date with the multitude of different chipsets and motherboards? Wouldn't each one require its own modified version? Seems like, unless the major motherboard manufacturers commit to using LinuxBIOS, that they'll forever be playing catch-up, trying to modify and QA their revisions against new pieces of hardware. Which I guess isn't a bad thing, but it seems like it'll never be mainstream that way.
One assumes they're doing this over SSL, so grabbing the coordinates and the image shouldn't be trivial. If you can do that, then you can conduct a MITM attack and basically the whole system is hosed; I don't think they're claiming (or, if they are, they're foolish) to be secure against that.
I'm still not convinced that you can do any kind of secure authentication if the client machine into which you type the password (whether it's typed as text or onto an imagemap or via any other means) is assumed to be untrusted and compromised with malware. If the machine is rooted, then you really can't believe anything it's presenting to you. The user cannot tell what site it's really sending data to, or whether it's actually using an encrypted connection, or anything else.
I suspect that the best way around compromised Windows machines is to do the authentication off-computer, using a USB key or SmartCard that's tamper-resistant and never sends anything down the wire to the computer in the clear. The computer would only act as an insecure conduit, passing packets from the authentication dongle to the bank's computer and back. You'd still have the problem of MITM, I think (although maybe not quite so bad, if the key was primed with the bank's fingerprints and public keys), and social-engineering/phishing, but it would basically stop password snooping. The only ways to combat social attacks are via user education, and that's decidedly 'nontrivial.'
Let's assume you had a booklet of codes, a true OTP, that you used to log in to your bank. For each login you'd tear off the top sheet and use the next code.
That would still be susceptible to phishing. I could set up a site purporting to be your bank, and convince you to log into it. In doing so, you'd give me your next OTP code, which I could then use to log into your account and steal your money.
It would be a step up over conventional passwords, granted, but I'm not sure that it would be necessarily better than existing rotating-numbers tokens (RSA SecureID, etc.), which are not OTPs, but use secure enough PRNGs that the methods of attack against them are generally phishing/social-engineering rather than cryptographic. (And the electronic tokens have the advantage of the code you type in this minute not being good 15 minutes from now.) I guess that giving a booklet of randomly printed codes would be cheaper than handing out electronic tokens, so maybe the booklet method would be good for banking/mass-market, or in developing countries where the tokens would be unfeasibly expensive, but I'm not sure they're more secure.
Three-factor authentication (know, have, are) would still seem to be the most secure, and even with a synchronized PRNG in the form of a SecureID or SmartCard, you still have the problem of MITM attacks.
I don't know about that, most of the U.S. military's aircraft, its armored vehicles, its artillery, even a fair majority of the ordnance itself, is designed and built by contractors, and it seems to generally do its job. It's just not cheap. But then again, contracting outfits have little reason to be cheap, since there's no competition except with each other, and the client literally has the ability to print money.
I've worked in government contracting, and however fucked up you think that side of things is, it doesn't even touch the level of fuckedupedness that is your average USG agency. The level of apathy, bizarre interpersonal conflicts, mindless bureaucracy, and downright incompetence that I saw from government employees was truly astounding. That the government manages to do anything never ceases to amaze me, and more often than not I think it's only because of the labor of a few very skilled and dedicated people, hauling along the rest of their agencies like an ant beneath a dead whale.
The government, and anything that touches it, however peripherally, is a total sausage factory. If you want to retain any appreciation at all for the things it produces, don't watch them being made.
While I'm not disagreeing with you that many municipalities in the U.S. are effectively corrupt, and have entered into exclusivity deals with cable and telcos that are holding back service deployments, I think that the population density figures that you're using are misleading.
Just taking a country's or state's population and dividing it by its area doesn't give much of a meaningful figure of population density. People don't obey the Ideal Gas Law and just spread out evenly over an area. If that was true, then each person in Canada would be sitting in the middle of a miles-wide patch of empty space. People choose to live in high-density areas, and at least in my experience, this trend is stronger in colder climates.
So Sweden might have a low population density, but that doesn't really say anything about how tightly people are "clumped." I'm not sure what kind of measurement you'd need in order to compare that, but it needs to be something that gives you an idea of how much area is inhabited at various densities. Not just urban development, but small towns and villages that are clustered with lots of space in between. I have a feeling that Sweden, if you looked at it from that kind of analysis perspective, would probably be a lot closer to Canada (low overall density but much of the population concentrated) than a suburban-sprawl area like California or most of the East Coast (the "Boston-Atlanta Metro Area" as Gibson once predicted).
The failure of broadband in the U.S. should go principally to local governments and their shortsighted dealmaking, but the geography and urbanization here doesn't help at all, and neither does the way telecommunications are regulated at the Federal level (more corruption/influence, no doubt).
Thank god there are more activities in the U.S. to do than be on the internet.
Yeah... like eat.
Somehow I think that if we just had so many other things to do, to the point where people just don't care about internet access, because they're just so darned happy to be outside playing softball and everything else, that we wouldn't be one of the most morbidly obese countries on the planet.
I've got another theory: the demand for Internet doesn't exist in the U.S. to the same extent it does in other countries, because people here prefer the passive entertainment of watching television. Which incidentally, they can do while eating.
I remember playing with a first-generation Philips CDi unit at school; I have no idea why they purchased them, except that they must have had some idea about using it for educational purposes. (Or maybe someone just had budget money to burn.)
Anyway, I used them once to play "Seventh Guest" (also a PC/Mac game) and thought it was pretty slick. At the time (this must have been 1992 or 93) I hadn't seen a game that incorporated that much full-motion video at that point, and found it fairly impressive. Alternately, it might have just seemed that way because we had the CDi running into a huge BARCO CRT projector...
I was never sold on CDi as a format, or the standalone players, but I did buy the game when I finally got around to buying a CD-Rom drive and a computer capable of running it. I guess CDi should get credit for that.
What about the Apple Pippin? Not only was it $600 and had practically no software, it was underpowered and tried to compete directly with the N64 and PSX, after they were both established in the market.
The point is not whether the planes are nicer, it's whether packing more and more people into a single aircraft is really a good idea, both from a safety standpoint, and from a logistical one. For example, how long is it going to take to get everyone on and off one of the A380s? Baggage handling? Turnaround time at terminals?
I could think of a lot of things that could start to make the experience less-than-optimal, simply as a result of scaling the aircraft up too big.
The smaller Airbus aircraft are definitely nice (although it's not an entirely fair comparison, since most of the Airbus aircraft that I've traveled on are substantially newer than the average Boeing), but that doesn't make me exactly eager to pack myself on to the flying sardine-can that is the 380.
Why couldn't this unit be modified to call in artillery if the attacking force appeared to be overwhelming? It could upload the fire mission to guns that can also fire with a minimum of manual intervention. It's all about not exposing your soldiers to enemy fire.
Not only that, but these guns could themselves be "called in" by other external sensors.
I'd imagine that they would be most effective when deployed as part of a deep network of sensors. The 'gun' would use these sensors as its eyes and ears, and would use them when selecting and engaging targets, even if a particular target wasn't visible from the gun itself (not that you can do a whole lot of accurate indirect fire with a 5.56mm machine gun). Perhaps more importantly, a network of these guns would allow them to be coordinated, and engage targets in concert -- working together far more skillfully than would even be possible for teams of discrete human shooters with radio communication.
Really, I see the speaker as more useful after it starts firing.
I can just see it now... the DMZ suddenly filled with the sounds of automatic gunfire; then silence. A moment's hesitation, then a loudspeaker rings out: "KILLING SPREE!"
This is just my understanding, but Darwin doesn't have nearly as many 'interesting' features that don't already exist in Linux. There is some neat Solaris-only stuff that people have wanted to bring into Linux for a while, but have not been able to because of licensing problems, and the work it would take to clean-room it.
The thing that I always hear talk about is dtrace (currently CDL, and tightly integrated with the Solaris kernel), but looking at the WP article on it, apparently it's been partially brought over to BSD and OS X. Then there are also containers and that "self-healing" fault-isolation system, which I don't pretend to understand.
Perhaps there are just as many cool, compelling features in Darwin that aren't talked about, and deserve being shared with Linux and other OSes... but I've definitely not heard as much 'buzz' about them as you hear about some particular features of Solaris that are supposedly very neat.
Actually I remember back in the day, it was pretty common with folks with "hi-fi" systems that had both a LP turntable and a reel-to-reel, to dub their best-loved LPs to tape, and then play the tape, thus saving wear on the vinyl.
I once dug up an early 'mix tape' that my father had made this way, in the late 60s...format shifting is not a new idea, and it's fairly recently that its been attacked and called "stealing."
The previous upgrade cycles mostly happened because there was some perceived consumer advantage. 'Cassette tapes' sucked less than eight-track (cassettes), particularly for use in cars. CDs were superior to vinyl in terms of damage resistance (or so they said at the time, anyway), not wearing out, ease of FF/REV and SKIP, and sound quality. People chose those upgrades. Anyone with a decent home stereo could go from LP to cassette tape pretty trivially, and some people did (I know I did, for my car), but it was time consuming and most people didn't bother.
With the CD to MP3 format changeover, moving one's music oneself is trivial. Put the disc into iTunes, hit Rip. Thus, a lot of people aren't repurchasing their music as they did in the past, because this changeover is easier than any in the past. This drives the record companies crazy, because they've been used to getting a huge influx of cash every time one of these changeovers has happened in the past -- in fact, they think they're entitled to it. That is their critical mistake. They are not.
Frankly, I think it is this sense of entitlement that really aggravates me about the RIAA and its member companies most of all.
I think it has something to do with how much money people are willing to spend on supercomputers.
A lot of people are willing to throw down enough cash to get into the middle of that list, but there are only a few few people who are willing to spend the huge sums of money to build the biggest, baddest, fastest one of them all.
It's like looking at cars, and saying "huh, if we look at the most expensive class of cars, they all do 200+ MPH, but once you get down past the top price class, they all start to get about the same." It's because the market for a car that does 115 MPH is a lot bigger than for one that does 230, particularly when the latter might cost five times as much and only go twice as fast.
Laugh all you want, then go over to the Apple store and take a look at the point-of-sale displays.
Not sure if they sell it to the public, but "iCashRegister" exists, and it works with the credit card readers, UPC scanners, receipt printers, electronic-pen signature devices, cash drawers and everything else there.
I probably should have been more clear -- I wasn't implying that OpenBSD or any other kernel has less bugs than Linux; I haven't reviewed the code so I can't say that. However, regardless of which OS or kernel we're talking about, if people are recognizing and fixing bugs silently, and disguising or obscuring their patches, then it makes it very hard to get an idea of how many bugs are actually there, and at what rate they're being fixed.
It was more the practice of silently or clandestinely fixing bugs, without pointing out that the bug was there even after it's fixed, that seems like it's a problem. It means that contributions are going into the kernel tree that aren't well understood except by the person who's submitting them, or at least that's the impression that I get.
It's really that -- not-well-understood patches being submitted and accepted -- which I think is an issue. The relative merits of Linux vs OpenBSD isn't a can of worms I wanted to open up, except in how their processes for reviewing and accepting code differ.
I don't have an original Walkman, but somewhere around I do have a full-size-cassette Dictaphone of similar vintage, that's one of the best-made pieces of portable equipment I've ever owned. All metal construction, disassembelable (is that a word?) with a Phillips-head jewelers' screwdriver, reads and writes to a standard format, has all the inputs and outputs you'd expect, built to last forever. And perhaps most importantly, with a user-interface that you can use in the dark, with gloves on.
I keep it around mostly as an example of what high-end portable consumer electronics should be, and can be, but frequently aren't.
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Seems like it would probably be worth staying in business, as long as the fines don't drive their profit into negative numbers.
I suppose at some point you'd get to a shutdown condition where they would be better off liquidating their assets and invest the capital elsewhere, rather than continue to do business under heavy fines, but they would have to be a lot heavier than anything that's considered right now.
In short, I think the Europeans can squeeze Microsoft a lot harder, before they'll decide to take their ball and go home.
Yeah, because nobody in Europe knows how to get around Windows' auto-update features and run it as a pirate copy. Nope; only Americans and Asians know the secrets to that.
All that would happen if Microsoft did something (clearly insane) like that, would be that the European governments would have to invalidate Microsoft's copyrights over Windows, effectively legitimizing pirate copies. People would continue to use Windows, they would simply no longer pay for it.
It would actually be terrible for everyone concerned. A free-as-in-beer Windows would erode one of Linux's major advantages, while also denying Microsoft revenue, and starting a cat-and-mouse incompatibility game between various versions of Windows used in different markets.
In short, such a scenario isn't worth talking about, except as a fun mind game, because it will never happen.
This is a fairly good point.
I was talking to a coworker today about running old DOS applications, for people that don't want to or can't learn new software, but have new hardware.
Rather than try to install WordPerfect for DOS on top of an actual modern Windows install, I think it's a whole lot easier these days to install a virtualization system on top of the host OS, and run FreeDOS (or actual MS-DOS, if you can find a copy) on that, to support the old applications. As long as your VM system emulates the 'bare metal' and isn't aimed at only supporting one type of client OS, then this is pretty simple to set up.
I think actually the next time someone in my family complains about how much harder computers are to use today versus ten years ago, I'm going to set up MS-DOS in a VM (I still have a whole set of 3.5" installation floppies somewhere), fullscreen it, and see what they think. Somehow I think perhaps they're viewing the past through rose-colored glasses...but who knows. Maybe they'll prefer the old way.
Aren't the BIOS/firmware revisions specific to various motherboard models?
I always assumed that they were made by Award and Phoenix in conjunction with the mobo/chipset manufacturers, because the BIOS was specific to a particular configuration of parts, and wouldn't be interchangeable.
So if you did write an "open source BIOS," how would you keep it up to date with the multitude of different chipsets and motherboards? Wouldn't each one require its own modified version? Seems like, unless the major motherboard manufacturers commit to using LinuxBIOS, that they'll forever be playing catch-up, trying to modify and QA their revisions against new pieces of hardware. Which I guess isn't a bad thing, but it seems like it'll never be mainstream that way.
I can't be the only one here left wondering ... "if 1% of the Internet is porn, what's the other 99%?"
One assumes they're doing this over SSL, so grabbing the coordinates and the image shouldn't be trivial. If you can do that, then you can conduct a MITM attack and basically the whole system is hosed; I don't think they're claiming (or, if they are, they're foolish) to be secure against that.
I'm still not convinced that you can do any kind of secure authentication if the client machine into which you type the password (whether it's typed as text or onto an imagemap or via any other means) is assumed to be untrusted and compromised with malware. If the machine is rooted, then you really can't believe anything it's presenting to you. The user cannot tell what site it's really sending data to, or whether it's actually using an encrypted connection, or anything else.
I suspect that the best way around compromised Windows machines is to do the authentication off-computer, using a USB key or SmartCard that's tamper-resistant and never sends anything down the wire to the computer in the clear. The computer would only act as an insecure conduit, passing packets from the authentication dongle to the bank's computer and back. You'd still have the problem of MITM, I think (although maybe not quite so bad, if the key was primed with the bank's fingerprints and public keys), and social-engineering/phishing, but it would basically stop password snooping. The only ways to combat social attacks are via user education, and that's decidedly 'nontrivial.'
One-time-pads are not a panacea either.
Let's assume you had a booklet of codes, a true OTP, that you used to log in to your bank. For each login you'd tear off the top sheet and use the next code.
That would still be susceptible to phishing. I could set up a site purporting to be your bank, and convince you to log into it. In doing so, you'd give me your next OTP code, which I could then use to log into your account and steal your money.
It would be a step up over conventional passwords, granted, but I'm not sure that it would be necessarily better than existing rotating-numbers tokens (RSA SecureID, etc.), which are not OTPs, but use secure enough PRNGs that the methods of attack against them are generally phishing/social-engineering rather than cryptographic. (And the electronic tokens have the advantage of the code you type in this minute not being good 15 minutes from now.) I guess that giving a booklet of randomly printed codes would be cheaper than handing out electronic tokens, so maybe the booklet method would be good for banking/mass-market, or in developing countries where the tokens would be unfeasibly expensive, but I'm not sure they're more secure.
Three-factor authentication (know, have, are) would still seem to be the most secure, and even with a synchronized PRNG in the form of a SecureID or SmartCard, you still have the problem of MITM attacks.
I don't know about that, most of the U.S. military's aircraft, its armored vehicles, its artillery, even a fair majority of the ordnance itself, is designed and built by contractors, and it seems to generally do its job. It's just not cheap. But then again, contracting outfits have little reason to be cheap, since there's no competition except with each other, and the client literally has the ability to print money.
I've worked in government contracting, and however fucked up you think that side of things is, it doesn't even touch the level of fuckedupedness that is your average USG agency. The level of apathy, bizarre interpersonal conflicts, mindless bureaucracy, and downright incompetence that I saw from government employees was truly astounding. That the government manages to do anything never ceases to amaze me, and more often than not I think it's only because of the labor of a few very skilled and dedicated people, hauling along the rest of their agencies like an ant beneath a dead whale.
The government, and anything that touches it, however peripherally, is a total sausage factory. If you want to retain any appreciation at all for the things it produces, don't watch them being made.
While I'm not disagreeing with you that many municipalities in the U.S. are effectively corrupt, and have entered into exclusivity deals with cable and telcos that are holding back service deployments, I think that the population density figures that you're using are misleading.
Just taking a country's or state's population and dividing it by its area doesn't give much of a meaningful figure of population density. People don't obey the Ideal Gas Law and just spread out evenly over an area. If that was true, then each person in Canada would be sitting in the middle of a miles-wide patch of empty space. People choose to live in high-density areas, and at least in my experience, this trend is stronger in colder climates.
So Sweden might have a low population density, but that doesn't really say anything about how tightly people are "clumped." I'm not sure what kind of measurement you'd need in order to compare that, but it needs to be something that gives you an idea of how much area is inhabited at various densities. Not just urban development, but small towns and villages that are clustered with lots of space in between. I have a feeling that Sweden, if you looked at it from that kind of analysis perspective, would probably be a lot closer to Canada (low overall density but much of the population concentrated) than a suburban-sprawl area like California or most of the East Coast (the "Boston-Atlanta Metro Area" as Gibson once predicted).
The failure of broadband in the U.S. should go principally to local governments and their shortsighted dealmaking, but the geography and urbanization here doesn't help at all, and neither does the way telecommunications are regulated at the Federal level (more corruption/influence, no doubt).
Thank god there are more activities in the U.S. to do than be on the internet.
... like eat.
Yeah
Somehow I think that if we just had so many other things to do, to the point where people just don't care about internet access, because they're just so darned happy to be outside playing softball and everything else, that we wouldn't be one of the most morbidly obese countries on the planet.
I've got another theory: the demand for Internet doesn't exist in the U.S. to the same extent it does in other countries, because people here prefer the passive entertainment of watching television. Which incidentally, they can do while eating.
I remember playing with a first-generation Philips CDi unit at school; I have no idea why they purchased them, except that they must have had some idea about using it for educational purposes. (Or maybe someone just had budget money to burn.)
Anyway, I used them once to play "Seventh Guest" (also a PC/Mac game) and thought it was pretty slick. At the time (this must have been 1992 or 93) I hadn't seen a game that incorporated that much full-motion video at that point, and found it fairly impressive. Alternately, it might have just seemed that way because we had the CDi running into a huge BARCO CRT projector...
I was never sold on CDi as a format, or the standalone players, but I did buy the game when I finally got around to buying a CD-Rom drive and a computer capable of running it. I guess CDi should get credit for that.
What about the Apple Pippin? Not only was it $600 and had practically no software, it was underpowered and tried to compete directly with the N64 and PSX, after they were both established in the market.
On the upside though, it had SCSI.
The point is not whether the planes are nicer, it's whether packing more and more people into a single aircraft is really a good idea, both from a safety standpoint, and from a logistical one. For example, how long is it going to take to get everyone on and off one of the A380s? Baggage handling? Turnaround time at terminals?
I could think of a lot of things that could start to make the experience less-than-optimal, simply as a result of scaling the aircraft up too big.
The smaller Airbus aircraft are definitely nice (although it's not an entirely fair comparison, since most of the Airbus aircraft that I've traveled on are substantially newer than the average Boeing), but that doesn't make me exactly eager to pack myself on to the flying sardine-can that is the 380.
Well they're not going to sell you just one, silly. The minimum quantity is probably five or ten, so there's your million right there.
...
And that's before you get into spare parts, maintenance contracts, training
Why couldn't this unit be modified to call in artillery if the attacking force appeared to be overwhelming? It could upload the fire mission to guns that can also fire with a minimum of manual intervention. It's all about not exposing your soldiers to enemy fire.
Not only that, but these guns could themselves be "called in" by other external sensors.
I'd imagine that they would be most effective when deployed as part of a deep network of sensors. The 'gun' would use these sensors as its eyes and ears, and would use them when selecting and engaging targets, even if a particular target wasn't visible from the gun itself (not that you can do a whole lot of accurate indirect fire with a 5.56mm machine gun). Perhaps more importantly, a network of these guns would allow them to be coordinated, and engage targets in concert -- working together far more skillfully than would even be possible for teams of discrete human shooters with radio communication.
very few armies still use them (use of anti-tank mines is still considered ok)
Except on the Korean peninsula, where the only two armies that matter regionally both still use them heavily, particularly within the DMZ.
I'm not sure that the opinions of the rest of the world are really having any effect, or are particularly relevant, there.
I think there should be an international treaty banning all lethal weapons without a brain attached to the trigger.
In what way must the brain be attached? Would duct tape work? How about staples?
Really, I see the speaker as more useful after it starts firing.
... the DMZ suddenly filled with the sounds of automatic gunfire; then silence. A moment's hesitation, then a loudspeaker rings out: "KILLING SPREE!"
I can just see it now
This is just my understanding, but Darwin doesn't have nearly as many 'interesting' features that don't already exist in Linux. There is some neat Solaris-only stuff that people have wanted to bring into Linux for a while, but have not been able to because of licensing problems, and the work it would take to clean-room it.
... but I've definitely not heard as much 'buzz' about them as you hear about some particular features of Solaris that are supposedly very neat.
The thing that I always hear talk about is dtrace (currently CDL, and tightly integrated with the Solaris kernel), but looking at the WP article on it, apparently it's been partially brought over to BSD and OS X. Then there are also containers and that "self-healing" fault-isolation system, which I don't pretend to understand.
Perhaps there are just as many cool, compelling features in Darwin that aren't talked about, and deserve being shared with Linux and other OSes
Or do we want another IceWeasel?
As someone a post above you suggested, I think PeaBerry would be a good name for the Debian version...
Actually I remember back in the day, it was pretty common with folks with "hi-fi" systems that had both a LP turntable and a reel-to-reel, to dub their best-loved LPs to tape, and then play the tape, thus saving wear on the vinyl.
I once dug up an early 'mix tape' that my father had made this way, in the late 60s...format shifting is not a new idea, and it's fairly recently that its been attacked and called "stealing."
The previous upgrade cycles mostly happened because there was some perceived consumer advantage. 'Cassette tapes' sucked less than eight-track (cassettes), particularly for use in cars. CDs were superior to vinyl in terms of damage resistance (or so they said at the time, anyway), not wearing out, ease of FF/REV and SKIP, and sound quality. People chose those upgrades. Anyone with a decent home stereo could go from LP to cassette tape pretty trivially, and some people did (I know I did, for my car), but it was time consuming and most people didn't bother.
With the CD to MP3 format changeover, moving one's music oneself is trivial. Put the disc into iTunes, hit Rip. Thus, a lot of people aren't repurchasing their music as they did in the past, because this changeover is easier than any in the past. This drives the record companies crazy, because they've been used to getting a huge influx of cash every time one of these changeovers has happened in the past -- in fact, they think they're entitled to it. That is their critical mistake. They are not.
Frankly, I think it is this sense of entitlement that really aggravates me about the RIAA and its member companies most of all.
I think it has something to do with how much money people are willing to spend on supercomputers.
A lot of people are willing to throw down enough cash to get into the middle of that list, but there are only a few few people who are willing to spend the huge sums of money to build the biggest, baddest, fastest one of them all.
It's like looking at cars, and saying "huh, if we look at the most expensive class of cars, they all do 200+ MPH, but once you get down past the top price class, they all start to get about the same." It's because the market for a car that does 115 MPH is a lot bigger than for one that does 230, particularly when the latter might cost five times as much and only go twice as fast.
Laugh all you want, then go over to the Apple store and take a look at the point-of-sale displays.
Not sure if they sell it to the public, but "iCashRegister" exists, and it works with the credit card readers, UPC scanners, receipt printers, electronic-pen signature devices, cash drawers and everything else there.
I probably should have been more clear -- I wasn't implying that OpenBSD or any other kernel has less bugs than Linux; I haven't reviewed the code so I can't say that. However, regardless of which OS or kernel we're talking about, if people are recognizing and fixing bugs silently, and disguising or obscuring their patches, then it makes it very hard to get an idea of how many bugs are actually there, and at what rate they're being fixed.
It was more the practice of silently or clandestinely fixing bugs, without pointing out that the bug was there even after it's fixed, that seems like it's a problem. It means that contributions are going into the kernel tree that aren't well understood except by the person who's submitting them, or at least that's the impression that I get.
It's really that -- not-well-understood patches being submitted and accepted -- which I think is an issue. The relative merits of Linux vs OpenBSD isn't a can of worms I wanted to open up, except in how their processes for reviewing and accepting code differ.
I don't have an original Walkman, but somewhere around I do have a full-size-cassette Dictaphone of similar vintage, that's one of the best-made pieces of portable equipment I've ever owned. All metal construction, disassembelable (is that a word?) with a Phillips-head jewelers' screwdriver, reads and writes to a standard format, has all the inputs and outputs you'd expect, built to last forever. And perhaps most importantly, with a user-interface that you can use in the dark, with gloves on.
I keep it around mostly as an example of what high-end portable consumer electronics should be, and can be, but frequently aren't.