I think, as a Windows user, he's perfectly qualified to judge Linspire as a replacement for Windows. In fact, I'd say he's probably more qualified than someone who has a lot of previous Linux experience, or who isn't coming from a full-time, Windows-only background.
Honestly, it's that "hard to understand" part that is a major problem to getting non-geeks, or even geeks who don't like spending a lot of time twiddling with their computer's software, to be interested in Linux. I'd say that trading #2 for #1 (in your post) is not always a bad thing, depending on your ultimate goals for the system.
Huh? This is not true -- at least, it doesn't have to be true. You can use information that the user submits anyway during the course of using your service, in order to develop your database for targeting ads.
For instance, Google gives you targeted ads based on what you search for. If you search for "toothpaste," I'll bet you you're going to get toothpaste or dental-related ads. This doesn't require spyware, it just requires the site not to be stupid: it's stupid to give someone irrelevant ads when you have the capacity not to.
Obviously, spyware is evil, but it's not fair to say that all targeted advertising requires invasive client-side spyware; you can get a good degree of targeting just by using contextual and freely-available information, and stuff that people are giving you in the course of using your service anyway.
I don't think there's any charity involved at all, necessarily.
And I do think that people would pay an artist for future results; this isn't some stunningly new way or doing business, you pay people in advance of performance all the time. In fact, that's why contracts and contract law exists; it gives people a way of setting out the conditions for payment in advance, so that you can either pay and be relatively secure that the work will get done, or the worker can do the work and be secure that they'll be paid afterwards. Both would work with art; sometimes you might pay in advance, sometimes you might pay on or after delivery according to a contract that you had signed in advance. Either way, you'd want to agree on the terms beforehand, just like you'd do in any other business transaction.
What I'm really trying to get to here, is that there's nothing special about art. Really, there isn't. A painter is a photographer is a machinist is a doctor; they're all skilled laborers. If you want one to do something for you, you pay them. There's nothing revolutionary here. None of them require the amortized business model that's so common today in entertainment in order to exist.
And while you might not particularly like what's on YouTube, that's a personal value judgement. If that's all that was available, perhaps you'd feel it necessary to spend a few dollars in advance -- take a small risk, in other words -- and fund someone who would create the sort of entertainment that you'd want to watch. It's all about what people are interested in paying for.
There is obviously a demand for entertainment, and there is a clear supply; the only thing we need to do is place as few barriers as possible in between those two groups, and let the problem work itself out.
As to your comment about DRM not being funadmentally wrong, I disagree. I disagree not on moral terms, but because of the negative effects they have on our society in general, because they make it harder for people to interact normally and use the rights which they ought to have, and because such restrictions distort the market from what it ought to be naturally.
That's the purpose of the discussion tab, but the problem that I have with it is that it tries to use the Wiki interface and style to do threaded discussions. It works OK, but can you imagine trying to have a Slashdot-like discussion through one? Or even a moderately high-traffic discussion, where you want to go back and forth between multiple users in near-real-time? It wouldn't work very well. (You'd run into problems with who is editing the page at any given time, for starters.)
It's a hack, basically. While it seems to work fine for Wikipedia, I think that the optimal solution involves something like you describe, having a wikipage that's linked to a forum, but not actually trying to emulate forum-like behavior in a wiki itself. Similarly, when you try to do group-FAQ pages in a forum, it's always a PITA: you have one person write up a long post and get it 'stickied' at the top of the forum, and then anyone who wants to suggest changes has to post a comment, which the original poster needs to incorporate by hand. Very tedious.
What I'd like to see is something that combined MediaWiki and PHPBB (or one of its clones) into a cohesive system, with a single markup language for both the forums and the Wikipages, and an intelligent way of linking various wikitext pages to forum discussions. A direct 1:1 relationship with threads would work, but I think there might be other/better ways. Maybe the way to do it would just be to create wikitext pages like new threads, right in the forum's threadlist: when you create a new topic, you get the option of creating it as a wiki page or as a discussion thread; and then various threads (whether wikis or discussions or something else) could be 'related' together. Users would have a choice of a straight list view (by date), or viewing all Wikipages, or just the forum posts, or maybe even some form of semantic tree-view.
At any rate, I think both technologies have their strengths and weaknesses, and there's no reason to assume that either one can completely replace the other. You can get a rough approximation of either's functions from within the other, but it's not much more than an approximation.
This is an excellent point. I honestly don't understand that much information theory, but when you put it in those terms, it makes the flaws in the "intellectual property" business model seem even more fundamental than they already are.
There are certainly ways to monetize information, but attempting to simply force it into a 'conservative' (in the 'conservation law' sense, not the political or economic one) distribution and business model, as if "information" are widgets that can be bought and sold on something approaching a commodity market, is not the way to do it.
Rather, services which interact with information in some way are salable. E.g., when you pay some one to research a topic for you, you are paying not for the information that they return, but for their labor involved in finding and summarizing and presenting it to you. (Though it may seem to be the information that you're paying for, since that's why their labor has value to you.) The information itself, once transcribed into a non-conservative realm, has little real inherent value; the way to monetize it revolves around where the information interacts with more traditional property and service markets, not by attempting to sell the information itself.
While I certainly can't argue with you about your personal feelings on commissioning work or not, I think you're very mistaken to say "Since the dawn of time it's been like this. If you create something, you take a risk doing it. If people like it, it may pay off." That's quite untrue. In fact, the whole 'at-risk' business model of entertainment is fairly new in terms of being universally dominant.
Throughout most of human history, artists made great works basically on commission, at least until they had developed enough of a reputation to ensure a market for their work. We hardly even remember the people that bankrolled the creation of much of our reportoire of classical music (unless it happens to be named for them), and yet without them it might not exist.
Traditionally, a person might get their start by working on direct commissions that offer very little creative control to the artist. An example might be a commissioned portrait, or a piece of music where the end-product is spelled out rather precisely ("I want an opera in the Viennese style, about..."). The client takes very little risk, because the acceptance criteria are clear, and the artist gets some income and develops their reputation. Provided that they can develop a market for their work, then in the future they can produce in advance, knowing that the next time someone comes through their door, they'll be able to sell them the previously-produced symphony/painting/whatever.
You say that you wouldn't put a down payment on a creation that hasn't been made yet, but I suspect that you do this all the time without really thinking about it. If you've ever paid a wedding photographer, you've done exactly that; you're commissioning artwork, by paying in advance (or agreeing to pay) for somebody's time. If you've ever had a house built, same thing applies: you're paying a "creator" (the tradespeople/contractors who do the construction) to make a "work" (the house), according to an agreement (perhaps plans, or perhaps just your general idea of what you want). A better example might be an architect; they design you a building based on your (potentially vague) criteria and desires, in return for payment. This might not seem very 'artistic,' but it's the exact same concept. And in the economic model I'm suggesting, there's really not much difference between a general contractor and an architect and a painter and a performance artist. They are all skilled tradespeople, and all get compensated for the time that they spend on projects, based on the demand that exists for their trade.
The current economic system favors tradespeople who can produce works which are easily reproducable: you can't take the same house and sell it 10,000 times over, but you can do that with an audio recording; thus a recording artist seems like a more potentially lucrative career than a carpenter. However, once technology collapses the inflated-value bubble that one could previously create by selling copies, the recording artist is left in the same posistion as any other skilled person; their income arrives as a direct result of finding people who will pay for them to do whatever it is that they do.
Free riding isn't a "problem" per se, it's really just indicative of a lack of demand.
If people want new content, then they'll have to help pay for it to be created; if they don't want to do that, then the content doesn't get created, and the artist does something else with his time. As people become more bored with existing content, the demand for new content increases. Is it possible that a lot of people will sit around and just wait for someone else to pay for the new content? Sure; but really that's just saying that they're not really that interested in it, or interested enough. It's a value proposition, and they don't value it enough.
That's the simplest possible scenario; you just wait until someone with enough resources becomes bored enough with what's out there, to pay for new content just to have it created. It will happen eventually, you just have to wait for it.
Of course, there are lots of other ways that you can encourage people to pay for content-creation themselves, rather than try to game the system and hope that somebody else will; you can reward the people who actually pay for the creation (e.g., by giving them a credit so they can show off to all their friends that they were a supporter, by inviting them to the initial performance/showing/release, publicly thanking them, etc.) so that there's a social pressure not to freeload.
At any rate, I think it's a key mistake to look at the market as being one of "art" or "entertainment," as if art is a tradable commodity. That's exactly the problem that's gotten us to this point. Rather than looking at the market as one where 'art' is bought and sold, it's better to look at it as a labor market, where the labor of artists is bought and sold. If you are an artist, your job becomes not marketing your artwork so much as marketing your labor (which if you are an artist, by definition involves creating some form of art, persistent or ephemeral). So if you wanted to be a successful artist, rather than selling copies of your work, you would need to look at yourself in the same way that any other skilled tradesman does, and develop a market for your time.
Essentially that's what I'd like to see us return to; rather than "art" being something that's stamped out in a factory like aspirin tablets (a very industrial-age idea), and the focus being on creating a market for the copies, put the focus back on the labor, where being an artist is an avocation like any other.
I've discussed this in other threads before, but I think the way that you make money without DRM is by not trying to make entertainment on speculation.
Basically the entertainment companies go out right now, and make a movie/song/whatever, and spend a whole lot of money doing it, in hopes that they can then go and sell the end product over and over and over to make up the investment. There is really not any way to do this, without DRM. As I think DRM is fundamentally flawed, so is this business model. That doesn't mean it might not stick around for a few centuries, but it's eventually doomed.
The problem is that DRM tries to artifically limit the supply of something that requires very little labor in order to reproduce. The n-th copy of a digitally delivered Brittany Spears album costs virtually nothing; it's only the first copy that really costs a lot to make. (Okay, so this sets aside that the net value of any given Brittany Spears album may in fact be negative.)
In the past, since the recording companies basically controlled the means of producing more copies (vinyl/CD stamping factories), they could artificially inflate the cost of the marginal (that is, n-th) copy, in order to pay for a bit of that first one. The only reason this works is because they have a monopoly on the means of producing more copies. That's it.
What digital delivery, and computers/the Internet in general, do is make widely available the means of production. (Apologies if I'm sounding a little Marxist here, but it's tough to avoid the terminology.) When anyone can make that 'one last' copy, you can't fix the price of it anymore. You just can't. DRM is an attempt to put a finger in the dike, to make it artificially hard again to make an additional copy, but they have a whole lot of information theory working against them. There is no practical way, that I can envision, to allow people access to digital media which does not inherently give them an opportunity to copy it, particularly since copying is inherent to the digital distribution process. And this is only going to get more difficult in the future.
So given this, what to do? The answer is to make people pay in advance. There will always be a demand for new content; even with the entire past produce of human civilization on tap, it is the nature of people to want things that are fresh, that have been created specifically for them (whether individually or as a group). Rather than trying to make money up off of the marginal copies, which have little to no inherent value, charge for the first copy. Charge interested parties, in advance, for creation of the work. If people aren't interested in funding its creation, it doesn't get made. If fans want an artist to continue to produce, then they can pay to commission more albums. Rather than paying an inflated cost for each copy, which has some portion of the original labor's cost built into it, they will pay for the cost of that labor up front. It is the labor which is valuable, not the copies.
This of course would force a re-evaluation of both how we think of the relationship between artists and their public, and also of how much art we as a society produce (right now I think it's clear that we produce a surplus; we produce more new art than the public really demands, and one must understand that in a pay-in-advance system, this would no longer be supportable), but I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with it. As people demand new content, they will pay for it to be created. Either they will pay what it costs to create it, or it will not be made.
This is the way the market should work: as people desire novelty, the business models would be formed around the demand. Instead of a top-down approach, it's bottom-up; allowing consumer choice and demand to drive how people will make money. There are lots of ways that they could do it, from straight work-on-commission to more subtle crediting schemes, or donationware/threatware (e.g. "I'll write the next installment of the
But I think the "NPOV" (or any 'neutral' or 'group consensus') perspective is almost always artificial; nobody actually has a 'neutral point of view,' so you're inherently striving for a finished product that cannot represent the entire opinion of any single person. In some situations -- where you actually want to form or represent some sort of consensus -- this can be a good thing. I've contributed to Wikipedia and I think it's useful in this way. (Actually I think it's amusing that you think I'm WP-bashing, since in other contexts I've been accused of fanboyism.)
However, I stand by my assertion that a Wiki page which is open to public edits, or for that matter a committee-written white paper, really isn't the best way of showing off the complexities of a particular issue and capturing the various differing opinions. It's the difference between original sources (actually hearing various opinions on an issue from the people that hold them, in their own voices) and a secondary one, where the various sources have been amalgamated together. Even if all the factual information in each is retained somehow, much of the tone and contextual information is still lost. It is, in short, like a lossy compression method. Sometimes it may be desirable, but its lossiness should be noted.
Sometimes a wiki can be handy; they're great for getting an overview of a particular issue, and of the various parties involved. But on a contentiously debated subject, there is almost always some watering down of the arguments on either side in order to produce 'neutrality,' not to mention the impossible-to-remove author/editor bias, and thus there is still (and always will be) a place for discussion forums where a consensus-derived product is not the goal, but rather individual opinions are more valuable.
And I think groupthink is a significant problem; put people in a group and there is a strong tendency to discourage and suppress viewpoints which are disharmonious, even if they are sometimes factually correct. This is a greater problem when people are working together in person than collaborating online (since people, in my experience, are much more willing to self-censor in person to prevent confrontation than when psuedonymous), but it's naive to pretend that it doesn't exist.
There's always going to be a place for forums and wikis, even if the introduction of the latter makes aspects of the former somewhat redundant.
Forums are important because it provides a way of gleaning multiple opinions from distinct individuals, in direct response to a particular issue. Wikis are good at giving a group consensus opinion, but they're a poor way of showing someone all sides of an issue. The false "NPOV" perspective that an author has to take when writing a wiki is the same problem faced when you're reading a paper written by a committee; it's entirely possible that fallacious or spurious arguments get given improper weight because of efforts to appear 'neutral,' or that good but unpopular viewpoints are left out because of groupthink and self-censorship.
These problems may still happen in forums, but it's a lot easier when people can respond individually and don't have edit rights on each others work to give dissenting opinions. It's also easier to ask a particular question and get a particular answer; wikis are great for developing generalized reference, but they're a poor way to answer questions in a back-and-forth format. I've always felt that forums (aka Wikipedia's discussion pages) done through Wikis feel like a hack. With a forum, you can ask one question and get a dozen answers from a dozen distinct individuals; with a wiki you may not have an opportunity to ask a particular question, and instead you really have "one answer" (the entire document) which might or might not answer a lot of questions.
Thus I think they'll always be a place for both. Where Wikis may take over (and rightly so) are places where forums are being used as document repositories, for collective opinions. E.g., the "sticky" posts you see at the top of many forums, giving answers to frequently asked questions.
I'm still waiting for someone to develop a true combination of wiki and forum; maybe it's out there and I just haven't seen it yet, but I think neither extreme really does the job of the other well. A combination, maybe of wiki-type pages with attached discussion forums, would be best, and the two are really complementary, not exclusive.
How would this be in any way superior, from the "consumer electronics-Hollywood complex" perspective, than simply encrypting all of the content on the disc?
If you encrypt the high frequencies, they still have to be decrypted by 'approved' playback devices... meaning somewhere, there is a decrypted stream, or analog output, just waiting for some person with too much free time and a fast enough oscilloscope* to poke around inside and break out, feed into a generic DAC, and record. You can't let people watch it at full quality without exposing that signal somewhere in the chain; even if it's not something obvious like just being able to record the feed to the monitor. So it doesn't magically 'solve' piracy in the way that the studios would like to think that it does.
And if you're not going to allow copying, why even make the lower frequencies copyable via un-encryption? It seems simpler just to go all-or nothing. I think it's flawed and doomed to failure in the long run either way, but the studios just have no reason, when you use their own apparent logic, to allow any sort of digital copying at all if it's preventable.
* Okay, probably wouldn't actually be an oscilloscope these days, probably some form of very high-speed logic analyzer, but whatever.
That's rather shortsighted. Your cost of living only seems constant; what happens is that for the same price (in terms of hours of labor), your living conditions increase as technology improves and we as a society become more efficient.
Take a look at what was considered "average" or "middle class" 50 or 60 years ago. Much smaller houses, generally one car, no air conditioning, very few modern 'convenience' appliances (dishwasher, microwave, etc.), much less complex entertainment. Today, if you wanted to, you could have that exact same standard of living, for a lot less money, inflation-adjusted. Today, middle class people expect and take for granted "personal" automobiles (instead of "family" ones), air conditioning, microwaves, multiple television sets, probably computers as well.
Obviously this ignores several things, like whether people are actually happier as a result of this increase on paper, and it also ignores a potential for the dividends of society to be distributed in-equally, so that certain segments get a much bigger boost over time than others (creating gaps), but in general, the amount of "tech" that you can buy with a normal income today is far greater than at any point in the past. That is the benefit of increased efficiency.
Whether you personally think that being able to buy more "tech" is a good thing or a bad thing, is a personal decision. Personally, I like it, although I don't think it affects overall 'happiness' very much; while technological progress is not a zero-sum game, I'm more and more convinced that happiness and satisfaction basically are.
There were early adopters who went out and bought the obscenely priced first generation DVD players, but by and large the rest of the world didn't really follow suit until the players dropped below about $200 and Blockbuster started stocking a lot of new releases on DVD. And I wouldn't say that DVDs became ubiquitous until the cheap chinese ($50) "WalMart Special" DVD players came onto the scene.
Frankly, early on I think the biggest benefit to most people of DVDs versus VHS is that you didn't have to rewind it. I know my parents just thought that was the coolest damn thing; you could talk to them about digital audio until you were blue in the face, but what they liked was the ability to jump instantly to any point in a film, pause it for extended lengths of time without "wearing" the disc, and never having to worry about rewind anything.
I think whichever HD-disc format wins, it'll end up being like that. Mainstream consumers aren't going to buy it, until there are movies down at Blockbuster that they can rent, and they can buy the player at Walmart for under $200-250. Normal people just don't spend much more than that on what's effectively a fancy videocassette player (even if it's not really a cassette player...in most people's minds, the function is exactly the same, to play movies).
Agreed. I think geotagging (of the photos themselves, by the camera) is a sleeper feature. It's not something that people know that they want, but it's something that once people get it, they're going to wonder how they ever lived without it. Not because looking at LAT/LON coordinates in iPhoto is particularly interesting, but because it lets you build a whole range of neat utilities, using your photo album as a data source.
For example, if your camera records GPS data, you don't need to keep a detailed itinerary anymore. Your camera becomes your field notebook, particularly if it can record videos and voice notes. When you get back from your vacation, you could have a utility that would plot a map showing the route you took, and letting you click on each "stop" (where a stop could be any place where you took a predetermined number of photos in a particular radius, say 10 photos within 5 miles) and replay your trip.
You can do obvious searches that are difficult now: "show me all my photos from Connecticut" is trivial when they're geotagged; without this, you'd have to hope that you tagged them correctly by hand. And of course, the process of tagging itself becomes easier when you can do batch operations based on the coordinates; pulling out and tagging photos that you took on a particular trip is easy, and doesn't require good organizational skills.
In the same way that people simply take advantage of the time/date stamps that most cameras embed in the EXIF data right now, without really thinking about it, is how people will use GPS data if and when it becomes ubiquitious.
The major problem with adopting it is that the camera manufacturers don't seem to exactly be in a hurry to add it as a feature (which is too bad of them, because it seems like they need some compelling features to drive upgrades, now that the megapixel race seems to have reached a plateau where most consumers are satisfied), and there aren't a lot of standard interfaces for attaching an outboard GPS. (At least not that I've seen.)
Linking digital cameras and cellphones over Bluetooth is probably the best bet, since it would allow both for easy geotagging (using the phone's GPS) and sharing (use phone as modem/email-device), however this has the downside of requiring most people to upgrade two devices, rather than just one.
Well, there's the very slight problem that it costs almost $900 and is only 3.2 megapixels; I was interested until I saw that.
It's unfortunate that the major camera manufacturers don't work out a standardized interface for addons; something as simple as a serial interface to connect an outboard GPS would be fine, although the ability to use a single type of CF GPS cards would be better.
Of course, interoperability has never been chief on the camera manufacturers' minds; these are the same people that can barely standardize on a flash hot-shoe. Perhaps when their business starts to get squeezed by 'convergence'-type devices, they'll come around.
Except that WinModems are the exact OPPOSITE of the philosophy that's being espoused here with crypto offload engines, intelligent network cards, etc.
The WinModem was an attempt to take traditional modem functions and move them onto the CPU, in software. Rather than actually having a box full of circuitry that did the hardware handshaking, data compression, and all that good stuff, you just replace it with a simple device that barely connects the analog telephone line to the computer, and have the computer do all the heavy lifting.
I think the justification behind this approach is "software is cheap, hardware is expensive." Therefore, you put the 'brains' in software, and your dumb-hardware/smart-software combo is cheaper than the traditional combination of dumb-software/smart-hardware.
It's a pretty radical departure to essentially go in the opposite direction, from WinModems to these kind of "intelligent network cards," which seem more like a traditional serial modem in philosophy; they do all the work themselves and basically present the computer with a standardized data stream.
The only way that I could see this whole business being "WinModem-like" is in it being tremendously difficult to program for on non-Microsoft OSes. But that's not a consequence of the design per se, but of how I suspect MS will choose to implement it.
IPv6 really shouldn't be necessary so long as the router can know which way to forward the incoming voice data.
That's kind of the problem though.
If you only have one outside-facing IP address, it makes it pretty damn hard to have multiple phones behind the same gateway and receive incoming calls. That's the real benefit of IPv6, you can have an address which is tied to your phone and moves around when it does, rather than having complicated NAT traversal and routing schemes, which are what you'd need with v4... if you could make it work at all.
Roaming, incoming calls... these all become much easier with IPv6.
I think it's you that misunderstand. Discrimination merely means separating something from something else based on predetermined criteria. If you allow Linux users in and not Windows users, then you are discriminating on the basis of operating system. If you allow white people in and not black people, you are discriminating on the basis of skin color. One of those things is illegal, the other is not. This doesn't even get into the use of the word as an adjective instead of a verb (e.g., to be a discriminating connoisseur of operating systems, perhaps?).
The use of the word 'discrimination' doesn't necessarily imply anything racial, nor does it necessarily even imply anything wrong. Though it's true that the world carries negative connotations in many people's minds, that doesn't mean the use of the word is limited; its use is simply a rhetorical trick (and an unsubtle one at that).
It is useful to make things hard for the law abiding, not for pirates.
Sadly, although what you're saying is complete common sense, it seems to be frequently lost on people making laws. I don't know if they perform some sort of lobotomy on you when you run for office, and disconnect the part of your brain that normally would say "Hey buddy, done a reality check in a while?" but it sure seems like it.
My personal opinion is that the pro-DRM argument smells a lot like the pro-gun-control argument, in that both of them put restrictions on law-abiding people in order to modify the behavior of people who frequently just ignore the law anyway; when you ignore the difference between law-abiding people and those who just don't give a damn, it's quite easy to descend into a "feedback loop," where in response to your last restrictive law not working, you pass a more restrictive one... ad infinium. The net result is just a lot of collateral damage.
Of course, they never will; just like Apple never will. Both companies are convinced that the only way to succeed is to get down on their knees and give the big sucky-sucky to the music companies in return for use of their content.
I've argued previously that Apple's iTunes is only a shadow of what it could be, if Apple wasn't hobbled from developing it in interesting ways because they're addicted to the cashflow that comes with being able to run the iTMS. Microsoft is the same way -- perhaps they'll have a little more freedom because they're bigger than Apple, and because they're partnered with the music companies less directly, but if they want anything to do with the music companies, there's a limit to what they can do.
Apple developed the iTMS, in my opinion, originally because they needed some way to give the whole MP3 player concept legitimacy. Without the iTMS, they could be accused of doing nothing but creating a piracy vehicle. Once the Music Store took off, it became an integral part of their business model, as did the relationship with the music companies. Innovative features, like music library sharing, were slowly disabled in order to appease them. There's really no way to tell what the iPod and iTunes could have been without this influence, because now the products are undoubtedly being designed with a secondary goal of "not pissing off the labels." (E.g., I doubt you'll see an iPod with a built-in line input, because the labels would go crazy; to them it would just be a copy machine.)
I don't think Microsoft will be any different. If anything, they've shown even more of a propensity in the past to favor "partnerships" with other companies and vertical- and horizontal-integration models, at the expense of their customers.
I am quite convinced that at this point, the innovative products -- the iPod killer, in other words -- are not going to come from Microsoft, Apple, or any other major manufacturer (certainly not Sony, who is so hobbled they're practically hopping around on one leg) who has to maintain a relationship with the music labels. For that, you're going to have to find an independent manufacturer, someone who's willing to create a product that does what people so want it to, even if the labels don't like it, or even if it means the manufacturer won't have a continuous income stream from a particular bundled music store.
This doesn't have any effect on WMV. It's WMA -- that's audio content only.
So you're still stuck.
Not sure whether the DRM schemes are related at any fundamental level, though; perhaps a break in one of them could lead to a break in the other sometime soon? It's really surprised me that they haven't been circumvented earlier.
Well there's another use; let's say you've used a particular store to buy a lot of music, and you'd like to kiss off that service and move to something else -- or move to another platform entirely, perhaps a non-Microsoft one. It seems like a tool like this would be handy to convert your music to a neutral format so that you could take it with you.
Granted, a better way to be would simply to have avoided buying DRMed music in the first place, but not everyone has that foresight.
I think the problem that OSS software has is documentation.
Namely, that there isn't any. And I'm not talking about end-user documentation here, I mean process documentation. Specification documents and all that. The kind of stuff that normally gets developed alongside code, in any commercial/industrial development methodology.
There is an unspoken assumption behind the OSS ideals, and this is that the program's source code is the only documentation that anyone should ever need. This, frankly, is not true. It might be fine for code that has an obvious purpose and scope, and for systems software, but it starts to break down when you get into business software. How are you supposed to know from the source code, what the business process is that a particular segment of code is designed to support? You don't. How can you tell if something is a result of bad coding, or an incorrect design? You don't -- unless the same person both understands the code and the processes involved.
While it might be a safe assumption in many OSS projects to have the same person reading the code and analyzing the processes, this just doesn't happen in the real world. You usually have different people (even different groups of people) developing the specifications and processes, and writing the software from those specifications. In many cases, the people developing the specifications don't have the background or knowledge necessary to read the code directly.
I've said this elsewhere, but there's a lot of resistance in the OSS world to writing specifications. I don't know if this is because most of the software is written by programmers in their free time, and these people detest structured methodologies because they have to work with them in their day jobs, or if it's just a consequence of the way OSS is developed, but we're starting to see problems -- it's very hard to merge free software, where the code is the documentation, into a workflow where you have distinct levels of docs, where the code is only the very lowest level of end-product.
It's not if the systems to maintain documentation alongside code don't exist: some sort of Wiki-type interface, which was kept up-to-date against a project's official sources, would do just fine, and go a long ways towards improving the usefulness of OSS. However, there's little motivation for most projects to go to that level of effort.
I really don't have a good solution; I just know that I work in a situation very similar to the OP's, and we don't use any OSS code... not because we really even care about license issues, but just because it would require more effort to document somebody else's code than it would just to draw up the documentation and have a programmer rewrite it. The former would require running our entire system "in reverse;" it would require a programmer to read the source code of the outside project and write a specification from it, which they're not used to doing. (I can almost see the objections forming right now.)
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I think, as a Windows user, he's perfectly qualified to judge Linspire as a replacement for Windows. In fact, I'd say he's probably more qualified than someone who has a lot of previous Linux experience, or who isn't coming from a full-time, Windows-only background.
Honestly, it's that "hard to understand" part that is a major problem to getting non-geeks, or even geeks who don't like spending a lot of time twiddling with their computer's software, to be interested in Linux. I'd say that trading #2 for #1 (in your post) is not always a bad thing, depending on your ultimate goals for the system.
Huh? This is not true -- at least, it doesn't have to be true. You can use information that the user submits anyway during the course of using your service, in order to develop your database for targeting ads.
For instance, Google gives you targeted ads based on what you search for. If you search for "toothpaste," I'll bet you you're going to get toothpaste or dental-related ads. This doesn't require spyware, it just requires the site not to be stupid: it's stupid to give someone irrelevant ads when you have the capacity not to.
Obviously, spyware is evil, but it's not fair to say that all targeted advertising requires invasive client-side spyware; you can get a good degree of targeting just by using contextual and freely-available information, and stuff that people are giving you in the course of using your service anyway.
I don't think there's any charity involved at all, necessarily.
And I do think that people would pay an artist for future results; this isn't some stunningly new way or doing business, you pay people in advance of performance all the time. In fact, that's why contracts and contract law exists; it gives people a way of setting out the conditions for payment in advance, so that you can either pay and be relatively secure that the work will get done, or the worker can do the work and be secure that they'll be paid afterwards. Both would work with art; sometimes you might pay in advance, sometimes you might pay on or after delivery according to a contract that you had signed in advance. Either way, you'd want to agree on the terms beforehand, just like you'd do in any other business transaction.
What I'm really trying to get to here, is that there's nothing special about art. Really, there isn't. A painter is a photographer is a machinist is a doctor; they're all skilled laborers. If you want one to do something for you, you pay them. There's nothing revolutionary here. None of them require the amortized business model that's so common today in entertainment in order to exist.
And while you might not particularly like what's on YouTube, that's a personal value judgement. If that's all that was available, perhaps you'd feel it necessary to spend a few dollars in advance -- take a small risk, in other words -- and fund someone who would create the sort of entertainment that you'd want to watch. It's all about what people are interested in paying for.
There is obviously a demand for entertainment, and there is a clear supply; the only thing we need to do is place as few barriers as possible in between those two groups, and let the problem work itself out.
As to your comment about DRM not being funadmentally wrong, I disagree. I disagree not on moral terms, but because of the negative effects they have on our society in general, because they make it harder for people to interact normally and use the rights which they ought to have, and because such restrictions distort the market from what it ought to be naturally.
That's the purpose of the discussion tab, but the problem that I have with it is that it tries to use the Wiki interface and style to do threaded discussions. It works OK, but can you imagine trying to have a Slashdot-like discussion through one? Or even a moderately high-traffic discussion, where you want to go back and forth between multiple users in near-real-time? It wouldn't work very well. (You'd run into problems with who is editing the page at any given time, for starters.)
It's a hack, basically. While it seems to work fine for Wikipedia, I think that the optimal solution involves something like you describe, having a wikipage that's linked to a forum, but not actually trying to emulate forum-like behavior in a wiki itself. Similarly, when you try to do group-FAQ pages in a forum, it's always a PITA: you have one person write up a long post and get it 'stickied' at the top of the forum, and then anyone who wants to suggest changes has to post a comment, which the original poster needs to incorporate by hand. Very tedious.
What I'd like to see is something that combined MediaWiki and PHPBB (or one of its clones) into a cohesive system, with a single markup language for both the forums and the Wikipages, and an intelligent way of linking various wikitext pages to forum discussions. A direct 1:1 relationship with threads would work, but I think there might be other/better ways. Maybe the way to do it would just be to create wikitext pages like new threads, right in the forum's threadlist: when you create a new topic, you get the option of creating it as a wiki page or as a discussion thread; and then various threads (whether wikis or discussions or something else) could be 'related' together. Users would have a choice of a straight list view (by date), or viewing all Wikipages, or just the forum posts, or maybe even some form of semantic tree-view.
At any rate, I think both technologies have their strengths and weaknesses, and there's no reason to assume that either one can completely replace the other. You can get a rough approximation of either's functions from within the other, but it's not much more than an approximation.
This is an excellent point. I honestly don't understand that much information theory, but when you put it in those terms, it makes the flaws in the "intellectual property" business model seem even more fundamental than they already are.
There are certainly ways to monetize information, but attempting to simply force it into a 'conservative' (in the 'conservation law' sense, not the political or economic one) distribution and business model, as if "information" are widgets that can be bought and sold on something approaching a commodity market, is not the way to do it.
Rather, services which interact with information in some way are salable. E.g., when you pay some one to research a topic for you, you are paying not for the information that they return, but for their labor involved in finding and summarizing and presenting it to you. (Though it may seem to be the information that you're paying for, since that's why their labor has value to you.) The information itself, once transcribed into a non-conservative realm, has little real inherent value; the way to monetize it revolves around where the information interacts with more traditional property and service markets, not by attempting to sell the information itself.
While I certainly can't argue with you about your personal feelings on commissioning work or not, I think you're very mistaken to say "Since the dawn of time it's been like this. If you create something, you take a risk doing it. If people like it, it may pay off." That's quite untrue. In fact, the whole 'at-risk' business model of entertainment is fairly new in terms of being universally dominant.
..."). The client takes very little risk, because the acceptance criteria are clear, and the artist gets some income and develops their reputation. Provided that they can develop a market for their work, then in the future they can produce in advance, knowing that the next time someone comes through their door, they'll be able to sell them the previously-produced symphony/painting/whatever.
Throughout most of human history, artists made great works basically on commission, at least until they had developed enough of a reputation to ensure a market for their work. We hardly even remember the people that bankrolled the creation of much of our reportoire of classical music (unless it happens to be named for them), and yet without them it might not exist.
Traditionally, a person might get their start by working on direct commissions that offer very little creative control to the artist. An example might be a commissioned portrait, or a piece of music where the end-product is spelled out rather precisely ("I want an opera in the Viennese style, about
You say that you wouldn't put a down payment on a creation that hasn't been made yet, but I suspect that you do this all the time without really thinking about it. If you've ever paid a wedding photographer, you've done exactly that; you're commissioning artwork, by paying in advance (or agreeing to pay) for somebody's time. If you've ever had a house built, same thing applies: you're paying a "creator" (the tradespeople/contractors who do the construction) to make a "work" (the house), according to an agreement (perhaps plans, or perhaps just your general idea of what you want). A better example might be an architect; they design you a building based on your (potentially vague) criteria and desires, in return for payment. This might not seem very 'artistic,' but it's the exact same concept. And in the economic model I'm suggesting, there's really not much difference between a general contractor and an architect and a painter and a performance artist. They are all skilled tradespeople, and all get compensated for the time that they spend on projects, based on the demand that exists for their trade.
The current economic system favors tradespeople who can produce works which are easily reproducable: you can't take the same house and sell it 10,000 times over, but you can do that with an audio recording; thus a recording artist seems like a more potentially lucrative career than a carpenter. However, once technology collapses the inflated-value bubble that one could previously create by selling copies, the recording artist is left in the same posistion as any other skilled person; their income arrives as a direct result of finding people who will pay for them to do whatever it is that they do.
Free riding isn't a "problem" per se, it's really just indicative of a lack of demand.
If people want new content, then they'll have to help pay for it to be created; if they don't want to do that, then the content doesn't get created, and the artist does something else with his time. As people become more bored with existing content, the demand for new content increases. Is it possible that a lot of people will sit around and just wait for someone else to pay for the new content? Sure; but really that's just saying that they're not really that interested in it, or interested enough. It's a value proposition, and they don't value it enough.
That's the simplest possible scenario; you just wait until someone with enough resources becomes bored enough with what's out there, to pay for new content just to have it created. It will happen eventually, you just have to wait for it.
Of course, there are lots of other ways that you can encourage people to pay for content-creation themselves, rather than try to game the system and hope that somebody else will; you can reward the people who actually pay for the creation (e.g., by giving them a credit so they can show off to all their friends that they were a supporter, by inviting them to the initial performance/showing/release, publicly thanking them, etc.) so that there's a social pressure not to freeload.
At any rate, I think it's a key mistake to look at the market as being one of "art" or "entertainment," as if art is a tradable commodity. That's exactly the problem that's gotten us to this point. Rather than looking at the market as one where 'art' is bought and sold, it's better to look at it as a labor market, where the labor of artists is bought and sold. If you are an artist, your job becomes not marketing your artwork so much as marketing your labor (which if you are an artist, by definition involves creating some form of art, persistent or ephemeral). So if you wanted to be a successful artist, rather than selling copies of your work, you would need to look at yourself in the same way that any other skilled tradesman does, and develop a market for your time.
Essentially that's what I'd like to see us return to; rather than "art" being something that's stamped out in a factory like aspirin tablets (a very industrial-age idea), and the focus being on creating a market for the copies, put the focus back on the labor, where being an artist is an avocation like any other.
By all means. I would appreciate attribution (credit/backlink/whatever), aside from that you can do with it what you will.
I've discussed this in other threads before, but I think the way that you make money without DRM is by not trying to make entertainment on speculation.
Basically the entertainment companies go out right now, and make a movie/song/whatever, and spend a whole lot of money doing it, in hopes that they can then go and sell the end product over and over and over to make up the investment. There is really not any way to do this, without DRM. As I think DRM is fundamentally flawed, so is this business model. That doesn't mean it might not stick around for a few centuries, but it's eventually doomed.
The problem is that DRM tries to artifically limit the supply of something that requires very little labor in order to reproduce. The n-th copy of a digitally delivered Brittany Spears album costs virtually nothing; it's only the first copy that really costs a lot to make. (Okay, so this sets aside that the net value of any given Brittany Spears album may in fact be negative.)
In the past, since the recording companies basically controlled the means of producing more copies (vinyl/CD stamping factories), they could artificially inflate the cost of the marginal (that is, n-th) copy, in order to pay for a bit of that first one. The only reason this works is because they have a monopoly on the means of producing more copies. That's it.
What digital delivery, and computers/the Internet in general, do is make widely available the means of production. (Apologies if I'm sounding a little Marxist here, but it's tough to avoid the terminology.) When anyone can make that 'one last' copy, you can't fix the price of it anymore. You just can't. DRM is an attempt to put a finger in the dike, to make it artificially hard again to make an additional copy, but they have a whole lot of information theory working against them. There is no practical way, that I can envision, to allow people access to digital media which does not inherently give them an opportunity to copy it, particularly since copying is inherent to the digital distribution process. And this is only going to get more difficult in the future.
So given this, what to do? The answer is to make people pay in advance. There will always be a demand for new content; even with the entire past produce of human civilization on tap, it is the nature of people to want things that are fresh, that have been created specifically for them (whether individually or as a group). Rather than trying to make money up off of the marginal copies, which have little to no inherent value, charge for the first copy. Charge interested parties, in advance, for creation of the work. If people aren't interested in funding its creation, it doesn't get made. If fans want an artist to continue to produce, then they can pay to commission more albums. Rather than paying an inflated cost for each copy, which has some portion of the original labor's cost built into it, they will pay for the cost of that labor up front. It is the labor which is valuable, not the copies.
This of course would force a re-evaluation of both how we think of the relationship between artists and their public, and also of how much art we as a society produce (right now I think it's clear that we produce a surplus; we produce more new art than the public really demands, and one must understand that in a pay-in-advance system, this would no longer be supportable), but I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with it. As people demand new content, they will pay for it to be created. Either they will pay what it costs to create it, or it will not be made.
This is the way the market should work: as people desire novelty, the business models would be formed around the demand. Instead of a top-down approach, it's bottom-up; allowing consumer choice and demand to drive how people will make money. There are lots of ways that they could do it, from straight work-on-commission to more subtle crediting schemes, or donationware/threatware (e.g. "I'll write the next installment of the
Actually, no.
But I think the "NPOV" (or any 'neutral' or 'group consensus') perspective is almost always artificial; nobody actually has a 'neutral point of view,' so you're inherently striving for a finished product that cannot represent the entire opinion of any single person. In some situations -- where you actually want to form or represent some sort of consensus -- this can be a good thing. I've contributed to Wikipedia and I think it's useful in this way. (Actually I think it's amusing that you think I'm WP-bashing, since in other contexts I've been accused of fanboyism.)
However, I stand by my assertion that a Wiki page which is open to public edits, or for that matter a committee-written white paper, really isn't the best way of showing off the complexities of a particular issue and capturing the various differing opinions. It's the difference between original sources (actually hearing various opinions on an issue from the people that hold them, in their own voices) and a secondary one, where the various sources have been amalgamated together. Even if all the factual information in each is retained somehow, much of the tone and contextual information is still lost. It is, in short, like a lossy compression method. Sometimes it may be desirable, but its lossiness should be noted.
Sometimes a wiki can be handy; they're great for getting an overview of a particular issue, and of the various parties involved. But on a contentiously debated subject, there is almost always some watering down of the arguments on either side in order to produce 'neutrality,' not to mention the impossible-to-remove author/editor bias, and thus there is still (and always will be) a place for discussion forums where a consensus-derived product is not the goal, but rather individual opinions are more valuable.
And I think groupthink is a significant problem; put people in a group and there is a strong tendency to discourage and suppress viewpoints which are disharmonious, even if they are sometimes factually correct. This is a greater problem when people are working together in person than collaborating online (since people, in my experience, are much more willing to self-censor in person to prevent confrontation than when psuedonymous), but it's naive to pretend that it doesn't exist.
There's always going to be a place for forums and wikis, even if the introduction of the latter makes aspects of the former somewhat redundant.
Forums are important because it provides a way of gleaning multiple opinions from distinct individuals, in direct response to a particular issue. Wikis are good at giving a group consensus opinion, but they're a poor way of showing someone all sides of an issue. The false "NPOV" perspective that an author has to take when writing a wiki is the same problem faced when you're reading a paper written by a committee; it's entirely possible that fallacious or spurious arguments get given improper weight because of efforts to appear 'neutral,' or that good but unpopular viewpoints are left out because of groupthink and self-censorship.
These problems may still happen in forums, but it's a lot easier when people can respond individually and don't have edit rights on each others work to give dissenting opinions. It's also easier to ask a particular question and get a particular answer; wikis are great for developing generalized reference, but they're a poor way to answer questions in a back-and-forth format. I've always felt that forums (aka Wikipedia's discussion pages) done through Wikis feel like a hack. With a forum, you can ask one question and get a dozen answers from a dozen distinct individuals; with a wiki you may not have an opportunity to ask a particular question, and instead you really have "one answer" (the entire document) which might or might not answer a lot of questions.
Thus I think they'll always be a place for both. Where Wikis may take over (and rightly so) are places where forums are being used as document repositories, for collective opinions. E.g., the "sticky" posts you see at the top of many forums, giving answers to frequently asked questions.
I'm still waiting for someone to develop a true combination of wiki and forum; maybe it's out there and I just haven't seen it yet, but I think neither extreme really does the job of the other well. A combination, maybe of wiki-type pages with attached discussion forums, would be best, and the two are really complementary, not exclusive.
Hunh?
... meaning somewhere, there is a decrypted stream, or analog output, just waiting for some person with too much free time and a fast enough oscilloscope* to poke around inside and break out, feed into a generic DAC, and record. You can't let people watch it at full quality without exposing that signal somewhere in the chain; even if it's not something obvious like just being able to record the feed to the monitor. So it doesn't magically 'solve' piracy in the way that the studios would like to think that it does.
How would this be in any way superior, from the "consumer electronics-Hollywood complex" perspective, than simply encrypting all of the content on the disc?
If you encrypt the high frequencies, they still have to be decrypted by 'approved' playback devices
And if you're not going to allow copying, why even make the lower frequencies copyable via un-encryption? It seems simpler just to go all-or nothing. I think it's flawed and doomed to failure in the long run either way, but the studios just have no reason, when you use their own apparent logic, to allow any sort of digital copying at all if it's preventable.
* Okay, probably wouldn't actually be an oscilloscope these days, probably some form of very high-speed logic analyzer, but whatever.
That's rather shortsighted. Your cost of living only seems constant; what happens is that for the same price (in terms of hours of labor), your living conditions increase as technology improves and we as a society become more efficient.
Take a look at what was considered "average" or "middle class" 50 or 60 years ago. Much smaller houses, generally one car, no air conditioning, very few modern 'convenience' appliances (dishwasher, microwave, etc.), much less complex entertainment. Today, if you wanted to, you could have that exact same standard of living, for a lot less money, inflation-adjusted. Today, middle class people expect and take for granted "personal" automobiles (instead of "family" ones), air conditioning, microwaves, multiple television sets, probably computers as well.
Obviously this ignores several things, like whether people are actually happier as a result of this increase on paper, and it also ignores a potential for the dividends of society to be distributed in-equally, so that certain segments get a much bigger boost over time than others (creating gaps), but in general, the amount of "tech" that you can buy with a normal income today is far greater than at any point in the past. That is the benefit of increased efficiency.
Whether you personally think that being able to buy more "tech" is a good thing or a bad thing, is a personal decision. Personally, I like it, although I don't think it affects overall 'happiness' very much; while technological progress is not a zero-sum game, I'm more and more convinced that happiness and satisfaction basically are.
Yes.
There were early adopters who went out and bought the obscenely priced first generation DVD players, but by and large the rest of the world didn't really follow suit until the players dropped below about $200 and Blockbuster started stocking a lot of new releases on DVD. And I wouldn't say that DVDs became ubiquitous until the cheap chinese ($50) "WalMart Special" DVD players came onto the scene.
Frankly, early on I think the biggest benefit to most people of DVDs versus VHS is that you didn't have to rewind it. I know my parents just thought that was the coolest damn thing; you could talk to them about digital audio until you were blue in the face, but what they liked was the ability to jump instantly to any point in a film, pause it for extended lengths of time without "wearing" the disc, and never having to worry about rewind anything.
I think whichever HD-disc format wins, it'll end up being like that. Mainstream consumers aren't going to buy it, until there are movies down at Blockbuster that they can rent, and they can buy the player at Walmart for under $200-250. Normal people just don't spend much more than that on what's effectively a fancy videocassette player (even if it's not really a cassette player...in most people's minds, the function is exactly the same, to play movies).
Agreed. I think geotagging (of the photos themselves, by the camera) is a sleeper feature. It's not something that people know that they want, but it's something that once people get it, they're going to wonder how they ever lived without it. Not because looking at LAT/LON coordinates in iPhoto is particularly interesting, but because it lets you build a whole range of neat utilities, using your photo album as a data source.
For example, if your camera records GPS data, you don't need to keep a detailed itinerary anymore. Your camera becomes your field notebook, particularly if it can record videos and voice notes. When you get back from your vacation, you could have a utility that would plot a map showing the route you took, and letting you click on each "stop" (where a stop could be any place where you took a predetermined number of photos in a particular radius, say 10 photos within 5 miles) and replay your trip.
You can do obvious searches that are difficult now: "show me all my photos from Connecticut" is trivial when they're geotagged; without this, you'd have to hope that you tagged them correctly by hand. And of course, the process of tagging itself becomes easier when you can do batch operations based on the coordinates; pulling out and tagging photos that you took on a particular trip is easy, and doesn't require good organizational skills.
In the same way that people simply take advantage of the time/date stamps that most cameras embed in the EXIF data right now, without really thinking about it, is how people will use GPS data if and when it becomes ubiquitious.
The major problem with adopting it is that the camera manufacturers don't seem to exactly be in a hurry to add it as a feature (which is too bad of them, because it seems like they need some compelling features to drive upgrades, now that the megapixel race seems to have reached a plateau where most consumers are satisfied), and there aren't a lot of standard interfaces for attaching an outboard GPS. (At least not that I've seen.)
Linking digital cameras and cellphones over Bluetooth is probably the best bet, since it would allow both for easy geotagging (using the phone's GPS) and sharing (use phone as modem/email-device), however this has the downside of requiring most people to upgrade two devices, rather than just one.
Well, there's the very slight problem that it costs almost $900 and is only 3.2 megapixels; I was interested until I saw that.
It's unfortunate that the major camera manufacturers don't work out a standardized interface for addons; something as simple as a serial interface to connect an outboard GPS would be fine, although the ability to use a single type of CF GPS cards would be better.
Of course, interoperability has never been chief on the camera manufacturers' minds; these are the same people that can barely standardize on a flash hot-shoe. Perhaps when their business starts to get squeezed by 'convergence'-type devices, they'll come around.
Hmm... Do I smell WinModem?
Except that WinModems are the exact OPPOSITE of the philosophy that's being espoused here with crypto offload engines, intelligent network cards, etc.
The WinModem was an attempt to take traditional modem functions and move them onto the CPU, in software. Rather than actually having a box full of circuitry that did the hardware handshaking, data compression, and all that good stuff, you just replace it with a simple device that barely connects the analog telephone line to the computer, and have the computer do all the heavy lifting.
I think the justification behind this approach is "software is cheap, hardware is expensive." Therefore, you put the 'brains' in software, and your dumb-hardware/smart-software combo is cheaper than the traditional combination of dumb-software/smart-hardware.
It's a pretty radical departure to essentially go in the opposite direction, from WinModems to these kind of "intelligent network cards," which seem more like a traditional serial modem in philosophy; they do all the work themselves and basically present the computer with a standardized data stream.
The only way that I could see this whole business being "WinModem-like" is in it being tremendously difficult to program for on non-Microsoft OSes. But that's not a consequence of the design per se, but of how I suspect MS will choose to implement it.
IPv6 really shouldn't be necessary so long as the router can know which way to forward the incoming voice data.
... if you could make it work at all.
... these all become much easier with IPv6.
That's kind of the problem though.
If you only have one outside-facing IP address, it makes it pretty damn hard to have multiple phones behind the same gateway and receive incoming calls. That's the real benefit of IPv6, you can have an address which is tied to your phone and moves around when it does, rather than having complicated NAT traversal and routing schemes, which are what you'd need with v4
Roaming, incoming calls
I think it's you that misunderstand. Discrimination merely means separating something from something else based on predetermined criteria. If you allow Linux users in and not Windows users, then you are discriminating on the basis of operating system. If you allow white people in and not black people, you are discriminating on the basis of skin color. One of those things is illegal, the other is not. This doesn't even get into the use of the word as an adjective instead of a verb (e.g., to be a discriminating connoisseur of operating systems, perhaps?).
The use of the word 'discrimination' doesn't necessarily imply anything racial, nor does it necessarily even imply anything wrong. Though it's true that the world carries negative connotations in many people's minds, that doesn't mean the use of the word is limited; its use is simply a rhetorical trick (and an unsubtle one at that).
It is useful to make things hard for the law abiding, not for pirates.
... ad infinium. The net result is just a lot of collateral damage.
Sadly, although what you're saying is complete common sense, it seems to be frequently lost on people making laws. I don't know if they perform some sort of lobotomy on you when you run for office, and disconnect the part of your brain that normally would say "Hey buddy, done a reality check in a while?" but it sure seems like it.
My personal opinion is that the pro-DRM argument smells a lot like the pro-gun-control argument, in that both of them put restrictions on law-abiding people in order to modify the behavior of people who frequently just ignore the law anyway; when you ignore the difference between law-abiding people and those who just don't give a damn, it's quite easy to descend into a "feedback loop," where in response to your last restrictive law not working, you pass a more restrictive one
Of course, they never will; just like Apple never will. Both companies are convinced that the only way to succeed is to get down on their knees and give the big sucky-sucky to the music companies in return for use of their content.
I've argued previously that Apple's iTunes is only a shadow of what it could be, if Apple wasn't hobbled from developing it in interesting ways because they're addicted to the cashflow that comes with being able to run the iTMS. Microsoft is the same way -- perhaps they'll have a little more freedom because they're bigger than Apple, and because they're partnered with the music companies less directly, but if they want anything to do with the music companies, there's a limit to what they can do.
Apple developed the iTMS, in my opinion, originally because they needed some way to give the whole MP3 player concept legitimacy. Without the iTMS, they could be accused of doing nothing but creating a piracy vehicle. Once the Music Store took off, it became an integral part of their business model, as did the relationship with the music companies. Innovative features, like music library sharing, were slowly disabled in order to appease them. There's really no way to tell what the iPod and iTunes could have been without this influence, because now the products are undoubtedly being designed with a secondary goal of "not pissing off the labels." (E.g., I doubt you'll see an iPod with a built-in line input, because the labels would go crazy; to them it would just be a copy machine.)
I don't think Microsoft will be any different. If anything, they've shown even more of a propensity in the past to favor "partnerships" with other companies and vertical- and horizontal-integration models, at the expense of their customers.
I am quite convinced that at this point, the innovative products -- the iPod killer, in other words -- are not going to come from Microsoft, Apple, or any other major manufacturer (certainly not Sony, who is so hobbled they're practically hopping around on one leg) who has to maintain a relationship with the music labels. For that, you're going to have to find an independent manufacturer, someone who's willing to create a product that does what people so want it to, even if the labels don't like it, or even if it means the manufacturer won't have a continuous income stream from a particular bundled music store.
First they need to figure out if it's dead or alive, and whether it should be treated as both.
Well that depends; have they opened the box that it's in to check yet?
This doesn't have any effect on WMV. It's WMA -- that's audio content only.
So you're still stuck.
Not sure whether the DRM schemes are related at any fundamental level, though; perhaps a break in one of them could lead to a break in the other sometime soon? It's really surprised me that they haven't been circumvented earlier.
Well there's another use; let's say you've used a particular store to buy a lot of music, and you'd like to kiss off that service and move to something else -- or move to another platform entirely, perhaps a non-Microsoft one. It seems like a tool like this would be handy to convert your music to a neutral format so that you could take it with you.
Granted, a better way to be would simply to have avoided buying DRMed music in the first place, but not everyone has that foresight.
I think the problem that OSS software has is documentation.
... not because we really even care about license issues, but just because it would require more effort to document somebody else's code than it would just to draw up the documentation and have a programmer rewrite it. The former would require running our entire system "in reverse;" it would require a programmer to read the source code of the outside project and write a specification from it, which they're not used to doing. (I can almost see the objections forming right now.)
Namely, that there isn't any. And I'm not talking about end-user documentation here, I mean process documentation. Specification documents and all that. The kind of stuff that normally gets developed alongside code, in any commercial/industrial development methodology.
There is an unspoken assumption behind the OSS ideals, and this is that the program's source code is the only documentation that anyone should ever need. This, frankly, is not true. It might be fine for code that has an obvious purpose and scope, and for systems software, but it starts to break down when you get into business software. How are you supposed to know from the source code, what the business process is that a particular segment of code is designed to support? You don't. How can you tell if something is a result of bad coding, or an incorrect design? You don't -- unless the same person both understands the code and the processes involved.
While it might be a safe assumption in many OSS projects to have the same person reading the code and analyzing the processes, this just doesn't happen in the real world. You usually have different people (even different groups of people) developing the specifications and processes, and writing the software from those specifications. In many cases, the people developing the specifications don't have the background or knowledge necessary to read the code directly.
I've said this elsewhere, but there's a lot of resistance in the OSS world to writing specifications. I don't know if this is because most of the software is written by programmers in their free time, and these people detest structured methodologies because they have to work with them in their day jobs, or if it's just a consequence of the way OSS is developed, but we're starting to see problems -- it's very hard to merge free software, where the code is the documentation, into a workflow where you have distinct levels of docs, where the code is only the very lowest level of end-product.
It's not if the systems to maintain documentation alongside code don't exist: some sort of Wiki-type interface, which was kept up-to-date against a project's official sources, would do just fine, and go a long ways towards improving the usefulness of OSS. However, there's little motivation for most projects to go to that level of effort.
I really don't have a good solution; I just know that I work in a situation very similar to the OP's, and we don't use any OSS code