// Copy my music from the device to another... yes I know it's possible, no thanks to Apple.
It works as a usb storage device, the mp3s will be in/iPod_Control or something, they have funny filenames but they still have the id3 tags etc. I have transferred files off of ipods several times, so long as you use standard non drm'd files (my ipod has zero drm content on it)...// For seconds... just copy my music to the device as.mp3 files so I can either play it with the machine or play it on the music player of the computer I happen to be sitting behind (which is usually a// Linux machine, not iTunes). Same for movies.
You can play it from the device on a linux box, just as you can copy the files off... As i said, the filenames will be mangled but the id3 tags are fine. As for copying files *to* the ipod, this is a bit more of a pain but there is plenty of third party software for doing it. It's because the devices use a particular file structure/db instead of just a big dir of mp3 files like most other mp3 players do.// Install Rockbox or iPodLinux for starters...
Why can't you? Is this a new ipod which hasn't had rockbox or ipodlinux ported to it yet? I'm sure it will once the respective developers have had time to do so...
It's not that America uses CDMA that is the point tho, it's that different American networks use different and incompatible protocols. If CDMA was simply a national standard and every operator used it that would make sense. By contrast - GSM is the European standard.
I don't even see why people are using skype... As you point out, it's a horrible lock-in protocol, and is tied to a single service for relaying calls to regular phones, a service which isn't very competitively priced. Personally i use SIP, i have accounts with several providers for outbound calls and i switch whenever a better deal comes along, the reason i have multiple accounts is both for redundancy and because different suppliers offer different rates to different places. I also run my own asterisk pbx, and connect to it using multiple hardware voip phones (cisco 7960s, nokia n95, and a few cheap brandless ones) and have it connected to a physical elephone line. I wouldn't have any of this flexibility if i was locked in to the skype protocol.
Because Bush and his administration have proven time and again that they are only out for themselves, and don't give a shit about the American people or even the American environment, let alone the world as a whole. There will be some self serving reason this has been done, whether to save money so it can be siphoned off elsewhere, or perhaps to increase bandwidth usage as people download instead (im sure bush has ties to isps/telcos, but doesn't stand to benefit from the government printing office having more work to do), or maybe to increase sales of printer ink/toner since most people will just print this themselves, using far less efficient devices than a large printing press would. Or it could be just an attempt at getting some cheap positive PR.
The motivation behind it certainly won't have been helping the environment, that's merely a side effect of whatever the true motive is.
That's because the Romanian government doesn't make much money from gouging people with overpriced media... The US government on the other hand, is very much in the pocket of large companies, including media companies who wish to retain artificially high prices.
I would have to disagree, AmigaOS was the best consumer level OS in 1995, it satisfied all the criteria you mention. Small, reasonable command line, fast/light ui, full multitasking, and the OS itself was very stable (but, like win9x and macosx could be taken down by an errant program).
However, i would never recommend such an OS to IT admins, an OS with no user separation is a terrible idea in a managed multiuser environment. You want to make sure users can't mess with other users or the system itself.
People should be browsing the web from appliances anyway, not full blown computers... If you build a small unix box where the only areas the user can write to are mounted noexec, and all executable areas are read only it becomes much harder to get malware on the system, even with a clueless user. The only way you could execute something is by exploiting one of the client apps, and that would still have to further acquire root privileges in order to do any major damage or make itself survive a restart. For updates you could have a special "maintenance mode", which requires flipping a physical switch to activate. Sure, users would lose a lot of the freedom they currently have over their machines, but consider that... The users who get infected are usually the technically illiterate ones, who only use their machines for a very limited subset of activities. The users who actually take advantage of the ability to install/execute arbitrary apps are clued up enough to actually do so, and subsequently usually aware of the dangers of malware and far less likely to leave their machine in an insecure state, or to fall for a social engineering scam.
Or they could have used the xp_cmdshell function of mssql to actually execute commands, often as the SYSTEM user and thus infected the servers themselves with the malware payload.
Why don't they go after microsoft too? They've been distributing a computer solitaire game for many years in clear violation of this patent, and they have plenty of money to sue them for!
The GPL is already far less restrictive than most commercial licenses...
Do you think Microsoft would sit idly by if someone took the windows source code that was leaked a couple of years back and created a derivative work? The leaked source could have proved beneficial to projects like Wine, Reactos and Samba etc, but they avoided it because it would be illegal. Given a reversed situation i doubt whether microsoft would behave in such a responsible and ethical manner, but despite their behaviour they do have the same right to govern distribution of their code as anyone else.
All antivirus products are a huge waste of resources... The extra overhead of "security products" on a typical windows install just serve to increase the perceived performance benefits of Linux.
GPL code does not "infect innocent suspects' code"... If you choose to use GPL code in your product, then you must agree to the terms under which you are permitted to do so. These companies cross license code between each other all the time with a plethora of different licensing requirements. For example Microsoft will license a lot of code to you, such as wma/wmv codecs and drm, under the condition that you pay them for each copy you distribute as part of one of your products. The only difference with the GPL is the requirements which you must abide by in order to distribute. Don't like the terms? Then write your own, or license code from somewhere else under different terms, or merely change the way you use the GPL code so that compliance no longer bothers you.
All this garbage about "releasing the source makes our products less secure" is ridiculous... Open source software has a very good track record when it comes to security, just look at OpenBSD for instance, and then you have apps like qmail for which the source has been available for years without huge numbers of holes. And Solaris hasn't suddenly seen a rash of new vulnerabilities since being open sourced. If code is well written, it doesn't matter who can see the source code. If it's poorly written you can understand why someone wouldn't want to be embarrassed by it's release, but if it's full of holes people will still reverse engineer the binaries to find them.
Well, interoperable DRM may be easier to crack, but it would also remove one of the biggest and most legitimate reasons for cracking it.
Of course DRM is not intended to prevent copying, it's intended to inhibit fair use and cause legitimate buyers to buy multiple copies of the same media for playing on different devices. Pirates will always find a way to make copies, even if they have to make lower quality analog copies.
Well, if support for WMA is a "desirable" feature, and Apple are hurting the market by not including it... Surely support for Apple's DRM is an even more desirable feature, and all those other music players on the market are hurting their customers too.
Also ODF is a desirable feature, and Microsoft are hurting the market by not supporting it.
But you're right, Apple already include support for the industry standard music format (MP3).. Anything else is just a tickbox feature. When there's an industry standard for DRM'd music maybe the lawsuit would have a point, but with the current trend away from DRM that's unlikely to happen.
I've used several logitech input devices, and always been able to configure their buttons for use with linux, or had them work out of the box on OSX... Never needed to install their drivers, which much like isp-provided software, are completely unnecessary and tend to cause all kinds of problems.
Microsoft developed frontpage server extensions for apache on linux many years ago, they were binary only and broke if you updated apache, and they were full of security holes.
I had such an annoyance this week actually... I saw an advertisement for a new apartment block while i was walking to the station, i remembered the URL and when i got on the train i tried to browse it using my phone.. But the site depended on flash, and was unviewable.
Copyright terms should certainly be a lot shorter for software... They should be tied to obsolescence, when a product is deprecated and ceeased to be supported/sold it's copyright should expire. That said, old software is really only of value for historic purposes (learning how things were done etc) and for companies that got locked in to old proprietary apps.
Disney have already made more than their fair share of profits from Mickey Mouse... Why should they be allowed to keep re-releasing the same cartoons over and over again? If they weren't able to do this, then they would have to actually come up with something new.
That's not to say there shouldn't be trademark protection on the character and likeness of Mickey Mouse to protect against unscrupulous organizations using the name/image in association with things like pornography, but the original Mickey Mouse cartoons should be in the public domain now and able to be distributed in their original form/context.
How about requiring copyright holders to make works available for no more than their previous cost... That is, they must keep something available and they can't simply jack up the price to unrealistic levels once they want to discontinue something. Companies could continue deriving a small revenue stream from what would otherwise have been discontinued products, and people who want these products can still obtain them. At the very least a copyright holder could place the work on a web server and permit downloads of it for a minimal cost, very little work on their part. If they want to stop distributing something, they are always free to release it into the public domain.
You'd think these companies could bother to write proper english in their scam mails...
But it's not just about people sending fake details, you can write scripts to do the same. I used to do it with phishing sites, I would just submit garbage information to their forms, sometimes tweaking the scripts to make it look more legit in the hope of wasting their time when they try to filter out all the crap. I started doing it through proxies after i got dossed a couple of times.
And more than enough time to do the switch... It's been planned for years, surely you've bought a new TV or two in that time? Anyone who bought an analogue only TV in the last few years should contact me, I have some analogue cellphones and 386 PC's for sale.
You can connect it via a bluetooth phone which never has to leave your pocket... The N800 is large by necessity of having a fairly big screen, it would make a poor phone at that size. You don't even need a Nokia phone, any bluetooth phone with 3g/gprs modem capability will work.
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// Copy my music from the device to another ... yes I know it's possible, no thanks to Apple.
/iPod_Control or something, they have funny filenames but they still have the id3 tags etc. I have transferred files off of ipods several times, so long as you use standard non drm'd files (my ipod has zero drm content on it)... // For seconds ... just copy my music to the device as .mp3 files so I can either play it with the machine or play it on the music player of the computer I happen to be sitting behind (which is usually a // Linux machine, not iTunes). Same for movies.
// Install Rockbox or iPodLinux for starters ...
It works as a usb storage device, the mp3s will be in
You can play it from the device on a linux box, just as you can copy the files off... As i said, the filenames will be mangled but the id3 tags are fine. As for copying files *to* the ipod, this is a bit more of a pain but there is plenty of third party software for doing it. It's because the devices use a particular file structure/db instead of just a big dir of mp3 files like most other mp3 players do.
Why can't you? Is this a new ipod which hasn't had rockbox or ipodlinux ported to it yet? I'm sure it will once the respective developers have had time to do so...
It's not that America uses CDMA that is the point tho, it's that different American networks use different and incompatible protocols. If CDMA was simply a national standard and every operator used it that would make sense.
By contrast - GSM is the European standard.
What exactly would you like to do on your ipod that you can't do due to drm?
I don't even see why people are using skype...
As you point out, it's a horrible lock-in protocol, and is tied to a single service for relaying calls to regular phones, a service which isn't very competitively priced.
Personally i use SIP, i have accounts with several providers for outbound calls and i switch whenever a better deal comes along, the reason i have multiple accounts is both for redundancy and because different suppliers offer different rates to different places. I also run my own asterisk pbx, and connect to it using multiple hardware voip phones (cisco 7960s, nokia n95, and a few cheap brandless ones) and have it connected to a physical elephone line.
I wouldn't have any of this flexibility if i was locked in to the skype protocol.
Because Bush and his administration have proven time and again that they are only out for themselves, and don't give a shit about the American people or even the American environment, let alone the world as a whole.
There will be some self serving reason this has been done, whether to save money so it can be siphoned off elsewhere, or perhaps to increase bandwidth usage as people download instead (im sure bush has ties to isps/telcos, but doesn't stand to benefit from the government printing office having more work to do), or maybe to increase sales of printer ink/toner since most people will just print this themselves, using far less efficient devices than a large printing press would. Or it could be just an attempt at getting some cheap positive PR.
The motivation behind it certainly won't have been helping the environment, that's merely a side effect of whatever the true motive is.
That's because the Romanian government doesn't make much money from gouging people with overpriced media... The US government on the other hand, is very much in the pocket of large companies, including media companies who wish to retain artificially high prices.
Are you sure? I always thought TOS was co-operative like MacOS of the day... That was one of the things that sold me on an Amiga instead.
I would have to disagree, AmigaOS was the best consumer level OS in 1995, it satisfied all the criteria you mention. Small, reasonable command line, fast/light ui, full multitasking, and the OS itself was very stable (but, like win9x and macosx could be taken down by an errant program).
However, i would never recommend such an OS to IT admins, an OS with no user separation is a terrible idea in a managed multiuser environment. You want to make sure users can't mess with other users or the system itself.
People should be browsing the web from appliances anyway, not full blown computers...
If you build a small unix box where the only areas the user can write to are mounted noexec, and all executable areas are read only it becomes much harder to get malware on the system, even with a clueless user.
The only way you could execute something is by exploiting one of the client apps, and that would still have to further acquire root privileges in order to do any major damage or make itself survive a restart.
For updates you could have a special "maintenance mode", which requires flipping a physical switch to activate.
Sure, users would lose a lot of the freedom they currently have over their machines, but consider that...
The users who get infected are usually the technically illiterate ones, who only use their machines for a very limited subset of activities.
The users who actually take advantage of the ability to install/execute arbitrary apps are clued up enough to actually do so, and subsequently usually aware of the dangers of malware and far less likely to leave their machine in an insecure state, or to fall for a social engineering scam.
Or they could have used the xp_cmdshell function of mssql to actually execute commands, often as the SYSTEM user and thus infected the servers themselves with the malware payload.
Why don't they go after microsoft too? They've been distributing a computer solitaire game for many years in clear violation of this patent, and they have plenty of money to sue them for!
The GPL is already far less restrictive than most commercial licenses...
Do you think Microsoft would sit idly by if someone took the windows source code that was leaked a couple of years back and created a derivative work? The leaked source could have proved beneficial to projects like Wine, Reactos and Samba etc, but they avoided it because it would be illegal. Given a reversed situation i doubt whether microsoft would behave in such a responsible and ethical manner, but despite their behaviour they do have the same right to govern distribution of their code as anyone else.
All antivirus products are a huge waste of resources...
The extra overhead of "security products" on a typical windows install just serve to increase the perceived performance benefits of Linux.
GPL code does not "infect innocent suspects' code"...
If you choose to use GPL code in your product, then you must agree to the terms under which you are permitted to do so. These companies cross license code between each other all the time with a plethora of different licensing requirements. For example Microsoft will license a lot of code to you, such as wma/wmv codecs and drm, under the condition that you pay them for each copy you distribute as part of one of your products.
The only difference with the GPL is the requirements which you must abide by in order to distribute. Don't like the terms? Then write your own, or license code from somewhere else under different terms, or merely change the way you use the GPL code so that compliance no longer bothers you.
All this garbage about "releasing the source makes our products less secure" is ridiculous... Open source software has a very good track record when it comes to security, just look at OpenBSD for instance, and then you have apps like qmail for which the source has been available for years without huge numbers of holes. And Solaris hasn't suddenly seen a rash of new vulnerabilities since being open sourced.
If code is well written, it doesn't matter who can see the source code. If it's poorly written you can understand why someone wouldn't want to be embarrassed by it's release, but if it's full of holes people will still reverse engineer the binaries to find them.
Well, interoperable DRM may be easier to crack, but it would also remove one of the biggest and most legitimate reasons for cracking it.
Of course DRM is not intended to prevent copying, it's intended to inhibit fair use and cause legitimate buyers to buy multiple copies of the same media for playing on different devices. Pirates will always find a way to make copies, even if they have to make lower quality analog copies.
Well, if support for WMA is a "desirable" feature, and Apple are hurting the market by not including it...
Surely support for Apple's DRM is an even more desirable feature, and all those other music players on the market are hurting their customers too.
Also ODF is a desirable feature, and Microsoft are hurting the market by not supporting it.
But you're right, Apple already include support for the industry standard music format (MP3).. Anything else is just a tickbox feature. When there's an industry standard for DRM'd music maybe the lawsuit would have a point, but with the current trend away from DRM that's unlikely to happen.
I've used several logitech input devices, and always been able to configure their buttons for use with linux, or had them work out of the box on OSX...
Never needed to install their drivers, which much like isp-provided software, are completely unnecessary and tend to cause all kinds of problems.
Microsoft developed frontpage server extensions for apache on linux many years ago, they were binary only and broke if you updated apache, and they were full of security holes.
I had such an annoyance this week actually...
I saw an advertisement for a new apartment block while i was walking to the station, i remembered the URL and when i got on the train i tried to browse it using my phone.. But the site depended on flash, and was unviewable.
Copyright terms should certainly be a lot shorter for software... They should be tied to obsolescence, when a product is deprecated and ceeased to be supported/sold it's copyright should expire.
That said, old software is really only of value for historic purposes (learning how things were done etc) and for companies that got locked in to old proprietary apps.
Disney have already made more than their fair share of profits from Mickey Mouse... Why should they be allowed to keep re-releasing the same cartoons over and over again?
If they weren't able to do this, then they would have to actually come up with something new.
That's not to say there shouldn't be trademark protection on the character and likeness of Mickey Mouse to protect against unscrupulous organizations using the name/image in association with things like pornography, but the original Mickey Mouse cartoons should be in the public domain now and able to be distributed in their original form/context.
How about requiring copyright holders to make works available for no more than their previous cost...
That is, they must keep something available and they can't simply jack up the price to unrealistic levels once they want to discontinue something. Companies could continue deriving a small revenue stream from what would otherwise have been discontinued products, and people who want these products can still obtain them.
At the very least a copyright holder could place the work on a web server and permit downloads of it for a minimal cost, very little work on their part.
If they want to stop distributing something, they are always free to release it into the public domain.
You'd think these companies could bother to write proper english in their scam mails...
But it's not just about people sending fake details, you can write scripts to do the same. I used to do it with phishing sites, I would just submit garbage information to their forms, sometimes tweaking the scripts to make it look more legit in the hope of wasting their time when they try to filter out all the crap.
I started doing it through proxies after i got dossed a couple of times.
And more than enough time to do the switch... It's been planned for years, surely you've bought a new TV or two in that time?
Anyone who bought an analogue only TV in the last few years should contact me, I have some analogue cellphones and 386 PC's for sale.
You can connect it via a bluetooth phone which never has to leave your pocket...
The N800 is large by necessity of having a fairly big screen, it would make a poor phone at that size.
You don't even need a Nokia phone, any bluetooth phone with 3g/gprs modem capability will work.