A lot of the older music does still have FairPlay and its not like you can redownload everything sans DRM now.
If by "older music" you mean "music you downloaded before April 2009", then yes, Apple didn't go into your computer and strip the DRM from all the music you previously bought.
However, it is my understanding that you can redownload everything sans DRM, you just can't do so for free.
Either way, it's crystal clear that Apple doesn't think that "technology based vendor lock in for music will remain a valid strategy" at all, since they've eliminated it entirely.
The way the section quoted in the summary plays up the "wide-open field" of Android just strikes me as very silly. If you replaced "Android" with "Mac" and "iPhone" with "Windows," you'd have a pretty good approximation of the marketshare situation in the PC game market...and no one's suggesting that writing games for Mac is smarter than writing games for Windows due to massive overcrowding of the Windows games market.
(Apologies for any incoherence. Please blame posting before fully waking up.)
If you had witnessed the past eight years from outside the US, you would be wondering how anyone in the world can possibly not hate everything american.
Heck, I witnessed the past eight years from inside the US, and am having a hard time not hating everything American.
If this actually happens, it will be a Very Good Thing for the world in general, as Microsoft will no longer be legally able to keep changing their protocols to break access by non-Microsoft software.
Given their track record, though, I don't believe for a minute that Microsoft will actually make all the information available in a clear and usable format. More likely they'll release some information that looks nice, to show what good boys they're being, then release some more information terribly scrambled, and keep most of the information to themselves, because by that point the EU will be paying less attention to them and they'll have to take them back to court to get them to do anything more.
Same old story.
And yes, I am a terminal cynic. Why do you ask?;-)
That's rhetoric and ideology, not legal reasoning.
My "rhetoric and ideology" is based on decades of rational thought and experience. I know you statists hate to admit it, but the free market is PROVEN to be the only rational way of running a society. So please stop trying to change the subject and start educating yourself.
Pot, meet kettle.
I asked a simple question, the answer to which would have been some concrete facts about specific rights, duties, etc. You responded with standard libertarian ideology.
I didn't say that you were wrong. Whether or not your ideology is correct is irrelevant to this. I just said that you didn't answer the question, which you didn't.
And then you accuse me of trying to change the subject and link to Ayn Rand in the same breath?
I consider myself reasonably smart, and I wouldn't mind serving on a jury.
Only problem is, from everything I've seen and heard, my intelligence, basic working knowledge of the legal system, inquisitive mind, and sense of justice would result in me getting removed in the first round of jury selection.
That's rhetoric and ideology, not legal reasoning.
Why can there not be legal language giving corporations a specific set of rights necessary to act as corporations must and should, yet not defining them as people?
Protecting the liability of employees/owners in the case of lawsuit, misconduct or fraud.
It has some merit, but really, its gone way to far in recent years.
My understanding was that this is the purpose of corporations. It, too, as you say, has gone too far lately, but my question was about the purpose of corporate personhood.
Seriously. Can anyone with a legal background explain what part of corporate daily business requires that corporations be legally considered equivalent to people?
If there's nothing truly fundamental that requires it, I think it might be time to start writing letters to our representatives and senators asking that corporate personhood be revoked, or at least replaced with something much more watered-down. It's really starting to go too far...
The previous ones were probably Apple deliberately (and stupidly) trying to push its software to Windows machines that didn't have it already.
Given that almost no one needs the iPhone Configuration Utility among regular consumer-type users, I can see no benefit to Apple in deliberately pushing it out, and thus conclude that it was just a mistake.
"Your Job" Is largely to make sure your manager succeeds in his job. Period. Never forget this, seriously.
In a properly-run, efficient company, that's exactly backwards.
The purpose of having managers in the first place is to help the line workers, of whatever stripe, do their jobs most effectively. Any manager who thinks his job is more important to the company than the jobs of the people he manages has become a bad manager, almost by definition.
So...by your logic, murder should be one of the most lightly punished crimes of all.
After all, someone attempting to murder you but failing is a very traumatic experience, that stays with you forever.
Being mugged at gunpoint isn't something you're likely to forget soon.
Losing all your money to a Wall Street ponzi scheme is a terrible shock, that can affect you and your family for not just your life, but your children's lives, as they will have to grow up in poverty.
...Do you begin to see where your theory falls down?
Yes, rape is a terrible and traumatic crime. However, if you survive something, there is the chance of picking up the pieces and having a life again on the other side. I personally know someone who was raped as a teenager. She is now happily married and living a perfectly normal life.
If she had been murdered instead of raped, that wouldn't be the case.
So...your recommendation is that we just give up, and assume that at some point, the police are going to come for us, and we're going to die, because they are uncaring jackbooted goose-stepping fascist bastards who just love torturing people to death.
Even aside from the terminal cynicism of that viewpoint, it's totally useless. What's useful is the knowledge that at least in some cases a plausible-deniability encryption tool like TrueCrypt will provide you with the means to keep some data private even when you are required by law to hand over encryption keys.
So pardon me if I flip your ideology the bird and go where people believe in at least trying to live a normal life.
But LaTeX uses human-readable markup for this very reason! You can easily enter formatting information as you are working on the text without it getting in the way / becoming opaque and difficult to edit like in a wysiwyg.
Though I don't know LaTeX, I'm quite sure I could learn it if I had cause. But I'm a geek, and most people aren't. If I wanted to, I could just write in HTML all the time, and that would produce formatted output, but that's a) not what normal people would be willing or able to do, and b) not what I want to do.
No; no kind of markup is acceptable for this kind of thing. For non-geeks, a WYSIWYG editor is absolutely essential...and even geeks might like one some of the time.
First, it is a better use of space. Why have vertical menus drop down and obscure your work space? The ribbon keeps 'stuff' out of your way and doesn't drop into the work space.
You're kidding me, right?
Let's see: The menu bar is approximately 1 cm of space at the top of my window, which can expand, on demand, to a menu with an arbitrary number of different options of varying obscurity, which then disappears when I'm through with it, leaving me with only that 1 cm of precious vertical space taken up again.
The ribbon is about an inch and a half of vertical space at the top of my window, and it's always there.
Vertical space is the most precious resource on modern widescreen displays, especially laptop displays (and I do use laptops nearly exclusively). Setting aside completely issues of usability, retraining, etc, the ribbon is a terrible interface for its use of vertical screen space.
Well, after my experience with the OO.o developers, I'm going to guess it'll be implemented as an opt-in on-install hidden option(no checkbox), which requires cmdline arguments added to the installer to turn off, and requires a complete reinstall to disable.
Oh, well, as long as it's only a reinstall that's required, rather than a complete recompile, that's all right then.
Document preparation is a much better model. It has two completely different stages, each of which calls for its own program, instead of being thrown together in a half-baked mashup and called "word processing." Those stages are text editing and typesetting.
I'm not sure I agree.
For producing a professional product, yes, I can certainly see that. But when I'm just writing something, I don't want to have to go back and make a second pass just to get the formatting right. This is particularly true since most of the writing I do is either discursive (like here) or creative, and in both cases, formatting is more than just making sure the margins are right, and the paragraphs are spaced correctly, etc: it is applying the appropriate emphases in the appropriate places. This is easy to do as I am typing it, but much harder to come back and re-create after the fact.
I'm extrapolating from what I hear on Slashdot, what I hear on other online sites, and what I see and hear in my own workplace and personal life.
I don't know of any scientific studies that have investigated the matter, but if you know of some proving that the ribbon is the best thing since sliced bread, please feel free to share them with us.
They want to take what's probably the single most reviled "feature" of MS Office 2007 and put it into OpenOffice? When one of the big selling points of OpenOffice, among people I've talked to, is that it looks and feels more like the Office they're used to?
Please tell me they're only thinking of putting it in as an opt-in option, not as the default or only option...
Forgive me for having learned all I know about our criminal justice system from Law & Order (and similar), but wouldn't this be absolutely perfect grounds for appeal? Instructions/rulings from the judge that fly in the face of established precedent, common sense, and possibly even black-letter law...my understanding was that this sort of thing is exactly the stuff that gets verdicts overturned on appeal, which judges don't like...
Is Mr. Beckerman around to give us some insight into this...?
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the older music does still have FairPlay and its not like you can redownload everything sans DRM now.
If by "older music" you mean "music you downloaded before April 2009", then yes, Apple didn't go into your computer and strip the DRM from all the music you previously bought.
However, it is my understanding that you can redownload everything sans DRM, you just can't do so for free.
Either way, it's crystal clear that Apple doesn't think that "technology based vendor lock in for music will remain a valid strategy" at all, since they've eliminated it entirely.
Dan Aris
... but one has to wonder if technology based vendor lock in for music will remain a valid strategy forever
Um...what technology based vendor lock in?
You do know that not a single track sold on the iTunes store since April has had FairPlay DRM, don't you?
Dan Aris
The way the section quoted in the summary plays up the "wide-open field" of Android just strikes me as very silly. If you replaced "Android" with "Mac" and "iPhone" with "Windows," you'd have a pretty good approximation of the marketshare situation in the PC game market...and no one's suggesting that writing games for Mac is smarter than writing games for Windows due to massive overcrowding of the Windows games market.
(Apologies for any incoherence. Please blame posting before fully waking up.)
Dan Aris
If you had witnessed the past eight years from outside the US, you would be wondering how anyone in the world can possibly not hate everything american.
Heck, I witnessed the past eight years from inside the US, and am having a hard time not hating everything American.
Dan Aris
If this actually happens, it will be a Very Good Thing for the world in general, as Microsoft will no longer be legally able to keep changing their protocols to break access by non-Microsoft software.
Given their track record, though, I don't believe for a minute that Microsoft will actually make all the information available in a clear and usable format. More likely they'll release some information that looks nice, to show what good boys they're being, then release some more information terribly scrambled, and keep most of the information to themselves, because by that point the EU will be paying less attention to them and they'll have to take them back to court to get them to do anything more.
Same old story.
And yes, I am a terminal cynic. Why do you ask? ;-)
Dan Aris
My "rhetoric and ideology" is based on decades of rational thought and experience. I know you statists hate to admit it, but the free market is PROVEN to be the only rational way of running a society. So please stop trying to change the subject and start educating yourself.
Pot, meet kettle.
I asked a simple question, the answer to which would have been some concrete facts about specific rights, duties, etc. You responded with standard libertarian ideology.
I didn't say that you were wrong. Whether or not your ideology is correct is irrelevant to this. I just said that you didn't answer the question, which you didn't.
And then you accuse me of trying to change the subject and link to Ayn Rand in the same breath?
You're either a towering hypocrite or a troll.
Dan Aris
I consider myself reasonably smart, and I wouldn't mind serving on a jury.
Only problem is, from everything I've seen and heard, my intelligence, basic working knowledge of the legal system, inquisitive mind, and sense of justice would result in me getting removed in the first round of jury selection.
Dan Aris
That's rhetoric and ideology, not legal reasoning.
Why can there not be legal language giving corporations a specific set of rights necessary to act as corporations must and should, yet not defining them as people?
Dan Aris
Protecting the liability of employees/owners in the case of lawsuit, misconduct or fraud.
It has some merit, but really, its gone way to far in recent years.
My understanding was that this is the purpose of corporations. It, too, as you say, has gone too far lately, but my question was about the purpose of corporate personhood.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you?
Dan Aris
Seriously. Can anyone with a legal background explain what part of corporate daily business requires that corporations be legally considered equivalent to people?
If there's nothing truly fundamental that requires it, I think it might be time to start writing letters to our representatives and senators asking that corporate personhood be revoked, or at least replaced with something much more watered-down. It's really starting to go too far...
Dan Aris
The previous ones were probably Apple deliberately (and stupidly) trying to push its software to Windows machines that didn't have it already.
Given that almost no one needs the iPhone Configuration Utility among regular consumer-type users, I can see no benefit to Apple in deliberately pushing it out, and thus conclude that it was just a mistake.
Dan Aris
"Your Job" Is largely to make sure your manager succeeds in his job. Period. Never forget this, seriously.
In a properly-run, efficient company, that's exactly backwards.
The purpose of having managers in the first place is to help the line workers, of whatever stripe, do their jobs most effectively. Any manager who thinks his job is more important to the company than the jobs of the people he manages has become a bad manager, almost by definition.
Dan Aris
The iPhone does have Skype now, you know. True, it's only allowed to work over the 802.11 connection, not the cellular, but it's definitely there.
Dan Aris
Or you can do like a friend of mine did - retire at 35 to a beach house in a little town on the Gulf coast.
Great, and the next time a big hurricane comes through, that beach house will be matchsticks.
No thanks. If I retire to a beach house, it'll be on Lake Ontario.
Dan Aris
Death is a finality. Rape lasts for a lifetime.
So...by your logic, murder should be one of the most lightly punished crimes of all.
After all, someone attempting to murder you but failing is a very traumatic experience, that stays with you forever.
Being mugged at gunpoint isn't something you're likely to forget soon.
Losing all your money to a Wall Street ponzi scheme is a terrible shock, that can affect you and your family for not just your life, but your children's lives, as they will have to grow up in poverty.
...Do you begin to see where your theory falls down?
Yes, rape is a terrible and traumatic crime. However, if you survive something, there is the chance of picking up the pieces and having a life again on the other side. I personally know someone who was raped as a teenager. She is now happily married and living a perfectly normal life.
If she had been murdered instead of raped, that wouldn't be the case.
Dan Aris
So...your recommendation is that we just give up, and assume that at some point, the police are going to come for us, and we're going to die, because they are uncaring jackbooted goose-stepping fascist bastards who just love torturing people to death.
Even aside from the terminal cynicism of that viewpoint, it's totally useless. What's useful is the knowledge that at least in some cases a plausible-deniability encryption tool like TrueCrypt will provide you with the means to keep some data private even when you are required by law to hand over encryption keys.
So pardon me if I flip your ideology the bird and go where people believe in at least trying to live a normal life.
Dan Aris
You'd have to know Chinese to get the joke though.
Care to share? Or are you just being facetious?
'Cause, y'know, most of us don't know Chinese, and thus can't even tell whether or not there was supposed to be a joke.
Dan Aris
But LaTeX uses human-readable markup for this very reason! You can easily enter formatting information as you are working on the text without it getting in the way / becoming opaque and difficult to edit like in a wysiwyg.
Though I don't know LaTeX, I'm quite sure I could learn it if I had cause. But I'm a geek, and most people aren't. If I wanted to, I could just write in HTML all the time, and that would produce formatted output, but that's a) not what normal people would be willing or able to do, and b) not what I want to do.
No; no kind of markup is acceptable for this kind of thing. For non-geeks, a WYSIWYG editor is absolutely essential...and even geeks might like one some of the time.
Dan Aris
First, it is a better use of space. Why have vertical menus drop down and obscure your work space? The ribbon keeps 'stuff' out of your way and doesn't drop into the work space.
You're kidding me, right?
Let's see: The menu bar is approximately 1 cm of space at the top of my window, which can expand, on demand, to a menu with an arbitrary number of different options of varying obscurity, which then disappears when I'm through with it, leaving me with only that 1 cm of precious vertical space taken up again.
The ribbon is about an inch and a half of vertical space at the top of my window, and it's always there.
Vertical space is the most precious resource on modern widescreen displays, especially laptop displays (and I do use laptops nearly exclusively). Setting aside completely issues of usability, retraining, etc, the ribbon is a terrible interface for its use of vertical screen space.
Dan Aris
Well, after my experience with the OO.o developers, I'm going to guess it'll be implemented as an opt-in on-install hidden option(no checkbox), which requires cmdline arguments added to the installer to turn off, and requires a complete reinstall to disable.
Oh, well, as long as it's only a reinstall that's required, rather than a complete recompile, that's all right then.
;-)
Dan Aris
Document preparation is a much better model. It has two completely different stages, each of which calls for its own program, instead of being thrown together in a half-baked mashup and called "word processing." Those stages are text editing and typesetting.
I'm not sure I agree.
For producing a professional product, yes, I can certainly see that. But when I'm just writing something, I don't want to have to go back and make a second pass just to get the formatting right. This is particularly true since most of the writing I do is either discursive (like here) or creative, and in both cases, formatting is more than just making sure the margins are right, and the paragraphs are spaced correctly, etc: it is applying the appropriate emphases in the appropriate places. This is easy to do as I am typing it, but much harder to come back and re-create after the fact.
Dan Aris
I'm extrapolating from what I hear on Slashdot, what I hear on other online sites, and what I see and hear in my own workplace and personal life.
I don't know of any scientific studies that have investigated the matter, but if you know of some proving that the ribbon is the best thing since sliced bread, please feel free to share them with us.
Dan Aris
They want to take what's probably the single most reviled "feature" of MS Office 2007 and put it into OpenOffice? When one of the big selling points of OpenOffice, among people I've talked to, is that it looks and feels more like the Office they're used to?
Please tell me they're only thinking of putting it in as an opt-in option, not as the default or only option...
Dan Aris
Has anyone checked to see if he's hiking in the Applachians?
(fixed spelling)
No...you didn't. It's "Appalachian."
Dan Aris
Forgive me for having learned all I know about our criminal justice system from Law & Order (and similar), but wouldn't this be absolutely perfect grounds for appeal? Instructions/rulings from the judge that fly in the face of established precedent, common sense, and possibly even black-letter law...my understanding was that this sort of thing is exactly the stuff that gets verdicts overturned on appeal, which judges don't like...
Is Mr. Beckerman around to give us some insight into this...?
Dan Aris