I wonder what would happen if a library that was given a couple dozen PC's by Bill Gates turned around and starting running Linux on them........
You can be almost certain that the "gracious" donations by the Gate's foundation stipulates what software is allowed to be used on those systems, especially what OS. I bet there is even a time frame in which the recipient must upgrade the OS, and this time there is no free ride. Give them the razor and sell them the blades.
It is precisely because of this that Windows is unsuitable for a kiosk-like system. It is simply too powerful.
I think your are confusing simplified with powerful. A bunch of task simplifying "wizards" does not equal power. I recently deployed 1,600 Windows 2000 based kiosks and all those wizards did nothing to help. I had to replaced explorer.exe the desktop shell with my own since it crashed too much and locked every stinkin file it touches. I wrapped IE with a custom browser to try to lock it down more and had to write a management and monitoring application to handle all 1,600 kiosks. MS Windows sucks for being scriptable, something that would have made my work much easier. I would have had far more real power at my disposal had I been able to use Linux.
less feature-filled operating systems are needed.
I think you are confusing the large amount of software available on MS Windows as a feature of MS Windows. It is a benefit, but not a feature of the OS itself. What great feautres are included with MS windows out of the box that are not included with a mainstream Linux distro?
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, had 31 percent of the MP3 player market in terms of units for the months of October and November, and accounted for 55 percent of the MP3 player market when measured by revenue, according to Jobs.
And with HP pushing WMA on the iPod, I doubt iTMS will hold its #1 postion for long.
And what makes you think the other 4 RIAA companies want to make backroom deals
The whole point of the RIAA is to give more power to the individual recording studios. You never heard of all the price fixing crap? The recording studios want to sell music, and their dream is a pay-per-listen service. It will be companies like MS, HP and Dell that sadly, drive the market to WMA music stores and players. The problem with Apple and thier iPod and iTMS is that again, they are a one solution no competitioin supplier. Their hardware, their software. I am sure that the market has show over the last 10 years or so that consumers do not want that. So all the new players and stores comming out over the next year or so will support WMA and let consumers pick what player and what music store to go to and iTMS market share will go way down. iTMS has the market share now because they are pretty much the only "acceptable" music store around. Napster's DRM is just too draconian.
There are plenty of geeks trying to do things about it and it is called Open Source. What we need are some EE geeks to start to design and sell new hardware and not put DRM in it. The only way MS could stop that hardware would be through legislation which would turn more heads then typical MS software lock-in. An open hardware platform is all we geeks need. Don't forget that there is life outside of Intel and AMD. IBM makes one of the best processor in the world. Now if IBM could only start to mass produce their processors and mobo's to become a comodity, we geeks may have an open option. Oh, and no, Apple is not an option since Apple has been all about lock-in from day one. Given the opportunity, they would be just as bad as MS at locking customers into their hardware/software. Notice that I am talking about Open/Free and not free (as in cost/beer). Charge all you want for hardware and software, but leave it open for consumer chioce and competition.
Your kidding right? Think how long it took for the whole anti-trust ball to get rolling with MS. The next time it would have to get very bad for some fat politician to get off his/her butt to even get the ball rolling (3 - 5 years of major complaints). Then a few years for the government to get the effort "organized". Add a year or more in court and throw in one extra year for miscellaneous garbage. By the time it all played out, it would not matter, MS would own all major IT channels, software, control of hardware specs, BIOS, 1,000's of patents. There will be no practical way to compete.
Notes: Do not use SonicStage while logged on to a domain user account under Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional or Windows XP Home Edition.
This rules out most corporate workers. Why in the world would they have this restriction?
Actually, Apple has the number one postion based on sales because their iPod/iPodMini are priced more on average then the copetitiors. As far as number of units sold, they do not have the #1 postion. However, 3 million units is a pretty good number of players to have out their and those players are pretty much locked into iTMS.
Where I see Sony having an advantage is their size and market force that Apple cannot touch. Sony doesn't have to pay the same royalties that Apple does to labels sine Sony is a major label. Sony can also pull strings to get a bunch of thier "cool" "artists" to do some commercials and you now have millions of screaming teens crying to their parents to get them a device from Sony. Next, Sony can do deals with MS that Apple just cannot do. With MS and Sony, they can own the Media market by locking consumers into their technology. Give it about two years and Apple will dwindle, not because iTMS is bad, but becuase it is just too hard to fight "the system".
Think about all the things Sony can do to stop Apple. They can do back room deals with other labels to release new content to only thier format or MS's format. That right there would slowly kill Apple. Either Apple dies or changes iTMS to work with the new formats. If Apple works with the new formats, then Apple loses the lock-in to their iPod.
You are actually right. I see that same bias. Oh look it is from Apple so it is OK. I personally think that any DRM is bad and will not purchase media with it. If that means I never buy a single audio CD or DVD again, so be it. The problem is lazy people who do not want to be inconvenienced and so just accept what they are given just to hear a song or watch a movie. It is really sad.
I agree with almost all of your points and they are scary and PO me as well as many others. One point I do not agree 100% with is thinking that Linux will not help. It will with the limitation of media. Most of this DRM crap is to lock down music and video and strip away fair use rights. You could happily use your Linux box with no DRM and work with most of the internet. What I see being blocked on the internet is media. I personally do not buy music any longer, while I still purchase an occasional DVD since I don't think the MPAA has been as ugly as the RIAA.
What really is the problem is users, including many on/. They complain with no action. This is what big business and big government love. Let us bitch all we want, and in the end they" get what they will with endless power. I personally cannot believe that people do not care that MS has taken on the role of government and are now stripping us of our fair use rights. Note, I am not talking about some punk sharing music/video that does not have the right to distribute. This Janus crap will stop you from doing things in your OWN HOME that you have a LEGAL RIGHT TO. Imagine if you go out and buy an audio CD and come home and you are only allowed to play it in one CD player. I personally have a few around the house in different rooms. It sure would suck to have to move the same CD player around the house. This is what MS is doing. And yes it is MS even though the content industry wants it. MS should be standing up for their end users and not playing government. They have no right to make software that takes away a legal right. And what is most sad is the fact that our congressmen and senators are not standing up for us. They are the ones who should be carrying our voices since we do not live in a true democracy and depend on them to represent us. Instead they are representing big businesses who do not even have the right to vote in our nation, so how could they be representing their constituents?
Sure they can. They have the lawyers, and you don't.
Well I do have a lawyer, I got a great deal from Larry's Discount Lawyers. They handle any case for the low, low price of $29.99 + tax. I should have no problems : )
Now what is more likely? You were downloading a movie, or you hacked your bittorrent
For normal users, the former, for/.ers, the later.
Getting a list of IP's does not prove copyright infringement. Also, the **AA are going after people distributing not downloading. So the person who put the tracker up is more at risk. However, if you block the **AA from connecting to your tracker, they will have a pretty hard time proving copyright infingement. I could put a plain text file up on my web server named Mike_Jackson__Thriller.mp3 and block the **AA from getting to it. If they sent their C&D letter to my ISP, they will look pretty silly when they find out it is just a plain text file. So again, the **AA needs more then a list of IP's and file names to actually prove copyright infringement.
No way. Azureus is extremely fast. Java is not slow, that is old news. The Java JVM compiles byte code to _native_ code, so it will run at native speed. My CPU usage for a 2Mbs line never gets over 1% or so. Also, Java is used extensively for server type applications. Do you think it would have wide industry support for sever apps if the CPU got hosed? JVM's have been compiling to native code for a long, long time now, it is called JIT or Just In Time compiling.
They cannot prove copyright infringement because your IP is in a file/list. They have to prove that you are distributing a copyrighted work that you do not have permission to do, so if they can never connect to your box to verify that you are distributing, then how could they prove copyright infringement? IANAL, so the crappy DMCA may make the level of proof extremely low. Also, the tracker should only have the IP of the person who put it up, not the IP's of anyone downloading/uploading the file. In the end the only way to play it safe is to not share copyrighted works that one does not have the permission to distribute : )
It looks like this user was using bittorrent. If you are using bittorrent, the only client you should ever use is Azureus. Once you have Azureus installed, also install the Azureus SafePeer plugin. This will download the latest ip addresses from PeerGuardian which moved to a new address. This should help keep unwanted users out of your box.
There is always more to MS then what you see on the surface.
Do you really think MS's DRM will be fully documented and open? No. The version for SMPTE may be, though as you pointed out there are fees for the documentation and SDK which are not really priced for small business or individuals and then there is the license fee which again, I don't consider open in any sense of the word. Concerning MS's DRM, it will still be closed and proprietary, otherwise you would have 1,000+ cracks out there and the RIAA/MPAA would never go for it. The DRM that the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers use may be documented while encumbered by patents, the DRM that will go into the OS to protect digital content will be closed. There is nothing stopping MS from having two version of WM9 and DRM. The SMPTE won't use WM9 since there is a trademark so MS can continue WM9 down the closed proprietary path and have a slightly different version called VP9 or whatever for the SMPTE.
Does it matter that WM-9 has been accepted as a standard? The DRM that goes with WM-9 is NOT open and never will be. Being able to implement a WM-9 player is not much use if it cannot handle the DRM ladened content, which as we all know, will be just about all content pumped out from the RIAA/MPAA.
Yes I know. It is hard to pick whose stats to accept. Google's Zeitgeist show Mac at 4% and Linux at only 1%, while this site shows IDC analyst showing that Linux 25% of the new server market an 2.8% of the desktop which is almost the same as Mac on the desktop. It is hard to know whose "stats" to accept anymore : )
When your fortune 500 company standardizes it's web browser to Mozilla on the desktop, then you can come back and claim some sort of victory.
I work on back-end servers, middleware and web apps. When we develop web apps, they are standards compliant and do work on Mozilla, IE, and other browsers so there is no need to "standardize on IE". In fact, the majority of problems reported from home users have been from IE users that have had their computers taken over by spyware and the like thanks to the great security of IE. It would save most companies tons of money in support if they did "standardize" on Mozilla.
Oh, stop trolling. Do you think Open Source and the GPL are about getting the source code? Where have you been? Under a rock? The GPL is about giving more rights to end users then standard copyright allows. The GPL is all about giving YOU more rights. You may be able to look at the source code to Java, however you are very limited with what you can do with it. Just like MS's "Shared Source" that prevents you from doing anything with the code.
Think about this: what in the world does letting me look at the Java source do for me if I cannot legally do anything with it? I cannot create a better Java can I? Nope, Sun would not let me. I personally don't think Java should be under the GPL since that could require all Java apps to be GPLed and that would be stupid. Maybe the LGPL, which would allow closed source Java apps and only require that changes to Java itself be returned to the community, or Sun could come up with another OSS license that prevents someone from taking the Java code and making a proprietary implementation such as the BSD license would allow. BSD would be a bad choice here since MS could make their MS Java and use their monopoly to take away Java and have most Java code only work with the proprietary, closed source MS Java. I have actually ran into this with some Java applets that only work with the MS JVM and IE and not Sun's JVM.
Numerous forks of the code would occur completely destroying the "write once, run anywhere" nature of java.
Stop smoking crack and spreading FUD. No one would use all the little silly forks. The official fork would still be used. Look at the Linux kernel. There are other version for specific tasks such as real time OSes and people who need those versions use it. However, the strong majority still get the kernel from kernel.org, even the vendors that add a lot of patches such as Red Hat. Who in the world would use Joe's Java Fork for any real production work? Do you think enterprises would? How about JBoss, Bea, IBM, Oracle etc? Nope. Forking is a non-issue, please give me one example of OSS software that has forked where the original official version was still doing its job? Many people may say XFree. However, XFree became stagnant, and X.org came around to stop XFree from dying since most of OSS software depends on a good X implementaion. So here, forking actually saved the day. I would like to know of one instance of where forking has killed the original product where that original product was actually continuing to improve and meet the end-users needs?
They are not consistent with what I have seen. Mozilla also has a nice feature that lets you accept each cookie and it will remember your choice to accept or reject that cookie from that site. I personally OK each cookie for the first time and always reject onestat and other similar stat/tracking cookies (which I bet a lot of geeks do). You also need to look at the type of sites that onestat tracks. They are more of the sites that average Joe user goes to, so they are not getting accurate stats since many power users and geeks are not counted. If you look at the stats for more geeky sites, then you will see that Mozilla/Firebird has a nice share and the numbers are growing.
I am a senior programmer for a fortune 500 with 140,000 employees. I just compiled a bunch of stats about our corporate intranet wich is accessible to home users. About 90% of traffic came from IE and MS Windows, the rest came from Mozilla and non-MS windows users. We actually still have about 5 users using WebTV, 3 users using Win 3.1, one user using SunOS and about 8% of all 140,000 home users are using Mac or Linux with Mozilla/Safari.
Stats should always be taken with a huge grain of salt. If we base our stats on just/. traffic, Mozilla, Linux and Mac would seem to have a very large market share. If we take our stats from just MSN, then IE and MS Windows would show as being very dominant. OneStat is mostly mainstream and show that most of your average Joe Home user with little to no tech experience just use what they get when they buy a computer wich is MS Windows and IE.
Slashdot Mirror
I replied to a similar post. Just ignore the first part on the market share of iPod ad iTMS.
And with HP pushing WMA on the iPod, I doubt iTMS will hold its #1 postion for long.The whole point of the RIAA is to give more power to the individual recording studios. You never heard of all the price fixing crap? The recording studios want to sell music, and their dream is a pay-per-listen service. It will be companies like MS, HP and Dell that sadly, drive the market to WMA music stores and players. The problem with Apple and thier iPod and iTMS is that again, they are a one solution no competitioin supplier. Their hardware, their software. I am sure that the market has show over the last 10 years or so that consumers do not want that. So all the new players and stores comming out over the next year or so will support WMA and let consumers pick what player and what music store to go to and iTMS market share will go way down. iTMS has the market share now because they are pretty much the only "acceptable" music store around. Napster's DRM is just too draconian.
There are plenty of geeks trying to do things about it and it is called Open Source. What we need are some EE geeks to start to design and sell new hardware and not put DRM in it. The only way MS could stop that hardware would be through legislation which would turn more heads then typical MS software lock-in. An open hardware platform is all we geeks need. Don't forget that there is life outside of Intel and AMD. IBM makes one of the best processor in the world. Now if IBM could only start to mass produce their processors and mobo's to become a comodity, we geeks may have an open option. Oh, and no, Apple is not an option since Apple has been all about lock-in from day one. Given the opportunity, they would be just as bad as MS at locking customers into their hardware/software. Notice that I am talking about Open/Free and not free (as in cost/beer). Charge all you want for hardware and software, but leave it open for consumer chioce and competition.
Your kidding right? Think how long it took for the whole anti-trust ball to get rolling with MS. The next time it would have to get very bad for some fat politician to get off his/her butt to even get the ball rolling (3 - 5 years of major complaints). Then a few years for the government to get the effort "organized". Add a year or more in court and throw in one extra year for miscellaneous garbage. By the time it all played out, it would not matter, MS would own all major IT channels, software, control of hardware specs, BIOS, 1,000's of patents. There will be no practical way to compete.
This rules out most corporate workers. Why in the world would they have this restriction?
Where I see Sony having an advantage is their size and market force that Apple cannot touch. Sony doesn't have to pay the same royalties that Apple does to labels sine Sony is a major label. Sony can also pull strings to get a bunch of thier "cool" "artists" to do some commercials and you now have millions of screaming teens crying to their parents to get them a device from Sony. Next, Sony can do deals with MS that Apple just cannot do. With MS and Sony, they can own the Media market by locking consumers into their technology. Give it about two years and Apple will dwindle, not because iTMS is bad, but becuase it is just too hard to fight "the system".
Think about all the things Sony can do to stop Apple. They can do back room deals with other labels to release new content to only thier format or MS's format. That right there would slowly kill Apple. Either Apple dies or changes iTMS to work with the new formats. If Apple works with the new formats, then Apple loses the lock-in to their iPod.
Someone mod this guy a troll!
Just kidding : )
You are actually right. I see that same bias. Oh look it is from Apple so it is OK. I personally think that any DRM is bad and will not purchase media with it. If that means I never buy a single audio CD or DVD again, so be it. The problem is lazy people who do not want to be inconvenienced and so just accept what they are given just to hear a song or watch a movie. It is really sad.
What really is the problem is users, including many on /. They complain with no action. This is what big business and big government love. Let us bitch all we want, and in the end they" get what they will with endless power. I personally cannot believe that people do not care that MS has taken on the role of government and are now stripping us of our fair use rights. Note, I am not talking about some punk sharing music/video that does not have the right to distribute. This Janus crap will stop you from doing things in your OWN HOME that you have a LEGAL RIGHT TO. Imagine if you go out and buy an audio CD and come home and you are only allowed to play it in one CD player. I personally have a few around the house in different rooms. It sure would suck to have to move the same CD player around the house. This is what MS is doing. And yes it is MS even though the content industry wants it. MS should be standing up for their end users and not playing government. They have no right to make software that takes away a legal right. And what is most sad is the fact that our congressmen and senators are not standing up for us. They are the ones who should be carrying our voices since we do not live in a true democracy and depend on them to represent us. Instead they are representing big businesses who do not even have the right to vote in our nation, so how could they be representing their constituents?
Getting a list of IP's does not prove copyright infringement. Also, the **AA are going after people distributing not downloading. So the person who put the tracker up is more at risk. However, if you block the **AA from connecting to your tracker, they will have a pretty hard time proving copyright infingement. I could put a plain text file up on my web server named Mike_Jackson__Thriller.mp3 and block the **AA from getting to it. If they sent their C&D letter to my ISP, they will look pretty silly when they find out it is just a plain text file. So again, the **AA needs more then a list of IP's and file names to actually prove copyright infringement.
No way. Azureus is extremely fast. Java is not slow, that is old news. The Java JVM compiles byte code to _native_ code, so it will run at native speed. My CPU usage for a 2Mbs line never gets over 1% or so. Also, Java is used extensively for server type applications. Do you think it would have wide industry support for sever apps if the CPU got hosed? JVM's have been compiling to native code for a long, long time now, it is called JIT or Just In Time compiling.
They cannot prove copyright infringement because your IP is in a file/list. They have to prove that you are distributing a copyrighted work that you do not have permission to do, so if they can never connect to your box to verify that you are distributing, then how could they prove copyright infringement? IANAL, so the crappy DMCA may make the level of proof extremely low. Also, the tracker should only have the IP of the person who put it up, not the IP's of anyone downloading/uploading the file. In the end the only way to play it safe is to not share copyrighted works that one does not have the permission to distribute : )
It looks like this user was using bittorrent. If you are using bittorrent, the only client you should ever use is Azureus. Once you have Azureus installed, also install the Azureus SafePeer plugin. This will download the latest ip addresses from PeerGuardian which moved to a new address. This should help keep unwanted users out of your box.
There is always more to MS then what you see on the surface. Do you really think MS's DRM will be fully documented and open? No. The version for SMPTE may be, though as you pointed out there are fees for the documentation and SDK which are not really priced for small business or individuals and then there is the license fee which again, I don't consider open in any sense of the word. Concerning MS's DRM, it will still be closed and proprietary, otherwise you would have 1,000+ cracks out there and the RIAA/MPAA would never go for it. The DRM that the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers use may be documented while encumbered by patents, the DRM that will go into the OS to protect digital content will be closed. There is nothing stopping MS from having two version of WM9 and DRM. The SMPTE won't use WM9 since there is a trademark so MS can continue WM9 down the closed proprietary path and have a slightly different version called VP9 or whatever for the SMPTE.
Does it matter that WM-9 has been accepted as a standard? The DRM that goes with WM-9 is NOT open and never will be. Being able to implement a WM-9 player is not much use if it cannot handle the DRM ladened content, which as we all know, will be just about all content pumped out from the RIAA/MPAA.
Java is much more then just a compiler. It is a framework. Why do you think that glibc (GNU C Library) is released under the LGPL and not GPL?
Yes I know. It is hard to pick whose stats to accept. Google's Zeitgeist show Mac at 4% and Linux at only 1%, while this site shows IDC analyst showing that Linux 25% of the new server market an 2.8% of the desktop which is almost the same as Mac on the desktop. It is hard to know whose "stats" to accept anymore : )
Think about this: what in the world does letting me look at the Java source do for me if I cannot legally do anything with it? I cannot create a better Java can I? Nope, Sun would not let me. I personally don't think Java should be under the GPL since that could require all Java apps to be GPLed and that would be stupid. Maybe the LGPL, which would allow closed source Java apps and only require that changes to Java itself be returned to the community, or Sun could come up with another OSS license that prevents someone from taking the Java code and making a proprietary implementation such as the BSD license would allow. BSD would be a bad choice here since MS could make their MS Java and use their monopoly to take away Java and have most Java code only work with the proprietary, closed source MS Java. I have actually ran into this with some Java applets that only work with the MS JVM and IE and not Sun's JVM.
I am a senior programmer for a fortune 500 with 140,000 employees. I just compiled a bunch of stats about our corporate intranet wich is accessible to home users. About 90% of traffic came from IE and MS Windows, the rest came from Mozilla and non-MS windows users. We actually still have about 5 users using WebTV, 3 users using Win 3.1, one user using SunOS and about 8% of all 140,000 home users are using Mac or Linux with Mozilla/Safari.
Stats should always be taken with a huge grain of salt. If we base our stats on just /. traffic, Mozilla, Linux and Mac would seem to have a very large market share. If we take our stats from just MSN, then IE and MS Windows would show as being very dominant. OneStat is mostly mainstream and show that most of your average Joe Home user with little to no tech experience just use what they get when they buy a computer wich is MS Windows and IE.
Are you running gimp 2.0? Here is a screen shot of Gimp 2.0 running under MS Windows XP, the Linux version has the same UI.
Yeah, your reality != others reality (Moz = 10.1%). Stats can be changed to benefit anyone.