The I, Cringely column has some speculation on this, and I tend to agree.
Basically, it comes down to Bill's Paranoia.
You've seen it in Microsoft's anti-trust defense, you've seen it in Bill's book. The man is petrified that what he's built will come tumbling down like a house of cards if he doesn't control every possible factor that could hurt it.
And why shouldn't he? He got where he is because his mom knew someone at IBM and he wound up with the MS-DOS contract at a critical juncture. His coding skills have been described as anywhere from simply plagiaristic to decent, depending on who you talk to, but nobody has described him as being up to date in creating code these days. The one piece of brilliance I've seen in the man (and I'm not even sure if it's his) is negotiating with IBM in such a way that he got to keep the rights to MS-DOS himself, but considering his parental ties to them, he may not even have faith in that.
He's never wanted to compete because he still has no faith in how he got where he is. So instead, if he saw something that looked like it might compete, he simply did his best to crush it. Not outperform it, but make it difficult for the product to live. This has been MS's operating stance since day one. DR-DOS, Netscape, BeOS, Word, now Linux etc. Those cash reserves aren't there to be invested in better technology. They're their to fund the next buy out or market-flooding when a competitive product comes up.
Which is part of the reason why Linux is MS's nemesis. Linux can't be bought out, and can't be bankrupted by a market flood. The only way to compete with Linux is to actually compete for users hearts and minds. But Bill doesn't know how to do that. He's never had to. I doubt he even realizes that that's what it's down to now.
Heck, I'm a windows user and I certainly don't need the Google toolbar even though I use Google all the time.
Why? Because Opera has a nifty little field right by my address bar that I've set to be my google search automatically. However, if I want, it'll also search dictionary.com and thesaurus.com if I'm looking for a particular word or meaning, or any number of a bunch of other sites, just by using the pull down menu (without even having to retype).
And pop-up blocking? Who needs third party software extensions for that? Opera's got it automagically.
That Deskbar thing looks neat, but it'd be of no use to me. Why? Because Opera is *always* running. After all, it's my e-mail client, it's my notepad (with the comments hotlist), it's my newsreader, it's my address book, it's my reference source -- all in a single button on my taskbar. Which means my taskbar is now free to have my music player, my calculator, my IDE, and any professional documents, all with room to actually see what each one is.
See, the thing is, you're basically asking for things that are already covered. Just because you haven't actually tried something else to see if it's there doesn't mean you should assume it doesn't exist.
Too simplistic. As some people have pointed out, it could well have a chilling effect.
A better idea is for the Court or legislature to set what it considers to be "reasonable rates" for an adequate defense and/or prosecution. These rates would allow for a single lawyer at a certain maximum rate, and also provide maximum rates payable for any expert testimony hours.
The loser then has to pay *that* fee on top of any judgement. If the winner went and spent more than that, that's their problem.
In some ways, it's much like the system now, where you simply get a judgement and pay your lawyer from it, but it specifically acknowledges that legal representation does not come free, and differentiates between the judgement for damages and the costs of representation.
This way it gives incentive to the big guy not to try to simply outspend the little guy on a hopeless case, as the longer they prolong the trial, the higher their eventual pay-out will wind up being.
As somebody else mentioned, write your congressman and senator about the situation and push for legislation that would make a difference.
One significant and fairly easy change to make is that once a patent is submitted for registration it may not be altered. It either passes or fails in its current state. If it fails, you have to submit an entirely new patent application. This means make sure you get it right the first time or cough up more money (giving more resources to the patent office to adequately check things) It also means you don't get to say that a patent you submitted in 1954 but have been changing every 3 years to match current technology counts as being patented since 1954.
Another simple change would be to make it so that people who have their patents thrown out in a court of law have to repay any liscence fees previously collected, plus a penalty fine of up to 50% of those total fees to be paid to the court system, (thus reducing the burden on the taxpayer that the "patent to sue" practice places on us by over-use of the courts)
Now examine Microsoft. They are a convicted monopolist, and continue to enjoy unparalleled control over the domestic software (and to an extent, hardware) market. But what has arisen from this that would lead their chairman to be considered for an honorary knighthood? Thrust aside the seething hate for a second and just look. What accomplishments have arisen? Computers running software whose price/performance is fantastic? One of the easiest-to-develop-for video game consoles ever? Highly capable web servers that run some of the busiest sites--Dell.com, Nasdaq.com, MSNBC.com? Software conformity (and all the positives and negatives that result)?
Actually, you're playing a bit of a "What if" game there. You're saying "What if it hadn't been for Microsoft? None of these things would have happened."
But we've absolutely no evidence for that. Standard bodies were already starting to become active, some de-facto standardization was taking place, Moore's Law was certainly still in effect. Apple and Amiga were both stronger at the time. Without the predatory and illegal tactics of Microsoft at the time other systems, perhaps better systems, would have been able to enter the marketplace, and we may have had all of what you attribute to Microsoft plus much more.
We simply don't know how things would have gone without them, so giving them credit for the good things that happened without acknowledging that things could have been even better is hardly fair.
You don't slap a judge in the face and then ask for a favor.
When a judge specifically asks you if you have enough time to comply with a request and you say yes, and then when the time comes, part of your excuse is "Well, Christmas, y'know.. we didn't have time," you've just essentially told the judge how little you respect them and the law.
So my guess is that SCO will do exactly what you say, and the judge will flat out refuse, saying it isn't relevant to these discovery proceedings and IBM's request to see the evidence that SCO is bringing the case forward under, but rather is only relevant once the case itself begins as to whether they actually own the code or not.
I expect the judge would likely choose to delay the full case until that aspect is done, but not discovery. And since SCO hasn't complied with the requests of discovery, it'll be thrown out, meaning there won't be any full case to delay.
..how much time have you spent listening to bad quality copies, or copies that end up being cut short? Perhaps not a ton, but some I'm sure.
So your music experience could be even *easier* yet. What if, instead of it taking to the end of the night to find and download Pitchfork's Top 50 Singles of 2003, it only took you a couple of hours, and you knew before-hand that everything you downloaded would be great quality and fully complete. Would you consider paying for that?
Now, on top of that, what if, once you'd downloaded a certain amount of Pitchfork, it gave you the option to download a free CD cover image and/or booklet to print out and go with your new Pitchfork tunes, would that be an incentive to have you purchase more Pitchfork tunes? And as you purchased more, other incentives would open up -- perhaps a discount code for Pitchfork merchandise, access to a mailing list that the artists themselves talk on once in a while, downloadable posters, exclusive interview tracks, etc.
What if, on top of that, after downloading a bunch of Pitchfork tunes, it started giving you the option to download a free single from a group somewhat like Pitchfork, to see if you want to try them out as well? Would that be a valuable service, one that might encourage you to keep spending money?
The media companies don't need to be screwed at all. They just need to realize that they can no longer be in the business of restricting access to music to those who can pay, and instead need to be in the business of selling what services they can add to make that music more valuable when it comes from them.
Actually, there's a bit more to see here than that.
You see, by the USPTO basically passing their work off on to the Court system. They are tying up our courts from doing the real work that needs doing for the justice department and at the same time basically leeching off of public funds by simply not putting the effort into their own work.
And on top of this, they are charging people who have reasonable patents for this complete lack of service.
Patents should not be abolished, but the USPTO should be made into a smoking crater, it's staff fired en masse, and then we can restart with some people in there who actually give a damn.
Two other points: that there are crap very violent games doesn't seem to be particularly pertinent, unless one is arguing that more violence = more sales. The argument instead is that violence, even extreme violence, has appeal. But even if correlation were the argument, one would have to compare extremely violent crap games against generic crap games with similar marketing budgets, and we all know that there are tragically a very large number of crap games.
What a non-argument that is. Everything has an appeal to someone.
The person you were replying to was making the point that violence does not sell games, even if publishers think it will. The amount of violence or non-violence in a game is completely orthoganal to the game's likelihood to sell.
So why are violent games made? Not because they sell any better, but because they're easier to conceptualize and easier to market.
Violence is a very easy thing to conceptualize. You against the other thing, and if you don't succeed, you die or are hurt. Everybody understands the idea of hurting or dying. It's a lot harder to conceptualize a game where if you don't perform better than someone else you receive a more nebulous penalty, and more difficult to make the choices the player makes in the game feel like they matter or have significant impact on the player's experience. (eg, explain what the game is in Unreal.. now try and explain what the game is in "The Sims")
Violence is easy to market: People understand what's implied by a picture of a guy with a rifle. People have a more difficult time understanding what a game would be if it has a picture of say Gallileo sitting at his desk writing letters.
So it's not a case of publishers choosing violence for the sake of being violent. It's a case of them choosing violence as a convenient, easily understood mechanism for game-play.
Wow.. so you're telling me that before IPv4 was around, the load balancing systems, routing products, and consumer and general business ISPs, and all those other folks you talked about, they all provided support for it?
No? They didn't even exist before IPv4? Goodness, however in the world did they come to support it then? Saw a market and developed for it, perhaps?
But you're probably right. Nobody will ever do that for v6. After all, nobody ever wants to be the first to move into a market that doesn't have any serious competition yet.
Get real. Like any technology, some folks will go for it too early and die. Some will go for it too late and have a hard fight, but those in the middle.. who get in just as the window is fully opening up.. they'll fly.
Given the IP shortage in China, Japan, and South Korea, and given how fast they're playing technological catch-up, I'm willing to lay odds that you're very wrong.
I take it you never heard of streaming video before? Because right there is the complete example of using a digital device to play the front half of a live speech/performance, etc while the back half was finishing up.
Ineffectual patent examiners, congressmen purchased by media conglomerates, and a trial system that allows far too many obviously ridiculous suits to be tried... THOSE suck.
When you purchase a CD (or Music Disc, as these companies are calling them) you are strictly purchasing the physical medium. According to the industry, you are also purchasing a licence to use what happens to be on that medium. If you weren't, after all, then you'd be using the copyrighted material illegally, even on the CD.
Now they haven't ever strictly defined it as this, instead preferring to leave it as vague as possible. Otherwise what would get tricky is that they provide no means (and actually want to disable any means) by which you can ensure that should your owned physical medium break, the contents of it (which you have supposedly licenced in perpetuity) are still accessible to you in some way.
So if you break the CD, that's your problem. It's your medium, it's your problem.. but the licence entitles you to a usable copy of the contents -- by the companies refusing to provide that, and even refusing to allow you to provide your own, it is the companies who are violating the liscence agreement.
I'm still a 98 user. My hardware likes it (unlike XP), it runs my old windows-only software (unlike Linux/BSD, even with WINE and the like), and I didn't have to shell out for it beyond the computer purchase price (unlike other alternatives).
I'm also pretty careful with my security setup, keeping up-to-date and removing Outlook Express and Outlook from my system entirely so as to remove the most common vector for a good chunk of the virii out there. So, I'm not terribly concerned about them discontinuing 98 support.. except for one thing.
Inevitably, I'm going to have to reinstall at some point.. if only because I decide I want a bigger hard-drive, or some such. When that happens, if Microsoft has the various Win98SE patches that they've already developed somewhere online, I'm a happy camper. But we both know the odds on that are slim to none, and not only that, but there's no way that I can download them all to stuff onto a CD for later use.
When Redhat or other companies discontinue support, they discontinue providing support themselves, but there are still other places that support and patches can be found.
When MS does it, we're screwed. Yeah, they have every right to, but how considerate is it when they don't even provide old users with the means to support themselves?
Between your intercom and IMing is that your intercomm required a specific action from you in order to communicate -- one that took you away from whatever else it was you were doing. You used the intercom *only* when you wanted to tell them something.
The IMing family works because the family is already on their own computers anyway. If the people are already on their computers, the IM does not take them away from what they're already doing, it's asynchronous communication, so can wait a few minutes if you're very involved in something, in short, it can make communicating between families easier.
Now, it's true that kids need to get outdoors and have some direct interaction with people, but IMing isn't the problem here.
Take something free, add effort and/or materials, and charge for it. I'm surprised you didn't go for the most basic, "Time is free yet people make money from using it to do stuff for other people and selling the results."
Congratulations on describing absolutely every enterprise of man from the first farmer who gave two chickens for a goat.
What the "free" point was getting at was companies that actually do give things for free, not companies that take things for free, add their own time, effort, and/or materials and then charge for that.
I'm pretty sure that no vendor lock-in will happen here.
Then you haven't been paying attention.
Here's the key: Like most technologies, EFI has both good and bad aspects.
Among the bad aspects is that it makes possible a completely locked down OS. One that ensures your computer is entirely trusted (by the OS vendor) from the moment the power switch goes on.
What this works out to mean is that the software vendor can, finally, entirely control what programs actually run on your computer if they so desire. They can prevent non-signed programs from being run at the same time as their OS. They can ensure that reverse assemblers, unauthorized music rippers, or basically anything that people might use to manipulate data in ways the corporation(s) do not like is not able to be run on your OS.
At the same time they can also ensure that all the data that runs or is viewable on their OS is encrypted so that it cannot be viewed on other OS's, and that you cannot bleed off the unencrypted data through some sort of hardware hack.
Now, when you combine this with Palladium, where they can set access rights on everything including e-mail, and you have a great strategy for lock-in.
Stage one is to get a good number of people using DRM capable machines without using DRM features.
Stage two is to start pushing the DRM features: Keep your email from prying eyes. Keep your documents from prying eyes. Have your old emails expire. Control who sees your videos. Get people used to the idea that some content requires them to enter "protected" mode. They generally see the same functionality in either mode, so soon they just stay in that mode.
Stage three, make protected mode the default, thus forcing more people to use it as mails from grandma become impossible to view otherwise. At the same time, spammers now have to sign their messages accurately, so spam drops like a rock. Everybody hails this as wonderful.
Stage four, since everybody is running in protected mode anyway, lock the hardware so it automatically rejects downloading anything created in non-protected mode. Push this on to Cisco and the routers under the banner of protecting people from virii as well
At this point, anybody NOT using a protected mode is locked out. Suddenly all it takes is a minor bureaucratic finagling and Linux applications and data that they create are no longer recognized as being "signed" for a few months by Windows machines (thank goodness automatic updates let these root certificates be spread to everybody)
I was playing something very much like Tranquility back in the early 90s called "Continuum".
The differences from Tranquility included that instead of just playing a "level" you went through a sequence of rooms trying to reach the target in each, and that you could change your "mobile", each of which had different properties. Some flew forward very quickly, but had lousy turn response time, others had a lot of mass, so would gain speed on the descent quickly, but didn't bounce worth a darn. Still others could turn and reorient themselves quickly, bounced very high, but were painfully slow moving forward. Part of the skill came in knowing which mobile was appropriate for what, and when to change. (ie, one of the tougher areas required that you switch to the heavy mobile to descend quickly, then just before hitting, switch to what I called the "frog" so that you could bounce extremely high and rapidly turn to face your intended target, then switch to the "rocket" at the apex of the bounce so that you could fly the length of the room and reach the otherwise inaccessible platform under the target.)
Additionally, there were other mobiles that would attempt to knock you off your platform -- some moved in predictable patterns, others hunted you down more directly.
Slashdot Mirror
The I, Cringely column has some speculation on this, and I tend to agree.
Basically, it comes down to Bill's Paranoia.
You've seen it in Microsoft's anti-trust defense, you've seen it in Bill's book. The man is petrified that what he's built will come tumbling down like a house of cards if he doesn't control every possible factor that could hurt it.
And why shouldn't he? He got where he is because his mom knew someone at IBM and he wound up with the MS-DOS contract at a critical juncture. His coding skills have been described as anywhere from simply plagiaristic to decent, depending on who you talk to, but nobody has described him as being up to date in creating code these days. The one piece of brilliance I've seen in the man (and I'm not even sure if it's his) is negotiating with IBM in such a way that he got to keep the rights to MS-DOS himself, but considering his parental ties to them, he may not even have faith in that.
He's never wanted to compete because he still has no faith in how he got where he is. So instead, if he saw something that looked like it might compete, he simply did his best to crush it. Not outperform it, but make it difficult for the product to live. This has been MS's operating stance since day one. DR-DOS, Netscape, BeOS, Word, now Linux etc. Those cash reserves aren't there to be invested in better technology. They're their to fund the next buy out or market-flooding when a competitive product comes up.
Which is part of the reason why Linux is MS's nemesis. Linux can't be bought out, and can't be bankrupted by a market flood. The only way to compete with Linux is to actually compete for users hearts and minds. But Bill doesn't know how to do that. He's never had to. I doubt he even realizes that that's what it's down to now.
No... MATIE as in "Aaargh, MATIE! Thar be a treasure fer yon pyrates!"
Linux users?
Heck, I'm a windows user and I certainly don't need the Google toolbar even though I use Google all the time.
Why? Because Opera has a nifty little field right by my address bar that I've set to be my google search automatically. However, if I want, it'll also search dictionary.com and thesaurus.com if I'm looking for a particular word or meaning, or any number of a bunch of other sites, just by using the pull down menu (without even having to retype).
And pop-up blocking? Who needs third party software extensions for that? Opera's got it automagically.
That Deskbar thing looks neat, but it'd be of no use to me. Why? Because Opera is *always* running. After all, it's my e-mail client, it's my notepad (with the comments hotlist), it's my newsreader, it's my address book, it's my reference source -- all in a single button on my taskbar. Which means my taskbar is now free to have my music player, my calculator, my IDE, and any professional documents, all with room to actually see what each one is.
See, the thing is, you're basically asking for things that are already covered. Just because you haven't actually tried something else to see if it's there doesn't mean you should assume it doesn't exist.
..this depends.
If MS produces another X-box to send to the store to replace the one you purchased? They've lost money.
If they don't, they've gained.
Or.. your employers might get smart and say "We can't afford that. Tell me about this Linux thing, can we get support?"
Too simplistic. As some people have pointed out, it could well have a chilling effect.
A better idea is for the Court or legislature to set what it considers to be "reasonable rates" for an adequate defense and/or prosecution. These rates would allow for a single lawyer at a certain maximum rate, and also provide maximum rates payable for any expert testimony hours.
The loser then has to pay *that* fee on top of any judgement. If the winner went and spent more than that, that's their problem.
In some ways, it's much like the system now, where you simply get a judgement and pay your lawyer from it, but it specifically acknowledges that legal representation does not come free, and differentiates between the judgement for damages and the costs of representation.
This way it gives incentive to the big guy not to try to simply outspend the little guy on a hopeless case, as the longer they prolong the trial, the higher their eventual pay-out will wind up being.
As somebody else mentioned, write your congressman and senator about the situation and push for legislation that would make a difference.
One significant and fairly easy change to make is that once a patent is submitted for registration it may not be altered. It either passes or fails in its current state. If it fails, you have to submit an entirely new patent application. This means make sure you get it right the first time or cough up more money (giving more resources to the patent office to adequately check things) It also means you don't get to say that a patent you submitted in 1954 but have been changing every 3 years to match current technology counts as being patented since 1954.
Another simple change would be to make it so that people who have their patents thrown out in a court of law have to repay any liscence fees previously collected, plus a penalty fine of up to 50% of those total fees to be paid to the court system, (thus reducing the burden on the taxpayer that the "patent to sue" practice places on us by over-use of the courts)
Now examine Microsoft. They are a convicted monopolist, and continue to enjoy unparalleled control over the domestic software (and to an extent, hardware) market. But what has arisen from this that would lead their chairman to be considered for an honorary knighthood? Thrust aside the seething hate for a second and just look. What accomplishments have arisen? Computers running software whose price/performance is fantastic? One of the easiest-to-develop-for video game consoles ever? Highly capable web servers that run some of the busiest sites--Dell.com, Nasdaq.com, MSNBC.com? Software conformity (and all the positives and negatives that result)?
Actually, you're playing a bit of a "What if" game there. You're saying "What if it hadn't been for Microsoft? None of these things would have happened."
But we've absolutely no evidence for that. Standard bodies were already starting to become active, some de-facto standardization was taking place, Moore's Law was certainly still in effect. Apple and Amiga were both stronger at the time. Without the predatory and illegal tactics of Microsoft at the time other systems, perhaps better systems, would have been able to enter the marketplace, and we may have had all of what you attribute to Microsoft plus much more.
We simply don't know how things would have gone without them, so giving them credit for the good things that happened without acknowledging that things could have been even better is hardly fair.
You don't slap a judge in the face and then ask for a favor.
When a judge specifically asks you if you have enough time to comply with a request and you say yes, and then when the time comes, part of your excuse is "Well, Christmas, y'know.. we didn't have time," you've just essentially told the judge how little you respect them and the law.
So my guess is that SCO will do exactly what you say, and the judge will flat out refuse, saying it isn't relevant to these discovery proceedings and IBM's request to see the evidence that SCO is bringing the case forward under, but rather is only relevant once the case itself begins as to whether they actually own the code or not.
I expect the judge would likely choose to delay the full case until that aspect is done, but not discovery. And since SCO hasn't complied with the requests of discovery, it'll be thrown out, meaning there won't be any full case to delay.
Oh come on, you can be more specific than that.
Wear them both and see through the lies!
..how much time have you spent listening to bad quality copies, or copies that end up being cut short? Perhaps not a ton, but some I'm sure.
So your music experience could be even *easier* yet. What if, instead of it taking to the end of the night to find and download Pitchfork's Top 50 Singles of 2003, it only took you a couple of hours, and you knew before-hand that everything you downloaded would be great quality and fully complete. Would you consider paying for that?
Now, on top of that, what if, once you'd downloaded a certain amount of Pitchfork, it gave you the option to download a free CD cover image and/or booklet to print out and go with your new Pitchfork tunes, would that be an incentive to have you purchase more Pitchfork tunes? And as you purchased more, other incentives would open up -- perhaps a discount code for Pitchfork merchandise, access to a mailing list that the artists themselves talk on once in a while, downloadable posters, exclusive interview tracks, etc.
What if, on top of that, after downloading a bunch of Pitchfork tunes, it started giving you the option to download a free single from a group somewhat like Pitchfork, to see if you want to try them out as well? Would that be a valuable service, one that might encourage you to keep spending money?
The media companies don't need to be screwed at all. They just need to realize that they can no longer be in the business of restricting access to music to those who can pay, and instead need to be in the business of selling what services they can add to make that music more valuable when it comes from them.
Actually, there's a bit more to see here than that.
You see, by the USPTO basically passing their work off on to the Court system. They are tying up our courts from doing the real work that needs doing for the justice department and at the same time basically leeching off of public funds by simply not putting the effort into their own work.
And on top of this, they are charging people who have reasonable patents for this complete lack of service.
Patents should not be abolished, but the USPTO should be made into a smoking crater, it's staff fired en masse, and then we can restart with some people in there who actually give a damn.
Damn straight.
You think Darl & Co are satisfied with a normal pump & dump?
What do you want to bet they've also shorted a ton of SCO stock as well?
Two other points: that there are crap very violent games doesn't seem to be particularly pertinent, unless one is arguing that more violence = more sales. The argument instead is that violence, even extreme violence, has appeal. But even if correlation were the argument, one would have to compare extremely violent crap games against generic crap games with similar marketing budgets, and we all know that there are tragically a very large number of crap games.
What a non-argument that is.
Everything has an appeal to someone.
The person you were replying to was making the point that violence does not sell games, even if publishers think it will. The amount of violence or non-violence in a game is completely orthoganal to the game's likelihood to sell.
So why are violent games made? Not because they sell any better, but because they're easier to conceptualize and easier to market.
Violence is a very easy thing to conceptualize. You against the other thing, and if you don't succeed, you die or are hurt. Everybody understands the idea of hurting or dying. It's a lot harder to conceptualize a game where if you don't perform better than someone else you receive a more nebulous penalty, and more difficult to make the choices the player makes in the game feel like they matter or have significant impact on the player's experience. (eg, explain what the game is in Unreal.. now try and explain what the game is in "The Sims")
Violence is easy to market: People understand what's implied by a picture of a guy with a rifle. People have a more difficult time understanding what a game would be if it has a picture of say Gallileo sitting at his desk writing letters.
So it's not a case of publishers choosing violence for the sake of being violent. It's a case of them choosing violence as a convenient, easily understood mechanism for game-play.
Wow.. so you're telling me that before IPv4 was around, the load balancing systems, routing products, and consumer and general business ISPs, and all those other folks you talked about, they all provided support for it?
No? They didn't even exist before IPv4? Goodness, however in the world did they come to support it then? Saw a market and developed for it, perhaps?
But you're probably right. Nobody will ever do that for v6. After all, nobody ever wants to be the first to move into a market that doesn't have any serious competition yet.
Get real.
Like any technology, some folks will go for it too early and die. Some will go for it too late and have a hard fight, but those in the middle.. who get in just as the window is fully opening up.. they'll fly.
Given the IP shortage in China, Japan, and South Korea, and given how fast they're playing technological catch-up, I'm willing to lay odds that you're very wrong.
nobody was using PC's to time-shift at that time
I take it you never heard of streaming video before? Because right there is the complete example of using a digital device to play the front half of a live speech/performance, etc while the back half was finishing up.
And you'll be wrong every time you say it.
Copyright and patent laws do *not* suck.
Ineffectual patent examiners, congressmen purchased by media conglomerates, and a trial system that allows far too many obviously ridiculous suits to be tried... THOSE suck.
Actually, it only says it's compliant if it has the CD logo.
Most of these music discs do not. Instead they have a copy-controlled logo on them.
You have it exactly backwards.
When you purchase a CD (or Music Disc, as these companies are calling them) you are strictly purchasing the physical medium. According to the industry, you are also purchasing a licence to use what happens to be on that medium. If you weren't, after all, then you'd be using the copyrighted material illegally, even on the CD.
Now they haven't ever strictly defined it as this, instead preferring to leave it as vague as possible. Otherwise what would get tricky is that they provide no means (and actually want to disable any means) by which you can ensure that should your owned physical medium break, the contents of it (which you have supposedly licenced in perpetuity) are still accessible to you in some way.
So if you break the CD, that's your problem. It's your medium, it's your problem.. but the licence entitles you to a usable copy of the contents -- by the companies refusing to provide that, and even refusing to allow you to provide your own, it is the companies who are violating the liscence agreement.
I'm still a 98 user. My hardware likes it (unlike XP), it runs my old windows-only software (unlike Linux/BSD, even with WINE and the like), and I didn't have to shell out for it beyond the computer purchase price (unlike other alternatives).
I'm also pretty careful with my security setup, keeping up-to-date and removing Outlook Express and Outlook from my system entirely so as to remove the most common vector for a good chunk of the virii out there. So, I'm not terribly concerned about them discontinuing 98 support.. except for one thing.
Inevitably, I'm going to have to reinstall at some point.. if only because I decide I want a bigger hard-drive, or some such. When that happens, if Microsoft has the various Win98SE patches that they've already developed somewhere online, I'm a happy camper. But we both know the odds on that are slim to none, and not only that, but there's no way that I can download them all to stuff onto a CD for later use.
When Redhat or other companies discontinue support, they discontinue providing support themselves, but there are still other places that support and patches can be found.
When MS does it, we're screwed.
Yeah, they have every right to, but how considerate is it when they don't even provide old users with the means to support themselves?
Between your intercom and IMing is that your intercomm required a specific action from you in order to communicate -- one that took you away from whatever else it was you were doing. You used the intercom *only* when you wanted to tell them something.
The IMing family works because the family is already on their own computers anyway. If the people are already on their computers, the IM does not take them away from what they're already doing, it's asynchronous communication, so can wait a few minutes if you're very involved in something, in short, it can make communicating between families easier.
Now, it's true that kids need to get outdoors and have some direct interaction with people, but IMing isn't the problem here.
Take something free, add effort and/or materials, and charge for it. I'm surprised you didn't go for the most basic, "Time is free yet people make money from using it to do stuff for other people and selling the results."
Congratulations on describing absolutely every enterprise of man from the first farmer who gave two chickens for a goat.
What the "free" point was getting at was companies that actually do give things for free, not companies that take things for free, add their own time, effort, and/or materials and then charge for that.
Then you haven't been paying attention.
Here's the key: Like most technologies, EFI has both good and bad aspects.
Among the bad aspects is that it makes possible a completely locked down OS. One that ensures your computer is entirely trusted (by the OS vendor) from the moment the power switch goes on.
What this works out to mean is that the software vendor can, finally, entirely control what programs actually run on your computer if they so desire. They can prevent non-signed programs from being run at the same time as their OS. They can ensure that reverse assemblers, unauthorized music rippers, or basically anything that people might use to manipulate data in ways the corporation(s) do not like is not able to be run on your OS.
At the same time they can also ensure that all the data that runs or is viewable on their OS is encrypted so that it cannot be viewed on other OS's, and that you cannot bleed off the unencrypted data through some sort of hardware hack.
Now, when you combine this with Palladium, where they can set access rights on everything including e-mail, and you have a great strategy for lock-in.
At this point, anybody NOT using a protected mode is locked out. Suddenly all it takes is a minor bureaucratic finagling and Linux applications and data that they create are no longer recognized as being "signed" for a few months by Windows machines (thank goodness automatic updates let these root certificates be spread to everybody)
How's that for lock-in?
but it's the most original game I've ever seen
You haven't seen enough then.
I was playing something very much like Tranquility back in the early 90s called "Continuum".
The differences from Tranquility included that instead of just playing a "level" you went through a sequence of rooms trying to reach the target in each, and that you could change your "mobile", each of which had different properties. Some flew forward very quickly, but had lousy turn response time, others had a lot of mass, so would gain speed on the descent quickly, but didn't bounce worth a darn. Still others could turn and reorient themselves quickly, bounced very high, but were painfully slow moving forward. Part of the skill came in knowing which mobile was appropriate for what, and when to change. (ie, one of the tougher areas required that you switch to the heavy mobile to descend quickly, then just before hitting, switch to what I called the "frog" so that you could bounce extremely high and rapidly turn to face your intended target, then switch to the "rocket" at the apex of the bounce so that you could fly the length of the room and reach the otherwise inaccessible platform under the target.)
Additionally, there were other mobiles that would attempt to knock you off your platform -- some moved in predictable patterns, others hunted you down more directly.