Well, looks like Microsoft finally figured it out. DRM file formats and protocols have been on my mind for quite awhile as potential tools that they could could use to *specifically* target Open Source. Here's why:
What Microsoft will do with the Word DRM is "license" the technology to other commercial interests that wish to maintain file compatibility. They know that THIS is the wedge they can drive into things to split off the open-source projects, because A) no self-respecting open-source project would license MICROSOFT technology, and B) even if they would, they likely couldn't afford it.
Look for this to happen with the next round of media file formats as well. On a more sensationalistic note, what if MS bribed say, NVidia to DRMize their hardware interface. Nobody could then make calls to that hardware without either having a license or violating the DMCA. Again, commercial interests can afford the license, but do you think RedHat and such would like to bankroll Open Source's hardware compatibility licenses? Perhaps at first, but eventually I think not...
In the long run, your electrician bill is going to be cheaper if you just let them do it right for you, rather than 1) having to pay anyway because you jacked it up and 2) having to pay burial costs due to getting zapped by 220.
TRANSLATION: We don't know what the title of the new movie will be, so we are going to call it the "Temple of Doom". That's how serious we are as "Entertainment Journalists".
Dateline: Monday, June 3, 2002
"By: CHRISTOPHER ALLAN SMITH AND ANTHONY C. FERRANTE "
TRANSLATION: Yeah, that's us - the "entertainment journalists"
"Only a day after Paramount announced Frank Darabont as the long-awaited choice to script INDIANA JONES 4, we've got some quotes from the man himself, Steven Spielberg, about the project and Harrison Ford's skills as maybe the ultimate action hero."
TRANSLATION: After hearing about Darabont from a Paramont security guard, we called Spielberg at 3 in the morning using a phone number we got from hax0ring E.T.'s intergalactic email. He had a few kind words for us.
"'The status is that Frank Darabont is starting - he's writing the screenplay,' Spielberg told us about THE GREEN MILE, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION writer/director. Darabont also wrote for the now-defunct YOUNG INDIANA JONES series. 'We just made Frank's deal two weeks ago. We have the story, which is a story George Lucas wrote. It's a wonderful story. We have Harrison Ford, who's approved the story. He's ready to perform in the movie.'"
TRANSLATION: After Spielberg's kind words we asked him if we could have Darabont and Ford's phone numbers. After he refused, we warned him that we would write about how he sucked Ford and Darabont like grandma's Hoover. Then the lawyers got ahold of it and we had to edit a bit.
"He also confirmed the timetable for shooting the fourth chapter of the action-adventure series, 'The movie's going to be shot probably in May of 2004. When I say probably, it could be April or May of 2004 and the movie's going to come out probably for the July 4th weekend of 2005, because the last STAR WARS is going to come out the week before Memorial Day 2005. So we're coordinating this to be a one-two punch with the last STAR WARS coming out in 2005 in May and INDIANA JONES 4 coming out 2005, probably June 29th or July 4th.'"
TRANSLATION: "I probably will make the movie...um probably because if I am lucky, then probably Star Wars 3 will probably come out this century, so probably because I like to get laid by someone other than my right hand I probably will get my guys to get that Mississippi Jenkins I mean Illinois James, well whoever it is - I'll probably get that movie done first. And then I will probably get laid by the gal that played the hot blonde Nazi in that Indy movie with the Holy Grail. Probably."
"While that gives hope to fans of the highest grossing adventure series in history, more than a few fans wonder about Ford's advancing years, given it will be almost 25 years since RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK before INDY 4 hits screens. "
TRANSLATION: Seeing as how the last job offer Ford got was for Viagra ads, we're wondering if he can still handle a whip. If the movie sucks though, it'll be that lazy bastard Spielberg's fault though - I mean, waiting 25 years for a follow-up is UNHEARD of...oh wait there WAS that STAR WARS thing...
"What does Spielberg think?"
TRANSLATION: We don't really care what Spielberg thinks, as long as he gets with it and makes the effing movie
"'Harrison Ford can still kick the s**t out of most people half his age," Spielberg told us. "I think he's in great condition to put the fedora and the hat and the leather jacket back on and crack that bullwhip a few more times.'"
TRANSLATION: "Have you seen what we did with Yoda? S**t, C.G. and latex prosthetics can do wonders."
Actually, yeah - I'm well aware of it. I just like capitalizing the 'S' because it reminds me of the days when they were a much smaller part of our everyday life:)
There is a good explanation for why AOL did what they did. Quite simply, WASTE provides something that they would like to be in the market for, namely secure communication and filesharing over the corporate intranet. When Justin goes and releases it under GPL, this keeps them from being able to sell it. I guarantee that if he had kept WASTE's existence between him and AOL, in a few months we'd see it released as a commercial product, perhaps being expanded upon and used in corporate environments in the same way as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. That's the killer app for WASTE, IMHO...an extensible, secure, distributed network would kick all sorts of ass if they had the ability to build calendaring and rendezvous-type collaboration tools on top of it in addition to filesharing and IM.
Come to think of it, why doesn't this exist yet???????? Surely I'm not the first to think of it.
If everyone here is preaching diversity of opinion, why are all the up-moderated comments of the same mindset that consolidation is evil? Answer: moderators voted with their points. This is the same as the real-world, only the reason that what's on the radio is there is because people voted with their dollars.
Those that are of the opinion that we need to bring back the fairness doctorine need to give me +3 Opposition for presenting an opposing view to this monotonous thread. Sound ridiculous? IT IS.
Good lord, chill out man. I was OK with what you said up to the final sentences, at which point your post degenerated to flame-level. IMHO means just that - and should represent to the reader the idea that "If you think otherwise, that's fine by me. This is just what I'm thinking, and I make no attempt to speak for the community as a whole." This is always my intent when I use that particular four-letter-word.
Any other ways you may take this, including making gross assumptions about what a jerk the author is, are your loss. IMHO, such assumptions have a jerk-like quality in and of themselves.
As with any thread I get involved in that goes flame...this will be my last post in thread. And to reinforce the "H" in "IMHO", I am chosing to forego my +1 Bonus. Have a nice day.
that the REAL story here is the availability of Bink and Miles. These two tools are widely used in the gaming industry, and should make porting of MANY games and other multimedia apps (not just NWN) a real possibility. In fact, a quick look at Rad Game Tools page shows 2,700 games that use the Miles API. Bink is pretty cool too...used in quite a few games as well.
IMHO, this is not a story that I want to see on Slashdot. There are already 343,225,988,332,112 hardware sites (most seemingly run by 13-year-old computer prodigies that have a rough time spelling), ALL of which carry the same collection of heat sink and other "enthusiast" hardware reviews. Use of Slashdot's bandwith for such redundancy is unnecessary, unless it's all part of an evil scheme to take out all 343,225,988,332,112 sites by slashdotting...leaving Slashdot to take over... If this is the case however, I'd like to note that I'd rather read about ESR (!!!) than the latest in static-lump-of-copper-with-a-noisy-ass-fan-on-top technology.
As far as I can tell, actual real-life uses for this are not really in the area of getting the daily news. Rather, it seems better suited to "man-on-the-street" type coverage where unfamiliar parties are thrown together. Perhaps some types of urban warfare??? It's not so hard to envision trust metrics changing based on the consortium-of-the-week in some third-world environment where transmissions need to be made in the clear but some sort of filter is necessary and identity verification is important.
I should think that in a situation such as this, we should judge value not by sales numbers, but by return rates. I would love to see a comparison between the return rates for machines preloaded with Lindows, Mac OS X, and Windows XP. Come to think of it...why haven't we seen this yet? Sure, the specific machine configurations will be different so that will play into an individual return decision, but it should still provide some useful data when combined with other things such as support call volume and other indicators of customer satisfaction. Someone should combine all these numbers and make a report like those seen for automobiles.
IDC: Windows 2000 Offers Better Total Cost Of Ownership Than Linux Win 2000 offers cost advantage in four out of five server workloads
By Paula Rooney, CRN Framingham, Mass. 4:55 PM EST Mon., Dec. 02, 2002 Microsoft's Windows 2000 offers a better total cost of ownership (TCO) than Linux for most traditional server workloads over a five-year time span, according to an IDC study.
Just a day before the Enterprise Linux Forum gets under way in Boston, Microsoft is celebrating the results of a study that maintains that the Windows 2000 Server operating system offers a better cost of ownership for running network infrastructure, print serving, file serving and security applications than Linux.
According to the survey of 104 companies in North America, the cost advantage of Windows over Linux for the four workloads ranges from 11 percent to 22 percent over a five-year period.
Linux demonstrated a cost advantage over Windows in only one category--Web serving. According to the survey, Linux offers a cost advantage of 6 percent over Windows for running Web applications over that same time frame.
While Microsoft's Licensing 6.0 acquisition costs are significantly higher than those of the free Linux OS, software acquisition represents a small percentage--roughly 5 percent--of the TCO, IDC found.
IDC says factors other than software acquisition cost--particularly staffing and downtime--are the most significant factors when determining TCO over a long-term period. For example, IDC says that IT staffing alone accounts for 62.2 percent of TCO, while downtime represented another 23.1 percent of the costs. Software acquisition, in contrast, accounts for a mere 4.6 percent of the TCO, while hardware represents 4.4 percent.
"The study shows very clearly that up-front costs, including hardware or software, are not the most significant items contributing to the five-year TCO value," said Al Gillen, an IDC analyst. "Think about it. How long does it take to surpass the cost of software when you have a high-paid staff member managing the system? That staff member cost is there regardless of what the original software and hardware cost," he said.
Expenditures for managing, maintaining, troubleshooting and restoring the systems operations of a Linux server were, "in almost every case, higher than for systems running Windows 2000," according to the study, titled "Windows 2000 Versus Linux in Enterprise Computing."
IDC attributed the Windows 2000 win to the maturity of Windows management features and third-party tools in the marketplace. This countered the immaturity of Linux system management tools and low penetration of Linux management platforms in the enterprise.
However, the report also noted that the increasing availability of respected management tools for the Linux platform--including BMC Patrol, CA Unicenter, HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, NetIQ and Novell Zenworks--will likely improve the installation, deployment and maintenance numbers for Linux servers. "Over time, the gap in support costs between Linux and Windows will contract," the study stated.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, looks like Microsoft finally figured it out. DRM file formats and protocols have been on my mind for quite awhile as potential tools that they could could use to *specifically* target Open Source. Here's why:
What Microsoft will do with the Word DRM is "license" the technology to other commercial interests that wish to maintain file compatibility. They know that THIS is the wedge they can drive into things to split off the open-source projects, because A) no self-respecting open-source project would license MICROSOFT technology, and B) even if they would, they likely couldn't afford it.
Look for this to happen with the next round of media file formats as well. On a more sensationalistic note, what if MS bribed say, NVidia to DRMize their hardware interface. Nobody could then make calls to that hardware without either having a license or violating the DMCA. Again, commercial interests can afford the license, but do you think RedHat and such would like to bankroll Open Source's hardware compatibility licenses? Perhaps at first, but eventually I think not...
Watch out.
-JT
Now if only they could apply this technology to the scars from my woman's boob job :)
-JT
Am I the only one that read this as the US starting a money-laundering organization for Iranians?
"Funds Anonymizer", heh...
-JT
HIRE A DAMN ELECTRICIAN!
In the long run, your electrician bill is going to be cheaper if you just let them do it right for you, rather than 1) having to pay anyway because you jacked it up and 2) having to pay burial costs due to getting zapped by 220.
-JT
Eldo Says,
Experts scan system that eBay runs, determine that selling in quantity drives price down.
Maximum fun, profit! Create listing for automatic money! Order today experts! Receive a manual describing shipping your manual, that's all it is!
-James Nathanson
"© 2001 Paramount Harrison Ford as Indy in INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
Breaking Cinescape Exclusive
Spielberg talks INDIANA JONES 4 with us Director is high on Lucas' story, Ford's action talents"
TRANSLATION: We don't know what the title of the new movie will be, so we are going to call it the "Temple of Doom". That's how serious we are as "Entertainment Journalists".
Dateline: Monday, June 3, 2002 "By: CHRISTOPHER ALLAN SMITH AND ANTHONY C. FERRANTE "
TRANSLATION: Yeah, that's us - the "entertainment journalists"
"Only a day after Paramount announced Frank Darabont as the long-awaited choice to script INDIANA JONES 4, we've got some quotes from the man himself, Steven Spielberg, about the project and Harrison Ford's skills as maybe the ultimate action hero."
TRANSLATION: After hearing about Darabont from a Paramont security guard, we called Spielberg at 3 in the morning using a phone number we got from hax0ring E.T.'s intergalactic email. He had a few kind words for us.
"'The status is that Frank Darabont is starting - he's writing the screenplay,' Spielberg told us about THE GREEN MILE, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION writer/director. Darabont also wrote for the now-defunct YOUNG INDIANA JONES series. 'We just made Frank's deal two weeks ago. We have the story, which is a story George Lucas wrote. It's a wonderful story. We have Harrison Ford, who's approved the story. He's ready to perform in the movie.'"
TRANSLATION: After Spielberg's kind words we asked him if we could have Darabont and Ford's phone numbers. After he refused, we warned him that we would write about how he sucked Ford and Darabont like grandma's Hoover. Then the lawyers got ahold of it and we had to edit a bit.
"He also confirmed the timetable for shooting the fourth chapter of the action-adventure series, 'The movie's going to be shot probably in May of 2004. When I say probably, it could be April or May of 2004 and the movie's going to come out probably for the July 4th weekend of 2005, because the last STAR WARS is going to come out the week before Memorial Day 2005. So we're coordinating this to be a one-two punch with the last STAR WARS coming out in 2005 in May and INDIANA JONES 4 coming out 2005, probably June 29th or July 4th.'"
TRANSLATION: "I probably will make the movie...um probably because if I am lucky, then probably Star Wars 3 will probably come out this century, so probably because I like to get laid by someone other than my right hand I probably will get my guys to get that Mississippi Jenkins I mean Illinois James, well whoever it is - I'll probably get that movie done first. And then I will probably get laid by the gal that played the hot blonde Nazi in that Indy movie with the Holy Grail. Probably."
"While that gives hope to fans of the highest grossing adventure series in history, more than a few fans wonder about Ford's advancing years, given it will be almost 25 years since RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK before INDY 4 hits screens. "
TRANSLATION: Seeing as how the last job offer Ford got was for Viagra ads, we're wondering if he can still handle a whip. If the movie sucks though, it'll be that lazy bastard Spielberg's fault though - I mean, waiting 25 years for a follow-up is UNHEARD of...oh wait there WAS that STAR WARS thing...
"What does Spielberg think?"
TRANSLATION: We don't really care what Spielberg thinks, as long as he gets with it and makes the effing movie
"'Harrison Ford can still kick the s**t out of most people half his age," Spielberg told us. "I think he's in great condition to put the fedora and the hat and the leather jacket back on and crack that bullwhip a few more times.'"
TRANSLATION: "Have you seen what we did with Yoda? S**t, C.G. and latex prosthetics can do wonders."
"For t
Actually, yeah - I'm well aware of it. I just like capitalizing the 'S' because it reminds me of the days when they were a much smaller part of our everyday life :)
MicroSoft XBox: $169.00
Mod Chip: $30.00
CD to burn the latest distro to: $0.20
Using the above system to call MicroSoft Tech Support via VoIP to complain about how bad KDE looks on a 20" black-and-white TV: PRICELESS.
-JT
3) Licenses are more powerful than any other known force in existence in the whole wide world.
2) You don't exactly have to *sell* software to make money in software.
and the Number One thing SCO/Caldera learned from Linux....
WORLD DOMINATION!
Laugh. It's funny.
-JT
...but rather what you're looking at ON them. #1 cause of carpal tunnel in most of the world: http://www.thehun.com
Of course, since it was a Dutch study, #1 cause over there is probably the red light district in Amsterdam.
-JT
That if you put "DMCA" in it, you automatically have something that will get posted by the editors of Slashdot.
-JT
There is a good explanation for why AOL did what they did. Quite simply, WASTE provides something that they would like to be in the market for, namely secure communication and filesharing over the corporate intranet. When Justin goes and releases it under GPL, this keeps them from being able to sell it. I guarantee that if he had kept WASTE's existence between him and AOL, in a few months we'd see it released as a commercial product, perhaps being expanded upon and used in corporate environments in the same way as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. That's the killer app for WASTE, IMHO...an extensible, secure, distributed network would kick all sorts of ass if they had the ability to build calendaring and rendezvous-type collaboration tools on top of it in addition to filesharing and IM.
Come to think of it, why doesn't this exist yet???????? Surely I'm not the first to think of it.
-JT
Let's look at the situation here for a sec.
If everyone here is preaching diversity of opinion, why are all the up-moderated comments of the same mindset that consolidation is evil? Answer: moderators voted with their points. This is the same as the real-world, only the reason that what's on the radio is there is because people voted with their dollars.
Those that are of the opinion that we need to bring back the fairness doctorine need to give me +3 Opposition for presenting an opposing view to this monotonous thread. Sound ridiculous? IT IS.
QED. - JT
Looks like it might be...at least that's how I'm choosing to interpret the following quote:
Do you like gay sex?
Indeed i do! What's your phone number?
212 596 7765
-JT
Good lord, chill out man. I was OK with what you said up to the final sentences, at which point your post degenerated to flame-level. IMHO means just that - and should represent to the reader the idea that "If you think otherwise, that's fine by me. This is just what I'm thinking, and I make no attempt to speak for the community as a whole." This is always my intent when I use that particular four-letter-word.
Any other ways you may take this, including making gross assumptions about what a jerk the author is, are your loss. IMHO, such assumptions have a jerk-like quality in and of themselves.
As with any thread I get involved in that goes flame...this will be my last post in thread. And to reinforce the "H" in "IMHO", I am chosing to forego my +1 Bonus. Have a nice day.
-JT
Note above comment should have read:
"...availability of Bink and Miles for Linux"
-JT
that the REAL story here is the availability of Bink and Miles. These two tools are widely used in the gaming industry, and should make porting of MANY games and other multimedia apps (not just NWN) a real possibility. In fact, a quick look at Rad Game Tools page shows 2,700 games that use the Miles API. Bink is pretty cool too...used in quite a few games as well.
-JT
IMHO, this is not a story that I want to see on Slashdot. There are already 343,225,988,332,112 hardware sites (most seemingly run by 13-year-old computer prodigies that have a rough time spelling), ALL of which carry the same collection of heat sink and other "enthusiast" hardware reviews. Use of Slashdot's bandwith for such redundancy is unnecessary, unless it's all part of an evil scheme to take out all 343,225,988,332,112 sites by slashdotting...leaving Slashdot to take over... If this is the case however, I'd like to note that I'd rather read about ESR (!!!) than the latest in static-lump-of-copper-with-a-noisy-ass-fan-on-top technology.
-JT
As far as I can tell, actual real-life uses for this are not really in the area of getting the daily news. Rather, it seems better suited to "man-on-the-street" type coverage where unfamiliar parties are thrown together. Perhaps some types of urban warfare??? It's not so hard to envision trust metrics changing based on the consortium-of-the-week in some third-world environment where transmissions need to be made in the clear but some sort of filter is necessary and identity verification is important.
-JT
The technology claims to be able to provide "news that you can trust in", but it should be noted that trust != truth.
As in traditional trust systems (Karma, anyone?), someone being trusted does not necessarily mean that their information is valid.
-JT
I should think that in a situation such as this, we should judge value not by sales numbers, but by return rates. I would love to see a comparison between the return rates for machines preloaded with Lindows, Mac OS X, and Windows XP. Come to think of it...why haven't we seen this yet? Sure, the specific machine configurations will be different so that will play into an individual return decision, but it should still provide some useful data when combined with other things such as support call volume and other indicators of customer satisfaction. Someone should combine all these numbers and make a report like those seen for automobiles.
-JT
I find Stallman instead to be one of the most persistently, relentlessly reasonable people whose thoughts I've ever encountered.
Someone please tell me why this falls under either:
1) News for Nerds
2) Stuff that matters
with specific emphasis on 2) with respect to the personal opinion of a Slashdot editor.
-JT
IDC: Windows 2000 Offers Better Total Cost Of Ownership Than Linux
Win 2000 offers cost advantage in four out of five server workloads
By Paula Rooney, CRN
Framingham, Mass.
4:55 PM EST Mon., Dec. 02, 2002
Microsoft's Windows 2000 offers a better total cost of ownership (TCO) than Linux for most traditional server workloads over a five-year time span, according to an IDC study.
Just a day before the Enterprise Linux Forum gets under way in Boston, Microsoft is celebrating the results of a study that maintains that the Windows 2000 Server operating system offers a better cost of ownership for running network infrastructure, print serving, file serving and security applications than Linux.
According to the survey of 104 companies in North America, the cost advantage of Windows over Linux for the four workloads ranges from 11 percent to 22 percent over a five-year period.
Linux demonstrated a cost advantage over Windows in only one category--Web serving. According to the survey, Linux offers a cost advantage of 6 percent over Windows for running Web applications over that same time frame.
While Microsoft's Licensing 6.0 acquisition costs are significantly higher than those of the free Linux OS, software acquisition represents a small percentage--roughly 5 percent--of the TCO, IDC found.
IDC says factors other than software acquisition cost--particularly staffing and downtime--are the most significant factors when determining TCO over a long-term period. For example, IDC says that IT staffing alone accounts for 62.2 percent of TCO, while downtime represented another 23.1 percent of the costs. Software acquisition, in contrast, accounts for a mere 4.6 percent of the TCO, while hardware represents 4.4 percent.
"The study shows very clearly that up-front costs, including hardware or software, are not the most significant items contributing to the five-year TCO value," said Al Gillen, an IDC analyst. "Think about it. How long does it take to surpass the cost of software when you have a high-paid staff member managing the system? That staff member cost is there regardless of what the original software and hardware cost," he said.
Expenditures for managing, maintaining, troubleshooting and restoring the systems operations of a Linux server were, "in almost every case, higher than for systems running Windows 2000," according to the study, titled "Windows 2000 Versus Linux in Enterprise Computing."
IDC attributed the Windows 2000 win to the maturity of Windows management features and third-party tools in the marketplace. This countered the immaturity of Linux system management tools and low penetration of Linux management platforms in the enterprise.
However, the report also noted that the increasing availability of respected management tools for the Linux platform--including BMC Patrol, CA Unicenter, HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, NetIQ and Novell Zenworks--will likely improve the installation, deployment and maintenance numbers for Linux servers. "Over time, the gap in support costs between Linux and Windows will contract," the study stated.
is of course, that the planet Rupert has finally been discovered.
Let the monitoring begin.
-JT
(and for those that are completely missing the reference, pick up the Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide and get a little cultured)
Oh wait...um, that was another device I was thinking of... ;)
(let's just see who gets this)
-JT