Your argument falls down simply on the fact that there are other choices. If you don't want the pain in the ass, use Apple products, as they offer convenience. If you don't want to pay Apple for the convenience of their services, how exactly do you think you are entitled to them?
Yeah, I hate how many times I get hassled every day here in the great states about not being Muslim. Oh yeah, I don't. Policies and actions to stop that form of terrorism overseas have no bearing on actions like this. The "terrorism" they are fighting here are the freedoms we rely on them to protect. Now, if you want to talk about our policies overseas, fine - we can do that. You should also realize that some of us don't agree with the administrations viewpoint that westernizing the world is a proper course of action.
I swear to god I'm not trying to start any type of flaming, but I have yet to see something vague and difficult to understand on slashdot. Poor grammar, sometimes. Duplicate posts, frequently. But hard to understand, and uncommon acronyms? I have yet to be confused by this. What in particular is confusing? WGA? It has been all over the press recently. This is a geek site, WGA is a well known term for a component of a popular(huge understatement) operating system. It is also a subject that has been covered on this very site countless of times before. I keep seeing people complain, but I don't understand how they can miss things that have been paraded before them countless times before if they actually ever read the site. As a side note, even zdnet and news.com are referring to it by this acronym, typically without any further explanation, and I doubt their editors are getting fired.
Actually, to the best of my knowledge, AOL's retention queue is still handled in house. I believe they have outsourced their tech support, and whatnot, but they still handle "saves" as they call them. I know, because I used to work for them (tech, not retention... I wouldn't sell myself out like that).
Are you kidding me? There is a reason that Fox bought myspace - strictly for it's "data" as you put it. Myspace is a site where one of the most profitable(not to mention fickle) demographic in the world voluntarily offer up their likes/dislikes etc to a company in great detail that is easily searched, cross referenced, and advertised to. It is possibly the biggest advertising goldmine I've ever imagined. It's always baffled me how so many people could miss what is so big and profitable about Myspace. Even if the site itself never made money (which I doubt, as they advertise heavily and widely) - the data they collect is worth millions upon millions of dollars.
Perhaps their customers would find it more valuable if they offered a refreshed build available for purchase with new drivers on some form of regular timetable. In fact, I believe they do this - via SP2 and whatnot discs that are available, but I don't think that is sufficient. Maybe I'm wrong and they do this more than I thought (it's been a long time since I've had a shrink-wrap Windows disc, and it will be a cold day in hell before I spend money on another) - but it occurs to me that their practices may not be sufficient if this problem is ongoing.
Impressive that you have built a solution that works so well for you, and I like seeing happy Linux users. That out of the way, your very argument is what makes me so happy I am so far away from Open Source elitist bullshit these days. A few years ago, I switched to OSS full time - I would not go near proprietary solutions for work or for play based on the premise that I believed OSS was the end all be all of everything. I loved the philosophy, I like most of the software, and I didn't mind when the software was incapable of doing what I needed to do - I enjoyed the challenge of 'making it work'. These days I use a Mac for my work. Why? Because at some point, I need to be able to do my work. My computer is not a toy, it is not for games, it is for work. By trade, I am a graphic designer/web coder. Linux/FOSS does not have the capabilities to do my work. Period. I am reliant on closed source software (Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, etc) to get things done. When you argue that anyone who is serious about their work will convert, I think you are correct - you just did not mention what we will convert to. Do I like Linux and OSS as a whole? Yes. I use a lot of OSS software on a daily basis (vim, openoffice, firefox, etc). But a computer is there to do what you want it to do, when you want to do it. I hope in the future I can rely on Open Source to build the tools I need, but just because I can't at this time, that does not make my work or my needs a triviality as the elitists would suggest. Your needs are not my needs, and apparently my needs aren't what open source developers on the whole care about. If the community would stop being so rabid and learn to bend a little bit, I think we would all be far better off.
Oh good god no. That is the cancellations department (or as they call it the "Saves" department). They tried to make me take saves rollover calls once, I immediately and politely cancelled every account that the customer wanted cancelled. Lowest call time and highest customer satisfaction I think that queue ever saw. They never asked me to do it again...
That's the first thing I thought as well. I worked for AOL Support several years ago (nearly the worst job on this planet, although they were actually pretty good to their employees) - and phishing was a very big concern, and something they were trying to implement a plan for even back then. I frequently had people call in having troubles with the "AOL Payment forms you guys sent me a link to" - not realizing they were giving everything up to and including their SSN to some mob thug overseas.
I wouldn't be shocked at all if this hit a spam filter for this reason. Then again, maybe I'm wrong and they really didn't like what the site had to say. *shrug*
Well, here in the US we're still a ways away from tomorrow... so expect it to take a little while. Personally, I like the April Fools jokes on sites, they are usually very obvious, but still fun to see what they come up with.
It is bad practice to give users an easily accessible interface for destroying the application they are using. Every argument on slashdot ignores this principle, and I can't for the life of me fathom why. Properly made extensions should only break on major version number changes - and that is fine. That is good practice. If I have 11 extensions, and re-enabling one incorrectly tanks my browser, it doesn't matter if the other 10 are good.
Everytime this discussion comes up, it's the early adopters who are frustrated by extensions not being updated as quickly as they would like. Here's another easy solution - wait for the major release branch to settle before upgrading - give extension developers time to respond to major changes.
True true, regardless of this - dependencies don't just go away because code doesn't need to be compiled. For everyone who has a problem with Firefox extensions needing to be updated with new version number releases : go find me a plugin for, hrrm - lets say Outlook 2000, and tell me if it supports Outlook 2003 out of the box with no code changes or updates. Of the ones I've tried and used back from when I was on the MS Office bandwagon, they didn't seem to be forward compatible either, and I didn't expect them to. Maybe this has changed, but not to my knowledge. I'm just happy that the fact that this is open source gives me a workaround even if the developer doesn't update it, with closed source software I don't have that luxury.
Don't worry about it - standard aac ripping (even with iTunes) is an unprotected MPEG-4 rip. What you get from the music store is an m4p(I believe that's the extension used) - which indicates that it has the DRM encapsulation. MPEG-4 isn't going anywhere, your current collection should be as safe as the next music format. (And for many reasons, which I will expand upon if anyone shows interest, I would offer an argument that it is safer than ogg and absolutely safer than wma. MP3 would be safer, but would not sound quite as good.)
Re:JavaScript standards???
on
DOM Scripting
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I believe the people at www.meebo.com and www.campfirenow.com would disagree with your example.
As a user of both of these 'near impossible' services, I can assure you that they do quite well.
I do not know the specifics as I don't run windows any longer, and didn't bother looking into it... HOWEVER - There was recently a remote execution exploit to the windows image rendering code. So yes, viewing an image on a Windows machine that is unpatched can be dangerous. Perhaps one of our windows using friends out there can provide more details if you need it...
Did you even read the article? This is doing the same thing that is being done anyway - with a lesser cost and an ability to disable it. Microsoft, inadvertantly, has done the same thing through an easily exploited bug in their image handling code. You just can't turn it off.
Not only are you dead on with everything you are saying here, but try this on for size : Microsoft does this. Put a cd in your drive, load up Windows Media Player - check out what happens. I gathers information about the music currently playing automatically. Where is this data going? Did it ask you if it could? I could keep going about this.
One last minor point - tell me the key combination to stop Windows Media Player from doing these things... One company provides one - the other doesn't.
Mountains out of molehills, indeed.
(Slight addendum : I don't think Windows Media Player is doing anything wrong either, just an example of people trying to use sweeping statements about hypocrisy against an entire community. I know it's trendy to hate the slashdot crowd, but realize you're one of us too.)
You seem to miss the point of this statement. According to their claims, it is NOT gathering information about you. As in - the feature, even when it is on, is not doing any form of audit on your song collection. Ever google band information about a band you're listening to? That is more likely to capture data about you than this would. Now the next question is whether we trust Apple to be true to it's word about this. If they are lying about this, I would be more concerned with them lying, than with any data they would get from my collection. Personally, I don't have any reason to mistrust them at this point, as even the dark side of any conspiracy theories about this are fairly harmless, in my estimation.
Both have something strikingly in common - It is optional for you to be a customer of either.
Differentiating between an app on your computer that only sends data on user action, and an app on a web server that does likewise, is assinine and foolish.
If iTunes, OTOH, was sending information 24/7 regardless of you starting and using it - this would be a completely different scenario.
Hanging out with it's other impractical and non-profitable brothers : hover cars and meat popsicles.
On a more serious note - I agree it would be nice to see it happen as I do like Linux, but I can't see how Apple could ever justify the cost. There just really wouldn't be a very large return on it for them, unless they open sourced it (how many Linux fans that you know would run a closed binary?) - which would open an entirely new, different, and expensive for them bag of worms.
Re:Extremely easy to disable, and more info
on
iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, because Apple's DRM practices are so very very terrible. They have possibly the most lenient and accessible DRM of all that is out there - just enough that they can keep the suits happy and signing papers that make it so they can deliver a product.
Is it a "lesser of evils" case? Sure. I'll take Apple over Sony and/or Microsoft any day of the week, though. I will also continue purchasing music - I don't fear the future enough to completely disregard products of the present.
Still disagree with my stance? Try this on - If you have bought a CD from any major corporation in the last 3 months, and/or if you run Windows Media Player(which does the same thing) - you are a hypocrite.
(I suppose I should mention I'm a recent convert. Got a powerbook abou 5 months ago, and am now in the process of converting all my boxes to Macs.)
Thank you for this reply, I wish I had the mod points to raise this above his 'argument'.
I would also like to point out that you nailed it with :
"That intelligence did not develop in the last 100K years. It developed over the course of 3.5 million years."
Written history != the whole of human development. I do not know how this idea is propogated, but it does.
Slashdot Mirror
The last half of your post contradicts the first half. There is no monopoly if you can use the services you cite.
People keep claiming that Orwell's predictions were on(and I'm not saying I don't see the patterns). I say Rand had it closer to the mark, by far.
Your argument falls down simply on the fact that there are other choices. If you don't want the pain in the ass, use Apple products, as they offer convenience. If you don't want to pay Apple for the convenience of their services, how exactly do you think you are entitled to them?
Yeah, I hate how many times I get hassled every day here in the great states about not being Muslim. Oh yeah, I don't. Policies and actions to stop that form of terrorism overseas have no bearing on actions like this. The "terrorism" they are fighting here are the freedoms we rely on them to protect.
Now, if you want to talk about our policies overseas, fine - we can do that. You should also realize that some of us don't agree with the administrations viewpoint that westernizing the world is a proper course of action.
I swear to god I'm not trying to start any type of flaming, but I have yet to see something vague and difficult to understand on slashdot. Poor grammar, sometimes. Duplicate posts, frequently. But hard to understand, and uncommon acronyms? I have yet to be confused by this.
What in particular is confusing? WGA? It has been all over the press recently. This is a geek site, WGA is a well known term for a component of a popular(huge understatement) operating system. It is also a subject that has been covered on this very site countless of times before.
I keep seeing people complain, but I don't understand how they can miss things that have been paraded before them countless times before if they actually ever read the site.
As a side note, even zdnet and news.com are referring to it by this acronym, typically without any further explanation, and I doubt their editors are getting fired.
Actually, to the best of my knowledge, AOL's retention queue is still handled in house. I believe they have outsourced their tech support, and whatnot, but they still handle "saves" as they call them. I know, because I used to work for them (tech, not retention... I wouldn't sell myself out like that).
Are you kidding me? There is a reason that Fox bought myspace - strictly for it's "data" as you put it. Myspace is a site where one of the most profitable(not to mention fickle) demographic in the world voluntarily offer up their likes/dislikes etc to a company in great detail that is easily searched, cross referenced, and advertised to. It is possibly the biggest advertising goldmine I've ever imagined.
It's always baffled me how so many people could miss what is so big and profitable about Myspace. Even if the site itself never made money (which I doubt, as they advertise heavily and widely) - the data they collect is worth millions upon millions of dollars.
Perhaps their customers would find it more valuable if they offered a refreshed build available for purchase with new drivers on some form of regular timetable.
In fact, I believe they do this - via SP2 and whatnot discs that are available, but I don't think that is sufficient.
Maybe I'm wrong and they do this more than I thought (it's been a long time since I've had a shrink-wrap Windows disc, and it will be a cold day in hell before I spend money on another) - but it occurs to me that their practices may not be sufficient if this problem is ongoing.
Impressive that you have built a solution that works so well for you, and I like seeing happy Linux users. That out of the way, your very argument is what makes me so happy I am so far away from Open Source elitist bullshit these days.
A few years ago, I switched to OSS full time - I would not go near proprietary solutions for work or for play based on the premise that I believed OSS was the end all be all of everything. I loved the philosophy, I like most of the software, and I didn't mind when the software was incapable of doing what I needed to do - I enjoyed the challenge of 'making it work'.
These days I use a Mac for my work. Why? Because at some point, I need to be able to do my work. My computer is not a toy, it is not for games, it is for work.
By trade, I am a graphic designer/web coder. Linux/FOSS does not have the capabilities to do my work. Period. I am reliant on closed source software (Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, etc) to get things done.
When you argue that anyone who is serious about their work will convert, I think you are correct - you just did not mention what we will convert to.
Do I like Linux and OSS as a whole? Yes. I use a lot of OSS software on a daily basis (vim, openoffice, firefox, etc). But a computer is there to do what you want it to do, when you want to do it. I hope in the future I can rely on Open Source to build the tools I need, but just because I can't at this time, that does not make my work or my needs a triviality as the elitists would suggest.
Your needs are not my needs, and apparently my needs aren't what open source developers on the whole care about. If the community would stop being so rabid and learn to bend a little bit, I think we would all be far better off.
Oh good god no. That is the cancellations department (or as they call it the "Saves" department). They tried to make me take saves rollover calls once, I immediately and politely cancelled every account that the customer wanted cancelled. Lowest call time and highest customer satisfaction I think that queue ever saw. They never asked me to do it again...
That's the first thing I thought as well. I worked for AOL Support several years ago (nearly the worst job on this planet, although they were actually pretty good to their employees) - and phishing was a very big concern, and something they were trying to implement a plan for even back then. I frequently had people call in having troubles with the "AOL Payment forms you guys sent me a link to" - not realizing they were giving everything up to and including their SSN to some mob thug overseas. I wouldn't be shocked at all if this hit a spam filter for this reason. Then again, maybe I'm wrong and they really didn't like what the site had to say. *shrug*
Well, here in the US we're still a ways away from tomorrow... so expect it to take a little while. Personally, I like the April Fools jokes on sites, they are usually very obvious, but still fun to see what they come up with.
Hrrm... after giving it some thought, I actually think it's more difficult to properly support IE than it is to carry the earth.
I've already responded to this argument here - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=180746&cid=149 57822, but I think it's an important enough one that I'll expand on it a bit more -
It is bad practice to give users an easily accessible interface for destroying the application they are using. Every argument on slashdot ignores this principle, and I can't for the life of me fathom why. Properly made extensions should only break on major version number changes - and that is fine. That is good practice. If I have 11 extensions, and re-enabling one incorrectly tanks my browser, it doesn't matter if the other 10 are good.
Everytime this discussion comes up, it's the early adopters who are frustrated by extensions not being updated as quickly as they would like. Here's another easy solution - wait for the major release branch to settle before upgrading - give extension developers time to respond to major changes.
True true, regardless of this - dependencies don't just go away because code doesn't need to be compiled. For everyone who has a problem with Firefox extensions needing to be updated with new version number releases : go find me a plugin for, hrrm - lets say Outlook 2000, and tell me if it supports Outlook 2003 out of the box with no code changes or updates.
Of the ones I've tried and used back from when I was on the MS Office bandwagon, they didn't seem to be forward compatible either, and I didn't expect them to. Maybe this has changed, but not to my knowledge.
I'm just happy that the fact that this is open source gives me a workaround even if the developer doesn't update it, with closed source software I don't have that luxury.
Don't worry about it - standard aac ripping (even with iTunes) is an unprotected MPEG-4 rip. What you get from the music store is an m4p(I believe that's the extension used) - which indicates that it has the DRM encapsulation. MPEG-4 isn't going anywhere, your current collection should be as safe as the next music format.
(And for many reasons, which I will expand upon if anyone shows interest, I would offer an argument that it is safer than ogg and absolutely safer than wma. MP3 would be safer, but would not sound quite as good.)
I believe the people at www.meebo.com and www.campfirenow.com would disagree with your example. As a user of both of these 'near impossible' services, I can assure you that they do quite well.
I do not know the specifics as I don't run windows any longer, and didn't bother looking into it...
HOWEVER - There was recently a remote execution exploit to the windows image rendering code. So yes, viewing an image on a Windows machine that is unpatched can be dangerous.
Perhaps one of our windows using friends out there can provide more details if you need it...
I hate to feed trolls but...
Did you even read the article? This is doing the same thing that is being done anyway - with a lesser cost and an ability to disable it.
Microsoft, inadvertantly, has done the same thing through an easily exploited bug in their image handling code. You just can't turn it off.
Not only are you dead on with everything you are saying here, but try this on for size : Microsoft does this. Put a cd in your drive, load up Windows Media Player - check out what happens. I gathers information about the music currently playing automatically. Where is this data going? Did it ask you if it could? I could keep going about this.
One last minor point - tell me the key combination to stop Windows Media Player from doing these things... One company provides one - the other doesn't.
Mountains out of molehills, indeed.
(Slight addendum : I don't think Windows Media Player is doing anything wrong either, just an example of people trying to use sweeping statements about hypocrisy against an entire community. I know it's trendy to hate the slashdot crowd, but realize you're one of us too.)
You seem to miss the point of this statement. According to their claims, it is NOT gathering information about you. As in - the feature, even when it is on, is not doing any form of audit on your song collection.
Ever google band information about a band you're listening to? That is more likely to capture data about you than this would.
Now the next question is whether we trust Apple to be true to it's word about this. If they are lying about this, I would be more concerned with them lying, than with any data they would get from my collection.
Personally, I don't have any reason to mistrust them at this point, as even the dark side of any conspiracy theories about this are fairly harmless, in my estimation.
Both have something strikingly in common - It is optional for you to be a customer of either.
Differentiating between an app on your computer that only sends data on user action, and an app on a web server that does likewise, is assinine and foolish.
If iTunes, OTOH, was sending information 24/7 regardless of you starting and using it - this would be a completely different scenario.
"Where the heck is my linux iTunes client?"
Hanging out with it's other impractical and non-profitable brothers : hover cars and meat popsicles.
On a more serious note - I agree it would be nice to see it happen as I do like Linux, but I can't see how Apple could ever justify the cost. There just really wouldn't be a very large return on it for them, unless they open sourced it (how many Linux fans that you know would run a closed binary?) - which would open an entirely new, different, and expensive for them bag of worms.
Yes, because Apple's DRM practices are so very very terrible. They have possibly the most lenient and accessible DRM of all that is out there - just enough that they can keep the suits happy and signing papers that make it so they can deliver a product.
Is it a "lesser of evils" case? Sure. I'll take Apple over Sony and/or Microsoft any day of the week, though. I will also continue purchasing music - I don't fear the future enough to completely disregard products of the present.
Still disagree with my stance? Try this on - If you have bought a CD from any major corporation in the last 3 months, and/or if you run Windows Media Player(which does the same thing) - you are a hypocrite.
(I suppose I should mention I'm a recent convert. Got a powerbook abou 5 months ago, and am now in the process of converting all my boxes to Macs.)
Thank you for this reply, I wish I had the mod points to raise this above his 'argument'.
I would also like to point out that you nailed it with :
"That intelligence did not develop in the last 100K years. It developed over the course of 3.5 million years."
Written history != the whole of human development. I do not know how this idea is propogated, but it does.