It seems to me that they (The networks) seem to place a higher value on their content than I do. I think years of having a captive audience have spoiled them to the idea that they are entitled to be able to use a public resource to beam their content to anyone who will still watch it, and still control how it is viewed.
Personally, I think that the price of having to watch nine minutes of commercials for every twenty one minutes of programming is too high, especially considdering the volume of really crappy shows on T.V. (there are good ones, they are just a rarity.) That I cannot tape it and watch it when I have free time is too much. I'm not organizing my life to fit their schedule.
Don't devote energy fighting them. Let them waste all the money they want buying politicians and lobbyists. They can rule their twisted little corner of the airwaves with an iorn fist. (Insert obligatory princess Leia line from SW here.) I just quit watching TV. It's amazing how much other stuff there is to do in life when you stop watching TV, and how much free time you have to do it.
(For example, you can go post frothing neo-luddite rants about 'killing your tv' on your favorite internet discussion board...)
RTFA, the EULA does not mention this at all...the writer of the article made a specific point with respect to this.
It's awful hard to conceal a rootkit if it is mentioned explicitly in the EULA....
You, the user, will not remove or tamper with the rootkit we have installed at c:\winnt\system32\secretsonyrootkit. You will not interfere with it communicating with servers at 64.27.129.244 on ports 62001-62004, or stop the windows service labeled 'svchost_mgr'. If you fail to comply with the terms of this binding legal agreement, you will be forced to by Brittiny's next five (5) albums.
They don't put it there. You do. They just packaged it for you. If you didn't want to give them permission to run arbitrary executables on your computer, then WHY DID YOU RUN THEIR EXECUTABLE??
IANAL, however, I believe that contracts that are made in bad faith, or with the intent to decieve a particpant are not binding. If this is the case, I think that I wouldn't be hard to argue in a court that you have no obligation to keep Sony's rootkit (by deffinition an illicit and deceptive tool) on your computer. Moreover, you might also be entitled to damages resulting from said 'bad faith' agreement.
Even if my assessment isn't quite correct, it seems to me that it is probably fuzzy enough of a point to invite litigation. If I were a multimillion(billion?) dollar company I wouldn't be the one to test the legal water on something like this.
if you encrypt your traffic and the FCC or some other Govt agency attempts/succeeds in breaking your encryption, could it ("they") be found guilty under the DMCA?
Yes, but you would only be allowed to take posession of all the Brittiny Spears mp3s that they have on their hard drives.
and have more features to help speed up development time for people that *know* what they are doing.
Nice ad hominem attack. You sure burned me there. Way to make a point!
They have more tools
...that are not really essential...
more language support
What, Dot Net? Who cares, notepad works fine for the kind of rinky-dink projects one might use dot net for. You don't need a massive IDE to build a database middleware interface. I need an IDE when I'm doing some real work on a C++ app that has 100 files in the project.
have better dynamic help
An annoying distraction that is pretty poor at providing any real useful content. MSDN is better organized, and that's saying something, since it is a mess in its own right.
Whether you use these tools or not is up to you and most of the help they give can be turned off or completely ignored.
Which brings us to my primary bitch with most MS products. I don't want the Queen Mary. I want something that is basic, fast and lean. I don't need to spend lots of time fooling around all the 'helpful' features that MS thoughtfull decided to include.
I have been coding for years, and the latest VS offerings are crap. VS6 was pretty nice, as you could at least igonre the MFC auto generated code and just write whatever you wanted to.
More recent versions of VS are just awful. They try to 'help' you so much, it just gets in the way. Compund that with the way that MS products intrgrate with each other, and you have a nightmare of a program. And yeah, too much stuff is hidden behind pretty drag and drop component menus.
I think the reason that MS is so interested in search engines lately is not due to a desire to compete with google, but just to have a search engine that can find a useful article in MSDN when you need it.
Hey Taco,
I think that everything you said is dead on; It's their game but they seem to suck at customer service. Have you thought about playing the same game with them?
They are a meidum sized company of computer people, chances are that at least a few of them read slashdot, so here is what you do. Look up their IP, and flag all users posting from that block. After you have a few accounts flagged, go rename them and change their UID to eight digit numbers. Vindictive? Perhaps. But there is a chance to illustrate to the powers at Blizzard that people get upset at this sort of thing, and that the GMs aren't very good at customer service.
After all, it is YOUR blog...
There's 0 evidence that Dell/HP boots slower than home-built. If anything their bios flips through much faster than generic.
I think the poster was referring to the fact that a lot of pre-built computers are loaded with twenty three zillion TSRs, 'helper' programs, and pre-installed AOL trial software. While you probably are correct about the actual bios settings being nicely pre-optimized, you seem to lose that extra boost as the computer loads 3.5 gigs of 'free' extra crap that compaq/hp/gateway was kind enough to install on the system.
...how it was that wrestlers could have "patented moves."
And since we can now patent thing like that, I'm going to patent 'fucking', and become the richest person on the planet. Or, perhaps I'll refuse to issue licenses, and I'll be the only person on th planet that all the fine ladies can get down with....
About the only thing I've really noticed is that they're America-centric, but they report what everyone else reports
Of course they do. The claims of bias originate from the fact that everything they report has a conservative spin on it. They are pushing a conservative agenda, as opposed to trying to objectively report the news. Now you can make the claim that truly objective reporting is impossible, but most news orginazations get far closer to this ideal than FOX does.
FOX news is a propaganda organization more than a news agency. While they bring on liberal guests, rarely are they allowed to debate the topic in any effective way. Debates on FOX seem to be geared to create confusion on a topic, not clarirify the salient points.
I think you need to watch FOX, and think about the message that they are giving you more critically. They want you to think that they are only reporting the news, because then you lower your guard, and don't think about the underlying message.
Oh yeah, and my bias? I distrust both the Republican and Democrat agenda. They are all scum.
Sounds more like religion than science if you ask me.
I think the reason that scientists 'made up' dark matter, was to describe what they were seeing (or not seeing), based on their current understandings of phyiscs. If the math says that there is missing matter, scientists figure out how it would behave and try to find it, so the theory can be proven or disproven, and achieve greater understanding of existance. Exotic Dark Matter wasn't created to just make the math work out, and wish away data that doesn't make sense.
Just because people are studying some supposed invisible intangible matter, doesn't mean they are trying to pull a fast one on you, or even that they believe it exists themselves. I suspect that a fair number of people studying the problem are skeptical, and are looking to eliminate exotic dark matter as a possiblity.
who could possibly so %^#$@#%@ stupid, that he would build a system that needs to be up !25/8!(yes that is meant as 25 hours a day, 8 days a week) on a software that hasnt been proven to be stable for years in a row ? you CANT have a failure in plant with the software. enough can already go wrong without it.
You know, for someone who really seems to hate 'stupid', you are making a pretty big assumption. Just because they were writing sortware for the nuclear power industry, doesn't mean that they were writing reactor control systems. I mean, the nuclear power industry needs infrastructure databases like any other businuess.
in fact these days many films sounds tracks make more money then the film does.
I understand your point that films make a lot of money on the side that isn't counted towards the film's gross, but your statement is waaaaaay of base.
Pretend that there is no cost to create, market, and distribute a soundtrack because the hollywood accountant weasles have included that in the film's budget to prevent a writer who took a cut of the profits from seeing anything. (Not absolutely feasable, but it helps keep the math simple.
Now, lets assume that we can make $10 per disk/tape/record sold. If a cheap film costs $50 million to make (about average cost, from what I see), We still have to sell 5 million to equal the film revenue. That would be a album that goes platinum five times. Incase you don't follow the music world, a lot of artists would be very happy to go platinum five times. You would be on par with people like Prince, Madonna, Whitney, and a whole slew of very successful pop artists.
Sound Transit isn't chugging along just fine. It has already been cut in length, and gone over budget. It still hasn't addressed several places where they might have to tunnel, wich will drive the budget even higher. It also runs at street level in places, and that will further compete with existing traffic for space.
I have often wondered if my generation (gen x) will be the last that has code monkeys that truly understand computers.
We grew up with computers, learning assembly, BASIC, and then OOP as they languages were evolving. Now, I see 'programming' books that only show how to code using GUI drag-and-drop components, and scripting languages. While that sort of thing is great for producing applications with low dev time, what does it do to the next generation of coders?
There are people running around that 'Code' html using WYSIWYG applications, and they wouldn't know the difference between a SPAN tag and pointer if it bit them on the ass.
I don't see you grumbling because kids can't buy beer, smokes, and porn. Why is this such a hot topic for you?
Because beer and smokes have proven detrimental effects when misused. Video games don't. If there were some good studies done that proved that violent video games turned kids into serial killers, then sure, let's pass a law. However, there aren't, so this is the government jerking off when they could be doing something useful. This legislation looks like the sort of thing politicians support to show the soccer moms that they 'care' about family values.
Porn is a great example of something that the government has meddled in that they probably didn't need to. While lots of people will say that it is 'evil', and 'Immoral', nobody has any real solid evidence that seeing a naked chick before you are 18 mentally scars somebody for life. While I'm not suggesting you give a stack of Hustlers to a preschooler, do we really need a law that prohibits sale of porn to people under 18?
I'm going to take a wild guess and and say that you are male and close to if not over 18. Did the government ban on porn keep you frome EVER seeing anything pornographic before you were 18? I'm going to guess not. Oopsie, the government's ban on porn has failed.
As for the California legeslature personally draing New Orleans, yeah that is exactly what I meant. They should be personally filling sandbags.
Or, perhaps, I was implying that the legislatures of all the states would better serve their constituants by working on real issues, and not such frivilous laws as fines for stores that sell GTA to a 17 year old.
My point had nothing to do with underage rights. It isn't the government's job to make decisions about how you raise your kids. They should be devoting their efforts to important things, draining New Orleans, or getting properly organized so they can actually do some good the next time there is a major disaster, not waste time and taxmoney deciding if the latest 'quake' clone qualifies for a mature or adult sticker in walmart.
I oppose this kind of legislation, because the govenrment is not your mother. Because if it IS your mother, it is a homeless teen aged alchoholic crack ho mother. The government is good for managing trade with forign countries, invading middle eastern dictactorships, and building overpriced freeways, and that is about it.
Explane to me how the government is going to properly define a violent game, without pissing everyone off. Hell, there might even be grounds for a lawsuit in the attempt.
It's crap like this that makes me hate the democrats as much as the republicans.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that they (The networks) seem to place a higher value on their content than I do. I think years of having a captive audience have spoiled them to the idea that they are entitled to be able to use a public resource to beam their content to anyone who will still watch it, and still control how it is viewed.
Personally, I think that the price of having to watch nine minutes of commercials for every twenty one minutes of programming is too high, especially considdering the volume of really crappy shows on T.V. (there are good ones, they are just a rarity.) That I cannot tape it and watch it when I have free time is too much. I'm not organizing my life to fit their schedule.
Don't devote energy fighting them. Let them waste all the money they want buying politicians and lobbyists. They can rule their twisted little corner of the airwaves with an iorn fist. (Insert obligatory princess Leia line from SW here.) I just quit watching TV. It's amazing how much other stuff there is to do in life when you stop watching TV, and how much free time you have to do it.
(For example, you can go post frothing neo-luddite rants about 'killing your tv' on your favorite internet discussion board...)
RTFA, the EULA does not mention this at all...the writer of the article made a specific point with respect to this.
It's awful hard to conceal a rootkit if it is mentioned explicitly in the EULA....
You, the user, will not remove or tamper with the rootkit we have installed at c:\winnt\system32\secretsonyrootkit. You will not interfere with it communicating with servers at 64.27.129.244 on ports 62001-62004, or stop the windows service labeled 'svchost_mgr'. If you fail to comply with the terms of this binding legal agreement, you will be forced to by Brittiny's next five (5) albums.
They don't put it there. You do. They just packaged it for you. If you didn't want to give them permission to run arbitrary executables on your computer, then WHY DID YOU RUN THEIR EXECUTABLE??
IANAL, however, I believe that contracts that are made in bad faith, or with the intent to decieve a particpant are not binding. If this is the case, I think that I wouldn't be hard to argue in a court that you have no obligation to keep Sony's rootkit (by deffinition an illicit and deceptive tool) on your computer. Moreover, you might also be entitled to damages resulting from said 'bad faith' agreement.
Even if my assessment isn't quite correct, it seems to me that it is probably fuzzy enough of a point to invite litigation. If I were a multimillion(billion?) dollar company I wouldn't be the one to test the legal water on something like this.
Hey, it got wet, I had to dry it, what else could I do?
if you encrypt your traffic and the FCC or some other Govt agency attempts/succeeds in breaking your encryption, could it ("they") be found guilty under the DMCA?
Yes, but you would only be allowed to take posession of all the Brittiny Spears mp3s that they have on their hard drives.
and have more features to help speed up development time for people that *know* what they are doing.
...that are not really essential...
Nice ad hominem attack. You sure burned me there. Way to make a point!
They have more tools
more language support
What, Dot Net? Who cares, notepad works fine for the kind of rinky-dink projects one might use dot net for. You don't need a massive IDE to build a database middleware interface. I need an IDE when I'm doing some real work on a C++ app that has 100 files in the project.
have better dynamic help
An annoying distraction that is pretty poor at providing any real useful content. MSDN is better organized, and that's saying something, since it is a mess in its own right.
Whether you use these tools or not is up to you and most of the help they give can be turned off or completely ignored.
Which brings us to my primary bitch with most MS products. I don't want the Queen Mary. I want something that is basic, fast and lean. I don't need to spend lots of time fooling around all the 'helpful' features that MS thoughtfull decided to include.
I have been coding for years, and the latest VS offerings are crap. VS6 was pretty nice, as you could at least igonre the MFC auto generated code and just write whatever you wanted to.
More recent versions of VS are just awful. They try to 'help' you so much, it just gets in the way. Compund that with the way that MS products intrgrate with each other, and you have a nightmare of a program. And yeah, too much stuff is hidden behind pretty drag and drop component menus.
I think the reason that MS is so interested in search engines lately is not due to a desire to compete with google, but just to have a search engine that can find a useful article in MSDN when you need it.
Will there be a warning sticker on the chip that says:
ABSOLUTELY, DO NOT OPEN THE CHIP CASING AND LOOK AT THE FIGGEN' LASER, STUPID. IT WILL MELT YOUR FACE!
Because, I'm thinking that will be needed for something that modulates (holds pinky to mouth) 100 BEEEELLION times per second!
Hey Taco, I think that everything you said is dead on; It's their game but they seem to suck at customer service. Have you thought about playing the same game with them? They are a meidum sized company of computer people, chances are that at least a few of them read slashdot, so here is what you do. Look up their IP, and flag all users posting from that block. After you have a few accounts flagged, go rename them and change their UID to eight digit numbers. Vindictive? Perhaps. But there is a chance to illustrate to the powers at Blizzard that people get upset at this sort of thing, and that the GMs aren't very good at customer service. After all, it is YOUR blog...
royalties
BWHahahahahaha ahhahahhhahahahahahhhahahhahahhahahahhh... (pant)(pant)
Ahhahahahahahhahahah hahahahhah hahahahh hhah hhahahha... (pant)(pant)
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHAAhahahaha hahahahahahhah hahahh hahh... (pant)(pant)
hahahahah.....hahahahh......haha...... (gasp) Oh, *ahem*......hehe..er, *cough*....hehe...hehhhhheee...
Sorry, hehehehe, *ahem*....... Now, I think- royalties
AAHAHAHHAHAHHHAHHAHHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHA!
Hmmm, I'm dating myself. Also, I made a slight error in using the term 'TSR', as a TSR was a USEFUL program that resides in memory...
There's 0 evidence that Dell/HP boots slower than home-built. If anything their bios flips through much faster than generic.
I think the poster was referring to the fact that a lot of pre-built computers are loaded with twenty three zillion TSRs, 'helper' programs, and pre-installed AOL trial software. While you probably are correct about the actual bios settings being nicely pre-optimized, you seem to lose that extra boost as the computer loads 3.5 gigs of 'free' extra crap that compaq/hp/gateway was kind enough to install on the system.
And since we can now patent thing like that, I'm going to patent 'fucking', and become the richest person on the planet. Or, perhaps I'll refuse to issue licenses, and I'll be the only person on th planet that all the fine ladies can get down with....
(Queue the bad porno music here)
About the only thing I've really noticed is that they're America-centric, but they report what everyone else reports
Of course they do. The claims of bias originate from the fact that everything they report has a conservative spin on it. They are pushing a conservative agenda, as opposed to trying to objectively report the news. Now you can make the claim that truly objective reporting is impossible, but most news orginazations get far closer to this ideal than FOX does.
FOX news is a propaganda organization more than a news agency. While they bring on liberal guests, rarely are they allowed to debate the topic in any effective way. Debates on FOX seem to be geared to create confusion on a topic, not clarirify the salient points.
I think you need to watch FOX, and think about the message that they are giving you more critically. They want you to think that they are only reporting the news, because then you lower your guard, and don't think about the underlying message.
Oh yeah, and my bias? I distrust both the Republican and Democrat agenda. They are all scum.
Sounds more like religion than science if you ask me.
I think the reason that scientists 'made up' dark matter, was to describe what they were seeing (or not seeing), based on their current understandings of phyiscs. If the math says that there is missing matter, scientists figure out how it would behave and try to find it, so the theory can be proven or disproven, and achieve greater understanding of existance. Exotic Dark Matter wasn't created to just make the math work out, and wish away data that doesn't make sense.
Just because people are studying some supposed invisible intangible matter, doesn't mean they are trying to pull a fast one on you, or even that they believe it exists themselves. I suspect that a fair number of people studying the problem are skeptical, and are looking to eliminate exotic dark matter as a possiblity.
who could possibly so %^#$@#%@ stupid, that he would build a system that needs to be up !25/8!(yes that is meant as 25 hours a day, 8 days a week) on a software that hasnt been proven to be stable for years in a row ? you CANT have a failure in plant with the software. enough can already go wrong without it.
You know, for someone who really seems to hate 'stupid', you are making a pretty big assumption. Just because they were writing sortware for the nuclear power industry, doesn't mean that they were writing reactor control systems. I mean, the nuclear power industry needs infrastructure databases like any other businuess.
in fact these days many films sounds tracks make more money then the film does.
I understand your point that films make a lot of money on the side that isn't counted towards the film's gross, but your statement is waaaaaay of base.
Pretend that there is no cost to create, market, and distribute a soundtrack because the hollywood accountant weasles have included that in the film's budget to prevent a writer who took a cut of the profits from seeing anything. (Not absolutely feasable, but it helps keep the math simple.
Now, lets assume that we can make $10 per disk/tape/record sold. If a cheap film costs $50 million to make (about average cost, from what I see), We still have to sell 5 million to equal the film revenue. That would be a album that goes platinum five times. Incase you don't follow the music world, a lot of artists would be very happy to go platinum five times. You would be on par with people like Prince, Madonna, Whitney, and a whole slew of very successful pop artists.
I don't see that happening.
Sound Transit isn't chugging along just fine. It has already been cut in length, and gone over budget. It still hasn't addressed several places where they might have to tunnel, wich will drive the budget even higher. It also runs at street level in places, and that will further compete with existing traffic for space.
Is that really 'just fine'?
I have often wondered if my generation (gen x) will be the last that has code monkeys that truly understand computers.
We grew up with computers, learning assembly, BASIC, and then OOP as they languages were evolving. Now, I see 'programming' books that only show how to code using GUI drag-and-drop components, and scripting languages. While that sort of thing is great for producing applications with low dev time, what does it do to the next generation of coders?
There are people running around that 'Code' html using WYSIWYG applications, and they wouldn't know the difference between a SPAN tag and pointer if it bit them on the ass.
...It was called 'Trading Faces'. It starred Eddie Murphy, Right?
I don't see you grumbling because kids can't buy beer, smokes, and porn. Why is this such a hot topic for you?
Because beer and smokes have proven detrimental effects when misused. Video games don't. If there were some good studies done that proved that violent video games turned kids into serial killers, then sure, let's pass a law. However, there aren't, so this is the government jerking off when they could be doing something useful. This legislation looks like the sort of thing politicians support to show the soccer moms that they 'care' about family values.
Porn is a great example of something that the government has meddled in that they probably didn't need to. While lots of people will say that it is 'evil', and 'Immoral', nobody has any real solid evidence that seeing a naked chick before you are 18 mentally scars somebody for life. While I'm not suggesting you give a stack of Hustlers to a preschooler, do we really need a law that prohibits sale of porn to people under 18?
I'm going to take a wild guess and and say that you are male and close to if not over 18. Did the government ban on porn keep you frome EVER seeing anything pornographic before you were 18? I'm going to guess not. Oopsie, the government's ban on porn has failed.
As for the California legeslature personally draing New Orleans, yeah that is exactly what I meant. They should be personally filling sandbags. Or, perhaps, I was implying that the legislatures of all the states would better serve their constituants by working on real issues, and not such frivilous laws as fines for stores that sell GTA to a 17 year old.
Um, I'm over 30, Dude...
My point had nothing to do with underage rights. It isn't the government's job to make decisions about how you raise your kids. They should be devoting their efforts to important things, draining New Orleans, or getting properly organized so they can actually do some good the next time there is a major disaster, not waste time and taxmoney deciding if the latest 'quake' clone qualifies for a mature or adult sticker in walmart.
I oppose this kind of legislation, because the govenrment is not your mother. Because if it IS your mother, it is a homeless teen aged alchoholic crack ho mother. The government is good for managing trade with forign countries, invading middle eastern dictactorships, and building overpriced freeways, and that is about it.
Explane to me how the government is going to properly define a violent game, without pissing everyone off. Hell, there might even be grounds for a lawsuit in the attempt.
It's crap like this that makes me hate the democrats as much as the republicans.
I agree, this is pretty stupid.
Stupid doesn't begin to describe it. Try pathetic. They wouldn't last 30 seconds on alt.flame.flame.flame.
...I didn't see any mention of making a 'Star Brand' movie...What about 'Psi-force'? Or, my personal favorite, 'Kickers, Inc.'?
We new univers fans DEMAND equal representation in this new film deal!