You're still talking about lobbyists and corruption. We already _have_ those. I'm talking about justice, and I know it seems like a strange, strange idea but I think justice exists. This sort of thing opens up areas that _can_ be used to also argue for the existence of digital private property. I'm saying that given that capacity they _will_ be used- that lawyers of all persuasions will hammer out a notion of digital property that seems consistent. If it's not, it's just asking for some case law to be piled onto it to knock the inconsistency out of it.
It's a bit of a red flag for me simply that you use the term 'the free market' twice. Sounds like a libertarian perspective, and you're not necessarily going to see it backed by the courts. It's pretty well accepted that limitations on this consumer ability to examine are expected- that the legal system tries to strike a balance between the wish of a seller to con the buyer, and the wish of a buyer to 'make a rational choice' (HA!).
By the same token, it's pretty well accepted that 'consumers' can't even voluntarily waive their rights completely- if you say "here's three cents off, and if it kills you we're not liable!" it won't stand up in court if the thing does kill somebody, because people don't go around making rational decisions all the time. For this reason, post-sale control of goods and services has an uphill battle if it wants to get to where the copyright lobby wants it- and in fact book publishers have already lost this battle, which is why there's case law on first sale rights.
The only thing that _can_ affect corporate entities is law and terrorism. But law _does_ affect corporate entities. You're personalising them and that's a mistake. If law says they've gotta do something, they may weasel but it's really not in the interests of the shareholders for them to try to overthrow the law itself- bad PR, poor chances, not a win. It's the legacy of Microsoft that's confused you about this, because Microsoft is an insane corporation and would _much_ rather overthrow law and justice than please the stockholders. MS has control issues. You can't generalise that to all corporations.
The justice system of the United States Of America already disagrees with you on the last bit. Just because said system also permits appeals doesn't change that. And selling bare machines is _strongly_ discouraged- by Microsoft. You may not want to know what they can do to you if you persist in doing so.
I knew perfectly well I was pushing it with my first example, hence the 'or more plausibly'. It's pretty unlikely that they will ever not be allowed to cease supporting stuff. It is, however, possible that they will not be allowed to gratituously break stuff that used to work- and this is precisely what they are in the process of doing.
Do you want to be able to say "Trust me" to the RIAA, MPAA etc ad nauseam when they want to get permission to log onto your computer and scan it for copyrighted material? Do you want an ironclad legal defense stating that they have no business snooping around your property? Do you want to be able to run software they might be involved with, and not risk the possibility that they will use it as a trojan to hunt down copyrighted material and delete it or report you to the police?
Do you want to be able to say "Trust me" and be certain that if they then try to spy on you, infiltrate your system, or destroy your data, that THEY will be the criminals in that case?
Or would you like them to be able to do all this and then turn you over to the authorities if they find anything they think is incriminating?
Our 'cyberspace property rights' are way weaker than physical property rights. Having this change is not necessarily a bad thing.
No no- the article _defuses_ that thinking. Currently the wall builder is always right. The article raises the issue of where such walls may be built- and a person's own computer may reasonably be considered their private property- and an inappropriate place for building!
This is a big change from how things work now.
I have no problem with companies' own servers being very forcefully protected, or with extreme limits being placed on what I can do to or with THEIR computers- if the SAME LIMITS apply to what they can do with mine! This has often been a concern of mine. I see my hard disks as private property, and just because I run a program does not mean my expectation is to allow the software to run completely amok and cause problems while 'protecting' itself. That would be like saying if you let someone into your house, they are allowed to steal or wreck everything you own. Hey, you let 'em in!
The real world is more complicated than that. And I'm delighted to see the real world beginning to enter into software issues too.
"Technical measures implemented by the computer owner protect and control his property, while technical measures implemented by copyright owners provide control over their work at the expense of the computer owner."
This is a _good_ article. Law and justice that doesn't have two sides is no law at all... this article goes a long way towards presenting a concept of digital property rights that is _local_.
There is a lot of money and power behind content creators, copyright holders etc. saying "we own this, it is OUR property, therefore we get to scan your computer, send back information to the mothership, and if you are a criminal we get to delete stolen goods off your hard drive, you pirate you! You miscreant!"
The thing is, _law_ sees this and comes back with "If you're saying that is property, wouldn't the person's hard disk be property too? As in 'not yours', as in 'you are a guest but they bought it and own it and live in it'?"
That's the beauty of law and justice- it balances, in time. The inevitable result of pushing for extensive 'property' law regarding copyright etc. is to also cast light on the subject of what kind of property a person's datasphere is.
I even wrote an essay on this in November 1998: it's at http://www.airwindows.com/fiction/essays/Hotel.htm l. When you operate a computer it is like you are moving your stuff around on virtual property: you put something somewhere. Does a company have a right to move it to somewhere else? To pile stuff next to it obscuring it? To paint it a different color, or dust it off? To remove, discard it, set it on fire, impound it as evidence?
The fact that all of this seems totally permissible only shows that law hasn't begun thinking about these issues yet.
You can't have it both ways- if I am forbidden even to portscan a company, then the company is forbidden to go over _my_ computer either. It's analogous. If we're tightening the protections for company-owned 'cyberspace' we're also laying a precedent for tighter protections on privately owned cyberspace.
In the future it may be ILLEGAL for Microsoft to shut off the mp3 encoding in its software and force people to migrate to WMA- or more plausibly, it may be ILLEGAL for them to take a WMA file that was once functional and render it nonfunctional arbitrarily if you don't cough up a license fee. It may also be illegal for them to place restrictions on OEM desktops- on the basis that they make the building materials, the OEM builds the house, the customer buys it and moves in. There is no compelling argument that they must be able to prohibit the OEM from decorating the 'house' as they see fit.
Very interesting stuff in this article, and grounds for hope:)
That depends entirely on their notion of profiting 'from'. They could claim _anything_ is 'profiting from'. If you make a site with your resume and a spoken version in mp3 format, it is possible they would claim _that_ is profiting from, and legally demand $2000 from you on the spot.
I think they will refuse to define what they mean- and that's dangerous. Very dangerous.
It means they can chill speech and discussion about formats by holding the threat of legal action above _anyone_ involved with mp3 streaming. Very bad.
That's really the question. Does it have to be direct income for streaming, or is simply operating a business enough to permanently disqualify you from the exemption?
For instance, if you run a lumber company and wish to have a mp3 of your president talking about things, freely downloadable by prospective customers, does that not count as free because you're trying to sell them lumber and using the mp3 as a tool to do that?
I'm not even going to get into the 'musician selling CDs' angle, that's even more ominous...
My question is, do they intend to allow people to maintain commercial sites and make the _mp3s_ available free, or do they intend to only let you stream if you do nothing whatsoever else to make money?
This matters. If it's the first case, it will prop up OMDs that allow free indie music downloading and streaming to consumers, and will punish those that want to change to pay-per-download or micropayments. I actually like that. If it's the second sense, they will only let you stream if you're _not_ the artist, and if you're the artist and sell your own CDs, they'll nail you! That's messed up.
Worse yet- they may not have decided which one they mean- or they may refuse to specify except on a case-by-case basis. That's a recipe for massive abuses.
Not so fast- we already know that clown gets heavy coverage everytime he says anything. Maybe the idea is for the heavy coverage to include stuff like "Mundie was greeted with a barrage of boos and catcalls, and when he completed his keynote he was met with stony silence- and then a pie in the face, and the room erupted with laughter".
At the very least, it means being able to have instant rebuttal to whatever he says, instead of having to wait a few days:)
And most of all- how many times can you get a Microsoft guy to cause 'open source' to be mentioned in the news? Apparently quite a few times... apparently he can be made to keep those words in the news day after day as Microsoft's sketchy reputation continues to slooooowly erode...
Re:The Net content players- some winners, some los
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Suck Stops Sucking
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Who in the internet content business is going to survive?
When large groups of Microsoft employees at pep rallies chant, "Microsoft, kill them!", who is 'them'? Is there a defined 'them' that, once killed, will make this attitude unnecessary, or does 'them' expand with Microsoft's own growth?
Because XP has just kicked into its copyright-control phase, according to The Register, no longer lets you make mp3 files and refuses to let you play the WMA files it does let you make unless it thinks you have a license to do it.
OSX: iTunes.
If you take a consumer point of view, the gap between OSX and XP is only going to widen. People want to put all their CDs onto their computer. After all, they own both CDs and computer legally, and they go well together! I'd be shocked to see slashdotters contest this as geeks were the _first_ to get heavy into keeping all their CDs on hard disk, compressed.
Yeah, but if you read The Register you'll notice that the guy posting bulletins about the latest XP betas has just reported that they've just turned ALL THE COPYRIGHT CONTROLS ON. There is NO capacity to switch from WMA to MP3 anymore. He is already getting license problems with WMA files he already has on his disk!
Compare that to iTunes. Bit of a difference, no?
They certainly should repeat this test after the final build of XP. But they need to include 'making a mix CD of CDs that you own' in the tests. People _want_ to get their music onto their computer for easy random access. There is no denying that.
The difference is, Apple is banking on the good PR from their supporting people's fair use rights- and Microsoft has just put into action their whole copyright control apparatus, complete with the software phoning home to some server somewhere to check up on whether it should bust you- and complete with mp3 being taken away. Sucks to own mp3 playing hardware huh kids?
I give it a 20 percent chance that they literally go through disks deleting files if the security check says you're a bad-boy.
The CNET test is just the beginning. We may see a CNET test with XP against some future version of _Linux_ where they side with Linux! There is only so much you can do blatantly against consumers before you stop winning these sorts of tests.
If they can do this, it's not all that far from correcting regular HTML tags that happen to point to DeCSS, and 'fixing' them to point to the MPAA's FAQ.
Far from committing a 'crime', Microsoft will be in the position of protecting millions of innocent net users from committing crimes!:P even if you WANT to, you won't be able to get to 'illegal' content. It's not such a big stretch.
Re:PS2 manufacturing cost.
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If it _does_ become the case that consoles get used for such things and eat up marketshare of PCs- Sony does _not_ make an OS. Microsoft does. So if this starts happening, Sony is benefitted by having the PS2 beat X-Box in that sphere.
Note the original outrageously great result the Emotion Engine got proved to be erroneous. The new figure (to save you the 470K download and them the slashdotting) is 616.67 POVmark, on Linux 2.2.2, at CPU speed of 294 Mhz (comparing to 1000Mhz PCs at that level). The score of $ divided by POVmark is 0.48. The only other results anywhere near that are AMD PC systems and a PowerMac G4, all of which do outperform the PS2 board, but the nearest price-performace is one of the AMD systems at 0.88. The other AMD systems are at 0.92 and 0.95 price/performance. The G4 is at 1.05 and is running OSX- very likely running just Darwin, with no GUI layer present.
It looks like if you're into POV, a PS2 can probably render faster than your PC for almost any value of PC. It takes particularly good gigahertz Athlon systems to beat it, or a stripped-down G4 running Darwin to beat it- or a quad Intel system to get anywhere near it;)
Nah. You'd think so, but no. The only real compelling reason to keep up on corpo-fashion in any sphere is if you are working in that sphere- and even then, if you don't have your own 'cool' to bring to the table, you're commercially doomed, and can expect no better than to be a flash in the pan.
Even the corporate fashionmakers know that global 'cool' is the absolute last stage of the process. They themselves are constantly looking for the next thing. If you have a style of your own, that might at least possibly be the next thing, increasing your value. The ONLY thing that is absolutely certain is this: the next thing will not be the _current_ thing, therefore being all in tune with the current thing is commercially worthless, and there's no point in even bothering to understand it. By definition it's on the way out and won't be coming back anytime soon. It's the last stage, the final step. If it takes you that long to clue to it, you might as well not bother.
Not _his_ fault if he doesn't understand that lots of people in his position, far from carefully planning every detail to appease the demands of some cool-obsessed small-town perfectionists, carefully plan every detail to appease the demands of some market-studied consensus approximation of an optimal consumer.
Bravo for Dave Eggers. Three cheers for Dave Eggers. But I don't think it has _ever_ been him that people are concerned about, or ever will be.
He should chill out, secure in the knowledge that it's not really his problem, and let other people try to determine things like whether movie studios are making up artifical fans for upcoming movies, whether music studios are designing upcoming artists to catch perceived 'cool' waves, whether it's all a shuck to suck money out of your pocket and really represents nobody's creative force.
And the kicker (that Dave would _love_) is this: Frank Zappa, in the late Sixties, intentionally founded the Mothers Of Invention as a 'gap-filling product' to fill the niche between 'serious' and 'pop' music. He used the tools of advertising and market analysis he'd learned earlier in life, and invented the Mothers as a 'no commercial potential' band, and the niche turned out to be there enough to support a long, illustrious career. All invented to fit latent market needs.
But the kicker to the kicker is this: Zappa had been listening to Varese and other such music, as well as seriously obscure R&B, since he was a kid. That is what he _loved_ and what he wanted to do, and it shows.
So, Zappa's an object lesson that Eggers would appreciate- he was simultaneously totally fake, and totally real. Everything he did was tailored to what he thought would sell- and at the same time, he did what he wanted, what he liked.
When it comes right down to it, you've got to drop the obsessions of who will like what, and do what you do the best you can. Having a target or goal is good, intending to get wildly popular can't hurt, but the only _real_ fatal flaw is to be untrue to your artistic foundation. When people do blatantly commercial stuff because they just plain love it, you get Meat Loaf- and continuous sales over many years, extensive success. When people do blatantly commercial stuff just to cash in- you go platinum in a year or less, and then nobody ever wants to hear you again. And there are too many examples of THAT out there to even begin annoying people with specific cases like Warrant or Shaun Cassidy:) oops, I did it again!;)
No, not at all. Linux has built-in balkanization. Anytime someone wants to take a distribution in a different direction they can fork it and put effort into producing their own spin on things. Because consumer preference is extremely subdivisible into smaller classes and categories, no single dist of Linux can ever be in the position that Microsoft is in.
If you could do that with Microsoft, there would be somebody out there with a stripped down, debugged version of W95 for gaming and functional use, that would be eating W2K's lunch. You can't, so there was never the possibility of forking existing hugely popular market sections off as their own OS. It was always expand expand, debug AND expand more, bloat and migrate people unwillingly. If Microsoft's having trouble doing this, a Linux dist would find it flat impossible.
The Linux model isn't much like, say, the market for cable. It's more like the market for food. Personal taste can wildly differentiate. That's actually an advantage...
It's particularly disconcerting that the brainwashing is _literally_ stadiums of people chanting "Microsoft, kill 'em! Microsoft, kill 'em!". I mean, whaaat??? Who on earth considers this normal or sensible or right? I'd love to see the modern German citizen's take on that spectacle- Germany is a better country than the USA these days- certainly a lot wiser.
Are there _videos_ of the Microsoft rallies involving this chant? Can _footage_ be put on television? If it is mysteriously impossible to put the footage on American television, is it possible for other countries to run it heavily on television?
This time around _we_ might be the ones who need to be stepped on and straightened out- to the extent that we _do_ align ourselves with 'Microsoft, kill 'em!' and behave like we support Microsoft seizing control of world commerce and communications. I don't care about junk like X-Box (doomed) or the specifics: they may not be invincible but their _attitude_ is damned worrying and that needs to be fully considered.
Since when are 'we' blind uncritical supporters of anything with the word 'free' stapled to it?
It would be great if 'free market' actually meant something to the effect of 'people are free to enter it and conduct business', but seeing as 'free market' demonstrably means 'free to put up barriers to entry and drain business off to sweatshops in Costa Rica', why should anybody consider that a good thing?
Face it, we've been trying 'free market' in the sense you mean. We've given it a good try, and this _is_ what happens. So what is so wrong with the idea of wanting to support a BIG market for a change, one with a LOT of players in it? What is wrong with wanting to have a lot of choices? I mean, just to HAVE choices! Bring 'em on!
And if the only practical ways of doing this seem socialist or commie to you, because they give Microsoft only 70% of the world rather than 99% like it'd get without regulation... well boo hoo. Poor it. Poor you. Then wipe your tears and get busy participating in a REAL market- one that you can get a goddamn foothold in, one where you may not be guaranteed monster success but you _do_ have more assurance that you're not going to be flung out of the market entirely by the shifting of a giant.
Welcome to the real world. You might like it- if, that is, we get a chance to _implement_ it that way. First thing we do, we'll find a better word for 'free' for _your_ kind of market. How about 'constricted'?
Nader is a _lot_ smarter than Jon. I hope you're joking;)
Jon's got the right idea but a lot of his facts are total vapor. Actual performance of XBox protoypes suggests it's a lot weaker than PS2- 'Halo' starts to crawl when doing nothing more complicated than splitting the screen four ways. Microsoft's money is often talked about, but I for one am deeply skeptical- prove it. Whose figures are we citing here? Microsoft's. There's talk that they are operating a share-valuation pyramid scheme, and plenty of support for that position. In effect, Microsoft's money is strikingly similar to the dot-com 'bubble'- cash or not, it could be burned up awfully fast, and you've only their word that this cash reserve is even there. Many companies would not have a reason to lie about the amount of assets they have- but Microsoft is not normal, and they do have such a reason and have constantly lied, even in court, much less outside of it.
Microsoft's a huge threat, but far from invincible. The important thing is to try and get at the truth, and to not be a damned Pollyanna about their future plans. There are many things they can do to seize control of world commerce, for instance, if they're not subject to higher authority- and of course everything they say confirms that in their opinion, they are not.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bit of a red flag for me simply that you use the term 'the free market' twice. Sounds like a libertarian perspective, and you're not necessarily going to see it backed by the courts. It's pretty well accepted that limitations on this consumer ability to examine are expected- that the legal system tries to strike a balance between the wish of a seller to con the buyer, and the wish of a buyer to 'make a rational choice' (HA!).
By the same token, it's pretty well accepted that 'consumers' can't even voluntarily waive their rights completely- if you say "here's three cents off, and if it kills you we're not liable!" it won't stand up in court if the thing does kill somebody, because people don't go around making rational decisions all the time. For this reason, post-sale control of goods and services has an uphill battle if it wants to get to where the copyright lobby wants it- and in fact book publishers have already lost this battle, which is why there's case law on first sale rights.
The only thing that _can_ affect corporate entities is law and terrorism. But law _does_ affect corporate entities. You're personalising them and that's a mistake. If law says they've gotta do something, they may weasel but it's really not in the interests of the shareholders for them to try to overthrow the law itself- bad PR, poor chances, not a win. It's the legacy of Microsoft that's confused you about this, because Microsoft is an insane corporation and would _much_ rather overthrow law and justice than please the stockholders. MS has control issues. You can't generalise that to all corporations.
The justice system of the United States Of America already disagrees with you on the last bit. Just because said system also permits appeals doesn't change that. And selling bare machines is _strongly_ discouraged- by Microsoft. You may not want to know what they can do to you if you persist in doing so.
I knew perfectly well I was pushing it with my first example, hence the 'or more plausibly'. It's pretty unlikely that they will ever not be allowed to cease supporting stuff. It is, however, possible that they will not be allowed to gratituously break stuff that used to work- and this is precisely what they are in the process of doing.
Astroturf much? ;)
Do you want to be able to say "Trust me" to the RIAA, MPAA etc ad nauseam when they want to get permission to log onto your computer and scan it for copyrighted material? Do you want an ironclad legal defense stating that they have no business snooping around your property? Do you want to be able to run software they might be involved with, and not risk the possibility that they will use it as a trojan to hunt down copyrighted material and delete it or report you to the police?
Do you want to be able to say "Trust me" and be certain that if they then try to spy on you, infiltrate your system, or destroy your data, that THEY will be the criminals in that case?
Or would you like them to be able to do all this and then turn you over to the authorities if they find anything they think is incriminating?
Our 'cyberspace property rights' are way weaker than physical property rights. Having this change is not necessarily a bad thing.
This is a big change from how things work now.
I have no problem with companies' own servers being very forcefully protected, or with extreme limits being placed on what I can do to or with THEIR computers- if the SAME LIMITS apply to what they can do with mine! This has often been a concern of mine. I see my hard disks as private property, and just because I run a program does not mean my expectation is to allow the software to run completely amok and cause problems while 'protecting' itself. That would be like saying if you let someone into your house, they are allowed to steal or wreck everything you own. Hey, you let 'em in!
The real world is more complicated than that. And I'm delighted to see the real world beginning to enter into software issues too.
This is a _good_ article. Law and justice that doesn't have two sides is no law at all... this article goes a long way towards presenting a concept of digital property rights that is _local_.
There is a lot of money and power behind content creators, copyright holders etc. saying "we own this, it is OUR property, therefore we get to scan your computer, send back information to the mothership, and if you are a criminal we get to delete stolen goods off your hard drive, you pirate you! You miscreant!"
The thing is, _law_ sees this and comes back with "If you're saying that is property, wouldn't the person's hard disk be property too? As in 'not yours', as in 'you are a guest but they bought it and own it and live in it'?"
That's the beauty of law and justice- it balances, in time. The inevitable result of pushing for extensive 'property' law regarding copyright etc. is to also cast light on the subject of what kind of property a person's datasphere is.
I even wrote an essay on this in November 1998: it's at http://www.airwindows.com/fiction/essays/Hotel.htm l. When you operate a computer it is like you are moving your stuff around on virtual property: you put something somewhere. Does a company have a right to move it to somewhere else? To pile stuff next to it obscuring it? To paint it a different color, or dust it off? To remove, discard it, set it on fire, impound it as evidence?
The fact that all of this seems totally permissible only shows that law hasn't begun thinking about these issues yet.
You can't have it both ways- if I am forbidden even to portscan a company, then the company is forbidden to go over _my_ computer either. It's analogous. If we're tightening the protections for company-owned 'cyberspace' we're also laying a precedent for tighter protections on privately owned cyberspace.
In the future it may be ILLEGAL for Microsoft to shut off the mp3 encoding in its software and force people to migrate to WMA- or more plausibly, it may be ILLEGAL for them to take a WMA file that was once functional and render it nonfunctional arbitrarily if you don't cough up a license fee. It may also be illegal for them to place restrictions on OEM desktops- on the basis that they make the building materials, the OEM builds the house, the customer buys it and moves in. There is no compelling argument that they must be able to prohibit the OEM from decorating the 'house' as they see fit.
Very interesting stuff in this article, and grounds for hope :)
I think they will refuse to define what they mean- and that's dangerous. Very dangerous.
It means they can chill speech and discussion about formats by holding the threat of legal action above _anyone_ involved with mp3 streaming. Very bad.
For instance, if you run a lumber company and wish to have a mp3 of your president talking about things, freely downloadable by prospective customers, does that not count as free because you're trying to sell them lumber and using the mp3 as a tool to do that?
I'm not even going to get into the 'musician selling CDs' angle, that's even more ominous...
This matters. If it's the first case, it will prop up OMDs that allow free indie music downloading and streaming to consumers, and will punish those that want to change to pay-per-download or micropayments. I actually like that. If it's the second sense, they will only let you stream if you're _not_ the artist, and if you're the artist and sell your own CDs, they'll nail you! That's messed up.
Worse yet- they may not have decided which one they mean- or they may refuse to specify except on a case-by-case basis. That's a recipe for massive abuses.
Oooo. I bow to your seniority ;)
At the very least, it means being able to have instant rebuttal to whatever he says, instead of having to wait a few days :)
And most of all- how many times can you get a Microsoft guy to cause 'open source' to be mentioned in the news? Apparently quite a few times... apparently he can be made to keep those words in the news day after day as Microsoft's sketchy reputation continues to slooooowly erode...
Those that pay their own way, who else? ;)
When large groups of Microsoft employees at pep rallies chant, "Microsoft, kill them!", who is 'them'? Is there a defined 'them' that, once killed, will make this attitude unnecessary, or does 'them' expand with Microsoft's own growth?
Because XP has just kicked into its copyright-control phase, according to The Register, no longer lets you make mp3 files and refuses to let you play the WMA files it does let you make unless it thinks you have a license to do it.
OSX: iTunes.
If you take a consumer point of view, the gap between OSX and XP is only going to widen. People want to put all their CDs onto their computer. After all, they own both CDs and computer legally, and they go well together! I'd be shocked to see slashdotters contest this as geeks were the _first_ to get heavy into keeping all their CDs on hard disk, compressed.
So what else is new?
Compare that to iTunes. Bit of a difference, no?
They certainly should repeat this test after the final build of XP. But they need to include 'making a mix CD of CDs that you own' in the tests. People _want_ to get their music onto their computer for easy random access. There is no denying that.
The difference is, Apple is banking on the good PR from their supporting people's fair use rights- and Microsoft has just put into action their whole copyright control apparatus, complete with the software phoning home to some server somewhere to check up on whether it should bust you- and complete with mp3 being taken away. Sucks to own mp3 playing hardware huh kids?
I give it a 20 percent chance that they literally go through disks deleting files if the security check says you're a bad-boy.
The CNET test is just the beginning. We may see a CNET test with XP against some future version of _Linux_ where they side with Linux! There is only so much you can do blatantly against consumers before you stop winning these sorts of tests.
If they can do this, it's not all that far from correcting regular HTML tags that happen to point to DeCSS, and 'fixing' them to point to the MPAA's FAQ.
Far from committing a 'crime', Microsoft will be in the position of protecting millions of innocent net users from committing crimes! :P even if you WANT to, you won't be able to get to 'illegal' content. It's not such a big stretch.
If it _does_ become the case that consoles get used for such things and eat up marketshare of PCs- Sony does _not_ make an OS. Microsoft does. So if this starts happening, Sony is benefitted by having the PS2 beat X-Box in that sphere.
Note the original outrageously great result the Emotion Engine got proved to be erroneous. The new figure (to save you the 470K download and them the slashdotting) is 616.67 POVmark, on Linux 2.2.2, at CPU speed of 294 Mhz (comparing to 1000Mhz PCs at that level). The score of $ divided by POVmark is 0.48. The only other results anywhere near that are AMD PC systems and a PowerMac G4, all of which do outperform the PS2 board, but the nearest price-performace is one of the AMD systems at 0.88. The other AMD systems are at 0.92 and 0.95 price/performance. The G4 is at 1.05 and is running OSX- very likely running just Darwin, with no GUI layer present.
It looks like if you're into POV, a PS2 can probably render faster than your PC for almost any value of PC. It takes particularly good gigahertz Athlon systems to beat it, or a stripped-down G4 running Darwin to beat it- or a quad Intel system to get anywhere near it ;)
Even the corporate fashionmakers know that global 'cool' is the absolute last stage of the process. They themselves are constantly looking for the next thing. If you have a style of your own, that might at least possibly be the next thing, increasing your value. The ONLY thing that is absolutely certain is this: the next thing will not be the _current_ thing, therefore being all in tune with the current thing is commercially worthless, and there's no point in even bothering to understand it. By definition it's on the way out and won't be coming back anytime soon. It's the last stage, the final step. If it takes you that long to clue to it, you might as well not bother.
Not _his_ fault if he doesn't understand that lots of people in his position, far from carefully planning every detail to appease the demands of some cool-obsessed small-town perfectionists, carefully plan every detail to appease the demands of some market-studied consensus approximation of an optimal consumer.
Bravo for Dave Eggers. Three cheers for Dave Eggers. But I don't think it has _ever_ been him that people are concerned about, or ever will be.
He should chill out, secure in the knowledge that it's not really his problem, and let other people try to determine things like whether movie studios are making up artifical fans for upcoming movies, whether music studios are designing upcoming artists to catch perceived 'cool' waves, whether it's all a shuck to suck money out of your pocket and really represents nobody's creative force.
And the kicker (that Dave would _love_) is this: Frank Zappa, in the late Sixties, intentionally founded the Mothers Of Invention as a 'gap-filling product' to fill the niche between 'serious' and 'pop' music. He used the tools of advertising and market analysis he'd learned earlier in life, and invented the Mothers as a 'no commercial potential' band, and the niche turned out to be there enough to support a long, illustrious career. All invented to fit latent market needs.
But the kicker to the kicker is this: Zappa had been listening to Varese and other such music, as well as seriously obscure R&B, since he was a kid. That is what he _loved_ and what he wanted to do, and it shows.
So, Zappa's an object lesson that Eggers would appreciate- he was simultaneously totally fake, and totally real. Everything he did was tailored to what he thought would sell- and at the same time, he did what he wanted, what he liked.
When it comes right down to it, you've got to drop the obsessions of who will like what, and do what you do the best you can. Having a target or goal is good, intending to get wildly popular can't hurt, but the only _real_ fatal flaw is to be untrue to your artistic foundation. When people do blatantly commercial stuff because they just plain love it, you get Meat Loaf- and continuous sales over many years, extensive success. When people do blatantly commercial stuff just to cash in- you go platinum in a year or less, and then nobody ever wants to hear you again. And there are too many examples of THAT out there to even begin annoying people with specific cases like Warrant or Shaun Cassidy :) oops, I did it again! ;)
If you could do that with Microsoft, there would be somebody out there with a stripped down, debugged version of W95 for gaming and functional use, that would be eating W2K's lunch. You can't, so there was never the possibility of forking existing hugely popular market sections off as their own OS. It was always expand expand, debug AND expand more, bloat and migrate people unwillingly. If Microsoft's having trouble doing this, a Linux dist would find it flat impossible.
The Linux model isn't much like, say, the market for cable. It's more like the market for food. Personal taste can wildly differentiate. That's actually an advantage...
So what kind of jail times does that usually get?
Are there _videos_ of the Microsoft rallies involving this chant? Can _footage_ be put on television? If it is mysteriously impossible to put the footage on American television, is it possible for other countries to run it heavily on television?
This time around _we_ might be the ones who need to be stepped on and straightened out- to the extent that we _do_ align ourselves with 'Microsoft, kill 'em!' and behave like we support Microsoft seizing control of world commerce and communications. I don't care about junk like X-Box (doomed) or the specifics: they may not be invincible but their _attitude_ is damned worrying and that needs to be fully considered.
It would be great if 'free market' actually meant something to the effect of 'people are free to enter it and conduct business', but seeing as 'free market' demonstrably means 'free to put up barriers to entry and drain business off to sweatshops in Costa Rica', why should anybody consider that a good thing?
Face it, we've been trying 'free market' in the sense you mean. We've given it a good try, and this _is_ what happens. So what is so wrong with the idea of wanting to support a BIG market for a change, one with a LOT of players in it? What is wrong with wanting to have a lot of choices? I mean, just to HAVE choices! Bring 'em on!
And if the only practical ways of doing this seem socialist or commie to you, because they give Microsoft only 70% of the world rather than 99% like it'd get without regulation... well boo hoo. Poor it. Poor you. Then wipe your tears and get busy participating in a REAL market- one that you can get a goddamn foothold in, one where you may not be guaranteed monster success but you _do_ have more assurance that you're not going to be flung out of the market entirely by the shifting of a giant.
Welcome to the real world. You might like it- if, that is, we get a chance to _implement_ it that way. First thing we do, we'll find a better word for 'free' for _your_ kind of market. How about 'constricted'?
Jon's got the right idea but a lot of his facts are total vapor. Actual performance of XBox protoypes suggests it's a lot weaker than PS2- 'Halo' starts to crawl when doing nothing more complicated than splitting the screen four ways. Microsoft's money is often talked about, but I for one am deeply skeptical- prove it. Whose figures are we citing here? Microsoft's. There's talk that they are operating a share-valuation pyramid scheme, and plenty of support for that position. In effect, Microsoft's money is strikingly similar to the dot-com 'bubble'- cash or not, it could be burned up awfully fast, and you've only their word that this cash reserve is even there. Many companies would not have a reason to lie about the amount of assets they have- but Microsoft is not normal, and they do have such a reason and have constantly lied, even in court, much less outside of it.
Microsoft's a huge threat, but far from invincible. The important thing is to try and get at the truth, and to not be a damned Pollyanna about their future plans. There are many things they can do to seize control of world commerce, for instance, if they're not subject to higher authority- and of course everything they say confirms that in their opinion, they are not.