Have you looked at mailreader market share stats lately? It's something like 40% webmail, 20% Outlook, and 2% or less each of about eighty different mailreaders, each of whose fans are insistent that it's the best one. If you'd asked me to list thirty of them at random, I don't think Windows Mail would have probably made the list. Power users prefer more advanced things (Pegasus, Gnus, Eudora,...). Corporate Windows users mostly have Outlook, and nearly everybody else in the Windows world is either on whatever their ISP bundles in the connection/setup kit, or else webmail.
> As long as they make sure that OEMs include some... > Else customers will not be too happy out of the box.
Meh. We're talking about "apps" like Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker. In other words, not actual applications that people actually use. (I've never even encountered *anecdotal* evidence of anyone using any of those. In fact, I'd forgotten that Windows Mail was still being produced; the last time I remember seeing it was on Windows 95 OSR2. I only know about the other two because a default install of XP features their icons somewhat prominently in the Start menu.)
Honestly, the users aren't going to so much as notice that they're gone.
Now, if they got rid of WordPad or Internet Explorer or even Paint, that would be a somewhat different thing. But there's no reason to suppose that those would be on the axe list.
You don't need SPF to do this if you only need to receive mail from known parties and/or with known characteristics (e.g., a known mailing list you subscribe to in the To: field, a known flag string in the Subject field, etc). Just write your filters to pick up legitimate mail and plop it in the folders you read regularly, and the spam goes into the unsorted, unfiltered inbox, which you only look through when you have time to kill and/or a reason to believe you've missed a message. This is essentially what I do now. And it kind of works. Almost.
This kind of system (i.e., whitelist filtering) is a long way from perfect, though, especially if you'd like to be reachable by people whose messages you (and your filters) don't know to look for. And I'm not sure what the digital signatures would add, honestly, even if *everyone* used them. The spammers don't know my friends' email addresses and whatnot to fake them. Okay, yeah, I'm sure the spammers *have* my friends' email addresses, but they don't know that those email addresses are ones that *I*, in particular, normally expect to receive mail from, so they're no more likely to send me fake mail "from" those addresses than any of the hillion jillion other addresses in their vast databases. Occasionally a spam message does trip one of my subject-line filters by pure dumb luck, but the volume of such messages is very low (lower than the volume of legitimate messages), so it's not a very big deal.
The bigger problem is that I can't easily make myself publicly reachable under such a system. I can't just stick my email address in the signature/footer/sidebar/whatever of my website/blog/slashdot-profile/whatever and thus enable people who read it and want to respond to easily contact me. I mean, yes, I can tell them "put the word todhsals in the subject line", but that's an ugly annoying pain and has a lot of shortcomings. And it has to be different from what everyone else is doing, because if it becomes standardized the spammers will quickly implement it. But digital signatures don't solve this problem at all, because there's no way for my filtering rules to distinguish between the digital signatures of strangers and the digital signatures of spammers. Spammers can generate digital signatures just as well as anyone else. New ones, based on new keys, for each message, if necessary.
The article discusses pull technology, wherein the sending mail server would inform the recipient's mail server, basically, "I have a message for your user with such-and-such address, and he can retrieve it with this magic token message id", and then when the recipient checks his mail the mail client software gets these notices (basically a list of tuples, where each tuple has, at minimum, the sender's mail server, whence the message can be retrieved, and the magic token or message id that you ask for to get it). There could also be other metadata, such as the sender's return address. The client software then goes down this list and attempts to retrieve the messages; any it can't retrieve right now (e.g., because the sender's mail server is experiencing technical difficulties), it can save the metadata and try again later. This isn't perfect either, but it would have certain advantages, most notably that the sending mail server uses more resources than the receiving mail server, which shifts the economics in the recipient's favor. To my way of thinking, that would be a big deal. You'd still get some junk mail, of course. You get junk mail through the postal service, after all, when the sender pays postage. But there are limits to how *much* junk mail you get with sender-pays economics. It's a manageable flow. You could potentially actually take the time to glance at each subject line individually and decide whether to read the message, without having to quit your day job to keep up.
Of course, the existing email infrastructure (notably, SMTP and POP3) can't be retrofit with this, because it's different at the design level. We'd need new protocols and, t
> I don't understand this. Why wouldn't the former slave owner agree to the same arrangements as before?
In short, because he's extremely peeved. After a very bloody and unpleasant war, which stripped the south of a lot of its resources, now Congress has been totally taken over completely not just by northerners (southern states were at this point not permitted representation), which would be bad enough, but in particular things are now being run largely by the *radical* northerners, and they're gleefully (and arrogantly) enacting said former slave owner's worst nightmares, and crowing about it.
This period in history is generally known as "reconstruction", but to a lot of southerners at the time it felt more like a second destruction. And they were not pleased.
Of course, many of them weren't going to be *very* pleased with any outcome that involved the union's winning and the dismantling of the confederacy. But after Lincoln's assassination, the kinder, gentler plan for reconstruction was set aside in favor of a harsher, more brutal version. Vengeance, if you will.
I think we're mostly over this now, and there is little real animosity left at this point. But it has taken a long time (err, well, a long time in American terms, as in, "The British think a hundred miles is a long way, and the Americans think a hundred years is a long time). And maybe I am missing the full extent of the animosity that is does remain, because I have spent very little time in the south -- very little, as in, measured in weeks, in single digits, over the course of my whole life.
Note that I mean there's very little real animosity systemically, looking at our society as a whole. Obviously there are individual people who have animosity aimed in various directions. But overall at this point I don't think northerners versus southerners is a much bigger feud for in our society than, say, jocks versus nerds. Again, though, I don't live in the south, so I guess I could be missing something.
But in the years following the war, it was a very different thing. People were *extremely* upset, and a lot of them behaved rather... emotionally.
PC-DOS 3.3 will boot in under twenty seconds at 4.mumble MHz, so on modern hardware it ought to be right near instantaneous. Back in the day I used an extremely cuspy little text editor called UED (short for "useful editor"), which I'm sure is still floating around and available someplace or another. (It was at one point distributed along with the DOS version of Online Bible. This was in the days before Windows came pre-installed on new computers, when most consumer software was still written for DOS, or in some cases for Mac and DOS.) UED doesn't have huge piles of features, but it can open up to nine files at a time, cut/copy/paste between them in full lines, traditional ranges, or rectangular blocks, among other features. (The handling of rectangular blocks is actually significantly better than in Emacs.) Its menu system is very straightforward, and everything is very discoverable. Oh, and it's small. (The version I have is 38704 bytes. Yes, I still have it sitting around, though I haven't attempted to use it lately, since I'm comfortable with Emacs now.)
One cool thing about this kind of option is that the partition you use for it can be a *tiny* (as in, measured in kilobytes, depending on how much data you need to be able to store there at once) FAT16 system, or even FAT12. Then in your main OS you can just mount it and copy/move the text files over, possibly in an init or login script. It takes up so little drive space, the menu configuration stuff to get the boot loader to offer it to you as an option on power-up is actually a significant fraction.
And speed? Oh, yes. I've used DOS 5 and UED on a Pentium II system (233 MHz), and it really screams. Greased lightning on wet ice, man. Makes vim look like molasses on a cold February night.
Yeah, I had one of those big yellow onions once. I didn't put it on my belt, though, on account of the fact that I didn't own any belts at the time. See, I know a lot of people use belts as fashion accessories, but I tend to use them to keep my pants up, only back in '64 all my pants actually fit properly, not like now, because back then they sold pants that were the same size it said on the label, and the fit pretty well. These days I always have to get a belt, because the pants don't fit right, but back then, they did. As Wacko Warner says, if the pants don't fit, you must acquit! So anyway, I didn't put the onion on my belt, but I kept it around for a while, and then when it started to go soft I sliced it up, fried the slices, and made sandwiches with watercress, fried onion slices, and chunky peanut butter, on pumpernickle bread. Pumpernickle has always been one of my absolute favorites.
Sorry, I inadvertently left out the word "immediately". You are correct that Lincoln anticipated a future when slavery would eventually be abolished. But my intended point was that he didn't plan to eliminate slavery during his own term of office. He was going to leave it for someone else to do later.
> How can it have had value to him because of a trademark that didn't exist when he registered it?
It had value to him because he was speculating that the trademark in question might exist in the future (and, indeed, now it does). It is evident upon even a cursory examination of the site that he indeed registered the domain for the express purpose of being in this position in the event that the city of Chicago decided to bid for the Olympics in that year. Go look at the site, and this will become clear to you. His whole purpose here is to gain a popular site based on the effort and money that someone else is putting into marketing the phrase "Chicago 2016", by having a site with the same name and a URL based on that name and gaining free benefit from the other party's advertising. This is *exactly* what trademark law exists to prevent. Saying "but he was *first*" doesn't change that.
> His site isn't commercial, has no ads and only accepts donations to fight this legal challenge > so there is no financial motive here.
That may limit somewhat the monetary damages they can collect.
> Except of course for the fact that he bought the domain and created his site before the trademark > came into being. Indeed before Chicago even decided to bid for the Olympics. His site is a > discussion of the possible costs of a hypothetical bid for the 2016 Olympics.
Umm, sure. Good luck getting the court to buy that. Sounds like a disingenuous sophistry to me. The word "hypothetical" seems particularly unlikely to play.
He may have been speculating beforehand, and Chicago may not have made its final decision yet when he registered the thing, but he's still deliberately drawing on the success of someone else's action and marketing and whatnot, attempting to benefit from the effort they are putting into promoting the mark.
> The idea that he can be forced to give up the name because it is now a trademark is ridiculous.
The issue is that the name has value to him primarily *because* of the other party's trademark. Chronology isn't really the issue. He appears to be going out of his way to benefit from somebody else's investment in promoting the mark. It's practically a textbook case.
> Much like if I started an international punctuation competition called Slash Dot > and then demanded ownership of slashdot.org.
In that case, the creators of slashdot.org did not register that domain in anticipation that you might be creating said punctuation competition, and the site is not in any way *related* to your punctuation competition, nor are they attempting to take advantage of your investment in *promoting* said competition. That last point, from what I understand, is a particularly major big deal for trademark law.
As with any really close election, a lot of people felt that their candidate was cheated. The resentment will last until the losing party (in this case the Dems) gets one of their candidates into the office, and then over the next few years it will fade. We'll know it's mended when we have a landslide election again.
> I think you'd be hard pressed to claim that the current electoral system is ideal.
I don't know that I'd use the word "ideal", but I will say that designing a better system would be much harder than most people realize. There are some subtle things that the current system does that are very beneficial. Among other things, both major political parties are drawn toward the center, and toward moderation, as they seek to make their candidates viable in the (relatively) moderate swing states. This leaves a lot of people dissatisfied, feeling that their party doesn't really represent them, that they compromise too much, and so on. But it de-emphasizes the major political differences across geographical lines and helps to hold us together, and that's a pretty big deal.
> And the failures, as 2000 showed, are fairly catastrophic (i don't mean Bush's policies. > I mean the turmoil, and lack of clarity)
There are always going to be close elections, in any system that has legitimate, free elections. We've had it before (e.g., Truman), and I imagine we'll have it again. People feel robbed, yes, and believe their candidate was cheated, and all that. But it's better than the alternative.
When none of the elections are close, it's because there's only one viable candidate. We usually consider those governments to be dictatorships.
A landslide now and then is okay, even good. But if *every* election is a landslide, you have a big problem.
> I'm just think the *details* of the way in which it was phased out were... suboptimal.
And, incidentally, I think there are lessons we can learn from that, which we might do well to pay attention to if we're going to phase out anything else that we think is wrong and needs to be phased out. I won't name any specific thing (if nothing else because comparing any of our current problems to slavery would be flamebait of the worst kind). But in general I think we should study the past and try to learn from it so as to do things more carefully and wisely in the future.
> Thanks to our lousy government run education, everyone thinks Lincoln abolished > slavery with his "Emancipation Proclamation". Read it. It allowed slavery in the north.
Actually, it allowed slavery in the south as well. The only slaves freed were those encountered by Union forces during the actual war. After Appomattox, southern slave owners who had managed to retain their slaves would have been permitted to keep them -- for the time being.
Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He had other priorities. He was willing to let slavery continue in the south for the time being, in exchange for other concessions. Lincoln did disagree in principle with slavery, but he was a liberal, not a radical. He believed in doing things gradually.
Abruptness is harmful. You free all the slaves at once, overnight, and you get exactly what we got: a sudden surplus of unskilled agricultural workers with no education, no property, nowhere to go, and no way to earn a living. Many of them were worse off than they had been before. Almost all of them had to go to work for former slave owners, doing the same kinds of things they'd done before, only now they were responsible for their own debts and bills, providing food and housing and whatnot for themselves and their children. The former slave owners were extremely unhappy with the situation and were not strongly inclined to pay more for the former slaves' wages than they had previously spent on their upkeep, and they were no longer required to provide benefits like free housing... It was a real mess for a long time. The descendants of the slaves *still* have lower average per-capita incomes and education levels than the rest of the population, going on a century and a half later. And we haven't even started talking about the bitterness and social upheaval and resentment...
On the other hand, if you do things more gradually... Say for instance you provide the children of slaves with the same education opportunities as other children, and free two-thirds of them at age 21. That's just *one* way to do things a bit more gradually.
Don't get me wrong: I have some philosophical objections to slavery in general, and numerous *very strong* moral and ethical objections to the way slavery was practiced in the US. It was an extremely egregiously bad system, and it absolutely had to go. I'm very glad we don't have that in this country any more. It's a system I wouldn't wish on anyone, even the gravest of enemies, and it's good that we're rid of it.
I'm just think the *details* of the way in which it was phased out were... suboptimal.
> Weren't the northern states, in the old system, capable of declining trade with slave-enabling states?
Wouldn't have accomplished anything. They could get what they needed from Europe.
It is true that the southern economy was not going to be long-term sustainable. Single-product economies never are, even if the single product is something as important as agriculture.
> I don't personally subscribe to the idea that "them states had slaves, they were e-veel, > so they must be stopped immediately!!!!
Neither do I, as such. Slavery, as it was practiced in the US south, was wrong. But a more gradual approach to phasing it out would probably have been better for all concerned -- including the slaves, or at least their great grandchildren.
The introduction of slaves' rights might have been a good step: the right not to be executed without a trial, for starters. (Granted, the trials wouldn't have been fair, especially at first. But you have to start somewhere.) The right to own property would have been a good one, and potentially could have led to the potential for (a very small minority of) slaves to buy their freedom -- something that had theoretically existed at one point but had been lost.
I tend to think the most important thing would have been to break the chain of inheritance. Under the system of slavery used in the US south, the child of a slave was born into slavery and remained a slave for life, and passed the slavery along to his (or her) children as well. This is perhaps *the* single most wrong thing about the way slavery worked in the US. Stopping that would have led eventually to fewer slaves and perhaps ultimately to abolition, after a few generations (assuming the Atlantic trade in new slaves from overseas was also ended, but I think it already had been, at least mostly, by the time of the war).
In some ways I kind of like the ancient Hebrew system, wherein you can fall into slavery through economic hardship, but you remain a slave for a maximum of six years and must be released in the seventh year. (It was actually more complicated, but that's the executive summary.) Indentured servitude in the new world was originally *ostensibly* supposed to work (approximately) that way, but in practice it never really did, at least not if your skin was dark. By the time of the US Civil War that was a mere footnote in the history books.
> That's why you had a civil war. People in the southern states were keeping slaves.
While the issue of slavery was a big issue, and was resolved because of the war, the war did not happen because of slavery. The US civil war was inevitable by the end of the revolution.
Okay, it's true that the "trigger issue" that set the thing off was the secession of South Carolina, and the main excuse for said secession was the slavery issue. But this only *caused* the war in the same sense that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused the Great War. It's what set the thing going, yes, but if it had not done so, something else would have come along and set it going at some point, probably sooner rather than later.
The real major driving issue behind the civil war was the strong correlation between geography, economy, and politics. You could get out a map and pretty much draw a line between the conservative, rural areas with a simple, primary (and to a large extent agrarian) economy, and on the other side of the line the liberal areas, with higher population density and a more complex (and more modern) economy. The south wanted protectionism. The north wanted a more laissez faire, free-market approach to economic issues. The south was mostly anti-federalist, believing strongly in reserving as many powers as possible to the states and the people, limiting the power of the federal government to the absolute minimum. The north mostly was largely federalist. The southern economy relied heavily on slavery; the northern states didn't even allow it. And so on and so forth.
A lot of people think Lincoln wanted to end slavery, and that's why the south seceded. In fact, he had no such intention. He opposed the unchecked *spread* of slavery to more and more states and territories, but he had no plans to suddenly put an immediate end to it in the south. That's the way things played out, but it wasn't what he had in mind before the war. South Carolina opposed Lincoln and seceded when he was elected for complex reasons, and his position on slavery was just one of several things they hated about the man. It was an excuse, and a rallying cry for other states, but the states-rights issue (i.e., antifederalism) was *also* an excuse and a rallying cry.
South Carolina seceded to prove that the state could do that, that the union with the rest of the country was strictly voluntary on the part of the state, and that the majority of the other states could *not* get together and decide things for them at a federal level. Slavery was *one* of the things they didn't want the federal government deciding for them. Tariffs were another. But the main thing is that the state government of South Carolina felt too much of their authority was being usurped. To them, Washington was the next London. The North didn't agree, because as far as they were concerned the south had full representation. South Carolina had as many US Senators as any other state, and Representatives proportional to their population, and so on and so forth, the same as any other state in the union.
As I said, slavery was a major issue, both in contributing to the war and in being resolved by the war. (The protectionism issue, in contrast, was not resolved until much later, if indeed it has been fully resolved, and there's some question about that.) But it was not, by itself, the cause of the war, nor was it the main thing the war was ultimately about.
And actually, the slavery issue might not have been as completely resolved by the war if Lincoln had not been assassinated. His plan for reconstruction did not include immediate abolition. He wanted to bar the major Confederate ringleaders from holding future political office and then let the southern states back into the union almost immediately, with the understanding that the issue of secession had been decided and it was not permitted. But Johnson wasn't able to make it work that way.
Incidentally, the GOP was the liberal party at the time, and the Dems were the conservatives. The history of how that got turned around is interesting in its own right.
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to entrust my medical care to a doctor who doesn't know basic organic chemistry.
I suppose it might depend a little on the specialty. Doctors who don't do anything but surgery, for instance, could probably get by without it. But for general practice, and especially for diagnosis of systemic conditions... how on earth would you understand what's going on in the human body -- especially when something is going wrong -- without a solid grounding in how the body is supposed to actually work?
Suck it up and take the class. You might learn something.
Except, he is using the domain to host a site that is clearly covering the *same topic* that the trademark refers to. From a trademark law perspective, that is going to very much work against him, because it makes for a strong case that he is infringing the mark, deliberately.
If the site were about something else, something not related to the Olympics (say, the 2016 most interesting things to do and see in the city of Chicago), he would have a rather better case, I should think.
IANAL, but I've read a lot of IP-law posts on slashdot.
Well, by the time the web was invented in the nineties, C and C++ were already fully developed languages, and already fully documented. Every comp sci program already had classes on it, too, and *most* of the people who were ever going to do serious programming in these languages were already doing it. New young aspiring programmers were picking up languages like Perl and Java (and later Python and Ruby).
That may not be the whole reason, but I bet it's got something to do with it.
I've seen QuickTime for Windows, and while the UI isn't very *good*, it's not nearly as bad as Real Player.
Granted, I'm kind of at a loss for why QuickTime for Windows needs to exist, given that the main purpose of QuickTime in the first place is to be the default/bundled media player on the Mac (which is what Windows Media Player is on Windows) and that anyone willing to download and install third-party freeware can easily find a much *better* media player (than either QT or WMP). Still, the UI isn't really where QT falls down. (If anything, WMP has a worse UI.) QT's real failings are that it doesn't support enough formats and doesn't have enough modern features (e.g., freedb support, proper playlists, volume normalization, scrobbling, the ability to call external commands when changing songs, you know, the useful stuff). Also, for Windows users, there's the fact that it doesn't really have any compelling feature that makes it worth the effort to replace the bundled WMP with it. It supports a couple of formats that WMP doesn't, but the reverse is true too, so that's a wash. If you're going to download a media player for better format support, you may as well get one that supports both WMP and QT formats, plus others (e.g., Vorbis).
But while QuickTime for Windows is certainly unnecessary, it's not as actively terrible as RealPlayer.
> In fact I've never seen an email client that couldn't [automatically check and notify]
A lot of older mail clients, especially Unix-oriented ones, don't do this in the mail reader because the expectation used to be that you would use a separate biff utility if you wanted that. This is changing, but gradually. Gnus, for instance, still doesn't do automatic new-mail notification last I checked, and it is a *very* powerful mail client in other respects. Having used Gnus, I tried to use Thunderbird for a while at work (people were raving about it...), and the lack of even the most basic functionality was so extreme in comparison to Gnus that it was *painful*. (It couldn't even properly rewrap quoted excerpts! And as for per-group configuration, forget about it.) I'm back to Gnus now, needless to say.
Personally I just check my mail about once a day and let it go at that, stuff that can't wait a day is normally handled by phone where I work, or in person. But if I wanted to know when I get new mail, it's not hard to set up a separate biff utility.
Indeed. The thing about email is that it doesn't interrupt you. You're supposed check it between times, when you *aren't* in the middle of doing something else.
From the summary: > people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing
This statement is true, but the article has the cause and the effect switched around.
The only people who check their email every five minutes are people who are looking for a way to waste some time, either because they've run out of work to do, or more likely because they don't want to do their work. If they didn't have email to check, they'd check the weather, change their wallpaper again, shuffle some papers around on their desks, or print out something unnecessarily just for a reason to walk to the printer and back and stop by the water cooler on the way. They'd probably play a couple of rounds of Minesweeper if they thought they could get away with it.
I mean, come on, every five *minutes*? That just screams "I'm bored and have nothing else to do."
> The reputation of the challenger has NOTHING to do with the > legitimacy of the challenge, which stands for itself.
On what basis? A double dog dare?
Sorry, that might work in sixth grade, but out here in the adult world I think most of the data recovery companies are run by... adults. A challenge issued by nobody in particular just doesn't provide any inherent incentive. Put something at stake that matters, like a well-known reputation, or some substantial money, and it'll get noticed.
> The only 'real' advantage to this program is that you can go into a store and buy it. It comes > from a semi-legit company and probably doesn't have too many spyware and popup modules included.
Umm, no. This doesn't come from a semi-legit company. It comes from RealNetworks, the same devious, inept, cretinous slimeballs responsible for RealAudio and RealVideo, among other things. Their software is always terrible in the uttermost extreme. I consider it to be a particularly egregious form of malware, worse in a lot of ways than a lot of the spyware that's out there.
Software distributed under the Real brand always has an unbelievably horrible user interface, always does a terrible job at its supposed function, if the user can figure out how to make it work at all, generally makes the computer run noticeably slower, and frequently causes other problems (e.g., system instability). Typically their software regularly pops up prompts for the user to upgrade to a newer version, then tries to get money out of the user for the upgrade.
Real lives on the fact that most end users don't know their track record and are too gullible to do much checking, so they believe the company's claims about what its software will do and so naively go ahead and install it. Which is ALWAYS a mistake.
> I don't think anyone was questioning why anyone would want to > copy DVD's - just why they'd want to do so with this program.
It's simple, really. There are a lot of people out there who are sufficiently gullible and forgetful that they are simply not aware of Real's long history of overtly user-hostile schenanighans. The website says, "these audio clips are in Real format, which you can play with the Real player, download it for free [link]", and the naive user just *believes* that the website is giving them a way to listen to audio clips, without asking "What's the catch?"
Of course, after they click the link they find out that it's a lot of hassle, and it has the worst user interface in the history of computing, and they never do actually figure out how to listen to the stupid audio clips on the website, but they do get prompted eighty times a month to upgrade the Real player, and the upgrade is a bait-and-switch in that there's a newer freeware version, but the upgrade thing tries hard to get them to buy the non-freeware version instead, and any audio you play with the thing sounds terrible, if you can ever even get it to play audio, which you often cannot, and the computer runs noticeably slower now, and...
Sure, everything Real has ever produced has been like that, so people who have been around the internet for a while theoretically *ought* to know what they're like. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows, right?
But normal users don't know. After a bad experience with RealAudio, when they see a website that has *video* in Real format, they come to me (since I'm the computer guy) all excited and say, "Can you install this video player for me? I need it to watch the video clips on [site]." And I say, "Umm, this is Real. Their software is terrible. You don't want this on your computer." And they look at me funny and say, "But I want to watch the videos!" End users don't think about things like who made the software, and what implications that might have. To them, that's highly technical, and they think it's irrelevant to their lives. All they want to know is what button they have to push to listen to the stupid audio clips, watch the stupid videos, or copy the stupid DVDs.
My advice to sysadmins is to preemptively install some half-decent DVD-copying software now, even if it's not needed. Because you don't want your users trying to install a Real product. Nothing good can come from that.
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Have you looked at mailreader market share stats lately? It's something like 40% webmail, 20% Outlook, and 2% or less each of about eighty different mailreaders, each of whose fans are insistent that it's the best one. If you'd asked me to list thirty of them at random, I don't think Windows Mail would have probably made the list. Power users prefer more advanced things (Pegasus, Gnus, Eudora, ...). Corporate Windows users mostly have Outlook, and nearly everybody else in the Windows world is either on whatever their ISP bundles in the connection/setup kit, or else webmail.
> As long as they make sure that OEMs include some...
> Else customers will not be too happy out of the box.
Meh. We're talking about "apps" like Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker. In other words, not actual applications that people actually use. (I've never even encountered *anecdotal* evidence of anyone using any of those. In fact, I'd forgotten that Windows Mail was still being produced; the last time I remember seeing it was on Windows 95 OSR2. I only know about the other two because a default install of XP features their icons somewhat prominently in the Start menu.)
Honestly, the users aren't going to so much as notice that they're gone.
Now, if they got rid of WordPad or Internet Explorer or even Paint, that would be a somewhat different thing. But there's no reason to suppose that those would be on the axe list.
You don't need SPF to do this if you only need to receive mail from known parties and/or with known characteristics (e.g., a known mailing list you subscribe to in the To: field, a known flag string in the Subject field, etc). Just write your filters to pick up legitimate mail and plop it in the folders you read regularly, and the spam goes into the unsorted, unfiltered inbox, which you only look through when you have time to kill and/or a reason to believe you've missed a message. This is essentially what I do now. And it kind of works. Almost.
This kind of system (i.e., whitelist filtering) is a long way from perfect, though, especially if you'd like to be reachable by people whose messages you (and your filters) don't know to look for. And I'm not sure what the digital signatures would add, honestly, even if *everyone* used them. The spammers don't know my friends' email addresses and whatnot to fake them. Okay, yeah, I'm sure the spammers *have* my friends' email addresses, but they don't know that those email addresses are ones that *I*, in particular, normally expect to receive mail from, so they're no more likely to send me fake mail "from" those addresses than any of the hillion jillion other addresses in their vast databases. Occasionally a spam message does trip one of my subject-line filters by pure dumb luck, but the volume of such messages is very low (lower than the volume of legitimate messages), so it's not a very big deal.
The bigger problem is that I can't easily make myself publicly reachable under such a system. I can't just stick my email address in the signature/footer/sidebar/whatever of my website/blog/slashdot-profile/whatever and thus enable people who read it and want to respond to easily contact me. I mean, yes, I can tell them "put the word todhsals in the subject line", but that's an ugly annoying pain and has a lot of shortcomings. And it has to be different from what everyone else is doing, because if it becomes standardized the spammers will quickly implement it. But digital signatures don't solve this problem at all, because there's no way for my filtering rules to distinguish between the digital signatures of strangers and the digital signatures of spammers. Spammers can generate digital signatures just as well as anyone else. New ones, based on new keys, for each message, if necessary.
The article discusses pull technology, wherein the sending mail server would inform the recipient's mail server, basically, "I have a message for your user with such-and-such address, and he can retrieve it with this magic token message id", and then when the recipient checks his mail the mail client software gets these notices (basically a list of tuples, where each tuple has, at minimum, the sender's mail server, whence the message can be retrieved, and the magic token or message id that you ask for to get it). There could also be other metadata, such as the sender's return address. The client software then goes down this list and attempts to retrieve the messages; any it can't retrieve right now (e.g., because the sender's mail server is experiencing technical difficulties), it can save the metadata and try again later. This isn't perfect either, but it would have certain advantages, most notably that the sending mail server uses more resources than the receiving mail server, which shifts the economics in the recipient's favor. To my way of thinking, that would be a big deal. You'd still get some junk mail, of course. You get junk mail through the postal service, after all, when the sender pays postage. But there are limits to how *much* junk mail you get with sender-pays economics. It's a manageable flow. You could potentially actually take the time to glance at each subject line individually and decide whether to read the message, without having to quit your day job to keep up.
Of course, the existing email infrastructure (notably, SMTP and POP3) can't be retrofit with this, because it's different at the design level. We'd need new protocols and, t
> I don't understand this. Why wouldn't the former slave owner agree to the same arrangements as before?
In short, because he's extremely peeved. After a very bloody and unpleasant war, which stripped the south of a lot of its resources, now Congress has been totally taken over completely not just by northerners (southern states were at this point not permitted representation), which would be bad enough, but in particular things are now being run largely by the *radical* northerners, and they're gleefully (and arrogantly) enacting said former slave owner's worst nightmares, and crowing about it.
This period in history is generally known as "reconstruction", but to a lot of southerners at the time it felt more like a second destruction. And they were not pleased.
Of course, many of them weren't going to be *very* pleased with any outcome that involved the union's winning and the dismantling of the confederacy. But after Lincoln's assassination, the kinder, gentler plan for reconstruction was set aside in favor of a harsher, more brutal version. Vengeance, if you will.
I think we're mostly over this now, and there is little real animosity left at this point. But it has taken a long time (err, well, a long time in American terms, as in, "The British think a hundred miles is a long way, and the Americans think a hundred years is a long time). And maybe I am missing the full extent of the animosity that is does remain, because I have spent very little time in the south -- very little, as in, measured in weeks, in single digits, over the course of my whole life.
Note that I mean there's very little real animosity systemically, looking at our society as a whole. Obviously there are individual people who have animosity aimed in various directions. But overall at this point I don't think northerners versus southerners is a much bigger feud for in our society than, say, jocks versus nerds. Again, though, I don't live in the south, so I guess I could be missing something.
But in the years following the war, it was a very different thing. People were *extremely* upset, and a lot of them behaved rather... emotionally.
PC-DOS 3.3 will boot in under twenty seconds at 4.mumble MHz, so on modern hardware it ought to be right near instantaneous. Back in the day I used an extremely cuspy little text editor called UED (short for "useful editor"), which I'm sure is still floating around and available someplace or another. (It was at one point distributed along with the DOS version of Online Bible. This was in the days before Windows came pre-installed on new computers, when most consumer software was still written for DOS, or in some cases for Mac and DOS.) UED doesn't have huge piles of features, but it can open up to nine files at a time, cut/copy/paste between them in full lines, traditional ranges, or rectangular blocks, among other features. (The handling of rectangular blocks is actually significantly better than in Emacs.) Its menu system is very straightforward, and everything is very discoverable. Oh, and it's small. (The version I have is 38704 bytes. Yes, I still have it sitting around, though I haven't attempted to use it lately, since I'm comfortable with Emacs now.)
One cool thing about this kind of option is that the partition you use for it can be a *tiny* (as in, measured in kilobytes, depending on how much data you need to be able to store there at once) FAT16 system, or even FAT12. Then in your main OS you can just mount it and copy/move the text files over, possibly in an init or login script. It takes up so little drive space, the menu configuration stuff to get the boot loader to offer it to you as an option on power-up is actually a significant fraction.
And speed? Oh, yes. I've used DOS 5 and UED on a Pentium II system (233 MHz), and it really screams. Greased lightning on wet ice, man. Makes vim look like molasses on a cold February night.
Yeah, I had one of those big yellow onions once. I didn't put it on my belt, though, on account of the fact that I didn't own any belts at the time. See, I know a lot of people use belts as fashion accessories, but I tend to use them to keep my pants up, only back in '64 all my pants actually fit properly, not like now, because back then they sold pants that were the same size it said on the label, and the fit pretty well. These days I always have to get a belt, because the pants don't fit right, but back then, they did. As Wacko Warner says, if the pants don't fit, you must acquit! So anyway, I didn't put the onion on my belt, but I kept it around for a while, and then when it started to go soft I sliced it up, fried the slices, and made sandwiches with watercress, fried onion slices, and chunky peanut butter, on pumpernickle bread. Pumpernickle has always been one of my absolute favorites.
Sorry, I inadvertently left out the word "immediately". You are correct that Lincoln anticipated a future when slavery would eventually be abolished. But my intended point was that he didn't plan to eliminate slavery during his own term of office. He was going to leave it for someone else to do later.
> How can it have had value to him because of a trademark that didn't exist when he registered it?
It had value to him because he was speculating that the trademark in question might exist in the future (and, indeed, now it does). It is evident upon even a cursory examination of the site that he indeed registered the domain for the express purpose of being in this position in the event that the city of Chicago decided to bid for the Olympics in that year. Go look at the site, and this will become clear to you. His whole purpose here is to gain a popular site based on the effort and money that someone else is putting into marketing the phrase "Chicago 2016", by having a site with the same name and a URL based on that name and gaining free benefit from the other party's advertising. This is *exactly* what trademark law exists to prevent. Saying "but he was *first*" doesn't change that.
> His site isn't commercial, has no ads and only accepts donations to fight this legal challenge
> so there is no financial motive here.
That may limit somewhat the monetary damages they can collect.
> Except of course for the fact that he bought the domain and created his site before the trademark
> came into being. Indeed before Chicago even decided to bid for the Olympics. His site is a
> discussion of the possible costs of a hypothetical bid for the 2016 Olympics.
Umm, sure. Good luck getting the court to buy that. Sounds like a disingenuous sophistry to me. The word "hypothetical" seems particularly unlikely to play.
He may have been speculating beforehand, and Chicago may not have made its final decision yet when he registered the thing, but he's still deliberately drawing on the success of someone else's action and marketing and whatnot, attempting to benefit from the effort they are putting into promoting the mark.
> The idea that he can be forced to give up the name because it is now a trademark is ridiculous.
The issue is that the name has value to him primarily *because* of the other party's trademark. Chronology isn't really the issue. He appears to be going out of his way to benefit from somebody else's investment in promoting the mark. It's practically a textbook case.
> Much like if I started an international punctuation competition called Slash Dot
> and then demanded ownership of slashdot.org.
In that case, the creators of slashdot.org did not register that domain in anticipation that you might be creating said punctuation competition, and the site is not in any way *related* to your punctuation competition, nor are they attempting to take advantage of your investment in *promoting* said competition. That last point, from what I understand, is a particularly major big deal for trademark law.
As with any really close election, a lot of people felt that their candidate was cheated. The resentment will last until the losing party (in this case the Dems) gets one of their candidates into the office, and then over the next few years it will fade. We'll know it's mended when we have a landslide election again.
> I think you'd be hard pressed to claim that the current electoral system is ideal.
I don't know that I'd use the word "ideal", but I will say that designing a better system would be much harder than most people realize. There are some subtle things that the current system does that are very beneficial. Among other things, both major political parties are drawn toward the center, and toward moderation, as they seek to make their candidates viable in the (relatively) moderate swing states. This leaves a lot of people dissatisfied, feeling that their party doesn't really represent them, that they compromise too much, and so on. But it de-emphasizes the major political differences across geographical lines and helps to hold us together, and that's a pretty big deal.
> And the failures, as 2000 showed, are fairly catastrophic (i don't mean Bush's policies.
> I mean the turmoil, and lack of clarity)
There are always going to be close elections, in any system that has legitimate, free elections. We've had it before (e.g., Truman), and I imagine we'll have it again. People feel robbed, yes, and believe their candidate was cheated, and all that. But it's better than the alternative.
When none of the elections are close, it's because there's only one viable candidate. We usually consider those governments to be dictatorships.
A landslide now and then is okay, even good. But if *every* election is a landslide, you have a big problem.
> I'm just think the *details* of the way in which it was phased out were... suboptimal.
And, incidentally, I think there are lessons we can learn from that, which we might do well to pay attention to if we're going to phase out anything else that we think is wrong and needs to be phased out. I won't name any specific thing (if nothing else because comparing any of our current problems to slavery would be flamebait of the worst kind). But in general I think we should study the past and try to learn from it so as to do things more carefully and wisely in the future.
> Thanks to our lousy government run education, everyone thinks Lincoln abolished
> slavery with his "Emancipation Proclamation". Read it. It allowed slavery in the north.
Actually, it allowed slavery in the south as well. The only slaves freed were those encountered by Union forces during the actual war. After Appomattox, southern slave owners who had managed to retain their slaves would have been permitted to keep them -- for the time being.
Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He had other priorities. He was willing to let slavery continue in the south for the time being, in exchange for other concessions. Lincoln did disagree in principle with slavery, but he was a liberal, not a radical. He believed in doing things gradually.
Abruptness is harmful. You free all the slaves at once, overnight, and you get exactly what we got: a sudden surplus of unskilled agricultural workers with no education, no property, nowhere to go, and no way to earn a living. Many of them were worse off than they had been before. Almost all of them had to go to work for former slave owners, doing the same kinds of things they'd done before, only now they were responsible for their own debts and bills, providing food and housing and whatnot for themselves and their children. The former slave owners were extremely unhappy with the situation and were not strongly inclined to pay more for the former slaves' wages than they had previously spent on their upkeep, and they were no longer required to provide benefits like free housing... It was a real mess for a long time. The descendants of the slaves *still* have lower average per-capita incomes and education levels than the rest of the population, going on a century and a half later. And we haven't even started talking about the bitterness and social upheaval and resentment...
On the other hand, if you do things more gradually... Say for instance you provide the children of slaves with the same education opportunities as other children, and free two-thirds of them at age 21. That's just *one* way to do things a bit more gradually.
Don't get me wrong: I have some philosophical objections to slavery in general, and numerous *very strong* moral and ethical objections to the way slavery was practiced in the US. It was an extremely egregiously bad system, and it absolutely had to go. I'm very glad we don't have that in this country any more. It's a system I wouldn't wish on anyone, even the gravest of enemies, and it's good that we're rid of it.
I'm just think the *details* of the way in which it was phased out were... suboptimal.
> Weren't the northern states, in the old system, capable of declining trade with slave-enabling states?
Wouldn't have accomplished anything. They could get what they needed from Europe.
It is true that the southern economy was not going to be long-term sustainable. Single-product economies never are, even if the single product is something as important as agriculture.
> I don't personally subscribe to the idea that "them states had slaves, they were e-veel,
> so they must be stopped immediately!!!!
Neither do I, as such. Slavery, as it was practiced in the US south, was wrong. But a more gradual approach to phasing it out would probably have been better for all concerned -- including the slaves, or at least their great grandchildren.
The introduction of slaves' rights might have been a good step: the right not to be executed without a trial, for starters. (Granted, the trials wouldn't have been fair, especially at first. But you have to start somewhere.) The right to own property would have been a good one, and potentially could have led to the potential for (a very small minority of) slaves to buy their freedom -- something that had theoretically existed at one point but had been lost.
I tend to think the most important thing would have been to break the chain of inheritance. Under the system of slavery used in the US south, the child of a slave was born into slavery and remained a slave for life, and passed the slavery along to his (or her) children as well. This is perhaps *the* single most wrong thing about the way slavery worked in the US. Stopping that would have led eventually to fewer slaves and perhaps ultimately to abolition, after a few generations (assuming the Atlantic trade in new slaves from overseas was also ended, but I think it already had been, at least mostly, by the time of the war).
In some ways I kind of like the ancient Hebrew system, wherein you can fall into slavery through economic hardship, but you remain a slave for a maximum of six years and must be released in the seventh year. (It was actually more complicated, but that's the executive summary.) Indentured servitude in the new world was originally *ostensibly* supposed to work (approximately) that way, but in practice it never really did, at least not if your skin was dark. By the time of the US Civil War that was a mere footnote in the history books.
> That's why you had a civil war. People in the southern states were keeping slaves.
While the issue of slavery was a big issue, and was resolved because of the war, the war did not happen because of slavery. The US civil war was inevitable by the end of the revolution.
Okay, it's true that the "trigger issue" that set the thing off was the secession of South Carolina, and the main excuse for said secession was the slavery issue. But this only *caused* the war in the same sense that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused the Great War. It's what set the thing going, yes, but if it had not done so, something else would have come along and set it going at some point, probably sooner rather than later.
The real major driving issue behind the civil war was the strong correlation between geography, economy, and politics. You could get out a map and pretty much draw a line between the conservative, rural areas with a simple, primary (and to a large extent agrarian) economy, and on the other side of the line the liberal areas, with higher population density and a more complex (and more modern) economy. The south wanted protectionism. The north wanted a more laissez faire, free-market approach to economic issues. The south was mostly anti-federalist, believing strongly in reserving as many powers as possible to the states and the people, limiting the power of the federal government to the absolute minimum. The north mostly was largely federalist. The southern economy relied heavily on slavery; the northern states didn't even allow it. And so on and so forth.
A lot of people think Lincoln wanted to end slavery, and that's why the south seceded. In fact, he had no such intention. He opposed the unchecked *spread* of slavery to more and more states and territories, but he had no plans to suddenly put an immediate end to it in the south. That's the way things played out, but it wasn't what he had in mind before the war. South Carolina opposed Lincoln and seceded when he was elected for complex reasons, and his position on slavery was just one of several things they hated about the man. It was an excuse, and a rallying cry for other states, but the states-rights issue (i.e., antifederalism) was *also* an excuse and a rallying cry.
South Carolina seceded to prove that the state could do that, that the union with the rest of the country was strictly voluntary on the part of the state, and that the majority of the other states could *not* get together and decide things for them at a federal level. Slavery was *one* of the things they didn't want the federal government deciding for them. Tariffs were another. But the main thing is that the state government of South Carolina felt too much of their authority was being usurped. To them, Washington was the next London. The North didn't agree, because as far as they were concerned the south had full representation. South Carolina had as many US Senators as any other state, and Representatives proportional to their population, and so on and so forth, the same as any other state in the union.
As I said, slavery was a major issue, both in contributing to the war and in being resolved by the war. (The protectionism issue, in contrast, was not resolved until much later, if indeed it has been fully resolved, and there's some question about that.) But it was not, by itself, the cause of the war, nor was it the main thing the war was ultimately about.
And actually, the slavery issue might not have been as completely resolved by the war if Lincoln had not been assassinated. His plan for reconstruction did not include immediate abolition. He wanted to bar the major Confederate ringleaders from holding future political office and then let the southern states back into the union almost immediately, with the understanding that the issue of secession had been decided and it was not permitted. But Johnson wasn't able to make it work that way.
Incidentally, the GOP was the liberal party at the time, and the Dems were the conservatives. The history of how that got turned around is interesting in its own right.
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to entrust my medical care to a doctor who doesn't know basic organic chemistry.
I suppose it might depend a little on the specialty. Doctors who don't do anything but surgery, for instance, could probably get by without it. But for general practice, and especially for diagnosis of systemic conditions... how on earth would you understand what's going on in the human body -- especially when something is going wrong -- without a solid grounding in how the body is supposed to actually work?
Suck it up and take the class. You might learn something.
Except, he is using the domain to host a site that is clearly covering the *same topic* that the trademark refers to. From a trademark law perspective, that is going to very much work against him, because it makes for a strong case that he is infringing the mark, deliberately.
If the site were about something else, something not related to the Olympics (say, the 2016 most interesting things to do and see in the city of Chicago), he would have a rather better case, I should think.
IANAL, but I've read a lot of IP-law posts on slashdot.
Well, by the time the web was invented in the nineties, C and C++ were already fully developed languages, and already fully documented. Every comp sci program already had classes on it, too, and *most* of the people who were ever going to do serious programming in these languages were already doing it. New young aspiring programmers were picking up languages like Perl and Java (and later Python and Ruby).
That may not be the whole reason, but I bet it's got something to do with it.
I would rate search.cpan.org as the most useful site I have encountered for any programming language.
I've seen QuickTime for Windows, and while the UI isn't very *good*, it's not nearly as bad as Real Player.
Granted, I'm kind of at a loss for why QuickTime for Windows needs to exist, given that the main purpose of QuickTime in the first place is to be the default/bundled media player on the Mac (which is what Windows Media Player is on Windows) and that anyone willing to download and install third-party freeware can easily find a much *better* media player (than either QT or WMP). Still, the UI isn't really where QT falls down. (If anything, WMP has a worse UI.) QT's real failings are that it doesn't support enough formats and doesn't have enough modern features (e.g., freedb support, proper playlists, volume normalization, scrobbling, the ability to call external commands when changing songs, you know, the useful stuff). Also, for Windows users, there's the fact that it doesn't really have any compelling feature that makes it worth the effort to replace the bundled WMP with it. It supports a couple of formats that WMP doesn't, but the reverse is true too, so that's a wash. If you're going to download a media player for better format support, you may as well get one that supports both WMP and QT formats, plus others (e.g., Vorbis).
But while QuickTime for Windows is certainly unnecessary, it's not as actively terrible as RealPlayer.
> In fact I've never seen an email client that couldn't [automatically check and notify]
A lot of older mail clients, especially Unix-oriented ones, don't do this in the mail reader because the expectation used to be that you would use a separate biff utility if you wanted that. This is changing, but gradually. Gnus, for instance, still doesn't do automatic new-mail notification last I checked, and it is a *very* powerful mail client in other respects. Having used Gnus, I tried to use Thunderbird for a while at work (people were raving about it...), and the lack of even the most basic functionality was so extreme in comparison to Gnus that it was *painful*. (It couldn't even properly rewrap quoted excerpts! And as for per-group configuration, forget about it.) I'm back to Gnus now, needless to say.
Personally I just check my mail about once a day and let it go at that, stuff that can't wait a day is normally handled by phone where I work, or in person. But if I wanted to know when I get new mail, it's not hard to set up a separate biff utility.
Indeed. The thing about email is that it doesn't interrupt you. You're supposed check it between times, when you *aren't* in the middle of doing something else.
From the summary:
> people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing
This statement is true, but the article has the cause and the effect switched around.
The only people who check their email every five minutes are people who are looking for a way to waste some time, either because they've run out of work to do, or more likely because they don't want to do their work. If they didn't have email to check, they'd check the weather, change their wallpaper again, shuffle some papers around on their desks, or print out something unnecessarily just for a reason to walk to the printer and back and stop by the water cooler on the way. They'd probably play a couple of rounds of Minesweeper if they thought they could get away with it.
I mean, come on, every five *minutes*? That just screams "I'm bored and have nothing else to do."
> The reputation of the challenger has NOTHING to do with the
> legitimacy of the challenge, which stands for itself.
On what basis? A double dog dare?
Sorry, that might work in sixth grade, but out here in the adult world I think most of the data recovery companies are run by... adults. A challenge issued by nobody in particular just doesn't provide any inherent incentive. Put something at stake that matters, like a well-known reputation, or some substantial money, and it'll get noticed.
> The only 'real' advantage to this program is that you can go into a store and buy it. It comes
> from a semi-legit company and probably doesn't have too many spyware and popup modules included.
Umm, no. This doesn't come from a semi-legit company. It comes from RealNetworks, the same devious, inept, cretinous slimeballs responsible for RealAudio and RealVideo, among other things. Their software is always terrible in the uttermost extreme. I consider it to be a particularly egregious form of malware, worse in a lot of ways than a lot of the spyware that's out there.
Software distributed under the Real brand always has an unbelievably horrible user interface, always does a terrible job at its supposed function, if the user can figure out how to make it work at all, generally makes the computer run noticeably slower, and frequently causes other problems (e.g., system instability). Typically their software regularly pops up prompts for the user to upgrade to a newer version, then tries to get money out of the user for the upgrade.
Real lives on the fact that most end users don't know their track record and are too gullible to do much checking, so they believe the company's claims about what its software will do and so naively go ahead and install it. Which is ALWAYS a mistake.
> I don't think anyone was questioning why anyone would want to
> copy DVD's - just why they'd want to do so with this program.
It's simple, really. There are a lot of people out there who are sufficiently gullible and forgetful that they are simply not aware of Real's long history of overtly user-hostile schenanighans. The website says, "these audio clips are in Real format, which you can play with the Real player, download it for free [link]", and the naive user just *believes* that the website is giving them a way to listen to audio clips, without asking "What's the catch?"
Of course, after they click the link they find out that it's a lot of hassle, and it has the worst user interface in the history of computing, and they never do actually figure out how to listen to the stupid audio clips on the website, but they do get prompted eighty times a month to upgrade the Real player, and the upgrade is a bait-and-switch in that there's a newer freeware version, but the upgrade thing tries hard to get them to buy the non-freeware version instead, and any audio you play with the thing sounds terrible, if you can ever even get it to play audio, which you often cannot, and the computer runs noticeably slower now, and...
Sure, everything Real has ever produced has been like that, so people who have been around the internet for a while theoretically *ought* to know what they're like. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows, right?
But normal users don't know. After a bad experience with RealAudio, when they see a website that has *video* in Real format, they come to me (since I'm the computer guy) all excited and say, "Can you install this video player for me? I need it to watch the video clips on [site]." And I say, "Umm, this is Real. Their software is terrible. You don't want this on your computer." And they look at me funny and say, "But I want to watch the videos!" End users don't think about things like who made the software, and what implications that might have. To them, that's highly technical, and they think it's irrelevant to their lives. All they want to know is what button they have to push to listen to the stupid audio clips, watch the stupid videos, or copy the stupid DVDs.
My advice to sysadmins is to preemptively install some half-decent DVD-copying software now, even if it's not needed. Because you don't want your users trying to install a Real product. Nothing good can come from that.