Wow, getting your office raided by armed police... on the strength of an anonymous tip-off... for (alledgedly) having unlicensed software?! Call me a cynical commie, but I'm not exactly quaking in my boots that the chain of local corner shops might be using a dodgy version of office. Not that this system is open to abuse or anything...
Hello, BSA? I have reason to believe that my ex-company are using illegal software!
What?! What's the address? 1 Microsoft Way. They're using using modified GPL code in a *shipping operating system*
*click* Was it something I said?
Bearing a resemblence to reality doesn't make any sense in the RIAA universe. I think they're currently lobbying to make reality a punishable offence.
As an aside, the RIAA don't just make this stuff up. You need to have had about a kilo of marching powder up your nose before you start thinking up numbers as big as that. Observe this example:
Non-coked-up RIAA executive 1: So how much did we lose to downloading this year? Non-coked-up RIAA executive 2: Well, when you factor in the fact that most of what we call "pirates" wouldn't buy it anyway... maybe 5% of our revenue, tops Non-coked-up RIAA executive 1: Hmm, we need to think about expanding into new markets if we're going to stay relevant with both musicians and listeners.
Once more, with feeling:
Coked-up RIAA executive 1: Fuck! How much did we lose to those dealers... I mean students... those internet people? Coked-up RIAA executive 2: What? I thought we were talking about how great a businessman I am? Coked-up RIAA executive 1: Dude, we're trying to write a report here, we need to know how much money we need to cover our... er... habit next year Coked-up RIAA executive 2: Fuck yeah! Uh. Gotta be at least half a billion dollars. Coked-up RIAA executive 1: You going to this meeting about this fucking proposal for an online store in the morning? Coked-up RIAA executive 2: Fuck that, it's Shanamarie's album party tonight, I'm gonna be so high I reckon I'll see the future
N.B. this really was taken from an actual transcript that my Secret Hidden Spy Network got to me. Names have been removed to protect the guilty.
P.S. I do not endorse the taking of cocaine. You should pay for it like everyone else.
Thanks for the Creel reference, I'd never seen the name mentioned before (but was aware of the misonfirmation campaign during Woodrow Wilson's administration); it's generally only the european side of WW1 that's common knowledge over here. Some interesting reading coming up:)
...if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Ooops, sorry, insta-Godwin.
But we see the same tactics from the RIAA all the time - persistently referring to copyright infringement as stealing (maybe I should redefine "RIAA executive" as "sex offender"? I'd love to be able to change the meanings of legally applicable terms to suit my preference), persistently telling us that "piracy" loses a magical $X billion from the economy every year, that it supports terrorism/drug dealers/the mafia/anyone else seen as "bad". Lies. More lies. TFA (a good, polite rant) is just a catalogue of their lies and, occasionally spin-tastic back-pedalling. And yet such an organisation is not only allowed to exist, but to get in bed with the government too? And now they want to get their greasy paws on every privately owned internet connection in the US?
Sorry, no. I think my insta-Godwin was half-warranted in the case of these capricious fucks.
There's someone pimping the stock in the comments there. Oddly enough, the site he links to is an analyst firm with a front page consisting entirely of... Qtrax pimpage http://www.positionmakers.com/
I keep hearing you Americans say this, but I don't think it's sinking in and I still find it mind boggling:) Heck, I wouldn't see the point in owning a personal phone if I had to pay to receive calls (currently have a crackberry provided by work and a venerable 6130i for personal use). Does this mean businesses get arsey if you *receive* lots of personal calls on your mobile?! hHell, there was a huge stink back here a few years ago when Vodafone allowed a bunch of spammers to flood users with SMS - if people had actually had to pay for them heads would have rolled. I really, really can't get my head around why anyone would be prepared to accept a pay-to-receive model, we tried that with our postmen a couple of hundred years ago and it didn't work then either. I assume you're not given a huge amount of choice in your contracts?
Heck, if you're on a UK contract plan as opposed to PayG, same-carrier calls are either completely free or just discounted from your "free minutes". In fact, most call plans take all calls (mobile > mobile, mobile > other carrier mobile, mobile > landline) out of your free minutes pool these days. It's like someone finally extended the idea behing IP peering agreements to the mobile telcos.
Utterly mind boggling. Is there no-one in the states who offers a "pay to send, free to receive" tariff on the model of, erm, practically every other type of delivery service I've ever heard of?
Good job I'm not planning to visit the states any time soon, I object to having to pay to be spammed (even if it's from people I know) on principle.
They don't care enough about it to justify the billions spent on the spectrum, at least here in the UK. Sure, there are plenty of people, like you and me and some people in the company I work for, who care about being able to chuck a USB modem in their laptop and get a 1Mb/s connection over the corporate VPN. Or just to check their hotmail.
But the vast, vast majority of people barely notice the different between GPRS and 3G because they use it so little. If it takes ten seconds longer to download a ringtone, no-one cares. Heck, my crackberry only does GPRS and EDGE and, frankly, the difference in browsing the web between the two is so marginal that if I was told I could get a cheaper GPRS-only tariff I wouldn't hesitate.
But as it is, the networks are saddled with a huge debt that has to be passed onto customers. They've done this by trying to make 3G "essential" but the simple truth is the majority of people are perfectly happy living without it, even the ringtone craze seems to have died down considerably.
*anecdote != data. Datapoints taken from MrNemesis' UK perspective may not be applicable in other geographical locales, except for T-Mobile, you suck the world over;)
Jesus fuck, you make me ashamed to be male. I realise that stereotypically we geeks are all meant to be socially malignant outcasts who couldn't get a snog for toffee, but we're also stereotypically meant to use our brains for thinking.
In either case, WTF is going on there? I don't expect digital flaws- even minor ones- on stuff from iTunes, and I certainly don't expect them on my CDs!
Feel your pain on that one. Bought an album from UK's 7digital that was full of clicks and pops; tech support didn't want to look at the problem unless I outlined every single click and pop in every track with a timestamp. WTF?! I'm meant to be the paying customer, not one of your Q&A team. I could understand the issue if there was just one or two clicks and pops, but on some of the tracks (which I outlined in my email) there's literally one every five seconds.
Cue the fact that you can't download an entier album either (unless you install their "media management" app which, quelle surprise, isn't available for Linux and in any case I'm against the idea on principle) and I'm no longer a 7digital customer. Roll on amazon.co.uk!
GP was basing his post on the people who *run* the scientoogy racket, not the exploited sheeple who follow it. His stance, which I largely agree with, is that the people at the top don't believe it.
I know it's terrible form to reply to oneself, but I've just realised* that "The Church of Scientology" is an anagram of "Tech go filch tunes, cry ooh!" - if that isn't enough evidence for an RIAA lawsuit of titanic proportions I don't know what is.
* i.e. put it into the anagram finder at wordsmith.org
What's the old saying? I know enough about religion to know how to exploit it?
Likewise, I don't believe the bosses of scientology believe it any more than Hubbard did. But it'd be nice to see some Mutually Assured Destruction between two parties who actually seem to deserve it. It's difficult not to get in a bad mood when any article involves either of those two organisations. Think I'm going to need to include Cheney and co. in my next flight of ruinous fantasy at this rate.
Even better; tell the RIAA that the Church of Scientology is a massive front for copying CD's. Simultaneously, tell the scientologists that the RIAA are planning to clone Xenu from some evil thetans that were surgically extracted from Britney.
Unstoppable force, meet immovable object. Space DC-10's dropping atom bombs on volcanoes will be nothing compared to those fireworks:)
WMP itself might only be 20MB of code, but that'll mostly be the GUI. The nuts'n'bolts of WMP lies inside DirectX, namely DirectShow, which is the accelerated API that codecs use for displaying moving images. Ever notice how when WMP b0rks playing videos they generally won't work in MPC or PowerDVD or any of the other DShow-based players either, yet will work with VLC or mPlayer (which have self-contained codec libs)?
In essence, they're all multimedia frameworks - DirectShow, Quicktime, GStreamer to name but three. The GUI that lies on top of them is largely irrelevant. They'll all take a specific input at one end, decode it into an internal format and let it pass through a bunch of common filters, until it ends up on your screen (or through your speakers in the case of audio frameworks). That way you only need to code most things once, and you just need a H.264 > DShow codec instead of an H.264 > NotDShow + nine million filters that are already part of every other NotDShow codec.
Not trying to absolve them here; if this is true, then Apple are idiots for letting this pass through testing and I pity anyone this lands on. But the crux of the matter is that multimedia frameworks are fecking complicated, more so when "defective by design" philosophy is applied. I don't know how much AfterEffects relies on the QT framework (there are loads of audio and video editing apps that eschew OS-specific frameworks in lieu of ones that might be faster, or more royalty free, or more customisable, etc), but it's obvious that something essential to it does.
MSI are releasing an x86 board with EFI instead of legacy BIOS soon. I'd be interested to see if OSX would run on that natively. As other people have said, OSX checks for a TPM chip that advertises itself as "certified Apple" hardware. If it's not there, the kernel stops booting.
Thanks to the fact it's open source, you can NOOP those chunks of code out and build your own kernel with blackjack and hookers, but fact of the matter is Apple is using DRM to stop their software being used on non-approved hardware.
Ditto, I find IM invaluable at work. When I just need an answer to "what server does $app" live on?", I IM. When we're discussing some techie points on some projects, we email. Two different tools for two different types of communications.
All the IM stuff is logged but only in the event of an audit. Keeping all of the techie correspondents in your email means that writing the doc the night before the projects goes live (our projects tend to be short, on the order of 1-2 months so it rarely mounts up to a huge amount) is usually little more than grepping through your mailbox, pasting and making spelling/grammar corrections.
...but the proceedings would take years, by which point the "windows comes with office free!" already has an entrenched user base. Cue people moaning about how the evil EU is trying to make computers little more than a stone tablet and chisel at the expense of the good ol' US of A.
Personally, I'd just like them to force them to open every file format and network protocol to every EU citizen FOR FREE, unlike the 10,000 Euros they're currently (indirectly) charging the Samba project for the latest copy of the SMB/CIFS spec (also under an NDA so it's illegal to re-post the docs, it has to be implemented in source code only).
That's an easy one to explain, OSX was initially designed to be deliberately slow and they've just taken out increasing amounts of sleep() calls from the code with every major release so that they can claim they've magically made it faster.
As further testament to the genius of Jobs, he then sold all the sleep()'s to the project lead for Vista under the guise of a "technology partnership" contract.
How much would you bet that a sizable %age of non-techies, when they noticed that $SHOW could no longer be downloaded, plugged "$SHOW download" into google and found no less than three torrent sites on the first page?
Sod the game - if there was an open source, cross-platform hardware, architecture agnostic accelerated RT API available (I'm assuming that vendor-specific OpenRT acceleration a la nVidia's OGL would still be closed source) that made RT viable for the mainstream (either for gaming or CAD/animation work), there'd be practically no difference between MS and everything else either for gaming (including consoles) or 3D workstation work, and D3D would no longer be the de feacto standard for accelerated 3D - that'd be a BIG win for open standards.
We have the same problem at work too; desktop crap that results in the machines taking forever to start up (10-15mins), the biggest culprint being the Odyssey wireless client on the laptops (even if you use the RF killswitch - you actually have to disable the WLAN in windows in order to get boots to a reasonable level). Various people,myself included, have suggsted changing policy to suspend or hibernate after an hour or two idle (theoretically not disrupting any work) but we've run into plenty of software and hardware combos that b0rk horrifically, meaning the net result is the whole company leaving their computers on 24/7.
Servers are another big problem, with so many crappy programs "requiring" their own server in order to qualify for the support contract. VMWare helps enourmously in this regard but there's a few apps that need the raw performance (even when they're only needed for a few minutes a day) and apparently there's apps that have "no virtualisation" clauses (as well as a million other stupid clauses that I'm sure a fair few of you are familiar with), most of which seem to me to be due to the devs not having the time or inclination to test it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, getting your office raided by armed police... on the strength of an anonymous tip-off... for (alledgedly) having unlicensed software?! Call me a cynical commie, but I'm not exactly quaking in my boots that the chain of local corner shops might be using a dodgy version of office. Not that this system is open to abuse or anything...
Hello, BSA? I have reason to believe that my ex-company are using illegal software!
What?! What's the address?
1 Microsoft Way. They're using using modified GPL code in a *shipping operating system*
*click*
Was it something I said?
Bearing a resemblence to reality doesn't make any sense in the RIAA universe. I think they're currently lobbying to make reality a punishable offence.
As an aside, the RIAA don't just make this stuff up. You need to have had about a kilo of marching powder up your nose before you start thinking up numbers as big as that. Observe this example:
Non-coked-up RIAA executive 1: So how much did we lose to downloading this year?
Non-coked-up RIAA executive 2: Well, when you factor in the fact that most of what we call "pirates" wouldn't buy it anyway... maybe 5% of our revenue, tops
Non-coked-up RIAA executive 1: Hmm, we need to think about expanding into new markets if we're going to stay relevant with both musicians and listeners.
Once more, with feeling:
Coked-up RIAA executive 1: Fuck! How much did we lose to those dealers... I mean students... those internet people?
Coked-up RIAA executive 2: What? I thought we were talking about how great a businessman I am?
Coked-up RIAA executive 1: Dude, we're trying to write a report here, we need to know how much money we need to cover our... er... habit next year
Coked-up RIAA executive 2: Fuck yeah! Uh. Gotta be at least half a billion dollars.
Coked-up RIAA executive 1: You going to this meeting about this fucking proposal for an online store in the morning?
Coked-up RIAA executive 2: Fuck that, it's Shanamarie's album party tonight, I'm gonna be so high I reckon I'll see the future
N.B. this really was taken from an actual transcript that my Secret Hidden Spy Network got to me. Names have been removed to protect the guilty.
P.S. I do not endorse the taking of cocaine. You should pay for it like everyone else.
Thanks for the Creel reference, I'd never seen the name mentioned before (but was aware of the misonfirmation campaign during Woodrow Wilson's administration); it's generally only the european side of WW1 that's common knowledge over here. Some interesting reading coming up :)
...if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Ooops, sorry, insta-Godwin.
But we see the same tactics from the RIAA all the time - persistently referring to copyright infringement as stealing (maybe I should redefine "RIAA executive" as "sex offender"? I'd love to be able to change the meanings of legally applicable terms to suit my preference), persistently telling us that "piracy" loses a magical $X billion from the economy every year, that it supports terrorism/drug dealers/the mafia/anyone else seen as "bad". Lies. More lies. TFA (a good, polite rant) is just a catalogue of their lies and, occasionally spin-tastic back-pedalling. And yet such an organisation is not only allowed to exist, but to get in bed with the government too? And now they want to get their greasy paws on every privately owned internet connection in the US?
Sorry, no. I think my insta-Godwin was half-warranted in the case of these capricious fucks.
Whoops, forgot the stock ticker link.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=BLLN.PK&t=5d
Does anyone who actually uses stocks know where you can find out who the key traders are/were?
...pump'n'dump, but someone's bound to have gotten there before me. How much do you bet this whole thing was planned from the start?
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13526_1-9859255-27.html
There's someone pimping the stock in the comments there. Oddly enough, the site he links to is an analyst firm with a front page consisting entirely of... Qtrax pimpage http://www.positionmakers.com/
Mmm, smell the astroturf.
I keep hearing you Americans say this, but I don't think it's sinking in and I still find it mind boggling :) Heck, I wouldn't see the point in owning a personal phone if I had to pay to receive calls (currently have a crackberry provided by work and a venerable 6130i for personal use). Does this mean businesses get arsey if you *receive* lots of personal calls on your mobile?! hHell, there was a huge stink back here a few years ago when Vodafone allowed a bunch of spammers to flood users with SMS - if people had actually had to pay for them heads would have rolled. I really, really can't get my head around why anyone would be prepared to accept a pay-to-receive model, we tried that with our postmen a couple of hundred years ago and it didn't work then either. I assume you're not given a huge amount of choice in your contracts?
Heck, if you're on a UK contract plan as opposed to PayG, same-carrier calls are either completely free or just discounted from your "free minutes". In fact, most call plans take all calls (mobile > mobile, mobile > other carrier mobile, mobile > landline) out of your free minutes pool these days. It's like someone finally extended the idea behing IP peering agreements to the mobile telcos.
Utterly mind boggling. Is there no-one in the states who offers a "pay to send, free to receive" tariff on the model of, erm, practically every other type of delivery service I've ever heard of?
Good job I'm not planning to visit the states any time soon, I object to having to pay to be spammed (even if it's from people I know) on principle.
They don't care enough about it to justify the billions spent on the spectrum, at least here in the UK. Sure, there are plenty of people, like you and me and some people in the company I work for, who care about being able to chuck a USB modem in their laptop and get a 1Mb/s connection over the corporate VPN. Or just to check their hotmail.
;)
But the vast, vast majority of people barely notice the different between GPRS and 3G because they use it so little. If it takes ten seconds longer to download a ringtone, no-one cares. Heck, my crackberry only does GPRS and EDGE and, frankly, the difference in browsing the web between the two is so marginal that if I was told I could get a cheaper GPRS-only tariff I wouldn't hesitate.
But as it is, the networks are saddled with a huge debt that has to be passed onto customers. They've done this by trying to make 3G "essential" but the simple truth is the majority of people are perfectly happy living without it, even the ringtone craze seems to have died down considerably.
*anecdote != data. Datapoints taken from MrNemesis' UK perspective may not be applicable in other geographical locales, except for T-Mobile, you suck the world over
Jesus fuck, you make me ashamed to be male. I realise that stereotypically we geeks are all meant to be socially malignant outcasts who couldn't get a snog for toffee, but we're also stereotypically meant to use our brains for thinking.
In either case, WTF is going on there? I don't expect digital flaws- even minor ones- on stuff from iTunes, and I certainly don't expect them on my CDs!
Feel your pain on that one. Bought an album from UK's 7digital that was full of clicks and pops; tech support didn't want to look at the problem unless I outlined every single click and pop in every track with a timestamp. WTF?! I'm meant to be the paying customer, not one of your Q&A team. I could understand the issue if there was just one or two clicks and pops, but on some of the tracks (which I outlined in my email) there's literally one every five seconds.
Cue the fact that you can't download an entier album either (unless you install their "media management" app which, quelle surprise, isn't available for Linux and in any case I'm against the idea on principle) and I'm no longer a 7digital customer. Roll on amazon.co.uk!
I stand corrected, and still chortling merrily :D
GP was basing his post on the people who *run* the scientoogy racket, not the exploited sheeple who follow it. His stance, which I largely agree with, is that the people at the top don't believe it.
I know it's terrible form to reply to oneself, but I've just realised* that "The Church of Scientology" is an anagram of "Tech go filch tunes, cry ooh!" - if that isn't enough evidence for an RIAA lawsuit of titanic proportions I don't know what is.
* i.e. put it into the anagram finder at wordsmith.org
What's the old saying? I know enough about religion to know how to exploit it?
Likewise, I don't believe the bosses of scientology believe it any more than Hubbard did. But it'd be nice to see some Mutually Assured Destruction between two parties who actually seem to deserve it. It's difficult not to get in a bad mood when any article involves either of those two organisations. Think I'm going to need to include Cheney and co. in my next flight of ruinous fantasy at this rate.
Even better; tell the RIAA that the Church of Scientology is a massive front for copying CD's. Simultaneously, tell the scientologists that the RIAA are planning to clone Xenu from some evil thetans that were surgically extracted from Britney.
:)
Unstoppable force, meet immovable object. Space DC-10's dropping atom bombs on volcanoes will be nothing compared to those fireworks
WMP itself might only be 20MB of code, but that'll mostly be the GUI. The nuts'n'bolts of WMP lies inside DirectX, namely DirectShow, which is the accelerated API that codecs use for displaying moving images. Ever notice how when WMP b0rks playing videos they generally won't work in MPC or PowerDVD or any of the other DShow-based players either, yet will work with VLC or mPlayer (which have self-contained codec libs)?
In essence, they're all multimedia frameworks - DirectShow, Quicktime, GStreamer to name but three. The GUI that lies on top of them is largely irrelevant. They'll all take a specific input at one end, decode it into an internal format and let it pass through a bunch of common filters, until it ends up on your screen (or through your speakers in the case of audio frameworks). That way you only need to code most things once, and you just need a H.264 > DShow codec instead of an H.264 > NotDShow + nine million filters that are already part of every other NotDShow codec.
Not trying to absolve them here; if this is true, then Apple are idiots for letting this pass through testing and I pity anyone this lands on. But the crux of the matter is that multimedia frameworks are fecking complicated, more so when "defective by design" philosophy is applied. I don't know how much AfterEffects relies on the QT framework (there are loads of audio and video editing apps that eschew OS-specific frameworks in lieu of ones that might be faster, or more royalty free, or more customisable, etc), but it's obvious that something essential to it does.
MSI are releasing an x86 board with EFI instead of legacy BIOS soon. I'd be interested to see if OSX would run on that natively. As other people have said, OSX checks for a TPM chip that advertises itself as "certified Apple" hardware. If it's not there, the kernel stops booting.
Thanks to the fact it's open source, you can NOOP those chunks of code out and build your own kernel with blackjack and hookers, but fact of the matter is Apple is using DRM to stop their software being used on non-approved hardware.
Ditto, I find IM invaluable at work. When I just need an answer to "what server does $app" live on?", I IM. When we're discussing some techie points on some projects, we email. Two different tools for two different types of communications.
All the IM stuff is logged but only in the event of an audit. Keeping all of the techie correspondents in your email means that writing the doc the night before the projects goes live (our projects tend to be short, on the order of 1-2 months so it rarely mounts up to a huge amount) is usually little more than grepping through your mailbox, pasting and making spelling/grammar corrections.
How can anyone working in the patent racket sleep at night?
;)
Duh. You don't need to sleep if you don't have a soul.
...but the proceedings would take years, by which point the "windows comes with office free!" already has an entrenched user base. Cue people moaning about how the evil EU is trying to make computers little more than a stone tablet and chisel at the expense of the good ol' US of A.
Personally, I'd just like them to force them to open every file format and network protocol to every EU citizen FOR FREE, unlike the 10,000 Euros they're currently (indirectly) charging the Samba project for the latest copy of the SMB/CIFS spec (also under an NDA so it's illegal to re-post the docs, it has to be implemented in source code only).
That's an easy one to explain, OSX was initially designed to be deliberately slow and they've just taken out increasing amounts of sleep() calls from the code with every major release so that they can claim they've magically made it faster.
;)
As further testament to the genius of Jobs, he then sold all the sleep()'s to the project lead for Vista under the guise of a "technology partnership" contract.
How much would you bet that a sizable %age of non-techies, when they noticed that $SHOW could no longer be downloaded, plugged "$SHOW download" into google and found no less than three torrent sites on the first page?
Sod the game - if there was an open source, cross-platform hardware, architecture agnostic accelerated RT API available (I'm assuming that vendor-specific OpenRT acceleration a la nVidia's OGL would still be closed source) that made RT viable for the mainstream (either for gaming or CAD/animation work), there'd be practically no difference between MS and everything else either for gaming (including consoles) or 3D workstation work, and D3D would no longer be the de feacto standard for accelerated 3D - that'd be a BIG win for open standards.
:D
Ah, a man can dream...
We have the same problem at work too; desktop crap that results in the machines taking forever to start up (10-15mins), the biggest culprint being the Odyssey wireless client on the laptops (even if you use the RF killswitch - you actually have to disable the WLAN in windows in order to get boots to a reasonable level). Various people,myself included, have suggsted changing policy to suspend or hibernate after an hour or two idle (theoretically not disrupting any work) but we've run into plenty of software and hardware combos that b0rk horrifically, meaning the net result is the whole company leaving their computers on 24/7.
Servers are another big problem, with so many crappy programs "requiring" their own server in order to qualify for the support contract. VMWare helps enourmously in this regard but there's a few apps that need the raw performance (even when they're only needed for a few minutes a day) and apparently there's apps that have "no virtualisation" clauses (as well as a million other stupid clauses that I'm sure a fair few of you are familiar with), most of which seem to me to be due to the devs not having the time or inclination to test it.
Yay for shoddy software.