Apple/iTunes/iPod -- call it what you will. It's DRM, and Apple is just the beginning. Once the average Joe thinks it's okay to give up his rights for his precious iPod, the RIAA wins.
Mac users are too smug about almost everything. If you look up "blissfully ignorant" in the dictionary, you should see a picture of a Mac user. There are a few Mac users (actually, just one) I know that aren't like that, but for the most part, this is my experience with them.
Not to mention that, let's admit it, Apple is just as evil as Microsoft, if not moreso. I hated Apple at one time, but then they released OS X, and I was all turned around. There was a time I was ready and willing to buy a Mac Mini. But I held off, and I'm glad I did. The more I know about Apple, the less I want to do with them. I'm in the embedded audio/home theater business, and the whole iPod/iTunes/DRM vendor-lock-in thing just makes me sick. How else could you have gotten a bunch of Microsoft-haters to swallow DRM so easily? If M$ had done the same thing, the Apple fanboys would have been crying "foul" from day one.
Hard Drives will be useful for the forseeable future in lots of areas. Hopefully, however, in many applications, we can get rid of them altogether. With the correct wear-leveling algorithms, flash can last a long time. And there aren't big seek penalties like in hard drives, so read performance can be much better. And for applications where seek times dominate, this will boost performance big time. You'll be able to get good performance out of a fully normalized database without requiring nearly as much cache.
I, for one, welcome... oh never mind.
As flash drives become more and more popular, more dollars will pour into flash research and development. And applications will learn to accomodate the strengths and weaknesses of flash. I think we'll be seeing some really neat things over the next 10 years. Terabyte flash drive, anyone?
I'm starting to think that Microsoft doesn't understand the point of having a console system. They're single-handedly ruining the whole concept.
Apparently Microsoft's strategy is not to put DRM into existing PC's. The strategy is to put DRM into the Xbox, sell the Xbox to all the suckers out there, then gradually make the Xbox as much like a PC as possible. Then make people believe that if they have an Xbox, they don't need a PC. Once they've replaced the PC with the Xbox, Bill gets all the lock-in, DRM, and control he wants, and he never needs to change the PC at all.
If you'd told me 5 years ago that you were going to buy a system where you have to buy add-ons to play the best games, where you had to worry about worms and trojans, you had to make sure all your hardware and software is compatible and up-to-date, and you had to pay royalties to Microsoft, I would have said "oh, you're buying Windows." "Nope," you reply, "I'm buying Microsoft's video game console."
Just another attempt to get people to buy lossy music in a proprietary format wrapped up in fair-use-obstructing DRM. But Microsoft is better because...they have Justin Timberlake?!?!???
Obligatory Simpsons quote from snpp:
Homer: _These_ are the people who
saw an overcrowded marketplace and said, "Me too!"
Wrong. You've been beaten pretty badly by the PC police. Any private citizen or organization should be able to do business however they like. I should be able to refuse to do business with you because you don't pay your bills, because I don't like your hair color, or simply because you're annoying. In a real free market, someone else will gladly pick up the slack. Go buy from them.
Yes, racism is often a very bad thing. However, making it illegal sets a poor precedent, and erodes freedoms. What if I own an authentic chinese restaurant and I only want chinese people working there? There is nothing immoral about me turning away an Italian chef or a waitress from West Virginia.
You said racism should be illegal. Here's a nice quote from Thoreau's Civil Disobedience:
There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves.
Now replace "slavery" in the above quote with "racism". Making racism illegal didn't advance racial equality one bit. And it only became illegal after the average joe citizen had already decided it was generally immoral. But when the government made racism illegal, we lost some of our freedoms.
The system should be tuned on the side of caution.
TFA: "...12 percent of passengers tend to show stress even when they have nothing to hide."
This means that, if one in every 1 million passengers is a real terrorist, then there will be 120,000 false positives for every single terrorist. This makes for a useless system. If you're an airport worker and you've just seen your 100,000th false positive, what's the likelihood that you're going to trust the system anymore? Answer: You're not. Long before that point, you will have started waving everyone through. Even if only 0.1 percent of people fail the test, that's still 1000 false positives per terrorist, and it's too much.
This system is a waste of money and passenger time.
With all due respect, I don't think the Mythbusters are as smart as Archimedes was. You shouldn't impugn someone just because they lived a long time ago.
Wow! Yes, I was talking about "Till We Have Faces" by Lewis. I checked the book and the copyright has been renewed. So that means the copyright expires in 2038 (well, for now...) That's a long time.
I don't understand this. My favorite book was published in 1956, and the author died just 7 years later. He had no offspring and he outlived his wife. Now would someone please explain to me why someone was allowed to extend the copyright and why the work isn't yet in the public domain?
There's also a good article about audio DRM here. It's nice to know that consumers (at least the savvy ones) are already starting to notice that DRM is encroaching on their freedoms.
...I realized that I could finally use my ethernet connection in my dorm room without having to trick the network into thinking I was using a 32-bit operating system (using Trumpet Winsock).
Microsoft was still using FAT16 at this time, which meant that the cluster size was 32kB if you had a "large" disk (600 MB) and nearly half your disk space was wasted if you had lots of small files. It wasn't until Windows 98 that Microsoft advertised the revolutionary new filesystem (FAT32) that would reclaim that space for you.
About a year later, I started using Linux primarily.
this is the only NFL title you'll get to play this year. So, what are the players to do?
Uh... why can't they play Madden '05 or Madden '04 or even... I don't know... Madden '03?
Someone who enjoys video football enough to buy a new version every year probably isn't very difficult to entertain. He'll buy Madden '06 even if it's just a feature-creep of '05.
Thanks! That's much better. His paper states that "TCP window sizes were not considered in the calculations." Perhaps not, but I find it hard to believe that he is the first to realize that. This guy probably deserves the credit for creating a media frenzy about this problem, but not much else.
It really has bugged me, in the past, that all the popular operating systems assign outgoing ports sequentially. This especially causes problems with net-booted systems, because if the system gets interrupted part-way into the initial network transfer, the routers get really confused because on retry, all the source port and sequence numbers are the same! I've had problems with this before (I design software for embedded systems), and I think this is when I first "discovered", like this guy did, how relatively easy it is to perform TCP RST attacks under some circumstances.
Discovered? Late last year? I think I remember "discovering" then subsequently reading about this problem in one of my TCP/IP books many years ago. Does this have to do with inserting packets into a TCP stream that have the RST flag set? (I can't find any technical information on this...some of the dumbed-down articles have broken links, but no interesting information.)
...except that nobody is doing it the right way. DRM, crappy file formats, vendor lock-in, etc. Until there is a service that provides what I want, I'll not pay for it. I'm not going to buy an I-Pod. I have maybe 10 devices at home or in my car(s) that are already perfectly capable of playing just about any reasonable digital music format.
Sell me music that I can put on all my music servers, in my car, and on my computers and I'll buy it. Until then the online music market is non-existant (or is limited to CDs from Amazon). I'm sure I don't need to say this on Slashdot, but: Microsoft isn't going to give it to us.
Nearly 2/3 of adult internet shoppers thought that practice was illegal...
This just exposes the mentality of the average internet user: if something is bad for them, they expect it to be illegal. They expect the government to take full responsibility for their well-being, and this is why government (the US government, at least) has gotten so big.
I was reading a front-page article in my city's newspaper the other day. A "mentally disabled" woman walked into a retention pond and drowned. The response from the journalist was not to blame the caretaker of the woman, nor the gate that she passed through to get to the pond, but the pond itself, and the government that allows retention ponds to be built without fences around them!!!
That is NOT what I said. Please read my post one more time. I'm not making an over-generalization. I am giving an example. There are several businesses within walking distance of my wife's workplace which provide a service/product (publishing/copying) that she requires at times. In this case, there are several good businesses and at least one poorly run business. However, she is not allowed to use the preferable or closer businesses simply because they are owned by Caucasian-Americans.
Do you understand this now? Let me spell it out for you. This an example of a case in which time (and thus money) is wasted by the City of Indianapolis because its workers are not allowed to make spending decisions based on quality of service or other attributes except by the race of the owner. This policy is racist.
That's strange, considering that the City of Indianapolis (and a lot of other cities, I assume) has a rule that preference is given to minority-owned businesses. My wife, who works on a project for the city, walks right past several reputable downtown businesses (when she needs something published or copied) in order to be serviced rudely, slowly, and incompetantly by a half-baked, mostly illegal-immigrant non-English speaking, minority-owned business.
These policies are just stupid. Apparently, all problems can be fixed through legislation. I like what Thoreau said in his Civil Disobedience paper:
"Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischevious persons who put obstructions on the railroads."
I was reading through this old diary of a young girl who was 11 years of age at the time. Freud specifically states that errors in the text were not fixed.
Now compare this little girl's work to that of the average slashdot poster, who incorrectly spells words like "lose" and can't correctly place an apostrophe even by sheer luck. Truly awesome.
Sounds like they're trying to get individuals with an appetite for the "startup culture" (e.g. 80 hour work weeks, brilliant minds) to do the work for them, while they reap the profits. Let's face it, most of the "technologies" that Microsoft is "lending out" probably aren't very well developed, and have hit a brick wall in the last few years. If Microsoft doesn't do something like this, they'll never get a dime for their efforts.
It's not blasphemy, it's just common sense. If China has 4 times the population of the US, then it should be 4 times as productive as the US. The real question is, why has it taken this long for these countries to "catch up" to their potential? From an economic point of view, it's inexcusable. Think of the cancer treatments we would have, the incredibly stable world economy, the competition that would drive product costs down and job satisfaction up...We should have had all this hundreds of years ago.
What's most annoying, however, is when I hear an insecure Anti-American say something like, "America is going down! The American age is over." Not really. What's really happening is that the USA is finally taking its rightful place among the economic powers of the world.
Re:Read the fine print for your savings and checki
on
Tracking Your Taxes
·
· Score: 1
You must have Comcast. They always give out DNS server IP addresses with their DHCP leases, but the DNS servers they tell you to use stop functioning on a weekly basis. Since I'm in Indiana, I use the following DNS servers instead:
Slashdot Mirror
Apple/iTunes/iPod -- call it what you will. It's DRM, and Apple is just the beginning. Once the average Joe thinks it's okay to give up his rights for his precious iPod, the RIAA wins.
Not to mention that, let's admit it, Apple is just as evil as Microsoft, if not moreso. I hated Apple at one time, but then they released OS X, and I was all turned around. There was a time I was ready and willing to buy a Mac Mini. But I held off, and I'm glad I did. The more I know about Apple, the less I want to do with them. I'm in the embedded audio/home theater business, and the whole iPod/iTunes/DRM vendor-lock-in thing just makes me sick. How else could you have gotten a bunch of Microsoft-haters to swallow DRM so easily? If M$ had done the same thing, the Apple fanboys would have been crying "foul" from day one.
Mod me down. I've got karma to burn.
I, for one, welcome... oh never mind.
As flash drives become more and more popular, more dollars will pour into flash research and development. And applications will learn to accomodate the strengths and weaknesses of flash. I think we'll be seeing some really neat things over the next 10 years. Terabyte flash drive, anyone?
Apparently Microsoft's strategy is not to put DRM into existing PC's. The strategy is to put DRM into the Xbox, sell the Xbox to all the suckers out there, then gradually make the Xbox as much like a PC as possible. Then make people believe that if they have an Xbox, they don't need a PC. Once they've replaced the PC with the Xbox, Bill gets all the lock-in, DRM, and control he wants, and he never needs to change the PC at all.
If you'd told me 5 years ago that you were going to buy a system where you have to buy add-ons to play the best games, where you had to worry about worms and trojans, you had to make sure all your hardware and software is compatible and up-to-date, and you had to pay royalties to Microsoft, I would have said "oh, you're buying Windows." "Nope," you reply, "I'm buying Microsoft's video game console."
Obligatory Simpsons quote from snpp:
Yes, racism is often a very bad thing. However, making it illegal sets a poor precedent, and erodes freedoms. What if I own an authentic chinese restaurant and I only want chinese people working there? There is nothing immoral about me turning away an Italian chef or a waitress from West Virginia.
You said racism should be illegal. Here's a nice quote from Thoreau's Civil Disobedience:
Now replace "slavery" in the above quote with "racism". Making racism illegal didn't advance racial equality one bit. And it only became illegal after the average joe citizen had already decided it was generally immoral. But when the government made racism illegal, we lost some of our freedoms.TFA: "...12 percent of passengers tend to show stress even when they have nothing to hide."
This means that, if one in every 1 million passengers is a real terrorist, then there will be 120,000 false positives for every single terrorist. This makes for a useless system. If you're an airport worker and you've just seen your 100,000th false positive, what's the likelihood that you're going to trust the system anymore? Answer: You're not. Long before that point, you will have started waving everyone through. Even if only 0.1 percent of people fail the test, that's still 1000 false positives per terrorist, and it's too much.
This system is a waste of money and passenger time.
With all due respect, I don't think the Mythbusters are as smart as Archimedes was. You shouldn't impugn someone just because they lived a long time ago.
Wow! Yes, I was talking about "Till We Have Faces" by Lewis. I checked the book and the copyright has been renewed. So that means the copyright expires in 2038 (well, for now...) That's a long time.
I don't understand this. My favorite book was published in 1956, and the author died just 7 years later. He had no offspring and he outlived his wife. Now would someone please explain to me why someone was allowed to extend the copyright and why the work isn't yet in the public domain?
There's also a good article about audio DRM here. It's nice to know that consumers (at least the savvy ones) are already starting to notice that DRM is encroaching on their freedoms.
Good lord! Is writing on the topic of software really that bad?
Oh wait, that's your opinion. ...and oh wait, this is Slashdot.
Microsoft was still using FAT16 at this time, which meant that the cluster size was 32kB if you had a "large" disk (600 MB) and nearly half your disk space was wasted if you had lots of small files. It wasn't until Windows 98 that Microsoft advertised the revolutionary new filesystem (FAT32) that would reclaim that space for you.
About a year later, I started using Linux primarily.
Uh... why can't they play Madden '05 or Madden '04 or even ... I don't know... Madden '03?
Someone who enjoys video football enough to buy a new version every year probably isn't very difficult to entertain. He'll buy Madden '06 even if it's just a feature-creep of '05.
It really has bugged me, in the past, that all the popular operating systems assign outgoing ports sequentially. This especially causes problems with net-booted systems, because if the system gets interrupted part-way into the initial network transfer, the routers get really confused because on retry, all the source port and sequence numbers are the same! I've had problems with this before (I design software for embedded systems), and I think this is when I first "discovered", like this guy did, how relatively easy it is to perform TCP RST attacks under some circumstances.
Discovered? Late last year? I think I remember "discovering" then subsequently reading about this problem in one of my TCP/IP books many years ago. Does this have to do with inserting packets into a TCP stream that have the RST flag set? (I can't find any technical information on this...some of the dumbed-down articles have broken links, but no interesting information.)
Sell me music that I can put on all my music servers, in my car, and on my computers and I'll buy it. Until then the online music market is non-existant (or is limited to CDs from Amazon). I'm sure I don't need to say this on Slashdot, but: Microsoft isn't going to give it to us.
This just exposes the mentality of the average internet user: if something is bad for them, they expect it to be illegal. They expect the government to take full responsibility for their well-being, and this is why government (the US government, at least) has gotten so big.
I was reading a front-page article in my city's newspaper the other day. A "mentally disabled" woman walked into a retention pond and drowned. The response from the journalist was not to blame the caretaker of the woman, nor the gate that she passed through to get to the pond, but the pond itself, and the government that allows retention ponds to be built without fences around them!!!
*shakes head*
Do you understand this now? Let me spell it out for you. This an example of a case in which time (and thus money) is wasted by the City of Indianapolis because its workers are not allowed to make spending decisions based on quality of service or other attributes except by the race of the owner. This policy is racist.
These policies are just stupid. Apparently, all problems can be fixed through legislation. I like what Thoreau said in his Civil Disobedience paper: "Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischevious persons who put obstructions on the railroads."
kid == a young goat
see dictionary.com
Now compare this little girl's work to that of the average slashdot poster, who incorrectly spells words like "lose" and can't correctly place an apostrophe even by sheer luck. Truly awesome.
Sounds like they're trying to get individuals with an appetite for the "startup culture" (e.g. 80 hour work weeks, brilliant minds) to do the work for them, while they reap the profits. Let's face it, most of the "technologies" that Microsoft is "lending out" probably aren't very well developed, and have hit a brick wall in the last few years. If Microsoft doesn't do something like this, they'll never get a dime for their efforts.
What's most annoying, however, is when I hear an insecure Anti-American say something like, "America is going down! The American age is over." Not really. What's really happening is that the USA is finally taking its rightful place among the economic powers of the world.
128.210.11.5 (ns.purdue.edu)
128.174.5.6 (ns.uiuc.edu)
You may want to use some closer to you, but these should get you up and running, at least.