Please go educate the masses of "average consumer".
I'll bet 90% of people of buy DVDs dont know what DRM is or what it does to them.
In general I think you're probably right, but I did have a surprising
conversation last week with someone who definitely wasn't a
computer nerd. She had basically been screwed over by
iTunes and the 3 computer limit that this software imposes.
(Excuse me if I don't get the exact details right -- I'm
not interested in buying music in crippled formats for myself).
She had activated her laptop and a couple of her work machines,
but had then changed jobs and had her laptop stolen. The result
was that although she still had the music, she was unable to
play it at all, and I can tell you she understood exactly
what was going on and she was not happy at all about it.
So it seems to me that as more people get screwed over by the
music distributors, the message will eventually get out, even
if only in a simple form -- "my ripped MP3s work, but my paid
downloads don't".
> Anyhow, you believe in god. I believe that pigs have the ability to fly but they don't do it when people are looking. It's exactly the same thing.
My apologies for saying that you believe in god. I should have written
Osama believes in god, which is a fair bet.
Regardless, your example is ridiculous and not the same thing. The ability of pigs to fly is a falsifiable fact. The existence of God is not. I can devise any number of experiments to disprove your claim that pigs have the ability to fly.
How so? I already said they don't fly when people are observing them. And the flight
I believe in happens by a mystical telekenesis which comes from
realms outside our universe.
Well he's mad in the sense that anyone who believes religion
in the teeth of obvious evidence to the contrary is mad. By
that definition you've got a madman in the Whitehouse too.
Well, if you follow the link in my signature, you'll
get a good idea of which language I'd recommend. And yes,
it's impure functional.
What you say about Java is right -- but just because
one garbage collected language sucks badly does not
imply that all GCs are bad.
Interestingly, rendering engines as powerful and complete as Gecko have
been written in functional, garbage collected languages. The
most advanced is PrinceXML
which is written in Mercury, which is not just "uber-functional", but a logic
programming language too - a bit like Prolog:-) Check out some
of the amazing rendering
examples on their website. And yes, it even passes ACID2.
What gets me is that they effectively started over in 1998, but still chose a language which doesn't have garbage collection (or a bunch of other basic features). I mean, what programmer sits there worrying about who owns a piece of memory anymore?
That's easy to say in 2006, but 10-15 years ago the "footprint" of the OS was a huge purchasing decision.
Why do think Apple dumped so much money into Copeland? Because at that point in time, the average Mac had 8MB of RAM and they could never have shipped a Unix-based OS that required 64MB or so of memory.
I think that just goes to show that they didn't understand
Moore's law.
It's almost unheard of to find a large mature codebase which is particularly clean. What would have started out as a clean architecture gets pulled out of shape with bug fixes, new features, support for new architectures and so on over time. In particular, many fixes are done in a 'quick and dirty' fashion because there's a need to correct a critical security flaw now, so a quick fix is preferred to a considered refactoring of the relevant code.
What about Linux.. cough, GNU/Linux -- I mean the whole software stack from
office suites through GUIs through servers through to the kernel? Here's software
which dates back some of it over 20 years. Of course
you can point to some bits as sucking, maybe sendmail, Gtk or whatever
is your least favorite part. But it's clear that any part could be
replaced easily. In fact, equivalent replacement exists for almost every
part of Linux you could name (eg. exim instead of sendmail, Qt for Gtk,
KOffice for OpenOffice, and so on). So here you actually have a huge codebase developed
by people who've never even met each other (nevermind not working
for the same company), which is maintainable, modular and
mostly clean.
He's donated billions of dollars worth of medicine to children all over Africa and elsewhere.
I'm glad that he's spending all the illegally gotten gains on good causes.
But would life be better if competition had caused operating system software to go towards zero (it's approximate real cost). Goods and services which depend for their production on computers (ie. just about everything) would be cheaper. Whole countries would not be exporting $billions to him every year, and instead would be able to spend that money on investment and growth.
Or you could just go to a certified Apple repair shop and pay to have your drive replaced.
But would they give me a hackable drive?
I could also buy an external DVD drive, but at this point I refuse
to give more money to the morons at the DVD consortium
and have the hassle of having to flash firmware just to
save some time. I'll take my time and keep my money away from people
who want to take away my freedom.
Certain (Newer) Apple DVD drives have a seperate on-drive lock that won't even stream the encrypted blocks i the region codes don''t match.
Yes, the drive is a MATSUSHITA CW-8124, for which there is no
available RPC-1 firmware, nor any known cracks for the region
coding. The drive won't stream blocks from DVDs from another
region. Stupid stupid stupid - I'll have to keep ripping my
legally purchased DVDs I suppose.
Yes, I was a bit surprised myself that it came originally as R1 -
even through it was ordered through the Apple UK store.
Of course the reason it is now locked to R1 is that I've changed
the region code 5 times to play disks from various parts of the
world... I may have only myself to blame for
this, but my point is that region coding has turned me into
someone who had to go through the process of finding out how
to rip DVDs - I would never have bothered otherwise.
Neither VLC nor MPlayerOSX work on R2 DVDs. They give I/O errors
(the DVDs themselves are fine - they play/rip on the Linux box with
no problems). I'm assuming that since these "I/O errors" only happen
with R2 DVDs, that something is happening in the BIOS of the drive
to do with region coding.
True story:
In order to play Region 2 DVDs* on my Mac (which is permanently
locked to Region 1), I have to rip them on my Linux box and copy
the file over.
Much like another celebrated cartoon pair. Milton Caniff was working for the NY Daily News when he created Terry and the Pirates. It was wildly successful in syndication; the paper netted millions and Caniff got a ten percent raise.
Caniff went to the editor and said he thought he was entitled to a piece of the action. The editor pointed out that he was only an employee,
I'm no fan of copyright, but the editor has a point here.
As an employee, Caniff gets a steady salary and benefits,
whether or not he comes up with the next million-selling
cartoon. In fact, almost everyone over their whole lives
won't come up with a great invention / work of art / whatever,
so the employee trade-off works well for almost everyone in
the world.
If Caniff had wanted to keep his creation, he should instead
have started out for himself, and suffered years of
uncertainty and poverty until he came up with his great character.
Which he might never have done. But at least he could
have kept the full rewards.
But Stallman's "facts" are impractial in the real world.
Last time I checked, copyright goes completely against the laws of physics.
It's a human construct designed to make bits uncopyable. In the
words of Bruce Schneier, it's akin
to trying to make water not wet.
Now maybe in a reality-free zone where everybody works for the common good and nobody takes more than his* fair share, that would be a reasonable thing to pass off as a fact.
Well, no. What you do, as with free software, is accept -- indeed welcome --
the fact that bits can be copied. You then charge people for your time.
Sure - you won't be the next Microsoft doing this. But the good old
capitalist economy will be better off if the Microsoft tax on basic
business goes away. There's no communism here. This is the free
market at work. Without artificial monopolies.
Seeing that it was used before you doesn't tell you anything useful about who the person was who did the editing (unless their nick or IP is one you recognize as someone you know outside of Wikipedia).
On the contrary, you can look at their other contributions and find
out what they're interested in. You might say that this is better
than knowing someone in real life -- my friend Ann seems like a nice
quiet girl, but my gosh she's been editing a lot of BDSM articles on
Wikipedia...
Slashdot Mirror
Please go educate the masses of "average consumer".
I'll bet 90% of people of buy DVDs dont know what DRM is or what it does to them.
In general I think you're probably right, but I did have a surprising conversation last week with someone who definitely wasn't a computer nerd. She had basically been screwed over by iTunes and the 3 computer limit that this software imposes. (Excuse me if I don't get the exact details right -- I'm not interested in buying music in crippled formats for myself). She had activated her laptop and a couple of her work machines, but had then changed jobs and had her laptop stolen. The result was that although she still had the music, she was unable to play it at all, and I can tell you she understood exactly what was going on and she was not happy at all about it.
So it seems to me that as more people get screwed over by the music distributors, the message will eventually get out, even if only in a simple form -- "my ripped MP3s work, but my paid downloads don't".
Rich.
big sky daddy
Someone please mod the parent up :-)
Rich.> Anyhow, you believe in god. I believe that pigs have the ability to fly but they don't do it when people are looking. It's exactly the same thing.
My apologies for saying that you believe in god. I should have written Osama believes in god, which is a fair bet.
Regardless, your example is ridiculous and not the same thing. The ability of pigs to fly is a falsifiable fact. The existence of God is not. I can devise any number of experiments to disprove your claim that pigs have the ability to fly.
How so? I already said they don't fly when people are observing them. And the flight I believe in happens by a mystical telekenesis which comes from realms outside our universe.
Rich.Anyhow, you believe in god. I believe that pigs have the ability to fly but they don't do it when people are looking. It's exactly the same thing.
Rich.
Rich.
Have the guy responsible for shuttle safety fly with 'em. I hold any bets that those shuttles will be safer than driving through downtown NY rush hour
Or indeed get a politician to ride in one.
Rich.
What you say about Java is right -- but just because one garbage collected language sucks badly does not imply that all GCs are bad.
Interestingly, rendering engines as powerful and complete as Gecko have been written in functional, garbage collected languages. The most advanced is PrinceXML which is written in Mercury, which is not just "uber-functional", but a logic programming language too - a bit like Prolog :-) Check out some
of the amazing rendering
examples on their website. And yes, it even passes ACID2.
Rich.
Rich.
Rich.
And fuck.eu too.
Damn.
Rich.
That's easy to say in 2006, but 10-15 years ago the "footprint" of the OS was a huge purchasing decision.
Why do think Apple dumped so much money into Copeland? Because at that point in time, the average Mac had 8MB of RAM and they could never have shipped a Unix-based OS that required 64MB or so of memory.
I think that just goes to show that they didn't understand Moore's law.
Rich.
It's almost unheard of to find a large mature codebase which is particularly clean. What would have started out as a clean architecture gets pulled out of shape with bug fixes, new features, support for new architectures and so on over time. In particular, many fixes are done in a 'quick and dirty' fashion because there's a need to correct a critical security flaw now, so a quick fix is preferred to a considered refactoring of the relevant code.
What about Linux .. cough, GNU/Linux -- I mean the whole software stack from
office suites through GUIs through servers through to the kernel? Here's software
which dates back some of it over 20 years. Of course
you can point to some bits as sucking, maybe sendmail, Gtk or whatever
is your least favorite part. But it's clear that any part could be
replaced easily. In fact, equivalent replacement exists for almost every
part of Linux you could name (eg. exim instead of sendmail, Qt for Gtk,
KOffice for OpenOffice, and so on). So here you actually have a huge codebase developed
by people who've never even met each other (nevermind not working
for the same company), which is maintainable, modular and
mostly clean.
Rich.
We all know that the war on drugs works.
Rich.
Rich.
For humanity it is necessary to recognise the intrinsic nature of capitalism (blah blah)
What have government-granted monopolies (such as the circumvention clause in the DMCA which makes DRM possible) got to do with capitalism?Rich.
I'm glad that he's spending all the illegally gotten gains on good causes.
But would life be better if competition had caused operating system software to go towards zero (it's approximate real cost). Goods and services which depend for their production on computers (ie. just about everything) would be cheaper. Whole countries would not be exporting $billions to him every year, and instead would be able to spend that money on investment and growth.
I suppose we'll never know.
Rich.
Or you could just go to a certified Apple repair shop and pay to have your drive replaced.
But would they give me a hackable drive?I could also buy an external DVD drive, but at this point I refuse to give more money to the morons at the DVD consortium and have the hassle of having to flash firmware just to save some time. I'll take my time and keep my money away from people who want to take away my freedom.
Rich.
Certain (Newer) Apple DVD drives have a seperate on-drive lock that won't even stream the encrypted blocks i the region codes don''t match.
Yes, the drive is a MATSUSHITA CW-8124, for which there is no available RPC-1 firmware, nor any known cracks for the region coding. The drive won't stream blocks from DVDs from another region. Stupid stupid stupid - I'll have to keep ripping my legally purchased DVDs I suppose.
Rich.
Rich.
Rich.
Rich.
* I live in the UK so most DVDs are R2.
Much like another celebrated cartoon pair. Milton Caniff was working for the NY Daily News when he created Terry and the Pirates. It was wildly successful in syndication; the paper netted millions and Caniff got a ten percent raise.
Caniff went to the editor and said he thought he was entitled to a piece of the action. The editor pointed out that he was only an employee,
I'm no fan of copyright, but the editor has a point here. As an employee, Caniff gets a steady salary and benefits, whether or not he comes up with the next million-selling cartoon. In fact, almost everyone over their whole lives won't come up with a great invention / work of art / whatever, so the employee trade-off works well for almost everyone in the world.
If Caniff had wanted to keep his creation, he should instead have started out for himself, and suffered years of uncertainty and poverty until he came up with his great character. Which he might never have done. But at least he could have kept the full rewards.
Rich.
But Stallman's "facts" are impractial in the real world.
Last time I checked, copyright goes completely against the laws of physics. It's a human construct designed to make bits uncopyable. In the words of Bruce Schneier, it's akin to trying to make water not wet.
Now maybe in a reality-free zone where everybody works for the common good and nobody takes more than his* fair share, that would be a reasonable thing to pass off as a fact.
Well, no. What you do, as with free software, is accept -- indeed welcome -- the fact that bits can be copied. You then charge people for your time. Sure - you won't be the next Microsoft doing this. But the good old capitalist economy will be better off if the Microsoft tax on basic business goes away. There's no communism here. This is the free market at work. Without artificial monopolies.
Rich.
Seeing that it was used before you doesn't tell you anything useful about who the person was who did the editing (unless their nick or IP is one you recognize as someone you know outside of Wikipedia).
On the contrary, you can look at their other contributions and find out what they're interested in. You might say that this is better than knowing someone in real life -- my friend Ann seems like a nice quiet girl, but my gosh she's been editing a lot of BDSM articles on Wikipedia ...
Rich.