Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos, and iVillage, will be visited by people who read Slashdot and have found an easy workaround to the advertising.
The rest of Internet users will still go to those websites because inertia is an insanely powerful force when it comes the computing habits of your "average" person.
I use personally use Linux to get away from the liscensing nonsense that MicroAppleSunSoft tries to cram down my throat and sockets. They force too much upon me. It's my hardware, not theirs. I use Linux because it is Free. I use OSX at work and MS-Windows at work because I have to. What management decides is out of my control.
Unless you are a GNU/Zealot, I can't see what problem you would have with Apple's licenses. They are about the minimal license for a piece of proprietary software: can't redistribute, they own it, etc. If this is "cramming it down my throat," I can't imagine what MS is. I'm also confused as to what you mean by "It's my hardware, not theirs." I've installed OpenBSD and Linux on a Mac before with no problems (that is, except for the exceptionally painful install process).
Companies that use proprietary sizes, or much worse, don't even let the user change their own battery, are asking to be sued.
How is Apple asking to be sued? Did they advertise that the iPods had replaceable batteries? No. Did they claim that the batteries would last forever? No. Apple made a design choice to have a non-user accessible battery in order to have a smaller, sleeker design. If you don't like this design, DON'T BUY THE DAMN THING. And if you do buy it, don't bitch later like you were mislead or lied to.
There is no excuse for producing throw away players that cost several hundred dollars.
Good, I hope this dicourages anybody else to make such dumb decitions in the future.
Apple chose to make an an audio player that was much smaller and much more sleek than any other player available at the time (or even now IMO). One of the tradeoffs of this design is that the battery is not removeable. However, this is nothing new for Apple. The iMac is basically impossible for the average consumer to tinker with (save adding RAM), but it still has sold well because people love the simplicity of an all-in-one design.
If you don't like the iPod because of this, don't purchase one. However, for many of us, the iPod has served faithfully as an excellent audio player. I recently replaced my original 5 GB with a 40 GB for HD space issues, but the 5 GB still runs as well as the day I got it. Hell, it runs better now due to the firmware updates. If these were dumb decisions on my, I guess I'm happy being dumb and satisfied.
"What about all of us who don't go to the movies or buy dvds, etc. and practice what we preach you insensitive clod!"
What about those of us who aren't so caught up in the swarm mentality of Slashdot that we can still think for ourselves? I don't have that big of a problem with the MPAA. Sure, there are some things I would change on how they go about things, but in the end I'm not going to boycott the film industry. There are many good movies out there to choose from and prices for both the theatre and DVD experience are reasonable in my mind. Sure, those anti-piracy ads are annoying, but if they want to spend their money on it I could care less.
(On a side note, why the hell do they run those ads AT THE MOVIE THEATRE? I can understand on TV, but when you've already got my 7 bucks, shouldn't you assume that I'm not the kinda guy who downloaded the movie 2 weeks before it came out?)
You know, it's not okay for the RIAA to sue college students and adults. But it's at least slightly morally acceptable. After all, these are adults you're suing, they know stuff has consquences.
Breaking the law is breaking the law. While I don't agree with some of the amounts the RIAA has pushed for, I don't see anything wrong with a copyright holder suing somebody for violating their copyright.
But once those jackasses begin suing minors, that's where I draw the f***ing line.
As the AC who posted before me said, they are suing the parents, not the child. A minor can't enter into a legal contract, can't be sued, etc. If the parents let their children get away with this stuff, they have to face the consequences.
Doesn't the RIAA know that they're pushing away the people they need to make money? This girl's going to have her plight featured on the local news TV/newspaper, probably going to be the lead story. What effect is that going to have on her friends/classmates? Right, they're probably not going to log on to Kazaa. But I really doubt they're going to go out and buy the next Britney Spears CD or whatever they listen to. They'll probably ask a friend to buy it, then the CD will get passed, and everybody will rip a copy of the CD themselves. After all, it's not illegal to allow a friend to borrow/share a CD, is it?
First, growing up with a little sister and watching her go through her teenage years, I *highly* doubt that any teenage girls would have the social consciousness or spine to boycott the RIAA. If they want the new Brittney CD, they will go buy it, or possibly rip it. They won't go out telling their friends not to get it due to the practices of the evil RIAA. The demographic that the RIAA will lose is people like me who have had enough of their antics and will actually boycott them (as I've done for about 6 months now). However, the RIAA seems to have pretty much given up on this demographic, in no small part due to the fact that we often purchase a good chunk of indie music already.
The RIAA might make $3500 in the short term, but I'm willing to bet they're going to lose a lot more than that in the future because the girl is not going to buy CDs, and her friends won't either. Say the average CD is $10. (Which is a bit on the low end). I would be willing to bet that the girl + friends + classmates would buy more than 350 cds over her lifetime ($350 * $10 = 3500, for you math illiterate). But those sales are now lost. Nice job RIAA. You might be filthy stinking rich in the short term, but long term, forget it.
Ok, so they get the $3500 which we both know is negligible in the long term. Then you have to weight the number of people who will stop buying CDs in protest to the number of people who will, out of fear, buy CDs rather than downloading them. I hate to say this about our country, but we have become, on the whole, an incredibly apathetic bunch. Very few people will speak their mind (or with their wallet), but many will want to avoid a lawsuit.
Ethical or not, I still believe that this is a good business decision for the RIAA.
Re:Apple tells you this when you download iTunes
on
iTunes Disables MusicMatch
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's kind of funny to see how Slashdotters race to the defense of Apple when they start acting like a monopoly, but when MS does it, the sky is falling.
Ok, on one hand you have a company a with ~5% OS marketshare writing software for another OS and specifically telling people it will disable certain other software on the system.
On the other hand, you have a company with ~95% OS marketshare bundling apps (such as a web browser) with their OS in order to crush the competition by leveraging the power of their monopoly.
Now please, explain to me how the first is anywhere near comparable to the second?
PS - If you click "Agree" on a fucking EULA, you damn well better have read it. Otherwise, you are accepting that there may have been terms in their you would have found disagreeable, but you don't care.
If you like conservatism and patriotism, and you dislike civil disobedience, then move to Communist China. They are very conservative, very patriotic, and don't tolerate civil disobedience. Your kind of people...
Kiss my patriotic ass. This stupid ultra-liberal backlash against patriotism is pissing me off. Patriotism != blindly following Dubya and his henchmen. Patriotism, as I see it, has always meant a love for the United States and the ideals set forth by the founding fathers, two of these ideals being the Constitutional rights to freedom of press and freedom of speech. By that view of patriotism, what these students are doing is clearly patriotic. No American in their right mind would argue that having our elections run by a bunch of incompetent buffoons who try to cover their massive flaws with lawsuits is a good thing.
Meh, you might have an inkling of a point if it weren't for the fact that Smirnoff Ice is pretty expensive and you can get some damn nice beer for the same price./me dreams of Harp and Guinness while going to get a Miller Highlife out of the fridge in my college apartment.
This would be just about the dumbest time since the introduction of PowerPC chips in Apple hardware to consider porting to x86. For starters, just a few years after making all their developers port from OS 9 to OS X, now they will have to port from PPC to x86. So let's piss off a bunch of people by making developers port apps for a second and making customers wait for these new x86 ports. (Although, if I were to ever hear a troll go on about how they aren't switching away from OS X-PPC because it runs Quark, I think the ensuing laughter would be worth all the trouble.) So, after paying this high penalty for changing chip architectures, you are left with one of two shitty situations:
1) OS X runs on commodity x86 hardware. Apple's hardware sales get eaten alive by Dell's ability to build machines in mass and cheaply. Then Apple is forced to survive as a software company on the sales of an OS squaring off with the 800 lbs gorilla of marketshare, Windows. Don't get me wrong, OS X is my baby, but the sheer numbers and monopolistic presence of Microsoft would make me very wary of the outcome.
2) OS X runs only on Apple-made x86 boxes. After doing a magnificent job of figuring out how to stick two G5s in a PowerMac, Apple engineers get to throw that all out the window and do it with Xeons or Athlons. Not to mention the aforementioned porting done by developers. And the pissing off of customers who now have incompatible software. All this for what, a chance at a slight speed increase? Depending on which benchmarks you believe, the G5 is either just below, on par with, or just above high-end x86 systems. You are telling me Apple should go through all this hassle for what's going to end up being unnoticeable in the end?
Maybe if you had suggested this in late 2000 when Motorola was beginning to show how they were going to fuck up G4 production in the future but before OS X was released, you might have had a case. But right now, things are looking the best they have in a very long time for Apple. Switching to x86 would be just about the dumbest move possible.
Should unlocking the car you paid for be a crime? No.
PS - Why do people feel the urge to use crappy analogies like this? We are all tech-savvy here, so why can't we discuss the issues for what they are instead of drawing false parallels?
While the ad-hominen attack against the parent meta-review's author was on target, and the increase in the level of abstraction was intriguing (though not entirely original), this meta-review was too short to be informative.
I think I just figured out what alias Jon Katz has been posting under.
Apple used to have an easy solution for this by giving logical names to the different Powermac models such as "Yikes," "Yosemite," and "Sawtooth." However, they abandoned this in favor of non-descript names like "Quicksilver" and "Mirror Drive Door." For the life of me, I can't figure out how people remember model names now.
Slashdot Mirror
PC clusters are a joke, Macs even more so.
Haha!
Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos, and iVillage, will be visited by people who read Slashdot and have found an easy workaround to the advertising.
The rest of Internet users will still go to those websites because inertia is an insanely powerful force when it comes the computing habits of your "average" person.
Don't delude yourself.
27-0
52-21
47-22
I suggest you delete that mp3 and start singing this song:
Fight On for 'ol SC
Our men Fight On to victory.
Our Alma Mater dear, looks up to you
Fight On and win For 'ol SC
Fight On to victory Fight On!
Yes, this one may sound like Slashdot-Do-My-Homework...
Don't worry Cliff. After reading his proposed curriculum, I don't think he has been doing his own homework for some time now.
This is a rehash of an old Apple troll. Mod down accordingly.
(I'm wondering what Alan Cox will come up with after he finishes his MBA.)
/me ducks
Longhorn?
I use personally use Linux to get away from the liscensing nonsense that MicroAppleSunSoft tries to cram down my throat and sockets. They force too much upon me. It's my hardware, not theirs. I use Linux because it is Free. I use OSX at work and MS-Windows at work because I have to. What management decides is out of my control.
Unless you are a GNU/Zealot, I can't see what problem you would have with Apple's licenses. They are about the minimal license for a piece of proprietary software: can't redistribute, they own it, etc. If this is "cramming it down my throat," I can't imagine what MS is. I'm also confused as to what you mean by "It's my hardware, not theirs." I've installed OpenBSD and Linux on a Mac before with no problems (that is, except for the exceptionally painful install process).
3: weed
"Marijuana is not a drug. I used to suck dick for coke. Now that's an addiction. You ever suck some dick for marijuana?"
Companies that use proprietary sizes, or much worse, don't even let the user change their own battery, are asking to be sued.
How is Apple asking to be sued? Did they advertise that the iPods had replaceable batteries? No. Did they claim that the batteries would last forever? No. Apple made a design choice to have a non-user accessible battery in order to have a smaller, sleeker design. If you don't like this design, DON'T BUY THE DAMN THING. And if you do buy it, don't bitch later like you were mislead or lied to.
There is no excuse for producing throw away players that cost several hundred dollars.
Good, I hope this dicourages anybody else to make such dumb decitions in the future.
Apple chose to make an an audio player that was much smaller and much more sleek than any other player available at the time (or even now IMO). One of the tradeoffs of this design is that the battery is not removeable. However, this is nothing new for Apple. The iMac is basically impossible for the average consumer to tinker with (save adding RAM), but it still has sold well because people love the simplicity of an all-in-one design.
If you don't like the iPod because of this, don't purchase one. However, for many of us, the iPod has served faithfully as an excellent audio player. I recently replaced my original 5 GB with a 40 GB for HD space issues, but the 5 GB still runs as well as the day I got it. Hell, it runs better now due to the firmware updates. If these were dumb decisions on my, I guess I'm happy being dumb and satisfied.
That's all true, but almost anything that you can do in any of those languages you can do in Perl with 1/4 the code and in 1/8 the time.
When I see a kernel in Perl on par with a BSD or Linux, then I'll believe you.
Remember to always use the right tool for the right job.
"What about all of us who don't go to the movies or buy dvds, etc. and practice what we preach you insensitive clod!"
What about those of us who aren't so caught up in the swarm mentality of Slashdot that we can still think for ourselves? I don't have that big of a problem with the MPAA. Sure, there are some things I would change on how they go about things, but in the end I'm not going to boycott the film industry. There are many good movies out there to choose from and prices for both the theatre and DVD experience are reasonable in my mind. Sure, those anti-piracy ads are annoying, but if they want to spend their money on it I could care less.
(On a side note, why the hell do they run those ads AT THE MOVIE THEATRE? I can understand on TV, but when you've already got my 7 bucks, shouldn't you assume that I'm not the kinda guy who downloaded the movie 2 weeks before it came out?)
When you're in San Francisco, the whole country is "the east bay".
So you're the guy I saw asking everybody on BART how long until the New York stop!
Two minutes before I go on campus for my last final, I am justifying reading (and now posting) on Slashdot as "clearing my mind."
Damn, I'm fucked.
You can also just logout/login. This will clear all user/non-system swapfiles.
You know, it's not okay for the RIAA to sue college students and adults. But it's at least slightly morally acceptable. After all, these are adults you're suing, they know stuff has consquences.
Breaking the law is breaking the law. While I don't agree with some of the amounts the RIAA has pushed for, I don't see anything wrong with a copyright holder suing somebody for violating their copyright.
But once those jackasses begin suing minors, that's where I draw the f***ing line.
As the AC who posted before me said, they are suing the parents, not the child. A minor can't enter into a legal contract, can't be sued, etc. If the parents let their children get away with this stuff, they have to face the consequences.
Doesn't the RIAA know that they're pushing away the people they need to make money? This girl's going to have her plight featured on the local news TV/newspaper, probably going to be the lead story. What effect is that going to have on her friends/classmates? Right, they're probably not going to log on to Kazaa. But I really doubt they're going to go out and buy the next Britney Spears CD or whatever they listen to. They'll probably ask a friend to buy it, then the CD will get passed, and everybody will rip a copy of the CD themselves. After all, it's not illegal to allow a friend to borrow/share a CD, is it?
First, growing up with a little sister and watching her go through her teenage years, I *highly* doubt that any teenage girls would have the social consciousness or spine to boycott the RIAA. If they want the new Brittney CD, they will go buy it, or possibly rip it. They won't go out telling their friends not to get it due to the practices of the evil RIAA. The demographic that the RIAA will lose is people like me who have had enough of their antics and will actually boycott them (as I've done for about 6 months now). However, the RIAA seems to have pretty much given up on this demographic, in no small part due to the fact that we often purchase a good chunk of indie music already.
The RIAA might make $3500 in the short term, but I'm willing to bet they're going to lose a lot more than that in the future because the girl is not going to buy CDs, and her friends won't either. Say the average CD is $10. (Which is a bit on the low end). I would be willing to bet that the girl + friends + classmates would buy more than 350 cds over her lifetime ($350 * $10 = 3500, for you math illiterate). But those sales are now lost. Nice job RIAA. You might be filthy stinking rich in the short term, but long term, forget it.
Ok, so they get the $3500 which we both know is negligible in the long term. Then you have to weight the number of people who will stop buying CDs in protest to the number of people who will, out of fear, buy CDs rather than downloading them. I hate to say this about our country, but we have become, on the whole, an incredibly apathetic bunch. Very few people will speak their mind (or with their wallet), but many will want to avoid a lawsuit.
Ethical or not, I still believe that this is a good business decision for the RIAA.
It's kind of funny to see how Slashdotters race to the defense of Apple when they start acting like a monopoly, but when MS does it, the sky is falling.
Ok, on one hand you have a company a with ~5% OS marketshare writing software for another OS and specifically telling people it will disable certain other software on the system.
On the other hand, you have a company with ~95% OS marketshare bundling apps (such as a web browser) with their OS in order to crush the competition by leveraging the power of their monopoly.
Now please, explain to me how the first is anywhere near comparable to the second?
PS - If you click "Agree" on a fucking EULA, you damn well better have read it. Otherwise, you are accepting that there may have been terms in their you would have found disagreeable, but you don't care.
If you like conservatism and patriotism, and you dislike civil disobedience, then move to Communist China. They are very conservative, very patriotic, and don't tolerate civil disobedience. Your kind of people...
Kiss my patriotic ass. This stupid ultra-liberal backlash against patriotism is pissing me off. Patriotism != blindly following Dubya and his henchmen. Patriotism, as I see it, has always meant a love for the United States and the ideals set forth by the founding fathers, two of these ideals being the Constitutional rights to freedom of press and freedom of speech. By that view of patriotism, what these students are doing is clearly patriotic. No American in their right mind would argue that having our elections run by a bunch of incompetent buffoons who try to cover their massive flaws with lawsuits is a good thing.
Meh, you might have an inkling of a point if it weren't for the fact that Smirnoff Ice is pretty expensive and you can get some damn nice beer for the same price. /me dreams of Harp and Guinness while going to get a Miller Highlife out of the fridge in my college apartment.
This would be just about the dumbest time since the introduction of PowerPC chips in Apple hardware to consider porting to x86. For starters, just a few years after making all their developers port from OS 9 to OS X, now they will have to port from PPC to x86. So let's piss off a bunch of people by making developers port apps for a second and making customers wait for these new x86 ports. (Although, if I were to ever hear a troll go on about how they aren't switching away from OS X-PPC because it runs Quark, I think the ensuing laughter would be worth all the trouble.) So, after paying this high penalty for changing chip architectures, you are left with one of two shitty situations:
1) OS X runs on commodity x86 hardware. Apple's hardware sales get eaten alive by Dell's ability to build machines in mass and cheaply. Then Apple is forced to survive as a software company on the sales of an OS squaring off with the 800 lbs gorilla of marketshare, Windows. Don't get me wrong, OS X is my baby, but the sheer numbers and monopolistic presence of Microsoft would make me very wary of the outcome.
2) OS X runs only on Apple-made x86 boxes. After doing a magnificent job of figuring out how to stick two G5s in a PowerMac, Apple engineers get to throw that all out the window and do it with Xeons or Athlons. Not to mention the aforementioned porting done by developers. And the pissing off of customers who now have incompatible software. All this for what, a chance at a slight speed increase? Depending on which benchmarks you believe, the G5 is either just below, on par with, or just above high-end x86 systems. You are telling me Apple should go through all this hassle for what's going to end up being unnoticeable in the end?
Maybe if you had suggested this in late 2000 when Motorola was beginning to show how they were going to fuck up G4 production in the future but before OS X was released, you might have had a case. But right now, things are looking the best they have in a very long time for Apple. Switching to x86 would be just about the dumbest move possible.
EFF
I'm sure if this goes to court and he needs financial help, they will back him. If not, your money is still in good hands.
Should stealing unlocked cars be a crime?
Yes.
Should unlocking the car you paid for be a crime? No.
PS - Why do people feel the urge to use crappy analogies like this? We are all tech-savvy here, so why can't we discuss the issues for what they are instead of drawing false parallels?
Or, send a serial number so that I may liberate it off of KaZaA Plus.
Aww, how cute, a Windows user pretending he owns a Mac.
While the ad-hominen attack against the parent meta-review's author was on target, and the increase in the level of abstraction was intriguing (though not entirely original), this meta-review was too short to be informative.
I think I just figured out what alias Jon Katz has been posting under.
Apple used to have an easy solution for this by giving logical names to the different Powermac models such as "Yikes," "Yosemite," and "Sawtooth." However, they abandoned this in favor of non-descript names like "Quicksilver" and "Mirror Drive Door." For the life of me, I can't figure out how people remember model names now.