So how long until someone writes a program to just save all the streamed music for burnination to CD or use in portables and laptops? Congratulations RIAA! That CD in Sally Student's SUV just net'ed you....I mean the artist....less than 1 cent!
I love iTunes. I've sold many, many more songs on iTunes than I ever did on CD (over the 'net).
On the other hand, when I try to describe DRM to people, they kind of blank out and say "uh...ok", and move on.
DRM hurts small artists because it confuses people. Small artists desperately need the impulse buying that online distribution allows, and confusion or second thoughts destroy this impulse buying.
So....
Apple: Thank you!
But:
Apple:
* Make the DRM optional...I don't care about it and it hurts sales. * Let me pick a price. I'd love to lower my lesser-sold songs to say, 60 cents to try to get them out there. * Improve the 'community' aspect so more people have exposure to different music * 128 bits? Yeah that's why I spent my kids college money on production.
Fix this stuff,t hen we'll really love you....Heck we might even have some loyalty when those sub $100, 40 gig competitor devices come out.
I learned the hard way that backing your data up to another hard drive does no good when the power supply freaks out and fries *everything*...including BOTH hard drives.
Luckily, I had bought matching drives for use in another computer (a total of 4 HDs). By removing the controllers from the good drives and carfully placing them on the fried drives, I was able to get everything back.
Word to the wise, backup and keep off box and off site!
I was trying to explain the workings of the various online digital distributors to someone at the office. After a couple minutes she said "I think I'll just buy the CD and rip it".
Now junk like this is adding the same confusion to purchasing a CD. The logical result? "I think I'll just download a pirated copy".
When you have to post a 'response' to a new thing on an old thing that used to just work, you have by definition created confusion. People will go for the simpler option: piracy.
Remember that in many (if not most) companies, implementation, QA, admin, security etc. is just as much of a creative function as coding. Keep those people stimulated and comfortable too.
I've seen alot of good software severely marginalized when the coder was seen as the sole creator.
I disagree. The OS was not leveraged more than Novell dropped the ball.
Remember TCP/IP? Remember how slow Novell was to adopt it?
Remember how hard it was to write NLMs for Novell vs. apps for NT?
Remember how cryptic working on the server console was? Granted, you didn't have to do it often but next to the GUI most small offices went the logical way.
Bottom line, Novell got complacent, then got the pants beat off em fair and square with a more market friendly product. Microsoft is vulnerable to the same thing now.
So let's say MS releases a next gen XBox that is superior to current offerings, and provides a large window to be the leader.
This would be a great opportunity for smaller game companies to take advantage of microsofts well funded gamble--something the article actually alludes to.
The crux of the article is that established game companies won't want to develop for XBox because they would have to neglect existing profit streams. This is part of something termed "The innovators Dilemma" by a guy named Christensen.
Hey guys, tough cookies. You can milk the cash cow and go out of business, or come up with a way to innovate AND keep up the revenue stream. Nobody said the tech biz is easy, and it seems a bit silly to whine that technology is advancing too fast when it is in fact the reason you exist.
Yeah, if non DRM machines become difficult to aquire...it'd be a shame to be relegated to a fringe niche who build our computers from kits, use obscure operating systems, share code and knowlege via informal and uncommercial channels, and generally operate in communities of geeky friends under the radar of multi-billion dollar companies.
Sometimes going back to such things seems like a really, really good idea.
Actually, If you're planning a crime, isn't that called "conspiracy to commit" that crime. That's potentially the case here (or what they are investigating).
I'm not a big fan of the PA and Ashcroft, but if I have pipe, black powder, and manifestos about how certain places should be blown up....I should at *least* expect to be investigated of conspiracy/intent to commit such a crime if someone finds the stuff.
Sure, in some way my pipe bomb building could be artistic expression...or maybe it was purely for research for my novel I'm writing...or maybe I wasn't going to actually do anything at all. But that's what the process will try to discover.
That's what's odd in this case. Once the decision was made to go with Sun they actually hired a couple very good Sun guys, and a couple really good Oracle DBAs. But the momentum for lots of low end Sun boxes was already in full swing by the time they loaded the new red Swingline and had enough clout to matter.
I guess the danger of many cheap servers is that it can give the illusion of cost savings over the long haul, when in reality a far more economical approach would be to go ahead and start big...or just scale as you go (which is supposed to be a strong point of Sun). But it's alot easier to periodically squeak through POs for 10 low end servers than one high end server at half total price.
And the true costs of juggling those servers go beyond dollars to many, many hidden things. Unlike stories at Google and archive.org, I don't think most companies are firing up a beowulf cluster to run accounting apps.
I know that some companies skimp on talent in line with lower hardware costs, but this is the second time I've seen this illusion in effect. The first was with the aforementioned NT environment where a few good but overwhelmed engineers were left to try and keep a hopelessly large NT farm afloat...while the execs wondered why they couldn't see Emperor Uptimes new clothes.
I wish my company would do this. They chose Oracle on Linux a couple years back with a single (mediocre at best) developer as the admin. The resulting and expected crappy experience resulted in a decision to go with Sun.
But instead of going with serious Sun hardware we now have a whole slew of entry level sun servers that routinely sweat under even moderate loads. Even then, they just incrementally buy small servers for *every* function. (It's like NT shops used to be, except twice as expensive).
The server admins have, at this point, kind of a glazed humorous look in their eyes. If we'd made an intelligent choice between Linux and Solaris (even if it resulted in a hybrid situation), we could have saved thousands and thousands of dollars and have a managable situation. Instead, it's insanity.
Word to the wise: Don't believe the hype and TEST THE SETUP WITH COMPETENT ENGINEERS!. You'd think this would be common sense...but alas...we seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.
In my technology and civilization college course, we had to know a good bit about airplanes. The game Red Baron had thoroughly edumuhcated me on alot of the WWI stuff, so I didn't really have to study it.
and it will be because of the descendants of things like this.
One day you'll be able to tune into a radio station based on URL, and it will be *the* true revolution for music delivery. Information may or may not want to be free...but it definitely hates coming from central sources.
Newspaper cartoons are to Strongbad as top 40 is to the bands of the future.
Great things can be achieved
if you use subliminal tools that are proven to be
very effective by people with the
experience in the areas of consciousness,
memory and mental capacity. If you just believe
every quack out there there's no telling the
mess you can get into. So don't trust every
offer by every amateur with a web page.
Nobody will tell you the bad results. In fact,
everyone will say they have good results.
You need to do your research well.
So how feasible is a "zapper" that will render RFID's useless? The idea is you come home and run your new purchases throught some sort of scanner...and poof! Normal merchandise again.
Any EE types that are familiar with what it would take to do something like this?
Well, you certainly sound more sane than the prior post....and I appreciate that hammer!
However, remember the title of the article: "Risk management". There is no safe way of banking or doing business...period. There are only various shades of grey. As long as a financial institution understands the risks and takes appropriate steps to mitigate the risks and shield their customers/members from damage, they can implement a given technology. The question this thread seems to be encountering is "what is the level of risk that is impossible to mitigate". I submit that a wireless network with WPA and some other tricks falls well within the realm of manageable risk.
When you use an ATM, or buy something on the 'net, or give your personal check to someone, or use internet banking, or give someone your social security number, you are engaging in far, far more risk than if your FI uses a properly secured wireless network.
Did you know that your entire financial history is routinely fedexed on a tape? Did you know that there's a 99% chance that your financial data is routinely transmitted through multiple telecom companies unencrypted? Did you know that there is a good chance your paycheck is transmitted via a very secure, but very DDOSable single Federal Reserve website?
Trust me or don't, a loan officer on a car lot using a properly secured WPA implementation to loan you money is perfectly safe compared to the risk you are exposed to every day by simply existing as a financial being.
But before you put all your money into your matress, manage the risk of a house fire.;)
I saw only a tiny blurb about WPA, which should be a primary consideration for banks and credit unions analyzing the risk of wireless.
WPA has stronger encryption that WEP and authentication mechanisms built in. I work for a Credit Union processing/software company, and many financial institutions are waiting for WPA to become more mature before they jump into wireless.
For too long developers have been held up as the ultimate in computing knowledge, while administration has been seen as some monkeyboy sitting in a computer room swapping tapes out.
As a result, nearly every end user of a developed system is given attention before system administrators and operators. The secondary result is SA's and operators are left with big piles of innefficient crap to wade through, and much of the pressure of making said piece of crap work. How many folks here have had to work in huge, bloated teams of SA's all to support an ill-concieved and poorly developed (but gee whiz does it look greeeat!) product, getting paged and phoned all night to come in an slap more duct tape? How many people here have had to manage a bunch of boot-camp MCSE's trying to do 400 manual processes an hour because "that's the way it was developed"? How many people here have had to explain to a customer that some piece of code written by a fresh off the MIS degree train VB developer isn't RFC compliant and therefore 45 percent of the people in the world won't be able to interface with it? How many SAs here have had to tune the crap out of boxes and networks because a login page makes 75+ ODBC database calls? How many security consultants have had to go in and basically tell a company that they'll have to repartition and reinstall every server because someone found SQL injection in an app that required superuser privileges?
The list goes on and on. Administrators aren't there to make life easier for developers, they are there to make things work--and make them work better, more reliably, and more securely. I'd suggest that this whiny ivory tower developer wake up and realize that coporations have gotten smart to the crap he's been turning out and further realized that the people who run the stuff are just as important as the people who write it and use it.
In short, he needs to learn how to work on a team.
Developers are smart, but they aren't the top of the computing pyramid. There are many other groups of people that are just as smart in different areas.
Slashdot Mirror
So how long until someone writes a program to just save all the streamed music for burnination to CD or use in portables and laptops? Congratulations RIAA! That CD in Sally Student's SUV just net'ed you....I mean the artist....less than 1 cent!
I love iTunes. I've sold many, many more songs on iTunes than I ever did on CD (over the 'net).
On the other hand, when I try to describe DRM to people, they kind of blank out and say "uh...ok", and move on.
DRM hurts small artists because it confuses people. Small artists desperately need the impulse buying that online distribution allows, and confusion or second thoughts destroy this impulse buying.
So....
Apple: Thank you!
But:
Apple:
* Make the DRM optional...I don't care about it and it hurts sales.
* Let me pick a price. I'd love to lower my lesser-sold songs to say, 60 cents to try to get them out there.
* Improve the 'community' aspect so more people have exposure to different music
* 128 bits? Yeah that's why I spent my kids college money on production.
Fix this stuff,t hen we'll really love you....Heck we might even have some loyalty when those sub $100, 40 gig competitor devices come out.
I learned the hard way that backing your data up to another hard drive does no good when the power supply freaks out and fries *everything*...including BOTH hard drives.
Luckily, I had bought matching drives for use in another computer (a total of 4 HDs). By removing the controllers from the good drives and carfully placing them on the fried drives, I was able to get everything back.
Word to the wise, backup and keep off box and off site!
I was trying to explain the workings of the various online digital distributors to someone at the office. After a couple minutes she said "I think I'll just buy the CD and rip it".
Now junk like this is adding the same confusion to purchasing a CD. The logical result? "I think I'll just download a pirated copy".
When you have to post a 'response' to a new thing on an old thing that used to just work, you have by definition created confusion. People will go for the simpler option: piracy.
Good thinkin' record people!
Remember that in many (if not most) companies, implementation, QA, admin, security etc. is just as much of a creative function as coding. Keep those people stimulated and comfortable too.
I've seen alot of good software severely marginalized when the coder was seen as the sole creator.
I disagree. The OS was not leveraged more than Novell dropped the ball. Remember TCP/IP? Remember how slow Novell was to adopt it? Remember how hard it was to write NLMs for Novell vs. apps for NT? Remember how cryptic working on the server console was? Granted, you didn't have to do it often but next to the GUI most small offices went the logical way. Bottom line, Novell got complacent, then got the pants beat off em fair and square with a more market friendly product. Microsoft is vulnerable to the same thing now.
So let's say MS releases a next gen XBox that is superior to current offerings, and provides a large window to be the leader.
This would be a great opportunity for smaller game companies to take advantage of microsofts well funded gamble--something the article actually alludes to.
The crux of the article is that established game companies won't want to develop for XBox because they would have to neglect existing profit streams. This is part of something termed "The innovators Dilemma" by a guy named Christensen.
Hey guys, tough cookies. You can milk the cash cow and go out of business, or come up with a way to innovate AND keep up the revenue stream. Nobody said the tech biz is easy, and it seems a bit silly to whine that technology is advancing too fast when it is in fact the reason you exist.
Yeah, if non DRM machines become difficult to aquire...it'd be a shame to be relegated to a fringe niche who build our computers from kits, use obscure operating systems, share code and knowlege via informal and uncommercial channels, and generally operate in communities of geeky friends under the radar of multi-billion dollar companies.
Sometimes going back to such things seems like a really, really good idea.
I say raise the bar.
Where is the 10 million dollar data center, corporate jet, and 5 million lines of worthless code?
Actually, If you're planning a crime, isn't that called "conspiracy to commit" that crime. That's potentially the case here (or what they are investigating).
I'm not a big fan of the PA and Ashcroft, but if I have pipe, black powder, and manifestos about how certain places should be blown up....I should at *least* expect to be investigated of conspiracy/intent to commit such a crime if someone finds the stuff.
Sure, in some way my pipe bomb building could be artistic expression...or maybe it was purely for research for my novel I'm writing...or maybe I wasn't going to actually do anything at all. But that's what the process will try to discover.
It's called a "plaintext protocol"....
That's what's odd in this case. Once the decision was made to go with Sun they actually hired a couple very good Sun guys, and a couple really good Oracle DBAs. But the momentum for lots of low end Sun boxes was already in full swing by the time they loaded the new red Swingline and had enough clout to matter.
I guess the danger of many cheap servers is that it can give the illusion of cost savings over the long haul, when in reality a far more economical approach would be to go ahead and start big...or just scale as you go (which is supposed to be a strong point of Sun). But it's alot easier to periodically squeak through POs for 10 low end servers than one high end server at half total price.
And the true costs of juggling those servers go beyond dollars to many, many hidden things. Unlike stories at Google and archive.org, I don't think most companies are firing up a beowulf cluster to run accounting apps.
I know that some companies skimp on talent in line with lower hardware costs, but this is the second time I've seen this illusion in effect. The first was with the aforementioned NT environment where a few good but overwhelmed engineers were left to try and keep a hopelessly large NT farm afloat...while the execs wondered why they couldn't see Emperor Uptimes new clothes.
I wish my company would do this. They chose Oracle on Linux a couple years back with a single (mediocre at best) developer as the admin. The resulting and expected crappy experience resulted in a decision to go with Sun.
But instead of going with serious Sun hardware we now have a whole slew of entry level sun servers that routinely sweat under even moderate loads. Even then, they just incrementally buy small servers for *every* function. (It's like NT shops used to be, except twice as expensive).
The server admins have, at this point, kind of a glazed humorous look in their eyes. If we'd made an intelligent choice between Linux and Solaris (even if it resulted in a hybrid situation), we could have saved thousands and thousands of dollars and have a managable situation. Instead, it's insanity.
Word to the wise: Don't believe the hype and TEST THE SETUP WITH COMPETENT ENGINEERS!. You'd think this would be common sense...but alas...we seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.
In my technology and civilization college course, we had to know a good bit about airplanes. The game Red Baron had thoroughly edumuhcated me on alot of the WWI stuff, so I didn't really have to study it.
I watched an old Kung Fu movie on one of these, and the words matched the lips!
and it will be because of the descendants of things like this.
One day you'll be able to tune into a radio station based on URL, and it will be *the* true revolution for music delivery. Information may or may not want to be free...but it definitely hates coming from central sources.
Newspaper cartoons are to Strongbad as top 40 is to the bands of the future.
Multiple hard drives in multiple physical locations and lots of dilligence. All other techniques are chasing the wind.
Firewire drives make this easy, although you'll have to spend a few bucks.
Great things can be achieved
if you use subliminal tools that are proven to be
very effective by people with the
experience in the areas of consciousness,
memory and mental capacity. If you just believe
every quack out there there's no telling the
mess you can get into. So don't trust every
offer by every amateur with a web page.
Nobody will tell you the bad results. In fact,
everyone will say they have good results.
You need to do your research well.
Great! Now my neighbors can flood the first hop router with adware and Paris Hilton DIVX' at fiber speeds!
Might as well dial up.
Asymetric encryption in every pot!
Personal firewalls as a right!
Tax breaks for vulnerability scans!
Secure coding is bad for the economy!
America's childred deserve the latest bolt-on, after-the-fact, security solutions! You aren't against America's children...are you?
Seriously, print this out for future reference.
So how feasible is a "zapper" that will render RFID's useless? The idea is you come home and run your new purchases throught some sort of scanner...and poof! Normal merchandise again.
Any EE types that are familiar with what it would take to do something like this?
Please restart your rover. If the problem persists, contact support@nasa.gov.
Well, you certainly sound more sane than the prior post....and I appreciate that hammer!
;)
However, remember the title of the article: "Risk management". There is no safe way of banking or doing business...period. There are only various shades of grey. As long as a financial institution understands the risks and takes appropriate steps to mitigate the risks and shield their customers/members from damage, they can implement a given technology. The question this thread seems to be encountering is "what is the level of risk that is impossible to mitigate". I submit that a wireless network with WPA and some other tricks falls well within the realm of manageable risk.
When you use an ATM, or buy something on the 'net, or give your personal check to someone, or use internet banking, or give someone your social security number, you are engaging in far, far more risk than if your FI uses a properly secured wireless network.
Did you know that your entire financial history is routinely fedexed on a tape? Did you know that there's a 99% chance that your financial data is routinely transmitted through multiple telecom companies unencrypted? Did you know that there is a good chance your paycheck is transmitted via a very secure, but very DDOSable single Federal Reserve website?
Trust me or don't, a loan officer on a car lot using a properly secured WPA implementation to loan you money is perfectly safe compared to the risk you are exposed to every day by simply existing as a financial being.
But before you put all your money into your matress, manage the risk of a house fire.
I saw only a tiny blurb about WPA, which should be a primary consideration for banks and credit unions analyzing the risk of wireless.
WPA has stronger encryption that WEP and authentication mechanisms built in. I work for a Credit Union processing/software company, and many financial institutions are waiting for WPA to become more mature before they jump into wireless.
For more info, google, or check this out.
For too long developers have been held up as the ultimate in computing knowledge, while administration has been seen as some monkeyboy sitting in a computer room swapping tapes out.
As a result, nearly every end user of a developed system is given attention before system administrators and operators. The secondary result is SA's and operators are left with big piles of innefficient crap to wade through, and much of the pressure of making said piece of crap work. How many folks here have had to work in huge, bloated teams of SA's all to support an ill-concieved and poorly developed (but gee whiz does it look greeeat!) product, getting paged and phoned all night to come in an slap more duct tape? How many people here have had to manage a bunch of boot-camp MCSE's trying to do 400 manual processes an hour because "that's the way it was developed"? How many people here have had to explain to a customer that some piece of code written by a fresh off the MIS degree train VB developer isn't RFC compliant and therefore 45 percent of the people in the world won't be able to interface with it? How many SAs here have had to tune the crap out of boxes and networks because a login page makes 75+ ODBC database calls? How many security consultants have had to go in and basically tell a company that they'll have to repartition and reinstall every server because someone found SQL injection in an app that required superuser privileges?
The list goes on and on. Administrators aren't there to make life easier for developers, they are there to make things work--and make them work better, more reliably, and more securely. I'd suggest that this whiny ivory tower developer wake up and realize that coporations have gotten smart to the crap he's been turning out and further realized that the people who run the stuff are just as important as the people who write it and use it.
In short, he needs to learn how to work on a team.
Developers are smart, but they aren't the top of the computing pyramid. There are many other groups of people that are just as smart in different areas.