'At present, P2P software has too many times been hijacked by those who use it for illegal purposes to which the vast majority of our consumers do not wish to be exposed.'
Yeah, right. All those people logging onto P2P aren't trying to find pirated software, movies, or music. No way -- they don't want to be exposed to that!
Give me a fucking break. That's the entire reason that P2P services are so popular! People go there to get their pirated goods because it's one of the few thriving places left where you can actually find what you're looking for and get it for free.
It's the same reason Usenet still has a cult following today... it's not because it's a haven for people to converse about various topics. It's because it's one of the few places left where piracy hasn't been stomped out by corporations and government. Buy a good Usenet subscription for $10/month, and you've got access to all the pirated content and software you could ever need.
I won't get into the debate about whether it's right or wrong to pirate, or whether it helps or hurts the corporations. But you do have to acknowledge reality here and apply some common sense based on your own observations. People overwhelmingly use these types of services to facilitate piracy, and that's the entire appeal of them.
Now, that said, BitTorrent and FreeNet are often lumped into the P2P category just because of their underlying technology. Hell, even Skype uses P2P technology. But to lump those into the same category as file-sharing programs like KaZaa is bullshit. They have completely different purposes and designs.
Be VERY careful not to take an over-the-counter medication like this on any long-term basis (longer than 2-3 days straight) as a "solution" to your sleeping problems. These medications are harsh on your liver and kidneys and are not meant to be taken for longer than a few days, max. If you take them every day over a long period you can permanently screw yourself up.
A lot of people think companies should open-source their products, but they can't do that. They have to protect their patents, pending patents, product strategies, and trade secrets. Source code generally reveals all of that.
Even if you ignore that, consider this: open source also means open binaries. By giving people the freedom to copy, modify, and reuse source code, you're also granting them the freedom to build their own binaries from that code. Why would anyone pay good money to buy binaries from you when they can get the source and build binaries themselves?
The only approach that would work for a business would be to legally restrict the source code from being copied. When you buy the software, you would get a license to look at, modify, and rebuild the source code for your own use only. You wouldn't be permitted to redistribute any of the original source code, although you could distribute diffs of your work (so as to share your improvements/changes with other users and/or the company).
This way you would get the best of both worlds: lots of eyes reviewing the code, quick security updates, community-driven features and improvements, and yet the company would still get compensated for their work and would maintain control and direction over official releases.
The only way to avoid this is to sell it to that person for the price of developing, which means that there will only be incentive for a company to write software if it's in-house or built-to-order. There goes company innovation.
This is why preordering is the right solution. No company would be able to build a complex OS like Windows for just a single client and deliver it at a reasonable price. Plus, Windows is something more than just one client would like to buy. So the way you properly offset the huge development costs WITHOUT lobbying your government to enact an asinine system of copyrights is to only sell the software via preorder. Your development is funded fully by the preorders, and you are guaranteed to have made your money before the software ever gets released into the wild (where it will be copied profusely, eliminating your ability to sell it anymore).
The only "problem" with the preorder model (from the software maker's perspective) is that it's a one-time thing. Once the software is out in the wild, people will copy it for free. There's no recurring sales or license revenue for subsequent years to come.
But I would argue that's the way things should be. If you're making $90 on a 50-cent CD, and you can just keep mass-producing them well beyond your original development costs, then you're in effect being ludicrously overpaid for your work. That's the system we have now, which makes software companies like Microsoft (and record labels and movie studies) rich. They produce something once, then sell it inifnitely many times. Once they've covered their costs, any further sales are really just magical creation of wealth without any real creation. It distorts the economy in their favor, and that's exactly why they love it.
Bad music will never stop selling
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When are record companies going to realize that DRM isn't going to help them sell more of the bad music that dominates the airwaves?
First of all, the TMBG interview didn't talk about DRM technology. It just talked about the band holding onto their rights to digitally distribute the music. I suppose that if they wanted to, TMBG could still slap DRM technology and restrictions onto the digital content they give away or sell.
That said, as long as people keep buying up bad (unoriginal, uninteresting, trite, formulaic) music, the record companies will keep selling it. And the sad thing is that people will keep buying it up, because that music sounds original, interesting, and novel to the next upcoming generation of kids who haven't already heard it all before and who are more interested in image and style than in the actual music. Bad music will forever sell, because it will always seem new and interesting to stupid teenagers.
It's interesting to hear people talk about "the music industry" when what is being sold is not primarily the music but the image. For instance, most rap doesn't sell because it's great music. Most rap sells because of its stereotypical woman-as-objects, BLING-BLING bullshit imagery that, for whatever ridiculous reason, millions of black and latino kids (and plenty of race-confused fat white chicks) find appealing. The RIAA ought to be the Retarded Image Assosciation of America, and their industry is the image industry, not the music industry.
The real music "industry" doesn't try to sell image, but instead focuses on the music and message itself. This industry is arguably larger than the big evil "music" industry we all hear about, but it is composed mostly of independent bands and small labels that have nothing to do with the RIAA or the big studios. Bands like TMBG and Primus are more prominent examples, and they actually have more relation to the big RIAA industry than others... but for each independent band you've heard about, there are likely a thousand others that make great music you would enjoy if you could only find out about them. While they do each project their own image, it's not the entire (or main) point of what they do. The focus is on the music itself, and the substance actually exists to back up the image.
We need legislation that catches the corporate thieves. The law should make it possible to charge a CEO with theft if he pays himself 100 or more times the median salary in his company. He or she is a crook. Belongs in prison, not the corner office suite.
Hoorah! I whole-heartedly support this idea. It's long overdue.
Unfortunately, that only attacks one end of the problem (insanely overpaid rich people). The other end of the problem is that it's virtually impossible for poor families to work their way out of poverty in this country. To work your way up, you have to have time, money, or both. But minimum wage is set too low, higher education is too expensive, and there's no global enforcement of the 40-hour work week, so hard-working poor people don't have the time or money necessary to move up in the world even if they genuinely want to.
When minimum wage was defined, it was enough for a full-time employee to live off of. Not comfortably, mind you, but it would cover the basics (food, clothing, shelter, transportation). These days in most areas of the country you can't even pay rent alone on minimum wage. Minimum wage has not been increased enough to keep up with the rest of the economy's growth.
The 40-hour work week was defined to keep people from having to work to death just so they could try to survive. Unfortunately the 40-hour work week has become just a myth in modern society. Employers have used every possible loophole to work around it.
Because of the minimum wage and 40-hour-work-week problems, it's now all too common to see young couples (whose parents were not well off enough to send their kids to college) in which both the mom and the dad are working basically all the time, have no time to take care of their kids or their own personal lives, and are still just barely making enough money to pay rent and put milk and bread on the table. Those kids won't be able to afford college either, and the cycle perpetuates itself.
(True, a couple in such a situation should have been wiser and not had kids if they weren't financially read for it, but it's also true that our government has very directly screwed people like that from ever crawling their way out of poverty).
Land of opportunity, indeed! The only way to effectively escape from poverty in this country is through random luck.
Haven't you seen the commercials? He he leaps off the label, shows off his shiny bald head, and then *BAM* housewives everywhere are falling for him. He's always got his buff arms folded with a look on his face like, "Dude, I just did some guy's wife!"
What's amazing to me is that people will bitch violently about paying $2.00 for a gallon of gasoline, and yet they will gleefully pay the same amount for a little bottle of water.
I don't believe he uses Free Software; that means that Microsoft is not satisfying their customers, and Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!
No it doesn't. That means he loves the principles behind open source enough, or is enough of a tech geek himself, to put up with the god-awful usability and complexity in most open-source software. That's true of an overwhelming majority of people who use Linux or *BSD for their desktops.
But most people aren't going to upgrade to HDTV sets over the next five years. Well-off home theater geeks will, but not most others.
Even if HDTV set prices drop to the same price as today's non-HDTV sets, there's not enough incentive (in most people's minds) to purchase one. Okay, the picture is a little sharper. To tech heads this may be a big deal, but to most people it's a minor improvement. Certainly not enough of an improvement to justify throwing $500 or more at a new TV when your current one still works fine. Plus you have to then sign up for something more (expensive) than analog cable service to actually see anything in HDTV.
I predict HDTV won't really take hold for about 15 years, because that's probably about how long, on average, today's non-HDTV sets will last before dying and needing replacement. Replacing a dead TV is the biggest incentive most people have for buying something better at similar prices.
You entirely missed my point. Slashdot articles should always take a few words to explain what the things are that each article references, rather than assuming that everyone already knows and making us have to look it up.
The current consoles are more than powerful enough already. We need better games, not better consoles. All this focus on newer fancier (and more expensive) hardware is misplaced effort. It's just going to turn the video game industry into the same mess that the PC industry has been for years: perpetual upgrade cycle with no time for developers to make software that truly utilizes the current generation of capabilities well.
Price is only one-third of the reason regular people buy PCs over Macs.
The two others reasons are (1) lack of games, and (2) lack of compatibility with common Windows software and file formats.
If Mac OS X had something like Wine/WineX, but it was brain-dead simple to set up and worked with like 95% accuracy, AND it were advertised as a key feature of the Macintosh, then people would buy Macs instead of PCs. Unfortunately, the problem is not just that it's a different OS, but that it's a totally different hardware platform as well, so you'll never get something like Wine/WineX running at equivalent PC speed on a Macintosh.
Short answer... Trusted Computing my ass, TCPA is another developers lock in scheme, once code signing is mandatory and keys have to be purchased. So still no trust from my side.
If you'll re-read my post more carefully, you'll see that I was referring to the Trustworthy Computing Initiative, not the TCPA/Palladium project. They are two separate things. And if you would bother reading up on TCPA/Palladium, you would see that the thing is designed to always give the user the choice whether to run unsigned code or not, so you're never locked out from running unsigned code. But I think it's a moot point now, since I think I recall reading in the news that Microsoft had decided to drop TCPA/Palladium and just recycle some of the underlying tech in other ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing about possessing or using technology that bypasses encryption. Its legal to have, use and modify, just not distribute. Kind of like the GPL.
Don't you have to have something in order to give it to someone else? Doesn't that imply that distribution is also illegal?
'At present, P2P software has too many times been hijacked by those who use it for illegal purposes to which the vast majority of our consumers do not wish to be exposed.'
Yeah, right. All those people logging onto P2P aren't trying to find pirated software, movies, or music. No way -- they don't want to be exposed to that!
Give me a fucking break. That's the entire reason that P2P services are so popular! People go there to get their pirated goods because it's one of the few thriving places left where you can actually find what you're looking for and get it for free.
It's the same reason Usenet still has a cult following today... it's not because it's a haven for people to converse about various topics. It's because it's one of the few places left where piracy hasn't been stomped out by corporations and government. Buy a good Usenet subscription for $10/month, and you've got access to all the pirated content and software you could ever need.
I won't get into the debate about whether it's right or wrong to pirate, or whether it helps or hurts the corporations. But you do have to acknowledge reality here and apply some common sense based on your own observations. People overwhelmingly use these types of services to facilitate piracy, and that's the entire appeal of them.
Now, that said, BitTorrent and FreeNet are often lumped into the P2P category just because of their underlying technology. Hell, even Skype uses P2P technology. But to lump those into the same category as file-sharing programs like KaZaa is bullshit. They have completely different purposes and designs.
Be VERY careful not to take an over-the-counter medication like this on any long-term basis (longer than 2-3 days straight) as a "solution" to your sleeping problems. These medications are harsh on your liver and kidneys and are not meant to be taken for longer than a few days, max. If you take them every day over a long period you can permanently screw yourself up.
A lot of people think companies should open-source their products, but they can't do that. They have to protect their patents, pending patents, product strategies, and trade secrets. Source code generally reveals all of that.
Even if you ignore that, consider this: open source also means open binaries. By giving people the freedom to copy, modify, and reuse source code, you're also granting them the freedom to build their own binaries from that code. Why would anyone pay good money to buy binaries from you when they can get the source and build binaries themselves?
The only approach that would work for a business would be to legally restrict the source code from being copied. When you buy the software, you would get a license to look at, modify, and rebuild the source code for your own use only. You wouldn't be permitted to redistribute any of the original source code, although you could distribute diffs of your work (so as to share your improvements/changes with other users and/or the company).
This way you would get the best of both worlds: lots of eyes reviewing the code, quick security updates, community-driven features and improvements, and yet the company would still get compensated for their work and would maintain control and direction over official releases.
The only way to avoid this is to sell it to that person for the price of developing, which means that there will only be incentive for a company to write software if it's in-house or built-to-order. There goes company innovation.
This is why preordering is the right solution. No company would be able to build a complex OS like Windows for just a single client and deliver it at a reasonable price. Plus, Windows is something more than just one client would like to buy. So the way you properly offset the huge development costs WITHOUT lobbying your government to enact an asinine system of copyrights is to only sell the software via preorder. Your development is funded fully by the preorders, and you are guaranteed to have made your money before the software ever gets released into the wild (where it will be copied profusely, eliminating your ability to sell it anymore).
The only "problem" with the preorder model (from the software maker's perspective) is that it's a one-time thing. Once the software is out in the wild, people will copy it for free. There's no recurring sales or license revenue for subsequent years to come.
But I would argue that's the way things should be. If you're making $90 on a 50-cent CD, and you can just keep mass-producing them well beyond your original development costs, then you're in effect being ludicrously overpaid for your work. That's the system we have now, which makes software companies like Microsoft (and record labels and movie studies) rich. They produce something once, then sell it inifnitely many times. Once they've covered their costs, any further sales are really just magical creation of wealth without any real creation. It distorts the economy in their favor, and that's exactly why they love it.
When are record companies going to realize that DRM isn't going to help them sell more of the bad music that dominates the airwaves?
First of all, the TMBG interview didn't talk about DRM technology. It just talked about the band holding onto their rights to digitally distribute the music. I suppose that if they wanted to, TMBG could still slap DRM technology and restrictions onto the digital content they give away or sell.
That said, as long as people keep buying up bad (unoriginal, uninteresting, trite, formulaic) music, the record companies will keep selling it. And the sad thing is that people will keep buying it up, because that music sounds original, interesting, and novel to the next upcoming generation of kids who haven't already heard it all before and who are more interested in image and style than in the actual music. Bad music will forever sell, because it will always seem new and interesting to stupid teenagers.
It's interesting to hear people talk about "the music industry" when what is being sold is not primarily the music but the image. For instance, most rap doesn't sell because it's great music. Most rap sells because of its stereotypical woman-as-objects, BLING-BLING bullshit imagery that, for whatever ridiculous reason, millions of black and latino kids (and plenty of race-confused fat white chicks) find appealing. The RIAA ought to be the Retarded Image Assosciation of America, and their industry is the image industry, not the music industry.
The real music "industry" doesn't try to sell image, but instead focuses on the music and message itself. This industry is arguably larger than the big evil "music" industry we all hear about, but it is composed mostly of independent bands and small labels that have nothing to do with the RIAA or the big studios. Bands like TMBG and Primus are more prominent examples, and they actually have more relation to the big RIAA industry than others... but for each independent band you've heard about, there are likely a thousand others that make great music you would enjoy if you could only find out about them. While they do each project their own image, it's not the entire (or main) point of what they do. The focus is on the music itself, and the substance actually exists to back up the image.
Well of course Mac users are smarter... they bought Macs rather than PCs, didn't they? :-P
We need legislation that catches the corporate thieves. The law should make it possible to charge a CEO with theft if he pays himself 100 or more times the median salary in his company. He or she is a crook. Belongs in prison, not the corner office suite.
Hoorah! I whole-heartedly support this idea. It's long overdue.
Unfortunately, that only attacks one end of the problem (insanely overpaid rich people). The other end of the problem is that it's virtually impossible for poor families to work their way out of poverty in this country. To work your way up, you have to have time, money, or both. But minimum wage is set too low, higher education is too expensive, and there's no global enforcement of the 40-hour work week, so hard-working poor people don't have the time or money necessary to move up in the world even if they genuinely want to.
When minimum wage was defined, it was enough for a full-time employee to live off of. Not comfortably, mind you, but it would cover the basics (food, clothing, shelter, transportation). These days in most areas of the country you can't even pay rent alone on minimum wage. Minimum wage has not been increased enough to keep up with the rest of the economy's growth.
The 40-hour work week was defined to keep people from having to work to death just so they could try to survive. Unfortunately the 40-hour work week has become just a myth in modern society. Employers have used every possible loophole to work around it.
Because of the minimum wage and 40-hour-work-week problems, it's now all too common to see young couples (whose parents were not well off enough to send their kids to college) in which both the mom and the dad are working basically all the time, have no time to take care of their kids or their own personal lives, and are still just barely making enough money to pay rent and put milk and bread on the table. Those kids won't be able to afford college either, and the cycle perpetuates itself.
(True, a couple in such a situation should have been wiser and not had kids if they weren't financially read for it, but it's also true that our government has very directly screwed people like that from ever crawling their way out of poverty).
Land of opportunity, indeed! The only way to effectively escape from poverty in this country is through random luck.
Haven't you seen the commercials? He he leaps off the label, shows off his shiny bald head, and then *BAM* housewives everywhere are falling for him. He's always got his buff arms folded with a look on his face like, "Dude, I just did some guy's wife!"
What's amazing to me is that people will bitch violently about paying $2.00 for a gallon of gasoline, and yet they will gleefully pay the same amount for a little bottle of water.
Spoiled brat yuppie hypocrites.
I am curious, how you guys, would solve this problem, which seems very trivial for many environments.
Oh my god! Christopher Walken posts on Slashdot!
+sqrt(pi), Confused
Please refrain from squirting in the pie.
I don't believe he uses Free Software; that means that Microsoft is not satisfying their customers, and Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!
No it doesn't. That means he loves the principles behind open source enough, or is enough of a tech geek himself, to put up with the god-awful usability and complexity in most open-source software. That's true of an overwhelming majority of people who use Linux or *BSD for their desktops.
But most people aren't going to upgrade to HDTV sets over the next five years. Well-off home theater geeks will, but not most others.
Even if HDTV set prices drop to the same price as today's non-HDTV sets, there's not enough incentive (in most people's minds) to purchase one. Okay, the picture is a little sharper. To tech heads this may be a big deal, but to most people it's a minor improvement. Certainly not enough of an improvement to justify throwing $500 or more at a new TV when your current one still works fine. Plus you have to then sign up for something more (expensive) than analog cable service to actually see anything in HDTV.
I predict HDTV won't really take hold for about 15 years, because that's probably about how long, on average, today's non-HDTV sets will last before dying and needing replacement. Replacing a dead TV is the biggest incentive most people have for buying something better at similar prices.
You entirely missed my point. Slashdot articles should always take a few words to explain what the things are that each article references, rather than assuming that everyone already knows and making us have to look it up.
The current consoles are more than powerful enough already. We need better games, not better consoles. All this focus on newer fancier (and more expensive) hardware is misplaced effort. It's just going to turn the video game industry into the same mess that the PC industry has been for years: perpetual upgrade cycle with no time for developers to make software that truly utilizes the current generation of capabilities well.
What the hell is URPMI?
It's tough to turn the concept of tentacle-rape into an MMORPG.
Okay, well, maybe not.
fuck@you.comm ewhere@overtherainbow.net
fuck@off.com
nunya@bidness.net
so
Who, other than a terrorist organization or government able to order the official version would want a missile?
SCO?
Price is only one-third of the reason regular people buy PCs over Macs.
The two others reasons are (1) lack of games, and (2) lack of compatibility with common Windows software and file formats.
If Mac OS X had something like Wine/WineX, but it was brain-dead simple to set up and worked with like 95% accuracy, AND it were advertised as a key feature of the Macintosh, then people would buy Macs instead of PCs. Unfortunately, the problem is not just that it's a different OS, but that it's a totally different hardware platform as well, so you'll never get something like Wine/WineX running at equivalent PC speed on a Macintosh.
Your girlfriend is a fucking ham-beast. Did she eat the butterfly after that picture was taken?
Good work. When you die, there will now be at least two more people rejoicing that you've finally gotten what you deserved.
Then you obviously haven't tried installing it on an MSI KT4 Ultra with a Western Digital Caviar 20GB drive configured as "Auto" in the BIOS.
Short answer... Trusted Computing my ass, TCPA is another developers lock in scheme, once code signing is mandatory and keys have to be purchased. So still no trust from my side.
If you'll re-read my post more carefully, you'll see that I was referring to the Trustworthy Computing Initiative, not the TCPA/Palladium project. They are two separate things. And if you would bother reading up on TCPA/Palladium, you would see that the thing is designed to always give the user the choice whether to run unsigned code or not, so you're never locked out from running unsigned code. But I think it's a moot point now, since I think I recall reading in the news that Microsoft had decided to drop TCPA/Palladium and just recycle some of the underlying tech in other ways.