Yes, it's easy and free and you can get more music than you could ever listen to in a relatively short time. But it's not worth it to me from a legal or moral standpoint.
But admittedly, that's easy for me to say -- I don't feel the need to buy the latest highly marketed CD at retail price. Pop music in particular tends to have a very short shelf life. Wait a few months (sometimes a few *weeks*) until the early adopters overplay their purchases, the shine is off the bauble, and titles start cropping up in bargain bins, severely discounted on amazon, or turn up at the dollar store. And the advantage of buying a CD for $1.99 is that if your research didn't pan out and it's junk, you don't feel as badly about giving it to your niece, or even throwing it away.
I'm quite sure that the thought didn't even enter Steve's head. It was never his problem. He was in the business of selling appliances. Content was the hook to sell hardware. It's not that complicated.
That his customers were short-sighted enough not to consider that DRM-protected content is non-transferable, was a bonus.
Contrary to customer reports, Steve was not a saint. He was a businessman.
Pragmatically, Bruce could afford to set a fund aside to re-purchase his library in one of his daughter's names, but I'm sure it's the principle of the thing, and in that respect he's right.
The moral of the story, something I discovered years ago, is that generally it's the terminally lazy and shortsighted who buy their music from itunes. Buy the real CD, import it into itunes, and it's yours forever. You even have a handy backup in the Tupperware bin in the closet. And your kids can get your entire music collection on a DRM-free hard drive that itunes will play, or a collection of cds that they can rip if they feel like it.
I understand, buying directly from itunes is often cheaper than buying a recent commercial CD. (With older music, of course, you can often buy the entire CD for the cost of a couple of tracks, but that's besides the point.) But one of the prices you pay for that discount is that the music is not yours. Oh, it might seem like it's yours, but try to give it away, and you find that it doesn't belong to you.
> In a saner world, we'd just ship all hipsters to Seattle, and be done with them.
I just now had a fantasy of a town without hipsters... Of being able to go into a coffee shop and not have to stand behind a skinny guy in a long leather jacket with a shaved head ordering a drink so complicated that the clerk has to take notes....and then demand in a screechy voice that she check "in the back" for whatever esoteric food item he wants that they don't have.
My understanding from this is that if I break into someone's wifi, or "borrow" someone's mobile phone, and perform some kind of illegal transaction, the owner of that access point or device is liable? Besides being a great way to avoid legal consequences, it occurs to me that this could be used as a weapon against anyone who owns a wireless device or any company that maintains a wireless network.
Oh, this is too good not to use in a movie. I want to see; perp picks bystander's pocket, makes illegal call, puts phone back in pocket, then walks away as the police tackle bystander.
Hand waving never occurs in science? "Here's the initial conditions, stuff happens over there, and here is the final product." "What stuff happens?" "We don't know yet, so we just call it 'stuff'." This never ever happens in science?
In second grade, my teachers tried to force me to be right handed. (For which I would like to give a personal "thank you". Oh, and "may you burn in hell".) I got terrible headaches and a bad stutter. (I know handedness as a cause of stuttering is now considered controversial. I can only tell you what I experienced.) In fifth grade I switched myself back. My symptoms gradually disappeared. As a result, I never learned to write cursive with my dominant hand, as those years were spent training a hand that doesn't write anymore.
However, being the only southpaw in a large extended family, I was introduced to the perils of a right-hand-only world at an early age. Even though I now own left handed scissors, I still tend to use them right handed out of habit.
Most left handed people (such as myself) learn to handle tools and gadgets right handed. It is a right handed world. In a way this is an advantage, as we southpaws do more and therefore tend to have more dexterity using the "wrong hand" than most righties. This tends to make southpaws somewhat ambidextrous. Watch someone doing a repetitious task -- if they're naturally a leftie, chances are they're using both hands. If they're naturally a rightie, often their left arm just hangs there like a piece of meat.
Back in the days of mechanical cash registers, me and the only other leftie checker were the fastest bar none.
I wish they would, but I suspect if they did, Microsoft could string it out until AVG was out of money. Microsoft has more lawyers than AVG has employees.
I know the article has been posted for awhile, but this just hit me. It's an epiphany.
This is a downgraded logo. It's the logo of a once puissant company that is on the decline. It's an admission that "we're still going to be around, but in a reduced capacity". It's Microsoft marketing... giving up.
IANAL but I think there are "reasonable person" legal clauses that would apply. IE a reasonable person would expect that if you set passwords on all your accounts, someone would not be able to log in by hitting escape. Oops, that one actually happened.
A reasonable person would expect that your ATM would not let the next guy access the account you just accessed after you retrieved your card. And so forth. I think a case could be made that it's about reasonable expectations.
And of course, it would be up to juries and precedent to decide what was "reasonable".
> Microsoft has previously argued against such a move
Well, of course (/snark)
> claiming a burglary victim wouldn't expect to be able to sue the manufacturer of the door or a window in their home.
Maybe one could expect that, if the advertisement for the door or window led one to believe a level of security that the door or window was not designed to supply. Or if a reasonable person would assume, for instance, that a door with a security-type cylindrical-key lock on it could not be opened with a common ink pen (true story).
I think it's about reasonable expectations. For instance, if there was an unknown back door in an otherwise reasonably secure OS, and the manufacturer lost the credentials, and didn't 'fess up, and as a result a bad guy nabbed my customer credit card database, yeah, as a person with reasonable expectations, I'd sue.
I think you're right. Besides, it didn't really make any sense. OSX and iOS use the same kernel as far as I know; the rest is environment-specific, (touch vs kvm) which is how it should be. The philosophy of trying to make one interface work in all environments has a tendency to build a product that's good at nothing.
> and you can't even make it possible for 6% of your population to have 3Mbps *dsl*? Over your existing phone lines?
I'm told the problem there, us being the first to have widespread telephone and all, is that we have a lot of ancient infrastructure still in use, which was never envisioned to carry data. I've heard rumors of 100 year old wire still in place. So yeah, no 3Mbps over existing phone lines in some areas, for a rather bizarre value of "existing".
I personally have fiber to the house, but I admit that's not widespread in this country. Putting up new infrastructure in a country this big with this number of households is not a trivial thing.
I read somewhere that some former eastern bloc countries actually have a more modern telephone infrastructure than ours, by virtue of the fact they had to start from scratch after the soviet union broke up, whereas we have all this legacy stuff still in place from early last century.
That's absolutely true. And for power users who think the i-products are somewhat limited, there are alternatives.
And this is how it should be. People shouldn't need to be geeks to use a phone, or a tablet. On the other hand, geeks shouldn't have to be protected from their own capabilities, unless they want to be. Two schools of thought, leading perhaps to two types of devices.
> Here's what I think happened: MS decided (along with half the industry) that tablets will gradually replace desktop computer and decided they had to invent a new GUI paradigm that made Windows tablet-friendly.
Which, I would argue, is true! If you've ever tried to use Windows 7 "tablet edition" on a tablet (we own one, it sucks) you can see immediately that the desktop environment is not appropriate for touch devices. Not even a little bit.
> Whereupon they made the same mistake they've made many times before — they forgot that many of their users still need the old paradigm.
...which could be paraphrased as "windows everywhere", which has demonstrably not worked in the past ("Start" on mobile devices) and still doesn't work (tiles on desktop).
Nope. Things like robots that build cars, or medical equipment, or any number of devices that do work in the real world and are controlled by computers. If you drop huge amounts of money on such equipment, you're not going to want to throw it away and buy a new one just because the controller OS is obsolete.
Enterprises have these kinds of issues all the time. The nature of the capital investment of course varies, but whether it is a big clunky ERP system, an airline scheduling system, or some big machine, the bottom line is that people write code that isn't portable and the easiest solution for a company is to just stick with an OS vendor that will support them for a decade or two.
Ok. I think you'd be surprised how many of them run embedded windows, or more rarely, linux. The machine may cost a lot of money, but the controller is often a rack mount PC. I worked in IT for a short time for a developer of such things, and they went with an industrial PC because there were a lot of sources, and it was a known architecture and environment to which they could develop.
And,.... you'd be surprised, I think, in how many older control systems are still showing Windows 98 splash screens on boot. 'S not the way I'd do it, but they didn't ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
What, really? Seriously, there are people who look at the latest ipods and go
"I just gotta have me one a those"
"What for, Mel?"
"Dunno. It's so sleek and purty"
I don't torrent music.
Yes, it's easy and free and you can get more music than you could ever listen to in a relatively short time. But it's not worth it to me from a legal or moral standpoint.
But admittedly, that's easy for me to say -- I don't feel the need to buy the latest highly marketed CD at retail price. Pop music in particular tends to have a very short shelf life. Wait a few months (sometimes a few *weeks*) until the early adopters overplay their purchases, the shine is off the bauble, and titles start cropping up in bargain bins, severely discounted on amazon, or turn up at the dollar store. And the advantage of buying a CD for $1.99 is that if your research didn't pan out and it's junk, you don't feel as badly about giving it to your niece, or even throwing it away.
I'm quite sure that the thought didn't even enter Steve's head. It was never his problem. He was in the business of selling appliances. Content was the hook to sell hardware. It's not that complicated.
That his customers were short-sighted enough not to consider that DRM-protected content is non-transferable, was a bonus.
Contrary to customer reports, Steve was not a saint. He was a businessman.
Pragmatically, Bruce could afford to set a fund aside to re-purchase his library in one of his daughter's names, but I'm sure it's the principle of the thing, and in that respect he's right.
The moral of the story, something I discovered years ago, is that generally it's the terminally lazy and shortsighted who buy their music from itunes. Buy the real CD, import it into itunes, and it's yours forever. You even have a handy backup in the Tupperware bin in the closet. And your kids can get your entire music collection on a DRM-free hard drive that itunes will play, or a collection of cds that they can rip if they feel like it.
I understand, buying directly from itunes is often cheaper than buying a recent commercial CD. (With older music, of course, you can often buy the entire CD for the cost of a couple of tracks, but that's besides the point.) But one of the prices you pay for that discount is that the music is not yours. Oh, it might seem like it's yours, but try to give it away, and you find that it doesn't belong to you.
> In a saner world, we'd just ship all hipsters to Seattle, and be done with them.
I just now had a fantasy of a town without hipsters... Of being able to go into a coffee shop and not have to stand behind a skinny guy in a long leather jacket with a shaved head ordering a drink so complicated that the clerk has to take notes. ...and then demand in a screechy voice that she check "in the back" for whatever esoteric food item he wants that they don't have.
John Pinette voice: Get out of the liiiiine.
> You seem to be confusing "science and technology" with "marketing buzzwords."
You are my favorite person for this week. And it's only Wednesday.
Had I mod points, I'd mod this informative just to see people's reaction.
There used to be something called "common carrier status" at least in the US. These days, I have no idea.
My understanding from this is that if I break into someone's wifi, or "borrow" someone's mobile phone, and perform some kind of illegal transaction, the owner of that access point or device is liable? Besides being a great way to avoid legal consequences, it occurs to me that this could be used as a weapon against anyone who owns a wireless device or any company that maintains a wireless network.
Oh, this is too good not to use in a movie. I want to see; perp picks bystander's pocket, makes illegal call, puts phone back in pocket, then walks away as the police tackle bystander.
> hand waving only goes so far.
Hand waving never occurs in science? "Here's the initial conditions, stuff happens over there, and here is the final product." "What stuff happens?" "We don't know yet, so we just call it 'stuff'." This never ever happens in science?
In second grade, my teachers tried to force me to be right handed. (For which I would like to give a personal "thank you". Oh, and "may you burn in hell".) I got terrible headaches and a bad stutter. (I know handedness as a cause of stuttering is now considered controversial. I can only tell you what I experienced.) In fifth grade I switched myself back. My symptoms gradually disappeared. As a result, I never learned to write cursive with my dominant hand, as those years were spent training a hand that doesn't write anymore.
However, being the only southpaw in a large extended family, I was introduced to the perils of a right-hand-only world at an early age. Even though I now own left handed scissors, I still tend to use them right handed out of habit.
Most left handed people (such as myself) learn to handle tools and gadgets right handed. It is a right handed world. In a way this is an advantage, as we southpaws do more and therefore tend to have more dexterity using the "wrong hand" than most righties. This tends to make southpaws somewhat ambidextrous. Watch someone doing a repetitious task -- if they're naturally a leftie, chances are they're using both hands. If they're naturally a rightie, often their left arm just hangs there like a piece of meat.
Back in the days of mechanical cash registers, me and the only other leftie checker were the fastest bar none.
I wish they would, but I suspect if they did, Microsoft could string it out until AVG was out of money. Microsoft has more lawyers than AVG has employees.
I know the article has been posted for awhile, but this just hit me. It's an epiphany.
This is a downgraded logo. It's the logo of a once puissant company that is on the decline. It's an admission that "we're still going to be around, but in a reduced capacity". It's Microsoft marketing... giving up.
IANAL but I think there are "reasonable person" legal clauses that would apply. IE a reasonable person would expect that if you set passwords on all your accounts, someone would not be able to log in by hitting escape. Oops, that one actually happened.
A reasonable person would expect that your ATM would not let the next guy access the account you just accessed after you retrieved your card. And so forth. I think a case could be made that it's about reasonable expectations.
And of course, it would be up to juries and precedent to decide what was "reasonable".
> Microsoft has previously argued against such a move
Well, of course (/snark)
> claiming a burglary victim wouldn't expect to be able to sue the manufacturer of the door or a window in their home.
Maybe one could expect that, if the advertisement for the door or window led one to believe a level of security that the door or window was not designed to supply. Or if a reasonable person would assume, for instance, that a door with a security-type cylindrical-key lock on it could not be opened with a common ink pen (true story).
I think it's about reasonable expectations. For instance, if there was an unknown back door in an otherwise reasonably secure OS, and the manufacturer lost the credentials, and didn't 'fess up, and as a result a bad guy nabbed my customer credit card database, yeah, as a person with reasonable expectations, I'd sue.
I think you're right. Besides, it didn't really make any sense. OSX and iOS use the same kernel as far as I know; the rest is environment-specific, (touch vs kvm) which is how it should be. The philosophy of trying to make one interface work in all environments has a tendency to build a product that's good at nothing.
> and you can't even make it possible for 6% of your population to have 3Mbps *dsl*? Over your existing phone lines?
I'm told the problem there, us being the first to have widespread telephone and all, is that we have a lot of ancient infrastructure still in use, which was never envisioned to carry data. I've heard rumors of 100 year old wire still in place. So yeah, no 3Mbps over existing phone lines in some areas, for a rather bizarre value of "existing".
I personally have fiber to the house, but I admit that's not widespread in this country. Putting up new infrastructure in a country this big with this number of households is not a trivial thing.
I read somewhere that some former eastern bloc countries actually have a more modern telephone infrastructure than ours, by virtue of the fact they had to start from scratch after the soviet union broke up, whereas we have all this legacy stuff still in place from early last century.
Well... um...
Actually, that's pretty cool.
Seriously, this is the best they could do?
That's absolutely true. And for power users who think the i-products are somewhat limited, there are alternatives.
And this is how it should be. People shouldn't need to be geeks to use a phone, or a tablet. On the other hand, geeks shouldn't have to be protected from their own capabilities, unless they want to be. Two schools of thought, leading perhaps to two types of devices.
> Here's what I think happened: MS decided (along with half the industry) that tablets will gradually replace desktop computer and decided they had to invent a new GUI paradigm that made Windows tablet-friendly.
Which, I would argue, is true! If you've ever tried to use Windows 7 "tablet edition" on a tablet (we own one, it sucks) you can see immediately that the desktop environment is not appropriate for touch devices. Not even a little bit.
> Whereupon they made the same mistake they've made many times before — they forgot that many of their users still need the old paradigm.
Nope. Things like robots that build cars, or medical equipment, or any number of devices that do work in the real world and are controlled by computers. If you drop huge amounts of money on such equipment, you're not going to want to throw it away and buy a new one just because the controller OS is obsolete.
Enterprises have these kinds of issues all the time. The nature of the capital investment of course varies, but whether it is a big clunky ERP system, an airline scheduling system, or some big machine, the bottom line is that people write code that isn't portable and the easiest solution for a company is to just stick with an OS vendor that will support them for a decade or two.
Ok. I think you'd be surprised how many of them run embedded windows, or more rarely, linux. The machine may cost a lot of money, but the controller is often a rack mount PC. I worked in IT for a short time for a developer of such things, and they went with an industrial PC because there were a lot of sources, and it was a known architecture and environment to which they could develop.
And,.... you'd be surprised, I think, in how many older control systems are still showing Windows 98 splash screens on boot. 'S not the way I'd do it, but they didn't ask me.