Thanks, you saved me having to write that. In order to sell something, it needs to be valuable to the customer. Depending on what the thing is and how you provide it, you can influence this value.
Selling music online, if done properly (iTunes without DRM, or eMusic with mainstream music) has great potential, because it can offer great value. You (would) have the convenience of files in the format of your choice. You could listen to them on the computer, in the car, in your home, on your portable player, or however else you want. You get the warm fuzzy feeling of helping the artist, and of knowing that you won't be sued. You don't have to go through the hastle of ripping CDs. You would get album art, accurate track names, and high quality rips. You'd have a wide selection, it would be quick and easy to buy music. Parents could give their kids a music budget. Few would download illegally, because it wouldn't be worth dealing with the shortcomings of P2P networks. The economies of scale are more than enough to make the artists rich. This is the potential of online music sales.
The music industry doesn't see this yet. DRM isn't helping them. As long as there are CDs, as long as iTunes lets you rip CDs, as long as there analog speakers, and as long as sound is transmitted through vibrating air instead of through an encrypted channel directly into a cochlear implant or nerve graft, DRM does not hinder piracy! DRM cannot have the convenience of unencumbered music: it won't be cross-platform, players will be expensive, there will be the chance of losing the music, the system will be centralized, and music won't have the tangibility and concreteness of a file. DRM, for me anyway, will always kill the sale. Others aren't so idealistic, but the inconvenience won't help. DRM actively drives people to illegally download music from P2P networks. The sooner the industry realizes this, the better off they'll be.
Two paths to sanity: First, the industry might pull it's head out of the sand, give us a non-DRM cross-platform multi-format iTunes-alike, and reap the rewards. Second, the amplified marketing power of the internet might let eMusic or similar services become so popular that indie music could supplant the mainstream. These are interesting times.
The real problem is that the legal system is simply too slow! Everyone here knows SCO will be laughed out of the courtroom, but unfortunately, that won't happen for at least a year, and in the meantime, SCO can continue to cause damage. The software marketplace moves much, much faster than the courts, so there's a window of probably two years when one can destroy an industry and get rich off their stock with no consequences.
Is there any way IBM or RedHat can get a "STFU" order (as other countries have) in a reasonable timeframe?
To clarify, there are several Geekiness levels within Lego Mindstorms. The lowest level is using the lego-style graphical-intensive Windows-only macro language. One level up is using the OCX control in Visual Basic. For real Geekiness, you need to use NQC, which compiles to the RCX's limited bytecode, but has C-like syntax. Above that, there are Fourth and Java implementations that run on the RCX. And to be the king of the geeks, you must build yourself a cross-compiling GCC and use LegOS.
Apparently Coleman doesn't like outrageous fines or the complete lack of due process the DMCA lets the RIAA get away with. That's good, but he could go further. What are his opinions on the circumvention clauses, the ones which make DeCSS code illegal to use, possess, or even discuss? And are there any other evil parts of the DMCA I'm overlooking? It would be really cool if Coleman's proposal morphed into some kind of DMCA reform, or even totally neutered it.
Luckily, there are alternatives. While Linux isn't ready for everyone yet (I hope it improves more before it solidifies), I'd love to be able to say, "Your CD-ROM doesn't work in Windows? Here, try Linux."
I agree that no matter what they do, nobody could sell motherboards that won't run Linux. Heck, even Microsoft failed to keep it off the XBox. Microsoft's power over hardware vendors is insufficient to bully them into selling hardware that won't boot other OSs.
P2P causes a lot of traffic and is expensive, and often results in C&D letters. Obviously colleges have an incentive to get it off their network, or at least throttle it. But there are much better ways.
Florida's current solution is much too invasive, and not very effective. Does the app run in Linux? Wine? Mac? Limiting operating system choices is a very bad thing for a university, especially for the computer science students who are trying to widen their experience.
It's also not effective. What's to stop someone from running the spyware in an emulator? Renaming their P2P programs?
The problem is that a university network has untrusted (in the security usage) clients. But it's not a problem: It's easy to tell who's running P2P programs, and who's infected, centrally. This is more effective and less limiting.
Fine, but part of the point is to provide secure content. The user has shown that he can't be trusted, so the content providers have a useless security system. A computer is a tool. It's pretty stupid to say you have a god-given right to see every bit in every memory location.
Content providers do not have a God-given right to complete control of their content. They have a government given right to partial control. As history has shown, content providers are completely against fair use. (I'm talking about ripping, transcoding, timeshifting, and playing in the car, not P2P copying (which DRM doesn't stop anyway).) Putting content providers in a completely controlling position is not a good idea.
Why am I opposed to DRM? For one, why should I buy something from someone who explicitly states they don't trust me? More importantly, while I personally can choose to abstain from DRM, the vast majority of computer users are uninformed. When they choose DRM, they're choosing "music" over "no music," not "DRM music" over "unencumbered music." This is a result of the lack of competition in the content industry - because DRM lowers content's value, no single provider would sell it, because nobody'd buy it. Unfortunately, the content industry is dominated by a cartel, so DRM is being pushed down the throats of uninformed users who haven't been shown an alternative.
Not necessairily. If you (and all other contributors) agree, you can give them nonexclusive rights to the code under whatever non-GPL license you please. The community would still be able to improve the last GPL version, but the company wouldn't be obligated to release your modifications. Granted, it would be difficult to sign such a contract without knowing it.
I don't think that travelling through a wormhole is faster than light. It just means that point A and point B were much closer than you thought. Just because you found an alleyway that cuts a 10 minute trip down to 2 doesn't mean your Model T can do 50.
iRiver was one of the first to work with Xiph.org, and there was something about demo boards, and some agreement, but nothing concrete for a long time. It's nice to see this come to fruition. I personally am very glad, because this is one more choice when I get a portable player for college. I have a huge Vorbis collection.
Microsoft claims that the "digital signatures" won't be valid, and that especially because the limitations to the settlement aren't obvious, many of the claims will be fraudulent. They have a point.
But it doesn't matter if not a single claim goes through. Lindows sells software and Click-n-Run. Their expenses are the already-written software and the negligible costs to run the servers. Lindows benefits greatly from more Lindows users. This whole thing is nothing more than an elaborate scheme to give away Lindows. I think that's a good thing. Lindows has made some errors, technical and otherwise, but they are trying to make Linux work better for the non-l337 desktop users.
I think Lindows was a little over the top, but what they are doing can probably be done legally. It might require some sort of snail-mail transaction with Lindows at least, and Microsoft makes some valid points. They ought to at least mention the school children, for instance, and using "guilty" to describe the antitrust settlement probably wasn't something a lawyer would have done. Not making the restrictions (you must have bought it in California) clear was particularly dumb.
On the other hand, while the letter plays heavily on the theme of fraud, and more lightly on the theme of taking from the children, in truth, somebody filing the claim is taking Microsoft software, not money, from those kids. I view that as a good thing.
On the information page, they say they may offer downloads in Vorbis. As someone who's bought from them, do they do this yet?
Since they must store their music as WAV, they're in a unique position to choose formats. If I were them, I'd offer both LAME MP3 and -q3 Vorbis streams (or lower-bitrate Vorbis for dialup streaming) to the masses, and your choice of formats (FLAC, WAV, MP3, Vorbis) at any quality when you buy the album.
The best marketing, word of mouth, is free. If someone I know tells me something is good, that means way more than any marketing the RIAA could pay for. Also, consider that web space is relatively cheap. The RIAA isn't living on borrowed time because the internet has made music distribution too easy, they're on borrowed time because the internet has made marketing too easy.
Set your browser to open them in XMMS. (Or just do that manually, type "xmms foo.m3u". Those files are just a list of the URLs to stream the MP3s from.
There are a (very few) RIAA artists who make ungodly amounts of money for their music (or marketing, or sex appeal...). The majority of those artists get screwed, but you don't hear about that in mainstream media.
Let's make some independent artist rich. Famous enough to get an article about indie music in Time or similar. Non-mainstream music needs some marketing - to give examples that it can work, and to show the public that there are alternatives.
We already brought the streaming from magnatune to it's knees. Let's slashdot an artist. (Maybe Dave Berry could give somebody's PayPal number.)
I don't think you realize how diabolical the RIAA is. They saw a nice upstart record company, so they got Michael to sell out and Slashdot the site. How does it feel to be a tool of the oppressors?
How many non-geeks use Linux? Not very many, but I don't hear you speaking out against that here, as well you shouldn't. Besides, Winamp supports Vorbis by default, and the OggDS filters are easy to install.
I'm with the OP, it would be nice if they offered Vorbis. Unfortunately, it may not be practical for them, as it might double their storage needs, which may not be worth it to them. I'm not so fanatical that I refuse MP3, or that I'd rather have a transcoded Vorbis file, but Vorbis is my preference. Look on the bright side, it's not WMA.
It's because most people don't want or need SELinux. One part of it is a bunch of patches against the kernel, which allow you to restrict (not grant) access in a very tightly controlled way. But the "mainstream" access control is good enough for most people. It's just another of many ofshoots of the Linux kernel, like User Mode Linux, uCLinux, and others.
I don't think IM needs a centralized network, any more than, say, email does. It just needs a standard protocol for clients to communicate with servers and servers to communicate with each other. This is Jabber's approach. The infrastructure to do this has been in place for years. Being on a different network simply means the @foo.bar part of your name changes.
So why are there centralized networks? I think it's just about control. AOL didn't want to create an open-standard decentralized thing like email, they wanted something they could control. Towards this end, they made their server and their client, and proceded to be control freaks about it. Others have copied them, and compatible clients have struggled to survive, but whatever they do is at the mercy of whoever owns the servers, which is exactly how those owners want it. Unfortunately, this means the IM companies will be even more opposed to Jabber than they will be to their other competitors.
With this interview and IBM's most recent counterclaim, SCO fell about 20 precent. But I have a feeling they will bounce back.
What we need is to group the "bad" news together. Suppose IBM filed a counterclaim, RedHat did something interesting, SCO lost something overseas, and several open source leaders made more papers (and actually publicized them). The idea would be to get the stock as far down as possible in one day. We would keep a little news in reserve to drown out their PR responses the next day. Maybe by forcing the stock price down, we'd convince speculation buyers that the house of cards is falling, and perhaps get some of the private holders to pull out.
Slashdot Mirror
Selling music online, if done properly (iTunes without DRM, or eMusic with mainstream music) has great potential, because it can offer great value. You (would) have the convenience of files in the format of your choice. You could listen to them on the computer, in the car, in your home, on your portable player, or however else you want. You get the warm fuzzy feeling of helping the artist, and of knowing that you won't be sued. You don't have to go through the hastle of ripping CDs. You would get album art, accurate track names, and high quality rips. You'd have a wide selection, it would be quick and easy to buy music. Parents could give their kids a music budget. Few would download illegally, because it wouldn't be worth dealing with the shortcomings of P2P networks. The economies of scale are more than enough to make the artists rich. This is the potential of online music sales.
The music industry doesn't see this yet. DRM isn't helping them. As long as there are CDs, as long as iTunes lets you rip CDs, as long as there analog speakers, and as long as sound is transmitted through vibrating air instead of through an encrypted channel directly into a cochlear implant or nerve graft, DRM does not hinder piracy! DRM cannot have the convenience of unencumbered music: it won't be cross-platform, players will be expensive, there will be the chance of losing the music, the system will be centralized, and music won't have the tangibility and concreteness of a file. DRM, for me anyway, will always kill the sale. Others aren't so idealistic, but the inconvenience won't help. DRM actively drives people to illegally download music from P2P networks. The sooner the industry realizes this, the better off they'll be.
Two paths to sanity: First, the industry might pull it's head out of the sand, give us a non-DRM cross-platform multi-format iTunes-alike, and reap the rewards. Second, the amplified marketing power of the internet might let eMusic or similar services become so popular that indie music could supplant the mainstream. These are interesting times.
Is there any way IBM or RedHat can get a "STFU" order (as other countries have) in a reasonable timeframe?
To clarify, there are several Geekiness levels within Lego Mindstorms. The lowest level is using the lego-style graphical-intensive Windows-only macro language. One level up is using the OCX control in Visual Basic. For real Geekiness, you need to use NQC, which compiles to the RCX's limited bytecode, but has C-like syntax. Above that, there are Fourth and Java implementations that run on the RCX. And to be the king of the geeks, you must build yourself a cross-compiling GCC and use LegOS.
Apparently Coleman doesn't like outrageous fines or the complete lack of due process the DMCA lets the RIAA get away with. That's good, but he could go further. What are his opinions on the circumvention clauses, the ones which make DeCSS code illegal to use, possess, or even discuss? And are there any other evil parts of the DMCA I'm overlooking? It would be really cool if Coleman's proposal morphed into some kind of DMCA reform, or even totally neutered it.
I agree that no matter what they do, nobody could sell motherboards that won't run Linux. Heck, even Microsoft failed to keep it off the XBox. Microsoft's power over hardware vendors is insufficient to bully them into selling hardware that won't boot other OSs.
Florida's current solution is much too invasive, and not very effective. Does the app run in Linux? Wine? Mac? Limiting operating system choices is a very bad thing for a university, especially for the computer science students who are trying to widen their experience.
It's also not effective. What's to stop someone from running the spyware in an emulator? Renaming their P2P programs?
The problem is that a university network has untrusted (in the security usage) clients. But it's not a problem: It's easy to tell who's running P2P programs, and who's infected, centrally. This is more effective and less limiting.
Content providers do not have a God-given right to complete control of their content. They have a government given right to partial control. As history has shown, content providers are completely against fair use. (I'm talking about ripping, transcoding, timeshifting, and playing in the car, not P2P copying (which DRM doesn't stop anyway).) Putting content providers in a completely controlling position is not a good idea.
Why am I opposed to DRM? For one, why should I buy something from someone who explicitly states they don't trust me? More importantly, while I personally can choose to abstain from DRM, the vast majority of computer users are uninformed. When they choose DRM, they're choosing "music" over "no music," not "DRM music" over "unencumbered music." This is a result of the lack of competition in the content industry - because DRM lowers content's value, no single provider would sell it, because nobody'd buy it. Unfortunately, the content industry is dominated by a cartel, so DRM is being pushed down the throats of uninformed users who haven't been shown an alternative.
Not necessairily. If you (and all other contributors) agree, you can give them nonexclusive rights to the code under whatever non-GPL license you please. The community would still be able to improve the last GPL version, but the company wouldn't be obligated to release your modifications. Granted, it would be difficult to sign such a contract without knowing it.
Won't -Wall catch most uninitialized variables? Always use -Wall.
I don't think that travelling through a wormhole is faster than light. It just means that point A and point B were much closer than you thought. Just because you found an alleyway that cuts a 10 minute trip down to 2 doesn't mean your Model T can do 50.
There's a Wiki list of (hopefully) all portable Vorbis players at http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware. That page has a link to some detailed information from iRiver about which of their players will support Vorbis.
But it doesn't matter if not a single claim goes through. Lindows sells software and Click-n-Run. Their expenses are the already-written software and the negligible costs to run the servers. Lindows benefits greatly from more Lindows users. This whole thing is nothing more than an elaborate scheme to give away Lindows. I think that's a good thing. Lindows has made some errors, technical and otherwise, but they are trying to make Linux work better for the non-l337 desktop users.
On the other hand, while the letter plays heavily on the theme of fraud, and more lightly on the theme of taking from the children, in truth, somebody filing the claim is taking Microsoft software, not money, from those kids. I view that as a good thing.
Since they must store their music as WAV, they're in a unique position to choose formats. If I were them, I'd offer both LAME MP3 and -q3 Vorbis streams (or lower-bitrate Vorbis for dialup streaming) to the masses, and your choice of formats (FLAC, WAV, MP3, Vorbis) at any quality when you buy the album.
The best marketing, word of mouth, is free. If someone I know tells me something is good, that means way more than any marketing the RIAA could pay for. Also, consider that web space is relatively cheap. The RIAA isn't living on borrowed time because the internet has made music distribution too easy, they're on borrowed time because the internet has made marketing too easy.
Set your browser to open them in XMMS. (Or just do that manually, type "xmms foo.m3u". Those files are just a list of the URLs to stream the MP3s from.
Let's make some independent artist rich. Famous enough to get an article about indie music in Time or similar. Non-mainstream music needs some marketing - to give examples that it can work, and to show the public that there are alternatives.
We already brought the streaming from magnatune to it's knees. Let's slashdot an artist. (Maybe Dave Berry could give somebody's PayPal number.)
I don't think you realize how diabolical the RIAA is. They saw a nice upstart record company, so they got Michael to sell out and Slashdot the site. How does it feel to be a tool of the oppressors?
I'm with the OP, it would be nice if they offered Vorbis. Unfortunately, it may not be practical for them, as it might double their storage needs, which may not be worth it to them. I'm not so fanatical that I refuse MP3, or that I'd rather have a transcoded Vorbis file, but Vorbis is my preference. Look on the bright side, it's not WMA.
It's because most people don't want or need SELinux. One part of it is a bunch of patches against the kernel, which allow you to restrict (not grant) access in a very tightly controlled way. But the "mainstream" access control is good enough for most people. It's just another of many ofshoots of the Linux kernel, like User Mode Linux, uCLinux, and others.
I think he's living in the future (or else todays is just more apropos.) It's here.
So why are there centralized networks? I think it's just about control. AOL didn't want to create an open-standard decentralized thing like email, they wanted something they could control. Towards this end, they made their server and their client, and proceded to be control freaks about it. Others have copied them, and compatible clients have struggled to survive, but whatever they do is at the mercy of whoever owns the servers, which is exactly how those owners want it. Unfortunately, this means the IM companies will be even more opposed to Jabber than they will be to their other competitors.
Legolas: ...43...
What we need is to group the "bad" news together. Suppose IBM filed a counterclaim, RedHat did something interesting, SCO lost something overseas, and several open source leaders made more papers (and actually publicized them). The idea would be to get the stock as far down as possible in one day. We would keep a little news in reserve to drown out their PR responses the next day. Maybe by forcing the stock price down, we'd convince speculation buyers that the house of cards is falling, and perhaps get some of the private holders to pull out.