Yeah, thats great. Replace all the legacy ports in a PC with multiple other types of ports, some of which are certain to eventually die off and in 10, 5, or even 2 years be considered "legacy".
Seriously, what's the point of having so many different busses? USB, S-ATA, AGP... I would think that to be 'modern' there should be ONE bus that *anything* can connect to. Yes, that raises throughput issues. But there is already a model that does this, and solves these problems - ethernet.
I would picture a "legacy-free" pc as being one that has ONE bus in, that anything can plug into. Of course, to make sure things stay speedy, the mobo would have, say, 4 seperate segments of this bus. And you'd put your hard drives on a seperate segment than your video card. Have too many devices on one segment? Throw in a switch that intelligently routes traffic.
Why is it a good thing? WMV is a closed, proprietary format. DRM or not (no matter if you like DRM or not), its not good to have proprietary formats. Porting it to linux means that content creators have less reason to encode things in open formats, espessially with the way microsoft crams things down everyone's throats.
Marketing + availability on many systems + marketing + being the only encoder included with many products + marketing = content creators only making their stuff available in proprietary formats.
I don't want to pay another $1 when I rent a dvd to pay for the WMV licence to be able to decode the content..:p
You seem to be mistaken about the scope and validity of Acacia's patents. Have you read them???
No, because I couldn't find them. And I know the name of the company and basically what I'm searching for. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, or the PO website is setup very non-intuatively, but seems to prove my point even more (at least to myself..)
So your solution is to prevent RealNetworks and Ogg (hypothetically) from ever having existed?
Well, basically, yes. If they never existed, you never would have missed them.:) But really, they would have devised another way to accomplish what they're trying to do that doesn't infringe on Acacia's patent.
So you think they approve patents they don't even understand? The patent office is supposed to decide if the patent is okay or not, and if they don't know what the hell they're doing, then they have no purpose.
Well, that's the feeling I get considering how many broad patents are issued, espessially in the software area. It was my understanding they weren't supposed to issue broad patents.
Believe it or not, you can actually search for and read already issued patents.
Yes, you can. So why is RealNetworks a company? Why does Ogg exist? How does Fraunhofer have patents on MP3? Why did Microsoft create WMP? Apple has had QuickTime for years. I guess none of them bothered to search for patents?
Perhaps it's more along the lines of these patents being obscure and hard - if not impossible - to find, or the fact there's 6+ million. You can describe a patent on cookies without actually using the word 'cookie'. Now how exactly is anyone supposed to find that patent?
Want another example? SBC claims Web frames patent. Why didn't they try to enforce this patent when W3C added them to the HTML specifications in 1997? And Netscape, Microsoft and others had browers that could render them probably earlier than that.
I don't know where you're getting this entrapment stuff from.
Entrapment probably wasn't the right word. Perhaps extorsion would have been better.
That sounds like the situation with trademarks today: if your trademark is infringed, and you don't defend it, you lose it. That's how we ended up with companies being ridiculously overzealous about trademarks.
So? Is this really a bad thing in regards to patents? If you don't defend your patent, and over the next few years you start getting companies, formats and standards that are actually infringing your non-enforced patent, how is it fair to say you still have a right to it? You'd suddenly be putting companies out of business (RealNetworks would be hard-pressed to survive without streaming media, for one). You'd be forcing open-source initatives to pay royalties they obviously can't afford (Ogg can stream).
So yes, if you don't enforce your patent, you should lose rights to it. Basing your business model on a misuse of the patent system - namely, making an obscure patent, waiting years for enough people to violate that patent without knowing, and then suddenly bringing them all to court and get a big payoff - should not be allowed.
The only way out is not to issue overbroad patents.
Yes, that's true. But there are many many problems with this. Often the patent office doesn't have people with enough knowledge to decide if a patent is too broad or not. Often patents are filed on new research where there are only a couple of people in the world that know enough about it to decide if it's overly broad - and those are the people filing the patent.
So really, it becomes impossible to stop these patents from being filed. Instead, it should be rememebered that the patent system is designed to protect intellectual property, and not a place to make money by basically using entrapment.
That raises an interesting idea. Shouldn't the onus be on the patent owner to enforce their patent when someone else first starts to violate it? Sitting on your hands for a few years while many companies violate your patent, then suddenly decided you want to collect on them is akin to entrapment.
By waiting, you're simply allowing more people to violate the patent and increasing the overall payoff for yourself when you go to file suit against all the companies (as opposed to doing it to the first one and stopping future patent violations).
It's also not fair to put the onus on the other side, as there are literally millions of patents, and searching for patents on every little proccess would be futile. Espessially with some of the descriptions they have for software processes, and being able to construe them as patents on something like hyperlinks or cookies.
I totally agree. Google is one of the VERY FEW sites where I've actually clicked on ads, and beyond that -- found them useful.
When you're searching for a certain type of product (say, usb to rs485 adapters), without knowing what companies make them, the ads are often better than the results, because you get companies, and not just articles or forum posts or pages discussing them.
The computer software industry is still too immature to fall under these types of guidelines. Too many programs are not stable yet are shipped out because marketing wants them to.
Perhaps as software engineers enter the fold, this will happen much less. If a software firm has a PEng on staff, then what happens when they say "No, this software is not ready to ship yet"? If the company releases it anyways, despite the engineer saying not to, I'm sure that there is a whole legal element that would come into play, much like if a hospital administrator decided to release a paitent even though an MD said no.
I would imagine with this sort of system, a lot of companies would be reluctant to hire software engineers, because then they suddenly have to release software based on code maturity, so you switch to the OSS style functionality-based (make the features work properly before adding more) design instead of profit-based (add lots of features and fix the bugs later) design. As long as the public is aware of it though, it would be a great marketing tool to be able to say it was designed by a P.Eng., because then it's basically guaranting it's a great project.
I can only imagine the look on the face of whoever recieves motherboard back on RMA.. trying to figure out why the pcb has some sort of residue on it, and a smell not unlike that of fast-food french fries.
I took a course in sound recording (and post-production audio etc) a few years ago, and the instructor had worked at a theme park as the sound engineer during the summer. He said he was blown away by the number of singers that lip synched during their live performances (this would have been mid 90's, when teeny pop and boy-bands where mainstream). He couldn't actually name names, but he definately made it clear that there were a lot of the very popular bands that did it.
This is a very interesting idea - HOWEVER, it overlooks something very simple: If EVERYONE is installing this program, why wouldn't they just properly secure their SMTP's?
If everyone is using ESMTP, POP-before-SMTP or IP-based authentication, this isn't really needed on those systems in our scenario where everyone installs it. That means no more open-relay servers.
As long as all ISPs are blocking outgoing SMTP connections, it means all mail has to be routed through their servers. If they were running it, they could take it a step further since they know the exact user sending the spam, and cut them off.
That means no more spam, or at least a VERY reduced amount (as the people sending it get their accounts cut off). The problem here is which ISP is going to be the one to step up and deny access? Their spammer customers will seek another ISP that doesnt block the ports.
Lets assume that ALL of the ISPs decide that they want to cut off some of their profits and block all spam. Then spammers will start getting their own servers. Of course, we can blacklist them. But if they setup a server, do a HUGE mass mailing all at once, then get blacklisted and move on, everyone is still going to get the spam from before they were blocked.
I was actually thinking about this the other day, and maybe it's already been implemented, but: what if spam assassin IS used at the source?
If you were to use SpamAssasin on OUTGOING email, you could prevent spam from even leaving your network. Of course, you still have the same problems as you do with false positives when you use it on incoming mail. However, you have one other little trick you can use: volume. Don't block any emails right away, but rather, wait until you get a number of messages from the same host that all have a high spam rating.
This would greatly reduce the usability for spammers. If they can only send 10 spams before the system detects all their messages have a high spam probability and blocks them, it suddenly becomes pretty ineffective to use that network to send mail.
This, however, is a pretty optimistic view - it assumes that an ISP wants to step up and prevent their users from spamming, and don't care more about the revenue.
Sun makes (or someone makes them for Sun, not totally sure) x86-based cards that plug into their SunFire servers, and workstations. I saw a demo once of one of their thin clients opening up its own PC sessions using one of the actual x86 cards in the server (the card is dedicated to the client, so no "virtual" stuff). You could also access the SunFire server from a Sparc workstation, and have a PC card in the sparc that let you do the same thing. Was pretty neat.
One of the first things I thought of with this setup is simple panning - playing some riffs with the strings all panned differently could sound really cool (and you wouldnt have to multitrack). Or putting an echo/octavator on only the high strings, etc. Wonder how long it is before someone comes out with a cool effects board for this?
I bought a Digitech RP-6 6 or 7 years ago, and besides being a really fun toy, it let me do a ton of stuff really easily. Stomp a button, and get a totally new sound.. Hook direct into a PA and still sound good. I even used it in the studio without an amp, and hooked the stereo out right into the console. The RP-12 was even more impressive (I couldn't afford it at the time), and I haven't even looked at any of the new stuff in the past few years.
But the power of an effects unit that could process digital guitar.. that'd be damn cool. You wouldn't even have to buy a new amp, unless of course you wanted to buy the 5 more and have multistring surround:)
That's not necessarily a good thing. In the "programming" world, particularly with languages like C and C++ that force the programmer to deal with memory (pointers, etc), it's posssible to have buffer overflows, put the wrong data into pointers, and problems like that are typically much more severe than when you put a character into a variable expecting an integer.
But deciding if a problem like not being able to change the time is a problem that should be self-sufficient or requires outside help is also somewhat subjective. Really, to anyone who's been in a car before or seen any sort of moden electronics, setting the time is a trivial task, that, at most, will require a quick look in the manual to see how to get into time changing mode. If you put a caveman in the car, they're going to have a LOT more difficulty figuring out how to change the time, if for nothing else than they don't know where to look in the manual.
Right now, on tdlp.org, there's 458 HOW-TO's and mini HOW-TO's, 826k of man pages (gzipped), and many various other faq's and articles. Google matches about 4 million records for "linux help". I think that it's fair to say that's a VERY big "manual" to search through, espessially if you don't know exactly what you're looking for (ie, "my network card doesn't work").
Like I originally said, and I see being echoed in other comments replying to the same parent, users want to use the computer. No one - except those of us that read/. - has interest in using another system (even if it's superior) if it means they have to spend hours and hours setting it up, tinkering, and reading thousands of lines of technical manuals.
OSDN claims 8.8 million unique visitors (probably a good number to use for the people that are "self-sufficient"). The world has around 6.2 billion people. Thats about 0.14% of the population of the planet that can solve their own computer problems. Obviously, thats not that fair, so saying there's about 605.60 million people on the internet, that's about 1.5% of people that can solve their own problems (interestingly, not far off from my 2% estimate:) ).
Is it really fair to expect those 596 million people to read all that documentation? Do you think they read everything on msdn.microsoft.com when they installed windows?
Now try wondering why windows has such a huge market share...
You see, what we REALLY want is for people to be self-sufficient, and able to figure things out for themselves.
But the thing is, 98% of people use computers because they are a tool to get a job done. They don't CARE to become self-sufficient, they want it to work. Like it or not, it's a reality of the computing world.
If your car broke, and you took it to a mechanic, and he refused to do any service on it - even though he knew exactly what was wrong - until you read the engineering spec manuals for all the parts he had to replace, how happy would you be?
Re:My idea for bringing a new form of BBS back
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Blizzard Births BBS
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Yes, it certainly makes more sense to dedicate a business phone line, get some system running with a modem, and install some old no-longer-in-development software (though, you could always continue development yourself, it's not like that takes a lot of time) in order to be able to show one person at a time your price list in ASCII. And all they have to do to find it is somehow guess that you have a BBS, open up their phone book to find the number, and install a program capable of using a modem to dial up.
Of course, I'm being optimistic here and assuming people even HAVE modems still.. (i only ever put a nic in my new systems).
I think they've already realized it, hence their non-involvment with what's going on.
I'm not really sure what they're waiting for. Perhaps they realize that any direct involvment on their behalf will mean either losing lots of money (in favour of RIAA), or totally changing the way the recording industry works (against RIAA, and this road will probably cost lots of money). Businesses don't like to lose lots of money.
I emailed Alan Cross to see if there were transcripts of that show available, but according to him, due to copyright issues they can't do that. Maybe they will replay it at some point. If you happen to live in Ontario, there are also some otherstations that air the show.
This is actually the other article that I was basing my comment about AOL on in a previous/. thread.
I will just repost a bit of what I said in that thread, because it is relevant to this too:
The industry is in turmoil right now anyways. The RIAA is bringing lawsuits to everyone they can. Then theres the media companies:
Sony has their music division, which grosses something like $6 million/year. They also have Sony Electronics, which makes things like portable MP3 players, CD burners, etc. This division grosses $40 million/year.
AOL Time Warner is another one. Time Warner has an entertainment divison, selling CDs, etc. AOL is an internet service provider, and obviously one of the reasons people use internet is for downloading music.
Does Sony really have an interest in killing off half the business for another division that makes 8 times as much money? Does AOLTW want to back the RIAA and push their subscribers away (which they will do if you can't download music on AOL)?
He won't buy CD's because if a CD has a song that he likes there will be 12-15 songs on there that he thinks SUCK. In other words he's paying ~$15 for ONE SONG.
In the past 20 years, music has changed quite a bit. There are many more genres of music nowadays, and many more bands, and many more one-hit-wonder type bands.
The recording industry obviously knows this - most of the big ones have different divisions for different genres, and there are hundreds of smaller companies now that deal with specific styles of music. Despite this, they still try to sell music in the exact same way - you buy an entire album, and get all the songs on it, regardless if you only actually like or want one or two songs. From a consumers point of view, you're now paying ~$15 to be able to listen to that one song.
From the article:
The music industry blames the popularity of such networks, including Kazaa and Grokster, where millions of consumers swap songs for free, for the decline in recorded music sales.
They need to take this as a sign: its time to wake up, start doing what consumers want, and sell individual songs. Obviously, tradional methods for this don't make sense - the overhead in producing a CD (printing, packaging, shipping, etc) with one or two songs doesn't make it worth it. But the internet provides a perfect medium for this by eliminating most of the overhead costs.
The industry is in turmoil right now anyways. The RIAA is bringing lawsuits to everyone they can. Then theres the media companies:
Sony has their music division, which grosses something like $6 million/year. They also have Sony Electronics, which makes things like portable MP3 players, CD burners, etc. This division grosses $40 million/year.
AOL Time Warner is another one. Time Warner has an entertainment divison, selling CDs, etc. AOL is an internet service provider, and obviously one of the reasons people use internet is for downloading music.
All of a sudden, it starts making sense why these companies remain tight-lipped about the RIAA's actions and things like the DCMA.
(The sony example was originally from the radio show "The Ongoing History of New Music" by Alan Cross, which did a very interesting show a while back on how the music industry works. Sorry, I can't find a link)
As residential access speeds increase, so does the potential for devastating distributed denial-of-service attacks. A "botnet" with 1000 users, each with 7 MBit connections can do a lot more damage than a 1.5 MBit connection.
Even now, there should be some kind of controls in place to protect against worms and trojans from home users - it's in everyones best interest (ISPs, web hosts, carriers), even if Joe Home user that's infected with the trojan doesn't know or care to know. What's going to happen when DDoS attackers get 5 times as much bandwidth to play with?
I've witnessed a lot of the phenomenon known as the "bell curve" in my engineering courses (and I've seen/heard of the same in other universities in Ontario). Since sci/engineering courses are mostly right/wrong (with part marks here and there), your mark is basically what you get, it's not a subjective mark from the prof.
However, a lot of universities will try to maintain a certain average for the class, usually in the 65 range. Which means that if the average is really low or really high, they will curve the marks to get that average.
Maybe you got a 45 on a test, but the whole class did relatively bad (50 average). The prof curves the marks up to get a 65 average, and suddenly you passed. Of course, I've seen it have the opposite effect, too. Get a 60 on an exam, but the whole class got an 80 average, which is obviously way too high, so curve it down, and suddenly you just failed the course.
It's been able to work like this for a long time (using the cgi version, "#!/usr/bin/php -q"), but as of 4.3.0 they're officially supporting command-line mode as an option.
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Seriously, what's the point of having so many different busses? USB, S-ATA, AGP... I would think that to be 'modern' there should be ONE bus that *anything* can connect to. Yes, that raises throughput issues. But there is already a model that does this, and solves these problems - ethernet.
I would picture a "legacy-free" pc as being one that has ONE bus in, that anything can plug into. Of course, to make sure things stay speedy, the mobo would have, say, 4 seperate segments of this bus. And you'd put your hard drives on a seperate segment than your video card. Have too many devices on one segment? Throw in a switch that intelligently routes traffic.
And take your damn ribbon cables and go home.
Marketing + availability on many systems + marketing + being the only encoder included with many products + marketing = content creators only making their stuff available in proprietary formats.
I don't want to pay another $1 when I rent a dvd to pay for the WMV licence to be able to decode the content.. :p
No, because I couldn't find them. And I know the name of the company and basically what I'm searching for. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, or the PO website is setup very non-intuatively, but seems to prove my point even more (at least to myself..)
Well, basically, yes. If they never existed, you never would have missed them. :) But really, they would have devised another way to accomplish what they're trying to do that doesn't infringe on Acacia's patent.
So you think they approve patents they don't even understand? The patent office is supposed to decide if the patent is okay or not, and if they don't know what the hell they're doing, then they have no purpose.
Well, that's the feeling I get considering how many broad patents are issued, espessially in the software area. It was my understanding they weren't supposed to issue broad patents.
Believe it or not, you can actually search for and read already issued patents.
Yes, you can. So why is RealNetworks a company? Why does Ogg exist? How does Fraunhofer have patents on MP3? Why did Microsoft create WMP? Apple has had QuickTime for years. I guess none of them bothered to search for patents?
Perhaps it's more along the lines of these patents being obscure and hard - if not impossible - to find, or the fact there's 6+ million. You can describe a patent on cookies without actually using the word 'cookie'. Now how exactly is anyone supposed to find that patent?
Want another example? SBC claims Web frames patent. Why didn't they try to enforce this patent when W3C added them to the HTML specifications in 1997? And Netscape, Microsoft and others had browers that could render them probably earlier than that.
I don't know where you're getting this entrapment stuff from.
Entrapment probably wasn't the right word. Perhaps extorsion would have been better.
So? Is this really a bad thing in regards to patents? If you don't defend your patent, and over the next few years you start getting companies, formats and standards that are actually infringing your non-enforced patent, how is it fair to say you still have a right to it? You'd suddenly be putting companies out of business (RealNetworks would be hard-pressed to survive without streaming media, for one). You'd be forcing open-source initatives to pay royalties they obviously can't afford (Ogg can stream).
So yes, if you don't enforce your patent, you should lose rights to it. Basing your business model on a misuse of the patent system - namely, making an obscure patent, waiting years for enough people to violate that patent without knowing, and then suddenly bringing them all to court and get a big payoff - should not be allowed.
The only way out is not to issue overbroad patents.
Yes, that's true. But there are many many problems with this. Often the patent office doesn't have people with enough knowledge to decide if a patent is too broad or not. Often patents are filed on new research where there are only a couple of people in the world that know enough about it to decide if it's overly broad - and those are the people filing the patent.
So really, it becomes impossible to stop these patents from being filed. Instead, it should be rememebered that the patent system is designed to protect intellectual property, and not a place to make money by basically using entrapment.
By waiting, you're simply allowing more people to violate the patent and increasing the overall payoff for yourself when you go to file suit against all the companies (as opposed to doing it to the first one and stopping future patent violations).
It's also not fair to put the onus on the other side, as there are literally millions of patents, and searching for patents on every little proccess would be futile. Espessially with some of the descriptions they have for software processes, and being able to construe them as patents on something like hyperlinks or cookies.
When you're searching for a certain type of product (say, usb to rs485 adapters), without knowing what companies make them, the ads are often better than the results, because you get companies, and not just articles or forum posts or pages discussing them.
Perhaps as software engineers enter the fold, this will happen much less. If a software firm has a PEng on staff, then what happens when they say "No, this software is not ready to ship yet"? If the company releases it anyways, despite the engineer saying not to, I'm sure that there is a whole legal element that would come into play, much like if a hospital administrator decided to release a paitent even though an MD said no.
I would imagine with this sort of system, a lot of companies would be reluctant to hire software engineers, because then they suddenly have to release software based on code maturity, so you switch to the OSS style functionality-based (make the features work properly before adding more) design instead of profit-based (add lots of features and fix the bugs later) design. As long as the public is aware of it though, it would be a great marketing tool to be able to say it was designed by a P.Eng., because then it's basically guaranting it's a great project.
I can only imagine the look on the face of whoever recieves motherboard back on RMA.. trying to figure out why the pcb has some sort of residue on it, and a smell not unlike that of fast-food french fries.
I took a course in sound recording (and post-production audio etc) a few years ago, and the instructor had worked at a theme park as the sound engineer during the summer. He said he was blown away by the number of singers that lip synched during their live performances (this would have been mid 90's, when teeny pop and boy-bands where mainstream). He couldn't actually name names, but he definately made it clear that there were a lot of the very popular bands that did it.
This is a very interesting idea - HOWEVER, it overlooks something very simple: If EVERYONE is installing this program, why wouldn't they just properly secure their SMTP's? If everyone is using ESMTP, POP-before-SMTP or IP-based authentication, this isn't really needed on those systems in our scenario where everyone installs it. That means no more open-relay servers. As long as all ISPs are blocking outgoing SMTP connections, it means all mail has to be routed through their servers. If they were running it, they could take it a step further since they know the exact user sending the spam, and cut them off. That means no more spam, or at least a VERY reduced amount (as the people sending it get their accounts cut off). The problem here is which ISP is going to be the one to step up and deny access? Their spammer customers will seek another ISP that doesnt block the ports. Lets assume that ALL of the ISPs decide that they want to cut off some of their profits and block all spam. Then spammers will start getting their own servers. Of course, we can blacklist them. But if they setup a server, do a HUGE mass mailing all at once, then get blacklisted and move on, everyone is still going to get the spam from before they were blocked.
I was actually thinking about this the other day, and maybe it's already been implemented, but: what if spam assassin IS used at the source?
If you were to use SpamAssasin on OUTGOING email, you could prevent spam from even leaving your network. Of course, you still have the same problems as you do with false positives when you use it on incoming mail. However, you have one other little trick you can use: volume. Don't block any emails right away, but rather, wait until you get a number of messages from the same host that all have a high spam rating.
This would greatly reduce the usability for spammers. If they can only send 10 spams before the system detects all their messages have a high spam probability and blocks them, it suddenly becomes pretty ineffective to use that network to send mail.
This, however, is a pretty optimistic view - it assumes that an ISP wants to step up and prevent their users from spamming, and don't care more about the revenue.
Sun makes (or someone makes them for Sun, not totally sure) x86-based cards that plug into their SunFire servers, and workstations. I saw a demo once of one of their thin clients opening up its own PC sessions using one of the actual x86 cards in the server (the card is dedicated to the client, so no "virtual" stuff). You could also access the SunFire server from a Sparc workstation, and have a PC card in the sparc that let you do the same thing. Was pretty neat.
I bought a Digitech RP-6 6 or 7 years ago, and besides being a really fun toy, it let me do a ton of stuff really easily. Stomp a button, and get a totally new sound.. Hook direct into a PA and still sound good. I even used it in the studio without an amp, and hooked the stereo out right into the console. The RP-12 was even more impressive (I couldn't afford it at the time), and I haven't even looked at any of the new stuff in the past few years.
But the power of an effects unit that could process digital guitar.. that'd be damn cool. You wouldn't even have to buy a new amp, unless of course you wanted to buy the 5 more and have multistring surround :)
That's not necessarily a good thing. In the "programming" world, particularly with languages like C and C++ that force the programmer to deal with memory (pointers, etc), it's posssible to have buffer overflows, put the wrong data into pointers, and problems like that are typically much more severe than when you put a character into a variable expecting an integer.
Right now, on tdlp.org, there's 458 HOW-TO's and mini HOW-TO's, 826k of man pages (gzipped), and many various other faq's and articles. Google matches about 4 million records for "linux help". I think that it's fair to say that's a VERY big "manual" to search through, espessially if you don't know exactly what you're looking for (ie, "my network card doesn't work").
Like I originally said, and I see being echoed in other comments replying to the same parent, users want to use the computer. No one - except those of us that read /. - has interest in using another system (even if it's superior) if it means they have to spend hours and hours setting it up, tinkering, and reading thousands of lines of technical manuals.
OSDN claims 8.8 million unique visitors (probably a good number to use for the people that are "self-sufficient"). The world has around 6.2 billion people. Thats about 0.14% of the population of the planet that can solve their own computer problems. Obviously, thats not that fair, so saying there's about 605.60 million people on the internet, that's about 1.5% of people that can solve their own problems (interestingly, not far off from my 2% estimate :) ).
Is it really fair to expect those 596 million people to read all that documentation? Do you think they read everything on msdn.microsoft.com when they installed windows? Now try wondering why windows has such a huge market share...
But the thing is, 98% of people use computers because they are a tool to get a job done. They don't CARE to become self-sufficient, they want it to work. Like it or not, it's a reality of the computing world.
If your car broke, and you took it to a mechanic, and he refused to do any service on it - even though he knew exactly what was wrong - until you read the engineering spec manuals for all the parts he had to replace, how happy would you be?
Of course, I'm being optimistic here and assuming people even HAVE modems still.. (i only ever put a nic in my new systems).
I'm not really sure what they're waiting for. Perhaps they realize that any direct involvment on their behalf will mean either losing lots of money (in favour of RIAA), or totally changing the way the recording industry works (against RIAA, and this road will probably cost lots of money). Businesses don't like to lose lots of money.
I emailed Alan Cross to see if there were transcripts of that show available, but according to him, due to copyright issues they can't do that. Maybe they will replay it at some point. If you happen to live in Ontario, there are also some other stations that air the show.
In the past 20 years, music has changed quite a bit. There are many more genres of music nowadays, and many more bands, and many more one-hit-wonder type bands.
The recording industry obviously knows this - most of the big ones have different divisions for different genres, and there are hundreds of smaller companies now that deal with specific styles of music. Despite this, they still try to sell music in the exact same way - you buy an entire album, and get all the songs on it, regardless if you only actually like or want one or two songs. From a consumers point of view, you're now paying ~$15 to be able to listen to that one song.
From the article:
They need to take this as a sign: its time to wake up, start doing what consumers want, and sell individual songs. Obviously, tradional methods for this don't make sense - the overhead in producing a CD (printing, packaging, shipping, etc) with one or two songs doesn't make it worth it. But the internet provides a perfect medium for this by eliminating most of the overhead costs.
The industry is in turmoil right now anyways. The RIAA is bringing lawsuits to everyone they can. Then theres the media companies:
- Sony has their music division, which grosses something like $6 million/year. They also have Sony Electronics, which makes things like portable MP3 players, CD burners, etc. This division grosses $40 million/year.
- AOL Time Warner is another one. Time Warner has an entertainment divison, selling CDs, etc. AOL is an internet service provider, and obviously one of the reasons people use internet is for downloading music.
All of a sudden, it starts making sense why these companies remain tight-lipped about the RIAA's actions and things like the DCMA.(The sony example was originally from the radio show "The Ongoing History of New Music" by Alan Cross, which did a very interesting show a while back on how the music industry works. Sorry, I can't find a link)
Even now, there should be some kind of controls in place to protect against worms and trojans from home users - it's in everyones best interest (ISPs, web hosts, carriers), even if Joe Home user that's infected with the trojan doesn't know or care to know. What's going to happen when DDoS attackers get 5 times as much bandwidth to play with?
I've witnessed a lot of the phenomenon known as the "bell curve" in my engineering courses (and I've seen/heard of the same in other universities in Ontario). Since sci/engineering courses are mostly right/wrong (with part marks here and there), your mark is basically what you get, it's not a subjective mark from the prof.
However, a lot of universities will try to maintain a certain average for the class, usually in the 65 range. Which means that if the average is really low or really high, they will curve the marks to get that average.
Maybe you got a 45 on a test, but the whole class did relatively bad (50 average). The prof curves the marks up to get a 65 average, and suddenly you passed. Of course, I've seen it have the opposite effect, too. Get a 60 on an exam, but the whole class got an 80 average, which is obviously way too high, so curve it down, and suddenly you just failed the course.
It's been able to work like this for a long time (using the cgi version, "#!/usr/bin/php -q"), but as of 4.3.0 they're officially supporting command-line mode as an option.