1. Harry goes to school.
2. After a few weeks something weird starts to happen.
The doors are locked, teachers and students are nowhere to be found,
Quidditch match seems to be canceled.
3. Ignore it until just before the school year ends.
Harry wonders the halls and
checks the owl-mail every half an hour.
4. Find out what was causing whatever was weird to happen.
After adding up all of the clues he gathered throughout the semester,
Harry decides to check the Message Board. It reveals that the school
is not in session. Harry suspects that Voldemort is to blame, but
no one believes him.
5. Defeat it/Showdown with Voldemort.
To confirm Harry's fears, Voldemort finally shows up. He explains that he spent all this
time looking for Harry, but he never expected him to be in a
closed-up school, out of all places. He is tries to cast Avada Kedavra,
but fails because he cannot stop laughing. Harry escapes victorious
once again.
Mods, check the basic facts before wasting your points.
Customers who purchase Windows Vista Ultimate, the most expensive Vista version, at retail will be able to upgrade two more PCs in their home to Vista Home Premium for $49.99 each.
Let's see... Mine says "Slashdot Troll Special Edition, 2007 - OO".
(I guess they had to use infinity in order to include the Duke Nukem
Forever release date).
I don't even know where to begin with this article...
Digital Rights Management is a good thing.
Welcome to Slashdot.
A world completely free of DRM is the wishful thinking of pirates or the quixotic dream of the naive.
The author is 10 years old?
A world without DRM is a world without premium content.
Or 9, may be?
Every implementation of DRM has only hurt honest users.
Since he already stressed that DRM cannot stop piracy,
doesn't it stand to reason (on his view) that DRM
was specifically designed to hurt honest users?
"Perfect DRM" already exists today. [...] It's called the printed book.
It's like he has all the clues, but no lightbulb.
Dead tree--hard to replicate--we need publishers' services.
Digitized information--easy to replicate--publishers can kick the rocks.
In some ways, the HD ecosystem is going to buy time to help DRM reach
that magic steady state that we enjoy with books.
Magic? Enjoy? The books should have been digitized like 30 years ago,
and e-books are at least 5 years overdue. Thanks to copyright being
infinity minus one day, some books are almost impossible to find.
My personal grudge is that many great old textbooks are prohibitively
expensive simply because
they are rare. No one is printing them anymore, and no one is allowed
to digitize them either. Enjoy? I don't think so.
And for the love of me, I have no idea how to comment on his
screenwriter theme. Yeah, there are other people working behind the curtains.
But if movie people themselves think that the most important
and creative part is done by the actors and the director, are they
going to lie to the rest of us? That makes no sense at all.
True that. My $90 Antec case is now 8 years old and has the original power supply.
Everything else just came and went: 2 motherboards (think also CPU, RAM), 2 hard drives,
3 graphics cards. It's big and heavy, but it saved me a heap of money for being
a pretty decent gaming rig that it is.
What's with all the lawyer bashing and paranoia? These guys are clearly making fun of him.
Just because the person is a lawyer, doesn't mean he is out to rip you off.
There are plenty of good lawyers around. In fact, most lawyers wouldn't do
something unethical just because it pays so handsomely well.
I strongly suspect that both most OS X users have never run Linux on the desktop
Do you realize that the statement above is precisely the one I am defending?
And that it implies (bar BSD considerations) that "most OSX users did not have
a pleasure to experience both free and proprietary OS, and so cannot readily see
the disadvantages of an OS which stem directly from it being non-free"?
If you don't mind, I'll abandon this thread. It starts consuming my life.
I do not suppose that I put in the last word: your comments were insightful.
I just feel like we have beaten this topic to death.
We've had that feature for n years, and it's better done, too.
I beg your pardon, Vista is yet to be outdone in the video-scrambling
department; although even that feature they borrowed from others: in this
case, The Sims. And what other system is as good at phoning the home office to
report your hardware state? GNU/Linux still has a looooong way to go.
Your sample is not representative at all, partly because of its
size, and partly because it might have too many people who work
in IT. In the US and Western Europe, most people with computers
do not work in IT.
I do not base my estimate on a sample. Intuitively, it seems
plausible to me because the share of Gnu/Linux is around 0.035,
and the same goes for Mac; Windows is at 0.9 (these numbers are
easy to google for).
If the OS usage is normally distributed (e.g., many users are
familiar with an average number of systems: 2, and relatively few
are familiar with 1 or 3, even fewer with 4 or more), then the intersection of
GNU/Linux and Mac is likely to be very small. The intersection of
Windows and Gnu/Linux, on the other hand, is very likely to cover
most of the latter (not to mention that Windows is likely to be
used by anyone because of its ubiquity). Same thing for Mac and Windows: the
intersection is probably a substantial part of the Mac user base.
Conclusion: most people who are familiar with OSX are not familiar
with GNU/Linux.
The OEM deal is not set in stone. If Microsoft increases the OEM prices,
it will only make the free OS system relatively cheaper. Kind of sucks
for Microsoft to maim themselves like that. You are right though. Others
pointed out that I ignored the support costs. Zero marginal cost argument
doesn't really work here, but it is still very plausible that manufacturers
will be able to profit by offering a free OS option if the market is
big enough.
Well, you can chalk up about 75 people in my office that use OS X to develop software that runs on Linux and NetBSD. I mean, have you been to any conferences lately? Blackhat, Defcon, etc. are full of Mac users, most of whom were using Linux or a BSD as their primary OS a few years ago. I even had a Linux user I was chatting with the other day tell me he was switching to OS X, not for any given feature, but because everyone else has and it makes it easier to get support for some of the more obscure uses of a computer.
This, at best, shows that a fair number of GNU/Linux users are familiar with OSX. That is
exactly what I have asserted.
I'm pretty sure most OS X users have used OS X, sort of by definition.
You are right to get me here: I was imprecise to the degree of being plain wrong.
I meant to say "but the quivalent, e.g. that most OSX users have used both
proprietary and free OS in the past,..."
A fair number have used Linux or some other OS, but that number is a lot more uncertain.
If you read carefully, the number I was talking about in my original
post was the number of OSX users who have not experienced a free OS.
Windows does not count, so the set is even smaller than the one you are talking about.
I do not believe that it was an unfair generalization.
Nice rant. I, however, stand by my assessment of the OSX user base.
I did not call them "clueless noobs", as you have implied; I merely pointed
out that most (as few as 0.51) of OSX users have never seriously
encountered a free OS. The one in TFA certainly sounds like he
didn't. As such, they do not have an insight about the strengths of
an OS which benefits from the tinkering of enthusiasts around the world.
Do you really find it controversial that almost every Linux user
has worked extensively with either Windows or OSX, but the same
cannot be said of most OSX users?
You have a good point there, and I missed it. While I don't think that Ubuntu support would
be any more expensive than Vista support, I can see that it has to scale
together with the customer base. My zero marginal cost argument doesn't work anymore:)
This might be the very reason why Gateways of this world are waiting
for a much more substantial market before they start delivering GNU/Linux.
I don't know why I am arguing with you, may because I am bored. Don't
take it too seriously: it's ultimately a moot.
But anyway, I disagree with your pessimistic view. Gnome is just as easy
to use as OSX. I've actually had to laugh when I saw a very analog-minded,
Windows-nourished user bump into one of my Ubuntu desktops. He didn't even
ask me any questions, just located a Firefox icon and started using
the computer to the maximum of his ability. After about
10 minutes of being productive he turned around and said: "What is this,
some kind of Mac?".
As for the cost issue, you are just wrong. Sure, Windows never see
themselves paying for Windows, but manufacturers do! Do you think
that Gateway gives a flying bird about what to install? Besides,
that is, the price of the components. As long as there
is a decent market--as much as 0.1, I suppose--they'll jump on it, because
the marginal cost of delivering another OS is zero. The amount of hardware
testing only increases by a small constant, and then a market of
any size whatsoever can be saturated at no additional cost.
The savings, on the other hand, increase linearly. 50 bucks is a hellova
deal when entry-level systems are priced below 600.
Hehe, fair enough. But no. I mean, they miss the richness afforded
by the fact that other people (who know what they are doing) can
tinker with the system. Think all the distributions, window
managers, and desktop environments (all two of them).
I second that. I owned a PPC powerbook for about a year, and both Panther
and Tiger crashed on me pretty badly about once a month (just hang or not wake up).
I cannot really say that my Ubuntu Gateway is all that better, since I never
got it to sleep without loosing modules, and ndiswrapper used to misbehave
(until they fixed it). The rest of the OS, though, is absolutely rock-solid.
Not a single crash since Edgy came out.
I felt that the criticism for Vista and OSX was kinda weak.
May be it's not even about a shill, but rather about not
knowing any better. The main issue with the non-free systems is that
you cannot tinker with them, but most users do not even realize
what they are missing. The Windows guys were, like, "Vista > XP",
and the OSX guy was, like, "OSX > XP". Well, duh. Of course
the new version is better than the one that's 5 years old--anything less than
that would be a disaster. They do not see, though, how limited
they are in their ability to customize their systems, both
in terms of appearance and functionality, and this limitation
is directly linked to the fact that the source is proprietary and
the system can only be produced in "one size fits them all" format.
Only the Linux guy was actually capable of providing a reasonable
assessment of strengths and weaknesses, thanks to his broader knowledge
of OSes and what they are useful for.
I was thinking the same thing. The situation is just laughable: we find ourselves at a point where it is actually easier to crack the state-of-the-art DRM than to publish the description of the vulnerability. I am sure it took some work, but the blurb makes it sound like the researcher is thinking to himself: "Oops, it broke. What shit did I get myself into now?"
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a good day to be a pirate.
the whole point of TPM modules is to deny the owner full control
Dude, that's like saying that the whole point of door locks
is to deny the owner the access to his own house. Granted, TPM
is completely useless for most applications; granted, it should NOT be
implemented in the commodity hardware for the reasons hinted at in your post;
but from the technical point
of view, if you have the keys then you can re-sign your binaries
and you DO have full control over your system.
In related news, Dialog Solutions, Inc., released a report stating that
"the market of interpersonal conversations requires stronger Analog Rights
Management protections". Dialog Solutions aspires to be the world's leader in
producing professional quality dialogs, polylogs, and solitary musings
which can be used for both commercial and entertainment purposes.
The demand for their products, however, has been allegedly hurt by the
rampant piracy. "What is to stop people from taking the fruits of
our hard work and using it in their private conversations?" said Gill Bates,
the chief of marketing, "Without any kind of copy protection in place, anyone
is free to talk about anything they want with their collegues and
friends without paying us a dime. Not only it hurts our bottom line,
but it also lowers the overall quality of conversations."
The report goes on to further indicate that without an effective
copy protection scheme the culture and society as we know it might
come to an abrupt end. "If no one can benefit financially from producing
a conversation, then who is going to talk?", it states, "It may seem that
the economy is thriving in spite of the conversation piracy, but in fact
the pirates are only re-using the intellectual property of others.
If the content creators cannot get paid, then the primary source of
conversations will dry out."
In order to combat piracy and recover the slipping-away market,
Dialog Solutions proposed to implement the system of Analog Rights
Management along with the Trusted Thinking Platform. This technology
would allow the interlocutor to be absolutely certain that he or she
is always using genuine, properly licensed dialog lines, while at
the same time ensuring that the content creators are receiving
their due payments. To thwart piracy, the Trusted Thinking Platform
would have to be implemented somewhere in between the memory
region and the speech apparatus, in order to authenticate everything
that's coming out a person's mouth and to ascertain that the
user has a proper license for the spoken content.
If all else fails, why not use Gimp (or Photoshop)
to fix your pictures? One of the tools that I use almost too much
is the selective Gaussian blur. You could select the sky with
the magic wand and apply it as many times as needed. Or,
if you don't have any clouds, why not just blur it?
Slashdot Mirror
Mods, check the basic facts before wasting your points.
Let's see... Mine says "Slashdot Troll Special Edition, 2007 - OO". (I guess they had to use infinity in order to include the Duke Nukem Forever release date).
Oh, I see that you came up with a checklist. I was thinking the very same thing yesterday. We need to expand this baby and make it standard :)
There's quite a bit, actually. Pirate Bay top 10, by seeds:
But, to help you point, (11) is "Penthouse And Playboy PDF files"
Magic? Enjoy? The books should have been digitized like 30 years ago, and e-books are at least 5 years overdue. Thanks to copyright being infinity minus one day, some books are almost impossible to find. My personal grudge is that many great old textbooks are prohibitively expensive simply because they are rare. No one is printing them anymore, and no one is allowed to digitize them either. Enjoy? I don't think so.
And for the love of me, I have no idea how to comment on his screenwriter theme. Yeah, there are other people working behind the curtains. But if movie people themselves think that the most important and creative part is done by the actors and the director, are they going to lie to the rest of us? That makes no sense at all.
True that. My $90 Antec case is now 8 years old and has the original power supply. Everything else just came and went: 2 motherboards (think also CPU, RAM), 2 hard drives, 3 graphics cards. It's big and heavy, but it saved me a heap of money for being a pretty decent gaming rig that it is.
What's with all the lawyer bashing and paranoia? These guys are clearly making fun of him. Just because the person is a lawyer, doesn't mean he is out to rip you off. There are plenty of good lawyers around. In fact, most lawyers wouldn't do something unethical just because it pays so handsomely well.
Because most lawyers are dead.
Ah, haha, I just couldn't resist...
Do you realize that the statement above is precisely the one I am defending? And that it implies (bar BSD considerations) that "most OSX users did not have a pleasure to experience both free and proprietary OS, and so cannot readily see the disadvantages of an OS which stem directly from it being non-free"?
If you don't mind, I'll abandon this thread. It starts consuming my life. I do not suppose that I put in the last word: your comments were insightful. I just feel like we have beaten this topic to death.
I beg your pardon, Vista is yet to be outdone in the video-scrambling department; although even that feature they borrowed from others: in this case, The Sims. And what other system is as good at phoning the home office to report your hardware state? GNU/Linux still has a looooong way to go.
Your sample is not representative at all, partly because of its size, and partly because it might have too many people who work in IT. In the US and Western Europe, most people with computers do not work in IT.
I do not base my estimate on a sample. Intuitively, it seems plausible to me because the share of Gnu/Linux is around 0.035, and the same goes for Mac; Windows is at 0.9 (these numbers are easy to google for). If the OS usage is normally distributed (e.g., many users are familiar with an average number of systems: 2, and relatively few are familiar with 1 or 3, even fewer with 4 or more), then the intersection of GNU/Linux and Mac is likely to be very small. The intersection of Windows and Gnu/Linux, on the other hand, is very likely to cover most of the latter (not to mention that Windows is likely to be used by anyone because of its ubiquity). Same thing for Mac and Windows: the intersection is probably a substantial part of the Mac user base. Conclusion: most people who are familiar with OSX are not familiar with GNU/Linux.
The OEM deal is not set in stone. If Microsoft increases the OEM prices, it will only make the free OS system relatively cheaper. Kind of sucks for Microsoft to maim themselves like that. You are right though. Others pointed out that I ignored the support costs. Zero marginal cost argument doesn't really work here, but it is still very plausible that manufacturers will be able to profit by offering a free OS option if the market is big enough.
Nice rant. I, however, stand by my assessment of the OSX user base. I did not call them "clueless noobs", as you have implied; I merely pointed out that most (as few as 0.51) of OSX users have never seriously encountered a free OS. The one in TFA certainly sounds like he didn't. As such, they do not have an insight about the strengths of an OS which benefits from the tinkering of enthusiasts around the world.
Do you really find it controversial that almost every Linux user has worked extensively with either Windows or OSX, but the same cannot be said of most OSX users?
You have a good point there, and I missed it. While I don't think that Ubuntu support would be any more expensive than Vista support, I can see that it has to scale together with the customer base. My zero marginal cost argument doesn't work anymore :)
This might be the very reason why Gateways of this world are waiting
for a much more substantial market before they start delivering GNU/Linux.
I stand corrected.
I don't know why I am arguing with you, may because I am bored. Don't take it too seriously: it's ultimately a moot.
But anyway, I disagree with your pessimistic view. Gnome is just as easy to use as OSX. I've actually had to laugh when I saw a very analog-minded, Windows-nourished user bump into one of my Ubuntu desktops. He didn't even ask me any questions, just located a Firefox icon and started using the computer to the maximum of his ability. After about 10 minutes of being productive he turned around and said: "What is this, some kind of Mac?".
As for the cost issue, you are just wrong. Sure, Windows never see themselves paying for Windows, but manufacturers do! Do you think that Gateway gives a flying bird about what to install? Besides, that is, the price of the components. As long as there is a decent market--as much as 0.1, I suppose--they'll jump on it, because the marginal cost of delivering another OS is zero. The amount of hardware testing only increases by a small constant, and then a market of any size whatsoever can be saturated at no additional cost. The savings, on the other hand, increase linearly. 50 bucks is a hellova deal when entry-level systems are priced below 600.
Hehe, fair enough. But no. I mean, they miss the richness afforded by the fact that other people (who know what they are doing) can tinker with the system. Think all the distributions, window managers, and desktop environments (all two of them).
I second that. I owned a PPC powerbook for about a year, and both Panther and Tiger crashed on me pretty badly about once a month (just hang or not wake up). I cannot really say that my Ubuntu Gateway is all that better, since I never got it to sleep without loosing modules, and ndiswrapper used to misbehave (until they fixed it). The rest of the OS, though, is absolutely rock-solid. Not a single crash since Edgy came out.
I felt that the criticism for Vista and OSX was kinda weak. May be it's not even about a shill, but rather about not knowing any better. The main issue with the non-free systems is that you cannot tinker with them, but most users do not even realize what they are missing. The Windows guys were, like, "Vista > XP", and the OSX guy was, like, "OSX > XP". Well, duh. Of course the new version is better than the one that's 5 years old--anything less than that would be a disaster. They do not see, though, how limited they are in their ability to customize their systems, both in terms of appearance and functionality, and this limitation is directly linked to the fact that the source is proprietary and the system can only be produced in "one size fits them all" format.
Only the Linux guy was actually capable of providing a reasonable assessment of strengths and weaknesses, thanks to his broader knowledge of OSes and what they are useful for.
I was thinking the same thing. The situation is just laughable: we find ourselves at a point where it is actually easier to crack the state-of-the-art DRM than to publish the description of the vulnerability. I am sure it took some work, but the blurb makes it sound like the researcher is thinking to himself: "Oops, it broke. What shit did I get myself into now?"
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a good day to be a pirate.
Dude, that's like saying that the whole point of door locks is to deny the owner the access to his own house. Granted, TPM is completely useless for most applications; granted, it should NOT be implemented in the commodity hardware for the reasons hinted at in your post; but from the technical point of view, if you have the keys then you can re-sign your binaries and you DO have full control over your system.
Why is this modded funny? I am using it as my new motto...
In related news, Dialog Solutions, Inc., released a report stating that "the market of interpersonal conversations requires stronger Analog Rights Management protections". Dialog Solutions aspires to be the world's leader in producing professional quality dialogs, polylogs, and solitary musings which can be used for both commercial and entertainment purposes.
The demand for their products, however, has been allegedly hurt by the rampant piracy. "What is to stop people from taking the fruits of our hard work and using it in their private conversations?" said Gill Bates, the chief of marketing, "Without any kind of copy protection in place, anyone is free to talk about anything they want with their collegues and friends without paying us a dime. Not only it hurts our bottom line, but it also lowers the overall quality of conversations."
The report goes on to further indicate that without an effective copy protection scheme the culture and society as we know it might come to an abrupt end. "If no one can benefit financially from producing a conversation, then who is going to talk?", it states, "It may seem that the economy is thriving in spite of the conversation piracy, but in fact the pirates are only re-using the intellectual property of others. If the content creators cannot get paid, then the primary source of conversations will dry out."
In order to combat piracy and recover the slipping-away market, Dialog Solutions proposed to implement the system of Analog Rights Management along with the Trusted Thinking Platform. This technology would allow the interlocutor to be absolutely certain that he or she is always using genuine, properly licensed dialog lines, while at the same time ensuring that the content creators are receiving their due payments. To thwart piracy, the Trusted Thinking Platform would have to be implemented somewhere in between the memory region and the speech apparatus, in order to authenticate everything that's coming out a person's mouth and to ascertain that the user has a proper license for the spoken content.
If all else fails, why not use Gimp (or Photoshop) to fix your pictures? One of the tools that I use almost too much is the selective Gaussian blur. You could select the sky with the magic wand and apply it as many times as needed. Or, if you don't have any clouds, why not just blur it?