DRM really only affects popular media - this is easily something most people could learn to live without.
I think that in the worst case scenario, we will see the profits of large media companies shrink, and people turning to 'indy' sources for their music, movies, games etc.
This is not, in my opinion, a bad thing. Independant productions are really gaining momentum, and quality is nearly matching, and sometimes exceeding that of the big studios. The only media offerings that are still overwhelmingly better than their indy counterparts are action/blockbuster movies and games.
Really, the question is not one of rejecting DRM, it's one of rejecting the big advertising budget / low quality offerings of media studios.
One problem with encrypting information is that in an environment where multiple users need to access the data, you lose central control.
For example, Department A installs an encrypted file-system for a CRM database; Department B, who work with a portion of that data, allow for offline backups onto their users unprotected laptops, inevitably, one of the laptops is lost or stolen, and someone finds unencrypted data all over it.
The only possible solution to this is a really pervasive security policy that extends to all employees, contractors, users, clients etc., and that is what's really missing from this puzzle.
We may call it 'earthshine', but advanced extraterrestrials probably call it 'signs of parasitic infestation', and warn tourists to stay away in case they catch something.
As someone who is responsible in part for network security where I work, I would disagree that we are not doing 'enough'.
The sad reality is that information security is rather hard to achieve in an imperfect environment and without unlimited resources.
To make a bad analogy, it is hard to physically protect your client/employer if they insist on partaking in high-risk pursuits, and the environmaent is harsh and dangerous. Email-header spoofing, bot-nets, vulnerabilities in 3rd part software - these are not under the control of the admin, at least not if you are committed to the Microsoft platform.
The same could be said that a doctor cannot be held responsible for their patients health, if their patient is a chain-smoking, alcoholic base-jumper who rides his a monocycle down the freeway at 100 km/h.
Just tell him/her you are unable to do it during work hours, as it is too busy / against company policy / whatever. Offer to help him out if he brings his PC to your house after hours.
I had a Sony Ericsson P900, which played MP3, took (crappy) photos and video, and was a pretty decent phone. I think you could set mp3s as ringtones, though maybe it was just wav files.
It also ran Symbian which meant there were tons of free games for it. I could store 1Gb of music on it, and play it with a fairly full featured player, and it had a cool jog-dial like the Clie PDA, only better. Even though it did everything, and quite elegantly, I still prefer separate devices. Go figure.
Most people do not really want one device to do all of these functions. I have gone through several such devices, and they are essentially a gimmick, soon discarded in favour of separate devices that do each job well.
What I want is to be able to receive phone calls on my mobile, even when the battery on my MP3 player is dead.
Or use my phone independantly of my PDA, like when I'm playing tetris while talking to my wife.
Having said that, I'll bet they sell a truckload of these to early adopters, who will play with it a bit, then promptly throw it into a drawer never to be used again, eventually poisoning some landfill somewhere.
"The bear prints appear identical to the native brown bear, except that they seemingly belong to a 30 foot high specimen" the lead scientist was heard to say.
There are also footprints belonging to a giant, dinosaur-like creature.
From my understanding, the Patriot act makes it illegal to use encryption to conceal any information that may be used as evidence in a federal crime. This carries quite a large prison sentence.
I'd imagine that Homeland security would have special terrorist warning alarms that go off whenever someone puts an encrypted file onto this online storage service. Then when they come knocking on your door, you _have_ to decrypt what's in those files, or face criminal charges.. Sad world, really.
Before people start claiming to be geniuses because they failed math at high school, there are many exceptions to this ieda, take for instance Stephen Hawking, ,
Stephen Wolfram or
Mozart
All three were highly talented in their fields at a very early age.
I'm sure I could find plenty more examples given time.
Just search for the words "news", "sport", and "content" and replace with the word "advertising" to really understand what's going on in the online 'news' industry.
Every day, I log onto a site affiliated with Fox or MSN, and every day, I see a new way of obscuring articles with advertising.
Then the site is designed in such a way as to be rendered unreadable if you disable those moronic flash advertisments that float around and make you wish you'd just bought the plain old newspaper.
I like to use Sandra as a benchmarking utility, as it allows you to test various bits of hardware independantly, and compares them to various common models currently on the market.
This will let you work out which pieces of hardware are not up to scratch. Then you just have to work out whether they're responsible for whatever 'bottleneck' you're trying to get around.
In a multiplatform setup, I reckon it's better to acknowledge that you are not an expert in every field, and let those who now best manage their domain.
Hats off to you if you are the uber-expert, of course.
Delegate responsibility to the sysadmins, and set up guidelines as to who is responsible for what. Generally, be more of a manager than an active administrator.
Also, don't be afraid to impose restrictions on the other administrators. Communicate clearly why these restrictions are required, and where possible, allow the administrators to make their case as to why they need the restrictions listed. Listen to their arguments, and alter your guidelines if needed.
If you have time and money, play with the budget you have at your disposal to make life easier for yourself and your charges.
I have previously used Borland ECO to create some simple MDA applications, and overall, found it a useful tool.
The implementation of said tool was unfortunately fairly mediocre, and I finally gave up on trying anything non-trivial using ECO, after the third time that the source code and model became 'out of synch' and my 1000's of lines of generated code would not compile.
If I had the time, I would like to try an updated version of ECO, or perhaps another alternative, but overall, I still prefer the safety net of being in control of the coding process, and actually understanding what is going on under the hood.
I have this dodgy PS2 controller, occasionally, the X button stops working, or the analog functionality disappears.
If I want a real challenge, I just plug it in, and play Gran Turismo.
Hours of extra fun.
The beauty of those shiny plastic disks called DVDs is that you don't need any special means of transporting them from a store to your house.
Besides, how long would it take to copy 6-40 Gb of files to an iPod through a dock. How many customers per hour does a blockbuster store serve?
Most people who visit video stores seem to hire 2-3 movies at a time, possibly more for weekly hires. This seems like an awfully slow way to process customers.
What about n00bs? I very recently had to convince a friend that that nice lady from Sierra Leone was not _really_ going to give him $300,000.
He only just got a PC, and has been oblivious to anything computer related for all his life. Suddenly, he gets a PC, an internet account, and he's told to go off and have fun.
Seriously, I sometimes wish you needed a license to operate a computer.
If you host it yourself, make sure taht your ISP has no plans to block the port(s) you plan to use for the servers. There seem to be a lot ISP now, at least here in Australia, who routinely block port 80, 25 and a host of others.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that in the worst case scenario, we will see the profits of large media companies shrink, and people turning to 'indy' sources for their music, movies, games etc.
This is not, in my opinion, a bad thing. Independant productions are really gaining momentum, and quality is nearly matching, and sometimes exceeding that of the big studios. The only media offerings that are still overwhelmingly better than their indy counterparts are action/blockbuster movies and games.
Really, the question is not one of rejecting DRM, it's one of rejecting the big advertising budget / low quality offerings of media studios.
For example, Department A installs an encrypted file-system for a CRM database; Department B, who work with a portion of that data, allow for offline backups onto their users unprotected laptops, inevitably, one of the laptops is lost or stolen, and someone finds unencrypted data all over it.
The only possible solution to this is a really pervasive security policy that extends to all employees, contractors, users, clients etc., and that is what's really missing from this puzzle.
More likely, I'd just set it up, plug it in and show her where 'the internet' is.
Or maybe not.
We may call it 'earthshine', but advanced extraterrestrials probably call it 'signs of parasitic infestation', and warn tourists to stay away in case they catch something.
The sad reality is that information security is rather hard to achieve in an imperfect environment and without unlimited resources.
To make a bad analogy, it is hard to physically protect your client/employer if they insist on partaking in high-risk pursuits, and the environmaent is harsh and dangerous. Email-header spoofing, bot-nets, vulnerabilities in 3rd part software - these are not under the control of the admin, at least not if you are committed to the Microsoft platform.
The same could be said that a doctor cannot be held responsible for their patients health, if their patient is a chain-smoking, alcoholic base-jumper who rides his a monocycle down the freeway at 100 km/h.
Then move far away.
This worked for me
It also ran Symbian which meant there were tons of free games for it. I could store 1Gb of music on it, and play it with a fairly full featured player, and it had a cool jog-dial like the Clie PDA, only better. Even though it did everything, and quite elegantly, I still prefer separate devices. Go figure.
Or use my phone independantly of my PDA, like when I'm playing tetris while talking to my wife.
Having said that, I'll bet they sell a truckload of these to early adopters, who will play with it a bit, then promptly throw it into a drawer never to be used again, eventually poisoning some landfill somewhere.
the lead scientist was heard to say.
There are also footprints belonging to a giant, dinosaur-like creature.
I read it as applying to any evidence in a federal crime, regardless of wether you have been convicted or charged with anything yourself.
From my understanding, the Patriot act makes it illegal to use encryption to conceal any information that may be used as evidence in a federal crime. This carries quite a large prison sentence.
I'd imagine that Homeland security would have special terrorist warning alarms that go off whenever someone puts an encrypted file onto this online storage service. Then when they come knocking on your door, you _have_ to decrypt what's in those files, or face criminal charges.. Sad world, really.
That would be from a brown dwarf star
It spooky how for every colour of cheese, there's a corresponding star type.
It's common knowledge that the moon is made of cheese, and we all know that the sun is yellow.
What color is cheese?
There's your connection, right there.
All three were highly talented in their fields at a very early age.
I'm sure I could find plenty more examples given time.
Every day, I log onto a site affiliated with Fox or MSN, and every day, I see a new way of obscuring articles with advertising.
Then the site is designed in such a way as to be rendered unreadable if you disable those moronic flash advertisments that float around and make you wish you'd just bought the plain old newspaper.
aarghh!
This will let you work out which pieces of hardware are not up to scratch. Then you just have to work out whether they're responsible for whatever 'bottleneck' you're trying to get around.
In a multiplatform setup, I reckon it's better to acknowledge that you are not an expert in every field, and let those who now best manage their domain.
Hats off to you if you are the uber-expert, of course.
Also, don't be afraid to impose restrictions on the other administrators. Communicate clearly why these restrictions are required, and where possible, allow the administrators to make their case as to why they need the restrictions listed. Listen to their arguments, and alter your guidelines if needed.
If you have time and money, play with the budget you have at your disposal to make life easier for yourself and your charges.
The implementation of said tool was unfortunately fairly mediocre, and I finally gave up on trying anything non-trivial using ECO, after the third time that the source code and model became 'out of synch' and my 1000's of lines of generated code would not compile.
If I had the time, I would like to try an updated version of ECO, or perhaps another alternative, but overall, I still prefer the safety net of being in control of the coding process, and actually understanding what is going on under the hood.
I have this dodgy PS2 controller, occasionally, the X button stops working, or the analog functionality disappears. If I want a real challenge, I just plug it in, and play Gran Turismo. Hours of extra fun.
Not everyone has an iPod or cares about Apple.
The beauty of those shiny plastic disks called DVDs is that you don't need any special means of transporting them from a store to your house.
Besides, how long would it take to copy 6-40 Gb of files to an iPod through a dock. How many customers per hour does a blockbuster store serve?
Most people who visit video stores seem to hire 2-3 movies at a time, possibly more for weekly hires. This seems like an awfully slow way to process customers.
What about n00bs? I very recently had to convince a friend that that nice lady from Sierra Leone was not _really_ going to give him $300,000.
He only just got a PC, and has been oblivious to anything computer related for all his life. Suddenly, he gets a PC, an internet account, and he's told to go off and have fun.
Seriously, I sometimes wish you needed a license to operate a computer.
If you host it yourself, make sure taht your ISP has no plans to block the port(s) you plan to use for the servers.
There seem to be a lot ISP now, at least here in Australia, who routinely block port 80, 25 and a host of others.