(a) I can't sign away rights. No matter how many slavery contracts you sign, you can't sell yourself into slavery.
IANAL, so I don't know the term to describe your facetiousness, but by your reasoning all NDAs and gag-orders would be useless, since they'd interfere with your right to free speech. And while simply clicking 'I Agree' may be unclear software license acceptance, actually authorizing payment after clicking probably is a little clearer as acceptance of terms for a contract.
All fair use arguments pretty much imply personal use, with a fuzzy area about family use in the same house. And while you may have the 'right' to listen to your music however you want, no one is required to make it easy. Can you use a CD on that RISC-Toaster of yours? What's that? You'd have to rip it by hand? Kinda like what you'd have to do for iTunes? How 'bout that.
And for your first argument, the same thing applies: whatever 'right' you may have to listen to 7 copies at once, they certainly aren't going to give you an extra 6 CDs when you buy one. So you'd still have to set it up yourself.
I am being denied my fair use rights. There's really no debating it.
Technically, it is debatable. You can set iTunes on a single machine to share its music, including purchased, with any Macs on the same network. The main reason Apple allows authorization on multiple machines is for fair use when traveling or at an office, and your main server wouldn't be available.
Whether or not this is convenient for you is a personal matter, but the technology already exists to share your music with any computer you could carry CDs back and forth to, without having to authorize/de-authorize.
Does anybody know what is happening when it says "Optimizing the volume [...]"?
Yes. Market Research has shown the switchers from Windows PCs don't trust software installations that proceed to quickly. The "Optimizing" loop will steadily decrease for as long as you own the machine to zero, at which point you will compare the time to a Windows machine and assume that Windows has steadily required more and more time and you are even more discouraged from switching back.
All this really does is cut out the 'Burn to CD, Rip back' steps. The music still needs to be purchased, and the buyer still has to be involved and aware of their actions. I'm not saying there aren't people that wouldn't do this, just that those types determined to share already have ulterior methods.
In fact, there's nothing saying that it also translates it automatically from AAC into MP3. So you'd still need another step for most non-iPod uses anyway!
Whoa. I'm specifically comparing the iTunes/iPod solution to this new Rental system from MS. About the only real reason you gave to not choose this route is that you feel it's overpriced.
Well, that's an opinion, but lets look at it. I would suggest that unless you like all songs on every CD you buy (not impossible with Greatest Hit CDs, but limiting), then you're losing money. If all you care about is the cheapest way to legally acquire music and get it to MP3 player X is to buy each individual track you want on iTunes and burn and rip them back. Yeah it's an extra step, but can save you money on each CD.
And if you say that's too hard, let's try the math. $15 a CD. Let's say you average 5 songs a CD. Compared to iTunes, after 10 CDs you've wasted $100. No wonder an iPod seems expensive.
Yes, I know, you like more than 5 songs each CD. Well, it's simple algebra to estimate your actual waste*. Let i be how many songs total you've bought on CD. Let j be the total amount you've spent on those CDs. Now let k be the number of songs you wouldn't have bought if you'd have gone on a per-song basis. The amount of money you've wasted = (j/i)*k
While you may be ultra selective on what CDs you've bought over the years, I'm sure there are quite a few people that would be surprised to learn just how much money they've thrown away over the years, and how much the iPod/iTunes would save going forward.
* Yes, this math ignores the fact that many songs can't be bought individually, but it also ignores the fact that most CDs on iTunes with less than ten songs are less than 9.99 unlike real CDs which would still be 10 or more, and many over ten songs are only 9.99 where again the retail price would be higher.
Unless they've already developed a new, proprietary headphone, a high quality 1/8" to RCA cord already circumvents this. Or -hello- get it from the CD. This 'prevention' will only matter if they can actually get exclusive content that people want, and anything that can be listened to can be copied.
File this under "Too little; too late". If this was here 10 years ago it would have ruled the market, even 2 years ago before iPod/iTunes made legitimate music buying easy* it would have had a chance. Now it's just another unwanted product; at best a footnote in a future history book.
* I'm thinking specifically of when the iTunes Music Store came to Windows. To head off the 'no ogg/Linux support, so no business from me!' posts, that most assuredly applies to this new product as well and is pointless in a comparison.
I don't get it. You were paid developer wages to perform borderline-mindless secretarial type duties.
That seems more like a paid vacation. Unless, of course, you didn't have internet access. I'd guess a job without the internet gets bonus minus points, no matter how overpaid you are.
I think VA Tech is banking on a big performance increase then.
So suddenly having the number 3 super computer for less cost than any of the others in the top 10 wasn't a factor? I'm guessing whatever they're crunching isn't being slowed down by a 32-bit finder window.
Isn't that a point in favor of Apple, a higher resale value? Kinda like Toyota/Ford truck ads always blab about? Or you could say Apple's remain useful longer, so you'll only see older ones for sale cheap. Heck, some of the older older ones are more expensive for nostalgia value.
I guess I got stuck on why you think Apple would want to compete for your purchase in this case. Would Toyota care that you can buy a used Ford truck that you got from some guy? They're looking only at new truck buyers.
About the only possible 'compete' point that could vaguely be made is that by not having a cheap model for people to buy, they're losing sales to people that replace their cheap model with newer more expensive models and go with the same as what they had. Well, they tried that once with clones and all it did was suck sales from their high end. (It's more complicated than that, but that was the underlying effect)
FWIW, old Macs are also easier to cycle through families or put to other uses. I have an iMac G3 400Mhz I've 'replaced' with an Al. Powerbook, but I've been working at turning into a web server and a mail server, using standard Apache/Postfix and no licensing fees. After working with the mess at work that IIS and Exchange are I doubt anyone who gets the idea to do this on a Windows machine just for the heck of it would give up fairly quickly. Even if they tried to go with open source solutions, they'd still be on top of Windows and deal with any worms/whatever that come out.
(And yes, I'm making the broad assumption that a good deal of the 486-based PCs are from Windows users upgrading to play newer games, not from Linux users who could do what I said. They would also more than likely shove their old box somewhere as a fileserver or something.)
First of all, since you didn't buy from Dell either you might as well ask 'How does Dell compete with that?'
Secondly, there are plenty of used Macs. While not any cheap G4s, there are dozens of G3's, either towers, iMacs or eMacs. And OSX runs fine on my iMac SE DV w/ G3@400 Mhz. Mind you, I'm not playing Halo on it. But if all you've got to spend is $265 you'd have to accept less than cutting edge.
This has already taken over the movie industry where I see a PG-13 movie artificially rated R with gratuitous swearing.
This is more a factor of MPAA's crusade against swearing than anything else. To paraphrase Kyle's mom from South Park The Movie: "Excessive violence is okay, as long as they don't use any naughty words." If in Finding Nemo a shark had eaten a fish, it would have jumped to PG or maybe PG-13. But just one 'fuck' would have sent it straight to R.
The main problem with comparing Movie Ratings and Game Ratings is that they have different standards, and in reality the game ratings generally make more sense.
People buying low-end computers who are not computer-savvy would love to get the pretty Mac that they see at CompUSA
These are the same people driving Hyundais but want BMWs. Some things cost more. Would you expect BMW to sell a $9,000 car? Why not? Lot's of people by $9000 cars, they're sure to sell a lot.
What's that? They'd rather make nice cars than cheap cars? Those bums! Don't they realize the market share they could have?
Yeah, but running only on poorly setup windows boxes would probably depress it pretty quick. We can only hope it would go full cycle of sentience-self actualization-massive disillusionment-depression-suicide before reaching anything useful.
Or it will start ordering from it's own spam and get really confused.
[Jessica] Simpson, whose verbal gaffes are also legendary, pulled another one Sunday visiting the White House, our sources say. The singer was introduced to Interior Secretary Gale Norton and gushed: "You've done a nice job decorating the White House.
(source, near the bottom, after W. refers to the Ford Theatre as the Lincoln Theatre.)
Aren't there any 'Stock-footage' type DVD's out there that include a license to redistribute they could have used? Or couldn't they at least have tried to get permission for the clips they used?
While they might not have want to try to argue fair use through education or reviewing, they could have found at least one clip they could distribute. Hell, rent a high end digital camera and make one. Tape traffic on a highway, both daytime and nighttime, and you've got a motion video test, or a fountain, or anything.
Is it me, or does every SCO story nowadays turn into the 6-degrees-of-Bill-Gates?
"See SCO get there money from Baystar, which gets its money from Vulcan Capital, who has a large investor in the form of Paul Allen, who sits on the board of Microsoft, which is headed by BILL GATES!"
Imagine if GM had 95% of the American auto market and built their cars to only run on GM brand gasoline?
Or worse yet, imagine there was a software company that had 95% of the OS market and used it to prevent competition with its other offerings, and a long running anti-trust trial buried by a corporate-minded administration.
I guess it all comes down to what USENIX means by 'stopped support'. My first reading I'm thinking of it as in 'if any users call w/ questions, they can go to hell.' (I'm tainted supporting this damn software, but nevermind.) Further reflection it probably means they won't help SCO ensure that new versions of either's software are cross compatible, which is definitely within their rights.
Stopping support for those who receive it from SCO is an odd choice - to subquote article 4:
However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
Just because someone received it from SCO doesn't mean that they've done anything inappropriate. While USENIX are in their rights to support whomever they'd like, this seems excessively vindictive.
From a certain point of view, they almost have a point.
Stay with me, I'm as surprised as anyone else.
Consider this: you buy a window that says it will stop insects. And it does. But then some nut genetically enhances* an insect to have diamond tip cutters that can cut through the window. Since the window did keep out all know insects when originally sold, the manufacture really isn't liable for the new one and is allowed to say 'the new model fixes it', though they could release a spray the would cover your old model but possibly introduce new problems.
Yes, that's a terrible analogy, but it shows that they have a bit of a point: any business would go out of business if they had to fix problems that were ineffable at the time of the original sale. Where this falls down with Microsoft, of course, is whether the problems were from completely new areas, or flaws in their original work that they just ignored and denied -- similar to how certain problems in cars/children's toy result in recalls, but other problems don't. (e.g. it isn't a problem if a toy breaks after 3 years of continued use, but it's a problem if it breaks in a potentially injurious way - and let's not get started on the liability/lemon laws that Microsoft avoids with EULA.)
* And this isn't intended as an attack on genetic engineering per se. But anyone who does this to insects would be, in my opinion, a nut.
Er, no. There was just a patch a couple of weeks ago for OS X Jaguar, and Panther came out months ago. While 10.0 isn't likely to be supported, the most likely reason right now for a fix not being applied to an older OS X is that that version didn't have the problem.
While it is unlikely that Apple will do much with user level software because of it's interconnectedness*, the base OS is BSD. It is probably rather trivial to keep all OS X code bases around so that if any low-level problem is found it will be applied to all of them as appropriate, especially since most of these fixes will be developed elsewhere as well anyway so the least that will be necessary is to make sure the change doesn't break something higher up.
* What comes to mind here are things like the latest Safari not running on earlier versions because of it's dependancies on changes in the GUI layer. If anyone wants to throw this back in my face, please answer this: the discussion here appears to concern the base 2.0.40 of Linux. Does this include the current gnome/kde/x11/whatever versions? Are they all maintained as well?
Consider also that the "linux community", as the parent puts it, is millions of people full. Apple's, and for that matter Microsoft's, OS divisions are not. The people who support the prior linux software have good odds of being the same people using it.
This rant kind of rambled, but I wanted to respond to allegations against Apple base on Microsoft's behavior. While I won't argue that they aren't mainly concerned with current and upcoming OS Xs, they have been releasing security fixes for the base OS for past versions.
It has a couple of interpreters, and if you hop around it has the games. I just refinished Hitchhikers and am working through Planetfall.
Note - there are other Frotz's
around, though I got the OS X one through Fink. Using Terminal really brings out the throw-back experience if you set the background to black and get some neon green for the letters. Though I am 'cheating' with a larger than 80*24 screen for legibility.:)
Slashdot Mirror
(a) I can't sign away rights. No matter how many slavery contracts you sign, you can't sell yourself into slavery.
IANAL, so I don't know the term to describe your facetiousness, but by your reasoning all NDAs and gag-orders would be useless, since they'd interfere with your right to free speech. And while simply clicking 'I Agree' may be unclear software license acceptance, actually authorizing payment after clicking probably is a little clearer as acceptance of terms for a contract.
All fair use arguments pretty much imply personal use, with a fuzzy area about family use in the same house. And while you may have the 'right' to listen to your music however you want, no one is required to make it easy. Can you use a CD on that RISC-Toaster of yours? What's that? You'd have to rip it by hand? Kinda like what you'd have to do for iTunes? How 'bout that.
And for your first argument, the same thing applies: whatever 'right' you may have to listen to 7 copies at once, they certainly aren't going to give you an extra 6 CDs when you buy one. So you'd still have to set it up yourself.
I am being denied my fair use rights. There's really no debating it.
Technically, it is debatable. You can set iTunes on a single machine to share its music, including purchased, with any Macs on the same network. The main reason Apple allows authorization on multiple machines is for fair use when traveling or at an office, and your main server wouldn't be available.
Whether or not this is convenient for you is a personal matter, but the technology already exists to share your music with any computer you could carry CDs back and forth to, without having to authorize/de-authorize.
Does anybody know what is happening when it says "Optimizing the volume [...]"?
Yes. Market Research has shown the switchers from Windows PCs don't trust software installations that proceed to quickly. The "Optimizing" loop will steadily decrease for as long as you own the machine to zero, at which point you will compare the time to a Windows machine and assume that Windows has steadily required more and more time and you are even more discouraged from switching back.
All this really does is cut out the 'Burn to CD, Rip back' steps. The music still needs to be purchased, and the buyer still has to be involved and aware of their actions. I'm not saying there aren't people that wouldn't do this, just that those types determined to share already have ulterior methods.
In fact, there's nothing saying that it also translates it automatically from AAC into MP3. So you'd still need another step for most non-iPod uses anyway!
Whoa. I'm specifically comparing the iTunes/iPod solution to this new Rental system from MS. About the only real reason you gave to not choose this route is that you feel it's overpriced.
Well, that's an opinion, but lets look at it. I would suggest that unless you like all songs on every CD you buy (not impossible with Greatest Hit CDs, but limiting), then you're losing money. If all you care about is the cheapest way to legally acquire music and get it to MP3 player X is to buy each individual track you want on iTunes and burn and rip them back. Yeah it's an extra step, but can save you money on each CD.
And if you say that's too hard, let's try the math. $15 a CD. Let's say you average 5 songs a CD. Compared to iTunes, after 10 CDs you've wasted $100. No wonder an iPod seems expensive.
Yes, I know, you like more than 5 songs each CD. Well, it's simple algebra to estimate your actual waste*. Let i be how many songs total you've bought on CD. Let j be the total amount you've spent on those CDs. Now let k be the number of songs you wouldn't have bought if you'd have gone on a per-song basis. The amount of money you've wasted = (j/i)*k
While you may be ultra selective on what CDs you've bought over the years, I'm sure there are quite a few people that would be surprised to learn just how much money they've thrown away over the years, and how much the iPod/iTunes would save going forward.
* Yes, this math ignores the fact that many songs can't be bought individually, but it also ignores the fact that most CDs on iTunes with less than ten songs are less than 9.99 unlike real CDs which would still be 10 or more, and many over ten songs are only 9.99 where again the retail price would be higher.
Unless they've already developed a new, proprietary headphone, a high quality 1/8" to RCA cord already circumvents this. Or -hello- get it from the CD. This 'prevention' will only matter if they can actually get exclusive content that people want, and anything that can be listened to can be copied.
File this under "Too little; too late". If this was here 10 years ago it would have ruled the market, even 2 years ago before iPod/iTunes made legitimate music buying easy* it would have had a chance. Now it's just another unwanted product; at best a footnote in a future history book.
* I'm thinking specifically of when the iTunes Music Store came to Windows. To head off the 'no ogg/Linux support, so no business from me!' posts, that most assuredly applies to this new product as well and is pointless in a comparison.
I don't get it. You were paid developer wages to perform borderline-mindless secretarial type duties.
That seems more like a paid vacation. Unless, of course, you didn't have internet access. I'd guess a job without the internet gets bonus minus points, no matter how overpaid you are.
I think VA Tech is banking on a big performance increase then.
So suddenly having the number 3 super computer for less cost than any of the others in the top 10 wasn't a factor? I'm guessing whatever they're crunching isn't being slowed down by a 32-bit finder window.
It is not a shoe, it is a sandal!
Isn't that a point in favor of Apple, a higher resale value? Kinda like Toyota/Ford truck ads always blab about? Or you could say Apple's remain useful longer, so you'll only see older ones for sale cheap. Heck, some of the older older ones are more expensive for nostalgia value.
I guess I got stuck on why you think Apple would want to compete for your purchase in this case. Would Toyota care that you can buy a used Ford truck that you got from some guy? They're looking only at new truck buyers.
About the only possible 'compete' point that could vaguely be made is that by not having a cheap model for people to buy, they're losing sales to people that replace their cheap model with newer more expensive models and go with the same as what they had. Well, they tried that once with clones and all it did was suck sales from their high end. (It's more complicated than that, but that was the underlying effect)
FWIW, old Macs are also easier to cycle through families or put to other uses. I have an iMac G3 400Mhz I've 'replaced' with an Al. Powerbook, but I've been working at turning into a web server and a mail server, using standard Apache/Postfix and no licensing fees. After working with the mess at work that IIS and Exchange are I doubt anyone who gets the idea to do this on a Windows machine just for the heck of it would give up fairly quickly. Even if they tried to go with open source solutions, they'd still be on top of Windows and deal with any worms/whatever that come out.
(And yes, I'm making the broad assumption that a good deal of the 486-based PCs are from Windows users upgrading to play newer games, not from Linux users who could do what I said. They would also more than likely shove their old box somewhere as a fileserver or something.)
First of all, since you didn't buy from Dell either you might as well ask 'How does Dell compete with that?'
Secondly, there are plenty of used Macs. While not any cheap G4s, there are dozens of G3's, either towers, iMacs or eMacs. And OSX runs fine on my iMac SE DV w/ G3@400 Mhz. Mind you, I'm not playing Halo on it. But if all you've got to spend is $265 you'd have to accept less than cutting edge.
This has already taken over the movie industry where I see a PG-13 movie artificially rated R with gratuitous swearing.
This is more a factor of MPAA's crusade against swearing than anything else. To paraphrase Kyle's mom from South Park The Movie: "Excessive violence is okay, as long as they don't use any naughty words." If in Finding Nemo a shark had eaten a fish, it would have jumped to PG or maybe PG-13. But just one 'fuck' would have sent it straight to R.
The main problem with comparing Movie Ratings and Game Ratings is that they have different standards, and in reality the game ratings generally make more sense.
People buying low-end computers who are not computer-savvy would love to get the pretty Mac that they see at CompUSA
These are the same people driving Hyundais but want BMWs. Some things cost more. Would you expect BMW to sell a $9,000 car? Why not? Lot's of people by $9000 cars, they're sure to sell a lot.
What's that? They'd rather make nice cars than cheap cars? Those bums! Don't they realize the market share they could have?
Yeah, but running only on poorly setup windows boxes would probably depress it pretty quick. We can only hope it would go full cycle of sentience-self actualization-massive disillusionment-depression-suicide before reaching anything useful.
Or it will start ordering from it's own spam and get really confused.
... to worry about security.
[Jessica] Simpson, whose verbal gaffes are also legendary, pulled another one Sunday visiting the White House, our sources say. The singer was introduced to Interior Secretary Gale Norton and gushed: "You've done a nice job decorating the White House.
(source, near the bottom, after W. refers to the Ford Theatre as the Lincoln Theatre.)
Aren't there any 'Stock-footage' type DVD's out there that include a license to redistribute they could have used? Or couldn't they at least have tried to get permission for the clips they used?
While they might not have want to try to argue fair use through education or reviewing, they could have found at least one clip they could distribute. Hell, rent a high end digital camera and make one. Tape traffic on a highway, both daytime and nighttime, and you've got a motion video test, or a fountain, or anything.
Is it me, or does every SCO story nowadays turn into the 6-degrees-of-Bill-Gates?
"See SCO get there money from Baystar, which gets its money from Vulcan Capital, who has a large investor in the form of Paul Allen, who sits on the board of Microsoft, which is headed by BILL GATES!"
(If you don't get the reference, click here.)
Imagine if GM had 95% of the American auto market and built their cars to only run on GM brand gasoline?
Or worse yet, imagine there was a software company that had 95% of the OS market and used it to prevent competition with its other offerings, and a long running anti-trust trial buried by a corporate-minded administration.
*SHUDDER*
--Studies have been done that show using Word with spell/grammar check is a detriment.
--What methodology was used? can you cite sources
He's extrapolating upon the 'Calculators are a detriment to slide rule skills' research conducted back in the 70's.
Which, if you'll recall, dates all the way back to the 'Pointy sticks are a detriment to bludgeoning-with-rocks skills' study of 20,000 BCE.
I guess it all comes down to what USENIX means by 'stopped support'. My first reading I'm thinking of it as in 'if any users call w/ questions, they can go to hell.' (I'm tainted supporting this damn software, but nevermind.) Further reflection it probably means they won't help SCO ensure that new versions of either's software are cross compatible, which is definitely within their rights.
Stopping support for those who receive it from SCO is an odd choice - to subquote article 4:
However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
Just because someone received it from SCO doesn't mean that they've done anything inappropriate. While USENIX are in their rights to support whomever they'd like, this seems excessively vindictive.
From a certain point of view, they almost have a point.
Stay with me, I'm as surprised as anyone else.
Consider this: you buy a window that says it will stop insects. And it does. But then some nut genetically enhances* an insect to have diamond tip cutters that can cut through the window. Since the window did keep out all know insects when originally sold, the manufacture really isn't liable for the new one and is allowed to say 'the new model fixes it', though they could release a spray the would cover your old model but possibly introduce new problems.
Yes, that's a terrible analogy, but it shows that they have a bit of a point: any business would go out of business if they had to fix problems that were ineffable at the time of the original sale. Where this falls down with Microsoft, of course, is whether the problems were from completely new areas, or flaws in their original work that they just ignored and denied -- similar to how certain problems in cars/children's toy result in recalls, but other problems don't. (e.g. it isn't a problem if a toy breaks after 3 years of continued use, but it's a problem if it breaks in a potentially injurious way - and let's not get started on the liability/lemon laws that Microsoft avoids with EULA.)
* And this isn't intended as an attack on genetic engineering per se. But anyone who does this to insects would be, in my opinion, a nut.
Er, no. There was just a patch a couple of weeks ago for OS X Jaguar, and Panther came out months ago. While 10.0 isn't likely to be supported, the most likely reason right now for a fix not being applied to an older OS X is that that version didn't have the problem.
While it is unlikely that Apple will do much with user level software because of it's interconnectedness*, the base OS is BSD. It is probably rather trivial to keep all OS X code bases around so that if any low-level problem is found it will be applied to all of them as appropriate, especially since most of these fixes will be developed elsewhere as well anyway so the least that will be necessary is to make sure the change doesn't break something higher up.
* What comes to mind here are things like the latest Safari not running on earlier versions because of it's dependancies on changes in the GUI layer. If anyone wants to throw this back in my face, please answer this: the discussion here appears to concern the base 2.0.40 of Linux. Does this include the current gnome/kde/x11/whatever versions? Are they all maintained as well?
Consider also that the "linux community", as the parent puts it, is millions of people full. Apple's, and for that matter Microsoft's, OS divisions are not. The people who support the prior linux software have good odds of being the same people using it.
This rant kind of rambled, but I wanted to respond to allegations against Apple base on Microsoft's behavior. While I won't argue that they aren't mainly concerned with current and upcoming OS Xs, they have been releasing security fixes for the base OS for past versions.
Does that Handspring still use Palm OS?
:)
Here you go.
It has a couple of interpreters, and if you hop around it has the games. I just refinished Hitchhikers and am working through Planetfall.
Note - there are other Frotz's around, though I got the OS X one through Fink. Using Terminal really brings out the throw-back experience if you set the background to black and get some neon green for the letters. Though I am 'cheating' with a larger than 80*24 screen for legibility.
So, we could actually be arguing over nothing.
On slashdot? That's unpossible,