What happens when technology advances to a point where high-end music making equipment is dirt-cheap? It's already getting close to that now. You can go out and buy a 24-bit/96KHz digital audio card for your computer for practically nothing. Sure it has cheap ADCs, but that will change.
Someday, it's going to be so easy and inexpensive to make high-quality recordings that everybody will be doing it. Obviously talent is still required on the part of the musicians and recording engineers, but the high availability of the equipment will make more of those people come out of the woodwork.
It won't take long for new musicians to start recording and distributing their own stuff. No more record companies. It'll be direct from musician to listener. In a scenario such as this I can see many musicians not favoring encryption of their work. They're going to want as many people as possible to hear their stuff. Especially new bands just getting started.
Our society has advanced to the point where many things are highly available and easy to obtain. As technology keeps on advancing, it's only going to get easier. Unfortunately, this conflicts with the ideals of capitalism, which thrives on scarcity. That's why we're seeing so much activity in the area of encryption. Money is made by controlling who can use your product.
Maybe it's utopian to think that someday money won't exist. In order for that to happen though, people will have to stop chasing after the almighty dollar and find something else to strive for. I think humanity has the potential to achieve that, if we would only get off our asses and do it.
...when all devices in our lives are digital. All connected together on the same fiber-optic network. Data from any device could be routed to any other, anywhere on the planet in an instant. Think of the possibilities.
The downside however is that most of this data will probably be encrypted. The manufacturers will claim it's in the interests of fighting piracy, but it's more than that. In actuality, you won't be able to use the data in any way, shape or form without obtaining some kind of costly license, thus enabling the makers of these fine products to control innovation. In other words, they don't want to allow anyone to make a better product unless they get a cut.
If this scenario happens I can see two possible outcomes. Either the world will wake up and smell the feces, or those of us who cherish our freedom to create and interoperate will be labeled outcasts and outlaws.
We had this problem once. @Home blocked all email from our company's servers, claiming the sender was bad. This continued for a couple of hours before it mysteriously cleared up.
I've been dealing with @Home tech-support for a couple of years now, and I've found the best way to get them to move is to threaten them with antitrust action. They have an interesting market position since in many areas they are the only company providing such a high-end service for such an affordable price. It's my opinion that they know this and are taking advantage of it to slack off.
Here are just a few things that I've seen from them:
No backup power on their infrastructure (routers/switches/hubs)
Regular failures of their internal core routers
Regular failures of their mail servers
64-KB limit on outgoing email attachments (which they claim doesn't exist)
Magic terms-of-service (now you see them, now you don't, now you see them again,...)
Back when I was an @Home customer I went as far as to track and log some of the above mentioned failures. I found on average they happened 2 to 3 times per day. I've never seen a major ISP have such critical issues so frequently. To me, this is a sign of incompetence.
I try to compile as much as I can for the specific platforms on which I'm installing. It has been my experience that a custom build can perform significantly better than the distributor's stock build. However, there have been times when I actually wanted binaries instead of sources.
Sometimes it's because I felt lazy and didn't want to compile a large system. Mostly it's because I needed to run on a non-Intel system with no build tools. Many UNIX systems do not come with compilers (e.g. Solaris, IRIX). You must purchase them separately. In such cases, binaries are the only way to go if you actually want to get anything done.
Another thing to remember is there are over 6 billion people on this little planet. We all have different attitudes, approaches and agendas. Many people don't want, need or even care about manually compiling source packages. They just want to plug something in and go.
In an ideal world we might all build sources and use packages custom tweaked to our specific systems. In reality however, there are many places where binaries are just plain necessary. Of course, necessary is a subjective term.....=)
Seems to me what were talking about here is forced upgrades. I'm sure we've all had a situation at one time or another where upgrading a piece of software was a bad idea, due to incompatibilities with other packages, feature changes, or whatever. With the traditional licensing model, if you don't want to upgrade, no problem. Just keep using the old version. With the subscription service MS is talking about, your old version will stop working. To keep things going you'll have to renew your subscription, and knowing MS they'll ship you whatever the current version is whether you want it or not.
However, we all have different tastes, so I'm sure this system will work for someone.
Hello. Microsoft Tech Support. Can I Scare You?
on
Why Develop On Linux?
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· Score: 2
Here is a little story that happened to me a few years back which made me rethink my decision to develop for Windows.
I was having trouble developing an MFC application. I forget what the actual issue was, but when I called Microsoft's tech support for assistance, I was asked a number of questions about the configuration of my project. One of the things they wanted to know was what options I had chosen in the AppWizard. I told them I didn't use AppWizard because I preferred to code everything by hand. There was a long silence, then the MS representative said, "You can do that?"
Up until this point I had always believed Microsoft's claims that they put wizards in Developer Studio to remove the tedium of repetitive programming tasks. This incident got me thinking. Why is MS so adamant that people use the wizards that even their tech support doesn't know there's another way?
Wizards are supposed to be helpers. If you don't feel you need the help and would rather do it yourself, why use them? I learned more about MFC's internals while coding by hand than I'm sure these tech support people even knew.
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What happens when technology advances to a point where high-end music making equipment is dirt-cheap? It's already getting close to that now. You can go out and buy a 24-bit/96KHz digital audio card for your computer for practically nothing. Sure it has cheap ADCs, but that will change.
Someday, it's going to be so easy and inexpensive to make high-quality recordings that everybody will be doing it. Obviously talent is still required on the part of the musicians and recording engineers, but the high availability of the equipment will make more of those people come out of the woodwork.
It won't take long for new musicians to start recording and distributing their own stuff. No more record companies. It'll be direct from musician to listener. In a scenario such as this I can see many musicians not favoring encryption of their work. They're going to want as many people as possible to hear their stuff. Especially new bands just getting started.
Our society has advanced to the point where many things are highly available and easy to obtain. As technology keeps on advancing, it's only going to get easier. Unfortunately, this conflicts with the ideals of capitalism, which thrives on scarcity. That's why we're seeing so much activity in the area of encryption. Money is made by controlling who can use your product.
Maybe it's utopian to think that someday money won't exist. In order for that to happen though, people will have to stop chasing after the almighty dollar and find something else to strive for. I think humanity has the potential to achieve that, if we would only get off our asses and do it.
...when all devices in our lives are digital. All connected together on the same fiber-optic network. Data from any device could be routed to any other, anywhere on the planet in an instant. Think of the possibilities.
The downside however is that most of this data will probably be encrypted. The manufacturers will claim it's in the interests of fighting piracy, but it's more than that. In actuality, you won't be able to use the data in any way, shape or form without obtaining some kind of costly license, thus enabling the makers of these fine products to control innovation. In other words, they don't want to allow anyone to make a better product unless they get a cut.
If this scenario happens I can see two possible outcomes. Either the world will wake up and smell the feces, or those of us who cherish our freedom to create and interoperate will be labeled outcasts and outlaws.
The submittor also expressed some concerns about how humans handling of the Earth - and whether we'll repeat the same problems on other planets.
Duh!
I've been dealing with @Home tech-support for a couple of years now, and I've found the best way to get them to move is to threaten them with antitrust action. They have an interesting market position since in many areas they are the only company providing such a high-end service for such an affordable price. It's my opinion that they know this and are taking advantage of it to slack off.
Here are just a few things that I've seen from them:
- No backup power on their infrastructure (routers/switches/hubs)
- Regular failures of their internal core routers
- Regular failures of their mail servers
- 64-KB limit on outgoing email attachments (which they claim doesn't exist)
- Magic terms-of-service (now you see them, now you don't, now you see them again,
...)
Back when I was an @Home customer I went as far as to track and log some of the above mentioned failures. I found on average they happened 2 to 3 times per day. I've never seen a major ISP have such critical issues so frequently. To me, this is a sign of incompetence.I try to compile as much as I can for the specific platforms on which I'm installing. It has been my experience that a custom build can perform significantly better than the distributor's stock build. However, there have been times when I actually wanted binaries instead of sources.
Sometimes it's because I felt lazy and didn't want to compile a large system. Mostly it's because I needed to run on a non-Intel system with no build tools. Many UNIX systems do not come with compilers (e.g. Solaris, IRIX). You must purchase them separately. In such cases, binaries are the only way to go if you actually want to get anything done.
Another thing to remember is there are over 6 billion people on this little planet. We all have different attitudes, approaches and agendas. Many people don't want, need or even care about manually compiling source packages. They just want to plug something in and go.
In an ideal world we might all build sources and use packages custom tweaked to our specific systems. In reality however, there are many places where binaries are just plain necessary. Of course, necessary is a subjective term.....=)
Seems to me what were talking about here is forced upgrades. I'm sure we've all had a situation at one time or another where upgrading a piece of software was a bad idea, due to incompatibilities with other packages, feature changes, or whatever. With the traditional licensing model, if you don't want to upgrade, no problem. Just keep using the old version. With the subscription service MS is talking about, your old version will stop working. To keep things going you'll have to renew your subscription, and knowing MS they'll ship you whatever the current version is whether you want it or not.
However, we all have different tastes, so I'm sure this system will work for someone.
Here is a little story that happened to me a few years back which made me rethink my decision to develop for Windows.
I was having trouble developing an MFC application. I forget what the actual issue was, but when I called Microsoft's tech support for assistance, I was asked a number of questions about the configuration of my project. One of the things they wanted to know was what options I had chosen in the AppWizard. I told them I didn't use AppWizard because I preferred to code everything by hand. There was a long silence, then the MS representative said, "You can do that?"
Up until this point I had always believed Microsoft's claims that they put wizards in Developer Studio to remove the tedium of repetitive programming tasks. This incident got me thinking. Why is MS so adamant that people use the wizards that even their tech support doesn't know there's another way?
Wizards are supposed to be helpers. If you don't feel you need the help and would rather do it yourself, why use them? I learned more about MFC's internals while coding by hand than I'm sure these tech support people even knew.