You can download, read, compile & use the source code for the program. I fail to see how that's anything other than open source. It may not be "Free" as in the GPL or BSD licenses, but it certainly is open-sorce (as is code released under Microsoft's shared-source license).
In the future, the technology "could also be used an IP phone if the user is in a Wi-Fi hotspot outdoors, such as an airport, cafe, or conference centre for example. But we chose to concentrate first on usage at home," TeliaSonera spokesman Rune Fick Hansen told AFP.
I would like that hotspot capability more than at home.
Indeed. That was the part of the article that leaped out at me, too. Without it the phone is completely freaking crippled. The ability to use the cheap wi-fi calls part of the phone at your g/f's house, on your office wireless LAN or at your holiday home would makes it a real seller.
The real story here is that some artists painted life-sized portraits of a bunch of Silicon Valley pioneers and set them at the side of the road in Eastern USA to "hitchhike" their way across the USA. As an amusing art-project this was featured on the front page of many tech websites, including this one & Boing Boing.
Because their founders were selected as famous & influential enough to feature for inclusion as Silicon Valley "pioneers", HP were offered first chance to sponsor this art and buy the life-sized portraits - not really a "cardboard cut-out" - at the end of their journey. $6,000 seems to me not an unreasonable figure considering the normal selling price of portraits & paintings, and the publicity that this project had garnered, but HP declined. Surely $6,000 is a paltry amount to pay for portraits of your founders to place in the foyer of your company headquarters, but hey! that's HP's choice.
Sun were aware of this back-story because one of their engineers worked on integrating a mobile phone tracking system into the portraits, so that members of the art-loving public could view the progress of the "cardboard cut-outs" on a website which used Google Maps' API. So when they heard that HP had declined to sponsor the project, Sun, perhaps a little jealous of the prestige given to their competitor's founders by this art project, decided to get some free publicity by stepping up to the plate, buying the artwork and dressing them up in girls' clothes or whatever.
This is Slashdot-worthy because it involves technology companies acting like spoilt children. Have fun!
What does the label give you? A chance at a very, very small slice of a larger "pie," but really what's the advantage of that over having a much larger slice of a smaller pie?
Small pie = $10k, you get to keep 90%.
Large pie = $10m, you get to keep 1%.
You do the math.
Well, I've just done the math & sales of $10m at $15 a CD mean you have to sell 650,000 or so albums. Heck, some of Madonna's albums don't sell that well. Admittedly not many of Madonna's albums sell so poorly, but those sorts of figures are in different leagues - to make sales of $10k at $15 an album requires you to sell only 650 or so CDs, which is may well be easily achievable only by selling CDs at your gigs.
So you're not really comparing large pies with small pies here, you're comparing Fray Bentos with the the local charity cake bake.
You should probably also read Steve Albini's article The Problem With Music before trying to simplify the figures so.
It's probably more realistic to compare:
Sales of 670 albums @ $15 each = $10k, you get to keep 90% = $9k.
Sales of 60,000 albums @ $15 each = $900k, you get to keep 1% = $9k.
These figures are probably more interesting if you consider a "large slice" of 6,500 CDs sold against your "small slice" of over half a million albums. 6,500 CDs as a "self-published" venture would justify the employment of a full time promotional assistant, provide decent wages for the band and only require about 20 CDs a day actually to be put into jiffy bags & posted out to paying fans. Yet both these earn in the same region.
I used to have a friend, not a young guy, whose life ambition was to get signed to a record label. Even though he had been around the music industry for years, was realistic about his potential, and realised how little he was likely to make, he once admitted to me that he'd been trying so long that he still wanted to "be signed", I guess as evidence that he'd "made it" or of how good he was, or how committed or whatever. I'd think that most young bands signing up with labels just want to be rock stars, and are not interested in managing themselves or undertaking their own "career development".
We now use MSN 7.5 (pre Live) quite successfully...
Mind if I ask why you use 7.5 & not Live?
Last time I checked - admittedly some months ago - MSN 7.5 was a beta, so when I saw the availability of Live I snagged it. I have to admit that I don't really use videochat much myself, and that my choice of videochat software would be iChatAV, but since the iSight on my laptop now has Windows drivers it would be nice to have the "best" version of MSN installed.
Hmmmn... it would also be nice to have MSN without the shitty ads at the bottom of the buddylist, but I guess that's reachin'.
Stroller.
Old Grandma Hardcore, red-neck game-playing granny
on
Gaming When We're 64
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· Score: 1
Those videos of the old woman playing side scrollers and stuff in her chair, swearing away at the console?
... it was called "Old Grandma Hard Core" or something. You might try googling for that, but I won't.
The website is indeed a blog called Old Grandma Hardcore and it chronicles Grandma's hospital visits and back surgery as well as her video gaming addiction. The lucky old gal even gets free shit from Microsoft, Sony & Nintendo, which surprises me a little considering how she refers to the bad guys in their games as "fuckers".
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but does the GPL not expressly prohibit the restriction of rights beyond what it already provides...
It's irrelevant what the GPL provides, because the authors aren't releasing their software under the GPL. They're releasing their software under a license which contains this clause but which is otherwise similar to the GPL.
The GPL has no authority here, only the conditions laid down by the copyright holders, in this case the software authors. One of those conditions might be "you're allowed to distribute this as much as you like as long as you also distribute the source code and keep it under the same license" another might be "you may modify the program as much as you like" but in this case neither of these conflicts (boom boom!) with the pacifism clause. The license (presumably) does not include the part of the GPL which would conflict with the pacifism clause.
We have noticed from your grocery purchases that this month you did not buy proper amounts of vegetables from our approved Nutritional Excellence(tm) list. Instead you purchased some cakes which, you must realize, are bad for your health. Accordingly, we have no choice but to double your health insurance premiums.
Sincerely yours
Great news! I buy all my fags duty-free, and could easily pop through the chunnel for my beer supplies if necessary.
Around here that would look something like this:
Dear Mr. Stroller,
We have noticed from your grocery purchases that this month you have been buying a lot of carrots and fresh spring greens , which are rated highly on our approved Nutritional Excellence(tm) list. This has offset the cream cakes you indulge in and we are glad to be able to reduce your health insurance premiums.
The Quicktime stream for the address was posted some hours ago, although I've only just discovered it myself. It's kinda choppy here and has stalled after 18 minutes, but I'm hopeful it'll be ok once half the world has gone to bed.
I think it should be possible to convert the stream to a file, perhaps using Mplayer or similar but I can't find the appropriate executable to call from the command-line in the Mplayer.app binary I just downloaded. If anyone has any joy with this I'd love to see a torrent of a single movie file of the presentation, so I can actually enjoy watching it.
I'm sure it used to be possible to watch Steve's keynotes live on the web. Or maybe it's just that when I used to work full-time I was able to avoid commentary on them until after I'd watched them. In any case, reading about a keynote just spoils it for me - there's something about the show I enjoy.
Of course Google won't SELL music - the only thing that Google sells is advertising.
But am I the only person here who read TFA and noticed the word "sell"? What was Google doing at the annual conference of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, anyway? It would be far more in line with Google's search business to have a gTunes "music search" engine, where bands can upload their own music and fans can search for it for free. Wouldn't that seem far more like a "proven" and "web 2.0" concept in the light of YouTube and Google Video?
Wouldn't it be more like Google to use their gpay online payment system to "enable" bands to sell music themselves, direct to the consumer? Or for bands to receive a payment for every song downloaded that has had a catchy advertising jingle appended to the end? Local radio has already established that listeners will suffer listening to advertising in exchange for their favourite music (god alone knows why!), and Google's advertising could be far better targeted.
Apple must have made a massive investment in administrative infrastructure negotiating with record labels and establishing contracts and DRM that they can all live with - that was all necessary in order to bring convenient online ordering of already popular artists to their portable music player. But Google has no investment in the status quo here, and isn't interested in selling iPods - it would be far more convienient to them to have a standard "publishers agreement" and terms of service open to anyone with a Google account. Any wannabe rock-star can then sign up and upload their own MP3s, Google is a "common carrier" and just like eBay they can pull the account of anyone selling music they receive an infringement complaint about.
Despite the number of assertions I read about increasing record sales in the last few years associated with P2P users discovering bands (I don't know whether this is a long-term trend over the last decade, or just a statement that was just thrown around during Napster's height?) nothing that has occurred involving music and the internet has followed the model that the traditional music publishing industry is comfortable with. I don't see why Google should be any different, and I don't see why they should ignore music, seeing as how they've already taken an interest in books and video.
Wake up mods! DHMO = H2O. The linked website is clearly a gag and the parent poster was surely aiming for "+5 funny" rather than the "insightful" moderation he's showing right now. I guess he won't be complaining about the karma bonus, tho'.
This doesn't really explain why he can't lay his hands on the dodgy CD / license number that he claims to have bought, or name the supplier. I explained in my previous post why he should surely be able to manage this.
I find this whole retraction story very, VERY hard to believe.
When you buy a legitimate OEM copy of Windows - from someone like Dabs.com or NewEgg - it comes in a cellophane wrapper with a hologrammed CD inside and a license sticker on the outside. There's also a scantly little booklet in there entitled "Welcome to Windows XP" or somesuch.
I could understand Thurrott not expecting the hologrammed CD if he's never bought a separate copy of Windows before. Windows 98 & 2000 used to come with a screen-printed CD, and I guess many PCs with Windows pre-installed still do; for some reason if you're a small OEM then you get the full pack of hologrammed CD, sticker & leaflet that I describe above, but it seems that if you're a major-volume OEM like Dell or Packard Hell then you're allowed to buy the stickers separately & stamp your own "restore CDs" or (as many big OEMs are now doing) offer to let the user burn their own restore CD. I guess they get a discount for this.
But does Thurrott really expect us to believe that he doesn't know what an OEM sticker looks like? When he purchased this alleged copy of Windows, the license number must have been printed on something! Wouldn't you be a little suspicious in this day and age if you were buying an OEM copy of Windows "just like all the PC manufacturers use" and the license key was hand-written on a scrap of paper? Ok, I'm exaggerating, but everyone knows what an OEM sticker looks like - Thurrott must have bought a laptop with Windows pre-installed; he may build all his own PCs, but he must have worked on a friend's PC, or handled an OEM-built PC in someone's office. All these computers will have a proper OEM licence sticker on them - stuck on the underneath of the laptop, for sure; on many PC towers I see nowadays the sticker is on the top of the PC, right at the front, but they're rarely hard to find. Microsoft deliberately make these stickers distinctive and hand to fake - the one I have here even has hologramming along the edge.
If Thurrott bought this copy of Windows for an article then he would have kept the receipt to claim against tax. And I concur entirely with Kosmosik that if he was burned by a retailer sending him a dodgy copy in this way then he'd be shouting their name to the rooftops! Also, as a tech-savvy computer professional * cough* there's no way he'd throw away the original disk and license number that they sent him - it's obvious that you might need it to reinstall some day, and it's no effort at all to drop the disk in a file or folder with all your other software licenses.
So something here really doesn't add up. He might not be prepared to admit that this is a copy he pirated because he didn't have the MSDN subscription disk handy at the time, but that's the only conclusion I can come to.
Defending yourself in court can be a real challenge that would pretty much require making it a full-time job.
It literally became a full-time job for Helen Steel and David Morris in the McLibel case.
The Wikipedia article only says: ... the two had no formal post-secondary school education, and few financial resources. Furthermore, they were denied legal aid by the courts. Although the pair were deemed no legal match for McDonald's enormous legal assets, they represented themselves, receiving much free legal advice, and doing enormous amounts of research in their spare time.
however I recall reading in a Sunday broadsheet at the time that the case dragged on for a couple of years (I think that was just the first case!) and that the two represented themselves in court for 8 hours a day, then spent several hours of an evening preparing their briefs for the next day.
Faced with legal action by a corporate behemoth like McDonalds, there was really no other affordable way to defend themselves, and I am in awe of their commitment - 3 other defendants were named in the initial proceedings, but they retracted the statements in the disputed pamphlet and apologised for its content. I believe that Steel & Morris gave up their jobs as a postman & as a gardener in because they refused to back down.
IIRC none of the defendants were the authors of the leaflet - the group they belonged to was very ad-hoc, meeting weekly in a pub, and the court case was brought a couple of years after the leaflet had been distributed; Steel or Morris was quoted in the article I read as saying they didn't remember who did write it, as it was only one of many activities the group undertook. This seems to me to quite a reasonable assertion after two years, considering that someone might've only attended only a few of the meetings over a period of a few months - you might well remember faces but be unable to put names to them, and be unable to provide contact details for Mick or Joe.
Why do most of those cameras write JPG faster than RAW to the CF card?
Ummm.... I hadn't really paid so much attention to that aspect of the tests, but I'm reading it the other way around, as RAW being faster than JPEG.
EG: on the EOS 350/XT table the SanDisk Extreme III 1GB writes Large Fine JPEG at 4.888MB/sec, whereas RAW.CR2 is written at 6.263MB/sec.
I would believe this to be because of the necessity of jpeg conversion - the RAW file is "raw" data straight from the camera's sensor, wrapped up in some simple headers & binary-formatting, whereas it takes some slightly complex encoding to produce a jpeg (admittedly from a dedicated processor within the camera).
What makes a CF card faster than some other card?
I.E. Is it the quality of the memory, the controller chip or a combination of the two?
In the Photography Forums that I tend to read we get the "which CFcard is best" question several times a week and everyone always refers the poster to the tables from the Rob Galbraith test last year. They actually have a number of different pages, having tested cards with a number of different cameras, but that doesn't matter, nor does the fact that it's currently a little out of date - the salient fact is that for many of the expensive flash memory cards the bottleneck is the camera's write speed.
I currently have two CFcards for my camera, a cheapie that came free with the camera & a SanDisk Ultra II. The SanDisk Ultra II was about twice the price of the cheapie memory, but it'll also write about twice as fast. The Extreme III, however, is what SanDisk are currently pushing as their fastest highest-tech card for your camera, and loads of people buy it. Check the table, however, and you'll see it's only a couple of percent faster in my camera... and at twice the price, of course.
So this is why the Rob Galbraith tables are more useful than some 19-page review full of ads - you can just glance down the page & easily compare the brands that your supplier offers for a real-world comparison and see if they're worth the price.
In the absence of copyright (and a way to practically enforce it - DRM), creative works would be a failed market because supply is infinite, therefore pushing prices down to zero. The creator of the creative work gets nothing in return for production of that good so, the market has failed.
I'll bite. In the absence of (enforced) copyright creative works stored in / on a digital medium are a failed market.
As the article observes DRM is effective in preventing Joe & Mary SixPack copying DVDs, the RIAA lawsuits are somewhat effective in curbing music downloads, but there are always some people who will buy the disk from the store just for the pleasure of owning the original, pouring over the liner-notes, or simply because they're collectors. In this environment it should be pretty easy for artists to make a decent wage out of their creative works... they just have to learn to think a little creatively (ha! the irony!) about how they market themselves and break out of doing things the "same old way" that things have been done for years.
I'll bet there's a 250 people out there who'd happily pay $1000 each for an autographed copy of Madonna's latest album on release day - that's a quarter of a million right there, Madge, for 45 minutes signing your name. Can you now please quit bitching about people getting your songs on Napster? Fans become fans by listening to & discovering music, and it's a large fan-base that supports this kind of marketplace. For smaller musicians limited-edition artwork & packaging can similarly produce additional revenue.
On Radio 1 news a few weeks ago there was a piece about the price of some tickets to a gig - I think they were about £300. Fans were interviewed & bitching about this "unreasonable" pricing (actually, I'll bet the word used was actually "unfair"), but judging from the number of my customers who have P2P software installed I wouldn't be surprised to hear of a downturn in album sales. Meanwhile, in purchasing tickets to a concert you're buying something that you can't download, that can't be duplicated - that uniqueness has value, a gig is a enjoyable event with a limited capacity, so supply & demand comes into play again. Where's your "failed market" there?
£300 for a ticket to a gig might seem like a lot of money - hey! I can buy 2 Wiis for that!! - but if you're really a fan, and it's the gig of an artist of Madonna or U2's significance that you'll be talking about for years, is a week or two's wages really so much? And if it IS so much, then that musician won't be filling the venue, and prices will have to fall for the next tour.
I'd love to see musicians release tickets to their concerts straight on to eBay (or an alternative bidding system), cutting out the middle-men, undermining the touts (there's currently a parliamentary investigation underway into ticket-touting on eBay. WTF??!?!?!) and letting the market's supply and demand work out how much tickets are really worth. Second-hand ticket prices demonstrate that some people are prepared to pay more for a ticket than list-price, and there will always be people who would consider going to a gig were it cheaper, so just give the high-bidders tickets in the VIP booths at the front & let those with less disposable income stand at the back.
It might not seem "fair" to the original artist that for zero-cost I can make a copy of his music with the same fidelity with which it was recorded in the studio, but this is a fact of the digital age, and there's no point in ignoring that fact. The Grateful Dead discovered that bootlegging did their popularity and over-all ticket & record sales no hard at all, and I believe that musicians in Eastern Europe and Asia are also living with both piracy and sell-out tours. Failed market? My donkey!
As for RPG's not coming to the US, the... problems are:
- Costs. An RPG requires hundreds or thousands of times the translation effort of an action title. Margins are not always very high and many producers and distributors simply don't want to deal with such large up-front costs. Even extremely popular games like Nintendo's Animal Crossing and Zelda get delayed by months so they can be translated.
Ok, I'll bite. I think you mean "an RPG requires some translation effort" - an action title requires practically none because the Japanese producers all know the English phrases "game over", "fire" and "hi scores". But an RPG surely doesn't require THAT MUCH translation effort - how hard can it be to write the code so that it pulls all the printed words out of a textfile, then send that textfile across town to a translation agency? Sure, this is more effort than required by an action title, but compared to the effort of reprinting all the covers & manuals, entering into a distribution agreement, marketing and actually getting a title into thousands of stores across another continent, I'd say it's fairly trivial.
So I call their pay tech support number and get through to a woman with a strong Indian accent... who, much to my surprise, deals with the matter quickly and professionally.
Yup. Indian tech support seems to be quite mixed - like everywhere, I guess - and I've had good experiences with them, too. (Not Tiscali's though, I don't think).
One of the biggest gripes from my customers - who are not IT professionals by any means - is that they can't understand "a word they're saying" when they call Indian tech support.
And it seems to be all the biggest ISPs - like BT & Tiscali - who market their services to Joe Consumer who also like to out-source their tech support in this way. Eventually they'll learn, but it may take a while - it seems to me that (at least here in the UK) Joe & Jane Consumer have a massive inertia about changing ISPs, and even if they know their ISP is crap it's easier than changing to someone else. But stitch them up enough and consumers have longer memories than elephants, and once they've left you it'll be a very long time before they come back.
This is the most positive news I have ever encountered with respect to Tiscali. My personal experience is with hours of phonecalls to their useless technical support over customers' ADSL connections.
Tech support: my name is Sanjay, how can I help you?
<listens>
Tech support: so these people have been pirating your music? Have you tried reinstalling your modem drivers?
Slashdot Mirror
Stroller.
Stroller.
Stroller.
This makes me feel old... erm... or something.
Stroller.
Stroller.
Because their founders were selected as famous & influential enough to feature for inclusion as Silicon Valley "pioneers", HP were offered first chance to sponsor this art and buy the life-sized portraits - not really a "cardboard cut-out" - at the end of their journey. $6,000 seems to me not an unreasonable figure considering the normal selling price of portraits & paintings, and the publicity that this project had garnered, but HP declined. Surely $6,000 is a paltry amount to pay for portraits of your founders to place in the foyer of your company headquarters, but hey! that's HP's choice.
Sun were aware of this back-story because one of their engineers worked on integrating a mobile phone tracking system into the portraits, so that members of the art-loving public could view the progress of the "cardboard cut-outs" on a website which used Google Maps' API. So when they heard that HP had declined to sponsor the project, Sun, perhaps a little jealous of the prestige given to their competitor's founders by this art project, decided to get some free publicity by stepping up to the plate, buying the artwork and dressing them up in girls' clothes or whatever.
This is Slashdot-worthy because it involves technology companies acting like spoilt children. Have fun!
Stroller.
So you're not really comparing large pies with small pies here, you're comparing Fray Bentos with the the local charity cake bake.
You should probably also read Steve Albini's article The Problem With Music before trying to simplify the figures so.
It's probably more realistic to compare:
- Sales of 670 albums @ $15 each = $10k, you get to keep 90% = $9k.
- Sales of 60,000 albums @ $15 each = $900k, you get to keep 1% = $9k.
These figures are probably more interesting if you consider a "large slice" of 6,500 CDs sold against your "small slice" of over half a million albums. 6,500 CDs as a "self-published" venture would justify the employment of a full time promotional assistant, provide decent wages for the band and only require about 20 CDs a day actually to be put into jiffy bags & posted out to paying fans. Yet both these earn in the same region.I used to have a friend, not a young guy, whose life ambition was to get signed to a record label. Even though he had been around the music industry for years, was realistic about his potential, and realised how little he was likely to make, he once admitted to me that he'd been trying so long that he still wanted to "be signed", I guess as evidence that he'd "made it" or of how good he was, or how committed or whatever. I'd think that most young bands signing up with labels just want to be rock stars, and are not interested in managing themselves or undertaking their own "career development".
Stroller.
Last time I checked - admittedly some months ago - MSN 7.5 was a beta, so when I saw the availability of Live I snagged it. I have to admit that I don't really use videochat much myself, and that my choice of videochat software would be iChatAV, but since the iSight on my laptop now has Windows drivers it would be nice to have the "best" version of MSN installed.
Hmmmn... it would also be nice to have MSN without the shitty ads at the bottom of the buddylist, but I guess that's reachin'.
Stroller.
The website is indeed a blog called Old Grandma Hardcore and it chronicles Grandma's hospital visits and back surgery as well as her video gaming addiction. The lucky old gal even gets free shit from Microsoft, Sony & Nintendo, which surprises me a little considering how she refers to the bad guys in their games as "fuckers".
Stroller.
The GPL has no authority here, only the conditions laid down by the copyright holders, in this case the software authors. One of those conditions might be "you're allowed to distribute this as much as you like as long as you also distribute the source code and keep it under the same license" another might be "you may modify the program as much as you like" but in this case neither of these conflicts (boom boom!) with the pacifism clause. The license (presumably) does not include the part of the GPL which would conflict with the pacifism clause.
Stoller
Dear Mr. Stroller,
We have noticed from your grocery purchases that this month you have been buying a lot of carrots and fresh spring greens , which are rated highly on our approved Nutritional Excellence(tm) list. This has offset the cream cakes you indulge in and we are glad to be able to reduce your health insurance premiums.
Sincerely yours
I think it should be possible to convert the stream to a file, perhaps using Mplayer or similar but I can't find the appropriate executable to call from the command-line in the Mplayer.app binary I just downloaded. If anyone has any joy with this I'd love to see a torrent of a single movie file of the presentation, so I can actually enjoy watching it.
I'm sure it used to be possible to watch Steve's keynotes live on the web. Or maybe it's just that when I used to work full-time I was able to avoid commentary on them until after I'd watched them. In any case, reading about a keynote just spoils it for me - there's something about the show I enjoy.
Stroller.
But am I the only person here who read TFA and noticed the word "sell"? What was Google doing at the annual conference of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, anyway? It would be far more in line with Google's search business to have a gTunes "music search" engine, where bands can upload their own music and fans can search for it for free. Wouldn't that seem far more like a "proven" and "web 2.0" concept in the light of YouTube and Google Video?
Wouldn't it be more like Google to use their gpay online payment system to "enable" bands to sell music themselves, direct to the consumer? Or for bands to receive a payment for every song downloaded that has had a catchy advertising jingle appended to the end? Local radio has already established that listeners will suffer listening to advertising in exchange for their favourite music (god alone knows why!), and Google's advertising could be far better targeted.
Apple must have made a massive investment in administrative infrastructure negotiating with record labels and establishing contracts and DRM that they can all live with - that was all necessary in order to bring convenient online ordering of already popular artists to their portable music player. But Google has no investment in the status quo here, and isn't interested in selling iPods - it would be far more convienient to them to have a standard "publishers agreement" and terms of service open to anyone with a Google account. Any wannabe rock-star can then sign up and upload their own MP3s, Google is a "common carrier" and just like eBay they can pull the account of anyone selling music they receive an infringement complaint about.
Despite the number of assertions I read about increasing record sales in the last few years associated with P2P users discovering bands (I don't know whether this is a long-term trend over the last decade, or just a statement that was just thrown around during Napster's height?) nothing that has occurred involving music and the internet has followed the model that the traditional music publishing industry is comfortable with. I don't see why Google should be any different, and I don't see why they should ignore music, seeing as how they've already taken an interest in books and video.
Stroller.
Here are some links about dihydrogen monoxide:
Stroller.
Stroller.
When you buy a legitimate OEM copy of Windows - from someone like Dabs.com or NewEgg - it comes in a cellophane wrapper with a hologrammed CD inside and a license sticker on the outside. There's also a scantly little booklet in there entitled "Welcome to Windows XP" or somesuch.
I could understand Thurrott not expecting the hologrammed CD if he's never bought a separate copy of Windows before. Windows 98 & 2000 used to come with a screen-printed CD, and I guess many PCs with Windows pre-installed still do; for some reason if you're a small OEM then you get the full pack of hologrammed CD, sticker & leaflet that I describe above, but it seems that if you're a major-volume OEM like Dell or Packard Hell then you're allowed to buy the stickers separately & stamp your own "restore CDs" or (as many big OEMs are now doing) offer to let the user burn their own restore CD. I guess they get a discount for this.
But does Thurrott really expect us to believe that he doesn't know what an OEM sticker looks like? When he purchased this alleged copy of Windows, the license number must have been printed on something! Wouldn't you be a little suspicious in this day and age if you were buying an OEM copy of Windows "just like all the PC manufacturers use" and the license key was hand-written on a scrap of paper? Ok, I'm exaggerating, but everyone knows what an OEM sticker looks like - Thurrott must have bought a laptop with Windows pre-installed; he may build all his own PCs, but he must have worked on a friend's PC, or handled an OEM-built PC in someone's office. All these computers will have a proper OEM licence sticker on them - stuck on the underneath of the laptop, for sure; on many PC towers I see nowadays the sticker is on the top of the PC, right at the front, but they're rarely hard to find. Microsoft deliberately make these stickers distinctive and hand to fake - the one I have here even has hologramming along the edge.
If Thurrott bought this copy of Windows for an article then he would have kept the receipt to claim against tax. And I concur entirely with Kosmosik that if he was burned by a retailer sending him a dodgy copy in this way then he'd be shouting their name to the rooftops! Also, as a tech-savvy computer professional * cough* there's no way he'd throw away the original disk and license number that they sent him - it's obvious that you might need it to reinstall some day, and it's no effort at all to drop the disk in a file or folder with all your other software licenses.
So something here really doesn't add up. He might not be prepared to admit that this is a copy he pirated because he didn't have the MSDN subscription disk handy at the time, but that's the only conclusion I can come to.
Stroller.
The Wikipedia article only says:
... the two had no formal post-secondary school education, and few financial resources. Furthermore, they were denied legal aid by the courts. Although the pair were deemed no legal match for McDonald's enormous legal assets, they represented themselves, receiving much free legal advice, and doing enormous amounts of research in their spare time.
however I recall reading in a Sunday broadsheet at the time that the case dragged on for a couple of years (I think that was just the first case!) and that the two represented themselves in court for 8 hours a day, then spent several hours of an evening preparing their briefs for the next day.
Faced with legal action by a corporate behemoth like McDonalds, there was really no other affordable way to defend themselves, and I am in awe of their commitment - 3 other defendants were named in the initial proceedings, but they retracted the statements in the disputed pamphlet and apologised for its content. I believe that Steel & Morris gave up their jobs as a postman & as a gardener in because they refused to back down.
IIRC none of the defendants were the authors of the leaflet - the group they belonged to was very ad-hoc, meeting weekly in a pub, and the court case was brought a couple of years after the leaflet had been distributed; Steel or Morris was quoted in the article I read as saying they didn't remember who did write it, as it was only one of many activities the group undertook. This seems to me to quite a reasonable assertion after two years, considering that someone might've only attended only a few of the meetings over a period of a few months - you might well remember faces but be unable to put names to them, and be unable to provide contact details for Mick or Joe.
Stroller.
"Hey, that dude over there in the turban & the false beard looks just like my boss. I guess I'd better file an SDR."
Stroller.
EG: on the EOS 350/XT table the SanDisk Extreme III 1GB writes Large Fine JPEG at 4.888MB/sec, whereas RAW .CR2 is written at 6.263MB/sec.
I would believe this to be because of the necessity of jpeg conversion - the RAW file is "raw" data straight from the camera's sensor, wrapped up in some simple headers & binary-formatting, whereas it takes some slightly complex encoding to produce a jpeg (admittedly from a dedicated processor within the camera).
Um... good question, but I have no idea.Stroller.
I currently have two CFcards for my camera, a cheapie that came free with the camera & a SanDisk Ultra II. The SanDisk Ultra II was about twice the price of the cheapie memory, but it'll also write about twice as fast. The Extreme III, however, is what SanDisk are currently pushing as their fastest highest-tech card for your camera, and loads of people buy it. Check the table, however, and you'll see it's only a couple of percent faster in my camera... and at twice the price, of course.
So this is why the Rob Galbraith tables are more useful than some 19-page review full of ads - you can just glance down the page & easily compare the brands that your supplier offers for a real-world comparison and see if they're worth the price.
Stroller.
As the article observes DRM is effective in preventing Joe & Mary SixPack copying DVDs, the RIAA lawsuits are somewhat effective in curbing music downloads, but there are always some people who will buy the disk from the store just for the pleasure of owning the original, pouring over the liner-notes, or simply because they're collectors. In this environment it should be pretty easy for artists to make a decent wage out of their creative works... they just have to learn to think a little creatively (ha! the irony!) about how they market themselves and break out of doing things the "same old way" that things have been done for years.
I'll bet there's a 250 people out there who'd happily pay $1000 each for an autographed copy of Madonna's latest album on release day - that's a quarter of a million right there, Madge, for 45 minutes signing your name. Can you now please quit bitching about people getting your songs on Napster? Fans become fans by listening to & discovering music, and it's a large fan-base that supports this kind of marketplace. For smaller musicians limited-edition artwork & packaging can similarly produce additional revenue.
On Radio 1 news a few weeks ago there was a piece about the price of some tickets to a gig - I think they were about £300. Fans were interviewed & bitching about this "unreasonable" pricing (actually, I'll bet the word used was actually "unfair"), but judging from the number of my customers who have P2P software installed I wouldn't be surprised to hear of a downturn in album sales. Meanwhile, in purchasing tickets to a concert you're buying something that you can't download, that can't be duplicated - that uniqueness has value, a gig is a enjoyable event with a limited capacity, so supply & demand comes into play again. Where's your "failed market" there?
£300 for a ticket to a gig might seem like a lot of money - hey! I can buy 2 Wiis for that!! - but if you're really a fan, and it's the gig of an artist of Madonna or U2's significance that you'll be talking about for years, is a week or two's wages really so much? And if it IS so much, then that musician won't be filling the venue, and prices will have to fall for the next tour.
I'd love to see musicians release tickets to their concerts straight on to eBay (or an alternative bidding system), cutting out the middle-men, undermining the touts (there's currently a parliamentary investigation underway into ticket-touting on eBay. WTF??!?!?!) and letting the market's supply and demand work out how much tickets are really worth. Second-hand ticket prices demonstrate that some people are prepared to pay more for a ticket than list-price, and there will always be people who would consider going to a gig were it cheaper, so just give the high-bidders tickets in the VIP booths at the front & let those with less disposable income stand at the back.
It might not seem "fair" to the original artist that for zero-cost I can make a copy of his music with the same fidelity with which it was recorded in the studio, but this is a fact of the digital age, and there's no point in ignoring that fact. The Grateful Dead discovered that bootlegging did their popularity and over-all ticket & record sales no hard at all, and I believe that musicians in Eastern Europe and Asia are also living with both piracy and sell-out tours. Failed market? My donkey!
Stroller.
Stroller.
(Not Tiscali's though, I don't think).
One of the biggest gripes from my customers - who are not IT professionals by any means - is that they can't understand "a word they're saying" when they call Indian tech support. And it seems to be all the biggest ISPs - like BT & Tiscali - who market their services to Joe Consumer who also like to out-source their tech support in this way. Eventually they'll learn, but it may take a while - it seems to me that (at least here in the UK) Joe & Jane Consumer have a massive inertia about changing ISPs, and even if they know their ISP is crap it's easier than changing to someone else. But stitch them up enough and consumers have longer memories than elephants, and once they've left you it'll be a very long time before they come back.
Stroller.
But in this case, I think Tiscali did only one thing wrong in their letter The British Phonographic Industry Limited.... they should have added "please feel free to phone us to discuss this further"
I can just imagine the conversation now: