THe grenade never went off, but some people posted saying stuff like they hoped it, or something like that.
You call them dissidents? I call them dumbasses. I don't think restrictions on saying stupid crap about wanting the president to die is that onerous of a restriction.
Yeah, it sounds a bit ridiculous, but think about it. People don't like carrying around multiple devices with them, and out of all the portable devices out there, the only one that has emerged as a necessity is the cellphone. These days, most cellphones you can buy have most of the features of the PDAs of yore. Listening to music is a fairly small feature to add to a device.
If you look at Nokia's cell phones, about half of them have cameras. A few years ago, a camera phone would've been pretty rare. I think that's where things are heading with hard drive cell phones, and once you have a hard drive, playing music off of it is pretty simple. Sure, the iPod is fairly entrenched as of right now, but when people's iPods break, they'll already have a device that can play music, making another iPod purchase much less lucrative. As more iPods break than get replaced, these Windows Mobile phones will be waiting to take the MP3 player market away.
social networking software won't really take off until you manage your own connections and spider-like software crawls it to offer whatever services it can.
Because it depends on undocumented "features" that are only available in the sun JRE
That's not true. The features are documented, but the free Java implementations haven't caught up yet. Everyone is so quick to prove some sort of malicious intent that they're ignoring the facts. The article doesn't say anything about undocumented features, it talks about unimplemented features.
The most visible evidence of that is that the FSF (Free Software Foundation) is "is looking for volunteers to maintain a version of OpenOffice that doesn't require a non-free Java platform."
This isn't about having something against Java as a language or being mad at Sun for implementing new features in Java. I think they should use whichever tools allow them to work most efficiently. All this is about is ensuring that all these new features can be utilized without Sun's JVM, since most distros can't ship it. This means people have to provide patches that deal with the incompleteness of the free JVMs. If the patches don't make it upstream, someone still needs to maintain them.
There's nothing wrong with wanting a completely free software stack, and I think there's generally less animosity out there than people are making it seem.
As far as I'm concerned its like stealing money from a crack dealer.
No it's not. It's like stealing crack from a crack dealer. You're still fucking yourself over because a time will come when stealing crack isn't a viable option. You probably should've gone into rehab instead.
If a subscription service dies, you just switch to another one.
But if you jump on the bandwagon because of Yahoo's $5 a month deal, then you're screwed when you move to Napster's $15 a month. And if none of the subscription services succeed, that's a big wasted investment that could've been used on tangible music purchases.
The thing about buying music online is that it all has no resale value. The things we typically rent, like apartments and DVDs, all have resale values. Because of this, you can always find people wlling to rent these things. You're not going to wake up and find that nobody rents apartments anymore. It's property with an established business model behind it. When you choose to rent a house instead of buying one, you're assuming the continued availability of the house to rent as a factor in that decision. If that's going to go away, you might as well start making the investment in owning a house now.
With music, there's a chance that everyone will stop renting it. You have to have a large library in order for the service to be viable, and that takes a large investment. Any owner of the traditional things we rent can start renting it out at any time. Not so with music.
Another difference between music and traditional rented property is that we use music over and over. Renting movies makes sense: you typically only watch them once. If people stop renting the movie and you want to see it, it's not as big of a deal as if the music subscription services all shut down. You need a library with music, but for everything else we rent, you only really need one.
Subscription music services aren't a good idea to bet on until they've been firmly established.
How does my portable player know my subscription has lapsed?
I'm not exactly sure about this, but I think if you don't connect the player to your computer within a certain time frame, the songs deactivate themselves. When you connect it to the computer, it checks your subscription and refreshes the time to live.
Kinda makes the "Plays For Sure" certification seem like a misnomer, no?
When I said buy, I was referring to the service. There are plenty of things we rent instead of purchasing outright. I think the subscription model is attractive to a large chunk of people.
Or it would be if all those people didn't have white earphones hanging out of their ears.
But, given how much market share the iPod (in all its incarnations) currently has, the prospect of being a Windows user with just a WMA player seems unlikely.
Right. I don't think the business model is very sound because the iPod is fairly entrenched. It's still a pretty attractive service if you don't have an iPod.
I can't think of any WMA players that would let me do that, or at least none that would let me do that easily.
Maybe not Firewire, but all the hard disk WMA players can do the same thing. I don't know about the battery life.
It must be nice to watch this battle over the niche WMA market unfold from the comfort of Cupertino. These subscription services are a disaster waiting to happen. The WMA market isn't large enough to sustain all the vendors out there. Once the first subscription service folds, everyone will stay far, far away from them. "I paid money every month for my music, then it all went away because they had a crappy business model." Tragic.
With Apple's model, there's no dependence on Apple's success for your music to play. You don't even have to depend on any specific hardware because you can burn it all to CD. $5 a month for the rest of my life for a huge library of music is an awesome deal. $5 a month for that library until the service folds and I'm left with no music isn't all that attractive.
Someone needs to point me to the venture capital firms that back things things (except in Yahoo's case). I have an idea for a company. I think I'm going to call it Webvan.
That's the problem right there. When will someone wise up and give us lossless, reasonably-priced downloads? Until then I'll continue to use BitTorrent.
Stop trying to justify your copyright infringement. You don't care about paying anyone, or you'd just buy regular CDs and get your lossless music that way. You really don't understand how to get what you want as a consumer. You stop using the product until they give you what you want. Taking it without permission still perpetuates your reliance on their product.
It's mainly a subscription based service. It doesn't matter if it's lossy, because you're never converting the music to another format. Ever.
When will "they" realise that this isn't going to cut the mustard?
I'm willing to bet that this does cut the mustard for most people. If you use Windows and have a WMA player, this service seems fine as long as you don't mind all your music self destructing when you stop paying. But honestly, at $5 a month for music, I'd be willing to pay that for quite some time. That's the lowest monthly bill I'd have, and I'd get to access a huge library of music on demand.
If you're paying $60 a year for music and buying a WMA player, what does hackers cracking the DRM have to do with anything?
By June 2005, we will have unlimited mp3's for $60 a year.
The only thing different from what's available now is "mp3". If you have a Windows computer and a WMA player, the restrictive DRM still lets you do everything you need to, namely play music. It's nice to be the first guy to say "I can't wait until they crack this," but chances are, nothing will change for you when they crack it.
$60 a year for music is cheap, especially for people like me who don't appreciate the value of building up a music collection yet. If their DRM allows you to do everything you plan to do with the music, then buy it. Novel concept, eh?
If the DRM doesn't allow you to do what you want, buy music from likeminded artists.
If this got proposed in my country (Australia) i would fight it with a public information campaign, which would be in addition to my countries relatively effective checks and balances halting it in its tracks.
If you haven't realized it yet, Australia is America's little brother. I don't mean "little brother" in a pejorative way. You're our little brother because you get all of our hand me downs. When we get shiny new legislation like the DMCA, your legislators say, "We want one of those too!" It's just a matter of time.
What a lot of people dont realize (Including a lot of programmers). That a lot of applications are not multithreaded. Thus wont get the speed advantage of the Duel-Core processor.
Correct. Instead of executing the code in parallel, both cores will fight to the death for the privilege. Since only one core survives, you don't really get much benefit from duel-core processors.
Yes, they earn it, especially when it comes to scientific research. I think that's something that a society should support. I'm pretty sure we're a bit far from each other on the political spectrum when it comes to taxation, but if we're going to pay for anything as a group, shouldn't it be the advancement of science? Raw ideas aren't always appealing from a free market standpoint.
Government == Force. They "choose to fund" with money taken at the point of a gun.
If that's what you think, then you've got bigger problems than scientific research. Last time I checked, you vote for the people who choose how much money to take and choose what to use that money for. If you disagree, vote for someone else. If there's no one running who agrees with your views, run yourself.
Scientific research is probably the last place that I'd say government funding is being wielded irresponsibly.
SO what you're saying is that we should demand funding from Canada, France, Russia, and Iraq because hey, the'll use the research too?
International funding of scientific research would be even better. This isn't about forcing anyone to do anything, it's about the government choosing to fund research. It's better when people from more places contribute, since everyone will benefit. What California is saying right now is, "Fine. You guys don't have to fund the research, but we're going to do it and create more jobs for our residents at the same time."
The problem with letting science direct "the funding" is that "the funding" is comming out of MY pocket and frankly, I'd rather decide where it goes than a bunch of people in DC or California, be they scientists or politicians.
That's what elected representatives are for. You alone can't fund anything worthwhile. When combined with your fellow citizens, you can.
I want my money going to research retinal implants for the blind rather than stems cells. The folks in California don't.
What you fail to realize is that funding for a specific area of research isn't commonplace. Since the federal government won't fund it, California is. The federal government does fund research to help the blind, so California doesn't need to pass special legislation to do so themselves.
I would say that this is an argument against government funding of scientific research.
When government funds research, it gets published. Everyone gets to use the knowledge that comes from it. In private research, that's not the case.
The reason research sponsored by individual states isn't ideal is because they have less money to work with. I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with it, especially because I'm a California resident studying biology. This legislation creates jobs for me, and I like that. The only problem is that there should be more money out there for this research, and that's not happening because the people in power think it's wrong.
You obviously don't think there's anything wrong with government funding of scientific research, or you'd have a problem with this as well. The California government is sponsoring research, and good things will come of it.
That's right people, there is no federal ban on stem cell research of any kind. No matter what the media tries to tell you.
There's a ban on federal funding for stem cell research. Most funding for scientific research comes from the federal government, so taking away funding for stem cell research is far more significant than you make it out to be. States rarely pass legislation funding specific areas of scientific research like California has now, and I doubt that many states will follow in their footsteps. Future advances in this area will come solely because the residents of the states who fund it chose to do so, and I'm sure people in other states won't have a problem with curing their Parkinson's when a cure comes along. It's easy for people to whine about destroying embryos when there's not a concrete benefit out there that has come from it yet. When it happens, it'll be fairly easy to spot the hypocrites.
That's not insightful. His site is broken, and Google shows information it shouldn't as a result. There are probably other cases in which the site breaks that hadn't been noticed yet because not that many people used a caching proxy before now. The rest of the article said not to idolize a company, because in the end, it's a company. That's not insightful, it's common sense.
Apple already released their ZeroConf stack for POSIX-like systems under an open source license.
Except it's under Apple's APSL, which isn't DFSG free. KDE uses it anyway, but I assume Debian strips it out before packaging it. Avahi is a GPL'd implementation of zeroconf, and AFAIK Gnome is waiting for it to mature before integrating it. The web page has a progress update added today.
Slashdot Mirror
THe grenade never went off, but some people posted saying stuff like they hoped it, or something like that.
You call them dissidents? I call them dumbasses. I don't think restrictions on saying stupid crap about wanting the president to die is that onerous of a restriction.
Yeah, it sounds a bit ridiculous, but think about it. People don't like carrying around multiple devices with them, and out of all the portable devices out there, the only one that has emerged as a necessity is the cellphone. These days, most cellphones you can buy have most of the features of the PDAs of yore. Listening to music is a fairly small feature to add to a device.
If you look at Nokia's cell phones, about half of them have cameras. A few years ago, a camera phone would've been pretty rare. I think that's where things are heading with hard drive cell phones, and once you have a hard drive, playing music off of it is pretty simple. Sure, the iPod is fairly entrenched as of right now, but when people's iPods break, they'll already have a device that can play music, making another iPod purchase much less lucrative. As more iPods break than get replaced, these Windows Mobile phones will be waiting to take the MP3 player market away.
We have a 7100 series that I use as a step-ladder to access stuff on a top shelf. It has never teetered or shifted.
And if it does start to teeter one day, you can fix it since you have the source now!
Or something like that.
social networking software won't really take off until you manage your own connections and spider-like software crawls it to offer whatever services it can.
That's what FOAF is for.
Because it depends on undocumented "features" that are only available in the sun JRE
That's not true. The features are documented, but the free Java implementations haven't caught up yet. Everyone is so quick to prove some sort of malicious intent that they're ignoring the facts. The article doesn't say anything about undocumented features, it talks about unimplemented features.
There's nothing wrong with wanting a completely free software stack, and I think there's generally less animosity out there than people are making it seem.
As far as I'm concerned its like stealing money from a crack dealer.
No it's not. It's like stealing crack from a crack dealer. You're still fucking yourself over because a time will come when stealing crack isn't a viable option. You probably should've gone into rehab instead.
If a subscription service dies, you just switch to another one.
But if you jump on the bandwagon because of Yahoo's $5 a month deal, then you're screwed when you move to Napster's $15 a month. And if none of the subscription services succeed, that's a big wasted investment that could've been used on tangible music purchases.
The thing about buying music online is that it all has no resale value. The things we typically rent, like apartments and DVDs, all have resale values. Because of this, you can always find people wlling to rent these things. You're not going to wake up and find that nobody rents apartments anymore. It's property with an established business model behind it. When you choose to rent a house instead of buying one, you're assuming the continued availability of the house to rent as a factor in that decision. If that's going to go away, you might as well start making the investment in owning a house now.
With music, there's a chance that everyone will stop renting it. You have to have a large library in order for the service to be viable, and that takes a large investment. Any owner of the traditional things we rent can start renting it out at any time. Not so with music.
Another difference between music and traditional rented property is that we use music over and over. Renting movies makes sense: you typically only watch them once. If people stop renting the movie and you want to see it, it's not as big of a deal as if the music subscription services all shut down. You need a library with music, but for everything else we rent, you only really need one.
Subscription music services aren't a good idea to bet on until they've been firmly established.
How does my portable player know my subscription has lapsed?
I'm not exactly sure about this, but I think if you don't connect the player to your computer within a certain time frame, the songs deactivate themselves. When you connect it to the computer, it checks your subscription and refreshes the time to live.
Kinda makes the "Plays For Sure" certification seem like a misnomer, no?
When I said buy, I was referring to the service. There are plenty of things we rent instead of purchasing outright. I think the subscription model is attractive to a large chunk of people.
Or it would be if all those people didn't have white earphones hanging out of their ears.
But, given how much market share the iPod (in all its incarnations) currently has, the prospect of being a Windows user with just a WMA player seems unlikely.
Right. I don't think the business model is very sound because the iPod is fairly entrenched. It's still a pretty attractive service if you don't have an iPod.
I can't think of any WMA players that would let me do that, or at least none that would let me do that easily.
Maybe not Firewire, but all the hard disk WMA players can do the same thing. I don't know about the battery life.
It must be nice to watch this battle over the niche WMA market unfold from the comfort of Cupertino. These subscription services are a disaster waiting to happen. The WMA market isn't large enough to sustain all the vendors out there. Once the first subscription service folds, everyone will stay far, far away from them. "I paid money every month for my music, then it all went away because they had a crappy business model." Tragic.
With Apple's model, there's no dependence on Apple's success for your music to play. You don't even have to depend on any specific hardware because you can burn it all to CD. $5 a month for the rest of my life for a huge library of music is an awesome deal. $5 a month for that library until the service folds and I'm left with no music isn't all that attractive.
Someone needs to point me to the venture capital firms that back things things (except in Yahoo's case). I have an idea for a company. I think I'm going to call it Webvan.
That's the problem right there. When will someone wise up and give us lossless, reasonably-priced downloads? Until then I'll continue to use BitTorrent.
Stop trying to justify your copyright infringement. You don't care about paying anyone, or you'd just buy regular CDs and get your lossless music that way. You really don't understand how to get what you want as a consumer. You stop using the product until they give you what you want. Taking it without permission still perpetuates your reliance on their product.
There are artists who sell lossless, reasonably priced downloads. Put your money where your mouth is.
pointless DRM based lossy music service.
It's mainly a subscription based service. It doesn't matter if it's lossy, because you're never converting the music to another format. Ever.
When will "they" realise that this isn't going to cut the mustard?
I'm willing to bet that this does cut the mustard for most people. If you use Windows and have a WMA player, this service seems fine as long as you don't mind all your music self destructing when you stop paying. But honestly, at $5 a month for music, I'd be willing to pay that for quite some time. That's the lowest monthly bill I'd have, and I'd get to access a huge library of music on demand.
Too bad I use Linux and have an iPod shuffle.
If you're paying $60 a year for music and buying a WMA player, what does hackers cracking the DRM have to do with anything?
By June 2005, we will have unlimited mp3's for $60 a year.
The only thing different from what's available now is "mp3". If you have a Windows computer and a WMA player, the restrictive DRM still lets you do everything you need to, namely play music. It's nice to be the first guy to say "I can't wait until they crack this," but chances are, nothing will change for you when they crack it.
$60 a year for music is cheap, especially for people like me who don't appreciate the value of building up a music collection yet. If their DRM allows you to do everything you plan to do with the music, then buy it. Novel concept, eh?
If the DRM doesn't allow you to do what you want, buy music from likeminded artists.
If this got proposed in my country (Australia) i would fight it with a public information campaign, which would be in addition to my countries relatively effective checks and balances halting it in its tracks.
If you haven't realized it yet, Australia is America's little brother. I don't mean "little brother" in a pejorative way. You're our little brother because you get all of our hand me downs. When we get shiny new legislation like the DMCA, your legislators say, "We want one of those too!" It's just a matter of time.
What a lot of people dont realize (Including a lot of programmers). That a lot of applications are not multithreaded. Thus wont get the speed advantage of the Duel-Core processor.
Correct. Instead of executing the code in parallel, both cores will fight to the death for the privilege. Since only one core survives, you don't really get much benefit from duel-core processors.
Yes, they earn it, especially when it comes to scientific research. I think that's something that a society should support. I'm pretty sure we're a bit far from each other on the political spectrum when it comes to taxation, but if we're going to pay for anything as a group, shouldn't it be the advancement of science? Raw ideas aren't always appealing from a free market standpoint.
I declare this the official dead baby joke thread.
What's the difference between a Ferrari and a dead baby?
I don't have a Ferrari in my garage.
Government == Force. They "choose to fund" with money taken at the point of a gun.
If that's what you think, then you've got bigger problems than scientific research. Last time I checked, you vote for the people who choose how much money to take and choose what to use that money for. If you disagree, vote for someone else. If there's no one running who agrees with your views, run yourself.
Scientific research is probably the last place that I'd say government funding is being wielded irresponsibly.
SO what you're saying is that we should demand funding from Canada, France, Russia, and Iraq because hey, the'll use the research too?
International funding of scientific research would be even better. This isn't about forcing anyone to do anything, it's about the government choosing to fund research. It's better when people from more places contribute, since everyone will benefit. What California is saying right now is, "Fine. You guys don't have to fund the research, but we're going to do it and create more jobs for our residents at the same time."
The problem with letting science direct "the funding" is that "the funding" is comming out of MY pocket and frankly, I'd rather decide where it goes than a bunch of people in DC or California, be they scientists or politicians.
That's what elected representatives are for. You alone can't fund anything worthwhile. When combined with your fellow citizens, you can.
I want my money going to research retinal implants for the blind rather than stems cells. The folks in California don't.
What you fail to realize is that funding for a specific area of research isn't commonplace. Since the federal government won't fund it, California is. The federal government does fund research to help the blind, so California doesn't need to pass special legislation to do so themselves.
I would say that this is an argument against government funding of scientific research.
When government funds research, it gets published. Everyone gets to use the knowledge that comes from it. In private research, that's not the case.
The reason research sponsored by individual states isn't ideal is because they have less money to work with. I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with it, especially because I'm a California resident studying biology. This legislation creates jobs for me, and I like that. The only problem is that there should be more money out there for this research, and that's not happening because the people in power think it's wrong.
You obviously don't think there's anything wrong with government funding of scientific research, or you'd have a problem with this as well. The California government is sponsoring research, and good things will come of it.
That's right people, there is no federal ban on stem cell research of any kind. No matter what the media tries to tell you.
There's a ban on federal funding for stem cell research. Most funding for scientific research comes from the federal government, so taking away funding for stem cell research is far more significant than you make it out to be. States rarely pass legislation funding specific areas of scientific research like California has now, and I doubt that many states will follow in their footsteps. Future advances in this area will come solely because the residents of the states who fund it chose to do so, and I'm sure people in other states won't have a problem with curing their Parkinson's when a cure comes along. It's easy for people to whine about destroying embryos when there's not a concrete benefit out there that has come from it yet. When it happens, it'll be fairly easy to spot the hypocrites.
That's not insightful. His site is broken, and Google shows information it shouldn't as a result. There are probably other cases in which the site breaks that hadn't been noticed yet because not that many people used a caching proxy before now. The rest of the article said not to idolize a company, because in the end, it's a company. That's not insightful, it's common sense.
Apple already released their ZeroConf stack for POSIX-like systems under an open source license.
Except it's under Apple's APSL, which isn't DFSG free. KDE uses it anyway, but I assume Debian strips it out before packaging it. Avahi is a GPL'd implementation of zeroconf, and AFAIK Gnome is waiting for it to mature before integrating it. The web page has a progress update added today.