I agree totally. There is a fair share of users out there that almost never use Windows. I, myself, use Linux at home, most of my friends use Linux, BSD or OS X and we use Sun Solaris at school.
Careful there -- you're challenging some Windows-users view of the computing world, and they're going to spout off on you with the fullness of their zeal for claiming to never use Windows. After all, how can you get by in the modern world without using Windows for every common computing task that every other platform out there can do?
You know, if your post was supposed to impress us about your professional skills, it didn't work for me. If you're really so freakishly good at what you do, you would try your hands on everything under the sun -- if not with a goal of achieving proficiency on that platform, then with the goal of figuring out what $foo platform does right so you can improve your favorite platform.
You certainly do assume quite a lot. First off, no matter how good a developer someone is, they can't go around and fix every piece of code on the planet. That includes me. Sorry -- I also have other things to do with my life that don't involve sitting in front of a computer.
Besides which, I'm more interested in generating new and novel research output at this point in time, than tweaking platforms. I've most recently been doing work in the realm of security, confidentiality, data communications, and data integrity for health information on portable computing devices. Along with some AI R&D on the side. None of which has required any Windows.
The computing world is a big, big place, and doesn't just revolve around writing end-user applications or OS software, you know.
I could be wrong, but it seems to me you've merely traded in the 'Windows is good enough' PHB attitude so decried on/. for a 'Java is good enough so the OS doesn't matter' attitude.
I've had to write more than my share of JNI code to not spout off like that here. There are a lot of things I like about Java, but in reality these days I use it professionally purely because it is well entrenched, and it's the target environment for many of the projects I've worked on (something that I haven't necessarily had a say in). For some of my own personal projects and research, I've been working in Objective-C as of late.
There are, however, problems where the language isn't all that important, and where the platform you do your development on (which may not be the target for execution -- ever try to write code and compile on a handheld or embedded device?) doesn't matter either. You just need to get out of the cubicle a little more often:).
Yes, I get your HIMYM reference -- does anybody else here?
Well, considering it was my post, and that I've never even heard of this show (much less seen it), any resemblance to something said/written/done/whatever in HIMYM is purely a coincidence. But hey, you win a cookie from me for finding an obscure reference anyhow:).
Picasa lets me 'monitor folders', something iPhoto will not let me do. I hate having to 'import' pictures into iPhoto everytime I want to see my new pictures there.
This is easy to set-up with iPhoto. Just create an Automator task that takes the files in a folder and auto-imports them into iPhoto when activated. Create a folder to dump photos into, and enable it's folder actions to call your Automator task whenever a file is added to the folder. Done.
Non-destructive edits. I can touch, crop and do anything I wish to my pictures in Picasa and it doesn't hurt the original picture at all. I can come back later and undo everything I did. If I wish to retain my changes, I can simply export the current state of the picture. On iPhoto, the edits you do are non-undoable once you are done with the edits. Very painful for a photographer who wants to quickly try out some edits before opening up the full-fledged Photoshop.
In the Library view, right click on the photo and select "Revert to Original". Edits in iPhoto are also non-destructive -- editing an image actually creates a new image file. The original is still present on your hard drive -- you just have to tell iPhoto to revert to the original, and you're ready to go.
These may not solve all of your issues with iPhoto, but if you feel the need or requirement to work with it, hopefully knowing these two tricks will make it a little less annoying to you.
Let's take a realistic point of view. We have a computer user who seems to be well experienced. They even have a nicely designed blog online where you can write in your favourite Windows-only applications. Yet they claim that they have never been a windows user before (Making me wonder where they have been for the past 10+ years where windows has been the ubiquitous consumer & business software platform.)
I'm a software developer. I've worked for IBM. I maintain and develop several Open Source software applications. And I haven't been a Windows user since Windows 3.1.
I always have to laugh when some Windows user thinks that it is simply not possible to exist in the computing world without using Windows. However, it's quite a bit easier to live outside the Windows world than you think.
How did I do it? Long before Windows 95 existed, I used a fine 32-bit, pre-emptively multitasking operating system called OS/2, which I used for most of the 1990's. Towards the late 1990's, when OS/2 was on the decline, I started working for IBM as an OS/2 developer, where I also did a lot of Unix/Linux work. Around the same time frame, I started running Linux at home in parallel to my OS/2 machine as a way of running software through X that I didn't otherwise have access to.
With the serious decline of OS/2 in the 2000's, I moved over to Mac OS X (along with running a lot of Unix systems). For the last number of years much of my paid work has been in Java comsulting, where I get to pick what platform I use.
So I haven't had a Windows machine since 1993 at this point. True, I have encountered them here and there over the years, but I've been able to avoid being assigned to a Windows machine in my home or at any place of work I've held in all that time. The trick is damn simple for the most part: be so freakishly good at what you do that people will be happy to comply with your platform requests, and let them know up from you have no interest in working with Windows. So far, it's worked every time here.
There are two smart things Apple has done with Boot Camp, which should help Mac OS X in the long run:
The current release is beta software, and eventually times out (I've read somewhere that it times out in November 2007, but have been unable to find the source of that information. I may be remembering it incorrectly),
In order to continue using Boot Camp, you need to buy the next version of Mac OS X.
A few results of this decision:
Apple is selling copies of Mac OS X regardless of whether you're planning on using it or not. If you want to run nothing but Windows on your Mac, you will still need to buy a copy of OS X (in the future) just to gain access to Boot Camp.
Presumably once Leopard (OS X 10.5) is released Macs shipping with it preinstalled will come with Boot Camp. However, I wouldn't be surprised if newer version of Boot Camp designed to support future versions of Windows require a new OS X purchase to get the updated Boot Camp software,
How will Boot Camp be serviced? My guess will be through the existing Software Update, which requires Mac OS X. As such, it probably makes sense that every Boot Camp user will always maintain at least a small OS X partition on their systems (which may also be necessary to get updated versions of Boot Camp through future new OS X upgrades -- if Boot Camp is upgraded with new versions of OS X, it is possible it will only install when you install the new OS X itself, which will only work if you have a partition to install OS X to in the first place).
As such, I don't see this as being a big problem for the future of Mac OS X -- if anything, Apple has just hooked in more future OS X customers.
Now if they would only extend Boot Camp to work with Linux...
I have one of the very-shortly-after-launch PS2s (as you may recall, they launched in October here in North America, but mine didn't show up until December), and pre-ordered the PS2 Linux kit. So I got it pretty early on.
Running it on your slim PS2 would be an interesting challenge. The original PS2s had the internal hard drive bay, which PS2 Linux requires for installation. However, the kit itself bootstraps off of the first PS2 Linux DVD, which can then load your kernel from a standard PS2 memory card. The stock kernel which comes with the kit is an old Linux v2.2 kernel, which IIRC didn't have USB support. Sony back-ported some USB support from later kernels into the kit so that mouse and keyboard would work, but IIRC there are no mass storage class drivers built into the kit.
Still, two groups have provided slightly more recent kernels. Some service from Sony only available in Japan uses a Linux kernel for the consumer hard drive, and as one would expect for GPL'ed code, the sources are available online. This 2.4 kernel variant apparently does have the USB mass storage drivers in it, which would mean that you should be able to use an external USB hard drive with your slim PS2.
Installation and configuration of all of this would require you to know someone with a working "thick" PS2 with the PS2 Linux kit installed on it, however. They would need to configure and compile the new kernel, and put it onto a memory card for you. I don't recall if you can use your own kernel for booting the installation, so as to make your own external drive installable, but I imagine this could be worked around with only minor hassle (particularly if you know someone with a thick PS2 with Linux already running on it).
I haven't had much luck over here getting the 2.4 kernel to compile, however. I've been trying to port netatalk this past week or so to run on my PS2, along with mDNSResponder. The netatalk port appears to have gone well, but without the appletalk kernel module being able to do anything more than connect to and browse shares has failed (ie: I can't actually transmit any files in either direction). mDNSResponder won't compile at all (I think it requires GCC 4.0 support, which isn't available on PS2 Linux that I've been able to find. And building it myself has so far been a disaster).
It's fun to play with, but in some ways is just a pain. I keep it going for that day when the system is finally obsolete as a gaming machine (i.e.: gets replaced by a PS3, if Sony doesn't screw it up), so I can run it as a home server of some sort (at 72W it uses less power than my current Intel-based home server, and should be able to handle internal DNS and file serving without much difficulty).
First off, I run Linux. A lot. On lots and lots of different machines, including my PlayStation 2. For the sorts of machines I'm running it on, Linux absolutely rocks.
That said, I can also see Mr. Negroponte's view point as well. There are a LOT of competing dependancies in the Linux world these days. It can be difficult to run anything other than a very dedicated Linux system without having both Perl and Python available, or without both Qt and GTK+ available. Now for modern-day desktop use, with hard drives in the hundreds of gigabytes and a gigabyte or more of RAM readily affordable, I personally don't care so much about so many layers of duplication or dependencies -- but I wouldn't like it if I were trying to design an inexpensive system with significant limitations in terms of available memory and persistent storage space.
And while one could say "Well, why not just pick one, and leave the others out?", the problem you then run into is finding suitable OSS to run on the resulting custom Linux build. If Useful Package A is built upon Qt, and Useful Package B is built upon GTK+, you now either have a significant amount of work ahead of you to do a API port to remove one of those dependencies, you need to find an equivilent program that uses just the APIs you've selected, or you need to write your own from scratch.
Doing this for one package is significant -- trying to do it for potentially dozens of packages would be a nightmare. You have to worry about runtime environments, graphic compositing APIs, audio APIs, networking APIs, and potentially hundreds more. Picking just one of each for all the possible combinations, and then trying to find existing software that fits your needs and uses just that specific set of APIs would be extremely frustrating.
You and I may not care that we need both Perl and Python installed to run common Linux applications, or that you should have both the Qt and GTK+ libraries installed -- but then again, we aren't the target of the $100 laptop. Choice can be a very good thing for developers -- but we shouldn't pretend that choice doesn't come at a cost.
A bit of background for those who are not familiar with some of the common academic research funding bodies here in Canada.
SSHRC is for the funding of Social Science and Humanities research, which includes things like literature research. A good friend of mine who is working on her Ph.D. in English has an application in for an SSHRC grant.
NSERC is for the funding of scientific and engineering research.
There are a few critical points to understand about these two funding organizations:. NSERC has way more money than the SSHRC. Scientific and engineering researchers typically have no problems getting the funding they need, whereas social science and humanities researchers can have a really hard time getting anything from the SSHRC. The SSHRC just doesn't get much money, and has to be stingy in doleing it out to ensure they get the best bang for their buck.
As such, it is entirely possible that the reason for the SSHRC denying this grant would be because the grant application was simply incomplete.
From my perspective as someone who has lived in three Provinces (and who has been to all the rest, with the notable exception of Newfoundland), Intelligent Design is a complete and total non-starter here in Canada. If it weren't for/. and exposure to US-based news services, I doubt I'd even have heard about it. There is no political movement here to stop the teaching of evolution in schools, no court cases, nothing. To most Canadians, it's just another of those idiotic ultra-conservative American things that occurs from time to time, and not something the vast majority of Canadians want any part of.
While I personally think this research would be interesting, it is quite possible that the SSHRC has more pressing areas of research to handle, such as the serious social problems in native communities. With only so much money to go around, there are inevitably going to be very worthy projects which get rejected for funding. The trick for a researcher is to look elsewhere for the funding they need to get their research completed and published.
I just don't get it - I prefer to listen to the music that I enjoy and focus on it, not use it as background noise in a work environment or (worse) while walking, cycling or driving.
You don't listen to the radio in your car? Are you driving a Ford Model-T?
Admittedly, in the car I listen to CBC Radio 1. But thanks to podcasting, I can listen to many R1 shows on my iPod as well.
You see, modern "music" players aren't solely for music. You can get audio books (I'm personally not a fan, but some people like to be read to). You can download podcasts, and not just amature stuff (I highly recommend CBC's Quirks and Quarks weekly science programming). So if music isn't your thing, listen to something else -- it's an audio device after all, and there are several different types of audio.
As to listening to music at work, well I suppose it depends on your work environment. Personally, I'm currently working in a computer lab where the people in my general vicinity like to work in complete silence. The ambient sounds are little but typing. Day in, day out, clickety-clack-clack-clack. It's enough to put anyone to sleep. Now personally, I'm the sort of person where ameggadon could be going on around me and I'd still be able to concentrate on the task-at-hand, but the people working in the lab with me are apparently easily distracted, and prefer no sounds, so I listen to my iPod from time to time (although not constantly, and certainly not every day). Sometimes it will be podcast material, and sometimes it will be music.
But perhaps that's just the nature of the type of work I do, and my surroundings. But that's the good thing about personal audio devices like the iPod -- listen to what you want when you want, or if you prefer, don't bother buying one and listen to nothing.
Think about this though, how many times do you click a URL from outside, or from an email or other application firing up an instance of a browser.
I can honestly say: never. The web browser tends to be the first thing I load when I log into my system (and as I'm the only user of the system, I virtually never log out, unless it is either to reboot the machine, or to force FileVault to recover free space in my home directory, both of which are extremely rare. Otherwise I put my system to sleep when I'm not using it, which password locks it for security). Firefox is always running here, so other applications never have to start it -- it's already there and knows how to act as a URL handler.
All that said -- I agree it should be an option for those (like yourself) who need it. Just so long as it isn't the default:).
The browser should be able to check for updates on startup only (I want the updates and to be told about them, just not in the middle of a session)
I'm not sure if that, on its own, would be a good solution. What about those of us who rarely restart Firefox? Yes -- we exist:). I restart Firefox once a week at most (it doesn't seem to leak memory as badly on Mac OS X as I hear it does on other platforms, and I have gobs of RAM installed:) ), and there are probably times where two weeks or more have passed between my Firefox restarts.
As software becomes more reliable, the need to restart becomes more infrequent, so timing important functions (like updates) to start-up time becomes less and less useful, so other mechanisms need to be put in place. That said, it doesn't mean that they couldn't change the alert mechanism to something that doesn't pop-up in another window or steal focus, or that they couldn't make this sort of thing into a preference. to remove the annoyance factor of yet another pop-up dialog at unexpected times.
Following years of exaggerated fears of Japanese hi-tech domination, Washington feared that this new fighter would be superior to anything that American companies could develop.
The history of the US doing this goes even further back than the 1980's. Well, at least as my grandfather told the story.
My maternal grandfather was a mechanic on the Avro Arrow project here in Canada, which, as the Wiki article quotes, was "...the biggest, most powerful, most expensive and potentially the fastest fighter that the world has yet seen...".
Now my grandfather was a consumate story teller, and certainly told his share which held dubious claims, but he had also done a number of remarkable things in his lifetime, and was long a very close follower of politics, so it was sometimes hard to differentiate between what was true, and what was just a good story.
Still, the way he told the tale, a major reason why Canada cancelled the Arrow program was due to pressure from the US, which didn't like the fact that Canada had developed a significantly more technologically advanced interceptor than the US contractors were able to develop. According to him, it was direct pressure on Ottawa from Washington to kill the project and instead buy a huge number of BOMARC missles from the US that brought on the end of the Arrrow programme.
Looking at the Wiki article, he may not have been that far off. The BOMARCs were purchased as soon as the Arrow programme was cancelled, and the US did pressure Ottawa to cancel the programme (although perhaps not for the reason Grampa cited). The engineering talent from Avro was quickly poached off by the US Government for the US space programme. Most experts believe that this single act set Canada's long advanced aerospace industry back by decades (during WWII, for example, it was a Canadian company that started making planes with standardized parts, so they could easily be interchanged).
Sadly, the BOMARCs were eventually phased out because they were expensive and completely ineffective. The Arrow could have been re-purposed, or even re-designed, but even this was not to be -- for reasons never explained, all of the plans for the Arrow were destroyed, alone with all of the working prototypes. The Canadian Government poured all of that money into the Arrow, and didn't even bother to store the blueprints for future use or defense research.
Whether it was my grandfathers "keep Canada down" conspiracy theory, the "interceptors aren't useful in the age of nuclear missles" official line, or a combination of the two, the end result has been the same: the BOMARCs sit in a warehouse in North Bay (last I heard at least...", the great bulk of which were copletely faulty and worthless, and we lost a symbol of national pride, and perhaps worst of all, lost some of the greatest brains behind our aerospace industry of the 1950's that put us at the forefront of aerospace research.
As an interesting aside, some years ago my grandfather showed me the some of tthe specially designed tools that were created to work on the Avro Arrow which he kept in his garage. He passed away nearly 5 years ago, and I have never been able to find out what happened to those tools (and am not sure if I could identify them anyhow -- the one I remember looked like a long piece of metal rod with a hook on the end, which could be easily confused with any number of metal rods he had in his workshop). If they could be identified and separated from the rest of his old tools and bits and pieces from over the years, they probably belong in a museum somewhere (heck, so far as I know, the rods he told me were "tools" could very well have been "parts", such as control rods of one sort or another).
Yaz.
Re:Not just Linux and Mac with problems...
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In2TV Goes Public
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· Score: 1
I wanna see B5 now damnit, how far off streaming torrents are we?
Probably quite a long ways, as BitTorrent doesn't require that parts of the file are sent in-order.
As the protocol stands now, to try to improve the overall download situation for everyone in the swarm, BitTorrent attempts to download the rarest file chunks (usually 256KB long) first. This probably isn't the first chunk in the file. Just as the next rarest chunk you download probably isn't the second chunk in the file, etc.
In-order BitTorrent would quickly break down. If you're the 10th peer in a swarm, and have all of the chunks but the last 256KB, but can't connect the the seed (as it's serving 8 of the 9 peers before you), you're hosed: you now either have to wait for the peers ahead of you to get the chunk and send it to you, or for them to complete and free up the seeder so you can connect to it.
And this doesn't have to happen at the end of a transfer (if BitTorrent sent chunks in order). It could happen 10% of the way through if you're connection speed is faster than that of those who are getting packets directly from the seeder (and/or each other). If the seed is saturated by 28.8K modem users, and you're on broadband, you're not going to get anything beyond what those modem peers have downloaded (and it's going to be brutally slow downloading from modem peers, but that's not the point. They could be on any connection slower than yours such that you get starved for chunks).
Transferring the packets out of order, and transfering the rarest ones first means you're more likely to get what you need. But this defeats streaming, which requires the data to generally be received in order (or if out of order, in small enough chunks and fast enough (and close enough to the chunks you need) that TCP can automatically re-order them with no noticable effect on viewing).
I'm not sure I would consider myself paranoid per-se: I don't think the black helicopters are out to get me, but I do follow these general rules for disposing of personal identifying information:
Shred any bits of paper containing my name and address, including envelopes. Keep the shreddings.
Once or twice a year (depending on volume) take the shreddings up to the family cottage. They make great starter paper for the fireplace and outdoor bonfires.
For plastic (ie: old credit cards) I cross-cut them with a pair of scissors into small pieces, and discard those pieces into various random garbage containers over time, much like your suggestion. I have a small container I keep the pieces in, and if there are pieces to be discarded, once every few days I'll take 3 or 4 with me to throw away during my travels.
None of this really takes much time -- the most time consuming thing is probably cutting up old credit cards, and that only happens once every year or two anyhow (as I don't own that many cards in the first place, and many of them don't need to be disposed of. My ATM card is at least 20 years old now, and still works fine for example). Some people may see the shredding and burning of papers a bit redundant, however in part for me this is less about paranoia, and more about not wasting good fuel for starting fires (as the two primary heat sources at the cottage are fireplaces, and shredded paper, when crumpled and not packed too tightly, burns readily and quite hot).
There are undoubtedly many ways someone could steal bits of identifying information from me that are outside of my control (let's face it -- credit card information is easily stolen any time you use the card. You never know when someone is going to record or digitally copy your credit card number, name, and expiration date and go around using it, as all of this information is recorded pretty much every time you use a credit card anyhow. At least the credit card companies, in my experience, make it pretty easy to report fraudulant card use, and (again, in my experience) are good about crediting you for such charges).
Yaz.
Re:Explain the fricken 12,000 bucks for this...
on
WinXP on a Mac, Hoax?
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· Score: 1
So, what you're really saying is, "Once you go Mac, you never go back"
I can see some people adopting that as their new tagline:).
Note that that isn't what I'm saying -- the possibility to switch from a Mac to a Windows-based machine has always been there. You'll be hard pressed to find any Mac users who aren't aware of (and haven't been forced to use at one time or another) this alternative.
People who are serious about buying their music legally will just start buying the CDs in that case. Labels would still have music product wihtin the country -- just not online.
Besides which -- I can give the exact same reason why anhy given label might be willing to pull out of France in such a scenario -- the money lost due to no more online sales in France would be dwarfed by potential sales all around the labels may feel they stand to lose if non-DRM encumbered music sales are allowed anywhere in the world. "The rest of the world" is bigger than just "France", and if the money lost in the rest of the world is bigger than the profit made in France alone, do you really think a foreign-owned label would even blink an eye at pulling out of France?
Look, the labels have put a LOT of time, money, and effort in an attempt to push DRM at the consumer at every turn. Do you really think after all that expensise and effort they would just throw up their hands and give up in any country around the world? I don't. Again -- as you said, it comes down to money -- but not quite as you intended. They'll look at their global balance sheet, and if it's globally more profitable for them to simply stop licensing their works for online digital sales in one country, they'll do it.
Otherwise, what has been the point of the labels push for more and more DRM schemes, laws to prevent people from reverse engineering those schemes, and per-country licensing for online stores like iTMS? Fun?
Yaz.
Re:Explain the fricken 12,000 bucks for this...
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WinXP on a Mac, Hoax?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Because WinXP boots just as nicely on a Walmart laptop. If people who own Mac hardware find themselves booting to Windows as often or more often than OSX, their next purchase may rationalize that the premium is just not worth it to run OSX.
This seems doubtful to happen in any significant numbers. It isn't as if Intel Mac owners don't know about this option known as the "Windows PC", or the "cheap Walmart Laptop" that you mention. The systems have been available for just a bit more than two months now -- if Intel Mac owners wanted a Windows XP machine running on cheap Intel hardware, they would have bought a Windows XP machine running on cheap Intel hardware.
There may be a percentage of "switchers" who decide to "switch back" -- but I imagine this has always been the case, so I don't see how anything would really be changing here. The only thing that is new is that the "switch back-ers" don't have to buy a new PC -- they can do it on their existing Mac hardware (assuming the challenge has indeed been met).
I mentioned that in my original post. Apple has been very reticient to do so up until this point -- and once they do, the genie is out of its bottle -- and it's damn hard to jam it back in. Apple may very well wish to avoid this, although it would seem to me in this case the DRM is attached to the device (the iPod) and not just the store (iTMS), so depending on the legislation, Apple may have to pull the iPod out of France in order to avoid Freeplay licensing.
That is something I don't really see Apple doing (pulling the iPod out of France, that is). I personally think they would open up Fairplay rather than stop selling the iPod in such a culturally important country in the world as France.
Whatever happens, we could be living in interesting times. As this legislation hasn't been passed yet, it still may change, making this entire discussion moot.
My thought exactly. And it's about time -- Sim Earth was long one of my favorite games. I still have it somewhere -- what I lack is a system capable of playing it (as it was a DOS VCPI game, and I run all Mac and Linux now).
One comment however -- in Sim earth you could start off without even a spore. You would have to bombard the planet with comets in the hope of eventually evolving a primitive bacteria, and then work your way up from there.
Sim Earth had some rather fun elements to it that went beyond reality as well. You could spawn sentience by using a Monolith (ala 2001: A Space Odyssey). I was once able to (very briefly) create sentient dolphins. Through high technology, you could create sentient robots (which had a tendency to completely obliterate life on the planet). I once tried to cool Venus by setting off hundreds of nuclear explosions.
Just to make something clear for anyone in case they're confused -- I'm merely discussing potential music industry tactics, and am not intending to signify that I agree with them. I don't. DRM, as you've pointed out, ultimately fails. And the music industry is wrong to persue it.
I'm also not claiming that the industry is logical, although I imagine at this point in time the industry would love to replace CD players altogether with DRM-encumbered devices, so they can stop selling CDs altogether, and either replace it with an optical format that is DRM encumbered, or purely with DRM-encumbered digital formats.
However, barring that, I wouldn't put it past some of the music companies to go for a retaliatory measure by pulling online digital sales of their music out, just to make a point. Hard-core music lovers will simply switch back to buying CDs, while at the same time the music labels will use the new laws to prosecute pirates even harder than before.
You sound like someone who has either read this draft law, or whom has at least read some better analysis of it then has been provided by the press in North America thus far.
The one thing I do have to ask, however -- is software to remove DRM from media currently illegal in France? I wasn't aware that it was. So far as I was aware, the only country that has made defeating DRM illegal is the US. Here in Canada, at least, it would seem that removing DRM for the purpose of making a personal copy is completely legit.
Is my impression that DRM removal is currently permitted in France incorrect? Or is this just a case of a law being created to explicitly permit what was previously only implicitly permitted?
Thanks for the feedback -- as I said in my original post, having a copy of the draft law in question would be handy, because TFA makes several wild suggestions, without any information to back them up.
I dont see anything there that suggests that fairplay needs to be opened. Remenber that an ipod can play mp3's and non drm aac. So to offer 'ipod compatable' music you dont need access to fairplay.
I think you need to read what I posted again, because I did indeed deal with this.
What incentive would, say, Sony BMG have to license music to any French digital music retailer, if that retailer wnated to sell their music in a non-DRM'ed format? Sony BMG (just as an example) could simply decide to get out of online digital music sales in France altogether, rather than have their music sold in MP3 or unprotected AAC format. And with no music to sell, the online stores will simply dry up and go away in France.
The only way the French government can get this to work is to allow the other vendors to reverse engineer Fairplay, and/or require Apple to license Fairplay to these other companies. The aim of this law doesn't appear to be to force online music stores out of business, and in order to work with Fairplay other online stores will need access to a users iTMS key. Because as I see it, every music company would rather stop selling all online digital music than permit legal, unprotected music downloads in France.
This is why, as I said, having access to the proposed text of this law would help clarify such issues.
I wish I had access to the draft of the bill in question (along with a good English translation) -- the article suggests several things which may or may not be true.
One of these suggestions is that Apple may have to stop running iTMS France in order to avoid compliance. However, it also states that other online stores would have to provide songs in a form that allows them to be played on the iPod.
Now I'm assuming that the primary music labels from outside of France would prefer to simply no longer license their works for digital download in France than allow providers to distribute music in an unencumbered format (such as MP3). Which would mean that the only way French law could permit other online music stores to provide music in iPod format would be for them to be allowed to use Fairplay.
This would mean that either Apple would be forced to license Fairplay to any online music store in France, or these companies will be permitted to reverse-engineer it. They would likewise need to be able to access a users Fairplay key.
In which case, the only way Apple may be able to avoid this whole mess would be to pull not only iTMS out of France, but the iPod as well. And I don't see Apple doing this.
The only way I see around this would be for all of the online music stores in France -- Apple's iTMS included -- to come up with a common, France-specific music DRM format. And while the added flexability would be of benefit to French digital music consumers, I'm not sure if having nation-specific DRM formats is going to be all that great of an idea.
The concept of "reasoned debate" goes back to the times of Socretes, and forms the basis of all Westernized governments.
..."identifiable group"
That is how the Criminal Code defines a group based on colour, creed, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. I am referring to a very specific legal definition which is used in the Criminal Code of Canada here. Nothing weasely about that -- if you don't like it, take it up with Parliament.
How about advocating capital punishment for "child love" practitioners?
Sorry, but Canadians by-and-large don't believe in capital punishment. It's not legal here.
I am happy to advocate "-1 Troll" for your posting, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Careful there -- you're challenging some Windows-users view of the computing world, and they're going to spout off on you with the fullness of their zeal for claiming to never use Windows. After all, how can you get by in the modern world without using Windows for every common computing task that every other platform out there can do?
Yaz
You certainly do assume quite a lot. First off, no matter how good a developer someone is, they can't go around and fix every piece of code on the planet. That includes me. Sorry -- I also have other things to do with my life that don't involve sitting in front of a computer.
Besides which, I'm more interested in generating new and novel research output at this point in time, than tweaking platforms. I've most recently been doing work in the realm of security, confidentiality, data communications, and data integrity for health information on portable computing devices. Along with some AI R&D on the side. None of which has required any Windows.
The computing world is a big, big place, and doesn't just revolve around writing end-user applications or OS software, you know.
I've had to write more than my share of JNI code to not spout off like that here. There are a lot of things I like about Java, but in reality these days I use it professionally purely because it is well entrenched, and it's the target environment for many of the projects I've worked on (something that I haven't necessarily had a say in). For some of my own personal projects and research, I've been working in Objective-C as of late.
There are, however, problems where the language isn't all that important, and where the platform you do your development on (which may not be the target for execution -- ever try to write code and compile on a handheld or embedded device?) doesn't matter either. You just need to get out of the cubicle a little more often :).
Yaz.
Well, considering it was my post, and that I've never even heard of this show (much less seen it), any resemblance to something said/written/done/whatever in HIMYM is purely a coincidence. But hey, you win a cookie from me for finding an obscure reference anyhow :).
Yaz.
This is easy to set-up with iPhoto. Just create an Automator task that takes the files in a folder and auto-imports them into iPhoto when activated. Create a folder to dump photos into, and enable it's folder actions to call your Automator task whenever a file is added to the folder. Done.
In the Library view, right click on the photo and select "Revert to Original". Edits in iPhoto are also non-destructive -- editing an image actually creates a new image file. The original is still present on your hard drive -- you just have to tell iPhoto to revert to the original, and you're ready to go.
These may not solve all of your issues with iPhoto, but if you feel the need or requirement to work with it, hopefully knowing these two tricks will make it a little less annoying to you.
Yaz.
I'm a software developer. I've worked for IBM. I maintain and develop several Open Source software applications. And I haven't been a Windows user since Windows 3.1.
I always have to laugh when some Windows user thinks that it is simply not possible to exist in the computing world without using Windows. However, it's quite a bit easier to live outside the Windows world than you think.
How did I do it? Long before Windows 95 existed, I used a fine 32-bit, pre-emptively multitasking operating system called OS/2, which I used for most of the 1990's. Towards the late 1990's, when OS/2 was on the decline, I started working for IBM as an OS/2 developer, where I also did a lot of Unix/Linux work. Around the same time frame, I started running Linux at home in parallel to my OS/2 machine as a way of running software through X that I didn't otherwise have access to.
With the serious decline of OS/2 in the 2000's, I moved over to Mac OS X (along with running a lot of Unix systems). For the last number of years much of my paid work has been in Java comsulting, where I get to pick what platform I use.
So I haven't had a Windows machine since 1993 at this point. True, I have encountered them here and there over the years, but I've been able to avoid being assigned to a Windows machine in my home or at any place of work I've held in all that time. The trick is damn simple for the most part: be so freakishly good at what you do that people will be happy to comply with your platform requests, and let them know up from you have no interest in working with Windows. So far, it's worked every time here.
Yaz.
Windows Free since '93.
There are two smart things Apple has done with Boot Camp, which should help Mac OS X in the long run:
A few results of this decision:
As such, I don't see this as being a big problem for the future of Mac OS X -- if anything, Apple has just hooked in more future OS X customers.
Now if they would only extend Boot Camp to work with Linux...
Yaz.
I have one of the very-shortly-after-launch PS2s (as you may recall, they launched in October here in North America, but mine didn't show up until December), and pre-ordered the PS2 Linux kit. So I got it pretty early on.
Running it on your slim PS2 would be an interesting challenge. The original PS2s had the internal hard drive bay, which PS2 Linux requires for installation. However, the kit itself bootstraps off of the first PS2 Linux DVD, which can then load your kernel from a standard PS2 memory card. The stock kernel which comes with the kit is an old Linux v2.2 kernel, which IIRC didn't have USB support. Sony back-ported some USB support from later kernels into the kit so that mouse and keyboard would work, but IIRC there are no mass storage class drivers built into the kit.
Still, two groups have provided slightly more recent kernels. Some service from Sony only available in Japan uses a Linux kernel for the consumer hard drive, and as one would expect for GPL'ed code, the sources are available online. This 2.4 kernel variant apparently does have the USB mass storage drivers in it, which would mean that you should be able to use an external USB hard drive with your slim PS2.
Installation and configuration of all of this would require you to know someone with a working "thick" PS2 with the PS2 Linux kit installed on it, however. They would need to configure and compile the new kernel, and put it onto a memory card for you. I don't recall if you can use your own kernel for booting the installation, so as to make your own external drive installable, but I imagine this could be worked around with only minor hassle (particularly if you know someone with a thick PS2 with Linux already running on it).
I haven't had much luck over here getting the 2.4 kernel to compile, however. I've been trying to port netatalk this past week or so to run on my PS2, along with mDNSResponder. The netatalk port appears to have gone well, but without the appletalk kernel module being able to do anything more than connect to and browse shares has failed (ie: I can't actually transmit any files in either direction). mDNSResponder won't compile at all (I think it requires GCC 4.0 support, which isn't available on PS2 Linux that I've been able to find. And building it myself has so far been a disaster).
It's fun to play with, but in some ways is just a pain. I keep it going for that day when the system is finally obsolete as a gaming machine (i.e.: gets replaced by a PS3, if Sony doesn't screw it up), so I can run it as a home server of some sort (at 72W it uses less power than my current Intel-based home server, and should be able to handle internal DNS and file serving without much difficulty).
Yaz.
First off, I run Linux. A lot. On lots and lots of different machines, including my PlayStation 2. For the sorts of machines I'm running it on, Linux absolutely rocks.
That said, I can also see Mr. Negroponte's view point as well. There are a LOT of competing dependancies in the Linux world these days. It can be difficult to run anything other than a very dedicated Linux system without having both Perl and Python available, or without both Qt and GTK+ available. Now for modern-day desktop use, with hard drives in the hundreds of gigabytes and a gigabyte or more of RAM readily affordable, I personally don't care so much about so many layers of duplication or dependencies -- but I wouldn't like it if I were trying to design an inexpensive system with significant limitations in terms of available memory and persistent storage space.
And while one could say "Well, why not just pick one, and leave the others out?", the problem you then run into is finding suitable OSS to run on the resulting custom Linux build. If Useful Package A is built upon Qt, and Useful Package B is built upon GTK+, you now either have a significant amount of work ahead of you to do a API port to remove one of those dependencies, you need to find an equivilent program that uses just the APIs you've selected, or you need to write your own from scratch.
Doing this for one package is significant -- trying to do it for potentially dozens of packages would be a nightmare. You have to worry about runtime environments, graphic compositing APIs, audio APIs, networking APIs, and potentially hundreds more. Picking just one of each for all the possible combinations, and then trying to find existing software that fits your needs and uses just that specific set of APIs would be extremely frustrating.
You and I may not care that we need both Perl and Python installed to run common Linux applications, or that you should have both the Qt and GTK+ libraries installed -- but then again, we aren't the target of the $100 laptop. Choice can be a very good thing for developers -- but we shouldn't pretend that choice doesn't come at a cost.
Yaz.
A bit of background for those who are not familiar with some of the common academic research funding bodies here in Canada.
SSHRC is for the funding of Social Science and Humanities research, which includes things like literature research. A good friend of mine who is working on her Ph.D. in English has an application in for an SSHRC grant.
NSERC is for the funding of scientific and engineering research.
There are a few critical points to understand about these two funding organizations:. NSERC has way more money than the SSHRC. Scientific and engineering researchers typically have no problems getting the funding they need, whereas social science and humanities researchers can have a really hard time getting anything from the SSHRC. The SSHRC just doesn't get much money, and has to be stingy in doleing it out to ensure they get the best bang for their buck.
As such, it is entirely possible that the reason for the SSHRC denying this grant would be because the grant application was simply incomplete.
From my perspective as someone who has lived in three Provinces (and who has been to all the rest, with the notable exception of Newfoundland), Intelligent Design is a complete and total non-starter here in Canada. If it weren't for /. and exposure to US-based news services, I doubt I'd even have heard about it. There is no political movement here to stop the teaching of evolution in schools, no court cases, nothing. To most Canadians, it's just another of those idiotic ultra-conservative American things that occurs from time to time, and not something the vast majority of Canadians want any part of.
While I personally think this research would be interesting, it is quite possible that the SSHRC has more pressing areas of research to handle, such as the serious social problems in native communities. With only so much money to go around, there are inevitably going to be very worthy projects which get rejected for funding. The trick for a researcher is to look elsewhere for the funding they need to get their research completed and published.
Yaz.
You don't listen to the radio in your car? Are you driving a Ford Model-T?
Admittedly, in the car I listen to CBC Radio 1. But thanks to podcasting, I can listen to many R1 shows on my iPod as well.
You see, modern "music" players aren't solely for music. You can get audio books (I'm personally not a fan, but some people like to be read to). You can download podcasts, and not just amature stuff (I highly recommend CBC's Quirks and Quarks weekly science programming). So if music isn't your thing, listen to something else -- it's an audio device after all, and there are several different types of audio.
As to listening to music at work, well I suppose it depends on your work environment. Personally, I'm currently working in a computer lab where the people in my general vicinity like to work in complete silence. The ambient sounds are little but typing. Day in, day out, clickety-clack-clack-clack. It's enough to put anyone to sleep. Now personally, I'm the sort of person where ameggadon could be going on around me and I'd still be able to concentrate on the task-at-hand, but the people working in the lab with me are apparently easily distracted, and prefer no sounds, so I listen to my iPod from time to time (although not constantly, and certainly not every day). Sometimes it will be podcast material, and sometimes it will be music.
But perhaps that's just the nature of the type of work I do, and my surroundings. But that's the good thing about personal audio devices like the iPod -- listen to what you want when you want, or if you prefer, don't bother buying one and listen to nothing.
Yaz.
I can honestly say: never. The web browser tends to be the first thing I load when I log into my system (and as I'm the only user of the system, I virtually never log out, unless it is either to reboot the machine, or to force FileVault to recover free space in my home directory, both of which are extremely rare. Otherwise I put my system to sleep when I'm not using it, which password locks it for security). Firefox is always running here, so other applications never have to start it -- it's already there and knows how to act as a URL handler.
All that said -- I agree it should be an option for those (like yourself) who need it. Just so long as it isn't the default :).
Yaz.
I'm not sure if that, on its own, would be a good solution. What about those of us who rarely restart Firefox? Yes -- we exist :). I restart Firefox once a week at most (it doesn't seem to leak memory as badly on Mac OS X as I hear it does on other platforms, and I have gobs of RAM installed :) ), and there are probably times where two weeks or more have passed between my Firefox restarts.
As software becomes more reliable, the need to restart becomes more infrequent, so timing important functions (like updates) to start-up time becomes less and less useful, so other mechanisms need to be put in place. That said, it doesn't mean that they couldn't change the alert mechanism to something that doesn't pop-up in another window or steal focus, or that they couldn't make this sort of thing into a preference. to remove the annoyance factor of yet another pop-up dialog at unexpected times.
Yaz.
The history of the US doing this goes even further back than the 1980's. Well, at least as my grandfather told the story.
My maternal grandfather was a mechanic on the Avro Arrow project here in Canada, which, as the Wiki article quotes, was "...the biggest, most powerful, most expensive and potentially the fastest fighter that the world has yet seen...".
Now my grandfather was a consumate story teller, and certainly told his share which held dubious claims, but he had also done a number of remarkable things in his lifetime, and was long a very close follower of politics, so it was sometimes hard to differentiate between what was true, and what was just a good story.
Still, the way he told the tale, a major reason why Canada cancelled the Arrow program was due to pressure from the US, which didn't like the fact that Canada had developed a significantly more technologically advanced interceptor than the US contractors were able to develop. According to him, it was direct pressure on Ottawa from Washington to kill the project and instead buy a huge number of BOMARC missles from the US that brought on the end of the Arrrow programme.
Looking at the Wiki article, he may not have been that far off. The BOMARCs were purchased as soon as the Arrow programme was cancelled, and the US did pressure Ottawa to cancel the programme (although perhaps not for the reason Grampa cited). The engineering talent from Avro was quickly poached off by the US Government for the US space programme. Most experts believe that this single act set Canada's long advanced aerospace industry back by decades (during WWII, for example, it was a Canadian company that started making planes with standardized parts, so they could easily be interchanged).
Sadly, the BOMARCs were eventually phased out because they were expensive and completely ineffective. The Arrow could have been re-purposed, or even re-designed, but even this was not to be -- for reasons never explained, all of the plans for the Arrow were destroyed, alone with all of the working prototypes. The Canadian Government poured all of that money into the Arrow, and didn't even bother to store the blueprints for future use or defense research.
Whether it was my grandfathers "keep Canada down" conspiracy theory, the "interceptors aren't useful in the age of nuclear missles" official line, or a combination of the two, the end result has been the same: the BOMARCs sit in a warehouse in North Bay (last I heard at least...", the great bulk of which were copletely faulty and worthless, and we lost a symbol of national pride, and perhaps worst of all, lost some of the greatest brains behind our aerospace industry of the 1950's that put us at the forefront of aerospace research.
As an interesting aside, some years ago my grandfather showed me the some of tthe specially designed tools that were created to work on the Avro Arrow which he kept in his garage. He passed away nearly 5 years ago, and I have never been able to find out what happened to those tools (and am not sure if I could identify them anyhow -- the one I remember looked like a long piece of metal rod with a hook on the end, which could be easily confused with any number of metal rods he had in his workshop). If they could be identified and separated from the rest of his old tools and bits and pieces from over the years, they probably belong in a museum somewhere (heck, so far as I know, the rods he told me were "tools" could very well have been "parts", such as control rods of one sort or another).
Yaz.
Probably quite a long ways, as BitTorrent doesn't require that parts of the file are sent in-order.
As the protocol stands now, to try to improve the overall download situation for everyone in the swarm, BitTorrent attempts to download the rarest file chunks (usually 256KB long) first. This probably isn't the first chunk in the file. Just as the next rarest chunk you download probably isn't the second chunk in the file, etc.
In-order BitTorrent would quickly break down. If you're the 10th peer in a swarm, and have all of the chunks but the last 256KB, but can't connect the the seed (as it's serving 8 of the 9 peers before you), you're hosed: you now either have to wait for the peers ahead of you to get the chunk and send it to you, or for them to complete and free up the seeder so you can connect to it.
And this doesn't have to happen at the end of a transfer (if BitTorrent sent chunks in order). It could happen 10% of the way through if you're connection speed is faster than that of those who are getting packets directly from the seeder (and/or each other). If the seed is saturated by 28.8K modem users, and you're on broadband, you're not going to get anything beyond what those modem peers have downloaded (and it's going to be brutally slow downloading from modem peers, but that's not the point. They could be on any connection slower than yours such that you get starved for chunks).
Transferring the packets out of order, and transfering the rarest ones first means you're more likely to get what you need. But this defeats streaming, which requires the data to generally be received in order (or if out of order, in small enough chunks and fast enough (and close enough to the chunks you need) that TCP can automatically re-order them with no noticable effect on viewing).
Yaz.
I'm not sure I would consider myself paranoid per-se: I don't think the black helicopters are out to get me, but I do follow these general rules for disposing of personal identifying information:
None of this really takes much time -- the most time consuming thing is probably cutting up old credit cards, and that only happens once every year or two anyhow (as I don't own that many cards in the first place, and many of them don't need to be disposed of. My ATM card is at least 20 years old now, and still works fine for example). Some people may see the shredding and burning of papers a bit redundant, however in part for me this is less about paranoia, and more about not wasting good fuel for starting fires (as the two primary heat sources at the cottage are fireplaces, and shredded paper, when crumpled and not packed too tightly, burns readily and quite hot).
There are undoubtedly many ways someone could steal bits of identifying information from me that are outside of my control (let's face it -- credit card information is easily stolen any time you use the card. You never know when someone is going to record or digitally copy your credit card number, name, and expiration date and go around using it, as all of this information is recorded pretty much every time you use a credit card anyhow. At least the credit card companies, in my experience, make it pretty easy to report fraudulant card use, and (again, in my experience) are good about crediting you for such charges).
Yaz.
I can see some people adopting that as their new tagline :).
Note that that isn't what I'm saying -- the possibility to switch from a Mac to a Windows-based machine has always been there. You'll be hard pressed to find any Mac users who aren't aware of (and haven't been forced to use at one time or another) this alternative.
Yaz.
People who are serious about buying their music legally will just start buying the CDs in that case. Labels would still have music product wihtin the country -- just not online.
Besides which -- I can give the exact same reason why anhy given label might be willing to pull out of France in such a scenario -- the money lost due to no more online sales in France would be dwarfed by potential sales all around the labels may feel they stand to lose if non-DRM encumbered music sales are allowed anywhere in the world. "The rest of the world" is bigger than just "France", and if the money lost in the rest of the world is bigger than the profit made in France alone, do you really think a foreign-owned label would even blink an eye at pulling out of France?
Look, the labels have put a LOT of time, money, and effort in an attempt to push DRM at the consumer at every turn. Do you really think after all that expensise and effort they would just throw up their hands and give up in any country around the world? I don't. Again -- as you said, it comes down to money -- but not quite as you intended. They'll look at their global balance sheet, and if it's globally more profitable for them to simply stop licensing their works for online digital sales in one country, they'll do it.
Otherwise, what has been the point of the labels push for more and more DRM schemes, laws to prevent people from reverse engineering those schemes, and per-country licensing for online stores like iTMS? Fun?
Yaz.
This seems doubtful to happen in any significant numbers. It isn't as if Intel Mac owners don't know about this option known as the "Windows PC", or the "cheap Walmart Laptop" that you mention. The systems have been available for just a bit more than two months now -- if Intel Mac owners wanted a Windows XP machine running on cheap Intel hardware, they would have bought a Windows XP machine running on cheap Intel hardware.
There may be a percentage of "switchers" who decide to "switch back" -- but I imagine this has always been the case, so I don't see how anything would really be changing here. The only thing that is new is that the "switch back-ers" don't have to buy a new PC -- they can do it on their existing Mac hardware (assuming the challenge has indeed been met).
Yaz.
I mentioned that in my original post. Apple has been very reticient to do so up until this point -- and once they do, the genie is out of its bottle -- and it's damn hard to jam it back in. Apple may very well wish to avoid this, although it would seem to me in this case the DRM is attached to the device (the iPod) and not just the store (iTMS), so depending on the legislation, Apple may have to pull the iPod out of France in order to avoid Freeplay licensing.
That is something I don't really see Apple doing (pulling the iPod out of France, that is). I personally think they would open up Fairplay rather than stop selling the iPod in such a culturally important country in the world as France.
Whatever happens, we could be living in interesting times. As this legislation hasn't been passed yet, it still may change, making this entire discussion moot.
Yaz.
My thought exactly. And it's about time -- Sim Earth was long one of my favorite games. I still have it somewhere -- what I lack is a system capable of playing it (as it was a DOS VCPI game, and I run all Mac and Linux now).
One comment however -- in Sim earth you could start off without even a spore. You would have to bombard the planet with comets in the hope of eventually evolving a primitive bacteria, and then work your way up from there.
Sim Earth had some rather fun elements to it that went beyond reality as well. You could spawn sentience by using a Monolith (ala 2001: A Space Odyssey). I was once able to (very briefly) create sentient dolphins. Through high technology, you could create sentient robots (which had a tendency to completely obliterate life on the planet). I once tried to cool Venus by setting off hundreds of nuclear explosions.
It was great stuff back in the day.
Yaz.
Just to make something clear for anyone in case they're confused -- I'm merely discussing potential music industry tactics, and am not intending to signify that I agree with them. I don't. DRM, as you've pointed out, ultimately fails. And the music industry is wrong to persue it.
I'm also not claiming that the industry is logical, although I imagine at this point in time the industry would love to replace CD players altogether with DRM-encumbered devices, so they can stop selling CDs altogether, and either replace it with an optical format that is DRM encumbered, or purely with DRM-encumbered digital formats.
However, barring that, I wouldn't put it past some of the music companies to go for a retaliatory measure by pulling online digital sales of their music out, just to make a point. Hard-core music lovers will simply switch back to buying CDs, while at the same time the music labels will use the new laws to prosecute pirates even harder than before.
Yaz.
You sound like someone who has either read this draft law, or whom has at least read some better analysis of it then has been provided by the press in North America thus far.
The one thing I do have to ask, however -- is software to remove DRM from media currently illegal in France? I wasn't aware that it was. So far as I was aware, the only country that has made defeating DRM illegal is the US. Here in Canada, at least, it would seem that removing DRM for the purpose of making a personal copy is completely legit.
Is my impression that DRM removal is currently permitted in France incorrect? Or is this just a case of a law being created to explicitly permit what was previously only implicitly permitted?
Thanks for the feedback -- as I said in my original post, having a copy of the draft law in question would be handy, because TFA makes several wild suggestions, without any information to back them up.
Yaz.
I think you need to read what I posted again, because I did indeed deal with this.
What incentive would, say, Sony BMG have to license music to any French digital music retailer, if that retailer wnated to sell their music in a non-DRM'ed format? Sony BMG (just as an example) could simply decide to get out of online digital music sales in France altogether, rather than have their music sold in MP3 or unprotected AAC format. And with no music to sell, the online stores will simply dry up and go away in France.
The only way the French government can get this to work is to allow the other vendors to reverse engineer Fairplay, and/or require Apple to license Fairplay to these other companies. The aim of this law doesn't appear to be to force online music stores out of business, and in order to work with Fairplay other online stores will need access to a users iTMS key. Because as I see it, every music company would rather stop selling all online digital music than permit legal, unprotected music downloads in France.
This is why, as I said, having access to the proposed text of this law would help clarify such issues.
Yaz.
I wish I had access to the draft of the bill in question (along with a good English translation) -- the article suggests several things which may or may not be true.
One of these suggestions is that Apple may have to stop running iTMS France in order to avoid compliance. However, it also states that other online stores would have to provide songs in a form that allows them to be played on the iPod.
Now I'm assuming that the primary music labels from outside of France would prefer to simply no longer license their works for digital download in France than allow providers to distribute music in an unencumbered format (such as MP3). Which would mean that the only way French law could permit other online music stores to provide music in iPod format would be for them to be allowed to use Fairplay.
This would mean that either Apple would be forced to license Fairplay to any online music store in France, or these companies will be permitted to reverse-engineer it. They would likewise need to be able to access a users Fairplay key.
In which case, the only way Apple may be able to avoid this whole mess would be to pull not only iTMS out of France, but the iPod as well. And I don't see Apple doing this.
The only way I see around this would be for all of the online music stores in France -- Apple's iTMS included -- to come up with a common, France-specific music DRM format. And while the added flexability would be of benefit to French digital music consumers, I'm not sure if having nation-specific DRM formats is going to be all that great of an idea.
Yaz.
The concept of "reasoned debate" goes back to the times of Socretes, and forms the basis of all Westernized governments.
That is how the Criminal Code defines a group based on colour, creed, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. I am referring to a very specific legal definition which is used in the Criminal Code of Canada here. Nothing weasely about that -- if you don't like it, take it up with Parliament.
Sorry, but Canadians by-and-large don't believe in capital punishment. It's not legal here.
I am happy to advocate "-1 Troll" for your posting, however.
Yaz.