That's fine then. They obviously had to have lost the case if I'm still able to sell my old CDs. I don't buy songs. I buy albums, so I'd likely never buy an MP3. I wouldn't know how the RIAA would handle selling MP3s. I thought that the MP3s you buy online have DRM implemented inside preventing you from playing the music elsewhere from the computer on which you initially purchased the song.
If DRM is used, then I guess you'd have to crack the MP3 just to get it playable on someone else's computer, but then you'd be violating the DMCA. But if you sell the MP3 as is and leave it up to the customer to crack it himself, then you could be an accessory to a crime since you reasonably knew that the customer would have to commit a crime in order to play the MP3 anyway.
But then, it all goes back to whether the license is transferrable and whether MP3 vendors have to obtain a special license from Big Music in order to sell MP3s. Anyone know what it takes to get in this business?
I'm a fan of figure skating, and after watching the World's tonight, I've been thinking I wish I had a great figure skating video game, something like Tony Hawk's series, wherein you portray a famous skater like Michelle Kwan or Irina Slutskaya, or create your own, and then skate in different locations, performing stunts, and wining medals.
I think this would be a great game, and it's probably very creative. Unfortunately, there are no box crates to blow up and no power-ups to help you survive against the mini-boss, and playing this game online would suck because the cheats would be limited to making the judges vote higher for you or lower for another player.:(
When I attempted to access the Web pages of exile groups opposed to the authoritarian Vientiane regime, I received an error message saying the pages were not accessible. My experience in the Vientiane cafe was a sobering antidote to a pervasive myth: that the Internet is a powerful force for democracy.
Disclaimer: I'm a part of this significant subset of the democratization industry that Kurlantzick mentioned. Kurlantzick is sadden by the inability of the Internet to topple regimes. Note that by Internet he means the World Wide Web and that he seriously anticipated the Internet to empower the meek and downtrodden with the weapons and ammunition needed to stage revolutions that will remove tyrants.
The Internet is a powerful force for democracy because the Internet is an enabler of open communication. It is just like a radio, a television, or a newspaper - all three of which have ignited flames of revolt all throughout history. The ability to voice one's opinion as well as one's oppression is a prerequisite to the democrazation of any social or political system. Now obviously a government can hinder the effectiveness of the Internet. China did this with Google. We did it with Early Bird. Cultures can also handicap the effectiveness of the Internet.
True story. A North African Muslim couple come to the US to study Information Systems. They catch the entrepreneurial spirit and decide to open an ISP in their home country upon returning home. A couple of years later they return to the US, having not started that ISP. Their reason was that their society was very fundamentalist Islamic despite a few liberal pockets. By starting an ISP, they would expose their customers to culturally and religiously offensive material such as WalMart.com women's casualware listings or Saks Fifth Avenue's pantyhose and shoe catalog. The couple feared a death sentence for bringing in what was considered locally, smut and porn.
This is one specific example of how the effectiveness of the Internet can be limited. However, the Internet has had more success in other places such as the former Yugoslavia. IIT's Project Kosovo and Project Bosnia have successfully used the Internet as a way of documenting war crimes and atrocities and getting the word out to the international community. Democratization efforts depend on getting information flowing. We need to get people talking. We need to start hearing more stories first-hand. The Internet hasn't been used seriously as an instrument for social change until the late 1990s, so results will take time. The ultimate goal is for the Internet to serve as conduit that permits a free exchange of ideas, and that through that exchange help can be given and lives can be improved.
The Internet has an even more important role today than envisioned years ago. Many people are frightened of sharing their political and social opinions in public out of fear of retribution by the authorities. The Internet a vital means for learning the issues from multiple perspectives and for engaging in healthy political debate. At this very moment, tech savvy groups like eToy are engaging in electronic hacktivsm, making people aware of issues that they won't hear about on corporate-controlled news channels. Even now in the US, the safest place to protest is not the free speech zones approved by the government but private chatrooms and blogs.
While it's true that the Internet has proved itself able to disseminate pop culture in authoritarian nations--not only Laos, but China, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere--to date, its political impact has been decidedly limited.
He already has the license to play the music right? So why does he have to keep paying full price?
Because he is buying a 2nd copy of the album, even if on an entirely different medium. You're not upgrading to a new version of the same product, even if this CD version is (arguably) better. Besides, technically he is not licensed to listen to the album, he's license to consume the contents contained on a particular medium. I'm licensed to listen to The Dark Side of the Moon as provided on the Pulse live album; however I am not license to listen to the same set of music as provided on the original album since I don't own it. Legal hairsplitting sucks.
If he had his receipt and original and went to RCA (I assume that's the producer, I'm sure I'm wrong) and demanded a CD, he'd be laughed the hell out of there.
Yes. RCA would easily argue it has put additional production value in the creation of the CD release, especially if we're talking about a digital remaster. Though it's the same album, it's not the same product. Does the vinyl and CD releases even share the same RCA catalog number?
But the record industry wants to stop you from selling the album to someone else, or even making copies of it
How? Why? Every year I gather my unwanted albums - usually remnants of dumb impulse buys, and I unload those albums on small independent stores like Disc-O'Round. They have no problems buying the albums and reselling them. They even buy albums that I got through BMG. As for making copies, you're right on. RIAA doesn't want you making legitimate backups or even remixes for your own consumption. Technically, I shouldn't be playing my music too loudly that my neighbors can unfairly and illegally consume music which they did not pay for. Eh, Fuck em if they can't take a joke!
You're right, it is they who should be adapting to change rather than forcing the law to bend to their own wants, but that's the way it is. The RIAA gives a lot of money to Congress through the combination of indivual donations and PAC money. The original story mentions Orin Hatch. Looking up the contributions he received in the 2004 election cycle, he's actually more of a whore for lawyers and pharmaceuticals than anything else.
That's interesting. Maybe small businesses would be running high end systems like Oracle... or were you saying that Oracle wouldn't be high end, but more like FileMaker Pro?
If there were no people like Gates and Jobs, could computing reach the state that it's in today? Granted, we've had some serious what-the-fuck moments over the years, but maybe enterprise level computing would be years away if we all continued to use disparate systems. I bet it would be a pain for software developers to have to port their apps to among fifteen different platforms in order to earn enough paydirt to make programming worthwhile.
Why do so many miss the point? There were more OS's and computer makers than IBM, Microsoft, and Mac. ... because that is not the point. Yes, we had a lot more choice back then. I can't remember how many platforms I played Civilization on, but we're talking about personalities here. I won't knock Amiga. It is a great machine, but hindsight being 20/20, Commodore wasn't going to dominate the market at the level that Apple or Microsoft did.
I only consider how aggressive those companies were and how well those companies extended their reach. IBM and HP had the extensive supply chains and the addressbooks to dominate personal computing, and yet neither did. Part of the reason was Apple and Microsoft, but absent those two companies, IBM and HP still lacked creativity.
Commodore and Be Inc. had the creativity, but neither company was aggressive enough to seek control anything. Commodore didn't mind having a pluralist computing environment. Be Inc, knew they had a great product but they didn't try to be more than a cult favorite. Again, BeOS users are very pluralistic people even though Microsoft fucked us while Palm took pictures.
Sounds to me like you are simply bitter that you can't afford to live in a hip place.
Nope. That can't be it. I can afford, and do live in, a hip place.
it is the high demand that drives the prices
Not in every case. The whole supply-dmand curve is not as simplistic as Economics 101 makes it out to be. Prices are influenced through mechanisms other than demand. For example, there are taxes and tariffs. There is also non-competitive behavior. Take for example natural monopolies such as what we call, utilities. The price for electricity at the local coop or for water and garbage is rarely based on demand. Consider sin taxes for products such as cigarettes, liquor, or porn. Following your logic about it being the high demand that drives the prices, the price for these products should have declined significantly in relation to demand; and yet this is not the case.
Is this a rally against capitalism? No, it isn't, nor is it a comment about capitalism. Price fixing exist independent of economic models. You'll find price fixing in planned economies just as easily as you would in capitalist economies.
Of course, we can always fall back on simple defenses like "people have options." This is fine in arguments about software giants setting prices above the market value, but it doesn't work when it comes to certain basic needs like housing and healthcare.
I think you need to re-evaluate who/what you are railing against.
Yeah, okay.
Unfortunately certain businesses do not follow logical rules of economics. In real estate, you never worry about setting a price too high that *no one* will buy the property. There will always be someone. Of course, selling at a rate much higher than the true market value of property still doesn't have to imply an astonomical amount. Take for instance the Kelly blue book value for a car. It's a pretty fair assessment of the value of a car, but when we look at real estate, especially with developed properties, we find that one can still be charged four digits for a place with 1950s era improvements and little more. Back to selling at too a high price to find customers, this behavior is actually encouraged. Setting prices higher than market value make it possible for the real estate business to engage in exclusionary practices. You can keep a pretty large group of undesirables out of your property if you use price as a barrier.
Again, not saying OO is bad...you people scare me...don't hurt me.
I won't hurt you. I agree with you.
Word.DOC is the de facto standard. We tend to assume that a standard is necessarily a measure of quality when it's not. It is a measure of consistency. That's why we talk about high and low standards instead of consistent or inconsistent standards. Now, arguably.DOC is not a consistent format, and that's a major reason why it is hard for developers outside of Microsoft to develop full support for it. Microsoft periodically changes its format. This is to be expected as newer features are added to Word, but some people do claim that Microsoft also messes with the.DOC format specifically in order to break compatibility. I believe the Word '97 to Word 2000 format change stirred some controversy that is right on point.
How could the ISP take the decision out of my hands? The way I see it,.mail is just another TLD. It means no more to me than a.cn or a.tv does. I would never ever set an email filter to automatically accept any emails coming from a particular domain. I get plenty of spam that purports to come from.edu, and as a matter of fruitless civil disopedience, I block all.gov addresses.
When it comes down to it, isn't it still about me deciding whether I want to read an incoming email or filter it out?
How would an ISP use a.mail as a whitelist anyway? I'm not clear on how it all works, but my understanding is that my ISP isn't blocking any TLDs, so what would the benefit be to a registrant since there's still no guarantee that people will accept solicitations?
If there were no Microsoft, there would be no savvy competitor to rival Apple. IBM and HP couldn't do it. They lacked the entrepreneurial creativity and energy Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer possessed. Jobs was only going to be defeated by someone with that new generation forethought.
Apple would have dominated, and Steve Jobs' meglomania would have only escalated. Eventually Apple would hold majority share and small developers would find themselves getting squeazed. So essentially, a world without Microsoft would be still be the same as a world with Microsoft.
I won't even entertain ideas about greater unchecked innovation. There are a lot of great technologies that have been killed off by kinder gentler cooperations that MS.
Seriously, you'd be hard pressed to find a more unscrupulous group than building developers.
Real estate people. They often work with unscrupulous building developers, especially in small towns where their power can rise to the level of local magistrates. Real estate people and building developers, by setting the market price for space, have the ability to influence countless many others. Consider cities like New York, LA, San Francisco, or Chicago. Rent is a big determinant of the kind of job you can accept in order to make ends meet. If it didn't cost $1200 for a shack just because it a real estate company decided to milk the value of a hip area code or high-growth zipcode, people could afford to accept one of the many wonderful thousands of jobs El Presidente has created for us.
There are a lot of 'high order' dreams in the computing science.
But it's the job of scientists in all disciplines to have high order dreams. Business people and governments just reign in the scientists with fancy talk of markets and consumer protections.
I personally have no sympathy for Palm in this issue. It's genuine competition. It's part of the dirty business of consumer electronics. Palm is certainly no saint either. Just ask a BeOS user how they feel about Palm.
Palm bought Be Inc. and has been gutting it for parts to use in its own products with no intention of bringing back BeOS. Be finally did settle its lawsuit with Microsoft and got some money, so Be could have turned out a new release. Right now, BeOS users and fans are in the situation of having to beg for the opportunity to keep BeOS alive.
I tell all my Microsoft-using friends to fuck off with their self-made problems, too, and get real operating systems, from real software companies... and most of them do.
I tell people to fuck off all the time for even lesser reasons. Hell, I just told someone to fuck off today, and I plan to do it again tomorrow! I like my Windows operating system, and I can live with my self-made problems. Virii, worms, and security holes occur on every OS, so it's more about how you address your own computing habits.
Of course, I'd go Linux if it could handle my needs (read my journal), but not because Windows has failed me. In my opinion, all this DRM talk and the love of Windows developers to create apps that dial back home has me thinking that the privacy-minded pixie ought to go back to UNIX.
OS writers are very much in a co-dependant relationship with the chip makers... the direction that the OS writers take their software and the direction the chip makers take their chips have to be in sync because one will not work without the other.
I'd agree that this is true today, but it's easy today. I think chip developers and chip programmers have an easier mechanism for finding each other and then communicating.
But back in the 70s when Steve Wozniak was working on the first generation of Apple computers, was this still true? I thought part of Woz's glory was in being a hacker who had strung together a bunch of generic computer parts to build a computer?
There is one valid barrier to handheld-computer that still exists today that I can't see being Microsoft's fault, and that's battery power. There are a lot of cool features we can have for mobile computing but I don't want my cell phone or PDA to last the whole of an hour because of resource-hungry chips and resource-hungrier operating systems... Windows CE I'm looking at you!
Let's not forget IBM's PC-DOS and OS/2. Was Atari running GEM? I only remember a roommate having a desktop that looked like a console.:)
I don't think that DR-DOS would have had any effect on the MS monopoly. I remember the lawsuits involving Microsoft adding code to Windows that would screw with DR-DOS users. If IBM had distributed PC-DOS on non-IBM computers, it probably wouldn't have helped much either. When people thought DOS, they meant MS-DOS. I had PC-DOS so I dealt with the burden of not having EDIT.COM available for my friends to use. I actually had a superior editor, the name of which escapes me now.
MS-DOS had a slew of undocumented features plus QBASIC. Yeah, it's not C/C++, but If you had the compiler version or even the interpreter version, you could really extend your system. I've never liked DR-DOS. PC-DOS had REXX, which I never used. But why would I? I had already copied QBASIC and had friend who could write some pretty advanced batch scripts.
I never cared for DR-DOS. I thought memory management under MS-DOS and PC-DOS was much better. Then again, I've always hated Novell. Those guys just really piss me off just like those Hello Kitty people do.
Excerpt from article: User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining")
In reference to total cost of ownership of Open Office. I agree to an extent. Retraining does incur costs, but I don't know - I think retraining is really an overemphasized cost, and it's careless to suggest retraining may be necessary without a deeper explanation of what the difference is between the UIs, and how those differences affect the user experience. Gourmet Settings flatware, while similar in many ways to Oneida flatware is not the same, and yet I've found it unnecessary to be retrained.
Additionally, OpenOffice does not have an e-mail client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application. http://www.openoffice.org
There is an implication being made here that an OpenOffice user will inevitably need to buy a separate e-mail application. I see language like this all the time in "persuasive arguments" such as position papers. The brochure could have mentioned that users could acquire equally free email applications, but it doesn't because the goal is steer consumers away from the product.
"I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough." In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs. Businesses need to:
- Exchange business transaction information externally with customers and vendors. How is this an advanced feature of MS Office? This is a secondary business activity that can be accomplished by using any set of compatible communication methodologies including EDI.
- Ensure that their mission-critical information is adequately protected from virus attack.
MS-Office protects businesses from virus attacks? Verdict: clever use of juxtaposition to imply a relationship between two independent things.
- Effectively manage customer relationships so as to maximize sales.
At least this point is more relevent; however, CRM implies much more than storing client emails in an addressbook or designing Word templates that tailor letters to specific clients.
- Quickly access key information from accounting and other business applications. Finally something I can support. Excel is very flexible and there are a lot of business applications out there that make use of the interactivity between Excel and Microsoft SQL database servers
- Create sales and marketing material that portrays the business in a professional manner. Photoshop. Illustrator. Dreamweaver... and yes, PowerPoint too... but Powerpoint is empowered by one's skills in the aforementioned applications. When you're giving a presentation, what matters is that the presentation is good, not whether it was done in PowerPoint. The new database features in Flash will help make Flash a very edgy presentation development app overtime. Especially if we start getting presentation templates for Flash.
- Do all this in a cost-effective manner because a small business does not have the resources of a large company for IT integration and support.
Perhaps the strongest argument for using OpenOffice instead of MS-Office. The bulk of document sharing is still paper-based. Therefore, if you won't be sharing your documents for editing purposes electronically, then you will be either printing the document or creating read-only versions of the documents using Acrobat.
I do like the idead of a document being perpetually current - always updated. The database features of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word bring us one-step closer; however, as I said, document sharing in business is still paper-based and will remain so. People will print out their documents to study them, archive them, and share them with others. Also, I have an inherent mistrust of documents that dialup database servers to update their contents.
A technique we Windows users have suggested for years has been to set the minimum and maximum swapfile/pagefile size to the same value equal to twice the amount of real RAM you have. Back under Windows 3.11 we had to type in the settings in our Windows configs. This technique has stuck really only out of habit though. At one time the formula was 2.5 x RAM. You can probably go lower. On Linux I used a swap filesystem equal in size to my real RAM, and I had no problems.
I've always found storing Swap/pagefile on a separate drive off my main drive has given me better performance especially when running data mining/modelling or video editing software. Video capturing to a drive that is sharing your Pagefile can be a real drag.
Maybe using a separate channel will result in bandwidth increases for the writes and reads on the swap disk. Eh??? But if it did, considering the speeds we're dealing with today, would it even make a noticeable difference?
For security, I like to put my pagefile on the dame physical drive I store other short-term data (emails, photos, etc - anything personal not put to disc right away). The reason is that I figure the pagefile contains a lot of data that might be personal. Is there any sense to this? I also have Windows set to delete the pagefile on shutdown so...
Add to games data mining and modelling software, plus the databases and the database software itself. Full resolution video capturing always roasts your system nicely too.
There are lot of people who can argue having a legitimate fear that we'll go down that same road the Germans did and very well end up killing millions in the process. I wouldn't be so quick to regard them or their comments as stupid. Sure there are some real twits among the lot, and some of these twits really stick out as being card-carrying twits. There are, however, some incredibly well-read intellectuals out there too.
For the most part, the comparisons that people draw between Bush's America and Hitler's Germany do not, and are not meant to, imply that genocide will result. Notice though that the people who bring up the genocide connection are the ones that most desperately want to kill the message entirely.
The more accurate statement is that we live in a fascist police state like that of Nazi Germany prior to the War wherein the civil liberties of citizens who are not part of a special class are trampled upon in the name patriotism and nationalism; and wherein the government makes extensive use of symbols and rhetoric to create a national sense of unity and mythological greatness amid an environment of fear and perpetual danger caused by outsiders who work from within and without to destroy our nation; and wherein the government uses censorship to control what information the public (and other government agencies) has access to.
Of course, if someone said all this, someone else would rant about how we're not like Nazi Germany because millions of [insert group of undesirables] haven't been murdered.
It would probably make more sense to call it, OS X 2.0 instead of OS XI. I love the Windows XP name. It works on several levels and sounds cool. Windows 6.0 is just weak. Microsoft will have to stick with the XP name for at least a couple of iterations. I don't know about the Mac crowd. Hasn't it been the tradition to just refer to MacOS by its version number (ie, System 7, etc) and not by some catchy brand?
Try Emacs !Once you get your key bindings right, it's really a fabulous editor. Lisp grows on you FAST.
Since you're an Emacs person, Brad Merrill, a Microsoft.NET Evangelist, has some tools for doing C# in Emacs. Also the people at @ic#code have a free as in beer, but still open-source IDE for C# programming. I don't know if I can do straight C/C++ with it. The screenshot has me believing otherwise. It looks like Visual Basic. I'm thinking I'll give that one a try before tackling Emacs.
While we're on the subject, I've just found that Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004 works as an IDE for C# programming. It does color syntax highlighting, which is an important feature for me, but I haven't found any other standard programming IDE features.
Finally, not being an Emacs guru, I'm not sure which implementation to get. I can always use Cygwin unless there's a regular Win32 port. However, I also found a Windows version that claims to be smaller and lighter at http://www.notgnu.org/ Any recommendations?
From the article: One proposal for the.mail domain has been put forward by anti-spam workers who want to use it for storing information about legitimate e-mail servers.
Putting aside the obvious problem of faked headers, etc, how would such a system be implemented? My ISP doesn't allow me to run an SMTP server. This pisses me off. But open relays exist somewhere...
Could.mail be used eventually to silence people who legitimately run their own SMTP servers, forcing people to either give up their privacy by using their ISP's service (in the age of Carnivore), or pay an entry fee for the privilege to send e-mail idependently of one's ISP - which the registration fee for a.mail domain could essentially do if ISPs and servers all over the Internet reject any email not originating from a.mail or other pre-approved source.
Maybe it's extreme. I'm shooting from the hip here, but it's enough I can't run my own SMTP!!
Thanks for the suggestion! For some reason when I read the title, John Bradley's XV came to mind. I don't think it gets more unpolished than that interface-wise. Actually, about the only polish I'd like to see on a picture viewer app's interface would be a skinned border that looks like either the white edge borders of a Polaroid snapshot or the borders of a picture frame.
Slashdot Mirror
That's fine then. They obviously had to have lost the case if I'm still able to sell my old CDs. I don't buy songs. I buy albums, so I'd likely never buy an MP3. I wouldn't know how the RIAA would handle selling MP3s. I thought that the MP3s you buy online have DRM implemented inside preventing you from playing the music elsewhere from the computer on which you initially purchased the song.
If DRM is used, then I guess you'd have to crack the MP3 just to get it playable on someone else's computer, but then you'd be violating the DMCA. But if you sell the MP3 as is and leave it up to the customer to crack it himself, then you could be an accessory to a crime since you reasonably knew that the customer would have to commit a crime in order to play the MP3 anyway.
But then, it all goes back to whether the license is transferrable and whether MP3 vendors have to obtain a special license from Big Music in order to sell MP3s. Anyone know what it takes to get in this business?
I'm a fan of figure skating, and after watching the World's tonight, I've been thinking I wish I had a great figure skating video game, something like Tony Hawk's series, wherein you portray a famous skater like Michelle Kwan or Irina Slutskaya, or create your own, and then skate in different locations, performing stunts, and wining medals.
:(
I think this would be a great game, and it's probably very creative. Unfortunately, there are no box crates to blow up and no power-ups to help you survive against the mini-boss, and playing this game online would suck because the cheats would be limited to making the judges vote higher for you or lower for another player.
Disclaimer: I'm a part of this significant subset of the democratization industry that Kurlantzick mentioned. Kurlantzick is sadden by the inability of the Internet to topple regimes. Note that by Internet he means the World Wide Web and that he seriously anticipated the Internet to empower the meek and downtrodden with the weapons and ammunition needed to stage revolutions that will remove tyrants.
The Internet is a powerful force for democracy because the Internet is an enabler of open communication. It is just like a radio, a television, or a newspaper - all three of which have ignited flames of revolt all throughout history. The ability to voice one's opinion as well as one's oppression is a prerequisite to the democrazation of any social or political system. Now obviously a government can hinder the effectiveness of the Internet. China did this with Google. We did it with Early Bird. Cultures can also handicap the effectiveness of the Internet.
True story. A North African Muslim couple come to the US to study Information Systems. They catch the entrepreneurial spirit and decide to open an ISP in their home country upon returning home. A couple of years later they return to the US, having not started that ISP. Their reason was that their society was very fundamentalist Islamic despite a few liberal pockets. By starting an ISP, they would expose their customers to culturally and religiously offensive material such as WalMart.com women's casualware listings or Saks Fifth Avenue's pantyhose and shoe catalog. The couple feared a death sentence for bringing in what was considered locally, smut and porn.
This is one specific example of how the effectiveness of the Internet can be limited. However, the Internet has had more success in other places such as the former Yugoslavia. IIT's Project Kosovo and Project Bosnia have successfully used the Internet as a way of documenting war crimes and atrocities and getting the word out to the international community. Democratization efforts depend on getting information flowing. We need to get people talking. We need to start hearing more stories first-hand. The Internet hasn't been used seriously as an instrument for social change until the late 1990s, so results will take time. The ultimate goal is for the Internet to serve as conduit that permits a free exchange of ideas, and that through that exchange help can be given and lives can be improved.
The Internet has an even more important role today than envisioned years ago. Many people are frightened of sharing their political and social opinions in public out of fear of retribution by the authorities. The Internet a vital means for learning the issues from multiple perspectives and for engaging in healthy political debate. At this very moment, tech savvy groups like eToy are engaging in electronic hacktivsm, making people aware of issues that they won't hear about on corporate-controlled news channels. Even now in the US, the safest place to protest is not the free speech zones approved by the government but private chatrooms and blogs.
This is opinion. I've spoken with many forei
He already has the license to play the music right? So why does he have to keep paying full price?
Because he is buying a 2nd copy of the album, even if on an entirely different medium. You're not upgrading to a new version of the same product, even if this CD version is (arguably) better. Besides, technically he is not licensed to listen to the album, he's license to consume the contents contained on a particular medium. I'm licensed to listen to The Dark Side of the Moon as provided on the Pulse live album; however I am not license to listen to the same set of music as provided on the original album since I don't own it. Legal hairsplitting sucks.
If he had his receipt and original and went to RCA (I assume that's the producer, I'm sure I'm wrong) and demanded a CD, he'd be laughed the hell out of there.
Yes. RCA would easily argue it has put additional production value in the creation of the CD release, especially if we're talking about a digital remaster. Though it's the same album, it's not the same product. Does the vinyl and CD releases even share the same RCA catalog number?
But the record industry wants to stop you from selling the album to someone else, or even making copies of it
How? Why? Every year I gather my unwanted albums - usually remnants of dumb impulse buys, and I unload those albums on small independent stores like Disc-O'Round. They have no problems buying the albums and reselling them. They even buy albums that I got through BMG. As for making copies, you're right on. RIAA doesn't want you making legitimate backups or even remixes for your own consumption. Technically, I shouldn't be playing my music too loudly that my neighbors can unfairly and illegally consume music which they did not pay for. Eh, Fuck em if they can't take a joke!
You're right, it is they who should be adapting to change rather than forcing the law to bend to their own wants, but that's the way it is. The RIAA gives a lot of money to Congress through the combination of indivual donations and PAC money. The original story mentions Orin Hatch. Looking up the contributions he received in the 2004 election cycle, he's actually more of a whore for lawyers and pharmaceuticals than anything else.
Orrin G. Hatch: 2004 Politican Profile
That's interesting. Maybe small businesses would be running high end systems like Oracle... or were you saying that Oracle wouldn't be high end, but more like FileMaker Pro?
If there were no people like Gates and Jobs, could computing reach the state that it's in today? Granted, we've had some serious what-the-fuck moments over the years, but maybe enterprise level computing would be years away if we all continued to use disparate systems. I bet it would be a pain for software developers to have to port their apps to among fifteen different platforms in order to earn enough paydirt to make programming worthwhile.
Why do so many miss the point? There were more OS's and computer makers than IBM, Microsoft, and Mac.
... because that is not the point. Yes, we had a lot more choice back then. I can't remember how many platforms I played Civilization on, but we're talking about personalities here. I won't knock Amiga. It is a great machine, but hindsight being 20/20, Commodore wasn't going to dominate the market at the level that Apple or Microsoft did.
I only consider how aggressive those companies were and how well those companies extended their reach. IBM and HP had the extensive supply chains and the addressbooks to dominate personal computing, and yet neither did. Part of the reason was Apple and Microsoft, but absent those two companies, IBM and HP still lacked creativity.
Commodore and Be Inc. had the creativity, but neither company was aggressive enough to seek control anything. Commodore didn't mind having a pluralist computing environment. Be Inc, knew they had a great product but they didn't try to be more than a cult favorite. Again, BeOS users are very pluralistic people even though Microsoft fucked us while Palm took pictures.
Thank you, bowronch. I've learned to italicize keywords I think people ought to lookup before replying. I guess I forgot one... *groan*
Sounds to me like you are simply bitter that you can't afford to live in a hip place.
Nope. That can't be it. I can afford, and do live in, a hip place.
it is the high demand that drives the prices
Not in every case. The whole supply-dmand curve is not as simplistic as Economics 101 makes it out to be. Prices are influenced through mechanisms other than demand. For example, there are taxes and tariffs. There is also non-competitive behavior. Take for example natural monopolies such as what we call, utilities. The price for electricity at the local coop or for water and garbage is rarely based on demand. Consider sin taxes for products such as cigarettes, liquor, or porn. Following your logic about it being the high demand that drives the prices, the price for these products should have declined significantly in relation to demand; and yet this is not the case.
Is this a rally against capitalism? No, it isn't, nor is it a comment about capitalism. Price fixing exist independent of economic models. You'll find price fixing in planned economies just as easily as you would in capitalist economies.
Of course, we can always fall back on simple defenses like "people have options." This is fine in arguments about software giants setting prices above the market value, but it doesn't work when it comes to certain basic needs like housing and healthcare.
I think you need to re-evaluate who/what you are railing against.
Yeah, okay.
Unfortunately certain businesses do not follow logical rules of economics. In real estate, you never worry about setting a price too high that *no one* will buy the property. There will always be someone. Of course, selling at a rate much higher than the true market value of property still doesn't have to imply an astonomical amount. Take for instance the Kelly blue book value for a car. It's a pretty fair assessment of the value of a car, but when we look at real estate, especially with developed properties, we find that one can still be charged four digits for a place with 1950s era improvements and little more. Back to selling at too a high price to find customers, this behavior is actually encouraged. Setting prices higher than market value make it possible for the real estate business to engage in exclusionary practices. You can keep a pretty large group of undesirables out of your property if you use price as a barrier.
Again, not saying OO is bad...you people scare me...don't hurt me.
.DOC is the de facto standard. We tend to assume that a standard is necessarily a measure of quality when it's not. It is a measure of consistency. That's why we talk about high and low standards instead of consistent or inconsistent standards. Now, arguably .DOC is not a consistent format, and that's a major reason why it is hard for developers outside of Microsoft to develop full support for it. Microsoft periodically changes its format. This is to be expected as newer features are added to Word, but some people do claim that Microsoft also messes with the .DOC format specifically in order to break compatibility. I believe the Word '97 to Word 2000 format change stirred some controversy that is right on point.
I won't hurt you. I agree with you.
Word
How could the ISP take the decision out of my hands? The way I see it, .mail is just another TLD. It means no more to me than a .cn or a .tv does. I would never ever set an email filter to automatically accept any emails coming from a particular domain. I get plenty of spam that purports to come from .edu, and as a matter of fruitless civil disopedience, I block all .gov addresses.
.mail as a whitelist anyway? I'm not clear on how it all works, but my understanding is that my ISP isn't blocking any TLDs, so what would the benefit be to a registrant since there's still no guarantee that people will accept solicitations?
When it comes down to it, isn't it still about me deciding whether I want to read an incoming email or filter it out?
How would an ISP use a
If there were no Microsoft, there would be no savvy competitor to rival Apple. IBM and HP couldn't do it. They lacked the entrepreneurial creativity and energy Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer possessed. Jobs was only going to be defeated by someone with that new generation forethought.
Apple would have dominated, and Steve Jobs' meglomania would have only escalated. Eventually Apple would hold majority share and small developers would find themselves getting squeazed. So essentially, a world without Microsoft would be still be the same as a world with Microsoft.
I won't even entertain ideas about greater unchecked innovation. There are a lot of great technologies that have been killed off by kinder gentler cooperations that MS.
Seriously, you'd be hard pressed to find a more unscrupulous group than building developers.
Real estate people. They often work with unscrupulous building developers, especially in small towns where their power can rise to the level of local magistrates. Real estate people and building developers, by setting the market price for space, have the ability to influence countless many others. Consider cities like New York, LA, San Francisco, or Chicago. Rent is a big determinant of the kind of job you can accept in order to make ends meet. If it didn't cost $1200 for a shack just because it a real estate company decided to milk the value of a hip area code or high-growth zipcode, people could afford to accept one of the many wonderful thousands of jobs El Presidente has created for us.
There are a lot of 'high order' dreams in the computing science.
... and most of them do.
But it's the job of scientists in all disciplines to have high order dreams. Business people and governments just reign in the scientists with fancy talk of markets and consumer protections.
I personally have no sympathy for Palm in this issue. It's genuine competition. It's part of the dirty business of consumer electronics. Palm is certainly no saint either. Just ask a BeOS user how they feel about Palm.
Palm explains interests in Be.
Palm bought Be Inc. and has been gutting it for parts to use in its own products with no intention of bringing back BeOS. Be finally did settle its lawsuit with Microsoft and got some money, so Be could have turned out a new release. Right now, BeOS users and fans are in the situation of having to beg for the opportunity to keep BeOS alive.
I tell all my Microsoft-using friends to fuck off with their self-made problems, too, and get real operating systems, from real software companies
I tell people to fuck off all the time for even lesser reasons. Hell, I just told someone to fuck off today, and I plan to do it again tomorrow! I like my Windows operating system, and I can live with my self-made problems. Virii, worms, and security holes occur on every OS, so it's more about how you address your own computing habits.
Of course, I'd go Linux if it could handle my needs (read my journal), but not because Windows has failed me. In my opinion, all this DRM talk and the love of Windows developers to create apps that dial back home has me thinking that the privacy-minded pixie ought to go back to UNIX.
OS writers are very much in a co-dependant relationship with the chip makers... the direction that the OS writers take their software and the direction the chip makers take their chips have to be in sync because one will not work without the other.
I'd agree that this is true today, but it's easy today. I think chip developers and chip programmers have an easier mechanism for finding each other and then communicating.
But back in the 70s when Steve Wozniak was working on the first generation of Apple computers, was this still true? I thought part of Woz's glory was in being a hacker who had strung together a bunch of generic computer parts to build a computer?
There is one valid barrier to handheld-computer that still exists today that I can't see being Microsoft's fault, and that's battery power. There are a lot of cool features we can have for mobile computing but I don't want my cell phone or PDA to last the whole of an hour because of resource-hungry chips and resource-hungrier operating systems... Windows CE I'm looking at you!
Let's not forget IBM's PC-DOS and OS/2. Was Atari running GEM? I only remember a roommate having a desktop that looked like a console. :)
I don't think that DR-DOS would have had any effect on the MS monopoly. I remember the lawsuits involving Microsoft adding code to Windows that would screw with DR-DOS users. If IBM had distributed PC-DOS on non-IBM computers, it probably wouldn't have helped much either. When people thought DOS, they meant MS-DOS. I had PC-DOS so I dealt with the burden of not having EDIT.COM available for my friends to use. I actually had a superior editor, the name of which escapes me now.
MS-DOS had a slew of undocumented features plus QBASIC. Yeah, it's not C/C++, but If you had the compiler version or even the interpreter version, you could really extend your system. I've never liked DR-DOS. PC-DOS had REXX, which I never used. But why would I? I had already copied QBASIC and had friend who could write some pretty advanced batch scripts.
I never cared for DR-DOS. I thought memory management under MS-DOS and PC-DOS was much better. Then again, I've always hated Novell. Those guys just really piss me off just like those Hello Kitty people do.
He also commutes something like 2 hours a day. That puts a lot of strain on one's life and health.
Excerpt from article:
User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining")
In reference to total cost of ownership of Open Office. I agree to an extent. Retraining does incur costs, but I don't know - I think retraining is really an overemphasized cost, and it's careless to suggest retraining may be necessary without a deeper explanation of what the difference is between the UIs, and how those differences affect the user experience. Gourmet Settings flatware, while similar in many ways to Oneida flatware is not the same, and yet I've found it unnecessary to be retrained.
Additionally, OpenOffice does not have an e-mail client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application. http://www.openoffice.org
There is an implication being made here that an OpenOffice user will inevitably need to buy a separate e-mail application. I see language like this all the time in "persuasive arguments" such as position papers. The brochure could have mentioned that users could acquire equally free email applications, but it doesn't because the goal is steer consumers away from the product.
"I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough." In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs. Businesses need to: - Exchange business transaction information externally with customers and vendors.
How is this an advanced feature of MS Office? This is a secondary business activity that can be accomplished by using any set of compatible communication methodologies including EDI.
- Ensure that their mission-critical information is adequately protected from virus attack.
MS-Office protects businesses from virus attacks? Verdict: clever use of juxtaposition to imply a relationship between two independent things.
- Effectively manage customer relationships so as to maximize sales.
At least this point is more relevent; however, CRM implies much more than storing client emails in an addressbook or designing Word templates that tailor letters to specific clients.
- Quickly access key information from accounting and other business applications.
Finally something I can support. Excel is very flexible and there are a lot of business applications out there that make use of the interactivity between Excel and Microsoft SQL database servers
- Create sales and marketing material that portrays the business in a professional manner.
Photoshop. Illustrator. Dreamweaver... and yes, PowerPoint too... but Powerpoint is empowered by one's skills in the aforementioned applications. When you're giving a presentation, what matters is that the presentation is good, not whether it was done in PowerPoint. The new database features in Flash will help make Flash a very edgy presentation development app overtime. Especially if we start getting presentation templates for Flash.
- Do all this in a cost-effective manner because a small business does not have the resources of a large company for IT integration and support.
Perhaps the strongest argument for using OpenOffice instead of MS-Office. The bulk of document sharing is still paper-based. Therefore, if you won't be sharing your documents for editing purposes electronically, then you will be either printing the document or creating read-only versions of the documents using Acrobat.
I do like the idead of a document being perpetually current - always updated. The database features of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word bring us one-step closer; however, as I said, document sharing in business is still paper-based and will remain so. People will print out their documents to study them, archive them, and share them with others. Also, I have an inherent mistrust of documents that dialup database servers to update their contents.
A technique we Windows users have suggested for years has been to set the minimum and maximum swapfile/pagefile size to the same value equal to twice the amount of real RAM you have. Back under Windows 3.11 we had to type in the settings in our Windows configs. This technique has stuck really only out of habit though. At one time the formula was 2.5 x RAM. You can probably go lower. On Linux I used a swap filesystem equal in size to my real RAM, and I had no problems.
I've always found storing Swap/pagefile on a separate drive off my main drive has given me better performance especially when running data mining/modelling or video editing software. Video capturing to a drive that is sharing your Pagefile can be a real drag.
Maybe using a separate channel will result in bandwidth increases for the writes and reads on the swap disk. Eh??? But if it did, considering the speeds we're dealing with today, would it even make a noticeable difference?
For security, I like to put my pagefile on the dame physical drive I store other short-term data (emails, photos, etc - anything personal not put to disc right away). The reason is that I figure the pagefile contains a lot of data that might be personal. Is there any sense to this? I also have Windows set to delete the pagefile on shutdown so...
Add to games data mining and modelling software, plus the databases and the database software itself. Full resolution video capturing always roasts your system nicely too.
There are lot of people who can argue having a legitimate fear that we'll go down that same road the Germans did and very well end up killing millions in the process. I wouldn't be so quick to regard them or their comments as stupid. Sure there are some real twits among the lot, and some of these twits really stick out as being card-carrying twits. There are, however, some incredibly well-read intellectuals out there too.
For the most part, the comparisons that people draw between Bush's America and Hitler's Germany do not, and are not meant to, imply that genocide will result. Notice though that the people who bring up the genocide connection are the ones that most desperately want to kill the message entirely.
The more accurate statement is that we live in a fascist police state like that of Nazi Germany prior to the War wherein the civil liberties of citizens who are not part of a special class are trampled upon in the name patriotism and nationalism; and wherein the government makes extensive use of symbols and rhetoric to create a national sense of unity and mythological greatness amid an environment of fear and perpetual danger caused by outsiders who work from within and without to destroy our nation; and wherein the government uses censorship to control what information the public (and other government agencies) has access to.
Of course, if someone said all this, someone else would rant about how we're not like Nazi Germany because millions of [insert group of undesirables] haven't been murdered.
It would probably make more sense to call it, OS X 2.0 instead of OS XI. I love the Windows XP name. It works on several levels and sounds cool. Windows 6.0 is just weak. Microsoft will have to stick with the XP name for at least a couple of iterations. I don't know about the Mac crowd. Hasn't it been the tradition to just refer to MacOS by its version number (ie, System 7, etc) and not by some catchy brand?
Try Emacs !Once you get your key bindings right, it's really a fabulous editor. Lisp grows on you FAST. .NET Evangelist, has some tools for doing C# in Emacs. Also the people at @ic#code have a free as in beer, but still open-source IDE for C# programming. I don't know if I can do straight C/C++ with it. The screenshot has me believing otherwise. It looks like Visual Basic. I'm thinking I'll give that one a try before tackling Emacs.
Since you're an Emacs person, Brad Merrill, a Microsoft
While we're on the subject, I've just found that Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004 works as an IDE for C# programming. It does color syntax highlighting, which is an important feature for me, but I haven't found any other standard programming IDE features.
Finally, not being an Emacs guru, I'm not sure which implementation to get. I can always use Cygwin unless there's a regular Win32 port. However, I also found a Windows version that claims to be smaller and lighter at http://www.notgnu.org/ Any recommendations?
From the article: .mail domain has been put forward by anti-spam workers who want to use it for storing information about legitimate e-mail servers.
.mail be used eventually to silence people who legitimately run their own SMTP servers, forcing people to either give up their privacy by using their ISP's service (in the age of Carnivore), or pay an entry fee for the privilege to send e-mail idependently of one's ISP - which the registration fee for a .mail domain could essentially do if ISPs and servers all over the Internet reject any email not originating from a .mail or other pre-approved source.
One proposal for the
Putting aside the obvious problem of faked headers, etc, how would such a system be implemented? My ISP doesn't allow me to run an SMTP server. This pisses me off. But open relays exist somewhere...
Could
Maybe it's extreme. I'm shooting from the hip here, but it's enough I can't run my own SMTP!!
Thanks for the suggestion! For some reason when I read the title, John Bradley's XV came to mind. I don't think it gets more unpolished than that interface-wise. Actually, about the only polish I'd like to see on a picture viewer app's interface would be a skinned border that looks like either the white edge borders of a Polaroid snapshot or the borders of a picture frame.