Yes it is a problem -- depending on the contract, but most would be of the "all your music are belong to us in perpetuity" kind, I reckon.
But this is not a reason why established artists should not try to release their future art in any way that they want. And these artists should be thanked all the more because of this problem. That's what I've just done, and I'll be watching for their future releases, even if I'm not such a fan of their art.
or, a buffer under-run, maybe: if the artists would unite against the labels, perhaps they might end their contracts, and produce and distribute music as indepents...
Great, I've found a new project to work on while on my train-trips home: alter the Slashdotter firefox plugin so that it filters out any post containing the regex "[jJ]onh [dD]vorak". Also any post made by Zonk.
I hope 3.1 addresses my main gripe with RPMs: an RPM built for Fedora won't install into SUSE because of dependency issues, or vice versa.
I'm still reading the latest spec to see if this has been or is going to be addressed. When/if it is, then I'll be very happy, because it will mean finally the end to confusion about using the "right" RPM repositories for your distro: if the distro is LSB compliant, then any RPM repository for that distro should work with other LSB compliant distros, with the dependencies for packages containing Base libraries being met or at least consistant accross the distros.
Until that happy day, the LSB doesn't add a lot of value to me as an end-user. As a developer, it does have some small value, in that it provides me a consistent API, but that's about it...
I commute by train (when not telecomuting, that is). It's a 1.5 hour trip in each direction. It would be 45-50 minutes to drive it.
In my busy life with a new family, this actually gains me time for reading a book, or watching a DVD, or even (if I'm extremely bored) catching up on email! I would not get this at home, trust me!
Here's some quick math: 3 hours per day, 5 days a week for 50 weeks = 750 hours all to myself (about a month - 31.25 days per anum)! Even if I had to work for half of that time while I commute, it's still an extra 2 weeks every year, for reading a good book.
I highly recommend it for people who would otherwise not get a spare hour or two to themselves. That is, if trains or other public transport which you do not have to drive are an option to you.
“640KB ought to be enough for everybody”—alleggedly said by Bill Gates, 1981
You can never have too much storage capacity. I think that a portable USB holostorage device with about a terabyte or two would suit many people nicely just for carying around their photos and MP3 collections, home movies and recorded video conferences...;-)
But appart from that, these are sensible questions, and the TFA doesn't say anything to answer them. There's a good/. comment further down with better information.
This is a great point, but I think it's open, since this is not a law, it's a code-of-practice.
An ISP cannot be convicted for failure to comply with a code-of-practice. The worst that might happen is that said ISP would not be able to say “We comply with the Australian ISP code-of-practice regarding SPAM protection”.
The ISP may suffer financially since it doesn't have that tick-box feature, so the cost/benefit of implementing the Code could be weighed against the percieved risk of customer disenchantment through not implementing it.
Summary: market preasure would probably drive adoption without needing to charge end-customers. Though whether the risk of customer attrition is real or not would probably only surface from customer feedback, so this is all conjecture (of course, this is/.;-) The alternative (ISP offers a spam-filtering service for a fee) would need to be weighed against the percieved market for this service.
I wonder who will fold on the OpenGL thing first? Big game vendors like id prefer it to DirectX... my synicism says id would roll over, but when you consider the market share of non-Windows + PlayStation against Windows+Xbox, it could be close either way...
People who understand the dangers of Digital Restrictions Management at a technical level (ie.Free and Open Source software developers) should warn the general public to avoid buying DRM-crippled hardware.
Yeah, I agree with all of your post, but who are people going to buy non-DRM hardware from??? Today, AMD (but they are/will follow suit). Alternatives I see (not for the mainstream):
Don't upgrade anymore. Even assuming you don't care about games on your PC (or settle for a console for games), so long as you use high-performance app's (like video rendering for your home movies), this is not workable for very long
Build your own CPU cluster from slower, but DRM-free hardware. Might work, or might not, depending on how easy it is to parallelise your high-performance apps that need the newer CPUs
Build your own CPU. This is workable only if you have access to your own fabrication facility.
Use (currently non-existent) Mod-chips. This is probably the most likely to succeed, and will probably emerge as a black-market industry
The first two options don't go well if you need to replace broken/stolen equipment either.
As you point out, people won't be able to trust the new Trusted Computing PCs. In my mind, they aren't realy PCs anymore, just as Macintels aren't PCs either, even if they share a lot of the components.
So effectively we will see the end of open/trusted commodity computers.:-(
Witness patent battles, intellectual property and copyright battles, lawsuits, hostile takeovers, noncompete agreements and violations of noncompete agreements, "new enterpreneurship" in which you work to gain expertise, then leave the company and start your own doing the same things, corporate cutbacks in benefits and resorting to temp workers and outsourcing...
There are all activities taken by employers, not employees... That is companies. So companies should be paranoid because their own behaviour supports their paranoia?
Now, if there were an increase in actual instances of industrial espionage or leaking of trade secrets, I would see some meagre justification for this corporate stance to not trust employees. However it appears from my viewpoint that corporations are modelling their expectations of employee behaviour from their own behaviour. This model should be carefully assessed before implementing a corporate direction on security, because all security measures have a cost in employee effectiveness (and some, such as email scanning, adversely affect morale and in fact could lead to adverse behaviour).
That's cool, thanks for letting me know:-) I'm glad you had some success.
You may (or may not...) have some success getting her Windows install to run inside Xen (which is included in SuSE 10). Then she would have the best of both worlds. Xen is not an emulator like WINE, but more like a virtual PC environment like VMWare. (So, you would install Windows on the PC along with SuSE, and then have Xen boot into Windows from inside SuSE -- apparently you get nearly native speed, but I have a bucket of salt...)
I haven't played with Xen yet, so I can't recommend it, and it might be a fiddle to get it going, don't know. But it's something to keep in the back of your head for next time, maybe...
Well, I agree that the internal desktop (and the MDI interface model in general) sucks, but is it a bad idea, or is it just an unworkable implementation of a good idea?
The good points of the internal desktop were that the different document types could be made to work together in a fasion that the OS doesn't seem able to do (the office suite is able to get at the meta-data and internals of your documents, and facilitates good indexing and integration of the documents -- but the OS just shows you filename/type/size and a date). The bad points are that the "Office" desktop and the "Real/OS" desktop are as seperate from each other as the "Physical" desktop items that your computer sits upon. So if you have a document that isn't produced from one of the suite's programes, it becomes difficult to locate and use it in the office desktop.
I would like to see the some of the ideas from SO5 and the winner's proposals migrate into the actual OS desktop. Unfortunately that would mean sharing meta-knowledge of the documents between the OS and the office apps, and would effectively end the cross-platform goals for KOffice and OOo.
The latest KDE (available on SUSE 10 -- I'm a recent SUSE convert now that Novell's Eval version can be had for $0, or OpenSuse is "Free" but without Flash, Real, Java...) fits most of these requirements:
Windows explorer clone with drag-n-drop: KDE's file manager "konqueror" does everything explorer.exe can, and better (e.g. you can filter files, to show only images, say, like the old Windows 3.x filemanager). Drag-n-drop works between konqueror and other KDE apps, and between most GNOME apps too (in fact in SUSE, the anoying distinction between KDE/GNOME is almost completely hidden from users now). You can make it behave like Windows explorer, or Norton Commander. FTP is transparent: just type the FTP URL in a location bar and drag-n-drop files as if the FTP server was another disc drive in your computer. Same for archives: konqueror automatically browses through.tgz and.zip files just like Windows does for.zip files.
Clipboard: Thanks to the freedesktop.org initiative, all KDE and GNOME programs now support cut-and-paste operations between each other. This works as in Windows, and the keys are the same (Ctrl-C/X,Ctrl-V), or X-style: just select to copy and then middle-click to paste. You can embed graphics/sounds in text documents if you want, either directly, or OLE-style.
In addition, KDE's klipboard words like the old Windows 3.x clipbook and lets you keep more than one item in the clipboard at a time.
Media players:This is still a weak area in standard distro installs. You need to install extra media players and muck around a bit (probably a week-end's worth of surfing). The best for.wmv,.avi,.xvid etc is MPlayer, which can be installed for SUSE with a bit of playing around. For music, amaroK or XMMS are both good, and support good audio filters. Video filters work too in Kaffeine.
There are good media editors like Audacity (audio editor), Rosegarden (effectively Cubase for Linux), kino (for DV camera work) and Blender and Jashaka (looks like the sort of things that ILM or Weta Digital use in making movies!)
Image viewers:There are too many of these! My favourites are gwenview (quite a lot like ACDSee) and digikam (which will talk to your digital camera too, and also supports drag-n-drop and cut-n-paste between KDE apps)
Image manipulations:My favourites are GIMP and ImageMagick, both can do quite a lot. I'm not familiar with PaintshopPro, I expect that GIMP/ImageMagick can do everything this can (?) but will require relearning some things. e.g. drag-n-drop won't work with GIMP, but cut-n-paste does. ImageMagick is a set of command-line tools, great for batch but there are probably better things for interactive.
I belive SUSE 10.0 supports the Nvidia 6100. Check for yourself here.
The Eval version of SUSE is free (as in beer) and includes a JRE pre-installed. No hoops.
When building a system, it pays (both meanings) to find out requirements before purchasing. If you knew ahead of time that Linux was an option, you could research any distro's supported hardware list and by that equipment.
So, in essence, they're saying they want desktops cluttered with unnecessary features
Actually, if they really want that, then Linux can easily provide it. My favourites are the KDE applets that do things like show you the Moon's phase, or xeyes, or kfish, or klife, or....:-)
Well then, the headline should have been: "Cane Toads Evloving Longer Legs"...
I have heard that there is now a solution to the original pest (the beetle) involving some native critter. Unfortunately the toads are still a major issue, and the only solution appears to be domestic travel (squish with cars)...
Why they would try to give this product to consumers when it is obviously too expensive to market as a real DVD alternative is beyond me. Especially since I know I get by just fine on a divx rip of a movie.
Well, you just hit it straight away: Sony beleive they have "good" DRM with BlueRay. That's why. Of course, whether Sony are correct is another issue.
What will happen is: all DRM'ed media will only be playable on Windows. If I legally purchase or rent a new-DRMed movie and want to watch it, I must install Windows on my PC, or buy a DRMed player for my living room. I will not be able to watch it on my FOSS software or home-built hardware, even though I have not deprived the DRMed content owner of their money. M$/Sony are attempting to ensure that I don't deprive _them_ of money by looking for alternate ways to view the media I already purchased.
Slashdot Mirror
This article is yet another ill-concieved, biased piece of FUD crap from the Register, brought to /. by Zonk.
/. is losing cred big-time.
Zonk should be dropped as a poster. Seriously,
But this is not a reason why established artists should not try to release their future art in any way that they want. And these artists should be thanked all the more because of this problem. That's what I've just done, and I'll be watching for their future releases, even if I'm not such a fan of their art.
or, a buffer under-run, maybe: if the artists would unite against the labels, perhaps they might end their contracts, and produce and distribute music as indepents...
Great, I've found a new project to work on while on my train-trips home: alter the Slashdotter firefox plugin so that it filters out any post containing the regex "[jJ]onh [dD]vorak". Also any post made by Zonk.
I'm still reading the latest spec to see if this has been or is going to be addressed. When/if it is, then I'll be very happy, because it will mean finally the end to confusion about using the "right" RPM repositories for your distro: if the distro is LSB compliant, then any RPM repository for that distro should work with other LSB compliant distros, with the dependencies for packages containing Base libraries being met or at least consistant accross the distros.
Until that happy day, the LSB doesn't add a lot of value to me as an end-user. As a developer, it does have some small value, in that it provides me a consistent API, but that's about it...
I commute by train (when not telecomuting, that is). It's a 1.5 hour trip in each direction. It would be 45-50 minutes to drive it. In my busy life with a new family, this actually gains me time for reading a book, or watching a DVD, or even (if I'm extremely bored) catching up on email! I would not get this at home, trust me! Here's some quick math: 3 hours per day, 5 days a week for 50 weeks = 750 hours all to myself (about a month - 31.25 days per anum)! Even if I had to work for half of that time while I commute, it's still an extra 2 weeks every year, for reading a good book. I highly recommend it for people who would otherwise not get a spare hour or two to themselves. That is, if trains or other public transport which you do not have to drive are an option to you.
I mean, come on! Can we please stop with the stupid /. articles and get on with nerd news? The past week's been rediculous.
But appart from that, these are sensible questions, and the TFA doesn't say anything to answer them. There's a good /. comment further down with better information.
An ISP cannot be convicted for failure to comply with a code-of-practice. The worst that might happen is that said ISP would not be able to say “We comply with the Australian ISP code-of-practice regarding SPAM protection”.
The ISP may suffer financially since it doesn't have that tick-box feature, so the cost/benefit of implementing the Code could be weighed against the percieved risk of customer disenchantment through not implementing it.
Summary: market preasure would probably drive adoption without needing to charge end-customers. Though whether the risk of customer attrition is real or not would probably only surface from customer feedback, so this is all conjecture (of course, this is /. ;-) The alternative (ISP offers a spam-filtering service for a fee) would need to be weighed against the percieved market for this service.
I wonder who will fold on the OpenGL thing first? Big game vendors like id prefer it to DirectX... my synicism says id would roll over, but when you consider the market share of non-Windows + PlayStation against Windows+Xbox, it could be close either way...
Agreed. Also the date you must buy new Trusted Computing hardware for Vista has also been pushed back. This is great news.
Yeah, I agree with all of your post, but who are people going to buy non-DRM hardware from??? Today, AMD (but they are/will follow suit). Alternatives I see (not for the mainstream):
The first two options don't go well if you need to replace broken/stolen equipment either.
As you point out, people won't be able to trust the new Trusted Computing PCs. In my mind, they aren't realy PCs anymore, just as Macintels aren't PCs either, even if they share a lot of the components.
So effectively we will see the end of open/trusted commodity computers. :-(
Now, if there were an increase in actual instances of industrial espionage or leaking of trade secrets, I would see some meagre justification for this corporate stance to not trust employees. However it appears from my viewpoint that corporations are modelling their expectations of employee behaviour from their own behaviour. This model should be carefully assessed before implementing a corporate direction on security, because all security measures have a cost in employee effectiveness (and some, such as email scanning, adversely affect morale and in fact could lead to adverse behaviour).
Conclusion: Don't buy or use anything with Symantec (or Norton) in it's name.
You may (or may not...) have some success getting her Windows install to run inside Xen (which is included in SuSE 10). Then she would have the best of both worlds. Xen is not an emulator like WINE, but more like a virtual PC environment like VMWare. (So, you would install Windows on the PC along with SuSE, and then have Xen boot into Windows from inside SuSE -- apparently you get nearly native speed, but I have a bucket of salt...)
I haven't played with Xen yet, so I can't recommend it, and it might be a fiddle to get it going, don't know. But it's something to keep in the back of your head for next time, maybe...
Well, I agree that the internal desktop (and the MDI interface model in general) sucks, but is it a bad idea, or is it just an unworkable implementation of a good idea? The good points of the internal desktop were that the different document types could be made to work together in a fasion that the OS doesn't seem able to do (the office suite is able to get at the meta-data and internals of your documents, and facilitates good indexing and integration of the documents -- but the OS just shows you filename/type/size and a date). The bad points are that the "Office" desktop and the "Real/OS" desktop are as seperate from each other as the "Physical" desktop items that your computer sits upon. So if you have a document that isn't produced from one of the suite's programes, it becomes difficult to locate and use it in the office desktop. I would like to see the some of the ideas from SO5 and the winner's proposals migrate into the actual OS desktop. Unfortunately that would mean sharing meta-knowledge of the documents between the OS and the office apps, and would effectively end the cross-platform goals for KOffice and OOo.
In addition, KDE's klipboard words like the old Windows 3.x clipbook and lets you keep more than one item in the clipboard at a time.
There are good media editors like Audacity (audio editor), Rosegarden (effectively Cubase for Linux), kino (for DV camera work) and Blender and Jashaka (looks like the sort of things that ILM or Weta Digital use in making movies!)
I hope these help!
That is my take too. I encourage RIAA (or Canada's equiv') to legislate themselves out of business. It would suit them right.
Well then, the headline should have been: "Cane Toads Evloving Longer Legs"...
I have heard that there is now a solution to the original pest (the beetle) involving some native critter. Unfortunately the toads are still a major issue, and the only solution appears to be domestic travel (squish with cars)...
hope so. But it also looks a lot like the MCP interface in Tron. I want one of those....
What will happen is: all DRM'ed media will only be playable on Windows. If I legally purchase or rent a new-DRMed movie and want to watch it, I must install Windows on my PC, or buy a DRMed player for my living room. I will not be able to watch it on my FOSS software or home-built hardware, even though I have not deprived the DRMed content owner of their money. M$/Sony are attempting to ensure that I don't deprive _them_ of money by looking for alternate ways to view the media I already purchased.