If you care about getting Britney Spears' "Poison" in a listenable format in 20 years, by all means, break the DRM then.
What's more likely to happen by that time is that some company like Rhino Records will put out non-DRMed versions of the songs that have made it into public domain. It's not too far off from what they do now. You should check out their site. They are selling cheap cheap cheap CDs of content. If you look in the "oldies" section (which is what any current content will be in 20 years), they've got a lot of great deals. Like a box set with 32 classic songs for $19.98. That's 66 cents a song, and you get the box, the discs, the liner notes and more.
That's for the good stuff. There's a lot of stuff nobody is going to care about in 20 years, even from a sociological or achaeological context. This thread, for one...
I'm actually confused as to the exact meaning of your comment. Are you saying that the Apple apologists are out in force, or that the breaking-copyrights-and-violating-terms-and-condit ions apologists are out in force. Depending on your perspective, both could be considered true.
And your "Four legs good, two legs better!" qoute is equally hard to decipher. If you're a mountain goat, four legs is indeed better, but I kind of like my place--fewer legs notwithstanding--on the food chain. In fact, not to be a biped apologist, from an evolutionary standpoint, one could argue that the move to two legs is one of several elements that required the further brain development that makes us who we are. Who needs stability? I've got a brain that can give me good balance!
So please, if you do have an opinion, please clarify. If not, your current comment will certainly suffice.;-)
If it's just about playing the files on Linux, why does it actually need to strip off all of the protection leaving an easy-to-distribute copy on the drive? Why not make something that mimic's iTunes' method of authenticating the file? Build in a little system to let your Linux machine be one of the three authorized machines that FairPlay allows.
I'm sure Apple would not like something like that, but at least that's defensible and would not kill the goose with the golden egg, since it does not actually defeat the DRM terms to which the RIAA agreed when they licensed their content to the ITMS.
There are three reasons not to do something this way:
It's harder!
Cry me a freakin' river. If you don't like the DRM, go buy the CDs at a store and rip them to MP3s yourself!
But I want to distribute my MP3s over Kazaa because information wants to be free!
Information wants to be free as in speech, it's true. But that doesn't mean that it should be free as in beer. Beer wants to be free, but someone does actually have to pick up the tab if you want there to be more beer. Yes, I know all the arguments, and I have not lost any sleep over Metallica's lost sales, but all in all, I believe that the artist who creates something should be allowed to make the decision as to how it is distributed, and their fans should respect that decision.
I want to put this music on some device other than that damned overpriced iPod!
So use a different music service! All the other services support much more byzantine DRM which fills the coffers of a bigger, badder company, which will not be named here. The merits of the iPod vs. other players can be discussed ad infinitum, but if, at the end of the day, you want to download your music legally and use a non-iPod device, just use a different service. Or buy the CDs and rip them yourself.
I guess there is another reason, a la Mt. Everest. I want to challenge the DRM because it's there. I don't have a good argument against that. Do it all you like. Just don't distribute the program so that anyone else can do it without a shred of technical knowledge.
In short, do the right thing, m'kay? It's worth it in the end.
Sadly, you're right. You don't have to look far for examples; look at SMTP, for example. It's a sort of Utopian networking standard, and what do we get for such openness? 60% of all e-mail is now SPAM.
I really do believe that *most* people *want* to do the *right* thing. The problem is it just takes a couple of fsking @$$holes to scroo it all up.
OK, I'll admit it, I'm a long-time Apple user. But I'm not too quick to defend them when they are wrong. The first poster had a good point in that ITMS would not even exist without some DRM, and the reason for that is not because of Apple or any other retailer. It is because without the DRM, the RIAA would not permit any sort of digital distribution.
You want fair use? Fine! Write your own program for doing whatever you want. But to distribute a public project which is essentially a tool for excising the golden egg from the goose is not a sustainable action. Didn't anyone read Aesop's Fables as a kid?
Forget Aesop. What about Jurassic Park? Aren't there a million examples of the same moral? "Just because you CAN do something doesn't make it right."
Too true, too true. And some of these companies invent problems to solve. Take razor companies like BIC and Gilette, for example. Do you know how many patents they have on the razor head for the Sensor XL? Something like 20. And half of them are on the mechanism for holding the head to the handle.
Why do they do this? It's not really to make a better shave like they say. It's so that once they've spent millions of dollars pushing a particular product, someone else can't come out with "Sensor-compatible" heads to take away their massive profits.
I understand that companies need to protect themselves, but it's one thing when they make something different that's better, and quite another when they've made something that's different and just better marketed. This sort of patent activity is a waste of time and an abuse of the system which makes it more difficult for legitimate inventions to be properly considered.
OK, I'm done with my little soapbox rant. It's just that I know some people who are small inventors and have a few patents having to do with radiation detectors, and I've seen the work that he's gone through to protect his inventions, and it makes me sick to think that some huge company with a big IP law department can force through some ridiculous patent while it takes a little guy years to get the final paperwork on truly innovative concepts.
Didn't one of those Cray folks say something like, "Would you rather have one ox pulling your wagon, or 1,000 chickens?" If I just need pure strength and control, the ox is indeed the right solution. However, if I run out of food on the trip, it's nice to know with the chickens that I can pull one out and eat it without too much loss to my system. If I start pulling individual meal-size chunks out of my ox, that could be a problem...
It's really nice when this sort of thing happens, isn't it? I mean, if they've got strong winds, why not use them? If they've got strong tides, why not use them?
Now if they could only capture all those lemmings and hook them up to little hamster wheel generators around the time they start running toward the sea, they'd have an energy surplus they could sell off cheap!
Obligatory Spinal Tap reference...
on
Giant Sub-Woofer
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· Score: 5, Funny
There are a handful of differences, though many of the definitions overlap.
The simplest way to think of these two classifications is that
- "Supercomputer" refers to processing speed and is defined differently in different contexts (i.e. Apple calling its G4 400 a supercomputer because of an outdated US Customs document).
- "Mainframe" refers to large systems that many users are going to use at the same time, typically via dumb terminal interfaces. Most importantly, mainframes have IO architectures which blow any desktop/workstation out of the water. A good mainframe can be talking to 500 terminals while printing 1000 different bank statements to 100 different high-speed line printers without even breaking a sweat.
Hope this helps. Any other fun definitions to add?
I actually applied for a job some years back at a place called Walker Interactive Systems. I don't know if they're still around, but at the time they were, co-incidentally enough, a major IBM partner. Your comment reminded me of this because while I was fluent in C, Scheme, Pascal and several versions of assembly at the time, this was a few years before the boom began (about 1993), and they were being picky. They told me, "We're really only interested in people with five or more years experience in COBOL coding.
I told them that with two weeks and a good book, I could be as fluent in COBOL as any of their engineers, but that wasn't good enough. I decided right then I didn't want to work for anyone as rigid as that. I don't know how they did in the boom, but I rememember hearing about them bleeding red ink just a couple of years later. And they don't appear to be on the Nasdaq anymore...
Gotta agree; they do good work at Apple. Good enough that I can get my work done without having to futz around with everything endlessly to no real purpose.
Once I changed the default system font so that my menu bar and file names and everything showed up in "sand", but that quicly lost its fun. I have my background images cycle through my vacation photos, but other than that, I don't waste my time modifying the environment.
I know someone who works at CollabNet, and they require engineers to be available at all times, to train their Indian counterparts to take over their jobs and work six or more days a week. They're allowed to telecommute if they are over six days of work.
People who didn't buck up got laid off and replaced with people willing to work 80-100 hours per week.
I'm sure my friend would have something to say on the matter, but s/he doesn't have time to read or write to/.
Names and genders have been obfuscated to protect the already tenuously employed.
Funny... I was thinking about this from another angle. If it's the cool factor that sells the iPods, I was thinking about auctioning off my white headphones on eBay...
Yup, 512k built-in, 512 add-in, and an external 2MB add-on on that odd port on the left-hand side. It looked like a 1-inch wide extension to the box, and had a pass-through just in case you wanted to buy a $200.00 SCSI adapter and a $300.00 20 MB (that's *M* as in MEGA) HD.
You're probably right. I'm sure if they go to hookers to celebrate their latest settlement, they probably go top-shelf. There; I did it, and now I'm ashamed.
This reminds me of wasting hours and hours on my Amiga500. Yeah, it only had 3MB of RAM and no hard drive, but give me a blitter chip and four channel audio any day! Anyway, there was a great version of Rexx for the Amiga that became the defacto scripting dialect of the day. Great stuff, that aRexx.
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Agreed. The comment was indeed intended to be merely tongue in cheek.
Because there were at least five or ten good songs in that archive!
And don't forget the 95% who have gotten most of their collections from Napster!
...and spending countless hours at the hardware store trying to find just the right parts to make the coolest bong in the school district?
What's more likely to happen by that time is that some company like Rhino Records will put out non-DRMed versions of the songs that have made it into public domain. It's not too far off from what they do now. You should check out their site. They are selling cheap cheap cheap CDs of content. If you look in the "oldies" section (which is what any current content will be in 20 years), they've got a lot of great deals. Like a box set with 32 classic songs for $19.98. That's 66 cents a song, and you get the box, the discs, the liner notes and more.
That's for the good stuff. There's a lot of stuff nobody is going to care about in 20 years, even from a sociological or achaeological context. This thread, for one...
And your "Four legs good, two legs better!" qoute is equally hard to decipher. If you're a mountain goat, four legs is indeed better, but I kind of like my place--fewer legs notwithstanding--on the food chain. In fact, not to be a biped apologist, from an evolutionary standpoint, one could argue that the move to two legs is one of several elements that required the further brain development that makes us who we are. Who needs stability? I've got a brain that can give me good balance!
So please, if you do have an opinion, please clarify. If not, your current comment will certainly suffice. ;-)
I'm sure Apple would not like something like that, but at least that's defensible and would not kill the goose with the golden egg, since it does not actually defeat the DRM terms to which the RIAA agreed when they licensed their content to the ITMS.
There are three reasons not to do something this way:
It's harder! Cry me a freakin' river. If you don't like the DRM, go buy the CDs at a store and rip them to MP3s yourself! But I want to distribute my MP3s over Kazaa because information wants to be free! Information wants to be free as in speech, it's true. But that doesn't mean that it should be free as in beer. Beer wants to be free, but someone does actually have to pick up the tab if you want there to be more beer. Yes, I know all the arguments, and I have not lost any sleep over Metallica's lost sales, but all in all, I believe that the artist who creates something should be allowed to make the decision as to how it is distributed, and their fans should respect that decision. I want to put this music on some device other than that damned overpriced iPod! So use a different music service! All the other services support much more byzantine DRM which fills the coffers of a bigger, badder company, which will not be named here. The merits of the iPod vs. other players can be discussed ad infinitum, but if, at the end of the day, you want to download your music legally and use a non-iPod device, just use a different service. Or buy the CDs and rip them yourself. I guess there is another reason, a la Mt. Everest. I want to challenge the DRM because it's there. I don't have a good argument against that. Do it all you like. Just don't distribute the program so that anyone else can do it without a shred of technical knowledge.In short, do the right thing, m'kay? It's worth it in the end.
I really do believe that *most* people *want* to do the *right* thing. The problem is it just takes a couple of fsking @$$holes to scroo it all up.
OK, I'll admit it, I'm a long-time Apple user. But I'm not too quick to defend them when they are wrong. The first poster had a good point in that ITMS would not even exist without some DRM, and the reason for that is not because of Apple or any other retailer. It is because without the DRM, the RIAA would not permit any sort of digital distribution.
You want fair use? Fine! Write your own program for doing whatever you want. But to distribute a public project which is essentially a tool for excising the golden egg from the goose is not a sustainable action. Didn't anyone read Aesop's Fables as a kid?
Forget Aesop. What about Jurassic Park? Aren't there a million examples of the same moral? "Just because you CAN do something doesn't make it right."
Why do they do this? It's not really to make a better shave like they say. It's so that once they've spent millions of dollars pushing a particular product, someone else can't come out with "Sensor-compatible" heads to take away their massive profits.
I understand that companies need to protect themselves, but it's one thing when they make something different that's better, and quite another when they've made something that's different and just better marketed. This sort of patent activity is a waste of time and an abuse of the system which makes it more difficult for legitimate inventions to be properly considered.
OK, I'm done with my little soapbox rant. It's just that I know some people who are small inventors and have a few patents having to do with radiation detectors, and I've seen the work that he's gone through to protect his inventions, and it makes me sick to think that some huge company with a big IP law department can force through some ridiculous patent while it takes a little guy years to get the final paperwork on truly innovative concepts.
Sigh.
Didn't one of those Cray folks say something like, "Would you rather have one ox pulling your wagon, or 1,000 chickens?" If I just need pure strength and control, the ox is indeed the right solution. However, if I run out of food on the trip, it's nice to know with the chickens that I can pull one out and eat it without too much loss to my system. If I start pulling individual meal-size chunks out of my ox, that could be a problem...
Now if they could only capture all those lemmings and hook them up to little hamster wheel generators around the time they start running toward the sea, they'd have an energy surplus they could sell off cheap!
The main question is, does it go to eleven?
No, no. The rigidity that I was referring to was the 5 year requirement.
The simplest way to think of these two classifications is that
- "Supercomputer" refers to processing speed and is defined differently in different contexts (i.e. Apple calling its G4 400 a supercomputer because of an outdated US Customs document).
- "Mainframe" refers to large systems that many users are going to use at the same time, typically via dumb terminal interfaces. Most importantly, mainframes have IO architectures which blow any desktop/workstation out of the water. A good mainframe can be talking to 500 terminals while printing 1000 different bank statements to 100 different high-speed line printers without even breaking a sweat.
Hope this helps. Any other fun definitions to add?
I told them that with two weeks and a good book, I could be as fluent in COBOL as any of their engineers, but that wasn't good enough. I decided right then I didn't want to work for anyone as rigid as that. I don't know how they did in the boom, but I rememember hearing about them bleeding red ink just a couple of years later. And they don't appear to be on the Nasdaq anymore...
Once I changed the default system font so that my menu bar and file names and everything showed up in "sand", but that quicly lost its fun. I have my background images cycle through my vacation photos, but other than that, I don't waste my time modifying the environment.
People who didn't buck up got laid off and replaced with people willing to work 80-100 hours per week.
I'm sure my friend would have something to say on the matter, but s/he doesn't have time to read or write to /.
Names and genders have been obfuscated to protect the already tenuously employed.
Can't you picture it? :-( :-(
UR TOO kewl!!!!! What seet RU in??
OMG, Im so embarrassed!!!!!!!. Im in da blEEEchers
Funny... I was thinking about this from another angle. If it's the cool factor that sells the iPods, I was thinking about auctioning off my white headphones on eBay...
Does anyone remember what Spock's first name was?
My understanding is that they are stepping in to save the PC by uniting the X-Box and Windows game development environment.
Those were the days.
Must... not... make... obscene... joke... about... lawyers'... sexual... proclivities!
You're probably right. I'm sure if they go to hookers to celebrate their latest settlement, they probably go top-shelf. There; I did it, and now I'm ashamed.
This reminds me of wasting hours and hours on my Amiga500. Yeah, it only had 3MB of RAM and no hard drive, but give me a blitter chip and four channel audio any day! Anyway, there was a great version of Rexx for the Amiga that became the defacto scripting dialect of the day. Great stuff, that aRexx.