Of course there is. What does a Blackberry do that something like a Treo with an IMAP client and web browser built into it can't do? I've seen my coworker's Blackberry and I'm not very impressed with it. He has to have his mail pulled by RIM from his IMAP servers and then pushed to his device. That seems like an unnecessary extra step IMHO.
And entering email on your PDA is easier than on the berry? Not in my experience. Besides, I think your message is right on. There are certainly more technically elegant solutions. That's not the point. The blackberry has the very clean, simple interface that just works, every time, right out of the box. No conflicts, no issues. Its a communications device, its as reliable as a pager. You don't spend all of your time worrying about coverage, or what network you're on, or whether the new firmware update is going to have an issue with your IMAP client.
It just works. And from a functional standpoint, an ugly but effective solution is way better than a sophisticated yet even slightly fragile one.
There really is no competitor to the BlackBerry when it comes to a complete solution. I realize that its trendy to be dismissive, but if you haven't at least played around with one, don't knock it until you do. If there was a true OSS or even standards-based alternative, that would be one thing - but there isn't. And the Feds really shouldn't be spending tons of money to develop solutions rather than buying COTS packages that work.
I'd love to see someone come up with a true competitor to the Blackberry. Hasn't happened yet...
My point is, why get something as small as a gig, when you can get 60 gigs for a little bit more?
Because it fits your needs, elegantly and simply? In a lot of ways your current post is like saying, "Why get a BMW 3-series when you could get a Crown Victoria for less money?" Size, contrary to popular belief, is far from everything.
But work is a major part of your life. It takes about half of your waking hours.
Oh, really? You're awake about 128 hours a week. You're at work about 40, leaving almost 90 hours free. If you structure your life around the concept that your time is valuable (live close to where you work, not an hour's drive from anywhere, even if it means a smaller house (which means less expensive crap to stuff into it, etc)), that's quite a bit of time.
Unless you work on the weekends, of course. In which case, I recommend not doing that.
I don't know of any broadband provider that doesn't offer guaranteed bandwidth connections - generally billed as "Business Accounts." Bandwidth numbers on most (all?) residential connections are labeled, admittedly in the small print, as peak. And you know what? They actually do deliver them a surprising amount of the time.
As someone who ran an ISP back in the '90s, let me tell you - the idea that you should guarantee everyone 5mbps+ download all the bloody time is just obscene. Think about it, that's only about 200 users to saturate even a theoretically perfect 1gbps pipe. ISPs have many more multiples of 200 users than they do 1gbps pipes.
You want the guaranteed bandwidth with no traffic shaping and symmetrical rates? Call 'em up and ask for it. But you'll pay for it, too. Want to pay 10% of the cost (or less) and have a few restrictions, like not flooding their upstream? That's available too. Want all the goodies for the cheap price? Sorry, but I'm not particularly sympathetic.
So let me ask you something....what do you do if you don't have ANY time during the week because of work, and your weekend is dominated by rest and chores that piled up from the week? How do you have time for relationships....or more importantly, the energy!?
Quit, if you can. Seriously. You are (or should be) way more than a job.
Not carrying a significant debt load is probably the single biggest contributor to being able to carry out that plan at will, of course. Still, I would say that you either want to find a relaxing (although interesting) job that gives you the time you need, or failing that at least a job that pays through the nose and lets you build up the savings necessary to get the flexibility to do what you want to do (even if that just means quitting for something else).
Do you value security and high pay over a potentially big reward (money, experience, personal satisfaction) that may or may not materialize? Would you be willing to leave a "good job" for something else that may be better or worse? How much do you believe in the start-up's chances and the people behind it?
Let me put it a better way. Why bother defining yourself by your job?
Show up at 8. Leave at 5. Every day. Give yourself a good life outside the office. Take up hobbies in your free time, which you'll have now and won't at the startup. Bank some money - if you can live off half your salary, that's a great cushion for the future when you do get the entreprenurial bug (or will let you retire surprisingly early if you don't).
But, in all seriousness, don't try to get everything you want out of life from your job. Take all of your vacation time every year. Insist on comp time and raises, too. Then go to Tahiti. Or train for marathons. Or play around with some cool scratch-an-itch software in your spare time (just don't spend it all in front of a monitor). Hang out with friends. Invest in yourself.
Don't let yourself become a "developer." You are a person. You have a job. The two are, should be, and can be seperate.
Stored procedures are BAD BAD BAD, I'm glad you have a hard time promoting those. Why?... So maybe it takes twice as long on the application servers to do what your stored procedure do - but you have a dozend application servers running and only one database
There are a few classic examples of situations in which SPs aren't just not BAD, but they've very GOOD. One of the classics is anything that depends on aggregating tons of data, especially in some kind of a tight loop. Network bandwidth is not the issue here, but network latency is. You're not talking about twice as long, depending on the queries you might be talking a couple of orders of magnitude. That really, really sucks.
Having said that, 99% or more of all SPs I've ever seen were worthless and crappy.
I think the main problem here is a conflict between two definitions of the word "theory" - from dictionary.com:
1) A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.
This is the one that most people are using when they're talking about things like the big bang theory.
6) An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.
AKA guess, hunch, belief. This is the one that ID proponents seem to be using to defend their use of the word. Heck, it confused me when I first encountered the scientific term, but IIRC that was something I learned in school before turning 10, so intentionally misleading people over the definitions is both annoying, and sad in that its so successful.
Even as stated, I would write the core in a highly tuned fashion (although C++ might not be my best choice for this), then write the GUI in the language of your choice, quite frankly. Optimise the bottlenecks (ie: your core processing) for speed, optimise everything else for maintainability and ease of development.
And you said:
This statement is just ignorant and wrong... It is vitally important that the tight inner loops be very fast but you could write the graphic output and network components in a shell script that calls command line packet/output programs written in java and it wouldn't slow the overall app much.
Well. Thanks. That makes so much more sense than my original WRONG post.
If you're willing to compromise performance to the point that you can use CORBA for IPC, then you should be more than willing to write it in the language of your choice, within reason. C, C#, C++, Java, all are far faster than your CORBA transport.
If you can provide more details about the specific requirements, you might get more informed responses. As it is, though, your stated goals really don't seem to add up.
Even as stated, I would write the core in a highly tuned fashion (although C++ might not be my best choice for this), then write the GUI in the language of your choice, quite frankly. Optimise the bottlenecks (ie: your core processing) for speed, optimise everything else for maintainability and ease of development.
However, we will stand by quietly while tables of hooded klansmen gather, or panthers, of avon representatives, or any other group, until we see people mentioning that table 9 is a fun place to be if you're gay. Then we'll enforce the rule.
Only if you subscribe to the notion that a parent of one gender or the other is not particularily important.
A second mom can love her daughter very dearly, but (unless the difference between genders is far more superficial than commonly-accepted evidence seems to indicate) she can never be the girl's father.
Well, the bigger extension of that argument is that - if it were true - widowed people with children should be forced to remarry. I mean, if it was that important...
But, of course, this also assumes that you have no friends of the opposite sex in your life if you're gay, which is rediculous.
That's a good point though. I mean, ammo? Is that realistic? Why not have an indicator on your weapon that shows you how much ammo you have left (or, in some cases when it wouldn't be obvious, just an unpleasant "click" sound)? Health and armor make more sense, although a visual picture (blood, debris, etc) would probably be better than either a bar or a number.
Good point, but I suppose that the difference would be that you *can* change the code and execute it -- albeit with difficulty (say, by changing the chip) -- and you are not legally restricted, which is the problem with DRM: its not that it is hard or difficult or virtually impossible to run modified code, is that if you circumvent the DRM they'll throw the DMCA book on you.
But that's (technically) not the fault of the DRM. After all, if you were willing to desolder/replace the chip in the first case, why not allow that in the second case? Or better yet, just run the GPL software on some different machine... after all, if I develop software on my machine and put it out on my FTP site, you don't have permission to download it, modify it, then upload it and run it on my server...
Its a tough little mental problem. Then again, that's what makes it an interesting edge case.
Cool. Now we just have to define "wire communication" - and for that matter "oral communication" as it refers to audible signal, such as a 300 baud modem. Which the code may well cover - I'm kicking myself for mentally skipping over the reference in my first post.
And NOTHING guarantees this at all. Indeed job queuing is pretty much random unless the OS has native tendencies. You won't get a stochastic job distribution among the processors, except by luck, and perhaps phase of the moon. So, fie.
Well, mayhap, and yet every modern OS is damnededly more responsive on a dual core/proc machine than it is on a single. After all, bottlenecks still exist in the best intentioned code.
That's the key, really. You don't need perfect distribution, just like you don't need a multi-lane road if you're in relatively even moving traffic. However, even the most (well, almost) brain-dead OS is able to shunt you around a temporarily blocked thread that's spinning CPU like there was no tomorrow if you have an extra processor - and it can be very difficult to correctly throttle the priority of a busy thread down and task-switch the heck out of it instead.
Interesting. I'm in Texas, so I looked up the appropriate statute. Here's a snippet:
Under the statute, consent is not required for the taping of a non-electronic communication uttered by a person who does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that communication. See definition of "oral communication," Texas Code Crim. Pro. Art. 18.20.
Now, I wonder just how closely they define "electronic communication"? Ignoring the fact that even a basic Bell telephone is electronic communication (as is a tape recorder for that matter), what if the signal travels over an IP network? Or is inside a PBX? And if that's legal because the final product is rendered audibly, what about recording the output of one of those old handset couplers?
If, however, you publish something that prevents copies from being made, then you forfeit the legal mechanism that the government has granted you. You are taking the job of preventing infringment of your work out of the government's hand, and taking responsibility for that yourself. After all, why should you be given protection from illicit copying of their work when your work is "uncopyable"?
This is, after all, exactly what happens when you choose to go after a patent instead of maintaining a trade secret. You either get federal protection (with expiration guarantees), or a theoretically open-ended timespan with no help from the government, but not both.
I don't see why this wouldn't work. I do see why it wouldn't be voted in, though.
There was an implicit form of rights management, in that only commercial printers have equipment capable of printing and binding on sufficiently thin paper to make a manageable book: if printed on conventional photocopier paper, the book is over three inches thick. Printing small sections for reference on photocopier paper is perfectly practical, but large-scale printing is not.
This is the key point. In very much the same way, music used to be impractical to store on any kind of a large scale except in its original format, due to technical limitations.
Now let's say that someone comes out with a pBook printer - something that can take a PDF document and generate a bound book with a quality comprable to that of a store-bought version. Let's assume that it costs around $50, with $5 ink/paper cartridges. Now how many people would be the (guessing) $30 hardcopy book? To extend this even closer to the music level, what if the ink/paper cartridges were somehow sold in the stores for $0.49 each? Again, how many people would buy the book? Probably some would, but a lot less than are buying it today.
Now how likely would you be to spend a lot of your own time working on your next technical book, if you knew it would be released in such a way that your royalties would be 1-2% of what they were for your last book?
Physical constraints work really well - up until the day that they surprisingly become irrelevant. That's when DRM becomes an issue.
I tend to think that eventually the entire concept will be discredited, because customers will choose with their dollars products that can be played on all their devices, and artist will choose to ally themselves their customers.
Unless the DRM is being pushed by a consortium (or single entity) that provides what most people want. Witness the iTMS DRM. Most people accept it, because those songs can play in iTunes and on their iPod - the leading technology. Less people are accepting of the MSFT approach because of the success of the iPod.
Now think about it - what if Word documents were all DRMd and could only be opened (legally) on Windows machines? If this had happened 5 years ago... would most people have complained? What would that have meant to the success of OSX, a large part of which is due to the availability of Office, without which many people won't consider it?
As long as 85%+ of the people are satisfied, the remaining 15% "voting with their wallets" won't have a significant impact and will tend to marginalize themselves.
You know, that's probably the single best anti-DRM post up here right now... and could probably be used successfully to challenge the DMCA if it could be kicked up high enough to the SCOTUS. Kudos. Making it illegal to exercise constitutional rights (because we're all pretending that theoretically copyrights will expire) is almost certainly an indication of an unconstitutional law.
So in essence, some hardware manufacturers have discovered a loophole. And so the GPL is been modified to compensate for this.
Well, what if someone makes a piece of hardware that runs on GPLed software, and has that software burnt into write-once memory? Admittedly, most people prefer to be able to reflash their firmware, but what if for reasons of budget, simplicity, et cetera, they decided not to? That would potentially include a lot of low-end devices.
Even with GPLv3 there's no guarantee that modifications you make to the software that comes with your device will run on that particular device. What it does guarantee (although so does GPLv2) is that you can take their code, modify it (or not), and use it in your own device, selling it as a competitor if you so choose. But nothing in v3 supports this any more than v2 did.
BUT - Any modifications that Dell makes to Linux, optimizations and whatnot, get released back to the community who can then take it and run it on non-Dell platforms to their heart's content. What is problem? You end up with an enhanced version of Linux that won't run on Dells without paying them.
The other alternative - if you take it as a given that Dell is releasing hardware that will only run signed binaries - is that you end up with an unenhanced version of Linux that also won't run on Dells, even if you offer to pay them. And this is better how exactly?
If Dell releases machines that won't run unsigned copies of Linux, then it doesn't matter if those copies of Linux were released under GPLv2, GPLv3, BSD, or any other license. You won't be able to run them. With that as a standard assumption (for this thread) across both sides, you can compare the different benefits and losses of making Linux available to them under a compatible (ie: GPLv2) license, or not, for the people who are not running their machines.
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Of course there is. What does a Blackberry do that something like a Treo with an IMAP client and web browser built into it can't do? I've seen my coworker's Blackberry and I'm not very impressed with it. He has to have his mail pulled by RIM from his IMAP servers and then pushed to his device. That seems like an unnecessary extra step IMHO.
And entering email on your PDA is easier than on the berry? Not in my experience. Besides, I think your message is right on. There are certainly more technically elegant solutions. That's not the point. The blackberry has the very clean, simple interface that just works, every time, right out of the box. No conflicts, no issues. Its a communications device, its as reliable as a pager. You don't spend all of your time worrying about coverage, or what network you're on, or whether the new firmware update is going to have an issue with your IMAP client.
It just works. And from a functional standpoint, an ugly but effective solution is way better than a sophisticated yet even slightly fragile one.
There really is no competitor to the BlackBerry when it comes to a complete solution. I realize that its trendy to be dismissive, but if you haven't at least played around with one, don't knock it until you do. If there was a true OSS or even standards-based alternative, that would be one thing - but there isn't. And the Feds really shouldn't be spending tons of money to develop solutions rather than buying COTS packages that work.
I'd love to see someone come up with a true competitor to the Blackberry. Hasn't happened yet...
My point is, why get something as small as a gig, when you can get 60 gigs for a little bit more?
Because it fits your needs, elegantly and simply? In a lot of ways your current post is like saying, "Why get a BMW 3-series when you could get a Crown Victoria for less money?" Size, contrary to popular belief, is far from everything.
But work is a major part of your life. It takes about half of your waking hours.
Oh, really? You're awake about 128 hours a week. You're at work about 40, leaving almost 90 hours free. If you structure your life around the concept that your time is valuable (live close to where you work, not an hour's drive from anywhere, even if it means a smaller house (which means less expensive crap to stuff into it, etc)), that's quite a bit of time.
Unless you work on the weekends, of course. In which case, I recommend not doing that.
I don't know of any broadband provider that doesn't offer guaranteed bandwidth connections - generally billed as "Business Accounts." Bandwidth numbers on most (all?) residential connections are labeled, admittedly in the small print, as peak. And you know what? They actually do deliver them a surprising amount of the time.
As someone who ran an ISP back in the '90s, let me tell you - the idea that you should guarantee everyone 5mbps+ download all the bloody time is just obscene. Think about it, that's only about 200 users to saturate even a theoretically perfect 1gbps pipe. ISPs have many more multiples of 200 users than they do 1gbps pipes.
You want the guaranteed bandwidth with no traffic shaping and symmetrical rates? Call 'em up and ask for it. But you'll pay for it, too. Want to pay 10% of the cost (or less) and have a few restrictions, like not flooding their upstream? That's available too. Want all the goodies for the cheap price? Sorry, but I'm not particularly sympathetic.
So let me ask you something....what do you do if you don't have ANY time during the week because of work, and your weekend is dominated by rest and chores that piled up from the week? How do you have time for relationships....or more importantly, the energy!?
Quit, if you can. Seriously. You are (or should be) way more than a job.
Not carrying a significant debt load is probably the single biggest contributor to being able to carry out that plan at will, of course. Still, I would say that you either want to find a relaxing (although interesting) job that gives you the time you need, or failing that at least a job that pays through the nose and lets you build up the savings necessary to get the flexibility to do what you want to do (even if that just means quitting for something else).
Do you value security and high pay over a potentially big reward (money, experience, personal satisfaction) that may or may not materialize? Would you be willing to leave a "good job" for something else that may be better or worse? How much do you believe in the start-up's chances and the people behind it?
Let me put it a better way. Why bother defining yourself by your job?
Show up at 8. Leave at 5. Every day. Give yourself a good life outside the office. Take up hobbies in your free time, which you'll have now and won't at the startup. Bank some money - if you can live off half your salary, that's a great cushion for the future when you do get the entreprenurial bug (or will let you retire surprisingly early if you don't).
But, in all seriousness, don't try to get everything you want out of life from your job. Take all of your vacation time every year. Insist on comp time and raises, too. Then go to Tahiti. Or train for marathons. Or play around with some cool scratch-an-itch software in your spare time (just don't spend it all in front of a monitor). Hang out with friends. Invest in yourself.
Don't let yourself become a "developer." You are a person. You have a job. The two are, should be, and can be seperate.
Stored procedures are BAD BAD BAD, I'm glad you have a hard time promoting those. Why? ... So maybe it takes twice as long on the application servers to do what your stored procedure do - but you have a dozend application servers running and only one database
There are a few classic examples of situations in which SPs aren't just not BAD, but they've very GOOD. One of the classics is anything that depends on aggregating tons of data, especially in some kind of a tight loop. Network bandwidth is not the issue here, but network latency is. You're not talking about twice as long, depending on the queries you might be talking a couple of orders of magnitude. That really, really sucks.
Having said that, 99% or more of all SPs I've ever seen were worthless and crappy.
I think the main problem here is a conflict between two definitions of the word "theory" - from dictionary.com:
1) A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.
This is the one that most people are using when they're talking about things like the big bang theory.
6) An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.
AKA guess, hunch, belief. This is the one that ID proponents seem to be using to defend their use of the word. Heck, it confused me when I first encountered the scientific term, but IIRC that was something I learned in school before turning 10, so intentionally misleading people over the definitions is both annoying, and sad in that its so successful.
So I said:
... It is vitally important that the tight inner loops be very fast but you could write the graphic output and network components in a shell script that calls command line packet/output programs written in java and it wouldn't slow the overall app much.
Even as stated, I would write the core in a highly tuned fashion (although C++ might not be my best choice for this), then write the GUI in the language of your choice, quite frankly. Optimise the bottlenecks (ie: your core processing) for speed, optimise everything else for maintainability and ease of development.
And you said:
This statement is just ignorant and wrong
Well. Thanks. That makes so much more sense than my original WRONG post.
If you're willing to compromise performance to the point that you can use CORBA for IPC, then you should be more than willing to write it in the language of your choice, within reason. C, C#, C++, Java, all are far faster than your CORBA transport.
If you can provide more details about the specific requirements, you might get more informed responses. As it is, though, your stated goals really don't seem to add up.
Even as stated, I would write the core in a highly tuned fashion (although C++ might not be my best choice for this), then write the GUI in the language of your choice, quite frankly. Optimise the bottlenecks (ie: your core processing) for speed, optimise everything else for maintainability and ease of development.
However, we will stand by quietly while tables of hooded klansmen gather, or panthers, of avon representatives, or any other group, until we see people mentioning that table 9 is a fun place to be if you're gay. Then we'll enforce the rule.
Only if you subscribe to the notion that a parent of one gender or the other is not particularily important.
A second mom can love her daughter very dearly, but (unless the difference between genders is far more superficial than commonly-accepted evidence seems to indicate) she can never be the girl's father.
Well, the bigger extension of that argument is that - if it were true - widowed people with children should be forced to remarry. I mean, if it was that important...
But, of course, this also assumes that you have no friends of the opposite sex in your life if you're gay, which is rediculous.
That's a good point though. I mean, ammo? Is that realistic? Why not have an indicator on your weapon that shows you how much ammo you have left (or, in some cases when it wouldn't be obvious, just an unpleasant "click" sound)? Health and armor make more sense, although a visual picture (blood, debris, etc) would probably be better than either a bar or a number.
Good point, but I suppose that the difference would be that you *can* change the code and execute it -- albeit with difficulty (say, by changing the chip) -- and you are not legally restricted, which is the problem with DRM: its not that it is hard or difficult or virtually impossible to run modified code, is that if you circumvent the DRM they'll throw the DMCA book on you.
But that's (technically) not the fault of the DRM. After all, if you were willing to desolder/replace the chip in the first case, why not allow that in the second case? Or better yet, just run the GPL software on some different machine... after all, if I develop software on my machine and put it out on my FTP site, you don't have permission to download it, modify it, then upload it and run it on my server...
Its a tough little mental problem. Then again, that's what makes it an interesting edge case.
Cool. Now we just have to define "wire communication" - and for that matter "oral communication" as it refers to audible signal, such as a 300 baud modem. Which the code may well cover - I'm kicking myself for mentally skipping over the reference in my first post.
That's pretty impressive, since regular HotSpot only access is $29/month anyway. Almost makes me wish I'd gone with TMobile...
And NOTHING guarantees this at all. Indeed job queuing is pretty much random unless the OS has native tendencies. You won't get a stochastic job distribution among the processors, except by luck, and perhaps phase of the moon. So, fie.
Well, mayhap, and yet every modern OS is damnededly more responsive on a dual core/proc machine than it is on a single. After all, bottlenecks still exist in the best intentioned code.
That's the key, really. You don't need perfect distribution, just like you don't need a multi-lane road if you're in relatively even moving traffic. However, even the most (well, almost) brain-dead OS is able to shunt you around a temporarily blocked thread that's spinning CPU like there was no tomorrow if you have an extra processor - and it can be very difficult to correctly throttle the priority of a busy thread down and task-switch the heck out of it instead.
Interesting. I'm in Texas, so I looked up the appropriate statute. Here's a snippet:
Under the statute, consent is not required for the taping of a non-electronic communication uttered by a person who does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that communication. See definition of "oral communication," Texas Code Crim. Pro. Art. 18.20.
Now, I wonder just how closely they define "electronic communication"? Ignoring the fact that even a basic Bell telephone is electronic communication (as is a tape recorder for that matter), what if the signal travels over an IP network? Or is inside a PBX? And if that's legal because the final product is rendered audibly, what about recording the output of one of those old handset couplers?
Hmm.
If, however, you publish something that prevents copies from being made, then you forfeit the legal mechanism that the government has granted you. You are taking the job of preventing infringment of your work out of the government's hand, and taking responsibility for that yourself. After all, why should you be given protection from illicit copying of their work when your work is "uncopyable"?
This is, after all, exactly what happens when you choose to go after a patent instead of maintaining a trade secret. You either get federal protection (with expiration guarantees), or a theoretically open-ended timespan with no help from the government, but not both.
I don't see why this wouldn't work. I do see why it wouldn't be voted in, though.
There was an implicit form of rights management, in that only commercial printers have equipment capable of printing and binding on sufficiently thin paper to make a manageable book: if printed on conventional photocopier paper, the book is over three inches thick. Printing small sections for reference on photocopier paper is perfectly practical, but large-scale printing is not.
This is the key point. In very much the same way, music used to be impractical to store on any kind of a large scale except in its original format, due to technical limitations.
Now let's say that someone comes out with a pBook printer - something that can take a PDF document and generate a bound book with a quality comprable to that of a store-bought version. Let's assume that it costs around $50, with $5 ink/paper cartridges. Now how many people would be the (guessing) $30 hardcopy book? To extend this even closer to the music level, what if the ink/paper cartridges were somehow sold in the stores for $0.49 each? Again, how many people would buy the book? Probably some would, but a lot less than are buying it today.
Now how likely would you be to spend a lot of your own time working on your next technical book, if you knew it would be released in such a way that your royalties would be 1-2% of what they were for your last book?
Physical constraints work really well - up until the day that they surprisingly become irrelevant. That's when DRM becomes an issue.
I tend to think that eventually the entire concept will be discredited, because customers will choose with their dollars products that can be played on all their devices, and artist will choose to ally themselves their customers.
Unless the DRM is being pushed by a consortium (or single entity) that provides what most people want. Witness the iTMS DRM. Most people accept it, because those songs can play in iTunes and on their iPod - the leading technology. Less people are accepting of the MSFT approach because of the success of the iPod.
Now think about it - what if Word documents were all DRMd and could only be opened (legally) on Windows machines? If this had happened 5 years ago... would most people have complained? What would that have meant to the success of OSX, a large part of which is due to the availability of Office, without which many people won't consider it?
As long as 85%+ of the people are satisfied, the remaining 15% "voting with their wallets" won't have a significant impact and will tend to marginalize themselves.
You know, that's probably the single best anti-DRM post up here right now... and could probably be used successfully to challenge the DMCA if it could be kicked up high enough to the SCOTUS. Kudos. Making it illegal to exercise constitutional rights (because we're all pretending that theoretically copyrights will expire) is almost certainly an indication of an unconstitutional law.
So in essence, some hardware manufacturers have discovered a loophole. And so the GPL is been modified to compensate for this.
Well, what if someone makes a piece of hardware that runs on GPLed software, and has that software burnt into write-once memory? Admittedly, most people prefer to be able to reflash their firmware, but what if for reasons of budget, simplicity, et cetera, they decided not to? That would potentially include a lot of low-end devices.
Even with GPLv3 there's no guarantee that modifications you make to the software that comes with your device will run on that particular device. What it does guarantee (although so does GPLv2) is that you can take their code, modify it (or not), and use it in your own device, selling it as a competitor if you so choose. But nothing in v3 supports this any more than v2 did.
BUT - Any modifications that Dell makes to Linux, optimizations and whatnot, get released back to the community who can then take it and run it on non-Dell platforms to their heart's content. What is problem? You end up with an enhanced version of Linux that won't run on Dells without paying them.
The other alternative - if you take it as a given that Dell is releasing hardware that will only run signed binaries - is that you end up with an unenhanced version of Linux that also won't run on Dells, even if you offer to pay them. And this is better how exactly?
If Dell releases machines that won't run unsigned copies of Linux, then it doesn't matter if those copies of Linux were released under GPLv2, GPLv3, BSD, or any other license. You won't be able to run them. With that as a standard assumption (for this thread) across both sides, you can compare the different benefits and losses of making Linux available to them under a compatible (ie: GPLv2) license, or not, for the people who are not running their machines.