If your biggest complaint is that linux, a marginalized OS that the mainstream doesnt use, isnt supported than that just shows youre just a childish whiner. Some of the most technophobic people I know can use itunes (and other online stores). Justifying breaking copyright because one of the least used desktop OSs isnt supported is just being purposely disengenious.
The argument that online sales arent easy, thus people pirate, is just BS. Nowdays, its much easier for the average person to pay for music than to download it illegally. If you just dont want to pay for music, just say so. You should find musicians who want to give out their stuff for free and leave the RIAA's music alone. You are only enabling them by being too morally weak to stop listening to their wares. Heaven forbid people boycott instead of justifying copyright violations.
You dont need an ipod. If you have a windows or osx machine you can play the songs through itunes or just burn them to a standard CD. Grandmas can do it. There are no more excuses anymore.
>If they'd simply tried to embrace technology and make it easy and quick to buy music
iTunes Music Store is both quick and easy. I really am tired of hearing justifications for violating copyright. Its like everyone thinks they have a right to corporate media. I can't decide whose worse the RIAA or the RIAA junkies.
>I really wish Slashdot could dispense with the hidden agendas, partisan attitudes and blatent fanboyism
Then it wouldnt be slashdot anymore. I sometimes think slashdot is a parody of a real tech site. Its kinda funny if you pretend you're reading the onion.
How generous! They also sift through it and host it. And if they decide to stop hosting it, guess what? I dont have data. Even the old exchange 5.5 server in the basement is owned by the company and we can pull data from it whenever we want. Even without an internet connection. And no one is data mining it for 'adsense' or whatever google is doing. And when I wipe it, it stays wiped.
Heck, when I delete from a hosted service (doesnt matter who) I have no idea if its actually deleted or who has access to this data. Or if they will defend me or do anything if someone complains or if law-enforcement gets involved.
This wholesale giving of power and data to google just to get away from MS, its something of an ill-informed fantasy. No surprise companies arent running to have google control all their data. Better interfaces and geek hate of MS aren't exactly the answer either.
>if the market gets broken open, we'll be able to do better than just to choose between giants...
Well, we have open office, but no big migration to it. We have the entire linux os, yet windows still dominates on the server and client side. I have two concerns:
1. Even if you build it, they may not come. Someone could release an outlook/exchange replacement tomorrow and it may very well have zero-effect.
2. Why is it suddenly the goal of OSS is to defeat MS? Can't we just keep making OSS for the sake of making software? This shit is too agenda-driven for me.
3. Google is a close-source corporation that is an infamous data miner. They certainly are not open-source and have little to do with OSS other than token gestures and leveraging OSS to fight MS. Again, more agenda-driven stuff but this time its corporate agenda-driven shit.
When did everyone become a google employee? The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
Putting Google and Mozilla in the same category is disingenuous.
My first thoughts too. At first I though "Wha? I can download google calendar and host it locally and its OSS?" Then I realized the editors are just being uninformed fanboys.
When people bring up Apple I usually bring up Sony. Sony has DVD players + movie rights. Apple has iTunesDRM/ipod + music rights. Sony is firmly entrenched in the slimy "we do everything we can put our brand on" territory and Apple is now joining them. Its an interesting ride, but I'm not at all surprised to hear about Apple putting OSX and its computer line on the backburner for the chance of becoming the nexy Sony or Nokia. Apple has already bitten from the 'us or them' apple. Sony loves its memory stick and its minidisc. Apple loves it protected DRM formats and is currently selling a media box that wont even play xvid/divx. Thats incredible.
What? This isnt a conspiracy of the highest order from the most powerful men in Business? Its just a bug that some fanboy went apeshit about? I refuse to believe it sir! Conspiracies make me feel important in my OS of choice and sell more ads for slashdot and other sites I visit. If it makes it to the slashdot front page, it must be true.
Makes perfect sense to me. Apple has become a consumer electronics goods company, thus the name change. Theyre a leader in portable music players and are tired of locking horns with MS, Dell, etc in the PC marketplace. I wouldnt be surprised if they stopped making computers in 10 years or just sold vanity windows laptops like Sony does with the VAIO line.
I dont see any harm in what apple is doing. Its loyalists can wait quite a bit for the next version of OSX. Its not like theyre going to jump ship to Dell. Apple's offerings are fashionable consumer lifestyle products more than they are computers. Apple delaying OSX is like Gucci raising the prices on their handbags. If anything, it just makes the product more desirable for those who have internalized the Apple brand.
Then you jsut block google's own ad servers, which Ive been doing for years with a simple hosts file. Works for all browsers/applications on my system. Also set your google never-expire tracking cookie to get deleted once per session and you're set.
Umm, of course its money. This is a business not a philosophy. If ATI, Apple, Intel and MS didn't support DRM then there will be a big sticker that says "Cannot play blu-ray content on this computer" which will turn off buyers. This is the price of bluray playback, no conspiracy theories needed.
Considering the kind of money involved, Id say that if more people at gate's level of wealth dont start getting in on the act you will never see space, not vice versa. Not to mention bgates has done the near impossible once in his life already by convincing people that a computer can be something used in the home and you should pay quite a bit out of pocket for one. (ignoring some of his methods and some of the lower points on MS history)
Sure, why not? Well, lets just say its doable. Just like sales tax, the onus should be on Blizzard to take care of things. If such a law was passed or current law was interpreted to extract tax like this the implementation should be blizzard taking 5% (or whatever) of the cut, calculating what the exchange rate for WoW gold is to american dollars, and paying the IRS en masse.
Something tells me there will be no shortage of experts who say WoW gold is worth.001 pennies (think how little valued coupons are) and this whole thing isnt worth doing.
IMHO, not only is this not really worth doing. The IRS would have better luck extracting money once it leaves the game, like when people sell characters or equipment. My only real concern is when the game developer is literally selling money to people like in Second Life. I think those guys are a lot more liable for taxation than your typical MMORPG player. Linden is pretty much selling them currency and taking money up front for it, instead of selling a subscription to a game where one can generate "money." Linden's money is much more real and should probably be taxed because the tokens they use for money are a direct conversion from real money. They even do a reverse conversion and pay out dollars. Whether or not this is worth enforcing is another question, but I wouldnt assume taxation for virtual money is out of the question.
How is bgates the bad guy here? Because his new OS plays bluray? Take that up with the bluray people and Sony. If you want the worlds worst DRM offender, look at the ITMS. ITMS has made DRM and everyday thing for Joe and Jane Sixpack.
Or you can sit around and complain about microsoft, thus making sure no one knows how wrong Apple is and, as usual, continue to accomplish nothing but whine and moan.
What US law? This is data streaming from a server in the form of video. Your anti-US tirade is tiresome.
The main issue is the control of information. When governments enact 'fair' laws, especially for elections, it always turns out bad. Look how Ralph Nader couldnt debate on television a few years ago because of the system of gatekeepers in the government and the media.
Considering youtube is a free upload and hosting service, this is decidedly anti-free speech which is very much a universal human issue, not an "american" one. Unless you're one of those people who thinks human rights are just for some and/or relative, which IMHO makes you a sort of nut.
We dont need gatekeepers anymore protecting the public from crazies on TV giving goofy speeches. Not only is cheap video hosting on the net here, it and its audience tend to attract crazies anyway. This guy was born for youtube viewership and somehow the tokyo old boys club feels threatened.
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Why is groklaw so secretive? If they do end up working for IBM in any way I hope they apologize and fold up for being astrturf.
Yep. We still cant make decent photos at home. Its still a better deal and better quality to get your prints developed commercially. Thats a 2D piece of paper. The 3D revolution has been in 'any day now' for a long time and I believe belongs in the category of things not economically viable. It is a boon to small and medium size businesses who outsource their fabrication equipment. Now they can make little prototypes in shop. Neat, but not a revolution. These business can drop multiple thousands of dollars on one of these machines and hire people to work with them properly. Joe "Whats a USB"
Sixpack, not so much.
The motor car! How dare they release such a mechanic monster into our neighborhoods. Our quiet horses are all a civilized person could ever want. These "cars" are outrageously loud and garish!
And whats this about these cars costing much less than a horse? Only gentlemen should be riding anyway. The peons should be glad we even let them walk, for I cant imagine the noise they would make with cheap technologies.
---- Its sad to see people take of the mantle of a luddite, dismiss logic (cell phones are safe on planes), and applaud these decisions because they dont like overhearing a conversation or two. Sad really. Thankfully, there's no federal association ready to take my laptop and pda. Well, not yet. Enjoy your big win, you have less rights in a plane now instead of more. Also note that no cell also means no cell modems, so now I will never be able to use my treo as a modem because of you anti-cell phone fanatics. Thanks!
>While vacationing in Italy, I found rail travel to be fantastic. It was so simple just to go from city to city to see the sights by rail -- a couple hours from Florence, and you're in Rome. Nice.
>This means that we don't have the population densities outside of a few major metropolitan areas to support rail travel.
Err, every major US city has a light rail system. On top of it the US is criss-crossed with freight lines and has a federally subsidized rail system called AmTrak. It also has enough highway to go anywhere and flights to and from major cities are dirt cheap.
I think its very easy to get a european mentality and think the US is a little bigger than greece but not as big as france, when in reality its just huge with many major cities are far apart from another. This makes easy european-like travel where very far cities are 100-300km away impossible because many US cities are 10x that distance: 1000-4000 km away.
>The United States today does not have the economics going for rail transport that some other countries have.
The US really lends itself to flight because of its history, geography, and wealth. Compare a cheap flight from NYC to Chicago to, say, a typical 6-18+ HOUR train ride in Russia. Err, you can keep your smelly, loud, packed, expensive, long and dangerous train ride, thanks!
>the American Dream includes owning a Home, with a yard and all that fun stuff.
Bullshit. Everyone I know except for a handful of exceptions are apartment/condo dwellers with no yard and many without cars. Whats next? Everyone likes to drive a 10mpg car and shoot buffalo?
"You could have one guitarist in Germany and another one in Texas, a drummer in New York and a singer from somewhere else, and they can play together online," EA's David DeMartini says.
Germany? Not with 200+ ms lag from an overseas connection. I hope they work out latency issues as low-fi, choppy, and unreliable best define VOIP aplications. Music is going to require more bandwidth and less latency than VOIP stuff the game industry can't get right today. I can see this as a problem with the vocals, but Im sure the "drumming' and "guitar" will be send as midi (or something close to it), but still you're going to need god's own internet connection to do this properly to avoid stuttering and keep the timing intact. One laggy connection will ruin the entire song. Clipping vocals will get annoying fast.
I also hope levels and compression (not the zip kind, think normalizing) are taken seriously with the levels. I'd hate to try this only to not be able to hear the vocals or having vocals at 10x the loudness of everything else.
I saw it and its was an incredible dystopian view ofthe future. At rottentomatoes its at 91% positive, so your opinion is very much in the minority. Its worth checking out if you like sci-fi.
In fact, I remember the cool, if not outright negative, response bladerunner got when it came out, its only of late that its even considered a decent movie, so the comparision doesnt really apply. A version of you in the 80s would have said 'its no 2001.'
Slashdot Mirror
If your biggest complaint is that linux, a marginalized OS that the mainstream doesnt use, isnt supported than that just shows youre just a childish whiner. Some of the most technophobic people I know can use itunes (and other online stores). Justifying breaking copyright because one of the least used desktop OSs isnt supported is just being purposely disengenious.
The argument that online sales arent easy, thus people pirate, is just BS. Nowdays, its much easier for the average person to pay for music than to download it illegally. If you just dont want to pay for music, just say so. You should find musicians who want to give out their stuff for free and leave the RIAA's music alone. You are only enabling them by being too morally weak to stop listening to their wares. Heaven forbid people boycott instead of justifying copyright violations.
You dont need an ipod. If you have a windows or osx machine you can play the songs through itunes or just burn them to a standard CD. Grandmas can do it. There are no more excuses anymore.
>If they'd simply tried to embrace technology and make it easy and quick to buy music
iTunes Music Store is both quick and easy. I really am tired of hearing justifications for violating copyright. Its like everyone thinks they have a right to corporate media. I can't decide whose worse the RIAA or the RIAA junkies.
>I really wish Slashdot could dispense with the hidden agendas, partisan attitudes and blatent fanboyism
Then it wouldnt be slashdot anymore. I sometimes think slashdot is a parody of a real tech site. Its kinda funny if you pretend you're reading the onion.
>They let you get your data.
How generous! They also sift through it and host it. And if they decide to stop hosting it, guess what? I dont have data. Even the old exchange 5.5 server in the basement is owned by the company and we can pull data from it whenever we want. Even without an internet connection. And no one is data mining it for 'adsense' or whatever google is doing. And when I wipe it, it stays wiped.
Heck, when I delete from a hosted service (doesnt matter who) I have no idea if its actually deleted or who has access to this data. Or if they will defend me or do anything if someone complains or if law-enforcement gets involved.
This wholesale giving of power and data to google just to get away from MS, its something of an ill-informed fantasy. No surprise companies arent running to have google control all their data. Better interfaces and geek hate of MS aren't exactly the answer either.
>if the market gets broken open, we'll be able to do better than just to choose between giants...
Well, we have open office, but no big migration to it. We have the entire linux os, yet windows still dominates on the server and client side. I have two concerns:
1. Even if you build it, they may not come. Someone could release an outlook/exchange replacement tomorrow and it may very well have zero-effect.
2. Why is it suddenly the goal of OSS is to defeat MS? Can't we just keep making OSS for the sake of making software? This shit is too agenda-driven for me.
3. Google is a close-source corporation that is an infamous data miner. They certainly are not open-source and have little to do with OSS other than token gestures and leveraging OSS to fight MS. Again, more agenda-driven stuff but this time its corporate agenda-driven shit.
When did everyone become a google employee? The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
Putting Google and Mozilla in the same category is disingenuous.
My first thoughts too. At first I though "Wha? I can download google calendar and host it locally and its OSS?" Then I realized the editors are just being uninformed fanboys.
When people bring up Apple I usually bring up Sony. Sony has DVD players + movie rights. Apple has iTunesDRM/ipod + music rights. Sony is firmly entrenched in the slimy "we do everything we can put our brand on" territory and Apple is now joining them. Its an interesting ride, but I'm not at all surprised to hear about Apple putting OSX and its computer line on the backburner for the chance of becoming the nexy Sony or Nokia. Apple has already bitten from the 'us or them' apple. Sony loves its memory stick and its minidisc. Apple loves it protected DRM formats and is currently selling a media box that wont even play xvid/divx. Thats incredible.
What? This isnt a conspiracy of the highest order from the most powerful men in Business? Its just a bug that some fanboy went apeshit about? I refuse to believe it sir! Conspiracies make me feel important in my OS of choice and sell more ads for slashdot and other sites I visit. If it makes it to the slashdot front page, it must be true.
Makes perfect sense to me. Apple has become a consumer electronics goods company, thus the name change. Theyre a leader in portable music players and are tired of locking horns with MS, Dell, etc in the PC marketplace. I wouldnt be surprised if they stopped making computers in 10 years or just sold vanity windows laptops like Sony does with the VAIO line.
I dont see any harm in what apple is doing. Its loyalists can wait quite a bit for the next version of OSX. Its not like theyre going to jump ship to Dell. Apple's offerings are fashionable consumer lifestyle products more than they are computers. Apple delaying OSX is like Gucci raising the prices on their handbags. If anything, it just makes the product more desirable for those who have internalized the Apple brand.
>The powers that be don't want the internet to work as well as it does. Instead they want to control it.
Yeah man, and like Henry Ford made a car that ran on pee, but was killed by Thomas's Edison's goons. pass the bong, man.
Then you jsut block google's own ad servers, which Ive been doing for years with a simple hosts file. Works for all browsers/applications on my system. Also set your google never-expire tracking cookie to get deleted once per session and you're set.
>Money? Too simplistic somehow.
Umm, of course its money. This is a business not a philosophy. If ATI, Apple, Intel and MS didn't support DRM then there will be a big sticker that says "Cannot play blu-ray content on this computer" which will turn off buyers. This is the price of bluray playback, no conspiracy theories needed.
Considering the kind of money involved, Id say that if more people at gate's level of wealth dont start getting in on the act you will never see space, not vice versa. Not to mention bgates has done the near impossible once in his life already by convincing people that a computer can be something used in the home and you should pay quite a bit out of pocket for one. (ignoring some of his methods and some of the lower points on MS history)
Usually the dongles just mean "you paid for the dvd playback license."
Sure, why not? Well, lets just say its doable. Just like sales tax, the onus should be on Blizzard to take care of things. If such a law was passed or current law was interpreted to extract tax like this the implementation should be blizzard taking 5% (or whatever) of the cut, calculating what the exchange rate for WoW gold is to american dollars, and paying the IRS en masse.
.001 pennies (think how little valued coupons are) and this whole thing isnt worth doing.
Something tells me there will be no shortage of experts who say WoW gold is worth
IMHO, not only is this not really worth doing. The IRS would have better luck extracting money once it leaves the game, like when people sell characters or equipment. My only real concern is when the game developer is literally selling money to people like in Second Life. I think those guys are a lot more liable for taxation than your typical MMORPG player. Linden is pretty much selling them currency and taking money up front for it, instead of selling a subscription to a game where one can generate "money." Linden's money is much more real and should probably be taxed because the tokens they use for money are a direct conversion from real money. They even do a reverse conversion and pay out dollars. Whether or not this is worth enforcing is another question, but I wouldnt assume taxation for virtual money is out of the question.
How is bgates the bad guy here? Because his new OS plays bluray? Take that up with the bluray people and Sony. If you want the worlds worst DRM offender, look at the ITMS. ITMS has made DRM and everyday thing for Joe and Jane Sixpack.
Or you can sit around and complain about microsoft, thus making sure no one knows how wrong Apple is and, as usual, continue to accomplish nothing but whine and moan.
What US law? This is data streaming from a server in the form of video. Your anti-US tirade is tiresome.
The main issue is the control of information. When governments enact 'fair' laws, especially for elections, it always turns out bad. Look how Ralph Nader couldnt debate on television a few years ago because of the system of gatekeepers in the government and the media.
Considering youtube is a free upload and hosting service, this is decidedly anti-free speech which is very much a universal human issue, not an "american" one. Unless you're one of those people who thinks human rights are just for some and/or relative, which IMHO makes you a sort of nut.
We dont need gatekeepers anymore protecting the public from crazies on TV giving goofy speeches. Not only is cheap video hosting on the net here, it and its audience tend to attract crazies anyway. This guy was born for youtube viewership and somehow the tokyo old boys club feels threatened.
Uh, ok
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Private, Registration GROKLAW.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
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Why is groklaw so secretive? If they do end up working for IBM in any way I hope they apologize and fold up for being astrturf.
Yep. We still cant make decent photos at home. Its still a better deal and better quality to get your prints developed commercially. Thats a 2D piece of paper. The 3D revolution has been in 'any day now' for a long time and I believe belongs in the category of things not economically viable. It is a boon to small and medium size businesses who outsource their fabrication equipment. Now they can make little prototypes in shop. Neat, but not a revolution. These business can drop multiple thousands of dollars on one of these machines and hire people to work with them properly. Joe "Whats a USB"
Sixpack, not so much.
The motor car! How dare they release such a mechanic monster into our neighborhoods. Our quiet horses are all a civilized person could ever want. These "cars" are outrageously loud and garish!
And whats this about these cars costing much less than a horse? Only gentlemen should be riding anyway. The peons should be glad we even let them walk, for I cant imagine the noise they would make with cheap technologies.
----
Its sad to see people take of the mantle of a luddite, dismiss logic (cell phones are safe on planes), and applaud these decisions because they dont like overhearing a conversation or two. Sad really. Thankfully, there's no federal association ready to take my laptop and pda. Well, not yet. Enjoy your big win, you have less rights in a plane now instead of more. Also note that no cell also means no cell modems, so now I will never be able to use my treo as a modem because of you anti-cell phone fanatics. Thanks!
>While vacationing in Italy, I found rail travel to be fantastic. It was so simple just to go from city to city to see the sights by rail -- a couple hours from Florence, and you're in Rome. Nice.
Italy: 116,000 square miles
USA: 3,537,441 square miles
>This means that we don't have the population densities outside of a few major metropolitan areas to support rail travel.
Err, every major US city has a light rail system. On top of it the US is criss-crossed with freight lines and has a federally subsidized rail system called AmTrak. It also has enough highway to go anywhere and flights to and from major cities are dirt cheap.
I think its very easy to get a european mentality and think the US is a little bigger than greece but not as big as france, when in reality its just huge with many major cities are far apart from another. This makes easy european-like travel where very far cities are 100-300km away impossible because many US cities are 10x that distance: 1000-4000 km away.
>The United States today does not have the economics going for rail transport that some other countries have.
The US really lends itself to flight because of its history, geography, and wealth. Compare a cheap flight from NYC to Chicago to, say, a typical 6-18+ HOUR train ride in Russia. Err, you can keep your smelly, loud, packed, expensive, long and dangerous train ride, thanks!
>the American Dream includes owning a Home, with a yard and all that fun stuff.
Bullshit. Everyone I know except for a handful of exceptions are apartment/condo dwellers with no yard and many without cars. Whats next? Everyone likes to drive a 10mpg car and shoot buffalo?
Worse, check out this quote:
"You could have one guitarist in Germany and another one in Texas, a drummer in New York and a singer from somewhere else, and they can play together online," EA's David DeMartini says.
Germany? Not with 200+ ms lag from an overseas connection. I hope they work out latency issues as low-fi, choppy, and unreliable best define VOIP aplications. Music is going to require more bandwidth and less latency than VOIP stuff the game industry can't get right today. I can see this as a problem with the vocals, but Im sure the "drumming' and "guitar" will be send as midi (or something close to it), but still you're going to need god's own internet connection to do this properly to avoid stuttering and keep the timing intact. One laggy connection will ruin the entire song. Clipping vocals will get annoying fast.
I also hope levels and compression (not the zip kind, think normalizing) are taken seriously with the levels. I'd hate to try this only to not be able to hear the vocals or having vocals at 10x the loudness of everything else.
I saw it and its was an incredible dystopian view ofthe future. At rottentomatoes its at 91% positive, so your opinion is very much in the minority. Its worth checking out if you like sci-fi.
In fact, I remember the cool, if not outright negative, response bladerunner got when it came out, its only of late that its even considered a decent movie, so the comparision doesnt really apply. A version of you in the 80s would have said 'its no 2001.'