I'm in the technology industry, and I don't think the DVD is dead. Hell, we just got a new DVD player with our surround sound kit. Does anyone see Blockbuster renting out something more than DVD?
This guy is making stupid generalizations to draw attention.
At 18, he should have known better. C'mon, he was actively telling others to actively disrupt his school's server. It might seem small, but in effect, he was asking people to participate in a distributed denial of service attack.
If someone DDoS'd your site, wouldn't you get the police involved if you couldn't stop it?
Not to mention that he was dumb enough to actually put it in writing on his own website. Why wouldn't he just tell people in person to do that?
To the Apple fanatics who are modding me down for no reason, using a combination of Flamebait and Overrated (c'mon guys, Overrated is the one to use, then you don't get metamodded! Geez, at least game the system right...), thanks muchly for demonstrating to everyone how stupid you are.
I fully expect this to end up a -1, Insightful and to have this entire, great discussion (that part said without sarcasm, because it is) shifted to the bottom of the thread. Thanks a lot, seriously.
Great post. If you're looking for a RAM-based offering, BTW, my RCA Lyra has never failed me and has battery life of a month (though admittedly my playing is not constant) on a single AAA battery.
I would warn you away from Creative Zen players if you're looking for another HDD-based one though, having had to do tech support on them before (they don't just show up as another drive, you have to use their [flawed] app).
Amen, though the whole "digitally signing / banning" is DRM, however you want to put it. Besides, if they did what you suggested, non-Microsoft players would simply ignore the digital signing bits and play the music regardless of its status.
The solution is simply to avoid DRM altogether. DRM is fundamentally flawed and will always be broken, because in the end, I have your music on my hard drive, and you're not going to be able to stop me from doing what I want with it.
Why should I be forced to burn music to a CD, physically take that CD, move it to another computer, then rip the music back into another format (which, BTW, lowers the quality of the music, unless you use FLAC or something otherwise lossless).
Right now, I can move my MP3 music like so: Copying it across the network. Said feat takes approximately five seconds per MP3.
But that's what people WANT! People don't download huge, several gig collections so they can burn them to albums and listen to them in the specified order, they just throw them on their Winamp playlist and turn on shuffle!
Maybe it's just me, but I wish one of these companies would get it some time.
The reason it won't work on iPods is because Apple won't let it work on iPods. If they offered FairPlay up for licensing, I guarantee you Microsoft would be interested. But since Apple wants their store to be the only one truly compatible with their device, Microsoft has no choice.
BTW, do you not think that songs purchased from iTMS have DRM in them? Why do you think it's so difficult to transfer them to another computer?
The articles are short on technical details unfortunately, so I'll assume that the music is in WMA format, which, for me, is a reason right there not to download it.
Anyway, I imagine this service is much like Napster in its all-you-can-eat mode; all the music you can download, until you stop paying, and then all the music stops playing. While I could easily strip the DRM off the WMA files (assuming they use a current-gen version of WMA, which we don't know), that would take too much effort on my part to make it worth the money.
Message to Microsoft: If you want to attract people who are currently downloading their music for free elsewhere, you have to offer more than what other music stores offer. Let people who download music through the subscription service (with perhaps a decent per-month limit, say, 100 tracks, to keep people from trying to download the entire database) keep their music when their subscription ends. Otherwise, the service has no value to me, because I know later on I'll get tired of downloading music for a while, and quit paying for the privilege to do so; that doesn't mean I want my entire music collection that I've already paid for to stop working.
I'd also recommend using non-DRM MP3, but hey, this is Microsoft we're talking about. Can't expect everything...
All I'm waiting for is someone to produce a device that intercepts the HDMI signal and strips it of any copy protection bits. You know that someone will make such a dongle soon after HDMI becomes standard, and then we'll again be free to do whatever we want.
The first thing I did when I got a cell phone a year ago was try connecting it to my home server (Apache running on a 233MMX box running then Win2K Advanced Server, now Gentoo Linux) to figure out how it worked. I learned WML and the inner workings of WAP (which led me to figure out some interesting ways around cell phone "DRM").
Basically, what I'm saying is that I'm a tinkerer, and the more options a device gives me, the better. A simple web browser would have gone a long way and probably would have doubled my use of the DS (considering that then, I could effectively use it as a digital planner and portable, around-the-house internet device), and I figure a few Slashdotters are thinking the same thing.
The question there would be whether or not Nintendo would license such a browser for use; if it were not licensed, it would not run without the use of an expensive (and arguably illegal) flash cart.
I got a DS for Christmas, and while the system is great (I've been playing Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time, good game, at least as good as the last Mario and Luigi), I was disappointed that there was no wi-fi connectivity outside of games. I mean, if the games connect to my wireless router and hotspots anyway, how hard would it have been to include a wireless browser in the interface outside of games?
I've heard about people trying to reverse engineer the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection so that this is possible, but I really think they should have included this in the first place. It would have had so many uses.
At first (and subsequent so far) glance, this guy appears to be awesome. He founded Xmission, which was the host of Maddox, an author who I feel would have been censored by other ISPs a long time ago. His policies also appear to be sane, and he seems to genuinely want input from the public (the Wiki goes a long way in my eyes). I would vote for him if I was in his district.
I guarantee you Dell and Gateway have outsourced a lot their tech support, I'm pretty sure about IBM, not so much about Sony (but probably).
Screw hardware sales, the reason these companies don't have good tech support is because they don't support their own products. Third party companies providing this sort of outsourced tech support can only do so much, having been there.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, and you can clear the "Ask me before clearing" checkbox to make it automatic.
I'm in the technology industry, and I don't think the DVD is dead. Hell, we just got a new DVD player with our surround sound kit. Does anyone see Blockbuster renting out something more than DVD?
This guy is making stupid generalizations to draw attention.
At 18, he should have known better. C'mon, he was actively telling others to actively disrupt his school's server. It might seem small, but in effect, he was asking people to participate in a distributed denial of service attack.
If someone DDoS'd your site, wouldn't you get the police involved if you couldn't stop it?
Not to mention that he was dumb enough to actually put it in writing on his own website. Why wouldn't he just tell people in person to do that?
To the Apple fanatics who are modding me down for no reason, using a combination of Flamebait and Overrated (c'mon guys, Overrated is the one to use, then you don't get metamodded! Geez, at least game the system right...), thanks muchly for demonstrating to everyone how stupid you are.
I fully expect this to end up a -1, Insightful and to have this entire, great discussion (that part said without sarcasm, because it is) shifted to the bottom of the thread. Thanks a lot, seriously.
I didn't say it would be difficult, just that it would be too much effort for something for which I would have been paying.
If I'm paying for something, I shouldn't be expected to mess around with formats and DRM stripping.
Great post. If you're looking for a RAM-based offering, BTW, my RCA Lyra has never failed me and has battery life of a month (though admittedly my playing is not constant) on a single AAA battery.
I would warn you away from Creative Zen players if you're looking for another HDD-based one though, having had to do tech support on them before (they don't just show up as another drive, you have to use their [flawed] app).
I don't care what Microsoft's history on licensing is, it would be damn stupid of them to ignore the iPod segment if it were possible to reach it.
Amen, though the whole "digitally signing / banning" is DRM, however you want to put it. Besides, if they did what you suggested, non-Microsoft players would simply ignore the digital signing bits and play the music regardless of its status.
The solution is simply to avoid DRM altogether. DRM is fundamentally flawed and will always be broken, because in the end, I have your music on my hard drive, and you're not going to be able to stop me from doing what I want with it.
Why should I be forced to burn music to a CD, physically take that CD, move it to another computer, then rip the music back into another format (which, BTW, lowers the quality of the music, unless you use FLAC or something otherwise lossless).
Right now, I can move my MP3 music like so: Copying it across the network. Said feat takes approximately five seconds per MP3.
So why should I be using these stores again?
What exactly are you saying "bullshit" to? I agree with practically everything you're saying!
See my post further down; if Microsoft wanted to attract people like me, they'd distribute in MP3.
But that's what people WANT! People don't download huge, several gig collections so they can burn them to albums and listen to them in the specified order, they just throw them on their Winamp playlist and turn on shuffle!
Maybe it's just me, but I wish one of these companies would get it some time.
The reason it won't work on iPods is because Apple won't let it work on iPods. If they offered FairPlay up for licensing, I guarantee you Microsoft would be interested. But since Apple wants their store to be the only one truly compatible with their device, Microsoft has no choice.
BTW, do you not think that songs purchased from iTMS have DRM in them? Why do you think it's so difficult to transfer them to another computer?
The articles are short on technical details unfortunately, so I'll assume that the music is in WMA format, which, for me, is a reason right there not to download it.
Anyway, I imagine this service is much like Napster in its all-you-can-eat mode; all the music you can download, until you stop paying, and then all the music stops playing. While I could easily strip the DRM off the WMA files (assuming they use a current-gen version of WMA, which we don't know), that would take too much effort on my part to make it worth the money.
Message to Microsoft: If you want to attract people who are currently downloading their music for free elsewhere, you have to offer more than what other music stores offer. Let people who download music through the subscription service (with perhaps a decent per-month limit, say, 100 tracks, to keep people from trying to download the entire database) keep their music when their subscription ends. Otherwise, the service has no value to me, because I know later on I'll get tired of downloading music for a while, and quit paying for the privilege to do so; that doesn't mean I want my entire music collection that I've already paid for to stop working.
I'd also recommend using non-DRM MP3, but hey, this is Microsoft we're talking about. Can't expect everything...
All I'm waiting for is someone to produce a device that intercepts the HDMI signal and strips it of any copy protection bits. You know that someone will make such a dongle soon after HDMI becomes standard, and then we'll again be free to do whatever we want.
The first thing I did when I got a cell phone a year ago was try connecting it to my home server (Apache running on a 233MMX box running then Win2K Advanced Server, now Gentoo Linux) to figure out how it worked. I learned WML and the inner workings of WAP (which led me to figure out some interesting ways around cell phone "DRM").
Basically, what I'm saying is that I'm a tinkerer, and the more options a device gives me, the better. A simple web browser would have gone a long way and probably would have doubled my use of the DS (considering that then, I could effectively use it as a digital planner and portable, around-the-house internet device), and I figure a few Slashdotters are thinking the same thing.
The question there would be whether or not Nintendo would license such a browser for use; if it were not licensed, it would not run without the use of an expensive (and arguably illegal) flash cart.
I'm 21 (22 in two weeks) and I have one.
It should be noted that I exclude Pictochat in this, because that's very limited. I can't, for example, check my messages with it.
I got a DS for Christmas, and while the system is great (I've been playing Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time, good game, at least as good as the last Mario and Luigi), I was disappointed that there was no wi-fi connectivity outside of games. I mean, if the games connect to my wireless router and hotspots anyway, how hard would it have been to include a wireless browser in the interface outside of games?
I've heard about people trying to reverse engineer the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection so that this is possible, but I really think they should have included this in the first place. It would have had so many uses.
Free, with a game that supports it.
Official Site
At first (and subsequent so far) glance, this guy appears to be awesome. He founded Xmission, which was the host of Maddox, an author who I feel would have been censored by other ISPs a long time ago. His policies also appear to be sane, and he seems to genuinely want input from the public (the Wiki goes a long way in my eyes). I would vote for him if I was in his district.
I predict that in a year or two, we're going to hear from some annoyed customers when Motorola shuts off this service because it's not profitable.
Exactly what would they sue for?
Criminal intent to infringe copyright?
Cause clearly a) the website is reading your mind, and b) said thoughts are illegal in the US.
I guarantee you Dell and Gateway have outsourced a lot their tech support, I'm pretty sure about IBM, not so much about Sony (but probably).
Screw hardware sales, the reason these companies don't have good tech support is because they don't support their own products. Third party companies providing this sort of outsourced tech support can only do so much, having been there.
This would be great if they had a red laser on the other side of the screen.
Course, I'd worry about putting it on the wrong way round.