For another example, I wrote this week a dead-simple chat program (because I needed a specific feature). It was simpler to write a web app instead of a real app, because the latter would require networking, windowing, and whatnot - the web interface made GUI easy and manual networking irrelevant.
I'm actually in the middle of doing the same thing, but I'm very new to AJAX. Any chance you would be willing to share your code with me?
Well, I have learned that common sense and smart decisions are deprecated in the upper levels of the entertainment industry. The major labels/studios are too big for their own good, they lost sight of what their real objectives should have been and now they are well on their merry way to self-destruction through customer base alienation. Tunnel vision is dangerous.
I whole heartedly agree. However, the problem I see here is that there really is a place in the music marketplace for music publishers/distributors, just not on the terms the RIAA is trying to dictate.
Does anyone know of any record companies, perhaps newly created, that are not members of the RIAA and stand for artists' rights? I'd love to buy music from a distributor who still thinks of it as a service industry, to both the fans and the artists, instead of a manufacturing industry who is constantly battling evil thieves. There are lots of ways of making money off music without destroying your customer base, but the RIAA member companies have lost sight of that.
Well, that code may make your browser sit and spin for about 120 seconds before working, but one could conceivably make that time a whole lot longer with some exponential magic:
function ex() {
var buffer = "A";
for (var i = 0; i 5000; i++) {
buffer += buffer;
}
document.title = buffer; }
And that would truly be a pain in the ass.
But it occurs to me: would it be practical to add an option to Firefox which limits the physical size of your history file, which the user could specify? Then if Firefox runs into this problem, it would only read in the first 1 MB (or whatever) of history and discard the rest. This could be extended to any area where Firefox stores data that is modifiable by Javascript DOM functions. We limit the size of the cache; why not this?
From all the grammar mistakes, to the pointless buzzwords ("camsnuffling", "podslurping"), to the mention of how USB devices instantly give anyone access to any data on a computer, to the fact that "hackers" and "computer attackers" are mentioned several times when the data being taken is clearly being taken by employees who have access to it in the first place.
And "Bluetooth" is apparently a USB storage device. Way to go.
But in all seriousness, companies do have security issues regarding sensitive data leaving their computers in the hand of employees. How can these companies be sure that their data is secure while still maintaining access for the people who need it and not treating their employees like criminals?
If I were Dell, or some other prebuilt Windows box company, I would offer a desktop computer with no external ports at all. No USB, no serial port, no floppy disk, no CD writer, no nothing. Just a hard drive and a network connection, and a DVD/CD-ROM drive. That way, companies can make all their data available over the internal network (c'mon, is setting up shared server space really *that* difficult?) and it's much harder to get the data out of the company. If the company is truly paranoid about people taking hard drives out of their desktops to take home with them, set up the computer with an encrypted file system which asks the main server for the passphrase every time the computer boots. If you're worried about people sending themselves things as attachments, then don't allow emails with attachments from your servers. If outside companies need access to sensitive data in order to do business with you, then set up a secure server for data exchange. No sweat.
Precautions can be taken on the server side that make it very difficult for employees to steal sensitive data, but that still allow for efficient data flow within the company. And, of course, none of these ways will prevent anyone who is truly determined to get your data, but it will stop the casual stealers, and your chances of sensitive data getting out are much lower.
Wikipedia's success has come from people joining together and creating new articles, not just editing them. We need to be able to post new facts, new ideas, and new discoveries that are going on in the world. New users are the primary source of these articles.
Perhaps you didn't read the summary.
"Wikipedia will restrict the creation of new articles to members. Anonymous users will only be able to edit existing articles."
Members. Not admins, or moderators, or privileged people. Just members. All you have to do to create an article is sign up. Becoming a member is free.
Most people on Slashdot moderate/modify Anonymous Cowards into oblivion. If someone takes the time to register their name, there's a greater likelihood that what they have to say is relevent, from a purely statistical point of view (trolls obviously also register their name). I don't see how Wikipedia should be any different in its regard of anonymous postings.
That's why [OpenOffice.org] developed OpenDoc... so that they could compete simply based on "We have an *open* format" and nothing else. Office12 makes OO.o look like utter trash.
That may be, but you are completely missing the point of having open standards.
This is not about "open source must crush Microsoft at any cost!" This is about making information available in a format that a single company does not control.
If Microsoft were to fully support the OpenDocument format in the next version of Office, then more power to them. MS Office is a fine program; the problem with it is that the formats it uses cannot be (properly/legally/fully) used outside of Microsoft Office. If someone wants to continue to read their old documents, they are forced to upgrade their installation of Office, because no other software fully supports the format (and cannot, legally). If, in the future, Microsoft stops making Office or stops supporting old versions of these files, then to read the files someone would have to go through a time-consuming, and legally dubious, process of reverse-engineering the proprietary format.
Contrast this with an open document standard: people are free to purchase Microsoft Office to create these open documents, but they also have a choice of many other products on the market, some proprietary, some open-source, some beer-free, some not. Thus the individual is able to make a choice based NOT on the format their files are already in, but on the merits of each piece of software individually. And if they decide at some point that they are not happy with the software they chose, they are welcome to try something else and not have to worry about converting all their existing documents.
Additionally, as governmental bodies are moving to digital archiving of important documents, there is a need to be able to open these documents on a much longer timescale than that of business. What if, 200 years from now, you need to read the original version of some obscure government document? If the documents are all stored in an open, well documented format, then writing a viewer would be a fairly simple task, and a viewer would be easy for the goverment to provide to its citizenry, at no cost (since government documents need to be available to the entire public, which means the cost should be zero). If the documents were in a long-lost proprietary format from a company that went under 100 years ago, that task would be much, much more difficult.
So, yes, I would agree that OpenOffice has a little way to go in feature catch-up before they are on par with Microsoft Office (but they are very, very close). But because of this new OpenDocument format, they are just one of several options in office suite software, and can now compete on an even playing field. Vendor lock-in for documents will be a thing of the past.
TFA reads basically as a step-by-step guide to teach any-and-everyone how to (at least attempt to) pull off a similar barcode scam.
Yes, that's right. Because if there is even the slightest chance that information could be used in a manner that breaks a law, then it must be locked up in a deep dark hole somewhere so no one can ever find it or show it to--God forbid--the general public. The "public" will most certainly use the information as soon as possible to break every law they can think of.
Now if you'll excuse me, my printout of "Murder Methods" is ready.
As long as the world is blanketed with sensors and every car knows where every other vehicle is, and can use radar to spot the things that it can't identify (like wildlife darting out into the road), then why not just hook the whole damn thing into the GPS navigation system and let it take care of itself?
I'd love to take a nap on the way to work.
(And while I'm dreaming, let's get some in-flight refueling technology on the roads. As long as I'm paying this much for gas, the gas stations should not make me stop to fill up.)
From my experience rebates are made for the customers, and the sellers. It gets people into the store, they save money they'd normally have to spend, and usually the store picks up the lost money on items added on (ie. Extended Warranty, mice, keyboards, cables, mouse pads, webcams, the list goes on and on).
The system you are talking about, where people are attracted to a sale because the price is low, and then the store makes it tempting to add on extras with a higher profit margin, can be done with old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness low prices. Rebates need not be involved. And if that were truly the only reason the rebates were there (to offer lower prices) then the stores would be losing lots of money on the people they pay to process rebates and mail checks.
No, my friend, rebates are just a way of "cooking the books." A store is obviously not going to offer a product for a loss*, so they price the product right where they want it, then mark it up an extra $X and offer an $(X-Y) rebate, where Y is the cost of processing the rebate. That way, if every single person mails in and receives their rebate check, the company breaks exactly even. However, even if a SINGLE customer out of millions doesn't send in the form, or is disqualified for not following instructions, then the company just made some money for essentially doing nothing. And even if only 1% of the customers don't mail it in, the company is rolling in it. The same thing is true of gift cards, for mostly the same reasons: they are pure profit.
What disturbs me is not that I am very slightly inconvenienced by the rebate form, it's that the companies would have the gall to do this sort of thing in the first place. I would like to know what happened to plain old customer service. How about offering a quality product at a reasonable price with knowledgeable staff and no strings attached? Is this something that major retailers cannot grasp? Is the drive for another 0.00001% profit margin so strong that you are willing to alienate, frustrate, and anger your customer base? This, simply put, is not good business, yet it's rampant. And just because some group who works in the interest of the large retailers comes forward and gives the rebate situation a positive spin does not justify the practice.
By the way, I also get as upset at grocery store SuperSaver cards. If they don't know who you are, you pay more, and that's unfair. Make the benefits of club membership something OTHER than the prices in the store. Give out frequent flyer miles or free teddy bears or something. Don't punish those of us who wish not to be spammed.
OK, rant over. We now return to your regularly scheduled lives.
*Certain extenuating circumstances do exist where a company will offer a product at a loss, such as inventory reduction, going-out-of-business, or lock-in, where other business units make up the cost (like the X-Box, or cell phones with plans). However, these are *exceedingly* rare in the major national retailers, and usually only happen in furniture stores.
I've seen people using the remote for half an hour, channel surfing all their satellite channels trying to find SOMETHING worth watching, either on the regular satellite, or ppv. And when they come up empty, they go through the whole rotation again.
This person is obviously a ten percenter who hasn't come to grips with it yet. I used to be like them (and you, from the sounds of things). I used to complain a lot about the things that were on television, and how all of it was crap, and why can't they run some decent shows, and who's running this stupid channel anyway, and who watches this crap, and....
And then it hit me: these shows are not FOR me. I am not the target audience. The networks don't care what I think. And you know what? I got over myself. Let the networks have their crappy shows and their marketing data that proves that such-and-such show is a huge hit among boys aged 10-15. I don't need any of it.
And then I came back to the realization that there ARE "diamonds in the rough," so to speak; there are a few select shows worth watching. They have to be hunted down, tracked through the dense forest of bad programming, and cherished. Technology like DVRs is my way of taking control of my television back from the masses that decide what's on. None of the shows I like last long, since very few people appreciate them, and the network replaces them fairly quickly. But I have no problem with that. If a beautiful moment lasts forever, it becomes ordinary.
So get down off your soapbox and stop deciding what's good for everyone else. If you don't like TV, don't watch it. But stop preaching.
As it is, it seems like Pandora is great for finding something that sounds damn near identical. Not the best system, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient than downloading random MP3s and figuring out which ones you like and what the pattern might be.
Point taken, but the best system would grab the random MP3 for you automatically, and just place it in the current playlist. I could envision iTunes, or a similar store/player setup, automagically throwing a random song that you don't own into the rotation and allow you to listen to it once. Then your reaction to that song would help shape your personalized tastes, and perhaps an entry would be made in a "sampled" page, which would allow you, if you liked the song, to purchase it for future listening, and provide links to similar songs for both purchase and personalizing. This seems like a win-win to me, where the consumer can easily find new things to buy based on their own tastes, and the distributor can market things effectively. Targeted marketing works, but only when you can include some off-target offers (with feedback) to broaden the consumer's horizons a little.
Well, its not really off-topic, because PVRs are supposed to help you "cherry-pcik", but in reality people use them to consume even more junk. Just like the original VCR - people tape stuff "becasue they can", and nver get around to watching half of it.
Then I'm glad you are here to tell us how to use our technology properly. News flash: everything on TV is there because lots of people watch it. That's the reality of the business. Just because you and I don't like 90% of the programming available doesn't mean that no one likes it. Obviously people are watching it, or the networks would replace it with something else. The whole point of television is to get people to watch, so they can sell advertising. And as a ten-percenter (someone who only likes 10% of available programming) I'm grateful for technologies that allow me to find what I want without having to watch the things I don't. And if I record something with the intention of watching it and never do, it's not a problem. I didn't pay to record that program, and once I delete it the disk space can be used for other things. No sweat.
So, how much TV have you watched the last year, including the time spent doing the "cherry-picking"? Mine stays off for weeks at a time. Actually, its pretty much only been on this year when friends come over to watch a dvd.
Actually, I've spent quite a bit of time watching program's I've "cherry-picked", but almost all of it was because of my automatic script pulling episodes out of RSS feeds and downloading them via BitTorrent. The actual television was off for most of that time, and the time spent doing the actual "cherry-picking" was minimal; it amounted to me typing a regular expression into my filter list and letting the script automatically download the episodes. Sometimes I hear about a new show, and I download one to try it out. If I like it, it goes into the regular rotation. If not, I delete it and get on with my life.
I am currently in the process of building a MythTV box, to free up my cable modem. And, so I can sit on the couch and watch the episodes, instead of at my desk. And, so I can see them on my big TV instead of my smaller LCD monitor. And, so I can record sports to timeshift (no one on BitTorrent seems to care about distributing NCAA basketball games). And, to free up my hard drive.
The DVR has essentially turned television into a pull medium instead of the push medium it has been since its debut. It has put the consumer back in control. How is this a bad thing, again?
You know, most of the media world is pretty excited about these concepts of "personalized media"... where the media that is presented to you is based on the types of things that you already like (it's just starting to take off in music, but watch for it in the future in television, movies, and internet sites). But I see this as somewhat of a problem, where people are never exposed to new things. If everything in our world is personalized and created specifically for our tastes, how do we define our tastes? When do we ever get a chance to listen to something we don't like, and say that we don't like it? Or listen to new things we've never heard of, and that may not be in any way related to our database of media we like, and say we like it?
The situation presents us with two possibilities: either we get pidgeonholed into a "genre" artificially created by the content distributors (as broad or narrow as that genre might be), or our tastes enter a feedback loop, where the only things we listen to are the things our personalized media players play for us, whose choices are based on things we listen to in our personalized media players.
So where do we get outside input? My suggestion at this point would be to do away with artificial genres and create relationships between media based purely on a database of what people like and don't like. (Last.FM does this now.) Then I would like to see the media player throw in a randomly chosen selection once in a while, just to test its own theory, so to speak. However, for that to work, the selection would have to be truly random; no fair throwing in something that you are marketing heavily (I'm talking to you, [RI|MP]AA...) just to get people to hear it. So instead of choosing music based only on your tastes, your media player will choose music based *mostly* on your tastes, and then throw you a curve ball once in a while to see how you react. Who knows? Maybe that diehard punk fan would enjoy a Beethoven piece or a 70's pop song. But the media player would never know that unless it tried.
Three boxes for the gamer-kings under Live Seven for the finance lords in their halls of stone Nine boxes for the mortal render farms doomed to die One Server for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
One XBox to rule them all, one XBox to find them One XBox to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them In the land of Redmond, where the shadows lie
In response to the PDF of the PowerPoint presentation:
On page 7, there's a graph with the y-axis labeled, "Miller Units", with bars representing "Dark" and "Light". "Light" I get, but I didn't realize Miller made a stout....
The task for the free information counterculture becomes obvious - compromise and release as many keys for as many best-selling players as possible, to face the content providers with the choice of either abandoning their DRM aspirations or incurring the wrath of the proletariat.
I can't wait to see the angry mobs of people returning devices at Circuit City because the new movie they just bought won't play on their model player. YOU try explaining to them how this is "protecting them from the evil pirates."
In some article they stated the radio was like almost US $300 (on today's dollars). But of course I am sure the "Use N' Throw" culture was still not abundant in the USA.
The iPod was $299 when it was first released. I would agree that the current culture of consumer electronics is disposable, but prices have nothing to do with it. People just buy more stuff now than they did then.
And I'm sure they'll be ready to play the standard 3 E's - embrace, extend (meaning the open source tools will mysteriously crash / improperly render Office-produced OpenDocument files), and extinguish.
An interesting point. And while that may have worked in the past, I don't think it will in this case.
Massachussetts basically just codified into law the requirement that whatever office suite is used by the state better well conform to the OpenDocument standard, to the letter. A prerequisite to purchasing (or downloading, if they went with a free-beer solution), would be to make sure the office suite created OpenDocument compatible files, and properly read and interpreted the entire OpenDocument spec. If Microsoft's software started adding features to OpenDocuments that were not in the specs, then it isn't an OpenDocument, is it? The people hired by Massachussetts to check for OpenDocument adherance would see that, and Microsoft would lose the sale. The three Es only work when the people using the software care more about features than spec compatibility, and that is clearly not the case here.
Microsoft can still compete for state business, but they will have to do it in ways other than forcing proprietary formats on their users. They might just have to shift their business model away from vendor lock-in and closer to providing quality products and services for a reasonable price. God help us all.
Beware, the evil web PDF! Here is the full text of Alan Yates' letter, in good ol' HTML. And yes, it is a very long letter.
-------
September 8, 2005
BY ELECTRONIC MAIL AND OVERNIGHT DELIVERY
Secretary Eric Kriss
Executive Office for Administration & Finance
State House, Room 373
Boston MA 02133
Mr. Peter Quinn
Chief Information Officer/Director
Information Technology Division
200 Arlington Street
Chelsea, MA 02150
Re: Proposed Revisions to Information Domain-Enterprise Technical Reference Model
Dear Secretary Kriss and Director Quinn:
Microsoft respectfully invites you to consider its responses to the proposed revisions to the Enterprise
Technical Reference Model-Information Domain published on August 29, 2005 (ETRM) which, as
currently framed, mandates exclusive use of a designated office document format within all executive
agencies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by January, 2007.
Microsoft strongly supports the efforts of the Information Technology Division (ITD) of the
Executive Office for Administration & Finance (ANF) to bring the benefits of XML to executive
agencies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We recognize that governments are challenged to
be fully accountable for archived public records well into the future, and for ensuring that government
agencies can efficiently handle data and documents across all technical and organizational boundaries.
We share the opinion that XML is the ideal format for data interoperability and storage, management,
and archiving of public records and endorse the direction to support open and agreed-upon
specifications for data interoperability within government via XML standards. We share the
proposal's goals for data interoperability across government agencies and for assuring proper storage
and maintenance of all public records. Consistent with this viewpoint, Microsoft has been deeply
committed to supporting XML within Microsoft Office for a number of years and continues to work
with many governments around the world toward these goals.
We have substantial concerns, however, with the definition of "open formats" in the current proposal.
This definition mandates adoption of a single, immature format for office documents throughout the
Commonwealth's executive agencies and effectively requires deployment of a single office
application technology within those executive agencies. As such, this unprecedented approach not
only prevents impacted state agencies of the Commonwealth from using many critical and well-
established technologies, but also runs afoul of well-established procurement norms without due
consideration for the enormous costs and technical challenges that stem from the proposal. We
simply do not believe that the proposed mandate for this exclusive document format is the best
solution for achieving the Commonwealth's laudable goals.
Microsoft's key concerns are as follows:
ANF did not provide sufficient time for review and comment on the proposed policy, nor a
robust process for addressing comments. Due process requires much more, particularly
given the unprecedented nature of the proposal and the potentially adverse consequences it
could provoke,
the proposed policy would create significant costs and problems for state agencies, for the
private sector, and for its citizens,
the document format designated in the proposed policy is new to the marketplace, still
subject to potential revision, and not widely deployed or tested in a wide variety of product
or usage scenarios,
there are substantial technical challenges associated with implementation of the proposed
policy. For example, there are issues associated with converting documents saved in the
well-established, existing document formats which apparently have not been considered,
including the possibility that the new policy will lock out citizens and organizations which
use software applications supporting these existing formats fro
This is just one step in the eventual commoditization of major software products. Eventually, because of open formats, the interconnected nature of the internet, and tightening IT budgets, there will be nothing Microsoft (or any other private company for that matter) can offer in a word processor to justify the price difference from Open Source alternatives. The same will be true for other types of software, such as spreadsheets, browsers, even operating systems. As a result, these types of "ninty-percenter" software will become commodities; each brand will be basically the same as every other brand, including OpenSource. And no one can compete with free.
Once this happens (and it already is, slowly), the software companies will have to make their money by creating "ten-percenter" software: highly specialized software contracted and built specifically for another company, or a niche market. To use an analogy, the "ninety-percenter" software market right now is like tract housing. Companies build products that they think people will like, and then sell them when the product is finished. The future of software design is much more like contract housing; people contact a company, tell them what they want in their product, and the company builds it for a contract fee, specifically for that customer. Both types of software development co-exist now, but soon the tract style will not be maintainable as a business model since groups of people are giving away tract houses for free.
Microsoft is struggling right now with the future of their products. Microsoft Office will soon be obsolete if MS continues their current business model, since there will be nothing to justify its high price. Right now, Microsoft maintains their pricepoint with vendor lock-in; but as soon as every major company and government is using open standards, MS Office will be just one choice out of several. I can see Microsoft Office being quite profitable in a commodity market, but Microsoft will have to add more than just office-suite productivity to their software. They have to offer more value than the next guy: in the form of tech support, or service contracts, or collaboration/version tracking software, or any of a number of things that would add value to the commodity. The commodity alone will not be enough.
This is a very good move by Massachusetts; in the long run, it will protect valuable data from vendor lock-in, and eventually foster competition in the office suite marketplace. Competition is always a Good Thing(tm).
I don't like replying to my own posts, but there was one point I forgot to make.
I also tested GMail and Yahoo with increasing/decreasing text size (in Firefox, with Ctrl +/-), which is a big issue for usability. Yahoo scaled fairly well, except for the left navbar, which broke somewhat. Text overlapped, text was overflowing out of the navbar region, and it was generally a mess. When I increased text size in GMail, everything scaled beautifully, with no overlap or overflow anywhere on the page. That alone says quite a bit about Google's commitment to usability.
Let's face facts here: Yahoo is playing catchup, and nothing some journalist who can't tell that labels are the same thing as folders can say will make it any different.
I don't like these complex AJAX "systems". Sometimes I wish people have the "KISS" (Keep It Simple, Stupid) concept in their minds.
You know what? You're right. There are times where users will not want to use the complex DHTML application that webmail services currently use. However, Google thought of that. At the bottom of every page of GMail is a link for using the service in "Standard" mode or in "Basic HTML" mode. The nifty features that I think make GMail worth it, like the spellchecker, the dynamic page structuring, the autocompletion popups, etc. will all be turned off in "Basic HTML" mode, and every view will be a new HTML page, according to the browser. You could even use GMail in Linx if you wanted to. I searched all over Yahoo Mail, in the preferences, on the page, and could not find any such option.
I also accessed both my GMail account and my Yahoo account from Linx, and Yahoo had many problems. I could not compose a message, because the link to compose was a javascript link. I was also having trouble navigating to some places because of the proliferation of javascript links. GMail, on the other hand, automatically detected that I was using an incompatible browser and switched over to Basic HTML mode. I was able to navigate, compose, etc. without any problems. The only thing I could not do was edit my preferences in Linx; Google told me to use a compliant browser to do that, since it could only be done in Standard mode. However, given that GMail is still in Beta, I would be willing to bet that Google adds a Basic HTML settings editor fairly soon.
In short, I think Google strikes the right balance between "KISS" and "Feature-Filled": and that balance is choice. The features are all there, and they work beautifully, but if for some reason you are using the application in an environment that precludes use of those features, then Google is more than willing to give you a "KISS" solution.
In the age of perfect digital copies, distributing DRM-free content is akin to a Ferrari dealership allowing test drives without requiring so much as a deposit, driver's license number, or even a name from the customer. Sure, it's illegal to drive off in that Ferrari and never return, but it's extremely easy to do so and the chances of getting caught are slim (ok, maybe Ferrari was a bad example due to the low percentage of them on the road, but the analogy still stands). Keep in mind that if this actually happened at a car dealership, people would most likely blame the dealership for not requiring a deposit before the test drive. From a purely statistical point of view, theft is inevitable when you leave your back door open.
Because of that statistical certainty, digital content distributors have two methods of locking the back door: they can either restrict distribution of the content with DRM, or see to it that content acquired through third party channels is inferior to the real product. The second option is much, much harder, since people could redistribute whatever added value the distributor put in the product (a good example is special features on DVDs... with BitTorrent, one can share multiple files under one share, and those extra files could contain the special features on the DVD, and even the cover artwork).
However, restricting distribution is not as easy as it sounds, either, especially when you factor in fair use and non-infringing copying such as format-shifting or time-shifting. Since the DRM itself is making decisions about how you are allowed to use the material, how can it tell whether this copy you are making is for your iPod, your car, another computer you own, or for 10,000 of your closest friends? The short answer is that it can't tell. So it has to make certain assumptions and allow the most common fair uses, while restricting everything else.
FairPlay, for example, allows songs to be burned to CD, but you cannot burn the same playlist more than a certain number of times (7, if I remember correctly). That seems like a really fair restriction to me. Theoretically, I should be able to make as many CDs of the same playlist as I want, as long as I'm not giving them to other people. I could wallpaper my room with copies of that playlist if I wanted. But because the ratio of "people who make more than x copies for the purposes of distribution" to "people who make more than x copies just for themselves, and never distribute any" is so high, it makes sense to restrict the number of copies one can make of a single playlist.
There are two extremes to DRM: no restriction at all, and no consumer rights at all. Good DRM will be a compromise between the two; it will allow the majority of people to exercise their fair use rights, and it will stop casual* distribution of the content.
-------- *I use the word "casual" here purposely: for those people determined to get something for nothing, the mantra "If I can hear it, I can pirate it" still stands. To continue our Ferrari analogy from before, these would be the people trying to steal the Ferrari by paying the deposit with counterfeit money and giving the dealership a fake ID. These people will always exist, and no amount of DRM will stop them from distributing content. But for the majority of users, if it is convenient to buy the real product, they will. If it is not convenient for them to distribute the content to others, they won't. Many of the problems people have with DRM currently stem from the fact that it is not convenient to use the product once it's paid for, since the DRM is too restrictive. Given the monopolistic nature of most of the media in this country, market forces won't take care of this problem. We still need to fight for consumers' rights in DRM schemes, but we will never accomplish anything if we fight for the removal of all DRM.
The information is encoded on the key, it's much more cost-effective to do it this way than to try to have "networked" door locks. Although I'd imagine that the information is not the room number but instead the lock id.
Ahh, that would make sense, as long as the lock IDs did not correlate with the room numbers in any predictable way. Thanks for clarifying that.
If the key has your room number and length of stay, then my lost & found room key plus a $39 magnetic stripe card reader equals a stolen laptop, right?
I don't think the room number is stored on the card. In fact, I don't think any information on the card itself is changed at all.
I worked in a computer lab in college that had a card-swipe reader to let the students in. They used their student ID cards, which were only coded with a 9-digit ID number. Every semester, we were given a list of the new students in the department and their ID numbers, and we programmed them into the door lock (over a serial connection, actually... we had to bring a laptop to the door and plug it in).
It seems to me that in the case of the hotel, programming the room number and swiping the card at the front desk just sends the card's serial number to the server, which contacts the correct door and says "admit this serial number until date xx/xx". Of course, there would be other serial numbers in the door, specifically for cards issued to security, maid service, etc. I'm not sure if this is done wirelessly or over a wired connection (perhaps through the hinge of the door?), but that would be the most secure way to do it.
Someone who has experience with hotel door lock systems, please correct me if I'm speculating incorrectly.
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For another example, I wrote this week a dead-simple chat program (because I needed a specific feature). It was simpler to write a web app instead of a real app, because the latter would require networking, windowing, and whatnot - the web interface made GUI easy and manual networking irrelevant.
I'm actually in the middle of doing the same thing, but I'm very new to AJAX. Any chance you would be willing to share your code with me?
Well, I have learned that common sense and smart decisions are deprecated in the upper levels of the entertainment industry. The major labels/studios are too big for their own good, they lost sight of what their real objectives should have been and now they are well on their merry way to self-destruction through customer base alienation. Tunnel vision is dangerous.
I whole heartedly agree. However, the problem I see here is that there really is a place in the music marketplace for music publishers/distributors, just not on the terms the RIAA is trying to dictate.
Does anyone know of any record companies, perhaps newly created, that are not members of the RIAA and stand for artists' rights? I'd love to buy music from a distributor who still thinks of it as a service industry, to both the fans and the artists, instead of a manufacturing industry who is constantly battling evil thieves. There are lots of ways of making money off music without destroying your customer base, but the RIAA member companies have lost sight of that.
Well, that code may make your browser sit and spin for about 120 seconds before working, but one could conceivably make that time a whole lot longer with some exponential magic:
function ex() {
var buffer = "A";
for (var i = 0; i 5000; i++) {
buffer += buffer;
}
document.title = buffer;
}
And that would truly be a pain in the ass.
But it occurs to me: would it be practical to add an option to Firefox which limits the physical size of your history file, which the user could specify? Then if Firefox runs into this problem, it would only read in the first 1 MB (or whatever) of history and discard the rest. This could be extended to any area where Firefox stores data that is modifiable by Javascript DOM functions. We limit the size of the cache; why not this?
Wow. This is a terrible article.
From all the grammar mistakes, to the pointless buzzwords ("camsnuffling", "podslurping"), to the mention of how USB devices instantly give anyone access to any data on a computer, to the fact that "hackers" and "computer attackers" are mentioned several times when the data being taken is clearly being taken by employees who have access to it in the first place.
And "Bluetooth" is apparently a USB storage device. Way to go.
But in all seriousness, companies do have security issues regarding sensitive data leaving their computers in the hand of employees. How can these companies be sure that their data is secure while still maintaining access for the people who need it and not treating their employees like criminals?
If I were Dell, or some other prebuilt Windows box company, I would offer a desktop computer with no external ports at all. No USB, no serial port, no floppy disk, no CD writer, no nothing. Just a hard drive and a network connection, and a DVD/CD-ROM drive. That way, companies can make all their data available over the internal network (c'mon, is setting up shared server space really *that* difficult?) and it's much harder to get the data out of the company. If the company is truly paranoid about people taking hard drives out of their desktops to take home with them, set up the computer with an encrypted file system which asks the main server for the passphrase every time the computer boots. If you're worried about people sending themselves things as attachments, then don't allow emails with attachments from your servers. If outside companies need access to sensitive data in order to do business with you, then set up a secure server for data exchange. No sweat.
Precautions can be taken on the server side that make it very difficult for employees to steal sensitive data, but that still allow for efficient data flow within the company. And, of course, none of these ways will prevent anyone who is truly determined to get your data, but it will stop the casual stealers, and your chances of sensitive data getting out are much lower.
Wikipedia's success has come from people joining together and creating new articles, not just editing them. We need to be able to post new facts, new ideas, and new discoveries that are going on in the world. New users are the primary source of these articles.
Perhaps you didn't read the summary.
"Wikipedia will restrict the creation of new articles to members. Anonymous users will only be able to edit existing articles."
Members. Not admins, or moderators, or privileged people. Just members. All you have to do to create an article is sign up. Becoming a member is free.
Most people on Slashdot moderate/modify Anonymous Cowards into oblivion. If someone takes the time to register their name, there's a greater likelihood that what they have to say is relevent, from a purely statistical point of view (trolls obviously also register their name). I don't see how Wikipedia should be any different in its regard of anonymous postings.
That's why [OpenOffice.org] developed OpenDoc ... so that they could compete simply based on "We have an *open* format" and nothing else. Office12 makes OO.o look like utter trash.
That may be, but you are completely missing the point of having open standards.
This is not about "open source must crush Microsoft at any cost!" This is about making information available in a format that a single company does not control.
If Microsoft were to fully support the OpenDocument format in the next version of Office, then more power to them. MS Office is a fine program; the problem with it is that the formats it uses cannot be (properly/legally/fully) used outside of Microsoft Office. If someone wants to continue to read their old documents, they are forced to upgrade their installation of Office, because no other software fully supports the format (and cannot, legally). If, in the future, Microsoft stops making Office or stops supporting old versions of these files, then to read the files someone would have to go through a time-consuming, and legally dubious, process of reverse-engineering the proprietary format.
Contrast this with an open document standard: people are free to purchase Microsoft Office to create these open documents, but they also have a choice of many other products on the market, some proprietary, some open-source, some beer-free, some not. Thus the individual is able to make a choice based NOT on the format their files are already in, but on the merits of each piece of software individually. And if they decide at some point that they are not happy with the software they chose, they are welcome to try something else and not have to worry about converting all their existing documents.
Additionally, as governmental bodies are moving to digital archiving of important documents, there is a need to be able to open these documents on a much longer timescale than that of business. What if, 200 years from now, you need to read the original version of some obscure government document? If the documents are all stored in an open, well documented format, then writing a viewer would be a fairly simple task, and a viewer would be easy for the goverment to provide to its citizenry, at no cost (since government documents need to be available to the entire public, which means the cost should be zero). If the documents were in a long-lost proprietary format from a company that went under 100 years ago, that task would be much, much more difficult.
So, yes, I would agree that OpenOffice has a little way to go in feature catch-up before they are on par with Microsoft Office (but they are very, very close). But because of this new OpenDocument format, they are just one of several options in office suite software, and can now compete on an even playing field. Vendor lock-in for documents will be a thing of the past.
TFA reads basically as a step-by-step guide to teach any-and-everyone how to (at least attempt to) pull off a similar barcode scam.
Yes, that's right. Because if there is even the slightest chance that information could be used in a manner that breaks a law, then it must be locked up in a deep dark hole somewhere so no one can ever find it or show it to--God forbid--the general public. The "public" will most certainly use the information as soon as possible to break every law they can think of.
Now if you'll excuse me, my printout of "Murder Methods" is ready.
Sounds great. Why do we need drivers?
As long as the world is blanketed with sensors and every car knows where every other vehicle is, and can use radar to spot the things that it can't identify (like wildlife darting out into the road), then why not just hook the whole damn thing into the GPS navigation system and let it take care of itself?
I'd love to take a nap on the way to work.
(And while I'm dreaming, let's get some in-flight refueling technology on the roads. As long as I'm paying this much for gas, the gas stations should not make me stop to fill up.)
From my experience rebates are made for the customers, and the sellers. It gets people into the store, they save money they'd normally have to spend, and usually the store picks up the lost money on items added on (ie. Extended Warranty, mice, keyboards, cables, mouse pads, webcams, the list goes on and on).
The system you are talking about, where people are attracted to a sale because the price is low, and then the store makes it tempting to add on extras with a higher profit margin, can be done with old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness low prices. Rebates need not be involved. And if that were truly the only reason the rebates were there (to offer lower prices) then the stores would be losing lots of money on the people they pay to process rebates and mail checks.
No, my friend, rebates are just a way of "cooking the books." A store is obviously not going to offer a product for a loss*, so they price the product right where they want it, then mark it up an extra $X and offer an $(X-Y) rebate, where Y is the cost of processing the rebate. That way, if every single person mails in and receives their rebate check, the company breaks exactly even. However, even if a SINGLE customer out of millions doesn't send in the form, or is disqualified for not following instructions, then the company just made some money for essentially doing nothing. And even if only 1% of the customers don't mail it in, the company is rolling in it. The same thing is true of gift cards, for mostly the same reasons: they are pure profit.
What disturbs me is not that I am very slightly inconvenienced by the rebate form, it's that the companies would have the gall to do this sort of thing in the first place. I would like to know what happened to plain old customer service. How about offering a quality product at a reasonable price with knowledgeable staff and no strings attached? Is this something that major retailers cannot grasp? Is the drive for another 0.00001% profit margin so strong that you are willing to alienate, frustrate, and anger your customer base? This, simply put, is not good business, yet it's rampant. And just because some group who works in the interest of the large retailers comes forward and gives the rebate situation a positive spin does not justify the practice.
By the way, I also get as upset at grocery store SuperSaver cards. If they don't know who you are, you pay more, and that's unfair. Make the benefits of club membership something OTHER than the prices in the store. Give out frequent flyer miles or free teddy bears or something. Don't punish those of us who wish not to be spammed.
OK, rant over. We now return to your regularly scheduled lives.
*Certain extenuating circumstances do exist where a company will offer a product at a loss, such as inventory reduction, going-out-of-business, or lock-in, where other business units make up the cost (like the X-Box, or cell phones with plans). However, these are *exceedingly* rare in the major national retailers, and usually only happen in furniture stores.
I've seen people using the remote for half an hour, channel surfing all their satellite channels trying to find SOMETHING worth watching, either on the regular satellite, or ppv. And when they come up empty, they go through the whole rotation again.
This person is obviously a ten percenter who hasn't come to grips with it yet. I used to be like them (and you, from the sounds of things). I used to complain a lot about the things that were on television, and how all of it was crap, and why can't they run some decent shows, and who's running this stupid channel anyway, and who watches this crap, and....
And then it hit me: these shows are not FOR me. I am not the target audience. The networks don't care what I think. And you know what? I got over myself. Let the networks have their crappy shows and their marketing data that proves that such-and-such show is a huge hit among boys aged 10-15. I don't need any of it.
And then I came back to the realization that there ARE "diamonds in the rough," so to speak; there are a few select shows worth watching. They have to be hunted down, tracked through the dense forest of bad programming, and cherished. Technology like DVRs is my way of taking control of my television back from the masses that decide what's on. None of the shows I like last long, since very few people appreciate them, and the network replaces them fairly quickly. But I have no problem with that. If a beautiful moment lasts forever, it becomes ordinary.
So get down off your soapbox and stop deciding what's good for everyone else. If you don't like TV, don't watch it. But stop preaching.
As it is, it seems like Pandora is great for finding something that sounds damn near identical. Not the best system, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient than downloading random MP3s and figuring out which ones you like and what the pattern might be.
Point taken, but the best system would grab the random MP3 for you automatically, and just place it in the current playlist. I could envision iTunes, or a similar store/player setup, automagically throwing a random song that you don't own into the rotation and allow you to listen to it once. Then your reaction to that song would help shape your personalized tastes, and perhaps an entry would be made in a "sampled" page, which would allow you, if you liked the song, to purchase it for future listening, and provide links to similar songs for both purchase and personalizing. This seems like a win-win to me, where the consumer can easily find new things to buy based on their own tastes, and the distributor can market things effectively. Targeted marketing works, but only when you can include some off-target offers (with feedback) to broaden the consumer's horizons a little.
Well, its not really off-topic, because PVRs are supposed to help you "cherry-pcik", but in reality people use them to consume even more junk. Just like the original VCR - people tape stuff "becasue they can", and nver get around to watching half of it.
Then I'm glad you are here to tell us how to use our technology properly. News flash: everything on TV is there because lots of people watch it. That's the reality of the business. Just because you and I don't like 90% of the programming available doesn't mean that no one likes it. Obviously people are watching it, or the networks would replace it with something else. The whole point of television is to get people to watch, so they can sell advertising. And as a ten-percenter (someone who only likes 10% of available programming) I'm grateful for technologies that allow me to find what I want without having to watch the things I don't. And if I record something with the intention of watching it and never do, it's not a problem. I didn't pay to record that program, and once I delete it the disk space can be used for other things. No sweat.
So, how much TV have you watched the last year, including the time spent doing the "cherry-picking"? Mine stays off for weeks at a time. Actually, its pretty much only been on this year when friends come over to watch a dvd.
Actually, I've spent quite a bit of time watching program's I've "cherry-picked", but almost all of it was because of my automatic script pulling episodes out of RSS feeds and downloading them via BitTorrent. The actual television was off for most of that time, and the time spent doing the actual "cherry-picking" was minimal; it amounted to me typing a regular expression into my filter list and letting the script automatically download the episodes. Sometimes I hear about a new show, and I download one to try it out. If I like it, it goes into the regular rotation. If not, I delete it and get on with my life.
I am currently in the process of building a MythTV box, to free up my cable modem. And, so I can sit on the couch and watch the episodes, instead of at my desk. And, so I can see them on my big TV instead of my smaller LCD monitor. And, so I can record sports to timeshift (no one on BitTorrent seems to care about distributing NCAA basketball games). And, to free up my hard drive.
The DVR has essentially turned television into a pull medium instead of the push medium it has been since its debut. It has put the consumer back in control. How is this a bad thing, again?
You know, most of the media world is pretty excited about these concepts of "personalized media"... where the media that is presented to you is based on the types of things that you already like (it's just starting to take off in music, but watch for it in the future in television, movies, and internet sites). But I see this as somewhat of a problem, where people are never exposed to new things. If everything in our world is personalized and created specifically for our tastes, how do we define our tastes? When do we ever get a chance to listen to something we don't like, and say that we don't like it? Or listen to new things we've never heard of, and that may not be in any way related to our database of media we like, and say we like it?
The situation presents us with two possibilities: either we get pidgeonholed into a "genre" artificially created by the content distributors (as broad or narrow as that genre might be), or our tastes enter a feedback loop, where the only things we listen to are the things our personalized media players play for us, whose choices are based on things we listen to in our personalized media players.
So where do we get outside input? My suggestion at this point would be to do away with artificial genres and create relationships between media based purely on a database of what people like and don't like. (Last.FM does this now.) Then I would like to see the media player throw in a randomly chosen selection once in a while, just to test its own theory, so to speak. However, for that to work, the selection would have to be truly random; no fair throwing in something that you are marketing heavily (I'm talking to you, [RI|MP]AA...) just to get people to hear it. So instead of choosing music based only on your tastes, your media player will choose music based *mostly* on your tastes, and then throw you a curve ball once in a while to see how you react. Who knows? Maybe that diehard punk fan would enjoy a Beethoven piece or a 70's pop song. But the media player would never know that unless it tried.
Three boxes for the gamer-kings under Live
Seven for the finance lords in their halls of stone
Nine boxes for the mortal render farms doomed to die
One Server for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
One XBox to rule them all, one XBox to find them
One XBox to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
In the land of Redmond, where the shadows lie
In response to the PDF of the PowerPoint presentation:
On page 7, there's a graph with the y-axis labeled, "Miller Units", with bars representing "Dark" and "Light". "Light" I get, but I didn't realize Miller made a stout....
The task for the free information counterculture becomes obvious - compromise and release as many keys for as many best-selling players as possible, to face the content providers with the choice of either abandoning their DRM aspirations or incurring the wrath of the proletariat.
I can't wait to see the angry mobs of people returning devices at Circuit City because the new movie they just bought won't play on their model player. YOU try explaining to them how this is "protecting them from the evil pirates."
Good times will be had by all.
In some article they stated the radio was like almost US $300 (on today's dollars). But of course I am sure the "Use N' Throw" culture was still not abundant in the USA.
The iPod was $299 when it was first released. I would agree that the current culture of consumer electronics is disposable, but prices have nothing to do with it. People just buy more stuff now than they did then.
And I'm sure they'll be ready to play the standard 3 E's - embrace, extend (meaning the open source tools will mysteriously crash / improperly render Office-produced OpenDocument files), and extinguish.
An interesting point. And while that may have worked in the past, I don't think it will in this case.
Massachussetts basically just codified into law the requirement that whatever office suite is used by the state better well conform to the OpenDocument standard, to the letter. A prerequisite to purchasing (or downloading, if they went with a free-beer solution), would be to make sure the office suite created OpenDocument compatible files, and properly read and interpreted the entire OpenDocument spec. If Microsoft's software started adding features to OpenDocuments that were not in the specs, then it isn't an OpenDocument, is it? The people hired by Massachussetts to check for OpenDocument adherance would see that, and Microsoft would lose the sale. The three Es only work when the people using the software care more about features than spec compatibility, and that is clearly not the case here.
Microsoft can still compete for state business, but they will have to do it in ways other than forcing proprietary formats on their users. They might just have to shift their business model away from vendor lock-in and closer to providing quality products and services for a reasonable price. God help us all.
Beware, the evil web PDF! Here is the full text of Alan Yates' letter, in good ol' HTML. And yes, it is a very long letter.
-------
September 8, 2005
BY ELECTRONIC MAIL AND OVERNIGHT DELIVERY
Secretary Eric Kriss
Executive Office for Administration & Finance
State House, Room 373
Boston MA 02133
Mr. Peter Quinn
Chief Information Officer/Director
Information Technology Division
200 Arlington Street
Chelsea, MA 02150
Re: Proposed Revisions to Information Domain-Enterprise Technical Reference Model
Dear Secretary Kriss and Director Quinn:
Microsoft respectfully invites you to consider its responses to the proposed revisions to the Enterprise Technical Reference Model-Information Domain published on August 29, 2005 (ETRM) which, as currently framed, mandates exclusive use of a designated office document format within all executive agencies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by January, 2007.
Microsoft strongly supports the efforts of the Information Technology Division (ITD) of the Executive Office for Administration & Finance (ANF) to bring the benefits of XML to executive agencies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We recognize that governments are challenged to be fully accountable for archived public records well into the future, and for ensuring that government agencies can efficiently handle data and documents across all technical and organizational boundaries. We share the opinion that XML is the ideal format for data interoperability and storage, management, and archiving of public records and endorse the direction to support open and agreed-upon specifications for data interoperability within government via XML standards. We share the proposal's goals for data interoperability across government agencies and for assuring proper storage and maintenance of all public records. Consistent with this viewpoint, Microsoft has been deeply committed to supporting XML within Microsoft Office for a number of years and continues to work with many governments around the world toward these goals.
We have substantial concerns, however, with the definition of "open formats" in the current proposal. This definition mandates adoption of a single, immature format for office documents throughout the Commonwealth's executive agencies and effectively requires deployment of a single office application technology within those executive agencies. As such, this unprecedented approach not only prevents impacted state agencies of the Commonwealth from using many critical and well- established technologies, but also runs afoul of well-established procurement norms without due consideration for the enormous costs and technical challenges that stem from the proposal. We simply do not believe that the proposed mandate for this exclusive document format is the best solution for achieving the Commonwealth's laudable goals.
Microsoft's key concerns are as follows:
This is just one step in the eventual commoditization of major software products. Eventually, because of open formats, the interconnected nature of the internet, and tightening IT budgets, there will be nothing Microsoft (or any other private company for that matter) can offer in a word processor to justify the price difference from Open Source alternatives. The same will be true for other types of software, such as spreadsheets, browsers, even operating systems. As a result, these types of "ninty-percenter" software will become commodities; each brand will be basically the same as every other brand, including OpenSource. And no one can compete with free.
Once this happens (and it already is, slowly), the software companies will have to make their money by creating "ten-percenter" software: highly specialized software contracted and built specifically for another company, or a niche market. To use an analogy, the "ninety-percenter" software market right now is like tract housing. Companies build products that they think people will like, and then sell them when the product is finished. The future of software design is much more like contract housing; people contact a company, tell them what they want in their product, and the company builds it for a contract fee, specifically for that customer. Both types of software development co-exist now, but soon the tract style will not be maintainable as a business model since groups of people are giving away tract houses for free.
Microsoft is struggling right now with the future of their products. Microsoft Office will soon be obsolete if MS continues their current business model, since there will be nothing to justify its high price. Right now, Microsoft maintains their pricepoint with vendor lock-in; but as soon as every major company and government is using open standards, MS Office will be just one choice out of several. I can see Microsoft Office being quite profitable in a commodity market, but Microsoft will have to add more than just office-suite productivity to their software. They have to offer more value than the next guy: in the form of tech support, or service contracts, or collaboration/version tracking software, or any of a number of things that would add value to the commodity. The commodity alone will not be enough.
This is a very good move by Massachusetts; in the long run, it will protect valuable data from vendor lock-in, and eventually foster competition in the office suite marketplace. Competition is always a Good Thing(tm).
I don't like replying to my own posts, but there was one point I forgot to make.
I also tested GMail and Yahoo with increasing/decreasing text size (in Firefox, with Ctrl +/-), which is a big issue for usability. Yahoo scaled fairly well, except for the left navbar, which broke somewhat. Text overlapped, text was overflowing out of the navbar region, and it was generally a mess. When I increased text size in GMail, everything scaled beautifully, with no overlap or overflow anywhere on the page. That alone says quite a bit about Google's commitment to usability.
Let's face facts here: Yahoo is playing catchup, and nothing some journalist who can't tell that labels are the same thing as folders can say will make it any different.
I don't like these complex AJAX "systems". Sometimes I wish people have the "KISS" (Keep It Simple, Stupid) concept in their minds.
You know what? You're right. There are times where users will not want to use the complex DHTML application that webmail services currently use. However, Google thought of that. At the bottom of every page of GMail is a link for using the service in "Standard" mode or in "Basic HTML" mode. The nifty features that I think make GMail worth it, like the spellchecker, the dynamic page structuring, the autocompletion popups, etc. will all be turned off in "Basic HTML" mode, and every view will be a new HTML page, according to the browser. You could even use GMail in Linx if you wanted to. I searched all over Yahoo Mail, in the preferences, on the page, and could not find any such option.
I also accessed both my GMail account and my Yahoo account from Linx, and Yahoo had many problems. I could not compose a message, because the link to compose was a javascript link. I was also having trouble navigating to some places because of the proliferation of javascript links. GMail, on the other hand, automatically detected that I was using an incompatible browser and switched over to Basic HTML mode. I was able to navigate, compose, etc. without any problems. The only thing I could not do was edit my preferences in Linx; Google told me to use a compliant browser to do that, since it could only be done in Standard mode. However, given that GMail is still in Beta, I would be willing to bet that Google adds a Basic HTML settings editor fairly soon.
In short, I think Google strikes the right balance between "KISS" and "Feature-Filled": and that balance is choice. The features are all there, and they work beautifully, but if for some reason you are using the application in an environment that precludes use of those features, then Google is more than willing to give you a "KISS" solution.
I wholeheartedly agree.
In the age of perfect digital copies, distributing DRM-free content is akin to a Ferrari dealership allowing test drives without requiring so much as a deposit, driver's license number, or even a name from the customer. Sure, it's illegal to drive off in that Ferrari and never return, but it's extremely easy to do so and the chances of getting caught are slim (ok, maybe Ferrari was a bad example due to the low percentage of them on the road, but the analogy still stands). Keep in mind that if this actually happened at a car dealership, people would most likely blame the dealership for not requiring a deposit before the test drive. From a purely statistical point of view, theft is inevitable when you leave your back door open.
Because of that statistical certainty, digital content distributors have two methods of locking the back door: they can either restrict distribution of the content with DRM, or see to it that content acquired through third party channels is inferior to the real product. The second option is much, much harder, since people could redistribute whatever added value the distributor put in the product (a good example is special features on DVDs... with BitTorrent, one can share multiple files under one share, and those extra files could contain the special features on the DVD, and even the cover artwork).
However, restricting distribution is not as easy as it sounds, either, especially when you factor in fair use and non-infringing copying such as format-shifting or time-shifting. Since the DRM itself is making decisions about how you are allowed to use the material, how can it tell whether this copy you are making is for your iPod, your car, another computer you own, or for 10,000 of your closest friends? The short answer is that it can't tell. So it has to make certain assumptions and allow the most common fair uses, while restricting everything else.
FairPlay, for example, allows songs to be burned to CD, but you cannot burn the same playlist more than a certain number of times (7, if I remember correctly). That seems like a really fair restriction to me. Theoretically, I should be able to make as many CDs of the same playlist as I want, as long as I'm not giving them to other people. I could wallpaper my room with copies of that playlist if I wanted. But because the ratio of "people who make more than x copies for the purposes of distribution" to "people who make more than x copies just for themselves, and never distribute any" is so high, it makes sense to restrict the number of copies one can make of a single playlist.
There are two extremes to DRM: no restriction at all, and no consumer rights at all. Good DRM will be a compromise between the two; it will allow the majority of people to exercise their fair use rights, and it will stop casual* distribution of the content.
--------
*I use the word "casual" here purposely: for those people determined to get something for nothing, the mantra "If I can hear it, I can pirate it" still stands. To continue our Ferrari analogy from before, these would be the people trying to steal the Ferrari by paying the deposit with counterfeit money and giving the dealership a fake ID. These people will always exist, and no amount of DRM will stop them from distributing content. But for the majority of users, if it is convenient to buy the real product, they will. If it is not convenient for them to distribute the content to others, they won't. Many of the problems people have with DRM currently stem from the fact that it is not convenient to use the product once it's paid for, since the DRM is too restrictive. Given the monopolistic nature of most of the media in this country, market forces won't take care of this problem. We still need to fight for consumers' rights in DRM schemes, but we will never accomplish anything if we fight for the removal of all DRM.
The information is encoded on the key, it's much more cost-effective to do it this way than to try to have "networked" door locks. Although I'd imagine that the information is not the room number but instead the lock id.
Ahh, that would make sense, as long as the lock IDs did not correlate with the room numbers in any predictable way. Thanks for clarifying that.
If the key has your room number and length of stay, then my lost & found room key plus a $39 magnetic stripe card reader equals a stolen laptop, right?
I don't think the room number is stored on the card. In fact, I don't think any information on the card itself is changed at all.
I worked in a computer lab in college that had a card-swipe reader to let the students in. They used their student ID cards, which were only coded with a 9-digit ID number. Every semester, we were given a list of the new students in the department and their ID numbers, and we programmed them into the door lock (over a serial connection, actually... we had to bring a laptop to the door and plug it in).
It seems to me that in the case of the hotel, programming the room number and swiping the card at the front desk just sends the card's serial number to the server, which contacts the correct door and says "admit this serial number until date xx/xx". Of course, there would be other serial numbers in the door, specifically for cards issued to security, maid service, etc. I'm not sure if this is done wirelessly or over a wired connection (perhaps through the hinge of the door?), but that would be the most secure way to do it.
Someone who has experience with hotel door lock systems, please correct me if I'm speculating incorrectly.