Out of the gate, iPods were Mac-only, back when Apple was still flailing with the Macintosh platform. iPods didn't start supporting Windows, as far as I can remember, until sometime around the summer of 2003. It didn't take them any time to outdo the competition, if by "competition" you mean MP3 players. MP3 players were just badly designed and not widely used. It took them a while to refine iTunes, get to the Windows market, and generate enough hype to overcome the general reticence of people to ditch walkmen/discmen in favor of the new, complicated, high-tech world of MP3 players.
Prior to the iPod, MP3 players were impractical and hard to use, and generally didn't have enough storage to be worth the trouble. The software for loading music on them was generally terrible, and the data was going through USB1, so that 32MB or flash memory wasn't getting new songs very often. The people who bought them and used them were usually hacker/geek types, which to this day isn't really the target audience for iPods.
You can argue with any one of my points, but it's hard to deny that the situation isn't different.
Even if all the states came up with some extremely strict spam laws it would just push spammers to other countries...
So if all the spammers move to Indonesia, that fact can at least be used as another factor to improve spam filtering. I don't receive a lot of legitimate e-mail from Indonesia. And hey, if Indonesia has a problem with having their country's e-mail filtered strictly by the rest of the world, then they can can crack down on spammers themselves.
You're right, laws without the ability to enforce them won't solve the problem. However, without any laws, there isn't even the ability to push them out of the country, even if you know who they are
Yes, exactly right. The Bill of Rights is less touchy-feely than most people think. Speech, arms, freedom for forcing soldiers into your home, freedom from unreasonable search and seizures, fair trials, nor cruel or unusual punishment, etc. These are to constrain the ability of the government to quell a just revolution.
If we want freedom for ourselves, we must preserve the right of others to say things we disagree with.
As an example had Gary Kildall patented some of his (at the time) massive innovations, he might have been able to get a truly fair due, instead of being ripped off and left in the wake of vast corporations taking his work and making billions.
It seems to me that patenting massive innovations just means the vast corporations' lawyers have to work a little harder to rip you off and make billions off of your work. Either way, it probably won't be you that makes the billions. Your best hope is to settle for a little less than the millions they would have paid their lawyers during the law suit.
cost-effectiveness and customer service of the US Post Office with Fed X and UPS
I don't know... less than 50 cents for someone to carry a piece of paper across the country in a weeks time... that seems pretty cost-effective to me.
In reality, a lot of scientific research is done at the university level. It's overly simplistic to think that we could simply abolish patents and, without the profit motive, get the same results. It's also overly simplistic to think that, if you drop the patent system, the human race will simply cease trying to cure disease.
Ah, I see. So you're saying that, while Dell tries to win businesses over with service, support, reliability, etc., they're trying to win home users over with "Oooooo... shiny!"
It's not like they remove your ability to have mail sent to your house or anything. The service is that they give you a new address to which you can have things shipped. So if you have checks or original documents, you can give them your home/business address, but if you have other mail you just want to be able to read/archive/shred, you give this other address, and then you can access your mail from anywhere.
More often than not, people WANT to hear about the bad from a new MP3 player rather than the good; it gives them a reasonable expectation of their own experiences with the device.
This is especially insightful since the success of the iPod has been its relative lack of "bad". All of these MP3 players will play music, for example, but the question is "what problems am I going to have getting the device to perform the simple task of playing music?" The closer the answer is to "none", the closer the player is to perfect.
That's fine if you prefer small companies-- I won't argue with that. I was just saying that cheap hardware isn't necessarily a better value. It's true that a consumer, buying one machine, might not notice more/greater problems with his e-machines computer than with his business-level Dell. However, if you're dealing with lots of machines, working in varied circumstances, using imaging techniques, looking for support, making upgrades, etc., etc., then after a while you'll see the difference.
It's not necessarily about going with a huge corporate-level integrator, either (though those do have advantages). Even if you're doing BTO, I'd suggest that it's generally worth it to get name-brand parts which are known to be decent quality, rather some weird brand you've never heard of. There is such a thing as a crappy motherboard, memory module, or video card, even if the specs look fine, and it's not all an issue of speed. There are issues with compatibility, reliability, and support to be considered, and very often, you get what you pay for-- though admittedly there are some deals and there are some rip-offs.
And it's the same with computers. Some very, very cheap boards and cards aside, they all offer the same value. It works. Some run faster, some run slower, but they all work.
I don't really know about some of the other things you've mentioned, but I'm guessing by this statement you've never worked helpdesk support. To this day, it's usually worth investing in bigger brands. A lot of instability and problems come out of crappy hardware and poorly-written drivers. Those cheap components with "the same value" are usually worse in terms of failure rate. And when things do break, support from the cheaper companies is worse, and you'll have more problems with replacement parts.
So for buying your personal computer and you don't care too much about speed, then that eMachines desktop might be fine. If you're going to be buying 50 computers and supporting them, you'll save yourself a lot of headaches if you buy Dell/HP business-level systems (i.e. Optiplex/Precision for Dell instead of Dimension).
There's no such thing as a Windows-based personal computer. Microsoft does not manufacture personal computers, and Windows is not integral to PCs.
Geeze, what do you want out of this distinction? First, nobody said "Microsoft manufactured computers". Second, coming with Microsoft Windows pre-installed is an integral part of the phenomenon being indicated. Given that all these different manufacturers were using the same operating system, it meant that the hardware needs and what hardware was supported was identical across the board, and individual OEMs couldn't really offer many unique features. One could argue that this contributed towards keeping the "beige box" design around for a long time, since you then just had OEMs using the same generic parts and competing on price.
Really, the distinguishing feature of this type of machine is that most of them come with Windows pre-installed. "Windows based" seems like a valid term for them.
Sure, if you can't read then lots of writing seems stupid. But, no, I see your point, a large monopolistic corporation would never dream of treating their customers unfairly.
My point is that the average user shouldn't be in a position of entering into these legal agreements without lawyers. Instead, let people who understand law figure out a basic language that covers most situations.
And do you really think that "interstate commerce" can't be used to justify regulation of EULAs? The whole "interstate commerce" thing has become a technicality to spread federal control over all sorts of things. Anyway, it doesn't matter if it's handled on the state level or federal level. Either way, we should do away with EULAs.
What you should do instead is start a campaign to educate whomever is in charge of making platform decisions at companies/schools/governments.
What you're talking about would still be a "boycott". I am, in fact, the decision-maker for an IT department, and I can tell you that I am not going to be upgrading to Vista anytime soon. I've talked to some of my peers (in other companies), and they aren't exactly eager to upgrade, either. When I suggest a "formal" boycott, I'm saying that instead of just not-buying Vista, we could publicly talk about why we aren't buying it, in order to spread the word and raise awareness of these issues. The truth is, your Directors of [whatever] and Chief [whatever] Officers aren't all PHBs who make arbitrary decisions. However, many of them aren't reading obscure Slashdot postings, and if general public awareness is very low, they might not be aware. They aren't hearing about it on the news, and Microsoft has their marketing people out in force. I believe that this is one instance where fear, uncertainty, and doubt is valid.
The real question is, why do we need a precise, "official" definition of "planet"?
Yes, exactly. The word "planet", as used today, describes a specific collection of bodies in our own solar system. It was devised by ancient astronomers to describe the lights in the sky that didn't follow the normal pattern of stars. Stars go in circles, planets go back and forth. The word has taken on a new meaning as our understanding of celestial bodies has grown, but now it's generally used to indicate that one of the collection of 9 specific bodies. Just as "sun" is used to indicate our star specifically, "planets" indicate specific bodies orbiting our sun.
If we really need a more general definition that's more scientific than "largish body that orbits a star," for the sake of scientific accuracy, then come up with a new term. Take the word "far" for example. It's a general-use word, not a scientific one. We might use it when talking about scientific issues, like, "the nearest star to the sun is far away," but it doesn't have scientific accuracy. This doesn't mean that we need to define "far" as "greater than 1 light-year" and then try to force people to stop claiming that someplace on earth is "far". It means that, if you want a precise scientific term to indicate "greater than 1 light-year away", you need to come up with a new word which isn't "far".
Meanwhile, you're still paying money to businesses who are putting their resources towards efforts to make your life harder, rather than efforts to make your life easier. For every "fix" or "work-around", you're still exerting extra effort where you just shouldn't need to. You're making your software buggier, and your music lower-quality for what it essentially 0 net-gain for anyone. And by buying the products that do this, you're sending the message to these companies that it is acceptable behavior, and that their efforts are good.
If you buy Vista, even if you crack it, you're telling Microsoft that their product is good. Buy pirating it and cracking it, you're telling them that their product is good, but that their "piracy protection" isn't good enough, and that they should put more resources on that front. But the only way to tell them that these "features" are unacceptable is to refuse to buy it or use it. And what will you have lost anyway, by not using Vista? What does Vista actually give you that Windows XP doesn't? Incompatibility and the need to buy new versions of the software you've already bought.
If Microsoft isn't servicing your needs, then you need to let them know. Even if we all simply refuse to buy it, Microsoft will claim that the reason Vista isn't selling is due to piracy, and their lobbyists will put forth a case that this means we need more restrictive laws on software use. It's important that, instead, we make a public case that Vista is not a good product.
I use Linux where I can, and where I can't I try to use OSX rather than Windows. Still, there are times where I have to use Windows. I have no choice.
In the end, I'm not on a quest to end closed-source software, or even get rid of Microsoft. I just want Microsoft to stop doing crappy things to hurt their own customers, and if they won't, then I think their customers should organize a formal boycott. We should make an example out of them for other software companies to see: Pull something like this activation/WGA crap, and your customers won't put up with it. Microsoft isn't the only offender, and all the activation, forced registration, dongles, etc. in the software industry is ridiculous. It hurts customers, but real pirates just find a way to circumvent these restrictions.
I'd like to start a website where people can voice their annoyance, sign a petition, see others' opinions, and generally organize a formal boycott. I'm sure lots of tech-savvy Windows users will not be upgrading anyway, but I think it's important to send a message to Microsoft as to why. However, I'm sure that there's someone out there who is more militant and web/tech savvy than I am, who'd do a better job setting it up.
Maybe if a company sued because their software was legal and got a false positive on being illegal and it caused down time, now that's something to sue about.
Even then, how many companies have the resources to sue Microsoft? The US government and EU can't get Microsoft to concede on simple points, and you think a small business owner in Des Moines is going to be able to bring a substantial fight against MS's army of lawyers?
This is true. Largely, the reason for EULAs is so that software companies can claim full rights over everything and no responsibility so that they can absolve themselves from lawsuits no matter what happens on your computer. Whether they cause a problem by accident, purposefully, or not at all, they don't want to be sued.
The problem is, when you pair this with something like Microsoft's activation/WGA scheme, it means that they can cause otherwise working software to cease to work for any reason whatsoever and the user has no recourse.
Personally, I think that Congress should pass some laws that would replace a basic/general EULA, i.e. software makers aren't responsible for most things unless they make claims to the contrary or cause purposeful damage. Instead of EULAs, we should have a general consensus of what rights/responsibilities/powers we generally grant to software authors vs. their customers. Then we should allow EULAs in certain circumstances where they're merited, but not allow other terms to be in EULAs. For example, no EULA should grant spyware and virus makers to take permanent control of a user's PC.
However, my point is that EULAs are stupid. It's an issue that should be worked out by lawyers and law-makers, because it makes no sense for end-users to be entering into legalistic license agreements, different individually for every piece of software they run, when nobody understands what the terms actually allow.
And in no case should Microsoft be allowed to cause my computer to stop working because an automated system is suspicious that my license might possibly be invalid.
Add in the fact that Microsoft is selling an antivirus to fix software you've already purchased, as well as changing formats every so often to force users to upgrade, and it seems like they're getting dangerously close to racketeering.
Same here. Does anyone want to start an official boycott or anything? No Vista or Office 2007 until Microsoft gets rid of some of these anti-consumer "features"?
You, sir, are completely dead-on correct. Judges are specifically supposed to interpret the law and prior precedence for specific cases. This includes trying to understand the intention behind laws and prior decisions as well as the literal language of them.
I'm sorry to disagree so much with someone who has such a similar name. However, if you read my other posts, I've given reasons why I suggested the formats I did. In 20 years, do you want to go back to your archive and find that you've gone through all this trouble of archiving, only to find you've archived MP3s? If the purpose is to preserve the data, then why on earth would you throw large portions of that data away by storing lossy formats?
FLAC is not an obscure or unknown format. In fact, I would hazard to say it's the de facto standard for lossless compressed audio. Likewise, PDF is a well supported and well documented open format for storing the layout of printed pages. Adobe Acrobat has its problems as a program, but the format itself is very good (for its intended purpose, which is to store accurate representations of print documents). PDF is commonly used in professional print settings and document archive systems.
If you really want to research the issues, there are options that I haven't mentioned. However, if you were more knowledgeable about this topic, you'd know that my suggestions are, at the very least, worth listening to.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of the gate, iPods were Mac-only, back when Apple was still flailing with the Macintosh platform. iPods didn't start supporting Windows, as far as I can remember, until sometime around the summer of 2003. It didn't take them any time to outdo the competition, if by "competition" you mean MP3 players. MP3 players were just badly designed and not widely used. It took them a while to refine iTunes, get to the Windows market, and generate enough hype to overcome the general reticence of people to ditch walkmen/discmen in favor of the new, complicated, high-tech world of MP3 players.
Prior to the iPod, MP3 players were impractical and hard to use, and generally didn't have enough storage to be worth the trouble. The software for loading music on them was generally terrible, and the data was going through USB1, so that 32MB or flash memory wasn't getting new songs very often. The people who bought them and used them were usually hacker/geek types, which to this day isn't really the target audience for iPods.
You can argue with any one of my points, but it's hard to deny that the situation isn't different.
And when the Quantum Vortex Core is failing what do you do? Reroute something to the deflector array? Where's CleverNickName when you need him?
Even if all the states came up with some extremely strict spam laws it would just push spammers to other countries...
So if all the spammers move to Indonesia, that fact can at least be used as another factor to improve spam filtering. I don't receive a lot of legitimate e-mail from Indonesia. And hey, if Indonesia has a problem with having their country's e-mail filtered strictly by the rest of the world, then they can can crack down on spammers themselves.
You're right, laws without the ability to enforce them won't solve the problem. However, without any laws, there isn't even the ability to push them out of the country, even if you know who they are
Yes, exactly right. The Bill of Rights is less touchy-feely than most people think. Speech, arms, freedom for forcing soldiers into your home, freedom from unreasonable search and seizures, fair trials, nor cruel or unusual punishment, etc. These are to constrain the ability of the government to quell a just revolution.
If we want freedom for ourselves, we must preserve the right of others to say things we disagree with.
As an example had Gary Kildall patented some of his (at the time) massive innovations, he might have been able to get a truly fair due, instead of being ripped off and left in the wake of vast corporations taking his work and making billions.
It seems to me that patenting massive innovations just means the vast corporations' lawyers have to work a little harder to rip you off and make billions off of your work. Either way, it probably won't be you that makes the billions. Your best hope is to settle for a little less than the millions they would have paid their lawyers during the law suit.
cost-effectiveness and customer service of the US Post Office with Fed X and UPS
I don't know... less than 50 cents for someone to carry a piece of paper across the country in a weeks time... that seems pretty cost-effective to me.
In reality, a lot of scientific research is done at the university level. It's overly simplistic to think that we could simply abolish patents and, without the profit motive, get the same results. It's also overly simplistic to think that, if you drop the patent system, the human race will simply cease trying to cure disease.
Ah, I see. So you're saying that, while Dell tries to win businesses over with service, support, reliability, etc., they're trying to win home users over with "Oooooo... shiny!"
It's not like they remove your ability to have mail sent to your house or anything. The service is that they give you a new address to which you can have things shipped. So if you have checks or original documents, you can give them your home/business address, but if you have other mail you just want to be able to read/archive/shred, you give this other address, and then you can access your mail from anywhere.
That's not always the case, but ok. What does that have to do with what we were talking about?
More often than not, people WANT to hear about the bad from a new MP3 player rather than the good; it gives them a reasonable expectation of their own experiences with the device.
This is especially insightful since the success of the iPod has been its relative lack of "bad". All of these MP3 players will play music, for example, but the question is "what problems am I going to have getting the device to perform the simple task of playing music?" The closer the answer is to "none", the closer the player is to perfect.
That's fine if you prefer small companies-- I won't argue with that. I was just saying that cheap hardware isn't necessarily a better value. It's true that a consumer, buying one machine, might not notice more/greater problems with his e-machines computer than with his business-level Dell. However, if you're dealing with lots of machines, working in varied circumstances, using imaging techniques, looking for support, making upgrades, etc., etc., then after a while you'll see the difference.
It's not necessarily about going with a huge corporate-level integrator, either (though those do have advantages). Even if you're doing BTO, I'd suggest that it's generally worth it to get name-brand parts which are known to be decent quality, rather some weird brand you've never heard of. There is such a thing as a crappy motherboard, memory module, or video card, even if the specs look fine, and it's not all an issue of speed. There are issues with compatibility, reliability, and support to be considered, and very often, you get what you pay for-- though admittedly there are some deals and there are some rip-offs.
And it's the same with computers. Some very, very cheap boards and cards aside, they all offer the same value. It works. Some run faster, some run slower, but they all work.
I don't really know about some of the other things you've mentioned, but I'm guessing by this statement you've never worked helpdesk support. To this day, it's usually worth investing in bigger brands. A lot of instability and problems come out of crappy hardware and poorly-written drivers. Those cheap components with "the same value" are usually worse in terms of failure rate. And when things do break, support from the cheaper companies is worse, and you'll have more problems with replacement parts.
So for buying your personal computer and you don't care too much about speed, then that eMachines desktop might be fine. If you're going to be buying 50 computers and supporting them, you'll save yourself a lot of headaches if you buy Dell/HP business-level systems (i.e. Optiplex/Precision for Dell instead of Dimension).
There's no such thing as a Windows-based personal computer. Microsoft does not manufacture personal computers, and Windows is not integral to PCs.
Geeze, what do you want out of this distinction? First, nobody said "Microsoft manufactured computers". Second, coming with Microsoft Windows pre-installed is an integral part of the phenomenon being indicated. Given that all these different manufacturers were using the same operating system, it meant that the hardware needs and what hardware was supported was identical across the board, and individual OEMs couldn't really offer many unique features. One could argue that this contributed towards keeping the "beige box" design around for a long time, since you then just had OEMs using the same generic parts and competing on price.
Really, the distinguishing feature of this type of machine is that most of them come with Windows pre-installed. "Windows based" seems like a valid term for them.
Sure, if you can't read then lots of writing seems stupid. But, no, I see your point, a large monopolistic corporation would never dream of treating their customers unfairly.
My point is that the average user shouldn't be in a position of entering into these legal agreements without lawyers. Instead, let people who understand law figure out a basic language that covers most situations.
And do you really think that "interstate commerce" can't be used to justify regulation of EULAs? The whole "interstate commerce" thing has become a technicality to spread federal control over all sorts of things. Anyway, it doesn't matter if it's handled on the state level or federal level. Either way, we should do away with EULAs.
What you should do instead is start a campaign to educate whomever is in charge of making platform decisions at companies/schools/governments.
What you're talking about would still be a "boycott". I am, in fact, the decision-maker for an IT department, and I can tell you that I am not going to be upgrading to Vista anytime soon. I've talked to some of my peers (in other companies), and they aren't exactly eager to upgrade, either. When I suggest a "formal" boycott, I'm saying that instead of just not-buying Vista, we could publicly talk about why we aren't buying it, in order to spread the word and raise awareness of these issues. The truth is, your Directors of [whatever] and Chief [whatever] Officers aren't all PHBs who make arbitrary decisions. However, many of them aren't reading obscure Slashdot postings, and if general public awareness is very low, they might not be aware. They aren't hearing about it on the news, and Microsoft has their marketing people out in force. I believe that this is one instance where fear, uncertainty, and doubt is valid.
The real question is, why do we need a precise, "official" definition of "planet"?
Yes, exactly. The word "planet", as used today, describes a specific collection of bodies in our own solar system. It was devised by ancient astronomers to describe the lights in the sky that didn't follow the normal pattern of stars. Stars go in circles, planets go back and forth. The word has taken on a new meaning as our understanding of celestial bodies has grown, but now it's generally used to indicate that one of the collection of 9 specific bodies. Just as "sun" is used to indicate our star specifically, "planets" indicate specific bodies orbiting our sun.
If we really need a more general definition that's more scientific than "largish body that orbits a star," for the sake of scientific accuracy, then come up with a new term. Take the word "far" for example. It's a general-use word, not a scientific one. We might use it when talking about scientific issues, like, "the nearest star to the sun is far away," but it doesn't have scientific accuracy. This doesn't mean that we need to define "far" as "greater than 1 light-year" and then try to force people to stop claiming that someplace on earth is "far". It means that, if you want a precise scientific term to indicate "greater than 1 light-year away", you need to come up with a new word which isn't "far".
Meanwhile, you're still paying money to businesses who are putting their resources towards efforts to make your life harder, rather than efforts to make your life easier. For every "fix" or "work-around", you're still exerting extra effort where you just shouldn't need to. You're making your software buggier, and your music lower-quality for what it essentially 0 net-gain for anyone. And by buying the products that do this, you're sending the message to these companies that it is acceptable behavior, and that their efforts are good.
If you buy Vista, even if you crack it, you're telling Microsoft that their product is good. Buy pirating it and cracking it, you're telling them that their product is good, but that their "piracy protection" isn't good enough, and that they should put more resources on that front. But the only way to tell them that these "features" are unacceptable is to refuse to buy it or use it. And what will you have lost anyway, by not using Vista? What does Vista actually give you that Windows XP doesn't? Incompatibility and the need to buy new versions of the software you've already bought.
If Microsoft isn't servicing your needs, then you need to let them know. Even if we all simply refuse to buy it, Microsoft will claim that the reason Vista isn't selling is due to piracy, and their lobbyists will put forth a case that this means we need more restrictive laws on software use. It's important that, instead, we make a public case that Vista is not a good product.
I use Linux where I can, and where I can't I try to use OSX rather than Windows. Still, there are times where I have to use Windows. I have no choice.
In the end, I'm not on a quest to end closed-source software, or even get rid of Microsoft. I just want Microsoft to stop doing crappy things to hurt their own customers, and if they won't, then I think their customers should organize a formal boycott. We should make an example out of them for other software companies to see: Pull something like this activation/WGA crap, and your customers won't put up with it. Microsoft isn't the only offender, and all the activation, forced registration, dongles, etc. in the software industry is ridiculous. It hurts customers, but real pirates just find a way to circumvent these restrictions.
I'd like to start a website where people can voice their annoyance, sign a petition, see others' opinions, and generally organize a formal boycott. I'm sure lots of tech-savvy Windows users will not be upgrading anyway, but I think it's important to send a message to Microsoft as to why. However, I'm sure that there's someone out there who is more militant and web/tech savvy than I am, who'd do a better job setting it up.
Maybe if a company sued because their software was legal and got a false positive on being illegal and it caused down time, now that's something to sue about.
Even then, how many companies have the resources to sue Microsoft? The US government and EU can't get Microsoft to concede on simple points, and you think a small business owner in Des Moines is going to be able to bring a substantial fight against MS's army of lawyers?
This is true. Largely, the reason for EULAs is so that software companies can claim full rights over everything and no responsibility so that they can absolve themselves from lawsuits no matter what happens on your computer. Whether they cause a problem by accident, purposefully, or not at all, they don't want to be sued.
The problem is, when you pair this with something like Microsoft's activation/WGA scheme, it means that they can cause otherwise working software to cease to work for any reason whatsoever and the user has no recourse.
Personally, I think that Congress should pass some laws that would replace a basic/general EULA, i.e. software makers aren't responsible for most things unless they make claims to the contrary or cause purposeful damage. Instead of EULAs, we should have a general consensus of what rights/responsibilities/powers we generally grant to software authors vs. their customers. Then we should allow EULAs in certain circumstances where they're merited, but not allow other terms to be in EULAs. For example, no EULA should grant spyware and virus makers to take permanent control of a user's PC.
However, my point is that EULAs are stupid. It's an issue that should be worked out by lawyers and law-makers, because it makes no sense for end-users to be entering into legalistic license agreements, different individually for every piece of software they run, when nobody understands what the terms actually allow.
And in no case should Microsoft be allowed to cause my computer to stop working because an automated system is suspicious that my license might possibly be invalid.
Add in the fact that Microsoft is selling an antivirus to fix software you've already purchased, as well as changing formats every so often to force users to upgrade, and it seems like they're getting dangerously close to racketeering.
Same here. Does anyone want to start an official boycott or anything? No Vista or Office 2007 until Microsoft gets rid of some of these anti-consumer "features"?
You, sir, are completely dead-on correct. Judges are specifically supposed to interpret the law and prior precedence for specific cases. This includes trying to understand the intention behind laws and prior decisions as well as the literal language of them.
I'm sorry to disagree so much with someone who has such a similar name. However, if you read my other posts, I've given reasons why I suggested the formats I did. In 20 years, do you want to go back to your archive and find that you've gone through all this trouble of archiving, only to find you've archived MP3s? If the purpose is to preserve the data, then why on earth would you throw large portions of that data away by storing lossy formats?
FLAC is not an obscure or unknown format. In fact, I would hazard to say it's the de facto standard for lossless compressed audio. Likewise, PDF is a well supported and well documented open format for storing the layout of printed pages. Adobe Acrobat has its problems as a program, but the format itself is very good (for its intended purpose, which is to store accurate representations of print documents). PDF is commonly used in professional print settings and document archive systems.
If you really want to research the issues, there are options that I haven't mentioned. However, if you were more knowledgeable about this topic, you'd know that my suggestions are, at the very least, worth listening to.