It's worse than you imply, though. It would be as if some guy from Jiffy Lube saw your car in a random parking lot while you're grocery shopping, believed that you'd stolen your oil from Jiffy Lube, and confiscated your car.
I guess that's the sort of treatment you agree to when you click "ok" on the EULA.
What I find surprising is that, in the few responses I've skimmed (including yours), I haven't seen anyone mention that these companies need to pay programmers. There's this tremendous myth that OSS is all written by good Samaritans in their spare time, and companies that sell it commercially simply rebrand it, box it, and ship it.
It's like people think that Linux is free, so why can't Redhat distribute it for almost nothing? Redhat and Novel employ programmers, too. In fact, the paid programmers make a tremendous contribution to all of this FOSS we benefit from. That's right, sometimes it's the big companies' work that makes the FOSS version so good, so the commercial companies aren't getting all that work for free.
I don't mean to insult anyone here, and I don't want to quibble about the ratio of good Samaritan contributions vs. paid contributions. Still, you can't discount that there are Redhat-employed programmers working on Redhat, and sometimes Redhat's work ends up in the free stuff.
So what I'm saying is, businesses selling commercial OSS have the same costs as a closed shop, even though they receive some free help. And for all the free help they get, these savings are offset by the fact that people don't have to buy their software. So let's say they cut their programming costs in 50% (just a number I'm plucking out of the air), their revenue is also cut by 75% (another made up number) by people who would buy it, but decided instead to download for free.
And this doesn't even take into account the whole dynamic of competition in commercial OSS. In short, for whatever Redhat spends in development, Novel also gets that work for free, and vice versa. Now maybe Novel doesn't want to use that work, and maybe Redhat is benefitting from Novel in just the same ways, but it sure does complicate the business model.
That's why I said that the question should probably be about how this tech compares to hard drives. It may be slower, and I didn't catch any indication as to whether it's available as RW or just R. So it might be that this technology is aimed at archival purposes, i.e. the same people who would buy DVD-R jukeboxes for archival backups.
It's targeted at commercial storage applications. The company says that a system about the same size as a tower PC and will be able to hold 4.7T bytes of data. A 19-inch rack mount model will be able to hold three times that amount of data.
So it seems that these aren't meant to be something that you'd carry around loose the way you do with CDs/DVDs. They'd be encased in cartridges, and those cartridges would be in some sort of device. So I think the question would be, how would this technology compare with hard drives?
I disagree. Lots of people love iTMS, and lots of people love the iPod. It's not as though it needs the lock in or no one would buy iPods (however noteworthy it may be that iTMS is more of an iPod marketing tool than a business in its own right). It's not that Apple needs to lock iPod users into the iTMS, as though everyone would rather get their content elsewhere, but are prevented from doing so by Apple's evil DRM. That was the whole thing with Real's attempt to sell Fairplay-wrapped DRM-- there was no big public outcry against Apple for preventing that, because very few people wanted to use Real's store.
Why Office?-- I can think of a couple reasons. First, Office 2004 doesn't really necessarily have all the same features and everything as Office 2003. It fits better with the OS, and you might like it better, but I've had Word documents, for example, generated in 2003, where the formatting wasn't the same in 2004 for Mac or OOo.
Also, Outlook is a big deal. Entourage is getting better, but they didn't even have Exchange support until about a year ago, and it still isn't quite up to snuff. It's ok, more or less, but IIRC, it doesn't support stationery, which as obnoxious as stationery is, I've had that be a deal breaker for some users. Also public folders don't always work correctly, and it isn't connecting through MAPI, which depending on your perspective, may or may not be a good thing.
So what I'm saying is, there are reasons. Having IE6 on your Mac is good for those annoying occasions where you run into an IE-only site. For example, when you want to use your Exchange server's webmail with all the bells and whistles.
Is it worth it to run these apps in Crossover? Not for me. I really like NeoOffice a lot, and it's a universal binary to boot. But yeah, I can imagine someone wanting to run Office 2003 in Crossover, and I like having the option.
Re:I'm not all that impressed....
on
The Day Against DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You know it's possible, just possible, that Apple could not love their DRM, but also not love laws being placed on them that would force them to adhere to someone else's particular standards of interoperability. In fact, I could imagine reasons why Apple could dislike DRM but also, once saddled with the responsibility, also not wish to support it on non-Apple stores and non-Apple devices.
Consider this: I'd bet that if someone else tried to program an alternate iTMS interface (besides iTunes), Apple would make an attempt to shut it down. Apple could get the full price of the song, and the DRM could remain intact, only playable in this iTunes replacement and on iPods, and Apple still probably wouldn't like it.
It's my sense, at least, that Jobs likes to keep control of things. He seems to like to keep things simple and consistent and, under most circumstances, limit the variables that Apple needs to deal with. Having other additional vendors in the mix would complicate things, make them messy, and probably increase Apple's support costs. If allow these third-party alternatives without strict control over them, then suddenly, when they want to change something about their software/hardware/services, they'd need to consider how it affects the third-party products. If they don't care and just break things for the third-party products, then they have to worry about the irritation of all the consumers who've grown accustomed to using those products/services.
And besides all that, there's just the threat of the unknown. If they license Fairplay to other players, it might grow into a situation that nobody is imagining. Of course, this is just my personal sense of Apple and Steve Jobs, but they seem cautious and prone to stay closed off and secretive as much as possible, and I believe it's this factor rather than love of DRM that keeps them from opening Fairplay to other vendors.
As to why they don't drop DRM entirely, that seems much more open-and-shut, and doesn't need any of this kind of interpretive guesswork: record/movie/TV companies would not have ever made their deals with Apple unless Apple provided DRM. If Apple stopped using DRM, these media companies would pull every one of their properties from the store.
Now, I don't like DRM either, and I think it is a problem. However, it's a problem that requires for its solution that we change a lot of societal factors. One of the chief factors would be to change IP law (i.e. copyrights) to something for which DRM was unsuitable.
You know, this is part of the reason I like iTMS. I've always said that iTMS is a good stepping-stone towards getting rid of DRM and the big media cartels.
The reason I say this is, the DRM is loose enough that people will buy it. Online distribution grows, and people get to be unaccustomed to the idea of movies and music being stuck on physical media. This loosens the grip of the RIAA/MPAA as their distribution channels become more or less obsolete.
Then, someday, someone comes out with a better store than iTMS or a better device than the iPod. No matter how much a fan of these things you are, these things are going to one day be obsolete, replaced by something else from either Apple or someone else. Or maybe there will be another service altogether that compliments these things-- but how it happens is not the point. The point is that someday, there will be massive numbers of people with large iTMS libraries that want to do something with their libraries that the DRM doesn't allow. There will be a big stink, and public pressure will mount.
So I predict that, whether it's by a gradual process of loosening DRM or by an immediate halt, DRM will go obsolete because of large numbers of people who find it unacceptable. However, in order to get to that point, you first need three things to happen:
physical media to become rare enough that people don't think of a song as a physical item that has meaningful replacement costs
large numbers of people who are going to find themselves restricted by a given DRM scheme
a new technological or cultural development that causes that DRM restriction to become extremely irritating to that large number of people.
To be fair, what OS works 100% of the time on 100% of the platforms it supports? Maybe OSX comes close, but only by limiting the supported platforms quite a lot.
Which would then obviate the need for payloads or containers that could withstand such high gees (at least the angular ones).
I don't know enough about this project or enough about physics to know what I'm talking about, but a couple things come to mind.
Maybe a straight track would make it enough shorter that they'd have to accelerate it more quickly, increasing the force again. There is some length at which it might be difficult to find a completely flat piece of land with no inhabitants or wildlife to worry about, since you probably wouldn't want to put something going mach 23 around anything you care about.
In a circle, they can accelerate as slowly as they want and not worry about running out of track, and it also cuts down on the amount of track that needs to be monitored and maintained. Plus, if you decide you want to abort part way through the launch, you can decelerate at whatever rate you want without needing to worry about running out of track. On a straight track, however, it seems like you'd hit a point of no return at some point, where the payload is going to fast to stop it before it hits the end.
It's still partially an issue of trust. Even on the shelf next to MS, if it's way cheaper, people may not buy it because it's cheaper. Sometimes cheaper things are perceived as substandard, and so there are instances where companies will inflate their prices just to avoid the image of being a crappy bargin brand.
It's really unfortunate, too. I've recommended OOo to lots of people. People ask me how they can get MSO cheap/free, essentially asking me to pirate it, I guess. People think because I work with computers I can just hook them up with whatever they want. So I say no, but point out that they can download OOo for free, and legally. It's not even hard to find.
And lots of people come back with, "I don't want a cheap crappy, program though. I need things like spell-check and track changes!" They don't believe me when I say OOo has that stuff. I try to explain the idea of FOSS, and that it's different from crappy nag-ware and spyware they've tried in the past. Nobody seems to believe that people would offer a high-quality program for free. And these are Firefox users.
I think you'll see Apple go after this in the courts if it can, or just start a vicious cycle of "upgrades" and "enhancements" to the format if it can't.
And this is pretty much what's happened in the past. He already broke the DRM with Hymn, and then Apple upgraded their DRM. Real tried selling their own Fairplay licensed music from their own reverse engineering, and I believe the DRM shifted then, too.
I think the important thing here (in this particular issue) is the way in which Windows lets certain things steal focus. This has long been a known problem in Windows, of things stealing focus in stupid ways and at stupid times.
It's not about immediate profit, it's about control. Someone is making money in a computer-related market, and Microsoft doesn't control it. They have no piece of the iTunes/iPod action, and apparently they don't like that. They'll be willing to lose money on the venture all the way up until they've established control, and then they'll rake users over the coals once users have been locked into the Microsoft platform.
That's what Microsoft is after these days-- an all inclusive end-to-end dominance on anything resembling a computer. Handhelds, MP3 players, servers, desktops, refrigerators, web browsers, e-mail, game consoles, etc. The result will be that, any emerging computer market, no matter what the market is, will need to go through Microsoft, and Microsoft will dominate it.
Microsoft is not in the business of providing consumer products or OEM software-- they're in the business of dominating markets and eliminating competition.
You do have some decent points, but.... I think the complaint is that, if you're going to have Wifi driving up the price and lowering battery time, you may as well have it do something that's actually useful. Wireless syncing would be slower, but an awful lot of people have 802.11G routers these days, meaning it's not as slow as you imply. Plus, wireless syncing wouldn't be as dumb as you imply.
First of all, a large portion of the wireless fad is born out of a general annoyance with wires. As we get more and more devices that can connect and need to be charged, we're constantly plugging things in, unplugging them, plugging them back in, and it's annoying. You might think it's petty, but it's why I like having a Bluetooth mouse for my laptop. And second, it actually makes some sense for MP3 players, since they're the sort of thing where their entire purpose is to be carried on your person. So what if I want to be syncing my Zune while sitting in a room on the other side of my apartment from my computer. It'd kind of piss me off to know that the device has the wireless technology in it to do that, and i've paid for that wireless hardware, but Microsoft just didn't bother to figure out how to do it because they weren't clever enough to overcome the problem of inputting a WPA password.
Web browsing-- I'm not sure whether I would find it useful myself, but I can imagine someone would. Frankly, I think cell phone companies charge way too much for the completely terrible internet access that they provide, but if I had WiFi in a portable device, maybe I would use it. I live in NYC, and there's free WiFi all over the place.
But you know, whatever. I wouldn't buy a Zune, but it does seem like a waste to put the hardware in there and not use it for much. I think that's why nobody else is putting wifi in their mp3 players-- they feel it's not worth throwing in extra useless features. But I guess it fits with Microsoft's marketing strategy, so like I said, whatever.
I think none of these companies really want to support OSX. I mean, sure, Symantec wants to scare mac users into buying 5 year-old software for no reason, but none of the Symantec software for OSX does anything. It's obvious that they don't want to put money into development for such a small market.
Someone who thinks that they have such a great solution that it is applicable to any and all problem domains is selling snake oil.
Yeah, but selling snake oil can be profitable.
However, the business side of running a business is not reduceable to a script.
This is very true. I once worked for an engineering firm, and the guy in charge used to be an engineer. They were constantly looking for ways to automate their business processes, which was fine, except that they wanted to do it to the point where the managers didn't have to manage and the sales people didn't have to sell. It was the sort of thing where people weren't doing their work, so they came up with a system so that people got little automated e-mails telling them exactly what to do, and then managers were baffled when people still didn't do their work. After all, they got the e-mail... But what it came down to was that no one wanted to do anything. The managers never even took the time to talk to their employees that nothing was being done. Salespeople weren't keeping track of the products being built or the customers. There's no technology to deal with that.
They've got the tech to keep one season of a tv show in order, it can't possibly be that difficult to extend that to keeping multiple seasons of a show in order.
I thought Netflix users just ripped the movies to their hard drive for later viewing anyway?
Unfortunately that's the way the law goes, a license means permission to use their patented technology, and they can demand those periodic lobsters as a condition of that permission.
Ok, so that's the law, which isn't to say that the law makes sense or is fair. There are plenty of laws about how you can use your own property and what kind of exchanges are appropriate, so saying, "You own it," isn't the same as saying "you can do what you want with it". Usury, for example, is a crime, and given patents are an extra right given by our government, I don't see why licenses couldn't be regulated somehow. Of course, that might not make sense anyway since the government has shown itself unable to make reasonable decisions regarding IP.
They aren't charging for "file copying" they're charging a fee per the ammount of content encoded in their codec, per the number of users it will be (commercially) distributed to.
But that's my point, that they're trying to charge for distribution when their patent isn't related to distribution. I can' understand charging when people use your patented technology, i.e. encoding and decoding, but charging for distribution is retarded. Their technology isn't being used in the copying of data. I'm surprised anyone gets away with that kind of scam.
But as you're pointing out, it depends on the information and your purposes. Ogg Theora? How many people can play that on their computers right now, without installing anything? Compare that with the number of people who can view an animated GIF right now, without installing anything.
Geeze, that just sounds random and stupid. So any of these companies can just arbitrarily decide that they want any random license fees they want? Yeah, I'll stick with my original claim that it's ambiguous. You need a lawyer to figure out what's really going on, or else you need to just pay fees to everyone and hope your covered.
Charging by number of files streamed? So you're charging people to actually encode and decode-- I can understand that. But charging for transmission of those encoded files where "file copying" isn't part of the patent? Like I said, that's retarded. Do people actually pay these fees?
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse than you imply, though. It would be as if some guy from Jiffy Lube saw your car in a random parking lot while you're grocery shopping, believed that you'd stolen your oil from Jiffy Lube, and confiscated your car.
I guess that's the sort of treatment you agree to when you click "ok" on the EULA.
Stop feeding the trolls. This person posted anonymously for a reason.
What I find surprising is that, in the few responses I've skimmed (including yours), I haven't seen anyone mention that these companies need to pay programmers. There's this tremendous myth that OSS is all written by good Samaritans in their spare time, and companies that sell it commercially simply rebrand it, box it, and ship it.
It's like people think that Linux is free, so why can't Redhat distribute it for almost nothing? Redhat and Novel employ programmers, too. In fact, the paid programmers make a tremendous contribution to all of this FOSS we benefit from. That's right, sometimes it's the big companies' work that makes the FOSS version so good, so the commercial companies aren't getting all that work for free.
I don't mean to insult anyone here, and I don't want to quibble about the ratio of good Samaritan contributions vs. paid contributions. Still, you can't discount that there are Redhat-employed programmers working on Redhat, and sometimes Redhat's work ends up in the free stuff.
So what I'm saying is, businesses selling commercial OSS have the same costs as a closed shop, even though they receive some free help. And for all the free help they get, these savings are offset by the fact that people don't have to buy their software. So let's say they cut their programming costs in 50% (just a number I'm plucking out of the air), their revenue is also cut by 75% (another made up number) by people who would buy it, but decided instead to download for free.
And this doesn't even take into account the whole dynamic of competition in commercial OSS. In short, for whatever Redhat spends in development, Novel also gets that work for free, and vice versa. Now maybe Novel doesn't want to use that work, and maybe Redhat is benefitting from Novel in just the same ways, but it sure does complicate the business model.
That's why I said that the question should probably be about how this tech compares to hard drives. It may be slower, and I didn't catch any indication as to whether it's available as RW or just R. So it might be that this technology is aimed at archival purposes, i.e. the same people who would buy DVD-R jukeboxes for archival backups.
I don't know, though.
So it seems that these aren't meant to be something that you'd carry around loose the way you do with CDs/DVDs. They'd be encased in cartridges, and those cartridges would be in some sort of device. So I think the question would be, how would this technology compare with hard drives?
I disagree. Lots of people love iTMS, and lots of people love the iPod. It's not as though it needs the lock in or no one would buy iPods (however noteworthy it may be that iTMS is more of an iPod marketing tool than a business in its own right). It's not that Apple needs to lock iPod users into the iTMS, as though everyone would rather get their content elsewhere, but are prevented from doing so by Apple's evil DRM. That was the whole thing with Real's attempt to sell Fairplay-wrapped DRM-- there was no big public outcry against Apple for preventing that, because very few people wanted to use Real's store.
Why Office?-- I can think of a couple reasons. First, Office 2004 doesn't really necessarily have all the same features and everything as Office 2003. It fits better with the OS, and you might like it better, but I've had Word documents, for example, generated in 2003, where the formatting wasn't the same in 2004 for Mac or OOo.
Also, Outlook is a big deal. Entourage is getting better, but they didn't even have Exchange support until about a year ago, and it still isn't quite up to snuff. It's ok, more or less, but IIRC, it doesn't support stationery, which as obnoxious as stationery is, I've had that be a deal breaker for some users. Also public folders don't always work correctly, and it isn't connecting through MAPI, which depending on your perspective, may or may not be a good thing.
So what I'm saying is, there are reasons. Having IE6 on your Mac is good for those annoying occasions where you run into an IE-only site. For example, when you want to use your Exchange server's webmail with all the bells and whistles.
Is it worth it to run these apps in Crossover? Not for me. I really like NeoOffice a lot, and it's a universal binary to boot. But yeah, I can imagine someone wanting to run Office 2003 in Crossover, and I like having the option.
You know it's possible, just possible, that Apple could not love their DRM, but also not love laws being placed on them that would force them to adhere to someone else's particular standards of interoperability. In fact, I could imagine reasons why Apple could dislike DRM but also, once saddled with the responsibility, also not wish to support it on non-Apple stores and non-Apple devices.
Consider this: I'd bet that if someone else tried to program an alternate iTMS interface (besides iTunes), Apple would make an attempt to shut it down. Apple could get the full price of the song, and the DRM could remain intact, only playable in this iTunes replacement and on iPods, and Apple still probably wouldn't like it.
It's my sense, at least, that Jobs likes to keep control of things. He seems to like to keep things simple and consistent and, under most circumstances, limit the variables that Apple needs to deal with. Having other additional vendors in the mix would complicate things, make them messy, and probably increase Apple's support costs. If allow these third-party alternatives without strict control over them, then suddenly, when they want to change something about their software/hardware/services, they'd need to consider how it affects the third-party products. If they don't care and just break things for the third-party products, then they have to worry about the irritation of all the consumers who've grown accustomed to using those products/services.
And besides all that, there's just the threat of the unknown. If they license Fairplay to other players, it might grow into a situation that nobody is imagining. Of course, this is just my personal sense of Apple and Steve Jobs, but they seem cautious and prone to stay closed off and secretive as much as possible, and I believe it's this factor rather than love of DRM that keeps them from opening Fairplay to other vendors.
As to why they don't drop DRM entirely, that seems much more open-and-shut, and doesn't need any of this kind of interpretive guesswork: record/movie/TV companies would not have ever made their deals with Apple unless Apple provided DRM. If Apple stopped using DRM, these media companies would pull every one of their properties from the store.
Now, I don't like DRM either, and I think it is a problem. However, it's a problem that requires for its solution that we change a lot of societal factors. One of the chief factors would be to change IP law (i.e. copyrights) to something for which DRM was unsuitable.
You know, this is part of the reason I like iTMS. I've always said that iTMS is a good stepping-stone towards getting rid of DRM and the big media cartels.
The reason I say this is, the DRM is loose enough that people will buy it. Online distribution grows, and people get to be unaccustomed to the idea of movies and music being stuck on physical media. This loosens the grip of the RIAA/MPAA as their distribution channels become more or less obsolete.
Then, someday, someone comes out with a better store than iTMS or a better device than the iPod. No matter how much a fan of these things you are, these things are going to one day be obsolete, replaced by something else from either Apple or someone else. Or maybe there will be another service altogether that compliments these things-- but how it happens is not the point. The point is that someday, there will be massive numbers of people with large iTMS libraries that want to do something with their libraries that the DRM doesn't allow. There will be a big stink, and public pressure will mount.
So I predict that, whether it's by a gradual process of loosening DRM or by an immediate halt, DRM will go obsolete because of large numbers of people who find it unacceptable. However, in order to get to that point, you first need three things to happen:
To be fair, what OS works 100% of the time on 100% of the platforms it supports? Maybe OSX comes close, but only by limiting the supported platforms quite a lot.
Which would then obviate the need for payloads or containers that could withstand such high gees (at least the angular ones).
I don't know enough about this project or enough about physics to know what I'm talking about, but a couple things come to mind.
Maybe a straight track would make it enough shorter that they'd have to accelerate it more quickly, increasing the force again. There is some length at which it might be difficult to find a completely flat piece of land with no inhabitants or wildlife to worry about, since you probably wouldn't want to put something going mach 23 around anything you care about.
In a circle, they can accelerate as slowly as they want and not worry about running out of track, and it also cuts down on the amount of track that needs to be monitored and maintained. Plus, if you decide you want to abort part way through the launch, you can decelerate at whatever rate you want without needing to worry about running out of track. On a straight track, however, it seems like you'd hit a point of no return at some point, where the payload is going to fast to stop it before it hits the end.
It's still partially an issue of trust. Even on the shelf next to MS, if it's way cheaper, people may not buy it because it's cheaper. Sometimes cheaper things are perceived as substandard, and so there are instances where companies will inflate their prices just to avoid the image of being a crappy bargin brand.
It's really unfortunate, too. I've recommended OOo to lots of people. People ask me how they can get MSO cheap/free, essentially asking me to pirate it, I guess. People think because I work with computers I can just hook them up with whatever they want. So I say no, but point out that they can download OOo for free, and legally. It's not even hard to find.
And lots of people come back with, "I don't want a cheap crappy, program though. I need things like spell-check and track changes!" They don't believe me when I say OOo has that stuff. I try to explain the idea of FOSS, and that it's different from crappy nag-ware and spyware they've tried in the past. Nobody seems to believe that people would offer a high-quality program for free. And these are Firefox users.
I think you'll see Apple go after this in the courts if it can, or just start a vicious cycle of "upgrades" and "enhancements" to the format if it can't.
And this is pretty much what's happened in the past. He already broke the DRM with Hymn, and then Apple upgraded their DRM. Real tried selling their own Fairplay licensed music from their own reverse engineering, and I believe the DRM shifted then, too.
Maybe he does read Slashdot?
looks around nervously
Maybe he's reading right now.
I think the important thing here (in this particular issue) is the way in which Windows lets certain things steal focus. This has long been a known problem in Windows, of things stealing focus in stupid ways and at stupid times.
It's not about immediate profit, it's about control. Someone is making money in a computer-related market, and Microsoft doesn't control it. They have no piece of the iTunes/iPod action, and apparently they don't like that. They'll be willing to lose money on the venture all the way up until they've established control, and then they'll rake users over the coals once users have been locked into the Microsoft platform.
That's what Microsoft is after these days-- an all inclusive end-to-end dominance on anything resembling a computer. Handhelds, MP3 players, servers, desktops, refrigerators, web browsers, e-mail, game consoles, etc. The result will be that, any emerging computer market, no matter what the market is, will need to go through Microsoft, and Microsoft will dominate it.
Microsoft is not in the business of providing consumer products or OEM software-- they're in the business of dominating markets and eliminating competition.
You do have some decent points, but.... I think the complaint is that, if you're going to have Wifi driving up the price and lowering battery time, you may as well have it do something that's actually useful. Wireless syncing would be slower, but an awful lot of people have 802.11G routers these days, meaning it's not as slow as you imply. Plus, wireless syncing wouldn't be as dumb as you imply.
First of all, a large portion of the wireless fad is born out of a general annoyance with wires. As we get more and more devices that can connect and need to be charged, we're constantly plugging things in, unplugging them, plugging them back in, and it's annoying. You might think it's petty, but it's why I like having a Bluetooth mouse for my laptop. And second, it actually makes some sense for MP3 players, since they're the sort of thing where their entire purpose is to be carried on your person. So what if I want to be syncing my Zune while sitting in a room on the other side of my apartment from my computer. It'd kind of piss me off to know that the device has the wireless technology in it to do that, and i've paid for that wireless hardware, but Microsoft just didn't bother to figure out how to do it because they weren't clever enough to overcome the problem of inputting a WPA password.
Web browsing-- I'm not sure whether I would find it useful myself, but I can imagine someone would. Frankly, I think cell phone companies charge way too much for the completely terrible internet access that they provide, but if I had WiFi in a portable device, maybe I would use it. I live in NYC, and there's free WiFi all over the place.
But you know, whatever. I wouldn't buy a Zune, but it does seem like a waste to put the hardware in there and not use it for much. I think that's why nobody else is putting wifi in their mp3 players-- they feel it's not worth throwing in extra useless features. But I guess it fits with Microsoft's marketing strategy, so like I said, whatever.
I think none of these companies really want to support OSX. I mean, sure, Symantec wants to scare mac users into buying 5 year-old software for no reason, but none of the Symantec software for OSX does anything. It's obvious that they don't want to put money into development for such a small market.
Someone who thinks that they have such a great solution that it is applicable to any and all problem domains is selling snake oil.
Yeah, but selling snake oil can be profitable.
However, the business side of running a business is not reduceable to a script.
This is very true. I once worked for an engineering firm, and the guy in charge used to be an engineer. They were constantly looking for ways to automate their business processes, which was fine, except that they wanted to do it to the point where the managers didn't have to manage and the sales people didn't have to sell. It was the sort of thing where people weren't doing their work, so they came up with a system so that people got little automated e-mails telling them exactly what to do, and then managers were baffled when people still didn't do their work. After all, they got the e-mail... But what it came down to was that no one wanted to do anything. The managers never even took the time to talk to their employees that nothing was being done. Salespeople weren't keeping track of the products being built or the customers. There's no technology to deal with that.
Does it seem to you that you're disagreeing with his assertion that PhDs are morons?
I thought Netflix users just ripped the movies to their hard drive for later viewing anyway?
Unfortunately that's the way the law goes, a license means permission to use their patented technology, and they can demand those periodic lobsters as a condition of that permission.
Ok, so that's the law, which isn't to say that the law makes sense or is fair. There are plenty of laws about how you can use your own property and what kind of exchanges are appropriate, so saying, "You own it," isn't the same as saying "you can do what you want with it". Usury, for example, is a crime, and given patents are an extra right given by our government, I don't see why licenses couldn't be regulated somehow. Of course, that might not make sense anyway since the government has shown itself unable to make reasonable decisions regarding IP.
They aren't charging for "file copying" they're charging a fee per the ammount of content encoded in their codec, per the number of users it will be (commercially) distributed to.
But that's my point, that they're trying to charge for distribution when their patent isn't related to distribution. I can' understand charging when people use your patented technology, i.e. encoding and decoding, but charging for distribution is retarded. Their technology isn't being used in the copying of data. I'm surprised anyone gets away with that kind of scam.
But as you're pointing out, it depends on the information and your purposes. Ogg Theora? How many people can play that on their computers right now, without installing anything? Compare that with the number of people who can view an animated GIF right now, without installing anything.
Charging by number of files streamed? So you're charging people to actually encode and decode-- I can understand that. But charging for transmission of those encoded files where "file copying" isn't part of the patent? Like I said, that's retarded. Do people actually pay these fees?