There are two lines of thought to answer "Why would you ever code an app from scratch again?" - one is simply that if you're doing something worthwhile and innovative, there IS NO OFF THE SHELF solution. If you can buy the solution, is your app doing anything that isn't already being done? The other is tying yourself to a vendor. I know anything from Gartner is designed to promote this, but in the real world, do you want your killer app at the mercy of a vendor who can drop support, go out of business, change the license model, etc - it's not a good business case to put your product at the mercy of third parties, especially now. (Especially with the quality of code in some instances. It takes less time to do it right yourself than buy-rather-than-build in some cases. Not all.)
Wait... was the study crafted to take into account the demographic shifts during this time period?
Even if we take as a given that file sharing = fewer sales (when most anecdotal accounts say the opposite - the ability to sample music leads to many CD sales), there are two trends I see little mention of.
Trend #1 is the artificial increase in CD sales as people replaced cassette and LP media with CDs. By 2003, I imagine most replacement purchases that are going to be made have already been made, and the sales boost of replacement media would have trickled to almost nothing. These purchases, too, would tend to be "keepers" - CDs people want to keep forever (or they wouldn't buy the same music in a new format) - and not casual purchases, so they would tend not to contribute to the glut of used CDs.
Trend #2 would be remastering. Because the record companies have done one or two rounds of remastering for their big back-catalogue artists, to sell the same thing to people who already own it, there is a glut of used CDs. There are the original CDs and the first round of remasters which people who buy the second round no longer want. This has led to a huge market (half.com, secondspin.com, etc) of used CDs which are sold at a discount so deep that they're normally cheaper than online music purchases, and DRM-free.
Unless a study takes into account the wider demographic trends, what is it telling us?
Plus a lot of the stuff I downloaded from the original Napster in its day was stuff you could not buy in a normal music store - b-sides, rare tracks, etc. I haven't used file sharing in some time, but are these tracks still available? How much shared music is actually purchaseable and not in some way out of print?
I am trying to build a hard disk image of a DOS PC from 1987 with all the software and versions from that time. See http://cyberreviews.skwc.com/dos87/
Barnes and Noble is a "search engine" - you go into their stores, search for books, and buy what you need. I don't remember why, but B+N started publishing their own classics and other books recently, bringing back high quality late-19th century translations to the shelves, and basically telling content providers (book publishers) that they wouldn't be messed with. Google ought to scan out of print books and newspapers, and put that info on a super-portal, and ignore newspapers, publishers, etc.
My favorite question along those lines is how to pull a single line out, at random, from a file without knowing in advance how many lines there are. Never had anyone know the answer...
The Do Not Call list is so successful that it's time for a Do Not Survey list, a Do Not Beg Me For Money list, a Do Not Try To Sell Me More Services Because I'm A Customer list, a Do Not Auto-Dial And "Click" Hang Up When I Pick Up The Phone List, a Do Not Call If You Can't Pronounce My Name list, etc. I don't think there's any way to express to companies that some people simply don't want unsolicited, unnecessary calls and will never buy/give over the telephone.
False alarms are what I hate - I get to where I hold a bag out in front of me to see if it will set of the alarm when I buy anything that is potentially tagged to set off the alarms. If a store is going to have all this, and treat customers as criminals, they ought to at least deactivate the tags when you give them their money. If only the RIAA could use these tags on MP3s!
.... but who remembers all this stuff? If you're actually working on real-world software, do people really remember all these algorithms and stuff no one uses anymore because class libraries do all the pointers and memory management for you? Given enough time and books, I could remember how to reverse a linked list, but with C++ templates, Java class libraries, and dynamic languages like Perl, who does that kind of stuff on a daily basis? I might remember something about B-Tree algorithms, but who hand-codes their own database anymore? In the hiring process, doesn't the track record of a person count for something?
"You own the music like you own a book." But it's much more difficult to make backup copies of a book...! Making a CD backup is effortless. Books usually cost more to back up than to make another copy, so you'd only do it with an out-of-print or rare book. Because books are harder to back up, the question would probably never arise - I would never have a set of backup books stashed in a drawer at my office.
They want you to pay either like fast food -- you pay every time you consume something -- or cable TV -- you pay for it even if you're not using it. Both models break down with music.
"Your question presupposes that there is a need for individuals to prove that they purchaced some music. I say that there is not." -- Maybe not, but it's an interesting line of speculation. Just how far can I go? I guess it's a question of how far something can be shifted before there is no way to trace it back to the original. This speculative line of reasoning could be applied to any artifact, but music is in the news a lot with lawsuits. The same question doesn't really arise when I scan family photos or childhood drawings. It's just when I buy something from someone else and then want to preserve it by media shifting that this issue arises. What happens when the originals are either destroyed, or are so obsolete that they can't be accessed in any way? (I haven't had a record player in a decade but still have a few LPs, particularly ones with songs that have never been released to CD.)
A variation on this defense would be that a great number of my CDs would NEVER APPEAR on a file-sharing system because they are too rare. Heck, I bought some CDs because I could not FIND the music on Napster back in the late 90s!:)
Just to clear up things on this thread: this has nothing to do with RIAA suits per se, other than they put the idea of litigation into people's minds.
I have wondered about this mainly because (1) I got rid of a lot of cassettes, where I bought CDs in some cases and digitized songs in others and (2) I have a lot of out-of-print CDs and rare CDs that have been difficult to collect, and I have made backup copies of these (I keep a set at work, etc).
The lawsuits are about dissimination, not possession, but I have wondered for years what would be acceptable proof of actual purchase, i.e. not "stealing" music, if someone had to do that, for example, if asked: "you have 9GB of MP3s on your hard disk, where did they come from?"
I guess this is the next best thing to having to prove you exist, or aren't crazy. Even if you could prove it, would anyone believe you?
The link says -- "...the 'evidentiary basis' for their allegation of copyright infringement, she received only a vague response." It is extremely important to clarify this! Just what are people being charged with by the RIAA? The mass media has consistently ignored this issue and said, in essence, people are being charged with downloading copyrighted material.
Can't be right -- for several reasons.
I'm not sure downloading copyrighted music is actually a crime. Is it?
The RIAA has to be charging people with disseminating their proprietary material. But they don't want anyone to know that, because this is a fear and chill campaign to stop downloading. There's no way the RIAA can sue people in China or Romania for disseminating their songs.
What bothers me is the potential for mistakes. The information provided by ISPs isn't necessarily right, and there's no due dilligence -- in fact, this isn't a criminal case. It's a civil case where the "evidence" is highly unreliable. How does grandma who never owned a computer prove she is not the person who had an IP address at the time the alleged crime was committed? That seems insane.
On the other hand, if people actually did disseminate music, ignorance (not knowing what your 11 year old was doing with the Internet connection you paid for) couldn't be an excuse, could it?
Maybe some day there will be clarification of these issues.
There's a LOT of misinformation about what the RIAA is suing people for. I wish the article had said it more forcefully, but it did make the point that the RIAA is suing people who disseminated their members' songs illegally. (I.e. "to scatter far and wide; spread abroad, as if sowing; promulgate widely".)
They're not suing you for downloading songs, they're suing you for sharing their songs illegally by being a distributor of copyrighted material. They know which IP address shared the songs on the P2P network at what time (do you know what your IP address was a year ago? last month? right now?) because that's public information on most P2P networks.
Note that the RIAA can't bait you, by disseminating their own songs on P2P networks and letting you download them, because they'd be giving away their own songs and it wouldn't be a crime then.
If you're sued, about all you can do is prove it wasn't you who committed the crime. The IP address wasn't yours at the time (most ISPs don't keep logs as I understand), or that your IP address was pirated by a hijacker who used it.
I do not think anyone has ever successfully proved it wasn't them -- most of these cases are thrown out on technicalities and not on the actual issues.
Is what the RIAA is doing -- asking ISPs to turn over who had which IP addresses at what time -- legal? I don't think this has ever been decided (in the USA). Hard to say this should happen, because it's just a civil suit by an entity that isn't in law enforcement. If it was a law enforcement agency getting this data for an actual criminal case, that would be different...
The burden of proof is on the RIAA, but if they have the ISP say an IP address allocated to John Doe who is paying the bill for Internet access did the P2P disseminating, it's hard to see how that could be proven any more solidly.
Great lesson for civics teachers to bring to class!
The stories I'm hearing recently are that the Windows activation lets Microsoft disable computers any time it wants for no particular reason. Who'd want to be held hostage to that? Seems like people would be fleeing MS's operating system, not moving to it. If MS wanted people to use their OS (not Linux), why not disable activation permanently?
This would be a great time for IBM to bring back OS/2. Maybe open-source it. WGA got you down? Windows deactivated? Want superb compatibility with your old Win-16 and DOS programs you're using because there are no 0-day exploits for Lotus 1-2-3 2.2 and WordPerfect 5.1 does everything anyone ever needed a word processor to ever do? OS/2 is the answer! A really clever advertising campaign would have a 1-800-WGA-HELP telephone number for people to call when Windows quits working, and have an OS/2 install CD overnighted to them. Port Firefox and Thunderbird to it and you're ready to go.
The Internet treats crud as an obstacle and routes around it. CORBA - haven't heard that name in a long time. It was so inhumanly complex that even though I had a book where little cartoon aliens tried to explain it to me, I blinked a few times and moved on to something else. CORBA came from a time when the technology industry had a lot of really complex crud like IBM's Visual Age platform, Standard C++, CORBA, etc. It was collapsing under its own weight. All this stuff might have been technologically superior, but it was difficult to use and no one used it and now we've got Linux and much simpler development environments. None of this complex crud ever got any traction.
Hoaxes are rarely stranger than the truth. If there was a red penny to be made, SCO probably WOULD release a new version of Caldera. The fact that their legal dept was suing someone over the GPL would probably not even be known to the marketing department who are presumeably still trying to sell products.
Like the April's Fool Day when I ordered something at a fast-food place and the guy at the drive-thru said they were out of it. I'm so used to unbelieveable incompetence at these places (screwed up orders, out of what I ordered, our equipment doesn't work today, etc) that the fact that what he said was a hoax never occurred to me.
To make a good hoax, it has to be fiction stranger than the truth, and that's difficult to come up with anymore.
"purely a branding change" -- Standard operating procedure for MS -- they rename their stuff like clockwork. Trace the history of DDE, OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX,.Net etc etc etc (same basic stuff) or their alphabet soup of database access methods which all boil down to that incredible confusing ODBC control panel doodad. (And you have to install the drivers on EVERY DESKTOP, too, or at least you used to...) If MS is not renaming their techologies, they're reorganizing the company.
This makes me feel vindicated for using LAMP, actually, because any productive technology that gets the job done is trashed, for whatever reason. PHP uses C syntax, so I'm productive in it. I can write modular code in it as easily as I can in C. PHP doesn't have Java's overweight runtime library.
Anyone can write bad code in any language, and I think the knock is not on PHP itself but on people who have no formal training in software development writing crud. Perl was the same way when LAPC was the current thing (Linux, Apache, Perl, CGI) - people saying Perl was an awful language because all the people were writing these insecure CGI scripts in Perl because their formal training was reading one Perl/CGI book.
I think what was meant is the federal government taxes the state tax refund. Your state taxes are withheld from your paycheck as pre-tax dollars, so when you get a refund this is pre-tax money that must be taxed because it wasn't taxed when it was withheld. This only happens when you itemize, though. Otherwise it's part of the standard deduction's magic dollar amount.
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There are two lines of thought to answer "Why would you ever code an app from scratch again?" - one is simply that if you're doing something worthwhile and innovative, there IS NO OFF THE SHELF solution. If you can buy the solution, is your app doing anything that isn't already being done? The other is tying yourself to a vendor. I know anything from Gartner is designed to promote this, but in the real world, do you want your killer app at the mercy of a vendor who can drop support, go out of business, change the license model, etc - it's not a good business case to put your product at the mercy of third parties, especially now. (Especially with the quality of code in some instances. It takes less time to do it right yourself than buy-rather-than-build in some cases. Not all.)
Wait ... was the study crafted to take into account the demographic shifts during this time period?
Even if we take as a given that file sharing = fewer sales (when most anecdotal accounts say the opposite - the ability to sample music leads to many CD sales), there are two trends I see little mention of.
Trend #1 is the artificial increase in CD sales as people replaced cassette and LP media with CDs. By 2003, I imagine most replacement purchases that are going to be made have already been made, and the sales boost of replacement media would have trickled to almost nothing. These purchases, too, would tend to be "keepers" - CDs people want to keep forever (or they wouldn't buy the same music in a new format) - and not casual purchases, so they would tend not to contribute to the glut of used CDs.
Trend #2 would be remastering. Because the record companies have done one or two rounds of remastering for their big back-catalogue artists, to sell the same thing to people who already own it, there is a glut of used CDs. There are the original CDs and the first round of remasters which people who buy the second round no longer want. This has led to a huge market (half.com, secondspin.com, etc) of used CDs which are sold at a discount so deep that they're normally cheaper than online music purchases, and DRM-free.
Unless a study takes into account the wider demographic trends, what is it telling us?
Plus a lot of the stuff I downloaded from the original Napster in its day was stuff you could not buy in a normal music store - b-sides, rare tracks, etc. I haven't used file sharing in some time, but are these tracks still available? How much shared music is actually purchaseable and not in some way out of print?
I am trying to build a hard disk image of a DOS PC from 1987 with all the software and versions from that time. See http://cyberreviews.skwc.com/dos87/
Barnes and Noble is a "search engine" - you go into their stores, search for books, and buy what you need. I don't remember why, but B+N started publishing their own classics and other books recently, bringing back high quality late-19th century translations to the shelves, and basically telling content providers (book publishers) that they wouldn't be messed with. Google ought to scan out of print books and newspapers, and put that info on a super-portal, and ignore newspapers, publishers, etc.
Trivial ... if you know how... but if you've never heard it before ...
My favorite question along those lines is how to pull a single line out, at random, from a file without knowing in advance how many lines there are. Never had anyone know the answer...
The Do Not Call list is so successful that it's time for a Do Not Survey list, a Do Not Beg Me For Money list, a Do Not Try To Sell Me More Services Because I'm A Customer list, a Do Not Auto-Dial And "Click" Hang Up When I Pick Up The Phone List, a Do Not Call If You Can't Pronounce My Name list, etc. I don't think there's any way to express to companies that some people simply don't want unsolicited, unnecessary calls and will never buy/give over the telephone.
False alarms are what I hate - I get to where I hold a bag out in front of me to see if it will set of the alarm when I buy anything that is potentially tagged to set off the alarms. If a store is going to have all this, and treat customers as criminals, they ought to at least deactivate the tags when you give them their money. If only the RIAA could use these tags on MP3s!
.... but who remembers all this stuff? If you're actually working on real-world software, do people really remember all these algorithms and stuff no one uses anymore because class libraries do all the pointers and memory management for you? Given enough time and books, I could remember how to reverse a linked list, but with C++ templates, Java class libraries, and dynamic languages like Perl, who does that kind of stuff on a daily basis? I might remember something about B-Tree algorithms, but who hand-codes their own database anymore? In the hiring process, doesn't the track record of a person count for something?
"You own the music like you own a book." But it's much more difficult to make backup copies of a book...! Making a CD backup is effortless. Books usually cost more to back up than to make another copy, so you'd only do it with an out-of-print or rare book. Because books are harder to back up, the question would probably never arise - I would never have a set of backup books stashed in a drawer at my office.
They want you to pay either like fast food -- you pay every time you consume something -- or cable TV -- you pay for it even if you're not using it. Both models break down with music.
"Your question presupposes that there is a need for individuals to prove that they purchaced some music. I say that there is not." -- Maybe not, but it's an interesting line of speculation. Just how far can I go? I guess it's a question of how far something can be shifted before there is no way to trace it back to the original. This speculative line of reasoning could be applied to any artifact, but music is in the news a lot with lawsuits. The same question doesn't really arise when I scan family photos or childhood drawings. It's just when I buy something from someone else and then want to preserve it by media shifting that this issue arises. What happens when the originals are either destroyed, or are so obsolete that they can't be accessed in any way? (I haven't had a record player in a decade but still have a few LPs, particularly ones with songs that have never been released to CD.)
A variation on this defense would be that a great number of my CDs would NEVER APPEAR on a file-sharing system because they are too rare. Heck, I bought some CDs because I could not FIND the music on Napster back in the late 90s! :)
Just to clear up things on this thread: this has nothing to do with RIAA suits per se, other than they put the idea of litigation into people's minds.
I have wondered about this mainly because (1) I got rid of a lot of cassettes, where I bought CDs in some cases and digitized songs in others and (2) I have a lot of out-of-print CDs and rare CDs that have been difficult to collect, and I have made backup copies of these (I keep a set at work, etc).
The lawsuits are about dissimination, not possession, but I have wondered for years what would be acceptable proof of actual purchase, i.e. not "stealing" music, if someone had to do that, for example, if asked: "you have 9GB of MP3s on your hard disk, where did they come from?"
I guess this is the next best thing to having to prove you exist, or aren't crazy. Even if you could prove it, would anyone believe you?
The question was speculative - it has nothing to do with current suits. I've wondered about this since I got rid of my cassettes.
The link says -- "...the 'evidentiary basis' for their allegation of copyright infringement, she received only a vague response." It is extremely important to clarify this! Just what are people being charged with by the RIAA? The mass media has consistently ignored this issue and said, in essence, people are being charged with downloading copyrighted material.
Can't be right -- for several reasons.
I'm not sure downloading copyrighted music is actually a crime. Is it?
The RIAA has to be charging people with disseminating their proprietary material. But they don't want anyone to know that, because this is a fear and chill campaign to stop downloading. There's no way the RIAA can sue people in China or Romania for disseminating their songs.
What bothers me is the potential for mistakes. The information provided by ISPs isn't necessarily right, and there's no due dilligence -- in fact, this isn't a criminal case. It's a civil case where the "evidence" is highly unreliable. How does grandma who never owned a computer prove she is not the person who had an IP address at the time the alleged crime was committed? That seems insane.
On the other hand, if people actually did disseminate music, ignorance (not knowing what your 11 year old was doing with the Internet connection you paid for) couldn't be an excuse, could it?
Maybe some day there will be clarification of these issues.
There's a LOT of misinformation about what the RIAA is suing people for. I wish the article had said it more forcefully, but it did make the point that the RIAA is suing people who disseminated their members' songs illegally. (I.e. "to scatter far and wide; spread abroad, as if sowing; promulgate widely".) They're not suing you for downloading songs, they're suing you for sharing their songs illegally by being a distributor of copyrighted material. They know which IP address shared the songs on the P2P network at what time (do you know what your IP address was a year ago? last month? right now?) because that's public information on most P2P networks. Note that the RIAA can't bait you, by disseminating their own songs on P2P networks and letting you download them, because they'd be giving away their own songs and it wouldn't be a crime then. If you're sued, about all you can do is prove it wasn't you who committed the crime. The IP address wasn't yours at the time (most ISPs don't keep logs as I understand), or that your IP address was pirated by a hijacker who used it. I do not think anyone has ever successfully proved it wasn't them -- most of these cases are thrown out on technicalities and not on the actual issues. Is what the RIAA is doing -- asking ISPs to turn over who had which IP addresses at what time -- legal? I don't think this has ever been decided (in the USA). Hard to say this should happen, because it's just a civil suit by an entity that isn't in law enforcement. If it was a law enforcement agency getting this data for an actual criminal case, that would be different... The burden of proof is on the RIAA, but if they have the ISP say an IP address allocated to John Doe who is paying the bill for Internet access did the P2P disseminating, it's hard to see how that could be proven any more solidly. Great lesson for civics teachers to bring to class!
The stories I'm hearing recently are that the Windows activation lets Microsoft disable computers any time it wants for no particular reason. Who'd want to be held hostage to that? Seems like people would be fleeing MS's operating system, not moving to it. If MS wanted people to use their OS (not Linux), why not disable activation permanently?
This would be a great time for IBM to bring back OS/2. Maybe open-source it. WGA got you down? Windows deactivated? Want superb compatibility with your old Win-16 and DOS programs you're using because there are no 0-day exploits for Lotus 1-2-3 2.2 and WordPerfect 5.1 does everything anyone ever needed a word processor to ever do? OS/2 is the answer! A really clever advertising campaign would have a 1-800-WGA-HELP telephone number for people to call when Windows quits working, and have an OS/2 install CD overnighted to them. Port Firefox and Thunderbird to it and you're ready to go.
The Internet treats crud as an obstacle and routes around it. CORBA - haven't heard that name in a long time. It was so inhumanly complex that even though I had a book where little cartoon aliens tried to explain it to me, I blinked a few times and moved on to something else. CORBA came from a time when the technology industry had a lot of really complex crud like IBM's Visual Age platform, Standard C++, CORBA, etc. It was collapsing under its own weight. All this stuff might have been technologically superior, but it was difficult to use and no one used it and now we've got Linux and much simpler development environments. None of this complex crud ever got any traction.
I am waiting for Bob Herbert's column about bringing the troops home and how fighting toads is not worth the cost of our blood and treasure.
Hoaxes are rarely stranger than the truth. If there was a red penny to be made, SCO probably WOULD release a new version of Caldera. The fact that their legal dept was suing someone over the GPL would probably not even be known to the marketing department who are presumeably still trying to sell products. Like the April's Fool Day when I ordered something at a fast-food place and the guy at the drive-thru said they were out of it. I'm so used to unbelieveable incompetence at these places (screwed up orders, out of what I ordered, our equipment doesn't work today, etc) that the fact that what he said was a hoax never occurred to me. To make a good hoax, it has to be fiction stranger than the truth, and that's difficult to come up with anymore.
"purely a branding change" -- Standard operating procedure for MS -- they rename their stuff like clockwork. Trace the history of DDE, OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, .Net etc etc etc (same basic stuff) or their alphabet soup of database access methods which all boil down to that incredible confusing ODBC control panel doodad. (And you have to install the drivers on EVERY DESKTOP, too, or at least you used to...) If MS is not renaming their techologies, they're reorganizing the company.
This makes me feel vindicated for using LAMP, actually, because any productive technology that gets the job done is trashed, for whatever reason. PHP uses C syntax, so I'm productive in it. I can write modular code in it as easily as I can in C. PHP doesn't have Java's overweight runtime library. Anyone can write bad code in any language, and I think the knock is not on PHP itself but on people who have no formal training in software development writing crud. Perl was the same way when LAPC was the current thing (Linux, Apache, Perl, CGI) - people saying Perl was an awful language because all the people were writing these insecure CGI scripts in Perl because their formal training was reading one Perl/CGI book.
I think what was meant is the federal government taxes the state tax refund. Your state taxes are withheld from your paycheck as pre-tax dollars, so when you get a refund this is pre-tax money that must be taxed because it wasn't taxed when it was withheld. This only happens when you itemize, though. Otherwise it's part of the standard deduction's magic dollar amount.