I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, just fear from Bush supporters to allow criticism of Bush. I'm conservative, and I have some major reservations with Bush - but too many of my GOP friends really can't stand discussion. It is too bad that news agencies are too afraid to print accurate criticisms.
Though with all the NSA wiretapping and executive gag orders who can blame them?
It is really worth the watch. Colbert starts about 40 minutes into the video. Get the torrent or watch it on youtube (part 1, part 2, and part 3). If you haven't seen the Colbert report - it is quite good. Comedy central has a bunch of videos up - my favorite is the "know a district" ones.
The Colbert Report is really high quality political humor, like the Daily Show with Jon Stewart - it is funny because so often it is true.
Artists usually get about 5%, that means from a $20 CD they get $1. It is amazing the distributors (who create nothing) get the lions share of profit. In this society creativity isn't rewarded - distribution is.
Not to mention the artists would be better off if you download an mp3 from p2p (or allofmp3) and then send them a check for $5. Or a check for $2. Either way.
Why did Microsoft care what browser people used? Operating systems can be replaced by higher level operating systems. BIOS stood for (used to, they changed it in the 90s) basic integrated operating system. BIOS was a full on (but limited) OS. Microsoft figured out how to use BIOS to boot DOS, a higher level OS. Later they figured out how to get DOS to boot Windows. Thus they knew operating systems could be replaced, they'd done it: BIOS > DOS > Windows (until they jettisoned DOS in 2000).
They were afraid the internet was going to do this again. And Netscape would be basically an OS on top of Windows. The problem was this: if everyone develops for Netscape, not for Windows, then Windows wouldn't matter (just like who makes your BIOS doesn't matter now). Microsoft was terrified that Windows would get built over. Then they couldn't charge much for Windows (because it wouldn't be that important). So they did their darndest to kill Netscape and force IE on everyone else.
Getting rid of the Apple Problem Macintosh threatened to throw a wrench in their plans. Even if Apple went out of business, someone would buy it up and still offer Macs. Because there was another viable platform, many early developers felt they should work for compatibility with both Mac and Windows. There was no IE for Macintosh and even if there had been, Microsoft needed a way to get Mac users to use it. If IE wasn't default for all major platforms, IE wouldn't be the standard, it would be a standard.*
Luck was on Microsft's side. They had been killing Apple's revenue for sometime and Apple was willing to partner with anyone to survive. For Microsoft it was worth $150 million to make IE the de facto standard that it remains to this day. For Apple is was worth accepting IE to survive to try and fight again.
So what about Netscape? Tying means using one product to sell another. Tying is like selling a copier and forcing (contractually or with technology) the consumer to get the copier serviced by you as well. This example is an actual case - Kodak did this. Tying is not bundling (for example selling Office rather than Excel or Powerpoint alone. Bundling is fine). Tying is per se illegal - if you are found to be tying, you are wrong, no debate - bundling is fine.
I don't think there was any doubt in Microsoft's mind that bolting IE to the OS was "tying." The problem for Microsoft was that permanently bolting IE to Windows (and making it default) was the only way to unseat the current king of the internet, Netscape. It worked. And then they got slapped with an anti-trust suit for guess what... tying.
During the trial a Princeton computer scientist got the Windows code via a court order and found that by removing two lines of code (from the source of Win98) you could get rid of IE. So Netscape presented this in court. Microsoft's rebuttal was a video, showing that by removing these two lines of code Windows crashed. When the prosecutors looked into this they found this was two different videos spliced together (thanks Ballmer). Guess what?
They were found guilty. Judge Penfield Jackson was furious. He'd been annoyed by Bill Gates' irritated deposition. Gates had been ornery and not very helpful, but this put Jackson over the top. So Jackson wrote a scathing decision and Microsoft was supposed to be split into three companies. Because this decision was so harsh when the change of administration came, they refused to enforce it.
So Microsoft won. They got IE to be the standard everyone uses when developing for the web and no penalties for it (if you don't think IE is the de facto standard, make your site incompatible with IE and, unless it is slashdot, don't expect to get much return traffic). Microsoft now has new pressure again - from alternate web browsers and from alternate operating systems. But there is a new savior on the horizon for them - trusted computing. If they succeed with the vendor lock-in trusted computing allows they'll never go out of business.
I think the neat thing here is that it'll have everything by default. (K)Ubuntu is about as easy as anything gets, unless you want to play an mp3, dvd, or anything covered by the w32 codec pack such as wmv. Then you have to grab additional software.
Yes it is really easy to get that software - if you know what you are doing (or you know how to google). But a lot of people don't. This distro is novel in that it will include support for all that stuff by default (OpenSuSE and Fedora don't include support by default either).
I feel totally comfortable with my grandma (or other non-techie user) using an easy distro like (K)Ubuntu - IF I set it up. If I can't set it up for them, I'm going to start suggesting Freespire - rather than Ubuntu plus all the apt-get (or synaptic) commands you need to run to get a fully functional desktop.
PS This isn't to bash other distros not including this stuff. I wouldn't include it either either if I decided what goes into them, this stuff is expensive to give away for free.
Likewise with Adobe Photoshop. It is industry standard now, because of piracy.
For example - almost no one under 20 has paid the $600 for Photoshop (let alone the $1200 for CS2). But many of them know Photoshop pretty well. How? Piracy. They pirate it, gain skills which future employers hire them for. When they are hired guess what - Adobe sells a real version of Photoshop to a person who knows it better than they could have any other way.
I'm not saying that sub 20 year olds set industry standard apps, but when they grow up they become the industry. Having them know Photoshop before they get there is a great asset to Adobe. IMHO this is true for other age groups as well.
Piracy is one the most powerful forces opposing opensource software. Why use and contribute to GIMP when you can pirate Photoshop. Why use Ubuntu when your friend has XP Pro you can use. That is why, in a very trotskyian fashion, DRM is fine by me. When proprietary stuff is so encumbered with DRM it is hard to use, it'll drive people towards the usability OSS faster than anything else ever could.
The real question is how do they keep these out of the US? My first bet is on region encoding, but that is so easy to break it is absurd. They can't require new hardware, or no one will buy it. It can't have DRM (aside from CSS), or existing DVD players won't play it. The only other option I can think of is removing major features. But I'd buy a DVD for $1.50 from China even if it didn't have special features.
So my question is, how do they keep people in the rest of the world from buying $1.50 DVDs? AFAIK, arbitrage is what killed price discrimination with region encoding in the first place, what is to say arbitrage won't kill it again? The DVDs will be in Mandarin (I assume) so language seems to be the only barrier that might hold back the tide of re-importing.
Another one to try, if you are bound to Windows and can't use Amarok, is Foobar2000. Foobar isn't shiny like iTunes, doesn't do as much stuff 'automatically' (like playlists) but it has some great advantages.
It's memory footprint is light. Very light. It loads songs much faster than iTunes. It can burn cds, has a nice masstagger & good replay gain (volume normalization), tabbed playlists, very customizable GUI, and it can transcode any supported audio (it supports everything I've run across). Plus, if it doesn't do what you want already, it supports extensions, and there are a ton of them. So you may be able to find what you want in an extension.
If you like iTunes because it is shiny and does things automagically, stick with iTunes. But if you want flexibility, power and a light memory footprint try Foobar2000.
(Not to mention foobar doesn't "automatically" install stuff you may not want without your consent - the iPod service that always launches, the quicktime player that sits in the system tray, and heaven only knows what else)
Give "Amorok" a try. I don't know if it's been ported to Windows, but IMHO it is the best media player out there. It has all the usual - links to iPod, supports automatic tagging (musicbrainz), cd burning, intelligent playlists, - plus it actively watches a directory for new music, finds other music you may like based on what you play (audioscrobbler) and has all sorts of advanced features. It is terrifically customizable, and has a reasonably light footprint considering it's options.
Articles about how awful the patent system is are ten a penny.
Yep, everyone has one. Here is mine - copied from my blog http://jambarama.blogspot.com./ As a warning it is long (really long) but I really put a lot of thought into this and I think I've proposed some good realistic solutions (not the "eliminate all patents" bull that gets posted to/. so often).
What is a patent supposed to be?
A patent is supposed to be a well defined property right that gives an owner (not necessarily inventor) a monopoly, or significant competitive advantage, on a device. It should be clear what the patent covers, enforceable, innovative and temporary.
Why give monopoly power?
Innovation has positive externalities. Meaning it benefits more than just the creator. A negative externality means that it is under-produced. To get around this problem, we give away temporary monopolies so that creators capture more (not all) of the benefits they produce for others. The temporary monopoly with the new invention makes people better off than not having the invention would.
The trade off is that the workings of the invention must be public. Any expert in the field should be able to use your patent application to recreate your invention. That way, when the invention falls into the public domain, everyone may benefit. This is why the government offers patents.
What are patents currently?
Patents today are the right to TRY to exclude others from using a property right granted exclusively to you. They are not often innovative (prior art issues)1, often held invalid and most of the time not very well defined.
Why do we care?
This is actually a great question to always ask. So patents aren't doing what they were designed to do. So what? I argue there are many problems. Patents are designed to incent innovation. They may in fact discourage it (as we'll see later). Legitimate patents may be invalidated and the uncertainty with not knowing the validity of a patent has negative externalities (so it causes harm to many, so we have too much of it). Patents may deter entry into markets, so monopolies can be extended. Patents may harm consumer welfare. All these things are bad.
Why are we so far off?
In brief, because of a poor incentive system. It was designed just fine, but some problems crept up, weren't fixed and it has gotten worse. Don't believe me? Here are some statistics. In the United States there are 350,000 patents filed each year, and 200,000 accepted. That isn't to say that 150,000 are rejected, there is a backlog of about 750,000 patents as of 2004. Does anyone think there is that much innovation going on in the United States?
Over-Patenting
One of the biggest problems is over patenting. As the previous statistics should show, we are filing and receiving way too many patents. I don't know what the right number is, but we'll see that 350,000 a year must be too high.
Over patenting is bad for a lot of reasons. Worthless patents swamp valuable ones in the examination process. Which patents are worth carefully examining? Patents on non-innovative ideas are terribly harmful to competition. The value of a patent (and enforceability) is diluted with frivolous patents.
Problems with Filing a Patent
Because patents are first come first receive, there is the incentive to file early to beat out competitors. Many patents are filed just in case a discovery turns out to matter in the future. If the inventor (usually a firm) doesn't know the value of a patent, there really is no way the PTO can know.
The PTO bears the burden of proof. Meaning your application is considered valid until proven invalid. Patents are relatively inexpensive to file for (the fees differ on a number of factors) but since the PTO spends an average of 18 hours on each patent, they are relatively expensive to handle fo
Not to plug my blog, but I recently wrote about patent abuse. The problem isn't so much unethical companies, the problem is that the incentives to patent are all wrong.
Microsoft is remarkably clean of patent/copyright abuse. Most other companies have less than perfect records. Even companies we see as victimized (ex - Apple sued by creative over 'heirarchal displays' and the Apple record label) have sued others (ex - apple again suing over trade secrets and tried to get gag orders for blogs).
Yeah the Mac fans will bury this comment (just like criticizing Linux is dangerous on/.) but the patent system does need some reforming.
I'd give them a look before I demanded the slashcode writers add features you want (or write the code yourself and submit it to slashcode), unlike other news sites this is an OSS project.
If you have time check out my post on why the patent system is broken, and how to fix it.
A summary:
The Problem: Way too many patents are filed for, way too many patents are recieved, and not enough are enforced (uncertainty is a problem).
The Fix: Either strengthen patents considerably (making it much harder to get one, but making litigation more predictable) or weaken patents considerably (making it trivial to get a patent and hard to enforce them). Either way.
This isn't that big of a deal really. Landfills are currently full of styrofoam. And when it gets buried it gets hot. You don't need it so hot it burns (which produces the gases you reference).
All you'd need to do is bury the bacteria deep enough in a styrofoam rich landfill and you're in good shape. It is warm enough for the little guys to go to work on all the styrofoam.
I just wonder what else the bacteria attacks and how long it can live in the wild.
Yeah this'll kill battery life. Especially if it is running actively, in that it scans all incoming files.
Just as importantly how will this affect performance. Norton made my computer run at 2-3% cpu all the time no matter what I was doing. And if I was downloading something it jumped.
And those dang scheduled scans, how about one of them popping up in the middle of your conversation? "Sorry my AV fired up while we were talking so I lagged out."
Yeah so everyone gives in and gets injected. What happens when someone LOSES their job? Surgery to remove the RFID chip? Reimplant everyone else with a new chip? It just doesn't seem workable.
Since patent litigation tends to have positive externalities it is underproduced. Sounds weird I know, stay with me.
Positive Externalities: Clarity (at least more so) for other patent holders, if the patent is declared invalid (46% of them are) it benefits anyone wanting to use it not just the litigator, 95+% of patents have no commercial applications so they aren't litigated, litigation is expensive only 6% of litigation goes to trial (the rest settle).
So actually we ought to encourage litigation. Its a pain in the butt, but if the courts could find some consistency we'd all be a lot better off. Or if the government could get off its butt and produce a viable patent system (rather than this broken IP system we have now) we'd abe a lot better off.
This is the same thing any oil refinery tries to do. If you can get the oil supplier to build a pipeline to your refinery, the costs are sunk so you can offer to pay them only marginal costs. That is a loss to them, but what choice do they have if they've already built the pipe.
But if you can get the refinery to be built first, the pipeline can charge a ton of money for the oil, so that the refiney can't make any money. This problem is what is referred to as the 'double marginalization' problem. When two complementary firms are both monopolies (or have market power). The solution has been long term contracts or buying the other guy out; rather than holding the other guy ransom.
I am sorry to say that the growing trend to throttle bittorrent is not based entirely on issues of piracy (although it is somewhat to blame). Many ISP's main reason for this is quality of service. While you may not intend to suck up all of the bandwidth that your ISP has, Bit torrent is notorious for sucking up bandwidth. Bit torrent has a rather poorly designed (for packet efficiency) protocol. It is terrific for other things, but not packet efficiency.
Bit torrent has the problem of opening a lot of connections (the larger the torrent storm, the more connections). While each of these connections to other seeders/leechers may only be passing small amounts of information, they tend to take up a lot of the routers memory (especially for very slow connections that stay open even though they don't pass much if not any information). This kills a router. You might not ever notice it at your own home but having a lot of people on torrents can take drop a router, and make the internet slow for all of the other users using your ISP.
While I don't agree with the actions of these ISPs I thought others might want to know other reasons for throttling this type of bandwidth. As for breaking this throttling your options is very limited. Most ISPs use a layer2 packet shaper, which has the ability to determine the actual content of a packet regardless of port. This is quite common these days.
As far as I know the only real option to get around it requires that you have a server outside of your ISP's network. If you have such a server or a friend somewhere with a nice fast connection (up and down), you would need to set up a tunnel. On top of that you would most likely need to setup a secure tunnel to avoid the packet shaper from understanding the packet data. You can do this using an SSH tunnel, or you can try to setup a site to site VPN tunnel (both of which you would want encrypted). Doing these things is not easy tasks and requires a fair amount of knowledge concerning the way networks works. There are several how-to's discussing how to setup a VPN tunnel and/or SSH tunnel.
Like I said these are not for the novice. It would however be a great opportunity to learn quite a bit more about networks than even the more network savvy people. Chances are most people are just going to have to live without torrent, or switch to a provider that doesn't throttle torrent activity.
The most common problem I've noticed that users have with heirarchal systems. They don't know where "My Documents" is because they presume folders are all flat, there cannot be nesting. I've heard many of my coworkers (I do low level computer support) use a file cabinet as an analogy for the file system. That is no good, when was the last time you had a folder in a folder in a filing cabinet? If users understood nesting, they'd probably get the whole file system thing pretty well. Then they might poke around to look for where their stuff is.
I can't say how often I've been asked to find a missing document. And I wish to hell windows had a pre-installed updatedb/locate feature.
Excellent comment. It isn't just scammers though. I went to Best Buy the other day looking for a few things. First I was looking for a monitor, I just wanted the cheapest CRT clunker they had. The salesman looked me in the eye and told me that if I had a new computer I had to get a flat screen. I told him it was for an older computer and he said he wasn't sure if their $100 CRT would work with it.
I've been told I needed 1gb+ ram to "run the internet." I've been told that I needed a 2gb flash drive because smaller ones fill up so fast I won't get any use out of them (this guy thought flash drives were like CDRs, write once). This is by guys who are supposed to know computers (I know they pay crud so they get a 17 year old PFY who doesn't understand FSB speeds from clock speeds).
The problem is more 'supposed' experts (especially those trying to sell you something) who have automatic trust of the consumer. I've tried to help people before who didn't trust that "Firefox" was actually safer. These are the exact same people who trust the best buy guy & buy a new power strip every 6 months because they 'wear out.'
To be honest I can only see Apple implementing something like that now, but eventually it'd hit the PC market. HP still innovates even if Dell doesn't.
EDIT PARENT: I'm sure there are other advantages too, but this is what came off the top of my head. If we could get read/write speeds on flash drives up to the speeds DDR RAM has you could have a computer that, when unplugged unexpectedly, doesn't lose anything it wasn't writing at that very millisecond. Boy wouldn't that be a leap ahead. (Windows Vista has an optional feature that uses flash drives as memory. Not as good as real RAM but leaps faster than virtual memory).
(I removed an "AND" that made the paragraph hard to read)
I'm not sure your analogy holds. These sorts of flash drives would be beautiful in portable devices, but I can see a terrific value using them in laptops. Imagine putting 5 x 16gb flash drives in a laptop in a RAID 5 array, giving 64GB usable space (more than enough for most laptops). You'd have a few huge advantages.
1. You'd save a terrific amount of power (spinning CDs and HDs kills batteries faster than about anything). 2. In a RAID 5 array (so long as only 1 drive fails at a time), if you have a drive failure, you could have a little program popup and say "look part of your HD has died. You haven't lost any data, so don't worry, but get this serviced immediately." 3. With the RAID 5 controlled by the computer, the read/write times would be unreal. Fastest loading ever. 10 second boots and instant program loading! 4. With solid state memory, no more hard drive heads scratching the hard drive platters if you drop your laptop. 5. Flash memory is small. Even 5 chips would be much smaller than a 2.5 inch hard drive. More importantly, it is flat. So you could get laptops half inch thick (assuming a slot loading CD drive).
I'm sure there are other advantages too, but this is what came off the top of my head. If we could get read/write speeds on flash drives up to the speeds DDR RAM has and you could have a computer that, when unplugged unexpectedly, doesn't lose anything it wasn't writing at that very millisecond. Boy wouldn't that be a leap ahead. (Windows Vista has an optional feature that uses flash drives as memory. Not as good as real RAM but leaps faster than virtual memory).
When you install Symantec (works with McAfee too I've been told) just set the system clock forward a few years. If it installs in 2010, but then finds itself in 2006, it'll think you have a 4 year subscription. I did this when I was still in the 'give me free stuff script kiddie' mode a few years back. A friend of mine just did it and confirmed that it still works. I switched to Debian and haven't had a problem with ClamAV.
While you are correct that no one loses money to get a tax break, parent poster is right about german tax law. There is a more detailed explanation of how to use German and British tax law here . As an example, "On paper, Tomb Raider's budget was $94 million. In fact, the entire movie cost Paramount less than $7 million." Pretty stunning tax loops.
Slashdot Mirror
And sadly enough the press is ignoring it. If you search front page stories at Digg.com - you'll find the same story has made it to the front page of digg three times in the last day and a half - and each story has been buried.
I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, just fear from Bush supporters to allow criticism of Bush. I'm conservative, and I have some major reservations with Bush - but too many of my GOP friends really can't stand discussion. It is too bad that news agencies are too afraid to print accurate criticisms. Though with all the NSA wiretapping and executive gag orders who can blame them?
It is really worth the watch. Colbert starts about 40 minutes into the video. Get the torrent or watch it on youtube (part 1, part 2, and part 3). If you haven't seen the Colbert report - it is quite good. Comedy central has a bunch of videos up - my favorite is the "know a district" ones.
The Colbert Report is really high quality political humor, like the Daily Show with Jon Stewart - it is funny because so often it is true.
Artists usually get about 5%, that means from a $20 CD they get $1. It is amazing the distributors (who create nothing) get the lions share of profit. In this society creativity isn't rewarded - distribution is.
Not to mention the artists would be better off if you download an mp3 from p2p (or allofmp3) and then send them a check for $5. Or a check for $2. Either way.
From my blog: http://jambarama.blogspot.com/2006/03/how-microsof t-got-ie-to-be-de-facto.html
Why did Microsoft care what browser people used?
Operating systems can be replaced by higher level operating systems. BIOS stood for (used to, they changed it in the 90s) basic integrated operating system. BIOS was a full on (but limited) OS. Microsoft figured out how to use BIOS to boot DOS, a higher level OS. Later they figured out how to get DOS to boot Windows. Thus they knew operating systems could be replaced, they'd done it: BIOS > DOS > Windows (until they jettisoned DOS in 2000).
They were afraid the internet was going to do this again. And Netscape would be basically an OS on top of Windows. The problem was this: if everyone develops for Netscape, not for Windows, then Windows wouldn't matter (just like who makes your BIOS doesn't matter now). Microsoft was terrified that Windows would get built over. Then they couldn't charge much for Windows (because it wouldn't be that important). So they did their darndest to kill Netscape and force IE on everyone else.
Getting rid of the Apple Problem
Macintosh threatened to throw a wrench in their plans. Even if Apple went out of business, someone would buy it up and still offer Macs. Because there was another viable platform, many early developers felt they should work for compatibility with both Mac and Windows. There was no IE for Macintosh and even if there had been, Microsoft needed a way to get Mac users to use it. If IE wasn't default for all major platforms, IE wouldn't be the standard, it would be a standard.*
Luck was on Microsft's side. They had been killing Apple's revenue for sometime and Apple was willing to partner with anyone to survive. For Microsoft it was worth $150 million to make IE the de facto standard that it remains to this day. For Apple is was worth accepting IE to survive to try and fight again.
So what about Netscape?
Tying means using one product to sell another. Tying is like selling a copier and forcing (contractually or with technology) the consumer to get the copier serviced by you as well. This example is an actual case - Kodak did this. Tying is not bundling (for example selling Office rather than Excel or Powerpoint alone. Bundling is fine). Tying is per se illegal - if you are found to be tying, you are wrong, no debate - bundling is fine.
I don't think there was any doubt in Microsoft's mind that bolting IE to the OS was "tying." The problem for Microsoft was that permanently bolting IE to Windows (and making it default) was the only way to unseat the current king of the internet, Netscape. It worked. And then they got slapped with an anti-trust suit for guess what... tying.
During the trial a Princeton computer scientist got the Windows code via a court order and found that by removing two lines of code (from the source of Win98) you could get rid of IE. So Netscape presented this in court. Microsoft's rebuttal was a video, showing that by removing these two lines of code Windows crashed. When the prosecutors looked into this they found this was two different videos spliced together (thanks Ballmer). Guess what?
They were found guilty. Judge Penfield Jackson was furious. He'd been annoyed by Bill Gates' irritated deposition. Gates had been ornery and not very helpful, but this put Jackson over the top. So Jackson wrote a scathing decision and Microsoft was supposed to be split into three companies. Because this decision was so harsh when the change of administration came, they refused to enforce it.
So Microsoft won. They got IE to be the standard everyone uses when developing for the web and no penalties for it (if you don't think IE is the de facto standard, make your site incompatible with IE and, unless it is slashdot, don't expect to get much return traffic). Microsoft now has new pressure again - from alternate web browsers and from alternate operating systems. But there is a new savior on the horizon for them - trusted computing. If they succeed with the vendor lock-in trusted computing allows they'll never go out of business.
I think the neat thing here is that it'll have everything by default. (K)Ubuntu is about as easy as anything gets, unless you want to play an mp3, dvd, or anything covered by the w32 codec pack such as wmv. Then you have to grab additional software.
Yes it is really easy to get that software - if you know what you are doing (or you know how to google). But a lot of people don't. This distro is novel in that it will include support for all that stuff by default (OpenSuSE and Fedora don't include support by default either).
I feel totally comfortable with my grandma (or other non-techie user) using an easy distro like (K)Ubuntu - IF I set it up. If I can't set it up for them, I'm going to start suggesting Freespire - rather than Ubuntu plus all the apt-get (or synaptic) commands you need to run to get a fully functional desktop.
PS This isn't to bash other distros not including this stuff. I wouldn't include it either either if I decided what goes into them, this stuff is expensive to give away for free.
Likewise with Adobe Photoshop. It is industry standard now, because of piracy.
For example - almost no one under 20 has paid the $600 for Photoshop (let alone the $1200 for CS2). But many of them know Photoshop pretty well. How? Piracy. They pirate it, gain skills which future employers hire them for. When they are hired guess what - Adobe sells a real version of Photoshop to a person who knows it better than they could have any other way.
I'm not saying that sub 20 year olds set industry standard apps, but when they grow up they become the industry. Having them know Photoshop before they get there is a great asset to Adobe. IMHO this is true for other age groups as well.
Piracy is one the most powerful forces opposing opensource software. Why use and contribute to GIMP when you can pirate Photoshop. Why use Ubuntu when your friend has XP Pro you can use. That is why, in a very trotskyian fashion, DRM is fine by me. When proprietary stuff is so encumbered with DRM it is hard to use, it'll drive people towards the usability OSS faster than anything else ever could.
The real question is how do they keep these out of the US? My first bet is on region encoding, but that is so easy to break it is absurd. They can't require new hardware, or no one will buy it. It can't have DRM (aside from CSS), or existing DVD players won't play it. The only other option I can think of is removing major features. But I'd buy a DVD for $1.50 from China even if it didn't have special features.
So my question is, how do they keep people in the rest of the world from buying $1.50 DVDs? AFAIK, arbitrage is what killed price discrimination with region encoding in the first place, what is to say arbitrage won't kill it again? The DVDs will be in Mandarin (I assume) so language seems to be the only barrier that might hold back the tide of re-importing.
Another one to try, if you are bound to Windows and can't use Amarok, is Foobar2000. Foobar isn't shiny like iTunes, doesn't do as much stuff 'automatically' (like playlists) but it has some great advantages.
It's memory footprint is light. Very light. It loads songs much faster than iTunes. It can burn cds, has a nice masstagger & good replay gain (volume normalization), tabbed playlists, very customizable GUI, and it can transcode any supported audio (it supports everything I've run across). Plus, if it doesn't do what you want already, it supports extensions, and there are a ton of them. So you may be able to find what you want in an extension.
If you like iTunes because it is shiny and does things automagically, stick with iTunes. But if you want flexibility, power and a light memory footprint try Foobar2000.
(Not to mention foobar doesn't "automatically" install stuff you may not want without your consent - the iPod service that always launches, the quicktime player that sits in the system tray, and heaven only knows what else)
Give "Amorok" a try. I don't know if it's been ported to Windows, but IMHO it is the best media player out there. It has all the usual - links to iPod, supports automatic tagging (musicbrainz), cd burning, intelligent playlists, - plus it actively watches a directory for new music, finds other music you may like based on what you play (audioscrobbler) and has all sorts of advanced features. It is terrifically customizable, and has a reasonably light footprint considering it's options.
iTunes is very nice, but amarok is killer.
Yep, everyone has one. Here is mine - copied from my blog http://jambarama.blogspot.com./ As a warning it is long (really long) but I really put a lot of thought into this and I think I've proposed some good realistic solutions (not the "eliminate all patents" bull that gets posted to
Not to plug my blog, but I recently wrote about patent abuse. The problem isn't so much unethical companies, the problem is that the incentives to patent are all wrong.
/.) but the patent system does need some reforming.
Microsoft is remarkably clean of patent/copyright abuse. Most other companies have less than perfect records. Even companies we see as victimized (ex - Apple sued by creative over 'heirarchal displays' and the Apple record label) have sued others (ex - apple again suing over trade secrets and tried to get gag orders for blogs).
Yeah the Mac fans will bury this comment (just like criticizing Linux is dangerous on
There are greasemonkey scripts to allow collapsing threads. And scripts to collapse stories and remove sidebars and figure out how much time you waste on /. and add mirrors and whatever else you want on slashdot.
I'd give them a look before I demanded the slashcode writers add features you want (or write the code yourself and submit it to slashcode), unlike other news sites this is an OSS project.
If you have time check out my post on why the patent system is broken, and how to fix it.
A summary:
The Problem: Way too many patents are filed for, way too many patents are recieved, and not enough are enforced (uncertainty is a problem).
The Fix: Either strengthen patents considerably (making it much harder to get one, but making litigation more predictable) or weaken patents considerably (making it trivial to get a patent and hard to enforce them). Either way.
This isn't that big of a deal really. Landfills are currently full of styrofoam. And when it gets buried it gets hot. You don't need it so hot it burns (which produces the gases you reference).
All you'd need to do is bury the bacteria deep enough in a styrofoam rich landfill and you're in good shape. It is warm enough for the little guys to go to work on all the styrofoam.
I just wonder what else the bacteria attacks and how long it can live in the wild.
Yeah this'll kill battery life. Especially if it is running actively, in that it scans all incoming files.
Just as importantly how will this affect performance. Norton made my computer run at 2-3% cpu all the time no matter what I was doing. And if I was downloading something it jumped.
And those dang scheduled scans, how about one of them popping up in the middle of your conversation? "Sorry my AV fired up while we were talking so I lagged out."
Yeah so everyone gives in and gets injected. What happens when someone LOSES their job? Surgery to remove the RFID chip? Reimplant everyone else with a new chip? It just doesn't seem workable.
Since patent litigation tends to have positive externalities it is underproduced. Sounds weird I know, stay with me.
Positive Externalities: Clarity (at least more so) for other patent holders, if the patent is declared invalid (46% of them are) it benefits anyone wanting to use it not just the litigator, 95+% of patents have no commercial applications so they aren't litigated, litigation is expensive only 6% of litigation goes to trial (the rest settle).
So actually we ought to encourage litigation. Its a pain in the butt, but if the courts could find some consistency we'd all be a lot better off. Or if the government could get off its butt and produce a viable patent system (rather than this broken IP system we have now) we'd abe a lot better off.
This is the same thing any oil refinery tries to do. If you can get the oil supplier to build a pipeline to your refinery, the costs are sunk so you can offer to pay them only marginal costs. That is a loss to them, but what choice do they have if they've already built the pipe.
But if you can get the refinery to be built first, the pipeline can charge a ton of money for the oil, so that the refiney can't make any money. This problem is what is referred to as the 'double marginalization' problem. When two complementary firms are both monopolies (or have market power). The solution has been long term contracts or buying the other guy out; rather than holding the other guy ransom.
That said, what a pain in the rear this is.
I am sorry to say that the growing trend to throttle bittorrent is not based entirely on issues of piracy (although it is somewhat to blame). Many ISP's main reason for this is quality of service. While you may not intend to suck up all of the bandwidth that your ISP has, Bit torrent is notorious for sucking up bandwidth. Bit torrent has a rather poorly designed (for packet efficiency) protocol. It is terrific for other things, but not packet efficiency.
Bit torrent has the problem of opening a lot of connections (the larger the torrent storm, the more connections). While each of these connections to other seeders/leechers may only be passing small amounts of information, they tend to take up a lot of the routers memory (especially for very slow connections that stay open even though they don't pass much if not any information). This kills a router. You might not ever notice it at your own home but having a lot of people on torrents can take drop a router, and make the internet slow for all of the other users using your ISP.
While I don't agree with the actions of these ISPs I thought others might want to know other reasons for throttling this type of bandwidth. As for breaking this throttling your options is very limited. Most ISPs use a layer2 packet shaper, which has the ability to determine the actual content of a packet regardless of port. This is quite common these days.
As far as I know the only real option to get around it requires that you have a server outside of your ISP's network. If you have such a server or a friend somewhere with a nice fast connection (up and down), you would need to set up a tunnel. On top of that you would most likely need to setup a secure tunnel to avoid the packet shaper from understanding the packet data. You can do this using an SSH tunnel, or you can try to setup a site to site VPN tunnel (both of which you would want encrypted). Doing these things is not easy tasks and requires a fair amount of knowledge concerning the way networks works. There are several how-to's discussing how to setup a VPN tunnel and/or SSH tunnel.
Like I said these are not for the novice. It would however be a great opportunity to learn quite a bit more about networks than even the more network savvy people. Chances are most people are just going to have to live without torrent, or switch to a provider that doesn't throttle torrent activity.
The most common problem I've noticed that users have with heirarchal systems. They don't know where "My Documents" is because they presume folders are all flat, there cannot be nesting. I've heard many of my coworkers (I do low level computer support) use a file cabinet as an analogy for the file system. That is no good, when was the last time you had a folder in a folder in a filing cabinet? If users understood nesting, they'd probably get the whole file system thing pretty well. Then they might poke around to look for where their stuff is.
I can't say how often I've been asked to find a missing document. And I wish to hell windows had a pre-installed updatedb/locate feature.
Excellent comment. It isn't just scammers though. I went to Best Buy the other day looking for a few things. First I was looking for a monitor, I just wanted the cheapest CRT clunker they had. The salesman looked me in the eye and told me that if I had a new computer I had to get a flat screen. I told him it was for an older computer and he said he wasn't sure if their $100 CRT would work with it.
I've been told I needed 1gb+ ram to "run the internet." I've been told that I needed a 2gb flash drive because smaller ones fill up so fast I won't get any use out of them (this guy thought flash drives were like CDRs, write once). This is by guys who are supposed to know computers (I know they pay crud so they get a 17 year old PFY who doesn't understand FSB speeds from clock speeds).
The problem is more 'supposed' experts (especially those trying to sell you something) who have automatic trust of the consumer. I've tried to help people before who didn't trust that "Firefox" was actually safer. These are the exact same people who trust the best buy guy & buy a new power strip every 6 months because they 'wear out.'
To be honest I can only see Apple implementing something like that now, but eventually it'd hit the PC market. HP still innovates even if Dell doesn't.
EDIT PARENT: I'm sure there are other advantages too, but this is what came off the top of my head. If we could get read/write speeds on flash drives up to the speeds DDR RAM has you could have a computer that, when unplugged unexpectedly, doesn't lose anything it wasn't writing at that very millisecond. Boy wouldn't that be a leap ahead. (Windows Vista has an optional feature that uses flash drives as memory. Not as good as real RAM but leaps faster than virtual memory).
(I removed an "AND" that made the paragraph hard to read)
I'm not sure your analogy holds. These sorts of flash drives would be beautiful in portable devices, but I can see a terrific value using them in laptops. Imagine putting 5 x 16gb flash drives in a laptop in a RAID 5 array, giving 64GB usable space (more than enough for most laptops). You'd have a few huge advantages.
1. You'd save a terrific amount of power (spinning CDs and HDs kills batteries faster than about anything).
2. In a RAID 5 array (so long as only 1 drive fails at a time), if you have a drive failure, you could have a little program popup and say "look part of your HD has died. You haven't lost any data, so don't worry, but get this serviced immediately."
3. With the RAID 5 controlled by the computer, the read/write times would be unreal. Fastest loading ever. 10 second boots and instant program loading!
4. With solid state memory, no more hard drive heads scratching the hard drive platters if you drop your laptop.
5. Flash memory is small. Even 5 chips would be much smaller than a 2.5 inch hard drive. More importantly, it is flat. So you could get laptops half inch thick (assuming a slot loading CD drive).
I'm sure there are other advantages too, but this is what came off the top of my head. If we could get read/write speeds on flash drives up to the speeds DDR RAM has and you could have a computer that, when unplugged unexpectedly, doesn't lose anything it wasn't writing at that very millisecond. Boy wouldn't that be a leap ahead. (Windows Vista has an optional feature that uses flash drives as memory. Not as good as real RAM but leaps faster than virtual memory).
When you install Symantec (works with McAfee too I've been told) just set the system clock forward a few years. If it installs in 2010, but then finds itself in 2006, it'll think you have a 4 year subscription. I did this when I was still in the 'give me free stuff script kiddie' mode a few years back. A friend of mine just did it and confirmed that it still works. I switched to Debian and haven't had a problem with ClamAV.
Silly Symantec, not getting a real date online.
While you are correct that no one loses money to get a tax break, parent poster is right about german tax law. There is a more detailed explanation of how to use German and British tax law here . As an example, "On paper, Tomb Raider's budget was $94 million. In fact, the entire movie cost Paramount less than $7 million." Pretty stunning tax loops.