Yes... the theory and the implementation are at a bit of a disconnect... but time and time again, that's the reason I've heard from business managers as to why they want MS software. It's not a matter of "How can I afford to sue MS?" but of "I don't even have the option to sue thousands of individuals!"
Answer: Linux == OMG PONEIZZZ!!! (In other words, Linux coders are fucking amateur hacker bitches!)
Mod me troll, but you know I'm right.
To spread your generalization a bit further, ALL coders fit this mould. Businesses choose Windows because then they know who to sue when things don't work right.
Watermarking audio? What for, anyway? Transcode once, lose watermark. Re-burn and re-rip, lose watermark. Transmission error, lose watermark. (Watermark in the sense that it can be batch-calculated on massive quantities of files. OF COURSE an human will recognize it.)
Actually, there are a lot of modern watermarking methods that are based on audio profiling that can survive transcoding just fine. Plus, any watermark worth its salt uses FEC, which would handle the transmission error.
However, I think it far more likely that the watermarking will somehow be encoded directly into the audio stream and won't depend on digital manipulation at all... for instance, since the studio has access to all the mixing tracks, they could easily just offset the drum track by a millisecond or so for selected beats (this could be shifted digitally during the encoding process), creating ever-so-slightly different audio tracks whose waveform when overlaid against the master track would show the unique sentinel just fine. For that matter, they could just pitch-shift the drum track -- very few people would notice that at all.
What about the majority of the people, who, since they are centrist and trying to eke out a living don't read any of those newspapers or really care about what goes on in them unless it impacts their own lives?
Most people watch the evening news or talk to their friends to get that kind of information. This is the silent majority that doesn't really care who rules the country as long as things don't change too much for the worse.
Precisely. I have a feeling that he would most likely only be found culpable for the tortuous misdemeanors. The criminal actions would be extremely hard to prove if they even exist (I guess we could all watch this trial for another 10 years however).
They haven't, because this lawsuit was brought by Capitol, not the RIAA. The RIAA only digs up the possible infringements -- the actual lawsuits are made in the name of the allegedly infringed company.
Also, unless you were an eyewitness to the events, you can't ever know for sure that the whole thing wasn't invented. Personally, I think soldiers opened fire on civilians who were causing a mild disturbance in Tienanmen Square in 1989, but everything past that point is (educated) conjecture.
Indeed, BackupPC does some clever tricks when storing (partially) identical files, which they call "pooling". So it's not actually compression (it does that in addition to the pooling, too), but rather the non-storage of redundant information that saves lots of space in the backups./blockquote Compression is done by finding identical bits of data (redundant data) and creating a reference to those bits that is smaller than the original data. Lempel-Ziv-Huffmann compression does this, and so does pooling at the file level. No need to be pedantic:)
For those who want a more specific description of what happens, backuppc pulls data off of the network using samba/rsync/ssh/whatever else you want to shoehorn in, performs file-level compression (whatever you want; bzip is the default), compares the md5sum on the files, and hard-links them against the table of md5-sums. The result is accessible via a web page, and you can set it up so that each user can back up/restore their own files manually.
BackupPC keeps track of a device's ping history. If the device only comes in during the day, after a couple of days the system will start backing it up as soon as it connects to the network.
I use it to back up the LAN, portables, and PCs connecting via VPN -- given that it can back up via RSYNC, SSH and SAMBA, pretty much anything with a HD connected to the network gets put into the system.
The backups are also mirrored for off-site storage so there's always an in-house revision system and an emergency remote restore point. The system works well, and for small businesses can easily store 1.5TB of data on a single 250MB HDD (make sure to mirror).
They eventually escaped, but don't forget that the Royal Bank of Canada once had a major stake in SCOX. This means everyone who had RBC bank accounts (especially those with mutual funds) were funding SCOX. I'm sure the people at RBC who recommended doing this in the first place have had a change of position since then.
Any company wanting to get into Unix world or use the SCO brand to get recognition will be buying (who will NOT be watching SCO?).
I think that unless the company was manufacturing toilet paper, the SCO brand won't be worth much. Brand recognition is great, but when it's associated with a pariah, fame only gets you so far.
Will it be taken over? Depends on its debts...Too high then unlikely.
Actually, debts can be quite lucrative for a takeover. Say you're a multi-billion dollar company with a huge income that has an enormous tax burden... purchasing debt for cheap can offset the tax burden while not significantly impacting your actual income. This means that less real money has to exit the company, which is good in some circumstances.
Why do you think that they will be held accountable?
Because now that major financial backing has to be paid through to Novell, and people want a ROI. It is now painfully obvious (due to where the money was going vs. where it goes now) that something wasn't quite right with SCO.
Of course, they still might not be held accountable due to the fact that their mismanagement will result in bankruptcy and disollution of the company before anyone can actually pin anything on the company. Mr. McBride might be in serious trouble, however.
Not many people these days are touch-typists and I think those of us that are, have higher standards of what constitutes "good" than those that don't. I guess it's not surprising that MB keyboards aren't aimed at us, however.
Funny... I'm a touch typist, and I find that key travel gets in the way of my typing... I can touch type faster on a piece of paper with a printed keyboard than on a standard PC keyboard. All you really need is the two indicators to tell you where your home key position is; the rest of the keys you store in muscle memory. You know when you've touched them because your fingers have pressure applied to them.
I'm confused. How exactly does copyright law prevent people from building upon previously existing ideas? The implication of your "simple economic proof" is that current copyright law is limiting production of copyrighted materials to a very tiny amount (say one every 500 or so years) of completely original works. The opposite is currently happening, with an overproduction of music that is all derivative of previous copyrighted works. Some proof indeed.
Actually, this argument is a good illustration of what's wrong. The reason we have so much derivative music is that the publishing houses, to play it safe, mostly produce music that is derivative of the other works in their library -- this reduces the likelihood of copyright lawsuits from the other publishers. Over time, this results in the derivative works becoming more and more similar, and even though the works by the various publishing houses become more similar to each other, they can point at their source material that is obviously NOT stolen from the other houses and say "That's where I stole^H^H^H^H^Hcopied that progression/melody/sample from." With no IP protection, we'd have variations copying from any source that sounds interesting to the composer, and the composer wouldn't be constantly thinking "Did I create that myself, or did I hear that somewhere sometime?" -- something that stifles a LOT of music composition.
How much of this is due to lazy software development by 3rd party vendors in the past 12 years since Windows 95 came on the scene? Many of the incompatibilities are due to hard coded file and data paths, poorly implemented file and registry permissions that require administrative user access to run the software, or non-standard GUI implementations. How does one create a secure OS when the applications that run on it are so poorly written? Vista breaking 3rd party apps was unfortunately a step MS had to make or they would run into more unfair criticism because they didn't do anything to fix security issues. Funny thing is I haven't seen MS apps break yet. Developers for years have been creating "Windows" software but they have been taking shortcuts to avoid the Windows interface. To me, that is the problem and there is no way MS could have made Windows more secure without alienating those broken apps.
What you say is true, but it doesn't change the situation. Basicly, you're saying that people don't switch to Vista for the same reason they don't switch to OS X -- their apps won't run on it.
MS was able to gain such a huge marketshare because they found the sweet spot for upgrading... there has been a continual backwards compatability between OS releases, with only a few API calls being broken with each release. The result is that people still have batch scripts and DOS software that will run under XP -- but all this ends with Vista.
Back on topic, the real middle ground would be for them to not override the colour settings set in the user's stylesheets (from their browser prefs) with their own.
This sounds like the best solution to me... for a number of reasons.
Along with what's listed above, the power savings only exist if the person is using a CRT (which is rarer and rarer) -- LCD monitors have an always-on backlight (so color doesn't change anything here), and it actually takes MORE energy to paint the screen black than it does to leave it at the default white.
So... with the majority of people using LCD screens these days (due to Dell going LCD), do the remaining CRTs using white instead of black REALLY eat up more energy than the LCDs using black instead of white?
China and India have different IP laws, and different law courts than the US, and anyone operating in the US is held to US law. The law clearly states what end users can do with MS's IP (almost nothing), and MS grants further rights to end users IN THE US through its EULA.
If you read their EULAs for different countries, you will notice that they are different, due to differing laws and legal systems. This is called living on planet Earth, and does not give you the ability to use MS software for free because the rights MS grants you to use their property are too confusing. If you can't understand your rights to use their software, then legally you have NO rights to use their software, other than what is spelled out in Fair Use doctrine (which doesn't cover as much as people think it does). As I said before, the only weakness in MS's tactics is that they could be sued for anticompetitive actions. To do this however, you'd first have to prove that they were indeed promoting piracy of their products or at least being very specific in who they targeted with their lawsuits.
"Rights abandonment" only works for trade marks. Copyright is automatic when a work is created (in countries subscribing to the Berne Convention anyway), and Patents are governed by time-limited issuance. Microsoft can abandon all it wants, but it still has the law behind it whenever it decides to sue someone over copyright/patent/EULA infringements. The only thing that could be argued is that if MS was seen to be obviously targeting ONLY specific people/groups with its suits, it could be in violation of business monopoly restrictions.
More than just this... they're comparing ALL flavours of OS X to ONE flavour of NT. For an equal comparison, they should be comparing at least Windows 2000+ to OS X, or else compare Vista to OS X 10.4.
I think all this shows is that when the summer comes, OS X users tend to spend more time outside, and less in front of a web browser.
So the question remains... what is the average groundspeed of these squirrels?
or
Should we go for the alternate reference: these squirrels are odorless and tasteless (they laugh at our jokes) and can kill you -- although you can build up an immunity to them over time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes... the theory and the implementation are at a bit of a disconnect... but time and time again, that's the reason I've heard from business managers as to why they want MS software. It's not a matter of "How can I afford to sue MS?" but of "I don't even have the option to sue thousands of individuals!"
To spread your generalization a bit further, ALL coders fit this mould. Businesses choose Windows because then they know who to sue when things don't work right.
OK, I'll bite...
Macs are "Fisher Price Toys" because they use sub-standard hardware.
Oh, wait... they use the same stuff everyone else does.
It must be because they're so much more expensive than the other options.
Wait... they're competitively priced.
OK, it must be the silly one button mouse and the plastic iBook case.
Hmm... Macs come with multibutton mice, and the latest iMacs are made with glass and aluminum...?
Well, it must be that crash-prone non-multitasking OS that gets in your way, contains bloat, runs slowly, and sacrifices usefulness for flashy images.
Wait... we're talking about OS X, or Vista here? OS X is sleek and efficient, and is officially a Unix OS now. Aqua's just a flashy front end.
Welcome to 2007. This isn't System 7.0 on a Mac Plus vs. MS DOS on an IBM PC AT we're talking about here.
However, I think it far more likely that the watermarking will somehow be encoded directly into the audio stream and won't depend on digital manipulation at all... for instance, since the studio has access to all the mixing tracks, they could easily just offset the drum track by a millisecond or so for selected beats (this could be shifted digitally during the encoding process), creating ever-so-slightly different audio tracks whose waveform when overlaid against the master track would show the unique sentinel just fine. For that matter, they could just pitch-shift the drum track -- very few people would notice that at all.
What about the majority of the people, who, since they are centrist and trying to eke out a living don't read any of those newspapers or really care about what goes on in them unless it impacts their own lives?
Most people watch the evening news or talk to their friends to get that kind of information. This is the silent majority that doesn't really care who rules the country as long as things don't change too much for the worse.
Precisely. I have a feeling that he would most likely only be found culpable for the tortuous misdemeanors. The criminal actions would be extremely hard to prove if they even exist (I guess we could all watch this trial for another 10 years however).
They haven't, because this lawsuit was brought by Capitol, not the RIAA. The RIAA only digs up the possible infringements -- the actual lawsuits are made in the name of the allegedly infringed company.
Also, unless you were an eyewitness to the events, you can't ever know for sure that the whole thing wasn't invented. Personally, I think soldiers opened fire on civilians who were causing a mild disturbance in Tienanmen Square in 1989, but everything past that point is (educated) conjecture.
FYI, BackupPC can use rsync for Windows as well; you just need to install rsync on your Windows PCs.
:}
Oh, and that was supposed to be GB, not MB
BackupPC keeps track of a device's ping history. If the device only comes in during the day, after a couple of days the system will start backing it up as soon as it connects to the network.
I use it to back up the LAN, portables, and PCs connecting via VPN -- given that it can back up via RSYNC, SSH and SAMBA, pretty much anything with a HD connected to the network gets put into the system.
The backups are also mirrored for off-site storage so there's always an in-house revision system and an emergency remote restore point. The system works well, and for small businesses can easily store 1.5TB of data on a single 250MB HDD (make sure to mirror).
They eventually escaped, but don't forget that the Royal Bank of Canada once had a major stake in SCOX. This means everyone who had RBC bank accounts (especially those with mutual funds) were funding SCOX. I'm sure the people at RBC who recommended doing this in the first place have had a change of position since then.
Sorry... I think you'll find the crimes and misdemeanors fall more under the following categories:
Libel
Slander
Stock Fraud
RICO
Breach of Contract
Of course, they still might not be held accountable due to the fact that their mismanagement will result in bankruptcy and disollution of the company before anyone can actually pin anything on the company. Mr. McBride might be in serious trouble, however.
A link or two might be useful for that comment.
MS was able to gain such a huge marketshare because they found the sweet spot for upgrading... there has been a continual backwards compatability between OS releases, with only a few API calls being broken with each release. The result is that people still have batch scripts and DOS software that will run under XP -- but all this ends with Vista.
Along with what's listed above, the power savings only exist if the person is using a CRT (which is rarer and rarer) -- LCD monitors have an always-on backlight (so color doesn't change anything here), and it actually takes MORE energy to paint the screen black than it does to leave it at the default white.
So... with the majority of people using LCD screens these days (due to Dell going LCD), do the remaining CRTs using white instead of black REALLY eat up more energy than the LCDs using black instead of white?
China and India have different IP laws, and different law courts than the US, and anyone operating in the US is held to US law. The law clearly states what end users can do with MS's IP (almost nothing), and MS grants further rights to end users IN THE US through its EULA.
If you read their EULAs for different countries, you will notice that they are different, due to differing laws and legal systems. This is called living on planet Earth, and does not give you the ability to use MS software for free because the rights MS grants you to use their property are too confusing. If you can't understand your rights to use their software, then legally you have NO rights to use their software, other than what is spelled out in Fair Use doctrine (which doesn't cover as much as people think it does). As I said before, the only weakness in MS's tactics is that they could be sued for anticompetitive actions. To do this however, you'd first have to prove that they were indeed promoting piracy of their products or at least being very specific in who they targeted with their lawsuits.
"Rights abandonment" only works for trade marks. Copyright is automatic when a work is created (in countries subscribing to the Berne Convention anyway), and Patents are governed by time-limited issuance. Microsoft can abandon all it wants, but it still has the law behind it whenever it decides to sue someone over copyright/patent/EULA infringements. The only thing that could be argued is that if MS was seen to be obviously targeting ONLY specific people/groups with its suits, it could be in violation of business monopoly restrictions.
I think all this shows is that when the summer comes, OS X users tend to spend more time outside, and less in front of a web browser.
or
Should we go for the alternate reference: these squirrels are odorless and tasteless (they laugh at our jokes) and can kill you -- although you can build up an immunity to them over time.