You don't have to pay for it; by "registering" it, he means to go to their web site and give them your e-mail address. I downloaded it, registered it (for free), and I haven't gotten any e-mails from them either. If you don't want to give them your e-mail address, just give them a mailinator address. The only "nag" screens I get are the ones that tell me that the virus database has been updated, and I could disable them if I wanted to.
The catch is that it is a class for all students to take, not just those interested in programming...
I read this as, "It is a programming class available and accessible to everyone, not just geeky programming students; it is 'programming for normal people.'" Not, "All students must take this class."
Could be wrong, though. Maybe the submitter can clarify...
Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this, so this isn't an endorsement, but...
Have you considered taking a look at Alice? It's the free system worked on by the late Randy Pausch to teach programming without jumping straight into coding. From the site:
Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games...By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.
The file was shown to be located in a non-existent folder inside the Symantec LiveUpdate folder.
An application that exists in a folder not accessible by the underlying operating system? Sounds suspiciously like a rootkit to me. If so, then man, am I glad I gave up Norton years ago! I mean seriously, what is so hard to understand about the concept that hiding things like directories is a security risk? Have we learned nothing from Sony's stupidity?
Oh yeah, it's Norton (aka Symantec) we're talking about here. I guess not.
Just an addendum to this little story to deal with those who are still trying to get over a false persecution complex. Ars Technica ran an update story on this today. Among the nuggests:
Microsoft responded, "In regards to sexual orientation, for gamertags or profiles we do not allow expression of any type of orientation, be that hetero or other...[We] just wanted to reemphasize that we take any harassment seriously and would encourage the woman mentioned in the Consumerist story to come forward and report the harassment so that we can take action against those individuals."
Sounds pretty damn fair to me, and it encompasses the two main points I made above: 1) the policy applies to straight people just as much as it does to gay people, and 2) the people who were "gay bashing" are just as subject to being banned, probably even more. As I said, this is not about homophobia. They're not applying different standards between gay and straight people. If you still want to claim that the policy is treating gay people unfairly, then put up or shut up. Show me your proof.
It is simply about a user breaking the Terms of Use, getting suspended for it, and pitching a fit about it. The most important point to me is that it is the gay person asking for special treatment here, and as such, they are harming the very cause—gay and straight being treated equally—that they are supposedly trying to advance. As I've said before, I'm a supporter of gay rights, a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and this expectation of special treatment disgusts me.
That might be the most spectacular straw-man argument I've seen in awhile.
Ha! This WHOLE STORY is one big straw-man argument. "Waaah, Microsoft is enforcing their Terms of Use! I don't have a shred of evidence that it's not done inconsistently, but because I happen to be gay, it must be persecution!"
The biggest fake-ass troll is the person who posted the original article as if it were some kind of cause instead of what it is: someone who broke the rules, got busted for it, and now exploits a genuine civil rights issue because they were stupid.
Like I said before, congratulations on being one of the duped. Put up your proof of inconsistency or lament in your meaningless arguments. I'm done humoring the sheeple who see bogeymen everywhere.
Since you still don't seem to get it, here, I'll try to make it even more simple.
Have you ever been to a funeral? They're pretty somber occasions. Most of the time, people stand around a church moping, rehashing good memories about the person who is deceased and comforting the family with kind words. Now imagine that some asshole comes in and starts loudly condemning what a lousy son of a bitch that Democrat was (when the deceased was not, in fact, particularly political), and started essentially making a Republican stump speech griping about those damn liberals with their social programs, homosexuals, killing babies, godlessness, political correctness, and so on.
Obviously, it would be well within the church's right to ask the person to leave, possibly even calling the cops to remove them if necessary. Even most right-wingers would agree that this is an inappropriate time and place to push a political agenda, especially in such a provoking way.
Of course, the next recourse of that person would be to post on The Internets how they got kicked out of one of those new age liberal churches because (gasp!) they have Conservative political views, and chances are, they'd round up a bunch of naive stupid twits who take everything they read from anonymous strangers at face value talking about how awful that church is.
Being a gay rights supporter and card-carrying member of the ACLU, incidentally, I seen this kind of bullshit happen all too often. Some gay twit gets the idea in their head that even though a company like Microsoft doesn't allow topics of sexuality in profiles at all, even for straight people, they have some special magical right to disregard the rules, break the terms of service, and get away with it because they're gay. When Microsoft hits them with the ban stick—again, for sexuality, not gay sexuality, a point you keep deliberately overlooking—then they seek commiseration in The Internets, where they know they'll find a bastion of really stupid people who take the word of an anonymous stranger at face value.
Of course, if this conversation follows its normal course, this is the part where you misinterpret where I said "gay twit" as meaning that all gay people are twits, instead of the reasonable assertion that in the population of gay people, some of them are stupid. At any rate, congratulations on being sucked into The Agenda. Microsoft is one of the first companies to offer same-sex domestic partnership benefits back in 1993 when this was very odd for a company to do. I remember how much shit they took from the right wingers for doing so and, while I'll be the first in line to gripe about their anti-competitive practices and support for DRM, I think it's pretty stupid that one of the companies instrumental in advancing gay rights is now being attacked for applying their terms of service equally.
But cases like these aren't about equality. It is, as I said before, about pushing an agenda in an inappropriate place and trying to use a minority status to get a free pass on breaking the rules. It is disgusting and counterproductive to the very cause they are trying to advance.
You seem to be implying that "gay" only starts after someone turns 18. Is that correct?
Nice try at deflecting the issue at hand with a meaningless tangent. Here, I'll try to return you back to point: You seem to be implying that discussing sexuality with children against the will of their parents in inappropriate places is perfectly fine. Is that correct?
I also object to the word stupidity. I honestly believe it was downright maliciousness and their actions were not without intelligence. They knew exactly what they were doing and thought they had the rights to do it.
The only downside is that since it's from Sony, it installs a rootkit on your cellphone that keeps you from copying pictures you take on it to your computer...
(Yes, I'm still holding that grudge. Such is the PR price a company pays for being so mind-numbingly stupid.)
I'm sure the new generation on the whole has gotten over most of it's homophobia [blah, blah, blah]...
It's not about homophobia. It's about gaming.
Xbox Live isn't a dating service, gay or straight. I have yet to see anything that disputes that the user would have been similarly banned if they had "I'm heterosexual" in the profile.
Like it or not, sexual orientation is a mature subject. Frankly, it sounds to me like the user did, in fact, either have an agenda to push or was soliciting something. I really want to know just why did she feel compelled to express her sexual orientation in her profile? At any rate, I'm pretty sure that if I put something like, "I'm into bondage and have a latex fetish" in my profile, I'd be just as banned as she is, even though last time I checked, I'm straight.
I consider myself about as enlightened as they come, but there's a time and a place for everything. Microsoft's gaming service is neither the time nor the place to express sexual preferences, and Microsoft was perfectly justified in banning this user. Just as justified, incidentally, as they would be when they hopefully banned the people who made sexual slurs when they encountered her.
I don't have anything against gay people. What I do have a problem with are people—gay or straight or anything else—who use everything in life as a forum for their cause, even in "neutral" places such as an online gaming service.
Oh, and if you think you're getting the whole story from the banned user, you're incredibly naive. Microsoft most certainly wouldn't ban a user so quickly unless either 1) the user was doing something much more questionable than merely having "lesbian" in her profile that she's not telling us here, or 2) she was warned beforehand about her behavior and chose to continue engaging in violating the terms of service.
Everyone who plays online games knows that it's actually moderately difficult to get banned unless you're incredibly stupid or actually trying, which is another reason that I think the user is either soliciting something or pushing an agenda. In either event, she's doing the gay community a disservice by being needlessly confrontational, not helping them.
Allowing entertainers to make a living isn't a right, but I'd prefer for those who want to make a living out of it to be able to do so if they're good enough.
The problem as I see it is that a lot of artists and the companies who promote them and have financial interests in their work think that they should be able to live comfortably for the rest of their lives because of one single thing they've done that is popular.
My take on it is that copyright should expire in a reasonable amount of time (and no, far past my own lifetime for people who died years ago is not "reasonable"). I don't begrudge them earning money—even large sums of it—during that reasonable time. But having an artist earn thousands or even millions of dollars off music written decades ago is just plain silly.
I have a good job, and I'm pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. Certainly good enough to make a living at it and then some. But it's not like I do one project and expect the company to keep paying me and my estate for the fine job I did for 95 years after my death. If an artist wants to keep making vast sums of money performing their art, they should have to keep working for it. Want to reap more rewards? Produce more art that people like.
If you choose instead to sit idle while your popular stuff fades into the public domain, you should starve just like anyone else. It's called "having a job."
I really thought Ogg went the way of the dinosaur. Let's hope Mozilla can help it to succeed in the real world. It will be hard to beat mp3.
...Just like PNG?
I remember when it was just a nutty outlier standard that hardly anyone ever heard of or supported. Web images were either.GIFs or.JPGs, or if you had tons of bandwidth and room,.BMPs, maybe.TIFs in some bizarre cases. "What's a.PNG?" they asked. "An image standard? Why would we need that? Patents? Ha! Good luck trying to oust the.JPG standard!"
Today,.PNG is supported by every major browser (although only eventually kicking and screaming by IE after Firefox used it as a valid claim of feature superiority), is unencumbered by patents, and with a full alpha channel instead of that screwy palette-based transparency crap that.GIFs stuck us with for years (and the.JPG doesn't support at all in any meaningful manner), it is actually a superior standard.
So please, keep on thinking that Flash and.MP3 is the be-all and end-all of standards, that nothing will ever supplant it. As for me, I've seen.OGG files already used extensively behind the scenes in various software so that developers don't have to pay nasty licensing fees, and I can easily imagine that a year or two or five down the road, open standards such as these will be just as prevalent and supported as predominant closed standards are today.
If he had bought, say, an 80 GB iPod before September of last year, he would have paid $350 for it. If instead he buys a Zune that lasts a few months for $50 and then buys an 80 GB iPod after September of last year, he would have paid $250 for it, thus a net GAIN of $50.
Point is, depending on how long the Zune lasted and what he gets to replace it, it's entirely possible that he broke even or even came out ahead. Shoot, maybe he'll buy one of those 80 GB iPods used and make a lot more than $50 for waiting on it. Or maybe he'll take advantage of the fact that by just getting by on a $50 Zune for a while, he can buy a much more interesting device now, such as a 32 GB iPod Touch, whereas if he had bought one of the shiny new 80 GB iPod videos a year ago, he likely wouldn't do.
At any rate, I just plain disagree that by buying something cheap now and holding off on getting the bleeding-edge gadgets, you're "losing" money, as should anyone who has, for example, invest $50 or $100 into upgrading a slow component of their desktop instead of going out dropping $2000 on a high-end system every year.
If NCsoft wanted to make a good faith measure to Tabula Rasa users, their parting gift to the community would be the ability to host the game on third party servers.
I kinda agree with you, but then I can also see why they wouldn't do this also. There are probably issues with IP and third-party licenses that keep them from distributing the server code.
What I would like to see, though, is maybe something like a "dead MMOG clearinghouse" company. If I were such a company, for example, I would pay NCsoft $x for the rights to set up and run one or more Tabula Rasa servers so that players could continue playing. There would never be any more updates to the game, except maybe content updates to advance the storylines given the existing mechanics. (I.e. the stuff probably stored in text files.) I would charge some nominal fee to access the game, and the client would be given away for free.
Well, their support website lets you deauthorize all 5 once per year.
Thanks for the link, I'll definitely use it. And yeah, I was lazy enough not to Google it, mainly because since I've converted over to buying DVDs and ripping them, I haven't had a compelling need to bother. Which was kinda my point...
Therein lies the problem, at least with me. I've had one motherboard die, and rather than replace it, I moved a few of the components to a new machine and scrapped the rest. I never had a chance to deauthorize that computer. The other was a hard drive failure. I had to reinstall the OS from scratch, so I didn't get a chance to deauthorize that one, either. I've burned through the other three, so when I got a new laptop recently (ironically, a MacBook Pro, the only Apple computer I own), I didn't have any authorizations left for my stuff.
I haven't had time to try to figure out if there's a way to deauthorize computers that no longer exist. If you know of a way, by all means, I'm all ears, as it would probably make my life a little simpler.
Still, it's all so very silly. I shouldn't have to go through this rigamarole. Like I said, there is no technical reason why my stuff shouldn't just play. And for a computer company that pitches its products in how they Just Work(TM), that's almost a sin. Also, like I said, the MP3 files and ripped DVDs I have just play. So illegal or not, that's what I'm going to use. (Speaking of which, the concept that ripping my own DVDs is illegal still baffles me to no end.) At any rate, there you go, that's why I don't buy stuff on iTunes any more.
I got an AppleTV a couple of years ago, and I had a video iPod already. Of course, the first thing I did was buy a whole bunch of my favorite shows so that I could use the AppleTV kind of like a Tivo, sans commercials and at higher quality video.
I still have my AppleTV, but it didn't take long to exceed its capacity. So I started storing my television shows on my computer. A couple of computers (and iPods, for that matter) later, I've moved my stuff around so much and dropped and reauthorized stuff to the point where the shows I bought when I first got my AppleTV are, for all practical purposes, gone forever unless I want to re-buy them.
So nowadays, I buy all of my stuff on DVD, period, and I rip it to my computer. I put the discs away forever, and I can watch it on anything I want any time I want. If I get a new computer, I copy the files over, I'm done. No reauthorization, no fuss, no chance of losing my stuff or having to re-rip them. Don't get me wrong, I still love my AppleTV. I rent movies on it once a week or so, and I watch a lot of the stuff I rip on it. I just don't buy video media from Apple iTunes any more.
Apple has always been a master of ease-of-use. I just think it's a shame that they, along with other companies in whose vested interest it is to make things as easy for the consumer as possible, can't use their retail power to shed all of this silliness. The technical capability is there for any video or song that you buy from Apple or anyone else to be extremely easily portable and transferrable. If they made it so, would piracy go up? Sure, no doubt. But you know what else would go up? Sales. And isn't that really the goal?
The reason BitTorrent and other illegal means of acquiring video and music is so popular is because it fills a gap that Apple and other RIAA/MPAA-colluding companies never will be able to, the ability to let people watch what they want, where they want. I'm sure the "free" thing is a factor too, but really, for me, it's not. If Apple announced tomorrow that they were dropping DRM on all music and all video, they'd have a loyal customer for life, and I would spend gobs of money in their store. As it is, though, they're losing my business to stores like Amazon.com that sell all DRM-less music and physical DVDs.
I *want* to buy the movie, but I won't until it plays on my hardware.
That's truth right there. After being burned a few times and wasting a lot of money, I decided a while back never to buy music or movies on a medium that I can't transfer. I've lost too many CDs, scratched up too many DVDs, had too many things go mysteriously bad to continue wasting money on such an archaic concept as DRM.
It's a really simple rule. If a company treats me like a criminal from the outset, even though I have done absolutely nothing wrong and they have no reason to believe that I might, then I won't do business with them. Until I'm confident that I can copy these movies for my own personal use to back them up and play them on whatever devices I own, I consider any list of movies like this as a "do not buy" list.
You've probably gathered this by now, but it was a joke. When I'm around science geeks, it's always good for a cheap laugh. "Man, it's supposed to be really cold tonight! I heard it's going to be ten below absolute zero!" Kind of like, you know, "Mine goes to eleven!" Or "let's give it 110%."
I just thought I'd poke a little fun at the submitter for breaking the cardinal rule of always specifying units. There's quite a bit of difference between 20 degrees Celsius and 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and depending on what country you call home, you could assume either one.
Just because your software is open source doesn't mean that you get to sit on your duff and collect money off your paid extensions in perpituity. Just like any other software company, if you want to keep food on your metaphorical table, you've got to continue to innovate and improve. Otherwise, just like any other software company, your competitors (in this case, open source develoeprs) will eat your metaphorical lunch.
For what it's worth, though, nothing would be different if your software were closed source, except that your user base would probably be smaller and, depending on how necessary your software is, open source competitors would be even more eager to push you out.
Um... I meant "opt-out," of course. They will make you take part in it until you explicitly ask not to. Also, the mechanism by which you opt out is via a cookie stored on your computer, so you have to opt out for each browser you use on every computer. Scummy.
Okay. Let's suppose I'm Google, and I have expenses to pay, so I put ads on my site. However people from British Telecom are seeing ads from Phorm instead.
Again, this is not my understanding of how it works.
As I read it, if you put Google ads on your site, people from British Telecom are seeing Google ads, period. However, as a web site owner, you can instead choose to put Phorm ads on your site, in which case, people from British Telecom will see the behavior tailored ads.
There's nothing new in that. What is new, and what I understand has everyone so up in arms, is that when British Telecom people are visiting your site (and seeing Google ads), Phorm is finding out about it and logging that fact, so that when British Telecom people visit other sites that have Phorm ads, what they will see is based on what they saw when they visited your site (with Google ads).
Plus, as an opt-out system, people won't know that the sites they're visiting are being silently watched by a third party, which is always very uncool.
If they're actually replacing content served by non-affiliated third parties (i.e. Google, or site owners who run Google ads), I'd like to see a reference to that, because I'm wrong in how I believe this works.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to pay for it; by "registering" it, he means to go to their web site and give them your e-mail address. I downloaded it, registered it (for free), and I haven't gotten any e-mails from them either. If you don't want to give them your e-mail address, just give them a mailinator address. The only "nag" screens I get are the ones that tell me that the virus database has been updated, and I could disable them if I wanted to.
I read this as, "It is a programming class available and accessible to everyone, not just geeky programming students; it is 'programming for normal people.'" Not, "All students must take this class."
Could be wrong, though. Maybe the submitter can clarify...
Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this, so this isn't an endorsement, but...
Have you considered taking a look at Alice? It's the free system worked on by the late Randy Pausch to teach programming without jumping straight into coding. From the site:
An application that exists in a folder not accessible by the underlying operating system? Sounds suspiciously like a rootkit to me. If so, then man, am I glad I gave up Norton years ago! I mean seriously, what is so hard to understand about the concept that hiding things like directories is a security risk? Have we learned nothing from Sony's stupidity?
Oh yeah, it's Norton (aka Symantec) we're talking about here. I guess not.
Just an addendum to this little story to deal with those who are still trying to get over a false persecution complex. Ars Technica ran an update story on this today. Among the nuggests:
Microsoft responded, "In regards to sexual orientation, for gamertags or profiles we do not allow expression of any type of orientation, be that hetero or other...[We] just wanted to reemphasize that we take any harassment seriously and would encourage the woman mentioned in the Consumerist story to come forward and report the harassment so that we can take action against those individuals."
Sounds pretty damn fair to me, and it encompasses the two main points I made above: 1) the policy applies to straight people just as much as it does to gay people, and 2) the people who were "gay bashing" are just as subject to being banned, probably even more. As I said, this is not about homophobia. They're not applying different standards between gay and straight people. If you still want to claim that the policy is treating gay people unfairly, then put up or shut up. Show me your proof.
It is simply about a user breaking the Terms of Use, getting suspended for it, and pitching a fit about it. The most important point to me is that it is the gay person asking for special treatment here, and as such, they are harming the very cause—gay and straight being treated equally—that they are supposedly trying to advance. As I've said before, I'm a supporter of gay rights, a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and this expectation of special treatment disgusts me.
Ha! This WHOLE STORY is one big straw-man argument. "Waaah, Microsoft is enforcing their Terms of Use! I don't have a shred of evidence that it's not done inconsistently, but because I happen to be gay, it must be persecution!"
The biggest fake-ass troll is the person who posted the original article as if it were some kind of cause instead of what it is: someone who broke the rules, got busted for it, and now exploits a genuine civil rights issue because they were stupid.
Like I said before, congratulations on being one of the duped. Put up your proof of inconsistency or lament in your meaningless arguments. I'm done humoring the sheeple who see bogeymen everywhere.
Since you still don't seem to get it, here, I'll try to make it even more simple.
Have you ever been to a funeral? They're pretty somber occasions. Most of the time, people stand around a church moping, rehashing good memories about the person who is deceased and comforting the family with kind words. Now imagine that some asshole comes in and starts loudly condemning what a lousy son of a bitch that Democrat was (when the deceased was not, in fact, particularly political), and started essentially making a Republican stump speech griping about those damn liberals with their social programs, homosexuals, killing babies, godlessness, political correctness, and so on.
Obviously, it would be well within the church's right to ask the person to leave, possibly even calling the cops to remove them if necessary. Even most right-wingers would agree that this is an inappropriate time and place to push a political agenda, especially in such a provoking way.
Of course, the next recourse of that person would be to post on The Internets how they got kicked out of one of those new age liberal churches because (gasp!) they have Conservative political views, and chances are, they'd round up a bunch of naive stupid twits who take everything they read from anonymous strangers at face value talking about how awful that church is.
Being a gay rights supporter and card-carrying member of the ACLU, incidentally, I seen this kind of bullshit happen all too often. Some gay twit gets the idea in their head that even though a company like Microsoft doesn't allow topics of sexuality in profiles at all, even for straight people, they have some special magical right to disregard the rules, break the terms of service, and get away with it because they're gay. When Microsoft hits them with the ban stick—again, for sexuality, not gay sexuality, a point you keep deliberately overlooking—then they seek commiseration in The Internets, where they know they'll find a bastion of really stupid people who take the word of an anonymous stranger at face value.
Of course, if this conversation follows its normal course, this is the part where you misinterpret where I said "gay twit" as meaning that all gay people are twits, instead of the reasonable assertion that in the population of gay people, some of them are stupid. At any rate, congratulations on being sucked into The Agenda. Microsoft is one of the first companies to offer same-sex domestic partnership benefits back in 1993 when this was very odd for a company to do. I remember how much shit they took from the right wingers for doing so and, while I'll be the first in line to gripe about their anti-competitive practices and support for DRM, I think it's pretty stupid that one of the companies instrumental in advancing gay rights is now being attacked for applying their terms of service equally.
But cases like these aren't about equality. It is, as I said before, about pushing an agenda in an inappropriate place and trying to use a minority status to get a free pass on breaking the rules. It is disgusting and counterproductive to the very cause they are trying to advance.
Nice try at deflecting the issue at hand with a meaningless tangent. Here, I'll try to return you back to point: You seem to be implying that discussing sexuality with children against the will of their parents in inappropriate places is perfectly fine. Is that correct?
You're absolutely right, I stand corrected.
The only downside is that since it's from Sony, it installs a rootkit on your cellphone that keeps you from copying pictures you take on it to your computer...
(Yes, I'm still holding that grudge. Such is the PR price a company pays for being so mind-numbingly stupid.)
It's not about homophobia. It's about gaming.
Xbox Live isn't a dating service, gay or straight. I have yet to see anything that disputes that the user would have been similarly banned if they had "I'm heterosexual" in the profile.
Like it or not, sexual orientation is a mature subject. Frankly, it sounds to me like the user did, in fact, either have an agenda to push or was soliciting something. I really want to know just why did she feel compelled to express her sexual orientation in her profile? At any rate, I'm pretty sure that if I put something like, "I'm into bondage and have a latex fetish" in my profile, I'd be just as banned as she is, even though last time I checked, I'm straight.
I consider myself about as enlightened as they come, but there's a time and a place for everything. Microsoft's gaming service is neither the time nor the place to express sexual preferences, and Microsoft was perfectly justified in banning this user. Just as justified, incidentally, as they would be when they hopefully banned the people who made sexual slurs when they encountered her.
I don't have anything against gay people. What I do have a problem with are people—gay or straight or anything else—who use everything in life as a forum for their cause, even in "neutral" places such as an online gaming service.
Oh, and if you think you're getting the whole story from the banned user, you're incredibly naive. Microsoft most certainly wouldn't ban a user so quickly unless either 1) the user was doing something much more questionable than merely having "lesbian" in her profile that she's not telling us here, or 2) she was warned beforehand about her behavior and chose to continue engaging in violating the terms of service.
Everyone who plays online games knows that it's actually moderately difficult to get banned unless you're incredibly stupid or actually trying, which is another reason that I think the user is either soliciting something or pushing an agenda. In either event, she's doing the gay community a disservice by being needlessly confrontational, not helping them.
The problem as I see it is that a lot of artists and the companies who promote them and have financial interests in their work think that they should be able to live comfortably for the rest of their lives because of one single thing they've done that is popular.
My take on it is that copyright should expire in a reasonable amount of time (and no, far past my own lifetime for people who died years ago is not "reasonable"). I don't begrudge them earning money—even large sums of it—during that reasonable time. But having an artist earn thousands or even millions of dollars off music written decades ago is just plain silly.
I have a good job, and I'm pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. Certainly good enough to make a living at it and then some. But it's not like I do one project and expect the company to keep paying me and my estate for the fine job I did for 95 years after my death. If an artist wants to keep making vast sums of money performing their art, they should have to keep working for it. Want to reap more rewards? Produce more art that people like.
If you choose instead to sit idle while your popular stuff fades into the public domain, you should starve just like anyone else. It's called "having a job."
I really thought Ogg went the way of the dinosaur. Let's hope Mozilla can help it to succeed in the real world. It will be hard to beat mp3.
...Just like PNG?
I remember when it was just a nutty outlier standard that hardly anyone ever heard of or supported. Web images were either .GIFs or .JPGs, or if you had tons of bandwidth and room, .BMPs, maybe .TIFs in some bizarre cases. "What's a .PNG?" they asked. "An image standard? Why would we need that? Patents? Ha! Good luck trying to oust the .JPG standard!"
Today, .PNG is supported by every major browser (although only eventually kicking and screaming by IE after Firefox used it as a valid claim of feature superiority), is unencumbered by patents, and with a full alpha channel instead of that screwy palette-based transparency crap that .GIFs stuck us with for years (and the .JPG doesn't support at all in any meaningful manner), it is actually a superior standard.
So please, keep on thinking that Flash and .MP3 is the be-all and end-all of standards, that nothing will ever supplant it. As for me, I've seen .OGG files already used extensively behind the scenes in various software so that developers don't have to pay nasty licensing fees, and I can easily imagine that a year or two or five down the road, open standards such as these will be just as prevalent and supported as predominant closed standards are today.
No need to read further. Actually sounds cool, but they just lost me. I'm not running Vista, that's a gamebreaker. (Literally. Shit don't work.)
Food for thought.
If he had bought, say, an 80 GB iPod before September of last year, he would have paid $350 for it. If instead he buys a Zune that lasts a few months for $50 and then buys an 80 GB iPod after September of last year, he would have paid $250 for it, thus a net GAIN of $50.
Point is, depending on how long the Zune lasted and what he gets to replace it, it's entirely possible that he broke even or even came out ahead. Shoot, maybe he'll buy one of those 80 GB iPods used and make a lot more than $50 for waiting on it. Or maybe he'll take advantage of the fact that by just getting by on a $50 Zune for a while, he can buy a much more interesting device now, such as a 32 GB iPod Touch, whereas if he had bought one of the shiny new 80 GB iPod videos a year ago, he likely wouldn't do.
At any rate, I just plain disagree that by buying something cheap now and holding off on getting the bleeding-edge gadgets, you're "losing" money, as should anyone who has, for example, invest $50 or $100 into upgrading a slow component of their desktop instead of going out dropping $2000 on a high-end system every year.
I kinda agree with you, but then I can also see why they wouldn't do this also. There are probably issues with IP and third-party licenses that keep them from distributing the server code.
What I would like to see, though, is maybe something like a "dead MMOG clearinghouse" company. If I were such a company, for example, I would pay NCsoft $x for the rights to set up and run one or more Tabula Rasa servers so that players could continue playing. There would never be any more updates to the game, except maybe content updates to advance the storylines given the existing mechanics. (I.e. the stuff probably stored in text files.) I would charge some nominal fee to access the game, and the client would be given away for free.
Thanks for the link, I'll definitely use it. And yeah, I was lazy enough not to Google it, mainly because since I've converted over to buying DVDs and ripping them, I haven't had a compelling need to bother. Which was kinda my point...
Therein lies the problem, at least with me. I've had one motherboard die, and rather than replace it, I moved a few of the components to a new machine and scrapped the rest. I never had a chance to deauthorize that computer. The other was a hard drive failure. I had to reinstall the OS from scratch, so I didn't get a chance to deauthorize that one, either. I've burned through the other three, so when I got a new laptop recently (ironically, a MacBook Pro, the only Apple computer I own), I didn't have any authorizations left for my stuff.
I haven't had time to try to figure out if there's a way to deauthorize computers that no longer exist. If you know of a way, by all means, I'm all ears, as it would probably make my life a little simpler.
Still, it's all so very silly. I shouldn't have to go through this rigamarole. Like I said, there is no technical reason why my stuff shouldn't just play. And for a computer company that pitches its products in how they Just Work(TM), that's almost a sin. Also, like I said, the MP3 files and ripped DVDs I have just play. So illegal or not, that's what I'm going to use. (Speaking of which, the concept that ripping my own DVDs is illegal still baffles me to no end.) At any rate, there you go, that's why I don't buy stuff on iTunes any more.
Well, it has, at least with me.
I got an AppleTV a couple of years ago, and I had a video iPod already. Of course, the first thing I did was buy a whole bunch of my favorite shows so that I could use the AppleTV kind of like a Tivo, sans commercials and at higher quality video.
I still have my AppleTV, but it didn't take long to exceed its capacity. So I started storing my television shows on my computer. A couple of computers (and iPods, for that matter) later, I've moved my stuff around so much and dropped and reauthorized stuff to the point where the shows I bought when I first got my AppleTV are, for all practical purposes, gone forever unless I want to re-buy them.
So nowadays, I buy all of my stuff on DVD, period, and I rip it to my computer. I put the discs away forever, and I can watch it on anything I want any time I want. If I get a new computer, I copy the files over, I'm done. No reauthorization, no fuss, no chance of losing my stuff or having to re-rip them. Don't get me wrong, I still love my AppleTV. I rent movies on it once a week or so, and I watch a lot of the stuff I rip on it. I just don't buy video media from Apple iTunes any more.
Apple has always been a master of ease-of-use. I just think it's a shame that they, along with other companies in whose vested interest it is to make things as easy for the consumer as possible, can't use their retail power to shed all of this silliness. The technical capability is there for any video or song that you buy from Apple or anyone else to be extremely easily portable and transferrable. If they made it so, would piracy go up? Sure, no doubt. But you know what else would go up? Sales. And isn't that really the goal?
The reason BitTorrent and other illegal means of acquiring video and music is so popular is because it fills a gap that Apple and other RIAA/MPAA-colluding companies never will be able to, the ability to let people watch what they want, where they want. I'm sure the "free" thing is a factor too, but really, for me, it's not. If Apple announced tomorrow that they were dropping DRM on all music and all video, they'd have a loyal customer for life, and I would spend gobs of money in their store. As it is, though, they're losing my business to stores like Amazon.com that sell all DRM-less music and physical DVDs.
That's truth right there. After being burned a few times and wasting a lot of money, I decided a while back never to buy music or movies on a medium that I can't transfer. I've lost too many CDs, scratched up too many DVDs, had too many things go mysteriously bad to continue wasting money on such an archaic concept as DRM.
It's a really simple rule. If a company treats me like a criminal from the outset, even though I have done absolutely nothing wrong and they have no reason to believe that I might, then I won't do business with them. Until I'm confident that I can copy these movies for my own personal use to back them up and play them on whatever devices I own, I consider any list of movies like this as a "do not buy" list.
You've probably gathered this by now, but it was a joke. When I'm around science geeks, it's always good for a cheap laugh. "Man, it's supposed to be really cold tonight! I heard it's going to be ten below absolute zero!" Kind of like, you know, "Mine goes to eleven!" Or "let's give it 110%."
I just thought I'd poke a little fun at the submitter for breaking the cardinal rule of always specifying units. There's quite a bit of difference between 20 degrees Celsius and 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and depending on what country you call home, you could assume either one.
The really impressive thing isn't that they overclocked a processor, it's that they cooled it to -20 K!
Yes, and there's nothing new with that.
Just because your software is open source doesn't mean that you get to sit on your duff and collect money off your paid extensions in perpituity. Just like any other software company, if you want to keep food on your metaphorical table, you've got to continue to innovate and improve. Otherwise, just like any other software company, your competitors (in this case, open source develoeprs) will eat your metaphorical lunch.
For what it's worth, though, nothing would be different if your software were closed source, except that your user base would probably be smaller and, depending on how necessary your software is, open source competitors would be even more eager to push you out.
Um... I meant "opt-out," of course. They will make you take part in it until you explicitly ask not to. Also, the mechanism by which you opt out is via a cookie stored on your computer, so you have to opt out for each browser you use on every computer. Scummy.
Again, this is not my understanding of how it works.
As I read it, if you put Google ads on your site, people from British Telecom are seeing Google ads, period. However, as a web site owner, you can instead choose to put Phorm ads on your site, in which case, people from British Telecom will see the behavior tailored ads.
There's nothing new in that. What is new, and what I understand has everyone so up in arms, is that when British Telecom people are visiting your site (and seeing Google ads), Phorm is finding out about it and logging that fact, so that when British Telecom people visit other sites that have Phorm ads, what they will see is based on what they saw when they visited your site (with Google ads).
Plus, as an opt-out system, people won't know that the sites they're visiting are being silently watched by a third party, which is always very uncool.
If they're actually replacing content served by non-affiliated third parties (i.e. Google, or site owners who run Google ads), I'd like to see a reference to that, because I'm wrong in how I believe this works.