Well well.... here we are again. The decaying corpse of a business model that the RIAA upholds persists in its campaign to put out an inferno with lighter fluid. The tone of that sentence alone tells you how much I begrudge the wasted efforts in this field as opposed to appropriate market adaptations..... but I applaud Marie being sued by the RIAA.
How in the world does one maintain such an untenable position? It's simple, really. The more truly innocent people the RIAA sics their dogs on, the less credibility they have when they lie about losing their money to unscrupulous thieves. I want the RIAA to go after Jane Doe who never touched a PC, or any other John Q. Public who never uses a computer. I want the toxicity level in the music consumer's blood to rise to the point of doing what should have been done a while ago: permitting market forces to crush competitors who do not innovate.
I will always feel for the artist who needs to get by on the $0.17 an album they may get from the big label pigs, but I will feel a lot better with the RIAA beaten from this current path, and P2P philosophy finally hitting music production.
The Register taking such open shots at Wikipedia is concerning to me. I do not object to The Register's right to do so, however, the support is hackneyed and poorly proofread. Check out this gem for example:
"Chase thought Wikipedia was a joke site and he made the edit to amuse a colleague. From which we conclude that the spoof site Uncyclopedia, which consists entirely of fictional entries, is doing far better than expected, and that Wikipedia has a long way to go to rid itself of the image that it's a massive, multiplayer shoot-em-up game, or MMORPG."
Umm. Yeah. Whoops! Might want to check such things. If the writer was trying to make some kind of editoral jab at the genres, it certainly wasn't clear as to why. Regardless, it distracted from the article. However, I shall move on:
"The blame goes here, the blame goes there - the blame goes anywhere, except Wikipedia itself. If there's a problem - well, the user must be stupid!"
That's downright insulting. Wikipedia provides the medium for user-submitted articles. An analogy immediately springs to mind here. The Department of Transportation provides the legal authority (medium) for our current forms of travel to exist and run as they are. Do you recall the last time the DOT was sued because a plane crashed out of the sky, or a tanker truck slipped on a highway due to poor maintenance after an ice storm? NO! The companies that provide the trucks and the planes, along with whomever they have operating them, are the ones that get sued, and are the only ones that have been liable in any sense. See how far you get pressing suit against the DOT when a TWA plane or whatever comes screaming from the sky. Lots of luck. The liable ones are the direct maintainers and the operators, the way it has always worked. Allowing Wikipedia to be held responsible for every idiot who posts falsehoods sets a DANGEROUS precedent which opens up other facets of our lives to the same treatment. The results are potentially disastrous.
NEXT!
"If you recall the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the advent of the public "internet" ten years ago, we were promised that unlimited access to the world's greatest "knowledge" was just around the corner. This hasn't happened, for reasons cited above, but now the public is now being exhorted to assume the posture of a citizen in an air raid, where every moving object might be a dangerous missile."
Wow. Just wow. Where did this utopian centralization of knowledge come from? I can't possibly imagine from a world where countless sources have been proven to lie to us about matters of economy, war, and more (politicans, reference books, etc). This kind of scary logic comes from dogmatic persons with draconian black and white views of either the world or many of the things in it. Knowledge is not absolute: it is not black and white. There is not one retelling of a single event or definition, but many. How absurd it is to ask a communications medium consisted of human beings to somehow become greater than human beings and defy all the traits of their constitution? Come on.
I could go on. Saying publication entails responsibility later in the article is silly too, again, because I challenge anyone to find one encyclopedia that is error free. Same goes for history textbooks. Lots of luck. How are those errors not defamatory to the persons whom are misrepresented?
*sigh* Progress is impeded by misguided perfectionists. It always will be.
The limitations of optical media are ever-present. Heat generation, great potential for mechanical failure.... solutions have been sought for decades for these problems and others. Remember the DIMM-based hard drives? One solution, however an expensive, cumbersome, and unmaintainable one.
Flash technology gives us a chance to gain most of the advantages in that old unmarketable drive. The reusability used to be an issue, but manufacturing processes, as previously stated under this discussion, are refined to the point of feasability. Let's see where this takes us, as the cost of aggravation for the status quo is worth lowering at almost any cost.
"It's the gaming company's product, so they can attach pretty much whatever rules they want."
No they can't..... it is not that simple. They bundle a copy of the license with the product. The CDs themselves, legally, are yours. You can wipe your butt or make deadly weapons out of them and throw them at the employees of the maker, the worst you would get is nasty cuts in the former and Assault with a Deadly Weapon for the latter. The EULAs and TOSes on the account itself are the things that become able to be legally restricted by the creator.
I always get a kick out of people being shocked over the financial gain in MMORPG commodities. The sale of in-game gold, powerleveling, and now character renting are more common then they ever were. This is a disaster for the MMORPG community.
I am an MMORPG vet. I spent many good hours of my youth, and now my adulthood, on UO, DAOC, EQ, EQ2, WoW, and the like. While the gaming experiences were different, a common element arises in this form of gameplay. You can ALWAYS tell the difference between a player at the maximum level who earned it, and a player who just picked up the account the other day on Ebay or through other forms of sale. You can always tell the difference between the person who quested for their items long and hard at the expense potentially of his/her sanity and the person who doesn't. It is that simple.
I could proceed to flame here. These players are less skilled, they decentralize the community attachment at the higher echelons of the game. They have no right to do this.
But they do.
Most of these account sales, sadly, come with the original product CDs. They are legal sales. Most of them carry the disclaimers the EULAs make them ("we own the account, not you. You are paying for the usage, not the ownership"). There is no law broken in the sales if done properly.
Do they eviscerate a previously elite community where you knew that every person earned their keep? Oh yes. Do they have a right to? Oh yes. People who don't know how to play have a right to play alongside the most skilled of players. We don't give people an IQ test to vote in democratic governments, do we?
If we can't apply it to the most basic of principles, we cannot apply it to an MMORPG.
I don't like it, you don't like it, but they have a right.
Which is precisely why we don't lay down and die here, and why drawing a line in the sand is the only sensible thing to do. The recession of rights across the globe is something we need not give up on.... we need to take a stand when it comes to the denial of rights.
We need to stand for the rights of developers to engage in reverse engineering proof-of-concept without being prosecuted.
We need to stand for so many things that our apathy has allowed undue recession into darker times. We wonder why our rights fall by the wayside as we sit here and doom-and-gloom over our "moral relativism"
Bloggers can't blog. Coders can't code. Children get flattened with tanks. What else do you need to act on your loss of rights, a gun to your head?
To blindly go in any direction because of precedent is a disastrous mistake, and I would dispute that this is what always happens. I personally deal with plenty of consciencous folk who deal comparatively based on the products rather than bash the newcomer until it comes. This makes little sense, and excessively generalizes the community of which you speak.
What is morally relative about a government denying its citizens rights they purport to give their citizens in their very constitution, as was insightfully stated?
Yes, but the point of this seems to lie in the fact that enough people doing this will hassle the powers that be and bring attention on a larger scale to the rights violations going on there.
Good. The mud has officially been slung. We are in for a hell of a fight, it seems.
The "Avalance is vaporware" vibe is a true one, but let's give Microsoft a chance for a real-world test before we cast our lots. Not completely dismissing the paper demonstrates Cohen in a more rational and less infuriated moment, and is fortunate that he did so, as industry leaders who dismiss competition get burned all too often. This is not to defend the test model in the slightest, which is junk and atypical of typical Bittorent usage as Cohen rightly points out.
The Avalanche paper is a start. Microsoft will need to finish, refine, and check their facts about the product with which they are competing. The idea of building a file without all the pieces reeks of difficult implementation, for example.... that's one protocol I would love to see come into reality. Bittorent will need to flex and build upon the established track record of the protocol, and innovate on top of that. Decentralized trackers were a good step.
I understand this sentiment. I also acknowledge that a company which has reached Google's size needs to diversify their pursuits and offerings to keep constant revenue streams and stay afloat.
It's the reason Microsoft is engaging in as many industries as it is. Same goes for IBM, or Sun, or any other huge player in the IT world. It's diversify or die in this economy. At least Google is making some attempt to make a useful service (if they can get it off the ground) in the process, rather than spam us with junk hardware, overpriced servers and OS'es, and the like.
As previous posters have pointed out, the picture's a bit sketchy for one, and this isn't the first time someone has tried this either.
Moving right along, however, this seems to me to be a bad idea on Google's part. A 3D map of an area has its merits, this I can grasp. What I cannot grasp is the cost of maintaining its accuracy. Modern construction is so quick to build, rebuild, and destroy properties that a 3D map taken two years ago in LA, or any other metropolitan area for that matter, would look vastly different from today. You figure, therefore, that the trucks will regularly have to do their rounds, and that's a lot of trucks at a lot of cost to Google.
Pardon my skepticism, but I don't envision even Google having those kinds of resources. They will need help from major financial players, and I don't see anyone tossing money down this money pit.
Thoughts? Omissions? I could be missing something.
"Your right to get the experience you paid for in a product you purchased isn't."
Your right to free speech, free assembly, and free press is protected under the constitution. Please define the difference between code and speech in this context.
What I did say was that this should not be necessary in a free society. The defendants made the means, and other people used them. Again, why do these gys get harsher penalties than those who sell guns?
Oh no, I got the same numbers. I just don't like my GFX's being able to cook eggs.
My cooling solutions keep it at about 40 degrees celsius at full load. I truly don't mind the stock in the sense that it is designed to operate at those temperatures. I realize, however, that design or no, electronics die faster at that temperature, no ifs ands or buts about it.
That is the point. Electronics that run that hot simply aren't designed to last as long as devices that run cooler. 6800s line the dead parts bins at both computer repair shops I have worked in, and it is for this reason that I cool mine to such an extent. The realities of the adverse effects of those temperatures must be explored by the manufacturer, save the end-user having graphics cards die on them far more than they're used to.
How many lawsuits over the DMCA must arise before we let our blood boil to the point of not tolerating this junk legislation?
Anger aside, let me justify my remark.
People with bombs in their shoes boarding planes spend less time in jail than DMCA violators. Why is this? Why does a company which spends so much time making their games cross-platform and well-coded try so hard to make the online options for their users so centrally controlled? Why do so many companies in general use the DMCA to bash the heads of unsuspecting coders who mean no harm to company or society? These people are trying to understand the way these software packages work. If people use their code for ill or to break EULAs, why are they liable? Outside the digital realm, why do gun shops get sued when one of their guns is shot by someone else and kills another?
It incenses me the lack of personal responsibility in this society. It's the means fault, not the person using the means. Am I alone here?
They didn't patent the appearance of the shell. They patented, if you read through that patent, the very functional concept of how the tablet PC works.
Different candy shell != respecting patents. Let's be careful about that.
Who is going to make the money?
on
IBM Tablet Announced
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, it looks like IBM will continue to have business relations with Apple, just not what they intended!
Seriously, let's be careful not to limit innovation. While I understand the sentiment "2.0GHz is enough for anybody, especially with 2Mb of cache", there are increasing needs for speed increases on all fronts. Before the PPU gets more done in the R and D department, the CPU will still handle all the non-graphical tasks.
I propose innovation on power and heat as well as the speed and size of clock, transitors, cache, datapath, and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
Well well.... here we are again. The decaying corpse of a business model that the RIAA upholds persists in its campaign to put out an inferno with lighter fluid. The tone of that sentence alone tells you how much I begrudge the wasted efforts in this field as opposed to appropriate market adaptations. .... but I applaud Marie being sued by the RIAA.
How in the world does one maintain such an untenable position? It's simple, really. The more truly innocent people the RIAA sics their dogs on, the less credibility they have when they lie about losing their money to unscrupulous thieves. I want the RIAA to go after Jane Doe who never touched a PC, or any other John Q. Public who never uses a computer. I want the toxicity level in the music consumer's blood to rise to the point of doing what should have been done a while ago: permitting market forces to crush competitors who do not innovate.
I will always feel for the artist who needs to get by on the $0.17 an album they may get from the big label pigs, but I will feel a lot better with the RIAA beaten from this current path, and P2P philosophy finally hitting music production.
The Register taking such open shots at Wikipedia is concerning to me. I do not object to The Register's right to do so, however, the support is hackneyed and poorly proofread. Check out this gem for example:
"Chase thought Wikipedia was a joke site and he made the edit to amuse a colleague. From which we conclude that the spoof site Uncyclopedia, which consists entirely of fictional entries, is doing far better than expected, and that Wikipedia has a long way to go to rid itself of the image that it's a massive, multiplayer shoot-em-up game, or MMORPG."
Umm. Yeah. Whoops! Might want to check such things. If the writer was trying to make some kind of editoral jab at the genres, it certainly wasn't clear as to why. Regardless, it distracted from the article. However, I shall move on:
"The blame goes here, the blame goes there - the blame goes anywhere, except Wikipedia itself. If there's a problem - well, the user must be stupid!"
That's downright insulting. Wikipedia provides the medium for user-submitted articles. An analogy immediately springs to mind here. The Department of Transportation provides the legal authority (medium) for our current forms of travel to exist and run as they are. Do you recall the last time the DOT was sued because a plane crashed out of the sky, or a tanker truck slipped on a highway due to poor maintenance after an ice storm? NO! The companies that provide the trucks and the planes, along with whomever they have operating them, are the ones that get sued, and are the only ones that have been liable in any sense. See how far you get pressing suit against the DOT when a TWA plane or whatever comes screaming from the sky. Lots of luck. The liable ones are the direct maintainers and the operators, the way it has always worked. Allowing Wikipedia to be held responsible for every idiot who posts falsehoods sets a DANGEROUS precedent which opens up other facets of our lives to the same treatment. The results are potentially disastrous.
NEXT!
"If you recall the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the advent of the public "internet" ten years ago, we were promised that unlimited access to the world's greatest "knowledge" was just around the corner. This hasn't happened, for reasons cited above, but now the public is now being exhorted to assume the posture of a citizen in an air raid, where every moving object might be a dangerous missile."
Wow. Just wow. Where did this utopian centralization of knowledge come from? I can't possibly imagine from a world where countless sources have been proven to lie to us about matters of economy, war, and more (politicans, reference books, etc). This kind of scary logic comes from dogmatic persons with draconian black and white views of either the world or many of the things in it. Knowledge is not absolute: it is not black and white. There is not one retelling of a single event or definition, but many. How absurd it is to ask a communications medium consisted of human beings to somehow become greater than human beings and defy all the traits of their constitution? Come on.
I could go on. Saying publication entails responsibility later in the article is silly too, again, because I challenge anyone to find one encyclopedia that is error free. Same goes for history textbooks. Lots of luck. How are those errors not defamatory to the persons whom are misrepresented?
*sigh* Progress is impeded by misguided perfectionists. It always will be.
The limitations of optical media are ever-present. Heat generation, great potential for mechanical failure.... solutions have been sought for decades for these problems and others. Remember the DIMM-based hard drives? One solution, however an expensive, cumbersome, and unmaintainable one.
Flash technology gives us a chance to gain most of the advantages in that old unmarketable drive. The reusability used to be an issue, but manufacturing processes, as previously stated under this discussion, are refined to the point of feasability. Let's see where this takes us, as the cost of aggravation for the status quo is worth lowering at almost any cost.
"It's the gaming company's product, so they can attach pretty much whatever rules they want."
No they can't..... it is not that simple. They bundle a copy of the license with the product. The CDs themselves, legally, are yours. You can wipe your butt or make deadly weapons out of them and throw them at the employees of the maker, the worst you would get is nasty cuts in the former and Assault with a Deadly Weapon for the latter. The EULAs and TOSes on the account itself are the things that become able to be legally restricted by the creator.
I always get a kick out of people being shocked over the financial gain in MMORPG commodities. The sale of in-game gold, powerleveling, and now character renting are more common then they ever were. This is a disaster for the MMORPG community.
I am an MMORPG vet. I spent many good hours of my youth, and now my adulthood, on UO, DAOC, EQ, EQ2, WoW, and the like. While the gaming experiences were different, a common element arises in this form of gameplay. You can ALWAYS tell the difference between a player at the maximum level who earned it, and a player who just picked up the account the other day on Ebay or through other forms of sale. You can always tell the difference between the person who quested for their items long and hard at the expense potentially of his/her sanity and the person who doesn't. It is that simple.
I could proceed to flame here. These players are less skilled, they decentralize the community attachment at the higher echelons of the game. They have no right to do this.
But they do.
Most of these account sales, sadly, come with the original product CDs. They are legal sales. Most of them carry the disclaimers the EULAs make them ("we own the account, not you. You are paying for the usage, not the ownership"). There is no law broken in the sales if done properly.
Do they eviscerate a previously elite community where you knew that every person earned their keep? Oh yes. Do they have a right to? Oh yes. People who don't know how to play have a right to play alongside the most skilled of players. We don't give people an IQ test to vote in democratic governments, do we?
If we can't apply it to the most basic of principles, we cannot apply it to an MMORPG.
I don't like it, you don't like it, but they have a right.
The Death Star music off in the distance....
Satire.... meant to be funny.... not to predict future accurately....????
"the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player"
Funny, WMP and Musicmatch allow this functionality, among others. I wonder why they weren't sued....
Smells fishy to me. Targetting the big kahuna rather than the concept.... I don't like it one bit. Yet another lawsuit that reeks of collusion.
I spoke of tit-for-tat earlier in the day. Here is another fine example of tit-for-tat.
Which is precisely why we don't lay down and die here, and why drawing a line in the sand is the only sensible thing to do. The recession of rights across the globe is something we need not give up on.... we need to take a stand when it comes to the denial of rights.
We need to stand for the rights of developers to engage in reverse engineering proof-of-concept without being prosecuted.
We need to stand for so many things that our apathy has allowed undue recession into darker times. We wonder why our rights fall by the wayside as we sit here and doom-and-gloom over our "moral relativism"
Bloggers can't blog. Coders can't code. Children get flattened with tanks. What else do you need to act on your loss of rights, a gun to your head?
To blindly go in any direction because of precedent is a disastrous mistake, and I would dispute that this is what always happens. I personally deal with plenty of consciencous folk who deal comparatively based on the products rather than bash the newcomer until it comes. This makes little sense, and excessively generalizes the community of which you speak.
What is morally relative about a government denying its citizens rights they purport to give their citizens in their very constitution, as was insightfully stated?
Yes, but the point of this seems to lie in the fact that enough people doing this will hassle the powers that be and bring attention on a larger scale to the rights violations going on there.
I agree that it would be useful, what I doubt is the likelihood that the system is economical enough to maintain.
Chalk this under proof-of-concept maybe?
Good. The mud has officially been slung. We are in for a hell of a fight, it seems.
The "Avalance is vaporware" vibe is a true one, but let's give Microsoft a chance for a real-world test before we cast our lots. Not completely dismissing the paper demonstrates Cohen in a more rational and less infuriated moment, and is fortunate that he did so, as industry leaders who dismiss competition get burned all too often. This is not to defend the test model in the slightest, which is junk and atypical of typical Bittorent usage as Cohen rightly points out.
The Avalanche paper is a start. Microsoft will need to finish, refine, and check their facts about the product with which they are competing. The idea of building a file without all the pieces reeks of difficult implementation, for example.... that's one protocol I would love to see come into reality. Bittorent will need to flex and build upon the established track record of the protocol, and innovate on top of that. Decentralized trackers were a good step.
Hmmmm.... well let's see.... ever heard of a man named Richard Reed?
I understand this sentiment. I also acknowledge that a company which has reached Google's size needs to diversify their pursuits and offerings to keep constant revenue streams and stay afloat.
It's the reason Microsoft is engaging in as many industries as it is. Same goes for IBM, or Sun, or any other huge player in the IT world. It's diversify or die in this economy. At least Google is making some attempt to make a useful service (if they can get it off the ground) in the process, rather than spam us with junk hardware, overpriced servers and OS'es, and the like.
As previous posters have pointed out, the picture's a bit sketchy for one, and this isn't the first time someone has tried this either.
Moving right along, however, this seems to me to be a bad idea on Google's part. A 3D map of an area has its merits, this I can grasp. What I cannot grasp is the cost of maintaining its accuracy. Modern construction is so quick to build, rebuild, and destroy properties that a 3D map taken two years ago in LA, or any other metropolitan area for that matter, would look vastly different from today. You figure, therefore, that the trucks will regularly have to do their rounds, and that's a lot of trucks at a lot of cost to Google.
Pardon my skepticism, but I don't envision even Google having those kinds of resources. They will need help from major financial players, and I don't see anyone tossing money down this money pit.
Thoughts? Omissions? I could be missing something.
"Your right to get the experience you paid for in a product you purchased isn't."
Your right to free speech, free assembly, and free press is protected under the constitution. Please define the difference between code and speech in this context.
I understand this. That is not what I said.
What I did say was that this should not be necessary in a free society. The defendants made the means, and other people used them. Again, why do these gys get harsher penalties than those who sell guns?
They shouldn't have to in a free society. That is the point.
Oh no, I got the same numbers. I just don't like my GFX's being able to cook eggs.
My cooling solutions keep it at about 40 degrees celsius at full load. I truly don't mind the stock in the sense that it is designed to operate at those temperatures. I realize, however, that design or no, electronics die faster at that temperature, no ifs ands or buts about it.
That is the point. Electronics that run that hot simply aren't designed to last as long as devices that run cooler. 6800s line the dead parts bins at both computer repair shops I have worked in, and it is for this reason that I cool mine to such an extent. The realities of the adverse effects of those temperatures must be explored by the manufacturer, save the end-user having graphics cards die on them far more than they're used to.
How many lawsuits over the DMCA must arise before we let our blood boil to the point of not tolerating this junk legislation?
Anger aside, let me justify my remark.
People with bombs in their shoes boarding planes spend less time in jail than DMCA violators. Why is this? Why does a company which spends so much time making their games cross-platform and well-coded try so hard to make the online options for their users so centrally controlled? Why do so many companies in general use the DMCA to bash the heads of unsuspecting coders who mean no harm to company or society? These people are trying to understand the way these software packages work. If people use their code for ill or to break EULAs, why are they liable? Outside the digital realm, why do gun shops get sued when one of their guns is shot by someone else and kills another?
It incenses me the lack of personal responsibility in this society. It's the means fault, not the person using the means. Am I alone here?
They didn't patent the appearance of the shell. They patented, if you read through that patent, the very functional concept of how the tablet PC works.
Different candy shell != respecting patents. Let's be careful about that.
Well, it looks like IBM will continue to have business relations with Apple, just not what they intended!
More fans or more occultists? ;)
Seriously, let's be careful not to limit innovation. While I understand the sentiment "2.0GHz is enough for anybody, especially with 2Mb of cache", there are increasing needs for speed increases on all fronts. Before the PPU gets more done in the R and D department, the CPU will still handle all the non-graphical tasks.
I propose innovation on power and heat as well as the speed and size of clock, transitors, cache, datapath, and so forth.