I guess that doesn't really answer your question, but I guess my question is why don't you like apt-get and other package managers?
I like apt-get and package managers and more importantly the benefits they bring. I also like OpenStep style packages and the benefits they bring. Despite the fact that no OS now integrates both, they are not mutually exclusive.
I can see your point of view--for you these download/install apps may not be right. Can you not accept that for others, the ability to browse a list of apps, view screen shots, click one and have it installed without knowing anything beyond the GUI is a good thing?
I don't see any reason why this an either/or proposition. Why can't Linux or OS X or any OS adopt OpenStep style packages with all the benefits thereof and add in a good package manager with all the benefits that entails? Is their any reason why Openstep packages can't be distributed by the package manager and extended to contain repository information so that if you get them elsewhere you can still update them, etc? Maybe I'm slow, but why not have packages you can discover from a central repository and which you can IM to a friend if that repository stops distributing it?
This is rather contradictory. You seem to state that we must choose whether to enforce the law with Apple or not...and if we do, MS will step in to this recently vacated market slot.
No. We are choosing whether or not to enforce the law, and if it yet applies to Apple, but MS will not "step in" they are already there. Despite Apple's bundling, MS's bundling is already a stronger force as evidenced by their domination of both the software jukebox player market and the DRM market. Approximately 70% of the portable players that let you play digital music are Apple iPods that work with Itunes and Fairplay above any beyond all others, but most DRM'd songs people have are in Windows media player format and Windows Media Player is the most common software jukebox in use.
When it comes to DRM at this point, if we enforce anti-trust law against Apple, we will not allow MS to step forward and do the same.
We won't? Your tense is wrong. We already have. Unless a different court rules against them, to date they were convicted and punished crime.
Get tough with Apple, as the EC wants to do, and it gets harder for Vista as well.
There is no tenable argument for allowing DRM to proceed, be it with Apple or MS.
If that is a choice, I'm right behind it, but it looks to me like we've already let MS not only implement DRM on 90% of all computers, but bundle it illegally without stopping them. Given that they are unlikely to be stopped by the courts after the trial and punishment is already over in the EU, I don't see as it makes sense to apply a different standard to Apple's lesser evil.
The EC already let MS walk and they are not who we are talking about in this case. This is about Norway, who is not an EU member and with support from two EU members, but not the EC.
I don't want MS to be able to do it any more that I do Apple. The point is, this is the firing line for Apple's DRM efforts; the battles are yet to come with Vista. First things first.
No. Microsoft already bundled DRM with Windows and was convicted of so doing and was ordered by the courts to take actions that in no way mitigate that abuse. They already won their battle while you were napping. The question at hand is if we also let Apple get away with it, or if we enforce the law against them, thus guaranteeing MS takes over the market. Apple's tying to the iPod is the only thing holding them back right now. The majority of people who have DRM'd music ripped it from CD and applied the DRM themselves because that is the default behavior of Windows media player. The only reason most people have heard of DRM at all is because they did this and then the songs did not work on the iPod. Your proposal would remove that barrier and stuff the whole issue back under the rug to fester.
What? That's not even close to being true. The iPod is the most popular brand, yes, and it's safe to say that they have a definite majority of the market; however, you can easily walk to Wal-mart and see a row of portable music players that are not iPods.
What economists and the courts are concerned with is the influence a single company wields in the market. You do not have to be the only player to be able to undermine the benefits of capitalism. You just need significant influence so that you can significantly undermine competition in other markets. Different jurisdictions judge this differently but most courts consider 70-90% of the market to be justification for investigation. Apple has between 65% and 75% of the market according to most people, hence they have come under investigation, which has not yet concluded if they do have sufficient influence. Please note, being a monopoly is not illegal. Doing certain things as a monopoly are illegal.
There's no lock-in at all; you're quite free to put any music that's encoded as MP3, AIFF, WAV, or AAC on the iPod, and there's nothing stopping that music from working everywhere else, as well. Those are all open formats that anybody can create without DRM.
This is actually irrelevant to whether or not they are a monopoly.
Assuming for the moment that Apple does wield significant influence they have clearly tied the iPod to the iTMS, ITunes software, and FairPlay DRM. Look at it this way. Can the iTMS division of Apple sell songs that have DRM restrictions mandated by the RIAA in order to get a contract and which will play on iPods? Yes. Can the online music division of Sony sell songs with restrictive DRM mandated by the RIAA in order to get a contract and which will play on iPods? No. Is this due to something under the control of these music selling divisions or is it because of something Apple did with the iPod. It is because of the iPod. Thus, it is tied.
Assuming Apple does have monopoly influence on iPods, they have to treat other companies that create other products (online music stores) exactly as they treat their own division that makes a product for that market. If they license FairPlay to iTMS, they have to license it to Sony. If they bundle ITunes on a CD that comes with IPods, they have to bundle any other jukebox software whose maker wants it on that CD.
This is no different than Microsoft's bundling of WMP with Windows or their tying of Windows Server to Windows desktop via secret protocols... except that MS definitely is a monopoly and one repeatedly convicted of abusing that position. Should Apple be found to be (legally) a monopoly then they should be required to stop tying the same way MS should be (but hasn't been).
Legally, in the EU, monopoly has a specific meaning: more than 25% share of the applicable market. That's when you start to be treated legally as a monopoly.
Actually, I believe in the EU if you have 70% or more, the EU considers that grounds to investigate your influence on the market.
Tell us honestly you didn't look up NIDS and IPS. I've written a custom BGP implementation from scratch based on RFC 1771 and didn't know the acronyms NIDS or IPS.
Well, no I didn't look them up, but I work in the field. In fact, my spellchecker did not even complain about them since I've long since added them to my dictionary.
A lot of people seem to have a misunderstanding about the concepts of the internet and especially (D)DoS. The fact that you're under attack, doesn't mean you can just rate limit and be over with it. You can't limit the number of requests are being sent and thus the only thing you can do is rate limit the responses to such requests so that you don't clog your upload. Most providers do have synchronous and separated bandwidth thus your down link will be full anyway.
Actually, this depends upon what technologies you have deployed. I was writing from the perspective of a tier-1 ISP operator. You certainly can blackhole traffic matching certain characteristics or hand it off to a dedicated filtering appliance which filters out particular patterns and onramps the remaining traffic back into your network. Additionally, more and more a large ISPs are starting to sell this service to their large customers, so as the recipient of a DDoS attack I log into a dedicated interface, insert the attack characteristics I'm seeing, and my ISP filters the attack at his peering edge, before the rest of it ever transits his network and reaches me.
Reactive (automated) things repel me too. I've seen them, evaluated them but the program/computer/system is too 'dumb' to recognize something bad is happening and where exactly to solve it.
In general this is true, but in particular there are exceptions. I've seen logs of major DDoS attacks automatically castrated while the admin was away over the weekend. Obviously you have to be very conservative about this to prevent false positives and a lot of network admins are understandable hesitant.
You could implement a type of AI, but then it's getting too expensive. The other thing is: who decides and how. You can set rules, but then you have to operate within the rules. You can set self-adjusting rules, but then if the attacker's intelligence > systems intelligence, it can still be altered, bent or even misused.
A well crafted system is self-adjusting, but without pulling people out of the loop. You can certainly implement some hard and fast rules though by white-listing critical traffic. When the "AI" decides an attack is occurring and shuts down traffic, it should have a auto-generated picture (relational database) of what traffic is normal and what traffic is vital. Thus it can follow priorities and shut down Web traffic to some office, while still allowing the payroll server to connect to the bank.
The problem is, that since anyone can't just influence the system, you'll eventually have a problem and the system is going to shut you and everyone else out. If you meddle with it, the system will go reactive and you'll have your favorite sci-fi horror movie realized
Umm if we were there for AIs a lot of out problems would already be gone and replaced with a different set of problems. If this ever happens I'll be more worried about who the mail server is voting for than whether or not my e-mail is marked as spam. I think we just walked off the deep end of this conversation.
The iPod is not tied to iTMS. If an online music vendor chooses to sell songs in MP3 or even AAC there is nothing preventing them from doing so, and those songs would play just fine on an iPod.
iPods ship with a copy of iTunes which accesses the iTMS. That is called "bundling" which is one common form of tying. iTMS implements Fairplay as does the iPod. iPod's do not implement any competing DRM schemes nor can other online stores implement Fairplay. As such, iTMS has the capabilities to satisfy the RIAA and get them to allow sales via that channel for iPod users. No other store can do that, thus they cannot sell RIAA songs (at the same price) to iPod users. That is another form of tying.
Here's a simple test for tying. Can other parties do the same thing as the company potentially tying? If not, is that because that company produces both products. If the answers are No and Yes respectively, you have tying.
You can[use Mplayer], or at least there are no legal prohibitions against it.
Can I play Fairplay encoded songs from the iTMS using Mplayer? Nope. Does Mplayer ship on a CD that comes with my iPod? Nope. Thus it is not a level playing field. The criteria for monopolistic tying is not "is there any way to make this happen or does the law stop me from doing this." It is "am I in any way motivated to use one product over another, because of something done with the monopolized product."
There is, for example, a Winamp plug-in that allows you to sync up your Winamp library with your iPod. All it would take is the makers of the software choosing to do so.
What you're missing is even if the Winamp team makes it upload to the iPod, they can't make it play DRM'd songs and they don't get to include their program on the CD that came with the iPod. Assuming Apple has monopoly influence (70% is where the courts start looking, about where Apple is now) this is illegal and the courts are supposed to stop Apple from continuing to do so.
The interview ranges over firewalling, logging, NIDS(Network Intrusion Detection System) and IPS(Intrusion Prevention System), how to fight DDoS(Distributed Denial of Service), and the future of BGP(Border Gateway Protocol) and DNS(Domain Name System).
If you don't know what all of these are, the chances are you won't care about or understand what he has to say anyway.
What do you think about reactive firewalls, also knows as IPS (Intrusion Prevention Systems)?
Bill Cheswick: Reactive security is an idea that keeps popping up. It seems logical. Why not send out a virus to cure a virus, for example? How about having an attacked host somehow stifle the attacker, or tell a firewall to block the noxious packets.
These are very tricky things to do, and the danger is always that an attacker can make you DOS yourself or someone else. As an attacker, I can make you shut down connections by making them appear to misbehave. This is often easier than launching the original attack that the reactive system was designed to suppress. (By the way, this happens a lot in biological immune systems as well. There are a number of diseases that trigger dangerous or fatal immune system responses.)
So I am skeptical about these systems. They may work out, but I want to keep an eye on the actual user experiences with these.
I think that Mr. Cheswick is mostly correct in his opinions, but in the case of IPS's some of them certainly are effective, if not for mitigating minor attacks, at least for keeping the network up and running during these attacks. He talks about making a network operator DoS themselves by feigning an attack, but to make this work you have to assume there is no meat in the loop. Just because someone appears to attack me does not mean I filter all packets from that IP(s). I'm not going to let my network automatically block traffic, although rate limiting can be automated to some degree. The real thing is, if your tools allow you enough visibility into your network to map what is your normal and critical traffic, you can block large swaths of noncritical traffic without serious financial consequences. Compared to the cost of a complete outage, this is a huge leap forward.
Still, may of the IPS tools on the market today do not provide that ability and you need to get a good toolset together.
For all these problems, and others in the past, I have been impressed with the response of the network community. These problems, and others like security weaknesses, security exploits, etc., usually get dealt with in a few days. For example, the SYN packet DOS attacks in 1996 quickly brought together ad hoc teams of experts, and within a week, patches with new mitigations were appearing from the vendors. You can take the Internet down, but probably not for very long.
Since the 90's a lot more effort has gone into formalizing and speeding up collaboration. It used to be that if a major worm or something hit the internet, within a week it would be well known as people called each other and traded notes and techniques for mitigation. Today if I see a novel new and widespread attack, I also have up to date data as to whether or not it is hitting other ISPs and large networks and where and in what traffic rates via information they automatically share with me. Further, I can semi-automatically create a signature that matches that attack, a filter for that attack for my routers and firewall type devices, and share that information with them along with my notes. Even if the network is down, I still often have the contact info for the security people at those networks so if my Internet access is out I can look at who else has been hit and call them.
This has really started to take off only in the last year or so, but what Mr. Cheswick applied to the 90's is today that same process on speed. Personally, I think anyone would be hard pressed to take out "the internet" today and the closest one might come would be a very sneaky attack on the Windows monoculture.
That's all well and good - but there is no reason to ease up on Apple.
So you think it's fair to stop one company from taking an action, while not stopping another? You think applying the law differently to different people is fair?
If anything, their failure to institute DRM on their terms will ultimately aid in the fight against Redmond.
If Apple can't bundle ITMS and iTunes the market goes to MS and their licensees because they can bundle. So you think all music being encoded with DRM that MS has patented and all people using Windows Media Player as their music jukebox will "aid in the fight against Redmond." Care to explain how?
Everyday consumers are not far from the point where they can understand what's on the table with DRM.
Most people who understand DRM, don't care. Just because you do, does not mean handing the DRM market to Microsoft will change anyone's mind.
If Apple serves as sacrificial lamb, so be it.
So if we have to drive you personally into bankruptcy since you did not stand up to the entire industry and laws to prove that those laws are unethical you think that is okay? Or is it only okay when it is someone else?
Why should a special status be accorded Apple when they fail?
Special status is treating one player differently. We need to treat Apple and MS the same, not differently. Stopping Apple form tying while not stopping MS is treating MS specially, not the other way around.
Yes, ITMC owns the rights to the music catalogs...
Look, I loathe DRM as much as the next guy, but Apple's not using their market dominance to smack around, say, Microsoft from making a run at them.
Apple is using their market dominance through tying to motivate the dominance of a product in one market with a product in another. Assuming the iPod wields sufficient market dominance (debatable, it is borderline) then Apple using iPods to promote ITunes is just as illegal as Microsoft using Windows to promote Windows Media Player.
Ergo, this is just market forces at work. The market has spoken, and people prefer the iPod and iTunes to the competition.
The market has spoken that they prefer iPods, but do they prefer iTunes? Is it better than Mplayer? Is it better than WMP? Is it better than Realplayer? Because of the tying we don't know. Maybe a consumer thinks the iPod is the best portable out there, but they don't like the iTunes store but do want to buy mainstream music online. Supposing CDs are not an option for some reason (nearest store is 100 miles and shipping takes 3 weeks). Why should they have to go with the ITMS, just because they like iPods? Isn't it more efficient if the market decides each item individually?
Having a monopoly means you have a lot of power. I don't know if Apple is there yet, but they are close. If you have a monopoly and tie that monopoly to a product in a separate market, then market forces are not "at work" they are bypassed. That is why it is illegal.
The real problem here is that there is already a monopoly illegally tied to a competitor in that space. Microsoft has tied their player and DRM to their OS. The minute Apple is forbidden from tying iTunes to iPods, Microsoft will take over that market because they have not been stopped from tying Windows to it. It is hypocritical and counter-productive to stop Apple after not stopping MS. That is not the free market at work, that is handing the market to a a well established, abusive monopoly instead of a company on the verge of being a monopoly with no history of abuse.
I disagree that they should not "monkey with the system." Monopolistic tying ruins markets and destroys the advantages of capitalism. But they do need to apply their monkeying equally.
So here's the deal. Apple has a near monopoly on portable music players. As such, they wield a lot of power normal companies do not. Thus, all other things equal, it is perfectly reasonable for the law to require them not to tie the iPod to their store and DRM and jukebox software. I think this is makes sense and benefits consumers. Just because I have an iPod (theoretically) doesn't mean I should have to buy my music from Apple instead of Sony's online store. Likewise, I should be able to use Mplayer of Windows Media player on equal ground with ITunes.
So here's the problem. Microsoft also has tied their DRM (which they license to stores) and their music jukebox software to a monopolized product (Windows). They have even been convicted of this by the EU courts. But no one has stopped them from this tying and the "punishment" was useless and did nothing.
I'm all for mandating only open standards, including DRM, for music players in a given country or the EU. But stopping Apple from tying while not stopping Microsoft is not justice, it is handing the market to Microsoft. As soon as Windows Media Player can interoperate with iPods it will own the market (it already owns a lot of it). Allowing MS to tie their jukebox software to Windows, but not letting Apple tie their jukebox software to iPods is enforcing a double standard.
All of this relates to public perception. People are accustomed to tolerating illegal lock-in with their operating system since it has been standard practice for years. People are less accustomed to the same for portable music players. Enforce the law against both of them or neither.
...Apple basically saying that, though they don't specifically say CVS.
I'm sure it isn't CVS, although it is versioning so the functionality is similar. Actually, it seems that Apple has moved to SVN internally, and SVN is included by default with Leopard (although not as part of the filesystem versioning). With a little luck, CVS will slowly wither away and die as SVN takes over. How I hate thee CVS... let me count the ways: no file moving, no file renaming, horrible handling of binaries...
Also, Apple seems to be providing this "time machine" functionality as an API to applications so that someone making a word processor, for example, can incorporate versioning of a file as well as merging and resolving differences in versions, rather than treating binaries as blobs and forcing application developers to create their own, parallel, solution.
This is probably just me being ignorant about power distribution, but is this a universal thing or just a by-product of the US's diverse power 'grid'?
Whenever you have small power sources coming in and out of the grid you'll have extra work compensating for that. Further, because the backbone is all three phase, adding and subtracting these sources is not at all straightforward or simple. The US power grid is a lot more fragile than other places (I know a guy who took out half a state via a cascade failure with one bad switch, that most power engineers would not have seen coming either). That said power generation and distribution are different, related tasks. The more diverse the generation, the more complex the the distribution is going to be.
what can be so complex about hooking thousands of smaller nodes into the grid aside from slightly more intelligent substations?
If your substation is constantly in need of different amounts of power, and may in fact have a surplus of power at different times, then you need to provide a way to buffer that from the system (expensive). Also, a lot of the local failures are the result of spikes and the more amateur operated, rarely serviced machinery you have the more likely it is that it will cause problems. Customers are not as granularly isolated as they should be for this. A lot of people think of power with a water pipe metaphor, but it is not exactly the same thing. When you realize that a lot of the power network is actually three parallel lines 120 degrees out of phase, with one another and connected not in a single line, but in an interconnected grid, the balance of those is a necessary components can be very fragile.
this is a php bug not an MS one, MS provides a search interface that allows applications to register there file types as searchable, php does not do this and hence XP search does not search there contents automatically.
Actually, I think this is a bug on MS's part. Assuming that all file types are associated with a given application is a serious mistake. What application should be registering HTML, PHP, XML,.c, Jamfile,.eps, h,.pl, etc? These are all common file types and should be supported out of the box. On OS X you drop a plugin in the/Library/Spotlight or ~/Library/Spotlight folder and searching works for those filetypes. Lots of applications come with these and add them and you can also grab them and add them yourself. Apple even maintains a free download site where developers put these. I've not yet seen an easy way to add common filetypes to the new Vista search functionality. Theoretically I know it is possible, but where is the OpenOffice plug-in?
It does function as a search! It searches the start menu, which makes perfect sense seeing as that's where it is! Do you expect the search box in Firefox's history sidebar to launch a google search?
This is just wrong. Things in the start menu generally apply to the entire OS, not to the start menu. Would you expect the Controls and Settings in the start menu to be settings for the OS, or just for the start menu. As a global feature of the OS, this is where most people look for functionality that applies to the filesystem and OS in general. It should be labeled "Search Start Menu" or should apply globally.
And it's not like it's useless or detracts from the UI in any way
It does detract form the UI. Every time a user tries to do something and finds it does not work as expected, it detracts. And what about when people think this is a global search, it finds nothing, and they are misled into thinking the file is gone? While Vista's search capabilities are much better than they used to be, they screwed up the UI component, as usual.
I guess the issue for MS is, that you and I (computer guru's) have picked up and embraced the XP paradigm but people like my wife never get it no matter how many times it is explained to her. So MS tried to move to another paradigm (am I using this properly?) to help more non-technical people understand how to find "basic" information.
I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're wrong. I don't think changing these names and rearranging things is more usable to people with a different overall viewpoint of using Windows. I think they are changes that happened because some middle manager wanted to make their mark. Both these examples are steps backward in usability based upon existing best practices. It is remotely possible that MS did extensive and well performed usability tests and concluded that this is beneficial to some subset of users, but I think it highly unlikely. From talking to ex-MS employees and simply looking at their changes and lack of changes over time I suspect MS has a number of good UI experts who work for them, and whose work is constantly undermined by marketing and management that insists on changing or not changing things that the UI people recommend.
There is no downside about not paying electrical bills but when you start supplying it at no cost, that's another ball game, the companies arent stupid if they dont have to cough up dough to maintain the equipment since you'll be paying for any broken parts of your solar installation.
It's a lot worse than that. The laws that require electric companies to pay you for electricity are not there to compensate for the electric company trying to maintain an electricity generation monopoly. If you are dumping small amounts of power onto the grid in diverse places it probably costs them more money to deal with your erratic power spikes and the like than it saves them in generation costs. Aside from the cost of maintaining equipment and keeping the system balanced, the power grid is not designed to handle distributed power generation. It is a worthwhile goal that every house be able to sustain itself and contribute to the system as a whole, but it takes a lot more than getting the power generation component of that cost effective.
My dad had a friend a while back that did this, I think maybe in Oregon or Washington, but I don't recall. He had a large property with a decent sized stream running through it, and set up a water wheel.
If you have a constantly running stream is is by far the most efficient source of power I could find. Waterwheels are a bit dated, but you can buy a water powered generator that looks a lot like an outboard motor, but works in reverse.
This is not something your average Chicago suburbanite is going to be able to swing effectively.
Chicago is not the place for solar panels at their current efficiencies and prices. Due to the latitude and weather you're getting 1/3 the light someone in southern CA is and snow will make them useless until it melts. Interestingly, almost any location that has that sort of weather (lake effect) also tends to have reliable winds, which are probably your best bet for a low-end solution. Even those, however, are not particularly cost effective compared to just investing the money you would spend.
I haven't run the numbers lately but most of the methods that are likely to work require significant up front investment. One option you might want to look into in Chicago is a natural gas or propane fuel cell designed for residential use. Last I looked $10K is about the bottom of the line, but it generates power whenever it is cost effective versus the electric co's prices, provides a backup if the grid goes down, and the waste heat can be tied into a forced air or radiator based heating system. Another option is a ground heat pump, which is basically a series of tubes that run into the ground and pull up air from underground to reduce heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Depending upon the size of your lot, however, this may not be an option.
n the trailing 9 months ending on July 1, 2006, Apple received nearly $1.5 billion in net sales from its iTunes-related business. Yes, that's only a 1/4 of what it got from iPod sales, but I'm willing to bet the profit margins are much better on iTunes sales than they are on iPods.
You don't have to guess. Apple has made it very clear that while they are not losing money on the iTunes Music Store, it is only barely doing more than keeping itself afloat and further Apple said that was their intention. iPods on the other hand accounts for 30-40% of Apples profit each quarter. Apple has informed their investors about this strategy a long time ago.
The real problem here is that we know that the most that the average person is going to do is complain, and that people can put as much horrible advertising in games as they want and no one will stop them or stop buying the games.
I will. You see I'm part of the largest market segment, the casual gaming market. I have choices and will choose the games that don't annoy me.
How do we, or me at least, know this? Television. They now have television advertising during the shows, covering up huge portions of the screen.
TV is nearly a monopoly in many places and the production/distribution buyout locks out most smaller players. That said, I don't watch ads on TV. I skip them with my DVR. If there are ads on the screen while I'm watching, I simply don't watch. If I want to see a series, I'm happy to get it on Netflix. More and more TV is moving towards IP TV, which may bring competition back... we'll see. The point is, computer games are already in that democratized distribution channel. If a game comes out with annoying ads in it, are you going to buy it? If so, you have yourself to blame.
Yeah, but only a tiny amount compared to the revenues from music. I don't think this is a factor. Deploying is probably more expensive than creating DRM.
*DRM is easily and routinely cracked or bypassed by pirates. *The people who want to pirate will pirate, the people who willingly buy music will continue to do so.
Both of these address what I feel to be an incorrect assumption. They assume the main purpose of DRM is to stop music pirates. I think this is 100% false. The purpose of DRM is to motivate people who do obey the law, to buy additional copies of music they have already purchased once. The RIAA's greatest fear is as follows: Music goes digital and everyone backs up that music on redundant and remote storage making data loss almost unheard of. Then people play that same copy on their portable, their living room stereo, in the car, as their cell phone ring tone, or in whatever new device is created in the future. Worse, children inherit this music when people die so it is handed down forever or sold in the secondary market.
DRM is about making sure that eventually all copies of music become obsolete or broken so that they have to purchased anew for new devices. It is about making sure fair use combined with better technology does not undermine their ability to resell the work done by people long dead.
Even if they don't totally abandon DRM, I can see them giving up on building the perfect scheme and just sticking with the easily bypassed and/or cracked schemes they have now. If someone claims that it somehow cost-effective to try and stay a step ahead of the pirates' ability to crack DRM...
Of course it isn't cost effective to do this and it never has been. People who don't care about the law just need a recording device. If I can hear it, so can the recorder. One person does this and posts it online and that's all there is to it. DRM is unworkable for stopping piracy and the RIAA knows that. It is not about stopping piracy. Of course easily crack-able DRM works pretty well for stopping people who obey the law, which is why they are likely to stay with current versions for a while before they move on and to a new, incompatible one to motivate people to buy another copy that works with new devices.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that doesn't really answer your question, but I guess my question is why don't you like apt-get and other package managers?
I like apt-get and package managers and more importantly the benefits they bring. I also like OpenStep style packages and the benefits they bring. Despite the fact that no OS now integrates both, they are not mutually exclusive.
I can see your point of view--for you these download/install apps may not be right. Can you not accept that for others, the ability to browse a list of apps, view screen shots, click one and have it installed without knowing anything beyond the GUI is a good thing?
I don't see any reason why this an either/or proposition. Why can't Linux or OS X or any OS adopt OpenStep style packages with all the benefits thereof and add in a good package manager with all the benefits that entails? Is their any reason why Openstep packages can't be distributed by the package manager and extended to contain repository information so that if you get them elsewhere you can still update them, etc? Maybe I'm slow, but why not have packages you can discover from a central repository and which you can IM to a friend if that repository stops distributing it?
This is rather contradictory. You seem to state that we must choose whether to enforce the law with Apple or not...and if we do, MS will step in to this recently vacated market slot.
No. We are choosing whether or not to enforce the law, and if it yet applies to Apple, but MS will not "step in" they are already there. Despite Apple's bundling, MS's bundling is already a stronger force as evidenced by their domination of both the software jukebox player market and the DRM market. Approximately 70% of the portable players that let you play digital music are Apple iPods that work with Itunes and Fairplay above any beyond all others, but most DRM'd songs people have are in Windows media player format and Windows Media Player is the most common software jukebox in use.
When it comes to DRM at this point, if we enforce anti-trust law against Apple, we will not allow MS to step forward and do the same.
We won't? Your tense is wrong. We already have. Unless a different court rules against them, to date they were convicted and punished crime.
Get tough with Apple, as the EC wants to do, and it gets harder for Vista as well.
There is no tenable argument for allowing DRM to proceed, be it with Apple or MS.
If that is a choice, I'm right behind it, but it looks to me like we've already let MS not only implement DRM on 90% of all computers, but bundle it illegally without stopping them. Given that they are unlikely to be stopped by the courts after the trial and punishment is already over in the EU, I don't see as it makes sense to apply a different standard to Apple's lesser evil.
The EC already let MS walk and they are not who we are talking about in this case. This is about Norway, who is not an EU member and with support from two EU members, but not the EC.
I don't want MS to be able to do it any more that I do Apple. The point is, this is the firing line for Apple's DRM efforts; the battles are yet to come with Vista. First things first.
No. Microsoft already bundled DRM with Windows and was convicted of so doing and was ordered by the courts to take actions that in no way mitigate that abuse. They already won their battle while you were napping. The question at hand is if we also let Apple get away with it, or if we enforce the law against them, thus guaranteeing MS takes over the market. Apple's tying to the iPod is the only thing holding them back right now. The majority of people who have DRM'd music ripped it from CD and applied the DRM themselves because that is the default behavior of Windows media player. The only reason most people have heard of DRM at all is because they did this and then the songs did not work on the iPod. Your proposal would remove that barrier and stuff the whole issue back under the rug to fester.
What? That's not even close to being true. The iPod is the most popular brand, yes, and it's safe to say that they have a definite majority of the market; however, you can easily walk to Wal-mart and see a row of portable music players that are not iPods.
What economists and the courts are concerned with is the influence a single company wields in the market. You do not have to be the only player to be able to undermine the benefits of capitalism. You just need significant influence so that you can significantly undermine competition in other markets. Different jurisdictions judge this differently but most courts consider 70-90% of the market to be justification for investigation. Apple has between 65% and 75% of the market according to most people, hence they have come under investigation, which has not yet concluded if they do have sufficient influence. Please note, being a monopoly is not illegal. Doing certain things as a monopoly are illegal.
There's no lock-in at all; you're quite free to put any music that's encoded as MP3, AIFF, WAV, or AAC on the iPod, and there's nothing stopping that music from working everywhere else, as well. Those are all open formats that anybody can create without DRM.
This is actually irrelevant to whether or not they are a monopoly.
Assuming for the moment that Apple does wield significant influence they have clearly tied the iPod to the iTMS, ITunes software, and FairPlay DRM. Look at it this way. Can the iTMS division of Apple sell songs that have DRM restrictions mandated by the RIAA in order to get a contract and which will play on iPods? Yes. Can the online music division of Sony sell songs with restrictive DRM mandated by the RIAA in order to get a contract and which will play on iPods? No. Is this due to something under the control of these music selling divisions or is it because of something Apple did with the iPod. It is because of the iPod. Thus, it is tied.
Assuming Apple does have monopoly influence on iPods, they have to treat other companies that create other products (online music stores) exactly as they treat their own division that makes a product for that market. If they license FairPlay to iTMS, they have to license it to Sony. If they bundle ITunes on a CD that comes with IPods, they have to bundle any other jukebox software whose maker wants it on that CD.
This is no different than Microsoft's bundling of WMP with Windows or their tying of Windows Server to Windows desktop via secret protocols... except that MS definitely is a monopoly and one repeatedly convicted of abusing that position. Should Apple be found to be (legally) a monopoly then they should be required to stop tying the same way MS should be (but hasn't been).
Legally, in the EU, monopoly has a specific meaning: more than 25% share of the applicable market. That's when you start to be treated legally as a monopoly.
Actually, I believe in the EU if you have 70% or more, the EU considers that grounds to investigate your influence on the market.
Tell us honestly you didn't look up NIDS and IPS. I've written a custom BGP implementation from scratch based on RFC 1771 and didn't know the acronyms NIDS or IPS.
Well, no I didn't look them up, but I work in the field. In fact, my spellchecker did not even complain about them since I've long since added them to my dictionary.
A lot of people seem to have a misunderstanding about the concepts of the internet and especially (D)DoS. The fact that you're under attack, doesn't mean you can just rate limit and be over with it. You can't limit the number of requests are being sent and thus the only thing you can do is rate limit the responses to such requests so that you don't clog your upload. Most providers do have synchronous and separated bandwidth thus your down link will be full anyway.
Actually, this depends upon what technologies you have deployed. I was writing from the perspective of a tier-1 ISP operator. You certainly can blackhole traffic matching certain characteristics or hand it off to a dedicated filtering appliance which filters out particular patterns and onramps the remaining traffic back into your network. Additionally, more and more a large ISPs are starting to sell this service to their large customers, so as the recipient of a DDoS attack I log into a dedicated interface, insert the attack characteristics I'm seeing, and my ISP filters the attack at his peering edge, before the rest of it ever transits his network and reaches me.
Reactive (automated) things repel me too. I've seen them, evaluated them but the program/computer/system is too 'dumb' to recognize something bad is happening and where exactly to solve it.
In general this is true, but in particular there are exceptions. I've seen logs of major DDoS attacks automatically castrated while the admin was away over the weekend. Obviously you have to be very conservative about this to prevent false positives and a lot of network admins are understandable hesitant.
You could implement a type of AI, but then it's getting too expensive. The other thing is: who decides and how. You can set rules, but then you have to operate within the rules. You can set self-adjusting rules, but then if the attacker's intelligence > systems intelligence, it can still be altered, bent or even misused.
A well crafted system is self-adjusting, but without pulling people out of the loop. You can certainly implement some hard and fast rules though by white-listing critical traffic. When the "AI" decides an attack is occurring and shuts down traffic, it should have a auto-generated picture (relational database) of what traffic is normal and what traffic is vital. Thus it can follow priorities and shut down Web traffic to some office, while still allowing the payroll server to connect to the bank.
The problem is, that since anyone can't just influence the system, you'll eventually have a problem and the system is going to shut you and everyone else out. If you meddle with it, the system will go reactive and you'll have your favorite sci-fi horror movie realized
Umm if we were there for AIs a lot of out problems would already be gone and replaced with a different set of problems. If this ever happens I'll be more worried about who the mail server is voting for than whether or not my e-mail is marked as spam. I think we just walked off the deep end of this conversation.
The iPod is not tied to iTMS. If an online music vendor chooses to sell songs in MP3 or even AAC there is nothing preventing them from doing so, and those songs would play just fine on an iPod.
iPods ship with a copy of iTunes which accesses the iTMS. That is called "bundling" which is one common form of tying. iTMS implements Fairplay as does the iPod. iPod's do not implement any competing DRM schemes nor can other online stores implement Fairplay. As such, iTMS has the capabilities to satisfy the RIAA and get them to allow sales via that channel for iPod users. No other store can do that, thus they cannot sell RIAA songs (at the same price) to iPod users. That is another form of tying.
Here's a simple test for tying. Can other parties do the same thing as the company potentially tying? If not, is that because that company produces both products. If the answers are No and Yes respectively, you have tying.
You can[use Mplayer], or at least there are no legal prohibitions against it.
Can I play Fairplay encoded songs from the iTMS using Mplayer? Nope. Does Mplayer ship on a CD that comes with my iPod? Nope. Thus it is not a level playing field. The criteria for monopolistic tying is not "is there any way to make this happen or does the law stop me from doing this." It is "am I in any way motivated to use one product over another, because of something done with the monopolized product."
There is, for example, a Winamp plug-in that allows you to sync up your Winamp library with your iPod. All it would take is the makers of the software choosing to do so.
What you're missing is even if the Winamp team makes it upload to the iPod, they can't make it play DRM'd songs and they don't get to include their program on the CD that came with the iPod. Assuming Apple has monopoly influence (70% is where the courts start looking, about where Apple is now) this is illegal and the courts are supposed to stop Apple from continuing to do so.
The interview ranges over firewalling, logging, NIDS(Network Intrusion Detection System) and IPS(Intrusion Prevention System), how to fight DDoS(Distributed Denial of Service), and the future of BGP(Border Gateway Protocol) and DNS(Domain Name System).
If you don't know what all of these are, the chances are you won't care about or understand what he has to say anyway.
From TFA:
What do you think about reactive firewalls, also knows as IPS (Intrusion Prevention Systems)?
Bill Cheswick: Reactive security is an idea that keeps popping up. It seems logical. Why not send out a virus to cure a virus, for example? How about having an attacked host somehow stifle the attacker, or tell a firewall to block the noxious packets.
These are very tricky things to do, and the danger is always that an attacker can make you DOS yourself or someone else. As an attacker, I can make you shut down connections by making them appear to misbehave. This is often easier than launching the original attack that the reactive system was designed to suppress. (By the way, this happens a lot in biological immune systems as well. There are a number of diseases that trigger dangerous or fatal immune system responses.)
So I am skeptical about these systems. They may work out, but I want to keep an eye on the actual user experiences with these.
I think that Mr. Cheswick is mostly correct in his opinions, but in the case of IPS's some of them certainly are effective, if not for mitigating minor attacks, at least for keeping the network up and running during these attacks. He talks about making a network operator DoS themselves by feigning an attack, but to make this work you have to assume there is no meat in the loop. Just because someone appears to attack me does not mean I filter all packets from that IP(s). I'm not going to let my network automatically block traffic, although rate limiting can be automated to some degree. The real thing is, if your tools allow you enough visibility into your network to map what is your normal and critical traffic, you can block large swaths of noncritical traffic without serious financial consequences. Compared to the cost of a complete outage, this is a huge leap forward.
Still, may of the IPS tools on the market today do not provide that ability and you need to get a good toolset together.
For all these problems, and others in the past, I have been impressed with the response of the network community. These problems, and others like security weaknesses, security exploits, etc., usually get dealt with in a few days. For example, the SYN packet DOS attacks in 1996 quickly brought together ad hoc teams of experts, and within a week, patches with new mitigations were appearing from the vendors. You can take the Internet down, but probably not for very long.
Since the 90's a lot more effort has gone into formalizing and speeding up collaboration. It used to be that if a major worm or something hit the internet, within a week it would be well known as people called each other and traded notes and techniques for mitigation. Today if I see a novel new and widespread attack, I also have up to date data as to whether or not it is hitting other ISPs and large networks and where and in what traffic rates via information they automatically share with me. Further, I can semi-automatically create a signature that matches that attack, a filter for that attack for my routers and firewall type devices, and share that information with them along with my notes. Even if the network is down, I still often have the contact info for the security people at those networks so if my Internet access is out I can look at who else has been hit and call them.
This has really started to take off only in the last year or so, but what Mr. Cheswick applied to the 90's is today that same process on speed. Personally, I think anyone would be hard pressed to take out "the internet" today and the closest one might come would be a very sneaky attack on the Windows monoculture.
That's all well and good - but there is no reason to ease up on Apple.
So you think it's fair to stop one company from taking an action, while not stopping another? You think applying the law differently to different people is fair?
If anything, their failure to institute DRM on their terms will ultimately aid in the fight against Redmond.
If Apple can't bundle ITMS and iTunes the market goes to MS and their licensees because they can bundle. So you think all music being encoded with DRM that MS has patented and all people using Windows Media Player as their music jukebox will "aid in the fight against Redmond." Care to explain how?
Everyday consumers are not far from the point where they can understand what's on the table with DRM.
Most people who understand DRM, don't care. Just because you do, does not mean handing the DRM market to Microsoft will change anyone's mind.
If Apple serves as sacrificial lamb, so be it.
So if we have to drive you personally into bankruptcy since you did not stand up to the entire industry and laws to prove that those laws are unethical you think that is okay? Or is it only okay when it is someone else?
Why should a special status be accorded Apple when they fail?
Special status is treating one player differently. We need to treat Apple and MS the same, not differently. Stopping Apple form tying while not stopping MS is treating MS specially, not the other way around.
Yes, ITMC owns the rights to the music catalogs...
Who is ITMC? What are you talking about?
Look, I loathe DRM as much as the next guy, but Apple's not using their market dominance to smack around, say, Microsoft from making a run at them.
Apple is using their market dominance through tying to motivate the dominance of a product in one market with a product in another. Assuming the iPod wields sufficient market dominance (debatable, it is borderline) then Apple using iPods to promote ITunes is just as illegal as Microsoft using Windows to promote Windows Media Player.
Ergo, this is just market forces at work. The market has spoken, and people prefer the iPod and iTunes to the competition.
The market has spoken that they prefer iPods, but do they prefer iTunes? Is it better than Mplayer? Is it better than WMP? Is it better than Realplayer? Because of the tying we don't know. Maybe a consumer thinks the iPod is the best portable out there, but they don't like the iTunes store but do want to buy mainstream music online. Supposing CDs are not an option for some reason (nearest store is 100 miles and shipping takes 3 weeks). Why should they have to go with the ITMS, just because they like iPods? Isn't it more efficient if the market decides each item individually?
Having a monopoly means you have a lot of power. I don't know if Apple is there yet, but they are close. If you have a monopoly and tie that monopoly to a product in a separate market, then market forces are not "at work" they are bypassed. That is why it is illegal.
The real problem here is that there is already a monopoly illegally tied to a competitor in that space. Microsoft has tied their player and DRM to their OS. The minute Apple is forbidden from tying iTunes to iPods, Microsoft will take over that market because they have not been stopped from tying Windows to it. It is hypocritical and counter-productive to stop Apple after not stopping MS. That is not the free market at work, that is handing the market to a a well established, abusive monopoly instead of a company on the verge of being a monopoly with no history of abuse.
I disagree that they should not "monkey with the system." Monopolistic tying ruins markets and destroys the advantages of capitalism. But they do need to apply their monkeying equally.
So here's the deal. Apple has a near monopoly on portable music players. As such, they wield a lot of power normal companies do not. Thus, all other things equal, it is perfectly reasonable for the law to require them not to tie the iPod to their store and DRM and jukebox software. I think this is makes sense and benefits consumers. Just because I have an iPod (theoretically) doesn't mean I should have to buy my music from Apple instead of Sony's online store. Likewise, I should be able to use Mplayer of Windows Media player on equal ground with ITunes.
So here's the problem. Microsoft also has tied their DRM (which they license to stores) and their music jukebox software to a monopolized product (Windows). They have even been convicted of this by the EU courts. But no one has stopped them from this tying and the "punishment" was useless and did nothing.
I'm all for mandating only open standards, including DRM, for music players in a given country or the EU. But stopping Apple from tying while not stopping Microsoft is not justice, it is handing the market to Microsoft. As soon as Windows Media Player can interoperate with iPods it will own the market (it already owns a lot of it). Allowing MS to tie their jukebox software to Windows, but not letting Apple tie their jukebox software to iPods is enforcing a double standard.
All of this relates to public perception. People are accustomed to tolerating illegal lock-in with their operating system since it has been standard practice for years. People are less accustomed to the same for portable music players. Enforce the law against both of them or neither.
I'm sure it isn't CVS, although it is versioning so the functionality is similar. Actually, it seems that Apple has moved to SVN internally, and SVN is included by default with Leopard (although not as part of the filesystem versioning). With a little luck, CVS will slowly wither away and die as SVN takes over. How I hate thee CVS... let me count the ways: no file moving, no file renaming, horrible handling of binaries...
Also, Apple seems to be providing this "time machine" functionality as an API to applications so that someone making a word processor, for example, can incorporate versioning of a file as well as merging and resolving differences in versions, rather than treating binaries as blobs and forcing application developers to create their own, parallel, solution.
This is probably just me being ignorant about power distribution, but is this a universal thing or just a by-product of the US's diverse power 'grid'?
Whenever you have small power sources coming in and out of the grid you'll have extra work compensating for that. Further, because the backbone is all three phase, adding and subtracting these sources is not at all straightforward or simple. The US power grid is a lot more fragile than other places (I know a guy who took out half a state via a cascade failure with one bad switch, that most power engineers would not have seen coming either). That said power generation and distribution are different, related tasks. The more diverse the generation, the more complex the the distribution is going to be.
what can be so complex about hooking thousands of smaller nodes into the grid aside from slightly more intelligent substations?
If your substation is constantly in need of different amounts of power, and may in fact have a surplus of power at different times, then you need to provide a way to buffer that from the system (expensive). Also, a lot of the local failures are the result of spikes and the more amateur operated, rarely serviced machinery you have the more likely it is that it will cause problems. Customers are not as granularly isolated as they should be for this. A lot of people think of power with a water pipe metaphor, but it is not exactly the same thing. When you realize that a lot of the power network is actually three parallel lines 120 degrees out of phase, with one another and connected not in a single line, but in an interconnected grid, the balance of those is a necessary components can be very fragile.
this is a php bug not an MS one, MS provides a search interface that allows applications to register there file types as searchable, php does not do this and hence XP search does not search there contents automatically.
Actually, I think this is a bug on MS's part. Assuming that all file types are associated with a given application is a serious mistake. What application should be registering HTML, PHP, XML, .c, Jamfile, .eps, h, .pl, etc? These are all common file types and should be supported out of the box. On OS X you drop a plugin in the /Library/Spotlight or ~/Library/Spotlight folder and searching works for those filetypes. Lots of applications come with these and add them and you can also grab them and add them yourself. Apple even maintains a free download site where developers put these. I've not yet seen an easy way to add common filetypes to the new Vista search functionality. Theoretically I know it is possible, but where is the OpenOffice plug-in?
It does function as a search! It searches the start menu, which makes perfect sense seeing as that's where it is! Do you expect the search box in Firefox's history sidebar to launch a google search?
This is just wrong. Things in the start menu generally apply to the entire OS, not to the start menu. Would you expect the Controls and Settings in the start menu to be settings for the OS, or just for the start menu. As a global feature of the OS, this is where most people look for functionality that applies to the filesystem and OS in general. It should be labeled "Search Start Menu" or should apply globally.
And it's not like it's useless or detracts from the UI in any way
It does detract form the UI. Every time a user tries to do something and finds it does not work as expected, it detracts. And what about when people think this is a global search, it finds nothing, and they are misled into thinking the file is gone? While Vista's search capabilities are much better than they used to be, they screwed up the UI component, as usual.
I guess the issue for MS is, that you and I (computer guru's) have picked up and embraced the XP paradigm but people like my wife never get it no matter how many times it is explained to her. So MS tried to move to another paradigm (am I using this properly?) to help more non-technical people understand how to find "basic" information.
I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're wrong. I don't think changing these names and rearranging things is more usable to people with a different overall viewpoint of using Windows. I think they are changes that happened because some middle manager wanted to make their mark. Both these examples are steps backward in usability based upon existing best practices. It is remotely possible that MS did extensive and well performed usability tests and concluded that this is beneficial to some subset of users, but I think it highly unlikely. From talking to ex-MS employees and simply looking at their changes and lack of changes over time I suspect MS has a number of good UI experts who work for them, and whose work is constantly undermined by marketing and management that insists on changing or not changing things that the UI people recommend.
There is no downside about not paying electrical bills but when you start supplying it at no cost, that's another ball game, the companies arent stupid if they dont have to cough up dough to maintain the equipment since you'll be paying for any broken parts of your solar installation.
It's a lot worse than that. The laws that require electric companies to pay you for electricity are not there to compensate for the electric company trying to maintain an electricity generation monopoly. If you are dumping small amounts of power onto the grid in diverse places it probably costs them more money to deal with your erratic power spikes and the like than it saves them in generation costs. Aside from the cost of maintaining equipment and keeping the system balanced, the power grid is not designed to handle distributed power generation. It is a worthwhile goal that every house be able to sustain itself and contribute to the system as a whole, but it takes a lot more than getting the power generation component of that cost effective.
My dad had a friend a while back that did this, I think maybe in Oregon or Washington, but I don't recall. He had a large property with a decent sized stream running through it, and set up a water wheel.
If you have a constantly running stream is is by far the most efficient source of power I could find. Waterwheels are a bit dated, but you can buy a water powered generator that looks a lot like an outboard motor, but works in reverse.
This is not something your average Chicago suburbanite is going to be able to swing effectively.
Chicago is not the place for solar panels at their current efficiencies and prices. Due to the latitude and weather you're getting 1/3 the light someone in southern CA is and snow will make them useless until it melts. Interestingly, almost any location that has that sort of weather (lake effect) also tends to have reliable winds, which are probably your best bet for a low-end solution. Even those, however, are not particularly cost effective compared to just investing the money you would spend.
I haven't run the numbers lately but most of the methods that are likely to work require significant up front investment. One option you might want to look into in Chicago is a natural gas or propane fuel cell designed for residential use. Last I looked $10K is about the bottom of the line, but it generates power whenever it is cost effective versus the electric co's prices, provides a backup if the grid goes down, and the waste heat can be tied into a forced air or radiator based heating system. Another option is a ground heat pump, which is basically a series of tubes that run into the ground and pull up air from underground to reduce heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Depending upon the size of your lot, however, this may not be an option.
n the trailing 9 months ending on July 1, 2006, Apple received nearly $1.5 billion in net sales from its iTunes-related business. Yes, that's only a 1/4 of what it got from iPod sales, but I'm willing to bet the profit margins are much better on iTunes sales than they are on iPods.
You don't have to guess. Apple has made it very clear that while they are not losing money on the iTunes Music Store, it is only barely doing more than keeping itself afloat and further Apple said that was their intention. iPods on the other hand accounts for 30-40% of Apples profit each quarter. Apple has informed their investors about this strategy a long time ago.
The real problem here is that we know that the most that the average person is going to do is complain, and that people can put as much horrible advertising in games as they want and no one will stop them or stop buying the games.
I will. You see I'm part of the largest market segment, the casual gaming market. I have choices and will choose the games that don't annoy me.
How do we, or me at least, know this? Television. They now have television advertising during the shows, covering up huge portions of the screen.
TV is nearly a monopoly in many places and the production/distribution buyout locks out most smaller players. That said, I don't watch ads on TV. I skip them with my DVR. If there are ads on the screen while I'm watching, I simply don't watch. If I want to see a series, I'm happy to get it on Netflix. More and more TV is moving towards IP TV, which may bring competition back... we'll see. The point is, computer games are already in that democratized distribution channel. If a game comes out with annoying ads in it, are you going to buy it? If so, you have yourself to blame.
*It costs money to produce new DRM schemes.
Yeah, but only a tiny amount compared to the revenues from music. I don't think this is a factor. Deploying is probably more expensive than creating DRM.
*DRM is easily and routinely cracked or bypassed by pirates. *The people who want to pirate will pirate, the people who willingly buy music will continue to do so.
Both of these address what I feel to be an incorrect assumption. They assume the main purpose of DRM is to stop music pirates. I think this is 100% false. The purpose of DRM is to motivate people who do obey the law, to buy additional copies of music they have already purchased once. The RIAA's greatest fear is as follows: Music goes digital and everyone backs up that music on redundant and remote storage making data loss almost unheard of. Then people play that same copy on their portable, their living room stereo, in the car, as their cell phone ring tone, or in whatever new device is created in the future. Worse, children inherit this music when people die so it is handed down forever or sold in the secondary market.
DRM is about making sure that eventually all copies of music become obsolete or broken so that they have to purchased anew for new devices. It is about making sure fair use combined with better technology does not undermine their ability to resell the work done by people long dead.
Even if they don't totally abandon DRM, I can see them giving up on building the perfect scheme and just sticking with the easily bypassed and/or cracked schemes they have now. If someone claims that it somehow cost-effective to try and stay a step ahead of the pirates' ability to crack DRM...
Of course it isn't cost effective to do this and it never has been. People who don't care about the law just need a recording device. If I can hear it, so can the recorder. One person does this and posts it online and that's all there is to it. DRM is unworkable for stopping piracy and the RIAA knows that. It is not about stopping piracy. Of course easily crack-able DRM works pretty well for stopping people who obey the law, which is why they are likely to stay with current versions for a while before they move on and to a new, incompatible one to motivate people to buy another copy that works with new devices.