See, the current business model for music (sell recorded music bound
to physical objects such as CDs) is, if not dying, on shakey ground.
The reason Sony hasn't moved to widespread DRM is that they make three
times as much money selling MP3 players as they do selling CDs.
I think Jobs is trying to get Apple to that place as well. He wants
to use Universal's content as a way to drive up demand for iPods and
iMacs.
If that's it, this is good news. It means a big chunk of the music industry will be owned by someone who'll just laugh at the RIAA.
What I noticed about the software/services described here is that 1)
they could be extremely useful to large organizations (e.g. General
Motors) for locating existing resources within the company WAN and 2)
they are all to some extent research projects.
I think this is a pretty clear-cut case of the RIAA attempting to
hinder technological progress in defence of its business model.
They're not going to win, though. This software is useful
for all sorts of things, not just music piracy. It infringes as much
as Google does.
This suit is bullying, plain and simple. I just hope the defendants
have good lawyers.
And I hope the RIAA gets busted for barratry over this.
Of course not. This is the company that's putting out reverse-switch ads aimed at Apple users. From the way they act, I can't help but think that MS management lies awake at night worrying that someone who isn't them is making money in computers.
Actually, their real anxiety is that someone will do to them what they did to IBM. The idea that PCs would replace mainframes was such an alien concept to IBM that they never even noticed it until it was too late. Then along comes the DOS PC and suddenly, MS has succeeded IBM as the Evil Empire.
MS management is so afraid that something like that will happen to them that they go after everything.
I just want to mention that April Fools to me has always been to make up BELIEVABLE stories that you can gloat over later - which really adds to more of the fun.
Perhaps I'm being trolled here, but I went ahead and downloaded the interpreter and wrote a toy program with it, so this is a real language.
that this state of things won't last. Once most people realize that it's the cost of ink cartridges that's important, they'll start pricing those first before buying a printer.
Then, being able to use generic cartridges will become a selling point, so the printer makers will need to make their printers compatible with the generic cartridges. That will increase the volume of generic cartridges, driving the price down, which increases demand for printers, which drives up their production volume, which (in the long run) drives down their prices and outcompeting the proprietary printers.
Eventually, proprietary printers will go the way of the Atari ST.
CP/M -- the precursor to what could have been DOS if only Kildall hadn't been out flying his airplane the on the day IBM knocked on his door.
<nitpick> Actually, this isn't true. Kildall had a long talk with the IBM people but decided he didn't like their offer. Apparently, they wanted to pay him a flat fee for a CP/M license and he wanted more. IBM went to Microsoft who agreed to the deal (for less cash up front but with the right to license DOS to other companies. The rest is history.
</nitpick>
The only way to make money from piracy is to actually sell pirated copies of things. So by promoting file-sharing networks, cheap CD-ROMs and burners and the like, you can let average people copy things themselves, thereby undercutting the commercial pirates.
Likewise, DRM technologies generally work by making it inconvenient or expensive to make copies. As a result, the only people who do make copies are professional pirates--those who can make money off of the copies to pay for the equipment and, presumably, use the excess to fund terrorism.
Therefore, Hollywood and the music industry must immediately stop using any sort of copy protection at all and lower their prices worldwide. Furthermore, all file-sharing networks must immediately be legalized and legitimized worldwide.
Only in this way can they undercut the pirates and dry up this source of funds for terrorists.
I realize that it's a big sacrifice for the content industries, but it's one that must be made and I, for one, salute them for it.
1. I'm pretty sure that the program is some variety of snake oil.
Whether it's an interesting AI project that might sometimes work or a
pure fraud remains to be seen.
2. This won't change anything, even if it works. The major
labels already use focus groups and mixing factories to make sure
every piece of music they release is bland. (Why? Because recording
has gotten too expensive, so they need to make every release a "sure
thing", so they spend millions on focus groups and big-name mixers.)
This program, even if it works, can't possibly make things worse.
I know I might sound completely moronic when I say this, but I
think the title 'NetHack' is almost, but not quite, entirely
misleading to the actual theme of the game.
That's just part of Nethack's charm.
Back when I was a quasi-regular in rec.games.roguelike.nethack, we'd
get about one confused skr1pt k1dd13 per week looking for cr4kz and
w4r3z. My absolute favourite of these was the one who said (paraphrased),
Would somebody please mailbomb $EMAIL_ADDRESS. He says I'm not
elite.
I tell ya, you don't get that grade of comedy with Diablo II.
Even ignoring the issue of whether they take a loss on console sales,
they still make most of their money on game publishing rights.
If MS were to sign a Linux kernel or boot-loader, people could write
Linux games for the XBox and publish them without going through MS.
Not only does that deprive them of publishing revenues, but it takes
away their ability to control the kinds of games available for the
XBox, something that gives marketers palpitations.
Notice how Sony handled this: they released a Linux kit for the PS 2
which costs as much as the console itself but provides the ability to
develop for it. The kit is very carefully designed (and licenced) so
that the software you develop with it will only work on consoles with
the Linux kit. This encourages the hobbyists (i.e. potential future
developers) while maintaining Sony's control over the platform. After
all, who's going to fork over an extra three hundred bucks just to
play Manholes of Venus.
If I were in MS's position, I'd do a similar thing--sell an extended
BIOS chip or similar add-on that has an extra key--priced to cover the loss on the
console. Then, I'd sign any open-source project that wasn't just a
scheme to run W4R3Z3D games (plus whatever Windows-based OS I wanted
to get the hobbyists interested in).
History Repeats Itself
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps I'm showing my age here, but I saw a similar story in an ad for Apple some years ago. The headline also read Baked Apple and showed a picture of a really toasted computer. In this case though, it appears that the computer in question had been at the center of a small house fire, but once again, it still worked and only needed a new case and keyboard.
Only, the computer wasn't a Mac. It was an original Apple II.
I keep seeing stuff about new BeOS variants on the street, but the
most "official" thing I have heard is that Palm owns it.
As I understand it, we have several different variants:
BeOS Professional Edition is the commercial version of BeOS. It
now belongs to Palm but (IIRC) someone still has the right to sell
copies through an older agreement with Be.
BeOS Personal Edition is the free-as-in-beer version of BeOS that
you could download from Be. There are still mirrors of it and AFAIK,
you can still legally put it up for download. It requires a Windows
or Linux installation to work.
The BeOS Developer Edition above is apparently a release of BeOS Max
Edition. This is basically BeOS Personal Edition with patches
applied, new drivers and various open-source contributions. It's
maintained by volunteers.
BlueOS is basically a Linux distribution with a BeOS
compatibility layer. I'm not sure how complete it is.
OpenBeOS is an
open-source re-implementation of BeOS. AIUI, they're basically
replacing BeOS components one by one.
Atheos is a completely
different open-source OS that sort of resembles BeOS.
Bill Hayden
forked it and along with the Linux kernel, made a BeOS-compatible
OS.
And there you go.
Note that I'm not really a BeOS enthusiast, so I may be wrong about
some of these. However, that's what it looks like to me.
Remember the 80's? Remember how all those software companies used to copy-protect their code? And how that managed to piss off their customers, so they'd switch to unprotected competing software? And how those companies went belly-up as a result?
Well, it's time for some 80's nostalgia.
--Chris...Now, where'd I leave that Big Country CD?..
There's actually a very good reason for this idea of putting The Rightful King on the throne.
In a medieval society, the absolute worst tyrant on the throne was still better for the common people than a war of succession. If you put the King's son on the throne, there's at least a reasonable chance of stability, but if the line of succession is unclear, you often end up with a long, bloody war.
WRT Brin, I think he worries too much. Sure, we like the trappings of royalty, but I think most people would start getting upset the moment some King declared that he was better than them. Monarchy is a product of the whole medieval world view, with a heirarchal view of society. We don't have that anymore. Today's royalty have exactly the same status as movie stars.
Canada still has the Queen of England as its official leader and this hasn't stopped it from being a democratic nation. Aside from appearing on TV a couple of times a year and visiting once in a while, the Monarchy has no real-world affect on us.
People who find pop-ups so annoying that they've gone to the trouble of installing software just to get rid of them will, when forced to look at pop-ups, still think favourably of the advertisers and buy from them.
Maybe they should try cold-calling people at 3:00 am. And wrapping flyers around bricks and then launching them through people's windows is certainly going to get them read.
This sort of thing happens a lot in the movie industry. Typically, profits are juggled like this in order to reduce taxes. That's why, if you ever make a royalty deal with a movie studio, make sure you're getting a percentage of the gross, not the net profits.
[Disclaimer: I haven't read the article. The linked site seems to have
succumbed to the Slashdot effect.]
If you want to reach an audience, or just play webmaster, paying for
hosting is far cheaper and more effective than screwing around with
cable modems. If you just want to warez, or just generally be a
jackass, your complaining is irrelevant to the article's claims of
corporate censorship.
What if I want to run a redirector from my PC at my-hostname.ca to my website at
www.my-hostname.ca? Or learn how to administrate a live Apache
installation? Or host the ssh-in-Java applet so I can ssh to my
computer from an Internet kiosk? Or develop a web-based application
in Lisp? Or to run a MUD server? Or an NNTP server carrying some
private newsgroups? Or host a Quake server for a few of my friends?
I agree with you that commercial hosting is the way to go if you want
to run a website, but there are a lot of legitimate, cool and useful
things that I want to do that really do require letting me run
(semi-)public services on my PC, something my current cable ISP forbids. While I don't object to them making sure that I don't use more
bandwidth than I've paid for, how I use that bandwidth is
really none of their business.
Calling it "trecharous computing" makes him sound like a kook, not a serious voice.
I was talking about Palladium with a geek friend of mine the other day and after a while, he pointed out that I sounded like I should be wearing a tinfoil hat.
And he was right. But it was all true. Palladium is one of those things that, if you explain it to non-geeks, makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist.
So, I've resolved to keep my explanation simpler. If any non-geek asks me about Pd, I'll just say that it's just MS trying to protect its monopoly and that it will make it a lot harder to make backup copies of movies and music.
Both are (IMHO) true and plausible and don't make it sound like the evil conspiracy it really is.
I don't have any objection to getting a free service in exchange for
being shown ads, but unless it was perfectly executed, I don't think
I'd use such a system. It's going to be a source of all kinds of
headaches:
If the banner-ad system doesn't support Linux, I'm out right
there. Using Windows is too high a price to pay.
The advertiser will insist that the banner always be on top.
Unfortunately, this makes it really annoying when you get a window
title-bar under the banner.
If the banner is too big, it'll eat my screen real-estate and I
won't be able to do anything useful. Since most of your users will be
using laptops, "too big" isn't really that big anymore.
If the banner has lots of animation, it will be too distracting
most of the time and I won't use it.
If the banner system uses Flash, it will like thrash the crap out
of my little Pentium Thinkpad, so I won't use it.
My guess is that even if you manage to get enough advertisers to fund
this thing, the ad system itself will make the service unusable.
You might be better off just leaving locked boxes with coin slots and
a sign asking for a donation of a dollar per hour online. That will
at least make the system easy for people to pay for.
Really, if you think about it, this is the obvious step.
At some point, it becomes cheaper to just write your own version of the software than to pay the per-seat license fees that MS and other commercial software vendors charge. If you're a large organization (or a consortium of really large organizations), writing your office apps in-house is economically viable. It's even moreso if you've already got open-source components to work from.
And open-sourcing everything--even if you aren't legally obligated to--costs nothing and often means that you get free additions to the project.
This sounds remarkably like the first step in George William Herbert's "Phobos on the Cheap" paper, here.
The basic idea of the paper is that you could fund the development of these things by doing satellite maintenance and related things, then use one of them as the propulsion system for a trip to Mars orbit.
Anyone who's read USENET for any length of time can see that this guy is just a net.kook. Of course, on USENET, he'd just be mocked by the Kibologists.
Slashdot Mirror
See, the current business model for music (sell recorded music bound to physical objects such as CDs) is, if not dying, on shakey ground. The reason Sony hasn't moved to widespread DRM is that they make three times as much money selling MP3 players as they do selling CDs.
I think Jobs is trying to get Apple to that place as well. He wants to use Universal's content as a way to drive up demand for iPods and iMacs.
If that's it, this is good news. It means a big chunk of the music industry will be owned by someone who'll just laugh at the RIAA.
What I noticed about the software/services described here is that 1) they could be extremely useful to large organizations (e.g. General Motors) for locating existing resources within the company WAN and 2) they are all to some extent research projects.
I think this is a pretty clear-cut case of the RIAA attempting to hinder technological progress in defence of its business model.
They're not going to win, though. This software is useful for all sorts of things, not just music piracy. It infringes as much as Google does.
This suit is bullying, plain and simple. I just hope the defendants have good lawyers.
And I hope the RIAA gets busted for barratry over this.
Of course not. This is the company that's putting out reverse-switch ads aimed at Apple users. From the way they act, I can't help but think that MS management lies awake at night worrying that someone who isn't them is making money in computers.
Actually, their real anxiety is that someone will do to them what they did to IBM. The idea that PCs would replace mainframes was such an alien concept to IBM that they never even noticed it until it was too late. Then along comes the DOS PC and suddenly, MS has succeeded IBM as the Evil Empire.
MS management is so afraid that something like that will happen to them that they go after everything.
Perhaps I'm being trolled here, but I went ahead and downloaded the interpreter and wrote a toy program with it, so this is a real language.
And that is the real April Fool's joke.
Then, being able to use generic cartridges will become a selling point, so the printer makers will need to make their printers compatible with the generic cartridges. That will increase the volume of generic cartridges, driving the price down, which increases demand for printers, which drives up their production volume, which (in the long run) drives down their prices and outcompeting the proprietary printers.
Eventually, proprietary printers will go the way of the Atari ST.
<nitpick> Actually, this isn't true. Kildall had a long talk with the IBM people but decided he didn't like their offer. Apparently, they wanted to pay him a flat fee for a CP/M license and he wanted more. IBM went to Microsoft who agreed to the deal (for less cash up front but with the right to license DOS to other companies. The rest is history. </nitpick>
I wonder if Redhat and Mandrake will be able to get the logo in time...
Likewise, DRM technologies generally work by making it inconvenient or expensive to make copies. As a result, the only people who do make copies are professional pirates--those who can make money off of the copies to pay for the equipment and, presumably, use the excess to fund terrorism.
Therefore, Hollywood and the music industry must immediately stop using any sort of copy protection at all and lower their prices worldwide. Furthermore, all file-sharing networks must immediately be legalized and legitimized worldwide. Only in this way can they undercut the pirates and dry up this source of funds for terrorists.
I realize that it's a big sacrifice for the content industries, but it's one that must be made and I, for one, salute them for it.
I'd never heard of Code Red until that IIS worm. Maybe that's what Raging Cow needs too.
After all, aren't they trying to do viral marketing here?
1. I'm pretty sure that the program is some variety of snake oil. Whether it's an interesting AI project that might sometimes work or a pure fraud remains to be seen.
2. This won't change anything, even if it works. The major labels already use focus groups and mixing factories to make sure every piece of music they release is bland. (Why? Because recording has gotten too expensive, so they need to make every release a "sure thing", so they spend millions on focus groups and big-name mixers.) This program, even if it works, can't possibly make things worse.
That's just part of Nethack's charm.
Back when I was a quasi-regular in rec.games.roguelike.nethack, we'd get about one confused skr1pt k1dd13 per week looking for cr4kz and w4r3z. My absolute favourite of these was the one who said (paraphrased),
I tell ya, you don't get that grade of comedy with Diablo II.
Because they make their money on the games.
Even ignoring the issue of whether they take a loss on console sales, they still make most of their money on game publishing rights. If MS were to sign a Linux kernel or boot-loader, people could write Linux games for the XBox and publish them without going through MS.
Not only does that deprive them of publishing revenues, but it takes away their ability to control the kinds of games available for the XBox, something that gives marketers palpitations.
Notice how Sony handled this: they released a Linux kit for the PS 2 which costs as much as the console itself but provides the ability to develop for it. The kit is very carefully designed (and licenced) so that the software you develop with it will only work on consoles with the Linux kit. This encourages the hobbyists (i.e. potential future developers) while maintaining Sony's control over the platform. After all, who's going to fork over an extra three hundred bucks just to play Manholes of Venus.
If I were in MS's position, I'd do a similar thing--sell an extended BIOS chip or similar add-on that has an extra key--priced to cover the loss on the console. Then, I'd sign any open-source project that wasn't just a scheme to run W4R3Z3D games (plus whatever Windows-based OS I wanted to get the hobbyists interested in).
Perhaps I'm showing my age here, but I saw a similar story in an ad for Apple some years ago. The headline also read Baked Apple and showed a picture of a really toasted computer. In this case though, it appears that the computer in question had been at the center of a small house fire, but once again, it still worked and only needed a new case and keyboard.
Only, the computer wasn't a Mac. It was an original Apple II.
As I understand it, we have several different variants:
And there you go.
Note that I'm not really a BeOS enthusiast, so I may be wrong about some of these. However, that's what it looks like to me.
Remember the 80's? Remember how all those software companies used to copy-protect their code? And how that managed to piss off their customers, so they'd switch to unprotected competing software? And how those companies went belly-up as a result?
...Now, where'd I leave that Big Country CD?..
Well, it's time for some 80's nostalgia.
--Chris
There's actually a very good reason for this idea of putting The Rightful King on the throne.
In a medieval society, the absolute worst tyrant on the throne was still better for the common people than a war of succession. If you put the King's son on the throne, there's at least a reasonable chance of stability, but if the line of succession is unclear, you often end up with a long, bloody war.
WRT Brin, I think he worries too much. Sure, we like the trappings of royalty, but I think most people would start getting upset the moment some King declared that he was better than them. Monarchy is a product of the whole medieval world view, with a heirarchal view of society. We don't have that anymore. Today's royalty have exactly the same status as movie stars.
Canada still has the Queen of England as its official leader and this hasn't stopped it from being a democratic nation. Aside from appearing on TV a couple of times a year and visiting once in a while, the Monarchy has no real-world affect on us.
Consider their basic assumption:
People who find pop-ups so annoying that they've gone to the trouble of installing software just to get rid of them will, when forced to look at pop-ups, still think favourably of the advertisers and buy from them.
Maybe they should try cold-calling people at 3:00 am. And wrapping flyers around bricks and then launching them through people's windows is certainly going to get them read.
Sheesh!
This sort of thing happens a lot in the movie industry. Typically, profits are juggled like this in order to reduce taxes. That's why, if you ever make a royalty deal with a movie studio, make sure you're getting a percentage of the gross, not the net profits.
If you want to reach an audience, or just play webmaster, paying for hosting is far cheaper and more effective than screwing around with cable modems. If you just want to warez, or just generally be a jackass, your complaining is irrelevant to the article's claims of corporate censorship.
What if I want to run a redirector from my PC at my-hostname.ca to my website at www.my-hostname.ca? Or learn how to administrate a live Apache installation? Or host the ssh-in-Java applet so I can ssh to my computer from an Internet kiosk? Or develop a web-based application in Lisp? Or to run a MUD server? Or an NNTP server carrying some private newsgroups? Or host a Quake server for a few of my friends?
I agree with you that commercial hosting is the way to go if you want to run a website, but there are a lot of legitimate, cool and useful things that I want to do that really do require letting me run (semi-)public services on my PC, something my current cable ISP forbids. While I don't object to them making sure that I don't use more bandwidth than I've paid for, how I use that bandwidth is really none of their business.
Calling it "trecharous computing" makes him sound like a kook, not a serious voice.
I was talking about Palladium with a geek friend of mine the other day and after a while, he pointed out that I sounded like I should be wearing a tinfoil hat.
And he was right. But it was all true. Palladium is one of those things that, if you explain it to non-geeks, makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist.
So, I've resolved to keep my explanation simpler. If any non-geek asks me about Pd, I'll just say that it's just MS trying to protect its monopoly and that it will make it a lot harder to make backup copies of movies and music.
Both are (IMHO) true and plausible and don't make it sound like the evil conspiracy it really is.
I am shocked--shocked, I say--to hear that Kazaa, a fine purveyor of music-stealing software, would behave in such an unethical manner.
I don't have any objection to getting a free service in exchange for being shown ads, but unless it was perfectly executed, I don't think I'd use such a system. It's going to be a source of all kinds of headaches:
My guess is that even if you manage to get enough advertisers to fund this thing, the ad system itself will make the service unusable.
You might be better off just leaving locked boxes with coin slots and a sign asking for a donation of a dollar per hour online. That will at least make the system easy for people to pay for.
Really, if you think about it, this is the obvious step.
At some point, it becomes cheaper to just write your own version of the software than to pay the per-seat license fees that MS and other commercial software vendors charge. If you're a large organization (or a consortium of really large organizations), writing your office apps in-house is economically viable. It's even moreso if you've already got open-source components to work from.
And open-sourcing everything--even if you aren't legally obligated to--costs nothing and often means that you get free additions to the project.
This sounds remarkably like the first step in George William Herbert's "Phobos on the Cheap" paper, here.
The basic idea of the paper is that you could fund the development of these things by doing satellite maintenance and related things, then use one of them as the propulsion system for a trip to Mars orbit.
So I wonder if this is that project.
Salon is easy to troll.
Anyone who's read USENET for any length of time can see that this guy is just a net.kook. Of course, on USENET, he'd just be mocked by the Kibologists.