It proves that the commonly parroted argument of 1 pirated copy == 1 lost sale is also a steaming pile of bullshit.
Thus, anyone worrying about piracy affecting the bottomline of their business is just wasting their time and money. Further, with a few more experiments like this, any company treating all of its customers as criminals by default (with things like DRM) whilst using the "evil pirate" defense should be a nice big fat target for a class-action lawsuit.
So these people can predict the future now?! Really, you never know what is going to happen for sure.
If you want to see what's going to happen in regard to mechanical vs solid state hard disks, you don't need a crystal ball. Just look at the transition from CRT to LCD displays. It wasn't so long ago (seems like only a few years) that LCD monitors were horribly expensive and that fact (combined with their other drawbacks) made them an unattractive option for most people. I can recall many, many people right here on Slashdot saying that they would never give up their enormous, power-hungry, failure-prone CRT displays. Now, you can't even buy a CRT computer monitor because LCD quality caught up and surpassed CRTs for most purposes while price plummeted. The same will happen with mechanical disks and SSDs. Maybe it'll happen faster, maybe slower, but it will happen.
Keep in mind also which company this "prediction" is coming from: Seagate lived a long and prosperous career engineering and manufacturing mechanical hard disks. They are a huge company whose entire operation is based around the concept of shipping hunks of metal with rotating platters inside. Since an SSD is just a bunch of memory chips duct-taped together, the memory companies (Transcend, Crucial, Corsair, Samsung, etc) were the first ones with SSDs on the market. The SSD thing likely hit Seagate by surprise and they can see that their run won't last long. It's not too late for them to start transitioning to manufacturing memory chips, but doing so would be brutal for many reasons. To start with, their decades of mechanical drive development experience, manufacturing facilities, engineers, trade secrets, R&D, etc are mostly about to be worthless. If they start selling this stuff off now while it's still fairly valuable, shareholders are going to do a huge "WTF?" and walk off. Second, the memory companies have a few years head start. Even if Seagate could enter the market and compete with them, the company would be leaving their position as a market leader to be a market newcomer, taking cues from everyone else. (Cue the sound of their last few shareholders stomping out.)
Basically, unless Seagate can buy up a few of the leading memory companies making SSDs right now, they're screwed. Until (or unless) that happens, all they can do right now is appease their shareholders and put their executives up on stage to have them parrot the lie that their business is going to be viable for a good long time yet. Oh, and frivolously sue all the SSD manufacturers on broad patent infringement grounds.
After watching the video linked to in TFA, I can't see how this is anything at all like Google Wave. All they apparently share in common is that they both have something to do with communication and the web.
I have yet to actually try it out, but to me, Raindrop looks like what would happen if you wrote an ordinary web email client and added support for twitter and facebook. I don't see why you couldn't achieve the same thing on the desktop with a few Thunderbird extensions.
The problem with that solution is that you're still supporting the system you claim to oppose.
When you download songs that are owned by an PRS or RIAA (or other equivalent, depending on your country) member label and don't pay them, you give them an excuse to claim that piracy is killing their business and that they deserve all kinds of special legal treatment. We know their "piracy" statistics are completely made up, but if someone ever goes out there and does a scientific survey of piracy, your downloads push the real numbers slightly closer to the made-up ones. And when you support RIAA-affiliated bands by buying a concert ticket or merchandise, you support the RIAA-affiliated labels. Once artists/bands start to realize that the RIAA is hurting their fans, they'll stop signing contracts with them.
There is lots of good independent music out there being made by people who care more about their music than how much money it makes them or how often they get played on the radio. More is arriving all the time since music production and distribution are incredibly cheap these days. The "music industry" is obsolete. By illegally downloading their music, you're not sticking it to anyone. You're propping up a business model that's on its final legs and is determined to take anyone it can down with it.
It wouldn't matter. PRS (and other countries' equivalents) have written the rules such that you're forced to pay royalties anyway under the assumption that the artist might one day join PRS. And even if musicians could opt-out, the burden would be on the radio station to prove (with documentation) that every single song they play isn't on the PRS's works list. And that it isn't a derivative of one.
The goals of organizations like PRS are two-fold:
1. To milk profits from public performances, even those where no revenue is being generated 2. To quash the whole idea of independent music regardless of genre, artist, or commercial intent
I have 5 mods points and wish I could use them all on the above comment.
Most people have no idea how much defense policy is (more or less) constructed by the defense contractors themselves. These firms invent scary-sounding problems and then offer expensive solutions. They develop nothing that they think can't be successfully pitched to the Pentagon. When a commander or committee buys into a billion-dollar project, they get a promotion and the contractor gets a billion taxpayer dollars.
I've seen this with my own eyes. Military bases are commanded by military commanders, but are largely run by contractors. Engineering; transportation; hospitality; I.T.; supply; training; build, vehicle, and aircraft maintenance; even physical security on occasion. I'm not saying that contractors shouldn't be utilized where it makes sense, but when I was in the military, I got the sense that the DoD was inching towards the goal of one day having companies run the entirety of all military operations, stopping short of actually contracting companies to fire the guns for them. (Although they are, if I'm not mistaken, already doing that.)
On the flipside, if I became severely ill in space, I'd (rightfully) panic, while I'd be more comfortable in an isolated trial, knowing that the full facilities of Moscow's health system were at my disposal, a few blocks away.
I dunno, I think I'd rather take my chances are Mars...
I'd really like to have an eBook reader. I'm one of those people who doesn't have the time to buy books from a bookstore or browse the library. I hate trying to find new creative places to store them in my home and don't want to deal with simply reselling them. I would love to read when I'm waiting in the doctor's office, winding down for the night, or driving to work but paperback books are just too inconvenient. The Kindle doesn't do it for me because the device has so much potential but is locked down with custom software and a "we control all your rightfully-purchased books" mentality. (Can't stand the keyboard, either.)
I've been waiting for an eBook reader that's closer to a general computing device than any of the options out there now. The hardware is certainly capable, no doubt about that. You can do a surprising number of useful tasks on a low-framerate monochrome display, but none of the current readers even attempt anything beyond reading a book. You could download and listen to podcasts, do (limited) web surfing, play some simple games, manage your schedule, and so on.
The LCD screen on the Nook already gives it an edge that other readers don't have, and I'm surprised that the price is as low as it is. If the Android app store is available as well, this could be a killer device. Let's hope B&N doesn't screw it up too badly.
I certainly hope so. If this reader can also do podcasts, play MP3s, and has a usable web browser (even if only over wifi), I'll be selling trading in my Nokia N800 for one of these.
These people can spew their bigotry in complete anonymity if they like; our laws and our Constitution guarantee that.
The constitution only guarantees freedom of speech. (And even then, only at the legislative level.) The Constitution does not guarantee anonymity in any case.
Of course, they obviously know this is NOT the case, and their efforts to conceal their signatures are no different than the white hoods the KKK used to wear.
Well, to be fair, a petition has so far not gone around killing people for sport.
What most people quite often fail to realise is that Latency is Good.
In some situations, but hardly all. PulseAudio needs to stop billing itself as a jack-of-all-trades solution to audio on Linux. Based on what I've seen, it's only helpful for use cases that few average users are likely to presently encounter. It may become the basis for a large number of really cool things in the future, but right now it's doing more harm than good by shipping by default on the majority of Linux distributions.
Here's a useless anecdote: For months I was trying to get a decent music production system set up on Linux and it was an unmitigated disaster. No distribution had the correct mix of drivers, sound servers, and applications that would make everything just work. I should point out that PulseAudio was enabled by default on all of them, and PulseAudio had to be manually disabled on all of them just to get any sound moving through the system at all.
When I can play a chord on my MIDI keyboard and have it played, mixed, processed, and output through the speakers in less than 20ms with PulseAudio in the chain, give me a call.
Ubuntu has gotten much better since then, the people involved are engaging with us upstream and a really good people to work with
I take it you haven't yet read Lennart Poettering's blog post today. In it, he basically says that Ubuntu is repeating the same kind of bonehead mistakes with packaging PA in Karmic that they've done with ever other Ubuntu release so far: "Not good, Ubuntu, really not good! And I'll get all the complaints for this f**up again. Thanks!"
I knew it was really over when I was walking through the Hard Rock Casino (*gag*) and saw a big crowd of people looking at something, and there was Paris Hilton in a shop
Well, you may think about it that way, but maybe that's part of the reason some people go? My friend went to Vegas a couple weeks ago on honeymoon and quite literally bumped into Carrot Top in some museum. I'm no fan, he's no fan, but he got an autograph out of it anyway and it sure must have been interesting to actually run into someone with a household name.
My friend said he really enjoyed it there, but he said the key was to stay away from the strip. Rent a car and drive around, basically do anything but gamble. I plan on visiting Vegas some day, but I for one have no intention of handing my money over to someone simply for the sake of handing it over, the most faithful and accurate definition of gambling.
My phone/DSL provider is a CLEC, operating on AT&T's local infrastructure. Over the last decade, they found that the only way to stay in business was to hire really good, really expensive lawyers and keep taking AT&T to court. Legally, the CLEC is forbidden from running any tests or performing any maintenance on AT&T's lines, so getting AT&T to simply cooperate with their technical needs required repeated judicial orders. AT&T sorely abused their position as incumbent because they would take months to provision lines, sabotage repairs, and disconnect CLEC customers during their own routine maintenance. Any time I see an AT&T van in the neighborhood I cringe and wonder if my dialtone is going to go away spontaneously again.
It got so bad that now, whenever the CLEC needs a line provisioned or repaired, AT&T is required to not only have the technician sign off on the maintenance, but two of his supervisors have to inspect and sign off on the work as well.
With cable and phone lines, municipalities have traditionally granted a single company a local monopoly over all of the cable/phone lines for every resident and business in their respective areas because telephone poles can only physically hold so many lines. For the consumer, this has turned out to be a tremendous mistake because it gives the incumbent providers no incentive to provide service that is either cheap or good, let alone both. By the time the government/public realized what a horrible idea this was in the 1980's or so, the dominant phone carrier had strung its lines across most of the country and by law, owned them. Cable companies followed the same path. Partly because AT&T had set the precedent for last-mile connections, and partly because the technology for operating multiple carriers on a single cable TV network didn't exist then. (This was when "cancelling your cable" meant sending a lineman up a telephone pole to physically disconnect the line.)
Cell carriers are a different game entirely because anyone with enough initiative and capital can put up new cell towers. Radio spectrum issues aside, there's no physical barrier to how many cell networks can cover a given area.
We geeks don't mind being corrected when someone shows us we're wrong. We appreciate correctness and having a firm grasp on facts. But normal people don't care about any of that. Doing what you describe to normal people doesn't make you look smart, it only makes you look like a condescending douche in their eyes.
It's one of those lessons most geeks (including myself) learn the hard way at some point or another.
It would only be a free market if the local government owned all the cable and phone lines, and simply leased access to them so that customers could chose from multiple companies to be their cable provider, phone company, or what have you. Instead, individual providers are given unfettered, perpetual monopolies on virtually all of the last-mile connections to the vast majority of the market's consumers. And this is something that can't be easily undone now. The shortest route to ensure that the incumbent providers play fair is to regulate them.
Slashdot Mirror
It proves that the commonly parroted argument of 1 pirated copy == 1 lost sale is also a steaming pile of bullshit.
Thus, anyone worrying about piracy affecting the bottomline of their business is just wasting their time and money. Further, with a few more experiments like this, any company treating all of its customers as criminals by default (with things like DRM) whilst using the "evil pirate" defense should be a nice big fat target for a class-action lawsuit.
If you want to see what's going to happen in regard to mechanical vs solid state hard disks, you don't need a crystal ball. Just look at the transition from CRT to LCD displays. It wasn't so long ago (seems like only a few years) that LCD monitors were horribly expensive and that fact (combined with their other drawbacks) made them an unattractive option for most people. I can recall many, many people right here on Slashdot saying that they would never give up their enormous, power-hungry, failure-prone CRT displays. Now, you can't even buy a CRT computer monitor because LCD quality caught up and surpassed CRTs for most purposes while price plummeted. The same will happen with mechanical disks and SSDs. Maybe it'll happen faster, maybe slower, but it will happen.
Keep in mind also which company this "prediction" is coming from: Seagate lived a long and prosperous career engineering and manufacturing mechanical hard disks. They are a huge company whose entire operation is based around the concept of shipping hunks of metal with rotating platters inside. Since an SSD is just a bunch of memory chips duct-taped together, the memory companies (Transcend, Crucial, Corsair, Samsung, etc) were the first ones with SSDs on the market. The SSD thing likely hit Seagate by surprise and they can see that their run won't last long. It's not too late for them to start transitioning to manufacturing memory chips, but doing so would be brutal for many reasons. To start with, their decades of mechanical drive development experience, manufacturing facilities, engineers, trade secrets, R&D, etc are mostly about to be worthless. If they start selling this stuff off now while it's still fairly valuable, shareholders are going to do a huge "WTF?" and walk off. Second, the memory companies have a few years head start. Even if Seagate could enter the market and compete with them, the company would be leaving their position as a market leader to be a market newcomer, taking cues from everyone else. (Cue the sound of their last few shareholders stomping out.)
Basically, unless Seagate can buy up a few of the leading memory companies making SSDs right now, they're screwed. Until (or unless) that happens, all they can do right now is appease their shareholders and put their executives up on stage to have them parrot the lie that their business is going to be viable for a good long time yet. Oh, and frivolously sue all the SSD manufacturers on broad patent infringement grounds.
That's GNU/Linux, you insensitive freeloading RMS-hating clods!
After watching the video linked to in TFA, I can't see how this is anything at all like Google Wave. All they apparently share in common is that they both have something to do with communication and the web.
I have yet to actually try it out, but to me, Raindrop looks like what would happen if you wrote an ordinary web email client and added support for twitter and facebook. I don't see why you couldn't achieve the same thing on the desktop with a few Thunderbird extensions.
The problem with that solution is that you're still supporting the system you claim to oppose.
When you download songs that are owned by an PRS or RIAA (or other equivalent, depending on your country) member label and don't pay them, you give them an excuse to claim that piracy is killing their business and that they deserve all kinds of special legal treatment. We know their "piracy" statistics are completely made up, but if someone ever goes out there and does a scientific survey of piracy, your downloads push the real numbers slightly closer to the made-up ones. And when you support RIAA-affiliated bands by buying a concert ticket or merchandise, you support the RIAA-affiliated labels. Once artists/bands start to realize that the RIAA is hurting their fans, they'll stop signing contracts with them.
There is lots of good independent music out there being made by people who care more about their music than how much money it makes them or how often they get played on the radio. More is arriving all the time since music production and distribution are incredibly cheap these days. The "music industry" is obsolete. By illegally downloading their music, you're not sticking it to anyone. You're propping up a business model that's on its final legs and is determined to take anyone it can down with it.
It wouldn't matter. PRS (and other countries' equivalents) have written the rules such that you're forced to pay royalties anyway under the assumption that the artist might one day join PRS. And even if musicians could opt-out, the burden would be on the radio station to prove (with documentation) that every single song they play isn't on the PRS's works list. And that it isn't a derivative of one.
The goals of organizations like PRS are two-fold:
1. To milk profits from public performances, even those where no revenue is being generated
2. To quash the whole idea of independent music regardless of genre, artist, or commercial intent
I have 5 mods points and wish I could use them all on the above comment.
Most people have no idea how much defense policy is (more or less) constructed by the defense contractors themselves. These firms invent scary-sounding problems and then offer expensive solutions. They develop nothing that they think can't be successfully pitched to the Pentagon. When a commander or committee buys into a billion-dollar project, they get a promotion and the contractor gets a billion taxpayer dollars.
I've seen this with my own eyes. Military bases are commanded by military commanders, but are largely run by contractors. Engineering; transportation; hospitality; I.T.; supply; training; build, vehicle, and aircraft maintenance; even physical security on occasion. I'm not saying that contractors shouldn't be utilized where it makes sense, but when I was in the military, I got the sense that the DoD was inching towards the goal of one day having companies run the entirety of all military operations, stopping short of actually contracting companies to fire the guns for them. (Although they are, if I'm not mistaken, already doing that.)
I have it on good authority that many of them post to Slashdot...
I dunno, I think I'd rather take my chances are Mars...
Did you file a bug report? If no, did you check to see that a bug report existed?
I'd really like to have an eBook reader. I'm one of those people who doesn't have the time to buy books from a bookstore or browse the library. I hate trying to find new creative places to store them in my home and don't want to deal with simply reselling them. I would love to read when I'm waiting in the doctor's office, winding down for the night, or driving to work but paperback books are just too inconvenient. The Kindle doesn't do it for me because the device has so much potential but is locked down with custom software and a "we control all your rightfully-purchased books" mentality. (Can't stand the keyboard, either.)
I've been waiting for an eBook reader that's closer to a general computing device than any of the options out there now. The hardware is certainly capable, no doubt about that. You can do a surprising number of useful tasks on a low-framerate monochrome display, but none of the current readers even attempt anything beyond reading a book. You could download and listen to podcasts, do (limited) web surfing, play some simple games, manage your schedule, and so on.
The LCD screen on the Nook already gives it an edge that other readers don't have, and I'm surprised that the price is as low as it is. If the Android app store is available as well, this could be a killer device. Let's hope B&N doesn't screw it up too badly.
I certainly hope so. If this reader can also do podcasts, play MP3s, and has a usable web browser (even if only over wifi), I'll be selling trading in my Nokia N800 for one of these.
Well, you could if the site wasn't down due to a database error. :(
The constitution only guarantees freedom of speech. (And even then, only at the legislative level.) The Constitution does not guarantee anonymity in any case.
Well, to be fair, a petition has so far not gone around killing people for sport.
If he is indeed allowing FTP logins over the public Internet (as the submission suggests), he is a n00b whether or not he realizes it.
In some situations, but hardly all. PulseAudio needs to stop billing itself as a jack-of-all-trades solution to audio on Linux. Based on what I've seen, it's only helpful for use cases that few average users are likely to presently encounter. It may become the basis for a large number of really cool things in the future, but right now it's doing more harm than good by shipping by default on the majority of Linux distributions.
Here's a useless anecdote: For months I was trying to get a decent music production system set up on Linux and it was an unmitigated disaster. No distribution had the correct mix of drivers, sound servers, and applications that would make everything just work. I should point out that PulseAudio was enabled by default on all of them, and PulseAudio had to be manually disabled on all of them just to get any sound moving through the system at all.
When I can play a chord on my MIDI keyboard and have it played, mixed, processed, and output through the speakers in less than 20ms with PulseAudio in the chain, give me a call.
I take it you haven't yet read Lennart Poettering's blog post today. In it, he basically says that Ubuntu is repeating the same kind of bonehead mistakes with packaging PA in Karmic that they've done with ever other Ubuntu release so far: "Not good, Ubuntu, really not good! And I'll get all the complaints for this f**up again. Thanks!"
Pfft, I get that stuff for under a dollar a bottle here in Michigan. Keeps my diet straight!
Well, you may think about it that way, but maybe that's part of the reason some people go? My friend went to Vegas a couple weeks ago on honeymoon and quite literally bumped into Carrot Top in some museum. I'm no fan, he's no fan, but he got an autograph out of it anyway and it sure must have been interesting to actually run into someone with a household name.
My friend said he really enjoyed it there, but he said the key was to stay away from the strip. Rent a car and drive around, basically do anything but gamble. I plan on visiting Vegas some day, but I for one have no intention of handing my money over to someone simply for the sake of handing it over, the most faithful and accurate definition of gambling.
My phone/DSL provider is a CLEC, operating on AT&T's local infrastructure. Over the last decade, they found that the only way to stay in business was to hire really good, really expensive lawyers and keep taking AT&T to court. Legally, the CLEC is forbidden from running any tests or performing any maintenance on AT&T's lines, so getting AT&T to simply cooperate with their technical needs required repeated judicial orders. AT&T sorely abused their position as incumbent because they would take months to provision lines, sabotage repairs, and disconnect CLEC customers during their own routine maintenance. Any time I see an AT&T van in the neighborhood I cringe and wonder if my dialtone is going to go away spontaneously again.
It got so bad that now, whenever the CLEC needs a line provisioned or repaired, AT&T is required to not only have the technician sign off on the maintenance, but two of his supervisors have to inspect and sign off on the work as well.
Can they? Yes. Should they? No.
With cable and phone lines, municipalities have traditionally granted a single company a local monopoly over all of the cable/phone lines for every resident and business in their respective areas because telephone poles can only physically hold so many lines. For the consumer, this has turned out to be a tremendous mistake because it gives the incumbent providers no incentive to provide service that is either cheap or good, let alone both. By the time the government/public realized what a horrible idea this was in the 1980's or so, the dominant phone carrier had strung its lines across most of the country and by law, owned them. Cable companies followed the same path. Partly because AT&T had set the precedent for last-mile connections, and partly because the technology for operating multiple carriers on a single cable TV network didn't exist then. (This was when "cancelling your cable" meant sending a lineman up a telephone pole to physically disconnect the line.)
Cell carriers are a different game entirely because anyone with enough initiative and capital can put up new cell towers. Radio spectrum issues aside, there's no physical barrier to how many cell networks can cover a given area.
A very famous computer once said, "The only way to win is not to play."
I think that applies perfectly well in the context of gambling.
We geeks don't mind being corrected when someone shows us we're wrong. We appreciate correctness and having a firm grasp on facts. But normal people don't care about any of that. Doing what you describe to normal people doesn't make you look smart, it only makes you look like a condescending douche in their eyes.
It's one of those lessons most geeks (including myself) learn the hard way at some point or another.
Things are getting so bad that even a technology tabloid has to outsource their articles because all of their qualified staff have gone home!
I'm a free market guy too, but...
It would only be a free market if the local government owned all the cable and phone lines, and simply leased access to them so that customers could chose from multiple companies to be their cable provider, phone company, or what have you. Instead, individual providers are given unfettered, perpetual monopolies on virtually all of the last-mile connections to the vast majority of the market's consumers. And this is something that can't be easily undone now. The shortest route to ensure that the incumbent providers play fair is to regulate them.