"Stupid but honest question: if DRM is bad, is the production of music only profitable through DRM also bad?"
There is no such thing as "the production of music only profitable through DRM". I believe, as do many anti-DRM activists, that the average person is more than willing to pay a fair price for anything they want or need, they do not need to be forced to do the right thing.
The problem is that the media giants have decided that they want more than a fair price for their product, so many people look elsewhere to get the things they want. This then results in the media giants deciding that they need to protect their products from theft... so they spend an ungodly amount of money developing and deploying ineffective technologies that do nothing but further alienate their customers while increasing their overhead. Now they have fewer customers, lower profit margins, and more theft occuring... so what do they do, the same stupid thing all over again!
What needs to happen is that these media giants need to start TRUSTING THEIR CUSTOMERS!!! We are in a web of distrust... we don't trust them, and they don't trust us. If an entertainer were to get most of the proceeds from their work, while the record company took a fair share, we could trust them. The cost of their wares would drop and most of us would buy the stuff without thought. But $20 for a CD of music I don't care much for, by an artist who I know only get's pennies of my money. It's bullshit. I would rather steal the music and send the artist a dollar or two.
Fortunately I don't like music, so I don't bother stealing it... talk radio is more entertaining.
... considering that this topic has been beaten to death here and every side of the argument has been discussed. It's a well known fact to any Slashdot reader that DRM is bad. Maybe this article should be posted on Apple's, the DMCA, and every other media monster's website. Here it's just telling us what we already know.
...they always have their client's best interest at heart. For example from TFA:
"Tuzhilin was hired to do the study as part of just-approved class-action settlement requiring Google to offer advertisers up to $60 million in refunds. That amount translates into less than 40 cents for every $100 that advertisers have paid Google since 2001. The attorneys who filed the suit will share $30 million."
So if I spent a whopping $100,000 of my annual advertising budget on Google over the last 6 years, I could expect to see a whole $2,400 back. Of course, I don't mind that the people who made my windfall possible made $30 Million... I got $2,400 of my $600,000 I paid Google!
Not that I have ever used AOL, but unfortunately some family memebers I support do... and their number one complaint is that "my internet is so slow". So now they will get double slammed with ads, AOL's and whatever webpage they decide to look at. I'm sure they will be thrilled.
I have a better idea for AOL. Make your service something people actually want. Make it fast, make it simple, make it cheap, and most of all make it about the customer rather than your thinning wallets. I would have no problem suggesting AOL to anyone if AOL was all of these things. Hell I might even encourage people to pay a couple of bucks more a month if it meant fewer phone calls to me.
Unfortunately, most of the phone calls I get from AOL users are because of AOL. Throw more ads into the mix and I bet the number of people leaving increases rather than decreases. People aren't leaving AOL because of cost, it's because of better alternatives. If AOL had made their service better, treated their customers with some respect, and gave them what they needed people who wanted a simple way to get on the net would have flocked to them. Instead they gave them the opposite and are only gonna make it worse by adding ads to the mix of things they are doing wrong.
From what little I can make of everything I read, LiveLabs is more of a think tank that is funded by Microsoft. I don't believe they are even under much if any creative control by MS. I would think of this more like a small startup with an idea and an enormous budget... memories of the dotcom era.
So because of this affiliation, MS comes out looking innovative and creative when it's merely a small team of appearently very creative developers who have probably never touched any code of any of MS's major income generators (Office, Windows, etc).
I imagine a secure webserver that is able to handle twice the number of concurrent connections is quadrupled because all of the encryption is handled in hardware by a $600 coprocessor.
was supposed to read
I imagine a secure webserver that is able to handle twice the number of concurrent connections because all of the encryption is handled in hardware by a $600 coprocessor.
Though Intel currently has the single chip speed title, where they lag is in interconnectivity between processors. I believe that if AMD continues down their current path, they will dominiate the server market.
There is no doubt that AMD's solution for connecting multiple cores and processors is superior to Intel's. And when we start to see coprocessors being popped into one CPU socket providing super-accelerated services such as encryption... the shift to AMD will accelerate. I imagine a secure webserver that is able to handle twice the number of concurrent connections is quadrupled because all of the encryption is handled in hardware by a $600 coprocessor. Sure Intel's system will be faster for general purpose activites, but when your talking paying $600 for a coprocessor, or several thousand for additional servers... well you get the idea.
I think that though Intel currently has a leg up, it's only a matter of time before AMD knocks their other leg out from under them.
Now I'm no fanboy, I'm anxiously waiting for the Core 2 Duo to become widely available before I build my next workstation. But I still believe that AMD is eventually going to become the king of server processors, if not the desktop.
Sure, I'll write the check now... considering you've proven that the jetpack managed to lift you a couple of inches on a teather. Of course I'm confident that you will be able to resolve all the issues of flight stability and emergency parachutes etc.
Is anyone else a little skeptical. Who in thier right mind would preorder something that hasn't even been properly demonstrated. Now if this guy managed to take off to about 30ft, hover a bit, then travel for a minute or two while performing some impressive demonstration of the manuverability I might consider this a worthwhile project. Otherwise it is nothing but a pipe dream... anyone can locate a motor of reasonable size and weight then mount it to a backpack... making it fly is the hard part!
Typically, when I think of a RPG I can't imagine not having a story to follow. What, no evil to overcome, no goal?
Well I have played one RPG with out a story and it really wasn't all that bad. It was a game released in 1992 called Darklands.
The game was truely nonlinar, had no goal except perhaps to increase your fame. Overall, it was not one that would compete with anything today but it did have it's appeal.
I want a new email reader that creates an image of all incoming emails using this technique and displays a thumbnail image beside each message. Once I was used to it, I could probably figure out which messages were spam just by looking at the resulting flower. Function and beauty in one.
It would work kinda like most baysian filters that give a percent likelyhood that a message is spam, except the prettier the flower, the more likely a message is spam.
Sure it's a waste of CPU cycles, but it would make recieving spam much more pleasurable.
I think NVidia needs to get into the processor market themselves. Maybe not for general computing, but I bet their designers have some great ideas for a processor that would be at home in a console! With GPU's being so powerful these days, I can't imagine that they lack the expertise to do it.
I always thought that AMD and Nvidia were the better combo. Besides the ATI Drivers suck for Linux, where a large percent of the enthusiast market's interests lie. Isn't AMD still more of an enthusists processor until it can get into one of the top vendor's machines?
Doesn't making this a free download make vmplayer redundant?
I wouldn't say redundant... if I want to distribute an application sample using vmware, I might want to send the player with it instead of server which might be too complicated for those I am sending the virtual OS to.
I do have to wonder what VMware is hoping to get out of this... Basically they are only selling the support and management products and completely opening up the VM end of their business. Is this to stop the mass migration to XEN?
Oh and how does the sever product compare to Workstation... is it the same?
Anyone can paint, sing, or write code with minimal training... what makes that person an artist is a devloped talent that allows them to do things in their field that the majority of those who participate in the field could only dream of doing. In addition their is usually a clear distinction between a true artist's work and that of someone who doesn't deserve the title... there is little middle ground.
I can write code, but I am certainly no hacker. Sure I might hack together a script to do something that may or may not have been done before... but a true hacker would make me look silly in my attempts.
I think the term hacker is thrown around way too frequently and used interchangably with someone who hacks together a solution to a problem. If I decide to paint something, I am NOT a painter; the same applies to hacking.
I have met hackers, and to watch them work and read their code is nearly a spiritual thing... I only wish I had the talent and time to dedicate to bring myself halfway to that level.
It's simply an open XML format for storing data that the developers of OpenOffice.org developed and utilize. It would be simple to modify other word processing applications to use this format... or if they stick with MS (who claims an open format in the future) I'm sure OO.o will migrate to that format.
Just because they are considering moving to OO.o doesn't mean that they are giving unfair or preferential treatment to a specific vendor... you could be their vendor if you bid low enough! All they have done is researched and chose the best open format for storing thier data that has a usable application that utilizes it.
I would bet if MS moved to an open format, they would use that instead... their objective is to have readable documents in 50 years... not to get away from MS (yet).
of those 92 million, only about 2 million actually use aol mail... the rest are people who used up thier free trial and moved on.
I mean seriously, you expect me to believe that AOL has 92 million paying customers?
Honestly if I were a spammer, I'd only pay half price for AOL addresses, the odds of someone reading your email (especially after filtering) is nearly zero.
I can see a use for this kind of density is in extremely crouded and busy environments similar to a trading floor at a stock exchange or something like that.
I would be willing to bet that one could use multiple of these devices by simply rotating them in relation to eachother so that different channels over lap:
C1 -- (AP) -- C12 C1 -- (AP) -- C12
In this situation C1 and C12 would overlap and thus not interfere... the other channels being directional would not occupy the same space and interfere with each other.
I agree with you on most points... however, I am not insisting that all adult sites belong in.xxx and instead would encourage the creation of.adlt or something like it that would contain adult only materials without necessarily being pornographic. In addition, a site could easily have the majority of it's content on a conventional domain and only place thier photos or comicstrips or whatever on the.adlt domain allowing the viewer who blocks adult content to read the content of the page before deciding to view or not veiw the images.
As far as things such as the comic strips and such... I would still rather my children not be exposed to such things even if they are not pornographic. Adult themes and issues are often difficult to explain to children, and sometimes a partial understanding can be more harm than good.
I'm not militant about protecting my children from adult issues, nor do I overprotect them in general... but it's just amazing some of the nastiness you can find with a simple typo and if it were easy to prevent thier viewing of such content I would. With younger and younger children being internet users, there have got to be a lot of kids asking their parents "Mommie why does this woman have that mans thingie in her mouth?" Or worse!
I don't want to censor, just compartmentalize the internet a little better, leaving it up to the user to determine what content is considered acceptable.
All that needs to be done to prevent all of the other materials from being wrongfully placed in the new tld is simply create a clear verbage defining those pages that must be there.
For example:
Any content created solely for the entertainment of adult audiences and includes nudity or sexually explicit imagery must place that portion of their content on a.xxx domain.
This simple wording excludes any material that has some other purpose outside adult entertainment. The only area I can see being questioned is artistic nudes, only because art can be so difficult to define (is it entertainment?). So perhaps a clause could protect artistic nudes by stating that sites dedicated to artistic creations and pursuits are excluded unless those sites focus primarily on nude/sexual art.
"The Bush administration is objecting to the creation of a.xxx domain, saying it has concerns about a virtual red-light district reserved exclusively for Internet pornography."
I personally perfer the idea of a virtual red-light district over what we have now... adult peep-shows on every corner.
Honestly, think about how easy it would be to filter porn if it were all in the.xxx domain. As easy as it is to avoid a redlight district (if your so inclined).
I personally think that the Bush administration should be lobbying to require that all sites providing materials for adult only entertainment should be required to relinquish their.com,.net,.info, etc. domains in favor of a.xxx or.adlt or some other top-level domain that allows the user to know the type of site they are visiting. That was the objective of the different top level domains after all.
I have planned to build one of these for a long time, but everytime I start to price components I realize it's not worth the money and time it would take me.
What I really want is a video server for DVD movies for the kid's tv in the back seat. I mean the tv/vcr combo thats there now is great... until the tape ends and needs rewinding. Not to mention that VHS tapes are so bulky that we only keep 5 or so in there.
Give me a video server that fits into the opening in my minivan and I'll be as happy as a fly on s#!t on the next road trip!
Now I fully agree that the airport is in the wrong here... but are they really?
The airport, it's grounds, and the space occupied by the airline are owned by someone. Does the owner of a property have the right to control what services are offered by it's tenants.
I know, for example, that some property holders can require that their tenants charge at least a certain amount for some products, or only offer certain products, or require that the tenants participate in certain programs as part of the lease agreement.
Perhaps there is a clause in the airline's lease that gives the airport the right to restrict the actions of the airline. But I doubt it, I'd guess that the airport is just greedy!
Slashdot Mirror
"Stupid but honest question: if DRM is bad, is the production of music only profitable through DRM also bad?"
There is no such thing as "the production of music only profitable through DRM". I believe, as do many anti-DRM activists, that the average person is more than willing to pay a fair price for anything they want or need, they do not need to be forced to do the right thing.
The problem is that the media giants have decided that they want more than a fair price for their product, so many people look elsewhere to get the things they want. This then results in the media giants deciding that they need to protect their products from theft... so they spend an ungodly amount of money developing and deploying ineffective technologies that do nothing but further alienate their customers while increasing their overhead. Now they have fewer customers, lower profit margins, and more theft occuring... so what do they do, the same stupid thing all over again!
What needs to happen is that these media giants need to start TRUSTING THEIR CUSTOMERS!!! We are in a web of distrust... we don't trust them, and they don't trust us. If an entertainer were to get most of the proceeds from their work, while the record company took a fair share, we could trust them. The cost of their wares would drop and most of us would buy the stuff without thought. But $20 for a CD of music I don't care much for, by an artist who I know only get's pennies of my money. It's bullshit. I would rather steal the music and send the artist a dollar or two.
Fortunately I don't like music, so I don't bother stealing it... talk radio is more entertaining.
... considering that this topic has been beaten to death here and every side of the argument has been discussed. It's a well known fact to any Slashdot reader that DRM is bad. Maybe this article should be posted on Apple's, the DMCA, and every other media monster's website. Here it's just telling us what we already know.
...they always have their client's best interest at heart. For example from TFA:
"Tuzhilin was hired to do the study as part of just-approved class-action settlement requiring Google to offer advertisers up to $60 million in refunds. That amount translates into less than 40 cents for every $100 that advertisers have paid Google since 2001. The attorneys who filed the suit will share $30 million."
So if I spent a whopping $100,000 of my annual advertising budget on Google over the last 6 years, I could expect to see a whole $2,400 back. Of course, I don't mind that the people who made my windfall possible made $30 Million... I got $2,400 of my $600,000 I paid Google!
Not that I have ever used AOL, but unfortunately some family memebers I support do... and their number one complaint is that "my internet is so slow". So now they will get double slammed with ads, AOL's and whatever webpage they decide to look at. I'm sure they will be thrilled.
I have a better idea for AOL. Make your service something people actually want. Make it fast, make it simple, make it cheap, and most of all make it about the customer rather than your thinning wallets. I would have no problem suggesting AOL to anyone if AOL was all of these things. Hell I might even encourage people to pay a couple of bucks more a month if it meant fewer phone calls to me.
Unfortunately, most of the phone calls I get from AOL users are because of AOL. Throw more ads into the mix and I bet the number of people leaving increases rather than decreases. People aren't leaving AOL because of cost, it's because of better alternatives. If AOL had made their service better, treated their customers with some respect, and gave them what they needed people who wanted a simple way to get on the net would have flocked to them. Instead they gave them the opposite and are only gonna make it worse by adding ads to the mix of things they are doing wrong.
From what little I can make of everything I read, LiveLabs is more of a think tank that is funded by Microsoft. I don't believe they are even under much if any creative control by MS. I would think of this more like a small startup with an idea and an enormous budget... memories of the dotcom era.
So because of this affiliation, MS comes out looking innovative and creative when it's merely a small team of appearently very creative developers who have probably never touched any code of any of MS's major income generators (Office, Windows, etc).
Before the grammer nazis get to me:
I imagine a secure webserver that is able to handle twice the number of concurrent connections is quadrupled because all of the encryption is handled in hardware by a $600 coprocessor.
was supposed to read
I imagine a secure webserver that is able to handle twice the number of concurrent connections because all of the encryption is handled in hardware by a $600 coprocessor.
Though Intel currently has the single chip speed title, where they lag is in interconnectivity between processors. I believe that if AMD continues down their current path, they will dominiate the server market.
There is no doubt that AMD's solution for connecting multiple cores and processors is superior to Intel's. And when we start to see coprocessors being popped into one CPU socket providing super-accelerated services such as encryption... the shift to AMD will accelerate. I imagine a secure webserver that is able to handle twice the number of concurrent connections is quadrupled because all of the encryption is handled in hardware by a $600 coprocessor. Sure Intel's system will be faster for general purpose activites, but when your talking paying $600 for a coprocessor, or several thousand for additional servers... well you get the idea.
I think that though Intel currently has a leg up, it's only a matter of time before AMD knocks their other leg out from under them.
Now I'm no fanboy, I'm anxiously waiting for the Core 2 Duo to become widely available before I build my next workstation. But I still believe that AMD is eventually going to become the king of server processors, if not the desktop.
Sure, I'll write the check now... considering you've proven that the jetpack managed to lift you a couple of inches on a teather. Of course I'm confident that you will be able to resolve all the issues of flight stability and emergency parachutes etc.
Is anyone else a little skeptical. Who in thier right mind would preorder something that hasn't even been properly demonstrated. Now if this guy managed to take off to about 30ft, hover a bit, then travel for a minute or two while performing some impressive demonstration of the manuverability I might consider this a worthwhile project. Otherwise it is nothing but a pipe dream... anyone can locate a motor of reasonable size and weight then mount it to a backpack... making it fly is the hard part!
Typically, when I think of a RPG I can't imagine not having a story to follow. What, no evil to overcome, no goal? Well I have played one RPG with out a story and it really wasn't all that bad. It was a game released in 1992 called Darklands. The game was truely nonlinar, had no goal except perhaps to increase your fame. Overall, it was not one that would compete with anything today but it did have it's appeal.
I want a new email reader that creates an image of all incoming emails using this technique and displays a thumbnail image beside each message. Once I was used to it, I could probably figure out which messages were spam just by looking at the resulting flower. Function and beauty in one.
It would work kinda like most baysian filters that give a percent likelyhood that a message is spam, except the prettier the flower, the more likely a message is spam.
Sure it's a waste of CPU cycles, but it would make recieving spam much more pleasurable.
I think NVidia needs to get into the processor market themselves. Maybe not for general computing, but I bet their designers have some great ideas for a processor that would be at home in a console! With GPU's being so powerful these days, I can't imagine that they lack the expertise to do it.
I always thought that AMD and Nvidia were the better combo. Besides the ATI Drivers suck for Linux, where a large percent of the enthusiast market's interests lie. Isn't AMD still more of an enthusists processor until it can get into one of the top vendor's machines?
I wouldn't say redundant... if I want to distribute an application sample using vmware, I might want to send the player with it instead of server which might be too complicated for those I am sending the virtual OS to.
I do have to wonder what VMware is hoping to get out of this... Basically they are only selling the support and management products and completely opening up the VM end of their business. Is this to stop the mass migration to XEN?
Oh and how does the sever product compare to Workstation... is it the same?
Anyone can paint, sing, or write code with minimal training... what makes that person an artist is a devloped talent that allows them to do things in their field that the majority of those who participate in the field could only dream of doing. In addition their is usually a clear distinction between a true artist's work and that of someone who doesn't deserve the title... there is little middle ground.
I can write code, but I am certainly no hacker. Sure I might hack together a script to do something that may or may not have been done before... but a true hacker would make me look silly in my attempts.
I think the term hacker is thrown around way too frequently and used interchangably with someone who hacks together a solution to a problem. If I decide to paint something, I am NOT a painter; the same applies to hacking.
I have met hackers, and to watch them work and read their code is nearly a spiritual thing... I only wish I had the talent and time to dedicate to bring myself halfway to that level.
IT'S NOT OPENOFFICE.ORG'S FORMAT
It's simply an open XML format for storing data that the developers of OpenOffice.org developed and utilize. It would be simple to modify other word processing applications to use this format... or if they stick with MS (who claims an open format in the future) I'm sure OO.o will migrate to that format.
Just because they are considering moving to OO.o doesn't mean that they are giving unfair or preferential treatment to a specific vendor... you could be their vendor if you bid low enough! All they have done is researched and chose the best open format for storing thier data that has a usable application that utilizes it.
I would bet if MS moved to an open format, they would use that instead... their objective is to have readable documents in 50 years... not to get away from MS (yet).
of those 92 million, only about 2 million actually use aol mail... the rest are people who used up thier free trial and moved on.
I mean seriously, you expect me to believe that AOL has 92 million paying customers?
Honestly if I were a spammer, I'd only pay half price for AOL addresses, the odds of someone reading your email (especially after filtering) is nearly zero.
I can see a use for this kind of density is in extremely crouded and busy environments similar to a trading floor at a stock exchange or something like that. I would be willing to bet that one could use multiple of these devices by simply rotating them in relation to eachother so that different channels over lap: C1 -- (AP) -- C12 C1 -- (AP) -- C12 In this situation C1 and C12 would overlap and thus not interfere... the other channels being directional would not occupy the same space and interfere with each other.
I agree with you on most points... however, I am not insisting that all adult sites belong in .xxx and instead would encourage the creation of .adlt or something like it that would contain adult only materials without necessarily being pornographic. In addition, a site could easily have the majority of it's content on a conventional domain and only place thier photos or comicstrips or whatever on the .adlt domain allowing the viewer who blocks adult content to read the content of the page before deciding to view or not veiw the images.
As far as things such as the comic strips and such... I would still rather my children not be exposed to such things even if they are not pornographic. Adult themes and issues are often difficult to explain to children, and sometimes a partial understanding can be more harm than good.
I'm not militant about protecting my children from adult issues, nor do I overprotect them in general... but it's just amazing some of the nastiness you can find with a simple typo and if it were easy to prevent thier viewing of such content I would. With younger and younger children being internet users, there have got to be a lot of kids asking their parents "Mommie why does this woman have that mans thingie in her mouth?" Or worse!
I don't want to censor, just compartmentalize the internet a little better, leaving it up to the user to determine what content is considered acceptable.
All that needs to be done to prevent all of the other materials from being wrongfully placed in the new tld is simply create a clear verbage defining those pages that must be there.
.xxx domain.
For example:
Any content created solely for the entertainment of adult audiences and includes nudity or sexually explicit imagery must place that portion of their content on a
This simple wording excludes any material that has some other purpose outside adult entertainment. The only area I can see being questioned is artistic nudes, only because art can be so difficult to define (is it entertainment?). So perhaps a clause could protect artistic nudes by stating that sites dedicated to artistic creations and pursuits are excluded unless those sites focus primarily on nude/sexual art.
"The Bush administration is objecting to the creation of a .xxx domain, saying it has concerns about a virtual red-light district reserved exclusively for Internet pornography."
.xxx domain. As easy as it is to avoid a redlight district (if your so inclined).
.com, .net, .info, etc. domains in favor of a .xxx or .adlt or some other top-level domain that allows the user to know the type of site they are visiting. That was the objective of the different top level domains after all.
I personally perfer the idea of a virtual red-light district over what we have now... adult peep-shows on every corner.
Honestly, think about how easy it would be to filter porn if it were all in the
I personally think that the Bush administration should be lobbying to require that all sites providing materials for adult only entertainment should be required to relinquish their
I have planned to build one of these for a long time, but everytime I start to price components I realize it's not worth the money and time it would take me.
What I really want is a video server for DVD movies for the kid's tv in the back seat. I mean the tv/vcr combo thats there now is great... until the tape ends and needs rewinding. Not to mention that VHS tapes are so bulky that we only keep 5 or so in there.
Give me a video server that fits into the opening in my minivan and I'll be as happy as a fly on s#!t on the next road trip!
Now I fully agree that the airport is in the wrong here... but are they really?
The airport, it's grounds, and the space occupied by the airline are owned by someone. Does the owner of a property have the right to control what services are offered by it's tenants.
I know, for example, that some property holders can require that their tenants charge at least a certain amount for some products, or only offer certain products, or require that the tenants participate in certain programs as part of the lease agreement.
Perhaps there is a clause in the airline's lease that gives the airport the right to restrict the actions of the airline. But I doubt it, I'd guess that the airport is just greedy!
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home/make-fire-from -water-116027.php
The flame is tiny, well the hydrogen flame is anyway, the damn flame sculpture is huge in comparison! I guess they realized producing a real fire from electricity and water was a little much.
I was gonna say just that... but then I thought... nah to obvious! That and who would run an OS that uses a smily sun as it's logo?
Solaris doesn't stand a chance against *BSD or Linux... their logo sucks! Come on... seriously... what's more cuter than a Penguin or a Daemon?