Why does everyone seem to think Apple is better then Microsoft?
They don't have to be "better" than MS, just different. I would much rather see a market where MS has 45% and Apple has 45% than one like now where MS has 88% and Apple has 2%. Even if their goals are the same, as long as they don't work in cahoots, having real competition will produce real benefits.
That's not to say that equal footing in the market for MS and Apple is the best possible end result, just that it is better than current conditions.
The truth of it is, that the problems arise whenever someone tries to mandate a religion, be it christianity, islam, or atheism. The excesses you attribute to communisim are no worse than those found in many theocracies.
Religion is just a convenient scapegoat. The problem is not religion or communism or any other -ism. The problem is intolerance. When people who do not like other people, for whatever reason, gain enough power to persecute those they dislike they will reach for any justification that is handy. In a theocracy, religion is handy. In other kinds of societies, other justifications are handy. In quasi-capitalist societies they blame the poor for being poor.
Atheism, on the other hand, is a bit hard to use as a justification - the absence of a belief is more than a little ephemeral. For example, most people don't believe in pink elephants, but you never hear that as an execuse for persecution - "I don't believe in pink elephants, so you must pay!!!"
Do you really believe that, or are you just trolling?
As far as I know, Stallman has nothing against capitalism. He just believes that ideas are not capital but can be the result of capitalism - just like a full belly or a feeling of happiness can be the result of capitalist production but are not capital themselves.
It really surprises me that people in the IT industry can be so apathetic to theft. We all know how many millions (billions ?) get put into software development each year, and how thankless a job it really is. Just as important, we're in this industry! I write code most every day of my life, as do many others here, to make a living.
It does not surprise me in the least. The reason is very simple - only a tiny minority of coders get paid for each copy of their software that is sold. Most of us are not selling software - we sell our labor.
It is the company owners who take the risk of hiring the labor, and thus the company owners that derive the greatest direct benefit from each software sale and also the greatest loss from each pirated copy.
The only risk an employee has is that his employer will lay him off. But that usually does not happen as a result of piracy - layoffs usually come as the result of bad management.
So most IT people's livelihoods and fortunes are only indirectly linked to sales versus piracy. Until that changes, they aren't going to care any more about piracy than any other profession that sells labor (the vast majority of jobs nowadays).
They'd benefit from this in the same way, good branding and promotion of their search engine which would ultimately trickle down into advertising profits.
Don't forget what a great big database they could build of your purchasing habits - perfect for targetted advertising which is Google's forte.
Ebay is set up to maximize selling prices - sniping is the best countermeasure, it benefits ALL bidders, even the ones who do not 'win' the auctions.
The whole idea of entering a maximum bid that the system will automatically bid up to causes the actual bid price to quickly escalate. That leaves time for human psychology to kick in and for the low-bidder(s) to change their mind about what their maximum bid would really be.
With "set it and forget it" sniping tools, there is no early bid escalation and thus no time to change your mind and do the "well, just 5 dollars more" dance. All snipers put in their maximum bid price and let the chips fall where they may.
I use a sniping service and I end up underbidding on at least 90% of the auctions I bid on. But that is OK by me, it means I was not tricked by the system into over-paying on those items (and my sniping service does not charge me for 'losing' bids). It also means that the guy who was the highest bidder probably paid less than if all the snipers had bid the "traditional" way. So he benefits too, regardless of if he sniped or not.
If you are sniping and you really absolutely must have the item, you can enter a ridiculously high max bid price and chances are that you will be the high bidder and that you will end up paying less than if you had just used the "traditional" bidding process and let ebay auto-bid for you as other bidders put in their maximums too.
So, no matter what the situation, sniping benefits all bidders - snipers and non-snipers alike - by helping to keep bid inflation in check.
The best benchmarks are those that lead their respective industries.
As manufacturers seek to maximize benchmark scores, they end up improving their products in ways that make the product more useful to the consumers.
One example of a bad benchmark: For the longest time, cpu frequency has been a sort of benchmark easily understood by the buying public. But it was a very poor one, leading Intel to maximize cpu frequency at the cost of almost all else -- actual computational performance fell behind, power efficiency became even worse with chips becoming mini-furnaces.
Presuming that since HD-DVD and BLU-RAY are roughly equivalent products that players for each have roughly equivalent components does that mean Sony has a $300 profit - a 43% margin (minus whatever the middlemen skim off) on their $1000 BLU-RAY player?
The 'Economics of Electronic Data Exchange' only apply if you insist that because you CAN distribute something at zero cost, and share it with strangers, you must be allowed to.
First off, your entire phrasing is biased - when you say "allowed to" it completely avoids the fact that sharing information is the natural order of things - you make it sound like we, as humans, naturally have some higher authority dictating what is and what is not allowed. While the State is constantly trying to assume that role, that does not make such authority natural law.
What educated people (vs the warez d00ds) are arguing regarding distribution is that the inherent scalability problems of physical distribution mean that, as a society, giving up the natural right to copy in exchange for increased incentives to artists was a good bargain for society. But the inherent ease of electronic distribution make that contract much less of a bargain for society today. The social contract must be renegotiated and that negotiation must take into account the costs to society as well as the benefits to society.
Many people argue that the costs of any sort of distribution restrictions are far too high -- in particular that enforcement is close to impossible, making it extremely expensive and that it leads to inefficient utilization of resources, or more plainly, it causes lots of wasted effort and lost opportunities which hurt society as a whole and serve only to enrich a few.
There are many areas where we are fighting the exact same battle against technological abuse - where governments insist that because they CAN do something with technology, they must be allowed to (snooping, cluster bombs, chemical weapons, data mining).
The difference between the two concepts here is huge. The governments in question exist solely by the will of the people. They are a social construct that has no inherent rights, not even an existence, without the people they are meant to serve and certainly no natural freedoms. It is entirely right and normal that the people should define what is and is not permissible for their government to do. Just because the people nominally in charge of governing have begun to think of themselves as an independent, self-sustaining entity does not change things - it just indicates that we've got problems that need to be fixed.
There is also the economics of production - even free culture has costs (the cost of your free time) - and for most artists, musicians and authors, those costs are eventually too high.
You are spot on with this, though perhaps you don't realize it. Digital networks have reduced distribution costs to near zero. But they have not, and can not, have a similar effect on production costs. Production as become more efficient as a result of digital networking, but it is unlikely to ever approach zero the way distribution costs have.
So, what should logically follow from that fact alone is that we should stop using distribution rights as a way to encourage creation. If distribution has zero marginal cost, then any market that is even close to competitive will cause pricing to approach zero too - thus making distribution rights completely valueless.
Instead, we should be looking at ways in which the production rights can be made valuable enough to encourage creation of new works.
My favorite example of such a system is commission-based production. Today, the studios act as a kind of venture capitalist - they fund a bunch of productions, fully expecting to take losses on a majority of them. But they also expect that out of the bunch, they will find one or two start performers that will earn back the losses of all the other failures and then some. In either case, the studios have no interest in the actual content produced, only whether or not it will sell.
With a commission system, the role of venture capitalist is spread out across the entire paying audience. The creator would set a price for the production and release
No - a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is explicitly for reorganization not for dissolution. Although it certainly isn't the best thing that can happen to a company, it can actually be a positive since it can allow them to shed some debt that would have otherwise forced the company to completely shut down.
As many erudite posters have pointed out this is nothing more than an astroturfing campaign by big telcos.. why is slashdot giving these people ad space?
Why not? It sure is better than running the advert in front of people who will take it at face value. At least on slashdot it gets a firm rebuttal and helps pay for the place.
Theoretically a receiver could decode AAC it is, after all, just another codec. Off hand, I am not aware of any home theater receivers with AAC decoders in the USA - but I haven't ever really looked for them either.
In Japan, their version of HDTV uses AAC instead of AC3, so any current japanese domestic market home theater receiver is going to support AAC. 4 or 5 years ago when I last purchased a receiver, at least some US models were identical to the JDM versions except for the lack of AAC decoder. I would expect the same is true today.
Perhaps the enormous popularity of itunes which is native AAC, will cause the manufacturers to start including AAC support in their US models too.
Lol! Because by all indications (i.e. you're just making stuff up) Apple signed an unfair contract, it somehow becomes fair when Apple does it to their own customers?
When you lose a physical CD, do you go whining to Best Buy for a replacement?
When you eat a piece of cake and want more do you go whining to the baker for a replacement? You are comparing apples and oranges.
Apple is certainly under no obligation to offer this service;
"Fair" and "obligation" are two different things. I'm talking about fairness.
carries significant potential for abuse
How so? I have never and will never purchase defective recorded media, but it seems to me that the whole point of DRM is to control the copying. If the copying enforcement mechanism is vulnerable to "replay" attacks, then the DRM can't be very effective to begin with - else you could just backup the files on the computer before you make any 'authorized' copies, and then restore them back and make more 'authorized' copies.
Therefore, as odd as it might look to you, Jobs's is the correct form. (Chicago manual of style also concurs on this issue. There are examples, as well as a few exceptions, at CMS 7.17-23.)
One of the exceptions is when discussing a diety. As another poster noted without realizing it, the correct possesive usage for Jesus is Jesus'.
Considering that Apple and Steve Jobs stories often get the most bizarro comment moderations, I think it is safe to say that some people here do indeed consider Steve Jobs to be a diety, maybe even their own personal Jesus. So for those people, it is technically correct to write it as Jobs'.
You should. It is entirely possible that the overhead for DRM is the source of your playback problems.
The guys over on avsforum.com discovered a long time a go that, with MS WMV9 encoded video, the DRM'd version could easily consume 20% more cpu than the same video stripped of DRM. Similar testing of music with and with-out DRM on portable players shows battery life being significantly (in the 20-30% ballpark) for playback of DRM'd audio versus the same audio in the clear.
Almost all DTS tracks are "half-rate" at 768kbps - the studios found that including full-rate DTS often consumed so much disc-space that they were prevente from including other features like commentary tracks or had to make visible sacrifices in video quality.
In addition - AC3 (on DVD) is usually 448kbps nowadays and is often indistinguishable from an equivalent half-rate DTS track. One reason for that is that AC3 uses a shared "pool" of bitrate for all channels while DTS keeps them seperate. Thus when the encoding algorithm needs lots of bits for just a couple of channels - like front left & right - AC3 can "steal" them from the other channels like the rears which may not even have any sound at all during that period. DTS can't do that, each channel is limited to a set bitrate and so channels with "dead air" just waste their bits.
Then there are newer, more efficient, algorithms like AAC - for movie and tv soundtracks it is reasonable to expect to get roughly equivalent 5.1 audio fidelity out of say a 300kbps AAC track as one does from a 448kbps AC3 track.
How is that fair? The cost of bandwidth for the occasional re-download is negligble, they are already tracking what you bought. What is so difficult about letting you redownload the same files as often as you want like emusic does?
Think of all the different ways a disc can now "phone-home" and report your activities - what movies you watched, what websites you went to, what scenes you paused and replayed - time and date that you were home and watching a movie instead of the ads on tv... A literal goldmine of marketing information that will probably end up being used for more than that - for example watch too many serial killer movies? you might be the guy they are looking for in the latest unsolved case.
You do realize this is a law in one state out of the fifty states () that make up the United States of America... a state the represents about 2.1% of the total population of the United Stated of America.
Regardless, gambling -- other than state lotteries (how's that for hypocrisy) is illegal in most US jurisdictions. This WA law just slides down that slippery slope to make talking about gambling illegal.
So the OP's original contention that its illegal to bet $10 is correct in the general case.
If you think the HR xvids are equivalent to full res HDTV, you are missing out. They are only 960x540 and the bitrate is nowhere near enough to prevent artifacts like macroblocking and mosquito noise.
Don't get me wrong - the HR encodes are better than most any analog tv signal, but it is rare that they are better than a good DVD much less the equal of HD.
Hopefully I was correct about all this, but the claims I have made above were made in many long-standing high-score comments in the last discussion about this subject, and not refuted, so hopefully peer review will have made me sound like I know what I'm talking about.
Heh. I just mailed them a link to your posting. Now your credibility is down the pooper.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does everyone seem to think Apple is better then Microsoft?
They don't have to be "better" than MS, just different. I would much rather see a market where MS has 45% and Apple has 45% than one like now where MS has 88% and Apple has 2%. Even if their goals are the same, as long as they don't work in cahoots, having real competition will produce real benefits.
That's not to say that equal footing in the market for MS and Apple is the best possible end result, just that it is better than current conditions.
The truth of it is, that the problems arise whenever someone tries to mandate a religion, be it christianity, islam, or atheism. The excesses you attribute to communisim are no worse than those found in many theocracies.
Religion is just a convenient scapegoat. The problem is not religion or communism or any other -ism. The problem is intolerance. When people who do not like other people, for whatever reason, gain enough power to persecute those they dislike they will reach for any justification that is handy. In a theocracy, religion is handy. In other kinds of societies, other justifications are handy. In quasi-capitalist societies they blame the poor for being poor.
Atheism, on the other hand, is a bit hard to use as a justification - the absence of a belief is more than a little ephemeral. For example, most people don't believe in pink elephants, but you never hear that as an execuse for persecution - "I don't believe in pink elephants, so you must pay!!!"
If Stallman wants to avoid capitalism, so be it.
WTF?
Do you really believe that, or are you just trolling?
As far as I know, Stallman has nothing against capitalism. He just believes that ideas are not capital but can be the result of capitalism - just like a full belly or a feeling of happiness can be the result of capitalist production but are not capital themselves.
It really surprises me that people in the IT industry can be so apathetic to theft. We all know how many millions (billions ?) get put into software development each year, and how thankless a job it really is. Just as important, we're in this industry! I write code most every day of my life, as do many others here, to make a living.
It does not surprise me in the least. The reason is very simple - only a tiny minority of coders get paid for each copy of their software that is sold. Most of us are not selling software - we sell our labor.
It is the company owners who take the risk of hiring the labor, and thus the company owners that derive the greatest direct benefit from each software sale and also the greatest loss from each pirated copy.
The only risk an employee has is that his employer will lay him off. But that usually does not happen as a result of piracy - layoffs usually come as the result of bad management.
So most IT people's livelihoods and fortunes are only indirectly linked to sales versus piracy. Until that changes, they aren't going to care any more about piracy than any other profession that sells labor (the vast majority of jobs nowadays).
They'd benefit from this in the same way, good branding and promotion of their search engine which would ultimately trickle down into advertising profits.
Don't forget what a great big database they could build of your purchasing habits - perfect for targetted advertising which is Google's forte.
Ebay is set up to maximize selling prices - sniping is the best countermeasure, it benefits ALL bidders, even the ones who do not 'win' the auctions.
The whole idea of entering a maximum bid that the system will automatically bid up to causes the actual bid price to quickly escalate. That leaves time for human psychology to kick in and for the low-bidder(s) to change their mind about what their maximum bid would really be.
With "set it and forget it" sniping tools, there is no early bid escalation and thus no time to change your mind and do the "well, just 5 dollars more" dance. All snipers put in their maximum bid price and let the chips fall where they may.
I use a sniping service and I end up underbidding on at least 90% of the auctions I bid on. But that is OK by me, it means I was not tricked by the system into over-paying on those items (and my sniping service does not charge me for 'losing' bids). It also means that the guy who was the highest bidder probably paid less than if all the snipers had bid the "traditional" way. So he benefits too, regardless of if he sniped or not.
If you are sniping and you really absolutely must have the item, you can enter a ridiculously high max bid price and chances are that you will be the high bidder and that you will end up paying less than if you had just used the "traditional" bidding process and let ebay auto-bid for you as other bidders put in their maximums too.
So, no matter what the situation, sniping benefits all bidders - snipers and non-snipers alike - by helping to keep bid inflation in check.
The best benchmarks are those that lead their respective industries.
As manufacturers seek to maximize benchmark scores, they end up improving their products in ways that make the product more useful to the consumers.
One example of a bad benchmark: For the longest time, cpu frequency has been a sort of benchmark easily understood by the buying public. But it was a very poor one, leading Intel to maximize cpu frequency at the cost of almost all else -- actual computational performance fell behind, power efficiency became even worse with chips becoming mini-furnaces.
Presuming that since HD-DVD and BLU-RAY are roughly equivalent products that players for each have roughly equivalent components does that mean Sony has a $300 profit - a 43% margin (minus whatever the middlemen skim off) on their $1000 BLU-RAY player?
The 'Economics of Electronic Data Exchange' only apply if you insist that because you CAN distribute something at zero cost, and share it with strangers, you must be allowed to.
First off, your entire phrasing is biased - when you say "allowed to" it completely avoids the fact that sharing information is the natural order of things - you make it sound like we, as humans, naturally have some higher authority dictating what is and what is not allowed. While the State is constantly trying to assume that role, that does not make such authority natural law.
What educated people (vs the warez d00ds) are arguing regarding distribution is that the inherent scalability problems of physical distribution mean that, as a society, giving up the natural right to copy in exchange for increased incentives to artists was a good bargain for society. But the inherent ease of electronic distribution make that contract much less of a bargain for society today. The social contract must be renegotiated and that negotiation must take into account the costs to society as well as the benefits to society.
Many people argue that the costs of any sort of distribution restrictions are far too high -- in particular that enforcement is close to impossible, making it extremely expensive and that it leads to inefficient utilization of resources, or more plainly, it causes lots of wasted effort and lost opportunities which hurt society as a whole and serve only to enrich a few.
There are many areas where we are fighting the exact same battle against technological abuse - where governments insist that because they CAN do something with technology, they must be allowed to (snooping, cluster bombs, chemical weapons, data mining).
The difference between the two concepts here is huge. The governments in question exist solely by the will of the people. They are a social construct that has no inherent rights, not even an existence, without the people they are meant to serve and certainly no natural freedoms. It is entirely right and normal that the people should define what is and is not permissible for their government to do. Just because the people nominally in charge of governing have begun to think of themselves as an independent, self-sustaining entity does not change things - it just indicates that we've got problems that need to be fixed.
There is also the economics of production - even free culture has costs (the cost of your free time) - and for most artists, musicians and authors, those costs are eventually too high.
You are spot on with this, though perhaps you don't realize it. Digital networks have reduced distribution costs to near zero. But they have not, and can not, have a similar effect on production costs. Production as become more efficient as a result of digital networking, but it is unlikely to ever approach zero the way distribution costs have.
So, what should logically follow from that fact alone is that we should stop using distribution rights as a way to encourage creation. If distribution has zero marginal cost, then any market that is even close to competitive will cause pricing to approach zero too - thus making distribution rights completely valueless.
Instead, we should be looking at ways in which the production rights can be made valuable enough to encourage creation of new works.
My favorite example of such a system is commission-based production. Today, the studios act as a kind of venture capitalist - they fund a bunch of productions, fully expecting to take losses on a majority of them. But they also expect that out of the bunch, they will find one or two start performers that will earn back the losses of all the other failures and then some. In either case, the studios have no interest in the actual content produced, only whether or not it will sell.
With a commission system, the role of venture capitalist is spread out across the entire paying audience. The creator would set a price for the production and release
No - a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is explicitly for reorganization not for dissolution. Although it certainly isn't the best thing that can happen to a company, it can actually be a positive since it can allow them to shed some debt that would have otherwise forced the company to completely shut down.
As many erudite posters have pointed out this is nothing more than an astroturfing campaign by big telcos.. why is slashdot giving these people ad space?
Why not? It sure is better than running the advert in front of people who will take it at face value. At least on slashdot it gets a firm rebuttal and helps pay for the place.
Theoretically a receiver could decode AAC it is, after all, just another codec. Off hand, I am not aware of any home theater receivers with AAC decoders in the USA - but I haven't ever really looked for them either.
In Japan, their version of HDTV uses AAC instead of AC3, so any current japanese domestic market home theater receiver is going to support AAC. 4 or 5 years ago when I last purchased a receiver, at least some US models were identical to the JDM versions except for the lack of AAC decoder. I would expect the same is true today.
Perhaps the enormous popularity of itunes which is native AAC, will cause the manufacturers to start including AAC support in their US models too.
I would imaging that since broadcast TV is all MPEG2 based,
Not in Europe. They are mostly skipping MPEG-2 and going directly to h264. The BBC is already doing h264 broadcasts on their "test" channel.
I don't understand what you're not understanding here.
What I don't understand here is arrrrg's assertion of fairness.
Apple doesn't do it to its own customers.
Lol! Thanks for admitting that indeed you really did just make that bit up.
Lol! Because by all indications (i.e. you're just making stuff up) Apple signed an unfair contract, it somehow becomes fair when Apple does it to their own customers?
When you lose a physical CD, do you go whining to Best Buy for a replacement?
When you eat a piece of cake and want more do you go whining to the baker for a replacement? You are comparing apples and oranges.
Apple is certainly under no obligation to offer this service;
"Fair" and "obligation" are two different things. I'm talking about fairness.
carries significant potential for abuse
How so? I have never and will never purchase defective recorded media, but it seems to me that the whole point of DRM is to control the copying. If the copying enforcement mechanism is vulnerable to "replay" attacks, then the DRM can't be very effective to begin with - else you could just backup the files on the computer before you make any 'authorized' copies, and then restore them back and make more 'authorized' copies.
Therefore, as odd as it might look to you, Jobs's is the correct form. (Chicago manual of style also concurs on this issue. There are examples, as well as a few exceptions, at CMS 7.17-23.)
One of the exceptions is when discussing a diety. As another poster noted without realizing it, the correct possesive usage for Jesus is Jesus'.
Considering that Apple and Steve Jobs stories often get the most bizarro comment moderations, I think it is safe to say that some people here do indeed consider Steve Jobs to be a diety, maybe even their own personal Jesus. So for those people, it is technically correct to write it as Jobs'.
I don't really care about the DRM angle.
You should. It is entirely possible that the overhead for DRM is the source of your playback problems.
The guys over on avsforum.com discovered a long time a go that, with MS WMV9 encoded video, the DRM'd version could easily consume 20% more cpu than the same video stripped of DRM. Similar testing of music with and with-out DRM on portable players shows battery life being significantly (in the 20-30% ballpark) for playback of DRM'd audio versus the same audio in the clear.
Almost all DTS tracks are "half-rate" at 768kbps - the studios found that including full-rate DTS often consumed so much disc-space that they were prevente from including other features like commentary tracks or had to make visible sacrifices in video quality.
In addition - AC3 (on DVD) is usually 448kbps nowadays and is often indistinguishable from an equivalent half-rate DTS track. One reason for that is that AC3 uses a shared "pool" of bitrate for all channels while DTS keeps them seperate. Thus when the encoding algorithm needs lots of bits for just a couple of channels - like front left & right - AC3 can "steal" them from the other channels like the rears which may not even have any sound at all during that period. DTS can't do that, each channel is limited to a set bitrate and so channels with "dead air" just waste their bits.
Then there are newer, more efficient, algorithms like AAC - for movie and tv soundtracks it is reasonable to expect to get roughly equivalent 5.1 audio fidelity out of say a 300kbps AAC track as one does from a 448kbps AC3 track.
How is that fair? The cost of bandwidth for the occasional re-download is negligble, they are already tracking what you bought. What is so difficult about letting you redownload the same files as often as you want like emusic does?
Think of all the different ways a disc can now "phone-home" and report your activities - what movies you watched, what websites you went to, what scenes you paused and replayed - time and date that you were home and watching a movie instead of the ads on tv... A literal goldmine of marketing information that will probably end up being used for more than that - for example watch too many serial killer movies? you might be the guy they are looking for in the latest unsolved case.
You do realize this is a law in one state out of the fifty states () that make up the United States of America... a state the represents about 2.1% of the total population of the United Stated of America.
Regardless, gambling -- other than state lotteries (how's that for hypocrisy) is illegal in most US jurisdictions. This WA law just slides down that slippery slope to make talking about gambling illegal.
So the OP's original contention that its illegal to bet $10 is correct in the general case.
HR-HDTV - full res HDTV quality encodes
If you think the HR xvids are equivalent to full res HDTV, you are missing out.
They are only 960x540 and the bitrate is nowhere near enough to prevent artifacts like macroblocking and mosquito noise.
Don't get me wrong - the HR encodes are better than most any analog tv signal, but it is rare that they are better than a good DVD much less the equal of HD.
About 30 for HD-DVD http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/format.cfm?classID= 1= 2
and 25 within the next month for BLU-RAY http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/format.cfm?classID
Not that anyone in their right mind would purchase either since both formats are DRM - Defective Recorded Media.
Hopefully I was correct about all this, but the claims I have made above were made in many long-standing high-score comments in the last discussion about this subject, and not refuted, so hopefully peer review will have made me sound like I know what I'm talking about.
Heh. I just mailed them a link to your posting. Now your credibility is down the pooper.