The standard Microsoft EULAs tend to protect the vendor from damages that result from using the software, but what about damages done to someone who never uses the software, and never agrees to a EULA? Could a group of people accused of collecting child porn because Microsoft Outlook users had their porn collections sent to others file a class action suit against Microsoft for damages caused by bugs in Outlook?
This is a pretty stupid move. Why is software company with serious interests in digital media trying to make it easier for people to use what has become little more than a medium for warez-trading?
Perhaps someone at Microsoft wants to make it easier to collect usenet goat-pr0n.
The first step to explain free software is to make sure that people start thinking about free from an ideological standpoint and not a financial standpoint. Free software may cost less to implement in some cases, in others it costs more. One way or another, the jury is still out on the money issue.
Instead, push the concept of freedom. Make it clear that a company spending millions of dollars a year on software and only getting what the vendor wants to sell could instead hire a bunch of open-source coders to add corporate interests to existing projects. Point out that OpenOffice formats are totally open, and help the company escape Microsoft's proprietary file format hell. Teach corporations that for far less than the cost of buying software, they can hire programmers to represent their interests in thousands of useful open-source projects.
People don't want to see free software as a way to get out of paying. That just makes them see the whole free/open source community as the eurocentric, socialist monstrosity that proprietary software vendors insinuate about. Offering people more actual freedom in the way they conduct their business, if not their lives, will open doors that saving dollars never can.
Teach people how to keep the system running and performing well. As a UNIX Engineer/Admin, I am constantly assailed by users who can do make a computer do a thousand things quite well, but trash the machine in the process, and expect me to help fix it. People need to know what breaks the machine and what keeps it going. Example classes include: - Anti-virus software - Simple firewalls - Using Windows update - Uninstalling programs correctly and completely - Driver maintenance - Disk defragmentation - Why to not install all of those silly programs floating around the internet, and how to get rid of all the spyware those programs install.
This is why we need to support Open-Source lobbying efforts. Right now, sending a native Chinese lobbyist to push China to adopt the work of the Ogg team as their official standards would be a great coup for the Open Source movement.
1- Stop wasting so much time on the web. Grow up and just get over the "temptation." 2- Get lots of exercise to burn off the extra energy that makes you fidgety. 3- Eat better. Less caffiene and sugary crap, more healthy meals. 4- If all else fails, BEER. Alcohol can calm a man down quickly.
1- Get rid of all your extraneous computers at home, so that you don't waste your life doing more work at home. Cut back to a single laptop behind a firewall, and don't install work software on the laptop. When not in use, put the laptop in a desk where you can't see it.
2- Only work 8-9 hour days. Eat healthy lunches at your desk. Don't work weekends. If you employer can't deal with this, find one who can.
3- Start exercising in your free time now that you work less and aren't geeking out at home. Run, swim, go to the gym, whatever. Do it shirtless on weekends so you get a tan.
4- Give up the following: Alcohol (Especially beer.), refined sugar, caffeine, junk food, etc.. You are what you eat, and if you eat nothing but fatty shit all day, you're going to look like a fat piece of shit.
The important thing to learn is that there is more to life than computers. Being a nerd is a lifestyle choice. If you want to spend your life in an office, around computers, eating junk and looking like shit, well, hello Richard Stallman. If you want to be less of a nerd, give up on the machines and go get a life.
"How they tie this to '9/11 fears' is curious considering the hijackers had valid paperwork."
The 9/11 hijackers had valid paperwork because various government agencies were not doing their jobs. These agencies are now under intense scruitiny, and are trying to do a better job to prevent potential terrorists from entering the country again. Smart chip passports will be much harder and more expensive to forge, making it harder for terrorists to travel using false identities. Overall, it's a small, important step in a larger program to keep the USA safe.
There's a really easy way to deal with the word problem. Refuse to send out or recieve documents in proprietary formats. Just stick with plaintext and PDF, OpenOffice does both just fine. It will piss off customers and co-workers, but if more and more people use OpenOffice and start refusing to mess with Word files, eventually the better file formats will catch on.
A few months ago I would have cared. But last month Apple released Safari 1.0, and after using it for a while, I realized that Mozilla Navigator is a big, bloated mess, with endless confusing interface changes. Now I just do most of my important browsing with Safari, although I still mess with Mozilla at the office where I have to run Linux.
Other thoughts follow.
Mozilla advocates really only have one big point for pushing Mozilla- standards compliance with some particular group's standards. Honestly though, most people don't give a rat's ass about being compliant with W3C, Microsoft, or anyone else's. We just want the damned web sites to render right.
Mozilla/Netscape mail is nice, but I really only use it because I want to use Verisign certs on Linux without installing Gnome and I haven't gotten around to finding another client.
Composer is just crap, and produces some of the worst HTML out there. It's more efficient to buy Dreamweaver than it is to waste time trying to get anything to not look outright ugly when done with composer.
Address book is nice, but so are the dozens of other options out there. If Mozilla Mail didn't automatically fill propigate addresses to it, I wouldn't know it exists.
Chatzilla is pointless. There are dozens of great IRC clients around, nobody really needs more.
Bugzilla is nice, but if the Mozilla crew had been trying to make a decent browser instead of a huge suite of internet apps, it wouldn't have been needed.
I - "I'd really like Slashdot's opinion on this. I recently secured an MP3 distribution deal..."
Good for you, but so have plenty other people, all of whom screwed it up. Look at their faults before you start building.
II - "We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files')."
Why? That sort of stuff is for antisocial pirates who like to sit in ivory towers full of their bootlegs CDs. Most people will never look at the art, much less print it, and would rather pay less than get a nice image that doesn't serve any point on an iPod.
III - "What would make you want to buy music in this way?"
Good advertising, word of mouth, and the old staple, radio airplay. Of those three, word of mouth is king, because if I hear someone playing it in the office, car, etc., and he tells me what site to get it from, I'll probably do it within 48 hours.
IV - "What types things would turn you away?"
DRM. Crappy web design, especially flash or anything that only renders well in one browser or other. Use google as a model for all web design.
V - "What are the positives and negatives of selling music in this manner?"
Positives: No physical CD to deal with. I can buy an album at three in the morning. Bands can sell singles and short albums (LPs) instead of long albums that are mostly filler tracks. David Lee Roth did really well in the 80s with short, cheap, filler free albums.
Negatives: Most people are too cheap/lazy to backup large hard disks, and will need to download entire album collections when a disk dies.
VI - "Do you think this is a viable alternative to someone who doesn't want to pay $10 or $15 for a physical CD?"
Emphatically yes.
VII - "Does the format the music is in or on have an impact on how serious you take it?"
I would *not* waste money on mp3 audio. Even the best mp3s sound like crap on a decent set of speakers, much less my car stereo or the THX sound system at my desk. Make high-quality files (.ogg) an option.
DRM is also an instant dealbreaker. If I do not have total control over how I playback the music, I'll just download a warez rip instead.
It won't just be Premiere. In this case Apple's "Final Cut" software was obviously the cause, but expect more software companies to flee Apple after the relase of 10.3 with its built-in XFree86 that makes running all that cool free software in Apple.com's "Downloads" section a breeze.
Adobe has already made it quite clear that Windows is their new preferred platform, so I think that it's safe to assume that we will see more of this down the road. Adobe is, for the most part, a proprietary software company, and with Apple cozying up to the Open Source world, Adobe's profit margins in the Apple world will shrink as popular free tools like Gimp encroach on Adobe's market share. Microsoft yanked IE support for Apple, punishing Apple for providing a little competition. It will continue.
Apple is doing what the Linux world has failed at- bringing Open-Source software to desktop users. In a few years Apple users might not need much proprietary software at all- making up for the higher cost of Mac hardware. Apple is taking a big risk by pissing off a lot of software companies, but the rewards should make up for it if Apple comes through it.
These benchmarks prove once again that while high-end RISC CPUs outperform commodity CISC CPUs per clock cycle, it really doesn't matter, because the CISC CPU runs so many more clock cycles that the CISC CPUs can blow away the RISC CPUs.
Some people will point out that the Intel chip barely beat out the G5. But the intel chip is available *now*, while the G5 won't actually be shipping in quantity until late August, at which point the intel CPU will have dropped in price and been replaced by faster models.
Of course, I would still rather have a new Apple over any more Lintel boxes;)
Does anyone else think that laptops could be gaining ground simply because of the overall convenience of having a small computer with a built-in screen that can be carried around? Aside from hard-core gamers, not too many consumers have a need for a desktop and a large screen. It also saves one from having a big ugly desktop and monitor sitting around, which is nice from a aesthetics perspective, especially in apartments.
"This puts the China-India space race and the China-USA space race in a very different light..."
There is no China-USA space race. Middle America has made it very clear that they do not care about fluff like expensive space programs when the government can instead provide them miniscule tax breaks and 24/7 war coverage. The horrendous mismanagement of NASA funding has become an embarassment to long-time memebers of the Congress, who would rather just sweep the whole idea under the rug and avoid drawing attention to an aging shuttle fleet that they were promising to replace in the 1980s.
America is no longer in a space race with anything other than the financial mismanagement that threatens to eventually kill manned flight entirely.
I've given up on ATI because of their crappy drivers. Sure the drivers are no longer the huge bottleneck that they once were, but it's all still a big mess on Windows, and they are real bastards about just being upfront and posting decent Linux drivers for download. Since buying my Radeon 9700 Pro I have had numerous problems trying to run games on it under Windows XP and Mandrake Linux, and at this point, I'd rather just lose some performance and go back to running Nvidia cards with detonators.
Maybe watching people get nailed left and right for illicit filesharing will encourage people to share files that they have a legitimate right to. This would encourage the diversity of media on the net overall, which is way better than people swapping around rips over overpriced and overproduced CDs by RIAA artists.
Apple is making silly claims about their processors being faster than they really are, that nobody else has made desktops with a powerful RISC architecture, and backs it up with benchmarks based on SPEC and Adobe products? Wow, what a surprise.
Why is this news? Apple has been spewing this BS since they started using the PPC architecture. The same goes for Sun. Nobody believes it, and in the long run, people buying systems for serious performance will stick with intel, who doesn't need to make any speed claims because their CPUs speak for themselves.
If Apple's marketing department ever starts speaking the truth it will be taken as a sign of the apocalypse. Not that the truth about Apple systems (That speed should not be the big concern when you want solid hardware and a great OS.) is a bad thing, but really, I think if they stopped spewing hype, we would all die of shock.
The OS X version of IE is a wonderful broswer, aside from the lack of tabs. It is faster, more stable, and all around better than the Windows version.
But we don't need it. OS X has an excellent port of Mozilla, which after over a year of use I can attest is excellent. Safari is also a nice option for users who want a less bloated browser, assuming that those users can tolerate that nasty brushed metal theme.
OS X users have two great browser options, we don't need IE. The only group who needs IE on OS X is Microsoft, and Microsoft has turned tail and run away after getting a nice ass-kicking in the OS X browser war.
OS X continues to prove that Open Source software is not just a niche market for programmers and sysadmins. Now we just need to educate Windows users about the great alternatives to Microsoft's products, and start beating down Redmond's doors.
The last time we did that, we all took jobs with another company. Don't walk out with nothing else lined up unless you really expect to get another job right away, and remember, you will get lower salary offers if you do not have a job and are looking for a new one.
How many people actually write in cursive anymore? Honestly, the only things I have ever used it for outside of school are signing my name and trying to read old documents written in cursive, which was still pretty much a lost cause because styles vary so much by writers and across time.
Perhaps cursive is something that *should* be lost, because in the long run, all it does is slow down a child's education with a style of writing that is essentially unecessary.
If you have the money to spare, get a nice Apple Powerbook. If you need to get something cheap, get an ibook. Either way you have a solid *NIX box with lots of cool bells and whistles.
Don't give those bastards more IPs! How many worms, portscans, and junk emails come from that fucking continent every day? Why don't we just leave them with those IP addresses and everyone else can block those subnets?
Slashdot Mirror
The standard Microsoft EULAs tend to protect the vendor from damages that result from using the software, but what about damages done to someone who never uses the software, and never agrees to a EULA? Could a group of people accused of collecting child porn because Microsoft Outlook users had their porn collections sent to others file a class action suit against Microsoft for damages caused by bugs in Outlook?
This is a pretty stupid move. Why is software company with serious interests in digital media trying to make it easier for people to use what has become little more than a medium for warez-trading?
Perhaps someone at Microsoft wants to make it easier to collect usenet goat-pr0n.
The first step to explain free software is to make sure that people start thinking about free from an ideological standpoint and not a financial standpoint. Free software may cost less to implement in some cases, in others it costs more. One way or another, the jury is still out on the money issue.
Instead, push the concept of freedom. Make it clear that a company spending millions of dollars a year on software and only getting what the vendor wants to sell could instead hire a bunch of open-source coders to add corporate interests to existing projects. Point out that OpenOffice formats are totally open, and help the company escape Microsoft's proprietary file format hell. Teach corporations that for far less than the cost of buying software, they can hire programmers to represent their interests in thousands of useful open-source projects.
People don't want to see free software as a way to get out of paying. That just makes them see the whole free/open source community as the eurocentric, socialist monstrosity that proprietary software vendors insinuate about. Offering people more actual freedom in the way they conduct their business, if not their lives, will open doors that saving dollars never can.
Teach people how to keep the system running and performing well. As a UNIX Engineer/Admin, I am constantly assailed by users who can do make a computer do a thousand things quite well, but trash the machine in the process, and expect me to help fix it. People need to know what breaks the machine and what keeps it going. Example classes include:
- Anti-virus software
- Simple firewalls
- Using Windows update
- Uninstalling programs correctly and completely
- Driver maintenance
- Disk defragmentation
- Why to not install all of those silly programs floating around the internet, and how to get rid of all the spyware those programs install.
This is why we need to support Open-Source lobbying efforts. Right now, sending a native Chinese lobbyist to push China to adopt the work of the Ogg team as their official standards would be a great coup for the Open Source movement.
1- Stop wasting so much time on the web. Grow up and just get over the "temptation."
2- Get lots of exercise to burn off the extra energy that makes you fidgety.
3- Eat better. Less caffiene and sugary crap, more healthy meals.
4- If all else fails, BEER. Alcohol can calm a man down quickly.
1- Get rid of all your extraneous computers at home, so that you don't waste your life doing more work at home. Cut back to a single laptop behind a firewall, and don't install work software on the laptop. When not in use, put the laptop in a desk where you can't see it.
2- Only work 8-9 hour days. Eat healthy lunches at your desk. Don't work weekends. If you employer can't deal with this, find one who can.
3- Start exercising in your free time now that you work less and aren't geeking out at home. Run, swim, go to the gym, whatever. Do it shirtless on weekends so you get a tan.
4- Give up the following: Alcohol (Especially beer.), refined sugar, caffeine, junk food, etc.. You are what you eat, and if you eat nothing but fatty shit all day, you're going to look like a fat piece of shit.
The important thing to learn is that there is more to life than computers. Being a nerd is a lifestyle choice. If you want to spend your life in an office, around computers, eating junk and looking like shit, well, hello Richard Stallman. If you want to be less of a nerd, give up on the machines and go get a life.
"How they tie this to '9/11 fears' is curious considering the hijackers had valid paperwork."
The 9/11 hijackers had valid paperwork because various government agencies were not doing their jobs. These agencies are now under intense scruitiny, and are trying to do a better job to prevent potential terrorists from entering the country again. Smart chip passports will be much harder and more expensive to forge, making it harder for terrorists to travel using false identities. Overall, it's a small, important step in a larger program to keep the USA safe.
There's a really easy way to deal with the word problem. Refuse to send out or recieve documents in proprietary formats. Just stick with plaintext and PDF, OpenOffice does both just fine. It will piss off customers and co-workers, but if more and more people use OpenOffice and start refusing to mess with Word files, eventually the better file formats will catch on.
A few months ago I would have cared. But last month Apple released Safari 1.0, and after using it for a while, I realized that Mozilla Navigator is a big, bloated mess, with endless confusing interface changes. Now I just do most of my important browsing with Safari, although I still mess with Mozilla at the office where I have to run Linux.
Other thoughts follow.
Mozilla advocates really only have one big point for pushing Mozilla- standards compliance with some particular group's standards. Honestly though, most people don't give a rat's ass about being compliant with W3C, Microsoft, or anyone else's. We just want the damned web sites to render right.
Mozilla/Netscape mail is nice, but I really only use it because I want to use Verisign certs on Linux without installing Gnome and I haven't gotten around to finding another client.
Composer is just crap, and produces some of the worst HTML out there. It's more efficient to buy Dreamweaver than it is to waste time trying to get anything to not look outright ugly when done with composer.
Address book is nice, but so are the dozens of other options out there. If Mozilla Mail didn't automatically fill propigate addresses to it, I wouldn't know it exists.
Chatzilla is pointless. There are dozens of great IRC clients around, nobody really needs more.
Bugzilla is nice, but if the Mozilla crew had been trying to make a decent browser instead of a huge suite of internet apps, it wouldn't have been needed.
To sum up, bloatware sucks.
I - "I'd really like Slashdot's opinion on this. I recently secured an MP3 distribution deal..."
Good for you, but so have plenty other people, all of whom screwed it up. Look at their faults before you start building.
II - "We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files')."
Why? That sort of stuff is for antisocial pirates who like to sit in ivory towers full of their bootlegs CDs. Most people will never look at the art, much less print it, and would rather pay less than get a nice image that doesn't serve any point on an iPod.
III - "What would make you want to buy music in this way?"
Good advertising, word of mouth, and the old staple, radio airplay. Of those three, word of mouth is king, because if I hear someone playing it in the office, car, etc., and he tells me what site to get it from, I'll probably do it within 48 hours.
IV - "What types things would turn you away?"
DRM. Crappy web design, especially flash or anything that only renders well in one browser or other. Use google as a model for all web design.
V - "What are the positives and negatives of selling music in this manner?"
Positives: No physical CD to deal with. I can buy an album at three in the morning. Bands can sell singles and short albums (LPs) instead of long albums that are mostly filler tracks. David Lee Roth did really well in the 80s with short, cheap, filler free albums.
Negatives: Most people are too cheap/lazy to backup large hard disks, and will need to download entire album collections when a disk dies.
VI - "Do you think this is a viable alternative to someone who doesn't want to pay $10 or $15 for a physical CD?"
Emphatically yes.
VII - "Does the format the music is in or on have an impact on how serious you take it?"
I would *not* waste money on mp3 audio. Even the best mp3s sound like crap on a decent set of speakers, much less my car stereo or the THX sound system at my desk. Make high-quality files (.ogg) an option.
DRM is also an instant dealbreaker. If I do not have total control over how I playback the music, I'll just download a warez rip instead.
It won't just be Premiere. In this case Apple's "Final Cut" software was obviously the cause, but expect more software companies to flee Apple after the relase of 10.3 with its built-in XFree86 that makes running all that cool free software in Apple.com's "Downloads" section a breeze.
Adobe has already made it quite clear that Windows is their new preferred platform, so I think that it's safe to assume that we will see more of this down the road. Adobe is, for the most part, a proprietary software company, and with Apple cozying up to the Open Source world, Adobe's profit margins in the Apple world will shrink as popular free tools like Gimp encroach on Adobe's market share. Microsoft yanked IE support for Apple, punishing Apple for providing a little competition. It will continue.
Apple is doing what the Linux world has failed at- bringing Open-Source software to desktop users. In a few years Apple users might not need much proprietary software at all- making up for the higher cost of Mac hardware. Apple is taking a big risk by pissing off a lot of software companies, but the rewards should make up for it if Apple comes through it.
These benchmarks prove once again that while high-end RISC CPUs outperform commodity CISC CPUs per clock cycle, it really doesn't matter, because the CISC CPU runs so many more clock cycles that the CISC CPUs can blow away the RISC CPUs.
;)
Some people will point out that the Intel chip barely beat out the G5. But the intel chip is available *now*, while the G5 won't actually be shipping in quantity until late August, at which point the intel CPU will have dropped in price and been replaced by faster models.
Of course, I would still rather have a new Apple over any more Lintel boxes
Does anyone else think that laptops could be gaining ground simply because of the overall convenience of having a small computer with a built-in screen that can be carried around? Aside from hard-core gamers, not too many consumers have a need for a desktop and a large screen. It also saves one from having a big ugly desktop and monitor sitting around, which is nice from a aesthetics perspective, especially in apartments.
"This puts the China-India space race and the China-USA space race in a very different light..."
There is no China-USA space race. Middle America has made it very clear that they do not care about fluff like expensive space programs when the government can instead provide them miniscule tax breaks and 24/7 war coverage. The horrendous mismanagement of NASA funding has become an embarassment to long-time memebers of the Congress, who would rather just sweep the whole idea under the rug and avoid drawing attention to an aging shuttle fleet that they were promising to replace in the 1980s.
America is no longer in a space race with anything other than the financial mismanagement that threatens to eventually kill manned flight entirely.
I've given up on ATI because of their crappy drivers. Sure the drivers are no longer the huge bottleneck that they once were, but it's all still a big mess on Windows, and they are real bastards about just being upfront and posting decent Linux drivers for download. Since buying my Radeon 9700 Pro I have had numerous problems trying to run games on it under Windows XP and Mandrake Linux, and at this point, I'd rather just lose some performance and go back to running Nvidia cards with detonators.
MPAA lawyers just joined every cable and broadcast network's lawyers in filing a class action suit againt Tivo...
Maybe watching people get nailed left and right for illicit filesharing will encourage people to share files that they have a legitimate right to. This would encourage the diversity of media on the net overall, which is way better than people swapping around rips over overpriced and overproduced CDs by RIAA artists.
Apple is making silly claims about their processors being faster than they really are, that nobody else has made desktops with a powerful RISC architecture, and backs it up with benchmarks based on SPEC and Adobe products? Wow, what a surprise.
Why is this news? Apple has been spewing this BS since they started using the PPC architecture. The same goes for Sun. Nobody believes it, and in the long run, people buying systems for serious performance will stick with intel, who doesn't need to make any speed claims because their CPUs speak for themselves.
If Apple's marketing department ever starts speaking the truth it will be taken as a sign of the apocalypse. Not that the truth about Apple systems (That speed should not be the big concern when you want solid hardware and a great OS.) is a bad thing, but really, I think if they stopped spewing hype, we would all die of shock.
The first person to patent a dog that refuses to pee in the house will be gangbusters.
The OS X version of IE is a wonderful broswer, aside from the lack of tabs. It is faster, more stable, and all around better than the Windows version.
But we don't need it. OS X has an excellent port of Mozilla, which after over a year of use I can attest is excellent. Safari is also a nice option for users who want a less bloated browser, assuming that those users can tolerate that nasty brushed metal theme.
OS X users have two great browser options, we don't need IE. The only group who needs IE on OS X is Microsoft, and Microsoft has turned tail and run away after getting a nice ass-kicking in the OS X browser war.
OS X continues to prove that Open Source software is not just a niche market for programmers and sysadmins. Now we just need to educate Windows users about the great alternatives to Microsoft's products, and start beating down Redmond's doors.
The last time we did that, we all took jobs with another company. Don't walk out with nothing else lined up unless you really expect to get another job right away, and remember, you will get lower salary offers if you do not have a job and are looking for a new one.
How many people actually write in cursive anymore? Honestly, the only things I have ever used it for outside of school are signing my name and trying to read old documents written in cursive, which was still pretty much a lost cause because styles vary so much by writers and across time.
Perhaps cursive is something that *should* be lost, because in the long run, all it does is slow down a child's education with a style of writing that is essentially unecessary.
If you have the money to spare, get a nice Apple Powerbook. If you need to get something cheap, get an ibook. Either way you have a solid *NIX box with lots of cool bells and whistles.
Don't give those bastards more IPs! How many worms, portscans, and junk emails come from that fucking continent every day? Why don't we just leave them with those IP addresses and everyone else can block those subnets?