If it had a monopoly on DRM too it would be a disaster!
Why? Because they would do a poor job at security?
So what? This is a GOOD thing!
It's a mixed bag. Some people like the all-you-can-eat-for-a-limited-time way of getting music.
I wish the media companies could trust their consumers, but the fact is they don't, and it's not likely they'll forget Napster's first incarnation anytime soon. As I said in my original post, I intend to keep getting my music by purchasing CDs.
The fact is that Microsoft succeeded in the operating system market by making themselves compatible with standardized hardware and fostering an environment for third party applications. You may argue that afterward they tried to leverage that power, but the fact that they initially succeeded this way was a good thing at the time.
I hope DVD Jon succeeds with his FairPlay-compatible DRM, and that that becomes the new industry standard. It's just that PlaysForSure has the advantage of already being successful outside of the iPod space. I'm no MS fanboy. I run Gentoo Linux, but I'm not an idiot, and I don't think that everything they do is evil. A professor of mine once warned us against ascribing motive to the actions of corporations. I think that was good advice.
The express purpose of DRM is to bind media to a particular owner, not to a brand of devices.
Interoperable DRM is exactly what PlaysForSure is: a system where the customer can arbitrarily choose between several services and several players, and switch either one at any time, without loosing any content because of incompatibility. It's just too bad that that isn't the entire market. If it were, then the DRM would only prevent a consumer from distributing the content to others, which is its sole avowed purpose anyway.
This is the situation I was describing as "tolerable," and it most certainly is different from the situation with no DRM as you describe, because in that situation, subscription services (such as Napster) do not exist, and there is no technical barrier to mass redistribution (i.e., copyright infringement).
In the situation with "interoperable DRM" which I described, the DRM did not get in the way of the consumer doing things he normally does, and it does not get in the way of him leaving one music provider for another, or one device manufacturer for another.
What I was saying is that Walmart could license DoubleTwist and sell music compatible with FairPlay to people who already have and use iPods. I'm pretty sure Walmart uses PlaysForSure, but they might also support this if it were to become available. That is the sort of freedom of choice that this reverse engineering makes possible: to have iTMS competitors for the iPod space, that still sell protected content.
I am not confused, but apparently I'm confusing, at least to you.
A content provider would license FairPlay compatible DRM not necessarily because it's cheaper, but because doing so enables them to sell songs for play on the iPod: it's not that it's cheaper, the product is more useful to a particular segment of consumers (a segment which happens to be large).
All he's done is reverse engineer for the sake of interoperability. Now you'll be able to download songs from, say, Walmart for 88 cents and play them on your iPod.
The next step would be to reverse engineer the iPod, so that you can play iTMS tracks on your Zune or iRiver or whatever other device is out there.
As long as the DRM on these other players works just as well as the iPod, the only thing that changes is that the single-vendor lock-in that Apple has worked so hard to create gets shattered. This is good for the consumer, and may perhaps be what finally moves DRM from the "evil" category over to "annoyance" in the mind of consumers, thus increasing the market size.
Only an idiot would voluntarily lock themselves in to a single vendor (Apple, Zune Marketplace) if they had the choice. PlaysForSure was Microsoft's shot at creating an open marketplace for players along with an open market for media players, which, if DRM must exist, is the best market situation from the consumer perspective: you get to pick the best music store (or several of them) and the best player (or several of them). Music and players are interchangeable commodities.
I still don't like the fact that downloaded music is licensed in stead of purchased (as with a CD), but if all DRM were made interoperable (as France recently tried to do), the difference would be tolerable.
I still plan on purchasing CDs for the foreseeable future, but this developement is definitely welcome.
Why the hell would you freeze the development of a web browser for a year or two? Even on Windows I update FF whenever a patch comes out. Then again, I use Gentoo, so I'm constantly updating my software as patches and new versions become available.
BSD still requires that you give proper credit to the original authors. What Debian is doing is changing Firefox and then passing it off as if it were put out by Mozilla. They are lying about who produced the software. If I forked Debian, and broke it, and then put it up on the web with their name and logo, I think they'd be pretty pissed when people started confusing my work with theirs. The purpose of trademarks is to identify the producer of a product. It doesn't restrict freedom in any way, it informs the consumer.
If I can't, then is Debian truly free? This is stupid.
There's a world of difference between the purpose of a trademark and the purpose of a free software license. Trademarks are like a signature: they associate a product with a unique producer. They do not restrict freedom in any meaningful way. If Debian is changing Firefox without Mozilla's approval, they shouldn't be claiming it's Firefox, because it isn't: it's their own fork of Firefox.
No that is actually more like waiting till some one else opens the door and you sticking your foot in it to keep it from closing.;)
It's more like waiting for someone to open the door, and then taking a picture of what's inside through the open door with your telephoto lens. On your own property.
"I didn't even circumvent the security system. I just cut the blue wire and the alarm happened to not go off."
Please explain to me the findamental difference between this and the analog hole.
In both cases, content is passed unencrypted in a space accessible to the end user. My computer belongs to me, and I have the right to read anything that gets written to its RAM, just as I have a right to read the data that gets output to my speakers, written onto my CD-R, or output to my sound card. If doing so enables me to take advantage of fair use (in order to be enabled to play the media on the device of my choice) then I have no qualms with doing so.
This issue is entirely separate from that of subsequent distribution of the content. That would be copyright infringement.
Wouldn't this fall under the category of reverse engineering for interoperability? As long as he isn't re-publishing copyrighted code, I don't see what their problem is.
IIRC, The program doesn't even circumvent the DRM, it just waits for WMP to do it, and then reads some of its memory.
Three different inputs on the same screen? I'd rather have a button (or CTRL key sequence) to switch between them rather than having to move my head or the screen.
If you want three (or four, or however many you like) different desktops for the same OS, you could just use Virtual Desktops, which can be had in Linux, OSX, and Windows (there's a PowerToy for this). If you want them to be different OSs, you could use Virtual Machines, each on their own Virtual Desktop.
If you want your inputs to come from different hardware, the best way to do this is a KVM switch.
Virtual Desktops are usually switched with either Ctrl+Alt+[Tab/Arrow/Number] or Meta+[Tab/Arrow/Number] or whatever hotkeys you set up. KVMs usually use a tap sequence: two machines is usually Ctrl,Ctrl (two taps on the Ctrl key), four or more is usually Scroll Lock,Number.
Stephen Hawking isn't very aesthetically pleasing but he's rarely wrong.
He certainly is "wrong" physically, which is the same way in which he is not aesthetically pleasing.
If his scientific papers were written in a sloppy, irregular, busy, and otherwise unaesthetically pleasing, it would probably be an indicator that they were not well thought out, and therefore that they were likely wrong.
1. plug in ipod, itunes auto launches and auto syncs all my media
The following is an honest question arising from genuine curiosity. I do not own an iPod, and I have never installed iTunes or any other portable media player software.
What happens when I have more music than can fit on my iPod? Is there a "this goes on my iPod" tag that I can apply to songs/albums offline before/during the sync?
I've never understood why people say "I could care less...". Care less then. Care so much more less that you can't care less. Then say it properly: "I couldn't care less...".
It was originally the sarcastic expression: "As if I could care any less [than I do]!"
It was shortened to "I could care less!" with the same meaning.
The great-grandparent seems unaware of the literal meaning, since inserting the word "really" into a textual sarcastic expression without including "as if" can have the effect of negating the sarcasm to some readers.
Indeed, however your comment history seems to suggest that you do.
I would highly recommend that you switch to Linux. I would expect to to experience a significant increase in both functionality and performance, as well as available applications.
My first Linux (which I still use, though I've since tried out other distros) was Gentoo, which I think is great for those who are tech-oriented, but new to Linux. The online handbook is excellent. I imagine someone who still uses Win95 is used to knowing where all the settings are, and installing Gentoo was, in my experience, the perfect way to get acquainted with them.
It didn't take me long to realize that the Gentoo experience was one of endless recompiling for every minor or trivial update.
I readily admit to doing this myself, but then I don't mind it. If you didn't like all the recompiling, why did you run "emerge --sync" every day? Even then, you didn't have to update everything the minute it came out. Also, it's not like *you* spent 8 hours compiling, or that your computer was rendered unuseable. Nothing prevented you or your computer from doing what they normally do in the meantime.
What would presumably make it painful for new users is that they might not understand what they were doing during each step. This is probably the main reason why Gentoo might not be the best distribution to start with. Not because it's difficult, but because you have to follow the documentation and if you don't understand the why of the documentation, there's more chance that you might want to skip some bits that might be crucial without realising what you're doing.
Either (1) you have never installed Gentoo, or (2) You had Linux experience before installing Gentoo. For one of these two reasons, you never relied on the Gentoo documentation, and therefore have no idea what you're talking about.
Gentoo is the *perfect* first distro precisely because the documentation explains at every step not only what to do, but what your other options are.
Gentoo is a great way to learn Linux precisely because it requires you to do everything yourself in small steps, and those steps are extremely well documented. There is nothing on my Linux box that I did not install myself and configure if necessary.
Of course you don't skip steps when installing Linux. It's a process. But that process has several paths to completion, and Gentoo does a very good job of helping the user navigate that path with fine-grained control, explaining each choice.
You hit it right on the head: Wikipedia's success is largely due to its casual nature.
I have hope, however that this project will serve as a sort of "stable" branch of Wikipedia, much like the Red Hat/Debian arrangement. The experts would then only be required to approve and merge changes that in their judgement were beneficial to the argument. I don't think either project benefits by "forking," and I suspect that in reality what will happen is that Wikipedia articles will find their way (after some fact-checking) into Citizendium, whether or not there is a formal merge process between the two.
I think it is you who are confused. Patents exist to prevent reverse engineering.
Your car analogy is flawed. Allow me to push you off the fence:
First of all, if there were a law preventing the end consumer from replacing the parts of their car with third-party parts, I would be pretty pissed. It's a well-known fact that manufacturer-branded dealerships overcharge for "genuine" parts.
However, this isn't a [car]/[parts of car] system we're talking about. Music is not part of a player any more than gas, oil, or window-washing fluid are parts of a car. This is in fact very similar to the case where HP encrypted their cartirges so that no one could make knock-offs, and someone reverse-engineered their encryption. HP has no right to grant themselves a monopoly on printer cartriges compatible with their printers, and Apple has no right to grant themselves a monopoly on digital music players compatible with their music download service, which is exactly what they have done.
I applaud the Europeans for paying enough attention to Apple's abuse of the market through encryption technology. I hope they put us Americans to shame by forcing Apple to open up or close up shop.
If they open up, then there will be a truly free market for players, since any manufacturer will be able to make a competing device. Apple will lose thir monopoly and make less money. Boo hoo.
If they withdraw their store from selling in those countries, then there will no longer be anything to force consumers to stick with the iPod brand, and (as much as we all dislike Microsoft here) MS's DRM scheme (which does not lock consumers to a particular player) will become the industry standard, which already has a fair market of compteing players. Apple will have left the market and lose money. Boo hoo.
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Why? Because they would do a poor job at security?
It's a mixed bag. Some people like the all-you-can-eat-for-a-limited-time way of getting music.
I wish the media companies could trust their consumers, but the fact is they don't, and it's not likely they'll forget Napster's first incarnation anytime soon. As I said in my original post, I intend to keep getting my music by purchasing CDs.
The fact is that Microsoft succeeded in the operating system market by making themselves compatible with standardized hardware and fostering an environment for third party applications. You may argue that afterward they tried to leverage that power, but the fact that they initially succeeded this way was a good thing at the time.
I hope DVD Jon succeeds with his FairPlay-compatible DRM, and that that becomes the new industry standard. It's just that PlaysForSure has the advantage of already being successful outside of the iPod space. I'm no MS fanboy. I run Gentoo Linux, but I'm not an idiot, and I don't think that everything they do is evil. A professor of mine once warned us against ascribing motive to the actions of corporations. I think that was good advice.
The express purpose of DRM is to bind media to a particular owner, not to a brand of devices.
Interoperable DRM is exactly what PlaysForSure is: a system where the customer can arbitrarily choose between several services and several players, and switch either one at any time, without loosing any content because of incompatibility. It's just too bad that that isn't the entire market. If it were, then the DRM would only prevent a consumer from distributing the content to others, which is its sole avowed purpose anyway.
This is the situation I was describing as "tolerable," and it most certainly is different from the situation with no DRM as you describe, because in that situation, subscription services (such as Napster) do not exist, and there is no technical barrier to mass redistribution (i.e., copyright infringement).
In the situation with "interoperable DRM" which I described, the DRM did not get in the way of the consumer doing things he normally does, and it does not get in the way of him leaving one music provider for another, or one device manufacturer for another.
What I was saying is that Walmart could license DoubleTwist and sell music compatible with FairPlay to people who already have and use iPods. I'm pretty sure Walmart uses PlaysForSure, but they might also support this if it were to become available. That is the sort of freedom of choice that this reverse engineering makes possible: to have iTMS competitors for the iPod space, that still sell protected content.
I am not confused, but apparently I'm confusing, at least to you.
A content provider would license FairPlay compatible DRM not necessarily because it's cheaper, but because doing so enables them to sell songs for play on the iPod: it's not that it's cheaper, the product is more useful to a particular segment of consumers (a segment which happens to be large).
All he's done is reverse engineer for the sake of interoperability. Now you'll be able to download songs from, say, Walmart for 88 cents and play them on your iPod.
The next step would be to reverse engineer the iPod, so that you can play iTMS tracks on your Zune or iRiver or whatever other device is out there.
As long as the DRM on these other players works just as well as the iPod, the only thing that changes is that the single-vendor lock-in that Apple has worked so hard to create gets shattered. This is good for the consumer, and may perhaps be what finally moves DRM from the "evil" category over to "annoyance" in the mind of consumers, thus increasing the market size.
Only an idiot would voluntarily lock themselves in to a single vendor (Apple, Zune Marketplace) if they had the choice. PlaysForSure was Microsoft's shot at creating an open marketplace for players along with an open market for media players, which, if DRM must exist, is the best market situation from the consumer perspective: you get to pick the best music store (or several of them) and the best player (or several of them). Music and players are interchangeable commodities.
I still don't like the fact that downloaded music is licensed in stead of purchased (as with a CD), but if all DRM were made interoperable (as France recently tried to do), the difference would be tolerable.
I still plan on purchasing CDs for the foreseeable future, but this developement is definitely welcome.
Why the hell would you freeze the development of a web browser for a year or two? Even on Windows I update FF whenever a patch comes out. Then again, I use Gentoo, so I'm constantly updating my software as patches and new versions become available.
The most useful name to the consumer would communicate that:
1. The software is based on FireFox, and therefore will probably be compatible with Firefox Add-ons
2. The software has been tweaked by Debian, and therefore might not be perfectly compatible, and now you know who to complain to when it breaks.
Not that I expect them to do this, but it would be the right thing to do.
BSD still requires that you give proper credit to the original authors. What Debian is doing is changing Firefox and then passing it off as if it were put out by Mozilla. They are lying about who produced the software. If I forked Debian, and broke it, and then put it up on the web with their name and logo, I think they'd be pretty pissed when people started confusing my work with theirs. The purpose of trademarks is to identify the producer of a product. It doesn't restrict freedom in any way, it informs the consumer.
If I can't, then is Debian truly free? This is stupid. There's a world of difference between the purpose of a trademark and the purpose of a free software license. Trademarks are like a signature: they associate a product with a unique producer. They do not restrict freedom in any meaningful way. If Debian is changing Firefox without Mozilla's approval, they shouldn't be claiming it's Firefox, because it isn't: it's their own fork of Firefox.
/. is the root of a file system
./ is the current directory
He must be referring to his own life experience.
It's more like waiting for someone to open the door, and then taking a picture of what's inside through the open door with your telephoto lens. On your own property.
Please explain to me the findamental difference between this and the analog hole.
In both cases, content is passed unencrypted in a space accessible to the end user. My computer belongs to me, and I have the right to read anything that gets written to its RAM, just as I have a right to read the data that gets output to my speakers, written onto my CD-R, or output to my sound card. If doing so enables me to take advantage of fair use (in order to be enabled to play the media on the device of my choice) then I have no qualms with doing so.
This issue is entirely separate from that of subsequent distribution of the content. That would be copyright infringement.
Note: I don't have any DRM'd media.
Wouldn't this fall under the category of reverse engineering for interoperability? As long as he isn't re-publishing copyrighted code, I don't see what their problem is.
IIRC, The program doesn't even circumvent the DRM, it just waits for WMP to do it, and then reads some of its memory.
If you want three (or four, or however many you like) different desktops for the same OS, you could just use Virtual Desktops, which can be had in Linux, OSX, and Windows (there's a PowerToy for this). If you want them to be different OSs, you could use Virtual Machines, each on their own Virtual Desktop.
If you want your inputs to come from different hardware, the best way to do this is a KVM switch.
Virtual Desktops are usually switched with either Ctrl+Alt+[Tab/Arrow/Number] or Meta+[Tab/Arrow/Number] or whatever hotkeys you set up. KVMs usually use a tap sequence: two machines is usually Ctrl,Ctrl (two taps on the Ctrl key), four or more is usually Scroll Lock,Number.
I don't think they had the option.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W
I would have modded you funny, but I've already commented on this thread.
That certainly is one dead straw man, though. You killed it expertly.
He certainly is "wrong" physically, which is the same way in which he is not aesthetically pleasing.
If his scientific papers were written in a sloppy, irregular, busy, and otherwise unaesthetically pleasing, it would probably be an indicator that they were not well thought out, and therefore that they were likely wrong.
I'm not trying to insult anyone. It's a good sales strategy.
The following is an honest question arising from genuine curiosity. I do not own an iPod, and I have never installed iTunes or any other portable media player software.
What happens when I have more music than can fit on my iPod? Is there a "this goes on my iPod" tag that I can apply to songs/albums offline before/during the sync?
It was originally the sarcastic expression: "As if I could care any less [than I do]!"
It was shortened to "I could care less!" with the same meaning.
The great-grandparent seems unaware of the literal meaning, since inserting the word "really" into a textual sarcastic expression without including "as if" can have the effect of negating the sarcasm to some readers.
Indeed, however your comment history seems to suggest that you do.
I would highly recommend that you switch to Linux. I would expect to to experience a significant increase in both functionality and performance, as well as available applications.
My first Linux (which I still use, though I've since tried out other distros) was Gentoo, which I think is great for those who are tech-oriented, but new to Linux. The online handbook is excellent. I imagine someone who still uses Win95 is used to knowing where all the settings are, and installing Gentoo was, in my experience, the perfect way to get acquainted with them.
I readily admit to doing this myself, but then I don't mind it. If you didn't like all the recompiling, why did you run "emerge --sync" every day? Even then, you didn't have to update everything the minute it came out. Also, it's not like *you* spent 8 hours compiling, or that your computer was rendered unuseable. Nothing prevented you or your computer from doing what they normally do in the meantime.
Either (1) you have never installed Gentoo, or (2) You had Linux experience before installing Gentoo. For one of these two reasons, you never relied on the Gentoo documentation, and therefore have no idea what you're talking about.
Gentoo is the *perfect* first distro precisely because the documentation explains at every step not only what to do, but what your other options are.
Gentoo is a great way to learn Linux precisely because it requires you to do everything yourself in small steps, and those steps are extremely well documented. There is nothing on my Linux box that I did not install myself and configure if necessary.
Of course you don't skip steps when installing Linux. It's a process. But that process has several paths to completion, and Gentoo does a very good job of helping the user navigate that path with fine-grained control, explaining each choice.
You hit it right on the head: Wikipedia's success is largely due to its casual nature.
I have hope, however that this project will serve as a sort of "stable" branch of Wikipedia, much like the Red Hat/Debian arrangement. The experts would then only be required to approve and merge changes that in their judgement were beneficial to the argument. I don't think either project benefits by "forking," and I suspect that in reality what will happen is that Wikipedia articles will find their way (after some fact-checking) into Citizendium, whether or not there is a formal merge process between the two.
I think it is you who are confused. Patents exist to prevent reverse engineering.
Your car analogy is flawed. Allow me to push you off the fence:
First of all, if there were a law preventing the end consumer from replacing the parts of their car with third-party parts, I would be pretty pissed. It's a well-known fact that manufacturer-branded dealerships overcharge for "genuine" parts.
However, this isn't a [car]/[parts of car] system we're talking about. Music is not part of a player any more than gas, oil, or window-washing fluid are parts of a car. This is in fact very similar to the case where HP encrypted their cartirges so that no one could make knock-offs, and someone reverse-engineered their encryption. HP has no right to grant themselves a monopoly on printer cartriges compatible with their printers, and Apple has no right to grant themselves a monopoly on digital music players compatible with their music download service, which is exactly what they have done.
I applaud the Europeans for paying enough attention to Apple's abuse of the market through encryption technology. I hope they put us Americans to shame by forcing Apple to open up or close up shop.
If they open up, then there will be a truly free market for players, since any manufacturer will be able to make a competing device. Apple will lose thir monopoly and make less money. Boo hoo.
If they withdraw their store from selling in those countries, then there will no longer be anything to force consumers to stick with the iPod brand, and (as much as we all dislike Microsoft here) MS's DRM scheme (which does not lock consumers to a particular player) will become the industry standard, which already has a fair market of compteing players. Apple will have left the market and lose money. Boo hoo.
Um... Didn't you read what he wrote: "For fuck's sake"?