Right now, the most "noise" is coming from the record companies, because quite franky, it doesn't require nearly as much bandwidth and time to download music as it does a movie.
As broadband technology becomes more prevalent and inexpensive though, the MPAA will be in the exact same boat that the RIAA is in today. (They're already in the first stages of it.)
The whole controversy about "is it right or wrong to download music" ignores the larger reality; technological changes are causing a lack of interest in purchasing music on prerecorded media. 5 years ago or so, the multi CD changers were a big deal. I remember being jealous at the people who got the fancy 200 disc CD changers for their home stereo. (I even ended up buying one for myself eventually, near the tail end of their popularity - on a closeout sale price. It's a Kenwood with a wireless IR keyboard that lets you type in the names of each disc, so it shows up on the changer's display.) Nowdays, these things are selling for $25-45 in the local "Surplus Electronics" hole-in-the-wall stores, along-side beat-up old speakers and Atari 2600 game systems.
People are realizing that it's more beneficial to have the music in digital form, stored on their computer, than stuck on a plastic audio disc. The people I see buying music CDs nowdays are immediately ripping them into MP3s, and storing the originals away as a "backup". They're not even playing the purchased CD itself anymore!
This can and will happen to movies on DVD, as well. PVR's are the first "mass market" example of technology headed that direction. It's just that right now, the sheer amount of data on a double-sided DVD (8 gigs. or so) + the cheap prices on set-up DVD players keeps the format viable for a little bit longer.
Until the MPAA and RIAA come to grips with this, and quit trying to keep a business model centered around providing music on overpriced tapes and discs using a proprietary format, they're fighting a losing battle.
I can certainly tell you that when I tried to recycle an older Powermac 7600 system as a Linux-based web and file server, I had much better results using Debian than Mandrake for PPC.
I know most people on here probably never bothered with the PPC versions of these distros - but for those who do, it seems like the distros that support PPC do it as almost an afterthought.
With Mandrake for PPC, I couldn't even get a working X environment (and I was simply trying to use the built-in video Apple supplies on all of these PowerMac 7600's).
I finally figured out it was a fairly simple matter of choosing the right video driver for X, followed by leaving one of the video setup questions blank/unanswered (where it wants to know which PCI slot the video device is installed in). In Debian though, I didn't have automatic setup tools promising to get it working and screwing things up. It was straight to the point, with simple text prompts - so errors were clearly just my own mistakes or lack of knowledge what to key in.
Excellent summary on the state of cellular in the U.S. Very informative and to the point!
As for the "free market" comments, in general, though - I think the biggest problem comes about when technology begins rendering the old assumptions about industries requiring regulation obsolete.
Right now, I think the U.S. is in sort of a strange place, where some of the traditionally "unquestioned" regulated monopolies are subject to new questions.
Telcos were the first to feel this. (The old concept that it just didn't make sense to have multiple competitors stringing wires everyplace loses some of its value when people are offering the same service without using the wires.)
The cable companies are subject to similar questioning, because frankly - they aren't providing a service essential to basic living (as your water or sewer company does), and other technologies (such as satellite TV) accomplish the same thing they do, again, without the wires. Furthermore, I don't think we're even so sure it's such a big deal having multiple competitors for cable TV each stringing their own lines. Much of it goes underground and out of the way, and there's not the need of *everything* in the country interconnecting, like telcos required.
I don't think we're quite ready to turn electric power generation over to the "free market" just yet - but it's only a matter of time before we can. One of these days, the technology will become readily available for the typical consumer to generate his/her own power - instead of having to sap it off of a public grid. (Maybe hydrogen fuel cell tech. will lead to this? Who knows?) There's a lot of energy loss just from pushing the generated power all over the place, before it reaches its destination. In that respect, it's an inherently bad idea to handle power generation the way we do today.
Do you have to even ask that question? Microsoft products and their support puts the food on lots of people's tables.
Quite frankly, it disgusts me every time I look in the local paper for I.T. jobs and find nothing but Microsoft..... Everyone who wants to hire anyone here in St. Louis seems to be a "Microsoft shop". (Well, there's always the occasional exception which typically turns out to be government-related, where they run minicomputers or mainframes.) How much more virus hassle, unreliability, high cost of licensing, software bloat, and buggy code will it take for some of these firms to switch to something else?
I did the MS support thing for 6 years or so, for a previous employer, before getting fed up with it. I'm trying to do Apple support now - and let me tell you, it IS a refreshing change. Only problem is, barely anyone seems to use their products in this city! There's one consulting firm that seems to pretty well have all the Apple corporate contracts locked up (and that's probably barely enough to make a good business out of it).
I haven't had reason to work with 16:9 aspect video yet myself (even though my Sony camcorder is capable of it), but I do recall seeing a discussion about this same issue you describe.
It seems to me they said something about iMovie not supporting 16:9 aspect ratio itself, but it would still allow you to import the 16:9 video and would export it again, unaltered, when told to export the movie. This isn't great, but at least it's not butchering your video when it imports it. You just can't preview it properly while in iMovie (if I'm understanding what I read correctly).
Most likely, Apple made a decision not to support 16:9 aspect in iMovie because it's their "consumer-grade" video editor (in some ways, a competitor to Microsoft's Movie Maker they include with Windows XP). Working with wide-screen format video is generally considered a "higher-end" filming project - and Apple would like you to spend the $'s for Final Cut Express or Pro for that sort of thing.
I guess it depends on what you define as "serious work". I recently used the iMovie and iDVD combo to create some training videos (introduction to using and troubleshooting computers and our software builds on them, for daycare/childcare centers), and while it wasn't perfect - it worked out pretty well.
I considered delving into DVD Studio Pro and Final Cut Pro, but the learning curve was more than I wanted to tackle for this project.
The biggest annoyance I find with iDVD is the way it throws the stock intro movies "in your face", and practically begs you to use them with every movie disc you make. They're nice templates for home movies (kid's birthday or what-have-you), but you certainly want to skip them if you're doing anything more professional.
There are some very nice add-on packs for iMovie though (Slick Transitions and EZEdia plug-in packs, for example), quite reasonably priced ($49 or so per volume, typically), that will greatly enhance the usability of the app.
The EZedia ones, in particular, allow filming in front of a blue screen and adding background movies behind the subject in the original film, overlaying logos on your movie, and much more. This isn't really "toy" stuff - and it's much cheaper than buying Final Cut Pro.
Personally, I find that I almost never subscribe to any email-based newsletters anymore because it just isn't the best mechanism for it.
When I check my email, it's nice to know that everything that comes in (short of spam) is targeted specifically at me. The newsletters, however useful and informative, tend to be lengthy and not the sort of thing I often have time to read when I'm trying to read and reply to my personal emails.
I realize the standard answer people give is to set up mailbox rules so the newsletters get tossed into their own folders. Sure, I can do that (and have often done so), but then I end up with a huge folder filled with overwhelming amounts of text to sift through. If I don't get time to read them for a few weeks, a lot of it ends up getting mass deleted. (It's not usually important enough to justify a marathon reading session to try to catch up with all the back messages piled up in there.)
I think of newsletters as publications, so as such, they're best published to the web - so viewers can access them at will. Don't take up everyone's disk space sending out hundreds (or thousands?) of copies of the same newsletter via email.
I'd really be interested to see how many of these recent worm infections happened on company systems, as opposed to people's home computers.
I agree that a big problem is educating the average home user to apply update patches as they become available, but this isn't usually an option at the corporate level.
I've seen corporate environments where even the I.T. staff in charge of the desktop systems has to fight and fight to get the approval to apply a security patch. (The team lead or I.T. manager may scratch the plan, arguing they haven't had sufficient time to make sure the patch doesn't break a "mission critical" application they run, or they may decide the patch can wait until another update it rolled out, so they can get 2 birds killed with one stone.) Letting the end users apply their own patches isn't typically allowed on corporate machines.
I'm not even sure I'd classify Kaaza Lite as "clearly crooked" myself, much less "blatant piracy".
Here's why I say that:
Kaaza Lite was an attempt to "de-louse" all the spyware bundled up into Kaaza. If it was truly a piracy attempt (hijaacking someone else's code), they would have changed the name of the software and played things off like it was their own original work. None of this seems to be the case. In fact, every reference to Kaaza Lite I've seen makes it pretty clear that it, indeed, *is* the Kaaza software, except cleaned up so it won't fill your computer with unwanted "extras".
For starters, what's with this statement they inserted in the middle of the whole thing:
"Libertarian IT workers who watch their jobs go overseas should derive joy from geographic shifts in employment. Their "dog eat dog" creed requires them to be happy whenever the marketplace finds a way to pay workers less and increase business owners' profits."
Did the author of the story suddenly feel a need to attack Libertarians or what?? That's, at best, a very inaccurate statement.
Libertarians have no "dog eat dog" creed! If anything, it's more of a "live and let live" creed. Do whatever you wish, as long as you don't infringe on other's rights to do the same.
As a self-proclaimed "Libertarian I.T. worker" myself, I can assure you, I'm not taking great joy in the marketplace constantly finding ways to pay workers less for their work. On the contrary, I'd simply like to see workers able to keep more of the money they're entitled to for their labor, rather than be forced to turn about 1/3rd. of it over in taxes.
But I digress....
On this I.T. outsourcing issue, I'm not sure if any of us really know yet how it will all pan out. I have a strong suspicion it will be a short-term "bad thing" that turns out to be a "good thing" in the long run. Why? Well, many 3rd. world countries are far behind the technology curve right now, but are trying hard to catch up. When enough of them earn some money doing I.T. (even if it is for the U.S. companies), it will help spur interest and growth of I.T. in their own countries. Eventually, that means they'll be needed locally, instead of only when they take U.S. jobs. (That also means new jobs might become available for U.S. workers willing to accept work overseas.)
Part of the problem with this whole "global economy" thing is that U.S. citizens are still going into it with "tunnel vision". We're all about the "What's in it for me, today?" -- and tend to forget it may take some pain and suffering now, to "jump start" the economies of other countries, so we'll all be operating on a larger, more level playing field down the road.
In the short term though, yeah - I don't think you can avoid some of the I.T. outsourcing. Much depends on how much human interaction is required from your job. Programmers generally don't need high levels of interaction. They're paid to bang out a product (code), and if foreigners code cheaper - that's the new "going rate" for the work.
Software purchases aren't always so "piddly" though. Yeah, sure - they usually are for an individual purchaser, but what about business purchases (which constitute the bulk of the software industry's profits)?
I know when I was responsible for doing some corporate software purchases in the past, I sent out at least a few purchase orders which would have covered more than what I paid for my house.
Take a package like AutoCAD, for just one example. A full version license runs you roughly $1100, last time I checked. Multiply that by, say, 75 copies, and you're looking at a pretty big investment.
With all the companies making their apps available via Citrix or Windows Terminal Server these days, costs quickly add up - because a license must be purchased for each user who can potentially run the program. (They don't generally allow concurrent licensing anymore for that type of installation.)
In my corporate software purchasing experience, it's tough to even find a salesperson who is knowledgeable about all the "ins and outs" of these volume license purchases. Sure, they can quote you a price based on some chart Microsoft supplied them - but they can't usually answer your questions about what you really get/don't get with the purchase. (EG. If you buy an MS Office XP Pro license for a user's desktop, is he/she legally allowed to install it on a portable computer too - or does he/she need another license for that? After all, he/she can't physically be in two places at once to use both copies at one time.)
I don't know how much insight I can provide, as far as summarizing the "big picture" of RAID controllers in Windows. I haven't ever purchased any of the newer Adaptec RAID cards for use with Windows 2000 or XP, and the only ACard product I've used recently was an Ultra-66 EIDE card for the Mac.
I do, however, own an MSI (Microstar) Pentium 4 motherboard with on-board Promise EIDE RAID support, and have been using it for quite a while now.
So far, I guess the product basically works "as advertised", in that it's doing hardware RAID and hasn't screwed anything up during disk writes.
Performance-wise though, yes, the boot time is very lengthy. Not really any more so than the older Adaptec SCSI cards were, however. If you're used to having Adaptec SCSI on your system, you'll find this feels pretty familiar from the boot-up standpoint.
I also have a concern that may or may not be founded in reality. (Comments from other Promise EIDE RAID users are welcome here?) When I first set up this board, I used a pair of brand new Western Digital 100GB 8MB cache drives. After only a week or two, I started having problems where the disk access light would stay lit during the middle of a disk read, and the system would freeze up. Occasionally, this would result in a blue screen of death. From listening closely to the sounds the drives were making when this happened, I decided it was a disk error (bad sectors), and swapped out the drive that appeared to be the culprit. Not too much later, this started happening again with the other drive. At this point, I swapped both out with the 120GB version of the same hardware. Out of curiousity, I reformatted both of the 100GB drives and tried using them as regular boot drives in other systems. Both worked without any problems!
Meanwhile, it's been at least 6 months since then and the pair of 120GB drives are still doing RAID in my P4 without any real issues, but every once in a while (maybe once a week?), I notice it sort of "hang" for a couple seconds doing a disk write, and hear that familiar drive seeking noise like the drive has a bad sector. Then it seems to recover and everything is fine again.
All of this is making me question whether or not the Promise on-board EIDE RAID has some bugs still in the firmware, or slight timing issues that can cause drives to appear to be malfunctioning when they're really not?
At the very least, I would have expected some sort of report from the Promise card that a drive was failing, when I had those problems with the 100GB drives.... not just a blue screen of death from Windows XP.
Your list was fine by me until you got to Mail.app. That app has got to be the most disappointly "half baked" thing I've seen in OS X to date!
For starters, it has issues with sending file attachments. Especially in the case of recipients using AOL (but not necessarily limited to AOL), photos attached to email sent from Mail.app aren't always viewable/saveable by the receiver. Apple, so far, denies this is a bug/issue - yet I've repeatedly witnessed this problem, as have columnists for Mac-centric magazines, who I've seen collecting information on this problem for write-up in future articles.
I'd also, personally, like to see Mail.app functionality extended to the ability to read/post to Usenet groups. OS X seems to be lacking a decent Usenet newsreader program. (Especially odd omission, considering even IBM's OS/2 used to include a newsreader application, years ago, and Microsoft has it built into Outlook Express.)
There seems to be quite a bit of Applescript used internally by software installers. (If you watch carefully when Photoshop 7 is installing on OS X, you'll see it launch Applescript to do part of its installation.)
For the "end user", it all depends on how often you perform repetitive tasks. Applescript can be written to launch specific programs, perform specific functions to a given file, save the changes, and cleanly exit the apps when done.
On the other hand though, I think some people get a bit carried away with their knowledge of Applescript and try to find ways to use it where it's not necessarily the best solution. (EG. I've seen people write Applescript solutions to getting address info out of Apple's Address Book for printing to mailing labels on a printer. Sure, it's doable - but it's faster and more elegant to just write a dedicated application for the purpose.)
It was only a matter of time before this technology reached the live stage. I don't think many people even realize how much it was relied on for recordings throughout the 80's, much less in the 90's.
I recall reading a recording magazine's article discussing how heavily Richard Marx relied on an autotuner for all of his recordings, for example. (I also recall the shock some people expressed at how much less "vocal talent" he seemed to have when they saw him perform live, when he did a show at Six Flags amusement park here in St. Louis.)
It's just another effects processor, ultimately. I'm sure there are purists out there who can't stand distortion being applied to the natural sound of an electric guitar. I know there are many people who can't stomach electronic drums/drum machines in music. Obviously, there are also those who won't care much for this effect being applied to vocals either.
In the end, I think the genre of music and the audience it's geared towards will determine how much autotuners are used. In a recording studio, pretty much anything's fair game (unless you're dealing with an act/artist that prefers a "raw" and "less refined" sound to the final recording - which is valid too). In live performances, I think harder/heavier rock acts tend to go for a more straightforward approach to things. Just project as much energy as possible and get the audience hyped up. For a "pop rock" act, achieving an "as close as possible to what you heard on the recording" sound is sometimes more acceptable.
As someone who played guitar in a local band before, I can tell you I wouldn't necessarily have had a problem with our singer using an autotuner on stage. Quite frankly, the guy had lots of energy and good stage presence, but his voice was "on again, off again". He had his "good days" where he sung our songs great, but many other times, he sounded like he was slaughtering cattle.
Ever since OBD-II diagnostics became standard, folks have been bypassing the emissions portion of the system. If you do a quick web search - you'll find a number of people selling little boxes to splice in to your car's wiring harness, so it generates the proper voltage pulses to trick the computer into thinking the catalytic converter is fully functional. (That way, folks can remove the restriction of said converter and get better performance out of their vehicle, without tripping "check engine" lights all the time.)
Yeah, it's illegal.... but it's also commonplace, and 99% of the time, those federally mandated testing stations will never notice one is installed. (Their test equipment plugs into the OBD-II diagnostics port and if everything seems normal on that end, you're ok by them.)
OBD-II does much more than check for emissions compliance, though. It's generally considered a good system, and an improvement over the original OBD-I computers. You can get a lot of cool information from OBD-II by attaching a laptop (or Palm) to one with the right cable + software, such as your engine temps. and timing, RPMs, etc.
OBD-III was probably supposed to be a technically superior OBD-II until the EPA got ahold of the specs and started trying to slip in more emissions control B.S.
Uh, yeah - you really got me there. I guess I better go edit my login notice on my warez site now - because wow, I had no idea I might be held responsible if I claimed no law enforcement people were allowed on my site!
(And now, for some reality.)
Some of those disclaimers on ftp sites *do* offer a measure of protection to the site operator, depending on their wording. If it can be shown that a particular server was indeed "private", not "open to the public" - that makes for a very different legal case.
If you're old enough to remember the BBS days, you might recall that practically nobody's BBS got busted if it was a private system. The only ones who had trouble were the boards that let anyone create new user accounts.
In fact, the "warez" boards that did get busted typically didn't ever have law enforcement officials directly calling them up and collecting evidence. Instead, they had informants do that for them. That way, they could completely sidestep the whole "entrapment?" question in cases where BBS's did claim that no law enforcement officials were allowed to use them.
No, it's simply because there's no corporation with a vested interest in protecting a specific set of directions on a method of murdering someone, or building bombs, which is currently leaked out all over the Internet against their wishes.
No, on the contrary, I think I have a pretty good handle on the copyright law in the United States. It's a topic that interests me.
The subpoenas currently issues *are* aimed at people distributing songs, but the RIAA was very recently quoted in numerous news articles as saying they'd take this to the end user if they had to.... to anyone trying to download free copies of songs. In their eyes, either activity is equally worthy of prosecution.
I think the law isn't exactly "crystal clear" on the whole issue of the legality of sharing music you own, either. Granted, I am not the copyright holder on any of the music I purchase, but the whole idea of "fair use" was introduced so folks could make reasonable use of the works they paid for. These days, it seems the courts are largely happy to throw that out - as though it's meaningless. Nonetheless, there's a very good case to be made that your sharing of only music you legally purchased *may* be "fair use". What's your intent? Maybe to make it easier for you to get to your songs, so you can listen to your music from work? This is the whole battle raging with Apple's iTunes software, you know. Until the latest update, you could share your music with it so your Mac at work could play the songs stored on your hard drive at home. Then, Apple opted to completely gut that feature, as a "sledgehammer" way of getting around any potential legal questions. Doesn't mean it was illegal to use it that way!
I totally disagree with your conclusions, although I agree with your initial statement.
The very idea of legally mandating some sort of level of Internet security is unworkable, and just a bad idea all around. For starters, you bring govt. dangerously close to taking the next logical step that comes after it - issuing Internet licenses. (Only a govt. licensed individual could run any type of Internet server, perhaps?) Scary thought....
But besides that, what sort of improvements would you visualize coming about from it? ISP's already have terms of service agreements that pretty well cover this. If you spam people or use their service to promote any sort of illegal activity, they can terminate your account. It doesn't mean they can magically stop these behaviors before they happen, a la "Minority Report". Same problem if you mandate some sort of degree of due diligence. People writing virii generally try to do so anonymously. They already know their actions break laws - but they're planning on not getting caught.
As you pointed out, yes, there certainly are legal ways to use a P2P network (such as downloading music only to sample it and then delete it when you've listened to it once).
I think the problem is, once the RIAA realizes this is the case and they can't realistically go after people for downloading the music, they'll go the other direction and attack anyone serving the music. (If you don't own a legal copy of the music yourself, you're not allowed to "loan" it out to others like a library, even if they *are* only listening to it once and deleting it. Real lending libraries and rental places own legal copies of everything they lend out.)
This is pretty much how things went down with commercial software offered on BBS systems (pre-Internet days). I never saw a BBS user get in legal trouble for downloading commercial programs from BBS's, but they went after the system operators for making the files available.
Where it gets interesting, though, is with trying to prove a user doesn't actually have a legal copy of music being shared online. Unlike commercial software, there's no unique "CD key" needed, or registration with the company producing the work. Not only that, but CDs are cheap. If they cited you for distributing 50 songs, you could buy all 50 CDs, used, for as little as $100 or so - and they'd have a pretty hard time proving you didn't own those before you posted the songs.
I think your statement is a little harsh there, don't you?
All I did was state that there are a number of products out there that do double-check to ensure compliance with their respective licenses.
Office X for Mac (single-user) does exactly what I said, so how am I lying to this guy?
I've never had a corporate edition of Office X for Mac, as I have yet to work in any corporation that actually used Macintoshes in quantity. (So far, every place I run into them in the workplace, it's isolated individuals using PowerBooks, or a small group (5 or 6 people, perhaps?) using them in one department, and they load all their software as individual versions.
In all things security-related, the more security you add, the more convenience and usability you take away.
Look at your own home, for instance. You can improve security against a break-in all sorts of ways. Add bars to your windows? (Effective, but probably makes your windows more of a pain to clean and makes your home unsightly.) Add a security alarm? (Ok, but now you always have to deal with entering that annoying code as soon as you go inside, and remember to arm it before you leave -- and you've got false alarms to deal with too.)
So it is with software. Add copy-protection schemes? End-users have problems making legal backups. Add dongles? Possible incompatibility problems and support headaches. Phone home reporting suspected pirates? Possible lawsuit when you find out your software made a mistake. Possibility of tripping internal firewalls or anti-virus/anti-spyware software and angering system administrators.
Piracy is a fact of life. Not everyone who desires to run a program is willing (or able) to pay for it. Making your product as user-friendly as possible (and least intrusive) will ensure satisfaction among the percentage of people who really are your customer.
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Right now, the most "noise" is coming from the record companies, because quite franky, it doesn't require nearly as much bandwidth and time to download music as it does a movie.
As broadband technology becomes more prevalent and inexpensive though, the MPAA will be in the exact same boat that the RIAA is in today. (They're already in the first stages of it.)
The whole controversy about "is it right or wrong to download music" ignores the larger reality; technological changes are causing a lack of interest in purchasing music on prerecorded media. 5 years ago or so, the multi CD changers were a big deal. I remember being jealous at the people who got the fancy 200 disc CD changers for their home stereo. (I even ended up buying one for myself eventually, near the tail end of their popularity - on a closeout sale price. It's a Kenwood with a wireless IR keyboard that lets you type in the names of each disc, so it shows up on the changer's display.) Nowdays, these things are selling for $25-45 in the local "Surplus Electronics" hole-in-the-wall stores, along-side beat-up old speakers and Atari 2600 game systems.
People are realizing that it's more beneficial to have the music in digital form, stored on their computer, than stuck on a plastic audio disc. The people I see buying music CDs nowdays are immediately ripping them into MP3s, and storing the originals away as a "backup". They're not even playing the purchased CD itself anymore!
This can and will happen to movies on DVD, as well. PVR's are the first "mass market" example of technology headed that direction. It's just that right now, the sheer amount of data on a double-sided DVD (8 gigs. or so) + the cheap prices on set-up DVD players keeps the format viable for a little bit longer.
Until the MPAA and RIAA come to grips with this, and quit trying to keep a business model centered around providing music on overpriced tapes and discs using a proprietary format, they're fighting a losing battle.
I can certainly tell you that when I tried to recycle an older Powermac 7600 system as a Linux-based web and file server, I had much better results using Debian than Mandrake for PPC.
I know most people on here probably never bothered with the PPC versions of these distros - but for those who do, it seems like the distros that support PPC do it as almost an afterthought.
With Mandrake for PPC, I couldn't even get a working X environment (and I was simply trying to use the built-in video Apple supplies on all of these PowerMac 7600's).
I finally figured out it was a fairly simple matter of choosing the right video driver for X, followed by leaving one of the video setup questions blank/unanswered (where it wants to know which PCI slot the video device is installed in). In Debian though, I didn't have automatic setup tools promising to get it working and screwing things up. It was straight to the point, with simple text prompts - so errors were clearly just my own mistakes or lack of knowledge what to key in.
Excellent summary on the state of cellular in the U.S. Very informative and to the point!
As for the "free market" comments, in general, though - I think the biggest problem comes about when technology begins rendering the old assumptions about industries requiring regulation obsolete.
Right now, I think the U.S. is in sort of a strange place, where some of the traditionally "unquestioned" regulated monopolies are subject to new questions.
Telcos were the first to feel this. (The old concept that it just didn't make sense to have multiple competitors stringing wires everyplace loses some of its value when people are offering the same service without using the wires.)
The cable companies are subject to similar questioning, because frankly - they aren't providing a service essential to basic living (as your water or sewer company does), and other technologies (such as satellite TV) accomplish the same thing they do, again, without the wires. Furthermore, I don't think we're even so sure it's such a big deal having multiple competitors for cable TV each stringing their own lines. Much of it goes underground and out of the way, and there's not the need of *everything* in the country interconnecting, like telcos required.
I don't think we're quite ready to turn electric power generation over to the "free market" just yet - but it's only a matter of time before we can. One of these days, the technology will become readily available for the typical consumer to generate his/her own power - instead of having to sap it off of a public grid. (Maybe hydrogen fuel cell tech. will lead to this? Who knows?) There's a lot of energy loss just from pushing the generated power all over the place, before it reaches its destination. In that respect, it's an inherently bad idea to handle power generation the way we do today.
Do you have to even ask that question? Microsoft products and their support puts the food on lots of people's tables.
Quite frankly, it disgusts me every time I look in the local paper for I.T. jobs and find nothing but Microsoft..... Everyone who wants to hire anyone here in St. Louis seems to be a "Microsoft shop". (Well, there's always the occasional exception which typically turns out to be government-related, where they run minicomputers or mainframes.) How much more virus hassle, unreliability, high cost of licensing, software bloat, and buggy code will it take for some of these firms to switch to something else?
I did the MS support thing for 6 years or so, for a previous employer, before getting fed up with it. I'm trying to do Apple support now - and let me tell you, it IS a refreshing change. Only problem is, barely anyone seems to use their products in this city! There's one consulting firm that seems to pretty well have all the Apple corporate contracts locked up (and that's probably barely enough to make a good business out of it).
I haven't had reason to work with 16:9 aspect video yet myself (even though my Sony camcorder is capable of it), but I do recall seeing a discussion about this same issue you describe.
It seems to me they said something about iMovie not supporting 16:9 aspect ratio itself, but it would still allow you to import the 16:9 video and would export it again, unaltered, when told to export the movie. This isn't great, but at least it's not butchering your video when it imports it. You just can't preview it properly while in iMovie (if I'm understanding what I read correctly).
Most likely, Apple made a decision not to support 16:9 aspect in iMovie because it's their "consumer-grade" video editor (in some ways, a competitor to Microsoft's Movie Maker they include with Windows XP). Working with wide-screen format video is generally considered a "higher-end" filming project - and Apple would like you to spend the $'s for Final Cut Express or Pro for that sort of thing.
I guess it depends on what you define as "serious work".
I recently used the iMovie and iDVD combo to create some training videos (introduction to using and troubleshooting computers and our software builds on them, for daycare/childcare centers), and while it wasn't perfect - it worked out pretty well.
I considered delving into DVD Studio Pro and Final Cut Pro, but the learning curve was more than I wanted to tackle for this project.
The biggest annoyance I find with iDVD is the way it throws the stock intro movies "in your face", and practically begs you to use them with every movie disc you make. They're nice templates for home movies (kid's birthday or what-have-you), but you certainly want to skip them if you're doing anything more professional.
There are some very nice add-on packs for iMovie though (Slick Transitions and EZEdia plug-in packs, for example), quite reasonably priced ($49 or so per volume, typically), that will greatly enhance the usability of the app.
The EZedia ones, in particular, allow filming in front of a blue screen and adding background movies behind the subject in the original film, overlaying logos on your movie, and much more. This isn't really "toy" stuff - and it's much cheaper than buying Final Cut Pro.
Personally, I find that I almost never subscribe to any email-based newsletters anymore because it just isn't the best mechanism for it.
When I check my email, it's nice to know that everything that comes in (short of spam) is targeted specifically at me. The newsletters, however useful and informative, tend to be lengthy and not the sort of thing I often have time to read when I'm trying to read and reply to my personal emails.
I realize the standard answer people give is to set up mailbox rules so the newsletters get tossed into their own folders. Sure, I can do that (and have often done so), but then I end up with a huge folder filled with overwhelming amounts of text to sift through. If I don't get time to read them for a few weeks, a lot of it ends up getting mass deleted. (It's not usually important enough to justify a marathon reading session to try to catch up with all the back messages piled up in there.)
I think of newsletters as publications, so as such, they're best published to the web - so viewers can access them at will. Don't take up everyone's disk space sending out hundreds (or thousands?) of copies of the same newsletter via email.
I'd really be interested to see how many of these recent worm infections happened on company systems, as opposed to people's home computers.
I agree that a big problem is educating the average home user to apply update patches as they become available, but this isn't usually an option at the corporate level.
I've seen corporate environments where even the I.T. staff in charge of the desktop systems has to fight and fight to get the approval to apply a security patch. (The team lead or I.T. manager may scratch the plan, arguing they haven't had sufficient time to make sure the patch doesn't break a "mission critical" application they run, or they may decide the patch can wait until another update it rolled out, so they can get 2 birds killed with one stone.) Letting the end users apply their own patches isn't typically allowed on corporate machines.
I'm not even sure I'd classify Kaaza Lite as "clearly crooked" myself, much less "blatant piracy".
Here's why I say that:
Kaaza Lite was an attempt to "de-louse" all the spyware bundled up into Kaaza. If it was truly a piracy attempt (hijaacking someone else's code), they would have changed the name of the software and played things off like it was their own original work. None of this seems to be the case. In fact, every reference to Kaaza Lite I've seen makes it pretty clear that it, indeed, *is* the Kaaza software, except cleaned up so it won't fill your computer with unwanted "extras".
For starters, what's with this statement they inserted in the middle of the whole thing:
"Libertarian IT workers who watch their jobs go overseas should derive joy from geographic shifts in employment. Their "dog eat dog" creed requires them to be happy whenever the marketplace finds a way to pay workers less and increase business owners' profits."
Did the author of the story suddenly feel a need to attack Libertarians or what?? That's, at best, a very inaccurate statement.
Libertarians have no "dog eat dog" creed! If anything, it's more of a "live and let live" creed. Do whatever you wish, as long as you don't infringe on other's rights to do the same.
As a self-proclaimed "Libertarian I.T. worker" myself, I can assure you, I'm not taking great joy in the marketplace constantly finding ways to pay workers less for their work. On the contrary, I'd simply like to see workers able to keep more of the money they're entitled to for their labor, rather than be forced to turn about 1/3rd. of it over in taxes.
But I digress....
On this I.T. outsourcing issue, I'm not sure if any of us really know yet how it will all pan out. I have a strong suspicion it will be a short-term "bad thing" that turns out to be a "good thing" in the long run. Why? Well, many 3rd. world countries are far behind the technology curve right now, but are trying hard to catch up. When enough of them earn some money doing I.T. (even if it is for the U.S. companies), it will help spur interest and growth of I.T. in their own countries. Eventually, that means they'll be needed locally, instead of only when they take U.S. jobs. (That also means new jobs might become available for U.S. workers willing to accept work overseas.)
Part of the problem with this whole "global economy" thing is that U.S. citizens are still going into it with "tunnel vision". We're all about the "What's in it for me, today?" -- and tend to forget it may take some pain and suffering now, to "jump start" the economies of other countries, so we'll all be operating on a larger, more level playing field down the road.
In the short term though, yeah - I don't think you can avoid some of the I.T. outsourcing. Much depends on how much human interaction is required from your job. Programmers generally don't need high levels of interaction. They're paid to bang out a product (code), and if foreigners code cheaper - that's the new "going rate" for the work.
Software purchases aren't always so "piddly" though. Yeah, sure - they usually are for an individual purchaser, but what about business purchases (which constitute the bulk of the software industry's profits)?
I know when I was responsible for doing some corporate software purchases in the past, I sent out at least a few purchase orders which would have covered more than what I paid for my house.
Take a package like AutoCAD, for just one example. A full version license runs you roughly $1100, last time I checked. Multiply that by, say, 75 copies, and you're looking at a pretty big investment.
With all the companies making their apps available via Citrix or Windows Terminal Server these days, costs quickly add up - because a license must be purchased for each user who can potentially run the program. (They don't generally allow concurrent licensing anymore for that type of installation.)
In my corporate software purchasing experience, it's tough to even find a salesperson who is knowledgeable about all the "ins and outs" of these volume license purchases. Sure, they can quote you a price based on some chart Microsoft supplied them - but they can't usually answer your questions about what you really get/don't get with the purchase. (EG. If you buy an MS Office XP Pro license for a user's desktop, is he/she legally allowed to install it on a portable computer too - or does he/she need another license for that? After all, he/she can't physically be in two places at once to use both copies at one time.)
That's ok. Your tagline says you voted Democrat, which tells me quite a bit about your problems dealing with logic.....
Yeah, I realize there are several teriffic newsreader programs for OS X. My point was, Apple should have included one to get new users started.
(I'm still not sure why my original post was labeled "flamebait" - as I think I'm addressing a very real concern.)
See this site for a bunch of people reporting problems with Mail.app and attachments:
http://www.macintouch.com/mail.app01.html
I don't know how much insight I can provide, as far as summarizing the "big picture" of RAID controllers in Windows. I haven't ever purchased any of the newer Adaptec RAID cards for use with Windows 2000 or XP, and the only ACard product I've used recently was an Ultra-66 EIDE card for the Mac.
I do, however, own an MSI (Microstar) Pentium 4 motherboard with on-board Promise EIDE RAID support, and have been using it for quite a while now.
So far, I guess the product basically works "as advertised", in that it's doing hardware RAID and hasn't screwed anything up during disk writes.
Performance-wise though, yes, the boot time is very lengthy. Not really any more so than the older Adaptec SCSI cards were, however. If you're used to having Adaptec SCSI on your system, you'll find this feels pretty familiar from the boot-up standpoint.
I also have a concern that may or may not be founded in reality. (Comments from other Promise EIDE RAID users are welcome here?) When I first set up this board, I used a pair of brand new Western Digital 100GB 8MB cache drives. After only a week or two, I started having problems where the disk access light would stay lit during the middle of a disk read, and the system would freeze up. Occasionally, this would result in a blue screen of death. From listening closely to the sounds the drives were making when this happened, I decided it was a disk error (bad sectors), and swapped out the drive that appeared to be the culprit. Not too much later, this started happening again with the other drive. At this point, I swapped both out with the 120GB version of the same hardware. Out of curiousity, I reformatted both of the 100GB drives and tried using them as regular boot drives in other systems. Both worked without any problems!
Meanwhile, it's been at least 6 months since then and the pair of 120GB drives are still doing RAID in my P4 without any real issues, but every once in a while (maybe once a week?), I notice it sort of "hang" for a couple seconds doing a disk write, and hear that familiar drive seeking noise like the drive has a bad sector. Then it seems to recover and everything is fine again.
All of this is making me question whether or not the Promise on-board EIDE RAID has some bugs still in the firmware, or slight timing issues that can cause drives to appear to be malfunctioning when they're really not?
At the very least, I would have expected some sort of report from the Promise card that a drive was failing, when I had those problems with the 100GB drives.... not just a blue screen of death from Windows XP.
Your list was fine by me until you got to Mail.app. That app has got to be the most disappointly "half baked" thing I've seen in OS X to date!
For starters, it has issues with sending file attachments. Especially in the case of recipients using AOL (but not necessarily limited to AOL), photos attached to email sent from Mail.app aren't always viewable/saveable by the receiver. Apple, so far, denies this is a bug/issue - yet I've repeatedly witnessed this problem, as have columnists for Mac-centric magazines, who I've seen collecting information on this problem for write-up in future articles.
I'd also, personally, like to see Mail.app functionality extended to the ability to read/post to Usenet groups. OS X seems to be lacking a decent Usenet newsreader program. (Especially odd omission, considering even IBM's OS/2 used to include a newsreader application, years ago, and Microsoft has it built into Outlook Express.)
There seems to be quite a bit of Applescript used internally by software installers. (If you watch carefully when Photoshop 7 is installing on OS X, you'll see it launch Applescript to do part of its installation.)
For the "end user", it all depends on how often you perform repetitive tasks. Applescript can be written to launch specific programs, perform specific functions to a given file, save the changes, and cleanly exit the apps when done.
On the other hand though, I think some people get a bit carried away with their knowledge of Applescript and try to find ways to use it where it's not necessarily the best solution. (EG. I've seen people write Applescript solutions to getting address info out of Apple's Address Book for printing to mailing labels on a printer. Sure, it's doable - but it's faster and more elegant to just write a dedicated application for the purpose.)
It was only a matter of time before this technology reached the live stage. I don't think many people even realize how much it was relied on for recordings throughout the 80's, much less in the 90's.
I recall reading a recording magazine's article discussing how heavily Richard Marx relied on an autotuner for all of his recordings, for example. (I also recall the shock some people expressed at how much less "vocal talent" he seemed to have when they saw him perform live, when he did a show at Six Flags amusement park here in St. Louis.)
It's just another effects processor, ultimately. I'm sure there are purists out there who can't stand distortion being applied to the natural sound of an electric guitar. I know there are many people who can't stomach electronic drums/drum machines in music. Obviously, there are also those who won't care much for this effect being applied to vocals either.
In the end, I think the genre of music and the audience it's geared towards will determine how much autotuners are used. In a recording studio, pretty much anything's fair game (unless you're dealing with an act/artist that prefers a "raw" and "less refined" sound to the final recording - which is valid too). In live performances, I think harder/heavier rock acts tend to go for a more straightforward approach to things. Just project as much energy as possible and get the audience hyped up. For a "pop rock" act, achieving an "as close as possible to what you heard on the recording" sound is sometimes more acceptable.
As someone who played guitar in a local band before, I can tell you I wouldn't necessarily have had a problem with our singer using an autotuner on stage. Quite frankly, the guy had lots of energy and good stage presence, but his voice was "on again, off again". He had his "good days" where he sung our songs great, but many other times, he sounded like he was slaughtering cattle.
Ever since OBD-II diagnostics became standard, folks have been bypassing the emissions portion of the system. If you do a quick web search - you'll find a number of people selling little boxes to splice in to your car's wiring harness, so it generates the proper voltage pulses to trick the computer into thinking the catalytic converter is fully functional. (That way, folks can remove the restriction of said converter and get better performance out of their vehicle, without tripping "check engine" lights all the time.)
.... but it's also commonplace, and 99% of the time, those federally mandated testing stations will never notice one is installed. (Their test equipment plugs into the OBD-II diagnostics port and if everything seems normal on that end, you're ok by them.)
Yeah, it's illegal
OBD-II does much more than check for emissions compliance, though. It's generally considered a good system, and an improvement over the original OBD-I computers. You can get a lot of cool information from OBD-II by attaching a laptop (or Palm) to one with the right cable + software, such as your engine temps. and timing, RPMs, etc.
OBD-III was probably supposed to be a technically superior OBD-II until the EPA got ahold of the specs and started trying to slip in more emissions control B.S.
Uh, yeah - you really got me there. I guess I better go edit my login notice on my warez site now - because wow, I had no idea I might be held responsible if I claimed no law enforcement people were allowed on my site!
(And now, for some reality.)
Some of those disclaimers on ftp sites *do* offer a measure of protection to the site operator, depending on their wording. If it can be shown that a particular server was indeed "private", not "open to the public" - that makes for a very different legal case.
If you're old enough to remember the BBS days, you might recall that practically nobody's BBS got busted if it was a private system. The only ones who had trouble were the boards that let anyone create new user accounts.
In fact, the "warez" boards that did get busted typically didn't ever have law enforcement officials directly calling them up and collecting evidence. Instead, they had informants do that for them. That way, they could completely sidestep the whole "entrapment?" question in cases where BBS's did claim that no law enforcement officials were allowed to use them.
No, it's simply because there's no corporation with a vested interest in protecting a specific set of directions on a method of murdering someone, or building bombs, which is currently leaked out all over the Internet against their wishes.
No, on the contrary, I think I have a pretty good handle on the copyright law in the United States. It's a topic that interests me.
The subpoenas currently issues *are* aimed at people distributing songs, but the RIAA was very recently quoted in numerous news articles as saying they'd take this to the end user if they had to.... to anyone trying to download free copies of songs. In their eyes, either activity is equally worthy of prosecution.
I think the law isn't exactly "crystal clear" on the whole issue of the legality of sharing music you own, either. Granted, I am not the copyright holder on any of the music I purchase, but the whole idea of "fair use" was introduced so folks could make reasonable use of the works they paid for. These days, it seems the courts are largely happy to throw that out - as though it's meaningless. Nonetheless, there's a very good case to be made that your sharing of only music you legally purchased *may* be "fair use". What's your intent? Maybe to make it easier for you to get to your songs, so you can listen to your music from work? This is the whole battle raging with Apple's iTunes software, you know. Until the latest update, you could share your music with it so your Mac at work could play the songs stored on your hard drive at home. Then, Apple opted to completely gut that feature, as a "sledgehammer" way of getting around any potential legal questions. Doesn't mean it was illegal to use it that way!
I totally disagree with your conclusions, although I agree with your initial statement.
The very idea of legally mandating some sort of level of Internet security is unworkable, and just a bad idea all around. For starters, you bring govt. dangerously close to taking the next logical step that comes after it - issuing Internet licenses. (Only a govt. licensed individual could run any type of Internet server, perhaps?) Scary thought....
But besides that, what sort of improvements would you visualize coming about from it? ISP's already have terms of service agreements that pretty well cover this. If you spam people or use their service to promote any sort of illegal activity, they can terminate your account. It doesn't mean they can magically stop these behaviors before they happen, a la "Minority Report". Same problem if you mandate some sort of degree of due diligence. People writing virii generally try to do so anonymously. They already know their actions break laws - but they're planning on not getting caught.
As you pointed out, yes, there certainly are legal ways to use a P2P network (such as downloading music only to sample it and then delete it when you've listened to it once).
I think the problem is, once the RIAA realizes this is the case and they can't realistically go after people for downloading the music, they'll go the other direction and attack anyone serving the music. (If you don't own a legal copy of the music yourself, you're not allowed to "loan" it out to others like a library, even if they *are* only listening to it once and deleting it. Real lending libraries and rental places own legal copies of everything they lend out.)
This is pretty much how things went down with commercial software offered on BBS systems (pre-Internet days). I never saw a BBS user get in legal trouble for downloading commercial programs from BBS's, but they went after the system operators for making the files available.
Where it gets interesting, though, is with trying to prove a user doesn't actually have a legal copy of music being shared online. Unlike commercial software, there's no unique "CD key" needed, or registration with the company producing the work. Not only that, but CDs are cheap. If they cited you for distributing 50 songs, you could buy all 50 CDs, used, for as little as $100 or so - and they'd have a pretty hard time proving you didn't own those before you posted the songs.
I think your statement is a little harsh there, don't you?
All I did was state that there are a number of products out there that do double-check to ensure compliance with their respective licenses.
Office X for Mac (single-user) does exactly what I said, so how am I lying to this guy?
I've never had a corporate edition of Office X for Mac, as I have yet to work in any corporation that actually used Macintoshes in quantity. (So far, every place I run into them in the workplace, it's isolated individuals using PowerBooks, or a small group (5 or 6 people, perhaps?) using them in one department, and they load all their software as individual versions.
In all things security-related, the more security you add, the more convenience and usability you take away.
Look at your own home, for instance. You can improve security against a break-in all sorts of ways. Add bars to your windows? (Effective, but probably makes your windows more of a pain to clean and makes your home unsightly.) Add a security alarm? (Ok, but now you always have to deal with entering that annoying code as soon as you go inside, and remember to arm it before you leave -- and you've got false alarms to deal with too.)
So it is with software. Add copy-protection schemes? End-users have problems making legal backups. Add dongles? Possible incompatibility problems and support headaches. Phone home reporting suspected pirates? Possible lawsuit when you find out your software made a mistake. Possibility of tripping internal firewalls or anti-virus/anti-spyware software and angering system administrators.
Piracy is a fact of life. Not everyone who desires to run a program is willing (or able) to pay for it. Making your product as user-friendly as possible (and least intrusive) will ensure satisfaction among the percentage of people who really are your customer.