Oh dear, the attempts to control what travels through the Internet and into our brains. Is that what's hurting us? Can we put one ounce (28.349523 grams) of this effort towards nailing the bot nets, spam generators and Internet pirates with Phishing schemes instead of policing our minds? Maybe policing our minds is easier than the hard work of really fixing a dozen Chinese hosts throwing the dictionary at my servers all day long or absorbing 80% of the Internet's bandwidth with noise. Fix that, lawmakers.
Yes, policing used to be easier when the library and the magazine stand contents were all that needed control, but the Internet is a massive book store with all the books thrown on the floor and a frantic mob running through it with snow shovels. Forget it. There's no organization and any effort to control that will fail.
Selling hardware certainly subsidizes the OS. I wonder how much OS X would cost along with all the bundled apps but without hardware sales? Perhaps more than a workable copy of Vista (whenever that comes out). Might as well buy the approved hardware and not twist your brain getting it to install...
Long ago, I remember reading a quote from a major music exec stating (paraphrase from memory) that "the worst thing that ever happened to us was the CD". It was in the midst of the original Napster. No, the honor system didn't work so well then and still doesn't.
When DRM is abandoned, sales of digital music will go through the roof.
I'd say we do agree but for slightly different reasons. Maybe sales to Slashdotters will go through the roof but the general public hasn't cared so far - a couple billion DRM'd tracks sold tells me that. The major impact may well be subscription services going the way of the DIVX [pay-per-view] DVD and those customers will begin actually buying music. Also, the general notion of making it simpler to buy music which plays anywhere will kill off the CD. I can't wait.
What about people like me who hate mp3 players, but love mp3s?
Choices are a wonderful thing. From an organizational standpoint, it's good that you've standardized on what works for you.
I've found that 30GB of music is easier to carry around on a little bar of soap than a box of CDs that I have to fumble with. People like me will take the iPod out of the stereo dock at home, listen to it in my car on the way to the ski slopes then stick the iPod in my jacket while skiing this weekend. In the car, I can also listen to my CD/MP3/AAC disks (unencrypted) or plug a USB key into the Kenwood head unit and listen to those tunes.
There are almost too many choices but it's still great to just shove music on any USB key and play it in the car. Technology aside, digital files enable playing music anywhere and they're fabulous.
Here's my leading theory as to why selling MP3s and selling CDs is different: Most people who have bought CDs used them in a CD player. As pervasive as portable music players are becoming, I'm sure the majority of individual CDs have never been ripped. Slashdotters don't count as a majority (sorry). I get that data from the cross section of people I know with large CD collections who don't own a DMP/iPod. The ones who do own an iPoddish device maybe rip a CD or three and the new stuff gets bought from an iTunesesque place. (ok, they're ALL iPods) Those are the CD purchasers music executives like. That will change in the future - there won't be any CDs to rip (or press or ship or store or take up shelf space).
On the other end of the spectrum are people who "share" music. Everyone who has ever been on Hotline, Carracho etc knows that to get music, you have to upload music. A culture was rapidly born where kids all over the globe pooled their money and bought a handful of CDs to be shared among tens of thousands of users. Kids (and minor adults) would heed the "wish list", make a [relatively] huge investment in a CD to upload so they could download a dozen other CDs. Those were all lost sales and that's the difference. Maybe not all sales were "lost" since these same kids couldn't afford to buy all the CDs anyway.
Unencumbered MP3s will allow a continuance of this very same activity except there won't be any physical media to rip first. Plus, only the cherry tracks need be purchased, not the whole CD worth. Very economical that way. It's going on now but the demise of DRM or unstored streaming will remove a barrier, enabling a return to those seminal days of Napster sharing. The Majors know that and I'm certain that each purchased file will contain a tag marking the purchaser (like a watermark) but that will be instantly defeated and stripped away.
Somebody has to do it but first, the music "sharing" (pronounced "stealing") problem still needs to be solved or EMI will be very broke, very fast. I don't think the "honor system" has been completely worked out (or is it "honour system"?). Second, I wonder how much one of the majors would charge for a lifetime, unencumbered digital music license? Otherwise, this is a very exciting development. Competing with Apple would be less a factor since the iPod is the cash cow (not the iTunes store) and the iPod is an MP3 player first and foremost.
When we used cassette tapes, we could play them in any cassette player we wanted, regardless of who manufactured it.
That's correct on the surface but lets extend that logic into what we're faced with today. The universe of recorded music during the cassette days include Compact-Cassettes (with various incompatible noise reduction), vinyl records (in 12" and 7" flavors), 8-track tapes, 4-track open reel tapes (in several speeds) and PlayTapes. Buy music in one format and it won't play in the other.
You were definitely "locked in" to a format but nobody griped to manufacturers or the government about the inability to stick a 45 RPM record into an 8-track slot. If you wanted a different format, your best hope was to copy one format to another and endure the losses - or buy a new copy. Same deal today. All of these arguments are reminiscent of the cassette fans yelling "8-tracks suck" and visa-versa.
These former choices are very analogous to what we have today except the consumer doesn't understand that these seemingly identical MP3 players are wildly different. The various formats (then and now) aren't about ease of use, sound quality or flexibility. They're all about collecting royalties through sales. The features of the format are designed to sell, the marketing hype is designed to glorify the features and the music is the hook.
That said, I agree that vendor lock-in is a very dangerous thing and format lock-in should be a thing of the past completely. However, follow the above logic of collecting royalties and that's exactly what's going on. It ain't about the music but that's what's being marketed. I believe that Apple should license FairPlay to two more manufacturers (Sony and Samsung?) and Apple will do just fine in the market place.
...just like Steve Ballmer flew in to "help" the city of Munich decide against Linux desktops. To quote a famous Princess; "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
From Wikipedia - Sic is a Latin word meaning "thus", "so", or "just as that". In writing, it is placed within square brackets and usually italicized -- [sic] -- to indicate that an incorrect or unusual spelling, phrase, punctuation, and/or other preceding quoted material is a verbatim reproduction of the quoted original and is not a transcription error.
The thing lacking in OS X and Linux which currently owns millions of Windows machines is the scripting host which has admin access and can run unauthenticated through many entry points like Windows Messenger, Outlook, DirectX, on the tail of a buffer overflow, through Explorer (use VBS to do system calls right through Explorer). That horribly insecure scripting host has survived update after update of Windows. What makes anyone think they've fixed it now? I really hope Microsoft has fixed it in Vista because I'm sick of all the Windows driven spam I get every day.
What gets ridiculous is Windows fans proclaiming the first REAL OS X exploit will negate all 100,000 Windows exploits and make the Mac OS X platform "just as insecure". The Schadenfreude approach to security never helped anyone. If I can plug an out of the box OS X machine into the internet and anyone can plant a worm or start making Viagra popups on my desktop within 20 minutes, only then is OS X just as insecure as Windows. My OS X box at home hasn't done that in the last 5 years.
I get your point that Vista is a completely different animal than previous Windows, just as the old MacOS and OS X are. Out of the 30-ish MOAB exploits, most are quite a stretch, some will just create a hang, some require the administrator to install it, many revolve around 3rd party applications - those are just grasping at straws. If that's all they can shake out of a 6 year old OS, that's pretty good. I also cite the Microsoft track record of covering real problems with marketing, like Jedi Mind Tricks. Hundreds of thousands of bugs were fixed in Windows while all the while Microsoft told everyone just how wonderful it is. I'm just damn glad I was running Sybase on an Xserve when the SQL Slammer Worm came around. This is certainly a "wait and see" development with Vista but I wouldn't take Microsoft's word on how wonderful it is. If I had the money, I can apparently buy customized Zero Day Exploits for Vista right now. Vista could be NT/2000 in a colorful clown suit just like XP was. Ask me again in a year if Vista is secure.
Of course, you can trick any computer user into performing a self inflicted insecurity. "Click here to see the dancing monkeys". If you're a malicious person sitting at the keyboard with the administrator password, you can also inflict security issues. Those aren't nearly as dangerous as the simple act of plugging a [classic] Windows machine into the cable modem. Maybe Vista as well. We're already seeing serious security buzz about the month-old Vista and I'd class it as only slightly worse than the six-year-old (in March) Mac OS X. Color me skeptical.
The 140,000 exploit number was buried on the Symantec site (along with 40 exploits for the old MacOS and Zero for OS X). Granted, it was two years ago and I can't find it any more but I've seen it quoted several times from different sources not related to me, so they saw it too.
Most of the exploits use exactly the same mechanism and most Microsoft "patches" do nothing but disallow a specific signature of an incoming exploit while doing nothing to fix the underlying problems.
The outright hubris displayed by Bill Gates is evidence of Microsoft's future death warrant. It's not just him, the whole culture is in denial except the ones "leaving to explore other opportunities". Yes, it is a train coming.
We must have missed the "Don't Slow Down" checkbox somewhere. There's nothing much to set up - Citrix and a published application on one server, SQL Server on the other - gigabit network and only 35 users. Aside from that, we're restarting print cues every other day. People_Ready? I'm ready to launch the whole rig into the parking lot.
I've read all those as they came out and shook my head. They may as well have added the serious flaw that an administrator can launch terminal and sudo rm -rf/Users/<username>. Half of the exploits required the administrator sitting at the keyboard. Others needed to trick the user into doing something dumb. The rest were holes in applications. Those were a far cry from the fun available in Windows World.
Mac ads are as inaccurate as Microsoft ads showing beautiful integration, ease of use, truly empowering the worker; People_Ready. If you leave out the way the OS jumps in your way all the time, turns you into a spam generator or the fact you have to reboot the servers once a week because they slow down, it's closer to true. We have two Windows 2003 servers that get rebooted at least every two weeks because they slow down.
ARS Technica doesn't buy it either but The New York Times cited six major issues with Vista mostly dug out by a security firm. They've since taken the reference to the article away so you'll need to dig it out if you're curious.
Steven Levy needed to fill in the dead spaces in Bill's output - like this:
Yes, although security is a [The process could not access the file because it is being used by another process]. You're [Overflow at 0x0b26f033: WKSSVC.DLL has stopped responding.] the fact that there have been some security updates already for Windows Vista. This is exactly the way it should work. When somebody comes to us [A Runtime Error has occured. Would you like to debug? Line: 29 Error: Object Expected] we've got [The Program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down] before there is any exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not try the U.S. method and call in an air strike on the source of the offensive material?
Oh dear, the attempts to control what travels through the Internet and into our brains. Is that what's hurting us? Can we put one ounce (28.349523 grams) of this effort towards nailing the bot nets, spam generators and Internet pirates with Phishing schemes instead of policing our minds? Maybe policing our minds is easier than the hard work of really fixing a dozen Chinese hosts throwing the dictionary at my servers all day long or absorbing 80% of the Internet's bandwidth with noise. Fix that, lawmakers.
Yes, policing used to be easier when the library and the magazine stand contents were all that needed control, but the Internet is a massive book store with all the books thrown on the floor and a frantic mob running through it with snow shovels. Forget it. There's no organization and any effort to control that will fail.
Shouldn't that say "Bork Bork Bork" at the end or is that only Swedish?
Damn - I just got Slashdot blocked in Sweden.
Selling hardware certainly subsidizes the OS. I wonder how much OS X would cost along with all the bundled apps but without hardware sales? Perhaps more than a workable copy of Vista (whenever that comes out). Might as well buy the approved hardware and not twist your brain getting it to install...
oh - I forgot where I was for a second.
Long ago, I remember reading a quote from a major music exec stating (paraphrase from memory) that "the worst thing that ever happened to us was the CD". It was in the midst of the original Napster. No, the honor system didn't work so well then and still doesn't.
When DRM is abandoned, sales of digital music will go through the roof.
I'd say we do agree but for slightly different reasons. Maybe sales to Slashdotters will go through the roof but the general public hasn't cared so far - a couple billion DRM'd tracks sold tells me that. The major impact may well be subscription services going the way of the DIVX [pay-per-view] DVD and those customers will begin actually buying music. Also, the general notion of making it simpler to buy music which plays anywhere will kill off the CD. I can't wait.
What about people like me who hate mp3 players, but love mp3s?
Choices are a wonderful thing. From an organizational standpoint, it's good that you've standardized on what works for you.
I've found that 30GB of music is easier to carry around on a little bar of soap than a box of CDs that I have to fumble with. People like me will take the iPod out of the stereo dock at home, listen to it in my car on the way to the ski slopes then stick the iPod in my jacket while skiing this weekend. In the car, I can also listen to my CD/MP3/AAC disks (unencrypted) or plug a USB key into the Kenwood head unit and listen to those tunes.
There are almost too many choices but it's still great to just shove music on any USB key and play it in the car. Technology aside, digital files enable playing music anywhere and they're fabulous.
What are you talking about? I get a CD, rip it to mp3 or I buy an mp3 in digital store. Where is the difference?
There's no difference between the two in your scenario. The difference is you're buying music instead of "sharing" it from somewhere else.
What you say is not insightful, it is repeating the logical fallacy that brought us here!
Ahhh... bullshit. What I'm saying is what brought us to DRM. According to the music industry, they're not selling 90% of the music out there. The global piracy rates are anywhere from 25% to 92%.
Here's my leading theory as to why selling MP3s and selling CDs is different: Most people who have bought CDs used them in a CD player. As pervasive as portable music players are becoming, I'm sure the majority of individual CDs have never been ripped. Slashdotters don't count as a majority (sorry). I get that data from the cross section of people I know with large CD collections who don't own a DMP/iPod. The ones who do own an iPoddish device maybe rip a CD or three and the new stuff gets bought from an iTunesesque place. (ok, they're ALL iPods) Those are the CD purchasers music executives like. That will change in the future - there won't be any CDs to rip (or press or ship or store or take up shelf space).
On the other end of the spectrum are people who "share" music. Everyone who has ever been on Hotline, Carracho etc knows that to get music, you have to upload music. A culture was rapidly born where kids all over the globe pooled their money and bought a handful of CDs to be shared among tens of thousands of users. Kids (and minor adults) would heed the "wish list", make a [relatively] huge investment in a CD to upload so they could download a dozen other CDs. Those were all lost sales and that's the difference. Maybe not all sales were "lost" since these same kids couldn't afford to buy all the CDs anyway.
Unencumbered MP3s will allow a continuance of this very same activity except there won't be any physical media to rip first. Plus, only the cherry tracks need be purchased, not the whole CD worth. Very economical that way. It's going on now but the demise of DRM or unstored streaming will remove a barrier, enabling a return to those seminal days of Napster sharing. The Majors know that and I'm certain that each purchased file will contain a tag marking the purchaser (like a watermark) but that will be instantly defeated and stripped away.
Waddayathink?
Somebody has to do it but first, the music "sharing" (pronounced "stealing") problem still needs to be solved or EMI will be very broke, very fast. I don't think the "honor system" has been completely worked out (or is it "honour system"?). Second, I wonder how much one of the majors would charge for a lifetime, unencumbered digital music license? Otherwise, this is a very exciting development. Competing with Apple would be less a factor since the iPod is the cash cow (not the iTunes store) and the iPod is an MP3 player first and foremost.
PC users will never buy OSX (period)
Absolutely true as long as you can't run OS X on a plain vanilla PC. You probably meant to add "they'll just switch to Macs completely".
I've got it. The biggest problem is DRM is illegal to hack. Get rid of those laws globally. Problem solved.
When we used cassette tapes, we could play them in any cassette player we wanted, regardless of who manufactured it.
That's correct on the surface but lets extend that logic into what we're faced with today. The universe of recorded music during the cassette days include Compact-Cassettes (with various incompatible noise reduction), vinyl records (in 12" and 7" flavors), 8-track tapes, 4-track open reel tapes (in several speeds) and PlayTapes. Buy music in one format and it won't play in the other.
You were definitely "locked in" to a format but nobody griped to manufacturers or the government about the inability to stick a 45 RPM record into an 8-track slot. If you wanted a different format, your best hope was to copy one format to another and endure the losses - or buy a new copy. Same deal today. All of these arguments are reminiscent of the cassette fans yelling "8-tracks suck" and visa-versa.
These former choices are very analogous to what we have today except the consumer doesn't understand that these seemingly identical MP3 players are wildly different. The various formats (then and now) aren't about ease of use, sound quality or flexibility. They're all about collecting royalties through sales. The features of the format are designed to sell, the marketing hype is designed to glorify the features and the music is the hook.
That said, I agree that vendor lock-in is a very dangerous thing and format lock-in should be a thing of the past completely. However, follow the above logic of collecting royalties and that's exactly what's going on. It ain't about the music but that's what's being marketed. I believe that Apple should license FairPlay to two more manufacturers (Sony and Samsung?) and Apple will do just fine in the market place.
You bought it, it's your property.
heh... the best you can do with most software is rent it, especially from Microsoft.
...just like Steve Ballmer flew in to "help" the city of Munich decide against Linux desktops. To quote a famous Princess; "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Yeah.... "Error: -29 Incompatible Key. You must install MS-OpenID to continue"
From Wikipedia - Sic is a Latin word meaning "thus", "so", or "just as that". In writing, it is placed within square brackets and usually italicized -- [sic] -- to indicate that an incorrect or unusual spelling, phrase, punctuation, and/or other preceding quoted material is a verbatim reproduction of the quoted original and is not a transcription error.
I thought for sure the Zunies would get the golden poop award.
The thing lacking in OS X and Linux which currently owns millions of Windows machines is the scripting host which has admin access and can run unauthenticated through many entry points like Windows Messenger, Outlook, DirectX, on the tail of a buffer overflow, through Explorer (use VBS to do system calls right through Explorer). That horribly insecure scripting host has survived update after update of Windows. What makes anyone think they've fixed it now? I really hope Microsoft has fixed it in Vista because I'm sick of all the Windows driven spam I get every day.
What gets ridiculous is Windows fans proclaiming the first REAL OS X exploit will negate all 100,000 Windows exploits and make the Mac OS X platform "just as insecure". The Schadenfreude approach to security never helped anyone. If I can plug an out of the box OS X machine into the internet and anyone can plant a worm or start making Viagra popups on my desktop within 20 minutes, only then is OS X just as insecure as Windows. My OS X box at home hasn't done that in the last 5 years.
I get your point that Vista is a completely different animal than previous Windows, just as the old MacOS and OS X are. Out of the 30-ish MOAB exploits, most are quite a stretch, some will just create a hang, some require the administrator to install it, many revolve around 3rd party applications - those are just grasping at straws. If that's all they can shake out of a 6 year old OS, that's pretty good. I also cite the Microsoft track record of covering real problems with marketing, like Jedi Mind Tricks. Hundreds of thousands of bugs were fixed in Windows while all the while Microsoft told everyone just how wonderful it is. I'm just damn glad I was running Sybase on an Xserve when the SQL Slammer Worm came around. This is certainly a "wait and see" development with Vista but I wouldn't take Microsoft's word on how wonderful it is. If I had the money, I can apparently buy customized Zero Day Exploits for Vista right now. Vista could be NT/2000 in a colorful clown suit just like XP was. Ask me again in a year if Vista is secure.
Of course, you can trick any computer user into performing a self inflicted insecurity. "Click here to see the dancing monkeys". If you're a malicious person sitting at the keyboard with the administrator password, you can also inflict security issues. Those aren't nearly as dangerous as the simple act of plugging a [classic] Windows machine into the cable modem. Maybe Vista as well. We're already seeing serious security buzz about the month-old Vista and I'd class it as only slightly worse than the six-year-old (in March) Mac OS X. Color me skeptical.
The 140,000 exploit number was buried on the Symantec site (along with 40 exploits for the old MacOS and Zero for OS X). Granted, it was two years ago and I can't find it any more but I've seen it quoted several times from different sources not related to me, so they saw it too.
Most of the exploits use exactly the same mechanism and most Microsoft "patches" do nothing but disallow a specific signature of an incoming exploit while doing nothing to fix the underlying problems.
The outright hubris displayed by Bill Gates is evidence of Microsoft's future death warrant. It's not just him, the whole culture is in denial except the ones "leaving to explore other opportunities". Yes, it is a train coming.
We must have missed the "Don't Slow Down" checkbox somewhere. There's nothing much to set up - Citrix and a published application on one server, SQL Server on the other - gigabit network and only 35 users. Aside from that, we're restarting print cues every other day. People_Ready? I'm ready to launch the whole rig into the parking lot.
I've read all those as they came out and shook my head. They may as well have added the serious flaw that an administrator can launch terminal and sudo rm -rf /Users/<username>. Half of the exploits required the administrator sitting at the keyboard. Others needed to trick the user into doing something dumb. The rest were holes in applications. Those were a far cry from the fun available in Windows World.
Mac ads are as inaccurate as Microsoft ads showing beautiful integration, ease of use, truly empowering the worker; People_Ready. If you leave out the way the OS jumps in your way all the time, turns you into a spam generator or the fact you have to reboot the servers once a week because they slow down, it's closer to true. We have two Windows 2003 servers that get rebooted at least every two weeks because they slow down.
ARS Technica doesn't buy it either but The New York Times cited six major issues with Vista mostly dug out by a security firm. They've since taken the reference to the article away so you'll need to dig it out if you're curious.
Steven Levy needed to fill in the dead spaces in Bill's output - like this:
Yes, although security is a [The process could not access the file because it is being used by another process]. You're [Overflow at 0x0b26f033: WKSSVC.DLL has stopped responding.] the fact that there have been some security updates already for Windows Vista. This is exactly the way it should work. When somebody comes to us [A Runtime Error has occured. Would you like to debug? Line: 29 Error: Object Expected] we've got [The Program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down] before there is any exploit.