Other than people who get stuck with Vista on a new PC purchase, who is going to buy copies of this? I can't imagine another painful cycle of OS upgrading just to get what I feel is essentially eye candy that likely won't even work on the 12-18 month old hardware at our office.
It will be interesting to see how successful Microsoft is in pitching this "upgrade" to enterprise customers with thousands or tens of thousands of seats.
The bottom line is that if I can see it or I can hear it, I can find a way to copy it. If you make it too difficult to watch a movie or listen to a music, people won't buy it. They'll eventually figure out that they have more to gain by making things easy to use rather than creating ill will and incompatibiity by trying to stamp out casual copying.
How come I never get any of these "impartial surveys"? I have racks and racks of RHEL Linux servers that I only reboot when:
a. a machine suffers a hardware failure (fairly rare) or b. there's a kernel update that impacts security
In the case of (b), I apply the updated rpms and reboot which normally results in a downtime of approximately 60 seconds for that server. This might happen a few times a year (single digits).
For our small number of Windows 2003 server boxes, it seems that each "windows update" cycle recommends a restart. We'll call that a once a month reboot when Microsoft gets around to releasing their monthly cleanup. Total server downtime is maybe 2-3 minutes (windows takes a bit longer to reboot on the identical hardware used with our Linux machines).
So while I *could* say that our windows servers are down XYZ percent more than our Linux servers, in terms of actual downtime, both platforms are about the same, with Linux seemingly holding a small edge in my experience.
I replaced sendmail on all my machines around 1999-ish with postfix and never felt the need to look back. It just works and takes about 10 minutes to learn how to configure. It's also hands-down faster if you've got to deal with large volumes of mail.
There's also qmail, but I could never get past the "if you want qmail you'd better be willing to install all of djb's other tools too" thing.
For the low low price of 99 cents a mile, you can use these fancy running shoes with built-in music. If you stop paying, they break your legs. The RIAA will love it!
If they've got this powerful cpu farm and it's obviously underutilized, why don't they donate un-rented cycles to something that helps us all (like the Folding@Home project)??? Seems like if they chose some sort of charitable recipient, they could even write the cost off on their corporate tax bill.
I had a similar experience with Cablevision/Optimum Online, and Skype, and Vonage...now I just use a pedestrian POTS line again. I resent having to pay all the BS fees and taxes, but it simply works and I don't have to take time out of my day chasing around my service provider when my incoming and/or outgoing phone service just stops for no apparent reason.
With the exception of there being more "off the shelf software available" I've found that Windows users also flounder if you stick them in front of OSX. Does that mean OSX is difficult to use or immature? Of course not, but it is definitely different than windows and there's a non-trivial learning curve before you start to feel comfortable.
They are raking in such huge margins on credit card debt that until very very recently, they seemed to more or less wink at online fraud. Only now that it's starting to really cut into their margins are they really taking notice and making half-hearted attempts to deal with the problem.
As much as I want to blame the "online idiot" who falls victim to phishing and other scams, the banks really bear a lot of blame themselves for making it so damn easy to steal from these people.
It's far more likely that the NSA has always had this information, but that someone "inside" was about to spill the beans. Someone inside, for example, that wanted to derail the chances for the former NSA chief to become the head of the CIA?
Nothing to see here. Just dirty laundry being aired to fill someone's political sails and deflate someone else's.
Learning how to write proficiently is certainly useful. Learning how to make yourself understood is even more useful. We all have different priorities. Agonizing over someone's diction, while it may be useful in necessary in an academic environment, seems akin to an art professor agonizing over someone's brush strokes when they're just trying to paint their house.
The guy is clearly a loon. Anyone who is "smart enough" to get into secure defence department computers and still cannot extract one iota of these images that prove his point is probably just inventing the whole thing (other than the break-in).
Regarding your comment...it's a bit pointless to work on a defense measure for a military threat AFTER it has been deployed or its deployment is iminent. While it sure is popular to bash the US these days, I'm sure there is all kinds of research going on around the world to counter perceived threats that might seem silly now, but may become dead serious 10 years from now.
So are the universities (and all networks, by extension) supposed to sniff every packet and look for "copyrighted material" so it can take whatever action the industry think is "appropriate"?
Perhaps every car should also have a sensor to detect speeding and automatically cut the gas?
Fuck the music industry. Their ever more desperate measures only mean they are painfully aware of how irrelevant they are about to become.
The big labels had absolutely no leverage unless they were willing to "go on strike" and cut Itunes off altogether. Given the numbers that Itunes has been pumping for the labels, the result (after the requisite bluster) was a forgone conclusion.
However, you can bet your ass that the labels are colluding to cut Apple out of the pie after getting a very public caning.
"People who ask me to sign or pose are asking for some of my time, which needs must come from my other volunteer work for the cause. On most occasions, the total time involved is not very large, so I do as they ask, taking steps to make the process efficient. But this does not mean my time is theirs to dispose of. I think it is entirely proper to ask people to make a small contribution to the cause in exchange."
---
When I write a piece of open source code, that takes a bit of my time too and is sometimes boring. By RMS's logic, I should charge each user some sort of nuissance fee so that my time is better spent on more "productive pursuits" or somesuch. Hrmmmmm...
I do like the fact that he is starting to grasp how scarcity is managed in a capitalist economy though.
I've been using the democracy player under OSX and Windows for the last several versions. It also frequently crashes, often taking out its config files in the process. The bitorrent bits wreak havoc on your network connection (on OSX and WinXP). The Linux version JUST became available, but given the problems with the more "mature" platforms, I'm reluctant to inflict it on my Linux laptop...
Granted, one shouldn't steal software from Microsoft. Stealing, even from another thief, is still wrong. I suspect most pirates will ignore the nag screens and those that are truly offended will just us another OS. I doubt this is going to contribute a penny in new sales for Microsoft, but it will generate negative publicity. As the RIAA/MPAA have shown us, as a company/organization loses relevance to its constituency, they will employ ever more desperate measures to maintain their hold on those constituents. While I don't see Microsoft falling into ruin anytime soon, things like this are clear markers that they are in decline.
Perhaps someday they will become efficient enough that it will be cost effective to build arrays several dozen miles square on the light side of the moon and then beam the energy back to earth as microwaves. In the absence of some sort of major breakthrough in fusion energy production, that seems like the way to go for clean energy.
The physical transport layer confusion is only part of the problem. There's also all the incompatible DRM schemes, the incompatible revs of HDMI implementations, the utter lack of any content, etc. It will likely be several years before you can put your finger on anything resembling a "standard" that is gaining real market traction and you'll probably have to buy all new home theater bits in addition to the player so that you don't get bitten by incompatibility issues.
Slashdot Mirror
A project fork. :)
Other than people who get stuck with Vista on a new PC purchase, who is going to buy copies of this? I can't imagine another painful cycle of OS upgrading just to get what I feel is essentially eye candy that likely won't even work on the 12-18 month old hardware at our office.
It will be interesting to see how successful Microsoft is in pitching this "upgrade" to enterprise customers with thousands or tens of thousands of seats.
The bottom line is that if I can see it or I can hear it, I can find a way to copy it. If you make it too difficult to watch a movie or listen to a music, people won't buy it. They'll eventually figure out that they have more to gain by making things easy to use rather than creating ill will and incompatibiity by trying to stamp out casual copying.
How come I never get any of these "impartial surveys"? I have racks and racks of RHEL Linux servers that I only reboot when:
a. a machine suffers a hardware failure (fairly rare) or
b. there's a kernel update that impacts security
In the case of (b), I apply the updated rpms and reboot which normally results in a downtime of approximately 60 seconds for that server. This might happen a few times a year (single digits).
For our small number of Windows 2003 server boxes, it seems that each "windows update" cycle recommends a restart. We'll call that a once a month reboot when Microsoft gets around to releasing their monthly cleanup. Total server downtime is maybe 2-3 minutes (windows takes a bit longer to reboot on the identical hardware used with our Linux machines).
So while I *could* say that our windows servers are down XYZ percent more than our Linux servers, in terms of actual downtime, both platforms are about the same, with Linux seemingly holding a small edge in my experience.
Cheers,
I replaced sendmail on all my machines around 1999-ish with postfix and never felt the need to look back. It just works and takes about 10 minutes to learn how to configure. It's also hands-down faster if you've got to deal with large volumes of mail.
There's also qmail, but I could never get past the "if you want qmail you'd better be willing to install all of djb's other tools too" thing.
For those of us who aren't parasitic lawyers? :-)
For the low low price of 99 cents a mile, you can use these fancy running shoes with built-in music. If you stop paying, they break your legs. The RIAA will love it!
If they've got this powerful cpu farm and it's obviously underutilized, why don't they donate un-rented cycles to something that helps us all (like the Folding@Home project)??? Seems like if they chose some sort of charitable recipient, they could even write the cost off on their corporate tax bill.
I had a similar experience with Cablevision/Optimum Online, and Skype, and Vonage...now I just use a pedestrian POTS line again. I resent having to pay all the BS fees and taxes, but it simply works and I don't have to take time out of my day chasing around my service provider when my incoming and/or outgoing phone service just stops for no apparent reason.
I keep seeing comparisons of how RIM was "abused" in this manner. However, RIM is no stranger to using the courts to extort licensing fees either.
Granted, I think professional patent trollers ought to be shut down, but using RIM as an example of a "victim" in this process is a bit disingenius.
With the exception of there being more "off the shelf software available" I've found that Windows users also flounder if you stick them in front of OSX. Does that mean OSX is difficult to use or immature? Of course not, but it is definitely different than windows and there's a non-trivial learning curve before you start to feel comfortable.
Cheers,
Next thing you know, they will start posting lots of dupes, links to career "linkers" who load up the "story page" with banner ads...uh....oh wait.
They are raking in such huge margins on credit card debt that until very very recently, they seemed to more or less wink at online fraud. Only now that it's starting to really cut into their margins are they really taking notice and making half-hearted attempts to deal with the problem.
As much as I want to blame the "online idiot" who falls victim to phishing and other scams, the banks really bear a lot of blame themselves for making it so damn easy to steal from these people.
It's far more likely that the NSA has always had this information, but that someone "inside" was about to spill the beans. Someone inside, for example, that wanted to derail the chances for the former NSA chief to become the head of the CIA?
Nothing to see here. Just dirty laundry being aired to fill someone's political sails and deflate someone else's.
Learning how to write proficiently is certainly useful. Learning how to make yourself understood is even more useful. We all have different priorities. Agonizing over someone's diction, while it may be useful in necessary in an academic environment, seems akin to an art professor agonizing over someone's brush strokes when they're just trying to paint their house.
The guy is clearly a loon. Anyone who is "smart enough" to get into secure defence department computers and still cannot extract one iota of these images that prove his point is probably just inventing the whole thing (other than the break-in).
Regarding your comment...it's a bit pointless to work on a defense measure for a military threat AFTER it has been deployed or its deployment is iminent. While it sure is popular to bash the US these days, I'm sure there is all kinds of research going on around the world to counter perceived threats that might seem silly now, but may become dead serious 10 years from now.
So are the universities (and all networks, by extension) supposed to sniff every packet and look for "copyrighted material" so it can take whatever action the industry think is "appropriate"?
Perhaps every car should also have a sensor to detect speeding and automatically cut the gas?
Fuck the music industry. Their ever more desperate measures only mean they are painfully aware of how irrelevant they are about to become.
The big labels had absolutely no leverage unless they were willing to "go on strike" and cut Itunes off altogether. Given the numbers that Itunes has been pumping for the labels, the result (after the requisite bluster) was a forgone conclusion.
However, you can bet your ass that the labels are colluding to cut Apple out of the pie after getting a very public caning.
Cheers,
it brings all the others out of the wordwork and encourages more extortion. Granted, RIM is no angel, but this is just getting silly.
RMS wrote:
"People who ask me to sign or pose are asking for some of my time, which needs must come from my other volunteer work for the cause. On most occasions, the total time involved is not very large, so I do as they ask, taking steps to make the process efficient. But this does not mean my time is theirs to dispose of. I think it is entirely proper to ask people to make a small contribution to the cause in exchange."
---
When I write a piece of open source code, that takes a bit of my time too and is sometimes boring. By RMS's logic, I should charge each user some sort of nuissance fee so that my time is better spent on more "productive pursuits" or somesuch. Hrmmmmm...
I do like the fact that he is starting to grasp how scarcity is managed in a capitalist economy though.
I've been using the democracy player under OSX and Windows for the last several versions. It also frequently crashes, often taking out its config files in the process. The bitorrent bits wreak havoc on your network connection (on OSX and WinXP). The Linux version JUST became available, but given the problems with the more "mature" platforms, I'm reluctant to inflict it on my Linux laptop...
Granted, one shouldn't steal software from Microsoft. Stealing, even from another thief, is still wrong. I suspect most pirates will ignore the nag screens and those that are truly offended will just us another OS. I doubt this is going to contribute a penny in new sales for Microsoft, but it will generate negative publicity. As the RIAA/MPAA have shown us, as a company/organization loses relevance to its constituency, they will employ ever more desperate measures to maintain their hold on those constituents. While I don't see Microsoft falling into ruin anytime soon, things like this are clear markers that they are in decline.
Perhaps someday they will become efficient enough that it will be cost effective to build arrays several dozen miles square on the light side of the moon and then beam the energy back to earth as microwaves. In the absence of some sort of major breakthrough in fusion energy production, that seems like the way to go for clean energy.
The physical transport layer confusion is only part of the problem. There's also all the incompatible DRM schemes, the incompatible revs of HDMI implementations, the utter lack of any content, etc. It will likely be several years before you can put your finger on anything resembling a "standard" that is gaining real market traction and you'll probably have to buy all new home theater bits in addition to the player so that you don't get bitten by incompatibility issues.