I agreed with nearly everything you wrote in both postings, except for the part about monopolies. I don't think most consumers think about monopolies nor care much about them. I certainly don't recall anyone saying in 1975-77 that they didn't buy a Betamax because Sony's a monopoly.
Sony has historically be a driving force in many superior technologies that ultimately failed, not because of quality but because the, all be it sometimes justified, fear of monopolies. BetaMax was superior in quality to VHS
As someone old enough to remember the Beta/VHS competition, let me assure you that no one was worried about "monopolies." There were two obstacles to Beta's success. One was that it was somewhat more expensive than VHS, but more importantly, VHS had a two-hour recording time to Beta's one. That made it impossible to tape a complete movie on a single Betamax tape. VHS traded picture quality, which most people didn't notice or didn't care about, for convenience, which most people did care about.
Joe Blow will never be a Unix hacker, and giving them a system that relies on loads of arcane arcane textual configuration files, command line tools, and shell scripts is asking for trouble
So how does Joe deal with the situation when some malware installs a bunch of keys in the Windows registry? I'm a smart person, and I've used computers for over 30 years, but I avoid mucking around in the registry like the plague. Who really knows what all those keys are for, which might be superfluous or problematic? Give me a nice text configuration file in/etc any day.
If that's the theory, I'm afraid it isn't a very persuasive one.
More openness will not make content providers any happier about people redistributing their material for free. So I don't see more openness as the solution to DRM, DMCA, or any similar methods of locking down content to the extent possible. Every trend in the marketplace at both the hardware and software levels seem to be moving in the direction of more lock-down. More open source adoptions will not change that an iota.
Just a thought, but maybe the US election contains so many different selections to put people off voting.
You're not far from the truth. The "Australian office-block" ballot was introduced in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Before that ballots tended to be party lists; all of a party's candidates were listed in a single column with the option of voting for the entire slate with one mark. This made it fairly easy for parties to mobilize even illiterate or non-English-speaking voters; they just needed to know how to make one mark for their party of choice. Elites introduced the office-block ballots precisely because it limited the ability of parties to mobilize immigrants and the uneducated.
I know this seems simple to everyone here, but you have to think about the part the voter sees and the needs of the adminstrators.
Ballots in the US are extremely complex and often not finalized until a short period before the election. Many jurisdictions require multilingual ballots so your system has to select the appropriate ballot for each voter. Ballots in the US often mix together federal, state, and local elections, and state and local ballot initiatives, so they often vary from one local jurisdiction to the next. The system must be comprehensible to people with a sixth-grade education who don't use computers in the normal lives. You need to make the systems accessible to people with disabilities. Etc.
It's not just a matter of counting the votes at all. That's the easy part.
For me it's old songs like the Beach Boys' "California Girls" popping up in my mind. Seems especially to happen while I'm standing over a six-foot putt.
No, I think it was bad politics on the part of the MA executive agency that brought forth ODF in the first place.
First, state agencies have affirmative responsibilities to hire people with disabilities, so they make up a large fraction of the workforce in state agencies than they do in the private sector. Second, in a state like MA, many groups like the disabled are quite powerful, especially when combined with strong public sector unions. That they were not brought into the process from the beginning was a big political mistake that opponents like Microsoft exploited.
Most advertising is designed to bolster market share and maintain a product's image in the marketplace. Advertising researchers have found that advertising established products doesn't appear to increase share all that much, but not advertising does result in loss of share. The result is a classic "prisoner's dilemma" game theory problem. Companies that produce established products would generally benefit if all the producers of that product stopped advertising, but none can afford to stop individually. (One intriguing application of this theory concers the ban on televised cigarette advertising in the 1960's. While cigarette manufacturers shifted a chunk of their advertising budgets to other, cheaper media like magazines, banning all advertising of cigarettes enabled all the companies to redirect a large chunk of money that would otherwise have gone to the television networks.)
The other traditional rationale for advertising is the introduction of new products. To take your example, Pepsi has just launched a new low-cal cola+fruit flavor product targeted, by the look of the ads, at younger women.
Since I tend only to watch sporting events on regular television, I naturally see a profusion of car ads. Given advertisers concern with "clutter," I'm always surprised to see a commercial block with ads from multiple car makers. The most ridiculuous examples happen at the local commercial breaks, where the network might show a Toyota and a Buick ad, then the local station throws in a Dodge and a Ford ad. Since, as others here have pointed out, car ads often look quite similar to one another, I'd be hard pressed after one of these ad blocks to identify the individual auto brands being marketed.
wonder how popular on-demand really is - I can't ever say that I've watched a show on-demand; just a few music videos. I'd think the use of the on-demand channels is mostly limited to a) those that have digital cable but not the DVR, b) those that actually want to watch the limited content available, and c) those who aren't frustrated by the confusing interface.
Our Comcast on-demand service has totally changed the way my daughter and I watch on television. Aside from things like live sporting events or the occasional teen-oriented show ("What Not to Wear" seems to be a current hit among my daughter's friends), we use on-demand almost exclusively. Comcast offers an extraordinary array of older movies for free. Right now they have nearly all the major Hitchcock works, some letterboxed, as well as many other great films from the past few decades.
When On-Demand first arrived, the best thing about it was ADV's Anime Network channel. This introduced us to a wide array of anime offerings. At the time, ADV showed complete series from some of its biggest franchises like Evangelion, Azumanga Daioh, and Chobits. I guess they didn't see the expected bump in DVD sales because now their offerings are pretty limited. Fortunately this space has been filled by Adult Swim and, especially, Comcast's own Anime Selects service. At first the AS offerings were a mish-mash of older anime series and some incredible gems, like Ghibli's Grave of the Fireflies, but now there are many more choices including demanding programs like Boogiepop Phantom.
Oh, and once in a while we watch a for-pay recent feature film. At $3-4 it easily competes with video rental shops, especially chains like Blockbuster which carry mostly mainstream titles anyway.
If Echostar is infringing, then it's the judge's duty to bring the infringement to an end. I don't see anything wrong with requiring that the boxes be disabled. Either Echostar will reach a licensing agreement with Tivo, or they'll watch their customers abandon them for DirecTV. They may also face a class-action suit from the owners of the now-infringing hardware unless it's prohibited by the terms of the Dish subscription contract. What better method of forcing Echostar to comply can you think of?
In the United States, a copyrighted work is defined in Title 17 of the United States Code.
Section 102 of the Code states:
"Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device." (my emphasis)
The key phrase is "tangible medium of expression" meaning things like paper, CD's, etc.
The rules governing your whistling, singing, or otherwise performing a copyrighted work are defined in the concept of a "public" performance (Sec. 101):
"To perform or display a work 'publicly' means --
(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or
(2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times." (again, my emphasis)
So you can sing anything you want in front of your family and its "social acquanitances" but not in front of strangers in a bar and not on TV. At that point the performance becomes "public" and subject to copyright law. Whether a particular performance infringes depends on the applicability of the "fair use" concept and any additional rights granted you by the rights-holder. The copyrighted song, "Happy Birthday to You!," is a common example. No one collects royalties from you when you sing it, unlicensed, at a party, but movie producers must credit the songwriters and pay them royalties if it's performed in a movie.
I just deleted all my google cookies (in FF), blocked all the sites they came from (google.com, groups.google.com, etc.), and ran a search. I get my search results without complaint, and I have no google cookies in my browser.
I dont' use gmail or any other google service, just searching, so YMMV.
I'm really puzzled by all of this. First, why would Microsoft license its WMV technologies to a Linux distribution? I can understand someone like Sun licensing Java, or ATI/nVidia licensing their drivers, but Microsoft? Why would they want to make it easier for a Linux distribution to compete with Windows, especially in an area where Microsoft has the advantage, namely bundling proprietary software?
Second, who is paying the licensing fees here? I presume that Linspire has to pay royalties for each download of Freespire. Where is the money coming from? On the wiki site, Linspire says it's paying for things like server space, etc., but doesn't really talk about the licensing fees. Are they really making so much money that they can afford to pay royalties but not be compensated by end-users in return?
My experience is that many sutomated spam programs try dozens, even hundreds, of times to deliver a message before giving up. In fact I had to write some scripts that parse my logs and blacklist IP addresses that repeatedly attempt delivery when blocked by one of my SMTP rules. Last night's report includes a number of IPs that tried to deliver to me over fifty times in a single day.
I've had some servers try literally 600-700 times to deliver a message. I finally had to automate the process of blocking these guys since it started to resemble a DDOS attack!
I stopped using Bayes filtering for my clients a couple years back. I found that auto-training inevitably led to false positives, and I didn't have the time to review all the traffic and decide what was really spam or ham.
I've found the most significant improvement in spam filtering has been the rise of the "URI RBLs" precisely because, as you say, the spammer needs to tell you how to get in touch with him or her. Each week I run a script that analyzes my/var/log/maillog and compiles how many times each SA rule was hit. The most effective rules almost always turn out to be:
1) no reverse DNS for the sending server, 2) messages that include a URI listed at Spamcop or some other URI RBL, 3) messages sent to my backup MX host, or, 4) messages that include words with embedded numbers like "st0cks"
I also block about 1/3 of the arriving traffic at the doorstep using a wide variety of rules based on the features of the SMTP dialog like the sending server IP/hostname, from domain, etc.
How about some examples? MSSQL is perhaps one of the easiest RDBMS to install/use of them all (yes, I've used Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL) even if it doesn't scale as high. Put in the install CD and hit the various Next/OK buttons and you are done with a system that, by default, is pretty good.
And this is easier than: yum install postgresql* because....?
With regards to the server market, this "fact" results from treating the $5B in Linux sales as not "Unix" sales. So, yes, the Solaris/HP-UX/AIX/etc. segment is dropping, but is that because these servers are being replaced by Windows Server 2003 or some flavor of Linux? My guess is the latter.
And, this only counts machines sold with Linux preinstalled. How many servers were shipped with no OS and Linux installed by the customer?
Is there a terrible price difference between purchasing a console instead of a PC, particularly when you consider the limited applications of a console, and the expandability and flexibility of a PC?
Having heard such positive reviews for "Elder Scrolls: Oblivion," and not owning a XBOX, I decided to buy a copy for the PC. My home has over half-a-dozen PC's of various vintages, some fewer than six months old. Not one of them will run this game because of its hardware demands. It won't run on Intel 855 graphics, for instance, because that card fails to support some particular instruction that's available only on ATI/NVidia chipsets.
How much would it cost me to buy a PC to play this game? Looking at my Dell discount catalog for this month gives me a number in the $700-800 range minimum.
I remember a time when my daughter was little when I bought a copy of "Lego Island." Here was a game aimed at children, yet it wouldn't run on my PC because it demanded an 8MB video card while most low-end PC's were shipping with 2MB onboard Intel video. What kind of logic suggests that you should create a game for kids that wouldn't run on probably 80-90% of the machines in homes at the time?
The PC games industry seems way too fixated on cutting-edge graphics to appeal to the fanboy segment that is willing to invest over a $1,000 in the hardware required to play the latest games.
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What a thoughtful discussion of these issues. Thanks.
Too bad I don't have mod points today. You probably won't get many because you're not taking the "COPPA is stupid" line.
I agreed with nearly everything you wrote in both postings, except for the part about monopolies. I don't think most consumers think about monopolies nor care much about them. I certainly don't recall anyone saying in 1975-77 that they didn't buy a Betamax because Sony's a monopoly.
Sony has historically be a driving force in many superior technologies that ultimately failed, not because of quality but because the, all be it sometimes justified, fear of monopolies. BetaMax was superior in quality to VHS
As someone old enough to remember the Beta/VHS competition, let me assure you that no one was worried about "monopolies." There were two obstacles to Beta's success. One was that it was somewhat more expensive than VHS, but more importantly, VHS had a two-hour recording time to Beta's one. That made it impossible to tape a complete movie on a single Betamax tape. VHS traded picture quality, which most people didn't notice or didn't care about, for convenience, which most people did care about.
Joe Blow will never be a Unix hacker, and giving them a system that relies on loads of arcane arcane textual configuration files, command line tools, and shell scripts is asking for trouble
So how does Joe deal with the situation when some malware installs a bunch of keys in the Windows registry? I'm a smart person, and I've used computers for over 30 years, but I avoid mucking around in the registry like the plague. Who really knows what all those keys are for, which might be superfluous or problematic? Give me a nice text configuration file in /etc any day.
If that's the theory, I'm afraid it isn't a very persuasive one.
More openness will not make content providers any happier about people redistributing their material for free. So I don't see more openness as the solution to DRM, DMCA, or any similar methods of locking down content to the extent possible. Every trend in the marketplace at both the hardware and software levels seem to be moving in the direction of more lock-down. More open source adoptions will not change that an iota.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Some do, some don't.
Just a thought, but maybe the US election contains so many different selections to put people off voting.
You're not far from the truth. The "Australian office-block" ballot was introduced in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Before that ballots tended to be party lists; all of a party's candidates were listed in a single column with the option of voting for the entire slate with one mark. This made it fairly easy for parties to mobilize even illiterate or non-English-speaking voters; they just needed to know how to make one mark for their party of choice. Elites introduced the office-block ballots precisely because it limited the ability of parties to mobilize immigrants and the uneducated.
For anyone interested in these issues, I recommend the work of Walter Dean Burnham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Dean_Burnham.
I know this seems simple to everyone here, but you have to think about the part the voter sees and the needs of the adminstrators.
Ballots in the US are extremely complex and often not finalized until a short period before the election. Many jurisdictions require multilingual ballots so your system has to select the appropriate ballot for each voter. Ballots in the US often mix together federal, state, and local elections, and state and local ballot initiatives, so they often vary from one local jurisdiction to the next. The system must be comprehensible to people with a sixth-grade education who don't use computers in the normal lives. You need to make the systems accessible to people with disabilities. Etc.
It's not just a matter of counting the votes at all. That's the easy part.
For me it's old songs like the Beach Boys' "California Girls" popping up in my mind. Seems especially to happen while I'm standing over a six-foot putt.
It has patent restrictions.
No, I think it was bad politics on the part of the MA executive agency that brought forth ODF in the first place.
First, state agencies have affirmative responsibilities to hire people with disabilities, so they make up a large fraction of the workforce in state agencies than they do in the private sector. Second, in a state like MA, many groups like the disabled are quite powerful, especially when combined with strong public sector unions. That they were not brought into the process from the beginning was a big political mistake that opponents like Microsoft exploited.
Most advertising is designed to bolster market share and maintain a product's image in the marketplace. Advertising researchers have found that advertising established products doesn't appear to increase share all that much, but not advertising does result in loss of share. The result is a classic "prisoner's dilemma" game theory problem. Companies that produce established products would generally benefit if all the producers of that product stopped advertising, but none can afford to stop individually. (One intriguing application of this theory concers the ban on televised cigarette advertising in the 1960's. While cigarette manufacturers shifted a chunk of their advertising budgets to other, cheaper media like magazines, banning all advertising of cigarettes enabled all the companies to redirect a large chunk of money that would otherwise have gone to the television networks.)
The other traditional rationale for advertising is the introduction of new products. To take your example, Pepsi has just launched a new low-cal cola+fruit flavor product targeted, by the look of the ads, at younger women.
Since I tend only to watch sporting events on regular television, I naturally see a profusion of car ads. Given advertisers concern with "clutter," I'm always surprised to see a commercial block with ads from multiple car makers. The most ridiculuous examples happen at the local commercial breaks, where the network might show a Toyota and a Buick ad, then the local station throws in a Dodge and a Ford ad. Since, as others here have pointed out, car ads often look quite similar to one another, I'd be hard pressed after one of these ad blocks to identify the individual auto brands being marketed.
wonder how popular on-demand really is - I can't ever say that I've watched a show on-demand; just a few music videos. I'd think the use of the on-demand channels is mostly limited to a) those that have digital cable but not the DVR, b) those that actually want to watch the limited content available, and c) those who aren't frustrated by the confusing interface.
Our Comcast on-demand service has totally changed the way my daughter and I watch on television. Aside from things like live sporting events or the occasional teen-oriented show ("What Not to Wear" seems to be a current hit among my daughter's friends), we use on-demand almost exclusively. Comcast offers an extraordinary array of older movies for free. Right now they have nearly all the major Hitchcock works, some letterboxed, as well as many other great films from the past few decades.
When On-Demand first arrived, the best thing about it was ADV's Anime Network channel. This introduced us to a wide array of anime offerings. At the time, ADV showed complete series from some of its biggest franchises like Evangelion, Azumanga Daioh, and Chobits. I guess they didn't see the expected bump in DVD sales because now their offerings are pretty limited. Fortunately this space has been filled by Adult Swim and, especially, Comcast's own Anime Selects service. At first the AS offerings were a mish-mash of older anime series and some incredible gems, like Ghibli's Grave of the Fireflies, but now there are many more choices including demanding programs like Boogiepop Phantom.
Oh, and once in a while we watch a for-pay recent feature film. At $3-4 it easily competes with video rental shops, especially chains like Blockbuster which carry mostly mainstream titles anyway.
If Echostar is infringing, then it's the judge's duty to bring the infringement to an end. I don't see anything wrong with requiring that the boxes be disabled. Either Echostar will reach a licensing agreement with Tivo, or they'll watch their customers abandon them for DirecTV. They may also face a class-action suit from the owners of the now-infringing hardware unless it's prohibited by the terms of the Dish subscription contract. What better method of forcing Echostar to comply can you think of?
In the United States, a copyrighted work is defined in Title 17 of the United States Code.
.
Section 102 of the Code states:
"Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device." (my emphasis)
The key phrase is "tangible medium of expression" meaning things like paper, CD's, etc.
The rules governing your whistling, singing, or otherwise performing a copyrighted work are defined in the concept of a "public" performance (Sec. 101):
"To perform or display a work 'publicly' means --
(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or
(2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times." (again, my emphasis)
So you can sing anything you want in front of your family and its "social acquanitances" but not in front of strangers in a bar and not on TV. At that point the performance becomes "public" and subject to copyright law. Whether a particular performance infringes depends on the applicability of the "fair use" concept and any additional rights granted you by the rights-holder. The copyrighted song, "Happy Birthday to You!," is a common example. No one collects royalties from you when you sing it, unlicensed, at a party, but movie producers must credit the songwriters and pay them royalties if it's performed in a movie.
If you're curious about your fair-use rights (in the US), I recommend reading 17 USC 107 http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107
IANAL.
I just deleted all my google cookies (in FF), blocked all the sites they came from (google.com, groups.google.com, etc.), and ran a search. I get my search results without complaint, and I have no google cookies in my browser.
I dont' use gmail or any other google service, just searching, so YMMV.
No, you have no redistribution rights whatsoever for the proprietary components. Seeo prietary_Components. There's an "OSS" version that contains none of the proprietary items and is, presumably, redistributable.
http://wiki.freespire.org/index.php/Summary_of_Pr
I'm really puzzled by all of this. First, why would Microsoft license its WMV technologies to a Linux distribution? I can understand someone like Sun licensing Java, or ATI/nVidia licensing their drivers, but Microsoft? Why would they want to make it easier for a Linux distribution to compete with Windows, especially in an area where Microsoft has the advantage, namely bundling proprietary software?
Second, who is paying the licensing fees here? I presume that Linspire has to pay royalties for each download of Freespire. Where is the money coming from? On the wiki site, Linspire says it's paying for things like server space, etc., but doesn't really talk about the licensing fees. Are they really making so much money that they can afford to pay royalties but not be compensated by end-users in return?
Some of these cases are attempts to deliver to multiple mailboxes, but many are attempts to deliver the same message to the same mailbox.
My experience is that many sutomated spam programs try dozens, even hundreds, of times to deliver a message before giving up. In fact I had to write some scripts that parse my logs and blacklist IP addresses that repeatedly attempt delivery when blocked by one of my SMTP rules. Last night's report includes a number of IPs that tried to deliver to me over fifty times in a single day.
I've had some servers try literally 600-700 times to deliver a message. I finally had to automate the process of blocking these guys since it started to resemble a DDOS attack!
I stopped using Bayes filtering for my clients a couple years back. I found that auto-training inevitably led to false positives, and I didn't have the time to review all the traffic and decide what was really spam or ham.
/var/log/maillog and compiles how many times each SA rule was hit. The most effective rules almost always turn out to be:
I've found the most significant improvement in spam filtering has been the rise of the "URI RBLs" precisely because, as you say, the spammer needs to tell you how to get in touch with him or her. Each week I run a script that analyzes my
1) no reverse DNS for the sending server,
2) messages that include a URI listed at Spamcop or some other URI RBL,
3) messages sent to my backup MX host, or,
4) messages that include words with embedded numbers like "st0cks"
I also block about 1/3 of the arriving traffic at the doorstep using a wide variety of rules based on the features of the SMTP dialog like the sending server IP/hostname, from domain, etc.
How about some examples? MSSQL is perhaps one of the easiest RDBMS to install/use of them all (yes, I've used Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL) even if it doesn't scale as high. Put in the install CD and hit the various Next/OK buttons and you are done with a system that, by default, is pretty good.
And this is easier than:
yum install postgresql*
because....?
With regards to the server market, this "fact" results from treating the $5B in Linux sales as not "Unix" sales. So, yes, the Solaris/HP-UX/AIX/etc. segment is dropping, but is that because these servers are being replaced by Windows Server 2003 or some flavor of Linux? My guess is the latter.
And, this only counts machines sold with Linux preinstalled. How many servers were shipped with no OS and Linux installed by the customer?
Is there a terrible price difference between purchasing a console instead of a PC, particularly when you consider the limited applications of a console, and the expandability and flexibility of a PC?
Having heard such positive reviews for "Elder Scrolls: Oblivion," and not owning a XBOX, I decided to buy a copy for the PC. My home has over half-a-dozen PC's of various vintages, some fewer than six months old. Not one of them will run this game because of its hardware demands. It won't run on Intel 855 graphics, for instance, because that card fails to support some particular instruction that's available only on ATI/NVidia chipsets.
How much would it cost me to buy a PC to play this game? Looking at my Dell discount catalog for this month gives me a number in the $700-800 range minimum.
I remember a time when my daughter was little when I bought a copy of "Lego Island." Here was a game aimed at children, yet it wouldn't run on my PC because it demanded an 8MB video card while most low-end PC's were shipping with 2MB onboard Intel video. What kind of logic suggests that you should create a game for kids that wouldn't run on probably 80-90% of the machines in homes at the time?
The PC games industry seems way too fixated on cutting-edge graphics to appeal to the fanboy segment that is willing to invest over a $1,000 in the hardware required to play the latest games.
That's why we're sticking with games for our PS2.
Doesn't work with Firefox 1.5.0.4 either. Of course, this is MSNBC.com....
Umm, Chrono Trigger (PSX version) was re-released in a package with Final Fantasy IV called "Final Fantasy Chronicles." It sells at GameDiva for $13.10. http://www.gamediva.com/amazonstore/iws?request=9& keyword=final+fantasy+chronicles