Why is it a good thing that large number of companies are spending huge amounts of money of software-licenses? Wouldn't it be better if those companies could get the software for free
Plus there is the added benefit of no taxes. The company that WOULD have made $1000 selling software licenses WOULD have had to pay taxes on that income. But with free software, there is no taxable transaction. Taken to the limit the government could lose billions of dollars of tax revenues...
When you are selling literally billions of tracks, letting everyone re-download their files over and over again is a great way to burn cash.
Actually, I believe the labels limit you to 1 download - it's not so much a bandwidth issue. The labels have a concept called "mechanical copying". In their interpretation, each download constitutes a mechanical copy and requires a payment. Now as I understand it, the mechanical copy fee was less than the license fee, but Apple would still be liable to pay it each time someone downloads.
... why people are leaving Massachusetts in droves. Having lived here most of my life (much to my embarrassment), I think the state should be renamed Nannychusetts.
The article is not very clear as to exactly what the "u-turn" is. First there is this:
The news that the software giant will now allow companies such as McAfee and Symantec access to the kernel of the 64-bit version of Vista has been met with cautious approval.
Is it only the 64 bit version of Vista that was the problem? Further down in the article we have this:
Not all security firms have had issues with Microsoft. Security experts Sophos will release its Vista-compatible product next month.
This makes me wonder what all the complaining is really about. You don't think McAfee and Symantec are just paving the way for future lawsuits when Vista's inherent security renders their products obsolete, do you?
Every night I put my cell phone in its charging cradle (in my bedroom). While it might seem convenient to charge and download at the same time, they are two distinct functions. Personally I would prefer to charge the device over night like my phone, but have it download music wirelessly, automatically, whenever it was in range of the wireless signal. I would also like to have the added benefit, once the software catches up to the hardware, of streaming music to my portable player rather than having to download it.
And in response to your question, no, I do not work for Sony.
How about putting music into the device in the first place? How about you sit down at your PC and the music is automatically sync'd into the device without you having to connect any cables? How about the device is also your phone, and can automatically sync your music from the "server in the sky" wherever you are?
Everyone loves to slam the Zune's minimally useful (some might say pathetic) wireless feature. They come up with all sorts of slurs, and even imply sharing earbuds is way better than wireless exchange of music. Does anyone on these boards *really* think that wireless-enabled portable media players are not the future? From my perspective, it is obvious that all portable players will have wireless capabilities, or they will cease to exist. Microsoft knows this and is positioning Zune for the inevitable future. Some might even say they are providing some much needed innovation in a fairly stagnant market. Perhaps their current implementation is lacking, but I think we all know it will get better. So I repeat the question: Does anybody really not think wireless will soon be a mandatory feature for all portable media players?
Er.. how about holding the child himself responsible?
Well, as it happens, this is my position as well... but the article was about suing parents for the child's actions, and I was merely pointing out the hypocrasy of that stance given everything else that is going on.
On the one hand the government is continually taking more and more control away from parents (for example, if a young girl wants an abortion she can get one without having to obtain parental permission; children are routinely taken away from "unfit" parents; parents are not allowed to prevent their children from being exposed to school material they find objectionable). Then on the other hand we want to blame parents for their kids' actions. There is no denying that there has been a steady erosion of parental rights in the past few decades. You can't have it both ways. If it takes a village to raise a child, then it is the village that is responsible when that child commits a crime, not the parents who's authority has been, in many cases, usurped.
Re:Deleted Scenes from the Interview
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Ballmer Sounds Off
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· Score: 3, Insightful
They just bought it. Give them at least a few days to come up with some plan.
When you spend $1.6B you're supposed to have a plan ahead of time. Now that doesn't mean they don't have a plan, they just aren't telling us what it is yet.
Netburst was designed for a market that touted clock speed as the performance measure for CPUs. AMD, with a big helping hand from the gamers, changed the game into rewarding true benchmark/performance rather than simple clock speed. I suppose if Intel had managed to achieve 10GHz clocks their performance would have been top notch, though one wonders how long those instruction pipelines would have to be... and how much power they would have burned.
Now Intel has out-benchmarked AMD, and is attempting to change the rules again to performance-per-watt. This next wave should be interesting to watch.
Sorry to be cynical, but I believe it's practiacally a given that any solution which begins with "if everybody just did [xyz]..." is hopeless.
I agree. Which is why I said "If a large number of..." rather than "everybody". It is impossible to get *everybody* to do anything. However, a large number is a completely different matter. The fact is, most energy-consuming markets (autos, aircraft, home heating, shipping) are so large that 5% of that market is a really big niche worthy of much investment.
MS has not discontinued support for the older WMA files. Windows still creates them and plays them. They merely decided not to support them with Zune. It actually wouldn't surprise me that they made that decision so as not to compete with their partners like iRiver and the rest of the PlaysForSure-compatible vendors. Now, if Microsoft goes ahead and removes support for the older WMA-DRM files from Windows, then the partners would have a legitimate beef, but so far that is not the case.
There doesn't seem to be anything in writing. Just some claims about wink-wink, nod-nod "agreements" from a guy who has subsequently been fired by Microsoft? You don't think this Goldfarb fellow *knows* most people are pre-disposed to believe anything about Microsoft and figured he could tap into that ill-will? He made a really bad $20M investment and now he's trying to cover his behind. This smacks of pure fiction, with perhaps a dollup of libel.
What it *doesn't* let you play is older DRM-protected WMA files such as those downloaded from Yahoo Music Unlimited or Rhapsody. It plays open WMA/WMV just fine, and it also plays WMx 11 DRM'd files. Of course the most important thing is it plays open MP3s, as well as open AACs. No OGG though:-(
I know my way around code pretty well. While poring through some source code I discover a code snippet with a particular vulnerability that I can exploit. Now if only I had a way to see if this same snippet appeared in other applications. I guess I'll have to wait for Google to introduce a source code search mechanism before I can figure that out. Bummer.
Commercia[l] interests are too powerful to care about Global Warming.
This attitude drives me crazy. If a large number of consumers start demanding greener products, some "commercial interest" will supply them. They will do this to gain an advantage over their competitors or a foothold in an entrenched market. Witness hybrid cars. They command a significant price premium over gas-only, yet there are waiting lists to buy them. Most financial analysts say they don't pay back that premium, even at $4/gallon for gas. But yet many people buy them anyhow - because they believe in the cause. And I'm sure they are very profitable as well (that nasty p-word). Those profits help the "commercial interests" to re-invest in even better models and progress is made. What is not helpful is reams of well-meaning government regulations which mostly serve to suffocate innovation, while at the same time, usually having unintended consequences that are more damaging than the problem they were attempting to address.
You are correct, I have virtually no experience managing servers. Recall that the premise was there were 150 servers (yielding 1 failed server per month assuming a 3 year average life). I assumed (falsely I guess) they were running some giant web service, and so bringing a new server on line would be a rather routine operation - how else would you get to 150 servers other than adding boxes along the way. Obviously if you have only 3 servers (one email, one database, one file/print) and one goes down you don't replace all 3 and shuffle all the services. But then, I would assume failing motherboards in the 3-server scenario should be fairly infrequent.
Also, I don't know what orifice you pulled those numbers out of
I got them out of Gordon Moore's orifice if you must know.;-)
3 years at 1.7X performance boost per year = 5X improvement. If you use a 1.5X number it takes 4 years to get to 5X. Sometimes the year-to-year boost is much more substantial, like when the dual cores came out (close to 2X), or when Core2 came out.
You don't jump willy-nilly into a new nightmare when you don't need the extra performance.
How brittle are these things? Aren't servers and the tools for managing/configuring them also getting much better as the years go by? Is it really a nightmare to replace a PIII-based web server with a Xeon Dual Core? I can see it being a nightmare going the other way as the olders/slower hardware raises complications.
I will also add the caveat (like you couldn't tell) that servers are not my area of expertise so perhaps I am completely off base. My experience is mostly on the Windows apps side -- and bringing up an old app on a brand new, faster desktop is *always* very easy (assuming of course the same OS - maybe just a newer version). Perhaps I'm just spoiled by Microsoft's rigorous efforts at maintaining backwards compatibility. Is this not the case in servers? Is bringing up a new server always a nightmare?
Even though that new server could do the job of 5 to 10 of the old servers? You must have some obsolescense plan for those servers - you can't keep them running forever. It seems to me 3 years is a reasonable lifetime for a box given how much things advance. And i assume if you have 150 servers they aren't all identical hardware, so you already must deal with a heterogenious environment.
.. and it fails you should replace the whole box with something modern. 3 years ago the largest hard drives were 100GB. SATA was just being introduced. The fastest P4/Xeon was 2.4GHz. No dual core. No DDR2. No gigE. Is it really cost effective to swap motherboards, transfering over all that obsolete hardware?
But I've made a general policy in my department that we've stopped purchasing or installing software that requires "activation" or any other kind of phoning-home.
Don't most OSes and applications do that to check if there are updates? It seems every time I turn onmy machine some application wants to update itself, be it Firefox, Windows, my printer driver, Acrobat Reader, etc etc. All of these things have something in common - they have to "phone home" (or at least check with some server outside my LAN) periodically to see if there are updates available.
Obviously the ignorant market needs more help to make the connection between Windows and unnecessary risk.
No, the ingorant market needs to make the connection between incompetent or overworked system admins and unnecessary risk. Now, Windows may be *harder* to protect than, say Linux, but in the hands of incompetent (or grossly overworked) system admins, neither system is safe.
Apology accepted. I guess I over-reacted... please accept my apology as well. I did read and re-read your comment because I couldn't believe what I was reading. Then I (unwisely) responded in kind. I am a bit sensitive in this area since I take alot of abuse in this forum for sometimes defending conservatism, capitalism, America, and Microsoft, and for having the temerity to occassionally point out weaknesses, inconsistencies and hypocracies in the sacred cows of this forum (such F/OSS, Google, Linux). My goal is always to engage in discussions through which I can learn, but sadly things often seem to devolve into name-calling and ad hominem attacks, which is really too bad as it abruptly ends the dialog.
As regards your point, I agree completely. Language is very ambiguous and so trying to ascribe absolute true/false meaning to statements is clearly not possible, except in those fact-based statements like your example of Pi. Oddly, I think we may have both been somewhat taken in by the article's/. headline, as I didn't see anything specific in the article about telling if pols were lying or truth-telling -- that seemed to be editorial license, perhaps meant to rile things up.
Slashdot Mirror
... why people are leaving Massachusetts in droves. Having lived here most of my life (much to my embarrassment), I think the state should be renamed Nannychusetts.
Is it only the 64 bit version of Vista that was the problem? Further down in the article we have this:
This makes me wonder what all the complaining is really about. You don't think McAfee and Symantec are just paving the way for future lawsuits when Vista's inherent security renders their products obsolete, do you?
Every night I put my cell phone in its charging cradle (in my bedroom). While it might seem convenient to charge and download at the same time, they are two distinct functions. Personally I would prefer to charge the device over night like my phone, but have it download music wirelessly, automatically, whenever it was in range of the wireless signal. I would also like to have the added benefit, once the software catches up to the hardware, of streaming music to my portable player rather than having to download it.
And in response to your question, no, I do not work for Sony.
Everyone loves to slam the Zune's minimally useful (some might say pathetic) wireless feature. They come up with all sorts of slurs, and even imply sharing earbuds is way better than wireless exchange of music. Does anyone on these boards *really* think that wireless-enabled portable media players are not the future? From my perspective, it is obvious that all portable players will have wireless capabilities, or they will cease to exist. Microsoft knows this and is positioning Zune for the inevitable future. Some might even say they are providing some much needed innovation in a fairly stagnant market. Perhaps their current implementation is lacking, but I think we all know it will get better. So I repeat the question: Does anybody really not think wireless will soon be a mandatory feature for all portable media players?
On the one hand the government is continually taking more and more control away from parents (for example, if a young girl wants an abortion she can get one without having to obtain parental permission; children are routinely taken away from "unfit" parents; parents are not allowed to prevent their children from being exposed to school material they find objectionable). Then on the other hand we want to blame parents for their kids' actions. There is no denying that there has been a steady erosion of parental rights in the past few decades. You can't have it both ways. If it takes a village to raise a child, then it is the village that is responsible when that child commits a crime, not the parents who's authority has been, in many cases, usurped.
Netburst was designed for a market that touted clock speed as the performance measure for CPUs. AMD, with a big helping hand from the gamers, changed the game into rewarding true benchmark/performance rather than simple clock speed. I suppose if Intel had managed to achieve 10GHz clocks their performance would have been top notch, though one wonders how long those instruction pipelines would have to be ... and how much power they would have burned.
Now Intel has out-benchmarked AMD, and is attempting to change the rules again to performance-per-watt. This next wave should be interesting to watch.
MS has not discontinued support for the older WMA files. Windows still creates them and plays them. They merely decided not to support them with Zune. It actually wouldn't surprise me that they made that decision so as not to compete with their partners like iRiver and the rest of the PlaysForSure-compatible vendors. Now, if Microsoft goes ahead and removes support for the older WMA-DRM files from Windows, then the partners would have a legitimate beef, but so far that is not the case.
There doesn't seem to be anything in writing. Just some claims about wink-wink, nod-nod "agreements" from a guy who has subsequently been fired by Microsoft? You don't think this Goldfarb fellow *knows* most people are pre-disposed to believe anything about Microsoft and figured he could tap into that ill-will? He made a really bad $20M investment and now he's trying to cover his behind. This smacks of pure fiction, with perhaps a dollup of libel.
What it *doesn't* let you play is older DRM-protected WMA files such as those downloaded from Yahoo Music Unlimited or Rhapsody. It plays open WMA/WMV just fine, and it also plays WMx 11 DRM'd files. Of course the most important thing is it plays open MP3s, as well as open AACs. No OGG though
I know my way around code pretty well. While poring through some source code I discover a code snippet with a particular vulnerability that I can exploit. Now if only I had a way to see if this same snippet appeared in other applications. I guess I'll have to wait for Google to introduce a source code search mechanism before I can figure that out. Bummer.
You are correct, I have virtually no experience managing servers. Recall that the premise was there were 150 servers (yielding 1 failed server per month assuming a 3 year average life). I assumed (falsely I guess) they were running some giant web service, and so bringing a new server on line would be a rather routine operation - how else would you get to 150 servers other than adding boxes along the way. Obviously if you have only 3 servers (one email, one database, one file/print) and one goes down you don't replace all 3 and shuffle all the services. But then, I would assume failing motherboards in the 3-server scenario should be fairly infrequent.
3 years at 1.7X performance boost per year = 5X improvement. If you use a 1.5X number it takes 4 years to get to 5X. Sometimes the year-to-year boost is much more substantial, like when the dual cores came out (close to 2X), or when Core2 came out.
How brittle are these things? Aren't servers and the tools for managing
I will also add the caveat (like you couldn't tell) that servers are not my area of expertise so perhaps I am completely off base. My experience is mostly on the Windows apps side -- and bringing up an old app on a brand new, faster desktop is *always* very easy (assuming of course the same OS - maybe just a newer version). Perhaps I'm just spoiled by Microsoft's rigorous efforts at maintaining backwards compatibility. Is this not the case in servers? Is bringing up a new server always a nightmare?
Even though that new server could do the job of 5 to 10 of the old servers? You must have some obsolescense plan for those servers - you can't keep them running forever. It seems to me 3 years is a reasonable lifetime for a box given how much things advance. And i assume if you have 150 servers they aren't all identical hardware, so you already must deal with a heterogenious environment.
Apology accepted. I guess I over-reacted ... please accept my apology as well. I did read and re-read your comment because I couldn't believe what I was reading. Then I (unwisely) responded in kind. I am a bit sensitive in this area since I take alot of abuse in this forum for sometimes defending conservatism, capitalism, America, and Microsoft, and for having the temerity to occassionally point out weaknesses, inconsistencies and hypocracies in the sacred cows of this forum (such F/OSS, Google, Linux). My goal is always to engage in discussions through which I can learn, but sadly things often seem to devolve into name-calling and ad hominem attacks, which is really too bad as it abruptly ends the dialog.
/. headline, as I didn't see anything specific in the article about telling if pols were lying or truth-telling -- that seemed to be editorial license, perhaps meant to rile things up.
As regards your point, I agree completely. Language is very ambiguous and so trying to ascribe absolute true/false meaning to statements is clearly not possible, except in those fact-based statements like your example of Pi. Oddly, I think we may have both been somewhat taken in by the article's