No, because Owner licensees shouldn't be limited in their use of their content as long as it's personal. If I buy a song or movie, I should be able to convert it to play on any playback device I want, or archive it in any format for backup. If I'm renting, or designated as a 'Friend licensee', there would be a good case for having copy protection on the files. But as an owner licensee, any restrictions to my normal usage is unacceptable. Obviously, redistributors and remixers should have unfettered access as well...
Some control will have to be given up. Obviously, nothing is going to stop unauthorized distribution over the internet. The point is to make a system that's realistic to the needs of the digital age that can be enforced through our standard judicial system, just as a framework for how protected works are to be distributed. It would still be necessary to go after major infractors the old-fashioned way once they become too popular. People will typically stick to services that are easy to use, seem legitimate, and are properly marketed, so those are the distributors that will have to be focused on for compliance with this system.
It's not just DRM and licensing that's in for a change, it's the entire structure of copyright protection. In this digital age, in order to enjoy it, content must be copied all over the place, from your hard disk, to your RAM, to your router and over the net to other computers and routers, ad infinitum. In the traditional sense of copyright, none of this copying would be allowed, but with the way digital processes work, it cannot be avoided. Inevitably, you get copies without any restrictions being stored and shared by people in an uncontrolled manner, since the demand is clearly there for unrestricted access.
What needs to happen is that we need to shift the focus from the right to copy (since mass-copying is unavoidable in a digital distribution system) to the right to *access* the content. When and artist creates a work for sale, (s)he gets the benefit of accessright protection, which guarantees them income based on who gets access to the content, and the extent of that access.
Levels of access could be in several tiers; Renters, who license access for a fixed time period; Owners, who license access indefinitely at a given sampling resolution (determines the quality of the recording in the case of audio or video content), and can designate a Friend licensee, who can access the content in a restricted form while they are listed as the Friend for that piece of content; and there are the Redistributors, who will pay a per-sale fee for any content redistributed. Optionally, they might designate a Remixer licensee, who, for a smaller per-sale fee, can incorporate the work into the Remixer's own.
The accessright-holder would have to register with a centralized open, global, NGO database (hopefully one that has safeguards in place to ensure privacy), and any content distributor would have to comply with this database, registering any licensees, and forwarding the licensing fees to the appropriate accessright holder.
At this point, DRM is unnecessary for all licensees except Renter and Friend licensees (as long as those can still access the content in a practical manner). It only makes sense to watermark the content with information identifying the licensee, and control distributors to comply with this system. It might not be the free ride some were hoping for, but it's the only system I see that could have a shot at working in this digital distribution age.
It doesn't matter if a 3rd party releases a Wii-mote type device for PS3 or 360. Developers won't use it unless it ships with either the system, or bundled with their game. I doubt they could be made cheaply enough to be bundled with games.
Apple, being a vertical product vendor, must deal with user support as well as hardware design. They always design their hardware to minimize support issues. If they see that shipping with a single mouse button reduces user support costs by 5%, then it's a no-brainer. This also forces application developers to assume that the user only has a single mouse button, and to make their interface accessible to single-button mouse users. This has a side-effect of forcing Mac developers to lay out their functionality visually, so there there is no hidden functionality only accessible with right-clicking, or in the case of some *nix apps, even 3rd-button clicking. In turn, this makes all Mac apps easier to pick up by poking around the interface, at the expense of compatibility with apps designed to use multiple mouse buttons.
I actually think it has a positive influence on Mac application design, even if it pisses me off that I bought a useless 1-button mouse with my desktop that will be accompanying the packaging to the trash. For my MacBook Pro, the two-fingered scrolling and right-clicking is a perfectly elegant solution, that turns out to be much more practical from an ergonomic standpoint than a trackpad with two buttons. I wouldn't be bothered if they split the huge mouse button in two, and gave the user the option of assigning the right half to right-click, but I haven't run into a situation where the trackpad is a usable input method for the task (meaning not gaming or extensive pixel-pushing), but two-fingered clicking was impractical or more difficult than clicking the right-side button. In cases where a task requires extensive mousing and using multiple mouse buttons, a trackpad is going to be unusable anyways, so a 3rd party input device with multiple buttons is a perfect alternative.
Apple does this all the time. It does make for a vibrant 3rd developer market, with opportunities to charge for updates at more points of failure, and the new technologies and frameworks you adopt with each OS revision typically provide enough incentive for people to put down their hard-earned cash. Unfortunately, this also makes OSX unacceptable for corporate use, as in-house solutions are much more difficult to support if APIs keep getting deprecated or significantly modified. Also, you tend to have to recompile with the latest version of XCode as major OS revisions are released, or your apps will have stability problems, meaning that you can't just keep using the same binaries for long periods of time. There are advantages (3rd party developer sales, enticing new features on a regular basis) and disadvantages (app stability and compatibility, increased effort for developers, lost corporate sales). In the consumer market where Apple thrives, they can get away with this tradeoff and offer their users more drastic progress. It costs them the corporate market, however, so that must be ceded to Microsoft, who will ensure backwards compatibility to developers who use their APIs, in exchange for less fundamental innovation and end user features.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, Linux is also geared to API stability to the extreme, and offers great value to corporate users. Since all the code to Linux is open, you can ensure that an API will be there in a usable form if you need it. As Linux takes away Microsoft's bread and butter, MS will react violently, trying to make big interface changes to compete with Apple in the consumer market, while keeping their corporate customers appeased with backwards-compatibility, and locked in with licensing agreements. This is a trap for them, though, as corporate customers don't care for fancy visual doodads or subscribing to ever-updating software. They want to run their productivity and database software on a stable platform, and that's it. They will keep their Win2k, XP and Office2k3 licenses until Linux and OpenOffice is able to be swapped in seamlessly (which is pretty much the case now), and get off of MS licensing for good. Since MS will be fighting to hold on to the remaining corporate diehards, they will be reluctant to make the big sweeping changes Apple has been able to, and so won't be able to compete in the consumer space as well. The combination of Apple's rise in the consumer space and Linux's rise in the corporate space will really start to put the hurt on Microsoft in the years to come. They're really caught between a rock and a hard place, and they're squeezing together at an increasing rate. Their attempts to lock down the screws with Windows Genuine Advantage are just going to accelerate this shift.
If Microsoft is to succeed, they will have to become a middleware vendor for other operating systems. If they focus on their vast library of APIs, and work on making them universally available, they would have great leverage, with all the software that depends on these APIs, to secure a large part of the future computer market. This would attract more developers to their platform, and make their platform more crucial to computing in general.
it's OK, they're only going to sell a total of twelve of these media centers worldwide. That shouldn't affect PS3 production too significantly; but now the European PS3 launch is pushed back to 2008...
Unfortunately, all Macs using slot-loading optical drives use Matshita DVD drives, which are incapable of accessing DVDs from other regions, even with VLC. The only solution is to get an external DVD drive from a decent manufacturer like Pioneer, which doesn't cripple multi-region disc accessing. There's even hacked region-free firmware available for most Pioneer models, with Mac installers available for all but the latest DVR-111.
I'm willing to be it's because television, music a movie industry interests are lobbying our representatives to place restrictions on the games industry, which they see as a threat. The games industry just isn't ponying up enough money to counterract the rest of the entertainment industry's lobbying dollars and stay off the regulation radar, and now they're paying the price. It's a terrible way to run a country, but people in power are making too much money to change it...
All you have to do is lower the ingested dose below the ID50 (infectious dose for 50% of the population), which is actually quite high. If you rinse your spinach leaves in water, even if there's a bit of E. coli left, it won't be enough to cause any problems (as long as you don't give it enough time to grow back to high enough concentrations - at least several hours at room temp with sufficient nutrients). If you do a quick rinse, as long as you do wet the entire leaves, there won't be any appreciable health hazard, even with remaining low levels of bacteria.
"I however do not really like any of the Mario Kart sequels nearly as much as the original."
I hope you mean since the N64 version. The original was for SNES... I've lost months of my waking life to Mario Kart N64, mostly in Battle mode, and can say without hesitation that it was the BEST GAME EVAR!!! My roommates and I in college would crack out on that game every chance we got... SNES version was ok, but N64 rocked the casbah. The Gamecube version sucked ass, though, mainly because the Battle mode courses were too simple, and didn't have the strategy and excitement of the N64 courses. I get bored with racing mode, so the improvements in that area were useless to me.
Don't underestimate the effect of the bad blood earned by Sony with all their DRM initiatives, rootkit fiasco, general customer-hostile attitude, etc.; and MS earns no love either with their track record of mee-too products and shoddy implementations (though they're still much better than Sony's software attempts). Nintendo comes out of it relatively unscathed, despite a kiddy image (much-helped by the success of the DS). Then, you have the good value proposition, realistic market expectations (no, most people don't have HDTVs) and true innovation, and I call this round in the big N's favor.
The thing is, that with major record labels requiring DRM restrictions, and taking such a large chunk of the transaction for a song purchase, that closed platform music stores tied to high-margin playback hardware has a huge market advantage. With margins on the purchases so thin, and the requirement to lock down the music files, it's almost a given that online music store operators will tie it to their hardware. The user experience advantage of a single vendor for the entire service is also very significant, as it ensures a more straightforward usability. Open platform DRM'd music vendors without any hardware profits have no chance to compete with vertical suppliers who can control the entire device and capitalize on hardware sales and advertising to support less profitable aspects of the service.
The only hope for open platform vendors is if record labels drop the DRM requirements, allowing them to compete on equal footing with files that will play on any player. The margins will still hurt, but the volume would increase dramatically to compensate.
Although it's not the smartest tactical move, it does make some sense that Zune won't play PlaysForSure content, as it guarantees some additional revenue (beyond the PlaysForSure licensing fees MS charges those other vendors) as customers are forced to use the MS music store. It will also make customer support much more straightforward; having every aspect of this music device from a single vendor will ensure a better user experience. Personally, I think the addition of PlaysForSure would have been an effective selling point, and could have helped MS get a foot in the market's door. On the other hand, those other music services haven't been too successful, so it isn't that big of a penalty.
While the decision will surely harm MS in the short term, and completely alienate all the other PlaysForSure software and hardware licensees (probably killing the format), it would definitely improve MS's long-term prospects, assuming it isn't pulled off the market after a year of dismal sales. If history is any indication, MS will stick with it, keep improving their offerings, and eventually have something that appeals to the lowest common denominator on the market.
I agree completely. If I can't burn to a standard DVD disc that will play on any DVD player, then I'm not interested. If I can't archive my movie purchases, or take them over to a friend's house or somewhere and play on their DVD player, then this is totally worthless. I'm not interested in a video iPod (my nano will be fine for another couple years), and I'm definitely not buying an iTV output device for the living room, so this is a dud for me. If they had let me burn the movies to DVD-R and play on standard DVD players, then I would bite; but the current service terms are unacceptable.
Don't you have anything more important to worry about? Who cares if gays get married? Does it affect you in any way whatsoever? Get over it and find something more relevant to spend your time worrying about...
I also experienced Airport flakiness after the 10.4.6 update (namely auto-connecting to a WiFi network with WPA Personal authentication). It was solved by going into Keychain Access (in your Utilities folder), and deleting all the Airport network password entries in the 'login' and 'System' sections. I then re-entered my WiFi settings (created a new prefered network), and it's been working perfectly since.
Apple said they'd support PPC for a couple more years. Leopard will definitely support PPC, and the version after that most-likely will as well. Most major Mac software will support PPC for at least a few more years. Don't forget that the pro desktop Macs are still all PPC until this summer.
On the other hand, I expect to see quite a bit of small and specialized software projects support Intel-only going forward, and it will become more and more difficult to find software for PPC starting a year from now. Already, there are some capabilities that PPC owners are left out of, like Boot Camp and Intel-compatible virtualization. I think developers will especially be enticed by Macs now that they can run Intel binaries, and they won't have PPC machines to test with, so they'll make Intel-only releases. Too bad there's no equivalent to Rosetta for running Intel binaries on PPC Macs...
Should have encouraged her to get a Mac. At least she'd have an easy-to-use system and good support options. Linux has no support, and Windows is crap... it's not your money, so that's not really your concern. If you can use Linux, surely you can set up OS X for her (email and ISP settings and such).
Slashdot Mirror
No, because Owner licensees shouldn't be limited in their use of their content as long as it's personal. If I buy a song or movie, I should be able to convert it to play on any playback device I want, or archive it in any format for backup. If I'm renting, or designated as a 'Friend licensee', there would be a good case for having copy protection on the files. But as an owner licensee, any restrictions to my normal usage is unacceptable. Obviously, redistributors and remixers should have unfettered access as well...
Some control will have to be given up. Obviously, nothing is going to stop unauthorized distribution over the internet. The point is to make a system that's realistic to the needs of the digital age that can be enforced through our standard judicial system, just as a framework for how protected works are to be distributed. It would still be necessary to go after major infractors the old-fashioned way once they become too popular. People will typically stick to services that are easy to use, seem legitimate, and are properly marketed, so those are the distributors that will have to be focused on for compliance with this system.
It's not just DRM and licensing that's in for a change, it's the entire structure of copyright protection. In this digital age, in order to enjoy it, content must be copied all over the place, from your hard disk, to your RAM, to your router and over the net to other computers and routers, ad infinitum. In the traditional sense of copyright, none of this copying would be allowed, but with the way digital processes work, it cannot be avoided. Inevitably, you get copies without any restrictions being stored and shared by people in an uncontrolled manner, since the demand is clearly there for unrestricted access.
What needs to happen is that we need to shift the focus from the right to copy (since mass-copying is unavoidable in a digital distribution system) to the right to *access* the content. When and artist creates a work for sale, (s)he gets the benefit of accessright protection, which guarantees them income based on who gets access to the content, and the extent of that access.
Levels of access could be in several tiers; Renters, who license access for a fixed time period; Owners, who license access indefinitely at a given sampling resolution (determines the quality of the recording in the case of audio or video content), and can designate a Friend licensee, who can access the content in a restricted form while they are listed as the Friend for that piece of content; and there are the Redistributors, who will pay a per-sale fee for any content redistributed. Optionally, they might designate a Remixer licensee, who, for a smaller per-sale fee, can incorporate the work into the Remixer's own.
The accessright-holder would have to register with a centralized open, global, NGO database (hopefully one that has safeguards in place to ensure privacy), and any content distributor would have to comply with this database, registering any licensees, and forwarding the licensing fees to the appropriate accessright holder.
At this point, DRM is unnecessary for all licensees except Renter and Friend licensees (as long as those can still access the content in a practical manner). It only makes sense to watermark the content with information identifying the licensee, and control distributors to comply with this system. It might not be the free ride some were hoping for, but it's the only system I see that could have a shot at working in this digital distribution age.
It doesn't matter if a 3rd party releases a Wii-mote type device for PS3 or 360. Developers won't use it unless it ships with either the system, or bundled with their game. I doubt they could be made cheaply enough to be bundled with games.
"PS3" is still winning over "Wii" though...
http://www.google.com/trends?q=ps3%2C+wii
Apple, being a vertical product vendor, must deal with user support as well as hardware design. They always design their hardware to minimize support issues. If they see that shipping with a single mouse button reduces user support costs by 5%, then it's a no-brainer. This also forces application developers to assume that the user only has a single mouse button, and to make their interface accessible to single-button mouse users. This has a side-effect of forcing Mac developers to lay out their functionality visually, so there there is no hidden functionality only accessible with right-clicking, or in the case of some *nix apps, even 3rd-button clicking. In turn, this makes all Mac apps easier to pick up by poking around the interface, at the expense of compatibility with apps designed to use multiple mouse buttons.
I actually think it has a positive influence on Mac application design, even if it pisses me off that I bought a useless 1-button mouse with my desktop that will be accompanying the packaging to the trash. For my MacBook Pro, the two-fingered scrolling and right-clicking is a perfectly elegant solution, that turns out to be much more practical from an ergonomic standpoint than a trackpad with two buttons. I wouldn't be bothered if they split the huge mouse button in two, and gave the user the option of assigning the right half to right-click, but I haven't run into a situation where the trackpad is a usable input method for the task (meaning not gaming or extensive pixel-pushing), but two-fingered clicking was impractical or more difficult than clicking the right-side button. In cases where a task requires extensive mousing and using multiple mouse buttons, a trackpad is going to be unusable anyways, so a 3rd party input device with multiple buttons is a perfect alternative.
Apple does this all the time. It does make for a vibrant 3rd developer market, with opportunities to charge for updates at more points of failure, and the new technologies and frameworks you adopt with each OS revision typically provide enough incentive for people to put down their hard-earned cash. Unfortunately, this also makes OSX unacceptable for corporate use, as in-house solutions are much more difficult to support if APIs keep getting deprecated or significantly modified. Also, you tend to have to recompile with the latest version of XCode as major OS revisions are released, or your apps will have stability problems, meaning that you can't just keep using the same binaries for long periods of time. There are advantages (3rd party developer sales, enticing new features on a regular basis) and disadvantages (app stability and compatibility, increased effort for developers, lost corporate sales). In the consumer market where Apple thrives, they can get away with this tradeoff and offer their users more drastic progress. It costs them the corporate market, however, so that must be ceded to Microsoft, who will ensure backwards compatibility to developers who use their APIs, in exchange for less fundamental innovation and end user features.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, Linux is also geared to API stability to the extreme, and offers great value to corporate users. Since all the code to Linux is open, you can ensure that an API will be there in a usable form if you need it. As Linux takes away Microsoft's bread and butter, MS will react violently, trying to make big interface changes to compete with Apple in the consumer market, while keeping their corporate customers appeased with backwards-compatibility, and locked in with licensing agreements. This is a trap for them, though, as corporate customers don't care for fancy visual doodads or subscribing to ever-updating software. They want to run their productivity and database software on a stable platform, and that's it. They will keep their Win2k, XP and Office2k3 licenses until Linux and OpenOffice is able to be swapped in seamlessly (which is pretty much the case now), and get off of MS licensing for good. Since MS will be fighting to hold on to the remaining corporate diehards, they will be reluctant to make the big sweeping changes Apple has been able to, and so won't be able to compete in the consumer space as well. The combination of Apple's rise in the consumer space and Linux's rise in the corporate space will really start to put the hurt on Microsoft in the years to come. They're really caught between a rock and a hard place, and they're squeezing together at an increasing rate. Their attempts to lock down the screws with Windows Genuine Advantage are just going to accelerate this shift.
If Microsoft is to succeed, they will have to become a middleware vendor for other operating systems. If they focus on their vast library of APIs, and work on making them universally available, they would have great leverage, with all the software that depends on these APIs, to secure a large part of the future computer market. This would attract more developers to their platform, and make their platform more crucial to computing in general.
it's OK, they're only going to sell a total of twelve of these media centers worldwide. That shouldn't affect PS3 production too significantly; but now the European PS3 launch is pushed back to 2008...
I still use buckets... am I out-of-touch?
Unfortunately, all Macs using slot-loading optical drives use Matshita DVD drives, which are incapable of accessing DVDs from other regions, even with VLC. The only solution is to get an external DVD drive from a decent manufacturer like Pioneer, which doesn't cripple multi-region disc accessing. There's even hacked region-free firmware available for most Pioneer models, with Mac installers available for all but the latest DVR-111.
That should read: "I'm willing to bet it's..."... Caught it too late.
I'm willing to be it's because television, music a movie industry interests are lobbying our representatives to place restrictions on the games industry, which they see as a threat. The games industry just isn't ponying up enough money to counterract the rest of the entertainment industry's lobbying dollars and stay off the regulation radar, and now they're paying the price. It's a terrible way to run a country, but people in power are making too much money to change it...
All you have to do is lower the ingested dose below the ID50 (infectious dose for 50% of the population), which is actually quite high. If you rinse your spinach leaves in water, even if there's a bit of E. coli left, it won't be enough to cause any problems (as long as you don't give it enough time to grow back to high enough concentrations - at least several hours at room temp with sufficient nutrients). If you do a quick rinse, as long as you do wet the entire leaves, there won't be any appreciable health hazard, even with remaining low levels of bacteria.
"I however do not really like any of the Mario Kart sequels nearly as much as the original."
I hope you mean since the N64 version. The original was for SNES... I've lost months of my waking life to Mario Kart N64, mostly in Battle mode, and can say without hesitation that it was the BEST GAME EVAR!!! My roommates and I in college would crack out on that game every chance we got... SNES version was ok, but N64 rocked the casbah. The Gamecube version sucked ass, though, mainly because the Battle mode courses were too simple, and didn't have the strategy and excitement of the N64 courses. I get bored with racing mode, so the improvements in that area were useless to me.
Don't underestimate the effect of the bad blood earned by Sony with all their DRM initiatives, rootkit fiasco, general customer-hostile attitude, etc.; and MS earns no love either with their track record of mee-too products and shoddy implementations (though they're still much better than Sony's software attempts). Nintendo comes out of it relatively unscathed, despite a kiddy image (much-helped by the success of the DS). Then, you have the good value proposition, realistic market expectations (no, most people don't have HDTVs) and true innovation, and I call this round in the big N's favor.
The thing is, that with major record labels requiring DRM restrictions, and taking such a large chunk of the transaction for a song purchase, that closed platform music stores tied to high-margin playback hardware has a huge market advantage. With margins on the purchases so thin, and the requirement to lock down the music files, it's almost a given that online music store operators will tie it to their hardware. The user experience advantage of a single vendor for the entire service is also very significant, as it ensures a more straightforward usability. Open platform DRM'd music vendors without any hardware profits have no chance to compete with vertical suppliers who can control the entire device and capitalize on hardware sales and advertising to support less profitable aspects of the service.
The only hope for open platform vendors is if record labels drop the DRM requirements, allowing them to compete on equal footing with files that will play on any player. The margins will still hurt, but the volume would increase dramatically to compensate.
Although it's not the smartest tactical move, it does make some sense that Zune won't play PlaysForSure content, as it guarantees some additional revenue (beyond the PlaysForSure licensing fees MS charges those other vendors) as customers are forced to use the MS music store. It will also make customer support much more straightforward; having every aspect of this music device from a single vendor will ensure a better user experience. Personally, I think the addition of PlaysForSure would have been an effective selling point, and could have helped MS get a foot in the market's door. On the other hand, those other music services haven't been too successful, so it isn't that big of a penalty.
While the decision will surely harm MS in the short term, and completely alienate all the other PlaysForSure software and hardware licensees (probably killing the format), it would definitely improve MS's long-term prospects, assuming it isn't pulled off the market after a year of dismal sales. If history is any indication, MS will stick with it, keep improving their offerings, and eventually have something that appeals to the lowest common denominator on the market.
This one's easy; just put a counterweight of equal mass on the disc, opposite the chip...
I agree completely. If I can't burn to a standard DVD disc that will play on any DVD player, then I'm not interested. If I can't archive my movie purchases, or take them over to a friend's house or somewhere and play on their DVD player, then this is totally worthless. I'm not interested in a video iPod (my nano will be fine for another couple years), and I'm definitely not buying an iTV output device for the living room, so this is a dud for me. If they had let me burn the movies to DVD-R and play on standard DVD players, then I would bite; but the current service terms are unacceptable.
Don't you have anything more important to worry about? Who cares if gays get married? Does it affect you in any way whatsoever? Get over it and find something more relevant to spend your time worrying about...
I also experienced Airport flakiness after the 10.4.6 update (namely auto-connecting to a WiFi network with WPA Personal authentication). It was solved by going into Keychain Access (in your Utilities folder), and deleting all the Airport network password entries in the 'login' and 'System' sections. I then re-entered my WiFi settings (created a new prefered network), and it's been working perfectly since.
Apple said they'd support PPC for a couple more years. Leopard will definitely support PPC, and the version after that most-likely will as well. Most major Mac software will support PPC for at least a few more years. Don't forget that the pro desktop Macs are still all PPC until this summer.
On the other hand, I expect to see quite a bit of small and specialized software projects support Intel-only going forward, and it will become more and more difficult to find software for PPC starting a year from now. Already, there are some capabilities that PPC owners are left out of, like Boot Camp and Intel-compatible virtualization. I think developers will especially be enticed by Macs now that they can run Intel binaries, and they won't have PPC machines to test with, so they'll make Intel-only releases. Too bad there's no equivalent to Rosetta for running Intel binaries on PPC Macs...
Can't stop laughing... you made my day!
More Mac users = more Mac apps. I, for one, welcome our poser overlords...
Should have encouraged her to get a Mac. At least she'd have an easy-to-use system and good support options. Linux has no support, and Windows is crap... it's not your money, so that's not really your concern. If you can use Linux, surely you can set up OS X for her (email and ISP settings and such).
Bravo man, bravo!