Er, the pink triangle is used as a symbol for homosexuals in a strange twist on the requirement in Nazi Germany that homosexuals wear them at all times (Jews were required to wear stars). I guess it was supposed to make it easier to tell whom to beat up.
Purple is not the gay pride color to the best of my knowledge, but lavender has been associated with homosexuals for a long time... this probably dates back to the Foppish atire popular in England a few hundred years ago.
Now lets see... the original superman wore a triangle on his chest with the letter S in it... ballet tights, a cape, and his underwear on the outside... his costume was red and blue, which mixed together make purple... and he was always hanging out with that Jimmy Olsen kid! Sounds like a plot to trick children into acceptance of gay lifestyles to me! Quick, get on the hotline to Falwell -- we've found another one!
I _don't_ work for Microsoft; never have. However, I have to agress with image, the anti-microsoft sentiment does get out of hand. Sure, M$ is a prominent and convenient target for jokes; I make jokes about them all the time. But OSS can not and should not allow itself to be defined as the "anti-microsoft".
In the real world that we live in, Windows and Linux systems exist side by side and need to interoperate. Computer users are best served if the designers of both Windows and Linux make design decisions based on enhancing interoperability, not on screwing users of the "enemy" OS.
From a historical perspective, IBM was once viewed much as M$ is now; as the 800 pound gorilla of the computer industry, more concerned with profits than with serving it's customers. IBM has recently redefined itself as one of the leading Linux advocates! Microsoft has also displayed an amazing ability to change direction and redefine itself. Implausible as it seems, M$ may someday become on open source stalwart. Two things do seems relatively certain: 1) The computer industry is changing, fragmenting, adopting new paradigms enabled by the internet. Microsoft itself must inevitably change as well. 2) Microsoft isn't going to go away. Like IBM, they can afford to lose a billion dollars a year and still stay in business for the next 20 years. Like it or not, they will be around in some way, shape, or form for the long haul. Better get used to it.
You forgot the new Intellimouse, which Goldtouch is now suing for patent violations over. Seems Goldtouch had a meeting with M$ and tried to sell them their ergonomic mouse technology. M$ didn't buy, but 6 months later released a mouse which looked remarkably simular...
I say we patent the business model of filing thousands of spurious patents in vague, generalized language, then suing the makers of any product that could possibly be interpreted as infringing... wait a minute, there may be considerable prior art on this one!
No, abusing people for the sake of abusing people is evil. Doing things for personal gain is human nature (like it or not).
No, most folks don't need a computer, and nobody is being forced to use Windows, so the analogy sucks. Slavery was not a choice. Windows is a choice, although an admittedly limited choice that does not server consumers best interests. Microsoft has never sent anyone to my home to physically carry me away and chain me to a Windows desktop. I choose to run Windows because my current job (which I've freely chosen) requires it at work, and because several pieces of software I enjoy running at home requires it.
Granted, I'd rather not give any money at all to M$. As soon as all the software I own runs well under Linux (WINE, anyone?) I'd be more than happy to run only Linux at home. As soon as somebody offers me a job paying as much or more money to work only with Linux, I'll jump at the chance. In the meantime, I've choosen to deal with the frustration and inconvenience of running Windows. Yes, it does crash all the time on me, especially Windows 98.
Just because you love Linux, doesn't mean you have to hate M$... I prefer rational evaluations to emotional ones. Unfortunately, there are still some problems for which Windows is a better solution -- although that set of problems is shrinking rapidly.
Not evil, just ammoral. They're not screwing their customers because they enjoy screwing them, they're just acting in their own short-term self interest, and don't care if their customers get screwed as a side effect. There is a big difference between that and acting deliberately malicious.
Microsoft is not the enemy. Microsoft is the dinosaur with one foot in the tar pit, thrashing around trying to figure out out to extricate itself...
I still don't see what prevents people from implementing a filter that removes the watermark. Suppose I purchase 2 copies with different CC# and compare the differences (after decompression, of course). That should tell me which bits to twiddle to obscure the existing CC#, shouldn't it? If they are relying on security though obscurity, than nobody will be able to implement players for it, and it will go over like a lead balloon.
I suppose that because it is now technologically possible to set up cameras everywhere to do optical character recognition on license plates, allowing someone to track all the cars anywhere they go, therefore license plates should also be outlawed?
A clue to the AZ legislature: if you want to do something productive then regulate tracking software, not hardware. A chip simply cannot, in and of itself, send an ID anywhere!
Yes, hard drives are much cheaper per byte than flash, and will probably continue to be. However, if you bump a hard drive will it's spinning, it tends to crash the read/write head into the disk, ruining that section of the disk surface and possible the read/write head. Last time I checked, flash rams had no moving parts. Ammortized over several years of you constantly replacing your 1.5" HDD, the flash is cheaper!
The lack of moving parts also makes them much better in terms of power consumption. Why do you think a Palm Pilot can go for a month on a battery, while the average Laptop dies is less than 2 hours? How long do you think the single 1.5v AA battery in a Rio could keep your 1GByte HDD spinning? Certainly not long enough to listen to all the music on it!
HDD are good for non-portable applications. Flash is used for portable applications because of it's low power, long life, fast access speed, and far superior resistance to harsh environments, e.g. shock, temperature, humidity, magnetic, etc.
Umm... that defeats the original purpose of a small, lightweight device that I can go running with. If I wanted to play songs off a hard drive, I'd just use the 8 GByte drive in my PC!
Of course, I'm assuming here that flash will rapidly come down in price, eventually making 512MByte modules no more expensive than 32MByte modules are today. Remember, 15 years ago people couldn't imagine the PC would ever need more than 640KBytes of memory...
The random number generator is way cool, however, I doubt that anybody with a clue would use it just as a seed. The problem with software-generated "random" numbers is that they are NOT random, they are pseudo-random, and if you know the algorithm and current number, you can predict future numbers...
Also, I fail to see how adding a processor ID which can be easily spoofed adds appreciably to the security of my transactions. If this were true, sites would already be using the disk driver serial numbers, etc.
You've done nothing to demonstrate any real value to consumers of this "feature".
What's wrong with you guys? Intel comes along and offers to shoot themselves in the foot to encourag the rapid adoption of OSS, and you criticize them for it! I say we do everything we can think to encourage Intel to proceed with this self-destructive behaviour! The greatest wound to the Wintel monster could turn out to be this self-inflicted one! This should appeal to all of you with a sense of irony and poetic justice. Beg them to ship processor IDs in ALL their processors, then start a campaign to remind people that "Big Brother Barrett is watching YOU!" Stand back, and watch Wintel sales plummet! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Intel, for sacrificing yourself for the greater good in order to speed Linux on it's way to Total World Domination!
The adoptation of new technology follows an S curve, as described by Harry S. Dent, Jr. in "The Roaring 2000s". According to his model, at about the 10% level, the curve really takes off... which by my calculations, should happen this year.
That being said, I still find it difficult to beleive that millions of people that struggled for years to learn the Windows interface will be willing to learn another new interface -- regardless of how superiour it is! The M$ experience has trained everybody to beleive that new releases are always buggy, documentation is always poor, new software is frustrating and difficult to learn, and support is either non-existant or prohibitively expensive. They will apply these lessons learned to Linux, and will shy away from anything new, prefering the evil they know to the "evil" they are unfamiliar with.
This seems to be a principle that all us geeks and early adopters have trouble grasping -- not everybody in the world thinks the way we do!
Looks like they got slash-dotted into promising Linux support! Good work, people!
I bought a Rio yesterday, and have already concluded that 32MBytes is NOT enough. And it looks like the Rio can only address 64MBytes, which is still not enough. I'm thinking somewhere around 0.5 to 1 GBytes should be sufficient... when are those 512MByte flash modules going to come out?
Even if massive Internet bandwith becomes dirt cheap, there will still be a demand for MP3, 'cause flash will still be expensive!
You forgot "product placement". It done in most movies now, it's just a matter of time before the makers of the Wonder Bra(TM) pay the Spice Girls(TM) to sing the praises of the product... isn't it a wonderful world we live in?
Most artists include offers for t-shirts, jackets, etc. in their CD cases... why not figure out a way to embed these in the digital audio format too?
And what better way to advertise your live concerts than to mention them in the recordings you're giving away for free?
And of course, there is always the "guiltware" model, simply ask people to send in money if they like the music (hey, it works for PBS!)
The general point is, the Internet changes everything, it make completely new business models possible. Everything that can be reduced to digital form will be sold over the 'net. Fighting it can only delay the inevitable. Music executives are resisting this only because they can't grasp the new business models this makes possible; they want things to stay the way they have been for the past 50 years.
Artists just aren't going to make music if they expect to sell 1 CD and have everyone else pirate a copy of it.
Ever heard of "live music"? How much money did the Rolling Stones make on their last tour? Ever thought of embedding advertising in your music, then giving it away for free? The point is, musicians should have the choice of charging for copies or of giving it away for free. By attacking MP3 distribution, RIAA is attempting to take that choice away from musicians. This is a bad thing.
Isn't any method of encoding digital audio that doesn't rely on proprietary hardware inherently secure? In other words, if I can play it once on my computer, I can capture the bits, and play it back for free as many times as I want, as long as the decryption and D/A conversion aren't built into the same chip. My reasoning is that ultimately they have to send the digital data to my soundcard, and it should be relatively easy to write software to emulate the soundcard (or any other D/A converter) and instead write the bits out to a file...
The other problem with proprietary audio formats is that it will inevitably limit ones market to ONLY windows owners, which seems somewhat shortsighted in my view... are any of these companiespromising to deliver proprietary players also promising to port them to Mac, OS/2, Be, Linus, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc.? I think not!
I already have the output from my sound card plugged into my home stereo, and I can store A LOT more MP3s on my 8GByte hard disk than I can on a CD... there's a market for portable "MP3Man" players, but I can't see any market for home stereo players! True audiophiles will still by the CD!
On a related issue, my friend used his new CD-R writer to copy an audio CD. Then we did a side-by-side comparison of the sound of the original to the sound of the copy, and there was very noticable loss of quality! This is counterintuitive, I was expect a straight binary copy to be indistinguishable. Has somebody mandated that the copying software "dither" the audio bits to cause degradation, or is this just a bug in the software, or is there some other explaination?
Slashdot Mirror
Er, the pink triangle is used as a symbol for homosexuals in a strange twist on the requirement in Nazi Germany that homosexuals wear them at all times (Jews were required to wear stars). I guess it was supposed to make it easier to tell whom to beat up.
Purple is not the gay pride color to the best of my knowledge, but lavender has been associated with homosexuals for a long time... this probably dates back to the Foppish atire popular in England a few hundred years ago.
Now lets see... the original superman wore a triangle on his chest with the letter S in it... ballet tights, a cape, and his underwear on the outside... his costume was red and blue, which mixed together make purple... and he was always hanging out with that Jimmy Olsen kid! Sounds like a plot to trick children into acceptance of gay lifestyles to me! Quick, get on the hotline to Falwell -- we've found another one!
I _don't_ work for Microsoft; never have. However, I have to agress with image, the anti-microsoft sentiment does get out of hand. Sure, M$ is a prominent and convenient target for jokes; I make jokes about them all the time. But OSS can not and should not allow itself to be defined as the "anti-microsoft".
In the real world that we live in, Windows and Linux systems exist side by side and need to interoperate. Computer users are best served if the designers of both Windows and Linux make design decisions based on enhancing interoperability, not on screwing users of the "enemy" OS.
From a historical perspective, IBM was once viewed much as M$ is now; as the 800 pound gorilla of the computer industry, more concerned with profits than with serving it's customers. IBM has recently redefined itself as one of the leading Linux advocates! Microsoft has also displayed an amazing ability to change direction and redefine itself. Implausible as it seems, M$ may someday become on open source stalwart. Two things do seems relatively certain: 1) The computer industry is changing, fragmenting, adopting new paradigms enabled by the internet. Microsoft itself must inevitably change as well. 2) Microsoft isn't going to go away. Like IBM, they can afford to lose a billion dollars a year and still stay in business for the next 20 years. Like it or not, they will be around in some way, shape, or form for the long haul. Better get used to it.
Oh, and keep those Bill Gates jokes coming...
You forgot the new Intellimouse, which Goldtouch is now suing for patent violations over. Seems Goldtouch had a meeting with M$ and tried to sell them their ergonomic mouse technology. M$ didn't buy, but 6 months later released a mouse which looked remarkably simular...
I say we patent the business model of filing thousands of spurious patents in vague, generalized language, then suing the makers of any product that could possibly be interpreted as infringing... wait a minute, there may be considerable prior art on this one!
So what happens when Billy Boy decides that if everbody doesn't play by his rules, he's gonna take his bat and ball and go home?
"When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow!"
So then, why is http://www.m1crosoft.com/ still online? (Note: That's a digit one between the m and c, not an i...)
You wanna post a link to that so the rest of us can stop using Windoze too? (Actually, I'm still waiting for the Unreal port to be finished...)
No, abusing people for the sake of abusing people is evil. Doing things for personal gain is human nature (like it or not).
No, most folks don't need a computer, and nobody is being forced to use Windows, so the analogy sucks. Slavery was not a choice. Windows is a choice, although an admittedly limited choice that does not server consumers best interests. Microsoft has never sent anyone to my home to physically carry me away and chain me to a Windows desktop. I choose to run Windows because my current job (which I've freely chosen) requires it at work, and because several pieces of software I enjoy running at home requires it.
Granted, I'd rather not give any money at all to M$. As soon as all the software I own runs well under Linux (WINE, anyone?) I'd be more than happy to run only Linux at home. As soon as somebody offers me a job paying as much or more money to work only with Linux, I'll jump at the chance. In the meantime, I've choosen to deal with the frustration and inconvenience of running Windows. Yes, it does crash all the time on me, especially Windows 98.
Just because you love Linux, doesn't mean you have to hate M$... I prefer rational evaluations to emotional ones. Unfortunately, there are still some problems for which Windows is a better solution -- although that set of problems is shrinking rapidly.
Not evil, just ammoral. They're not screwing their customers because they enjoy screwing them, they're just acting in their own short-term self interest, and don't care if their customers get screwed as a side effect. There is a big difference between that and acting deliberately malicious.
Microsoft is not the enemy. Microsoft is the dinosaur with one foot in the tar pit, thrashing around trying to figure out out to extricate itself...
Friends don't let friends run Windows... ;-)
So you're saying "Linux is a journey, it's not a destination"?
I still don't see what prevents people from implementing a filter that removes the watermark. Suppose I purchase 2 copies with different CC# and compare the differences (after decompression, of course). That should tell me which bits to twiddle to obscure the existing CC#, shouldn't it? If they are relying on security though obscurity, than nobody will be able to implement players for it, and it will go over like a lead balloon.
I suppose that because it is now technologically possible to set up cameras everywhere to do optical character recognition on license plates, allowing someone to track all the cars anywhere they go, therefore license plates should also be outlawed?
A clue to the AZ legislature: if you want to do something productive then regulate tracking software, not hardware. A chip simply cannot, in and of itself, send an ID anywhere!
Yes, hard drives are much cheaper per byte than flash, and will probably continue to be. However, if you bump a hard drive will it's spinning, it tends to crash the read/write head into the disk, ruining that section of the disk surface and possible the read/write head. Last time I checked, flash rams had no moving parts. Ammortized over several years of you constantly replacing your 1.5" HDD, the flash is cheaper!
The lack of moving parts also makes them much better in terms of power consumption. Why do you think a Palm Pilot can go for a month on a battery, while the average Laptop dies is less than 2 hours? How long do you think the single 1.5v AA battery in a Rio could keep your 1GByte HDD spinning? Certainly not long enough to listen to all the music on it!
HDD are good for non-portable applications. Flash is used for portable applications because of it's low power, long life, fast access speed, and far superior resistance to harsh environments, e.g. shock, temperature, humidity, magnetic, etc.
Umm... that defeats the original purpose of a small, lightweight device that I can go running with. If I wanted to play songs off a hard drive, I'd just use the 8 GByte drive in my PC!
Of course, I'm assuming here that flash will rapidly come down in price, eventually making 512MByte modules no more expensive than 32MByte modules are today. Remember, 15 years ago people couldn't imagine the PC would ever need more than 640KBytes of memory...
http://www.techserver.com/story/0,1643,11131-18983 -137390-0,00.html
hardware random seed
The random number generator is way cool, however, I doubt that anybody with a clue would use it just as a seed. The problem with software-generated "random" numbers is that they are NOT random, they are pseudo-random, and if you know the algorithm and current number, you can predict future numbers...
Also, I fail to see how adding a processor ID which can be easily spoofed adds appreciably to the security of my transactions. If this were true, sites would already be using the disk driver serial numbers, etc.
You've done nothing to demonstrate any real value to consumers of this "feature".
What's wrong with you guys? Intel comes along and offers to shoot themselves in the foot to encourag the rapid adoption of OSS, and you criticize them for it! I say we do everything we can think to encourage Intel to proceed with this self-destructive behaviour! The greatest wound to the Wintel monster could turn out to be this self-inflicted one! This should appeal to all of you with a sense of irony and poetic justice. Beg them to ship processor IDs in ALL their processors, then start a campaign to remind people that "Big Brother Barrett is watching YOU!" Stand back, and watch Wintel sales plummet! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Intel, for sacrificing yourself for the greater good in order to speed Linux on it's way to Total World Domination!
;-)
The adoptation of new technology follows an S curve, as described by Harry S. Dent, Jr. in "The Roaring 2000s". According to his model, at about the 10% level, the curve really takes off... which by my calculations, should happen this year.
That being said, I still find it difficult to beleive that millions of people that struggled for years to learn the Windows interface will be willing to learn another new interface -- regardless of how superiour it is! The M$ experience has trained everybody to beleive that new releases are always buggy, documentation is always poor, new software is frustrating and difficult to learn, and support is either non-existant or prohibitively expensive. They will apply these lessons learned to Linux, and will shy away from anything new, prefering the evil they know to the "evil" they are unfamiliar with.
This seems to be a principle that all us geeks and early adopters have trouble grasping -- not everybody in the world thinks the way we do!
Looks like they got slash-dotted into promising Linux support! Good work, people!
I bought a Rio yesterday, and have already concluded that 32MBytes is NOT enough. And it looks like the Rio can only address 64MBytes, which is still not enough. I'm thinking somewhere around 0.5 to 1 GBytes should be sufficient... when are those 512MByte flash modules going to come out?
Even if massive Internet bandwith becomes dirt cheap, there will still be a demand for MP3, 'cause flash will still be expensive!
You forgot "product placement". It done in most movies now, it's just a matter of time before the makers of the Wonder Bra(TM) pay the Spice Girls(TM) to sing the praises of the product... isn't it a wonderful world we live in?
Most artists include offers for t-shirts, jackets, etc. in their CD cases... why not figure out a way to embed these in the digital audio format too?
And what better way to advertise your live concerts than to mention them in the recordings you're giving away for free?
And of course, there is always the "guiltware" model, simply ask people to send in money if they like the music (hey, it works for PBS!)
The general point is, the Internet changes everything, it make completely new business models possible. Everything that can be reduced to digital form will be sold over the 'net. Fighting it can only delay the inevitable. Music executives are resisting this only because they can't grasp the new business models this makes possible; they want things to stay the way they have been for the past 50 years.
Artists just aren't going to make music if they expect to sell 1 CD and have everyone else pirate a copy of it.
Ever heard of "live music"? How much money did the Rolling Stones make on their last tour? Ever thought of embedding advertising in your music, then giving it away for free? The point is, musicians should have the choice of charging for copies or of giving it away for free. By attacking MP3 distribution, RIAA is attempting to take that choice away from musicians. This is a bad thing.
Isn't any method of encoding digital audio that doesn't rely on proprietary hardware inherently secure? In other words, if I can play it once on my computer, I can capture the bits, and play it back for free as many times as I want, as long as the decryption and D/A conversion aren't built into the same chip. My reasoning is that ultimately they have to send the digital data to my soundcard, and it should be relatively easy to write software to emulate the soundcard (or any other D/A converter) and instead write the bits out to a file...
The other problem with proprietary audio formats is that it will inevitably limit ones market to ONLY windows owners, which seems somewhat shortsighted in my view... are any of these companiespromising to deliver proprietary players also promising to port them to Mac, OS/2, Be, Linus, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc.? I think not!
I already have the output from my sound card plugged into my home stereo, and I can store A LOT more MP3s on my 8GByte hard disk than I can on a CD... there's a market for portable "MP3Man" players, but I can't see any market for home stereo players! True audiophiles will still by the CD!
On a related issue, my friend used his new CD-R writer to copy an audio CD. Then we did a side-by-side comparison of the sound of the original to the sound of the copy, and there was very noticable loss of quality! This is counterintuitive, I was expect a straight binary copy to be indistinguishable. Has somebody mandated that the copying software "dither" the audio bits to cause degradation, or is this just a bug in the software, or is there some other explaination?
Well for one, I'd hate to have to buy all new software everytime I upgrade my CPU...