I ask this question in all seriousness, and I hope it gets answered. What percentage of their cases that have gone to court has the RIAA actually won? I know they're getting settlements out the wazoo, but how many of the cases that go to court do they win? I keep hearing about cases that they dismiss with or without prejudice, but I haven't heard many in which they've actually won. I've been under the impression the number is fairly low, but it could just be those are the only ones that make the news.
I had emusic for a couple of months and downloaded two albums. Their selection isn't that great, and the quality was noticeably low on some tracks. I certainly agree that sources like emusic offer a refuge from the usual shenanigans associated with buying music (DRM, rootkits, insane prices), but I'm not going to spend my money there until the selection improves and the quality becomes more consistent.
I run beryl on an Intel integrated GMA chip. I have a Celeron M processor and 512 MB of memory. This is a fairly minimalist setup by today's standards, but beryl has no noticeable impact on the performance of my machine. I hate to think of how poorly Aeroglass would perform.
And a big red flag for every Slashdot reader is that CNW is a "market research" institute. Do you trust marketdroids to make engineering assessments?
I trust research that uses verifiable data and draws testable conclusions. In this case, the data seems dubious and the conclusions seem bogus. However disregarding data without looking at it because you don't like the source helps to propagate inaccurate "facts."
As a Linux user, I've found that what I want from an OS is different than what MS wants to deliver. I won't say MS will never get my business again, but they'll have to seriously overhaul their software and their business practices to get it.
I want a usable yet secure OS. I don't want to pay $50 a year for a security suite that's going to hog my system's resources and require I give express permission to every program that wants to run or connect to the internet.
I also don't want my OS to restrict what I can do with my own computer. I want to be able to use my media and my hardware without being told what is appropriate. I don't want my computer's security to lock me out.
I also don't want to rely on a particular company for access to my files. If MS files are only compatible with MS Office, and Microsoft decided to charge 10x as much for the next version of office, I'm either stuck with old, unsupported software, or paying out the wazoo to access my files. Everything I use comes with an open standard. If OpenOffice were to cease existing, someone else could easily replace them and my files would still be useful. If I could use open formats with MS office to ensure MS couldn't lock me to their products - this would mean I used their product because it was the best, rather than because I have to in order to access my files.
In short, if Microsoft wants to gain my business, they'll have to do it by creating the best product and convincing me I won't be tied to them no matter what for as long as I'm doing business. Right now, they seem more interested in satisfying media distributors and hardware vendors than the people who buy their product, and they'd rather create a market that requires you to use their product, rather than creating a product that's really superior.
Re:Any advantages over having only one connector?
on
eSATA Connectors
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· Score: 1
I think GP was suggesting every connector should do everything. That'd be great. The place you plug in your mouse is also capable of network connections and video. Having every connector on your computer do everything would drastically simplify things, but it certainly wouldn't keep costs down.
no platform exists for PC software vendors to target.
I disagree. I'm an Ubuntu user, and ever piece of software on my computer has been installed either from repositories or through programs like Automatix. Using repositories, I've installed Sun's Java 5, both the jre and the jdk, Adobe Reader and Flash. Using Automatix, I installed Google's Picasa and Google Earth. I also have a plethora of open source programs that weren't written with Ubuntu's repositories in mind. All Sun, Adobe, Google, or OS vendors provided were binaries or source code and dependency lists, and people with interest in having them available for Ubuntu made them easy to install.
With Ubuntu Feisty, Linspire's Click-N-Run will provide a platform for charging users for software, and the CNR software is being opened up to be ported to other Linux distributions.
Free (as in beer) software installation on Linux is easy, and vendors don't have to jump through hoops to make their program available on every distribution - the distributions will do that for them. Proprietary software is also becoming more practical with the availability of things like CNR.
Linux will never have a unified distribution, because it's too many different things to different people, but software installation is quickly improving. The ease of use of repositories, particularly with the upcoming availability of CNR, makes installing software on Ubuntu more consistent than the variety of executables available on Windows.
I would guess the reasons it takes a particularly long time on some occasions deals with it's ability or inability to find a network. I had a problem for a while that if my wireless card wasn't configured, and I wasn't plugged into a wired network, it would take a really long time looking for a network.
Feisty fixes this by using NetworkManager to handle network connections, but you can also configure a system at least as far back as Dapper to use NetworkManager, and it improves boot speeds considerably when you don't have an internet connection.
I've timed my laptop doing a fresh boot, returning from suspend, and returning from hibernate. It took about 1 minute 5 seconds to get to a usable desktop from a fresh boot, 8 seconds from suspend, and about 50 seconds from hibernate - the network properly configured in all cases. When I used Windows, I'd start it booting, go brush my teeth, type my password, go take a shower, and when I got back it would be at a useable desktop. Hibernate and suspend meant I didn't have to do that often, but a fresh boot took for ever, even after reducing a majority of the startup programs.
Until we realize that there's nothing wrong with boobies, we're never going to get rid of ideas like this.
Except porn isn't all online boobies. If a kid is looking at the nude female form, that's one thing. If they're looking at two people having sex, that's another thing. I don't have a major problem with either of those, but some of the porn on the web is incredibly degrading. I'll be among the first to say that kids should be taught about healthy sexual relationships fairly early on, but videos of guys who pick up girls on the street, have sex with them in the back of a moving vehicle, then dump them on the side of the road is not something kids need to be watching.
The key here is that parents should have the right to decide what their children see, and the ability to enforce that. I certainly don't think forcing porn to a different port in Utah is going to be the least bit effective, and if it were effective it would probably have unintended consequences that would resonate across the entire web. Requiring porn sites to include some kind of meta tag so they can easily be blocked by content filters would be just as effective (if not more, because some sites might do it voluntarily), and wouldn't have as bad of consequences.
Re:GNOME, Ubuntu, and the colour green...
on
Gnome 2.18 Released
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· Score: 1
I like blue myself, but when I set my girlfriend up with Kubuntu, she decked everything (and I mean everything) out in shades of green, and I was amazed how good it looked when she was done.
One other point (and you may have had a solid Myth system for long enough to see this): When you get a device like a Tivo that is stable, simple to use, and works every time, things change. It becomes a new tool that transforms how you do things. I can't imagine watching TV without Tivo--it's that different (and that much better) than plain-old service. I skip commercials (but fast-forward through them so I can catch new show announcements or the occasional ad that is amusing the first time you see it). I watch shows on "Tivo time," skipping through the boring parts. I fast forward to the end of the remodeling show so I can see the results without all the witty banter. I check out old shows I haven't seen in years because Tivo had space and nothing better to do than record it. I don't worry about when seasonal shows are on (like the Peanuts ones)--Tivo catches them for me.
Exactly how I feel about MythTV. I've got nothing against Tivo, and I wouldn't be surprised if I use one some time in the future. It sounds like it's more featureful than I thought. The DVRs offered by my cable company, on the other hand, suck for reasons described in my last comment.
Where do you get your TiVo? Is it something you bought third party? If so, how does it work with digital cable? According to the website you'd need the $800 dollar model to get HD.
To be fair, I've never used a Tivo. I have used a number of other DVRs provided by cable companies, and I'll take MythTV any day. The others I've used won't allow you to short your shows by TV show. When you have over 350 shows recorded, this is a must. I also have a 400 GB RAID for storage. Other DVRs will allow an eSATA drive, so they can get up to 500 GB, but lets hope you don't have a drive failure. MythTV also has a nice web interface, so I can set shows to record whether I'm in my room or across the country. My MythTV box has been up for a solid month without any problems, and I only rebooted then to try out a new Live CD and see if it would auto-detect my RAID. While I have had some more serious issues with MythTV, it's been 6 months, and I've upgraded both MythTV and my distro since then and it's been completely reliable. Tivo may be a cut above the other DVRs offered by my cable company, but MythTV puts the DVRs I've used to shame.
I agree. The economic value of entertainment aside, the government is passing a law that antiquates millions of televisions across the country. They're doing so in order to re-sell the frequencies TV currently uses. If the government is going to break my television for profit, I expect them to do something to make my TV usable again.
Same here. I've played through the game on my Gamecube, and played a few parts on a friend's Wii. I didn't feel that the game on the Wii was really any better. I think there are lots of things they could do with Zelda on the Wii, but making it compatible with Gamecube as well was rather limiting.
But you know what: we voted in a new House and Senate who will hopefully change America back to the way I think it should be. How's that for an honest statement.
I like to think that's true, but only because the democrats and the republicans will be forced to compromise to accomplish anything for the next couple of years. I don't want to see the democrats running the country any more than I want to see the republicans running it. Compromise is good, but there's been far too little of it lately.
What ever happened to the idea of isolating the cockpit from the rest of the plane? I remember a few years ago reading that the cockpit would not be accessible from the cabin while in the air, regardless of the pilot's discretion. It might be inconvenient to the pilots and flight staff, but it seems like the most idiot proof way of insuring the safety of the aircraft.
I have a laptop I paid ~$780 for that weighs 5 lbs, get's 3 hours battery life (6 since part of the $780 was a second battery), has a 40 GB hard drive, a Celeron M processor, and is capable of more or less everything my more powerful desktop is capable of. I was rather minimalist with this laptop, getting only what I needed while on the go, it's not intended to replace a desktop.
There's no way I'd pay $2,000 for something with a smaller keyboard, smaller hard drive, presumably less ram and a slower CPU. If it's my portable device, it doesn't need to be anything comparable to my desktop, but I'm not going to pay out the nose for something arguably worse than my laptop.
Theyre both fine in a homogenous environment, but in a mixed environment OOo sucks.
Last I checked, OOo does better with MS Office documents than MS Office does with OOo documents*. Your statement is true only if MS Office is treated as the standard (which it usually is).
*I know MS has released an ODF to MS Office plugin, but I have no idea how usable it is.
Think about what you're proposing for a second. No matter how high quality a product is, if it can be reproduced without any kind of protection for an original innovator, the original innovator has nothing to gain from it except the ability to say "I made that." If I spend 6 months of my life writing a book, recording an album, filming a movie, coding a piece of software, I want to know that it's going to be putting food on the table for a while. If someone can freely copy my work, that 6 months just went to waste. No matter how good the work was, digital works can be copied at just as high quality as the original, and the person who actually did the work gets nothing.
It's not that one human mind could have created something and another couldn't have, it's that one human mind did create something and another didn't. People who create media spend a lot of time and money on their products, and if they can't profit on it, there time would be better spent on other things.
You talk about releasing low quality products that break: that strikes me as more of a patent issue. Patents are not quite the same as copyright, but pretty much the same thing goes. If one person or company spends their time and money developing an idea or a product, then someone else comes along and starts reproducing the exact same thing without doing the initial research, they can sell the product at only the cost of the parts and labor.
Ignoring copyright and patents completely devalues creation. Reproduction is cheap. Creation and innovation are necessary to create high quality products, and without some kind of copyright protection for innovators, there would be no incentive to innovate and create the good quality products that you seem to desire.
I agree that copyright being 70 years + the life of the author is absurd, and patents being 17 years is a bit steep, but some kind of protection is absolutely necessary to encourage people to spend their time on a new idea.
Valid argument for music, but what about books and movies? As much as I'm a fan of live theatre (which also benefits from copyright), I also like going to see a movie at the theater or renting something from Blockbuster. You wouldn't have nearly the caliber of movies if there wasn't money to be made in their distribution. There might be a way to make money with movie theatres, but if one unknown projector manager releases the content, it could be on every non-licensed screen and all over the web with no recourse.
Books are also a problem. There's no way to make books profitable without some kind of copyright. You might get a little bit from book signing tours, but not much compared to actual sales.
And my DRM comment, I look at it this way. Media (music and movies) could be controlled by having very restricted formats, like old console games that each had their own cartridge format, and by adding encryption. If the entire media center, your display and speakers, as well as locked down equivalents of DVD and CD players, were all one unit and there were no software players, the analog hole would be fairly thoroughly plugged. If enough resources were dedicated to a crack (and I suspect they would be, as it would be commercially profitable), the latest DRM system might break down every few months, but if media producers intended to stay profitable, they would force new DRM schemes down the users throat every time a crack comes out. Of course, you could wait the indeterminate amount of time until the movie you want gets cracked, but if you want to stay up to date, you'll have to keep replacing your entire media center. I don't know if I expect that would actually work, but I expect the **AA would try to make it work if they didn't have copyright on their side.
As I said in my first post, I think copyright is in need of reform, but I think the quality of the media we have available to us is improved because of copyright. Without it, there would be no financial incentive to create many types of media.
I didn't say OOo was for everyone, I said it was sufficient for the majority of the users. Students, house wives, and Joe Blow who has a report to present on Monday can use OpenOffice without a hitch. There's no reason they should be dropping hundreds of dollars on an office suite that has more features which they're never going to use. As far as businesses go, if they used OpenOffice across the board, never trying to use MS Office formats, everything would flow more smoothly than trying to have an Open Office suite with closed documents.
If what you need is strong MS Office compatibility, you need MS Office. If you need a standalone office suite, OOo works fine in most cases. People seem to think the quality of an office suite is indicated by its compatibility with MS Office, rather than it's feature set. OpenOffice, along with ODF provide a usable office suite. If you're intending to use OpenOffice with MS documents, which are a closed, obscure format, you're lucky OpenOffice does as well as it does.
And that "?#NAME" thing, that generally means you botched your formula. Same thing happens in Excel. A valid criticism may be that it didn't support a function you were trying to use, but simply saying it says "?#NAME" and never figuring out why makes me think it was a user error.
I certainly think copyright needs some reform, but dropping copyright completely gets rid of any ability for people to profit from their works. Nobody would publish books, because anybody else could print it and sell it without having to pay the author. Nobody would make movies, because people would make copies and distribute them without paying for the actors, the set designers, etc. Same for music and software. And don't think GPL'd software is safe, because without copyright, anyone could make changes, close the source and sell it. DRM would go through the roof if copyright were eliminated, we'd only be able to use our media on a few select devices that we'd have to replace every year so media creators could keep money.
Slashdot Mirror
I ask this question in all seriousness, and I hope it gets answered. What percentage of their cases that have gone to court has the RIAA actually won? I know they're getting settlements out the wazoo, but how many of the cases that go to court do they win? I keep hearing about cases that they dismiss with or without prejudice, but I haven't heard many in which they've actually won. I've been under the impression the number is fairly low, but it could just be those are the only ones that make the news.
I had emusic for a couple of months and downloaded two albums. Their selection isn't that great, and the quality was noticeably low on some tracks. I certainly agree that sources like emusic offer a refuge from the usual shenanigans associated with buying music (DRM, rootkits, insane prices), but I'm not going to spend my money there until the selection improves and the quality becomes more consistent.
I run beryl on an Intel integrated GMA chip. I have a Celeron M processor and 512 MB of memory. This is a fairly minimalist setup by today's standards, but beryl has no noticeable impact on the performance of my machine. I hate to think of how poorly Aeroglass would perform.
I trust research that uses verifiable data and draws testable conclusions. In this case, the data seems dubious and the conclusions seem bogus. However disregarding data without looking at it because you don't like the source helps to propagate inaccurate "facts."
VMWare on Linux.
I want a usable yet secure OS. I don't want to pay $50 a year for a security suite that's going to hog my system's resources and require I give express permission to every program that wants to run or connect to the internet.
I also don't want my OS to restrict what I can do with my own computer. I want to be able to use my media and my hardware without being told what is appropriate. I don't want my computer's security to lock me out.
I also don't want to rely on a particular company for access to my files. If MS files are only compatible with MS Office, and Microsoft decided to charge 10x as much for the next version of office, I'm either stuck with old, unsupported software, or paying out the wazoo to access my files. Everything I use comes with an open standard. If OpenOffice were to cease existing, someone else could easily replace them and my files would still be useful. If I could use open formats with MS office to ensure MS couldn't lock me to their products - this would mean I used their product because it was the best, rather than because I have to in order to access my files.
In short, if Microsoft wants to gain my business, they'll have to do it by creating the best product and convincing me I won't be tied to them no matter what for as long as I'm doing business. Right now, they seem more interested in satisfying media distributors and hardware vendors than the people who buy their product, and they'd rather create a market that requires you to use their product, rather than creating a product that's really superior.
I think GP was suggesting every connector should do everything. That'd be great. The place you plug in your mouse is also capable of network connections and video. Having every connector on your computer do everything would drastically simplify things, but it certainly wouldn't keep costs down.
I disagree. I'm an Ubuntu user, and ever piece of software on my computer has been installed either from repositories or through programs like Automatix. Using repositories, I've installed Sun's Java 5, both the jre and the jdk, Adobe Reader and Flash. Using Automatix, I installed Google's Picasa and Google Earth. I also have a plethora of open source programs that weren't written with Ubuntu's repositories in mind. All Sun, Adobe, Google, or OS vendors provided were binaries or source code and dependency lists, and people with interest in having them available for Ubuntu made them easy to install.
With Ubuntu Feisty, Linspire's Click-N-Run will provide a platform for charging users for software, and the CNR software is being opened up to be ported to other Linux distributions.
Free (as in beer) software installation on Linux is easy, and vendors don't have to jump through hoops to make their program available on every distribution - the distributions will do that for them. Proprietary software is also becoming more practical with the availability of things like CNR.
Linux will never have a unified distribution, because it's too many different things to different people, but software installation is quickly improving. The ease of use of repositories, particularly with the upcoming availability of CNR, makes installing software on Ubuntu more consistent than the variety of executables available on Windows.
Feisty fixes this by using NetworkManager to handle network connections, but you can also configure a system at least as far back as Dapper to use NetworkManager, and it improves boot speeds considerably when you don't have an internet connection.
I've timed my laptop doing a fresh boot, returning from suspend, and returning from hibernate. It took about 1 minute 5 seconds to get to a usable desktop from a fresh boot, 8 seconds from suspend, and about 50 seconds from hibernate - the network properly configured in all cases. When I used Windows, I'd start it booting, go brush my teeth, type my password, go take a shower, and when I got back it would be at a useable desktop. Hibernate and suspend meant I didn't have to do that often, but a fresh boot took for ever, even after reducing a majority of the startup programs.
Except porn isn't all online boobies. If a kid is looking at the nude female form, that's one thing. If they're looking at two people having sex, that's another thing. I don't have a major problem with either of those, but some of the porn on the web is incredibly degrading. I'll be among the first to say that kids should be taught about healthy sexual relationships fairly early on, but videos of guys who pick up girls on the street, have sex with them in the back of a moving vehicle, then dump them on the side of the road is not something kids need to be watching.
The key here is that parents should have the right to decide what their children see, and the ability to enforce that. I certainly don't think forcing porn to a different port in Utah is going to be the least bit effective, and if it were effective it would probably have unintended consequences that would resonate across the entire web. Requiring porn sites to include some kind of meta tag so they can easily be blocked by content filters would be just as effective (if not more, because some sites might do it voluntarily), and wouldn't have as bad of consequences.
I like blue myself, but when I set my girlfriend up with Kubuntu, she decked everything (and I mean everything) out in shades of green, and I was amazed how good it looked when she was done.
Exactly how I feel about MythTV. I've got nothing against Tivo, and I wouldn't be surprised if I use one some time in the future. It sounds like it's more featureful than I thought. The DVRs offered by my cable company, on the other hand, suck for reasons described in my last comment.
Where do you get your TiVo? Is it something you bought third party? If so, how does it work with digital cable? According to the website you'd need the $800 dollar model to get HD.
To be fair, I've never used a Tivo. I have used a number of other DVRs provided by cable companies, and I'll take MythTV any day. The others I've used won't allow you to short your shows by TV show. When you have over 350 shows recorded, this is a must. I also have a 400 GB RAID for storage. Other DVRs will allow an eSATA drive, so they can get up to 500 GB, but lets hope you don't have a drive failure. MythTV also has a nice web interface, so I can set shows to record whether I'm in my room or across the country. My MythTV box has been up for a solid month without any problems, and I only rebooted then to try out a new Live CD and see if it would auto-detect my RAID. While I have had some more serious issues with MythTV, it's been 6 months, and I've upgraded both MythTV and my distro since then and it's been completely reliable. Tivo may be a cut above the other DVRs offered by my cable company, but MythTV puts the DVRs I've used to shame.
I agree. The economic value of entertainment aside, the government is passing a law that antiquates millions of televisions across the country. They're doing so in order to re-sell the frequencies TV currently uses. If the government is going to break my television for profit, I expect them to do something to make my TV usable again.
Same here. I've played through the game on my Gamecube, and played a few parts on a friend's Wii. I didn't feel that the game on the Wii was really any better. I think there are lots of things they could do with Zelda on the Wii, but making it compatible with Gamecube as well was rather limiting.
I like to think that's true, but only because the democrats and the republicans will be forced to compromise to accomplish anything for the next couple of years. I don't want to see the democrats running the country any more than I want to see the republicans running it. Compromise is good, but there's been far too little of it lately.
What ever happened to the idea of isolating the cockpit from the rest of the plane? I remember a few years ago reading that the cockpit would not be accessible from the cabin while in the air, regardless of the pilot's discretion. It might be inconvenient to the pilots and flight staff, but it seems like the most idiot proof way of insuring the safety of the aircraft.
There's no way I'd pay $2,000 for something with a smaller keyboard, smaller hard drive, presumably less ram and a slower CPU. If it's my portable device, it doesn't need to be anything comparable to my desktop, but I'm not going to pay out the nose for something arguably worse than my laptop.
Last I checked, OOo does better with MS Office documents than MS Office does with OOo documents*. Your statement is true only if MS Office is treated as the standard (which it usually is).
*I know MS has released an ODF to MS Office plugin, but I have no idea how usable it is.
It's not that one human mind could have created something and another couldn't have, it's that one human mind did create something and another didn't. People who create media spend a lot of time and money on their products, and if they can't profit on it, there time would be better spent on other things.
You talk about releasing low quality products that break: that strikes me as more of a patent issue. Patents are not quite the same as copyright, but pretty much the same thing goes. If one person or company spends their time and money developing an idea or a product, then someone else comes along and starts reproducing the exact same thing without doing the initial research, they can sell the product at only the cost of the parts and labor.
Ignoring copyright and patents completely devalues creation. Reproduction is cheap. Creation and innovation are necessary to create high quality products, and without some kind of copyright protection for innovators, there would be no incentive to innovate and create the good quality products that you seem to desire.
I agree that copyright being 70 years + the life of the author is absurd, and patents being 17 years is a bit steep, but some kind of protection is absolutely necessary to encourage people to spend their time on a new idea.
Books are also a problem. There's no way to make books profitable without some kind of copyright. You might get a little bit from book signing tours, but not much compared to actual sales.
And my DRM comment, I look at it this way. Media (music and movies) could be controlled by having very restricted formats, like old console games that each had their own cartridge format, and by adding encryption. If the entire media center, your display and speakers, as well as locked down equivalents of DVD and CD players, were all one unit and there were no software players, the analog hole would be fairly thoroughly plugged. If enough resources were dedicated to a crack (and I suspect they would be, as it would be commercially profitable), the latest DRM system might break down every few months, but if media producers intended to stay profitable, they would force new DRM schemes down the users throat every time a crack comes out. Of course, you could wait the indeterminate amount of time until the movie you want gets cracked, but if you want to stay up to date, you'll have to keep replacing your entire media center. I don't know if I expect that would actually work, but I expect the **AA would try to make it work if they didn't have copyright on their side.
As I said in my first post, I think copyright is in need of reform, but I think the quality of the media we have available to us is improved because of copyright. Without it, there would be no financial incentive to create many types of media.
I hadn't thought of that. You'd just have to make sure your cron job checked that it hadn't already run an hour ago.
If what you need is strong MS Office compatibility, you need MS Office. If you need a standalone office suite, OOo works fine in most cases. People seem to think the quality of an office suite is indicated by its compatibility with MS Office, rather than it's feature set. OpenOffice, along with ODF provide a usable office suite. If you're intending to use OpenOffice with MS documents, which are a closed, obscure format, you're lucky OpenOffice does as well as it does.
And that "?#NAME" thing, that generally means you botched your formula. Same thing happens in Excel. A valid criticism may be that it didn't support a function you were trying to use, but simply saying it says "?#NAME" and never figuring out why makes me think it was a user error.
I certainly think copyright needs some reform, but dropping copyright completely gets rid of any ability for people to profit from their works. Nobody would publish books, because anybody else could print it and sell it without having to pay the author. Nobody would make movies, because people would make copies and distribute them without paying for the actors, the set designers, etc. Same for music and software. And don't think GPL'd software is safe, because without copyright, anyone could make changes, close the source and sell it. DRM would go through the roof if copyright were eliminated, we'd only be able to use our media on a few select devices that we'd have to replace every year so media creators could keep money.