RAID-5 protection for single drive failure isn't without points of failure. The average home user would probably need some training to be able to manage one effectively for disaster-recovery purposes.
I would highly recommend that anyone thinking of implementing one for the first time first read up on the hardware and drivers they intend to use. Next, after purchase & initial install, they should tranfer a bunch of test files & practice a rebuild by simulating a drive going bad (take 1 drive out, erase everything on it from another machine, put it back in and rebuild the array).
I found out the hard way that it's quite easy to end up with a bunch of cross-linked files if you botch a rebuild. At that point, you're basically hosed. My ASUS mobo has built-in nVidia RAID-5, and after my first rebuild about 60% of the original files were just missing. Running chkdisk on it restored the files, but about 50% of the restored files (so 30% of all the original files) were corrupted with bad clusters.
Also, a 1TB RAID-5 will show marked performance degredation if it's used heavily & not defragged regularly. A defrag operation can take 24 hours plus to complete on a terabyte filesystem if not run nightly.
I see Maxtor offers some pretty good sized drives for the OneTouch backup system; you can currently do a 500Gb setup @ less than $0.55/Gb, which ain't half bad. For content other than large media files, rotating a couple separate external devices like this would make for a pretty effective and secure backup strategy. If the data is sensitive, just TrueCrypt ( http://www.truecrypt.org/ ) the drives first thing.
Torpark ( http://torpark.nfshost.com/ ) runs portably, clears all cached data (which is minimal in the first place) on close, and unlike the browser from TFA, it sets up a Tor circuit, giving you at least some chance of keeping the browsing you'd like to be private out of anyone's IP logs (and request/response logs if they're really anal).
Also, when Torpark is running, you can use the virtual proxy it sets up via Socks - e.g., you can set IE to use Torpark as its proxy server, as long as there's a gateway straight out of your LAN.
Torpark leaves your FF and IE history intact; the only inconvenience is that since Torpark *is* built on top of portable Firefox, you'll have to close your other FF instance when firing it up.
I would also provide a link to/files/31103061/QTFairUse6-1.0.zip.html on rapidshare.de, but that would be wrong.
Who benefits from the spread of FF?
on
Marketing Mozilla
·
· Score: 1
"Who gains anything by increasing the Mozilla marketshare?"
I think you answered yourself there: "webdevelopers [who] keep on spilling time working around annoyances." At some point along the marketshare continuum, webmasters could theoretically forget about *IE* compatibility the way they once ingored Netscape compatibility.
Come to think of it, there's your guerilla marketing strategy: Publish a library of standards-compliant HTML snippets that render properly in FF but not IE. FF-friendly webmasters can make heavy use of such elements, with a cute, Fox-emblazoned button explaining what readers can do if they're using IE and the page isn't displaying properly.
Seriously, developers should be the crux of Mozilla's efforts here. Sell developers on custom client-server functionality on the cheap (as an extension of course), and you have the potential to introduce FF as an application platform to a good number of SMB users. IE can host & run.NET Windows forms controls (but its such a kludge that it's not really a viable solution in most situations), and lots of developers use IE's godawful, memory & bandwidth hogging XMLDataIslands. For reasons as stupid as that, many business users are locked into IE via in-house app dependencies. Perhaps a stupid simple basic RAD editor for XPI apps would be a start; a syntax-aware plugin for Eclipse with a built in test harness / sandboxed virtual gecko runtime would be even better.
Since this is AOL-branded, I suppose it'll basically be stocked with 2.5 million versions of entries from Britney Spears' & Jessica Simpson's discography.
Most of us listen to the radio at least sometimes, and ads have always been a natural part of that. I use Pandora, which I see as basically analogous to a radio station, but with more ability to customize, plus all the ads being visual, so no commercial interruptions to the audio (so far).
Am I that odd for not finding the mere presence of ads all that objectionable? Sure, I'll bail on a service or site if the advertising it carries is intrusive, distracting or uses aggressive & coercive methods to gain my attention, but its presence alone just doesn't set me off that much.
On the other hand, while it represents an important step towards old media adopting fresher business models, the fact remains that the service discussed in TFA is offered by Universal, who was an RIAA label last time I checked. If using the service means generating ad revenue for an RIAA member organization directly, then I cannot in good conscience use the service. The RIAA uses its financial resources to harm US citizens and the US Constitution, after all.
Someone upstream mentioned the Urge service, and its interface looks a lot like Rhapsody's, which felt kind of stiff to me. Besides that, it appears to use DRM. So far, if I want portable music with maximal interoperability, I'll have to continue my "old fashioned" manaul method of ripping CDs to 320kbps MP3s. If the CD is from an RIAA member label, then I'll buy it used. Utopia would be if MP3Tunes.com got their indie artists into heavy rotation on Pandora & I could get Pandora's interface to asterisk those songs when playing. Pandora is my equivalent to radio these days, and I would be *so* much more likely to buy an album if I had a quick visual cue telling me it was an RIAA-free product.
"It seems to me the only people that have problems with DRM are the ones that think everything should be free and the ones who do regularly steal music and software."
Where is this idea coming from? Do you really think that people whose primary motive is to steal music bother to contribute heavily to the fight against DRM? These people are by definition leeches, and as such, they're most likely to be found saying little more than "can u sho me wher b da crack for dis proggie?"
I'm getting mighty sick of seeing people mindlessly equate "anti-DRM" with "wants something for nothing." I spent several paragraphs earlier in this topic on why, as someone who purchases his content, I cannot abide by DRM. Since you seem to be blithely unaware of what possible legitimate reasons someone could have for conscientiously opposing DRM, I respectfully suggest you go back and read that.
You're painting with a pretty broad brush there. How about engaging people's arguments instead of attacking the motives you project onto them?
If I want a song, I'm happy to pay for the CD once. Mind you, that doesn't mean once to play it from my computer, once to play it from my wife's, once to play it at work, once again for my car, and once again for my mobile device - and having that just cover usage in August. I'm not happy that purchased, DRMd content needs to be re-transferred to my mobile device every 48 hours because it expires, and that it requires a connection to the provider to renew the license. I'm not happy that my sister's entire *purchased* music library was lost over a DRM snafu. I'm not happy that quite a bit of music can't be purchased in an unencumbered, interoperable version at all, leaving illegit channels as the only purveyor of tracks in this manner.
If I want a movie, I'm happy to purchase or rent it. I pay for a Netflix subscription in addition to having HBO and Showtime added to my cable subscription. I'm also happy to pay my cable provider extra for the HDTV experience, and I'm happy to pay extra for a Media Center edition of Windows that lets me timeshift my content. Now I'm not happy to be unable to watch HDTV in HTDV through my setup. I'm not happy to have my purchased content artificially degraded down to S-Video quality when all the equipment is natively capable of recording the original HDTV stream and delivering it to my screen. I'm not happy that with many of my favorite programs, there is no way to purchase a recording at HD resolutions (or the means to make one legitimately), but there are means to acquire it illegitimately in HDTV with the commercials already stripped out. I'm also not happy to be artificially restricted from archiving certain programs to a video DVD from the Media Center interface, when a normal DVD recorder/player or any other software recorder would allow it; I'm not happy to have Media Center's TV guide data include flags that add artificial restrictions onto my already distorted copy of content I've rightfully purchased.
I'm also not happy to be forced to watch pre-show messages when viewing a DVD I've purchased on a player I've purchased.
Lastly, I'm *extremely* unhappy that I cannot legally discuss the technical details of programmatic fixes that may exist for some of the above conundrums. This isn't a fair use issue, it's a first ammendment issue.
At the end of the day, I'm happy to pay the asking price for the media I consume, and I'm one of the ones complaining the loudest about DRM. The discussion certainly is not all about free songs.
Glad you took the time to post your experience with this. Hope you also take the time to help non-techies understand what happened to you. I'm getting sick of being the tech support guy for acquaintances whose hassles are the result of uninformed purchasing decisions like using a DRM infested online store to acquire their entire music library.
When they work perfectly, DRM schemes prevent you from doing many things with your media. When they don't work perfectly, they are infinitely more likely to erroneously prevent access than to erroneously grant it. The crime of it all is that purveyors of crippled content take advantage of gullible consumers by creating an illusion of simplicity, ease and permanence. Only when they try to use the content as they normally would do these folks find out that what they actually got was an ultra-complicated rental process that takes their content with it when they cancel.
I can see your point, but "just dumb" is a little harsh. The word "right" can work in the examples you bring up, but it lacks some precision compared to, say, "license" or "privilege." Of course, I was not speaking to those subclasses or special cases of a Right proper in my previous comment.
Not sure why your comment was modded funny; seems spot on to me. "Insightful with a humorous flourish" would be more apropos if you asked me.
Anyway, back on topic... while it's not the most versatile visual layout in the world, it sure is the first time in a long time that I've seen a truly fresh, different, interesting and creative visual style like this. All the better that they built it without any annoying gizmos. Mui bueno, thanks for pointing it out.
Maybe they're not competing directly with anything; maybe they're carving out a new space before anyone else does. Face it, the hosted app space is a pretty nascent market as far as large-scale use goes. GMail isn't really directly analogous to any other web-based mail, and in some ways it could legitimately be thought of as its own breed of online app. Windows Live is pretty rushed, pretty rough and not extraordinarily useful, and MS is of course already working the angles on how to monetize it.
I use both Excel and Google Spreadsheets, and I use them for different things. I see both of those solutions being on my most valued tool list for some time. Google seems to approach from the "make it useful first" direction, rather than trying to feature match some competing offering or trying to build the application around the monetization approach. They don't need to build an "Office Killer" or "OOo Killer" for this to be a monster success.
Wow, that's a pretty fringe conception of "rights" there. But sure, I'll cop to being pretty naïve as you implied -- or at least, I'll admit that I share the naïveté of the school of thought that produced: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."
Re:Great idea
on
30 Days of DRM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't know about Canada, but in the US, I can buy CD-Rs dirt cheap (i.e., at similar prices to those you mention), but I can only buy *CD-R Music* discs at a significantly higher price. Only the latter will work in my rack CD recorder (made by Yamaha). The difference in price goes mostly to the RIAA.
The only difference between the discs is a simple flag specifying the type. It is allegedly illegal to sell an audio CD recorder (non-computer peripheral) here that allows recording onto a non-taxed disc.
If it is currently legal in Canada to deal in such equipment, please let me know, because I would love to be able to use cheaper spindles of CD-Rs for those audio recordings that I do not make through my computer. What's more, I would love to keep whatever money possible out of the hands of the RIAA, and as much as it shocks and dismays me to find myself saying this, I am willing to break United States law if it means exercising my fair use rights while reducing their influx of cash. Not long ago I would not have gone that far, but I'm afraid the time for mealy-mouthed opposition to these crimelords is long past.
That said it all right there. A Purchased Right is an oxymoron.
Wretched idea
on
30 Days of DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Uhm, you do realize that the blank media tax would eseentially fund organizations that spend every waking moment finding ways to keep you from being left alone to do what you want with your media, don't you?
Very true, and in fact I've set up a media PC with optical & S/PDIF audio IO for just those reasons. Given that, I don't find much use for the Yamaha's recording capability anymore, but that fact pisses me off more than it soothes me. I mean, I naïvely spent several hundred dollars on a piece of equipment on the basis that it was capable of digital recording. Unfortunately, I bought it quite a few years ago, before I had any real awareness of DRM issues, or the wherewithall to grill the salesperson about such.
What this leaves me with is an artificially handicapped machine. I own the equipment, and I happen to own a majority of the incoming signals that I wanted to use it to record. Nevertheless, I have the permission to record audio digitally only if I pay the RIAA a commission for such privilege. Now if the incoming signal is from my own band, does the RIAA forward that commission to me or my band mates? Hardly. Matter of fact, as an independent recording artist, I cannot even find out where to register for a share of the commision.
Call me militant, but the way I see it, the RIAA owes me the CD-R commission for whatever number of discs have been purchased to record my band's material onto. Failing that, they owe me the manufacturing blueprints to make discs for doing same without filtering currency through their hands. Failing both of those, then their CD-R scheme amounts to extortion and/or price fixing, and should be treated as such by the courts.
Yep, I can digitize FLACs and 320kbps MP3s all day long on my PC, but I'd also like to be able to use my rack equipment exactly as it says I can on the box, and the box doesn't say anything about paying a commission to the RIAA. Until then, I suppose I have enough past-due receivables on the RIAA account ledger to share quite a few MP3s at $750 a pop.
Re:Great idea
on
30 Days of DRM
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I have a CD recorder / player (Yamaha) in my component stereo system, and it will only record on the "CDR Music" type discs that carry the extra fee. Of course, there is no way around this fee if I am recording, e.g., a session of my own band's rehearsal from an old cassette tape or whatnot. I've also not yet heard of any way to see the cashflow from the extra fee, in order to verify that it is indeed making it to the artists for which it was levied in the first place.
Lastly, if the manufacture of these discs ever ceases, I am stuck with a play-only unit in my stereo rack. Nice, eh?
Sure hope somebody reverse engineers these and starts manufacturing them independently one of these days. I'd actually pay *more* for a product if a portion of its cost supported anti-DRM organizations.
If it's really impossible to be reasonably certain that something is harmless, we'll all just have to travel in carrier-provided clear plastic "air travel suits" with no carry on baggage. Checked baggage will fly in tandem but in a separate craft. The FAA will have to maintain a pharmacy from which passengers can register for in-flight meds if they absolutely cannot do without something for the duration of a flight.
I scanned all the "beneath current threshold" posts here 'cause I knew one of them would make this point. Thanks Doc.
What's more, I think the "pick better partners" quip skirts the issue altogether (no pun intended). Perhaps it's possible to have sexual relations only with people you know long enough, well enough & intimately enough to be fairly confident about about their future state of mind. In fact, that's a commendable way to conduct oneself. However, in this country it's not illegal to be a promiscuous fornicator with extraordinarily poor judgement; the original poster was simply pointing out that this very thing has the potential to land you in jail, and he's right. There's just no easy answer to that situation, personal responsibility included.
Here's what happened: Adoption of previous editions of Office have been slowed by, among other things, objections over the cluttered and confusing interface. Microsoft tried in their own (perhaps misguided) way to improve that over the years, and in doing so, they added bars and panes ad infinitum - a taskbar, a task pane, a help pane, new context menus, etc. - without much fanfare.
Since there was no real set of organizing principles for the evolution of the Office interface, these new toolspaces naturally filled up in a hurry as different internal groups poured their junk into them. This wasn't helping to reduce the clutter any, so they simultaneously tried making the main application menu context-sensitive, further confusing experienced users.
All these parallel but disconnected efforts tended to defeat each other more than anything, so this time around, MS decided to try something different: Take about 200 different interface ideas, test them with focus groups, and may the best one win. After that, make all the UI developers retrofit their stuff into a coordinated workflow based on the new winner, which is where they are today.
Basically, this is a first attempt at escaping the chains of their poor UI legacy, and perhaps a risky one at that. They estimate that only power users will be comfortable picking the new UI up on their own. For average users, they expect that some guided training will be necessary - all combined, probably just shy of a day's worth.
Personally, I think they'd have been better off monitoring clicks & keystrokes of a *vast* test group using previous office editions, after which they could form a core set of the most important interaction elements based on the 20% or so most used actions. Also, it didn't help that keyboard shortcuts were never standardized across the Office suite; power users who expected e.g. Ctrl+Tab to do the same thing in Word as in Excel were quickly alienated, and once alienated, it's not easy to win a user back.
Dmn... hit "submit" instead of "preview." First time I did that. ----------- Maybe some stupid obvious patents could be prevented like this: Pick a friendly noble license everyone's likely to be comfortable with (Creative Commons, GPL, or whatever). Set up a site that allow two kinds of community contributions under that license: (1) Descriptions of individual algorithms in any of a number of languages (perhaps pseudocode among them), (2) Descriptions of possible systems that can be derived from combinations and permutations of algorithms in the catalog.
The more robust the catalog becomes, the more likely it is that some system in the catalog will constitute evidence of prior art (or simultaneous / parallel art) in a future patent case. To get a robust system, it needs to be useful to programmers, i.e. searchable, easy to cobble together working code modules on the fly by wiring inputs & outputs together, etc. Just feed (bandwidth allocation algorithm 354) with the output of (peer behavior composite scoring system 12(peer action evaluation loop 18)).
This could actually be a worthwhile contribution to the community aside from its possible effects on private intellectual property accumulation. What "OWL" sought (seeks?) to be for classes, properties and relations, an endeavor like this could be for software systems.
Here's what we need if we want to preempt as many stupid obvious patents: Pick a friendly noble license everyone's most likely to agree on (Creative Commons, GPL, or whatever). Set up a site that allow two kinds of submissions: (1) Individual algorithms in a number of languages (and perhaps in pseudocode), (2)
If Weird Al were Luke Skywalker, then the RIAA would be the Empire and Sony would be the Emperor. Yes, the analogy's riddled with flaws, but you get the jist of it, right?
Before the DRM wars, Weird Al was one of about 4 artists whose every album I would purchase. The Sony relationship really pisses me off; it's getting harder and harder to avoid funding them these days. Someone else mentioned downloading songs & sending money directly to the artists -- an odd option, but perhaps worth considering. I like my MP3s at 320kbps though, so more likely I'll wait 'til I can find the album used, but still send Al at least the price of the CD.
Weird Al is an incredibly talented artist, and his attention to detail has gotten keener and keener over the years. Parodies and impressions get so much more punch when the artist catches some subtle detail of the original that you missed, then amplifies or caricatures it as a way of pointing it out to you. Yankovic is a master at this, so Poodle Hats off to him for his lifetime accomplishements in general, and for his spirit with stuff like DDTS in particular.
Slashdot Mirror
RAID-5 protection for single drive failure isn't without points of failure. The average home user would probably need some training to be able to manage one effectively for disaster-recovery purposes.
I would highly recommend that anyone thinking of implementing one for the first time first read up on the hardware and drivers they intend to use. Next, after purchase & initial install, they should tranfer a bunch of test files & practice a rebuild by simulating a drive going bad (take 1 drive out, erase everything on it from another machine, put it back in and rebuild the array).
I found out the hard way that it's quite easy to end up with a bunch of cross-linked files if you botch a rebuild. At that point, you're basically hosed. My ASUS mobo has built-in nVidia RAID-5, and after my first rebuild about 60% of the original files were just missing. Running chkdisk on it restored the files, but about 50% of the restored files (so 30% of all the original files) were corrupted with bad clusters.
Also, a 1TB RAID-5 will show marked performance degredation if it's used heavily & not defragged regularly. A defrag operation can take 24 hours plus to complete on a terabyte filesystem if not run nightly.
I see Maxtor offers some pretty good sized drives for the OneTouch backup system; you can currently do a 500Gb setup @ less than $0.55/Gb, which ain't half bad. For content other than large media files, rotating a couple separate external devices like this would make for a pretty effective and secure backup strategy. If the data is sensitive, just TrueCrypt ( http://www.truecrypt.org/ ) the drives first thing.
Torpark ( http://torpark.nfshost.com/ ) runs portably, clears all cached data (which is minimal in the first place) on close, and unlike the browser from TFA, it sets up a Tor circuit, giving you at least some chance of keeping the browsing you'd like to be private out of anyone's IP logs (and request/response logs if they're really anal).
Also, when Torpark is running, you can use the virtual proxy it sets up via Socks - e.g., you can set IE to use Torpark as its proxy server, as long as there's a gateway straight out of your LAN.
Torpark leaves your FF and IE history intact; the only inconvenience is that since Torpark *is* built on top of portable Firefox, you'll have to close your other FF instance when firing it up.
More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpark.
http://clusty.com/search?query=QTFairUse6
/files/31103061/QTFairUse6-1.0.zip.html on rapidshare.de, but that would be wrong.
I would also provide a link to
"Who gains anything by increasing the Mozilla marketshare?"
I think you answered yourself there: "webdevelopers [who] keep on spilling time working around annoyances." At some point along the marketshare continuum, webmasters could theoretically forget about *IE* compatibility the way they once ingored Netscape compatibility.
Come to think of it, there's your guerilla marketing strategy: Publish a library of standards-compliant HTML snippets that render properly in FF but not IE. FF-friendly webmasters can make heavy use of such elements, with a cute, Fox-emblazoned button explaining what readers can do if they're using IE and the page isn't displaying properly.
Seriously, developers should be the crux of Mozilla's efforts here. Sell developers on custom client-server functionality on the cheap (as an extension of course), and you have the potential to introduce FF as an application platform to a good number of SMB users. IE can host & run .NET Windows forms controls (but its such a kludge that it's not really a viable solution in most situations), and lots of developers use IE's godawful, memory & bandwidth hogging XMLDataIslands. For reasons as stupid as that, many business users are locked into IE via in-house app dependencies. Perhaps a stupid simple basic RAD editor for XPI apps would be a start; a syntax-aware plugin for Eclipse with a built in test harness / sandboxed virtual gecko runtime would be even better.
Since this is AOL-branded, I suppose it'll basically be stocked with 2.5 million versions of entries from Britney Spears' & Jessica Simpson's discography.
Most of us listen to the radio at least sometimes, and ads have always been a natural part of that. I use Pandora, which I see as basically analogous to a radio station, but with more ability to customize, plus all the ads being visual, so no commercial interruptions to the audio (so far).
Am I that odd for not finding the mere presence of ads all that objectionable? Sure, I'll bail on a service or site if the advertising it carries is intrusive, distracting or uses aggressive & coercive methods to gain my attention, but its presence alone just doesn't set me off that much.
On the other hand, while it represents an important step towards old media adopting fresher business models, the fact remains that the service discussed in TFA is offered by Universal, who was an RIAA label last time I checked. If using the service means generating ad revenue for an RIAA member organization directly, then I cannot in good conscience use the service. The RIAA uses its financial resources to harm US citizens and the US Constitution, after all.
Someone upstream mentioned the Urge service, and its interface looks a lot like Rhapsody's, which felt kind of stiff to me. Besides that, it appears to use DRM. So far, if I want portable music with maximal interoperability, I'll have to continue my "old fashioned" manaul method of ripping CDs to 320kbps MP3s. If the CD is from an RIAA member label, then I'll buy it used. Utopia would be if MP3Tunes.com got their indie artists into heavy rotation on Pandora & I could get Pandora's interface to asterisk those songs when playing. Pandora is my equivalent to radio these days, and I would be *so* much more likely to buy an album if I had a quick visual cue telling me it was an RIAA-free product.
"It seems to me the only people that have problems with DRM are the ones that think everything should be free and the ones who do regularly steal music and software."
Where is this idea coming from? Do you really think that people whose primary motive is to steal music bother to contribute heavily to the fight against DRM? These people are by definition leeches, and as such, they're most likely to be found saying little more than "can u sho me wher b da crack for dis proggie?"
I'm getting mighty sick of seeing people mindlessly equate "anti-DRM" with "wants something for nothing." I spent several paragraphs earlier in this topic on why, as someone who purchases his content, I cannot abide by DRM. Since you seem to be blithely unaware of what possible legitimate reasons someone could have for conscientiously opposing DRM, I respectfully suggest you go back and read that.
You're painting with a pretty broad brush there. How about engaging people's arguments instead of attacking the motives you project onto them?
If I want a song, I'm happy to pay for the CD once. Mind you, that doesn't mean once to play it from my computer, once to play it from my wife's, once to play it at work, once again for my car, and once again for my mobile device - and having that just cover usage in August. I'm not happy that purchased, DRMd content needs to be re-transferred to my mobile device every 48 hours because it expires, and that it requires a connection to the provider to renew the license. I'm not happy that my sister's entire *purchased* music library was lost over a DRM snafu. I'm not happy that quite a bit of music can't be purchased in an unencumbered, interoperable version at all, leaving illegit channels as the only purveyor of tracks in this manner.
If I want a movie, I'm happy to purchase or rent it. I pay for a Netflix subscription in addition to having HBO and Showtime added to my cable subscription. I'm also happy to pay my cable provider extra for the HDTV experience, and I'm happy to pay extra for a Media Center edition of Windows that lets me timeshift my content. Now I'm not happy to be unable to watch HDTV in HTDV through my setup. I'm not happy to have my purchased content artificially degraded down to S-Video quality when all the equipment is natively capable of recording the original HDTV stream and delivering it to my screen. I'm not happy that with many of my favorite programs, there is no way to purchase a recording at HD resolutions (or the means to make one legitimately), but there are means to acquire it illegitimately in HDTV with the commercials already stripped out. I'm also not happy to be artificially restricted from archiving certain programs to a video DVD from the Media Center interface, when a normal DVD recorder/player or any other software recorder would allow it; I'm not happy to have Media Center's TV guide data include flags that add artificial restrictions onto my already distorted copy of content I've rightfully purchased.
I'm also not happy to be forced to watch pre-show messages when viewing a DVD I've purchased on a player I've purchased.
Lastly, I'm *extremely* unhappy that I cannot legally discuss the technical details of programmatic fixes that may exist for some of the above conundrums. This isn't a fair use issue, it's a first ammendment issue.
At the end of the day, I'm happy to pay the asking price for the media I consume, and I'm one of the ones complaining the loudest about DRM. The discussion certainly is not all about free songs.
Glad you took the time to post your experience with this. Hope you also take the time to help non-techies understand what happened to you. I'm getting sick of being the tech support guy for acquaintances whose hassles are the result of uninformed purchasing decisions like using a DRM infested online store to acquire their entire music library.
When they work perfectly, DRM schemes prevent you from doing many things with your media. When they don't work perfectly, they are infinitely more likely to erroneously prevent access than to erroneously grant it. The crime of it all is that purveyors of crippled content take advantage of gullible consumers by creating an illusion of simplicity, ease and permanence. Only when they try to use the content as they normally would do these folks find out that what they actually got was an ultra-complicated rental process that takes their content with it when they cancel.
I can see your point, but "just dumb" is a little harsh. The word "right" can work in the examples you bring up, but it lacks some precision compared to, say, "license" or "privilege." Of course, I was not speaking to those subclasses or special cases of a Right proper in my previous comment.
Not sure why your comment was modded funny; seems spot on to me. "Insightful with a humorous flourish" would be more apropos if you asked me.
Anyway, back on topic... while it's not the most versatile visual layout in the world, it sure is the first time in a long time that I've seen a truly fresh, different, interesting and creative visual style like this. All the better that they built it without any annoying gizmos. Mui bueno, thanks for pointing it out.
Maybe they're not competing directly with anything; maybe they're carving out a new space before anyone else does. Face it, the hosted app space is a pretty nascent market as far as large-scale use goes. GMail isn't really directly analogous to any other web-based mail, and in some ways it could legitimately be thought of as its own breed of online app. Windows Live is pretty rushed, pretty rough and not extraordinarily useful, and MS is of course already working the angles on how to monetize it.
I use both Excel and Google Spreadsheets, and I use them for different things. I see both of those solutions being on my most valued tool list for some time. Google seems to approach from the "make it useful first" direction, rather than trying to feature match some competing offering or trying to build the application around the monetization approach. They don't need to build an "Office Killer" or "OOo Killer" for this to be a monster success.
Wow, that's a pretty fringe conception of "rights" there. But sure, I'll cop to being pretty naïve as you implied -- or at least, I'll admit that I share the naïveté of the school of thought that produced: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."
I don't know about Canada, but in the US, I can buy CD-Rs dirt cheap (i.e., at similar prices to those you mention), but I can only buy *CD-R Music* discs at a significantly higher price. Only the latter will work in my rack CD recorder (made by Yamaha). The difference in price goes mostly to the RIAA.
The only difference between the discs is a simple flag specifying the type. It is allegedly illegal to sell an audio CD recorder (non-computer peripheral) here that allows recording onto a non-taxed disc.
If it is currently legal in Canada to deal in such equipment, please let me know, because I would love to be able to use cheaper spindles of CD-Rs for those audio recordings that I do not make through my computer. What's more, I would love to keep whatever money possible out of the hands of the RIAA, and as much as it shocks and dismays me to find myself saying this, I am willing to break United States law if it means exercising my fair use rights while reducing their influx of cash. Not long ago I would not have gone that far, but I'm afraid the time for mealy-mouthed opposition to these crimelords is long past.
"You pay in order to have the right"
That said it all right there. A Purchased Right is an oxymoron.
Uhm, you do realize that the blank media tax would eseentially fund organizations that spend every waking moment finding ways to keep you from being left alone to do what you want with your media, don't you?
Very true, and in fact I've set up a media PC with optical & S/PDIF audio IO for just those reasons. Given that, I don't find much use for the Yamaha's recording capability anymore, but that fact pisses me off more than it soothes me. I mean, I naïvely spent several hundred dollars on a piece of equipment on the basis that it was capable of digital recording. Unfortunately, I bought it quite a few years ago, before I had any real awareness of DRM issues, or the wherewithall to grill the salesperson about such.
What this leaves me with is an artificially handicapped machine. I own the equipment, and I happen to own a majority of the incoming signals that I wanted to use it to record. Nevertheless, I have the permission to record audio digitally only if I pay the RIAA a commission for such privilege. Now if the incoming signal is from my own band, does the RIAA forward that commission to me or my band mates? Hardly. Matter of fact, as an independent recording artist, I cannot even find out where to register for a share of the commision.
Call me militant, but the way I see it, the RIAA owes me the CD-R commission for whatever number of discs have been purchased to record my band's material onto. Failing that, they owe me the manufacturing blueprints to make discs for doing same without filtering currency through their hands. Failing both of those, then their CD-R scheme amounts to extortion and/or price fixing, and should be treated as such by the courts.
Yep, I can digitize FLACs and 320kbps MP3s all day long on my PC, but I'd also like to be able to use my rack equipment exactly as it says I can on the box, and the box doesn't say anything about paying a commission to the RIAA. Until then, I suppose I have enough past-due receivables on the RIAA account ledger to share quite a few MP3s at $750 a pop.
I have a CD recorder / player (Yamaha) in my component stereo system, and it will only record on the "CDR Music" type discs that carry the extra fee. Of course, there is no way around this fee if I am recording, e.g., a session of my own band's rehearsal from an old cassette tape or whatnot. I've also not yet heard of any way to see the cashflow from the extra fee, in order to verify that it is indeed making it to the artists for which it was levied in the first place.
Lastly, if the manufacture of these discs ever ceases, I am stuck with a play-only unit in my stereo rack. Nice, eh?
Sure hope somebody reverse engineers these and starts manufacturing them independently one of these days. I'd actually pay *more* for a product if a portion of its cost supported anti-DRM organizations.
If it's really impossible to be reasonably certain that something is harmless, we'll all just have to travel in carrier-provided clear plastic "air travel suits" with no carry on baggage. Checked baggage will fly in tandem but in a separate craft. The FAA will have to maintain a pharmacy from which passengers can register for in-flight meds if they absolutely cannot do without something for the duration of a flight.
Or you could just drive there.
I scanned all the "beneath current threshold" posts here 'cause I knew one of them would make this point. Thanks Doc.
What's more, I think the "pick better partners" quip skirts the issue altogether (no pun intended). Perhaps it's possible to have sexual relations only with people you know long enough, well enough & intimately enough to be fairly confident about about their future state of mind. In fact, that's a commendable way to conduct oneself. However, in this country it's not illegal to be a promiscuous fornicator with extraordinarily poor judgement; the original poster was simply pointing out that this very thing has the potential to land you in jail, and he's right. There's just no easy answer to that situation, personal responsibility included.
Here's what happened: Adoption of previous editions of Office have been slowed by, among other things, objections over the cluttered and confusing interface. Microsoft tried in their own (perhaps misguided) way to improve that over the years, and in doing so, they added bars and panes ad infinitum - a taskbar, a task pane, a help pane, new context menus, etc. - without much fanfare.
Since there was no real set of organizing principles for the evolution of the Office interface, these new toolspaces naturally filled up in a hurry as different internal groups poured their junk into them. This wasn't helping to reduce the clutter any, so they simultaneously tried making the main application menu context-sensitive, further confusing experienced users.
All these parallel but disconnected efforts tended to defeat each other more than anything, so this time around, MS decided to try something different: Take about 200 different interface ideas, test them with focus groups, and may the best one win. After that, make all the UI developers retrofit their stuff into a coordinated workflow based on the new winner, which is where they are today.
Basically, this is a first attempt at escaping the chains of their poor UI legacy, and perhaps a risky one at that. They estimate that only power users will be comfortable picking the new UI up on their own. For average users, they expect that some guided training will be necessary - all combined, probably just shy of a day's worth.
Personally, I think they'd have been better off monitoring clicks & keystrokes of a *vast* test group using previous office editions, after which they could form a core set of the most important interaction elements based on the 20% or so most used actions. Also, it didn't help that keyboard shortcuts were never standardized across the Office suite; power users who expected e.g. Ctrl+Tab to do the same thing in Word as in Excel were quickly alienated, and once alienated, it's not easy to win a user back.
Dmn... hit "submit" instead of "preview." First time I did that.
-----------
Maybe some stupid obvious patents could be prevented like this: Pick a friendly noble license everyone's likely to be comfortable with (Creative Commons, GPL, or whatever). Set up a site that allow two kinds of community contributions under that license: (1) Descriptions of individual algorithms in any of a number of languages (perhaps pseudocode among them), (2) Descriptions of possible systems that can be derived from combinations and permutations of algorithms in the catalog.
The more robust the catalog becomes, the more likely it is that some system in the catalog will constitute evidence of prior art (or simultaneous / parallel art) in a future patent case. To get a robust system, it needs to be useful to programmers, i.e. searchable, easy to cobble together working code modules on the fly by wiring inputs & outputs together, etc. Just feed (bandwidth allocation algorithm 354) with the output of (peer behavior composite scoring system 12(peer action evaluation loop 18)).
This could actually be a worthwhile contribution to the community aside from its possible effects on private intellectual property accumulation. What "OWL" sought (seeks?) to be for classes, properties and relations, an endeavor like this could be for software systems.
Here's what we need if we want to preempt as many stupid obvious patents: Pick a friendly noble license everyone's most likely to agree on (Creative Commons, GPL, or whatever). Set up a site that allow two kinds of submissions: (1) Individual algorithms in a number of languages (and perhaps in pseudocode), (2)
If Weird Al were Luke Skywalker, then the RIAA would be the Empire and Sony would be the Emperor. Yes, the analogy's riddled with flaws, but you get the jist of it, right?
Before the DRM wars, Weird Al was one of about 4 artists whose every album I would purchase. The Sony relationship really pisses me off; it's getting harder and harder to avoid funding them these days. Someone else mentioned downloading songs & sending money directly to the artists -- an odd option, but perhaps worth considering. I like my MP3s at 320kbps though, so more likely I'll wait 'til I can find the album used, but still send Al at least the price of the CD.
Weird Al is an incredibly talented artist, and his attention to detail has gotten keener and keener over the years. Parodies and impressions get so much more punch when the artist catches some subtle detail of the original that you missed, then amplifies or caricatures it as a way of pointing it out to you. Yankovic is a master at this, so Poodle Hats off to him for his lifetime accomplishements in general, and for his spirit with stuff like DDTS in particular.
eom