I know. I am just trying to figure out how the picture will look. If a DVD is 720x480 and his plasma does 852x480, than there is no scaling at all. It would distort the image if it did horizontal scaling without vertical scaling. So I was just wondering if he has to watch DVD's with black bars on the sides to make up for the difference between 852x480 (his plasma) and 720x480 (DVD).
852x480? With no scaling, wouldn't you always have black bars on the side? If so, what is the point of having the Plasma display at 852 instead of 750? What content would actually fit in that weird 852x480 resolution?
For one, Australia has pretty damned close to 100% literacy. I've seen what this means, and it's not literacy as in read shakespeare fluently, but from what I've seen of else-where it still translates into a population massively more informed than (for example) the US.
Australia has a 99.9% literacy rate while the USA has a 97.0% literacy rate. I would not call that "massively more informed". A lot of those that are counted as being illiterate in the USA are immigrants from Mexico. Mexico has a literacy rate of only 90.3%. Many of the immigrants that come to the USA do not speak, read or write English. It is very, very, very rare to find someone that was born and raised in the USA that does not know how to read and write at a basic level.
Man, a lot of people come down on the USA, however I don't think anything in the USA approaches big-brother-ness like what is going on in the UK.
Why aren't the people of the UK fighting back? To me this crosses the line for what a a government should be allowed to do. Where is the line drawn on what is "anti-social"? Who gets to draw the "anti-social" line? Is kissing your loved one in public "anti-social"? If not now, what is stopping the government from continually adding more and more things to what is "anti-social"?
Was Orwell a profit or did he just get real lucky with his 1984 story? I find the similarities of 1984 and things that "modern" governments are trying to do to be amazing.
Am I the only one that thought the screen shots looked ugly? The wallpaper looks nice, but uhhh... that has nothing to do with the desktop. I think Gnome and KDE look way better than anything I seen in those screen shots. If I need a light weight desktop, I would use XFCE or fluxbox. However, all my systems are modern enough to handle Gnome so I really don't see any point in running a "light weight" desktop. Gnome 2.14 made nice speed improvements and now Gnome 2.16 is out with some more memory and speed improvements among other nice enhancements. To each his own, I guess.
Yeah, and just Google for how many songs are downloaded each month on p2p. That 1 billion+ looks like chump change in comparison. Compare any 12 month period of iTunes (and other DRM-encrusted downloads) to the same 12 moths of p2p downloads. The game is not even close. The *majority* of the technically savvy market have said no to DRM and it is evident every day by the millions of downloads on p2p. Sadly it is the non-technically savvy that get the short end of the stick and get stuck with DRM limitations.
Exactly what DRM is being circumvented? It is *Apple's* iTunes that does the removal of the DRM and then knowingly stores an unencrypted, non-DRM version of that paid-for work in memory. At that point no circumvention is needed. All you have to do is exercise your fair-use rights to make a backup of the legally obtained work. This tool has no ability to circumvent DRM. Period.
Not only that, it is what every program does when you do "File -> Save As".
I wish I were a millionaire to try to fight something like this out in court. I think it would have a good chance of standing up. The DMCA prevents circumvention of copy protection mechanism. However, this technique doesn't do any circumvention at all. It just makes a copy of an unprotected work you paid for. Technically it is no different then having an unprotected work on your computer and doing CTRL+c CTRL+v to make a copy.
I think you are on the wrong track. 1.5 Billion sounds like a lot. And it is a nice number of song downloads for Apple. However, compare that 1.5 billion _total_ downloads to the number of song downloads that happen on p2p every month. Just Google for it an you should find tons of numbers. I found one claim on The Register that say for every one DRM-encrusted download there are 16 DRM-Free downloads on p2p! Also, what about the DRM-Free legal downloads? I would like to know those numbers.
I think you are _way_ off when you said "It's a VERY tiny group of people who shy away from DRM-encrusted merchandise". No, I think it is a VERY tiny group that "accept" DRM-encrusted merchandise. I bet most of the people that just "accept" DRM-encrusted merchandise are not very technical with computers. I would like to see some numbers comparing the "acceptance" of DRM-encrusted merchandise from technically-savvy people vs. non-technically-savvy people.
Your an idiot. No wonder you posted as an AC. Copyright infringement doesn't even come close to *murder*, you moron.
There is nothing wrong with stripping out crappy DRM. It is your copy of the content. Do what you want with it. As long as the media companies continue to fight their customers and try to control what their legitimate customers can do, people will fight back. And I say long live the revolution:-)
However, I do NOT agree with you that it's "Fair Use". "Fair Use" applies to the fair use of copyrighted material that you *already* obtained legitimately, so how can the downloader claim "Fair Use"? I see no way a downloader can claim "Fair Use" regarding something he hasn't yet obtained. So I don't see downloading copyrighted broadcasts as "Fair Use"; I just don't think of it as "bad" in a practical sense.
That makes no sense to me. Copyright doesn't restrict *obtaining* it restricts _distributing_.
Would you have a problem with the me going to a store and buying a DVD and then lending it to a friend? I believe most people would claim that is Fair-Use. Would you have a problem with a friend recording a TV show on his DVR and then lending me a copy to watch? I believe most people would claim that is Fair-Use. Now just extend it one step further. Someone records a TV show that aired on tv and puts it on the web for people who missed the episode. How is it any different if I get a copy of the TV show from someone I do not know vs. getting the copy myself or from a friend? What if the copy on the internet left in the commercials? Would that make it OK?
The whole commercial argument to me is just FUD. At home I can (and almost always do) change the channels during commercials or I can get up and get a drink, etc. I pay for TV via my overpriced cable bill. I do watch some commercial. Some commercial are well done IMO. However most are just pure smut that tries to sell every product with sex. I have a wife and three small children. Don't put smut in your commercials and expect me to watch them. I can selectively pick the TV shows my family and I watch, however I have no control over what commercials come on. My only option is to change the channel during commercials.
I personally don't see anything wrong with downloading a TV show that aired on TV. If the show aired on pay-per-view then maybe that should not be available online. Maybe people who copy and upload public TV shows should just leave the commercials in?
The media companies want a pay per view/listen world. Every time you hear a song, you pay. Every time you view a movie/TV show you pay. Forget about being able to buy your favorite Star Wars movie and watch it several times. You will need to pay for each viewing. The media companies continue to dump millions into the coffers of our corrupted politicians. I wouldn't be surprised to see copyright law head this way over the next 10 years. Copyright has become too one-sided and is no longer a balanced deal between the people and the copyright owner. Until copyright is fair again, I couldn't care less about the media companies and their crying over "pirates".
I recently seen a commercial from the media companies about "piracy". They showed the average-Joe media workers, the costume makers, set builders, etc. All of them were saying things like "piracy" takes away our health benefits and food from our families. What a load of bull. The real "pirates" are the middle men execs of the media companies who take the largest part of profits while contributing nothing to the creation process. Does anyone really believe that if _all_ copyright infringement stopped for the next year, and *profits* doubled, that the average-Joe worker in the media industry would see any of those extra profits? Nope. It would go to a small percentage at the "top". The best thing that could happen to the media industry is its collapse. Maybe then it would be rebuilt around small independent companies competing to make the best media content instead of a few big corps controlling it all.
Or maybe just keep apologizing for MS? Even if this patch is somehow more complex, why not announce it? Why not throw some more brains and eyeballs at it? It would be a really big coincidence if the DRM patch was "just easier to write". I somehow doubt that. And looking at the history of Microsoft over the past decade, I wouldn't bet on the fact that this patch is being pushed to get finished just as hard as the DRM patch was pushed. Nope, this is just another example of Microsoft's priorities. Big media companies and their licensing fees are more important for MS. Microsoft wants their DRM crud to be used as the #1 DRM "solution". So MS will bend over backwards for the industries that want DRM....until they have the market that is. Then it will be another low priority task on the list of things to do. Microsoft, bleh.
Still, in 2006, this is where we stand: Apple's hardware runs Windows, and does so quite well.
Why does he, and many Mac fans, refer to it as "Apple's hardware"? Apple doesn't make the hardware. Apple just buys commodity PC hardware. I think it is time for all the Mac-Intel owners out there to come to the understanding that they are now just regular old PC USERS! They use commodity PC's just like the rest of us:-)
Re:New language does not equal better programmers
on
IronPython 1.0 is Born
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· Score: 1
I understand your point and do agree with you that I shouldn't blame the technology, but the user. I don't think it is the fault of a gun, but of the gun owner. However, my major beef with VB is that it lowered the bar to entry in the programming field to a level I think is too low. Sure, one can be a good programmer and code good algorithms in VB. However, over the last 9 years that I have been a professional programmer, I have found that to be the exception not the rule.
I guess I think that if all of the beginner level programming languages were removed, then the sub-par programmers would either improve their skill-set or leave the field. Is that is correct thinking? I do not know.
Re:New language does not equal better programmers
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IronPython 1.0 is Born
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· Score: 1
How would forcing your poor programmers to switch languages make them better programmers?
It is called training. In my experience, the more languages a programmer knows, the better they become. I first learned C. Then I learned C++ and became a better all around programmer. I then learned PHP, Java, and C#. Each new language required me to learn new techniques and made me a better programmer. VB is/was such a simple language it didn't really require much learning and it certainly didn't require much knowledge about programming techniques and algorithms. These legions of VB-only "programmers" are among the worst programmers I have ever had to work with. Requiring them to get training in a new language with new programming techniques and algorithms will make them better. There is also the possibility that a lot of those vb-only "programmers" will not have the aptitude to learn new languages and techniques, thus weeding out the bad apples.
The VB-only phenomenon is very similar to the COBOL phenomenon IMO. COBOL was designed to be very English-like and make it easy for business people to do simple programming tasks. However, business managers, hired a bunch of business people to become "programmers" and let them loose to write millions of lines of really bad code (I had to do some COBOL porting back in the day). It was the same situation a few years ago with VB5 and VB6. MS pushed it as a simple RAD tool that will give you great "ROI" and other business buzz words. The business managers went and looked for these business people with no real programming abilities, all they needed to have on their resumes was some type of VB experience with some simple SQL and they got a decent paying job. When.Net came around MS designed a decent language, C#, to work best with.Net and the new methods of.Net. MS could have killed off VB, however the legions of VB-only people cried what about us, so MS morphed a simple beginners language into a mess that is now VB.Net.
I recently was working on a medium-sized C#/.Net app. A new feature was asked for, however we didn't have the time to get to it for the first release. So some business manager went and hired some guy who had.Net on his resume. He was one of those VB-only guys and the parts he made were in VB.Net while 99.999% of everything was in C#. To the business managers this is no big deal because it makes their hiring easier. They just need to look for MS approved buzz words like.Net, ASP.Net and SQL. However, this situation stinks for a programming team who all hate VB. No one wants to have to fix and maintain the small VB.Net crap. I hate VB/VB.Net, it feels like I am working with some beginners language made for grade school kids. I have actually been spending my launch times slowly porting any VB.Net crap to C#, just to get rid of it.
So someone should have to pay extra money to run XP on their Macs just to download and watch a DRM-encrusted movie? Why bother when you can have the movie shipped to you and rip the DVD yourself and strip the stupid commercials? Oh, and why would someone want to taint a nice Mac with MS Windows?
And if you want to "stick it to the man", just use a service like Netflix and when you get the movies just rip a copy for your self before you send it back:-)
Mac OS X users? This content will not run on Mac OS X. It won't even run on Win2k. Read the system requirements....
Amazon Unbox System Requirements
Minimum System Requirements
OPERATING SYSTEM: The Amazon Unbox video player application is only compatible with Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition SP2, or Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Update Rollup 2. The Amazon Unbox video player is not compatible with Apple/Macintosh operating systems.
COMPUTER HARDWARE: A PC with a 1.5-gigahertz (GHz) processor or faster, at least 512MB of memory, and a DirectX 9.0 complaint Video (64 MB Memory) and Sound Card.
INTERNET CONNECTION: Broadband internet connection capable of 800 kbps sustained transfer speeds.
Recommended System Specifications
COMPUTER HARDWARE: A PC with a 2.4-gigahertz (GHz) processor or faster, at least 1024MB of memory, and a DirectX 9.0 compliant Video (128 MB Memory) and a Multi Channel 5.1 Capable Sound Card.
INTERNET CONNECTION: Broadband internet connection capable of 1.5+ mbps of sustained transfer speeds.
Not to sound like a parrot, but I have to say: "same here". $10 bucks for a DRM-encrusted-WinXP-Only video? No thanks. And as one of the GP posts points out, you can view this on two computers, but must download it separately for each computer. What crap. Is MS-DRM really that limited?
It certainly gives the developer more freedom than GPL.
The GPL is not about giving developers freedom, or letting people see the source code. The GPL is about granting rights above what standard copyright allows to users of the software, whether those users are developers or not.
Please stop this Sun fanboy-ism. Sun has gone out of their way to make life miserable for open source platforms, and Sun's Java implementations for Linux are stil much worse than their implementations for Windows. I think that barely counts as cross-platform,
Sorry but I am not a Sun fanboy. I do 99.99% of my development at work with C# in Visual Studio 2005. How much testing have you done with Sun's Linux Java version? Hmmm? Don't make up crap to try to make a point. Sun's Java runs great on Linux and many of the server apps we run have better overall performance on a Linux box vs an MS windows box, especially after you add in slower drive performance due to an on-access virus scanner and other things needed to lock down an MS Windows server. Also, Sun's Java is not the only Java in town. IBM has a good JVM that works great on MS Windows and Linux and Bea has JRockit which is optimized for Intel on Windows and Linux.
not that most developers even give a damn about cross-platform.
Huh? So you have talked to "most" developers to see what they care about? I somehow doubt that. I see Open Source growing very well on Linux, MS Windows and Mac OS X. I bet a goal of many of those projects are to be cross-platform.
But you're wrong on your facts anyway: IronPython is not Microsoft-only, it runs on Mono and that is the intent of the developers.
Yes, it currently runs on Mono until the next IronPython change, Mono get tweaked, IronPython change, lather-rinse-repeat. Most of Microsoft's.Net is not an ECMA spec, so IronPython, which is sponsored by Microsoft, is not cross-platform just because it currently runs in mono. Write an IronPython GUI app with Microsoft's non-ECMA Winforms and see how well it does on non-MS platforms.
Surely this is a corporate policy problem and not a technology problem
I agree 100%. I think it is a good thing that there are multiple languages with.Net. However, I have ran into to many places that think it is a plus to have people working in different languages on a project. I hear it touted as a plus for.Net over Java. IMO, the best projects have been projects where all developers worked in one language (not counting any odd scripting glue). This way if one dev is out, leaves or whatever, the project can continue with minimal interruptions. A manager where I work hired a consultant to work on a small web app that no one had time to start. The guy was VB-only and did the project in VB.Net because he didn't "know" C#. Now no one wants to maintain/enhance that project because no one wants to be stuck back in the VB world. Yes it is a corporate policy issues. However PHB's buy into to the buzz of.Net and being able to many different development languages to "increase ROI, and leverage existing skill sets". Bleh.
How does adding a port of Python to.NET make Python "MS-Only." Development continues on at least three other Python impementations for different runtimes. It's like saying that the existence of Visual C++ makes C++ MS-Only. It increases, not decreases the scope of Python.
Good point. I initially did a quick read of the site and thought it was worse than it is. However, once cannot expect to write something in IronPython and have it run in regular (CPython). Most of the other Python forks/implementations just tweak Python to make it faster or work better for certain things. So they still run your regular Python code. If you write some IronPython stuff with with.Net using WinForms, well you just killed one of the best features of Python, cross-platform execution.
Would you please stop talking out of your ass? IronPython does not need to be "ported" to Mono. Mono adheres to the ECMA CLR spec. IronPython adheres to the ECMA CLR spec. Any divergence is a bug. Most beta versions of IronPython do run on most beta versions of Mono and any incompatibility between the two in the final release versions will be considered a bug by one of the parties involved.
And your point? All of Microsoft's.Net platform is not part of an ECMA spec. In fact, the most important parts of it, the framework, are not an ECMA spec. So just because Mono and IronPython adhere to the ECMA CLR spec doesn't mean they will work. IronPython was paid for by MS so if MS has anything put in IronPython that is MS-Only, like Winforms, etc. then IronPython has basically become MS-Only.
I like C# and the.Net platform. I would really like to see it be a great cross-platform dev environment. However with MS it looks like it will always just be one MS-only extension after another. Just enough to make most.Net code to be MS-Only. Things like this is what makes me keep Java around. Otherwise I would have dropped Java for C#. At least with Java I know that there is the core standard Java framework that runs on multiple platforms thansk to Sun.
Furthermore, the IronPython license is very liberal.
I just prefer to use an Open Source or Free software license. I can see MS not wanting to go with a GPL license, however MS could have at lease picked an OSI approved license or have submitted their license to OSI.
"I'm not really sure it's fair to compare VB.NET to something like this:..."
OK, it is not as pull-your-hair-out verbose as COBOL, however it is far to verbose for my liking. Too many keywords that don't serve any purpose. Here is method declaration:
Public Function Add(Num1 as integer,Num2 as integer) As Integer
return Num1 + Num2 End Function
Why the need for the function keyword? It doesn't do anything, if a programmer cannot look at a method declaration and tell that it is a method declaration, well, they shouldn't be programming IMO. I hate the As keyword. It is just stupid and serves no purpose, the same goes with End keywords. VB.Net is just too verbose to me and feels like a Fisher Price language. Give me a language like C, C++, Java, PHP, C# any day. Here is the same method in C#.
Public int Add(int Num1, int Num2) {
return Num1 + Num2; }
No fluff, less typing and no hand-holding. If someone cannot learn to understand the above, they should look for a job in a field other than programming IMO.;-)
So I really wouldn't worry about the "shared source" write-up. It's an unusual choice of license, but it is considered Free Software and Open Source
Huh? No it is not. The "Shared" source license is not the CPL license, if it were, it would be called... the CPL license! Read the FAQ at the bottome of the license page for IronPython.
Q: Is this license OSI compliant?
A: This license has not been submitted to OSI, but it allows developers to take full
advantage of a dynamic language on the CLR and to have the freedom to distribute
their works for the benefit of the community at large. The license is half of
a page long and very straight forward. We believe it stands up to what developers
demand of an "open" license.
So why not submit it to OSI to get an official approval as an Open Source license? I am guessing some of the stuff in there about Microsoft and patents might not get through OSI approval.
We believe it stands up to what developers demand of an "open" license
eh? I would think that the majority of developers want something more GPL-like since 75%+ of all open source software uses a GPL license.
I actually find the multi-language of of the CLR to be a negative. I work at a fortune 500 and most of us use C# and/or Java. There are a few groups of "programmers" that have always been VB-only/ASP-Only "programmers". They have really no understanding of programming maintainable code. The majority of the junk they churn out is MS-Only/IE-Only crud. The bad part is if one of us programmers ever have to maintain the crappy VB.Net code. C# is a pretty nice language that flows well with.Net and is not overly verbose. VB.Net is the exact opposite, one might as well code in COBOL.Net. It really stinks to have the majority of a code-base in C# and then have some VB.Net assemblies thrown at you that you that you later have to maintain. IMO, it really kills productivity to have to switch to VB.Net from C# for a few bits of a project. To me it seems as if no real design went into VB.Net in contrast to C# which seems like a lot of thought went into how to do things and how not to do things.
I really wish MS just let VB die with VB 6, it would have been for the best. The VB 6 fans could have continued with VB 6 until they learned a real programming language and real programming techniques.
I don't see IronPython being adopted by the non-programmers though.
I agree. I think Python is a good language and most importantly it is cross-platform. Why would someone want to kill Python by making it MS-Only? As far as getting this IronPython on Mono, I don't see it happening. I use Mono and it is pretty nice. Mono has.Net 1.1 complete and.Net 2.0 is pretty much there now too. I just don't see IronPython ever getting enough development behind it to get a port to Mono, especially with a "shared" source license.
Even though the MS-PR-machine says.Net is cross-platform, it really is not. MS only released a C# compiler for FreeBSD. The compiler is not a big deal. The thing that makes.Net, just like Java, is the extensive framework. MS made an MS-Only framework. It is only because of the hard work of the Mono team that we can enjoy C#/.Net/ASP.Net/ADO.Net/etc on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and even MS Windows. Mono is cross-platform, Microsoft.Net is not. When Sun did Java, they put the effort in to make the most important part, the framework, cross-platform. I wish MS did the same.
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I know. I am just trying to figure out how the picture will look. If a DVD is 720x480 and his plasma does 852x480, than there is no scaling at all. It would distort the image if it did horizontal scaling without vertical scaling. So I was just wondering if he has to watch DVD's with black bars on the sides to make up for the difference between 852x480 (his plasma) and 720x480 (DVD).
852x480? With no scaling, wouldn't you always have black bars on the side? If so, what is the point of having the Plasma display at 852 instead of 750? What content would actually fit in that weird 852x480 resolution?
Australia has a 99.9% literacy rate while the USA has a 97.0% literacy rate. I would not call that "massively more informed". A lot of those that are counted as being illiterate in the USA are immigrants from Mexico. Mexico has a literacy rate of only 90.3%. Many of the immigrants that come to the USA do not speak, read or write English. It is very, very, very rare to find someone that was born and raised in the USA that does not know how to read and write at a basic level.
Man, a lot of people come down on the USA, however I don't think anything in the USA approaches big-brother-ness like what is going on in the UK.
Why aren't the people of the UK fighting back? To me this crosses the line for what a a government should be allowed to do. Where is the line drawn on what is "anti-social"? Who gets to draw the "anti-social" line? Is kissing your loved one in public "anti-social"? If not now, what is stopping the government from continually adding more and more things to what is "anti-social"?
Was Orwell a profit or did he just get real lucky with his 1984 story? I find the similarities of 1984 and things that "modern" governments are trying to do to be amazing.
UGLY!
Am I the only one that thought the screen shots looked ugly? The wallpaper looks nice, but uhhh... that has nothing to do with the desktop. I think Gnome and KDE look way better than anything I seen in those screen shots. If I need a light weight desktop, I would use XFCE or fluxbox. However, all my systems are modern enough to handle Gnome so I really don't see any point in running a "light weight" desktop. Gnome 2.14 made nice speed improvements and now Gnome 2.16 is out with some more memory and speed improvements among other nice enhancements. To each his own, I guess.
Yeah, and just Google for how many songs are downloaded each month on p2p. That 1 billion+ looks like chump change in comparison. Compare any 12 month period of iTunes (and other DRM-encrusted downloads) to the same 12 moths of p2p downloads. The game is not even close. The *majority* of the technically savvy market have said no to DRM and it is evident every day by the millions of downloads on p2p. Sadly it is the non-technically savvy that get the short end of the stick and get stuck with DRM limitations.
Exactly what DRM is being circumvented? It is *Apple's* iTunes that does the removal of the DRM and then knowingly stores an unencrypted, non-DRM version of that paid-for work in memory. At that point no circumvention is needed. All you have to do is exercise your fair-use rights to make a backup of the legally obtained work. This tool has no ability to circumvent DRM. Period.
Not only that, it is what every program does when you do "File -> Save As".
I wish I were a millionaire to try to fight something like this out in court. I think it would have a good chance of standing up. The DMCA prevents circumvention of copy protection mechanism. However, this technique doesn't do any circumvention at all. It just makes a copy of an unprotected work you paid for. Technically it is no different then having an unprotected work on your computer and doing CTRL+c CTRL+v to make a copy.
I think you are on the wrong track. 1.5 Billion sounds like a lot. And it is a nice number of song downloads for Apple. However, compare that 1.5 billion _total_ downloads to the number of song downloads that happen on p2p every month. Just Google for it an you should find tons of numbers. I found one claim on The Register that say for every one DRM-encrusted download there are 16 DRM-Free downloads on p2p! Also, what about the DRM-Free legal downloads? I would like to know those numbers.
I think you are _way_ off when you said "It's a VERY tiny group of people who shy away from DRM-encrusted merchandise". No, I think it is a VERY tiny group that "accept" DRM-encrusted merchandise. I bet most of the people that just "accept" DRM-encrusted merchandise are not very technical with computers. I would like to see some numbers comparing the "acceptance" of DRM-encrusted merchandise from technically-savvy people vs. non-technically-savvy people.
Your an idiot. No wonder you posted as an AC. Copyright infringement doesn't even come close to *murder*, you moron.
:-)
There is nothing wrong with stripping out crappy DRM. It is your copy of the content. Do what you want with it. As long as the media companies continue to fight their customers and try to control what their legitimate customers can do, people will fight back. And I say long live the revolution
Would you have a problem with the me going to a store and buying a DVD and then lending it to a friend? I believe most people would claim that is Fair-Use. Would you have a problem with a friend recording a TV show on his DVR and then lending me a copy to watch? I believe most people would claim that is Fair-Use. Now just extend it one step further. Someone records a TV show that aired on tv and puts it on the web for people who missed the episode. How is it any different if I get a copy of the TV show from someone I do not know vs. getting the copy myself or from a friend? What if the copy on the internet left in the commercials? Would that make it OK?
The whole commercial argument to me is just FUD. At home I can (and almost always do) change the channels during commercials or I can get up and get a drink, etc. I pay for TV via my overpriced cable bill. I do watch some commercial. Some commercial are well done IMO. However most are just pure smut that tries to sell every product with sex. I have a wife and three small children. Don't put smut in your commercials and expect me to watch them. I can selectively pick the TV shows my family and I watch, however I have no control over what commercials come on. My only option is to change the channel during commercials.
I personally don't see anything wrong with downloading a TV show that aired on TV. If the show aired on pay-per-view then maybe that should not be available online. Maybe people who copy and upload public TV shows should just leave the commercials in?
The media companies want a pay per view/listen world. Every time you hear a song, you pay. Every time you view a movie/TV show you pay. Forget about being able to buy your favorite Star Wars movie and watch it several times. You will need to pay for each viewing. The media companies continue to dump millions into the coffers of our corrupted politicians. I wouldn't be surprised to see copyright law head this way over the next 10 years. Copyright has become too one-sided and is no longer a balanced deal between the people and the copyright owner. Until copyright is fair again, I couldn't care less about the media companies and their crying over "pirates".
I recently seen a commercial from the media companies about "piracy". They showed the average-Joe media workers, the costume makers, set builders, etc. All of them were saying things like "piracy" takes away our health benefits and food from our families. What a load of bull. The real "pirates" are the middle men execs of the media companies who take the largest part of profits while contributing nothing to the creation process. Does anyone really believe that if _all_ copyright infringement stopped for the next year, and *profits* doubled, that the average-Joe worker in the media industry would see any of those extra profits? Nope. It would go to a small percentage at the "top". The best thing that could happen to the media industry is its collapse. Maybe then it would be rebuilt around small independent companies competing to make the best media content instead of a few big corps controlling it all.
Or maybe just keep apologizing for MS? Even if this patch is somehow more complex, why not announce it? Why not throw some more brains and eyeballs at it? It would be a really big coincidence if the DRM patch was "just easier to write". I somehow doubt that. And looking at the history of Microsoft over the past decade, I wouldn't bet on the fact that this patch is being pushed to get finished just as hard as the DRM patch was pushed. Nope, this is just another example of Microsoft's priorities. Big media companies and their licensing fees are more important for MS. Microsoft wants their DRM crud to be used as the #1 DRM "solution". So MS will bend over backwards for the industries that want DRM....until they have the market that is. Then it will be another low priority task on the list of things to do. Microsoft, bleh.
I understand your point and do agree with you that I shouldn't blame the technology, but the user. I don't think it is the fault of a gun, but of the gun owner. However, my major beef with VB is that it lowered the bar to entry in the programming field to a level I think is too low. Sure, one can be a good programmer and code good algorithms in VB. However, over the last 9 years that I have been a professional programmer, I have found that to be the exception not the rule.
I guess I think that if all of the beginner level programming languages were removed, then the sub-par programmers would either improve their skill-set or leave the field. Is that is correct thinking? I do not know.
The VB-only phenomenon is very similar to the COBOL phenomenon IMO. COBOL was designed to be very English-like and make it easy for business people to do simple programming tasks. However, business managers, hired a bunch of business people to become "programmers" and let them loose to write millions of lines of really bad code (I had to do some COBOL porting back in the day). It was the same situation a few years ago with VB5 and VB6. MS pushed it as a simple RAD tool that will give you great "ROI" and other business buzz words. The business managers went and looked for these business people with no real programming abilities, all they needed to have on their resumes was some type of VB experience with some simple SQL and they got a decent paying job. When
I recently was working on a medium-sized C#/.Net app. A new feature was asked for, however we didn't have the time to get to it for the first release. So some business manager went and hired some guy who had
So someone should have to pay extra money to run XP on their Macs just to download and watch a DRM-encrusted movie? Why bother when you can have the movie shipped to you and rip the DVD yourself and strip the stupid commercials? Oh, and why would someone want to taint a nice Mac with MS Windows?
:-)
And if you want to "stick it to the man", just use a service like Netflix and when you get the movies just rip a copy for your self before you send it back
Mac OS X users? This content will not run on Mac OS X. It won't even run on Win2k. Read the system requirements....
Amazon Unbox System Requirements
Minimum System Requirements
OPERATING SYSTEM: The Amazon Unbox video player application is only compatible with Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition SP2, or Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Update Rollup 2. The Amazon Unbox video player is not compatible with Apple/Macintosh operating systems.
COMPUTER HARDWARE: A PC with a 1.5-gigahertz (GHz) processor or faster, at least 512MB of memory, and a DirectX 9.0 complaint Video (64 MB Memory) and Sound Card.
INTERNET CONNECTION: Broadband internet connection capable of 800 kbps sustained transfer speeds.
Recommended System Specifications
COMPUTER HARDWARE: A PC with a 2.4-gigahertz (GHz) processor or faster, at least 1024MB of memory, and a DirectX 9.0 compliant Video (128 MB Memory) and a Multi Channel 5.1 Capable Sound Card.
INTERNET CONNECTION: Broadband internet connection capable of 1.5+ mbps of sustained transfer speeds.
Not to sound like a parrot, but I have to say: "same here". $10 bucks for a DRM-encrusted-WinXP-Only video? No thanks. And as one of the GP posts points out, you can view this on two computers, but must download it separately for each computer. What crap. Is MS-DRM really that limited?
Huh? So you have talked to "most" developers to see what they care about? I somehow doubt that. I see Open Source growing very well on Linux, MS Windows and Mac OS X. I bet a goal of many of those projects are to be cross-platform.
Yes, it currently runs on Mono until the next IronPython change, Mono get tweaked, IronPython change, lather-rinse-repeat. Most of Microsoft's
I agree with your points. However I am not sure if that aspect of C# bothers me more than exceptions in Java. Exceptions in Java are just annoying.
Good point. I initially did a quick read of the site and thought it was worse than it is. However, once cannot expect to write something in IronPython and have it run in regular (CPython). Most of the other Python forks/implementations just tweak Python to make it faster or work better for certain things. So they still run your regular Python code. If you write some IronPython stuff with with
And your point? All of Microsoft's
I like C# and the
I just prefer to use an Open Source or Free software license. I can see MS not wanting to go with a GPL license, however MS could have at lease picked an OSI approved license or have submitted their license to OSI.
"I'm not really sure it's fair to compare VB.NET to something like this:..."
;-)
OK, it is not as pull-your-hair-out verbose as COBOL, however it is far to verbose for my liking. Too many keywords that don't serve any purpose. Here is method declaration:
Public Function Add(Num1 as integer,Num2 as integer) As Integer
return Num1 + Num2
End Function
Why the need for the function keyword? It doesn't do anything, if a programmer cannot look at a method declaration and tell that it is a method declaration, well, they shouldn't be programming IMO. I hate the As keyword. It is just stupid and serves no purpose, the same goes with End keywords. VB.Net is just too verbose to me and feels like a Fisher Price language. Give me a language like C, C++, Java, PHP, C# any day. Here is the same method in C#.
Public int Add(int Num1, int Num2)
{
return Num1 + Num2;
}
No fluff, less typing and no hand-holding. If someone cannot learn to understand the above, they should look for a job in a field other than programming IMO.
eh? I would think that the majority of developers want something more GPL-like since 75%+ of all open source software uses a GPL license.
I really wish MS just let VB die with VB 6, it would have been for the best. The VB 6 fans could have continued with VB 6 until they learned a real programming language and real programming techniques.
I agree. I think Python is a good language and most importantly it is cross-platform. Why would someone want to kill Python by making it MS-Only? As far as getting this IronPython on Mono, I don't see it happening. I use Mono and it is pretty nice. Mono has
Even though the MS-PR-machine says