Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: ODF Wars, Duval Layoff, French DRM
Mandriva CEO responds to Duval Layoff. UltimaGuy writes "Duval has detailed his side of the story, 'Fired. Yes. Simply fired, for economical reasons, along with a few other ones. More than 7 years after I created Mandrake-Linux and then Mandrakesoft, the current boss of Mandriva "thanks me" and I'm leaving, sad, with my two-month salary indemnity standard package. It's difficult to accept that back in 1998 I created my job and the one of many other people, and that recently, on a February afternoon, Mandriva's CEO called to tell me that I was leaving.' Mandriva's CEO has responded, stating that 'Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off.'"
Apple responds to French DRM legislation. Sardon writes "In the aftermath of France's move to force companies to open their DRM, Apple has shot back. Calling the proposed legislation "state-sponsored piracy," Apple complained loudly about the prospects of opening up their DRM, arguing that DRM interoperability tools would just increase piracy. However, as the article points out, DRM interoperability isn't likely to make a significant contribution to piracy, seeing as how P2P networks are already flooded. If the measure passes the French Senate, Apple may consider closing its music operations in France."
Microsoft possibly undermining ODF ISO approval. Andy Updegrove writes "If you haven't been paying attention to the odf(oasis) vs. xmlrs(microsoft) format wars, here is what is happening... Both formats need iso approval. This process is very thorough all complaints and gripes are heard and reviewed, which takes quite a bit of time. It is easy for voters to slow this process down considerably. And, our good friends Microsoft joined a very small subcommittee called 'V1 Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface.' It just so happens that this small subcommittee (six companies - including Microsoft) is the entity charged with reconciling the votes that are being cast in the ISO vote to adopt the OASIS OpenDocument Format. So, presumably, Microsoft is going to delay ODF's ISO approval in hopes of xmlrs getting approval first and being the chosen format in Europe."
A more in-depth look at Fedora Core 5. LinuxForums has posted a much more in-depth look at the install process and functionality of the new Fedora Core 5 release. From the article: "I have to say though: this distribution impressed me in a way that no other distribution did before. Some things should of course be improved, such as the automatic hardware detection or, as mentioned above, the menus. But apart from these little details I can confidently say that Fedora Core 5 is the best desktop GNU/Linux distribution available at the moment."
More thoughts on the GPLv3. Guttata writes "Forbes has an interview with Richard Stallman on the upcoming GPLv3, which touches on Linus' stance on keeping the kernel at GPLv2. The article also shows Stallman's take on DRM, especially in reference to areas such as TiVo." Relatedly Glyn Moody writes "The FSF's General Counsel, Eben Moglen, explains why there is no situation in which the brokenness or otherwise of the GPL is ever an issue. Thanks to copyright law, GPL violators are always in the wrong."
Britannica strikes back at Wikipedia. tiltowait writes "Remember that study published by Nature magazine which likened Wikipedia's reliability to that of Encyclopedia Britannica? Well, Britannica has released -- not corrections -- but a corporate response stating that 'Nature's research was invalid [...] almost everything about the Nature's investigation was wrong and misleading.' So then, is this just one more example of how refereed journals can't be trusted?"
He was reassigned. He won't need to come into the office. He can do this job from home. Call it early retirement, but without pension.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the P2P-ftw free-the-culture anarcho-whatever shite that gets punted around here sometimes, but for Christ's sake what is Apple on? People have been using Hymn and the like for ages, and if they're stripping the DRM out of bought files for use on other players they are still buying from Apple and giving Apple money for the privilege. By definition, they wouldn't be going to P2P. If anything, if they up and leave France, all that will happen is that either P2P will become the only option for iPod owners or people will buy Creative/Archos/other PlaysForSure players and Napster or whatever will get their money. The only way this could become a win for piracy is if Apple makes it one.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Ho ho ho. "State sponsored piracy!" I like it. It has a nice ring to it. A bit like "state sponsored terrorism". Those bastard French people are trying to take away our freedom by taking restrictions out of DRM! Oh, wait...
Yes, naughty little French pirates. They need to be punished. They need to know what it feels like. I implore all Slashdotters to head over to Google Video and pirate some Alizee music videos. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past couple of years, Alizee is a hot French babe... uhh, I mean, PIRATE!
MS is in danger of becoming the company on the outside looking in. Their document formats have been a nightmare to tech support and average people over the years, and with an open ISO standard looming in the next years, every office product under the sun will be able to read everything else, except perhaps Microsoft's. What companies are going to pay $70+/computer to have Office Vista, when they can have the same functionality and better interoperability with everyone else? North America won't flip to Open Document right away because of Microsoft's influence over both the Canadian and American governments, but Europe will turn as Brazil has, and every other location will follow.
I don't want Canada to be stuck in the digital darkage created by Microsoft and proprietary document format wars. I'm going to be pressuring my MP to require government offices to convert to Open Document when it becomes an ISO standard.
Oh You POS
On a minor note, they make a big deal of the fact that Wiki has "a third more errors", and how this is very significant. But I'm not convinced that this is particularly statistically significant in the scheme of things - both have very small numbers of errors, and indeed, Brittanica has at least some errors (they can't argue with that) and so both are important points, worth mentioning by the article.
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
let go...
relieved of command...
disestablished...
made redundant...
surplus to requirements...
it all amounts to the same thing at the end of the day: Yer Outta Here.
I am a leaf on the wind
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200603211 63230297
/.'ers won't RTFA, but maybe Grok Law will get their attention.
The www.consortiuminfo.org blog links to her, but I know some
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Gael was not fired. He was laid off.
I'm sorry but the founder is not laid off. He quits if he tires of the company's direction or he's fired if he becomes an obstacle but he's not laid off. It's a question of morale: If the founder himself is of so little value that he can be laid off then every other employee is worthless too. When your employer shows they don't value your presence its past time to jump ship.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Ever notice how the GPL doesn't say that anyone who uses GPL code must attribute the creators of that code? Ever notice how the LICENSE file distributed along with binaries of GPL programs typically doesn't have the name of the creators in it? Consider this, is it legal to remove someone's name from a GPL work? Not from the copyright declaration on the top of the source files.. that's obviously unlawful. But what about from the About box or the documentation? There's nothing in the GPL which prevents these kinds of modifications. Seems like a pretty big ommission. After all, if users of software are not guarenteed to know who the original copyright holder is they have no recourse if the distributer of the work refuses to hand over source code. Only the copyright holder can force the distributer to follow the license. If the distributer has stripped the software of its original name, made significant modifications and removed attribution to the original creators then, in practice, they cannot be forced to give up those modifications when they distribute the work in binary form as the users don't know who the copyright holders are. Also note that there's nothing in GPLv3 that addresses this. It's ironic really, as almost all BSD-style licenses include this:
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
So the length of the GPL compared to BSD-style licenses seems to be working against it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
After reading the RMS interview with Forbes, what really stuck out was the following question and his reply:
Would it be ethical to steal lines of unfree code from companies like Microsoft and Oracle and use them to create a "free" version of that program?
It would not be unethical, but it would not really work, since if Oracle ever found out, it would be able to suppress the use of that free software. The reason for my conclusion is that making a program proprietary is wrong. To liberate the code, if it is possible, would not be theft, any more than freeing a slave is theft (which is what the slave owner would surely call it).
Am I the only one that sees this statement as a dangerous precedent? I mean, for all intents and purposes, RMS feels that 'stealing' copyrighted code is justifiable, if it's done with the intent to "liberate it".
Maybe you might consider this a trolling or a flame, but I think that it is quotes such as these that may end up bringing the most amount of trouble for the RMS crowd... I think the man is losing touch with reality, and approaching a point where zealotry is clowding his judgment to a dangerous level. How can we convince businesses that using the GPL and open source is a GOOOD THING if one of the main characters is in effect condoning IP theft if done for the 'right reasons'?
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
I believe the word Apple is looking for is "Privateer". A state-sponsored pirate is a privateer.
Thanks to copyright law, GPL violators are always in the wrong.
Except in those few cases where the GPL (and/or the FSF's interpretation of it) restricts something that (classic non-DMCA) copyright law does not. They are corner cases to be sure, but a few do exist.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
If the measure passes the French Senate, Apple may consider closing its music operations in France.
They would kind of have to, no? (Seeing as it doesn't look like they are to comply..)
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
heh...Stallman is still at his old game of "if I tell people it's mine over and over, someone will eventually believe it."
The FSF has already had its chance to bundle their tools around their own kernel with Hurd and that has failed miserably after MANY years of wasting resources on it. I wish he/they would stop trying to claim ownership of someone else's kernel to buy them the air of legitimacy needed to foist their political ideals on anyone who decides to use free software. The existing GPL isn't broken and weighing it down with political anti-DRM diatribe does not appeal to me, as a user, at all...even though I agree that DRM is not a great idea. I also don't agree with clubbing baby seals, but I don't think THAT needs to be part of the free software licensing scheme either...
That would be "privateering". A country would issue a letter of marque to a ship-owner/captain giving them leave to attack all of their country's enemies". Sometimes a priviteer's definition of "country's enemies" was a bit loose, though.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I know in this instance France wants Apple to open their DRM. But who is to say that another state might want to close DRM?
What we might end up with is worse than DVD's that are region coded. We might get the hardware that is region specific, and no other method of opening data (music, files, movies).
I think the world will move in that direction. What other reason would Sony or Universal have for forcing regions with DVD's? Why are they opposed of me buying movies from Spain or Germany? And if a company is so paranoid, just imagine nation-states that are worried their culture is being corroded away.
From previous experience, the Fedora installation has been painfully slow. You can see the (lack of) activity when it's copying over packages from the CDROM. It copies the package, installs it to the hard drive, copies another package, installs that, and so on.
It would be soooo much faster if it actually made use of parallel processes. One process copying from the CDROM, and another installing to the hard drive when the package is available. I mean, how hard can it be?! I've written perl scripts which do that and more.
Anyway, I hope that Fedora 5 has improved this, but looking at the review, I don't think it's happened.
You'll be telling us next that we should go round to France and collectively punish the French pirate babes by spanking them, or something. You're weird.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm willing to accept that Brittanica has perfect accuracy. It's accuracy has never troubled me. That isn't its problem.
I'm sitting on my comfy chair in the living room. On my right hand I have my laptop. The encyclopedia is sitting in the book case on my left side. I could reach out and get ten or so of the volumes without leaving my chair. Even so, I don't think any of the encyclopedia has been opened in a couple of years. For sure it hasn't been consulted this year. More and more I find my google searches including the word 'wiki'. (The wiki entries almost never appear near the top of a search unless I include the word 'wiki'.) I am almost never disappointed by the wiki articles.
In light of the above, my question is: "Who needs Brittanica?"
"You talk like a press release."
-- David Rodriguez
He was also "laid off" due to economic pressure (ie the new directors turned a profitable $20 million a year in revenue company into something that burned through twice that amount in less than a year before imploding). If you want to see the whole story it's here.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
But what about America? Microsoft has employees in Washington State, but it's not a major factor for Massechusetts. If Mass. residents are influenced, in the November elections - and it's a big if - then it'll be over cost savings (if significant). Other than that, there really won't be any noticable impact until after any decisions by ISO.
If ISO opts for Microsoft's format and the Government of the time is much more strict on anti-competitive actions, we might see some DOJ action, but not unless or until.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Call it "Freedom DRM".
They somehow think "competing" involves impeding the competitors rather than simply trying to be superior. And I think that's the crux of most people's problem with Microsoft.
I am referring to, of course, Microsoft's strange participation in the subcommittee involved in getting ODF ISO approved. They declined any and all participation in creating ODF and yet somehow they are involved in getting it ISO approved? Microsoft is now something along the lines of the fox guarding the henhouse.
And when I discuss Microsoft's "competitive" activities, I tend to think of elementary school kids running the 100 yard dash where Microsoft, instead of simply running as fast as it can, resorts to tying the laces of the shoes of other kids or to tripping them in some fashion.
Although "Competing" and "Impeding" rhyme nicely enough, they are certainly VERY different approaches when trying to win and one of them is often cause for legal retaliation.
Was Britannica ever a big deal? I used it in elementary school and stopped once I got to junior high. In high school, our teachers specifically told use not to use encyclopedias for our papers. And this was in the 80s.
And for some reason people still believe that line.
Yet Apple refuses to license (for more money!) their DRM and let someone ELSE sale music that will play on the ipod.
They're obviously either making money or planning to make money from music sales.
>> Ho ho ho. "State sponsored piracy!"
Great. We already have state sponsored gambling. I think that leaves state sponsored whoring. Maybe the more politically savvy can update us on that.
--Richard
"State sponsored piracy!" I like it. It has a nice ring to it.
The French have a history of using corsairs ; )
You can't take the sky from me...
The term you want is privateer. Privateers had letters of marque which legitimized their attacks as being sponsored by a government. (Except for the Spanish, who had a habit of refusing to honor letters of marque and just hanged them as common pirates.) Buccaneers, on the other hand, were pirates who started out in the barbecue business.
No, seriously. Buccaneers were originally hunters who sold cooked meat, grilled over an open fire, to passing ships. Eventually, an enterprising band of buccaneers realized that the passing ships were poorly armed and captured the ship--much more profitable than selling barbecue.
It got to the House of Lords, where it was ruled that the laws of other nations were of no consequence in this matter and that the laws of England held sway for those on English soil, no matter what their status in other lands.
You cannot take this analogy much further, as Free Software is not a Constitutional or legal obligation in any country (yet) - but if it were, then "closed source" that passed through such lands could reasonably be Opened, and the argument that this is automatically "bad" or "evil" is clearly false.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They do have it all on their website, you know. I think you have to pay for full access, but it's a lot cheaper than a set of encyclopedias.
Or you could buy the circa-$50 disk version, and install that, if you're running Windows or using a PPC Mac (as of yet their product doesn't run on Intel Macs due to some component developed by a third party which hasn't been made universal). Then you'd have access to it all without even needing to be online.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
This is a perfect reason why people should be happy with what they have.
This guy had a great distro. A lot of people cut their teeth on it. A lot more used it religously. He had a great user base.
But, could he be happy? No! He *needed* to go public. He *needed* the money so that he could grow his company. He *needed* money to compete with RedHat and MS in the global market for server domination.
Look, I have no pity for you. You saw RedHat (and a lot of others) get rich in the late 90s. You wanted a slice. You knew that you were taking a risk.
Now, when you are the boss and you decide to let a Board of Directors come in and run things, you are no longer the boss.
That kinda defeats the purpose of starting your own company, doesn't it?
On the up side, just wait a few years. By then, Debian will be looking for a new project manager.
Oh, and if, by some chance, you read this, know that I really do hope things get better for you.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
a HUGH amount of the reason that TCP/IP won that battle is because it was an open standard.
"Fired" is different, though. It implies you were canned because you were incompetent, or because you were engaged in something illegal, fraudulent or against company rules. You are fired when the problem is you, in other words, and presumably the company will need to hire or promote a replacement.
Most other terms (like the ones you list) is about the job disappearing. You were not doing anything wrong, but the job you were doing is either no longer necessary, or too expensive to continue doing at the current manpower level. You may be excellent at the job you were doing, but the result is no longer worth the expense for the company.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
http://wcuniverse.sourceforge.net
Teachers say that because encyclopedias are too good; kids would get all the answers in one place and they're done. They limit encyclopedia use not because they're worthless, but to handicap the student.
In Neo-America, DRM Frees you!
In Soviet Russia, DRM restricts you...huh? ah, In Russia, you restrict DRM?
In France, you free DRM?
It's funny, Britannica says the reviewers did not provide any sources for their ascertions, and then they go and say for every criticism "We do not accept this." Well, as long as the all knowing Britannica does not accept it, it must be invalid. All bow to the true keepers of knowledge.
When you grow up and do real research you learn that first-hand sources are the most important, and then journal articles, and then books with the most recent work being worth particular attention. At the very bottom of the barrel is the encyclopedia. What an encyclopedia can do is give you a brief, broad survey of a subject to get you going. If your research consists only of copying an encyclopedia article, then you are wasting everybody's time: the information is too old, too general, and too shallow.
I recently visited my father and his entire set of encyclopedia Britannica was in boxes in the driveway. Not even the Salvation Army would take them. Some customer who happened to be at the Sally Ann said he was interested but he never showed up even though they were free.
I expect that someone in the French government will talk to someone technical before this becomes law there. If they do, I expect they will scrap the plan.
What they are effectively demanding is a common DRM standard, and anyone who doesn't play by having another mechanism will have to also implement the standard mechanism, and permit transcoding into that mechanism. And this will mean more restrictions, not fewer.
To me, this looks like a ploy backed by someone who wants their DRM to become standard, but can't achieve this by making products that people want to buy, so they want to force everyone to adopt their DRM or die. And I expect that the DRM will be the most draconian DRM imaginable, since conversion will be viral in terms of supporting more restrictions.
Transcoding data from one DRM format to another is problematic, if you want the DRM to continue to be effective. The problem is that there is a potential impedence mismatch in license terms.
First, what if I'm translating music from a format that permits only a single copy, and no burning to CDROM, to (to take the current example), the iTunes format, which permits installation on multiple computers, an infinite number of iPods, and burning to a CD multiple times, based on a playlist?
If this happens, my only real option to maintain the licensing restrictions properly is to use one type of DRM, or to choose the most restriction union of both sets of DRM. So the *most* restrictive DRM will become viral, and limit what you can do with anyone's DRM.
Second, how many times - how many different instances/formats - am I permitted to do this transcoding? If the answer is "infinite", then there's effectively no DRM. Again, the most restrictive DRM wins.
Third, how would this impact limited node-locking? With iTunes, you are node-locked to a limited number of nodes, but those nodes can change over time - you are permitted to authorize and deauthorize nodes. With this capability, you could authorize any number of nodes, one at a time, to use the transcoding capability to copy from a limited node-locked format into an unlimited node-locked format. So say goodbye to the "limited" in "limited node-locking". Again, a virus.
People have said that Apple's DRM is tolerable - and they've said that any DRM is intolerable. For the first group, you would take away most of what permits Apple's DRM to be tolerable. For the second group - they're not going to be happy anyway, as long as DRM is permitted at all, and that's not one of the options on the table here.
(PS: I'm mostly in the second group - I think DRM is the moral equivalent of telling your customer you don't trust them).
-- Terry
"If you don't consider making code proprietary to be ethical, you clearly cannot consider liberating the code to be unethical"
I don't think ethics enters into it either way. The fruit of your effort is yours. Period. The effort of others is theirs. Period. The keeping or giving is a personal decision, and should be respected. Period. "Freeing", or "Proprietary" when used by the opposing party is wishwords for "why can't I have yours"?
Prositutes have to pay tax (and have legitimate deductions for things like condoms and lube), and there is a Prositutes Collective (though that may not be government run) looking after their rights and working conditions. Whore houses are legal, and pay taxes like any other 'service', reasonably freely advertisable, even street walkers have rights.
"Further, when it comes to discussing the ethical basis of copyright, I think it bears repeating that the reason we have copyright at all in the United States is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts". I'm not sure if you noticed, but it has been a trend lately amongst many technology and entertainment companies to injure the progress of science and the useful arts freely as long as they think it will keep them in the money. That includes activities such as subverting international standards organizations and activities such as subverting national governments so that they retroactively extend copyright, effectively "stealing IP", to use your terms, from all of humanity (or at least all of that country's citizens)."
Well let's tackle this from the top.
First of all you can't have promotion of science or arts without willing participants. Anything else reeks of artistic or intellectual slavery. Second IP is NOT the exclusive domain of corporations. An awful lot of slashdotters forget that simple fact in their zeal. Third the "theft"* you accuse corporations of is happening (not all mind you, just some). However any viable society has legitimate means for effecting change. The problem I have is that they're not being used, and just as bad people are making excuses for why they're not even going to try to use them.
*I prefer to think of it as a violation of a social contract (and don't any of you smart-asses give me that "but I didn't sign anything nonsense")
I'm sorry you fail to grasp the concept that one can simultaneously (1) consider a law unethical, and (2) still act in accordance to that law, either out of ethical or out of practical considerations.
Personally, I consider current copyright and patent law to be unethical, but I still obey them.
Ah, Fedora. Every distribution I have tried so far has been half baked. This time will be different! I don't have the energy to try FC5, but I probably will.
BTW despite the stupid name, Ubuntu doesn't suck.
That has to be the funniest thing I've heard in a long time!
40 minutes in a VMware virtual machine for me ... real box would have been quicker. That's respectable for 5 CD's.
Do you consider libraries immoral?
The whole purpose of copyright, if you have not read the constitution recently, is to encourage the useful arts and literature for the common good. That is, to increase the public domain by making publication more profitable than usual for a limited time by exclusivity. Exclusivity in itself was considered immoral by the constitution's authors and still has a bad taste, despite the efforts of large publishers to change your opinion.
You understand RMS less than you understand your own laws.
It's akin to saying that it's not unethical to steal TVs from shop windows, because TVs should be free.
Ohhh, I see that I've been trolled.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If the "license" and copyright are to be considered grown up legal documents, they need grown up names on them.
I wasn't aware of this. It's a rather large long term mistake if this is the case. No one has any idea what the mysterious future holds, other than surprises. We can already see what happens with "abandonedware" when the original owner can't be found. At some time in the future, something just totally weird could happen that might affect the Kernel. Not having all the names is extremely boneheaded and borderline naieve.
Um, you appear to be misunderstanding the parent.
Abandonware requires you to get permission from the copyright holder to use their work.
All GPLed software specifically and explicitly grants you the right to use that work without contacting the authors, so long as you adhere to the terms of the license.
How could you possibly have a problem with not being able to contact a copyright holder when you already have a license that says you don't need to?
As someone who worked at a successful start-up when that movie came out, I have to say that company didn't do a single thing right. (Except for having a good idea, but ideas are cheap.) I had no sympathy for any of them.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
MS is doing DRM but also fights it. As a gigantic player it knows deep down that piracy hasn't exactly hurt it. MS software is pirated to hell and back yet the billions keep rolling in and it controls the OS and office software markets. Could there be a link? That software that is easy to pirate gets used a lot so that is what people know so companies that need to decide on what to buy choose the package that people are familiar with at home from their pirated version?
That because MS is what everyone knows when people buy a new PC they don't mind that MS software is installed "for free" giving MS a nice steady stream of hazzle free revenue (no messy boxes to sell) as long as people buy new pc's?
Then their is Sony, a favorite target for the anti-drm crowd and they certainly screwed up badly enough with their music cd drm debacle but lets not forget that it was sony who gave us unrestricted video recording.
Yet the hero is Apple who has always maintained the thightest control on its software. Isn't making sure only YOU can make the hardware that runs YOUR software and sell them bundled only the best DRM? Go ahead. Pirate Mac OS X. What are you going to use it for? You need to buy a Mac to run it on. Oh sure, the paid updates are pirated but the main revenue source is safe.
Apple has also been very active in trying to get movie drm in place.
The whole story that Steve Jobs only did DRM for iTunes to keep the record industry happy just doesn't ring true to me.
What I think that Steve Jobs has done is realize that you need to take baby steps when tackling a difficult subject.
iTunes DRM isn't the least he could get away with regarding the music industry.
iTunes DRM is the most he could get away with regarding the paying public.
He knew that existing DRM crippled music stores were not succeeding so he added as much DRM as he could without scaring off customers.
It worked.
Steve Jobs is very good at that. He knows exactly how far to push something that it is still accepted. iPod's really ain't all the great. Every other MP3 player would be slammed for not working as a straight HD (you need itunes to put songs onto it in any meaningfull way) and slammed even worse for renaming your songs.
Same with the price. It is just not high enough to piss people off. Just high enough to generate a shitload of cash but not high enough to be seen as insanely overpriced.
Same with Apple PC's. Every apple story has comments about their bad service even going so far as that when you order a Apple with more memory all of a sudden it is a custom build and you loose a lot of warranty. Dell would never get away with it but Steve Jobs just judged it right that Apple fans defend that a PC build entirely by Apple is still a custom build because you told them to plug in more memory and therefore you don't deserve full warranty.
Steve Jobs is more about DRM then any other playing in the market. Check out his speeches and proposals. If he has his way we will have trusted computing shoved down our throath and media DRM'ed till we choke on it.
Just for now he isn't big enough to rely force the issue and MS who could is still sitting on the fence.
There are some people at MS warning that in a DRM and trusted computing world there would be very little value to a open PC. If I can't do anything with my media anyway do I need anything more then a console to play it? MS knows that the console market is far harder to dominate then the PC market.
Killing the PC would be very very silly of MS if they are not 100% sure they are going to be selling everyone the replacement.
The old slashdot standby "replace Apple with MS/Sony and reread the story" advice still stands.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The other day, descriptions of the proposal made it sound like an anti-DMCA-type bill, one that would give buyers of a product the right to bypass DRM for legitimate use. (I don't know if France currently has a DMCA, but that seemed to be the implication.)
Now it's suddenly about letting record companies and their DRM-using distributors create "interoperable" DRM. It has been a dream of media companies to have interoperable DRM, with the ability to pick from a menu of restrictions.
So this sounds an awful-lot like a pro-record-company bill either pretending to be, or preempting, a pro-consumer one.
Now, let's look at ipod sales....
Let's presume that the 1GB shuffle is the 'average' purchase at $120. I have a hard time believing that it cost them more than $60 to make that thing at the volume they're being produced, so that would come to $60 gross profit per ipod (not to mention $95 profit on their $99 leather holders!).
Now, I'm looking at two MacNN reports that Apple will sell 8million ipods this quarter, and another 12 million ipods in the last half of 2005. That would give a total of over 20 million ipods in the last 9 months. [[ Hmm.. this would give an average of about 50 itunes per ipod.... ]]
So, 20million ipods times $60 profit per pod, and you have about $1billion gross profit in ipod sales (I doubt my estimates are any better than one digit's significance).
at least as important as itunes sales.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
To that, you need to add the increased Mac sales that have been the 'fallout' from ipod sales, and you'll see why ipod sales are at least as important as itunes sales for apple.
(( I swear I used the preview button! ))
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I tried to install the x86_64 DVD and adding any packages whatsoever to the defaults resulted in the installer crashing. Obviously, they removed the "install everything" option because it exposed a nasty flaw in their installer.
http://www.theregister.com/2006/03/23/britannica_w ikipedia_nature_study/ Register has nice write up about it all. Apparently Nature cooked the study in a manner worthy of WMD spinmeisters pre IRAQ invasion.
And why should anyone be surprised? 14-year-old with too much time on his hands has as much weight in wikipedia as some 50-year-old senior academic in a given subject. More in practice as the said teenager can sit all night making revisions whereas the prof probably has classes and schoolwork to go over..
I love France more after seeing this video. :)
You are a good man.
Also, about the words: What does Anri she mentions have to do with it? Damn football players taking all the Hotties away from us geeks...
Almost every article I have read in the Wikipedia about China has had correct simplified characters, correct traditional characters and correctly accented pronunciation guides in pinyin.
We are talking about the same Andrew Orlowski that fabricated an email from Robert Scoble to try to make Microsoft look stupid? The same Andrew Orlowski that wrote a fake article reporting Jimbo Wales was shot?
If so, I'd read his articles with a lot of skepticism. While Orlowski does have some valid criticism, by and large I personally find him unreasonable and rarely pay him much heed. He quite likes attacking Wikipedia every opportunity he gets, so he's hardly an unbiased source. My suggestion is to take what he says with a grain of salt: he's not the most reliable journalist about.
TBSDY
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Aww, heck, Microsoft would buy Apple outright to kill the iPod if it could. Bill Gates is probably really irked that Steve Jobs is handing it to him in the portable music business. That the DOJ would put the smackdown on Microsoft if it did probably makes Steve giggle and makes Bill want to throw chairs like Steve Balmer. So, that probably means iTMS won't be spun off as a company - it has protection inside Apple.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_re sponse.pdf
Soft.
You need to read the original article.
The intent, at least in France, is to get laws in place for Vivendi/Universal Music Group and establish individual fines per song for content downloads without royalty payment, under cover of "rationalizing" French law with EU law.
The side effect of this is a DRM mandated by the companies - effectively it makes it legal to comply by transcoding the songs into another DRM format, and it makes it *technically* legal to crack DRM in theory, but difficult in practice.
This is basically a shot at business models that allow content in multiple places without multiple payments, and return of control of content distribution to the music industry, now that it's been proven that digital music sales can make money.
The provisions of this bill give them about 6 barriers with which they could shut down the iTMS from the French market, and potentially elsewhere. At the same time, you can be guaranteed that Vivendi will not distribute content that's not DRM'ed, so effectively and non-DRM'ed content they see on the network will be content that falls under the penalties of the new law.
So it's still a ploy to put in place Draconian DRM and throw everything else out of the market; you might have read my comment as referring to Microsoft's WMA format, but in fact I was speaking about Vivendi.
Cheers,
-- Terry
Reviewer comment: Yes, [Nature reviewer unclear here] in using the language of individual-level fitness and selection; but this was also a shortcoming of Hamilton's original formulation. Thus to say `They all carry the same genes...' (para 1) is misleading because what matters is not the totality of genes shared but the probability that relatives share a specific gene (strictly allele), in this case the one coding for the altruistic trait. By the same token, `individual fitness' is a proxy for allele fitness, again, in this case, specifically the allele for the altruistic trait. Kin selection is THE paradigm of the gene selection argument; it actually makes no sense when couched at the level of individual fitness. The problem cascades through the piece, thus: Par2, lines 4-5 - should be `A parent has a probability of 0.5 (or a half ) of sharing any given gene (again actually allele) with each progeny ...' and last line - should be `...because it increases the probability of transmission of the parental gene for caring.'
Britannica response: There is no inaccuracy here. We stand by our author, Francisco Ayala, who insists that the reviewer is wrong through and through: the altruistic behavior is favored by natural selection because relatives share (in fractions depending on the degree of relatedness) all their genes.
I can't see the original article (Britannica attacks Nature for not making their data available, but they're guilty of the same thing).
But it sounds like the reviewer was saying that the Britannica article conflates individual fitness with allele fitness.
Example: imagine a species S. A grenade is thrown at five individuals of species S. If one of them jumps on it, she will die but the other four will live. Else, each will die with probabilty 0.5. Should she do it? If we are looking at things from her individual point of view, she should not do it *no matter her relation to the other individuals*. Nobody's individual survival is benefitted by dying. But if we are looking at things from the point of view of her alleles, then her relation to the other four do make sense. If they are her clones, then the allele has a 0% chance of dying off at this moment if she does it, and a 1 in 32 chance if she doesn't. The average numbers of survivors is also higher: 4 vs 2.5.
It's true that the presence of altruistic individuals increases everyone's survival odds -- nonetheless, altruism is not justified on an individual level -- if it were, it wouldn't be altruism.
Ayala is wrong that altruistic behavior is favored by natural selection. Genes coding for altruistic behavior are favored; the behavior itself is not favored.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure Ayala understands this. Ayala thinks he's saying the right thing: in his brain, "altruistic behavior" is a shorthand for "genes coding for altruistic behavior", because he's an expert in kin selection and thinks about this all day. He just forgot that he was writing for a general encyclopedia. At least, that's the only theory I can come up with for why he insists that he's right..
Of course, if I later read the Britannica article and discover that it is correct, I'll be glad to retract this. Also, I'm not a geneticist -- I just like to think I understand some of genetics because I've read a bit about it; and this bit is basically game theory anyway. Perhaps a real geneticist will tell me that Ayala is using terms in the standard way, so the criticism fails on those grounds. If so, I'll accept that correction too.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
A bunch of us (well, I made the original proposal which fell flat on it's face, then another person came along and reproposed it independently) is a proposal for stable versions. We've already started with one article: Wikipedia. There is a box on the main Wikipedia article that directs the reader there.
Interested to know what you think of this idea as it directly addresses your concerns.
TBSDY
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"So then, is this just one more example of how refereed journals can't be trusted?"
In a word, no.
Why would it be? Science is an itterative process, part of which involves publishing. Then comments on published articles. Then other studies. Then meta-analysis, studying the results of all (or some cross-section) of studies.
EB makes some interesting points in their article. They should have submitted it to Nature and then nature comment on it, etc... but even if they are entirely correct that in and of itself doesn't invalidate refereed journals.
Not to mention if you ever could justify mistrust in the majority of refereed journals....think just how much of the Wiki that would invalidate (ever look at how many journals are cited as sources?)
IMBlaze, with this fucking classic quote: IMBlaze Instant Messenger is very unique. See if you can get access to its source code. Take a look at some screenshots of gaim while you're there. They had to close the Support Forum there because of people posting comments like this:
But at least they're not selling it like some people...
like, this britannica book doesn't have like *anything* about Britney Spears, so like what good is it? Wikipedia has a 5,000 word article on her and the music she writes. If I wanted to learn about science things I'd go to a science school. Get a life LOSER and go learn about your hydrogen star trek machine boooooring crap somewhere else lol!!! This is OPEN SOURCE. Do u now what that means? anyway i only came to your stoopid site to learn more about the IDIOTS who are on Wikipedia attacking that article. Do you know what POV means? Like, I didn't think so. talk about a personal attack, really, you weirdos.
and like, u can go to Britannica all you want, fine by me. try editing the harp seal page so you can make sure everyone knows about the horrible Canadians murdering helpless baby seals. How are you going to give people the facts about harp seals if you don't tell them how horrible it is to kill them?
not that it matters. once Rachel makes me admin i'll make sure you stay off wikipedia.