Stuff like MSN, the Xbox etc shows they in this for the long haul, as well they might be. So they need to buy time, because they don't know how fast things will move once Linux becomnes truly viable.
I can understand why Microsoft thinks that X-Box is a good idea: they're hoping that "digital convergance" will happen and that people will use all-in-one set-top boxes for all their TV needs. What they don't understand, I think, is that game consoles are a great way to lose a truly staggering amount of money. Sega, even with a top-notch first party lineup of titles, lost enough to push them out of the hardware business entirely. And electronics giant Matsushita tried the "not just a video game console" idea already with the "open specification" 3DO and also lost a bundle.
Given the generational and "temporary monopoly" nature of the console business, I don't expect Sony to stay on top forever. But I think it'll take a more nimble company to knock them from that perch; something I don't think Microsoft can manage. In the end, I expect them to regret the X-Box decision in the long run - though do I understand why they made that decision in the first place.
Fun with Cascading Style Sheets:) It might've been more effective, however, to stick the big image in an iframe so people can scroll around in it easier and have a look.
Seriously, it strikes me that the BSA and the OSS people should be cosying up something fierce.
The OSS folks have no trouble or competition with the BSA, and might encourage a piracy crackdown since it'll send more users/developers their way. But, as it stands now, OSS is a competitor to the BSA. So, if the BSA sends lots of users to OSS, they'll be cutting their own throats - especially as users hop off the upgrade treadmill.
Therefore, the BSA will always work to get people to buy more off-the-shelf software. That is their primary purpose; the preservation of copyrights is only a secondary aim at best.
It goes like this: The BSA figures everyone would like an ocean front home. Therefore, it generates a high number of people demanding an ocean front home. But since hardly anyone buys ocean front homes (since they tend to be expensive), the BSA assumes the difference between demanded homes and bought homes are pirated.
In effect, their piracy statistic is more made-up than most statistics, since they're just making up a number of how much pirated software is out there based on what they *think* would have sold.
If the fee started at $1 after fifty years and doubled every 2-3 years after, eventually it would be highly unprofitable for the work to remain copyrighted. Which would encourage artists/companies/whoever to create new works. Which was the whole point of copyright to begin with.
The Matrix badly needs a backstory sequence that explains how "we" got into that situation to begin with. Part of the trouble with the Matrix is that it's just "there" as if it always had been, and there's no aspect to the (often overdone) philosophizing that emphasizes it was "our" mistake originally to create these machines.
The Animatrix "Second Renaissance" shorts do a marvelous job of laying out the Matrix backstory. I'd go so far as to say their 20 combined minutes is better than "Reloaded". And, I'm pretty sure they're both free downloads.
It would be nice to have a poll to find out how many/.ers actually skipped AotC.
I loved the first two, but the third seemed to slide - which was unfortunate for the end of the trilogy. Then, I bought into the Lucas hype machine, watched the trailer for TPM a zillion times like everyone else, and was ultimately disappointed. So, I skipped TPM on disc, skipped AotC in the theater and on disc, and don't care much about Ep3 at all - since I'll likely wind up skipping that too.
It seems the best trilogies are coming out of New Zealand nowadays...
Re:Why bother
on
fvwm Turns Ten
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· Score: 2, Interesting
but an OS is not defined by its uptime for a large amount of the people that use computers.
It is when they decide to go online, access $FAVORITE_SITE and find it down for some reason. And really, reliability is something people should see as the rule rather than the exception from their computers.
Installing a program should require two clicks to the user. No RPM's, no Makefiles, no gcc. If it is needed, make it invisible to the user.
The majority of people can get by with pre-packaged software and the point-clicky equivilent of "redhat-config-packages". But all the ugliness on the back-end with Makefiles is what ensures it'll still be portable and usable many years from now after the prepackaged stuff is obsoleted by some newer packaging system.
Changing out hardware should be as easy as it is with Windows.
When one considers the horrors of "driver disks" and "driver installation", Windows doesn't have much to brag about in the hardware department, nor does it allow me to swap out an x86 chip for a PowerPC one, for example. Macintosh-quality hardware ease is to be aspired to, but it'll take better hardware standards for that to arrive.
All of this command line junk that is left from Unix of the 60's should at least be made transparent for the majority of tasks. Linux is behind the curve for use on a home PC, it should at least catch up before trying to out-do Windows.
I can type much faster than I can point & click, and I'd wager most other people can too. What we need is not the removal of the command line but rather the update to it. What we really need is a system that allows GUI elements and command-line elements to work seamlessly such that novice users won't be confused and expert users won't be crippled by slow interfaces.
And quite frankly, all the current user interfaces have a long way to go before the needs of all users can be satisfied.
I feel the same way every time I walk down the Windows software aisle. *shudder*
Re:this is killing Linux, OSD in general
on
Today's SCO News
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· Score: 2, Funny
CIO of my corporation today sent out a corporate memo to all IT departments. Basically it demands that any departmental pilot projects involving open-source materials be placed on hold given the 'ongoing legal concerns about the licensing of open source materials'.
Perhaps I should send an anonymous letter to your CIO warning that certain unnamed portions of Microsoft software have been taken from GPLed sources. I won't name the software, or tell what code's been taken. Instead, I'll just assert that all the "evidence" will come out someday in court, billions of $ will be involved and everybody's liable.
Given two contradictory freight trains of FUD, perhaps his little head will burst.
Well if the stock drops low enough every Linuxer is going to buy a LOT, performing a hostile takeover, ultimately:-))
But then the price will start going UP again. And besides, I already have an ample supply of toilet paper...
Re:Just make it work
on
Neuros Review
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· Score: 2, Informative
If this product cannot reliably transfer music without copious under the hood tweaking, I am not interested.
The Positron synch software is requiring less and less tweaking over time. Having music be automatically detected would be nice, but Ogg's consistent handling of metadata, mp3s support only a variety of hackish id3 tags which are probably best handled outside the device.
USB 2.0 would be a nice addition too but even on that I will make accomodation.
USB2.0 will be a free upgrade for those who buy their units before July (I think). That's also coming Real Soon.
(For comparison, the Playstation 2 was also released in 1999. Just in case you were wondering, you can still buy them.)
The Playstation 2 wasn't released in 1999. The Dreamcast had a year's head start and broke sales records when it was launched (probably because of titles like Crazy Taxi and Soul Calibur). But, consumers are fickle and Sega didn't have the cash to compete with Sony's juggernaut.
Incidentally, I tried, really tried, to give Shenmue a chance, and it's certailnly beautifully executed, but waiting all day for it to get dark so I could look for sailors again ("Sailors? Not here. I'd try looking in bars.") just wore me out.
Shenmue is a perfect example of a title that's innovative, but not necessarily a lot of fun. It plays more like "Virtua Japanese Guy" and, in spite of a beautiful environment with tons of interactivity, it seriously lacks any sort of action, rewards or difficult puzzles beyond "find item X, somewhere".
We all crave innovative titles, but it's better to play a fun-but-rehashed game than an innovative-but-tedious one.
I think the only thing large-scale movie piracy shows is that many people would rather get things for free than pay for them. If DVDs were $5, people would still be ripping them and trading them for free.
But not very many, to be sure. Consider that if one works for $10/hour, a $5 DVD is worth half an hour of their time. Between downloading, extracting and burning a DVD, it'll likely take more time than the disc is worth - making the $5 disc a better deal. Even at $15-20 a disc, it's still much more convenient to buy them than to muck around transferring 4+ gig files over the network.
For poor student folk with a surplus of bandwidth and shortage of cash, pirated movies are somewhat viable. But for most people, it's hardly worth the effort.
The word of mouth for "Reloaded" has been mediocre at best, so not as many people are shelling out for multiple screenings. The result is a very "front-loaded" movie that's going to be hard-pressed to make $300 million. If "Revolutions" isn't a better film, I expect it won't hang around the #1 spot for long either. Ultimately, bootlegs or no, the best way to make a lot of money at the box office is to make a very good film that people tell their friends to see.
You do know that advertising is what pays for TV programming, broadcasting, etc., in the USofA, don't you?
A lot of people in the USofA tune in to the Super Bowl solely to watch ads of a higher caliber than usual. If companies developing advertisements would make them more appealing on a regular basis, people would be more inclined to watch them rather than reach for the skip button.
Stop watching it. Doing so will change your life. I'm not joking. Watching TV conditions you for the worse, and the only way you'll know I'm not making this up is to go without for 2 months.
If the "intent of copyright", according to ReplayTV, is to play shows the way the network intended, why not show them only at the times they were intended also. For example, if "Brand new episode of series Foo" is airing at 7pm wednesday May 28th, ReplayTV can "respect the intent of copyright" and show it only at 7pm on wednesday May 28th.
You could kill the SCO ploy quickly and easily if it was viable to say that if SCO came calling you just need to have them identify "their" code, prove it is theirs, and then replace it by having coder x create substitute code from scratch or obtaining substitute code from open source project y. Would this work?
But replacing code previously published in violation of copyright doesn't excuse one from the original (purely hypothetical) violation.
Actually, I believe the point of this argument is that, because SCO itself didn't choose to license the "unmentioned code" under the GPL (as they are the copyright holder), then the GPL does not apply, as per a couple clauses in the GPL itself.
But if they (SCO/Caldera) didn't choose to release their (mythical, all-powerful SCO Unix code) code under the GPL, why release a Linux distribution with that code? It's difficult for them to argue that "we didn't mean to release that mythical code" when they, in fact, have already done so.
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand why Microsoft thinks that X-Box is a good idea: they're hoping that "digital convergance" will happen and that people will use all-in-one set-top boxes for all their TV needs. What they don't understand, I think, is that game consoles are a great way to lose a truly staggering amount of money. Sega, even with a top-notch first party lineup of titles, lost enough to push them out of the hardware business entirely. And electronics giant Matsushita tried the "not just a video game console" idea already with the "open specification" 3DO and also lost a bundle.
Given the generational and "temporary monopoly" nature of the console business, I don't expect Sony to stay on top forever. But I think it'll take a more nimble company to knock them from that perch; something I don't think Microsoft can manage. In the end, I expect them to regret the X-Box decision in the long run - though do I understand why they made that decision in the first place.
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Fun with Cascading Style Sheets :) It might've been more effective, however, to stick the big image in an iframe so people can scroll around in it easier and have a look.
The OSS folks have no trouble or competition with the BSA, and might encourage a piracy crackdown since it'll send more users/developers their way. But, as it stands now, OSS is a competitor to the BSA. So, if the BSA sends lots of users to OSS, they'll be cutting their own throats - especially as users hop off the upgrade treadmill.
Therefore, the BSA will always work to get people to buy more off-the-shelf software. That is their primary purpose; the preservation of copyrights is only a secondary aim at best.
In effect, their piracy statistic is more made-up than most statistics, since they're just making up a number of how much pirated software is out there based on what they *think* would have sold.
If the fee started at $1 after fifty years and doubled every 2-3 years after, eventually it would be highly unprofitable for the work to remain copyrighted. Which would encourage artists/companies/whoever to create new works. Which was the whole point of copyright to begin with.
The Animatrix "Second Renaissance" shorts do a marvelous job of laying out the Matrix backstory. I'd go so far as to say their 20 combined minutes is better than "Reloaded". And, I'm pretty sure they're both free downloads.
I loved the first two, but the third seemed to slide - which was unfortunate for the end of the trilogy. Then, I bought into the Lucas hype machine, watched the trailer for TPM a zillion times like everyone else, and was ultimately disappointed. So, I skipped TPM on disc, skipped AotC in the theater and on disc, and don't care much about Ep3 at all - since I'll likely wind up skipping that too.
It seems the best trilogies are coming out of New Zealand nowadays...
It is when they decide to go online, access $FAVORITE_SITE and find it down for some reason. And really, reliability is something people should see as the rule rather than the exception from their computers.
The majority of people can get by with pre-packaged software and the point-clicky equivilent of "redhat-config-packages". But all the ugliness on the back-end with Makefiles is what ensures it'll still be portable and usable many years from now after the prepackaged stuff is obsoleted by some newer packaging system.
When one considers the horrors of "driver disks" and "driver installation", Windows doesn't have much to brag about in the hardware department, nor does it allow me to swap out an x86 chip for a PowerPC one, for example. Macintosh-quality hardware ease is to be aspired to, but it'll take better hardware standards for that to arrive.
I can type much faster than I can point & click, and I'd wager most other people can too. What we need is not the removal of the command line but rather the update to it. What we really need is a system that allows GUI elements and command-line elements to work seamlessly such that novice users won't be confused and expert users won't be crippled by slow interfaces.
And quite frankly, all the current user interfaces have a long way to go before the needs of all users can be satisfied.
I feel the same way every time I walk down the Windows software aisle. *shudder*
Perhaps I should send an anonymous letter to your CIO warning that certain unnamed portions of Microsoft software have been taken from GPLed sources. I won't name the software, or tell what code's been taken. Instead, I'll just assert that all the "evidence" will come out someday in court, billions of $ will be involved and everybody's liable.
Given two contradictory freight trains of FUD, perhaps his little head will burst.
But then the price will start going UP again. And besides, I already have an ample supply of toilet paper...
The Positron synch software is requiring less and less tweaking over time. Having music be automatically detected would be nice, but Ogg's consistent handling of metadata, mp3s support only a variety of hackish id3 tags which are probably best handled outside the device.
USB2.0 will be a free upgrade for those who buy their units before July (I think). That's also coming Real Soon.Down about 20% at last check. The chart is beautiful to see.
Maybe someone should contact Steve Jackson Games...
The Playstation 2 wasn't released in 1999. The Dreamcast had a year's head start and broke sales records when it was launched (probably because of titles like Crazy Taxi and Soul Calibur). But, consumers are fickle and Sega didn't have the cash to compete with Sony's juggernaut.
Shenmue is a perfect example of a title that's innovative, but not necessarily a lot of fun. It plays more like "Virtua Japanese Guy" and, in spite of a beautiful environment with tons of interactivity, it seriously lacks any sort of action, rewards or difficult puzzles beyond "find item X, somewhere".
We all crave innovative titles, but it's better to play a fun-but-rehashed game than an innovative-but-tedious one.
But not very many, to be sure. Consider that if one works for $10/hour, a $5 DVD is worth half an hour of their time. Between downloading, extracting and burning a DVD, it'll likely take more time than the disc is worth - making the $5 disc a better deal. Even at $15-20 a disc, it's still much more convenient to buy them than to muck around transferring 4+ gig files over the network.
For poor student folk with a surplus of bandwidth and shortage of cash, pirated movies are somewhat viable. But for most people, it's hardly worth the effort.
$300 million domestically, I mean. Sorry for any confusion.
The word of mouth for "Reloaded" has been mediocre at best, so not as many people are shelling out for multiple screenings. The result is a very "front-loaded" movie that's going to be hard-pressed to make $300 million. If "Revolutions" isn't a better film, I expect it won't hang around the #1 spot for long either. Ultimately, bootlegs or no, the best way to make a lot of money at the box office is to make a very good film that people tell their friends to see.
Seems apt.
A lot of people in the USofA tune in to the Super Bowl solely to watch ads of a higher caliber than usual. If companies developing advertisements would make them more appealing on a regular basis, people would be more inclined to watch them rather than reach for the skip button.
And, not watching television will give you something to mention to people on a regular basis.
I'm sure it'll be a big hit.
But replacing code previously published in violation of copyright doesn't excuse one from the original (purely hypothetical) violation.
But if they (SCO/Caldera) didn't choose to release their (mythical, all-powerful SCO Unix code) code under the GPL, why release a Linux distribution with that code? It's difficult for them to argue that "we didn't mean to release that mythical code" when they, in fact, have already done so.
It seems a little late to cry foul now, I think.