Only problem - this isn't a free market. I've got restrictions on what kinds of services I can offer that Joe Brain-Damaged in India doesn't have. I have no choice about whether to comply with these restrictions or not.
Ergo it is not, by default, a free market. Not until India enacts labour laws offering the same degree of protection to its workers as the US does.
You know what's really interesting? India's new government is already doing that. And despite the fact that it has only raised the cost of workers there a little, companies are already abandoning India for China. Why? Because now, when they abuse their "employees" (read: slaves, and if you've spent any time at all talking to upper management, you know that's how they think of them), they can be held responsible.
What makes it even stranger is, by IBM's current tactics, it looks like if the patent was offered under fair terms and truly did represent an innovation the other party had developed first... They'd just license it and be done with it. Much less fuss than fighting it in court, and much less ill will than just crushing the other party.
That makes the frigging human brain illegal in countries that ratify this treaty. I can decrypt "program-carrying signals" encoded with Caesar ciphers in my head.
Never mind that the old theme was just plain nice. The icons were simply well-designed. From all the screenshots I've seen of the new one, it looks like crap. But as you say, there's little chance of it being rolled back.
I know that when Firefox 0.9's stable enough for me to give it a shot, I'm downloading Qute from the designer's homepage.
What's even scarier. Not only does IBM have a massive patent portfolio... But, since the antitrust trial in the early '80s, they never, ever abuse them. They know just how much damage attracting the government's attention and earning the ill will of the techies can cause. So instead, they take the simplest, most direct road to success. They play fair.
Yup. And I remember seeing a magazine pre-Win95 talking about how Microsoft had taken the taskbar from OS/2 Warp 3 for Windows 95 or some such. Part of an article looking at the various sources they were drawing on.
And despite that, they still are. They're one of the few desktop environments that supports Mac OR Windows style menus out of the box, and a host of other things that just plain Make Life Easier.
Oh, and Microsoft didn't do the taskbar window-switching concept first. OS/2 and a number of commercial Windows enhancement shells (all long-since dead) all used it. A bunch of programs also used it for MDI stuff.
A much better place to focus their efforts would be replacing GTK 2 with a sane windowing toolkit, like Qt, for the Linux port. The GTK 2 version is a piece of shit. Firefox now freezes or becomes unresponsive in situations it handled fine before - playing flash animations, for example, or loading more than one tab at once. It looks like GTK 2 required them to abandon any kind of multithreading.
Not that I'd expect anything better from such a fundamentally backwards windowing toolkit...
As long as "Linux Today" does not allow advertisers to interfere with its content, either directly or indirectly, I don't see an issue.
How would you be able to tell if they were? All it takes is a few choice phrases here and there to turn a positive article into an overwhelmingly negative one.
There's a very good reason for this that I haven't seen mentioned so far...
Hand-drawn animation has, largely, gone the way of the dodo in Japan. Its no surprise that those that do work on it exclusively are now getting paid peanuts, because their skills simply aren't in demand anymore. Most modern anime is mostly CG, and anything with a lot of action effects is going to be almost entirely CG.
CG artists, naturally, can pull down a hell of a lot more cash than animators specializing in hand-drawn cels. But they also tend to gravitate towards more "mature" animation, as that's where the money is these days - that's what American companies will pay big bucks for.
Actually, most labels don't even pay for production and marketing now. The cost of reproducing the CD comes out of the artist's share, as does the cost of recording, and much of the cost of marketing. And since most labels only advertise a tiny fraction of their artists...
Yes. My point is that, with ClearChannel gone, the market and airwaves open up again and have room for small, locally-owned stations. Yes, they're going to have a harder time attracting ads than ClearChannel did, but there's no reason they couldn't suppliment that by asking for donations from their listeners... A model that has, strangely enough, worked really well online.
Actually, they cost the labels next to nothing to make. Most of the real costs come out of the artist's share - recording, copying, promotion, and distribution. The label's share is almost pure profit.
This is an excellent point. DVDs loaded with extra features are now, often, cheaper than the soundtrack CD for the same movie. And compared to the DVD content, the CD content's trivial to track down on any P2P service.
So you're charging more for something with less value which the black market can provide more easily. And you expect anyone to buy your product WHY?
They also don't need to know for another reason. With ClearChannel as it is, people simply don't listen to the radio. Why? Because its the same homogenous crap. They can get the stuff they like from the record store for $15 or from a P2P service for free. And since they don't listen to the radio and can't try before they buy... That's a massive incentive to use P2P, right there.
Which just further proves the point of the grandparent and my original post. There's so many ways to get around any scheme that works with existing hardware. If you make a CD that doesn't work in CD-ROM drives, you've just killed your market, because people can't play it in their car. If it does work in a CD-ROM drive, the user can rip it.
Yes. The point isn't to stop piracy but, rather, to drop CDs into the impulse buy range. Who cares if everyone who buys a CD distributes copies to five hundred of their closest friends if all five hundred of these people are also buying two or three CDs at $5-10 a pop every time they walk into a record store?
I can name four fundamental changes to their model which will stop most piracy overnight.
Drop the price of a CD to $10 US or even close to $5 US.
Give a greater percentage of the money to the artist, and take the costs for the things the label supposedly provides (marketing, production, distribution) out of the label's share instead of the artist's.
Stop treating your customers like criminals. If you treat them like they're criminals, they're going to disregard the law. If you're tolerant of them making as many copies as they want to, of them ripping and sending favorite songs to friends, etc. they'll be more inclined to obey just laws. And you'll make more money.
Destroy ClearChannel. Utterly. Simply refuse to deal with them. Replace them with small local stations that are in tune with their audience. This will allow people to discover music that they like.
Of course, none of the above will ever happen. It stopped being about the money a long time ago. Now its about control - control over culture. Any of the above changes would reduce their control, and effectively eliminate their ability to dictate who becomes a "phenomenon" and who is relegated to back-shelf status.
Right, I'm sure this will work wonderfully. What do they plan to do, replace my CD-burning program? And how, exactly, are they going to do that? Is this just going to be another "corrupt strategic sectors of the CD" strategy? I thought they learned last time they tried that and discovered that a lot of CD players wouldn't read the CD at all. And never mind the fact that one could just rip to WAV files and then burn from there...
In short, it sounds to me like more snake oil salesmen peddling their wares to a desperate industry with a failed business model. I can't see any way to do this that's compatible with existing hardware and doesn't require control of the software. Which they most definitely don't have, no matter how much Microsoft wishes they did. To say nothing of the fact that anything implementing this "technology" would, by necessity, violate the Red Book CD Audio standard and run afoul of the same labelling laws as existing "methods".
What's wrong with it? No DRM support (thus, no Microsoft support) and it wasn't invented by Intel. (Thus, no Intel support) It is, however, a far superior system, and yet another reason to get a Mac. (YARTGAM)
So experts are the only ones who can find the secret key combination to get access to functionality I (and most computer users I know) were using within a week of first touching windows?
And its worth noting that the Spatial Finder can't be turned off either. Because, you know, configurability in software is inherently bad. Nothing to do with the fact that the unholy mess that is GTK makes coding real software hard as hell.
The fact that you can't manually type a filename into the "file open" dialog box would be more than enough for me to call it an abomination. Looks like the GNOME usability "experts" delivered another brilliant masterpiece which the developers and users will now spend the next six months defending as the only way software should be.
Meanwhile, KDE has a "file open" dialog box that not only lets me type in filenames, but lets me type in URLs and transparently open remote files. Now that's usability!
Also, it should be pointed out that seeing stuff on your computer screen isn't quite the same. This board lets them display a hell of a lot more data at once and, possibly more importantly, lets a whole lot of people see it at once. Anyone who's used a whiteboard knows how useful having such a thing for scribbling on can be when discussing. I suspect having these walls of data will be an important way for sharing information for the people who actually have to analyse it.
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Only problem - this isn't a free market. I've got restrictions on what kinds of services I can offer that Joe Brain-Damaged in India doesn't have. I have no choice about whether to comply with these restrictions or not.
Ergo it is not, by default, a free market. Not until India enacts labour laws offering the same degree of protection to its workers as the US does.
You know what's really interesting? India's new government is already doing that. And despite the fact that it has only raised the cost of workers there a little, companies are already abandoning India for China. Why? Because now, when they abuse their "employees" (read: slaves, and if you've spent any time at all talking to upper management, you know that's how they think of them), they can be held responsible.
What makes it even stranger is, by IBM's current tactics, it looks like if the patent was offered under fair terms and truly did represent an innovation the other party had developed first... They'd just license it and be done with it. Much less fuss than fighting it in court, and much less ill will than just crushing the other party.
That makes the frigging human brain illegal in countries that ratify this treaty. I can decrypt "program-carrying signals" encoded with Caesar ciphers in my head.
Never mind that the old theme was just plain nice. The icons were simply well-designed. From all the screenshots I've seen of the new one, it looks like crap. But as you say, there's little chance of it being rolled back.
I know that when Firefox 0.9's stable enough for me to give it a shot, I'm downloading Qute from the designer's homepage.
What's even scarier. Not only does IBM have a massive patent portfolio... But, since the antitrust trial in the early '80s, they never, ever abuse them. They know just how much damage attracting the government's attention and earning the ill will of the techies can cause. So instead, they take the simplest, most direct road to success. They play fair.
Yes. The problem is twofold:
Yup. And I remember seeing a magazine pre-Win95 talking about how Microsoft had taken the taskbar from OS/2 Warp 3 for Windows 95 or some such. Part of an article looking at the various sources they were drawing on.
... Seen this before?
And despite that, they still are. They're one of the few desktop environments that supports Mac OR Windows style menus out of the box, and a host of other things that just plain Make Life Easier.
Oh, and Microsoft didn't do the taskbar window-switching concept first. OS/2 and a number of commercial Windows enhancement shells (all long-since dead) all used it. A bunch of programs also used it for MDI stuff.
A much better place to focus their efforts would be replacing GTK 2 with a sane windowing toolkit, like Qt, for the Linux port. The GTK 2 version is a piece of shit. Firefox now freezes or becomes unresponsive in situations it handled fine before - playing flash animations, for example, or loading more than one tab at once. It looks like GTK 2 required them to abandon any kind of multithreading.
Not that I'd expect anything better from such a fundamentally backwards windowing toolkit...
As long as "Linux Today" does not allow advertisers to interfere with its content, either directly or indirectly, I don't see an issue.
How would you be able to tell if they were? All it takes is a few choice phrases here and there to turn a positive article into an overwhelmingly negative one.
There's a very good reason for this that I haven't seen mentioned so far...
Hand-drawn animation has, largely, gone the way of the dodo in Japan. Its no surprise that those that do work on it exclusively are now getting paid peanuts, because their skills simply aren't in demand anymore. Most modern anime is mostly CG, and anything with a lot of action effects is going to be almost entirely CG.
CG artists, naturally, can pull down a hell of a lot more cash than animators specializing in hand-drawn cels. But they also tend to gravitate towards more "mature" animation, as that's where the money is these days - that's what American companies will pay big bucks for.
Actually, most labels don't even pay for production and marketing now. The cost of reproducing the CD comes out of the artist's share, as does the cost of recording, and much of the cost of marketing. And since most labels only advertise a tiny fraction of their artists...
Yes. My point is that, with ClearChannel gone, the market and airwaves open up again and have room for small, locally-owned stations. Yes, they're going to have a harder time attracting ads than ClearChannel did, but there's no reason they couldn't suppliment that by asking for donations from their listeners... A model that has, strangely enough, worked really well online.
Actually, they cost the labels next to nothing to make. Most of the real costs come out of the artist's share - recording, copying, promotion, and distribution. The label's share is almost pure profit.
This is an excellent point. DVDs loaded with extra features are now, often, cheaper than the soundtrack CD for the same movie. And compared to the DVD content, the CD content's trivial to track down on any P2P service.
So you're charging more for something with less value which the black market can provide more easily. And you expect anyone to buy your product WHY?
They also don't need to know for another reason. With ClearChannel as it is, people simply don't listen to the radio. Why? Because its the same homogenous crap. They can get the stuff they like from the record store for $15 or from a P2P service for free. And since they don't listen to the radio and can't try before they buy... That's a massive incentive to use P2P, right there.
Which just further proves the point of the grandparent and my original post. There's so many ways to get around any scheme that works with existing hardware. If you make a CD that doesn't work in CD-ROM drives, you've just killed your market, because people can't play it in their car. If it does work in a CD-ROM drive, the user can rip it.
Yes. The point isn't to stop piracy but, rather, to drop CDs into the impulse buy range. Who cares if everyone who buys a CD distributes copies to five hundred of their closest friends if all five hundred of these people are also buying two or three CDs at $5-10 a pop every time they walk into a record store?
I can name four fundamental changes to their model which will stop most piracy overnight.
Of course, none of the above will ever happen. It stopped being about the money a long time ago. Now its about control - control over culture. Any of the above changes would reduce their control, and effectively eliminate their ability to dictate who becomes a "phenomenon" and who is relegated to back-shelf status.
Right, I'm sure this will work wonderfully. What do they plan to do, replace my CD-burning program? And how, exactly, are they going to do that? Is this just going to be another "corrupt strategic sectors of the CD" strategy? I thought they learned last time they tried that and discovered that a lot of CD players wouldn't read the CD at all. And never mind the fact that one could just rip to WAV files and then burn from there...
In short, it sounds to me like more snake oil salesmen peddling their wares to a desperate industry with a failed business model. I can't see any way to do this that's compatible with existing hardware and doesn't require control of the software. Which they most definitely don't have, no matter how much Microsoft wishes they did. To say nothing of the fact that anything implementing this "technology" would, by necessity, violate the Red Book CD Audio standard and run afoul of the same labelling laws as existing "methods".
What's wrong with it? No DRM support (thus, no Microsoft support) and it wasn't invented by Intel. (Thus, no Intel support) It is, however, a far superior system, and yet another reason to get a Mac. (YARTGAM)
So experts are the only ones who can find the secret key combination to get access to functionality I (and most computer users I know) were using within a week of first touching windows?
And its worth noting that the Spatial Finder can't be turned off either. Because, you know, configurability in software is inherently bad. Nothing to do with the fact that the unholy mess that is GTK makes coding real software hard as hell.
The fact that you can't manually type a filename into the "file open" dialog box would be more than enough for me to call it an abomination. Looks like the GNOME usability "experts" delivered another brilliant masterpiece which the developers and users will now spend the next six months defending as the only way software should be.
Meanwhile, KDE has a "file open" dialog box that not only lets me type in filenames, but lets me type in URLs and transparently open remote files. Now that's usability!
Also, it should be pointed out that seeing stuff on your computer screen isn't quite the same. This board lets them display a hell of a lot more data at once and, possibly more importantly, lets a whole lot of people see it at once. Anyone who's used a whiteboard knows how useful having such a thing for scribbling on can be when discussing. I suspect having these walls of data will be an important way for sharing information for the people who actually have to analyse it.