Most people don't really care if the games industry is like hollywood, they just want fun stuff to play. The publishing companies are the ones that want to make games like the movie industry. Lots of money flowing, almost entirely controlled by a few major players.
Hollywood is a hit driven, risk adverse industry, and that's what the media industry is used to. So that's where they're driving it. And just like a lot of movies today, they're focusing on fancier and fancier special effects and visuals, because it's easy. There's a bunch of computer engineers and graphics nerds doing all the hard innovative work in that field. They just have to hire some and tell them what to make. Add in a couple big names, and you've got yourself a blockbuster. You don't even need a new storyline, just remake a movie that was successful a couple decades ago.
It's cheap, it's easy, and if there are only a few big companies all doing the same thing, they can pretty much out hype any choice the consumers have, and they'll make lots of money.
Re:What would be the significance of this?
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Lake spotted on Titan?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
that's sort of a silly analogy, because shooting indiscriminately doesn't really result in anything productive. We aren't burning billions of gallons of oil per day just for fun. Fossil fuels have helped us create all sorts of neat technology and culture and things.
Who knows if we would've gotten this far without them. Is it realistically possible to go from water and wood burning straight to nuclear and solar? Could we have made the leaps in technology that we have without such a cheap and abundant energy source waiting for us right in the dirt?
Fossil fuels have been quite a step in our energy generation timeline. It has had plenty of unforeseen consequences, but that's life. Now, you can certainly argue that humanity, as a whole, is dragging its feet instead of moving along to the next step, but that doesn't mean that fossil fuels are evil or have been a waste of humanity's time.
Let me try and balance out your analogy with one of my own: Walking is more efficient for humans than crawling, yet we don't scold babies for crawling on all fours instead of running around on two feet. We understand that it's one step in the process, and as a child grows, it makes better choices and becomes more efficient with its energy.
Yeah, just making something as good as the competition isn't going to get you many converts. Making something a little bit better isn't even going to do the trick, because people are lazy. You have to make something that's a whole lot better, to make it worth the trouble of switching.
MS is going to have a hard time doing that on all the fronts that they're trying to approach. They're going against a dedicated search company in Google, a dedicated database company in Oracle, a dedicated OS developer community with Linux, and less strictly dedicated yet very focused OS producer in Apple, and so on.
Most of those companies have benefited not only from their own abilities and innovations, but also from stagnation of their competitors. Not only did Google release a good search engine, but all of the other ones really sucked at the time. OSX and Linux are good pieces of software, but they really shine when you stand them up next to your average malware ridden windows box.
Microsoft had a lot easier of a time defeating Netscape because Navigator was failing to improve. MS won't get that help from Google or Oracle or Apple. They can't leverage their monopoly as easily anymore, especially not when going against something web-based like Google. They're going to have a hard time competing with software that costs nothing. They're going to have to make some difficult choices and give up some of these fights. They can't win them all.
Maybe others are trying, he just gets it done faster because he's got more experience at it? And after he posts his work, nobody cares if some other guy figures it out and does it independently?
Lots of software gets cracked, by lots of different people. Most of it doesn't become as high profile as the DeCSS stuff did. Because of all that press back then, everything DVD Jon does is going to get overblown in the media, just like this case.
There are thousands of software companies, and many of them often release good software, but we tend to just hear lots of noise on/. about Google, Apple, MS, and a few others, because once you've gotten some press, it's a whole lot easier to get more. That's just how the world works.
That sort of raises an interesting question. Is manned space exploration really useful at this point? How many in orbit experiments do we have left to do? Can't we do most of them with just satellites and probes shot into orbit? Anything else should just get delegated to the space station, since we've spent so much time and money on it. Might as well use it for something. And we've got a cheaper way to send people there than the shuttle.
As for spacecraft that operate outside of earth's orbit, when does that become useful? Once you leave orbit, where's your destination? The moon? Maybe. Mars? That's a pretty long trip. Long enough in fact that you're going to need a craft specifically designed for that exact trip, not a general purpose spacecraft. Anything else worth visiting? Maybe an asteroid or something, but I don't think ones big enough to both investigating come nearby that often.
Basically, space is too freaking huge and empty, and everything is too far apart, and all our technology still has us traveling too slow. We can't just zoom around the solar system checking out whatever catches our interest. There's too much calculation and fuel management involved, not to mention travel times. It's almost depressing to think about.
You're not promoting it, so you're fine. Grokster might not be promoting it anymore since they got in trouble, but they've still built their business on it, and so they've been found liable for that.
Yeah, so he's saying that Apple is selling common and unimpressive technology for a premium and in numbers that his company can only dream of, and he wants us to think that he doesn't consider that something good? And he's a CEO? It sounds to me like he's awfully jealous.
The average person isn't that impressed by bigger, stronger, faster anymore when it comes to our high tech gizmos. Simply put, in the consumer world, there's more to technology than just technology. Apple knows this, and they've exploited it. Archos should be envious.
Grokster is a company who's business plan depends on their software being used for illegal file trading. They might be careful about saying that now, but it seems pretty obvious to me. I won't shed a tear if they go out of business.
This won't be the end of the internet. This won't even be the end of P2P. It might be the end of companies like Grokster. And I don't think that'll significantly distrupt the lives of most people. Free software will fill in the voids, and life will go on.
I'm not very well versed in matters of law, but I do have one question. How can something like the GPL violate the U.S. Constitution?
The Constitution is designed to set up our government, and list what tasks the government can and can't do, and limits the types of laws that they can create. Does it really have any relevance for a voluntary license between two private parties? Perhaps you could find a reason why the US Government shouldn't create and release software under the GPL, but I fail to see how the constitution even comes into play in a debate between the various copyright holders of Linux and SCO.
Yeah, there are differences, but there are also similarities. Whether you're stealing something, or you're copying something, you're still depriving people of income that they've worked for.
They have created things, and have decided to share them for a cost. You decided that these things are valuable enough that you desire them, yet you feel that the ability to get them for free absolves you of any responsibility to pay for them?
As for losing sympathy for the artists working under a label, don't you think that's a little bit judgmental of you? A lot of these bands were signed on when they were young, looking for a break in a competitive and overcrowded profession. And the labels often take advantage of that and lock the musicians into unfair contracts.
They made a bad decision, but that hardly justifies your point of view. They might not deserve much sympathy, and they certainly don't all deserve success, but I fail to see how that gives everyone else the right to distribute their work freely.
I actually agree. If the big studios want to make enjoying their product harder for us, let them. People won't like that, and they'll try and find alternatives. And the internet is making alternatives possible. A few big media people (like Mark Cuban), see what's going on, and see an opportunity, and they'll take it. And with media creation becoming easier and cheaper through computers, and distribution becoming easier with the internet, there's a lot of potential content out there for them to chose from.
The big media outlets have a good thing going. They've got a pretty good handle on the distribution of media, and they've made lots of money off of it. It's not airtight control, but it's still pretty good. But for some reason, they just want it all, and the more greedy they get, the more blind they make themselves to the new opportunities.
If they want to hasten their own irrelevance, good for them. A little less TV would only be a good thing for this country.
I agree with that. It gives the president too much power. A democratic political process of a country of millions of people will necessarily consist of all sorts of compromise in order to get anything done. Giving one person the ability to strike out all of the concessions that his "side" made really defeats the purpose of having congress in the first place.
They don't let people select which 70 minutes because they want to sell all of the product that they produce. Besides, that's basically another form of digital distribution, different than just pressing a whole bunch of CDs and then shipping them everywhere.
I could get a lot of things for free if I was determined enough. While downloading a song off of kazaa is not as big a deal as shoplifting, they're both taking something that I haven't paid for, and that is something that I try not to do. Have you had to work for a living? Do you like to get paid for your time and effort? I sure do, and I respect that musicians do too. Sure it sucks that the record labels serve as unfair middlemen, but I can't screw them over without screwing over their artists as well.
Your last sentence is completely true and relevant though.
It's filler to me. I don't really want those songs, but I can't buy a CD without them. And your point about paying for the other artists is true as well.
It's not how copyright works per say, as much as it's how physical media distribution works. It costs the same amount to ship a CD and keep it on the store shelves, whether it has 70 minutes of music or 20 minutes recorded on it. So they're going to fill them all, and charge about the same for all of them, and they've chosen the price that the good CD's can pull.
Digital distribution makes the whole equation different though, I don't have to pay for the filler anymore. If I spend $30 in a month on music via iTMS, I can make sure that I'm getting at least 30 songs that I like. That seems like a pretty good deal to me, especially compared to CD's on average.
I don't buy that much music, most of what I listen to is older stuff that I already have, but occasionally I hear some stuff on the radio that I like. I apologize if it's too mainstream or pop-ish for you, I guess I'm just not cultured enough. I hope you can forgive me for my failures as a human being.
I tend to think of buying the average CD as paying a few bucks for a handful of good songs, and then a bunch of filler thrown in for free. Sometimes there are albums that are good all the way through, and those are an excellent deal.
iTMS is nice because I don't have to pay for that filler, I can just get the songs I want. And compared to the way I view most CDs, a buck for a good song is a bargin.
I do wish more went to the artist though. Or to Apple. Anyone but the label. Digital distribution cuts out a lot of the costs that the label has traditionally handled for the artist, their cut of the profit should drop in response to this.
Even a hobbyist developer hacking on the kernel is doing it for a benefit, even if that benefit is just the enjoyment of a good challenge, or for the sense of accomplishment of making something useful.
A lot of people run servers on linux because it gets the job done, it's free, and they need a server. They're benefitting too.
If Linux has become the end all to you, then you've turned into a zealot, and as such, your thoughts on Linux or any other operating system are mostly useless.
Sorry, but your comment isn't insightful, as current moderation states. It's just sort of inane in its obviousness.
Right on. It's so much easier to stop someone doing something wrong than to deal with the consequences after they've done it. And if you're there, you can always do it yourself.
While in college, I spent a couple years running the studentweb server, providing personal webspace for students. Sometimes they had to use the space to make websites for classes (business school students mostly), so I'd get a lot of tech support questions.
If I had the time, I always prefered to meet with these people in person to work out whatever problems they had. The nature of computer use is such that it's much easier to show you than tell you. That's why good tutorials have so many screenshots.
Sure, I could write you an email that will tell you how to FTP, but it's much easier to do it in front of you and then watch and correct as you do it yourself. It's so much quicker to point and say, this is the remote server directory listing, click here, rather than write out a description of the window, where it should be on the screen, not knowing for sure what's in it, etc.
Of course, I generally met people for this in public places, computer labs and such. I'd be a little nervous going into the homes of complete strangers, because lots of people are damn weird.
That's an initial conclusion you might come to, but it's not really all that helpful, and here's why:
Everyone already knows that Linux needs a lot of work to become a viable mass market desktop. We've known it for quite a while. We even know a lot of the specific was in which it could be improved to bring it closer to this goal. So why isn't it getting done?
Some developers completely don't care about that. They use linux for what they use it for, and a polished gui desktop is not important to them. The success of Linux as a desktop OS means nothing to them.
Some think it's good enough, and that users should become more competent. A lot of Linux's woes are blamed on these sorts of developers, but I don't think there's as many of them as all the complaining would leave you to believe.
I'm guessing most Linux developers would love to have a more polished interface, but they don't want to do it, because it's boring work. The fact of the matter is, proofreading dialog boxes and checking for consistent menu options and whatnot is not all that fun. Linux development happens mostly through hobbyists, and they're going to spend their free time doing what they enjoy.
No, to really get the crappy work done, you've got to get paid. And right now, at least, it's hard to convince someone that there's money to be made paying for linux desktop development. The mere fact that the GPL requires you to give away the source code to anyone you sell it to makes the financial future of any investments questionable. You can't push service contracts on people the same way that you can with businesses, because people don't want to pay for that. I
I think the only way that it could work is something closer to Apple's model, where you're selling an entire system, and the integration between the hardware and the software is what you're really paying for. The complete experience. Otherwise, you're going up against the MS juggernaut completely head on, and you also have to compete against free versions of yourself. I have a hard time believing that that will work.
I guess there's more of a "workstation" market that could be targeted, and you might even be able to sell service contracts with those, but the workstation market is sort of fragmented, and there are lots of specialty needs, and I'd think it would be hard for your company to meet enough of those needs quickly enough to make money.
Sometimes, but they're also cut as technology advances make the components cheaper. With process shrinks and whatnot you can fit a lot more of a system on a smaller chunk of silicon, and so you save money that way.
When the next gen consoles come out, they'll be using some really fast (and expensive) memory, but as that stuff becomes more widespread and common, prices should drop.
Sony might start out having some yield problems with the Cell or something. Yield issues are expensive. As those technical difficulties get ironed out, costs will drop.
And then eventually Sony will lower the price a little, also keeping in mind sales volume. No need to lower the price if they're selling as fast as you can make them already.
I don't know. I just don't see consumers buying it. If the DRM is at all intrusive and annoying, downloading movies won't fly. The issue is that the bandwidth isn't there yet. You don't get the immediate gratification because it takes too long to download a movie, even on the average cable modem. It's just as quick to run to Target and buy a DVD, and you know you're not going to have any problems with that. Plus DVD's are generally quality video, plus decent sound, plus all those extra features.
How much cheaper would online movies have to be to compete with that? Pay-per-view? I can already do that through my cable company, it's easy, and it just goes to my cable bill. Why would I want to introduce a computer into the equation?
The DRM is even more pointless for movies than for music. Downloading movies right now is a lot of work, and usually for low quality. The ones willing to deal with that are going to be the ones that bother with circumventing the DRM. It's just going to piss off everyone else for no good reason. And don't even think of trying to lock out all unsigned code. Once you do that, it fails to be a computer, and it's basically an appliance. If you're selling an appliance, that's ok, but people will buy one of those in addition to their normal computer, not instead of.
But even if all that does come to pass, i don't think that it's going to hurt free software all that much. Let's be realistic, the casual consumer is not the target demographic for most free software. Ordinary end-user experience is not Linux's strong-point, and that's what this media-convergence is all about. Even if Linux totally misses out on legal movie downloads, it's still going to continue to grow, because noone's running linux for that. Linux has already established itself in the server market, the next step is government/corporate workstations. And then maybe some company will put up the money to make a consistent desktop environment suitable for home-use.
A few specific projects, like MythTV, could suffer, but overall, Free Software should be fine.
Although Apple's sales are still but a small percentage of the total computer market, I think I'd consider them a "player" in terms of their influence over the industry. Not that they don't want to sell more machines, but I think they're influential enough for Steve's ego that he'll bide his time and not make any too hasty moves quite yet.
On the topic of a movie distribution, I think the iTMS has probably proven that they can deliver content acceptably. All they have to do is piggyback it on top of iTunes, which is already the biggest installed base for that sort of thing.
And besides that actually think that their smaller Mac market can be beneficial in some cases like this. When the music labels originally signed with Apple, the iTMS came out for Macs first, allowing a smaller, more easily controlled test of the technologies, and helped ease the record execs into it. Rather than just dumping all that content on the much larger and more chaotic PC world. With all the fear that the media companies have of digital distribution and piracy, baby steps seems to be the best way forward.
Uh, as a long time Apple fanboy, I think I can authoritatively state that the Mac user in me is much more interested in the fact that Apple might release a new spreadsheet program, and far less interested in what the name is.
Yay for competition and hopefully Apple bringing some fresh ideas to spreadsheets! Meh for the name. But at least it's not more iStuff. That was getting old.
Also note that something really generic like "Word" is a pretty weak trademark, and MS has to be very careful how they defend it. For example, There are plenty of word processors with "Word" in the name. WordPerfect and Abiword being two examples. I'd imagine that if MS tried to get them to change, they'd have a hard time convincing anyone to side with them, seeing as the object in question, a WORD processor, had the trademark in its name before MS created their own.
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Most people don't really care if the games industry is like hollywood, they just want fun stuff to play. The publishing companies are the ones that want to make games like the movie industry. Lots of money flowing, almost entirely controlled by a few major players.
Hollywood is a hit driven, risk adverse industry, and that's what the media industry is used to. So that's where they're driving it. And just like a lot of movies today, they're focusing on fancier and fancier special effects and visuals, because it's easy. There's a bunch of computer engineers and graphics nerds doing all the hard innovative work in that field. They just have to hire some and tell them what to make. Add in a couple big names, and you've got yourself a blockbuster. You don't even need a new storyline, just remake a movie that was successful a couple decades ago.
It's cheap, it's easy, and if there are only a few big companies all doing the same thing, they can pretty much out hype any choice the consumers have, and they'll make lots of money.
that's sort of a silly analogy, because shooting indiscriminately doesn't really result in anything productive. We aren't burning billions of gallons of oil per day just for fun. Fossil fuels have helped us create all sorts of neat technology and culture and things.
Who knows if we would've gotten this far without them. Is it realistically possible to go from water and wood burning straight to nuclear and solar? Could we have made the leaps in technology that we have without such a cheap and abundant energy source waiting for us right in the dirt?
Fossil fuels have been quite a step in our energy generation timeline. It has had plenty of unforeseen consequences, but that's life. Now, you can certainly argue that humanity, as a whole, is dragging its feet instead of moving along to the next step, but that doesn't mean that fossil fuels are evil or have been a waste of humanity's time.
Let me try and balance out your analogy with one of my own:
Walking is more efficient for humans than crawling, yet we don't scold babies for crawling on all fours instead of running around on two feet. We understand that it's one step in the process, and as a child grows, it makes better choices and becomes more efficient with its energy.
Yeah, just making something as good as the competition isn't going to get you many converts. Making something a little bit better isn't even going to do the trick, because people are lazy. You have to make something that's a whole lot better, to make it worth the trouble of switching.
MS is going to have a hard time doing that on all the fronts that they're trying to approach. They're going against a dedicated search company in Google, a dedicated database company in Oracle, a dedicated OS developer community with Linux, and less strictly dedicated yet very focused OS producer in Apple, and so on.
Most of those companies have benefited not only from their own abilities and innovations, but also from stagnation of their competitors. Not only did Google release a good search engine, but all of the other ones really sucked at the time. OSX and Linux are good pieces of software, but they really shine when you stand them up next to your average malware ridden windows box.
Microsoft had a lot easier of a time defeating Netscape because Navigator was failing to improve. MS won't get that help from Google or Oracle or Apple. They can't leverage their monopoly as easily anymore, especially not when going against something web-based like Google. They're going to have a hard time competing with software that costs nothing. They're going to have to make some difficult choices and give up some of these fights. They can't win them all.
Maybe others are trying, he just gets it done faster because he's got more experience at it? And after he posts his work, nobody cares if some other guy figures it out and does it independently?
/. about Google, Apple, MS, and a few others, because once you've gotten some press, it's a whole lot easier to get more. That's just how the world works.
Lots of software gets cracked, by lots of different people. Most of it doesn't become as high profile as the DeCSS stuff did. Because of all that press back then, everything DVD Jon does is going to get overblown in the media, just like this case.
There are thousands of software companies, and many of them often release good software, but we tend to just hear lots of noise on
That sort of raises an interesting question. Is manned space exploration really useful at this point? How many in orbit experiments do we have left to do? Can't we do most of them with just satellites and probes shot into orbit? Anything else should just get delegated to the space station, since we've spent so much time and money on it. Might as well use it for something. And we've got a cheaper way to send people there than the shuttle.
As for spacecraft that operate outside of earth's orbit, when does that become useful? Once you leave orbit, where's your destination? The moon? Maybe. Mars? That's a pretty long trip. Long enough in fact that you're going to need a craft specifically designed for that exact trip, not a general purpose spacecraft. Anything else worth visiting? Maybe an asteroid or something, but I don't think ones big enough to both investigating come nearby that often.
Basically, space is too freaking huge and empty, and everything is too far apart, and all our technology still has us traveling too slow. We can't just zoom around the solar system checking out whatever catches our interest. There's too much calculation and fuel management involved, not to mention travel times. It's almost depressing to think about.
You're not promoting it, so you're fine. Grokster might not be promoting it anymore since they got in trouble, but they've still built their business on it, and so they've been found liable for that.
Yeah, so he's saying that Apple is selling common and unimpressive technology for a premium and in numbers that his company can only dream of, and he wants us to think that he doesn't consider that something good? And he's a CEO? It sounds to me like he's awfully jealous.
The average person isn't that impressed by bigger, stronger, faster anymore when it comes to our high tech gizmos. Simply put, in the consumer world, there's more to technology than just technology. Apple knows this, and they've exploited it. Archos should be envious.
Grokster is a company who's business plan depends on their software being used for illegal file trading. They might be careful about saying that now, but it seems pretty obvious to me. I won't shed a tear if they go out of business.
This won't be the end of the internet. This won't even be the end of P2P. It might be the end of companies like Grokster. And I don't think that'll significantly distrupt the lives of most people. Free software will fill in the voids, and life will go on.
I'm not very well versed in matters of law, but I do have one question. How can something like the GPL violate the U.S. Constitution?
The Constitution is designed to set up our government, and list what tasks the government can and can't do, and limits the types of laws that they can create. Does it really have any relevance for a voluntary license between two private parties? Perhaps you could find a reason why the US Government shouldn't create and release software under the GPL, but I fail to see how the constitution even comes into play in a debate between the various copyright holders of Linux and SCO.
Yeah, there are differences, but there are also similarities. Whether you're stealing something, or you're copying something, you're still depriving people of income that they've worked for.
They have created things, and have decided to share them for a cost. You decided that these things are valuable enough that you desire them, yet you feel that the ability to get them for free absolves you of any responsibility to pay for them?
As for losing sympathy for the artists working under a label, don't you think that's a little bit judgmental of you? A lot of these bands were signed on when they were young, looking for a break in a competitive and overcrowded profession. And the labels often take advantage of that and lock the musicians into unfair contracts.
They made a bad decision, but that hardly justifies your point of view. They might not deserve much sympathy, and they certainly don't all deserve success, but I fail to see how that gives everyone else the right to distribute their work freely.
I actually agree. If the big studios want to make enjoying their product harder for us, let them. People won't like that, and they'll try and find alternatives. And the internet is making alternatives possible. A few big media people (like Mark Cuban), see what's going on, and see an opportunity, and they'll take it. And with media creation becoming easier and cheaper through computers, and distribution becoming easier with the internet, there's a lot of potential content out there for them to chose from.
The big media outlets have a good thing going. They've got a pretty good handle on the distribution of media, and they've made lots of money off of it. It's not airtight control, but it's still pretty good. But for some reason, they just want it all, and the more greedy they get, the more blind they make themselves to the new opportunities.
If they want to hasten their own irrelevance, good for them. A little less TV would only be a good thing for this country.
I agree with that. It gives the president too much power. A democratic political process of a country of millions of people will necessarily consist of all sorts of compromise in order to get anything done. Giving one person the ability to strike out all of the concessions that his "side" made really defeats the purpose of having congress in the first place.
They don't let people select which 70 minutes because they want to sell all of the product that they produce. Besides, that's basically another form of digital distribution, different than just pressing a whole bunch of CDs and then shipping them everywhere.
I could get a lot of things for free if I was determined enough. While downloading a song off of kazaa is not as big a deal as shoplifting, they're both taking something that I haven't paid for, and that is something that I try not to do. Have you had to work for a living? Do you like to get paid for your time and effort? I sure do, and I respect that musicians do too. Sure it sucks that the record labels serve as unfair middlemen, but I can't screw them over without screwing over their artists as well.
Your last sentence is completely true and relevant though.
It's filler to me. I don't really want those songs, but I can't buy a CD without them. And your point about paying for the other artists is true as well.
It's not how copyright works per say, as much as it's how physical media distribution works. It costs the same amount to ship a CD and keep it on the store shelves, whether it has 70 minutes of music or 20 minutes recorded on it. So they're going to fill them all, and charge about the same for all of them, and they've chosen the price that the good CD's can pull.
Digital distribution makes the whole equation different though, I don't have to pay for the filler anymore. If I spend $30 in a month on music via iTMS, I can make sure that I'm getting at least 30 songs that I like. That seems like a pretty good deal to me, especially compared to CD's on average.
I don't buy that much music, most of what I listen to is older stuff that I already have, but occasionally I hear some stuff on the radio that I like. I apologize if it's too mainstream or pop-ish for you, I guess I'm just not cultured enough. I hope you can forgive me for my failures as a human being.
I tend to think of buying the average CD as paying a few bucks for a handful of good songs, and then a bunch of filler thrown in for free. Sometimes there are albums that are good all the way through, and those are an excellent deal.
iTMS is nice because I don't have to pay for that filler, I can just get the songs I want. And compared to the way I view most CDs, a buck for a good song is a bargin.
I do wish more went to the artist though. Or to Apple. Anyone but the label. Digital distribution cuts out a lot of the costs that the label has traditionally handled for the artist, their cut of the profit should drop in response to this.
Shouldn't everyone think that way?
Even a hobbyist developer hacking on the kernel is doing it for a benefit, even if that benefit is just the enjoyment of a good challenge, or for the sense of accomplishment of making something useful.
A lot of people run servers on linux because it gets the job done, it's free, and they need a server. They're benefitting too.
If Linux has become the end all to you, then you've turned into a zealot, and as such, your thoughts on Linux or any other operating system are mostly useless.
Sorry, but your comment isn't insightful, as current moderation states. It's just sort of inane in its obviousness.
Right on. It's so much easier to stop someone doing something wrong than to deal with the consequences after they've done it. And if you're there, you can always do it yourself.
While in college, I spent a couple years running the studentweb server, providing personal webspace for students. Sometimes they had to use the space to make websites for classes (business school students mostly), so I'd get a lot of tech support questions.
If I had the time, I always prefered to meet with these people in person to work out whatever problems they had. The nature of computer use is such that it's much easier to show you than tell you. That's why good tutorials have so many screenshots.
Sure, I could write you an email that will tell you how to FTP, but it's much easier to do it in front of you and then watch and correct as you do it yourself. It's so much quicker to point and say, this is the remote server directory listing, click here, rather than write out a description of the window, where it should be on the screen, not knowing for sure what's in it, etc.
Of course, I generally met people for this in public places, computer labs and such. I'd be a little nervous going into the homes of complete strangers, because lots of people are damn weird.
That's an initial conclusion you might come to, but it's not really all that helpful, and here's why:
Everyone already knows that Linux needs a lot of work to become a viable mass market desktop. We've known it for quite a while. We even know a lot of the specific was in which it could be improved to bring it closer to this goal. So why isn't it getting done?
Some developers completely don't care about that. They use linux for what they use it for, and a polished gui desktop is not important to them. The success of Linux as a desktop OS means nothing to them.
Some think it's good enough, and that users should become more competent. A lot of Linux's woes are blamed on these sorts of developers, but I don't think there's as many of them as all the complaining would leave you to believe.
I'm guessing most Linux developers would love to have a more polished interface, but they don't want to do it, because it's boring work. The fact of the matter is, proofreading dialog boxes and checking for consistent menu options and whatnot is not all that fun. Linux development happens mostly through hobbyists, and they're going to spend their free time doing what they enjoy.
No, to really get the crappy work done, you've got to get paid. And right now, at least, it's hard to convince someone that there's money to be made paying for linux desktop development. The mere fact that the GPL requires you to give away the source code to anyone you sell it to makes the financial future of any investments questionable. You can't push service contracts on people the same way that you can with businesses, because people don't want to pay for that. I
I think the only way that it could work is something closer to Apple's model, where you're selling an entire system, and the integration between the hardware and the software is what you're really paying for. The complete experience. Otherwise, you're going up against the MS juggernaut completely head on, and you also have to compete against free versions of yourself. I have a hard time believing that that will work.
I guess there's more of a "workstation" market that could be targeted, and you might even be able to sell service contracts with those, but the workstation market is sort of fragmented, and there are lots of specialty needs, and I'd think it would be hard for your company to meet enough of those needs quickly enough to make money.
Sometimes, but they're also cut as technology advances make the components cheaper. With process shrinks and whatnot you can fit a lot more of a system on a smaller chunk of silicon, and so you save money that way.
When the next gen consoles come out, they'll be using some really fast (and expensive) memory, but as that stuff becomes more widespread and common, prices should drop.
Sony might start out having some yield problems with the Cell or something. Yield issues are expensive. As those technical difficulties get ironed out, costs will drop.
And then eventually Sony will lower the price a little, also keeping in mind sales volume. No need to lower the price if they're selling as fast as you can make them already.
I don't know. I just don't see consumers buying it. If the DRM is at all intrusive and annoying, downloading movies won't fly. The issue is that the bandwidth isn't there yet. You don't get the immediate gratification because it takes too long to download a movie, even on the average cable modem. It's just as quick to run to Target and buy a DVD, and you know you're not going to have any problems with that. Plus DVD's are generally quality video, plus decent sound, plus all those extra features.
How much cheaper would online movies have to be to compete with that? Pay-per-view? I can already do that through my cable company, it's easy, and it just goes to my cable bill. Why would I want to introduce a computer into the equation?
The DRM is even more pointless for movies than for music. Downloading movies right now is a lot of work, and usually for low quality. The ones willing to deal with that are going to be the ones that bother with circumventing the DRM. It's just going to piss off everyone else for no good reason. And don't even think of trying to lock out all unsigned code. Once you do that, it fails to be a computer, and it's basically an appliance. If you're selling an appliance, that's ok, but people will buy one of those in addition to their normal computer, not instead of.
But even if all that does come to pass, i don't think that it's going to hurt free software all that much. Let's be realistic, the casual consumer is not the target demographic for most free software. Ordinary end-user experience is not Linux's strong-point, and that's what this media-convergence is all about. Even if Linux totally misses out on legal movie downloads, it's still going to continue to grow, because noone's running linux for that. Linux has already established itself in the server market, the next step is government/corporate workstations. And then maybe some company will put up the money to make a consistent desktop environment suitable for home-use.
A few specific projects, like MythTV, could suffer, but overall, Free Software should be fine.
Although Apple's sales are still but a small percentage of the total computer market, I think I'd consider them a "player" in terms of their influence over the industry. Not that they don't want to sell more machines, but I think they're influential enough for Steve's ego that he'll bide his time and not make any too hasty moves quite yet.
On the topic of a movie distribution, I think the iTMS has probably proven that they can deliver content acceptably. All they have to do is piggyback it on top of iTunes, which is already the biggest installed base for that sort of thing.
And besides that actually think that their smaller Mac market can be beneficial in some cases like this. When the music labels originally signed with Apple, the iTMS came out for Macs first, allowing a smaller, more easily controlled test of the technologies, and helped ease the record execs into it. Rather than just dumping all that content on the much larger and more chaotic PC world. With all the fear that the media companies have of digital distribution and piracy, baby steps seems to be the best way forward.
Uh, as a long time Apple fanboy, I think I can authoritatively state that the Mac user in me is much more interested in the fact that Apple might release a new spreadsheet program, and far less interested in what the name is.
Yay for competition and hopefully Apple bringing some fresh ideas to spreadsheets! Meh for the name. But at least it's not more iStuff. That was getting old.
No, CBS has better things to do than make a silly cash grab. At least tiger direct was somewhere near the same industry (computers).
Also note that something really generic like "Word" is a pretty weak trademark, and MS has to be very careful how they defend it. For example, There are plenty of word processors with "Word" in the name. WordPerfect and Abiword being two examples. I'd imagine that if MS tried to get them to change, they'd have a hard time convincing anyone to side with them, seeing as the object in question, a WORD processor, had the trademark in its name before MS created their own.