The thing that made Microshaft Word the market winner was the integration.... What continues to make OO on non-windows platforms a losing proposition is the lack of such APIs.
Nonsense. Most people don't embed anything except perhaps some images in their Word documents. And if they embed something it's an Excel spreadsheet or graph, and OOo allows embedding of OOo spreadsheets and graphs just fine, so they'd still be able to do that. In fact, it works a lot better. In OOo you can have a table with data and formulas in your text document, and then embed a graph in it based on that data (which automatically updates when you change the data). Try that in Word.
If anything is a niche it's people embedding things other than images, Excel spreadsheets or graphs in their Word documents. OOo won't be able so serve them. Well, whoopteedoo...
The cost of something is determined by the lowest retail price. For music that is zero today. Most people are unwilling to assign a much higher value to it either.
This just simply is not true. Look at Magnatunes: they let you choose how much you want to pay for an album, with a minimum of $5. If what you said was true one would expect almost everyone to pay $5. Instead, the average price people pay is $8! Apparently, people are perfectly willing to pay for music, as long as they know (as is the case with Magnatunes) that it is DRM-free and half of what they pay goes directly to the artist. I know I am, and that there are many people who think the same.
And saying that the reason people are willing to pay is because Magnatunes is a small label whose music isn't generally to be found on the peer-to-peer networks won't fly either, because Magnatunes make it extremely easy to listen to their music for free without any restrictions.
The "or later" clause in most GPL/LGPL liscencing represents a deliberately undefined reference. For instance, who defines "or later", is it the issuer or the receiver of the software?
Additionally, it is putting the terms of your liscence under the control of someone else (the FSF) in case of an update. There is nothing to prevent LGPL v3 from having a patent clause which applies to not just the code in the libarary.
Yes, if the module's license uses the "or later" language (which is optional), then that would mean that Sun would be allowed to re-license the code under a later version of the LGPL. How could that be a problem for Sun? I don't see what your argument has to do with the issue.
Why do Sun demand that ownership is signed over, can't they just accept dual licensing - that is you license it under the LGPL and license it specifically to Sun under other terms (eg BSD) so they can reuse it in staroffice.
That's the thing: that isn't even necessary! The whole point of the LGPL is that they could use it in StarOffice without having to make the whole of StarOffice open source! This is why Sun's position is so unreasonable.
Will they let you re-download stuff you have brought?
No, the terms and conditions state they won't allow you to re-download. I guess it makes some kind of sense, since they are not encumbered with DRM so it's really easy for you to make backup copies yourself. After all, if your house burns down your CD collection will be gone too and you will have repurchase those as well.
He is definitely un-'Merican. Wee means small is Glaswegian and the last time I have heard Glasgow is still part of the UK though some fishy characters want it to secede.
Civil liberty issues aside, that is some seriously cool tech... This means that the FBI really can do those things which have always been portrayed as ridiculously easy in shows like CSI, where they can instantly tap someone's phone or find its location with a few mouse clicks. Could you call that "life imitating art"?
How is it that Europe gets better defined standards to work with (GSM, DVB) to ensure compatibility while we in America are rolling the dice with cablecards without knowing if we have the switched video stuff or not that might prevent my cablecard device from working? Or that vastly reduces choice in what phones I can use on my cellphone network?
I'm actually really interested in whether anyone has some genuine insight into that, as I've often wondered the same thing myself. Why is it that the US, which is one country, apparently has so much more trouble to deploy some decent standards than Europe, which is a pretty loosely held together bunch of countries which couldn't be more different from each other?
Maybe its a civilization that managed to blow themselves out of history trought an accident somehow? If it is, I hope we can control that technology better when we advance enough to have it.
What, you mean like a particle accelerator inadvertently bumping the universe out of the false vacuum we may be living in, destroying everything at the speed of light? I've always found that a particularly entertaining scary story, mostly because it's entirely plausible...:-)
If they share it, use the watermark to look-up their address and send the heavies round.
The big problem with that method is that you can't prove they intended to share it. Someone may have hacked their computer and stole it, or perhaps their computer was stolen, or their ipod, or a USB stick. Perhaps they had their computer repaired and someone took the file, or someone hacked their WLAN and sniffed it. Etc., etc. There are many ways in which a file might be taken from you through no fault of your own, and the BBC (or anyone trying this business model) would rarely be able to prove that you shared the file on purpose.
There just isn't. Because this can't possibly mean more money for them, if prices cap at 0.98.
It can, if it means that much more sales. If the Big Four are convinced that they might sell so many more tracks that they would make more money than they do now, even at a lower average price, why wouldn't they go for it?
Great, now Switzerland will get involved and claim that the red cross is obviously a derivative work of their flag...
The Red Cross symbol is a derivative of the Swiss flag! The Red Cross was founded by a Swiss, and he created the symbol by reversing the colours of the Swiss flag.
(This comment directed either at you, or at the people who didn't understand the joke, depending on whether you were using ironic humour...:-) )
Pipe down will ya. The Windows Experience Index is a number which indicates the combined performance and capabilities of various parts of the hardware, such as the CPU, graphics card, memory and the hard disk. It's mainly intended so that game publishers can easily specify the minimum requirements for a game to run, and for it to run smoothly. All you have to know is the Windows Experience Index of your Windows install and compare it to the number on the box of the game.
It makes perfect sense for it to be on an absolute scale which is continually extended, as hardware gets more powerful. They can't very well keep the scale the same and recalibrate it every time a new graphics card comes out (quite apart from the administrative overhead that would entail), because then your Windows Experience Index would keep changing, and you could never compare it to the listed index on software which is older than a few months. In other words: it would be useless.
So in other words, you personally find it annoying when people answer mobile phones in your vicinity (if you don't want to know about my life, then stop listening in on my personal conversations!), and therefore you think they don't belong on any mode of transportation, ever, anywhere, and not only that, but you think that entitles you to assault people and vandalise their property? Wow. Judging from the style of your attack you're the type of person whom it would be completely useless to argue with, so I'm not even going to try to point out the many fallacies in that position.
I pity you. Good luck with your life, and may you find some enjoyment in it in spite of all those people who are so obviously out to annoy you personally.
However, if they claimed they feel instant pain the minute the transmitter kicks on, they're probably lying.
If you had read the article, you would know that they complain of nausea, headaches and tiredness (impossible to measure and quite easily caused by psychological causes), but that they also show measurable physical effects such as sweating and increased blood pressure! The thing is, there was no correlation between them experiencing these symptoms on the one hand and the transmitter actually being on or off on the other hand...
The obvious way to conduct such a study would be to correlate the incidence of illness with the proximity to radio sources.
That is what they tested! They did a double blind test, with a control group (it doesn't get much more scientific), which found no correlation between the transmitter being on or off and the subject becoming ill (as reported by themselves but also by physical symptoms such as sweating and higher blood pressure).
That means that there is no evidence for a link between radiation from mobile phone masts and illness, which is as far as science can go. It can't disprove a link. But it doesn't have to, the onus is on the people who assert that there is a link to prove that, and the fact that they fail again and again to do so in scientific studies is strong evidence that there is no link.
Hmmm. Some strange arguments here. It seems you're saying that the reason the airlines tell me to turn off my cell phone is because my battery would be drained too quickly, or the provider's network might be overloaded? That seems very unlikely. Surely that's my choice and/or the provider's business? Not to mention that I'm sure the GSM standard (or other cellular phone standard) has mechanisms to cope with situations like this without instantly overloading the entire network.
You go on to imply that this is a good argument why cell phones don't belong on air planes to begin with. Excuse me? There is no logical connection between those two statements! That's like saying cars don't belong on the highway because they cause traffic jams.
You even say to take the car instead of fly if I need to make phone calls. I'll let the US-centricity of that statement slide (you are aware that there are other countries on the other side of that big water at your borders, right?;-)), but surely it would be a lot safer to receive phone calls on an air plane, where I don't have to do anything but sit, than in a car, where my concentration is required for driving the car safely!
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Of their wrongdoing, yes. Not of of others' wrongdoing! That would be extremely unfair and unreasonable!
So I can only get their music on compact cassette or vinyl records?
Nonsense. Most people don't embed anything except perhaps some images in their Word documents. And if they embed something it's an Excel spreadsheet or graph, and OOo allows embedding of OOo spreadsheets and graphs just fine, so they'd still be able to do that. In fact, it works a lot better. In OOo you can have a table with data and formulas in your text document, and then embed a graph in it based on that data (which automatically updates when you change the data). Try that in Word.
If anything is a niche it's people embedding things other than images, Excel spreadsheets or graphs in their Word documents. OOo won't be able so serve them. Well, whoopteedoo...
Peter Jackson didn't make any of those though, did he...
This just simply is not true. Look at Magnatunes: they let you choose how much you want to pay for an album, with a minimum of $5. If what you said was true one would expect almost everyone to pay $5. Instead, the average price people pay is $8! Apparently, people are perfectly willing to pay for music, as long as they know (as is the case with Magnatunes) that it is DRM-free and half of what they pay goes directly to the artist. I know I am, and that there are many people who think the same.
And saying that the reason people are willing to pay is because Magnatunes is a small label whose music isn't generally to be found on the peer-to-peer networks won't fly either, because Magnatunes make it extremely easy to listen to their music for free without any restrictions.
Yes, if the module's license uses the "or later" language (which is optional), then that would mean that Sun would be allowed to re-license the code under a later version of the LGPL. How could that be a problem for Sun? I don't see what your argument has to do with the issue.
That's the thing: that isn't even necessary! The whole point of the LGPL is that they could use it in StarOffice without having to make the whole of StarOffice open source! This is why Sun's position is so unreasonable.
No, the terms and conditions state they won't allow you to re-download. I guess it makes some kind of sense, since they are not encumbered with DRM so it's really easy for you to make backup copies yourself. After all, if your house burns down your CD collection will be gone too and you will have repurchase those as well.
There are ads on Slashdot?
...and it will only be ten times as large as the original! Yay!
2003 != 2007
Note to self: learn to read.
Fired up Excel 2003. Typed in to A1: "=850*77,1". Got 65535. What am I doing wrong?
Yeah, but isn't the UK the 51st state?
Civil liberty issues aside, that is some seriously cool tech... This means that the FBI really can do those things which have always been portrayed as ridiculously easy in shows like CSI, where they can instantly tap someone's phone or find its location with a few mouse clicks. Could you call that "life imitating art"?
I'm actually really interested in whether anyone has some genuine insight into that, as I've often wondered the same thing myself. Why is it that the US, which is one country, apparently has so much more trouble to deploy some decent standards than Europe, which is a pretty loosely held together bunch of countries which couldn't be more different from each other?
What, you mean like a particle accelerator inadvertently bumping the universe out of the false vacuum we may be living in, destroying everything at the speed of light? I've always found that a particularly entertaining scary story, mostly because it's entirely plausible... :-)
The big problem with that method is that you can't prove they intended to share it. Someone may have hacked their computer and stole it, or perhaps their computer was stolen, or their ipod, or a USB stick. Perhaps they had their computer repaired and someone took the file, or someone hacked their WLAN and sniffed it. Etc., etc. There are many ways in which a file might be taken from you through no fault of your own, and the BBC (or anyone trying this business model) would rarely be able to prove that you shared the file on purpose.
It can, if it means that much more sales. If the Big Four are convinced that they might sell so many more tracks that they would make more money than they do now, even at a lower average price, why wouldn't they go for it?
The Red Cross symbol is a derivative of the Swiss flag! The Red Cross was founded by a Swiss, and he created the symbol by reversing the colours of the Swiss flag.
(This comment directed either at you, or at the people who didn't understand the joke, depending on whether you were using ironic humour... :-) )
Pipe down will ya. The Windows Experience Index is a number which indicates the combined performance and capabilities of various parts of the hardware, such as the CPU, graphics card, memory and the hard disk. It's mainly intended so that game publishers can easily specify the minimum requirements for a game to run, and for it to run smoothly. All you have to know is the Windows Experience Index of your Windows install and compare it to the number on the box of the game.
It makes perfect sense for it to be on an absolute scale which is continually extended, as hardware gets more powerful. They can't very well keep the scale the same and recalibrate it every time a new graphics card comes out (quite apart from the administrative overhead that would entail), because then your Windows Experience Index would keep changing, and you could never compare it to the listed index on software which is older than a few months. In other words: it would be useless.
So in other words, you personally find it annoying when people answer mobile phones in your vicinity (if you don't want to know about my life, then stop listening in on my personal conversations!), and therefore you think they don't belong on any mode of transportation, ever, anywhere, and not only that, but you think that entitles you to assault people and vandalise their property? Wow. Judging from the style of your attack you're the type of person whom it would be completely useless to argue with, so I'm not even going to try to point out the many fallacies in that position.
I pity you. Good luck with your life, and may you find some enjoyment in it in spite of all those people who are so obviously out to annoy you personally.
If you had read the article, you would know that they complain of nausea, headaches and tiredness (impossible to measure and quite easily caused by psychological causes), but that they also show measurable physical effects such as sweating and increased blood pressure! The thing is, there was no correlation between them experiencing these symptoms on the one hand and the transmitter actually being on or off on the other hand...
That is what they tested! They did a double blind test, with a control group (it doesn't get much more scientific), which found no correlation between the transmitter being on or off and the subject becoming ill (as reported by themselves but also by physical symptoms such as sweating and higher blood pressure).
That means that there is no evidence for a link between radiation from mobile phone masts and illness, which is as far as science can go. It can't disprove a link. But it doesn't have to, the onus is on the people who assert that there is a link to prove that, and the fact that they fail again and again to do so in scientific studies is strong evidence that there is no link.
Hmmm. Some strange arguments here. It seems you're saying that the reason the airlines tell me to turn off my cell phone is because my battery would be drained too quickly, or the provider's network might be overloaded? That seems very unlikely. Surely that's my choice and/or the provider's business? Not to mention that I'm sure the GSM standard (or other cellular phone standard) has mechanisms to cope with situations like this without instantly overloading the entire network.
You go on to imply that this is a good argument why cell phones don't belong on air planes to begin with. Excuse me? There is no logical connection between those two statements! That's like saying cars don't belong on the highway because they cause traffic jams.
You even say to take the car instead of fly if I need to make phone calls. I'll let the US-centricity of that statement slide (you are aware that there are other countries on the other side of that big water at your borders, right? ;-)), but surely it would be a lot safer to receive phone calls on an air plane, where I don't have to do anything but sit, than in a car, where my concentration is required for driving the car safely!