I'm not from such a country [1], but in a Geneva sauna recently(!) I met a member of a Russian government delegation attending a conference on DRM. He made two points about piracy in Russia. One was that when the standard price of a DVD is two weeks average wages then the legal busuness model has no chance of working; I suspect the same argument would apply to software. The other was that they kept piracy in-house: in terms of international trade in pirate goods (based on customs seizures) Russia barely registers on the international scale, whereas the USA is in the top five (and that no mention of this was being allowed at the conference). Personally I think the relevance of that second point is questionable -- lost sales are lost sales, whether they cross international borders or not -- but I think it's indicative of their view that they're being unfairly picked on by countries that should get their act together first.
[1] My SO is, but she has been away for too long to know the current situation./p?
Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.
on
The Death of Clippy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Now, with O2K7, Microsoft has taken a quantum leap forward in interface design and made easy enough that the quintessential grandmother can use it to its full potential. I balked at the ribbon myself until I actually used it. Honestly, they got their "wow" out of me after just a couple of minutes using it. That's not the word I used after a couple of minutes, and even after a couple of months it was seriously impairing my productivity. Yes, sure everybody who looked at it said "wow", but it was a different matter in practice. There's so much wrong with it, even in terms of established and reliable UI design principles, that it's a huge step backwards (I wish the designers had read "About Face", a Microsoft Press book on UI design -- there's a lot wrong with it, but it's right enough to show the O2K7 interface up for the usability disaster that it is). And the biggest issue is that the ribbon can't be configured, so stuff I know I won't use more than once a year (the stuff I build into templates) still has to clutter my desktop and distract me from whatever it is that I do need.
Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.
on
The Death of Clippy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Unfortunately, they overhauled the UI in a way that IMHO completely fsailed to help people find the functionality. The previous UI, with menus and toolbars, for me was a model of a tidy workshop, with most tools tidied away in logical places (the menus), and just the tools one uses a lot or are using just at the moment left out (on the toolbars).
The Office 2007 model, on the other hand, for me is a model of tipping out the contents of every draw and box in the workshop into a heap in the middle of the workshop floor (the ribbon) and having to search through it every time you want something. There doesn't seem to be any useful way of configuring it to particular styles of use, so whenever I wanted anything from the ribbon I was confronted with a huge block of the screen on my laptop taken up with options that I had set up once and for all in the template.
I could go into a lot of other things that I think are wrong with the Office 2007 UI (I tried the beta for two months, and I reckon by the end of that time it was still dropping my productivity by 20%-30%) but that's the main one that I think is related to the death of Clippy. Unfortulately, I think Clippy is needed more than ever, but needs to be equipped with a laser pointer to indicate the bit of the ribbon we should be looking at:-(
C S Lewis (yes, the Narnia one) considered that scenario in a short story, and speculated on the sort of woman who would volunteer for the mission. He decided that they would either have to be very desperate and unable to get any any other way, or well-meaning do-gooders who saw it as their duty to help the male astronauts, but were sure that it was just a duty and absolutely must not be enjoyable for anyone.
Surely all it would take is for DRM media not to be playable on general purpose computers?
And how would you do that? They don't call them GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTERS for nothing. Emulating another device is definitely within the powers of a GPC. It would depend on the strength of the security built into the hardware. Yes, any security can theoretically be cracked and so emulated on a GPC, but with good enough security it could be a pretty unlikely scenario.
If the USA mandated Treacherous Computing or the major suppliers of software and content started to insist on it then I reckon the general purpose computer would be dead within a few of years outside of museums and hobbyists bedrooms.
That would include places like universities and research labs. So, we have two scenarios: Why would universities and research labs need computers without TC? Perhaps a very very few niche activities, but for the general work of a university or lab the TC computer would work just fine and be no hinerance to research. And if the TC computer is the mass-market commodity item and the GPC is the special build then the TC is likely to be cheaper than the GPC despite the extra complexity.
Unless the US manages to make lots of other countries use TC, that move is as good as a poison pill. China is not going to stop making GPCs just because the US says so, if others are willing to buy them. China will stop making GPCs if there is no significant market for them. There will be no significant market for them if they don't do what the public want. If the public wants to play DRM that needs son-of-Palladium then the GPCs won'd do what the public want.
Even if they do make TCs for the US market, I doubt they will put much effort in making them tamper proof, unless they pay them for it (meaning that a TC will be more expensive than a GPC). Now, that is a good point, but it's not a question of whether those wanting DRM pay for it -- the rogue suppliers could happily take the money and still not put the effort in (ever had your auto serviced?) It means that the TC advocates will need to keep tight control of the hardware.
Surely all it would take is for DRM media not to be playable on general purpose computers? And it doesn't matter whether China cares or not: I don't think China is a significant market driver because as I understand they do much of their own hardware and don't buy much software because of rampant piracy (last time I was in China I couldn't find legal versions of any software). If the USA mandated Treacherous Computing or the major suppliers of software and content started to insist on it then I reckon the general purpose computer would be dead within a few of years outside of museums and hobbyists bedrooms.
If there were a law against thinking of committing a crime, then the thinking itself would be a crime, so you wouldn't get prosecuted for just thinking of committing a crime until they made it illegal to think of thinking of committing a crime. Except that means... oh, where's Zeno when you need him?
Some people say that teaching Linux in schools is a bad thing as the commerical world is all Microsoft on the desktop. That's total rubbish too, people should not be taught 'Word' they should be taught general word processing skills and preferably be exposed to a few alternative apps so they don't think there's only one way to do it. Yes. Both my kids' schools taught MS Office as if it were the only office suite in existence, even though I had a spare Office 2003 licence I could have used. I made a point of only installing Open Office on my kids' computer so they had to learn that there were alternatives. I tried to teach my daughter to use a laTeX/WinEdit combination too (as an easier way to handle maths and accents in French), but she was too resistant.
You're not free, you don't even have a constitution in which said freedoms would be granted.
The constitution is not an issue; there are lots of other things our government can ignore instead.
In our case, said freedom is granted by virtue of the UK being a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and various other treaties deriving from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As the Perl man page says, "There's more than one way to do it".
You're a royal subject, property of her Majesty the Queen of England.
A royal subject yes. Although ISTR a test case a few years ago that determined minors to be the property of the House of Lords, I don't think the Queen's ownership of her subjects has ever been tested (or even asserted) in law.
I am posting to inform you that you are in breach of my patent regarding the filing of sarcastic replies on internet discussion boards. My invoice for royalties is in the post.
Technically, energy out can be more than energy in, but I don't really think they have a nuclear reactor. What I think you meant to say is that mass-energy in has to exactly equal mass-energy out.
What has American English got to do with anything? The internet is international, and I for one have no intention of dropping the 'u' from 'colour' just because Americans bore easily!
Quite. I felt obliged to spend last weekend cleaning up my back yard because I discovered on Google Earth that you could see from space that it was like a tip.
Been there, done that, got the marriage certificate.
Whan I got married 17 years ago, the church warned us that videoing the service would be a copyright infringement because some of the hymns used were still in copyright (the organist wasn't fussed about copyright on his performance, because he was a personal friend).
We thanked the church for its advice. I couldn't possibly comment in a public forum whether we heeded it.
The same goes for content... if noone records a show, or watches it on Tivo buffer, its well earned demise can be accelerated.
Ah, you mean that high quality niche programmes can be more effectively eliminated, and we can move more rapidly to a paradise of homogeneous lowest-common-denominator pap? Gosh, I can hardly wait!
Is it true that Alaska is considering splitting into two states, purely to relegate Texas to the third biggest State from its present position of second?
They knew about it further west long ago; it was the molecule of the month at Bristol University back in October 2005, where they mention its contribution to the smell of the sea. And of truffles. And of farts. Mmm, versatile!
Yes, corporate desktops are Microsoft's bread and butter. But "Making the largest corporate users happy" is not the same thing as making the end users happy. The people who make the corporate buying decisions -- I'm pretty sure that's who was meant by "corporate users" and I'm absolutely sure it's who Microsoft are trying to please -- are not the end users. My experience of corporate buying decisions is that the buyers don't bother asking the actual users what they need, they give the users what they've read somewhere is good for the corporation.
Well, I've had the demand for a driver when changing USB port. So I gave it the driver. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, it's broken. But I've always been able to get it to work. Which is something I can't say for Linux.
I know it's not the fault of Linux, it's more down to the hardware manufacturers not caring -- but they're in business so why should they care? Open source hardware, anybody?
His particular issues might be because he's still really locked into MS even if he's trying to run the MS stuff under Linux, but I think he's on to a real issue.
I've tried many times to get a working Linux system, but I've always found something not working, and I don't mean Microsoft software not working. I mean sound not working or USB ports not working. Yes, I can hear everybody crying out "check the hardware compatibility lists first", and they right. But like the majority of computer users I live with off-the-shelf computers and I work to a budget, so I get the hardware the manufacturer gives me, and if I ask for Linux compatability I get blank stares. The folks I know with working Linux systems are pretty much all using home-builds, and I'm a software geek not (nowadays) a hardware geek so learning to do a home build is a hurdle too far.
Did they actually charge for the drivers? My recollection is that they charged if you wanted media but that downloads were free -- but maybe you're thinking of different all-in-ones. Mind, since I was on dial-up at the time, and the "drivers" (actually a whole software bundle) would have been something like a six-hour download, the difference was moot.
"A 90% chance humans are responsible for climate change"?
Do they mean a 90% confidence? Or are they all Bayesians? Or am I too pedantic for my own good?
I think I might have some eight-inch floppies somewhere. No, I'm not boasting; the young guns might not realise that they're what we had before five-and-a-quarter inch floppies.
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I'm not from such a country [1], but in a Geneva sauna recently(!) I met a member of a Russian government delegation attending a conference on DRM. He made two points about piracy in Russia. One was that when the standard price of a DVD is two weeks average wages then the legal busuness model has no chance of working; I suspect the same argument would apply to software. The other was that they kept piracy in-house: in terms of international trade in pirate goods (based on customs seizures) Russia barely registers on the international scale, whereas the USA is in the top five (and that no mention of this was being allowed at the conference). Personally I think the relevance of that second point is questionable -- lost sales are lost sales, whether they cross international borders or not -- but I think it's indicative of their view that they're being unfairly picked on by countries that should get their act together first.
[1] My SO is, but she has been away for too long to know the current situation./p?
Unfortunately, they overhauled the UI in a way that IMHO completely fsailed to help people find the functionality. The previous UI, with menus and toolbars, for me was a model of a tidy workshop, with most tools tidied away in logical places (the menus), and just the tools one uses a lot or are using just at the moment left out (on the toolbars).
The Office 2007 model, on the other hand, for me is a model of tipping out the contents of every draw and box in the workshop into a heap in the middle of the workshop floor (the ribbon) and having to search through it every time you want something. There doesn't seem to be any useful way of configuring it to particular styles of use, so whenever I wanted anything from the ribbon I was confronted with a huge block of the screen on my laptop taken up with options that I had set up once and for all in the template.
I could go into a lot of other things that I think are wrong with the Office 2007 UI (I tried the beta for two months, and I reckon by the end of that time it was still dropping my productivity by 20%-30%) but that's the main one that I think is related to the death of Clippy. Unfortulately, I think Clippy is needed more than ever, but needs to be equipped with a laser pointer to indicate the bit of the ribbon we should be looking at :-(
C S Lewis (yes, the Narnia one) considered that scenario in a short story, and speculated on the sort of woman who would volunteer for the mission. He decided that they would either have to be very desperate and unable to get any any other way, or well-meaning do-gooders who saw it as their duty to help the male astronauts, but were sure that it was just a duty and absolutely must not be enjoyable for anyone.
In Lewis's version the plan failed.
And how would you do that? They don't call them GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTERS for nothing. Emulating another device is definitely within the powers of a GPC. It would depend on the strength of the security built into the hardware. Yes, any security can theoretically be cracked and so emulated on a GPC, but with good enough security it could be a pretty unlikely scenario.
That would include places like universities and research labs. So, we have two scenarios:
Why would universities and research labs need computers without TC? Perhaps a very very few niche activities, but for the general work of a university or lab the TC computer would work just fine and be no hinerance to research. And if the TC computer is the mass-market commodity item and the GPC is the special build then the TC is likely to be cheaper than the GPC despite the extra complexity. Unless the US manages to make lots of other countries use TC, that move is as good as a poison pill. China is not going to stop making GPCs just because the US says so, if others are willing to buy them. China will stop making GPCs if there is no significant market for them. There will be no significant market for them if they don't do what the public want. If the public wants to play DRM that needs son-of-Palladium then the GPCs won'd do what the public want. Even if they do make TCs for the US market, I doubt they will put much effort in making them tamper proof, unless they pay them for it (meaning that a TC will be more expensive than a GPC). Now, that is a good point, but it's not a question of whether those wanting DRM pay for it -- the rogue suppliers could happily take the money and still not put the effort in (ever had your auto serviced?) It means that the TC advocates will need to keep tight control of the hardware.
Surely all it would take is for DRM media not to be playable on general purpose computers? And it doesn't matter whether China cares or not: I don't think China is a significant market driver because as I understand they do much of their own hardware and don't buy much software because of rampant piracy (last time I was in China I couldn't find legal versions of any software). If the USA mandated Treacherous Computing or the major suppliers of software and content started to insist on it then I reckon the general purpose computer would be dead within a few of years outside of museums and hobbyists bedrooms.
If there were a law against thinking of committing a crime, then the thinking itself would be a crime, so you wouldn't get prosecuted for just thinking of committing a crime until they made it illegal to think of thinking of committing a crime. Except that means ... oh, where's Zeno when you need him?
Oh, that's unfair. Windows is nowhere near ready for beta yet!
The constitution is not an issue; there are lots of other things our government can ignore instead.
In our case, said freedom is granted by virtue of the UK being a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and various other treaties deriving from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As the Perl man page says, "There's more than one way to do it".
You're a royal subject, property of her Majesty the Queen of England.A royal subject yes. Although ISTR a test case a few years ago that determined minors to be the property of the House of Lords, I don't think the Queen's ownership of her subjects has ever been tested (or even asserted) in law.
Do you really want Apple to be able to claim that they make a killer media player?
I am posting to inform you that you are in breach of my patent regarding the filing of sarcastic replies on internet discussion boards. My invoice for royalties is in the post.
Technically, energy out can be more than energy in, but I don't really think they have a nuclear reactor. What I think you meant to say is that mass-energy in has to exactly equal mass-energy out.
What has American English got to do with anything? The internet is international, and I for one have no intention of dropping the 'u' from 'colour' just because Americans bore easily!
Quite. I felt obliged to spend last weekend cleaning up my back yard because I discovered on Google Earth that you could see from space that it was like a tip.
Been there, done that, got the marriage certificate. Whan I got married 17 years ago, the church warned us that videoing the service would be a copyright infringement because some of the hymns used were still in copyright (the organist wasn't fussed about copyright on his performance, because he was a personal friend). We thanked the church for its advice. I couldn't possibly comment in a public forum whether we heeded it.
The same goes for content... if noone records a show, or watches it on Tivo buffer, its well earned demise can be accelerated.
Ah, you mean that high quality niche programmes can be more effectively eliminated, and we can move more rapidly to a paradise of homogeneous lowest-common-denominator pap? Gosh, I can hardly wait!
Is it true that Alaska is considering splitting into two states, purely to relegate Texas to the third biggest State from its present position of second?
They knew about it further west long ago; it was the molecule of the month at Bristol University back in October 2005, where they mention its contribution to the smell of the sea. And of truffles. And of farts. Mmm, versatile!
Yes, corporate desktops are Microsoft's bread and butter. But "Making the largest corporate users happy" is not the same thing as making the end users happy. The people who make the corporate buying decisions -- I'm pretty sure that's who was meant by "corporate users" and I'm absolutely sure it's who Microsoft are trying to please -- are not the end users. My experience of corporate buying decisions is that the buyers don't bother asking the actual users what they need, they give the users what they've read somewhere is good for the corporation.
Well, I've had the demand for a driver when changing USB port. So I gave it the driver. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, it's broken. But I've always been able to get it to work. Which is something I can't say for Linux.
I know it's not the fault of Linux, it's more down to the hardware manufacturers not caring -- but they're in business so why should they care? Open source hardware, anybody?
His particular issues might be because he's still really locked into MS even if he's trying to run the MS stuff under Linux, but I think he's on to a real issue.
I've tried many times to get a working Linux system, but I've always found something not working, and I don't mean Microsoft software not working. I mean sound not working or USB ports not working. Yes, I can hear everybody crying out "check the hardware compatibility lists first", and they right. But like the majority of computer users I live with off-the-shelf computers and I work to a budget, so I get the hardware the manufacturer gives me, and if I ask for Linux compatability I get blank stares. The folks I know with working Linux systems are pretty much all using home-builds, and I'm a software geek not (nowadays) a hardware geek so learning to do a home build is a hurdle too far.
Did they actually charge for the drivers? My recollection is that they charged if you wanted media but that downloads were free -- but maybe you're thinking of different all-in-ones. Mind, since I was on dial-up at the time, and the "drivers" (actually a whole software bundle) would have been something like a six-hour download, the difference was moot.
"A 90% chance humans are responsible for climate change"? Do they mean a 90% confidence? Or are they all Bayesians? Or am I too pedantic for my own good?
I think I might have some eight-inch floppies somewhere. No, I'm not boasting; the young guns might not realise that they're what we had before five-and-a-quarter inch floppies.