Congratulations on your amazingly back-asswards description of what "public domain" means. Now how does this in any way negate the existence of the concept of "public domain" (since you started out by stating "There is no public domain" right before explaining that after copyright expires on a piece of intellectual property it will enter the public domain)?
What about replicating solar and wind power plants for yourself? That way you get a long-term cost decrease. Also, if we ever get fusion power plants we really only need to replicate one of those a few thousand times...
And in a lot of countries context means a lot in the eyes of the law, if you put the porn under "pornography" in an encyclopedia it's no longer considered to be for the purpose of sexually exciting the reader.
Not to mention that there are plenty of countries where pornography isn't illegal in any way, Wikimedia could just host files that could potentially upset prudes in those countries and be done with it, that way every page with such content could contain a neat little warning along the lines of "Your politicians are insane so we need to warn you that if you continue beyond this notice you may find yourself looking at pictures of the human body and perfectly normal bodily functions" for all users accessing their sites from countries where the human body is considered "naughty".
Well, here in Sweden it seems almost no one uses iTunes to buy anything. The main reasons for this seem to be:
Spotify - Lots of people who are "casual" music listeners just use Spotify, it's like listening to the radio except you get the songs you want.
File sharing started early here in Sweden - Which means that for-pay services lagged behind regular file sharing even further than in a lot of other places.
No TV shows on iTunes - I've heard a lot of people here say they'd be more inclined to use iTunes to buy stuff if they could also pay for TV shows, not possible here in Sweden though.
Downloading music, TV shows and Movies used to be legal/semi-legal up until quite recently - It was basically made illegal because the content industry told our politicians that we'd be transformed into a Internet equivalent of a third world country otherwise.
This is yet another proprietary pointless gimmick that won't take off unless it is really really really well designed and constructed, and these things rarely are...
That was my immediate thought as well, this is by no means on-par with a "real" all-CG movie, it feels more like computer game cutscenes. What really disturbed me was that the character animations felt a bit too "floaty" at times (movement that looks like the characters are floating around under water).
My personal storage solution consists of a 4U rack case with a computer with a c2d CPU, gig-E NIC, a few gigs of ram, a bunch of 7200 RPM disks and FreeBSD on the system disk (I also have the system disk mirrored just in case). All the storage disks are then pooled using RAIDZ. Pretty simple yet powerful. Just don't expect too much in the way of performance.
If you actually read my entire post and not just that snippet it's painfully obvious that I'm comparing cellphone operating systems and console operating systems to those running on desktop computers and as part of this comparison I point out that cellphone operating systems tend to be more restricted than those found on general purpose computing devices of the "desktop" or "laptop" type. This combined with the fact that the Xbox which the parent poster claimed he was more comfortable with being a closed platform than a cellphone in fact has a lot more in common with said general purpose computing devices than the average cellphone when it comes to hardware made me question the parent poster's reasoning.
Also, have you ever developed apps for Symbian phones (which were extremely popular not that long ago)?
For some reason I can't help but think that it would be hilarious and kind of scary if everyone chuckles a bit at this and in a couple of months news reports come in saying that for some strange reason the long-running North Korean energy crisis seems to have been solved...
And they do this with a tone that suggests it's someone else's fault for not having the customer environment constantly updated to the latest release of everything, rather than their problem for not dealing with the actual situation in front of them. If you don't know why customer environments don't get upgraded as soon as the new release comes out, then ask a colleague over coffee.
Of course, when v3.2 came out in 1997, v4.0 came out in 2001 and the software is currently at v7.4 and the software is backwards compatible and either open source or only costs a few hundred bucks to upgrade "Just get the customer to upgrade" may very well be a valid response. It's a classic IT failure that everyone just starts thinking "we've always done it that way" and any suggestions for change are considered rocking the boat.
There are still companies running ancient off the shelf software on NT4 servers that require daily attention from their IT department because they consider the cost of spending a few hundred or thousand dollar on updated software to be an unnecessary expense, and not just little mom and pop shops either.
Whatever the reason, the cheapest MacBook is now $999 in the US, and €902 in Italy. Take out the 20% VAT and you get €721.6, which at the current rate is just $919 - actually less than in the US store.
Yes it does seem like Apple has finally started to use the real exchange rate when calculating the value of the "Apple dollar", here in Sweden the cheapest macbook costs SEK 9995 with sales tax which comes to just over $1000 without the sales tax. But this is definitely something fairly new, it used to be that people joked about how the "Apple dollar" had a SEK 15 : $1 exchange rate even when the real dollar was at SEK 7 : $1. There was even some guy who made a blog post when the macbook pro first came out, in this post he detailed how he was able to fly to the US, purchase a US mbp + swedish keyboard, stay a night in a hotel and finally fly back for less than the cost of a mbp in Sweden...
It wasn't like there were no security checkpoints at airports prior to the WTC attack, it was just that experience had taught everyone involved that if someone did hijack an airliner it was generally better to go along with their demands unless they were threatening to kill people.
I also don't think it's accurate to compare hijackings to regular street crime, the crack addict who stick a knife in your face and wants your wallet is a bit of a different creature than the average airplane hijacker.
It used to be you played real friendly with hijackers in a hostage situation. Now we know better.
Well, pre-9/11 the reason everyone just went along with what the hijackers wanted was because in general the hijackers wanted money, to make a political statement while getting themselves dropped off somewhere where they wouldn't get arrested or simply make a statement by landing the plane somewhere safe, taking all the passengers off and blowing up the empty plane. Basically if you just played along you'd be a lot safer than if you tried to take down the guy carrying a submachine gun and a hand grenade...
They server different purposes, they are not identical and are not meant to be identical.
As a side note, my experience with Toshiba's Satellite laptops is that they are hardly the best at anything, they are typical "consumer" laptops (slightly heavier than they need to be, slightly bulkier than they need to be, poorly supported hardware (on both Linux and Windows) and so on). There's a reason that laptop is cheap...
Over what timespan? Sure it's been opening up in recent years but if you compare computing in general from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s the trend becomes slightly different (yes, I'm talking about computing in general instead of just the web, a web example would be from the Mosaic days to the heyday of Active-X when IE had well over 90% of the browser market).
...and if the market decides that Indeo5 within an AVI container happens to be a much better for a given video than either of h.264 OR Theora, then why restrict that from being played back?
Because knowing "the market" MS or some other major player will come up with some wonderful proprietary "build a youtube clone in ten clicks or less!" "solution" that defaults to Indeo5 in an AVI container and we'll never get rid of it.
You opinion and your definition of "less", those buying the iPad clearly disagree but then I suspect they don't use the same metric as you do. Most likely they consider the user interface to be a big "more" even though you probably dismiss it as "less tactile feedback than a nomad, lame" (to steal a quote from Cmdrtaco).
Umm, yes. They've been attacking Google at every opportunity, backstabbing Adobe, one of Apple's biggest supporters (flashbacks to what MSFT did to IBM), Suing competitor over spurious software patents whist blatantly ignoring the hardware patents of other companies and threatening Open source codecs with law suits, very Microsoftian.
They don't even have a majority market share when it comes to the various markets that they're operating in, so they're not so much abusing their position as they are doing what all large corporations do, bickering and backstabbing, something which is a problem but isn't nearly as bad as when someone with practically complete control of the market does it.
Further more, the are attempting to circumvent web standards by forcing pages to be coded for the Iwhatever. Or did you honestly believe that they were trying to use an open standard, that isn't even a standard yet (strangely reminiscent of what MS did with IE).
Are you talking about html5? You do realize that it's not some magic "Apple HTML" but rather the next version of the HTML standard, one which is hardly backed by just Apple, right?
Like trying to force HTML 5 into H.264, or forcing flash sites switch to Apple's implementation of HTML 5. Perhaps the requirement for Iwhatever Application to be originally written in an Apple approved language also slipped your attention, deliberately making it difficult to make cross platform applications (DOS isn't done until Lotus wont run, do you see the resemblance). Maybe the banning of applications that mention Android also went unnoticed (banning something that even mentions a competitor is not anti-competitive, surely).
They're not the only backers of H.264 as the HTML 5 default for video, and there are actually plenty of sound technical reasons for preferring H.264 over Theora.
When you say "flash sites" do you by any chance mean video websites? Because yes, the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad don't support Flash, a decision which isn't all good or all bad, while Flash support would've been nice my experience with mobile devices and Flash is that the current state of it is just horrible, combine that with the history of Flash performance problems on OS X and it sort of makes sense that Apple would rather bet on HTML 5 than trust Adobe to magically pull an efficient and stable Flash release for the iPhone/iPad OS...
There's nothing illegal about being anti-competitive, in fact most companies are pretty anti-competitive, it's when you control a market that it becomes illegal. When it comes to morality it may be wrong but I don't see why we should hold Apple to a higher standard than other large corporations, they're not the ones who have the "Do no evil" mantra.
I've been paying enough attention to tell that Apple are doing exactly what Microsoft did to make us hate them so much.
They're releasing half-assed products that crash several times per day? They're trying to use their 90%+ market share in one market to wrestle competitors out of other markets while screwing the people they bought the tech they're giving away for free from? They're deliberately using broken implementations of open standards in their products to make it hard for other software to interact with it? Really? Are you absolutely sure?
I always carry my keys, lighter, cellphone and a few other things in my pockets, but then I always wear baggy pants with lots of pockets.
Back when I was in to street BMX riding I had everything in a backpack to minimize the risk of damaging anything (including myself) or losing stuff when I fell. The trick in those cases is to always keep track of your backpack. I can't really say I understand how some people manage to constantly misplace bags, I've had several girlfriends who would put their bag/purse down the moment they went indoors or sat down and then they'd be surprised that they'd miss 2/3 of all their incoming calls... If you have something important in your bag you make sure to keep the bag with you all the time (when sitting down on buses, trains and in other public places it's advisable to put one leg through one of the straps to make sure anyone who tries to grab it fails, it's hilarious when someone misses that little precaution)
Actually I believe it was more along the lines of...
"it will tank, like the Apple TV, no one will buy one because you can't run SETI@home, have16 xterms open, play Quake 3 through the ASCII version of SVGAlib, use XCode and Visual Studio and watch movies using VLC all at the same time as you're simultaneously controlling every appliance in your home."
Not to mention those who claimed that clearly it was a worse "couch computer" than a netbook because the netbook has a real keyboard and everyone knows that if you try to type without tactile feedback your hands will burst into flames and Satan(tm) will emerge to claim your soul. Well, at least that's what it sounded like if you added it all up.
Personally I think it's got potential and there are definitely situations in which I can imagine using an iPad but I currently have no plans to buy one, it's not really the right device for me.
I never heard anyone say that about the Macbook Air (I assume that's the product you meant when you wrote "the Air"), I did hear (and agree with) plenty of people talk about it being overpriced or being too much of an "executive" laptop (meaning it's ultra-light and had enough power to do just about anything most people do in a normal workday but overall what you're getting just isn't worth it since the small edge it has over regular laptops is negated by the high price).
Also, in case you didn't know, the Macbook Air was a full-fledged laptop where the focus was on making it lightweight and thin, unfortunately the price seemed to be too high for most people (I have met a couple of *nix geeks working as consultants who swore it was the best laptop they'd ever owned but they were an exception since they could afford it and it made sense for them to use a laptop with a decent-sized screen combined with a form factor that's as small as possible).
Really? You must be new to the computing world, I could give you a long list of laptops I've used that couldn't go above 800x600, 640x480 or even lower resolutions. I've also been using computers long enough to remember why "everyone" hates Microsoft...
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Congratulations on your amazingly back-asswards description of what "public domain" means. Now how does this in any way negate the existence of the concept of "public domain" (since you started out by stating "There is no public domain" right before explaining that after copyright expires on a piece of intellectual property it will enter the public domain)?
What about replicating solar and wind power plants for yourself? That way you get a long-term cost decrease. Also, if we ever get fusion power plants we really only need to replicate one of those a few thousand times...
And in a lot of countries context means a lot in the eyes of the law, if you put the porn under "pornography" in an encyclopedia it's no longer considered to be for the purpose of sexually exciting the reader.
Not to mention that there are plenty of countries where pornography isn't illegal in any way, Wikimedia could just host files that could potentially upset prudes in those countries and be done with it, that way every page with such content could contain a neat little warning along the lines of "Your politicians are insane so we need to warn you that if you continue beyond this notice you may find yourself looking at pictures of the human body and perfectly normal bodily functions" for all users accessing their sites from countries where the human body is considered "naughty".
What laws? Please cite the relevant laws or stop spreading misinformation.
Well, here in Sweden it seems almost no one uses iTunes to buy anything. The main reasons for this seem to be:
This is yet another proprietary pointless gimmick that won't take off unless it is really really really well designed and constructed, and these things rarely are...
That was my immediate thought as well, this is by no means on-par with a "real" all-CG movie, it feels more like computer game cutscenes. What really disturbed me was that the character animations felt a bit too "floaty" at times (movement that looks like the characters are floating around under water).
My personal storage solution consists of a 4U rack case with a computer with a c2d CPU, gig-E NIC, a few gigs of ram, a bunch of 7200 RPM disks and FreeBSD on the system disk (I also have the system disk mirrored just in case). All the storage disks are then pooled using RAIDZ. Pretty simple yet powerful. Just don't expect too much in the way of performance.
How about not misquoting me?
If you actually read my entire post and not just that snippet it's painfully obvious that I'm comparing cellphone operating systems and console operating systems to those running on desktop computers and as part of this comparison I point out that cellphone operating systems tend to be more restricted than those found on general purpose computing devices of the "desktop" or "laptop" type. This combined with the fact that the Xbox which the parent poster claimed he was more comfortable with being a closed platform than a cellphone in fact has a lot more in common with said general purpose computing devices than the average cellphone when it comes to hardware made me question the parent poster's reasoning.
Also, have you ever developed apps for Symbian phones (which were extremely popular not that long ago)?
For some reason I can't help but think that it would be hilarious and kind of scary if everyone chuckles a bit at this and in a couple of months news reports come in saying that for some strange reason the long-running North Korean energy crisis seems to have been solved...
And they do this with a tone that suggests it's someone else's fault for not having the customer environment constantly updated to the latest release of everything, rather than their problem for not dealing with the actual situation in front of them. If you don't know why customer environments don't get upgraded as soon as the new release comes out, then ask a colleague over coffee.
Of course, when v3.2 came out in 1997, v4.0 came out in 2001 and the software is currently at v7.4 and the software is backwards compatible and either open source or only costs a few hundred bucks to upgrade "Just get the customer to upgrade" may very well be a valid response. It's a classic IT failure that everyone just starts thinking "we've always done it that way" and any suggestions for change are considered rocking the boat.
There are still companies running ancient off the shelf software on NT4 servers that require daily attention from their IT department because they consider the cost of spending a few hundred or thousand dollar on updated software to be an unnecessary expense, and not just little mom and pop shops either.
Whatever the reason, the cheapest MacBook is now $999 in the US, and €902 in Italy. Take out the 20% VAT and you get €721.6, which at the current rate is just $919 - actually less than in the US store.
Yes it does seem like Apple has finally started to use the real exchange rate when calculating the value of the "Apple dollar", here in Sweden the cheapest macbook costs SEK 9995 with sales tax which comes to just over $1000 without the sales tax. But this is definitely something fairly new, it used to be that people joked about how the "Apple dollar" had a SEK 15 : $1 exchange rate even when the real dollar was at SEK 7 : $1. There was even some guy who made a blog post when the macbook pro first came out, in this post he detailed how he was able to fly to the US, purchase a US mbp + swedish keyboard, stay a night in a hotel and finally fly back for less than the cost of a mbp in Sweden...
It wasn't like there were no security checkpoints at airports prior to the WTC attack, it was just that experience had taught everyone involved that if someone did hijack an airliner it was generally better to go along with their demands unless they were threatening to kill people.
I also don't think it's accurate to compare hijackings to regular street crime, the crack addict who stick a knife in your face and wants your wallet is a bit of a different creature than the average airplane hijacker.
It used to be you played real friendly with hijackers in a hostage situation. Now we know better.
Well, pre-9/11 the reason everyone just went along with what the hijackers wanted was because in general the hijackers wanted money, to make a political statement while getting themselves dropped off somewhere where they wouldn't get arrested or simply make a statement by landing the plane somewhere safe, taking all the passengers off and blowing up the empty plane. Basically if you just played along you'd be a lot safer than if you tried to take down the guy carrying a submachine gun and a hand grenade...
They server different purposes, they are not identical and are not meant to be identical.
As a side note, my experience with Toshiba's Satellite laptops is that they are hardly the best at anything, they are typical "consumer" laptops (slightly heavier than they need to be, slightly bulkier than they need to be, poorly supported hardware (on both Linux and Windows) and so on). There's a reason that laptop is cheap...
Over what timespan? Sure it's been opening up in recent years but if you compare computing in general from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s the trend becomes slightly different (yes, I'm talking about computing in general instead of just the web, a web example would be from the Mosaic days to the heyday of Active-X when IE had well over 90% of the browser market).
Did you notice the "appliance" part? That's what it is, it's an appliance, it's not meant to be used in the same way as a full-fledged desktop.
...and if the market decides that Indeo5 within an AVI container happens to be a much better for a given video than either of h.264 OR Theora, then why restrict that from being played back?
Because knowing "the market" MS or some other major player will come up with some wonderful proprietary "build a youtube clone in ten clicks or less!" "solution" that defaults to Indeo5 in an AVI container and we'll never get rid of it.
You opinion and your definition of "less", those buying the iPad clearly disagree but then I suspect they don't use the same metric as you do. Most likely they consider the user interface to be a big "more" even though you probably dismiss it as "less tactile feedback than a nomad, lame" (to steal a quote from Cmdrtaco).
Umm, yes. They've been attacking Google at every opportunity, backstabbing Adobe, one of Apple's biggest supporters (flashbacks to what MSFT did to IBM), Suing competitor over spurious software patents whist blatantly ignoring the hardware patents of other companies and threatening Open source codecs with law suits, very Microsoftian.
They don't even have a majority market share when it comes to the various markets that they're operating in, so they're not so much abusing their position as they are doing what all large corporations do, bickering and backstabbing, something which is a problem but isn't nearly as bad as when someone with practically complete control of the market does it.
Further more, the are attempting to circumvent web standards by forcing pages to be coded for the Iwhatever. Or did you honestly believe that they were trying to use an open standard, that isn't even a standard yet (strangely reminiscent of what MS did with IE).
Are you talking about html5? You do realize that it's not some magic "Apple HTML" but rather the next version of the HTML standard, one which is hardly backed by just Apple, right?
Like trying to force HTML 5 into H.264, or forcing flash sites switch to Apple's implementation of HTML 5. Perhaps the requirement for Iwhatever Application to be originally written in an Apple approved language also slipped your attention, deliberately making it difficult to make cross platform applications (DOS isn't done until Lotus wont run, do you see the resemblance). Maybe the banning of applications that mention Android also went unnoticed (banning something that even mentions a competitor is not anti-competitive, surely).
They're not the only backers of H.264 as the HTML 5 default for video, and there are actually plenty of sound technical reasons for preferring H.264 over Theora.
When you say "flash sites" do you by any chance mean video websites? Because yes, the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad don't support Flash, a decision which isn't all good or all bad, while Flash support would've been nice my experience with mobile devices and Flash is that the current state of it is just horrible, combine that with the history of Flash performance problems on OS X and it sort of makes sense that Apple would rather bet on HTML 5 than trust Adobe to magically pull an efficient and stable Flash release for the iPhone/iPad OS...
There's nothing illegal about being anti-competitive, in fact most companies are pretty anti-competitive, it's when you control a market that it becomes illegal. When it comes to morality it may be wrong but I don't see why we should hold Apple to a higher standard than other large corporations, they're not the ones who have the "Do no evil" mantra.
I've been paying enough attention to tell that Apple are doing exactly what Microsoft did to make us hate them so much.
They're releasing half-assed products that crash several times per day? They're trying to use their 90%+ market share in one market to wrestle competitors out of other markets while screwing the people they bought the tech they're giving away for free from? They're deliberately using broken implementations of open standards in their products to make it hard for other software to interact with it? Really? Are you absolutely sure?
I always carry my keys, lighter, cellphone and a few other things in my pockets, but then I always wear baggy pants with lots of pockets.
Back when I was in to street BMX riding I had everything in a backpack to minimize the risk of damaging anything (including myself) or losing stuff when I fell. The trick in those cases is to always keep track of your backpack. I can't really say I understand how some people manage to constantly misplace bags, I've had several girlfriends who would put their bag/purse down the moment they went indoors or sat down and then they'd be surprised that they'd miss 2/3 of all their incoming calls... If you have something important in your bag you make sure to keep the bag with you all the time (when sitting down on buses, trains and in other public places it's advisable to put one leg through one of the straps to make sure anyone who tries to grab it fails, it's hilarious when someone misses that little precaution)
Actually I believe it was more along the lines of...
"it will tank, like the Apple TV, no one will buy one because you can't run SETI@home, have16 xterms open, play Quake 3 through the ASCII version of SVGAlib, use XCode and Visual Studio and watch movies using VLC all at the same time as you're simultaneously controlling every appliance in your home."
Not to mention those who claimed that clearly it was a worse "couch computer" than a netbook because the netbook has a real keyboard and everyone knows that if you try to type without tactile feedback your hands will burst into flames and Satan(tm) will emerge to claim your soul. Well, at least that's what it sounded like if you added it all up.
Personally I think it's got potential and there are definitely situations in which I can imagine using an iPad but I currently have no plans to buy one, it's not really the right device for me.
I never heard anyone say that about the Macbook Air (I assume that's the product you meant when you wrote "the Air"), I did hear (and agree with) plenty of people talk about it being overpriced or being too much of an "executive" laptop (meaning it's ultra-light and had enough power to do just about anything most people do in a normal workday but overall what you're getting just isn't worth it since the small edge it has over regular laptops is negated by the high price).
Also, in case you didn't know, the Macbook Air was a full-fledged laptop where the focus was on making it lightweight and thin, unfortunately the price seemed to be too high for most people (I have met a couple of *nix geeks working as consultants who swore it was the best laptop they'd ever owned but they were an exception since they could afford it and it made sense for them to use a laptop with a decent-sized screen combined with a form factor that's as small as possible).
Really? You must be new to the computing world, I could give you a long list of laptops I've used that couldn't go above 800x600, 640x480 or even lower resolutions. I've also been using computers long enough to remember why "everyone" hates Microsoft...