-back on topic, even though it's questionable tactics again (leveraging desktop vs. search), the anti-trust litigation has done one thing: kept MS from "innovating" too much. I'm pretty sure that without a good strong light being shined on their shady business practices, they would have easily co-opted the internet, TCP/IP and all sorts of other "free" things today.
to happen to Linux and, to a smaller degree, Mac OSX.
And not at the expense of existing paying Windows customers.
I don't think Microsoft is going to be convinced otherwise, and if people are pirating when they would really not use anything else, then hell, they should pay for their Windows license.
It might move those who pirate just for fun into other OS's:-)
You have to be a lawyer to know what parts are enforceable, what parts are questionable, and what parts are legal bullshit.
You think that lawyers came up with those evil unenforceable terms? You know, behind every sleazy corporate laywer, there is an equally sleazy, childish, control-freak of a corporate executive.
Killing all the lawyers will just create a market for new ones. Stopping the source of the bullshit (or better yet, legislating a environment where spouting bullshit was legally actionable) would be a much better solution.
Save the Planet, Recycle an Environmentalist!
How typical. Advocating someone's demise is criminal in most countries, you know. (yeah I get your joke, but you have serious problems if you're suggesting certain types of people should be killed... you would fit in nicely in a nice autocratic dictatorship somewhere).
Apple's hardware isn't all that exceptional. It tends to cost more and have fewer features than competing brands...
Since you base your arguement on this single peice of evidence, can you point me to where you can find something with the same size, noise factors as the Mac Mini for less? If you don't then I'm going have to assume you're trolling here. Seems like on/. you have to fight against the "common wisdom", and here they feel Apple hardware is great, so you have to prove (ie, valid data backing up your claim) yourself to fight that perception.
I try to keep an eye on things, even though it's not my responsibility, and I'm usually too busy to notice what's going on in the seating area unless there is a major disturbance (in other words: never).
You know, a simple deterrent would be a large, visible NON-functioning (or randomly functioning) camera that would ward off the stray thief. How this impacts business with regulars is up to you, but advertising it as a service to deter theft would be a good way to keep them on-board.
I'd be happy with a GUI system that would let me replace SetFocus (or whatever they call the equivalent) with a big fat no-op.
This sounds great, but would probably have major impact to the usability of everything in windows. From my understanding of Win32API, this would break about 90% of what's written out there. Perhaps you could get away with ignoring SetFocus where the windowHandle referenced wasn't in some way related to what you were working on... but that seems costly.
Siliconvalley.com points out that it's a mixed picture for Apple under Jobs...
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bus iness/columnists/mike_langberg/14191452.htm?source =rss&channel=siliconvalley_mike_langberg [siliconvalley.com]
Jeebus, I hate the article framing.... so the options they present "factors of success" are: Market share is up 50, 100, 200% or "you lose"?
What about: jump into new market and grow that market from a 10-100m to a multi-billion dollar market and keep majority share of that market?
How about: making tons of money selling stuff that people want (or perhaps even need)?
Market share only makes sense if you're concerned about innovating and creating new markets. The bottom line is that Apple is making money hand over fist, the old fashioned American way: innovating. I'd like to see HP, Microsoft, and Sony say they've done that in the past 5 years.
That Microsoft chooses not to control their own destiny at the cost of the consumer's experience?
How completlely predictably stupid. This chapter in the ever-continuing saga of "idea ownership" that was brought about by the terrible terrible legal precedent in 1998 (State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc), is marking a major decline in both the freedom of the market as well as potentially, freedom of the individuals who participate in that market.
I'm very lacking of pity for Microsoft, IBM and other patent-warchest-holding companies... but this insanity with the submarine patents (esp. on business ideas) has got to stop.
A proprietary format that is similar in price to a DVD but (I'm assuming) a fraction of the resolution is failing.
Not to mention your other (very good) options:
Netflix as a source is great, and convertible as you mentioned, to PSP format.
thepiratebay.org is very popular these days for someone who doesn't mind a few minutes searching...conversion is easy also
Video podcasting and iTMS downloads are quite usable, and although the screen and quality is smaller, it's much easier than converting DVD/download > PSP compatible. I already have my iPod sync going, now I just buy or subscribe to a podcast, and it works.
Or... I can just not watch movies, I mean jeebus, the PSP is a GAMING device, why would I want to watch something when I can be more interactive?
I took a look at TFA. Is it me or they don't discuss this new important feature: Ask.com Maps & Directions [ask.com].
Is it me, or did they copy Google completely?? I mean, I typed in my address and Ask gets it wrong the same way Google does (one nice improvement is the red arrow showing me which house is mine... but it's wrong!!).
Ok, they do have one feature that seems neat is the directions "playback", similar to Google Earth's "flyby" feature.
I think they need to improve their server response, though:-)
I'm not saying that a game with story is impossible, I'm definitely not.
You have obviously never played games like Betrayal at Krondor. Definitely great storywork there, and was intermingled with gameplay. The description of even common things like items and "flavor" characters were very rich and detailed.
I'll stop with the pump up, but imagine a political game with descriptions and narrative from Jon Stewart, or maybe an economics/finance game with narrative from other popstars (Jim Cramer, etc).
The fact is that there is a lot of real potenital for BOTH gameplay and narrative, each feeding on the other to produce something that is greater than either.
Oracle on the Applications side - anything that is a new release is so full of bugs and unworkable they end up paying the early adopters to implement (in free consultant hours after all is said and done) - it has patchsets galore.
SAP - same thing. Patches and the like are a regular occurrence. TBH I don't know how bad their new releases are in comparison to Oracle, but I'd wager they're on about the same page.
You do realize, of course, that almost anyone implementing enterprise software has DBAs, FSAs, and general integrators there to make the software work?
Compare contrast this with the home market where mom&pop don't even know how to login properly much less code an customization/integration to make the new software work with their existing systems/processes.
It's usually considered to be a conflict of interest. That's fine for you to do it, but generally journalist (in as much as this guy is a journalist at all, he mostly writes trash for Forbes) are supposed to refrain from it. Not required by law I don't think, just an ethical/professional thing.
It's not required to be divested of any such "conflicts", you just have to be open about them. It's called disclosure, and allows people to determine your biases as a source (every source is biased, it's unavoidable). Sometimes people state very clearly that they have no related biases, and this done to make it clear that there is no relation.
I guess Nintendo (and Sega, and Hudson, and anyone else who gets involved) will now be setting their lawyers on all the 'abandonware' ROM sites for outdated consoles...
As long as "unsigned" ROMs aren't playable on their systems, I doubt they would really care... well, any more than they already have.
I'm guessing it will take about a year before some asshat figures out how to "hack" the Revolution to allow standard ROMs to work; then the crackdown may happen.
Till then, they are trying to quash the "modded xbox" as their competitor? Not really, their competitor is Xbox360's download feature.
In related news, someone asked Sony what their response was... *crickets*
You can make a system with wicked clever algorithms, and still it wouldn't matter because what people are drawn to are pretty colors of the hardware and the UI.
Isn't it a bit deceptive to label "Good UI" as "pretty colors"? It's been proven that the OSX UI guidelines, look and feel, is MUCH better than both Windows and especially Linux.
It doesn't matter a damn that a computer or program is 50% faster, as most of the time the process waits on user input... it's making the users more productive and happy that really makes a computer/program solution *faster*... if that means "pretty colors" or "good UI guidelines" or "system stability" makes this possible, then those should really be what matters in benchmarking.
It can be pretty hard to get your hands on it, though, because they're too stupid to put a PDF on their website. You pretty much have to get a sunday paper.
Being a SF Bay longtime resident, I gotta second this... man, I love to read their sunday paper adverts.. it's so dumb of them that they don't just publish this via pdf or something (probably to avoid other stores from "gaming" with their prices).
They're also quite dumb in that up until 1999 or somthing they didn't even have a website... ironically, the only hits you'd get on altavista/yahoo/google would be "anti-Fry's" or "Fry's sucks" websites:-)
When he said that the Microsoft way was the "American way"...
I mean, lets look at the facts:
The US always says "trust us", and then acts in a manner to prove why you shouldn't... just like some folks from Redmond.
The US is all about coercive power... kind of like a coercive monopoly we all know.
The US built it's fortune from land stolen from the Native Americans... just like Microsoft built their fortune on someone else's code.
The US spends a vast fortune spinning each bad thing that comes their way, and never admitting they did any wrong... because to do so would look weak. Sounds very familiar indeed.
Ultimately, this proves one point... you should never trust any group to do the right thing... not the US, not Google, or Microsoft, and it was foolish in this case that the UK trusted a US company (part of the US military industrial complex)... there should have been a demand for this openness in the contract and at the first sign of secrecy the UK should have threatened to stop payment.
I agree that it is time for AMD to get a "K9" out of the door
... AMD's K9... will you let it out the doggie door? Will it be more bark than bite? Man, the press will have a field day with that core designation:-)
The purpose of these laws is to make a big stack of cash relatively useless. That helps make stealing or otherwise illegitimately "earning" a big stack of cash less inviting. Sure, you can steal a million dollars, but then you can't do anything with it.
Actually, this seems to be the arguement. But in reality the organized crime that not so surprisingly infests a good portion of the commerce in this country has ways to deal (think: someone on the payroll + proper response strategy to launder the ill-gotten goods) with these kinds of problems... it's just the small-timers that are caught.
In the end it's our freedoms that are trampled on, and those are going to be hard, if impossible to ever win back... especially since now, anything related to "terrorism" has effectively no oversight or appeal.
It's no wonder Apple want in - there are suckers aplenty who buy such tat even if their iPod is going to be obsolete by the same time next year.
I agree with your main point (accessories market == insane markups, even for marginally useful gadgets), but re: the whole obsolete comment... WTF?
I mean, my friend has an old 2 or 3G iPod that a) still works, b) has plenty of juice and c) has the same output quality as newer 5G ipods (for sound).
OK, so it's b/w screen isn't exactly sexy, it still works and is far from obsolete... it's over 4 years old now.
This is the problem that PC enthusiasts (most of/.) really have a problem understanding, having been part of the Microsoft/Intel upgrade treadmill: sometimes an older computer/device is still quite functional and need not be replaced... until, as the saying goes, it's broke. Apple's products for the most part aren't designed with obsolescence in mind, like some other major offenders out there (Nike/GM/Microsoft, I'm glaring your way).
Wait - what? I'd say 75% of slashdot is anti-copyright, 50% of it anti-patent, and 90% anti-software-patent.
Unless of course it involves Apple or Google... this from a relatively pro-Apple/.er (check my previous posts).
I can understand why us geeks would champion Apple and Google (ie, they're not corporate-sociopaths, like Microsoft and dozens of other truly evil companies), but we should also keep our eye on the ball: DRM is just plain bad, copyrights and idea-patents are untenable in an information-based society, and there will be a time when our darlings will see that "being evil" (ie, seriously evil) might become profitable enough to exploit.
Sure, support them as the underdogs for now, but make sure you keep a big rock behind your back in case that "underdog" turns on you.
Fix your price at a point higher than what the market wants.
Find comsumers who priate your music because they dont want to pay set price.
Extort said persons for more than they would ever spend in a year for music.
???
Profit
I think the missing 4. ??? is really:
4. Get everyone else who even think of pirating the music to agree that pirating (and getting sued) is less costly than buying overpriced music... and cash in on huge numbers of music listeners' fear.
Why is competition in the marketplace always characterized as a "war?"
The fundamentalist free-market believer will tell you that business is war. However, the analogy you are complaining about (competition = war) is the same thing that miffs me (political campaign = horserace).
What this does is remove a whole dimension from public thought. Frames everything as a zero-sum game, and you can drive attitudes like "you're with us or against us" where any action taken by large organization (like oh, say mandatory DRM, or maybe torturing prisoners) is acceptable as long as your "with them".
The framing of everything as a war (ie, zero-sum) is a purely fundamentalist ideology.
Slashdot Mirror
Zonk, wtf does this mean?
-back on topic, even though it's questionable tactics again (leveraging desktop vs. search), the anti-trust litigation has done one thing: kept MS from "innovating" too much. I'm pretty sure that without a good strong light being shined on their shady business practices, they would have easily co-opted the internet, TCP/IP and all sorts of other "free" things today.
All I can say is:
And not at the expense of existing paying Windows customers.
I don't think Microsoft is going to be convinced otherwise, and if people are pirating when they would really not use anything else, then hell, they should pay for their Windows license.
It might move those who pirate just for fun into other OS's :-)
You think that lawyers came up with those evil unenforceable terms? You know, behind every sleazy corporate laywer, there is an equally sleazy, childish, control-freak of a corporate executive.
Killing all the lawyers will just create a market for new ones. Stopping the source of the bullshit (or better yet, legislating a environment where spouting bullshit was legally actionable) would be a much better solution.
Save the Planet, Recycle an Environmentalist!
How typical. Advocating someone's demise is criminal in most countries, you know. (yeah I get your joke, but you have serious problems if you're suggesting certain types of people should be killed... you would fit in nicely in a nice autocratic dictatorship somewhere).
Since you base your arguement on this single peice of evidence, can you point me to where you can find something with the same size, noise factors as the Mac Mini for less? If you don't then I'm going have to assume you're trolling here. Seems like on /. you have to fight against the "common wisdom", and here they feel Apple hardware is great, so you have to prove (ie, valid data backing up your claim) yourself to fight that perception.
You know, a simple deterrent would be a large, visible NON-functioning (or randomly functioning) camera that would ward off the stray thief. How this impacts business with regulars is up to you, but advertising it as a service to deter theft would be a good way to keep them on-board.
This sounds great, but would probably have major impact to the usability of everything in windows. From my understanding of Win32API, this would break about 90% of what's written out there. Perhaps you could get away with ignoring SetFocus where the windowHandle referenced wasn't in some way related to what you were working on... but that seems costly.
What about: jump into new market and grow that market from a 10-100m to a multi-billion dollar market and keep majority share of that market?
How about: making tons of money selling stuff that people want (or perhaps even need)?
Market share only makes sense if you're concerned about innovating and creating new markets. The bottom line is that Apple is making money hand over fist, the old fashioned American way: innovating. I'd like to see HP, Microsoft, and Sony say they've done that in the past 5 years.
How completlely predictably stupid. This chapter in the ever-continuing saga of "idea ownership" that was brought about by the terrible terrible legal precedent in 1998 (State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc), is marking a major decline in both the freedom of the market as well as potentially, freedom of the individuals who participate in that market.
I'm very lacking of pity for Microsoft, IBM and other patent-warchest-holding companies... but this insanity with the submarine patents (esp. on business ideas) has got to stop.
Not to mention your other (very good) options:
Is it me, or did they copy Google completely?? I mean, I typed in my address and Ask gets it wrong the same way Google does (one nice improvement is the red arrow showing me which house is mine... but it's wrong!!).
Ok, they do have one feature that seems neat is the directions "playback", similar to Google Earth's "flyby" feature.
I think they need to improve their server response, though :-)
You have obviously never played games like Betrayal at Krondor. Definitely great storywork there, and was intermingled with gameplay. The description of even common things like items and "flavor" characters were very rich and detailed.
I'll stop with the pump up, but imagine a political game with descriptions and narrative from Jon Stewart, or maybe an economics/finance game with narrative from other popstars (Jim Cramer, etc).
The fact is that there is a lot of real potenital for BOTH gameplay and narrative, each feeding on the other to produce something that is greater than either.
SAP - same thing. Patches and the like are a regular occurrence. TBH I don't know how bad their new releases are in comparison to Oracle, but I'd wager they're on about the same page.
You do realize, of course, that almost anyone implementing enterprise software has DBAs, FSAs, and general integrators there to make the software work?
Compare contrast this with the home market where mom&pop don't even know how to login properly much less code an customization/integration to make the new software work with their existing systems/processes.
It's not required to be divested of any such "conflicts", you just have to be open about them. It's called disclosure, and allows people to determine your biases as a source (every source is biased, it's unavoidable). Sometimes people state very clearly that they have no related biases, and this done to make it clear that there is no relation.
As long as "unsigned" ROMs aren't playable on their systems, I doubt they would really care... well, any more than they already have.
I'm guessing it will take about a year before some asshat figures out how to "hack" the Revolution to allow standard ROMs to work; then the crackdown may happen.
Till then, they are trying to quash the "modded xbox" as their competitor? Not really, their competitor is Xbox360's download feature.
In related news, someone asked Sony what their response was... *crickets*
Isn't it a bit deceptive to label "Good UI" as "pretty colors"? It's been proven that the OSX UI guidelines, look and feel, is MUCH better than both Windows and especially Linux.
It doesn't matter a damn that a computer or program is 50% faster, as most of the time the process waits on user input... it's making the users more productive and happy that really makes a computer/program solution *faster*... if that means "pretty colors" or "good UI guidelines" or "system stability" makes this possible, then those should really be what matters in benchmarking.
Being a SF Bay longtime resident, I gotta second this... man, I love to read their sunday paper adverts.. it's so dumb of them that they don't just publish this via pdf or something (probably to avoid other stores from "gaming" with their prices).
They're also quite dumb in that up until 1999 or somthing they didn't even have a website... ironically, the only hits you'd get on altavista/yahoo/google would be "anti-Fry's" or "Fry's sucks" websites :-)
Ultimately, this proves one point... you should never trust any group to do the right thing... not the US, not Google, or Microsoft, and it was foolish in this case that the UK trusted a US company (part of the US military industrial complex)... there should have been a demand for this openness in the contract and at the first sign of secrecy the UK should have threatened to stop payment.
Not that I have anything against surveillance... just as long as it isn't abused
... AMD's K9... will you let it out the doggie door? Will it be more bark than bite? Man, the press will have a field day with that core designation :-)
Actually, this seems to be the arguement. But in reality the organized crime that not so surprisingly infests a good portion of the commerce in this country has ways to deal (think: someone on the payroll + proper response strategy to launder the ill-gotten goods) with these kinds of problems... it's just the small-timers that are caught.
In the end it's our freedoms that are trampled on, and those are going to be hard, if impossible to ever win back... especially since now, anything related to "terrorism" has effectively no oversight or appeal.
I agree with your main point (accessories market == insane markups, even for marginally useful gadgets), but re: the whole obsolete comment... WTF?
I mean, my friend has an old 2 or 3G iPod that a) still works, b) has plenty of juice and c) has the same output quality as newer 5G ipods (for sound).
OK, so it's b/w screen isn't exactly sexy, it still works and is far from obsolete... it's over 4 years old now.
This is the problem that PC enthusiasts (most of /.) really have a problem understanding, having been part of the Microsoft/Intel upgrade treadmill: sometimes an older computer/device is still quite functional and need not be replaced... until, as the saying goes, it's broke. Apple's products for the most part aren't designed with obsolescence in mind, like some other major offenders out there (Nike/GM/Microsoft, I'm glaring your way).
Unless of course it involves Apple or Google... this from a relatively pro-Apple /.er (check my previous posts).
I can understand why us geeks would champion Apple and Google (ie, they're not corporate-sociopaths, like Microsoft and dozens of other truly evil companies), but we should also keep our eye on the ball: DRM is just plain bad, copyrights and idea-patents are untenable in an information-based society, and there will be a time when our darlings will see that "being evil" (ie, seriously evil) might become profitable enough to exploit.
Sure, support them as the underdogs for now, but make sure you keep a big rock behind your back in case that "underdog" turns on you.
I think the missing 4. ??? is really:
4. Get everyone else who even think of pirating the music to agree that pirating (and getting sued) is less costly than buying overpriced music... and cash in on huge numbers of music listeners' fear.
The fundamentalist free-market believer will tell you that business is war. However, the analogy you are complaining about (competition = war) is the same thing that miffs me (political campaign = horserace).
What this does is remove a whole dimension from public thought. Frames everything as a zero-sum game, and you can drive attitudes like "you're with us or against us" where any action taken by large organization (like oh, say mandatory DRM, or maybe torturing prisoners) is acceptable as long as your "with them".
The framing of everything as a war (ie, zero-sum) is a purely fundamentalist ideology.