QQ - let them adjust their business model to the changing market and consumer desires. No one should be able to sue to enforce a business model. Adapt or die.
So it should be illegal to sell 'mac compatible' computers? Or it should be illegal to modify OSX?
It's the same modification end users can do themselves, just the modification is being provided as a service. Then the company puts it all together into one box with a compatible computer. If none of the individual actions are illegal then why does it become so when a company tries to put them together and make a buck?
Software is treated so obnoxiously compared to almost any other product. I can buy almost anything else, tinker with it (providing i don't do something illegal) and then resell it. You don't hear ford complaining when someone re-sells a souped up focus, mustang, or excursion.
I don't know GP from a hole in the wall, but I have rather limited trust in Consumer Reports compared to acutal "real life" corporate use/experience. My numbers never match the nonsense in white papers, surveys, etc.
Heck, I had someone ship a D600 in a fedex envelope. You know, the plastic-fiber-paper kind with no padding that's meant for documents. Made it across the country...little dinged up, couple keys loose, screen latch cracked, and the battery case a bit mangled. Fucker still booted up without an issue. I'm afraid of stacking 3 airs on top of each other in fear that the screens might crack.
I've been anti-mac for my entire computer 'lifetime' which, counting commodore64 and VIC20 days goes back a long time.
I've never owned one. Until a month ago...when work bought 4 Airs. Now I'm still anti-mac (easier since it wasn't my cash!) and feel more justified. Heck, i even managed to crash em a few times.
Maybe not conspiracy, but Apple certainly DOES have a track record of removing anything negative about their company that they can via any legal means they can come up with.
They protect their reputation with a fierceness even MS doens't match and then put on a cool 'joe-casual' face for anything public.
Brilliant. Let Apple win and further erode what little 'rights' software buyers have these days.
Actions like that might not be identical to MS but they're very much along the same lines - 'my way or the highway...to the court office'
I don't think Psystar losing is the best thing for the consumer. Them WINNING would put companies and their insane EULA's in check a bit. If you're so worried about MS DRM filtering over to apple - consider that every generation of Windows has had the activation DRM defeated.
It's just a matter of companies fighting to protect a business model that's out-dated and not in sync with actual consumer demand/desires.
Unless there was the possibility of the general public finding out of course. Does anyone seriously thing WW2 tactics mentioned by parent would fly in today's government? I mean... we're at WAR and the news papers were (and to a large degree still are) more interested in individual casualty counts than progress being made.
Now, as long as the TLA's are assure they won't get called out...they'll gladly keep this a secret.
The real problem is the password is probably stupid/embarassing '1.l0v3.g@y-t33n@ge^b0yZ' or similar. I think i'd rather sit in jail at that point too.
This is nothing more than another case of a company sueing to protect the business model they feel entitled to continued/endless profit from.
Psystar could still sell computers if apple didn't exist. They could sell them blank, with windows, with linux (oh wait, what is MacOS again?!). How is Apple killing the clone market any different than printer mfgs putting a extremely simple 'encryption' chip in their toners to use the DMCA against after-market toner mfgs?
And to imply that Apple needs hardware sales to survive is silly. MS makes the vast majority of it's profit off MS Office and MS Windows. Both have versions that will run on virtually any platform (remember the old PPC NT builds? ). They don't sell computers.
And that's why I don't understand how bliz won this case. You get fair use over you music and, despite their best efforts, the MAFIAA hasn't been able to stop you from ripping CDs to your computer and MP3 player.
How is it that software can be treated so differently? I don't buy into the click-thru EULA's as 1) there's no proof that the individual in question was the one to accept it and 2) existing laws supercede an arguably invalid contract.
Since when does a contract allow you to essentially re-write law? Bliz went looking for obscure loopholes and apparantly found one. Sad sad day when you no longer have the right to use a product as you wish. This whole licensing nonsense has got to end somewhere. Could bliz deny access to the online community to 'hackers' - sure. But there's so many twists to the logic here that it amazes me they actually got a judge to understand it all.
Yet another case of a company failing to adequatly protect their product and sueing over nonsense to get their way. Could glider have destroyed warcraft?...perhaps... but that's survival of the fittest. If the WoW community turned to crap it woudln't be the first time a product ran it's popular life and died out. They're no better than the MAFIAA in some regards.
IMHO the only reason they won this case is because they threw so much money at it they were bound to win. Why? Simple - WoW is such a huge cash cow they'd be stupid not to spend every dollar they had to keep it alive. Simply because next month the subs would put back a few gazillion bucks into their coffers.
Well the big difference is that eBay tries to act like wal-mart. Making everything fit their ideals, extra safe, family oriented and nicey nice... as long as they can squeeze out the extra.01c per transaction.
Is it me or has the size of eBay become the other half of the downfall. I hate searching for something and finding a million junk auctions or ubsurd shipping (which ebay is mostly to blame for anyhow) on many others. People that list 1000's of items simultaneously all for 'buy it now' aren't auctioning anything - they below in a store. Perhaps part of a larger, searchable multi-store "online mall" but still.
Ebay is trying to move away from 'auction' and towards 'online store front'. Meh.
Give me a google auction site and maybe i'll start doing online auctions again. Or better, convince Visa, MC, AMEX, or anyone to offer a realistic e-payment system that supports micropayments and fees somewhere close to reality. Seriously.
Heck, I don't understand why managers shouldn't be paid for overtime either. If I put in a 60 hour week (which I occasionaly do) I see no reason why I shouldn't receive compensation for it. Unfortunately that's not "how things are done" in the US. It's all about the corporate bottom line, not about work-life balance, fair pay, or any such thing (in most companies).
I'm guilty of continuing the culture too - if any of my teams get an email in the evening I EXPECT someone to reply in a reasonable time frame. At least some of those guys get OT for their time when it's more than a few minutes.
Ah, but if we go to the moon again we'll do it SOOO much more safely. Documented in triplicate too!
Yeah, I think we should get on with it too but every time something goes wrong now NASA introduces 15 new double-check proceedures and slows down even more.
They don't shoot satalites out of the sky. China took huge international flack for that stunt and added massive amounts of debris to the orbits.
They de-orbit sats before they die completly normally. Those that get dysfunctional are generally in orbits that will decay and re-enter...or stable enough that they just hang out and are tracked. Not like someone is going to wander by an old spy sat and try to peek inside.
NASA can't launch anything that will fly again in anything less than months.
NASA can't fart for less than $5million and a few hundered reams of documentation in triplicate.
So yes, private industry hasn't gotten ahead of NASA yet but they're not funded for free by the gov't. They have to be heading towards a return on investment that is entirely irrelevant to NASA. I don't believe it's been disclosed but SS1 and Two's total development and operational cost to date is probably a fraction of the cost for a single shuttle launch.
Yes but statistics without proper comparison are meaningless. How about looking at deaths per 100,000 employed in a given job? Or deaths per 1,000,000 man-hours of work?
The space program isn't extremely safe, but then again they're (in theory) on the edge of what our technology is capable of doing. Safety is important, but that's made the #1 concern to such a degree that everything else suffers horribly.
In terms of space exploration, we're not at the stage of impact-absorbing bumpers, 14 airbags, auto-tensioning 12-point seatbelts, etc. Our guys are lucky someone remembered to put a lap belt in:) Yet, people expect it to be 100% safe. If only people were more realistic.
Yes, I love how they claim copyright over descriptions of the game (in whole or in part) - this was a discussion previously. The point was made that, according to their overstated claim, telling you buddy the score of a game is infringement. It's a description of part of the game after all.
If nothing else, we need reform on companies claiming rights they don't have. That, or a less stupid general public with a LOT less government regulation of stupid things.
tab is not a complete documentation of a song in almost all cases and almost ever includes the timing. You can not OCR it to MIDI and expect to actually hear the song. It's a rough description of a song that requires interpretation by a skilled musician with the original recording available for guidance. Simply put, you can't take hendrix, lock him in a room with the tab for some recent metallica song and expect him to come up with something more than vaugely familiar. In fact, doing so would probably make some some interesting 'expert testimony' in court.
You didn't address my other point. A sportscaster is describing a hockey game in intimate detail. Heck, for arguments sake I'm writing a 5000 page book detailing every quirk of a game second-by-second. Do I need permission to describe something?
How long after the fact is irrelevant unless the time exceeds the copyright.
I'm half playin devil's advocate here...so take that into consideration.
One could consider tab to be a description of music. After all, you can't listen to tab directly and get the actual music. I'd compare it to a sportscaster giving a blow-by-blow of a hockey game. If the recording of the game was copyright does that mean a sportscaster needs specific permission to describe the game step-by-step? Yes, I know they work for the arena and are hired to do their job but that's besides the point. What if joe-neighbor watched the game and posted a blog online of step-by-step action after the fact?
It's not the actual work, it's not identical to the original and you can't derive the same exact thing from it. After all, I play guitar but metallica isn't going to sub me in for one of their shows and call it the same thing.:)
Then there's the not-so-minor consideration of every other bit of software. The vast majority is windows based (for better or worse) and again you have the same support considerations.
Water tends to seek it's own level. Here, linux is generally used on high-availability platforms running in-house code and applications. Places where complete understanding and transparancy of the host OS is important. Windows is commonly found in applications where off-the-shelf software (with whatever configurations and customizations) is being used.
I trust a multi-trillion dollar company that I have multi-million dollar support contracts with.
I'm not a MS fanboy by any stretch, I'm just a realist with responsibility in the IT field. If my support team finds a critical bug in a key system at 4AM I'm confident we can have a 3rd level engineer on the phone to address and resolve the issue immediately. I've had beta patches made available, even alpha-code written to address a particular fault in the past.
Sure, if I offered a F/OSS team leader a million dollars a year he'd promise to live at his desk in my office building. In reality that wouldn't be the case and I still couldn't draw on the 1,000's of other engineers and programmers MS has networked and available 24x7x365.
Is MS software buggy? Sure, some is...and some more than others. Is Linux buggy? Yep, its got its own list of bugs out there too. In the end both platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. We use both and - guess what - there's no plans to replace the linux servers with MS or vice versa. They can co-exist and allow us poor tech geeks to take the best of both worlds for each implementation.
Simple. Allow for the dismissal immediately after discovery with reasonable compensation for legal fees.
You thought you had enough to bring a case, put the defendant through the nusiance of giving you enough evidence to make you look stupid (not to mention having to hire a lawyer and show up in court) then you pay for that. This would make people think clearly before even bringing a lawsuit...and also serve to lower retarded legal fees in the first place i think.
Idk, i regularly open and close word and excel all day long. Sure, if i had OO and had to wait 10+ seconds for it to start i'd change my behavior and never close the app...but why bother?
Besides all that, MS Office is so popular *because* of all the bootlegs.
Several hundered minimum at a guess. By Major metro i'm thinking NYC.
That said, running new fiber, coax or whatever *anywhere* in Manhatten is ubsurdly expensive. Once you get to the building you've then got 5-75 floors of risers to go through if you're doing a direct fiber drop in a virgin building. It's not 1,000 or even 10,000s at that point. You're in the 6-7 figure range.
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QQ - let them adjust their business model to the changing market and consumer desires. No one should be able to sue to enforce a business model. Adapt or die.
So it should be illegal to sell 'mac compatible' computers? Or it should be illegal to modify OSX?
It's the same modification end users can do themselves, just the modification is being provided as a service. Then the company puts it all together into one box with a compatible computer. If none of the individual actions are illegal then why does it become so when a company tries to put them together and make a buck?
Software is treated so obnoxiously compared to almost any other product. I can buy almost anything else, tinker with it (providing i don't do something illegal) and then resell it. You don't hear ford complaining when someone re-sells a souped up focus, mustang, or excursion.
I don't know GP from a hole in the wall, but I have rather limited trust in Consumer Reports compared to acutal "real life" corporate use/experience. My numbers never match the nonsense in white papers, surveys, etc.
Heck, I had someone ship a D600 in a fedex envelope. You know, the plastic-fiber-paper kind with no padding that's meant for documents. Made it across the country...little dinged up, couple keys loose, screen latch cracked, and the battery case a bit mangled. Fucker still booted up without an issue. I'm afraid of stacking 3 airs on top of each other in fear that the screens might crack.
I've been anti-mac for my entire computer 'lifetime' which, counting commodore64 and VIC20 days goes back a long time.
I've never owned one. Until a month ago...when work bought 4 Airs. Now I'm still anti-mac (easier since it wasn't my cash!) and feel more justified. Heck, i even managed to crash em a few times.
Maybe not conspiracy, but Apple certainly DOES have a track record of removing anything negative about their company that they can via any legal means they can come up with.
They protect their reputation with a fierceness even MS doens't match and then put on a cool 'joe-casual' face for anything public.
Brilliant. Let Apple win and further erode what little 'rights' software buyers have these days.
Actions like that might not be identical to MS but they're very much along the same lines - 'my way or the highway...to the court office'
I don't think Psystar losing is the best thing for the consumer. Them WINNING would put companies and their insane EULA's in check a bit. If you're so worried about MS DRM filtering over to apple - consider that every generation of Windows has had the activation DRM defeated.
It's just a matter of companies fighting to protect a business model that's out-dated and not in sync with actual consumer demand/desires.
Unless there was the possibility of the general public finding out of course. Does anyone seriously thing WW2 tactics mentioned by parent would fly in today's government? I mean ... we're at WAR and the news papers were (and to a large degree still are) more interested in individual casualty counts than progress being made.
Now, as long as the TLA's are assure they won't get called out...they'll gladly keep this a secret.
The real problem is the password is probably stupid/embarassing '1.l0v3.g@y-t33n@ge^b0yZ' or similar. I think i'd rather sit in jail at that point too.
This is nothing more than another case of a company sueing to protect the business model they feel entitled to continued/endless profit from.
Psystar could still sell computers if apple didn't exist. They could sell them blank, with windows, with linux (oh wait, what is MacOS again?!). How is Apple killing the clone market any different than printer mfgs putting a extremely simple 'encryption' chip in their toners to use the DMCA against after-market toner mfgs?
And to imply that Apple needs hardware sales to survive is silly. MS makes the vast majority of it's profit off MS Office and MS Windows. Both have versions that will run on virtually any platform (remember the old PPC NT builds? ). They don't sell computers.
And that's why I don't understand how bliz won this case. You get fair use over you music and, despite their best efforts, the MAFIAA hasn't been able to stop you from ripping CDs to your computer and MP3 player.
How is it that software can be treated so differently? I don't buy into the click-thru EULA's as 1) there's no proof that the individual in question was the one to accept it and 2) existing laws supercede an arguably invalid contract.
Since when does a contract allow you to essentially re-write law? Bliz went looking for obscure loopholes and apparantly found one. Sad sad day when you no longer have the right to use a product as you wish. This whole licensing nonsense has got to end somewhere. Could bliz deny access to the online community to 'hackers' - sure. But there's so many twists to the logic here that it amazes me they actually got a judge to understand it all.
Yet another case of a company failing to adequatly protect their product and sueing over nonsense to get their way. Could glider have destroyed warcraft? ...perhaps... but that's survival of the fittest. If the WoW community turned to crap it woudln't be the first time a product ran it's popular life and died out. They're no better than the MAFIAA in some regards.
IMHO the only reason they won this case is because they threw so much money at it they were bound to win. Why? Simple - WoW is such a huge cash cow they'd be stupid not to spend every dollar they had to keep it alive. Simply because next month the subs would put back a few gazillion bucks into their coffers.
Well the big difference is that eBay tries to act like wal-mart. Making everything fit their ideals, extra safe, family oriented and nicey nice ... as long as they can squeeze out the extra .01c per transaction.
Is it me or has the size of eBay become the other half of the downfall. I hate searching for something and finding a million junk auctions or ubsurd shipping (which ebay is mostly to blame for anyhow) on many others. People that list 1000's of items simultaneously all for 'buy it now' aren't auctioning anything - they below in a store. Perhaps part of a larger, searchable multi-store "online mall" but still.
Ebay is trying to move away from 'auction' and towards 'online store front'. Meh.
Give me a google auction site and maybe i'll start doing online auctions again. Or better, convince Visa, MC, AMEX, or anyone to offer a realistic e-payment system that supports micropayments and fees somewhere close to reality. Seriously.
Heck, I don't understand why managers shouldn't be paid for overtime either. If I put in a 60 hour week (which I occasionaly do) I see no reason why I shouldn't receive compensation for it. Unfortunately that's not "how things are done" in the US. It's all about the corporate bottom line, not about work-life balance, fair pay, or any such thing (in most companies).
I'm guilty of continuing the culture too - if any of my teams get an email in the evening I EXPECT someone to reply in a reasonable time frame. At least some of those guys get OT for their time when it's more than a few minutes.
Ah, but if we go to the moon again we'll do it SOOO much more safely. Documented in triplicate too!
Yeah, I think we should get on with it too but every time something goes wrong now NASA introduces 15 new double-check proceedures and slows down even more.
They don't shoot satalites out of the sky. China took huge international flack for that stunt and added massive amounts of debris to the orbits.
They de-orbit sats before they die completly normally. Those that get dysfunctional are generally in orbits that will decay and re-enter...or stable enough that they just hang out and are tracked. Not like someone is going to wander by an old spy sat and try to peek inside.
Except NASA can't put men on the moon today.
NASA can't launch anything that will fly again in anything less than months.
NASA can't fart for less than $5million and a few hundered reams of documentation in triplicate.
So yes, private industry hasn't gotten ahead of NASA yet but they're not funded for free by the gov't. They have to be heading towards a return on investment that is entirely irrelevant to NASA. I don't believe it's been disclosed but SS1 and Two's total development and operational cost to date is probably a fraction of the cost for a single shuttle launch.
Yes but statistics without proper comparison are meaningless. How about looking at deaths per 100,000 employed in a given job? Or deaths per 1,000,000 man-hours of work?
The space program isn't extremely safe, but then again they're (in theory) on the edge of what our technology is capable of doing. Safety is important, but that's made the #1 concern to such a degree that everything else suffers horribly.
In terms of space exploration, we're not at the stage of impact-absorbing bumpers, 14 airbags, auto-tensioning 12-point seatbelts, etc. Our guys are lucky someone remembered to put a lap belt in :) Yet, people expect it to be 100% safe. If only people were more realistic.
Yes, I love how they claim copyright over descriptions of the game (in whole or in part) - this was a discussion previously. The point was made that, according to their overstated claim, telling you buddy the score of a game is infringement. It's a description of part of the game after all.
If nothing else, we need reform on companies claiming rights they don't have. That, or a less stupid general public with a LOT less government regulation of stupid things.
tab is not a complete documentation of a song in almost all cases and almost ever includes the timing. You can not OCR it to MIDI and expect to actually hear the song. It's a rough description of a song that requires interpretation by a skilled musician with the original recording available for guidance. Simply put, you can't take hendrix, lock him in a room with the tab for some recent metallica song and expect him to come up with something more than vaugely familiar. In fact, doing so would probably make some some interesting 'expert testimony' in court.
You didn't address my other point. A sportscaster is describing a hockey game in intimate detail. Heck, for arguments sake I'm writing a 5000 page book detailing every quirk of a game second-by-second. Do I need permission to describe something?
How long after the fact is irrelevant unless the time exceeds the copyright.
I'm half playin devil's advocate here...so take that into consideration.
One could consider tab to be a description of music. After all, you can't listen to tab directly and get the actual music. I'd compare it to a sportscaster giving a blow-by-blow of a hockey game. If the recording of the game was copyright does that mean a sportscaster needs specific permission to describe the game step-by-step? Yes, I know they work for the arena and are hired to do their job but that's besides the point. What if joe-neighbor watched the game and posted a blog online of step-by-step action after the fact?
It's not the actual work, it's not identical to the original and you can't derive the same exact thing from it. After all, I play guitar but metallica isn't going to sub me in for one of their shows and call it the same thing. :)
While I can get to the site...I have to question your logic.
Unless /. has some new magics you generally can't post HERE without an active internet connection.
Of course. None are on the scale of MS though.
Then there's the not-so-minor consideration of every other bit of software. The vast majority is windows based (for better or worse) and again you have the same support considerations.
Water tends to seek it's own level. Here, linux is generally used on high-availability platforms running in-house code and applications. Places where complete understanding and transparancy of the host OS is important. Windows is commonly found in applications where off-the-shelf software (with whatever configurations and customizations) is being used.
I trust a multi-trillion dollar company that I have multi-million dollar support contracts with.
I'm not a MS fanboy by any stretch, I'm just a realist with responsibility in the IT field. If my support team finds a critical bug in a key system at 4AM I'm confident we can have a 3rd level engineer on the phone to address and resolve the issue immediately. I've had beta patches made available, even alpha-code written to address a particular fault in the past.
Sure, if I offered a F/OSS team leader a million dollars a year he'd promise to live at his desk in my office building. In reality that wouldn't be the case and I still couldn't draw on the 1,000's of other engineers and programmers MS has networked and available 24x7x365.
Is MS software buggy? Sure, some is...and some more than others. Is Linux buggy? Yep, its got its own list of bugs out there too. In the end both platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. We use both and - guess what - there's no plans to replace the linux servers with MS or vice versa. They can co-exist and allow us poor tech geeks to take the best of both worlds for each implementation.
Simple. Allow for the dismissal immediately after discovery with reasonable compensation for legal fees.
You thought you had enough to bring a case, put the defendant through the nusiance of giving you enough evidence to make you look stupid (not to mention having to hire a lawyer and show up in court) then you pay for that. This would make people think clearly before even bringing a lawsuit...and also serve to lower retarded legal fees in the first place i think.
Idk, i regularly open and close word and excel all day long. Sure, if i had OO and had to wait 10+ seconds for it to start i'd change my behavior and never close the app...but why bother?
Besides all that, MS Office is so popular *because* of all the bootlegs.
Several hundered minimum at a guess. By Major metro i'm thinking NYC.
That said, running new fiber, coax or whatever *anywhere* in Manhatten is ubsurdly expensive. Once you get to the building you've then got 5-75 floors of risers to go through if you're doing a direct fiber drop in a virgin building. It's not 1,000 or even 10,000s at that point. You're in the 6-7 figure range.