I wonder how many people are in the same situation as I am? I'm a self confessed Apple fanboy, but there just wasn't much reason for me to give Apple any money last quarter.
I won't replace my iPhone 4 just now because there is bound to be a new model along soon. I can't replace my 2008 MacPro because they don't sell them in Europe any more, and even if they did, it would be foolish to invest in another cheesegrater when the black bin has already been pre-announced. I like the idea of a tablet, but I'm waiting on the inevitable retina iPad mini. For me Apple isn't tanking, they are just deferring revenue.
Adblock + gets rid of the overt adverts, and FBPurity (http://www.fbpurity.com/) gets rid of the spammy content (game requests, 'questions', 'trending articles', 'promoted posts') and cleans up the UI cruft (news ticker, half the left column).
With those two, and manually turning on the see all posts option for every page, FB doesn't have much left to charge for that you can't get for free.
Another factor in the decline in share value is that this isn't an instant 11% drop, it's a slide during which people are thinking to themselves "Hmm, I have a lot of my personal wealth tied up in a company that makes $900m mistakes, and I have just watched the value of that investment has dropped by 5...6...7...8...9... %. I have no idea when this will stop dropping. How much is loss am I willing to bare to get into a stock that isn't dropping?"
(btw. "Voila" is french for "see there!", "Viola" is English for large violin. Yes, there should be a accent on the a of voila, but slashdot mangles them.)
The Surface RTs failure hasn't cost $900m because it's a bad operating system with next to no apps, or because it's overpriced compared to the iPad, or because other manufacturers wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, those are just multi-million dollar mistakes. The billion dollar mistake was keeping on making more and more and more of them when public are not buying.
Apple famously throws it's weight around with suppliers to cut down on unsold inventory. It famously keeps just 5 days supply of products in stock. They save on warehouse space, they can roll out new products at short notice, and if the world stops buying something, they are not sitting on an unsold mountain of it. Why is this simple, non propitiatory method of not getting stuck with unsold inventory the one thing that Microsoft steadfastly refuse to copy from them?
Percentage efficiency isn't a very useful way of comparing vehicles. If we all drove 50% efficient Humvees, that would be far worse for the environment than if we all drove 25% efficient Smart Cars.
"If there were no copyright laws, do you think AMC would spend $3 million on each episode of Breaking Bad?"
Of course. The existence of copyright has no bearing on the laws of supply and demand. People would still want new episodes to be made, and AMC would still be able to fulfil that demand, all that would change is the business model. AMC would simply ask for pledges, and only make the show when they were guaranteed to make as much profit as they would under the current system.
As always when it comes to IP, the Register is wildly exaggerating to the point of trolling.
What this bill will actually do is allow museums to use orphan works, but only if they put the market value of a licence to use them into escrow, in case the owner is found later.
The details of how this will work haven't been published, but there's going to be a very interesting legal minefield in there.
What's a fair market value for a modern image where CC0 alternatives exist?
What they will do if an image is highly likely to be out of copyright? For example photo of Queen Victoria is almost certainly out of copyright, because the photographer probably died over 70 years ago. What's a fair market value for the rights to use one of the rare ones that isn't out of copyright because the photographer was young when he took it, and lived to a ripe old age, if plenty of public domain ones also exist?
If Microsoft wants a PC manufacturing business, why not just finish off the job they have already started and set one up themselves? They already have the product design, retail links and manufacturing capability in place from the Surface Pro, all it would take is launching a desktop or two (and possibly some servers) to flesh out the range and they would be all set to compete with Dell, for far less than $3Bn.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I can see big corporate buyers attaching more value to a Microsoft branded PC than an identically specified Dell branded one, on name alone.
The real issue here is the potential for monopoly abuse, Dell's current bulk deal for Windows might already be so good that it would be an unfair subsidy if they were owned by MSFT.
I think you're right, Ballmer's performance has been less than stellar. Windows RT is a strategic disaster (teaching customers that they can to adapt to an OS that's all different where their existing programs won't work is practically a training course for adopting Linux/ChromeOS) and Metro is a dud, but I think the move they *ought* to make is to find their own Jony Ive and give him absolute control over the UI and the look and feel of their products, to stem the tide of bad designs, and to provide a longer term USP that Linux/Open Office can't easily compete with.
Selling off the games division makes no sense to me, it's the part of the company that has consumer loyalty, and isn't fighting battle against free software that Microsoft absolutely has to win every single time, or the company will collapse overnight.
It's worth noting that this only applies to one particular Pirate Party.
When we set up the Pirate Party UK, I exchanged mails with RMS on the length of copyright he would consider reasonable, and he was happy with our 10 year proposal.
If the Australian Pirate Party go for 10 years not 5, then we can assume RMS won't object to that either.
In common with most 'world news' channels that claim to be unbiased, Al Jazeera is actually pretty good, provided you change channels when they report (or omit) events close to home. The same applies to another channel that Americans are likely to dismiss on name alone, Russia Today - they actually provide a solid and unbiased English language news channel when reporting on things that (to them) are both foreign and outside their sphere of influence.
My advice is, if you want a really independent view of the world, watch BBC World, Al Jazeera and Russia Today, and trust them whenever 2 or 3 out of 3 agree.
(disclaimer - I've briefly appeared on all three as founder of the Pirate Party UK, but not received payment from any of them. I did accept awful tea and coffee from the BBC and Russia Today â" the Russians hired satellite link facilities from the BBC so it was the same studio with the same BBC drinks â" while Al Jazeera bought me a tea from Starbucks. From an interviewee's point of view, Al Jazeera asked the toughest questions, the BBC seemed to have the lowest budget but were the only ones who offered to cover my travel expenses, and Russia Today were he only ones who expected me to want to pre-approve their questions).
If this lawsuit does establish a new intellectual property right, Warner could be in big trouble.
The 1966 Batmobile is a modified Lincoln Futura concept car from 1955. As this is a brand new type of property right, it's unlikely that George Barris who bought the concept car and modified it to make the Batmobile ever bought the 'sculpture' rights to it, so the rights would revert to the 'sculptor' of the original car, the Ford Motor Company. If they win, Warner could not stop clones, as Ford would be the rights holder, not Warner... and Ford would be able to bill Warner for the use of their 'sculpture' in all the toys, films, TV shows that have used it over the years.
This is actually one of the parts of the US Constitution that's based on an older UK law, our Bill of Rights (1689) says "That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;"
At the end of this year, apparently. The article missed out both the product name and any links to content from from this decade, but once you know it's called the Tata MiniCat, then google finds quite a few slightly less vapourish links.
I react very negatively to adverts. The more a company puts it's message in front of me, the less likely I am to buy from them. I instinctively avoid products with heavy TV marketing campaigns, because they can't represent good value for money, given that the cost of the campaign comes out of the price I'm paying.
So I adblock everything... and by doing so, I save advertisers from getting filed under 'I hate those irritating people and won't buy anything from them'. I'm more likely to buy from a company if I don't see their ads than If I do.
Ever street around me can get BT's 'infinity' broadband, with download speeds in the 30-40 meg range, but my street was forgotten about when BT upgraded the exchange and we're stuck with less than a tenth of that speed. Getting this omission dealt with is an ongoing nightmare, BT's 'infinity' division seadfastly refuse to talk to customers. Despite *being* a telephone company, they have no phone number on their website!
After bashing my head against this one for a while I found they will talk to me when I put my 'residents association' hat on, but want to know what funding we have in place to contribute to the cost of putting their mistake right... and here's where it gets Kafaesque:
They won't tell us what the problem is, because we don't have funding. We can't get funding because we don't know the cost of solving the problem, we don't know the cost of solving the problem because we don't know what the problem is....but it doesn't stop there...
We DO actually know what the problem is! The green box at the end of our street is the only one in the whole city that doesn't have a new type of green box next to it plastered with BT inifinty stickers. All we need is for BT to put this new box in, which they have already done free of charge for the rest of the city, but because BT won't officially confirm this really is the problem, they won't talk to us about it, or tell us how much it would cost to do, so we can't get funding, even though the council are talking about offering us funding!
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that Microsoft making spectacularly bad billion dollar purchases is a one-time event, especially given that they paid $8.5 billion for Skype and $1.2 billion for Yammer
With my design hat on... looking at the 'page of the day', I can see quite a few things that could be simplified or made more consistent.
There are eight links that just say "edit", why not just one at the top? The pictures have all been resized to different widths (and lead to a very unfriendly 'back-end' page when you click them). There's an non-standard icon for expanding pictures (2 overlapping rectangles, not 4 arrows pointing diagonally outwards), but the contents are hidden not with a matching 'x' icon in the corner, but some text, which is inexplicably in brackets, not underlined like links usually are. There's a cryptic green 'lock' icon near the top that doesn't match the small grey style of the other icons. The 'view history' tab should probably be changed to 'article history' to be less misleading. The 'rate this page' and footer parts have a lot of wasted space and could be a lot cleaner. There's no obvious visual cue that the article has ended and the rest is 'housekeeping'. Shifting the categories section before the notes would fix this, and suggest places for the reader to go next.
One question that Ofcom haven't answered... why would anyone appeal to win back £20 of their own money, when they could sue for libel and receive unlimited damages?
The thing that stops this is the proposed claim process, which is insanely complex. It requires copyright holders to accurately predict in advance how many claims they will make, take part in a blind dutch auction over how much they are willing to pay per claim, and the cost of claiming more than doubles if you are claiming against someone connected to the 4th or 5th biggest ISP.
The does not to allow small copyright holders such as independent musicians, journalists or photographers to pursue actions. Ofcom's consultation shows that the only people pointing this out and insisting that this would be wrong were the Pirate Party UK â" we don't like the DEAct, but if we are going to have it, we want it to be fair.
There are a range of battery options $50k buys you 160 miles per charge*, $70k for 265**. The only one shipping now is a pimped out $98k variant of the big battery one.
Congratulations, you've just nominated someone, pretty much at random, to be the heir to the Shakespeare copyrights, and therefore owner of most of the planet's wealth.
Untransferrable copyrights look like a great idea at first glance, but unless you allow authors to grant some kind of exclusivity to a publisher, then publishers can't do any useful kind of deal with authors. If you do allow this, then authors and publishers will draw up an agreement to hand over all the functional bits of copyright that acts in every practical way like a copyright transfer.
As for copyright expiry on death, I'm not convinced handing rap label owners a massive financial incentive to kill each other's artists would be a wise move!
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how many people are in the same situation as I am? I'm a self confessed Apple fanboy, but there just wasn't much reason for me to give Apple any money last quarter.
I won't replace my iPhone 4 just now because there is bound to be a new model along soon. I can't replace my 2008 MacPro because they don't sell them in Europe any more, and even if they did, it would be foolish to invest in another cheesegrater when the black bin has already been pre-announced. I like the idea of a tablet, but I'm waiting on the inevitable retina iPad mini. For me Apple isn't tanking, they are just deferring revenue.
Adblock + gets rid of the overt adverts, and FBPurity (http://www.fbpurity.com/) gets rid of the spammy content (game requests, 'questions', 'trending articles', 'promoted posts') and cleans up the UI cruft (news ticker, half the left column).
With those two, and manually turning on the see all posts option for every page, FB doesn't have much left to charge for that you can't get for free.
Another factor in the decline in share value is that this isn't an instant 11% drop, it's a slide during which people are thinking to themselves "Hmm, I have a lot of my personal wealth tied up in a company that makes $900m mistakes, and I have just watched the value of that investment has dropped by 5...6...7...8...9... %. I have no idea when this will stop dropping. How much is loss am I willing to bare to get into a stock that isn't dropping?"
(btw. "Voila" is french for "see there!", "Viola" is English for large violin. Yes, there should be a accent on the a of voila, but slashdot mangles them.)
The Surface RTs failure hasn't cost $900m because it's a bad operating system with next to no apps, or because it's overpriced compared to the iPad, or because other manufacturers wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, those are just multi-million dollar mistakes. The billion dollar mistake was keeping on making more and more and more of them when public are not buying.
Apple famously throws it's weight around with suppliers to cut down on unsold inventory. It famously keeps just 5 days supply of products in stock. They save on warehouse space, they can roll out new products at short notice, and if the world stops buying something, they are not sitting on an unsold mountain of it. Why is this simple, non propitiatory method of not getting stuck with unsold inventory the one thing that Microsoft steadfastly refuse to copy from them?
Govt. drones is if they strike you down, you become more powerful than they can possibly imagine.
Dead too, of course, but imagine the publicity!
Percentage efficiency isn't a very useful way of comparing vehicles. If we all drove 50% efficient Humvees, that would be far worse for the environment than if we all drove 25% efficient Smart Cars.
"If there were no copyright laws, do you think AMC would spend $3 million on each episode of Breaking Bad?"
Of course. The existence of copyright has no bearing on the laws of supply and demand. People would still want new episodes to be made, and AMC would still be able to fulfil that demand, all that would change is the business model. AMC would simply ask for pledges, and only make the show when they were guaranteed to make as much profit as they would under the current system.
As always when it comes to IP, the Register is wildly exaggerating to the point of trolling.
What this bill will actually do is allow museums to use orphan works, but only if they put the market value of a licence to use them into escrow, in case the owner is found later.
The details of how this will work haven't been published, but there's going to be a very interesting legal minefield in there.
What's a fair market value for a modern image where CC0 alternatives exist?
What they will do if an image is highly likely to be out of copyright? For example photo of Queen Victoria is almost certainly out of copyright, because the photographer probably died over 70 years ago. What's a fair market value for the rights to use one of the rare ones that isn't out of copyright because the photographer was young when he took it, and lived to a ripe old age, if plenty of public domain ones also exist?
Sadly, it's the same person.
If Microsoft wants a PC manufacturing business, why not just finish off the job they have already started and set one up themselves? They already have the product design, retail links and manufacturing capability in place from the Surface Pro, all it would take is launching a desktop or two (and possibly some servers) to flesh out the range and they would be all set to compete with Dell, for far less than $3Bn.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I can see big corporate buyers attaching more value to a Microsoft branded PC than an identically specified Dell branded one, on name alone.
The real issue here is the potential for monopoly abuse, Dell's current bulk deal for Windows might already be so good that it would be an unfair subsidy if they were owned by MSFT.
I think you're right, Ballmer's performance has been less than stellar. Windows RT is a strategic disaster (teaching customers that they can to adapt to an OS that's all different where their existing programs won't work is practically a training course for adopting Linux/ChromeOS) and Metro is a dud, but I think the move they *ought* to make is to find their own Jony Ive and give him absolute control over the UI and the look and feel of their products, to stem the tide of bad designs, and to provide a longer term USP that Linux/Open Office can't easily compete with.
Selling off the games division makes no sense to me, it's the part of the company that has consumer loyalty, and isn't fighting battle against free software that Microsoft absolutely has to win every single time, or the company will collapse overnight.
It's worth noting that this only applies to one particular Pirate Party.
When we set up the Pirate Party UK, I exchanged mails with RMS on the length of copyright he would consider reasonable, and he was happy with our 10 year proposal.
If the Australian Pirate Party go for 10 years not 5, then we can assume RMS won't object to that either.
In common with most 'world news' channels that claim to be unbiased, Al Jazeera is actually pretty good, provided you change channels when they report (or omit) events close to home. The same applies to another channel that Americans are likely to dismiss on name alone, Russia Today - they actually provide a solid and unbiased English language news channel when reporting on things that (to them) are both foreign and outside their sphere of influence.
My advice is, if you want a really independent view of the world, watch BBC World, Al Jazeera and Russia Today, and trust them whenever 2 or 3 out of 3 agree.
(disclaimer - I've briefly appeared on all three as founder of the Pirate Party UK, but not received payment from any of them. I did accept awful tea and coffee from the BBC and Russia Today â" the Russians hired satellite link facilities from the BBC so it was the same studio with the same BBC drinks â" while Al Jazeera bought me a tea from Starbucks. From an interviewee's point of view, Al Jazeera asked the toughest questions, the BBC seemed to have the lowest budget but were the only ones who offered to cover my travel expenses, and Russia Today were he only ones who expected me to want to pre-approve their questions).
If this lawsuit does establish a new intellectual property right, Warner could be in big trouble.
The 1966 Batmobile is a modified Lincoln Futura concept car from 1955. As this is a brand new type of property right, it's unlikely that George Barris who bought the concept car and modified it to make the Batmobile ever bought the 'sculpture' rights to it, so the rights would revert to the 'sculptor' of the original car, the Ford Motor Company. If they win, Warner could not stop clones, as Ford would be the rights holder, not Warner... and Ford would be able to bill Warner for the use of their 'sculpture' in all the toys, films, TV shows that have used it over the years.
This is actually one of the parts of the US Constitution that's based on an older UK law, our Bill of Rights (1689) says "That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;"
At the end of this year, apparently. The article missed out both the product name and any links to content from from this decade, but once you know it's called the Tata MiniCat, then google finds quite a few slightly less vapourish links.
I react very negatively to adverts. The more a company puts it's message in front of me, the less likely I am to buy from them. I instinctively avoid products with heavy TV marketing campaigns, because they can't represent good value for money, given that the cost of the campaign comes out of the price I'm paying.
So I adblock everything... and by doing so, I save advertisers from getting filed under 'I hate those irritating people and won't buy anything from them'. I'm more likely to buy from a company if I don't see their ads than If I do.
Ever street around me can get BT's 'infinity' broadband, with download speeds in the 30-40 meg range, but my street was forgotten about when BT upgraded the exchange and we're stuck with less than a tenth of that speed. Getting this omission dealt with is an ongoing nightmare, BT's 'infinity' division seadfastly refuse to talk to customers. Despite *being* a telephone company, they have no phone number on their website!
After bashing my head against this one for a while I found they will talk to me when I put my 'residents association' hat on, but want to know what funding we have in place to contribute to the cost of putting their mistake right... and here's where it gets Kafaesque:
They won't tell us what the problem is, because we don't have funding. We can't get funding because we don't know the cost of solving the problem, we don't know the cost of solving the problem because we don't know what the problem is. ...but it doesn't stop there...
We DO actually know what the problem is! The green box at the end of our street is the only one in the whole city that doesn't have a new type of green box next to it plastered with BT inifinty stickers. All we need is for BT to put this new box in, which they have already done free of charge for the rest of the city, but because BT won't officially confirm this really is the problem, they won't talk to us about it, or tell us how much it would cost to do, so we can't get funding, even though the council are talking about offering us funding!
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that Microsoft making spectacularly bad billion dollar purchases is a one-time event, especially given that they paid $8.5 billion for Skype and $1.2 billion for Yammer
With my design hat on... looking at the 'page of the day', I can see quite a few things that could be simplified or made more consistent.
There are eight links that just say "edit", why not just one at the top? The pictures have all been resized to different widths (and lead to a very unfriendly 'back-end' page when you click them). There's an non-standard icon for expanding pictures (2 overlapping rectangles, not 4 arrows pointing diagonally outwards), but the contents are hidden not with a matching 'x' icon in the corner, but some text, which is inexplicably in brackets, not underlined like links usually are. There's a cryptic green 'lock' icon near the top that doesn't match the small grey style of the other icons. The 'view history' tab should probably be changed to 'article history' to be less misleading. The 'rate this page' and footer parts have a lot of wasted space and could be a lot cleaner. There's no obvious visual cue that the article has ended and the rest is 'housekeeping'. Shifting the categories section before the notes would fix this, and suggest places for the reader to go next.
One question that Ofcom haven't answered... why would anyone appeal to win back £20 of their own money, when they could sue for libel and receive unlimited damages?
The thing that stops this is the proposed claim process, which is insanely complex. It requires copyright holders to accurately predict in advance how many claims they will make, take part in a blind dutch auction over how much they are willing to pay per claim, and the cost of claiming more than doubles if you are claiming against someone connected to the 4th or 5th biggest ISP.
The does not to allow small copyright holders such as independent musicians, journalists or photographers to pursue actions. Ofcom's consultation shows that the only people pointing this out and insisting that this would be wrong were the Pirate Party UK â" we don't like the DEAct, but if we are going to have it, we want it to be fair.
There are a range of battery options $50k buys you 160 miles per charge*, $70k for 265**. The only one shipping now is a pimped out $98k variant of the big battery one.
* Tesla's claim
** EPA's measurement
Congratulations, you've just nominated someone, pretty much at random, to be the heir to the Shakespeare copyrights, and therefore owner of most of the planet's wealth.
Untransferrable copyrights look like a great idea at first glance, but unless you allow authors to grant some kind of exclusivity to a publisher, then publishers can't do any useful kind of deal with authors. If you do allow this, then authors and publishers will draw up an agreement to hand over all the functional bits of copyright that acts in every practical way like a copyright transfer.
As for copyright expiry on death, I'm not convinced handing rap label owners a massive financial incentive to kill each other's artists would be a wise move!