How about things that most people actually give a shit about, like being able to view peoples' webcams (if not actually send webcam video), hear people talking, voice clips, winks, nudges, sending custom emoticons... all very well giving a snarky response mentioning "ads" but I'll bet dollars to doughnuts most normal users would gladly accept a few ads if it meant they could webcam with their friends.
So basically, it's not a Microsoft conspiracy to distort the market as the GP suggested, more that applications that people want to run don't work on Linux? This is hardly news; for the average user, they want Office, Photoshop and Windows Live Messenger, not OpenOffice, GIMP and Pidgin (the last one of which can easily be viewed as some kind of cruel joke by someone spoilt by the niceties and features of the official MSN client...)
While the CodePlex site does not mandate the license for projects, you are told to pick your own license with CodePlex directing you to the open-source license page of Wikipedia for more information. CodePlex is home to projects under a range of licenses recognized by the OSI, such as Apache 2.0, and open-source-like custom licenses not officially recognized. ®
Honestly, please read more than a paragraph or two of the article before submitting it to Slashdot. You can submit any code under any licence you like to CodePlex, and indeed encourages you to do so. Where's the problem here, exactly? That "open source" means different things to Microsoft than it does to some other people? That term means many things to many people, from the idea of being able to view the source of software but do little else with it, to the BSD/public domain-ish idea of all code being available for modification under virtually any terms. That's all this is. Nothing to see here, move along.
Many people (regular, average people) pirate. They would have bought the CD or whatever, but don't because they can get roughly the same thing for free. I've known people like this. Pretending they don't exist does nobody any favours - piracy, quite obviously, does harm the music companies.
Slashdotters can crow all they want about "distribution monopolies" or whatever being the real reasons, but if they really cared about that they'd be trying to stop indie bands from playing and selling CDs, which they're not - they're trying to stop people taking the stuff they sell for free. They're companies, motivated purely by profit, and they wouldn't pursue action against individual downloaders if it wasn't somehow in their interests.
You've spectacularly missed the point. Either that or built a lovely straw man. Either way... nah.
The point is you can't just have fines for copyright infringement/theft on a large scale set at the cost of the equivalent number of copies you could have bought legally/the goods you stole. Because that way, there's no deterrent. If someone who pirated a £10 CD and sold 50 copies was fined £500, that conceivably comes under the realms of "cost of doing business". It's not a deterrent. Same way as if a thief had to pay the owner of the goods the value of the things he took, or was fined that amount, then that's not a deterrent, because he's just made someone sell shit to him against their will.
Bear in mind that commercial copyright infringement is a profitable industry (of course it is, or else nobody would do it) and that it (and non-commercial copyright infringement, but that's another thread altogether with a few different arguments) does take away business from the people who make the stuff being pirated unfairly. It does do actual harm, and merits punishment. Having to pay retail price for every copy you made, considering the profits involved in the business, isn't a punishment or a deterrent.
To refer to your absolutely fucking stupid analogy, my point wasn't that I wanted harsh punishments for everything as a deterrent, like sending someone for the colonies for stealing a loaf of bread. Just that the punishment should total more than the cost of a loaf of bread. Is that really so hard to understand?
Because the fines for copyright infringement aren't based on how many of Album/Game/Book X you copy, but the infringement of the rights of the copyright holder.
Put it another way; if you steal someone's stuff and sell it, the punishment isn't "pay for what you stole and we'll leave it at that". You have to go over and beyond that to deter people, otherwise it'd just be a sale through force.
You can be a capitalist without being a prick. Barclays just don't care. These are the same cunts who did business in Apartheid-era South Africa, and still do in Zimbabwe.
It's more like offering to make a huge purchase at a mom and pop store, them banking on it, you pulling out and then buying what you were going to buy at a reduced price. Greedy and selfish, basically.
Here's a disgusting titbit. The day before Lehman went under, Barclays was in talks to buy it. They dropped out, Lehman went under, people lost their jobs, a company was destroyed.
And now who's buying Lehman's assets at a knock down price? Barclays. Picking up the spoils of a catastrophe they were instrumental in causing. What a bunch of dicks. (And that's to say nothing of their absolutely awful banking services...)
Nothing wrong with Iceweasel, but heaven forbid users have to learn what a web browser is in general rather than remembering a list of brand names.
Brand recognition counts for a LOT. The average user (who, I hasten to remind you, is whom Ubuntu is ostensibly for) wants something they've heard of. Not "IceWeasel".
Because then they couldn't call it Firefox. That's the reason for the EULA; Mozilla is quite understandably protective of its Firefox trademark, and doesn't want it applied to builds that have been patched or changed by distros. Ubuntu punches above the weight of most other distros, however, and could probably come to an agreement more easily; they'd want their users to be able to find a browser they're familiar with.
BTW, what you described pretty much already exists in the form of IceWeasel, which was created when Debian found that the terms for use of the Firefox trademark were too harsh for them.
For a lot of people, this EULA thing might make them snap and ditch Firefox completely. If that happens Mozilla will lose a bit of market share, maybe even a significant bit.
To be honest, I doubt there are that many outside of the Slashdot peanut gallery that will hear about this, and even fewer of those will care. Anyone pissed enough with Firefox over the Awesome Bar etc will probably have switched, and if there's going to be a significant dip in market share then it'll be because of visible things like that; things that actually matter and are obvious problems to end users. A EULA ranks lower; ask the man in the street what he thinks about his web browser popping up a license agreement over its trademarks and his reaction will most likely be "So?".
What a dumb move in light of all the recent activity around webkit based browsers.
Like Google Chrome, that doesn't yet run on Linux? Who does this matter to, exactly, aside from the vanishingly small number of people who take offence to the concept of accepting a license agreement? Certainly not the general masses to whom Ubuntu is targeted. Those general masses are more concerned with having a decent, well known web browser.
That's absurd. The Linux kernel can't have a EULA of the sort being discussed - it's impractical. The point is, so long as the terms are not onerous, and I doubt they would be, there's nothing wrong with Mozilla having a EULA stating their trademark rights and such things.
Firefox is a trademark, Mozilla need to defend that trademark, and it's in Ubuntu's interests to provide a browser that people have heard about, rather than "Iceweasel", which they haven't. That, and I doubt Mozilla's EULA would be that onerous; the only people who are going to be truly upset at this are the people who hear "EULA" and kneejerk a negative response.
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
on
Review: Spore
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· Score: 1
So, basically, you're prepared to misrepresent an issue so people agree with you?
What an asshole.
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
on
Review: Spore
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· Score: 1
Some of them aren't noobs, and are fairly well informed, but think it adds credence to their arguments if they're founded on half-truths.
Can you really call that carelessness on my part? And is £76 a fair fine for trying to spend six pence more than I had?
No, and no - I specifically said that the fees are too steep - £12, max, same as with credit card fees. And it's not your fault that some other idiot sat on a cheque for 5 months. Hence why you should appeal the fees.
Which bank is this, by the way? Sounds like NatWest to me (had similar fun with them one time, bunch of bellends). Try and get an account with HSBC, they don't charge you if you're only a little bit over.
In my experience, most people who go overdrawn and incur fees do so as a direct result of their own carelessness. They went out shopping and didn't check their balance, or didn't leave enough in the account to cover standing orders and Direct Debits. They then complain that the bank should have nannied them and refused their payments, when that could have had even worse consequences, and try and get the fees reversed.
If the overdraft is because of someone else's error, be it the bank's error, a DD company's error, your employer's error, the fees should be waived, and £30 or whatever is far too high; but if you just decided to go down Tesco with your debit card and didn't bother to check whether you had enough money in your account, why should you get away scot free?
You shouldn't need to spend that much money to tell people your 2 year old product isn't trash.
They shouldn't. But then, they have to be spending that money to try and counter some of the unsubstantiated FUD thats been spread about Vista, for free.
(Before I get modded as troll or whatever, I'm a Mac user, but I think this whole thing of slagging off Microsoft and then slagging them off further when they try and come back to it is stupid.)
Slashdot Mirror
That was beautiful, I agree entirely. Kudos.
(Yes, I did read the whole thing.)
How about things that most people actually give a shit about, like being able to view peoples' webcams (if not actually send webcam video), hear people talking, voice clips, winks, nudges, sending custom emoticons... all very well giving a snarky response mentioning "ads" but I'll bet dollars to doughnuts most normal users would gladly accept a few ads if it meant they could webcam with their friends.
So basically, it's not a Microsoft conspiracy to distort the market as the GP suggested, more that applications that people want to run don't work on Linux? This is hardly news; for the average user, they want Office, Photoshop and Windows Live Messenger, not OpenOffice, GIMP and Pidgin (the last one of which can easily be viewed as some kind of cruel joke by someone spoilt by the niceties and features of the official MSN client...)
From the article:
Honestly, please read more than a paragraph or two of the article before submitting it to Slashdot. You can submit any code under any licence you like to CodePlex, and indeed encourages you to do so. Where's the problem here, exactly? That "open source" means different things to Microsoft than it does to some other people? That term means many things to many people, from the idea of being able to view the source of software but do little else with it, to the BSD/public domain-ish idea of all code being available for modification under virtually any terms. That's all this is. Nothing to see here, move along.
...which they make a shitton of money out of.
Hmm.
Many people (regular, average people) pirate. They would have bought the CD or whatever, but don't because they can get roughly the same thing for free. I've known people like this. Pretending they don't exist does nobody any favours - piracy, quite obviously, does harm the music companies.
Slashdotters can crow all they want about "distribution monopolies" or whatever being the real reasons, but if they really cared about that they'd be trying to stop indie bands from playing and selling CDs, which they're not - they're trying to stop people taking the stuff they sell for free. They're companies, motivated purely by profit, and they wouldn't pursue action against individual downloaders if it wasn't somehow in their interests.
You've spectacularly missed the point. Either that or built a lovely straw man. Either way... nah.
The point is you can't just have fines for copyright infringement/theft on a large scale set at the cost of the equivalent number of copies you could have bought legally/the goods you stole. Because that way, there's no deterrent. If someone who pirated a £10 CD and sold 50 copies was fined £500, that conceivably comes under the realms of "cost of doing business". It's not a deterrent. Same way as if a thief had to pay the owner of the goods the value of the things he took, or was fined that amount, then that's not a deterrent, because he's just made someone sell shit to him against their will.
Bear in mind that commercial copyright infringement is a profitable industry (of course it is, or else nobody would do it) and that it (and non-commercial copyright infringement, but that's another thread altogether with a few different arguments) does take away business from the people who make the stuff being pirated unfairly. It does do actual harm, and merits punishment. Having to pay retail price for every copy you made, considering the profits involved in the business, isn't a punishment or a deterrent.
To refer to your absolutely fucking stupid analogy, my point wasn't that I wanted harsh punishments for everything as a deterrent, like sending someone for the colonies for stealing a loaf of bread. Just that the punishment should total more than the cost of a loaf of bread. Is that really so hard to understand?
Because the fines for copyright infringement aren't based on how many of Album/Game/Book X you copy, but the infringement of the rights of the copyright holder.
Put it another way; if you steal someone's stuff and sell it, the punishment isn't "pay for what you stole and we'll leave it at that". You have to go over and beyond that to deter people, otherwise it'd just be a sale through force.
When your rebuttal to what is actually a correct argument is something that happened 25 years ago, you might just have lost.
You can be a capitalist without being a prick. Barclays just don't care. These are the same cunts who did business in Apartheid-era South Africa, and still do in Zimbabwe.
It's more like offering to make a huge purchase at a mom and pop store, them banking on it, you pulling out and then buying what you were going to buy at a reduced price. Greedy and selfish, basically.
Here's a disgusting titbit. The day before Lehman went under, Barclays was in talks to buy it. They dropped out, Lehman went under, people lost their jobs, a company was destroyed.
And now who's buying Lehman's assets at a knock down price? Barclays. Picking up the spoils of a catastrophe they were instrumental in causing. What a bunch of dicks. (And that's to say nothing of their absolutely awful banking services...)
Firefox is the one that's had loads of press coverage, from articles on the BBC to full page ads in the New York Times. Iceweasel isn't.
Nothing wrong with Iceweasel, but heaven forbid users have to learn what a web browser is in general rather than remembering a list of brand names.
Brand recognition counts for a LOT. The average user (who, I hasten to remind you, is whom Ubuntu is ostensibly for) wants something they've heard of. Not "IceWeasel".
Because then they couldn't call it Firefox. That's the reason for the EULA; Mozilla is quite understandably protective of its Firefox trademark, and doesn't want it applied to builds that have been patched or changed by distros. Ubuntu punches above the weight of most other distros, however, and could probably come to an agreement more easily; they'd want their users to be able to find a browser they're familiar with.
BTW, what you described pretty much already exists in the form of IceWeasel, which was created when Debian found that the terms for use of the Firefox trademark were too harsh for them.
For a lot of people, this EULA thing might make them snap and ditch Firefox completely. If that happens Mozilla will lose a bit of market share, maybe even a significant bit.
To be honest, I doubt there are that many outside of the Slashdot peanut gallery that will hear about this, and even fewer of those will care. Anyone pissed enough with Firefox over the Awesome Bar etc will probably have switched, and if there's going to be a significant dip in market share then it'll be because of visible things like that; things that actually matter and are obvious problems to end users. A EULA ranks lower; ask the man in the street what he thinks about his web browser popping up a license agreement over its trademarks and his reaction will most likely be "So?".
What a dumb move in light of all the recent activity around webkit based browsers.
Like Google Chrome, that doesn't yet run on Linux? Who does this matter to, exactly, aside from the vanishingly small number of people who take offence to the concept of accepting a license agreement? Certainly not the general masses to whom Ubuntu is targeted. Those general masses are more concerned with having a decent, well known web browser.
That's absurd. The Linux kernel can't have a EULA of the sort being discussed - it's impractical. The point is, so long as the terms are not onerous, and I doubt they would be, there's nothing wrong with Mozilla having a EULA stating their trademark rights and such things.
Firefox is a trademark, Mozilla need to defend that trademark, and it's in Ubuntu's interests to provide a browser that people have heard about, rather than "Iceweasel", which they haven't. That, and I doubt Mozilla's EULA would be that onerous; the only people who are going to be truly upset at this are the people who hear "EULA" and kneejerk a negative response.
So, basically, you're prepared to misrepresent an issue so people agree with you?
What an asshole.
Some of them aren't noobs, and are fairly well informed, but think it adds credence to their arguments if they're founded on half-truths.
Can you really call that carelessness on my part? And is £76 a fair fine for trying to spend six pence more than I had?
No, and no - I specifically said that the fees are too steep - £12, max, same as with credit card fees. And it's not your fault that some other idiot sat on a cheque for 5 months. Hence why you should appeal the fees.
Which bank is this, by the way? Sounds like NatWest to me (had similar fun with them one time, bunch of bellends). Try and get an account with HSBC, they don't charge you if you're only a little bit over.
In my experience, most people who go overdrawn and incur fees do so as a direct result of their own carelessness. They went out shopping and didn't check their balance, or didn't leave enough in the account to cover standing orders and Direct Debits. They then complain that the bank should have nannied them and refused their payments, when that could have had even worse consequences, and try and get the fees reversed.
If the overdraft is because of someone else's error, be it the bank's error, a DD company's error, your employer's error, the fees should be waived, and £30 or whatever is far too high; but if you just decided to go down Tesco with your debit card and didn't bother to check whether you had enough money in your account, why should you get away scot free?
Who would you rather hang with: a WoW'er, or an American Idol devotee?
Irrelevant; the WoWer would be too busy WoWing to hang out with you. American Idol devotee it is.
You shouldn't need to spend that much money to tell people your 2 year old product isn't trash.
They shouldn't. But then, they have to be spending that money to try and counter some of the unsubstantiated FUD thats been spread about Vista, for free.
(Before I get modded as troll or whatever, I'm a Mac user, but I think this whole thing of slagging off Microsoft and then slagging them off further when they try and come back to it is stupid.)