The Xbox 360 and the PS3 target the young adult demographic, specifically teenagers and college students. None of these groups have any particularly huge amount of disposable income (or at least not huge enough to spend on both a console and an HDTV). Those still living with their parents might luck out due to living expenses being less costly and the possibility that the family might buy a set for everyone in the house, but college students, in particular those who have to work their way through college, typically have expenses so high and income so low that their choices for the remaining income after fixed expenses are between spending a lot on luxury goods and spending more on necessities. For many, the choice is between spending $1000+ on a good system and buying a decent amount of food.
Give those who do not mind their search requests being logged the option to improve the service, while letting those who do care use the service without logging.
Purism may seem to get in the way at times, but if everyone was pragmatic, and no one put their foot down and demanded that things be done in a certain way, then many of the advances we have made in the last decade or so would never come to pass. For example:
As stated in the summary, purism is what gave us GNOME. Purism is also responsible for getting Qt under the GPL. Regardless of your feelings about GNOME, you can't say that it is not at least a good thing we don't have only one major DE to choose from. Also, who knows what could have happened to KDE had Qt still been exclusively proprietary when Nokia bought Trolltech?
Purism is what gave us gzip and PNG. Instead of just complaining about LZW, developers made completely new formats, and generated enough momentum around them to virtually replace their patent-encumbered predecessors, all the while creating superior technologies in the process.
Purism is what gives us Web standards. The Browser Wars were one of the worst times in Web history because everyone was being too pragmatic. Browser vendors were only interested in locking in users to gain market share, and Web developers were only interested in coding for one browser and just pointing everyone who wasn't using that one to a download link for it. The Web is becoming a better place because of the growing purism among both browsers and developers, not in spite of it.
Interesting, considering that I don't remember ever hearing about ASP or AVC hardware decoders until after those formats became popular. It would seem that the popularity of the codec defines whether a hardware decoder exists, not the other way around.
The comparison I made was not supposed to be between the best settings for both codecs. Yes, x264 can produce better quality videos than even Thusnelda. I was never saying that it couldn't.
Rather, my point was that the settings that YouTube is using right now on the majority of their videos is quite terrible, and if they really want to argue on the merits of quality then they perhaps should tweak the settings to their own site first so that they can actually demonstrate the qualities of the codec they are using before discounting Theora purely on quality grounds.
I have seen the so-called "High Quality" clips, and, while a substantial improvement to the base quality, they still pale in comparison to what I get by default from competing services.
At any rate, I can't seem to find the HQ links anymore, even on videos that once had them.
Are you serious? YouTube rejecting Theora for quality issues? Have you been to YouTube recently? YouTube doesn't seem to give the slightest care about video quality.
Ignoring the tremendous improvements in the Thusnelda branch, if YouTube suddenly switched from severe H.26whatever overcompression to stock Theora with optimal settings (and everyone had libtheora and HTML 5 browsers), no one would notice the difference.
Risk? The movie studios would call lost movies a benefit because then they can either sell them to you a second time come obsolescence/destruction/damage of the previous format or pull them off the market completely if they cut too much into the current movie lineup profits.
(1) Unless of course you were listening to a leaked album, where the likelihood of you having a legal copy before the release date is extremely low. (2) Perhaps not, but it's pretty unlikely that tracks from an unreleased album appear because you borrowed a legit CD from a friend before it even went on sale. (3) Still true
From what I recall, the reason for the data release was to see who was listening to the leaked U2 album. While that may not have proved that the listener was the one who acquired the tracks, it certainly doesn't have the same amount of plausible deniability as listening to a normal track.
Of course, listeners allowing scrobbles of their leaked tracks to appear on a Web site that publicly displays your listening habits isn't exactly smart either.
Third, I think that students are already under a great deal of financial stress. The temptation to save a few dollars by grabbing a free copy of the textbook is very understandable to me. I just wish people would look at text book authors as the good guys because I think we provide much more information per dollar than the universities. Alas, I don't think I'm going to change people's ideas on that very soon.
The problem isn't so much the prices of the books as it is the horrible resale value. Textbooks are only valuable to me for 5 months, and to the market as a whole for a year (or whenever the latest edition comes out). Selling books back only gives the owner a pittance: I've found that I've bought books for $45-$70 and gotten less than $15-$20. And this assumes that the bookstore will even take it back. I've gotten stuck with textbooks bought for $130, used, for summer classes, only to find out that the store will not take them back at all because the new editions come out in the fall. Half of my textbooks so far are unreturnable.
The easy solution is to just use the last editions, but professors have come up with clever ways to force you to buy the required book, ranging from assigning problems only found in the latest edition to requiring supplemental materials that use registration keys that only work once.
You are right that textbook charges are the least of the financial woes (absurd tuition rates are far more annoying), but books are the one thing that a reasonable person would expect to recoup costs on, as they are a good and not a service.
Yes. It clearely is your fault if you don't know ahead of time influential and/or famous people that you may or may not be interested in to begin with.
"Doctorow, a novelist whose young adult novel 'Little Brother' spent seven weeks on the New York Times children's chapter books best-seller list last year, offers free electronic versions of his books on the same day they are published in hardcover. He believes free versions, even unauthorized ones, entice new readers."
This tipped the balance largly in favor of Doctorow, at least with respect to the submission (the article itself is more neutral).
I understand that expecting any kind of objectivity on Slashdot is really asking too much, but why is is that Doctorow's quote is in the submission by itself? Either publish both Doctorow's quote and something from Le Guin, or don't publish a quote at all.
High sales can be brought by more than just a sucessful business model.
A large store in a town with no or very little other commercial entities that compete with it will be more sucessful than one with an established commercial sector, for example.
"Open source" doesn't clarify much either, even in the context of software. All it says by itself is that the source is not secret. Nothing else is guaranteed. And at any rate, you would still have to explain what it means to others.
Now, both "Free" and Open source" have official definitions to try and clarify the matter, but I still have yet to see a truly unambiguous term for this, at least for English-speaking countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really.
The Xbox 360 and the PS3 target the young adult demographic, specifically teenagers and college students. None of these groups have any particularly huge amount of disposable income (or at least not huge enough to spend on both a console and an HDTV). Those still living with their parents might luck out due to living expenses being less costly and the possibility that the family might buy a set for everyone in the house, but college students, in particular those who have to work their way through college, typically have expenses so high and income so low that their choices for the remaining income after fixed expenses are between spending a lot on luxury goods and spending more on necessities. For many, the choice is between spending $1000+ on a good system and buying a decent amount of food.
Because most people have already spent all their money on the console?
Give those who do not mind their search requests being logged the option to improve the service, while letting those who do care use the service without logging.
Purism may seem to get in the way at times, but if everyone was pragmatic, and no one put their foot down and demanded that things be done in a certain way, then many of the advances we have made in the last decade or so would never come to pass. For example:
As stated in the summary, purism is what gave us GNOME. Purism is also responsible for getting Qt under the GPL. Regardless of your feelings about GNOME, you can't say that it is not at least a good thing we don't have only one major DE to choose from. Also, who knows what could have happened to KDE had Qt still been exclusively proprietary when Nokia bought Trolltech?
Purism is what gave us gzip and PNG. Instead of just complaining about LZW, developers made completely new formats, and generated enough momentum around them to virtually replace their patent-encumbered predecessors, all the while creating superior technologies in the process.
Purism is what gives us Web standards. The Browser Wars were one of the worst times in Web history because everyone was being too pragmatic. Browser vendors were only interested in locking in users to gain market share, and Web developers were only interested in coding for one browser and just pointing everyone who wasn't using that one to a download link for it. The Web is becoming a better place because of the growing purism among both browsers and developers, not in spite of it.
Undersea pirates?
Are you telling me they have developed gills now?
Interesting, considering that I don't remember ever hearing about ASP or AVC hardware decoders until after those formats became popular. It would seem that the popularity of the codec defines whether a hardware decoder exists, not the other way around.
The comparison I made was not supposed to be between the best settings for both codecs. Yes, x264 can produce better quality videos than even Thusnelda. I was never saying that it couldn't.
Rather, my point was that the settings that YouTube is using right now on the majority of their videos is quite terrible, and if they really want to argue on the merits of quality then they perhaps should tweak the settings to their own site first so that they can actually demonstrate the qualities of the codec they are using before discounting Theora purely on quality grounds.
I have seen the so-called "High Quality" clips, and, while a substantial improvement to the base quality, they still pale in comparison to what I get by default from competing services.
At any rate, I can't seem to find the HQ links anymore, even on videos that once had them.
Are you serious? YouTube rejecting Theora for quality issues? Have you been to YouTube recently? YouTube doesn't seem to give the slightest care about video quality.
Ignoring the tremendous improvements in the Thusnelda branch, if YouTube suddenly switched from severe H.26whatever overcompression to stock Theora with optimal settings (and everyone had libtheora and HTML 5 browsers), no one would notice the difference.
Risk? The movie studios would call lost movies a benefit because then they can either sell them to you a second time come obsolescence/destruction/damage of the previous format or pull them off the market completely if they cut too much into the current movie lineup profits.
(1) Unless of course you were listening to a leaked album, where the likelihood of you having a legal copy before the release date is extremely low.
(2) Perhaps not, but it's pretty unlikely that tracks from an unreleased album appear because you borrowed a legit CD from a friend before it even went on sale.
(3) Still true
From what I recall, the reason for the data release was to see who was listening to the leaked U2 album. While that may not have proved that the listener was the one who acquired the tracks, it certainly doesn't have the same amount of plausible deniability as listening to a normal track.
Of course, listeners allowing scrobbles of their leaked tracks to appear on a Web site that publicly displays your listening habits isn't exactly smart either.
It actually depends on the country. Downloading music is legal in Canada due to the blank media tax, for example.
Third, I think that students are already under a great deal of financial stress. The temptation to save a few dollars by grabbing a free copy of the textbook is very understandable to me. I just wish people would look at text book authors as the good guys because I think we provide much more information per dollar than the universities. Alas, I don't think I'm going to change people's ideas on that very soon.
The problem isn't so much the prices of the books as it is the horrible resale value. Textbooks are only valuable to me for 5 months, and to the market as a whole for a year (or whenever the latest edition comes out). Selling books back only gives the owner a pittance: I've found that I've bought books for $45-$70 and gotten less than $15-$20. And this assumes that the bookstore will even take it back. I've gotten stuck with textbooks bought for $130, used, for summer classes, only to find out that the store will not take them back at all because the new editions come out in the fall. Half of my textbooks so far are unreturnable.
The easy solution is to just use the last editions, but professors have come up with clever ways to force you to buy the required book, ranging from assigning problems only found in the latest edition to requiring supplemental materials that use registration keys that only work once.
You are right that textbook charges are the least of the financial woes (absurd tuition rates are far more annoying), but books are the one thing that a reasonable person would expect to recoup costs on, as they are a good and not a service.
Try switching on "Low bandwidth" in the general index preferences page.
Really? Seems like at least 25% of computer users know how to install another browser.
Note that this demographic includes Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and pretty much all non-IE and non-Safari browsers.
NoScript is the only way I can browse Slashdot without slowing my browser to a crawl.
Yes. It clearely is your fault if you don't know ahead of time influential and/or famous people that you may or may not be interested in to begin with.
Yes, but then this was added:
"Doctorow, a novelist whose young adult novel 'Little Brother' spent seven weeks on the New York Times children's chapter books best-seller list last year, offers free electronic versions of his books on the same day they are published in hardcover. He believes free versions, even unauthorized ones, entice new readers."
This tipped the balance largly in favor of Doctorow, at least with respect to the submission (the article itself is more neutral).
I understand that expecting any kind of objectivity on Slashdot is really asking too much, but why is is that Doctorow's quote is in the submission by itself? Either publish both Doctorow's quote and something from Le Guin, or don't publish a quote at all.
High sales can be brought by more than just a sucessful business model.
A large store in a town with no or very little other commercial entities that compete with it will be more sucessful than one with an established commercial sector, for example.
I'll just be content when the JavaScript stops eating up all of my clock cycles every time it pulls in more stories.
What is a "millions download"?
"Open source" doesn't clarify much either, even in the context of software. All it says by itself is that the source is not secret. Nothing else is guaranteed. And at any rate, you would still have to explain what it means to others.
Now, both "Free" and Open source" have official definitions to try and clarify the matter, but I still have yet to see a truly unambiguous term for this, at least for English-speaking countries.
I know where the term came from, but it quite clearly does not fit here. What is the "source code" for a book?
Free, libre, free as in speech. All of those are better descriptions in this scenario than "open source."
Can we get an editable format as well? PDFs are quite hard to modify.