I agree that the price seems extremely inflated. I'd imagine that the courts try to make up for other costs with those charges, but I have no evidence of that.
It just seemed like you were saying that Mr. Beckerman was liberating these documents in the same way that a song gets liberated when it pops up on P2P, I think that the difference is significant enough that the two don't warrant a comparison.
I don't have direct experience but I always assumed that lawyers subscribe to the services that give them access to digital libraries of these documents.
I will grant you that the irony part seems relevant in the case of those services...again I dunno about specifics but at school we had LexisNexis, it seems like they'd apply here. They are charging for access to documents. Of course, they are doing the work of maintaining/indexing them. (And I'm not sure that the "many eyes" theory behind OSS will help create a free-to-all online database of transcripts and other legal papers. In terms of sorting the things you would want the eyes to be attached to a lawyer, legal clerk, etc and they probably don't take as much hobby time as programmers do):D
You've already received what I would consider a valid answer, but I'd like to add something.
We don't apply this standard to other purchases. When you go to a restaurant (a meal costs about the same as a CD at most of the places I go) for the first time, it's *not* customary for me to ask the waiter for a sample of whatever is on the menu. With discretionary spending sometimes you have to take a chance.
Actually, the music industry is probably the best industry in terms of try-before-you-buy. Your friend could have the record, you could hear it on the radio, or see a video on TV, or read a review in Rolling Stone, or online. Most music stores have had headphones & CD players mounted to the walls for a long time, or will put something on if you are showing interest in it. I will point out again that with physical goods, especially consumable or perishable, you are much less likely to see such easy sampling. You can try out a chair in a store but when they restaurant says "try the veal" they mean "buy the veal".
Oddly enough you asked about online stores, where for most material it's impossible to avoid finding preview clips.
It's not like I don't download music, but I'd never dream of justifying it buy saying "OMG what if it's bad"? That doesn't even make sense to me...if it was bad I wouldn't be listening to it.
I couldn't listen to the tracks ahead of time, often 90% of the album sucked.
1983 saw the release of Tears for Fears' "The Hurting", The Police's "Synchronicity", U2's "War", Elvis Costello's "Punch the Clock", among others. You may disagree about the quality of those individual albums of course, but I tried to pick some that are widely regarded as being of high quality.
My point is that there was no shortage of good music in the 80's, people just like to remember the bad stuff because it was so horribly bad then.
People complain about buying albums where the only good song is the single, and all I can say is "buy better albums". To say that there is nobody out there putting out good albums, especially now when you can find everything online, is insanity.
An extremely small subset. It does not differ from other industries in that regard.
Of course, if this guy is trying to say that records are somehow immoral, he's crazy. I go to shows at every opportunity. I play shows. It is a different art. Like plays vs. movies.
No irony that I can see. The transcripts are available to the public. AFAIK they cost money to publish because everything costs money to publish, not because you are licensing the content from the courts.
It's possible that your Supreme Court feels the same way (then again, perhaps they don't, or haven't addressed it directly, or maybe precedent is different where you are). If that's the case then it'd be easy to point out to people why the recording industry is lying.
Many avenues for filtering your childrens' internet usage have existed for a long time. You can control what comes into your own house very easily. If there was an absolute lack of such software maybe I'd see the value in "governments, ISPs, and internet standards bodies" coming together to rate websites, but do you think your government will do that much better of a job than the private companies do? Or that you could do yourself?
If we're talking about health care, or roads, or some other huge concern that affects everyone on direct and indirect levels, then sure. But the internet is a world of ends, and rather than trying to force someone to stay in the middle and regulate, why not just exercise more control over your end? You could set up a separate proxy filter, or a software package, or a browser plugin, or a software or hardware firewall with web filtering.
I realize that not everybody can do or wants do to these things. This is why we have specialization of labor. If such a service is of value to you, and you're unwilling to learn, you can pay someone to do it.
Then the UK and US should mandate it within their own borders and put international pressure on other countries to do the same.
This reads the same to me as, "the government should set up public showers so that everyone that wants one can take one". It's much easier for people to just have bathrooms in their houses, no?* And if you don't want to do the plumbing, you can hire any plumber.
* Not talking about the homeless here, and providing funding for shelters is something that's absolutely necessary.
There is currently a "haha" tag. Maybe there wasn't when you posted.
In my experience the response is the same but the sneer is on a different side of the mouth. Why people get religious about OSes is beyond me, but I can assure that there was no shortage people waiting to jump in with little more to say than "I thought Macs didn't crash fanboi! Derp derp".
But I can't blame them, given how shrill Apple's TV ads always are.
With respect, I think the hypothetical numbers you posted simply back up the parent's claim.
In your numbers, IE's share has gone down, and the spread between the remaining browsers has evened out somewhat. This is only possible if those other browsers are all similar in what percentage of sites render nicely in them (stardards win) or have some killer features that drew people away from even Firefox (features win).
In practical terms, what I want is open standards and lots of competition between products. That it's made by Mozilla or whoever else makes no difference to me.
You are saying that there should be a strong, single competitor to IE so that it can be adopted in the enterprise. In this specific case, I take the opposite view...if you're running a Windows domain and IE is not the only browser on your user' machines, you are making a lot more work for yourself. There is only one browser that works with GPOs out of the box at the individual feature level, and that is IE. It updates through your SUS/WSUS setup on a schedule that you specify. It can use NTLM authentication for intranet apps. And so on.
It seems like there are far more zero-day exploits for IE, so I'll give you that, but running a Windows shop without good antivirus and timely MS updates is bad news anyway. At my place we have web filtering, too. Prior to putting in the web filtering I toyed with the idea of deploying FF but in seeking others' advice I realized the disadvantages and haven't looked back.
Once Firefox started recovering tabs after a crash, I stopped worrying about that altogether. So I have to say I disagree about the separate processes per tab...on the very rare occasion that FF crashes (and only then because I like to run the betas, 3.1 especially has some nice features for Mac users) I have all my tabs and I usually know which one it was anyway.
If having separate processes per tab allowed them to implement features they couldn't otherwise do, maybe like tear-off tabs (it's on the roadmap, I don't know if it requires separate processes -- only speaking hypothetically), then that'd be neat. But for me personally I don't see a gain other than feature parity with Chrome and IE, since FF has dealt with crahses gracefully for a while now.
Imagine if someone tried to pretend that two computing devices having the same name was the same as a computing device and a stack of wood pulp sheets with some glue on the end.
Seriously...many folks just can't be arsed to take five minutes to learn a new way of doing something, even when it can be shown to be unambiguously better. They'd rather click 20 different places like there's some sort of secret handshake to get at files and programs. The repetitive motions make them feel calm. But I have better things to do with my time.
I love the search box on Vista. This may be because I evaluate things objectively, refrain from whining, and do not (far as I know) exhibit symptoms of OCD. Some of my users, and certainly some members of my family, will get frustrated at something as small as an icon moving. I can chalk this up to a lack of confidence with the system and taking whatever permanence you can get, even if it's the location of an icon. But it just annoys me to come here, where I expect people not to exhibit such behavior, and see that they do, and it gets modded to the heavens.
Vista's main search bar is IMO not yet as good as Spotlight. There, you just hit cmd+space, type a few letters, and be it program, file, email, phone number, or whatever, you have it in less than a second in most cases. OTOH, Vista's built-in folder searching seems much better to me than Finder's.
Anyway, Vista is improved in a number of places, and people are picking the wrong things to complain about. I feel like the old Run box uses your stress level to determine whether or not it should auto-complete. The completion in cmd.exe is better. The run box sucks.
Of course, UAC is complete crap if you do *anything at all* on your computer other than leave it unplugged. Oh well.
Also, I'd imagine that they changed it for Vista because of all of the overly clever folks saying for the thousandth time, "why is it called add/remove if i can only remove?", much like the whole "press start to shutdown" thing. Hilarious stuff, if you're Andy Rooney, that is.
It's also used to actually add software in a domain setting. I don't think the button shows up in XP home or an install of pro that's in a workgroup. And I don't know how it looks in Vista.
But in XP Pro on a domain on a there is an add button which will have software if your admin has set you up for that, and a remove button that will remove software, so it makes sense that way.
Most Windows software doesn't bother to remove all traces from the registry, either. So we can say that in most cases the best way to uninstall software on a Mac is to drag the app folder to the trash. I have used Windows far longer than I have used a Mac, and you do not have to defend Windows' honor from me. Seriously, deleting (and usually installing) apps is 10x easier on a Mac and it's one of the nice things about the platform. Windows has its strong points, but worrying about whether or not something is in "All Users > Programs" or "Joe > Programs", as well as being at the mercy of uninstall scripts that can leave behind files and registry keys is just not one of them.
You can also actually add programs if you're in a domain and they've been made available to you. The admin can assign MSIs or ZAP files to a policy object and if you have XP Pro you use the "Add" button. I'm guessing with Vista it's the same (that is, no add feature on the home version, unless they've replaced that with that new software store).
There's an app called "network utility" that will show a lot of information, but there's ifconfig and probably some other utilities.
Actually I can't think of a situation on my Mac where, in the absence of a good link, I'd know exactly what was up from the dialogs. It seems like Windows and Mac just give you one error if there's no link and another if there's no IP address. Actually there's one: I don't think Macs will try to detect an IP conflict, but I could be wrong.
What I absolutely cannot freakin' stand is the way networking is done in Vista. I have set up networking on countless Vista machines for people (granted, usually simple stuff) and I still have no clue if there's any logic to the dialogs. All I want is a list of the interfaces. I do not care about pictures of park benches:D
And given that 99% of the time the network wasn't working because of Norton, I have to consider the automatic diagnostic wizard a spectacular failure as well, since instead of saying "uninstall Norton" it would say things like "I don't know, maybe the internet's broken today".
Short version: when people say "intuitive" they really mean "familiar", as in, they've seen something similar before or they've grown used to the UI over time. His main argument was a linguistic one; that we should not use the word "intuitive" like that because it gives everyone the wrong idea. I don't think he goes so far as to say that maintaining the status quo doesn't have its benefits, but he does lament over some instances where what he thought was a better UI was turned down because it wasn't as immediately familiar.
Anyway, I don't think you're wrong, but I think that in design you can have a "backwards compatibility" problem too. Even if in the short term it's better to retain it, in the long term people's initial annoyance is not so much of a factor, but the cruft will be.
My big problem with the control panel in Vista is that there's just too many icons. They're really past the point where having an icon for each dialog is useful. I wouldn't stumble every time I look for "Programs and Features" if there weren't so many of them (of course, if I had to use Vista every day I'm sure I'd get used to the control panel pretty fast).
IANACCNA but my understanding is that bridge mode makes the guest behave as if it has a network card that is physically distinct from (but on the same LAN as) the host. So I would try telling linux to use an IP that is valid for the LAN but unused. If it works then you won't have the conflict with the host. If it doesn't then you come back and flame me.
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I agree that the price seems extremely inflated. I'd imagine that the courts try to make up for other costs with those charges, but I have no evidence of that.
It just seemed like you were saying that Mr. Beckerman was liberating these documents in the same way that a song gets liberated when it pops up on P2P, I think that the difference is significant enough that the two don't warrant a comparison.
I don't have direct experience but I always assumed that lawyers subscribe to the services that give them access to digital libraries of these documents.
I will grant you that the irony part seems relevant in the case of those services...again I dunno about specifics but at school we had LexisNexis, it seems like they'd apply here. They are charging for access to documents. Of course, they are doing the work of maintaining/indexing them. (And I'm not sure that the "many eyes" theory behind OSS will help create a free-to-all online database of transcripts and other legal papers. In terms of sorting the things you would want the eyes to be attached to a lawyer, legal clerk, etc and they probably don't take as much hobby time as programmers do) :D
RIAA lawyer by any chance? :P
You've already received what I would consider a valid answer, but I'd like to add something.
We don't apply this standard to other purchases. When you go to a restaurant (a meal costs about the same as a CD at most of the places I go) for the first time, it's *not* customary for me to ask the waiter for a sample of whatever is on the menu. With discretionary spending sometimes you have to take a chance.
Actually, the music industry is probably the best industry in terms of try-before-you-buy. Your friend could have the record, you could hear it on the radio, or see a video on TV, or read a review in Rolling Stone, or online. Most music stores have had headphones & CD players mounted to the walls for a long time, or will put something on if you are showing interest in it. I will point out again that with physical goods, especially consumable or perishable, you are much less likely to see such easy sampling. You can try out a chair in a store but when they restaurant says "try the veal" they mean "buy the veal".
Oddly enough you asked about online stores, where for most material it's impossible to avoid finding preview clips.
It's not like I don't download music, but I'd never dream of justifying it buy saying "OMG what if it's bad"? That doesn't even make sense to me...if it was bad I wouldn't be listening to it.
And they'd still be doing it if there was no competition.
They also got busted for price fixing.
I couldn't listen to the tracks ahead of time, often 90% of the album sucked.
1983 saw the release of Tears for Fears' "The Hurting", The Police's "Synchronicity", U2's "War", Elvis Costello's "Punch the Clock", among others. You may disagree about the quality of those individual albums of course, but I tried to pick some that are widely regarded as being of high quality.
My point is that there was no shortage of good music in the 80's, people just like to remember the bad stuff because it was so horribly bad then.
People complain about buying albums where the only good song is the single, and all I can say is "buy better albums". To say that there is nobody out there putting out good albums, especially now when you can find everything online, is insanity.
An extremely small subset. It does not differ from other industries in that regard.
Of course, if this guy is trying to say that records are somehow immoral, he's crazy. I go to shows at every opportunity. I play shows. It is a different art. Like plays vs. movies.
No irony that I can see. The transcripts are available to the public. AFAIK they cost money to publish because everything costs money to publish, not because you are licensing the content from the courts.
I don't. It's just a protocol, and it's legitimate uses far outweigh any infringement that happens to take place over it.
Here in the US, our Supreme Court said in 1985 that unlawful copies are not the same as stolen goods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985)
It's possible that your Supreme Court feels the same way (then again, perhaps they don't, or haven't addressed it directly, or maybe precedent is different where you are). If that's the case then it'd be easy to point out to people why the recording industry is lying.
Many avenues for filtering your childrens' internet usage have existed for a long time. You can control what comes into your own house very easily. If there was an absolute lack of such software maybe I'd see the value in "governments, ISPs, and internet standards bodies" coming together to rate websites, but do you think your government will do that much better of a job than the private companies do? Or that you could do yourself?
If we're talking about health care, or roads, or some other huge concern that affects everyone on direct and indirect levels, then sure. But the internet is a world of ends, and rather than trying to force someone to stay in the middle and regulate, why not just exercise more control over your end? You could set up a separate proxy filter, or a software package, or a browser plugin, or a software or hardware firewall with web filtering.
I realize that not everybody can do or wants do to these things. This is why we have specialization of labor. If such a service is of value to you, and you're unwilling to learn, you can pay someone to do it.
Then the UK and US should mandate it within their own borders and put international pressure on other countries to do the same.
This reads the same to me as, "the government should set up public showers so that everyone that wants one can take one". It's much easier for people to just have bathrooms in their houses, no?* And if you don't want to do the plumbing, you can hire any plumber.
* Not talking about the homeless here, and providing funding for shelters is something that's absolutely necessary.
And Australia. Don't forget about Australia.
Key...board? Is that like a touch screen?
There is currently a "haha" tag. Maybe there wasn't when you posted.
In my experience the response is the same but the sneer is on a different side of the mouth. Why people get religious about OSes is beyond me, but I can assure that there was no shortage people waiting to jump in with little more to say than "I thought Macs didn't crash fanboi! Derp derp".
But I can't blame them, given how shrill Apple's TV ads always are.
With respect, I think the hypothetical numbers you posted simply back up the parent's claim.
In your numbers, IE's share has gone down, and the spread between the remaining browsers has evened out somewhat. This is only possible if those other browsers are all similar in what percentage of sites render nicely in them (stardards win) or have some killer features that drew people away from even Firefox (features win).
In practical terms, what I want is open standards and lots of competition between products. That it's made by Mozilla or whoever else makes no difference to me.
You are saying that there should be a strong, single competitor to IE so that it can be adopted in the enterprise. In this specific case, I take the opposite view...if you're running a Windows domain and IE is not the only browser on your user' machines, you are making a lot more work for yourself. There is only one browser that works with GPOs out of the box at the individual feature level, and that is IE. It updates through your SUS/WSUS setup on a schedule that you specify. It can use NTLM authentication for intranet apps. And so on.
It seems like there are far more zero-day exploits for IE, so I'll give you that, but running a Windows shop without good antivirus and timely MS updates is bad news anyway. At my place we have web filtering, too. Prior to putting in the web filtering I toyed with the idea of deploying FF but in seeking others' advice I realized the disadvantages and haven't looked back.
Once Firefox started recovering tabs after a crash, I stopped worrying about that altogether. So I have to say I disagree about the separate processes per tab...on the very rare occasion that FF crashes (and only then because I like to run the betas, 3.1 especially has some nice features for Mac users) I have all my tabs and I usually know which one it was anyway.
If having separate processes per tab allowed them to implement features they couldn't otherwise do, maybe like tear-off tabs (it's on the roadmap, I don't know if it requires separate processes -- only speaking hypothetically), then that'd be neat. But for me personally I don't see a gain other than feature parity with Chrome and IE, since FF has dealt with crahses gracefully for a while now.
Imagine if someone tried to pretend that two computing devices having the same name was the same as a computing device and a stack of wood pulp sheets with some glue on the end.
I think his problem was thinking TV == reality.
Seriously...many folks just can't be arsed to take five minutes to learn a new way of doing something, even when it can be shown to be unambiguously better. They'd rather click 20 different places like there's some sort of secret handshake to get at files and programs. The repetitive motions make them feel calm. But I have better things to do with my time.
I love the search box on Vista. This may be because I evaluate things objectively, refrain from whining, and do not (far as I know) exhibit symptoms of OCD. Some of my users, and certainly some members of my family, will get frustrated at something as small as an icon moving. I can chalk this up to a lack of confidence with the system and taking whatever permanence you can get, even if it's the location of an icon. But it just annoys me to come here, where I expect people not to exhibit such behavior, and see that they do, and it gets modded to the heavens.
Vista's main search bar is IMO not yet as good as Spotlight. There, you just hit cmd+space, type a few letters, and be it program, file, email, phone number, or whatever, you have it in less than a second in most cases. OTOH, Vista's built-in folder searching seems much better to me than Finder's.
Anyway, Vista is improved in a number of places, and people are picking the wrong things to complain about. I feel like the old Run box uses your stress level to determine whether or not it should auto-complete. The completion in cmd.exe is better. The run box sucks.
Of course, UAC is complete crap if you do *anything at all* on your computer other than leave it unplugged. Oh well.
Also, I'd imagine that they changed it for Vista because of all of the overly clever folks saying for the thousandth time, "why is it called add/remove if i can only remove?", much like the whole "press start to shutdown" thing. Hilarious stuff, if you're Andy Rooney, that is.
It's also used to actually add software in a domain setting. I don't think the button shows up in XP home or an install of pro that's in a workgroup. And I don't know how it looks in Vista.
But in XP Pro on a domain on a there is an add button which will have software if your admin has set you up for that, and a remove button that will remove software, so it makes sense that way.
Most Windows software doesn't bother to remove all traces from the registry, either. So we can say that in most cases the best way to uninstall software on a Mac is to drag the app folder to the trash. I have used Windows far longer than I have used a Mac, and you do not have to defend Windows' honor from me. Seriously, deleting (and usually installing) apps is 10x easier on a Mac and it's one of the nice things about the platform. Windows has its strong points, but worrying about whether or not something is in "All Users > Programs" or "Joe > Programs", as well as being at the mercy of uninstall scripts that can leave behind files and registry keys is just not one of them.
You can also actually add programs if you're in a domain and they've been made available to you. The admin can assign MSIs or ZAP files to a policy object and if you have XP Pro you use the "Add" button. I'm guessing with Vista it's the same (that is, no add feature on the home version, unless they've replaced that with that new software store).
Gotta use the terminal, it's all there though :)
There's an app called "network utility" that will show a lot of information, but there's ifconfig and probably some other utilities.
Actually I can't think of a situation on my Mac where, in the absence of a good link, I'd know exactly what was up from the dialogs. It seems like Windows and Mac just give you one error if there's no link and another if there's no IP address. Actually there's one: I don't think Macs will try to detect an IP conflict, but I could be wrong.
What I absolutely cannot freakin' stand is the way networking is done in Vista. I have set up networking on countless Vista machines for people (granted, usually simple stuff) and I still have no clue if there's any logic to the dialogs. All I want is a list of the interfaces. I do not care about pictures of park benches :D
And given that 99% of the time the network wasn't working because of Norton, I have to consider the automatic diagnostic wizard a spectacular failure as well, since instead of saying "uninstall Norton" it would say things like "I don't know, maybe the internet's broken today".
Jef Raskin on "Intuitive Interfaces"
Short version: when people say "intuitive" they really mean "familiar", as in, they've seen something similar before or they've grown used to the UI over time. His main argument was a linguistic one; that we should not use the word "intuitive" like that because it gives everyone the wrong idea. I don't think he goes so far as to say that maintaining the status quo doesn't have its benefits, but he does lament over some instances where what he thought was a better UI was turned down because it wasn't as immediately familiar.
Anyway, I don't think you're wrong, but I think that in design you can have a "backwards compatibility" problem too. Even if in the short term it's better to retain it, in the long term people's initial annoyance is not so much of a factor, but the cruft will be.
My big problem with the control panel in Vista is that there's just too many icons. They're really past the point where having an icon for each dialog is useful. I wouldn't stumble every time I look for "Programs and Features" if there weren't so many of them (of course, if I had to use Vista every day I'm sure I'd get used to the control panel pretty fast).
IANACCNA but my understanding is that bridge mode makes the guest behave as if it has a network card that is physically distinct from (but on the same LAN as) the host. So I would try telling linux to use an IP that is valid for the LAN but unused. If it works then you won't have the conflict with the host. If it doesn't then you come back and flame me.