This reminds me of wide eyed "consumers" that are in total awe of some consumer electronics device. They think that just because "they are impressed" that some company should have a 17 year long innovation stiffling excuse to sue anyone that produces something similar.
It's the "rube on the street" standard versus the "person skilled in the art". Although some of these things come off as fodder for university homework assignments.
Of course the "rube in the street" acting as a corporate shill has no interest in being contradicted by any "person skilled in the art".
> Comcast is giving the customer more value for their money
No they aren't. They are engaging in an obvious and blatant form of monopoly abuse. They are exploiting the natural monopoly part of their business to unfairly benefit the content delivery aspect of their business against rivals.
These rivals are well established first movers that rightfully deserve the "spoils" of innovating and providing new products.
Continued tolerance of these blatant monopoly activities will only drive the best companies out of the market while decreasing quality and increasing prices.
The ultimate result is in fact "less value for their money".
Since being re-jailed in order to run a more current version of PhoneOS, the old iPad is crashing so much I'm not sure an Android device could possibly be any worse.
Using the modern equivalent of a portable black & white TV set instead of a real TV just seems silly. For any of the "at home" use cases, you're much better off with a real TV and a cheaper Apple product.
Different hardware is still different hardware, even if it's just an annual refresh and the number of variations are relatively minor. You still have to consider that you may not be able to sell to the entire market or you might have to make a less ambitious product.
Fully exploit the potential of an iPad3, make an iPad1 crumble.
They are quite comparable. You're just unrealistic clinging onto a highly extreme notion of a requirement that isn't terribly important to most people.
Even those of us that have some real reason to be concerned about "volume" aren't terribly impressed by your "issue".
Except this situation isn't really anything like that. This is less like a single crime scene than it is an entire city block or perhaps an entire neighborhood.
It's more like the owner of an industrial park whining that they can't dispose of a factory that's been shut down and the associated litigation is still pending.
> There is no natural downward price progression on an item whose cost of production is not actually being reduce
That's funny because I have been observing just that effect over the last few years. It's why I have as many spinny disks as I do. Otherwise, I would just get sticker shock and never bother.
Unless there is some reason for the Sherman Act to be invoked, the market is what sets the price. Luxury goods by their very nature have very elastic demand. Prices should by pushed by natural forces to the marginal production cost.
The process of ripping is not legal enough for a company like Real or Apple to offer a handy dandy shiny happy tool that will hold your hand while to transfer things from physical media to your iTunes library.
That greatly hampers the availability of tools and the quality of those tools especially as it relates to most users.
Movies aren't so bad but TV shows can be a b*tch. I would not expect a "normal consumer" to bother. I would expect them to just hit the torrents regardless of whether they own a legit copy or not.
If it really does cost that much, it is far more likely the result of an industry that is accustomed to being immune from normal business and market pressures. They live in their own fantasy world isolated from the realities of normal people. The idea of being more efficient about what they do just doesn't occur to them.
Seems to apply to all "creative" industries.
This is one area in particular where Lucas wipes the floor with his peers. (at least when he was young)
Back in the 80s, music labels wouldn't even talk to you until you demonstrated that you already had an established fan base. You pretty much had to demonstrate an ability to "fend for yourself" before the gatekeepers would let you into the system.
Despite the alleged benefits of corporate publisher patronage, there are ample examples of artists of all kinds being forced to do the bulk of their own marketing.
Those "potential" benefits are entirely dependent upon an entire chain of events lining up just right. This includes the consumer taking enough care and spending enough money on their own home theatre setup as well as the studio taking even more care in the process of creating the original movie and mastering it to BD.
Since the original is already in the can, there may be nothing that can be done to make it seem worthwhile in a different format.
That's assuming that the studio even bothers with the effort.
Then you have to convince the users to care. Not everyone cares. Not everyone can notice the difference.
Ultimately for most people, the content is more important than the minutia of the format. The marginal improvement just isn't there.
The Open Group spec is pretty worthless. It's far too limited. It's primary value is just marketing. That's exactly the way you are trying to use it now.
That spec allows for a degree of variation that any fanboy would try to laugh at if it were applied to any other system.
You idiots whine about "fragmentation" in Android. That's nothing compared to what the Unix spec does not cover.
MacOS is only Unix when it's time to engage in mindless marketing. Otherwise, it's something that's ignored and avoided.
You MIGHT be able to get your data out if you WORK HARD AT IT.
That's a far cry from your data being in natively portable formats without any special effort being required by any time. The moment you declared "but I am able to export it", someone will chime in that such a thing is "too much of a bother". That's assuming that the exported result is complete and accurate.
Chances are that such a version will be declared inferior and the cycle of "you really need to use monopoly tool X" starts all over again.
ANY changes are a problem in this respect. It's not just limited to Linux. Merely upgrading to the newest version of Windows or Office will pose the same challenges. It's been this way since the early 90s.
Dealing with the "market leader products" is not free. Upgrading and maintaining them is not free. Never has been.
They are both fine with building off of Free Software. They don't seem to have a pathalogical "right to exclude". Although I wonder about Oracle sometimes.
There are no relevant restrictions for Apple to worry about. Every relevant aspect of MacOS falls into the same category of "proprietary software built on to of free software" that any EA game ported to Linux does. Same goes for Oracle products.
That's a very limited view of corporate computing.
The truth is that "network effects" favor Linux as a form of Unix in the server room and disfavors anything that isn't Windows any where else. However, the market in general has been moving more towards platform agnostic application development platforms in recent years.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Quite.
This reminds me of wide eyed "consumers" that are in total awe of some consumer electronics device. They think that just because "they are impressed" that some company should have a 17 year long innovation stiffling excuse to sue anyone that produces something similar.
It's the "rube on the street" standard versus the "person skilled in the art". Although some of these things come off as fodder for university homework assignments.
Of course the "rube in the street" acting as a corporate shill has no interest in being contradicted by any "person skilled in the art".
> Comcast is giving the customer more value for their money
No they aren't. They are engaging in an obvious and blatant form of monopoly abuse. They are exploiting the natural monopoly part of their business to unfairly benefit the content delivery aspect of their business against rivals.
These rivals are well established first movers that rightfully deserve the "spoils" of innovating and providing new products.
Continued tolerance of these blatant monopoly activities will only drive the best companies out of the market while decreasing quality and increasing prices.
The ultimate result is in fact "less value for their money".
You're engaging in a lot of rhetorical flourishes but you aren't actually telling anyone anything meaningful.
What would he be missing out on exactly?
Do try to be precise.
More empty rhetoric won't count.
Since being re-jailed in order to run a more current version of PhoneOS, the old iPad is crashing so much I'm not sure an Android device could possibly be any worse.
Using the modern equivalent of a portable black & white TV set instead of a real TV just seems silly. For any of the "at home" use cases, you're much better off with a real TV and a cheaper Apple product.
Different hardware is still different hardware, even if it's just an annual refresh and the number of variations are relatively minor. You still have to consider that you may not be able to sell to the entire market or you might have to make a less ambitious product.
Fully exploit the potential of an iPad3, make an iPad1 crumble.
They are quite comparable. You're just unrealistic clinging onto a highly extreme notion of a requirement that isn't terribly important to most people.
Even those of us that have some real reason to be concerned about "volume" aren't terribly impressed by your "issue".
People love to conflate personal papers and creative works.
This is an unfortunate side effect of trying to treat every scrap of paper as some sort of masterpiece and copyrighting it by default.
"Intellectual Property" is published creative works.
Whether or not I trust him is irrelevant.
Whether or not I like him is irrelevant.
There are just certain rules we don't break. This idea predates the republic. It's not a new idea that was invented with the ACLU.
Except this situation isn't really anything like that. This is less like a single crime scene than it is an entire city block or perhaps an entire neighborhood.
It's more like the owner of an industrial park whining that they can't dispose of a factory that's been shut down and the associated litigation is still pending.
> There is no natural downward price progression on an item whose cost of production is not actually being reduce
That's funny because I have been observing just that effect over the last few years. It's why I have as many spinny disks as I do. Otherwise, I would just get sticker shock and never bother.
Unless there is some reason for the Sherman Act to be invoked, the market is what sets the price. Luxury goods by their very nature have very elastic demand. Prices should by pushed by natural forces to the marginal production cost.
That's just the nature of the beast.
...which is precisely why a legitimate BluRay player is the single least convenient way to play an actual BluRay disk.
The same logic applies to successful "artists" that went through conventional publishers.
The main difference is that with Youtube is visibility and transparency.
The process of ripping is not legal enough for a company like Real or Apple to offer a handy dandy shiny happy tool that will hold your hand while to transfer things from physical media to your iTunes library.
That greatly hampers the availability of tools and the quality of those tools especially as it relates to most users.
Movies aren't so bad but TV shows can be a b*tch. I would not expect a "normal consumer" to bother. I would expect them to just hit the torrents regardless of whether they own a legit copy or not.
If it really does cost that much, it is far more likely the result of an industry that is accustomed to being immune from normal business and market pressures. They live in their own fantasy world isolated from the realities of normal people. The idea of being more efficient about what they do just doesn't occur to them.
Seems to apply to all "creative" industries.
This is one area in particular where Lucas wipes the floor with his peers. (at least when he was young)
Back in the 80s, music labels wouldn't even talk to you until you demonstrated that you already had an established fan base. You pretty much had to demonstrate an ability to "fend for yourself" before the gatekeepers would let you into the system.
Despite the alleged benefits of corporate publisher patronage, there are ample examples of artists of all kinds being forced to do the bulk of their own marketing.
What BluRay offers is "potential" benefits.
Those "potential" benefits are entirely dependent upon an entire chain of events lining up just right. This includes the consumer taking enough care and spending enough money on their own home theatre setup as well as the studio taking even more care in the process of creating the original movie and mastering it to BD.
Since the original is already in the can, there may be nothing that can be done to make it seem worthwhile in a different format.
That's assuming that the studio even bothers with the effort.
Then you have to convince the users to care. Not everyone cares. Not everyone can notice the difference.
Ultimately for most people, the content is more important than the minutia of the format. The marginal improvement just isn't there.
"The more they overtake the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
DRM doesn't stop pirates.
All DRM does is punish the PAYING CUSTOMER.
DRM just ads another level of uneccessary complexity that is prone to break or otherwise limit the usefulness of the product.
"Being a pirate" is the best way to avoid all of that nonsense.
> What is your criteria of Unix, by the way?
Actually using them. ALL of them.
The Open Group spec is pretty worthless. It's far too limited. It's primary value is just marketing. That's exactly the way you are trying to use it now.
That spec allows for a degree of variation that any fanboy would try to laugh at if it were applied to any other system.
You idiots whine about "fragmentation" in Android. That's nothing compared to what the Unix spec does not cover.
MacOS is only Unix when it's time to engage in mindless marketing. Otherwise, it's something that's ignored and avoided.
You MIGHT be able to get your data out if you WORK HARD AT IT.
That's a far cry from your data being in natively portable formats without any special effort being required by any time. The moment you declared "but I am able to export it", someone will chime in that such a thing is "too much of a bother". That's assuming that the exported result is complete and accurate.
Chances are that such a version will be declared inferior and the cycle of "you really need to use monopoly tool X" starts all over again.
ANY changes are a problem in this respect. It's not just limited to Linux. Merely upgrading to the newest version of Windows or Office will pose the same challenges. It's been this way since the early 90s.
Dealing with the "market leader products" is not free. Upgrading and maintaining them is not free. Never has been.
If it is a watered down version then it really isn't "Photoshop" now is it?
They are just using the name to confuse the ignorant.
It's like how some people don't know the difference between Intuit, Quicken, and Quickbooks.
Sun, IBM and Oracle are nice counterexamples.
They are both fine with building off of Free Software. They don't seem to have a pathalogical "right to exclude". Although I wonder about Oracle sometimes.
There are no relevant restrictions for Apple to worry about. Every relevant aspect of MacOS falls into the same category of "proprietary software built on to of free software" that any EA game ported to Linux does. Same goes for Oracle products.
That's a very limited view of corporate computing.
The truth is that "network effects" favor Linux as a form of Unix in the server room and disfavors anything that isn't Windows any where else. However, the market in general has been moving more towards platform agnostic application development platforms in recent years.