You folks always talk about the cost of producing movies/books/music, as if it were of any relevance to the debate. The cost of producing anything is an economic risk that lies squarely with the producer. Whether you are recording an album or manufacturing a car is irrelevant. What we should be talking about is the value of things. People pay significant premiums to have an Adidas logo on their running pants or a BMW sign on their car. The retail prices of both the pants and the car have very little to do with the cost of producing either but everything to do with how much people are willing to pay for having them, ie.: their value.
Apparently the perception of media's value has changed over the last decades. Where the producers - or more to the point: the distributors - see the value stable or even going up, the consumers see it going down. Way down. Films, music, books have become a commodity. IMDb gives 4,579 films released in 1970 and 20,578 in 2010. Those numbers may not be completely representative but they do get the point across: There is so much media competing with each other that the value of individual works has decreased. Add to that the vastly reduced cost of reproduction and you end up with a product which is seen as almost worthless by its supposed consumers.
I would like to see those statistics, please, because I am quite certain that there is a figure in them that says "x people will save up money in order to buy the $media AND pirate it for the time being". I know I do this.
Return to the X way, and it makes perfect sense [...]
...for those who ever made sense of the X way. I love the interface of the current Adobe applications. It does everything I need in a sensible, accessible way. GIMP's thousand windows hell is annoying me to no end. This is the same grievance I have about the OS X's way of ripping the application's menu bar off its window and putting it on the top of the screen: I love having each thing I do in one neat box, ie.: each application in one defined window, with all its parts assembled in one place.
No-one implied that Java was not patent encumbered. C# just picks up on that fault and throws in a few additional headaches for good measure. And forget Mono. I tried to run all kinds of.NET applications on it. Few worked at all, most simply crashed. Unless the developer aims for Mono compatibility - and keeps in mind that Mono runs on OSes other than Windows - and shies away from the more bleeding-edge features of.NET it is easier and more reliable to install the.NET framework in Wine and run the application on that. And I am not even talking about software of enterprise-level complexity.
IMO Java sucks hard, but the one thing it got right was the "build once, run everywhere" part. I seldom have a Java application go ballistic on me because my VM does not match that of the original developer. It happens so little I am inclined to ascribe it to stupid programmers in the cases that it does occur..NET applications that are not specifically targeted at Mono are a pain at best and lost cases at worst.
(That being said personally I would love to see both platforms die a quick but excessively painful death.)
"The Connect to Server dialog has also been redesigned in order to make it more efficient."
Could someone running GNOME 3 kindly provide a screenshot of this dialogue? If "efficient" is to be understood as "just scrap any options that are not used by at least 99% of all our users more than three times a day", as apparently is the working definition for the whole GNOME 3 team, I better start polishing up the curse words section of my mental lexicon.
Copyright is indeed what protects open-source software, but the other details are where trouble lies. Contributors to open-source projects must declare that the copyright on their work belongs to the project. That means it can't be itself copied from somewhere else without license (including tutorials, sample code, etc.). If that assignment isn't made, then any change in the project's licensing requires the approval of all the submitters!
You do realise that this is not a "problem" or a bug in the way copyleft is handled but an intended feature? People who contribute to a FOSS project do so under agreed-upon terms. If the terms change, the agreement has to be renewed.
Besides, many projects successfully went from GPLv2 to v3, OpenStreetMap is in the middle of a license change, Wikipedia is phasing out GFDL in favour of a CC license. It is doable, though it certainly adds complexity for large projects. But again: That is not a bug, it is a feature.
[...] you could blame Chernobyl on outdated and weak Soviet tech if you want, but a modern plant [...]
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was built from around 1970 and began operation in 1977. The reactor that went FUBAR in 1986, number 4, had been completed only in 1983.
Fukushima I was built from 1967 and began operation in 1971. The reactors most affected by the current disaster were built between the late Sixties and the early Seventies.
Those bloody reactors are older than the one at Chernobyl. And they are all based on the same basic designs.
With one U.S. penny weighing 2.5 g that would amount to a modest 18,750,000,000 to. Assuming short scale. I think I will need an XKDC issue to even begin to make sense of the sheer mass of money those loonies are asking for.
do you really want the equivalnt of the slammer virus going around on cell phones shutting down huge parts of the cell network?
Actually, yes, that would be awesome! It certainly would do more for improving the security and stability of our communication networks and devices than any locking down done to a select few handsets.
Of course they should be liable! If you tinker with your car and thereby cause an accident you are liable for any damages, not the manufacturer. If your "off-the-shelf" car displays a fault that leads to an accident the manufacturer is held responsible. We already have rules for all possible scenarios.
I am dumbstruck as to why the mere act of adding software to an already existing, well explained and satisfyingly regulated problem suddenly makes everything so complicated and somehow "special". Whether it is online fraud, phishing, liability for software errors, child pornography, terrorism - we already have several cubic LoC in laws and regulations for all of that. It just is not explicitly called online x, or x using a computer.
"I can't upgrade it whenever I like? By the time a version of comes out that I want to upgrade to but can't, the phone will be worn out from being used every day for 2 years, I'll be at the end of my contract and eligible for a heavily subsidised upgrade to the latest model. So again, I don't see why I should care."
I got my current phone (Nokia E65) in 2007. Apart from a broken display which cost me 12 € to repair and the scratched case which I do not care about the phone is perfectly fine. The contract I am on is older than that, though. 2003 at the latest.
I certainly am not representative of the majority of users, but not everyone treats their mobile phones and contracts as throw-away items. And not everyone takes subsidised phones.
Every phone should offer two modes of operation: One that is locked down by the manufacturer making him liable for any malfunction, and one that removes all the locks and limits and shifts liability to the user. That way everyone would be happy.
[...] I don't think you know how dictionaries work. [...]
The PP does not know the difference between a descriptive lexicon, which he/she wrongly criticises, and a prescriptive lexicon, which he/she should rather have bought but which indeed comes with its own share of issues.
Accessibility is a top priority for GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice and LibreOffice and many other major projects. Smaller projects often lack the resources to properly implement full accessibility. But then, so does the vast majority of smaller proprietary software.
It means that you mistook a sarcastic or ironic statement for a serious one. The GP certainly agrees with you that libraries are already understaffed, overburdened and severely short of budget.
People do not take the time to actually read a text as one coherent unit, they just quickly scan over it and pick up a few keywords. I see a lot of that at university. Makes me cringe every time.
No, they will continue to accept bug reports. But they will stop accepting new features until that bug counter goes below 15 again. The idea is to prevent a massive influx of new modules and patches while running up a backlog of bugs that no-one gets around to fixing.
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You folks always talk about the cost of producing movies/books/music, as if it were of any relevance to the debate. The cost of producing anything is an economic risk that lies squarely with the producer. Whether you are recording an album or manufacturing a car is irrelevant. What we should be talking about is the value of things. People pay significant premiums to have an Adidas logo on their running pants or a BMW sign on their car. The retail prices of both the pants and the car have very little to do with the cost of producing either but everything to do with how much people are willing to pay for having them, ie.: their value.
Apparently the perception of media's value has changed over the last decades. Where the producers - or more to the point: the distributors - see the value stable or even going up, the consumers see it going down. Way down. Films, music, books have become a commodity. IMDb gives 4,579 films released in 1970 and 20,578 in 2010. Those numbers may not be completely representative but they do get the point across: There is so much media competing with each other that the value of individual works has decreased. Add to that the vastly reduced cost of reproduction and you end up with a product which is seen as almost worthless by its supposed consumers.
I would like to see those statistics, please, because I am quite certain that there is a figure in them that says "x people will save up money in order to buy the $media AND pirate it for the time being". I know I do this.
"Right-clicking" or "hovering over" will never be implemented intuitively in a touch device.
Really? Oh, what a shame. Then Apple paid their lawyers for nothing, I guess.
Return to the X way, and it makes perfect sense [...]
...for those who ever made sense of the X way. I love the interface of the current Adobe applications. It does everything I need in a sensible, accessible way. GIMP's thousand windows hell is annoying me to no end. This is the same grievance I have about the OS X's way of ripping the application's menu bar off its window and putting it on the top of the screen: I love having each thing I do in one neat box, ie.: each application in one defined window, with all its parts assembled in one place.
No-one implied that Java was not patent encumbered. C# just picks up on that fault and throws in a few additional headaches for good measure. And forget Mono. I tried to run all kinds of .NET applications on it. Few worked at all, most simply crashed. Unless the developer aims for Mono compatibility - and keeps in mind that Mono runs on OSes other than Windows - and shies away from the more bleeding-edge features of .NET it is easier and more reliable to install the .NET framework in Wine and run the application on that. And I am not even talking about software of enterprise-level complexity.
IMO Java sucks hard, but the one thing it got right was the "build once, run everywhere" part. I seldom have a Java application go ballistic on me because my VM does not match that of the original developer. It happens so little I am inclined to ascribe it to stupid programmers in the cases that it does occur. .NET applications that are not specifically targeted at Mono are a pain at best and lost cases at worst.
(That being said personally I would love to see both platforms die a quick but excessively painful death.)
I am pretty sure the width of horse asses varies just as wildly. Now whether there lies a correlation...
"The Connect to Server dialog has also been redesigned in order to make it more efficient."
Could someone running GNOME 3 kindly provide a screenshot of this dialogue? If "efficient" is to be understood as "just scrap any options that are not used by at least 99% of all our users more than three times a day", as apparently is the working definition for the whole GNOME 3 team, I better start polishing up the curse words section of my mental lexicon.
More focused UIs make you much more productive when doing focused tasks. How do you "focus" a general-purpose desktop environment?
Copyright is indeed what protects open-source software, but the other details are where trouble lies. Contributors to open-source projects must declare that the copyright on their work belongs to the project. That means it can't be itself copied from somewhere else without license (including tutorials, sample code, etc.). If that assignment isn't made, then any change in the project's licensing requires the approval of all the submitters!
You do realise that this is not a "problem" or a bug in the way copyleft is handled but an intended feature? People who contribute to a FOSS project do so under agreed-upon terms. If the terms change, the agreement has to be renewed.
Besides, many projects successfully went from GPLv2 to v3, OpenStreetMap is in the middle of a license change, Wikipedia is phasing out GFDL in favour of a CC license. It is doable, though it certainly adds complexity for large projects. But again: That is not a bug, it is a feature.
Indeed, I stand corrected. Nevertheless Fukushima is a few decades past being the "modern plant" that Prikolist sees it for.
[...] you could blame Chernobyl on outdated and weak Soviet tech if you want, but a modern plant [...]
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was built from around 1970 and began operation in 1977. The reactor that went FUBAR in 1986, number 4, had been completed only in 1983.
Fukushima I was built from 1967 and began operation in 1971. The reactors most affected by the current disaster were built between the late Sixties and the early Seventies.
Those bloody reactors are older than the one at Chernobyl. And they are all based on the same basic designs.
With one U.S. penny weighing 2.5 g that would amount to a modest 18,750,000,000 to. Assuming short scale. I think I will need an XKDC issue to even begin to make sense of the sheer mass of money those loonies are asking for.
Does disabling the "Block reported $evilstuff" options under Security in the options make any difference with regard to name resolution?
do you really want the equivalnt of the slammer virus going around on cell phones shutting down huge parts of the cell network?
Actually, yes, that would be awesome! It certainly would do more for improving the security and stability of our communication networks and devices than any locking down done to a select few handsets.
Of course they should be liable! If you tinker with your car and thereby cause an accident you are liable for any damages, not the manufacturer. If your "off-the-shelf" car displays a fault that leads to an accident the manufacturer is held responsible. We already have rules for all possible scenarios.
I am dumbstruck as to why the mere act of adding software to an already existing, well explained and satisfyingly regulated problem suddenly makes everything so complicated and somehow "special". Whether it is online fraud, phishing, liability for software errors, child pornography, terrorism - we already have several cubic LoC in laws and regulations for all of that. It just is not explicitly called online x, or x using a computer.
"I can't upgrade it whenever I like? By the time a version of comes out that I want to upgrade to but can't, the phone will be worn out from being used every day for 2 years, I'll be at the end of my contract and eligible for a heavily subsidised upgrade to the latest model. So again, I don't see why I should care."
I got my current phone (Nokia E65) in 2007. Apart from a broken display which cost me 12 € to repair and the scratched case which I do not care about the phone is perfectly fine. The contract I am on is older than that, though. 2003 at the latest.
I certainly am not representative of the majority of users, but not everyone treats their mobile phones and contracts as throw-away items. And not everyone takes subsidised phones.
Every phone should offer two modes of operation: One that is locked down by the manufacturer making him liable for any malfunction, and one that removes all the locks and limits and shifts liability to the user. That way everyone would be happy.
[...] I don't think you know how dictionaries work. [...]
The PP does not know the difference between a descriptive lexicon, which he/she wrongly criticises, and a prescriptive lexicon, which he/she should rather have bought but which indeed comes with its own share of issues.
So everyone knows whom to blame.
Here in Germany - or at least here in Bavaria - any beer worth drinking is sold exclusively in glass bottles.
Accessibility is a top priority for GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice and LibreOffice and many other major projects. Smaller projects often lack the resources to properly implement full accessibility. But then, so does the vast majority of smaller proprietary software.
[...] the software isn't wide spread enough to reliably host multiple SSL websites on a single IP with vhosts. [...]
I may be mistaken, but did not Apache introduce this feature in version 2? I have used SSL with name based vhosts quite heavily for years.
It means that you mistook a sarcastic or ironic statement for a serious one. The GP certainly agrees with you that libraries are already understaffed, overburdened and severely short of budget.
People do not take the time to actually read a text as one coherent unit, they just quickly scan over it and pick up a few keywords. I see a lot of that at university. Makes me cringe every time.
No, they will continue to accept bug reports. But they will stop accepting new features until that bug counter goes below 15 again. The idea is to prevent a massive influx of new modules and patches while running up a backlog of bugs that no-one gets around to fixing.