Having read the first 2 pages of TFA, I still don't see how fast of a connection you need for these to become playable. I mean, where I live, the best connection you can get is a ~1 Megabit DSL connection.
Um... yes? "How many Nintendo games are going to appear on OnLive? The answer is none," Perry adds. "And some of the best games in the world are from Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft... I'm already talking to Nintendo. I'm talking to all the major publishers.
So in the end this service is going to end up as nothing more than PC games? Its not a good sign when a company who makes most of the classic games that people remember rejects your ideas, and I'm not sure Sony or MS wants to jump on the bandwagon (though it wouldn't surprise me if MS bought the company if they managed to turn out a decent product).
...Or they didn't move as much. I don't think this was carried around in the way that a laptop was but rather this was (for the time) a lighter alternative to a desktop, similar to the mini-PCs today like the Mac Mini.
This is totally pointless. I mean, if you already paid for the book, why should there have to be ads? Heck with digital distribution why even have ads on free stuff because the price of the device itself more than makes up for the minuscule price of transfer.
You fail to see though that unless he offers a demo version, people will want to pirate it to try it. I know I'm not going to pay $30 or more for software from A) an unknown company B) Haven't tried it and C) Might not play nicely with my hardware/drivers. Plus this isn't going to give him very good reviews. A contract you have to sign by hand? No thanks, I'm not going to buy that even if it was best software ever written.
I don't think it really helps the industry as a whole though. Consider if Shakespeare wasn't allowed to adapt key pieces from The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet into Romeo and Juliet (and if both had been around using the US copyright system, he wouldn't have). Both were part of the same industry (literature and plays), yet I don't think that The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet would have made as much of money and helped the industry compared to Romeo and Juliet. It sure helps a few individuals, but not the industry.
...So? The GPL isn't there to "lock up" a certain program but rather to do what copyright was meant to do, that is to allow the public to learn, use, distribute and adapt it while giving the creator of the work (very) limited control of it. I see nothing wrong with someone using GPL'd code to make a proprietary product so long as it doesn't "rip off" the creators of the work. For example, I would see nothing wrong with someone interested in making an OS looking at the Linux source code and adapting (but not just copying and pasting) the general structure of Linux for their own OS.
You only need to look at, well anything to see that everything is a derivative work of another thing. That was the point of public domain. Almost all of Shakespeare's work references heavily or is based on another work. Heck, music, movies, etc. Are all based on each other, anyone could tell you that. This is why it is very important to have a limited copyright. Anything more than ~30 years is harmful to the industry.
Thats because A) Google's ads are trustworthy and not annoying, a webmaster is going to feel safe with Google then somesite.ru running their advertising and B) Googles ads have good code to make them seem relevant without the "OMG THIS IS TRACKING MY EVERY MOVE" paranoia.
Internet advertising is dying is dead anyways though. Most every Firefox user has ABP or a decently configured/etc/hosts on their computer/router that blocks ads. And after all the malware that has spread through ads, most competent sysadmins block adservers for their company's computers at work too.
...Or you know, you would simply find other ways of making money from that. The way it currently is, I can get a better experience downloading a less-than-DVD quality movie then going to the movie theater. Even though the movie is of better quality, watching it really isn't when you have the people behind you talking, the kid screaming, the guy next to you texting, etc. Not to mention the $8 bag of popcorn and the $5 drink. With an experience like that theres wonder why people would pirate. With more high quality theaters buying the commercial rights to the movie, selling tickets, etc. The movie still makes a profit and so does the movie theater.
Same thing with music, give the downloads away for free, sell the CDs and charge for concerts. As for software, a lot of software is written for business purposes, that would still sell. As for the personal side, perhaps distributing unique binaries with a code built-in corresponding to an account would work, the server verifies that and lets you play multiplayer. Or be like WoW and charge a subscription. As for books, enough people will buy the physical book that you don't really have to worry about downloads in 2009.
There are enough things that you can make a profit on, even when the "product" you are selling is free.
How would that be stealing if it wasn't offered? Thats as stupid as me saying that you are stealing my profits when you buy a computer from Best Buy because I have a computer. Now, would I sell that computer to you? Probably not. How do you say that its stealing when you could never buy it anyways? With the cost of distribution approaching 0, there is no real reason to not make things available over the internet.
As long as companies are dealing with everyone voluntarily, the government should not be involved. Only when a business violates an invidual's rights through force or fraud should the government get involved.
That would be true, but the government uses a lot of MS software. By keeping the specs of a bunch of things closed or by not adhering to standards, they end up costing us, the taxpayers more in the long run. By locking the government into proprietary technologies that they are the only ones who can have a 100% guarantee they are rendering the document "correctly" the government will keep buying into them. Its effectively the same as having a public works bid but only allowing one company to bid.
Anti-trust is based on the altruist idea that the more successful you are - (aka "selfish") - the more evil you are, and the evil successful need to be brought down to favor the less successful, or failures. This also happens to be the moral underpinning for bailouts, welfare, "soak the rich", government healthcare, and many more.
However, the lack of anti trust cases only work in a free economy. The economy of the USA especially with copyright, patents and IP is not free. Repeal the DMCA, software patents, reduce the length of copyrights to a sane term. Then we can get rid of anti-trust. But the problem is, in the current state of things it makes no sense to get rid of perhaps the only thing left to strike against major corporations. I agree, we should move to your ideal state where the government is small and doesn't control the economy. When we move to there, sure, anti-trust acts make no sense. But while we still have the DMCA and other copyright atrocities as laws, it simply makes no sense to abolish anti-trust acts.
Let's see, I could use any browser or search engine or media player or OS I wanted.
No, for a long time if you used something other than IE, you would get an incorrectly rendered page because of IE having a huge chunk of the marketshare of browsers and thats what people used to only code for. Sure, you could use any search engine you wanted because of two main things A) The learning curve for a search engine is nearly non existent, if you can use MSN you can use Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing, Live Search, etc. and B) it takes less than 2 minutes to change the homepage on nearly every modern browser. But lets say you wanted to use any media player, too bad you won't be playing any WMAs unless you want to fork out for a patent license or break the DMCA by reverse engineering your own codecs. As for your own OS, how are you going to return the Windows license you unwillingly paid for? Sure, there are ways, but its not as simple as going into your local Best Buy and coming out with a $50 in your hand.
If the USA had A) No software patents, B) No DMCA and C) mandates that all government files/programs must use an open standard with an open implementation we would have no MS monopoly. However we do have software patents to the point where they can sue a GPS manufacturer for using perhaps the most basic filesystem in order to maintain compatibility with MS's own OS (want to use something patent free? Too bad the Ext drivers won't work in Vista due to changes by MS). We have the DMCA which won't let you hardly reverse engineer anything even for non-commercial use, and we have a government that still could require you to use proprietary technologies to do things like file tax returns.
Most software companies though don't have something that ships with ~95% of all new PCs. Most software companies do not have monopolies. About the only widely used software that I think comes close to this is that Flash asks if you want the Google toolbar if you are installing on Windows. However, that still is different because Google and Adobe are not the same company.
So MS does this to attempt to trick people into using Bing, yet Google is the one with the antitrust investigation? Seriously, who came up with this? A 5 year old could see the difference between MS and Google and see that MS is obviously abusing its OS monopoly while Google is simply the best at what it does.
Theres a big difference between MS and Google. What part of Google locks you in? Lets see... I can have my Gmail on a third party computer. My Google Docs can be exported to a non-proprietary format without losing formatting unlike MS Office. Etc. There is not a single thing that keeps me tied in to using only Google products except that Google products are better. On the other hand MS (still does or at least used to) prevent other OEMs from selling or at least adverting products without Windows or with a different OS or else they suffer financially. Use DOC or DOCX to keep Word documents locked in a proprietary standard and proprietary implementation (and no MS's implementation of OOXML does not follow the specs). IE broke many standards forcing web developers to code for IE only and because it didn't match the standards other browsers either had to emulate these bugs or suffer incorrectly rendered pages. Etc.
Google is simply good at what it does so people keep coming back. MS simply forces people to use them.
Ok, basically due to the USA having a screwed up copyright system, Google got the exclusive rights to a ton of books with questionable copyright status for them to search/digitize. Because of this a bunch of other companies cried foul and now the people who got us in this screwed up copyright mess and gave Google all these rights is investigating them and costing us even more money then if we would do the sane thing and reform copyright laws.
Exactly, if we would go to a 20 year copyright (10 years with mandatory registration with a 10 year renewal) along with clauses allowing for non-commercial use and distribution of any book, movie, program, etc. which is not being sold to the general public or is not available in the USA. And allowing the breaking of DRM for non-commercial use. Such things would eliminate this so called "Google monopoly" and improve our economy/country.
Would a crack addicted cop bust their crack dealer? I don't think so. The US government is "addicted" to using MS products even when there are free alternatives available (and something tells me that they can hire 30 guys cheaper to patch OOo to make it work like they want it to than buying MS office licenses). Europe is much less addicted to MS and their anti-trust suits seem to have little basis (just look at Intel which got hit with suits even though there are many alternatives such as AMD and VIA for x86 compatible and entire markets of other architectures such as PPC, ARM, etc.) and seem to think that no company should have more than 50% marketshare for any reason.
SQL has some great uses that its meant for. However, like all OSS tools it can get to where it is used enough for a certain purpose people will try to reuse it to varying success. SQL is great for financial data, however for some of the places it is in, SQL just doesn't do the job well.
But it still has lots of patterns that every language known has. Anyone can take a bunch of scribblings down and make it "seem" like a language, but the Voynich manuscript is unique that every part of it seems to be a language, not the work of someone insane.
Sure, shortwave radio would be great to communicate with the authorities or other people in your country. But as for getting word out to people outside there, it doesn't work. Most people get on Facebook, YouTube or another social network every day. If they got a bit more info about a crisis in Africa on the internet they would be more prone to act on it then a generic news broadcast about something that is happening on the other side of the globe that doesn't effect you one way or another.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a company trying to do all this. The answer is MS, a company with a wad of cash and markets for this (Halo on a Zune?).
Um... yes? "How many Nintendo games are going to appear on OnLive? The answer is none," Perry adds. "And some of the best games in the world are from Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft... I'm already talking to Nintendo. I'm talking to all the major publishers.
So in the end this service is going to end up as nothing more than PC games? Its not a good sign when a company who makes most of the classic games that people remember rejects your ideas, and I'm not sure Sony or MS wants to jump on the bandwagon (though it wouldn't surprise me if MS bought the company if they managed to turn out a decent product).
...Or they didn't move as much. I don't think this was carried around in the way that a laptop was but rather this was (for the time) a lighter alternative to a desktop, similar to the mini-PCs today like the Mac Mini.
This is totally pointless. I mean, if you already paid for the book, why should there have to be ads? Heck with digital distribution why even have ads on free stuff because the price of the device itself more than makes up for the minuscule price of transfer.
You fail to see though that unless he offers a demo version, people will want to pirate it to try it. I know I'm not going to pay $30 or more for software from A) an unknown company B) Haven't tried it and C) Might not play nicely with my hardware/drivers. Plus this isn't going to give him very good reviews. A contract you have to sign by hand? No thanks, I'm not going to buy that even if it was best software ever written.
I don't think it really helps the industry as a whole though. Consider if Shakespeare wasn't allowed to adapt key pieces from The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet into Romeo and Juliet (and if both had been around using the US copyright system, he wouldn't have). Both were part of the same industry (literature and plays), yet I don't think that The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet would have made as much of money and helped the industry compared to Romeo and Juliet. It sure helps a few individuals, but not the industry.
...So? The GPL isn't there to "lock up" a certain program but rather to do what copyright was meant to do, that is to allow the public to learn, use, distribute and adapt it while giving the creator of the work (very) limited control of it. I see nothing wrong with someone using GPL'd code to make a proprietary product so long as it doesn't "rip off" the creators of the work. For example, I would see nothing wrong with someone interested in making an OS looking at the Linux source code and adapting (but not just copying and pasting) the general structure of Linux for their own OS.
You only need to look at, well anything to see that everything is a derivative work of another thing. That was the point of public domain. Almost all of Shakespeare's work references heavily or is based on another work. Heck, music, movies, etc. Are all based on each other, anyone could tell you that. This is why it is very important to have a limited copyright. Anything more than ~30 years is harmful to the industry.
...How are you going to get Java to run on your iPhone in the first place?
Thats because A) Google's ads are trustworthy and not annoying, a webmaster is going to feel safe with Google then somesite.ru running their advertising and B) Googles ads have good code to make them seem relevant without the "OMG THIS IS TRACKING MY EVERY MOVE" paranoia.
/etc/hosts on their computer/router that blocks ads. And after all the malware that has spread through ads, most competent sysadmins block adservers for their company's computers at work too.
Internet advertising is dying is dead anyways though. Most every Firefox user has ABP or a decently configured
...Or you know, you would simply find other ways of making money from that. The way it currently is, I can get a better experience downloading a less-than-DVD quality movie then going to the movie theater. Even though the movie is of better quality, watching it really isn't when you have the people behind you talking, the kid screaming, the guy next to you texting, etc. Not to mention the $8 bag of popcorn and the $5 drink. With an experience like that theres wonder why people would pirate. With more high quality theaters buying the commercial rights to the movie, selling tickets, etc. The movie still makes a profit and so does the movie theater.
Same thing with music, give the downloads away for free, sell the CDs and charge for concerts. As for software, a lot of software is written for business purposes, that would still sell. As for the personal side, perhaps distributing unique binaries with a code built-in corresponding to an account would work, the server verifies that and lets you play multiplayer. Or be like WoW and charge a subscription. As for books, enough people will buy the physical book that you don't really have to worry about downloads in 2009.
There are enough things that you can make a profit on, even when the "product" you are selling is free.
How would that be stealing if it wasn't offered? Thats as stupid as me saying that you are stealing my profits when you buy a computer from Best Buy because I have a computer. Now, would I sell that computer to you? Probably not. How do you say that its stealing when you could never buy it anyways? With the cost of distribution approaching 0, there is no real reason to not make things available over the internet.
As long as companies are dealing with everyone voluntarily, the government should not be involved. Only when a business violates an invidual's rights through force or fraud should the government get involved.
That would be true, but the government uses a lot of MS software. By keeping the specs of a bunch of things closed or by not adhering to standards, they end up costing us, the taxpayers more in the long run. By locking the government into proprietary technologies that they are the only ones who can have a 100% guarantee they are rendering the document "correctly" the government will keep buying into them. Its effectively the same as having a public works bid but only allowing one company to bid.
Anti-trust is based on the altruist idea that the more successful you are - (aka "selfish") - the more evil you are, and the evil successful need to be brought down to favor the less successful, or failures. This also happens to be the moral underpinning for bailouts, welfare, "soak the rich", government healthcare, and many more.
However, the lack of anti trust cases only work in a free economy. The economy of the USA especially with copyright, patents and IP is not free. Repeal the DMCA, software patents, reduce the length of copyrights to a sane term. Then we can get rid of anti-trust. But the problem is, in the current state of things it makes no sense to get rid of perhaps the only thing left to strike against major corporations. I agree, we should move to your ideal state where the government is small and doesn't control the economy. When we move to there, sure, anti-trust acts make no sense. But while we still have the DMCA and other copyright atrocities as laws, it simply makes no sense to abolish anti-trust acts.
Let's see, I could use any browser or search engine or media player or OS I wanted.
No, for a long time if you used something other than IE, you would get an incorrectly rendered page because of IE having a huge chunk of the marketshare of browsers and thats what people used to only code for. Sure, you could use any search engine you wanted because of two main things A) The learning curve for a search engine is nearly non existent, if you can use MSN you can use Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing, Live Search, etc. and B) it takes less than 2 minutes to change the homepage on nearly every modern browser. But lets say you wanted to use any media player, too bad you won't be playing any WMAs unless you want to fork out for a patent license or break the DMCA by reverse engineering your own codecs. As for your own OS, how are you going to return the Windows license you unwillingly paid for? Sure, there are ways, but its not as simple as going into your local Best Buy and coming out with a $50 in your hand.
If the USA had A) No software patents, B) No DMCA and C) mandates that all government files/programs must use an open standard with an open implementation we would have no MS monopoly. However we do have software patents to the point where they can sue a GPS manufacturer for using perhaps the most basic filesystem in order to maintain compatibility with MS's own OS (want to use something patent free? Too bad the Ext drivers won't work in Vista due to changes by MS). We have the DMCA which won't let you hardly reverse engineer anything even for non-commercial use, and we have a government that still could require you to use proprietary technologies to do things like file tax returns.
Most software companies though don't have something that ships with ~95% of all new PCs. Most software companies do not have monopolies. About the only widely used software that I think comes close to this is that Flash asks if you want the Google toolbar if you are installing on Windows. However, that still is different because Google and Adobe are not the same company.
What happened to the geeks to could reverse engineer executables and actually point to the specific CPU instruction that actually did it?
They got legal threats after the DMCA was passed.
So MS does this to attempt to trick people into using Bing, yet Google is the one with the antitrust investigation? Seriously, who came up with this? A 5 year old could see the difference between MS and Google and see that MS is obviously abusing its OS monopoly while Google is simply the best at what it does.
Theres a big difference between MS and Google. What part of Google locks you in? Lets see... I can have my Gmail on a third party computer. My Google Docs can be exported to a non-proprietary format without losing formatting unlike MS Office. Etc. There is not a single thing that keeps me tied in to using only Google products except that Google products are better. On the other hand MS (still does or at least used to) prevent other OEMs from selling or at least adverting products without Windows or with a different OS or else they suffer financially. Use DOC or DOCX to keep Word documents locked in a proprietary standard and proprietary implementation (and no MS's implementation of OOXML does not follow the specs). IE broke many standards forcing web developers to code for IE only and because it didn't match the standards other browsers either had to emulate these bugs or suffer incorrectly rendered pages. Etc.
Google is simply good at what it does so people keep coming back. MS simply forces people to use them.
Ok, basically due to the USA having a screwed up copyright system, Google got the exclusive rights to a ton of books with questionable copyright status for them to search/digitize. Because of this a bunch of other companies cried foul and now the people who got us in this screwed up copyright mess and gave Google all these rights is investigating them and costing us even more money then if we would do the sane thing and reform copyright laws.
Exactly, if we would go to a 20 year copyright (10 years with mandatory registration with a 10 year renewal) along with clauses allowing for non-commercial use and distribution of any book, movie, program, etc. which is not being sold to the general public or is not available in the USA. And allowing the breaking of DRM for non-commercial use. Such things would eliminate this so called "Google monopoly" and improve our economy/country.
Would a crack addicted cop bust their crack dealer? I don't think so. The US government is "addicted" to using MS products even when there are free alternatives available (and something tells me that they can hire 30 guys cheaper to patch OOo to make it work like they want it to than buying MS office licenses). Europe is much less addicted to MS and their anti-trust suits seem to have little basis (just look at Intel which got hit with suits even though there are many alternatives such as AMD and VIA for x86 compatible and entire markets of other architectures such as PPC, ARM, etc.) and seem to think that no company should have more than 50% marketshare for any reason.
SQL has some great uses that its meant for. However, like all OSS tools it can get to where it is used enough for a certain purpose people will try to reuse it to varying success. SQL is great for financial data, however for some of the places it is in, SQL just doesn't do the job well.
But it still has lots of patterns that every language known has. Anyone can take a bunch of scribblings down and make it "seem" like a language, but the Voynich manuscript is unique that every part of it seems to be a language, not the work of someone insane.
If you are truly paranoid though, you extract your own tin and make it into foil then fold the foil into hats. Its the only way to be sure.
Sure, shortwave radio would be great to communicate with the authorities or other people in your country. But as for getting word out to people outside there, it doesn't work. Most people get on Facebook, YouTube or another social network every day. If they got a bit more info about a crisis in Africa on the internet they would be more prone to act on it then a generic news broadcast about something that is happening on the other side of the globe that doesn't effect you one way or another.