But, but, if you do the transcoding without using gold-plated Monster record heads on your HD, surely the individual bits won't be as sharp or crisply defined!? I paid $2000 to get my HD upgraded to gold-plated record heads, and I know I can hear the difference!:)
Try to find a Samsung player that doesn't support Vorbis. Go on, I dare you. For that matter, try to find any major Asian manufacturer's player (except Sony--a special case) that doesn't support Vorbis. For that matter, try finding a commodity decoder chipset with multiple format support that doesn't support Vorbis. Good luck with that.
As far as FOSS being something that has serious business problems in regarding to sustaining the developers who work on it, this is indeed a serious problem.
Hogwash!
The software industry is competitive and margins are always thin. Full stop. It has nothing to do with FLOSS, except insofar as FLOSS is an extreme example of how thin the margins can get!:)
Some examples from my own career:
1. I started out of school writing a quicksort for a company that needed one. It came in on time, under budget, and was very well done, and got me a full-time offer from the company. Nowadays, quicksort is a standard part of the standard C library, and nobody wants to hire someone to write a quicksort. Oh noes! But the end of the market for quicksort programmers had nothing to do with FLOSS!
2. I spent a few years working for a company that made one of the first word processors. Something...happened to the market for word processors, and it wasn't FLOSS, but it was just as bad as the effects you attribute to FLOSS (unless you work for a certain NW-US company which shall remain nameless).
3. I spent several years working for a company that did custom point-of-rental software for video stores. We charged a good amount of money, but we did customization and support, and, with all of that, barely managed to scrape along, until someone entered the market with a similar product for about 1/10th of what we could afford to charge. Of course, they didn't offer customization or support, but for some reason, store owners just saw that sticker on the front of the box, and decided they'd give us a pass. We were torpedoed out of the market, and, again, it had nothing to do with FLOSS.
FOSS is on the other extreme, its an open model but it leaves programmers in a situation where they cant afford to live.
That's just ridiculous. Yes, companies that specialize in creating pre-packaged software are going to struggle just as they have been since long before FLOSS came along. FLOSS is merely an extreme of what the software market tends to do in any case. But programmers are in no danger of losing their jobs, since something like 90% of them work for companies which use their software directly, rather than making it to resell. The company I work for now uses Apache and MySQL and Linux and other free software, but they still need programmers to glue it all together into the shape they need, and there's no sign that's going to change any time soon. Plus, once in a while, I even get paid to find and fix bugs in Apache or MySQL or Linux, and that's a very good feeling!:)
But in any case, so what? Even if you were right (and you're not), what gives programmers a right to earn a living as programmers? Why should buggy-whip makers deserve a living? If there's no market for programmers (and I assure you, there is), find something else to do. It's the way of the freakin' world, man! Things change. Whining about how we should all get together and conspire to force the auto manufacturers to require buggy-whips for cars is just silly, and ain't going to happen, and your plan makes about that much sense to me.
The language comes from the law, and beyond that, from classical economic theory. Free market competition is supposed to control you, not the other way around. If you raise your prices and/or lower your quality, people should be able to choose another option. That's free market competition. If they can't, for some reason, then you're no longer competing in the market.
Anti-competitive strictly means acting to reduce the forces of free-market competition in a market. Being anti-competitive (if you can pull it off) is indeed very "hyper-competitive", but it means that the market is less competitive. Not you.
For the case of utilities and such, the relevant term is "natural monopoly"; a case where a market is, for some reason (limited physical access to your house, for example) inherently somewhat non-competitive.
Me too. links and w3m are much, much better than lynx. I use w3m all the time, especially for browsing bug-report databases and other text-heavy sites, but I use lynx only when nothing else is yet available, i.e. troubleshooting a tricky install.
It's not a percentage: for purposes of anti-trust legislation, a monopoly is about the ability to control and manipulate the market without concern for normal free-market forces. (There's nothing wrong with having a monopoly in any case--it's abusing your monopoly power in anti-competitive ways which is illegal.) Depending on the type of competition they face, the threshold for no longer having a monopoly could be quite high or very low. In essence, the more united and cooperative their competitors, the easier it is for MS to lose their monopoly status. Likewise, the more MS works on interoperability and open standards, the easier it is for them to lose their monopoly atatus, because with open standards, people can switch (allowing normal free-market forces to come into play) even if they don't, and thus it won't matter so much if MS still has an overwhelming percentage of the market.
This is why monopoly status is judged by the courts instead of, say, the executive branch.
It's possibly to have monopoly power over a market with less than 50% if (and only if) you have have hundreds of competitors with only a tiny percentage each and those competitors refuse to work together, reducing their collective power to affect the market. It's hard to pull off, and requires your competitors to be really stupid, but it can be done. (Doesn't look like MS is likely to have that problem, though.)
All three come with tunable performance parameters. All three can have their performance boosted even further by recompiling everything optimized for the particular hardware being used, possibly using specialized compilers (e.g. from Sun or Intel). But that's not the point, IMO. This isn't (or shouldn't be) a pissing match--this should be an opportunity to improve all three systems by seeing where their strengths and weaknesses are, and working to bolster their weaknesses and improve their strengths.
In my experience, these sorts of tests on free/libre/open-source systems quickly become out-of-date because the developers take them as a challenge, and that's a good thing for everyone!:)
Ff your tests were more than a couple of years ago, they're probably so out-of-date as to be utterly meaningless, but that's a separate issue. Personally, I'm a big fan of all three systems and want to see all three thrive and grow and improve. This kind of testing can only help with that, once you get past all the dick-waving by narrow-minded advocates.
Snow Crash was ... what?!?
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
Snow Crash was sharp and fast-paced.
Man, that must be some good stuff you're smokin'! Pass it over here!:)
Snow Crash is one of his most self-indulgent, aimless books! Yes, it's also very entertaining, but when he started going on for page after page after page about the ancient Sumerian gods, it became blatantly obvious that this was a very good short novel hiding inside hundreds of pages of sheer, over-the-top auctorial rambling. Of course, that was part of its charm; it takes real skill to turn a hundred-page novel into a four-hundred page monstrosity without losing your audience, and Stephenson did (and does) fairly well at that, but SC was, if anything, more self-indulgent and meandering than Anathem. If Snow Crash was sharp and fast-paced, Anathem was a mono-filament blade traveling at supersonic speeds! (But IMO, neither of those statements is even remotely true.)
one of his less self-indulgent works, actually
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
Indeed, Snow Crash probably would have been more effective at half the length, and that's probably his most popular work. It's extremely self-indulgent, and if it weren't for the heavy tongue-in-cheek humor that runs through the whole thing, I doubt it ever would have made it. Zodiac and Diamond Age are probably his most focused works. I faced Anathem with some trepidation, even though I generally like Stephenson, because his last couple of works have been so totally random and wandering (I struggled with Cryptonomicon, and barely finished the Baroque Cycle), but to my surprise, once you get past all the made-up language (which he introduces slowly, gradually, and relatively painlessly), it's really a solid and fairly tight work--for Stephenson. I think it may be my second-favorite Stephenson ever.
What I find really fascinating, though, is the wide range of reactions to this novel.
Depends on what you want. Samsung is one of the few to actually advertise the Ogg Vorbis support that most* include these days, which is why they get my support and dollars. You may have other priorities.
* pretty much any modern portable mp3 player uses a standard decoder chipset which supports Vorbis. Notable exceptions include Apple and possibly MS and Sony and Creative (haven't confirmed the latter three). MS's own MTP protocol even has a predefined ID assigned to Vorbis.
Yeah, and over here are over 60,000 complete concert recordings which likewise are not illegal. And over here is what is almost certainly the largest legal/free torrent tracker in the world, with thousands more. I think they reported tracking the movement of over an exobyte in their first year (before they got big).
If Microsoft released Windows 7 and only allowed it to be installed and run on Microsoft branded machines, how long would that last? About ten seconds, yes?
Yes.
Then why the hell can Apple get away with it?
Because Microsoft has a monopoly and is subject to anti-trust laws while Apple doesn't and isn't.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an Apple fanboy--in fact, I tend towards mild dislike, and own none of their products--and I'm not even quite sure who I'm rooting for in this case (which is far from done), but I still have to admit that talking about a monopoly "in OS/X" is stretching things too far. I'd rather see PyStar lose this argument and then end up winning the whole case based on the doctrine of first sale or something similar. But I also admit that it's not necessarily quite that simple, and Apple may indeed have a valid case. I hope they lose, but I can understand why they might win, and don't think it would be the end of the world, unlike the look-and-feel cases back in the eighties, where I think it might actually have been the end of the world, or at least, the end of creative freedom, if they'd won (fortunately, they lost those ones).
Apple may be dicks (I think there's a pretty strong case to be made for that proposition), but they're not monopolists (although I tend to think they'd be even scarier than MS if they were).
These two sketches are not related at all, IMO, let alone "the same joke."
To be fair, the BBC made the same mistake, and my reaction when I saw it on the Beeb's site was the same as yours. The big difference is that on slashdot, you can post a correction. It'll get buried in hundreds of weak attempts at humor, and nobody will ever see it, but at least it's there. The Beeb doesn't really have a place for this sort of bad-analogy-correction. Mistaken facts, they'll correct (which is one way they're superior to Slashdot--the fact that they actually have functioning editors is another), but I wouldn't expect to see any corrections for a more abstract error of this type.
Yeah, 'cause there's nothing that makes me want to worship a god so much as finding out that the bastard is deliberately lying to me just to mess with my head.:)
It's funny how often a "test of faith" looks exactly like a test of intelligence, except that the expected results are reversed.
"It says in the book that he made us all to be just like him, so...if we're dumb, then God must be dumb! And maybe even a little ugly on the side."
--Frank Zappa, "Dumb All Over"
Primarily because the shape of the Lego brick is functional, while the shape of the Coca Cola bottle is not. You cannot trademark functional elements. Thus, while the cosmetic curves and ribbing of the bottle may be trademarked, the fact that it is a hollow, more-or-less cylindrical shape, narrowing at the top, cannot.
This also means that many specialized Lego bricks could probably be trademarked, but the generic ones cannot. Of course, with the specialized ones, they might have to show that they actually are associated with their brand, and not just random shapes that happen to carry the brand.
Because far too often at least one of the parties doesn't really want to be there.
Unlike most jobs? Let me tell you, I worked in retail years back when I was in school, and I didn't enjoy it one bit!
And is 'consenting' to something out of financial desperation/outright fear.
That's pretty much how I ended up running a cash register. If we eliminate jobs that people only consent to do out of financial desperation, most of the population will be out of work.
So, you can't sell your organs or sex.
The two are hardly comparable. Many people enjoy having sex on a regular basis and don't charge anything for the privilege. Most people are reluctant to give up their organs under any but the most extreme circumstances, and nobody does it on a regular basis. I've never heard one of my friends say, "boy, I sure hope I can lose another organ this weekend", but I've had friends, both male and female, make equivalent statements about sex.:)
The fact is: sex workers are criminals because of our society's weird puritanical phobias and prejudices, and for no other reason. Sure, it would be nice if people weren't forced into it, but that's true of a lot of jobs. The real problems with prostitution--the health risks, dangers of violence and such--could be greatly mitigated if it were legal.
Of course, I realize that's not going to happen in today's society, but let's at least not pretend that there's something inherently bad about sex-work. If people weren't idiots, I see no reason it couldn't be a perfectly respectable middle-class profession.
You have to look long and hard to find a portable audio device (from a vendor other than Apple) which doesn't support Ogg. They may not list it on the outside of the box, but it's built into the standard multiformat-decoder chipsets that nearly everyone uses. If it says "mp3, wma, aac", there's a very high chance it supports Ogg as well. Especially if the brand is Asian.
I've tried several players from Asia, and have yet to find one that didn't support Ogg. (Although I have my suspicions about Sony, but I'm not interested enough in their products to even try.)
Slashdot Mirror
But, but, if you do the transcoding without using gold-plated Monster record heads on your HD, surely the individual bits won't be as sharp or crisply defined!? I paid $2000 to get my HD upgraded to gold-plated record heads, and I know I can hear the difference! :)
Try to find a Samsung player that doesn't support Vorbis. Go on, I dare you. For that matter, try to find any major Asian manufacturer's player (except Sony--a special case) that doesn't support Vorbis. For that matter, try finding a commodity decoder chipset with multiple format support that doesn't support Vorbis. Good luck with that.
What I'm wondering about though is renting/borrowing CDs
Same as used book/cd/dvd/whatever sales. It's not copying, therefore copyright law doesn't come into play.
As far as FOSS being something that has serious business problems in regarding to sustaining the developers who work on it, this is indeed a serious problem.
Hogwash!
The software industry is competitive and margins are always thin. Full stop. It has nothing to do with FLOSS, except insofar as FLOSS is an extreme example of how thin the margins can get! :)
Some examples from my own career:
1. I started out of school writing a quicksort for a company that needed one. It came in on time, under budget, and was very well done, and got me a full-time offer from the company. Nowadays, quicksort is a standard part of the standard C library, and nobody wants to hire someone to write a quicksort. Oh noes! But the end of the market for quicksort programmers had nothing to do with FLOSS!
2. I spent a few years working for a company that made one of the first word processors. Something...happened to the market for word processors, and it wasn't FLOSS, but it was just as bad as the effects you attribute to FLOSS (unless you work for a certain NW-US company which shall remain nameless).
3. I spent several years working for a company that did custom point-of-rental software for video stores. We charged a good amount of money, but we did customization and support, and, with all of that, barely managed to scrape along, until someone entered the market with a similar product for about 1/10th of what we could afford to charge. Of course, they didn't offer customization or support, but for some reason, store owners just saw that sticker on the front of the box, and decided they'd give us a pass. We were torpedoed out of the market, and, again, it had nothing to do with FLOSS.
FOSS is on the other extreme, its an open model but it leaves programmers in a situation where they cant afford to live.
That's just ridiculous. Yes, companies that specialize in creating pre-packaged software are going to struggle just as they have been since long before FLOSS came along. FLOSS is merely an extreme of what the software market tends to do in any case. But programmers are in no danger of losing their jobs, since something like 90% of them work for companies which use their software directly, rather than making it to resell. The company I work for now uses Apache and MySQL and Linux and other free software, but they still need programmers to glue it all together into the shape they need, and there's no sign that's going to change any time soon. Plus, once in a while, I even get paid to find and fix bugs in Apache or MySQL or Linux, and that's a very good feeling! :)
But in any case, so what? Even if you were right (and you're not), what gives programmers a right to earn a living as programmers? Why should buggy-whip makers deserve a living? If there's no market for programmers (and I assure you, there is), find something else to do. It's the way of the freakin' world, man! Things change. Whining about how we should all get together and conspire to force the auto manufacturers to require buggy-whips for cars is just silly, and ain't going to happen, and your plan makes about that much sense to me.
The language comes from the law, and beyond that, from classical economic theory. Free market competition is supposed to control you, not the other way around. If you raise your prices and/or lower your quality, people should be able to choose another option. That's free market competition. If they can't, for some reason, then you're no longer competing in the market.
Anti-competitive strictly means acting to reduce the forces of free-market competition in a market. Being anti-competitive (if you can pull it off) is indeed very "hyper-competitive", but it means that the market is less competitive. Not you.
For the case of utilities and such, the relevant term is "natural monopoly"; a case where a market is, for some reason (limited physical access to your house, for example) inherently somewhat non-competitive.
Me too. links and w3m are much, much better than lynx. I use w3m all the time, especially for browsing bug-report databases and other text-heavy sites, but I use lynx only when nothing else is yet available, i.e. troubleshooting a tricky install.
It's not a percentage: for purposes of anti-trust legislation, a monopoly is about the ability to control and manipulate the market without concern for normal free-market forces. (There's nothing wrong with having a monopoly in any case--it's abusing your monopoly power in anti-competitive ways which is illegal.) Depending on the type of competition they face, the threshold for no longer having a monopoly could be quite high or very low. In essence, the more united and cooperative their competitors, the easier it is for MS to lose their monopoly status. Likewise, the more MS works on interoperability and open standards, the easier it is for them to lose their monopoly atatus, because with open standards, people can switch (allowing normal free-market forces to come into play) even if they don't, and thus it won't matter so much if MS still has an overwhelming percentage of the market.
This is why monopoly status is judged by the courts instead of, say, the executive branch.
It's possibly to have monopoly power over a market with less than 50% if (and only if) you have have hundreds of competitors with only a tiny percentage each and those competitors refuse to work together, reducing their collective power to affect the market. It's hard to pull off, and requires your competitors to be really stupid, but it can be done. (Doesn't look like MS is likely to have that problem, though.)
That's awfully fast, but the results don't exactly look right, and navigation is extremely difficult. :)
Let me know when there's a version of Chrome that doesn't require me to infest my system with expensive malware just to get it launched.
All three come with tunable performance parameters. All three can have their performance boosted even further by recompiling everything optimized for the particular hardware being used, possibly using specialized compilers (e.g. from Sun or Intel). But that's not the point, IMO. This isn't (or shouldn't be) a pissing match--this should be an opportunity to improve all three systems by seeing where their strengths and weaknesses are, and working to bolster their weaknesses and improve their strengths.
In my experience, these sorts of tests on free/libre/open-source systems quickly become out-of-date because the developers take them as a challenge, and that's a good thing for everyone! :)
Ff your tests were more than a couple of years ago, they're probably so out-of-date as to be utterly meaningless, but that's a separate issue. Personally, I'm a big fan of all three systems and want to see all three thrive and grow and improve. This kind of testing can only help with that, once you get past all the dick-waving by narrow-minded advocates.
Snow Crash was sharp and fast-paced.
Man, that must be some good stuff you're smokin'! Pass it over here! :)
Snow Crash is one of his most self-indulgent, aimless books! Yes, it's also very entertaining, but when he started going on for page after page after page about the ancient Sumerian gods, it became blatantly obvious that this was a very good short novel hiding inside hundreds of pages of sheer, over-the-top auctorial rambling. Of course, that was part of its charm; it takes real skill to turn a hundred-page novel into a four-hundred page monstrosity without losing your audience, and Stephenson did (and does) fairly well at that, but SC was, if anything, more self-indulgent and meandering than Anathem. If Snow Crash was sharp and fast-paced, Anathem was a mono-filament blade traveling at supersonic speeds! (But IMO, neither of those statements is even remotely true.)
Indeed, Snow Crash probably would have been more effective at half the length, and that's probably his most popular work. It's extremely self-indulgent, and if it weren't for the heavy tongue-in-cheek humor that runs through the whole thing, I doubt it ever would have made it. Zodiac and Diamond Age are probably his most focused works. I faced Anathem with some trepidation, even though I generally like Stephenson, because his last couple of works have been so totally random and wandering (I struggled with Cryptonomicon, and barely finished the Baroque Cycle), but to my surprise, once you get past all the made-up language (which he introduces slowly, gradually, and relatively painlessly), it's really a solid and fairly tight work--for Stephenson. I think it may be my second-favorite Stephenson ever.
What I find really fascinating, though, is the wide range of reactions to this novel.
Chrome isn't ready for prime time
And IE is? :)
Depends on what you want. Samsung is one of the few to actually advertise the Ogg Vorbis support that most* include these days, which is why they get my support and dollars. You may have other priorities.
* pretty much any modern portable mp3 player uses a standard decoder chipset which supports Vorbis. Notable exceptions include Apple and possibly MS and Sony and Creative (haven't confirmed the latter three). MS's own MTP protocol even has a predefined ID assigned to Vorbis.
Yeah, and over here are over 60,000 complete concert recordings which likewise are not illegal. And over here is what is almost certainly the largest legal/free torrent tracker in the world, with thousands more. I think they reported tracking the movement of over an exobyte in their first year (before they got big).
If Microsoft released Windows 7 and only allowed it to be installed and run on Microsoft branded machines, how long would that last? About ten seconds, yes?
Yes.
Then why the hell can Apple get away with it?
Because Microsoft has a monopoly and is subject to anti-trust laws while Apple doesn't and isn't.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an Apple fanboy--in fact, I tend towards mild dislike, and own none of their products--and I'm not even quite sure who I'm rooting for in this case (which is far from done), but I still have to admit that talking about a monopoly "in OS/X" is stretching things too far. I'd rather see PyStar lose this argument and then end up winning the whole case based on the doctrine of first sale or something similar. But I also admit that it's not necessarily quite that simple, and Apple may indeed have a valid case. I hope they lose, but I can understand why they might win, and don't think it would be the end of the world, unlike the look-and-feel cases back in the eighties, where I think it might actually have been the end of the world, or at least, the end of creative freedom, if they'd won (fortunately, they lost those ones).
Apple may be dicks (I think there's a pretty strong case to be made for that proposition), but they're not monopolists (although I tend to think they'd be even scarier than MS if they were).
These two sketches are not related at all, IMO, let alone "the same joke."
To be fair, the BBC made the same mistake, and my reaction when I saw it on the Beeb's site was the same as yours. The big difference is that on slashdot, you can post a correction. It'll get buried in hundreds of weak attempts at humor, and nobody will ever see it, but at least it's there. The Beeb doesn't really have a place for this sort of bad-analogy-correction. Mistaken facts, they'll correct (which is one way they're superior to Slashdot--the fact that they actually have functioning editors is another), but I wouldn't expect to see any corrections for a more abstract error of this type.
Yeah, 'cause there's nothing that makes me want to worship a god so much as finding out that the bastard is deliberately lying to me just to mess with my head. :)
It's funny how often a "test of faith" looks exactly like a test of intelligence, except that the expected results are reversed.
"It says in the book that he made us all to be just like him, so...if we're dumb, then God must be dumb! And maybe even a little ugly on the side."
--Frank Zappa, "Dumb All Over"
Primarily because the shape of the Lego brick is functional, while the shape of the Coca Cola bottle is not. You cannot trademark functional elements. Thus, while the cosmetic curves and ribbing of the bottle may be trademarked, the fact that it is a hollow, more-or-less cylindrical shape, narrowing at the top, cannot.
This also means that many specialized Lego bricks could probably be trademarked, but the generic ones cannot. Of course, with the specialized ones, they might have to show that they actually are associated with their brand, and not just random shapes that happen to carry the brand.
Yeah, and then you gotta wonder why they didn't switch to Thunderfox and Sunfox and Songfox.
Ever tried expressing a liking for two supposedly opposing products in a room full of geeks, or here?
As someone who uses both emacs and vi on a daily basis, that's a solid yuppers! :D
In fact, I don't bother with OpenOffice or Google Apps, because I already have both emacs and vim! :)
Comparing ODF to Word is like comparing HTML to IE. A data format is not the same thing as a program! Sheesh!
If you want ODF and Word, try here (works for me) or maybe here (haven't tried that one).
"I put on my robe and wizard hat"...actually, that's not something I think I want to see in my government. :)
"You still there, baby? I think it's getting hard now."
Cleaning up litter on your property is vigilantism?
Because far too often at least one of the parties doesn't really want to be there.
Unlike most jobs? Let me tell you, I worked in retail years back when I was in school, and I didn't enjoy it one bit!
And is 'consenting' to something out of financial desperation/outright fear.
That's pretty much how I ended up running a cash register. If we eliminate jobs that people only consent to do out of financial desperation, most of the population will be out of work.
So, you can't sell your organs or sex.
The two are hardly comparable. Many people enjoy having sex on a regular basis and don't charge anything for the privilege. Most people are reluctant to give up their organs under any but the most extreme circumstances, and nobody does it on a regular basis. I've never heard one of my friends say, "boy, I sure hope I can lose another organ this weekend", but I've had friends, both male and female, make equivalent statements about sex. :)
The fact is: sex workers are criminals because of our society's weird puritanical phobias and prejudices, and for no other reason. Sure, it would be nice if people weren't forced into it, but that's true of a lot of jobs. The real problems with prostitution--the health risks, dangers of violence and such--could be greatly mitigated if it were legal.
Of course, I realize that's not going to happen in today's society, but let's at least not pretend that there's something inherently bad about sex-work. If people weren't idiots, I see no reason it couldn't be a perfectly respectable middle-class profession.
You have to look long and hard to find a portable audio device (from a vendor other than Apple) which doesn't support Ogg. They may not list it on the outside of the box, but it's built into the standard multiformat-decoder chipsets that nearly everyone uses. If it says "mp3, wma, aac", there's a very high chance it supports Ogg as well. Especially if the brand is Asian.
I've tried several players from Asia, and have yet to find one that didn't support Ogg. (Although I have my suspicions about Sony, but I'm not interested enough in their products to even try.)