New technology allows the consumer to use the downloaded content, but not distribute it outside of their home.
Let me translate that statement for y'all:
"New technology requires consumers to purchase new proprietary hardware to play back the same content they enjoyed before, but this time with all sorts of annoying restrictions that supposedly won't get in the way, but in reality will."
And, by the way, there is no such thing as a DRM implementation that is Open Source friendly. It's very nature is "security" through obscurity, which thereby requires closed-source, proprietary components.
Put your money we're your mouth is.... If the economics are there, then do it.
I would if I was an author. My piece of the economic pie is Open Source based consulting. I develop and service free software. In the future I may write a book or service manuals related to software I develop. If my income stream is lacking, I'll try the approach I mentioned. I certainly will not sign any publishing deal where I get $2 of a book that retails for $20, however.
If they could get a better deal any way, they would have. Publishing is currently as effecient as anybody has managed to make it.
Once an easy-to-read (perhaps 200-300 dpi) display technology is readily available in convenient form factor, paperback books will quickly disappear. At this point, that's the only thing keeping authors from doing online-only publishing themselves. Books are easier on the eyes. When that changes, so will the business model.
The economics of being an author is very different then the economics of working as a programmer, or as a janitor, or whatever it is you do for an hourly rate. Shocking, shocking I tell you. It's entirely possible Card could work for a year on a book, and never see a dime (okay, maybe that's only true for a new author). Being an author is very risky.
The economics are only different because authors, like musicians, are screwed royally by publishers. If Mr. Card had seen more of the revenue from his book sales, he wouldn't be so dependent on royalties extending to the end of his life. He would have made enough to save for a decent retirement like the rest of the working world. Oh yeah.. and his work would all be in the public domain, as the copyright system originally intended. It's hard to blame him, though.. he's just a victim of the same system. Once again, a case for eliminating the middlemen through technology. How about this novel idea (ok, bad pun):
- Write a really good book. Put the first chapter or three online as a teaser. - Sell it yourself for $2 per copy online, but without any stupid DRM restrictions. Most people are not going to P2P-swap material that cheap anyhow. If any do, who cares.. they probably wouldn't have bought it otherwise. - Re-release it as public domain after 500,000 copies are sold. People who paid enjoy the fact that they were patrons of an art now benefitting all of society. - Retire a millionaire or repeat the process as desired. Capitalism at its finest!
It may be argued that publishers are needed to gain enough recognition to sell sufficient copies, however I believe this is another notion made obsolete by modern technology of instant communication and the social factors that surround it. This is especially true for established authors and artists, but it even works for newcomers. How many paid advertisements have you seen for homestarrunner.com? Yet that site gets tens of millions of hits and is growing steadily in popularity. Even if they only sell t-shirts and related merchandise, it proves that popularity can be home-grown.
I wonder where you got that 720x368 resolution? Ever hear of PAL and anamorphic DVDs?
All NTSC DVD's have a video stream resolution of 720x480. There are two aspect ratio options, 1.33 and 1.78. The latter instructs the player to stretch the image to 854x480. However, if you want to do 2.35:1 anamorphic, you still have to add black bars to the actual video stream, thereby wasting available stream resolution. Typically, the effective resolution after the bars is about 720x364. (not 368, my mistake..) Then, to make it 2.35:1, the aspect is set to 1.78. After the player stretches the image, the playback result is 854x364, which is very close to 2.35.
Yes, PAL disks use 720x540, so scale accordingly, but that's beside the point. Modern hardware is capable of so much more. The 1080i/p HDTV format is 1920x1080 of actual usable resolution. DVD's can't hold a candle to that and hence are already obsolete.
..now that we are heading into a "post-industrial" (don't blame me for that phrase), information-based economy, intellectual property rights will becomed entrenched. let's face it: the opensource folks like us are the diggers and godwinists of the information revolution. we will impact the nature of property rights, but not abolish them.
There's a major flaw in that argument. Agriculturally-useful land and factories are both severely limited resources. The information revolution is the first in which everyone controls means of production. That is not to say that production comes without cost (even time), but rather everyone who wants to produce can do so with minimum investment and few barriers of entry into the market.
Would the industrial era have looked any different if factories had costed $500 (in today's prices) and were possible to operate by one man?
For example, how much does it take to produce a typical audio CD? $50,000? $100,000? $250,000?
$50,000 is enough to build your own professional-grade home recording studio. For $100,000 you can build a dedicated, acoustically optimized extension to your house. For $250,000 you can have multiple studio rooms to rent out. And this is all assuming you don't know anyone who's already done this. Cost to produce a quality audio album is almost negligible today.
Contrast that to a major motion picture which might have cost the studio a hundred million dollars or more to create, and I can buy a copy of that production for the price of a music CD. That, to me, is not a bad value.
It sounds like a good value until you start to investigate where that hundred million dollars actually went. First consider $5-15 million for every big-name actor(ess) and/or director(s). (sometimes more!) Then consider all the bogus production costs like extravagant cast parties and pampering. Then consider that many movie studios burn money simply because they can. With the kind of profit margins in the movie industry, efficient spending tends to go out the window. So when you pear it all down, how much should it really cost to produce a decent flick? Certainly not more than $5 million for anything that's not an epic or special-effects showcase. Probably $1-2 million or even less if you're careful. And do ticket prices reflect production costs at all? Nope. How about DVD prices? Nope. (Unless it's a budget movie that totally flops too and ends up in the $5 junk bin) So, in the end, movies certainly cost more than music albums to produce, but need nowhere near as much as typically budgeted. And regardless, any good movie makes several times its production costs while still in the theaters. So home DVD sales are just the extra gravy. More specifically, Hollywood would still be extremely lucrative if movie copyrights expired in a couple months after they left the theater. Wow.. imagine that.. a flourishing public domain: what the copyright compromise was originally intended to create.
Sure, I dislike the encryption and region coding, and frankly the DMCA is almost enough to keep me from buying DVDs at all, but really there are some damned good movies out there nowadays.
DMCA should be enough to keep you from buying DVD's and not supporting the bastards that have so helped to corrupt our legal system. But let me give you a few more good reasons: 1.) DVD video resolution sucks. 720x368 is not enough to do a 2.35:1-aspect movie justice. DVD's will soon be obsolete because of this and the move to true HDTV formats. 2.) DVD audio is also notably weak. 448kbps is simply not enough to do 5 full-range (and one low-band) channels at a time in "CD quality". Sure, with really intense optimization, you can make it work by directing the bitrate to the channels that need it most, but there are still tradeoffs in sonically dense scenes. Many encodings seem to simply neglect the rear channels except for a few whiz-bang effect sequences. 3.) Watching the same movies over and over is a terrible waste of life. (yeah, that's subjective, but I still think it's a valid reason.:-)
Honestly, I don't mind paying $17 or so for a copy of The Hulk or Spiderman or any of the other major motion pictures in recent years.
I've noticed that most people who collect movies don't actually watch them that often. How many $1.59 rentals would that $17 buy? Refer also reason #3.
ps.) Just for fun, check out the insane production costs for various popular movies on IMDB.org and then compare the even more bogus grosses. Then compare some quality "small budget" films like Memento and Greek Wedding. It is truly a wonder that the independent film industry has not taken off more than it has already.
I bet you haven't even (in your view) dirtied yourself to use recent Mozilla or OO versions, have you?
Nope.. I use Mozilla 1.4 and OpenOffice 1.1beta3 regularly. They're both markably improved, but still terribly sluggish, especially on older machines. OpenOffice is obviously in far worse shape. Using it on anything less than about an 800Mhz. Athlon is torture. That is unacceptable when you consider how much better even the bloated MS Office runs on similar or even far older hardware. Hopefully this will be fixed with time. Mozilla is not as much a problem, but on older machines it's still a dog compared to Konqueror.
Let me explain something: Mozilla is now, by far, the best browser. Konqueror is poor by comparison (and don't quote the Apple bullshit)... it renders pages poorly, and more slowly than Moz... and when you take into account the entire KDE baggage that comes with it, it's a hell of a lot more bloated than Moz.
I never contended that Moz wasn't the best browser right now. In fact, it is the gold standard. I'm saying that once Konqueror reaches Moz's level of standards compliance, it'll become the browser of choice for performance reasons. It is not my experience that Konq. renders slower than Moz, but rather quite the opposite.. especially when certain Javascript is involved. Incidentally, the "KDE baggage" is pretty comparable to Gnome's or any other modern DE.. and it's only baggage if you're not running KDE, in which case you'd just use Mozilla anyhow. Apparently, the option of using Gecko in place of KHTML is also in the works.
It also has more features... KOffice apps are laughably under featured and would have difficult satisfying even a home user.
Once again, I never said KOffice was ready to replace OO.o. But I think it will someday unless OO.o gets in really high gear. (honestly, I've looked at the code and it's barely navigable) Here, I'll turn the tables just for kicks: have you dirtied yourself to check out the latest KOffice CVS lately? It is not the same as 1.2... heh
if you can get Trolltech to change the Qt license from the full GPL, to the LGPL (unlikely, given that they use it to extort large amounts of money from anyone wanting to write closed-source apps)
So you mean people who want to extort large amounts of money by selling proprietary software shouldn't have to pay anything for that privilege?
You're either a KDE app (which almost always means C++) and have access to the infrastructure provided, or you aren't. That poses problems for Wine, OpenOffice, Mozilla - not to mention all the desktop neutral software out there like XMMS, Gaim, mplayer and so on.
Hmm.. well, desktop-neutral software is neither an issue for KDE or Gnome, so that point is moot. The likes of OpenOffice and Mozilla aren't really a "problem" either. They both have rather monolithic interfaces not well tied to any desktop environment. And, incidentally, they're both horribly bloated and sluggish applications. Frankly, I think KOffice and Konqueror/KHTML have a better long term future, especially now that KOffice will be using the OpenOffice XML document formats and Apple is helping to develop KHTML for their own browser. OpenOffice and Mozilla are both projects where old, tangled proprietary code was thrown at the community. KOffice and Konqueror, in comparision, are fresh starts.
As others have pointed out, there are methods of interoperability between Qt/KDE and Gtk/Gnome apps. I don't think the separation is as bad as you make it out to sound, however I do think the redundancy is a waste.
Having built an entirely free software platform, there were a lot of people who weren't pleased with the idea that it might be compromised by Qt. Basically, they knew that would cause problems, but went ahead anyway and they got competition in the form of Gnome.
I was one who didn't use KDE during this mess. The old Qt license controversy was a good thing. It resulted in a GPL'ed release and the end of non-free licensing concerns. Now that the situation is resolved, it is pointless to keep bringing it up. Politics are no reason to use GNOME instead of KDE. On the other hand, the apparent technical and usability advantage of KDE at this point does make me question why GNOME still needs to exist as a seperate project. Is there truly a good reason to not roll them into one unified desktop environment at this point?
Re:GNOME 2 or.. Why I dislike MacOS and GNOME
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Gnome 2.4 Release(d)
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· Score: 1
If there's a common design philosophy between MacOS and GNOME developers, it seems to be minimalism. In other words: "the user will be confused if we add too many features, options, and ways to do things, so we'll just implement the absolute basics" More specifically, this philosophy gives way to very flat, low-context, over-simplified interfaces. I personally disagree with this philosophy wholeheartedly. If there's one thing that frustrates users, casual and techies alike, it's the inability to see exactly what they're working with. Users love context, rich details, and clearly displayed hierarchy. More advanced users want a high degree of configurability on top of that.
Take file managers as example. In the minimalist camp, we have MacOS's Finder, Gnome's Nautilus, and WinXP's default Explorer configuration which tries to hide details. In the full-featured camp, we have KDE's Konqueror and WinXP Explorer with more traditional tree + icons file details view. Among my non-tech-oriented friends, nearly every one of them hates the WinXP file manager (and typically they don't know how to reconfigure it otherwise). I hear them say things like "I just want to see my whole hard drive with all the folders so I know what I'm dealing with" or "I liked the Win2k/Win9x interface much better.. it gets right to the point and I can just drag and drop stuff around" I've heard similar complaints from those not familiar with MacOS. On the Free Software side, my non-tech friends greatly prefer KDE to GNOME. That's not opinion, that's just observation. It's all about what they're used to.
Having one elegant solution is nice and appeals to the mathematician in us all but if you look at speech there are many different ways to express a thought, perhaps one is more elegant than the others but all may be correct and logical. (to go back to the clock example: user A thinks "I want to change the time, that should be possible by doing something with the clock thingy" but in user B's opinion it's "I want to change a setting, it should be in the control panel")
IMHO, GUIs should try to enable users to do things their way and therefore it's better to have as many approaches as possible for a task
I definitely agree with this concept. Part of the advantage to a contextually rich, object oriented UI is that users can find their own ways to do things in whatever method is most comfortable to them. GNOME and MacOS are simply not designed in this fashion. The fact that default Mac mice have one button is in itself indicative of flat, low-context design!
If Free Software is to succeed on the desktop, it must be designed to the wishes of typical users, not elderly and technophobes in HIG studies. Typical users prefer richer interfaces and always have. Rich interfaces require object oriented design, which Qt excels at and Gtk2 struggles. Why, really, do we need two seperate GUI projects? It's a waste of valuable and limited development resources and it only makes for annoying inconsistancies. As a developer, Qt is far more polished as well.
My prediction, take it or leave it: GNOME development will be an insignificant niche or else merged into the KDE project within 5-10 years. Linux distros that try to hide the differences between the two projects are the harbingers of this change. Ultimately, the users will decide.
This proposed bill is such a laughably stupid pipe dream that it'll never see the light of day. Nobody should lose a wink of sleep over this political fumbling.
On the other hand, there is a general lack of understanding which is causing silly bills like this to even be considered. This is in dire need of correction. There seems to be a common trend assumption that computers--software especially--are something controllable. Ultimately, this is a failure to realize their very nature as programmable devices. People who start talking of "beacon software" and prohibiting certain types of generic program design prove that they have absolutely no fundamental understanding of computers whatsoever. There is a strong "manufacturing fallacy" as well -- the false assumption that software can be viewed as a manufactured, scarse product. As such, software begins to sound to them like something they can regulate to protect somebody's interests, much as safety belts were eventually required by law in all new automobiles. Some of these guys probably mean well--they're just poorly informed and as a result, knee jerk reactions get made. The big question: how to educate these clueless politicians.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
As a followup, this and other discussion by BIOS-knowledgeable people would seem to suggest that DRM in the BIOS is not necessarily evil. From the way the design of it was described, it does not appear to prevent you from booting any particular OS you want, but applications may insist on using DRM features.
Here's the deal: having DRM in the BIOS is not, in itself, evil. BUT.. the user MUST be able to set the master key. If so, DRM can be used for worthwhile security purposes. For example, an administrator can help protect against trojans and unauthorized software (hacking tools, etc.) by signing all binaries. The BIOS master key (password protected) will be used to prevent other non-signed software from running. This application of DRM is entirely Open Source friendly and doesn't violate anyone's rights.
Now, suppose that there's another DRM key hard-coded in the BIOS that the user cannot access or change. This key has been established by the BIOS manufacturer, Microsoft, and Hollywood. This key can be used to start a chain of cryptographic trust by booting an 'authorized' OS which provides neutered system services (user cannot raw access memory, hard disk, etc.). At this point, you have a platform to implement evil DRM.. controlling how consumers access content, etc.
Here's the really bad thing: if BIOS manufacturers started forcing the secret DRM key, such to allow only corresponding 'official' signed OS's to boot, users would be unable to run their own compiled OS's (Linux, BSD, etc.). Sure, somebody could neuter the Linux kernel to make it evil-DRM application friendly (ie. limited memory access even by root, etc.) and pay to have it signed, but this is obviously unacceptable.
Someone is going to want this feature, and if Linux does not implement it, it will be left out in the cold.
Says who? Do we need any evil-DRM enabled software for Linux? I think not. What if proprietary software writers insist on DRM OS's? Good! Another nail in their coffin.
A DRM-aware Linux OS would not prevent you from installing and running free software.
No, but it would prevent you from accessing your hardware the way you choose. (think blocked memory ranges, encrypted disk sectors, etc.) "DRM-aware" is not the proper term to use; DRM-neutered is. There is no "friendly-cooperation" possible. Evil-DRM doesn't work if the user can run their own custom-compiled kernel. They must be forced to use signed binaries only. Incidentally, this would make kernel development near impossible on any such hardware!
Free software would most likely simply not use the DRM features. Where the problem comes in would be writing free software to interact with, say, streaming audio/video sites. They may insist that the application talking to them be DRM-aware and enforce it by requiring the software to send the BIOS ID/key/whatever, which can be obtained only with a DRM-enabled kernel.
This is precisely the problem. Even if BIOS manufacturers leave in the option to boot an unsigned or user-signed OS, people will be blocked out of any new DRM-only, screw-the-consumer media schemes that Hollywood dreams up. Fortunately these schemes will be limited by the simple fact that most people will still be using older hardware for some time. (not to mention there is no ONE scheme) But, in the long term, it is a big hazard. Only one option here: Boycott.
Previously, people might have felt bad about depriving the artist of income but now, they'll just think "screw them"
Is that why people have stopped going to their favorite artist's concerts at ridiculous prices of $40-200 a pop? Oh yeah, they haven't. This whole thing has nothing to do with people wanting to screw artists. It has everything to do with people saying "Hey, this copyright thing isn't such a good social compromise anymore. I'm being totally ripped off when I buy a CD and so are my favorite artists." Unfortunately, P2P is not a true solution to the problem. It is a medium of change that has not been used effectively.
If only the P2P scene would put some political muscle behind their actions, we might see some actual change. 60 million activists could do a lot of good to reverse some of the current backwards and draconian copyright laws. How about a 7 year limit on music for starters. Why not put building the public domain back into the equation?
Or here's a novel idea: write your own free music and establish a community of others who enjoy doing the same. What's more effective against a software monopolist? Warez sites or a well-organized Open Source project? The same is true for music. Maybe more people could like.. actually learn how to play instruments.
They should have tested OpenOffice 1.1rc3 instead of 1.0.1. There have been massive improvements to the MS import filters since and it probably would have ranked a "99" in all categories, besting whatever StarOffice version it was they tested. It's still not perfect, but plenty good enough for most people. So far I've only run into one Excel spreadsheet that was problematic (it contained a bunch of complicated diagrams and graphics along with some scripting.. kinda an abuse of the whole spreadsheet concept anyhow)
Not really, the applications do most of the limiting, and since you HAVE to open the restricted document within a trusted application, it can stop you: printing, faxing, taking screen shots of that application.... So the only real way you can defeat this is by opening it in a non trusted application.
Or somebody can just break the "trusted" application. The original poster was correct: there's no way to prevent this unless the entire OS is crippled. In fact, you'd have to cripple all the hardware as well. And even then, it would eventually be cracked. So all this DRM stuff is pretty much worthless from a security perspective.
The DRM feature in Office and Outlook enables a user to prevent emails and documents from being forwarded to and viewed by people not specified by the sender/creator. That's all this feature is.
100% Wrong. You clearly do not understand how proprietary DRM systems work. All 'security' whatsoever hinges upon the assumption that the client's application will play by the rules. Once you have the sent document and the decryption key(s) on your computer, all faith is in the application software. The moment that someone releases a hack for the new Office and Outlook that allows a user to access the plaintext or override the "do not copy / re-send / print" flag, all supposed DRM security will be entirely worthless. It is truly this simple: If you can read it, you can copy it. The DRM being proposed here is security through obscurity. Microsoft is betting that people won't find the proverbial "key hidden under the doormat." Even if this DRM system was eventually backed up by hardware (which doesn't look very likely at this point), people could still take a picture of the screen and use OCR to recover the text.. that is until the hardware itself is cracked.
Furthermore, I would like to point out that not all of your e-mail recipients use or want to use Outlook. Anyone who doesn't won't be able to read your emails, so enabling DRM isn't really a viable option anyhow.
I want to control who has access without having to expose the recipient to the mystery and overhead of encryption.
What you're asking for is an impossible pipe dream. For the reasons explained above, you will never be able to have true control over what someone does with information you send them. Using encryption, you can protect that information up to the point where they receive it, but you cannot reliably keep them from sending it to someone else. The best you can ever hope to do is build trust among the people you communicate with.
By the way, you cannot avoid the "overhead" of encryption. It's the foundation of any DRM system. The only difference is that the new Outlook / Office / etc. will try to make it mostly invisible to the user. You'll still need keyrings, signing, and passphrases if that encryption is to be of any value whatsoever.
So, in summary: 1.) proprietary DRM systems are not very cool 2.) proprietary DRM systems are, in fact, insidious. They do not offer true security but they DO try to force people to all use the same email, office, whatever software.
Microsoft is always worse. That scummy, criminal company can do more damage to the computer industry than patents can.
Wrong. Software patents take away fundamental personal freedoms and are inherently unjust no matter what company holds them. Microsoft is just an unethical monopolist that will pass into obsolescence as technology and the Open Source movement evolves. In other words, the market will see to it that Microsoft gets what's coming to them, but software patents threaten to slow this from happening.
This article claims the profit margins for consumer electronics manufacturers is 1-2%. But I've also frequently heard that the total markup-inflated price of CE is typically about 10x the manufacturing cost. So, if a designer wants to sell a stereo receiver that'll cost $500 in the store, the total cost of parts and labor to build it needs to be about $50. So my question, for anyone who may be knowledgeable in this area, is who are the other players in this mark-up game and how does the breakdown look. Obviously the CE manufacturers have large overhead, but certainly this cannot be the whole picture.
I find it especially ironic that an electronics hobbiest such as myself can often build better quality "CE" equipment at lower cost in my basement and using parts purchased in small (non-bulk priced) quantities. Granted, I count the time investment as hobby and education, but shouldn't the big players be able to do a better job with their massive economies of scale?
QT (KDE) is not free and in fact it is way too expensive for most normal uses*. Not everyone wants to release their stuff as GPL. However, it's the best cross-platform GUI toolkit available and feels polished.
Is a society less free if it prohibits slavery? Certainly not. Likewise, the GPL is no less free for prohibiting non-free derivatives, or in this case, non-free products that depend on free libraries. If somebody decides to ignore the benefits of community development, that's their choice. But that doesn't mean we have to let them free-ride on the hard work of those who believe that Open Source is the future and that proprietary software, like slavery, is inefficient for society and perhaps often immoral.
Qt and KDE are 100% free and open.
I personally license all software I develop under GPL. This is done expressly for the benefit of my clients, who benefit when other developers contribute back to my codebase. Some of the software I develop is intended to completely obsolete the need for all proprietary products it competes with. Again, I do this solely for the benefit of my clients, and more importantly, future clients. What's in it for me? A massive competitive edge in total cost for my services and the ability to be involved in a large-scale software project while still being my own boss. What if other competing consultants use the same software? Great! More co-developers means less work for all of us.
There is no need for proprietary software to supplement Open Source. There is only a need for more honest, hard-working developer-consultants.
Re:LiIon can easily thermal-runaway
on
Flaming Cellphones
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Panasonic won't sell to anyone except a 'certified systems designer' who has signed agreements saying they'll design proper charging and current/temperature limiting circuitry. God forbid you should simply want to fix a battery pack which is no longer made. I suspect they do it mostly to keep battery pack repair impossible and force everyone to simply run right out and drop $50(cell phones) to $300(some laptop batteries). Sound conspiracy-theory ripe?:-)
It is a conspiracy, flat out. There's no need for theories on the matter. There are plenty of more "dangerous" electronic components made by the same companies that produce LiIon cells (such as large value capacitors, certain transformer types, etc.) that can be purchased without goofy "designer agreements." The only reasonable explanation is some means of trying to control who gets to play in the ridiculous-markup game of aftermarket battery replacements. But all hope is not lost. There are plenty of sources for LiIon cells online for DIY'ers... just not from the original manufacturers (and typically not from the big parts vendors either: Mouser, Digikey, etc.) Probably the cheapest way to get your hands on them is liquidated (new, unused) battery packs from outdated cell phones, laptops, etc. Sometimes you'll also find companies selling or auctioning bulk cells themselves.
I have taken apart dozens of battery packs of all types and they all use the same handful of standardized solder-tab cell types. Of the LiIon's, perhaps the most popular cell I've run into is the 18650, which is a 5/4-AA size, 3.7v cell. Most standard-size laptop batteries use this cell. Also, many camcorders use them. (the standard capacity battery packs will simply have half as many cells). I know of some camcorder packs that sell in the $50 range with a SINGLE 18650 cell, which can be easily had in the $3-5 range. (I got some from liquidated battery packs for about $2/ea). A typical laptop battery might use 6-8 of them and cost $150-300.
Oh yeah: as for the gas station / cell phone explosion "myth", there is actually a very very small chance that this could happen. (but not for the bogus reasons specified by the urban legend) If a cell phone was drawing a high enough current and the battery somehow came loose, a very small spark could be generated. Under perfect conditions, this may be enough to ignite gasoline vapors. However, you could say this about any battery operated device. In real life, it has never been a problem. A true hazard at gas stations is the large static discharge possible due to the vehicle building a charge while driving from friction of the rubber wheels. So ideally, the vehicle chassis should be grounded to earth before operating the pump.
There's a considerable number of programs for which there are a market, and people are willing to part with the cash, but there's none or too few OSS developers. Sure, a single company could do a "work for hire", but there's no mass-market equivalent. You don't see thousands or even millions of people pitching in a couple dollars to write an OSS piece of software, but the same people would consider paying for a commercial app.
This is an interesting point that I've brought up in my own discussions with people/clients many times. The "too few career OSS developers" problem is the only thing keeping the movement from seeing a more dramatic exponential growth. It's a tricky problem, but I believe there are some excellent solutions that simply need tried diligently:
1.) Apache-style foundations for all core business software: groupware, CRM, ERP, and accounting. Just like Apache, there only needs to be one really well written, flexible application for each of these needs.
2.) More OSS projects that employ various monetary reward systems to encourage further development (to the point where the lead developer can make a part-time job or even career out of his former hobby) An example would be an "adopt a feature" type system where users vote with their wallet on what they want to see implemented next.
3.) More developer-consultants who can find clients with needs that closely match existing OSS and then extend the software in any small ways it is deficient for that particular client. Over time, with enough consultants doing this, everyones' needs will be met -- even those whose needs were originally not candidates for OSS solutions.
And note that all of these methods are financially rewarding to those involved. (especially case 3, of which I am living proof) The notion that there is no money in OSS is total crap FUD.
Do you feel software publishers should have the right to peer into users data, if their software suspects foul play on the machine, or should it do the easy and intelligent thing and just stop working?
Seriously folks. This is not even a question that deserves to be asked. The answer is such an obvious NO that it's laughable. If any software publisher is actually doing or intending to do such unethical things, there needs to be privacy legislation written immediately to protect consumers against this nonsense. If our vehicles started regularly phoning home to Detroit to tell auto makers where we'd driven in the last month (just in case the vehicle was stolen), would people question the bad ethics and privacy invasion? This is absolutely no different.
Fortunately, these issues are going to be completely irrelevant as the world switches almost entirely to Free Software over the next, oh.. 10 to 15 years. Don't think that'll happen? Guess again. The OSS movement is growing exponentially. It's not a question of "if" but rather "when".
I don't use Windows, but several of my less geeky friends do. Just about every one of them has stated at one point or another that they hate the "new interface" of XP--especially Explorer. It's not surprising to me. Microsoft keeps designing interfaces that, by default, hide more and more information from the user while adding chubby new graphics and context sidebars. I get asked questions like "how do I make it just show all the files and directories on my hard drive?" Longhorn seems to be a step further in the direction of hiding more details to make the UI not user-friendly, but rather idiot-friendly. It may be more immediately useful to someone who's never touched a computer before, but it certainly isn't always efficient for the typical user. And if you look at those stupid interface studies that supposedly compare XP to KDE, you'll notice that most of them study near-illiterate users.
Chalk up yet another reason to convince people and businesses to switch to Linux / Free Software.
A number of Open Source developers out there need a good whack over the head with a cluestick. Goofy names are bad advertisement / publicity! What was wrong with "Xwin"? It's short, it's easy to spell, it's easy to remember, it's relevant to the project. I suggest a re-name, but with an open naming contest this time. "Xouvert" is about the worst project name I've seen yet. Even Ogg / Vorbis isn't as bad. At least it's easy to spell and remember. Worse yet, naming a project after an obscure occult reference is likely to be offensive to those of various religions.
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New technology allows the consumer to use the downloaded content, but not distribute it outside of their home.
Let me translate that statement for y'all:
"New technology requires consumers to purchase new proprietary hardware to play back the same content they enjoyed before, but this time with all sorts of annoying restrictions that supposedly won't get in the way, but in reality will."
And, by the way, there is no such thing as a DRM implementation that is Open Source friendly. It's very nature is "security" through obscurity, which thereby requires closed-source, proprietary components.
Just say no to DRMs.
Put your money we're your mouth is.... If the economics are there, then do it.
I would if I was an author. My piece of the economic pie is Open Source based consulting. I develop and service free software. In the future I may write a book or service manuals related to software I develop. If my income stream is lacking, I'll try the approach I mentioned. I certainly will not sign any publishing deal where I get $2 of a book that retails for $20, however.
If they could get a better deal any way, they would have. Publishing is currently as effecient as anybody has managed to make it.
Once an easy-to-read (perhaps 200-300 dpi) display technology is readily available in convenient form factor, paperback books will quickly disappear. At this point, that's the only thing keeping authors from doing online-only publishing themselves. Books are easier on the eyes. When that changes, so will the business model.
The economics of being an author is very different then the economics of working as a programmer, or as a janitor, or whatever it is you do for an hourly rate. Shocking, shocking I tell you. It's entirely possible Card could work for a year on a book, and never see a dime (okay, maybe that's only true for a new author). Being an author is very risky.
The economics are only different because authors, like musicians, are screwed royally by publishers. If Mr. Card had seen more of the revenue from his book sales, he wouldn't be so dependent on royalties extending to the end of his life. He would have made enough to save for a decent retirement like the rest of the working world. Oh yeah.. and his work would all be in the public domain, as the copyright system originally intended. It's hard to blame him, though.. he's just a victim of the same system. Once again, a case for eliminating the middlemen through technology. How about this novel idea (ok, bad pun):
- Write a really good book. Put the first chapter or three online as a teaser.
- Sell it yourself for $2 per copy online, but without any stupid DRM restrictions. Most people are not going to P2P-swap material that cheap anyhow. If any do, who cares.. they probably wouldn't have bought it otherwise.
- Re-release it as public domain after 500,000 copies are sold. People who paid enjoy the fact that they were patrons of an art now benefitting all of society.
- Retire a millionaire or repeat the process as desired. Capitalism at its finest!
It may be argued that publishers are needed to gain enough recognition to sell sufficient copies, however I believe this is another notion made obsolete by modern technology of instant communication and the social factors that surround it. This is especially true for established authors and artists, but it even works for newcomers. How many paid advertisements have you seen for homestarrunner.com? Yet that site gets tens of millions of hits and is growing steadily in popularity. Even if they only sell t-shirts and related merchandise, it proves that popularity can be home-grown.
I wonder where you got that 720x368 resolution? Ever hear of PAL and anamorphic DVDs?
All NTSC DVD's have a video stream resolution of 720x480. There are two aspect ratio options, 1.33 and 1.78. The latter instructs the player to stretch the image to 854x480. However, if you want to do 2.35:1 anamorphic, you still have to add black bars to the actual video stream, thereby wasting available stream resolution. Typically, the effective resolution after the bars is about 720x364. (not 368, my mistake..) Then, to make it 2.35:1, the aspect is set to 1.78. After the player stretches the image, the playback result is 854x364, which is very close to 2.35.
Yes, PAL disks use 720x540, so scale accordingly, but that's beside the point. Modern hardware is capable of so much more. The 1080i/p HDTV format is 1920x1080 of actual usable resolution. DVD's can't hold a candle to that and hence are already obsolete.
..now that we are heading into a "post-industrial" (don't blame me for that phrase), information-based economy, intellectual property rights will becomed entrenched. let's face it: the opensource folks like us are the diggers and godwinists of the information revolution. we will impact the nature of property rights, but not abolish them.
There's a major flaw in that argument. Agriculturally-useful land and factories are both severely limited resources. The information revolution is the first in which everyone controls means of production. That is not to say that production comes without cost (even time), but rather everyone who wants to produce can do so with minimum investment and few barriers of entry into the market.
Would the industrial era have looked any different if factories had costed $500 (in today's prices) and were possible to operate by one man?
For example, how much does it take to produce a typical audio CD? $50,000? $100,000? $250,000?
:-)
$50,000 is enough to build your own professional-grade home recording studio. For $100,000 you can build a dedicated, acoustically optimized extension to your house. For $250,000 you can have multiple studio rooms to rent out. And this is all assuming you don't know anyone who's already done this. Cost to produce a quality audio album is almost negligible today.
Contrast that to a major motion picture which might have cost the studio a hundred million dollars or more to create, and I can buy a copy of that production for the price of a music CD. That, to me, is not a bad value.
It sounds like a good value until you start to investigate where that hundred million dollars actually went. First consider $5-15 million for every big-name actor(ess) and/or director(s). (sometimes more!) Then consider all the bogus production costs like extravagant cast parties and pampering. Then consider that many movie studios burn money simply because they can. With the kind of profit margins in the movie industry, efficient spending tends to go out the window. So when you pear it all down, how much should it really cost to produce a decent flick? Certainly not more than $5 million for anything that's not an epic or special-effects showcase. Probably $1-2 million or even less if you're careful. And do ticket prices reflect production costs at all? Nope. How about DVD prices? Nope. (Unless it's a budget movie that totally flops too and ends up in the $5 junk bin) So, in the end, movies certainly cost more than music albums to produce, but need nowhere near as much as typically budgeted. And regardless, any good movie makes several times its production costs while still in the theaters. So home DVD sales are just the extra gravy. More specifically, Hollywood would still be extremely lucrative if movie copyrights expired in a couple months after they left the theater. Wow.. imagine that.. a flourishing public domain: what the copyright compromise was originally intended to create.
Sure, I dislike the encryption and region coding, and frankly the DMCA is almost enough to keep me from buying DVDs at all, but really there are some damned good movies out there nowadays.
DMCA should be enough to keep you from buying DVD's and not supporting the bastards that have so helped to corrupt our legal system. But let me give you a few more good reasons: 1.) DVD video resolution sucks. 720x368 is not enough to do a 2.35:1-aspect movie justice. DVD's will soon be obsolete because of this and the move to true HDTV formats. 2.) DVD audio is also notably weak. 448kbps is simply not enough to do 5 full-range (and one low-band) channels at a time in "CD quality". Sure, with really intense optimization, you can make it work by directing the bitrate to the channels that need it most, but there are still tradeoffs in sonically dense scenes. Many encodings seem to simply neglect the rear channels except for a few whiz-bang effect sequences. 3.) Watching the same movies over and over is a terrible waste of life. (yeah, that's subjective, but I still think it's a valid reason.
Honestly, I don't mind paying $17 or so for a copy of The Hulk or Spiderman or any of the other major motion pictures in recent years.
I've noticed that most people who collect movies don't actually watch them that often. How many $1.59 rentals would that $17 buy? Refer also reason #3.
ps.) Just for fun, check out the insane production costs for various popular movies on IMDB.org and then compare the even more bogus grosses. Then compare some quality "small budget" films like Memento and Greek Wedding. It is truly a wonder that the independent film industry has not taken off more than it has already.
Astronauts.. TO the moon.. nya nya nya nya nya nya!
I bet you haven't even (in your view) dirtied yourself to use recent Mozilla or OO versions, have you?
Nope.. I use Mozilla 1.4 and OpenOffice 1.1beta3 regularly. They're both markably improved, but still terribly sluggish, especially on older machines. OpenOffice is obviously in far worse shape. Using it on anything less than about an 800Mhz. Athlon is torture. That is unacceptable when you consider how much better even the bloated MS Office runs on similar or even far older hardware. Hopefully this will be fixed with time. Mozilla is not as much a problem, but on older machines it's still a dog compared to Konqueror.
Let me explain something: Mozilla is now, by far, the best browser. Konqueror is poor by comparison (and don't quote the Apple bullshit)... it renders pages poorly, and more slowly than Moz... and when you take into account the entire KDE baggage that comes with it, it's a hell of a lot more bloated than Moz.
I never contended that Moz wasn't the best browser right now. In fact, it is the gold standard. I'm saying that once Konqueror reaches Moz's level of standards compliance, it'll become the browser of choice for performance reasons. It is not my experience that Konq. renders slower than Moz, but rather quite the opposite.. especially when certain Javascript is involved. Incidentally, the "KDE baggage" is pretty comparable to Gnome's or any other modern DE.. and it's only baggage if you're not running KDE, in which case you'd just use Mozilla anyhow. Apparently, the option of using Gecko in place of KHTML is also in the works.
It also has more features... KOffice apps are laughably under featured and would have difficult satisfying even a home user.
Once again, I never said KOffice was ready to replace OO.o. But I think it will someday unless OO.o gets in really high gear. (honestly, I've looked at the code and it's barely navigable) Here, I'll turn the tables just for kicks: have you dirtied yourself to check out the latest KOffice CVS lately? It is not the same as 1.2... heh
if you can get Trolltech to change the Qt license from the full GPL, to the LGPL (unlikely, given that they use it to extort large amounts of money from anyone wanting to write closed-source apps)
So you mean people who want to extort large amounts of money by selling proprietary software shouldn't have to pay anything for that privilege?
Proprietary is dead. Get over it.
You're either a KDE app (which almost always means C++) and have access to the infrastructure provided, or you aren't. That poses problems for Wine, OpenOffice, Mozilla - not to mention all the desktop neutral software out there like XMMS, Gaim, mplayer and so on.
Hmm.. well, desktop-neutral software is neither an issue for KDE or Gnome, so that point is moot. The likes of OpenOffice and Mozilla aren't really a "problem" either. They both have rather monolithic interfaces not well tied to any desktop environment. And, incidentally, they're both horribly bloated and sluggish applications. Frankly, I think KOffice and Konqueror/KHTML have a better long term future, especially now that KOffice will be using the OpenOffice XML document formats and Apple is helping to develop KHTML for their own browser. OpenOffice and Mozilla are both projects where old, tangled proprietary code was thrown at the community. KOffice and Konqueror, in comparision, are fresh starts.
As others have pointed out, there are methods of interoperability between Qt/KDE and Gtk/Gnome apps. I don't think the separation is as bad as you make it out to sound, however I do think the redundancy is a waste.
Having built an entirely free software platform, there were a lot of people who weren't pleased with the idea that it might be compromised by Qt. Basically, they knew that would cause problems, but went ahead anyway and they got competition in the form of Gnome.
I was one who didn't use KDE during this mess. The old Qt license controversy was a good thing. It resulted in a GPL'ed release and the end of non-free licensing concerns. Now that the situation is resolved, it is pointless to keep bringing it up. Politics are no reason to use GNOME instead of KDE. On the other hand, the apparent technical and usability advantage of KDE at this point does make me question why GNOME still needs to exist as a seperate project. Is there truly a good reason to not roll them into one unified desktop environment at this point?
If there's a common design philosophy between MacOS and GNOME developers, it seems to be minimalism. In other words: "the user will be confused if we add too many features, options, and ways to do things, so we'll just implement the absolute basics" More specifically, this philosophy gives way to very flat, low-context, over-simplified interfaces. I personally disagree with this philosophy wholeheartedly. If there's one thing that frustrates users, casual and techies alike, it's the inability to see exactly what they're working with. Users love context, rich details, and clearly displayed hierarchy. More advanced users want a high degree of configurability on top of that.
Take file managers as example. In the minimalist camp, we have MacOS's Finder, Gnome's Nautilus, and WinXP's default Explorer configuration which tries to hide details. In the full-featured camp, we have KDE's Konqueror and WinXP Explorer with more traditional tree + icons file details view. Among my non-tech-oriented friends, nearly every one of them hates the WinXP file manager (and typically they don't know how to reconfigure it otherwise). I hear them say things like "I just want to see my whole hard drive with all the folders so I know what I'm dealing with" or "I liked the Win2k/Win9x interface much better.. it gets right to the point and I can just drag and drop stuff around" I've heard similar complaints from those not familiar with MacOS. On the Free Software side, my non-tech friends greatly prefer KDE to GNOME. That's not opinion, that's just observation. It's all about what they're used to.
Having one elegant solution is nice and appeals to the mathematician in us all but if you look at speech there are many different ways to express a thought, perhaps one is more elegant than the others but all may be correct and logical. (to go back to the clock example: user A thinks "I want to change the time, that should be possible by doing something with the clock thingy" but in user B's opinion it's "I want to change a setting, it should be in the control panel")
IMHO, GUIs should try to enable users to do things their way and therefore it's better to have as many approaches as possible for a task
I definitely agree with this concept. Part of the advantage to a contextually rich, object oriented UI is that users can find their own ways to do things in whatever method is most comfortable to them. GNOME and MacOS are simply not designed in this fashion. The fact that default Mac mice have one button is in itself indicative of flat, low-context design!
If Free Software is to succeed on the desktop, it must be designed to the wishes of typical users, not elderly and technophobes in HIG studies. Typical users prefer richer interfaces and always have. Rich interfaces require object oriented design, which Qt excels at and Gtk2 struggles. Why, really, do we need two seperate GUI projects? It's a waste of valuable and limited development resources and it only makes for annoying inconsistancies. As a developer, Qt is far more polished as well.
My prediction, take it or leave it: GNOME development will be an insignificant niche or else merged into the KDE project within 5-10 years. Linux distros that try to hide the differences between the two projects are the harbingers of this change. Ultimately, the users will decide.
This proposed bill is such a laughably stupid pipe dream that it'll never see the light of day. Nobody should lose a wink of sleep over this political fumbling.
On the other hand, there is a general lack of understanding which is causing silly bills like this to even be considered. This is in dire need of correction. There seems to be a common trend assumption that computers--software especially--are something controllable. Ultimately, this is a failure to realize their very nature as programmable devices. People who start talking of "beacon software" and prohibiting certain types of generic program design prove that they have absolutely no fundamental understanding of computers whatsoever. There is a strong "manufacturing fallacy" as well -- the false assumption that software can be viewed as a manufactured, scarse product. As such, software begins to sound to them like something they can regulate to protect somebody's interests, much as safety belts were eventually required by law in all new automobiles. Some of these guys probably mean well--they're just poorly informed and as a result, knee jerk reactions get made. The big question: how to educate these clueless politicians.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
As a followup, this and other discussion by BIOS-knowledgeable people would seem to suggest that DRM in the BIOS is not necessarily evil. From the way the design of it was described, it does not appear to prevent you from booting any particular OS you want, but applications may insist on using DRM features.
Here's the deal: having DRM in the BIOS is not, in itself, evil. BUT.. the user MUST be able to set the master key. If so, DRM can be used for worthwhile security purposes. For example, an administrator can help protect against trojans and unauthorized software (hacking tools, etc.) by signing all binaries. The BIOS master key (password protected) will be used to prevent other non-signed software from running. This application of DRM is entirely Open Source friendly and doesn't violate anyone's rights.
Now, suppose that there's another DRM key hard-coded in the BIOS that the user cannot access or change. This key has been established by the BIOS manufacturer, Microsoft, and Hollywood. This key can be used to start a chain of cryptographic trust by booting an 'authorized' OS which provides neutered system services (user cannot raw access memory, hard disk, etc.). At this point, you have a platform to implement evil DRM.. controlling how consumers access content, etc.
Here's the really bad thing: if BIOS manufacturers started forcing the secret DRM key, such to allow only corresponding 'official' signed OS's to boot, users would be unable to run their own compiled OS's (Linux, BSD, etc.). Sure, somebody could neuter the Linux kernel to make it evil-DRM application friendly (ie. limited memory access even by root, etc.) and pay to have it signed, but this is obviously unacceptable.
Someone is going to want this feature, and if Linux does not implement it, it will be left out in the cold.
Says who? Do we need any evil-DRM enabled software for Linux? I think not. What if proprietary software writers insist on DRM OS's? Good! Another nail in their coffin.
A DRM-aware Linux OS would not prevent you from installing and running free software.
No, but it would prevent you from accessing your hardware the way you choose. (think blocked memory ranges, encrypted disk sectors, etc.) "DRM-aware" is not the proper term to use; DRM-neutered is. There is no "friendly-cooperation" possible. Evil-DRM doesn't work if the user can run their own custom-compiled kernel. They must be forced to use signed binaries only. Incidentally, this would make kernel development near impossible on any such hardware!
Free software would most likely simply not use the DRM features. Where the problem comes in would be writing free software to interact with, say, streaming audio/video sites. They may insist that the application talking to them be DRM-aware and enforce it by requiring the software to send the BIOS ID/key/whatever, which can be obtained only with a DRM-enabled kernel.
This is precisely the problem. Even if BIOS manufacturers leave in the option to boot an unsigned or user-signed OS, people will be blocked out of any new DRM-only, screw-the-consumer media schemes that Hollywood dreams up. Fortunately these schemes will be limited by the simple fact that most people will still be using older hardware for some time. (not to mention there is no ONE scheme) But, in the long term, it is a big hazard. Only one option here: Boycott.
Previously, people might have felt bad about depriving the artist of income but now, they'll just think "screw them"
Is that why people have stopped going to their favorite artist's concerts at ridiculous prices of $40-200 a pop? Oh yeah, they haven't. This whole thing has nothing to do with people wanting to screw artists. It has everything to do with people saying "Hey, this copyright thing isn't such a good social compromise anymore. I'm being totally ripped off when I buy a CD and so are my favorite artists." Unfortunately, P2P is not a true solution to the problem. It is a medium of change that has not been used effectively.
If only the P2P scene would put some political muscle behind their actions, we might see some actual change. 60 million activists could do a lot of good to reverse some of the current backwards and draconian copyright laws. How about a 7 year limit on music for starters. Why not put building the public domain back into the equation?
Or here's a novel idea: write your own free music and establish a community of others who enjoy doing the same. What's more effective against a software monopolist? Warez sites or a well-organized Open Source project? The same is true for music. Maybe more people could like.. actually learn how to play instruments.
They should have tested OpenOffice 1.1rc3 instead of 1.0.1. There have been massive improvements to the MS import filters since and it probably would have ranked a "99" in all categories, besting whatever StarOffice version it was they tested. It's still not perfect, but plenty good enough for most people. So far I've only run into one Excel spreadsheet that was problematic (it contained a bunch of complicated diagrams and graphics along with some scripting.. kinda an abuse of the whole spreadsheet concept anyhow)
Not really, the applications do most of the limiting, and since you HAVE to open the restricted document within a trusted application, it can stop you: printing, faxing, taking screen shots of that application. ... So the only real way you can defeat this is by opening it in a non trusted application.
Or somebody can just break the "trusted" application. The original poster was correct: there's no way to prevent this unless the entire OS is crippled. In fact, you'd have to cripple all the hardware as well. And even then, it would eventually be cracked. So all this DRM stuff is pretty much worthless from a security perspective.
The DRM feature in Office and Outlook enables a user to prevent emails and documents from being forwarded to and viewed by people not specified by the sender/creator. That's all this feature is.
100% Wrong. You clearly do not understand how proprietary DRM systems work. All 'security' whatsoever hinges upon the assumption that the client's application will play by the rules. Once you have the sent document and the decryption key(s) on your computer, all faith is in the application software. The moment that someone releases a hack for the new Office and Outlook that allows a user to access the plaintext or override the "do not copy / re-send / print" flag, all supposed DRM security will be entirely worthless. It is truly this simple: If you can read it, you can copy it. The DRM being proposed here is security through obscurity. Microsoft is betting that people won't find the proverbial "key hidden under the doormat." Even if this DRM system was eventually backed up by hardware (which doesn't look very likely at this point), people could still take a picture of the screen and use OCR to recover the text.. that is until the hardware itself is cracked.
Furthermore, I would like to point out that not all of your e-mail recipients use or want to use Outlook. Anyone who doesn't won't be able to read your emails, so enabling DRM isn't really a viable option anyhow.
I want to control who has access without having to expose the recipient to the mystery and overhead of encryption.
What you're asking for is an impossible pipe dream. For the reasons explained above, you will never be able to have true control over what someone does with information you send them. Using encryption, you can protect that information up to the point where they receive it, but you cannot reliably keep them from sending it to someone else. The best you can ever hope to do is build trust among the people you communicate with.
By the way, you cannot avoid the "overhead" of encryption. It's the foundation of any DRM system. The only difference is that the new Outlook / Office / etc. will try to make it mostly invisible to the user. You'll still need keyrings, signing, and passphrases if that encryption is to be of any value whatsoever.
So, in summary:
1.) proprietary DRM systems are not very cool
2.) proprietary DRM systems are, in fact, insidious. They do not offer true security but they DO try to force people to all use the same email, office, whatever software.
Microsoft is always worse. That scummy, criminal company can do more damage to the computer industry than patents can.
Wrong. Software patents take away fundamental personal freedoms and are inherently unjust no matter what company holds them. Microsoft is just an unethical monopolist that will pass into obsolescence as technology and the Open Source movement evolves. In other words, the market will see to it that Microsoft gets what's coming to them, but software patents threaten to slow this from happening.
This article claims the profit margins for consumer electronics manufacturers is 1-2%. But I've also frequently heard that the total markup-inflated price of CE is typically about 10x the manufacturing cost. So, if a designer wants to sell a stereo receiver that'll cost $500 in the store, the total cost of parts and labor to build it needs to be about $50. So my question, for anyone who may be knowledgeable in this area, is who are the other players in this mark-up game and how does the breakdown look. Obviously the CE manufacturers have large overhead, but certainly this cannot be the whole picture.
I find it especially ironic that an electronics hobbiest such as myself can often build better quality "CE" equipment at lower cost in my basement and using parts purchased in small (non-bulk priced) quantities. Granted, I count the time investment as hobby and education, but shouldn't the big players be able to do a better job with their massive economies of scale?
QT (KDE) is not free and in fact it is way too expensive for most normal uses*. Not everyone wants to release their stuff as GPL. However, it's the best cross-platform GUI toolkit available and feels polished.
Is a society less free if it prohibits slavery? Certainly not. Likewise, the GPL is no less free for prohibiting non-free derivatives, or in this case, non-free products that depend on free libraries. If somebody decides to ignore the benefits of community development, that's their choice. But that doesn't mean we have to let them free-ride on the hard work of those who believe that Open Source is the future and that proprietary software, like slavery, is inefficient for society and perhaps often immoral.
Qt and KDE are 100% free and open.
I personally license all software I develop under GPL. This is done expressly for the benefit of my clients, who benefit when other developers contribute back to my codebase. Some of the software I develop is intended to completely obsolete the need for all proprietary products it competes with. Again, I do this solely for the benefit of my clients, and more importantly, future clients. What's in it for me? A massive competitive edge in total cost for my services and the ability to be involved in a large-scale software project while still being my own boss. What if other competing consultants use the same software? Great! More co-developers means less work for all of us.
There is no need for proprietary software to supplement Open Source. There is only a need for more honest, hard-working developer-consultants.
Panasonic won't sell to anyone except a 'certified systems designer' who has signed agreements saying they'll design proper charging and current/temperature limiting circuitry. God forbid you should simply want to fix a battery pack which is no longer made. I suspect they do it mostly to keep battery pack repair impossible and force everyone to simply run right out and drop $50(cell phones) to $300(some laptop batteries). Sound conspiracy-theory ripe? :-)
It is a conspiracy, flat out. There's no need for theories on the matter. There are plenty of more "dangerous" electronic components made by the same companies that produce LiIon cells (such as large value capacitors, certain transformer types, etc.) that can be purchased without goofy "designer agreements." The only reasonable explanation is some means of trying to control who gets to play in the ridiculous-markup game of aftermarket battery replacements. But all hope is not lost. There are plenty of sources for LiIon cells online for DIY'ers... just not from the original manufacturers (and typically not from the big parts vendors either: Mouser, Digikey, etc.) Probably the cheapest way to get your hands on them is liquidated (new, unused) battery packs from outdated cell phones, laptops, etc. Sometimes you'll also find companies selling or auctioning bulk cells themselves.
I have taken apart dozens of battery packs of all types and they all use the same handful of standardized solder-tab cell types. Of the LiIon's, perhaps the most popular cell I've run into is the 18650, which is a 5/4-AA size, 3.7v cell. Most standard-size laptop batteries use this cell. Also, many camcorders use them. (the standard capacity battery packs will simply have half as many cells). I know of some camcorder packs that sell in the $50 range with a SINGLE 18650 cell, which can be easily had in the $3-5 range. (I got some from liquidated battery packs for about $2/ea). A typical laptop battery might use 6-8 of them and cost $150-300.
Oh yeah: as for the gas station / cell phone explosion "myth", there is actually a very very small chance that this could happen. (but not for the bogus reasons specified by the urban legend) If a cell phone was drawing a high enough current and the battery somehow came loose, a very small spark could be generated. Under perfect conditions, this may be enough to ignite gasoline vapors. However, you could say this about any battery operated device. In real life, it has never been a problem. A true hazard at gas stations is the large static discharge possible due to the vehicle building a charge while driving from friction of the rubber wheels. So ideally, the vehicle chassis should be grounded to earth before operating the pump.
There's a considerable number of programs for which there are a market, and people are willing to part with the cash, but there's none or too few OSS developers. Sure, a single company could do a "work for hire", but there's no mass-market equivalent. You don't see thousands or even millions of people pitching in a couple dollars to write an OSS piece of software, but the same people would consider paying for a commercial app.
This is an interesting point that I've brought up in my own discussions with people/clients many times. The "too few career OSS developers" problem is the only thing keeping the movement from seeing a more dramatic exponential growth. It's a tricky problem, but I believe there are some excellent solutions that simply need tried diligently:
1.) Apache-style foundations for all core business software: groupware, CRM, ERP, and accounting. Just like Apache, there only needs to be one really well written, flexible application for each of these needs.
2.) More OSS projects that employ various monetary reward systems to encourage further development (to the point where the lead developer can make a part-time job or even career out of his former hobby) An example would be an "adopt a feature" type system where users vote with their wallet on what they want to see implemented next.
3.) More developer-consultants who can find clients with needs that closely match existing OSS and then extend the software in any small ways it is deficient for that particular client. Over time, with enough consultants doing this, everyones' needs will be met -- even those whose needs were originally not candidates for OSS solutions.
And note that all of these methods are financially rewarding to those involved. (especially case 3, of which I am living proof) The notion that there is no money in OSS is total crap FUD.
Do you feel software publishers should have the right to peer into users data, if their software suspects foul play on the machine, or should it do the easy and intelligent thing and just stop working?
Seriously folks. This is not even a question that deserves to be asked. The answer is such an obvious NO that it's laughable. If any software publisher is actually doing or intending to do such unethical things, there needs to be privacy legislation written immediately to protect consumers against this nonsense. If our vehicles started regularly phoning home to Detroit to tell auto makers where we'd driven in the last month (just in case the vehicle was stolen), would people question the bad ethics and privacy invasion? This is absolutely no different.
Fortunately, these issues are going to be completely irrelevant as the world switches almost entirely to Free Software over the next, oh.. 10 to 15 years. Don't think that'll happen? Guess again. The OSS movement is growing exponentially. It's not a question of "if" but rather "when".
I don't use Windows, but several of my less geeky friends do. Just about every one of them has stated at one point or another that they hate the "new interface" of XP--especially Explorer. It's not surprising to me. Microsoft keeps designing interfaces that, by default, hide more and more information from the user while adding chubby new graphics and context sidebars. I get asked questions like "how do I make it just show all the files and directories on my hard drive?" Longhorn seems to be a step further in the direction of hiding more details to make the UI not user-friendly, but rather idiot-friendly. It may be more immediately useful to someone who's never touched a computer before, but it certainly isn't always efficient for the typical user. And if you look at those stupid interface studies that supposedly compare XP to KDE, you'll notice that most of them study near-illiterate users.
Chalk up yet another reason to convince people and businesses to switch to Linux / Free Software.
It's a terrible name but you don't even give a single reason for your opinion?
It has non-obvious spelling and is harder to remember than say.. XOpen or Xwin or OpenX11 or whatever.
either you're dimwitted cause you didn't get the joke or you're just trolling
Nah, I just don't know French. (-: The description on the homepage sounds pretty kooky if you don't get the joke.
A number of Open Source developers out there need a good whack over the head with a cluestick. Goofy names are bad advertisement / publicity! What was wrong with "Xwin"? It's short, it's easy to spell, it's easy to remember, it's relevant to the project. I suggest a re-name, but with an open naming contest this time. "Xouvert" is about the worst project name I've seen yet. Even Ogg / Vorbis isn't as bad. At least it's easy to spell and remember. Worse yet, naming a project after an obscure occult reference is likely to be offensive to those of various religions.