Sony actually sold the vast bulk of their Walkman cassette players long after they'd become a commodity.
In raw numbers, yes. As market share, that's simply bullshit. They had a much smaller share of a much larger market. That's whats about to happen to Apple.
Ah, the old Geek "people always buy the cheapest item" canard,
Err. No. That's not what I said at all. I simply said that apple will not continue to completely dominate the market. Name a single piece of hardware for which one company dominates the market, and for which much cheaper alternatives are avaliable. Many people will continue to buy iPods. Many many many others won't.
However, it's a rather well known fact that only 3% of the songs on an average iPod were bought from the iTunes store, which means that 97% of them come from some other source. How does this support your contention? Oh, that's right, it doesn't...
Actually, it does. Since the vast majority of my music is not Apple DRM encumbered, why would I spend the $200 premium now I could a perfectly functional mp3 player for so much less?
Do you really think its going to stay that way? Now that massively cheaper, functional mp3-playing alternatives are available in every supermarket? Sony Walkmen had a massive share of the portable audio market after they were first released, but within two or three years the market had become completely commoditized. The only reason that hasn't happened yet is the fact that iTunes required an iPod until very recently.
Dude, until recently anyone with a non-Apple mp3 player couldn't use iTunes without jumping through ridiculous hoops. Given how cheap commodity flash mp3 players have become, why would any company opt to cut themselves out of that market.
iTunes have established a download market. They've served their purpose and are now surplus to Universal's requirements.
The person with the most standing in pre-2.4 works is Linus himself, he can make a pretty good case that the work continues to be a derivative of his original creation.
Undeniably. But that doesn't make it his sole copyright. Copyright belongs jointly to the creator of the original work
Folks who feel they have a surviving claim should not ignore a public notice.
Morally, you're quite right (except for the dead ones, obviously), and I agree with you. But being morally right and legally right (especially where copyright law is concerned) are basically orthogonal.
Folks with early works who ignore public notices and whose work has been massively overwritten probably don't have much standing to file any sort of complaint.
The notice of intent has absolutely no legal weight. All this would do is open the kernel up to further speculation and whispering concerning its legal status. Do we really need other OS vendors to say "Linux infringes unspecified patents and was recently relicensed in a legally questionable manner, raising the risk of copyright infringemnt suits from former developers."
Given the unrecorded provenance of most of the code prior to 2.4.x, that would pretty much require a rewriting of all the major subsystems that haven't been clean-room implemented since that time (even heavily modified code would be a derived work and dependent on the original copyright holders). Sure, that might happen, but to call the resulting massively-forked work "Linux" as we understand it would be merely an exercise in trademark semantics.
Re:OpenSolaris
on
GPLv3 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Linux relicensing won't happen. It pretty much can't happen. Any contributor to any file that does not have "or later version" (and there are many) in the license would have to sign off on the change. Some of them are dead, so you'd probably have to track down their descendants / executors.
Of course, OpenSolaris may use GPL3 for exactly that reason.
Has anyone noticed that the things that separate us from chickens are the very things that either libertarians or Ayn Rand said we shouldn't bother about?
If you want my guess (and it *is* a guess), it's a deliberate design decision linked in with the DRM controls and the automatic syncing whenever you plug an iPod in. If two copies are running, Apple loses its certainty as to whose iPod it is, and therefore couldn't get away with arbitrarily deleting files from the iPod as it does now.
Hey, if I wanted a horrible kludge, I'd run Linux. Seriously, why should my library be cluttered with songs I don't like, because Apple couldn't think outside the box.
Because iTunes allows you to share your playlists over a network. User one is logged in at the PC, playing her songs as she works. User two is playing *his* songs over via WiFi through a laptop plugged into the hi-fi.
Oh... while we're ranting... Have you ever tried to use the mechanism they provide to change the sort field of every Tom Waits song to "Waits, Tom". Who came up with that brutal, brutal interface, Ernst Rubik?
Gee, I hope its as user friendly as iTunes. I simply live to see the message "You cannot use iTunes because another user is running a copy". That's user friendliness right there.
His basic assumptions are so retarded as to invalidate his own thesis. Yes, depending on the difficulty of the exam, the range between the best and worst candidates will narrow. But the effect of guessing only becomes important in the extreme cases he looks at (impossibly hard test vs. impossibly easy).
And who the hell sets multiple choice questions with only two options? Rerun the numbers with five options and report back. You'll find the guesser is far more severely punished.
Besides pass rates as indication of the difficulty of exams is a myth. Set any exam with even the slightest differentiation, and you can have whatever pass rate you like. You just pick your passing grade appropriately.
Beyond a National Minimum Wage, none of their other manifesto promises have been kept
Well, NHS investment is massively higher. You can dispute the results, but not the expenditure.
Parliaments for Wales and Scotland? Not a Tory policy. Done Reduction in child poverty? Not a Tory priority, and not a Tory manifesto promise. Done. Reduced class sizes for KS 1 and 2? Done (see http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nscl.asp?ID=6065) Free education for all under fives? Done Do you want me to go on... I could list half a dozen more, and I'm not even a Labour voter (haven't been since the tuition fee disgrace, which *was* a broken manifesto promise).
Now you might argue that they were all bad things... and I've no interested in arguing with you. But that they've been done is uncontrovertible.
Labour could only get into power by espousing Conservative policies.
Have you read Labours '97 manifesto?... a national minimum wage, improving universal free-at-the-point-of-service healthcare, windfall taxes on big business, increased European integration.
These are Conservative policies? The major Tory policy stolen was that indirect taxes get noticed a lot less than direct taxes, so you can pretend to be tax cutting when you aren't -- which is exactly what John Major did.
This seems like a fairly sane response. I don't think violent games (or films) *cause* violent tendencies, but I do believe they can be influential and reinforcing to those in whom those tendencies already exist, (e.g. minors). As long as this law applies only to minors, I really can't see a problem.
I imagine every slashdotter knows how isolating obsessive tendencies can become (even if its just hours spent playing Nethack online).
[I know, I've stepped over slashdot's "all censorship is unremittingly evil" axiom. Make my day, mod me to hell]
"All science is either physics or stamp collecting".
If you're going to claim a favourite quote, at least recall enough of it to get the meaning right. Rutherford believed the harder ends of Chemistry and Biology to be subsets of physics, and the rest of those disciplines to be irrelevant. Organising taxonomies, for example, would be stamp collecting.
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Do you really think its going to stay that way? Now that massively cheaper, functional mp3-playing alternatives are available in every supermarket? Sony Walkmen had a massive share of the portable audio market after they were first released, but within two or three years the market had become completely commoditized. The only reason that hasn't happened yet is the fact that iTunes required an iPod until very recently.
Dude, until recently anyone with a non-Apple mp3 player couldn't use iTunes without jumping through ridiculous hoops. Given how cheap commodity flash mp3 players have become, why would any company opt to cut themselves out of that market.
iTunes have established a download market. They've served their purpose and are now surplus to Universal's requirements.
What you say is lovely, but its not the law.
Given the unrecorded provenance of most of the code prior to 2.4.x, that would pretty much require a rewriting of all the major subsystems that haven't been clean-room implemented since that time (even heavily modified code would be a derived work and dependent on the original copyright holders). Sure, that might happen, but to call the resulting massively-forked work "Linux" as we understand it would be merely an exercise in trademark semantics.
Linux relicensing won't happen. It pretty much can't happen. Any contributor to any file that does not have "or later version" (and there are many) in the license would have to sign off on the change. Some of them are dead, so you'd probably have to track down their descendants / executors.
Of course, OpenSolaris may use GPL3 for exactly that reason.
Has anyone noticed that the things that separate us from chickens are the very things that either libertarians or Ayn Rand said we shouldn't bother about?
If you want my guess (and it *is* a guess), it's a deliberate design decision linked in with the DRM controls and the automatic syncing whenever you plug an iPod in. If two copies are running, Apple loses its certainty as to whose iPod it is, and therefore couldn't get away with arbitrarily deleting files from the iPod as it does now.
This just in: "Poor design choice leads to further poor design choices."
Hey, if I wanted a horrible kludge, I'd run Linux.
Seriously, why should my library be cluttered with songs I don't like, because Apple couldn't think outside the box.
Because iTunes allows you to share your playlists over a network.
User one is logged in at the PC, playing her songs as she works.
User two is playing *his* songs over via WiFi through a laptop plugged into the hi-fi.
Oh ... while we're ranting... Have you ever tried to use the mechanism they provide to change the sort field of every Tom Waits song to "Waits, Tom". Who came up with that brutal, brutal interface, Ernst Rubik?
I share it with my girlfriend and what does she do? Kills my iTunes and then uses hers to play Elton John and the Moulin Rouge soundtrack.
It's a fucking travesty is what that is.
On Windows XP. Log in as a user, start iTunes. Now "Switch user" without logging out, and log in again as another user. Now try and start iTunes.
Gee, I hope its as user friendly as iTunes. I simply live to see the message "You cannot use iTunes because another user is running a copy". That's user friendliness right there.
His basic assumptions are so retarded as to invalidate his own thesis. Yes, depending on the difficulty of the exam, the range between the best and worst candidates will narrow. But the effect of guessing only becomes important in the extreme cases he looks at (impossibly hard test vs. impossibly easy).
And who the hell sets multiple choice questions with only two options? Rerun the numbers with five options and report back. You'll find the guesser is far more severely punished.
Besides pass rates as indication of the difficulty of exams is a myth. Set any exam with even the slightest differentiation, and you can have whatever pass rate you like. You just pick your passing grade appropriately.
Parliaments for Wales and Scotland? Not a Tory policy. Done
Reduction in child poverty? Not a Tory priority, and not a Tory manifesto promise. Done.
Reduced class sizes for KS 1 and 2? Done (see http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nscl.asp?ID=6065
Free education for all under fives? Done
Do you want me to go on
Now you might argue that they were all bad things... and I've no interested in arguing with you. But that they've been done is uncontrovertible.
It was abandonment of collective ownership, one of Labour's core principles.
That doesn't make them Tories.
These are Conservative policies?
The major Tory policy stolen was that indirect taxes get noticed a lot less than direct taxes, so you can pretend to be tax cutting when you aren't -- which is exactly what John Major did.
This seems like a fairly sane response. I don't think violent games (or films) *cause* violent tendencies, but I do believe they can be influential and reinforcing to those in whom those tendencies already exist, (e.g. minors). As long as this law applies only to minors, I really can't see a problem.
I imagine every slashdotter knows how isolating obsessive tendencies can become (even if its just hours spent playing Nethack online).
[I know, I've stepped over slashdot's "all censorship is unremittingly evil" axiom. Make my day, mod me to hell]
"All science is either physics or stamp collecting".
If you're going to claim a favourite quote, at least recall enough of it to get the meaning right. Rutherford believed the harder ends of Chemistry and Biology to be subsets of physics, and the rest of those disciplines to be irrelevant. Organising taxonomies, for example, would be stamp collecting.
Ah, this naive belief that markets reward technical quality. It's so quaint.