The least I can say about such an absurd statement is that it is utopian.
Developers writing code are creating intellectual property. Do you want them to stop developing?
Artists create art that is intellectual property. Do you want them to stop creating art?
Authors writing books are creating intellectual property? Do you want them to stop writing?
Don't even think about claiming that "real" creators would continue to work for free. People need and expect -- and have every right to expect -- to derive revenue from the work they do. The nature of the work is irrelevant. Someone who creates IP has just as much right to be paid as your odd example of someone driving heavy equipment -- who creates a hole in the ground. Lawyers are available to both in the case of non-payment.
This kind of unreasoning antipathy to IP smacks of someone who thinks corporate lawyers invented it 5 minutes ago simply to keep him from stealing music.
I bought a Mac several weeks ago. It came with a short period of free telephone support. I wanted more, so I bought an AppleCare package. In both cases, Apple's service is explicitly tied to the hardware I purchased: Call Apple support and the first thing they ask for is my machine's serial number. How do they get the serial number? From the store that sold you the Mac and from you, when you register online.
It is worth remembering that a lot of folks don't have much interest in all the open source/free software wrangling and use Linux because it is essentially Unix. For them, t's just a good Unix clone that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
No one has ever successfully marketed a Mac clone that would run an Apple OS and successfully defended itself against the inevitable Apple lawsuit. If you want to build a homebrew Mac in your basement, they don't care. If you put it in a pretty box and start selling it by the thousands, they'll roll all over you.
And the lawyers will surely tell you that Apple has been successfully suing clone vendors since the Apple II days. It isn't an Apple unless it runs Apple's boot code. If you market anything that uses that code or anything derived from it, they will sue you and win.
All that modularity is there because it reduces manufacturing costs, not because someone wants to sell to the homebrew crowd. It enables the Dells of the world to build more boxes faster and cheaper. It also allows them to cut costs by purchasing generic components. I doubt there's enough money in selling parts into the home-built market to sustain any but the most specialized vendors.
That this is at all possible is due to the open architecture designed into the original PC by the IBM team in Boca Raton.
How, exactly, might "Mac lovers" have prevented Apple from defeating the clone manufacturers in court? Sales figures and market share are irrelevant if you been caught infringing trademark and copyright and violating license agreements.
The last thing Apple wants to do is encourage and enable people to "experiment" with OSX on non-Apple hardware. You've noticed, I suspect, that Apple has never marketed an x86 version of any of its operating systems That's because Apple is hardware company, not a software vendor. Sure, they write their own OS, but it is precisely the tight integration of that proprietary OS with proprietary hardware that maintains the "uniquesness" of the Mac. Whether or not that uniqueness is worth the price is a matter of opinion, but the approach does ensure that only company that builds Macs is Apple.
Nope. Not every Linux user is too cheap to buy software. Lot's of people buy the OS itself in nice little shrinkwrapped boxes. Before I got broadband access a few months ago I'd purchased box sets of, I suspect, every RedHat version since 5.2, a number of SuSe versions, ditto Slack and Mandrake. I've also purchased a few commercial Linux apps, all of which fell into an immediate state of disuse -- they weren't good enough.
The problem with selling software into the Linux market, expecially desktop software, is the same problem that has afflicted the Unix market for more than a quarter of a century: There is no market. I.e., a typical Unix/Linux installation already has just about everything that a savvy Unix/Linux user wants in the way of software. Remember, this is the crowd that considers the editor space fully occupied by vi and emacs, and defines word processing as post-processing the code you added to your ASCII text.
If a company conjures up an honestly innovative idea for a piece of desktop software -- not a port, not an office suite -- that is worth taking the risk of paying people to develop it, they'd be foolish not to go after the largest market.
Apple supposedly has about 5 percent of the market. Microsoft has already ported Office. Adobe and a very small number of competitors have the graphics design business wrapped up. Macromedia sells into the same market slice. Other than games, there is no market for software used in the home. Realistically, what's left that could be profitable?
If It Looks, Smells and Walks Like Journalism....
on
ChronoSpace
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot may be CmdrTaco's own little playhouse, but if it's gonna run reviews, interviews, news, and the occassional feature, it's engaging in the practice of journalism.
Pretending that it's just a big talkfest for geeks is a copout. That doesn't absolve the "staff" from their responsibility to be accurate and professional. Nor do claims in the FAQ that Slashdot doesn't verify or check anything -- leaving that to the (anonymous or disguised) readership -- can't negate the fact that much of what's going on here is, in fact,journalism. Sloppy, biased, unbalanced and amateur-hour journalism, but still journalism.
The plot, after all, is simply the behavior of the characters. If the characters are believable, well-formed, and evoke enough of the reader's or viewer's interest and emotions, then the author doesn't need to rely on plot pyrotechnics to sustain interest. The characters become real, and we want to see what happens to them
Star Trek appeals to many, myself included, because it postulates that the future of humanity is positive, and that the future will play out on a grand scale. Star Trek tells out that we are not tethered to our planet, that we can resolve the problems we've created on Earth and find our true destiny among the stars.
This should give the writers, et al, a field of equal scope and scale. They have been offered the opportunity to create science fiction on a grand scale. Sadly, they usually just create reruns.
Your insight that Star Trek is a compilation of short stories is telling.
B5's great advantage was its use of a single story arc that played out over the course of several seasons. Within that arc were, of course, sub-arcs and standalone epsiodes, but the context of the show was established by that one large arc. This single fact gave the writers (more properly, the writer) great scope for plot and character development.
A novel, in other words.
Star Trek has never given itself that much freedom. Even Voyager, which launched as if it had an interesting long-range story to work with, found itself bogged down with the holodeck and villian-of-the-week. The conclusion of the series especially demonstrated the writers lack of vision and imagination.
Don't fret, you're normal. Reading book-length material online is a real pain (literally).
The "this book isn't necessary" chatter appears everytime/. runs a book review. (Why even ask if a book is "necessary"? That's not germane. A book is here because an author wanted to write it and a publisher bought it.) Some posters seem to take a book's existence as an affront to their personal image of the Universe. The rest can't seem to tell the difference between a reference book and something that might actually teach them something.
Re:PHP reference
on
Programming PHP
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Bookstores are floating in computer books and many of them are little more than repackaged manuals. The authors add little, if anything, to these books. But, if an author brings experience, perspective, insight and skill to a book, then you'll learn something that's not available elsewhere. If you confine your reading to readme files and syntax manuals, you're limiting yourself.
Browser users don't know or have a reason to know about standards. Like the people paying to have the site built, they "just want it to work". Don't count on their help.
If it revolves around something, regardless of size, it's a satellite of whatever it revolves around. The planets are satellites of the sun; the moon is a satellite of the Earth. Use of the word "moon" to refer to a "satellite" of a body other than Earth is common usage.
Charon is a satellite of Pluto. Perhaps you're thinking of recent evidence that both Pluto and Charon were not formed by the proceses that formed the other planets, but are, instead, Kuiper Belt objects. The Kuiper Belt is a region of the Solar System beyond the orbit of Pluto that is believed to be the source many comets and other objects.
I'm more likely to vote for someone like Ron Dellums than George Bush, and tend to agree with your overall argument (altho I'm not upset that non-citizens resident in the U.S. who engage in espionage or plot acts of terror are denied our Constitutional protections.) And I made no argument to trade safety for freedom. But most of the posts here on this, and many other political or social issues, strike me as coming from deeply inexperienced, ill-educated and, seemingly, deliberately ignorant indviduals who see the world in black and white. Bravery is a good and necessary thing, but these people are saying that their alleged bravery can substitute for security. It can't. When a plane crashes into a building, the brave die along with the cowards.
Slashdot Mirror
The least I can say about such an absurd statement is that it is utopian.
Developers writing code are creating intellectual property. Do you want them to stop developing?
Artists create art that is intellectual property. Do you want them to stop creating art?
Authors writing books are creating intellectual property? Do you want them to stop writing?
Don't even think about claiming that "real" creators would continue to work for free. People need and expect -- and have every right to expect -- to derive revenue from the work they do. The nature of the work is irrelevant. Someone who creates IP has just as much right to be paid as your odd example of someone driving heavy equipment -- who creates a hole in the ground. Lawyers are available to both in the case of non-payment.
This kind of unreasoning antipathy to IP smacks of someone who thinks corporate lawyers invented it 5 minutes ago simply to keep him from stealing music.
Anyone have an idea what Richards is worth today? In 1998, he was reportedly worth 105 million pounds.
I bought a Mac several weeks ago. It came with a short period of free telephone support. I wanted more, so I bought an AppleCare package. In both cases, Apple's service is explicitly tied to the hardware I purchased: Call Apple support and the first thing they ask for is my machine's serial number. How do they get the serial number? From the store that sold you the Mac and from you, when you register online.
No serial number, no support.
The folks posting here asking about the commercial possibilities.
Step One: Buy 3 Used Buicks ....
It is worth remembering that a lot of folks don't have much interest in all the open source/free software wrangling and use Linux because it is essentially Unix. For them, t's just a good Unix clone that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
>> Beta refers to the VCR, not the "testing"...
Oh, that. Oops.
No one has ever successfully marketed a Mac clone that would run an Apple OS and successfully defended itself against the inevitable Apple lawsuit. If you want to build a homebrew Mac in your basement, they don't care. If you put it in a pretty box and start selling it by the thousands, they'll roll all over you.
And the lawyers will surely tell you that Apple has been successfully suing clone vendors since the Apple II days. It isn't an Apple unless it runs Apple's boot code. If you market anything that uses that code or anything derived from it, they will sue you and win.
All that modularity is there because it reduces manufacturing costs, not because someone wants to sell to the homebrew crowd. It enables the Dells of the world to build more boxes faster and cheaper. It also allows them to cut costs by purchasing generic components. I doubt there's enough money in selling parts into the home-built market to sustain any but the most specialized vendors.
That this is at all possible is due to the open architecture designed into the original PC by the IBM team in Boca Raton.
How, exactly, might "Mac lovers" have prevented Apple from defeating the clone manufacturers in court? Sales figures and market share are irrelevant if you been caught infringing trademark and copyright and violating license agreements.
Interesting use of the word "beta", too.
The last thing Apple wants to do is encourage and enable people to "experiment" with OSX on non-Apple hardware. You've noticed, I suspect, that Apple has never marketed an x86 version of any of its operating systems That's because Apple is hardware company, not a software vendor. Sure, they write their own OS, but it is precisely the tight integration of that proprietary OS with proprietary hardware that maintains the "uniquesness" of the Mac. Whether or not that uniqueness is worth the price is a matter of opinion, but the approach does ensure that only company that builds Macs is Apple.
Nope. Not every Linux user is too cheap to buy software. Lot's of people buy the OS itself in nice little shrinkwrapped boxes. Before I got broadband access a few months ago I'd purchased box sets of, I suspect, every RedHat version since 5.2, a number of SuSe versions, ditto Slack and Mandrake. I've also purchased a few commercial Linux apps, all of which fell into an immediate state of disuse -- they weren't good enough.
The problem with selling software into the Linux market, expecially desktop software, is the same problem that has afflicted the Unix market for more than a quarter of a century: There is no market. I.e., a typical Unix/Linux installation already has just about everything that a savvy Unix/Linux user wants in the way of software. Remember, this is the crowd that considers the editor space fully occupied by vi and emacs, and defines word processing as post-processing the code you added to your ASCII text.
If a company conjures up an honestly innovative idea for a piece of desktop software -- not a port, not an office suite -- that is worth taking the risk of paying people to develop it, they'd be foolish not to go after the largest market.
Apple supposedly has about 5 percent of the market. Microsoft has already ported Office. Adobe and a very small number of competitors have the graphics design business wrapped up. Macromedia sells into the same market slice. Other than games, there is no market for software used in the home. Realistically, what's left that could be profitable?
Slashdot may be CmdrTaco's own little playhouse, but if it's gonna run reviews, interviews, news, and the occassional feature, it's engaging in the practice of journalism.
,journalism. Sloppy, biased, unbalanced and amateur-hour journalism, but still journalism.
Pretending that it's just a big talkfest for geeks is a copout. That doesn't absolve the "staff" from their responsibility to be accurate and professional. Nor do claims in the FAQ that Slashdot doesn't verify or check anything -- leaving that to the (anonymous or disguised) readership -- can't negate the fact that much of what's going on here is, in fact
...still waiting.
The plot, after all, is simply the behavior of the characters. If the characters are believable, well-formed, and evoke enough of the reader's or viewer's interest and emotions, then the author doesn't need to rely on plot pyrotechnics to sustain interest. The characters become real, and we want to see what happens to them
A prime Star Trek example is Spock.
Star Trek appeals to many, myself included, because it postulates that the future of humanity is positive, and that the future will play out on a grand scale. Star Trek tells out that we are not tethered to our planet, that we can resolve the problems we've created on Earth and find our true destiny among the stars.
This should give the writers, et al, a field of equal scope and scale. They have been offered the opportunity to create science fiction on a grand scale. Sadly, they usually just create reruns.
That's the one. SciFi Channel reran it last night. I read a book.
Your insight that Star Trek is a compilation of short stories is telling.
B5's great advantage was its use of a single story arc that played out over the course of several seasons. Within that arc were, of course, sub-arcs and standalone epsiodes, but the context of the show was established by that one large arc. This single fact gave the writers (more properly, the writer) great scope for plot and character development.
A novel, in other words.
Star Trek has never given itself that much freedom. Even Voyager, which launched as if it had an interesting long-range story to work with, found itself bogged down with the holodeck and villian-of-the-week. The conclusion of the series especially demonstrated the writers lack of vision and imagination.
Yep. It's called "writing".
Don't fret, you're normal. Reading book-length material online is a real pain (literally).
/. runs a book review. (Why even ask if a book is "necessary"? That's not germane. A book is here because an author wanted to write it and a publisher bought it.) Some posters seem to take a book's existence as an affront to their personal image of the Universe. The rest can't seem to tell the difference between a reference book and something that might actually teach them something.
The "this book isn't necessary" chatter appears everytime
Bookstores are floating in computer books and many of them are little more than repackaged manuals. The authors add little, if anything, to these books. But, if an author brings experience, perspective, insight and skill to a book, then you'll learn something that's not available elsewhere. If you confine your reading to readme files and syntax manuals, you're limiting yourself.
Browser users don't know or have a reason to know about standards. Like the people paying to have the site built, they "just want it to work". Don't count on their help.
If it revolves around something, regardless of size, it's a satellite of whatever it revolves around. The planets are satellites of the sun; the moon is a satellite of the Earth. Use of the word "moon" to refer to a "satellite" of a body other than Earth is common usage.
Charon is a satellite of Pluto. Perhaps you're thinking of recent evidence that both Pluto and Charon were not formed by the proceses that formed the other planets, but are, instead, Kuiper Belt objects. The Kuiper Belt is a region of the Solar System beyond the orbit of Pluto that is believed to be the source many comets and other objects.
I'm more likely to vote for someone like Ron Dellums than George Bush, and tend to agree with your overall argument (altho I'm not upset that non-citizens resident in the U.S. who engage in espionage or plot acts of terror are denied our Constitutional protections.) And I made no argument to trade safety for freedom. But most of the posts here on this, and many other political or social issues, strike me as coming from deeply inexperienced, ill-educated and, seemingly, deliberately ignorant indviduals who see the world in black and white. Bravery is a good and necessary thing, but these people are saying that their alleged bravery can substitute for security. It can't. When a plane crashes into a building, the brave die along with the cowards.
It all reeks of testosterone and alcohol.