Actually I don't pirate, and never really have. For a start, I like owning boxed copies of music / films, and wouldn't trade that for anything. Even with the aforementioned Radiohead album, I waited for the boxed copy. I don't tend to use Steam for the same reason.
The only exceptions I tend to make are for games with performance-inhibiting DRM (which is usually missing from the pirated copies), and the odd B-side / special edition track that I can't realistically get hold of in physical form.
Sorry to ruin your assumption that all people who oppose aggressive copyright and endorse industry modernisation are freeloading cheapskates. Sometimes an industry just needs to accept that things are changing, and attempt to change along with them.
We've already established that theres no technological way to effectively stop piracy, and RIAA "sue everybody" tactics don't appear to be making a dent. If people are confronted with a choice free media or media with a bloated price, it's obvious whats going to happen.
The easiest way to cut price is to cut fat. With the modern age of digital distribution and the huge shift in the way publicity works, the obvious target is to slice away the middlemen that are no-longer necessary. As the RIAA prove, these middlemen wont go down without a fight...
I've not found that to be true myself. I've used three generations of Motorola phone, a COWON audio player, and a couple of other odd devices with the USB>mini-USB cable that came with my first Motorola phone, and nothings exploded on me yet.
For mains adapters, always cast your eye of it's specs to make sure they match, but I wouldn't have thought this would have been a big problem with USB, being a standardized connector.
And just what proportion of a sale actually goes to the author, anyway? How much goes to the middlemen?
Traditionally, this is how it happens. Some people get together, and they make some music (or whatever). They are "discovered" by a distributor/publisher, who offers to sell their music for them. The distributor pays them X amount of money (sometimes a cut of the profit, often just a lump sum). They then market, manufacture, and sell the music using their business know-how, and make lots of money.
That makes perfect sense for selling tapes/CDs/vinyl from a high-street shop. The problem is, it doesn't make perfect sense in the internet age. These days, the best publicity is that which money can't buy- endorsement from the blogosphere, a popular My Space page or a YouTube hit. Manufacturing isn't really necessary, and nor are retailers- distributing music is now as simple as having a server and a (sturdy) internet connection (and with torrents, you don't even need a lot of bandwidth or a hardcore server).
There's a lot of room for the business model to change entirely. A lot of bands could probably carve out a good living out of donations alone, if their content was free. Publicity leads to high-profile live performances too- and you can charge what you want for that. And the appeal of purchasing a boxed copy is still strong- with sufficiently reduced numbers and internet-based shopping, this could be handled without involving huge corporate giants.
Case and point- Radiohead released their last album on the internet, with a "choose your own price" facility, allowing people to pay nothing if they wished. Radiohead made more money out of this album than they have out of any of their other 6 albums. Even when you take account of their big name and popularity, that still shows theres a pretty penny to be made outside of the traditional industry tactics.
Same can be said of Stardock's DRM free games too, and literary authors have survived alongside the concept of "libraries" for as long as anyone can remember. But lets not go into that.
Your viewpoint is restricted to one geographic region. Here in Ireland, for ordinary houses slate is traditionally used (although nowadays it isn't "real" slate but rather some composite material) or else terracotta.
I think you misread GP- thats what he was saying.
The "roof" he was talking about was presumably the actual structure that forms the top of your house- almost always wooden beams and paneling.
The shingles are the bits of terracotta, slate or whatever that cover the roof, making it waterproof.
Its all pedantics though. Figuring out which bit of a roof is the "true" roof seems like debate I don't want to be a part of.
Well that'd be it. I'm in the UK, and here, willingly giving out your credit card details to a third party counts as giving your consent. If you can be said to be doing your best at keeping your details private (pretty much just using it normally and not giving it away), then you're not liable for any damages if some no-goodnik commits fraud.
If you tell someone your credit card details so that they can make a transaction, and then they make a transaction you're not entirely happy with, it's the legal equivalent of all bets are off.
I work for a major financial company, and our policy is: you give out your card details, your problem. Its the monetary equivalent of getting robbed by leaving your front door open when you go on holiday- your insurance company just plain doesn't won; to know.
Apple contributes a ton to real world open source projects. How is that not R? WHat about GCC, or Squirrelfish, or ZeroConf, or launchd or Apache or Webkit or...
You get the picture.
Well actually you don't, but I'll bet you had fun spewing venom at your favorite company.
Just because it's not done by a bunch of guys who never see the real world and never produce real products, does not mean it's not R. R can actually lead to practical things too.
Generally, you distinguish between "research" and "development". Development is where you take an existing technology and pour resources into improving it, progressing it and generally making it better. Research is where you come up with something new, and try to get it to something vaguely workable.
Apple contributing to Apache is development, not research. They've taken an existing project, with established technologies, and are working to make it better. Its good. Its hugely useful. Its great for the technological world. But that doesn't necessarily make it research.
What MS R&D does is fund research into whole new and uncharted technologies. This is good too. The problem the investors have is that MS are monumentally awful at taking new research and inventions and actually turning them into profit. When you're laying off 100's of developers and engineers from profitable departments as a cost cutting measure, its pretty obvious that R&D is going to be in the firing line too.
Well its not rally a monorail, since it doesn't involve any rails (not even the one). The vehicles have rubber wheels like normal cars, and the "track" is just a piece of concrete with any electrical paraphernalia that might be needed to feed the vehicle.
Thats actually a pretty big advantage. Its really really difficult to build switches for monorails, meaning they're mostly limited to just a single simple circuit. Switching on trains is obviously plenty doable, but its complicated and expensive. Having "tracked" vehicles working on normal rubber wheels means you can do away with rail switching altogether, which is exactly what makes it possible to have 100's of little vehicles using the the same track at the same time, heading in different directions.
Does this apply to Apple bundling Safari with Mac and iPhone, too?
I mean I'm all for kicking MS while they're down as much as the next guy, but if the legal ruling is that bundling in-house browsers is bad practice, shouldn't that effect both big players?
I understand people getting all nervous at the thought of a traditionally iron-fisted government having control of an operating system, but I really can't see it as anything but a good thing.
Free software's best argument has always been that, while with proprietary software you're reliant on a third party for support and development, with FOSS you can always just dig in and support it yourself. If you're a government, in theory answerable only to your citizens, it makes perfect sense that you'd want your software to be under your direct control. For a government to hand control of their computer network over to foreign corporations seems like a breach of trust to the public- and thats applicable to the corporations behind Linux distros just as much as it is to Microsoft. Obama seems to be having the same idea in the US, and the debate is quietly simmering in the UK, so Russia isn't exactly alone.
Having another group pouring cash into Linux development is a good thing for FOSS, and having a dedicated localized OS for Cyrillic seems good for average folks. Assuming the Russian government sticks to the GPL, all that tasty goodness can be fed back into the open-source eco-system. And assuming they stick to the GPL, they can't exactly try any funny business; open-source means nowhere to hide.
Are you sure? Have you compared a 33Mhz ARM to a 33Mhz x86 chip? Is the performance that different?
There is no way to do an apples-to-apples comparison here, because I don't think anyone makes x86 chips that are as slow as ARM chips. The instruction set doesn't have that much bearing on performance. But power use goes up according to the square of the voltage, and voltage increases when clock speed increases -- so it is all about the megahertz.
Well isn't that sort of the point?
The basic premise is that a future laptop might have two cores- one regular x86 core of a normal sort of performance handling heavy-duty processing and acting as a compatibility layer, and then a small, low-power core which can handle simpler processes, using much less power.
If there was a small, low power x86 core on the market, then maybe that'd be the one we're talking about using. But theres isn't; all the best low power processors around at the moment are ARM. Whether a modern, cutting-edge low power x86 chip would have better performance or not is pretty much beside the point.
print? very rarely - only if I need to file a record (e.g. tax). if the information isn't accessible through free text search, it might as well not exist!
I still find I have to use old-fashioned post a fair bit. If I need to send a letter, I type it and print it. That's probably pretty common, especially among older and less tech-literate users (the ones who don't know what "CUPS" is).
And thats not getting in to working at my office. I send 10's of letters a day, with all sorts of printed attachments. Receive plenty too, so there must be plenty other people/offices who rely on dead trees.
That said, I was under the impression that Ubuntu handles installing features like that on the fly without bothering the user too much, so unless you run an offline workstation it shouldn't matter too much anyway.
While I really don't see MS taking Windows open source anytime soon (read: hell freezes over), I have sometimes thought what would happen if they did.
Linux would probably be sunk for one, as hobbyists and big business alike dig in to Windows source code. Apple would be annihilated too- theres no way they could compete with free, not if they had a 90% market share to beat. Thoughts of MS ever losing their monopoly would be right out.
The world would be stuck with Microsoft domination forever. Not a happy thought.
Far and aside from the fact that community and volunteer developers wouldn't just surrender their favourite project for the sake of the Linux "brand", a bigger problem would be the corporates.
A massive part of the hard-graft development is funded/sponsored/carried out by the big corporations in the FOSS world. All big companies only ever get involved with projects where they think they can make a profit out of it. If we had a one-flavour "official" Linux, most of their business models would be gone. Without a good business model they wouldn't get involved, and that means less resources backing the Linux project as a whole.
Take Red Hat. Their core business is in selling their official boxed version of RHEL, and selling support services to the companies and regular users that adopt both RHEL and Fedora. If there was just one variety of Linux, they wouldn't have their own product to sell- the best they could do would be to sell copies of Mono Linux (which is what I'm calling it now), where they'd be competing with every other Linux vendor (including those distribution it for free). Similarly, without their flagship products, their support services suddenly have no big selling point. Red Hat contribute lots to all manner of Linux-related FOSS projects- without them, theres less money to be had.
Similar goes for Canonical- they started a brand new company so they could develop and promote a new distro, with an eye to making a profitable, sustainable business. If they weren't able to create their own distro for some reason, what incentive would they have had to get involved with Linux in the first place?
Take away the best of the corporate support, and add in the troubles you'd have getting the community to support Mono Linux, and GNU/Linux wouldn't be what it is right now. Not to say it couldn't work, just that it'd be something else entirely.
tl;dr- If you want Linux without lots of distros, try BSD.
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A non porn half? Did you forget to carry the 1?
Actually I don't pirate, and never really have. For a start, I like owning boxed copies of music / films, and wouldn't trade that for anything. Even with the aforementioned Radiohead album, I waited for the boxed copy. I don't tend to use Steam for the same reason.
The only exceptions I tend to make are for games with performance-inhibiting DRM (which is usually missing from the pirated copies), and the odd B-side / special edition track that I can't realistically get hold of in physical form.
Sorry to ruin your assumption that all people who oppose aggressive copyright and endorse industry modernisation are freeloading cheapskates. Sometimes an industry just needs to accept that things are changing, and attempt to change along with them.
We've already established that theres no technological way to effectively stop piracy, and RIAA "sue everybody" tactics don't appear to be making a dent. If people are confronted with a choice free media or media with a bloated price, it's obvious whats going to happen.
The easiest way to cut price is to cut fat. With the modern age of digital distribution and the huge shift in the way publicity works, the obvious target is to slice away the middlemen that are no-longer necessary. As the RIAA prove, these middlemen wont go down without a fight...
I've not found that to be true myself. I've used three generations of Motorola phone, a COWON audio player, and a couple of other odd devices with the USB>mini-USB cable that came with my first Motorola phone, and nothings exploded on me yet.
For mains adapters, always cast your eye of it's specs to make sure they match, but I wouldn't have thought this would have been a big problem with USB, being a standardized connector.
And just what proportion of a sale actually goes to the author, anyway? How much goes to the middlemen?
Traditionally, this is how it happens. Some people get together, and they make some music (or whatever). They are "discovered" by a distributor/publisher, who offers to sell their music for them. The distributor pays them X amount of money (sometimes a cut of the profit, often just a lump sum). They then market, manufacture, and sell the music using their business know-how, and make lots of money.
That makes perfect sense for selling tapes/CDs/vinyl from a high-street shop. The problem is, it doesn't make perfect sense in the internet age. These days, the best publicity is that which money can't buy- endorsement from the blogosphere, a popular My Space page or a YouTube hit. Manufacturing isn't really necessary, and nor are retailers- distributing music is now as simple as having a server and a (sturdy) internet connection (and with torrents, you don't even need a lot of bandwidth or a hardcore server).
There's a lot of room for the business model to change entirely. A lot of bands could probably carve out a good living out of donations alone, if their content was free. Publicity leads to high-profile live performances too- and you can charge what you want for that. And the appeal of purchasing a boxed copy is still strong- with sufficiently reduced numbers and internet-based shopping, this could be handled without involving huge corporate giants.
Case and point- Radiohead released their last album on the internet, with a "choose your own price" facility, allowing people to pay nothing if they wished. Radiohead made more money out of this album than they have out of any of their other 6 albums. Even when you take account of their big name and popularity, that still shows theres a pretty penny to be made outside of the traditional industry tactics.
Same can be said of Stardock's DRM free games too, and literary authors have survived alongside the concept of "libraries" for as long as anyone can remember. But lets not go into that.
Your viewpoint is restricted to one geographic region. Here in Ireland, for ordinary houses slate is traditionally used (although nowadays it isn't "real" slate but rather some composite material) or else terracotta.
I think you misread GP- thats what he was saying.
The "roof" he was talking about was presumably the actual structure that forms the top of your house- almost always wooden beams and paneling.
The shingles are the bits of terracotta, slate or whatever that cover the roof, making it waterproof.
Its all pedantics though. Figuring out which bit of a roof is the "true" roof seems like debate I don't want to be a part of.
Well that'd be it. I'm in the UK, and here, willingly giving out your credit card details to a third party counts as giving your consent. If you can be said to be doing your best at keeping your details private (pretty much just using it normally and not giving it away), then you're not liable for any damages if some no-goodnik commits fraud.
If you tell someone your credit card details so that they can make a transaction, and then they make a transaction you're not entirely happy with, it's the legal equivalent of all bets are off.
Not true.
I work for a major financial company, and our policy is: you give out your card details, your problem. Its the monetary equivalent of getting robbed by leaving your front door open when you go on holiday- your insurance company just plain doesn't won; to know.
Damned quote tags. You know what I mean.
Apple contributes a ton to real world open source projects. How is that not R? WHat about GCC, or Squirrelfish, or ZeroConf, or launchd or Apache or Webkit or...
You get the picture.
Well actually you don't, but I'll bet you had fun spewing venom at your favorite company.
Just because it's not done by a bunch of guys who never see the real world and never produce real products, does not mean it's not R. R can actually lead to practical things too.
Generally, you distinguish between "research" and "development". Development is where you take an existing technology and pour resources into improving it, progressing it and generally making it better. Research is where you come up with something new, and try to get it to something vaguely workable.
Apple contributing to Apache is development, not research. They've taken an existing project, with established technologies, and are working to make it better. Its good. Its hugely useful. Its great for the technological world. But that doesn't necessarily make it research.
What MS R&D does is fund research into whole new and uncharted technologies. This is good too. The problem the investors have is that MS are monumentally awful at taking new research and inventions and actually turning them into profit. When you're laying off 100's of developers and engineers from profitable departments as a cost cutting measure, its pretty obvious that R&D is going to be in the firing line too.
Well its not rally a monorail, since it doesn't involve any rails (not even the one). The vehicles have rubber wheels like normal cars, and the "track" is just a piece of concrete with any electrical paraphernalia that might be needed to feed the vehicle.
Thats actually a pretty big advantage. Its really really difficult to build switches for monorails, meaning they're mostly limited to just a single simple circuit. Switching on trains is obviously plenty doable, but its complicated and expensive. Having "tracked" vehicles working on normal rubber wheels means you can do away with rail switching altogether, which is exactly what makes it possible to have 100's of little vehicles using the the same track at the same time, heading in different directions.
You know that lead poisoning makes people go crazy, right?
That might explain an awful lot. When was Bush born again?
Does this apply to Apple bundling Safari with Mac and iPhone, too?
I mean I'm all for kicking MS while they're down as much as the next guy, but if the legal ruling is that bundling in-house browsers is bad practice, shouldn't that effect both big players?
I understand people getting all nervous at the thought of a traditionally iron-fisted government having control of an operating system, but I really can't see it as anything but a good thing.
Free software's best argument has always been that, while with proprietary software you're reliant on a third party for support and development, with FOSS you can always just dig in and support it yourself. If you're a government, in theory answerable only to your citizens, it makes perfect sense that you'd want your software to be under your direct control. For a government to hand control of their computer network over to foreign corporations seems like a breach of trust to the public- and thats applicable to the corporations behind Linux distros just as much as it is to Microsoft. Obama seems to be having the same idea in the US, and the debate is quietly simmering in the UK, so Russia isn't exactly alone.
Having another group pouring cash into Linux development is a good thing for FOSS, and having a dedicated localized OS for Cyrillic seems good for average folks. Assuming the Russian government sticks to the GPL, all that tasty goodness can be fed back into the open-source eco-system. And assuming they stick to the GPL, they can't exactly try any funny business; open-source means nowhere to hide.
Are you sure? Have you compared a 33Mhz ARM to a 33Mhz x86 chip? Is the performance that different?
There is no way to do an apples-to-apples comparison here, because I don't think anyone makes x86 chips that are as slow as ARM chips. The instruction set doesn't have that much bearing on performance. But power use goes up according to the square of the voltage, and voltage increases when clock speed increases -- so it is all about the megahertz.
Well isn't that sort of the point?
The basic premise is that a future laptop might have two cores- one regular x86 core of a normal sort of performance handling heavy-duty processing and acting as a compatibility layer, and then a small, low-power core which can handle simpler processes, using much less power.
If there was a small, low power x86 core on the market, then maybe that'd be the one we're talking about using. But theres isn't; all the best low power processors around at the moment are ARM. Whether a modern, cutting-edge low power x86 chip would have better performance or not is pretty much beside the point.
print? very rarely - only if I need to file a record (e.g. tax).
if the information isn't accessible through free text search, it might as well not exist!
I still find I have to use old-fashioned post a fair bit. If I need to send a letter, I type it and print it. That's probably pretty common, especially among older and less tech-literate users (the ones who don't know what "CUPS" is).
And thats not getting in to working at my office. I send 10's of letters a day, with all sorts of printed attachments. Receive plenty too, so there must be plenty other people/offices who rely on dead trees.
That said, I was under the impression that Ubuntu handles installing features like that on the fly without bothering the user too much, so unless you run an offline workstation it shouldn't matter too much anyway.
While I really don't see MS taking Windows open source anytime soon (read: hell freezes over), I have sometimes thought what would happen if they did.
Linux would probably be sunk for one, as hobbyists and big business alike dig in to Windows source code. Apple would be annihilated too- theres no way they could compete with free, not if they had a 90% market share to beat. Thoughts of MS ever losing their monopoly would be right out.
The world would be stuck with Microsoft domination forever. Not a happy thought.
Good job Ballmer's on our side.
Far and aside from the fact that community and volunteer developers wouldn't just surrender their favourite project for the sake of the Linux "brand", a bigger problem would be the corporates.
A massive part of the hard-graft development is funded/sponsored/carried out by the big corporations in the FOSS world. All big companies only ever get involved with projects where they think they can make a profit out of it. If we had a one-flavour "official" Linux, most of their business models would be gone. Without a good business model they wouldn't get involved, and that means less resources backing the Linux project as a whole.
Take Red Hat. Their core business is in selling their official boxed version of RHEL, and selling support services to the companies and regular users that adopt both RHEL and Fedora. If there was just one variety of Linux, they wouldn't have their own product to sell- the best they could do would be to sell copies of Mono Linux (which is what I'm calling it now), where they'd be competing with every other Linux vendor (including those distribution it for free). Similarly, without their flagship products, their support services suddenly have no big selling point. Red Hat contribute lots to all manner of Linux-related FOSS projects- without them, theres less money to be had.
Similar goes for Canonical- they started a brand new company so they could develop and promote a new distro, with an eye to making a profitable, sustainable business. If they weren't able to create their own distro for some reason, what incentive would they have had to get involved with Linux in the first place?
Take away the best of the corporate support, and add in the troubles you'd have getting the community to support Mono Linux, and GNU/Linux wouldn't be what it is right now. Not to say it couldn't work, just that it'd be something else entirely.
tl;dr- If you want Linux without lots of distros, try BSD.