(voluntary disclosure: I am a practicing Catholic in full communion with the see of Peter, and a Canadian citizen)
I've actually thought about this a bit myself - partly about the Scientology problem, partly about the fact that copyright law makes it essentially impossible to post complete, up-to-date copies of Catholic liturgical texts and such online. I would be inclined to suggest the following:
Any "official" sacred writing or liturgical text of any religious group, or any translation thereof, is automatically in the public domain. (From a Catholic context, this would include Scripture itself, the contexts of the "official" liturgical books - the Missal, the Breviary, the Ritual, etc. - and other similar materials published by the Church herself, possibly including the Catechism of the Catholic Church. For other religious entities, I don't know enough about the details to comment in an informed manner.)
Now, this would in many ways solve the whole Scientology problem. If they are a religious group, then all these texts they're trying to protect would be public-domain, and so they couldn't suppress public dissemination and discussion of them using copyright law. If they insist on protecting these texts under copyright, then they're no longer a religious entity, but a business, and that opens them up to government legislation.
"And how long would Microsoft support Office on OS X once they realised it was used to switch people from Windows to *X for good?" quoth an anonymous coward.
This is a very good point indeed, and becomes even better when you consider the following: Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac does not support most of the new XML-based "secure" document formats that were introduced in Office 2003 for Windows. The only one it supports is the new XML-based Excel spreadsheet format.
I'm not sure to what extent these new formats have gained acceptance among actual users of Office 2003, but if they do gain significant traction, then all Microsoft needs to do is refuse to add support for them to Office for Mac OS X and Apple is in serious trouble.
I'm inclined to agree with you: software patents, at least in the form in which they currently exist, are extremely problematic to say the least.
But consider: software patents exist, and they have considerable power to stifle innovation. This is not something that we can wish away. What Novell is doing is trying to limit the damage that they can do to F/OSS projects, because of how dependent Novell's future is on such projects.
If software patents didn't exist, such measures wouldn't be necessary. If people like you succeed at making them cease to exist, then they will cease to be necessary. But for now, they are necessary, and so the fact that Novell is willing to put their weight behind some of the major F/OSS projects is a good thing.
I'm sure that this possibility has been raised ad infinitum on other stories, but I raise it again:
1. How much is the Apple Corps worth? Is it publicly-traded? 2. How much does Apple Computer have on hand that they could use in a corporate acquisition?
If I were in Steve's turtleneck, I would be looking into the possibility of buying out the Apple Corps entirely. If Apple really wanted to change the way things worked in the music industry, what better way than by having their own record label?
If this is indeed the case (I haven't read the book), then it reminds me a good deal of Orwell's famous Nineteen Eighty-Four. At the end, the protagonist is seen as being totally brainwashed into believing everything Big Brother tries to tell him. I am convinced that Orwell did this for a reason. Once things in a society get that bad, it is difficult to impossible for things ever to change, because people don't know that there is anything better - they don't even have the ability to imagine anything better! By the time we see the formation of a society like the one Orwell described, it could well be too late. The only time to stop it is before it starts.
The same could be said here. By having it end on such a depressing note, it reminds us that, once done, something like this is hard to undo. The only way to stop it is to prevent it from starting.
Actually, it's not the first time this has happened, though it is the first time that Apple has gone public about it.
During the summer of 2003, Apple had planned to release the second revision of the aluminum PowerBook G4s. However, the release was delayed until September - but in the meantime, all of the stock of the older models, and especially of the 12-inchers, had run out. For about two months, it was basically impossible to get a 12" PowerBook, and the other form factors were little better.
If a (day/week/whatever) has passed since the last check while the user is logged in, the computer runs a check right away.
But also, when the user logs in (incl. after a restart), and it's been more than a (day/week/whatever) since the last check, the computer checks once it's finished logging in.
Actually, it's only in the US that "aspirin" is a generic term. In many other countries in the world (including Canada), "Aspirin" is still a registered trademark of Bayer. Of course, Bayer's patents have long since expired, and so anyone can manufacture and sell acetylsalicylic acid, but they can't call it "aspirin."
Except that people who have had and used notebook computers for longer than he has might have an idea of the sorts of things that would be exceedingly useful and yet wouldn't be immediately obvious to someone who hadn't had one before. And since there are people a-plenty like that on Slashdot, it makes sense to ask.
What he ends up actually getting is still very much up to him.
I'd get an extra AC adapter - not as a spare, but so that you can have one live at your desk and one live in your notebook case. It makes it a lot quicker to just grab the computer and go.
Also, for the love of everything sacred, get a security cable!!!!!!
Actually, batteries are explicitly not covered under AppleCare - which makes sense when you think about it, as batteries are the one part that one would expect to have a limited life. (Of course, if your battery dies a month after you get the computer or something, Apple will replace it for you, as that battery is clearly defective.)
Next time, please read the whole thing before jumping to conclusions.
You might be trying to play an AAC file that was not created using iTunes or downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. Songs you download from the iTunes Music Store or import into your library using the AAC encoder are encoded using the
MPEG-4 AAC format, and will play in iTunes and on your iPod. Older AAC files that you find on the Internet or elsewhere won't play in iTunes. (emphasis mine)
In other words, AAC support in QuickTime is part of their support for the MPEG-4 standard. An MPEG-4 audio file encoded using AAC should work, regardless of who encoded it. But older MPEG-2 AAC files won't. (Does this have anything to do with the steep licensing fees for MPEG-2?)
True - except for the fact that Apple has committed to releasing a Windows client for this by the end of the year. If they succeed in this, then this service will be accessible to Windows users as well - the market becomes gargantuan.
I wonder if that's why they're not doing this service internationally yet. IIRC, most CDs are more expensive in the US than in Canada, because of the exchange rate. So maybe they're trying to figure out a way around this, and a way to offer this in currencies other than US dollars.
When I had cable internet installed in my room in res this year, the installer came and did the hookup of the actual cable modem, and then handed me a TOS agreement for me to sign.
"OK, just let me read through it and then I'll sign."
"No, you have to sign it now. You can read it later."
"No, I'm going to sign it after I've read it."
"I don't have time to wait for you to read it. Just sign it now!"
"Like hell I'm going to sign a legal agreement that I haven't even read!"
At this point, the installer stormed off in a huff, muttering insults to me as he went down the hall. He never did come back to collect the agreement from me. For a second I was worried that he was just going to pack up and leave instead of hooking me up...
Hold on a second... doesn't the doctrine of first sale make those sorts of restrictions from publishers illegal? As in, once you've bought it, if you want to ship it to your friend Down Under, the man can't do anything to stop you?
Or is first sale seriously so dead that even for books and stuff, where there is no "region encoding," you still can't export the stuff?!
Except that, under your law, isn't it illegal for that to happen? If two parties collude to bring forward a civil suit in order to set legal precedent, isn't it considered contempt of court or something?
Oh, right. I forgot. The law doesn't matter anymore - it's whoever has the most money to throw at the system. Silly me.
The really frustrating part of this whole mess is that IBM has been able to get G4s up to some mightily impressive clock speeds - not as high as the P4, perhaps, but certainly higher than any of Motorola's G4s - but they're not allowed to sell them. Why? Because Motorola doesn't want IBM selling G4s faster than it can make them, because that would make Motorola look bad. And since Motorola owns the Altivec routines, IBM has no recourse. And so, now Apple is caught in the middle of this mess, stuck with slow G4s!
But Motorola has been having problems of late, and may be willing to sell off parts of the semiconductor division... if Apple could buy the code for the Altivec routines from Motorola, and then licence that code to IBM, but without the restrictions on processor speed... I wonder how fast IBM could get the G4 running then...:)
Visual effects: There were several places in STII where the visual effects were done very cheaply and very badly. Most notable was the blatant re-use of spacecraft shots from Star Trek I - I mean, not only is a not-under-repair Enterprise in the 'Fleet Yards instead of at Spacedock, but the travel pod was supposed to dock at the torpedo bay, not the cargo/shuttlebay! I would honestly prefer to see these shots redone.
Dropped scenes: There were several scenes dropped in the theatrical release (but, oddly enough, returned to the film for the small screen) which actually help to move forward the plot. For example, Scotty's grief over Cadet Preston's death only fully makes sense after the revelation earlier in Engineering explaining that Scotty's his uncle. Maybe parts of those scenes should be restored to the movie; I don't know.
I have no clue what was done with the Director's Release - I haven't seen it yet - but these are the problems I had noticed with the original.
I have a couple beefs with the original version of Office X. Does anyone know if they've been fixed in SR1?
1. Text entry in Word doesn't support the normal Mac OS X way of entering characters in other character sets. (This may be tied to the fact that the Mac and Windows versions use a common file format; I don't know. That still doesn't make it good behaviour.)
2. The interface for text entry, etc. follows the Windows conventions, not the Mac OS ones. What I mean by this is such things as how the keys behave when you're scrolling through text on the keyboard, and what happens when you click the mouse below the last line of text - small annoyances, but frustrating to a long-time Mac user. (Whether the Mac conventions are better or not isn't so much the issue; the issue is that, if you're going to develop a Mac OS X app, follow the Mac OS X interface conventions, not the Windows ones!)
Slashdot Mirror
(voluntary disclosure: I am a practicing Catholic in full communion with the see of Peter, and a Canadian citizen)
I've actually thought about this a bit myself - partly about the Scientology problem, partly about the fact that copyright law makes it essentially impossible to post complete, up-to-date copies of Catholic liturgical texts and such online. I would be inclined to suggest the following:
Any "official" sacred writing or liturgical text of any religious group, or any translation thereof, is automatically in the public domain.
(From a Catholic context, this would include Scripture itself, the contexts of the "official" liturgical books - the Missal, the Breviary, the Ritual, etc. - and other similar materials published by the Church herself, possibly including the Catechism of the Catholic Church. For other religious entities, I don't know enough about the details to comment in an informed manner.)
Now, this would in many ways solve the whole Scientology problem. If they are a religious group, then all these texts they're trying to protect would be public-domain, and so they couldn't suppress public dissemination and discussion of them using copyright law. If they insist on protecting these texts under copyright, then they're no longer a religious entity, but a business, and that opens them up to government legislation.
Who said anything about anti-gravity porn? If there's any zero-gee fun to be had, I'm going to be the one having it, not the one watching!
"And how long would Microsoft support Office on OS X once they realised it was used to switch people from Windows to *X for good?" quoth an anonymous coward.
This is a very good point indeed, and becomes even better when you consider the following:
Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac does not support most of the new XML-based "secure" document formats that were introduced in Office 2003 for Windows. The only one it supports is the new XML-based Excel spreadsheet format.
I'm not sure to what extent these new formats have gained acceptance among actual users of Office 2003, but if they do gain significant traction, then all Microsoft needs to do is refuse to add support for them to Office for Mac OS X and Apple is in serious trouble.
I'm inclined to agree with you: software patents, at least in the form in which they currently exist, are extremely problematic to say the least.
But consider: software patents exist, and they have considerable power to stifle innovation. This is not something that we can wish away. What Novell is doing is trying to limit the damage that they can do to F/OSS projects, because of how dependent Novell's future is on such projects.
If software patents didn't exist, such measures wouldn't be necessary. If people like you succeed at making them cease to exist, then they will cease to be necessary. But for now, they are necessary, and so the fact that Novell is willing to put their weight behind some of the major F/OSS projects is a good thing.
I'm sure that this possibility has been raised ad infinitum on other stories, but I raise it again:
1. How much is the Apple Corps worth? Is it publicly-traded?
2. How much does Apple Computer have on hand that they could use in a corporate acquisition?
If I were in Steve's turtleneck, I would be looking into the possibility of buying out the Apple Corps entirely. If Apple really wanted to change the way things worked in the music industry, what better way than by having their own record label?
If this is indeed the case (I haven't read the book), then it reminds me a good deal of Orwell's famous Nineteen Eighty-Four. At the end, the protagonist is seen as being totally brainwashed into believing everything Big Brother tries to tell him. I am convinced that Orwell did this for a reason. Once things in a society get that bad, it is difficult to impossible for things ever to change, because people don't know that there is anything better - they don't even have the ability to imagine anything better! By the time we see the formation of a society like the one Orwell described, it could well be too late. The only time to stop it is before it starts.
The same could be said here. By having it end on such a depressing note, it reminds us that, once done, something like this is hard to undo. The only way to stop it is to prevent it from starting.
Look, it's people like you what cause unrest.
The television detector van from the Ministry of Housinge. (It was spelled like that on the van. I'm very observant.)
Actually, it's not the first time this has happened, though it is the first time that Apple has gone public about it.
During the summer of 2003, Apple had planned to release the second revision of the aluminum PowerBook G4s. However, the release was delayed until September - but in the meantime, all of the stock of the older models, and especially of the 12-inchers, had run out. For about two months, it was basically impossible to get a 12" PowerBook, and the other form factors were little better.
I believe the way it works is:
If a (day/week/whatever) has passed since the last check while the user is logged in, the computer runs a check right away.
But also, when the user logs in (incl. after a restart), and it's been more than a (day/week/whatever) since the last check, the computer checks once it's finished logging in.
Actually, it's only in the US that "aspirin" is a generic term. In many other countries in the world (including Canada), "Aspirin" is still a registered trademark of Bayer. Of course, Bayer's patents have long since expired, and so anyone can manufacture and sell acetylsalicylic acid, but they can't call it "aspirin."
Except that people who have had and used notebook computers for longer than he has might have an idea of the sorts of things that would be exceedingly useful and yet wouldn't be immediately obvious to someone who hadn't had one before. And since there are people a-plenty like that on Slashdot, it makes sense to ask.
What he ends up actually getting is still very much up to him.
I'd get an extra AC adapter - not as a spare, but so that you can have one live at your desk and one live in your notebook case. It makes it a lot quicker to just grab the computer and go.
Also, for the love of everything sacred, get a security cable!!!!!!
Actually, batteries are explicitly not covered under AppleCare - which makes sense when you think about it, as batteries are the one part that one would expect to have a limited life. (Of course, if your battery dies a month after you get the computer or something, Apple will replace it for you, as that battery is clearly defective.)
In other words, AAC support in QuickTime is part of their support for the MPEG-4 standard. An MPEG-4 audio file encoded using AAC should work, regardless of who encoded it. But older MPEG-2 AAC files won't. (Does this have anything to do with the steep licensing fees for MPEG-2?)
True - except for the fact that Apple has committed to releasing a Windows client for this by the end of the year. If they succeed in this, then this service will be accessible to Windows users as well - the market becomes gargantuan.
IIRC, it's based on the billing address of your credit card.
I wonder if that's why they're not doing this service internationally yet. IIRC, most CDs are more expensive in the US than in Canada, because of the exchange rate. So maybe they're trying to figure out a way around this, and a way to offer this in currencies other than US dollars.
Will artists be able to place their music on the iTunes Music Store on their own, independently of a recording company?
If so, then this could be absolutely huge for independent artists. :)
When I had cable internet installed in my room in res this year, the installer came and did the hookup of the actual cable modem, and then handed me a TOS agreement for me to sign.
"OK, just let me read through it and then I'll sign."
"No, you have to sign it now. You can read it later."
"No, I'm going to sign it after I've read it."
"I don't have time to wait for you to read it. Just sign it now!"
"Like hell I'm going to sign a legal agreement that I haven't even read!"
At this point, the installer stormed off in a huff, muttering insults to me as he went down the hall. He never did come back to collect the agreement from me. For a second I was worried that he was just going to pack up and leave instead of hooking me up...
Hold on a second... doesn't the doctrine of first sale make those sorts of restrictions from publishers illegal? As in, once you've bought it, if you want to ship it to your friend Down Under, the man can't do anything to stop you?
Or is first sale seriously so dead that even for books and stuff, where there is no "region encoding," you still can't export the stuff?!
Except that, under your law, isn't it illegal for that to happen? If two parties collude to bring forward a civil suit in order to set legal precedent, isn't it considered contempt of court or something?
Oh, right. I forgot. The law doesn't matter anymore - it's whoever has the most money to throw at the system. Silly me.
The really frustrating part of this whole mess is that IBM has been able to get G4s up to some mightily impressive clock speeds - not as high as the P4, perhaps, but certainly higher than any of Motorola's G4s - but they're not allowed to sell them. Why? Because Motorola doesn't want IBM selling G4s faster than it can make them, because that would make Motorola look bad. And since Motorola owns the Altivec routines, IBM has no recourse. And so, now Apple is caught in the middle of this mess, stuck with slow G4s!
:)
But Motorola has been having problems of late, and may be willing to sell off parts of the semiconductor division... if Apple could buy the code for the Altivec routines from Motorola, and then licence that code to IBM, but without the restrictions on processor speed... I wonder how fast IBM could get the G4 running then...
I would honestly prefer to see these shots redone.
I have no clue what was done with the Director's Release - I haven't seen it yet - but these are the problems I had noticed with the original.
Oh, nice! Up until now, I haven't been able to recommend OS X for anyone with (say) a Lombard or beige G3, but now... it's at least a viable option.
I have a couple beefs with the original version of Office X. Does anyone know if they've been fixed in SR1?
1. Text entry in Word doesn't support the normal Mac OS X way of entering characters in other character sets. (This may be tied to the fact that the Mac and Windows versions use a common file format; I don't know. That still doesn't make it good behaviour.)
2. The interface for text entry, etc. follows the Windows conventions, not the Mac OS ones. What I mean by this is such things as how the keys behave when you're scrolling through text on the keyboard, and what happens when you click the mouse below the last line of text - small annoyances, but frustrating to a long-time Mac user. (Whether the Mac conventions are better or not isn't so much the issue; the issue is that, if you're going to develop a Mac OS X app, follow the Mac OS X interface conventions, not the Windows ones!)