Good thing that you feel qualified to advise slashdotters about Exchange when BDCs haven't been around since Windows NT4 (retired with Windows 2000) - which means that your knowledge of Exchange and Microsoft operating systems is at least a decade out of date.
Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman have already given up - they were flooded with notification spam as people added them to their circles. Neither celebrity is a net newbie, and if they couldn't be arsed with it a lot of other celebrities aren't going to be arsed with it either.
Windows Phone 7 has a higher market share than Linux does on the desktop - clearly Linux enthusiasts should just give up and install Windows or Mac OS and give up on the desktop.
Because it gets you lots of positive Karma. Slashdot is increasingly becoming more uniform in the opinions expressed in the comments as people who don't share those opinions have migrated away to other sites.
Sony taught all the console manufacturers a lesson - Never ship with the ability to run Linux - if you take it away at some point in future a small group of angry geeks will make it their life's mission to destroy your business.
You've misunderstood - when someone says "they need to find a better business model" they are usually saying "I don't have to pay for this and I don't want to pay for this but I'm happy to keep consuming it". There was a cartoon published on Salon.com a few years ago that said "Internet Thinking Applied To The Real World" - where a guy identified as a computer professional had a plumber come around and fix his sink. When the plumber asked to be paid he was told that the computer professional wasn't going to pay in cash because the plumber should really be considering a different business model, but that the programmer was happy to provide recommendations to his friends about the quality of the plumber's service and that if he wanted to make an income from plumbing, he really should be selling t-shirts as people liked paying for t-shirts, but not for plumbers.
Of course if it was Hotmail or Yahoo losing the same amount of mail, you'd be able to cut the Schadenfreude from gmail users around here with a FKN lightsaber.
I dunno what Windows Tablet you use, but the handwriting recognition on Vista and Windows 7 is awesome. My handwriting has always been bad, but for the last 4 years I've been using it on Vista and now 7 and the number of corrections I have to make is minimal. Way more reliable than Dragon for input.
The great problem that libraries have is that most of them aren't used by the people that support them. As local governments are increasingly finding, you can shut a library and other than some well written letters to the editor, most taxpayers will go along with it. Public libraries have been around for 150 years and were far more important in ages where books were a lot less accessible. Spin forward to today and the use of public libraries has been declining. Part of this is the Internet. A lot of the information you once would have once gone to the library for you can search the internet for on your mobile phone. Schools have libraries that complement their curriculum, and Universities tend to be the place where you go if you are looking for more obscure books. My high school library was superior to the civic library when it came to research for papers back then. If I couldn't find stuff in my high school library, I had to go to the University library, because civic libraries didn't carry those sorts of books.
Although it is nice to believe that the community is charitable enough to want to spend money on putting books into the hands of people that can't afford them, a lot of people aren't willing to fund public health for poorer people. If you aren't willing to fund doctors for poor kids, you probably don't give a rats about making sure they have access to books. What is comes down to is that as much as a certain segment of the community likes the IDEA of libraries, the majority of the community doesn't give a rats arse because they never use them. That makes them an easy cut when local municipalities are trying to right the balance sheets.
People would rather less services than more tax and that puts libraries, increasingly less utilized, squarely into the "this is a luxury" column.
In this case you won't have to worry in the long term, because in the long term they simply won't bother making these shows anymore because there *isn't* a way to make money that is more convenient than drm-free download torrents. It would be like selling air. No one will pay for something they get conveniently for free. Why would you pay $5 for something that you can get as a torrent at the same time?
So long run - you won't have to worry about hearing spoilers for stuff you want to watch because they will stop making the stuff we want to watch because it is so horrifically unprofitable.
Over 800 new books are published in English *each day*. Because of copyright, each has to be new and unique rather than a recapitulation. Think of what types of cynical bastards movie studios and publishers are. If they were allowed to do more derivative work, do you think that they'd keep up with the production of original work. And for every Shakespeare, there are a million monkeys typing out Harry Potter fan fiction. If Shakespeare lived today, it is not unreasonable to believe that he'd still be a successful creative even if he was blocked from derivative works.
Two examples make not a law, rule or even a generalization. I know that Lessig and Doctorow drag out Disney and Shakespeare, but it is sort of like saying that Global Warming doesn't exist because winter has been cold in parts of the northern hemisphere this year.
We currently live in an age where the greatest amount of content creation is occurring in history, yet those that would remove copyright would damn us to constant recapitulations of stuff that we've already seen. Just how many Batman movies need to come out each year? Can you imagine how many Iron Man films would have come out the year after Iron Man was successful of there weren't some rights restrictions going on? Maybe one or two of them might have been good - but really - do people lack creativity to the point where they can't develop their own ideas? Why would any producer bother with something new and unique when tried and tested rehashes of stuff done before is cheaper to produce and more likely to bring success.
I agree that we can't be sure precisely why the great flourishing of creativity has happened, but if current copyright law were truly the stone around the creative industry's neck that many seem to claim it is, it wouldn't matter how awesome the publication technology was.
As insane as the copyright limits are, given the capitalist drive for the cheapest possible solution, reducing copyright terms would mean that instead of funding new creative works because they can't use old ones, big movie studios and publishers would just endlessly republish and remix existing works. Cheaper to redo than create from new and why go with something risky when you can redo something that succeeded again and again and again...
That is one particular interpretation of the history of culture, championed primarily by a lawyer (Lessig) who is arguing for changes to copywright law. Ask other people who study such things and you will get different answers. What we do know is that in today's age of restrictive copyright we are also seeing the greatest publication of new cultiral artifacts (books, music, film and so on) in history. Arguing that this would be improved by radically altering IP law is at best an unprovable proposition. If we were in a cultural drought, sure, bt it is just as reasonable to argue that the current rules force originality by blocking reuse.
Tell that to the folks that made Stargate, Terminator Salvation, Dollhouse, Caprica and a whole host of other Sci-Fi shows that were at the top of the list for being torrented, but weren't able to get enough viewers to actually *watch these shows on TV* for the producers to recoup their costs. Heck even the really good seasons of Galactica rated like crap - not because people weren't watching it, but because the people who were watching it certainly weren't watching it on SciFi.
Shows that aren't highly torrented are more likely to be renewed than shows that are. When a person views a show through a torrent, they are choosing not to view the show at the time when it needs to be viewed for the producers to recoup their costs.
Galactica Blood and Chrome won't get a second season. It won't matter if it is fantastic because the audience has already decided that they won't be watching it on SyFy, but that they will use alternate means to access that content. People can jump up and down all they want about the development of "alternate business models" (chances are, if there was one for SciFi, the shift would have occurred) - but the practical outcome is that entertainment producers have learned that making programs that the audience will torrent rather than watch is a losing proposition.
Nothing to stop you creating your own network to compete with PSN - which *you* would then own and which then *you* would be able to set gatekeeping criterion on.
PSN is Sony's property. Just like I don't have to let fat dudes with beards playing maracas into my house, Sony doesn't have to let anyone it doesn't want to let onto the network it built.
It's pretty amazing how they've managed to get their customers to swallow the line that it's reasonable to be expected to pay a third party for "anti-virus" software to fix their errors and vulnerabilities.
Meego looks about as ready for Prime Time as BeOS and certainly not worthy of any high-end mobile solution. But if you truly believe that they'd be better off with this undercooked underdeveloped solution than WP7 (something I suspect you've never actually used) then by all means advise all your friends and family to hold off and get one of those MeeGo tablets that will rock the world.
Slashdot Mirror
If Russia can default and still fly to space, maybe the US can.
Good thing that you feel qualified to advise slashdotters about Exchange when BDCs haven't been around since Windows NT4 (retired with Windows 2000) - which means that your knowledge of Exchange and Microsoft operating systems is at least a decade out of date.
Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman have already given up - they were flooded with notification spam as people added them to their circles. Neither celebrity is a net newbie, and if they couldn't be arsed with it a lot of other celebrities aren't going to be arsed with it either.
How does a guy that was paid by Redhat and MySQL and formed NoSoftwarePatents get tagged as being "Pro Microsoft" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Mueller
Google's efforts to ensure that Android didn't violated patents that required licensing from third parties is a lot like their effort to promote wave.
Windows Phone 7 has a higher market share than Linux does on the desktop - clearly Linux enthusiasts should just give up and install Windows or Mac OS and give up on the desktop.
Because it gets you lots of positive Karma. Slashdot is increasingly becoming more uniform in the opinions expressed in the comments as people who don't share those opinions have migrated away to other sites.
Space. I have so many books that space is more a limitation than cost. Ebooks neatly solve that conundrum.
Sony taught all the console manufacturers a lesson - Never ship with the ability to run Linux - if you take it away at some point in future a small group of angry geeks will make it their life's mission to destroy your business.
You've misunderstood - when someone says "they need to find a better business model" they are usually saying "I don't have to pay for this and I don't want to pay for this but I'm happy to keep consuming it".
There was a cartoon published on Salon.com a few years ago that said "Internet Thinking Applied To The Real World" - where a guy identified as a computer professional had a plumber come around and fix his sink. When the plumber asked to be paid he was told that the computer professional wasn't going to pay in cash because the plumber should really be considering a different business model, but that the programmer was happy to provide recommendations to his friends about the quality of the plumber's service and that if he wanted to make an income from plumbing, he really should be selling t-shirts as people liked paying for t-shirts, but not for plumbers.
Of course if it was Hotmail or Yahoo losing the same amount of mail, you'd be able to cut the Schadenfreude from gmail users around here with a FKN lightsaber.
And when did the Xerox Alto come out?
I dunno what Windows Tablet you use, but the handwriting recognition on Vista and Windows 7 is awesome. My handwriting has always been bad, but for the last 4 years I've been using it on Vista and now 7 and the number of corrections I have to make is minimal. Way more reliable than Dragon for input.
The great problem that libraries have is that most of them aren't used by the people that support them. As local governments are increasingly finding, you can shut a library and other than some well written letters to the editor, most taxpayers will go along with it. Public libraries have been around for 150 years and were far more important in ages where books were a lot less accessible. Spin forward to today and the use of public libraries has been declining. Part of this is the Internet. A lot of the information you once would have once gone to the library for you can search the internet for on your mobile phone. Schools have libraries that complement their curriculum, and Universities tend to be the place where you go if you are looking for more obscure books. My high school library was superior to the civic library when it came to research for papers back then. If I couldn't find stuff in my high school library, I had to go to the University library, because civic libraries didn't carry those sorts of books.
Although it is nice to believe that the community is charitable enough to want to spend money on putting books into the hands of people that can't afford them, a lot of people aren't willing to fund public health for poorer people. If you aren't willing to fund doctors for poor kids, you probably don't give a rats about making sure they have access to books. What is comes down to is that as much as a certain segment of the community likes the IDEA of libraries, the majority of the community doesn't give a rats arse because they never use them. That makes them an easy cut when local municipalities are trying to right the balance sheets.
People would rather less services than more tax and that puts libraries, increasingly less utilized, squarely into the "this is a luxury" column.
In this case you won't have to worry in the long term, because in the long term they simply won't bother making these shows anymore because there *isn't* a way to make money that is more convenient than drm-free download torrents. It would be like selling air. No one will pay for something they get conveniently for free. Why would you pay $5 for something that you can get as a torrent at the same time?
So long run - you won't have to worry about hearing spoilers for stuff you want to watch because they will stop making the stuff we want to watch because it is so horrifically unprofitable.
Over 800 new books are published in English *each day*. Because of copyright, each has to be new and unique rather than a recapitulation. Think of what types of cynical bastards movie studios and publishers are. If they were allowed to do more derivative work, do you think that they'd keep up with the production of original work. And for every Shakespeare, there are a million monkeys typing out Harry Potter fan fiction. If Shakespeare lived today, it is not unreasonable to believe that he'd still be a successful creative even if he was blocked from derivative works.
Two examples make not a law, rule or even a generalization. I know that Lessig and Doctorow drag out Disney and Shakespeare, but it is sort of like saying that Global Warming doesn't exist because winter has been cold in parts of the northern hemisphere this year.
We currently live in an age where the greatest amount of content creation is occurring in history, yet those that would remove copyright would damn us to constant recapitulations of stuff that we've already seen. Just how many Batman movies need to come out each year? Can you imagine how many Iron Man films would have come out the year after Iron Man was successful of there weren't some rights restrictions going on? Maybe one or two of them might have been good - but really - do people lack creativity to the point where they can't develop their own ideas? Why would any producer bother with something new and unique when tried and tested rehashes of stuff done before is cheaper to produce and more likely to bring success.
I agree that we can't be sure precisely why the great flourishing of creativity has happened, but if current copyright law were truly the stone around the creative industry's neck that many seem to claim it is, it wouldn't matter how awesome the publication technology was.
As insane as the copyright limits are, given the capitalist drive for the cheapest possible solution, reducing copyright terms would mean that instead of funding new creative works because they can't use old ones, big movie studios and publishers would just endlessly republish and remix existing works. Cheaper to redo than create from new and why go with something risky when you can redo something that succeeded again and again and again ...
That is one particular interpretation of the history of culture, championed primarily by a lawyer (Lessig) who is arguing for changes to copywright law. Ask other people who study such things and you will get different answers. What we do know is that in today's age of restrictive copyright we are also seeing the greatest publication of new cultiral artifacts (books, music, film and so on) in history. Arguing that this would be improved by radically altering IP law is at best an unprovable proposition. If we were in a cultural drought, sure, bt it is just as reasonable to argue that the current rules force originality by blocking reuse.
Tell that to the folks that made Stargate, Terminator Salvation, Dollhouse, Caprica and a whole host of other Sci-Fi shows that were at the top of the list for being torrented, but weren't able to get enough viewers to actually *watch these shows on TV* for the producers to recoup their costs. Heck even the really good seasons of Galactica rated like crap - not because people weren't watching it, but because the people who were watching it certainly weren't watching it on SciFi.
Shows that aren't highly torrented are more likely to be renewed than shows that are. When a person views a show through a torrent, they are choosing not to view the show at the time when it needs to be viewed for the producers to recoup their costs.
Galactica Blood and Chrome won't get a second season. It won't matter if it is fantastic because the audience has already decided that they won't be watching it on SyFy, but that they will use alternate means to access that content. People can jump up and down all they want about the development of "alternate business models" (chances are, if there was one for SciFi, the shift would have occurred) - but the practical outcome is that entertainment producers have learned that making programs that the audience will torrent rather than watch is a losing proposition.
It will drive Slashdotters a little nuts, but here is a video that Microsoft Research put out a few years ago showing this very functionality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHVjPCMEtts&feature=related
I'm sure that Long Zheng will be surprised to hear about the dump truck as he said the most he got out of it was a T-Shirt.
Nothing to stop you creating your own network to compete with PSN - which *you* would then own and which then *you* would be able to set gatekeeping criterion on. PSN is Sony's property. Just like I don't have to let fat dudes with beards playing maracas into my house, Sony doesn't have to let anyone it doesn't want to let onto the network it built.
It's pretty amazing how they've managed to get their customers to swallow the line that it's reasonable to be expected to pay a third party for "anti-virus" software to fix their errors and vulnerabilities.
No need to pay for a 3rd party solution because they offer a Free As In Beer Antivirus Solution.
Here's a preview of MeeGo from Mobile World Conference which show that Nokia had no choice.
http://gigaom.com/2011/02/14/meego-preview-shows-why-nokia-embraced-wp7/
Meego looks about as ready for Prime Time as BeOS and certainly not worthy of any high-end mobile solution. But if you truly believe that they'd be better off with this undercooked underdeveloped solution than WP7 (something I suspect you've never actually used) then by all means advise all your friends and family to hold off and get one of those MeeGo tablets that will rock the world.