MS earned what they have, tho it may not be right how they did it.
So, if I break into your house and steal all your furniture and home electronics, while how I got it may not have been right, I still "earned what I have." Let's not bring the government into it, just buy a better lock and go forward from there. It's irrelevant how shitty things were while you were sleeping on the floor waiting for the insurance company to help you buy a new bed. Let me run my house-theft business the way I want.
MS did not earn what they have, that's the whole point of these lawsuits. They used their monopoly to effectively threaten computer makers with being put out of business in order to secure OEM contracts which froze out the competition. That's illegal, and for good reason.
Simply put, Windows is the operating system that the masses choose, because it is relatively easy to use and understand, and powerful enough for most users.
I thought everybody understood by now that the reason the masses choose it is because it's what they have on their desks at work already, and it's easier to learn how to use one OS than two, even if the second one is vastly superior in nearly every way.
The history is not hard to look up: The MS Monopoly sprouted from the vanquished corpse of the IBM monopoly. In the early 1980s, IBM's big-iron reputation made them the only computer that large companies were willing to put on the desks of their employees. As a result, IBM quickly surpassed Apple as the platform for which the most business software was written. Then Compaq reverse-engineered their system. Soon companies like Compaq and Olivetti were running ads where shills would exclaim, "you mean this computer will run everything that an IBM can run!?" Suddenly, buying an IBM didn't matter, as long as you bought a computer that could run MS-DOS, because that would let you run all "IBM software" IBM, seeing their monopoly slip through their fingers, tried to move to their own proprietary OS (and foolishly recruited MS to help them write it), only to see Bill Gates convince the press to stop saying "IBM Compatable," and use the term "PC" to refer exclusively to x86 PCs which ran MS-DOS.
Meanwhile, Apple was still convinced that dominating the education market was going to ensure their future, because lots of young people would have an Apple as their first computer and become loyal customers... unfortunately for Apple, it's the old guys who don't give a crap about things like "interface design" make the buying decisions in big companies, and they went with "business computers" which cost less and promised to deliver exactly what they wanted.
Your entire argument hinges on the notion that Linux is "ready for the desktop" (or nearly so).
Most of the illegal OEM contracts that MS is being nailed for are from the 1990s, not the 21st Century.
Mere installation of Linux took a *nix geek until at least Red Hat 6 came out in the late 90s. Non-Microsoft word processors and spreadsheets for Linux have been a total joke until the last year or two. Don't even get me started on KDE and Gnome.
Yes, Linux is (as you say) "almost there." That doesn't change the fact that MS-Windows held a total (100%) monopoly on the "OS for non-geek users on cheap commodity hardware" market (which is at least 85% of the entire PC market), and abused that monopoly, ever since OS/2 Warp went down the crapper.
Were I Bill Gates, my response to this fine would be obvious: Don't pay it, and refuse to make any of the changes they are demanding.
The EU has no legal authority over how an American company packages and/or bundles their products. The most they could do in retaliation is ban MS software from being imported to their member states. As good as Linux and OS X are, and as spiffy as the various Office clones are, I don't see that happening any time soon. Even if the EU imposed such a ban, several countries would probably choose not to participate. Are the folks in The Hague prepared to tell 300 Million Europeans that they have to learn Linux because MS won't pay their extor... er... penalties?
(Of course, some would argue that a total loss of MS products would be a "best-case" outcome of all this. It's not as if people actually like their software.)
That's almost what the current law is, where x = 120. The only exception being that registration (or some other proof of the date of creation) is require to prove that somebody else stole your creative output. Lawsuits have been won by people who have mailed manuscripts to themselves and used the postmark to prove when they wrote it.
lower-case "p" has been a legitimate replacement for o in '1337 for many years now.
And I am almost always using it sarcastically when I use it at all. Read my comment again, and realize I was kidding around. The spelling I chose was a short-hand way of saying "I'm behaving like an absurd chatroom ass"
I guess your reaction is just more proof that sarcasm is rather difficult to use in the written word without at least some people not getting it.
Yes, IT requires people skills... So why are people not happy with IT? Probably because it's not the job for them.Sounds like you stumbled on a great new "Ask Slashdot": What's a good job for somebody with no people skills?
If this was 1870, I would say "Fur Trapper", but the Information Age is somewhat less accomodating to hermit kooks. Maybe that was the unibomber's real reason for disliking technology.
It's generally understood that IT pays "a lot" of money. Whenever there is an opportunity to make a good living at a job that's not back-breaking or dangerous, you are going to attract people who are pretty much only in it for the money.
On the other hand, nobody becomes a florist just for the money. The only people who become flortists are the sort of people who need to be doing a job that brings them contentment and happiness, and really like working with flowers, regardless of the low pay.
So, in my mind, the real shocking story is that 2 out of 3 florists hate their job.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm one of the 1 in 7. I enjoy IT office work.
as far as hbo... if this "let the gov't tell you what is ok" mentality continues, it won't be long before hbo/cable/ppv is regulated
That's a "slippery slope" argument, and I consider them invalid as a rule, because warnings of slippery slopes are nearly always used as a weapon of the extreme of one side or the other against the moderate position.
The FCC exists to regulate the public airwaves. You can say that it's a bad compromise between private industry and the public interest, but it's the one that our elected officials have opted for. Cable TV is privately-owned infrastructure, and falls outside the scope of the government's broadcast regulations, as it should.
Correct. However, you are not the only member of the public. If you were, then TV standards would conform to exactly what you want to see and not exclude anything if you were okay with it. However, the general consensus of the people (not just religious people - being an athiest does not mean you lack manners) is that public profanity is simply rude behavior.
This is not a censorship issue. It's a money issue.
Television broadcasters are allowed exclusive access to use our airwaves for free. In exchange for this incredibly valuable resource, which is collectively owned by The People, they are compelled to serve the public interest, which includes conforming to public standards of decent behavior.
It has been proposed many times by libertarians such as myself that TV signal bands should be auctioned off like real-estate to whoever is willing to pay for it, and then the FCC could collect a small tax from them for enforcement, but otherwise broadcasters could do whatever they like with the airwave spectrum they've purchased fair and square. The networks are addicted to free bandwidth, though, so they scream and wail every time it's brought up. Unless and until such a reform is made, they are accountable to the people, and the FCC is charges with enforcing the will of the people.
If you want to watch a show where people say "fuck" all the time, subscribe to HBO on cable. The Sopranos just recently got season 5 underway.
It never sat well with me that I could walk into a record store and gamble my money away on some unknown CD I have not heard.
Just about every time you walk into a movie theater, you gamble about eight bucks on a film you have not seen, because a new experience is what you want. You make the best bet you can based on the reputation of the director & cast, the sales pitch of the previews, and the advice of critics & friends. Sometimes you will end up seeing a movie you don't like.
I feel the same way about albums. Bringing home (or downloading) the latest project from a favorite band is always a thrill. With some bands, it's a real crapshoot, but Yes releases enough albums like "The Ladder" to cause me to forgive them for albums like "Talk."
Okay, you like to have that "first experience" for free (or nearly free), and that's all well and good, but opening-day ticket sales of movies would not be anything like they are if they let you watch the movie before going to the theater.
And they can make claims like "Our industry will die if... So you need to...".
What Congress really needs to hear is more people like us saying "their industry dieing is not a bad thing. It's the industry which regularilly promotes the instantly accessable over music which has any chance of enhancing your enjoyment of life. It's the industry which brought you the last half-dozen or so Superbowl Halftime show fiascos. It's the industry which regularilly puts the screws to moderately successful artists in order to afford the cost of constantly signing money-losing pop acts in order to blindly fish for The Next Big Thing. It's the industry which continues to corrupt radio with under-the-table payola schemes in spite of Congress's decades of efforts to prevent the practice. If the music industry as we know it dies, the state of music in Western Culture will probably be better off."
Look, if the RIAA-affiliated labels cared enough about these artists to buy out a site like this, they would have signed those artists to record deals, and then they would no longer be independent, would they? (In fact, for some of these bands, getting signed by a major label might be one of their goals.)
There will always be an indie music scene, and it will always operate outside the "protection" of the RIAA. When Joe Garage-band-player sells you a tape of his band, the full extent of copy protection he has is to tell you, "please don't bootleg this and pass it around to your friends or put it on the Internet or something. If I found out you have, I'll have to kick your ass." This site ammounts to the same thing. $0.99 per song, no DRM, and the band is basically saying "if you love us, please don't rip us off."
Too bad you can't get the files in AAC. I might be interested in buying some of this music if it was.
(Actually, if I wanted a song from this store, it would not be a factor. 192 VBR MP3 sounds just fine on my iPod... but there's at least one of you OGG cheerleaders saying the exact same thing about your favorite codec on Every Single God-Damned iTunes Music Store and/or iPod Thread, so I figured I should return the favor.)
Re:Sheesh!
on
TiVo Will Die
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Fingering, FTP, Newsgroups, academic web sites, etc. are all still there, all still being used. In fact, I would wager that there are more newsgroup users now than in '85, it's just that it's a slightly bigger fish in a much, much bigger pond. While some pre-HTML stuff has been usurped (Slashdot.org growing from a newsgroup, for example,) the commercial web mostly grew around the old Internet, not in place of it.
Whether you are talking about an old Macintosh, a jewelry box, a tool case, whatever... If you are just going to use it as the plastic walls around your garden-variety PC, your project is slightly less interesting than making a bong out of it.
Having seen "The Passion," I gotta say that the violence, while certainly explicit, has been dramatically overstated by a lot of people for some reason. It's a movie about the slow and methodical execution of one person. How Roger Ebert can call it the most violent movie he's ever seen, mere months after the blood-soaked release of "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" tells me that either his memory is not very good, or else the emotional impact of the crucifiction made the violence in The Passion harder for him to watch. (Also, "The Passion of the Christ" lacked campy 70s music which perhaps would have provided a lighter mood... but something tells me that it would have taken the film in entirely different direction than Gibson had intended.)
There really wasn't anything in "The Passion" that a typical American teen couldn't handle. The PG-13 rating was invented specifically for "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," a movie in which a man has his heart ripped one of the vilians is liquified by a rock crusher. The scenes of Christ being whipped, lugging the cross around, and bleeding all over everything were really no more shocking than that, especially when you consider that it was a depiction of recorded events which you really couldn't convincingly show any other way, rather than a summer action flick with buckets of blood added for pure shock value.
I have such a hard time beleiving that Hollywood will leave it alone.
Unlike Tolkein himself, who milked the trilogy for something like five more full-length novels and a crapload of notes that were posthumously bundled and sold by his family... but that was IT! Oh yea, and Christopher Tolkein has made a career out of publishing books related to the original stories.
Come to think of it, of Hollywood only cranks out one crappy sequel, they will be showing far more restraint than the author did.
My nightmare is the inevitable "Lord of the Rings On Ice!" That or the rock opera that Tim Rice and Elton John could end up doing.
Karaoke: 3 minutes in the spotlight, while people who don't care about the singing can still dance to the track. If you sing badly, it's good for a laugh or two, if you sing well, you just might impress members of the opposite sex.
Videoke: 3 minutes in the spotlight while no music plays, so everybody must sit quietly while you and your loser drinking buddy attempt to play Mr. Pink and Mr. White from Resevior Dogs. If you act badly, it's beyond tedious. If you act well, nobody cares.
I think it's obvious which will still be around in 2 years.
Will a microphone be included to, as with X-Box Live? The biggest hurdle to MMORPG on the cosole is the lack of a keyboard to allow chatting (and scripting!)
In Everquest, my cleric used to keep a script that looked like this:
/stand /gsay Fear not, %T, for by the power of the divine Mother Tunare, your wounds shall now be healed. /cast 1
This served a useful purpose in the game, because from a position of sitting and meditating, I could just monitor the health of my party, and if one of them needs healing, it would just take me two key strokes: First, I hit a function key to target the person who needs healing. Second, I hit the hotkey assigned to that script, so I would break meditation (stand), then announce to the party that I'm casting a heal and who it is that I'm healing (knowing this is important in the chaos of combat... if a druid sees somebody's health going down, and is not alerted to the fact that I'm healing him, he might waste mana on a heal spell of his own which the other player doesn't need. Also, it reassures the tanks not to cut and run if they are reminded that the HP recharges are coming), then cast the spell. Then it's just ctrl-B to go back to meditating (and chatting with others) until the next time somebody needs me. Scripting made me a much more efficient cleric, and I miss being able to do stuff like that when I play MMORPG games which lack such functions.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if I break into your house and steal all your furniture and home electronics, while how I got it may not have been right, I still "earned what I have." Let's not bring the government into it, just buy a better lock and go forward from there. It's irrelevant how shitty things were while you were sleeping on the floor waiting for the insurance company to help you buy a new bed. Let me run my house-theft business the way I want.
MS did not earn what they have, that's the whole point of these lawsuits. They used their monopoly to effectively threaten computer makers with being put out of business in order to secure OEM contracts which froze out the competition. That's illegal, and for good reason.
I thought everybody understood by now that the reason the masses choose it is because it's what they have on their desks at work already, and it's easier to learn how to use one OS than two, even if the second one is vastly superior in nearly every way.
The history is not hard to look up: The MS Monopoly sprouted from the vanquished corpse of the IBM monopoly. In the early 1980s, IBM's big-iron reputation made them the only computer that large companies were willing to put on the desks of their employees. As a result, IBM quickly surpassed Apple as the platform for which the most business software was written. Then Compaq reverse-engineered their system. Soon companies like Compaq and Olivetti were running ads where shills would exclaim, "you mean this computer will run everything that an IBM can run!?" Suddenly, buying an IBM didn't matter, as long as you bought a computer that could run MS-DOS, because that would let you run all "IBM software" IBM, seeing their monopoly slip through their fingers, tried to move to their own proprietary OS (and foolishly recruited MS to help them write it), only to see Bill Gates convince the press to stop saying "IBM Compatable," and use the term "PC" to refer exclusively to x86 PCs which ran MS-DOS.
Meanwhile, Apple was still convinced that dominating the education market was going to ensure their future, because lots of young people would have an Apple as their first computer and become loyal customers... unfortunately for Apple, it's the old guys who don't give a crap about things like "interface design" make the buying decisions in big companies, and they went with "business computers" which cost less and promised to deliver exactly what they wanted.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Most of the illegal OEM contracts that MS is being nailed for are from the 1990s, not the 21st Century.
Mere installation of Linux took a *nix geek until at least Red Hat 6 came out in the late 90s. Non-Microsoft word processors and spreadsheets for Linux have been a total joke until the last year or two. Don't even get me started on KDE and Gnome.
Yes, Linux is (as you say) "almost there." That doesn't change the fact that MS-Windows held a total (100%) monopoly on the "OS for non-geek users on cheap commodity hardware" market (which is at least 85% of the entire PC market), and abused that monopoly, ever since OS/2 Warp went down the crapper.
The EU has no legal authority over how an American company packages and/or bundles their products. The most they could do in retaliation is ban MS software from being imported to their member states. As good as Linux and OS X are, and as spiffy as the various Office clones are, I don't see that happening any time soon. Even if the EU imposed such a ban, several countries would probably choose not to participate. Are the folks in The Hague prepared to tell 300 Million Europeans that they have to learn Linux because MS won't pay their extor... er... penalties?
(Of course, some would argue that a total loss of MS products would be a "best-case" outcome of all this. It's not as if people actually like their software.)
That's almost what the current law is, where x = 120. The only exception being that registration (or some other proof of the date of creation) is require to prove that somebody else stole your creative output. Lawsuits have been won by people who have mailed manuscripts to themselves and used the postmark to prove when they wrote it.
And I am almost always using it sarcastically when I use it at all. Read my comment again, and realize I was kidding around. The spelling I chose was a short-hand way of saying "I'm behaving like an absurd chatroom ass"
I guess your reaction is just more proof that sarcasm is rather difficult to use in the written word without at least some people not getting it.
Try not to be so knee-jerk and hostile in your reactions.
Yes, IT requires people skills...
So why are people not happy with IT? Probably because it's not the job for them.Sounds like you stumbled on a great new "Ask Slashdot": What's a good job for somebody with no people skills?
If this was 1870, I would say "Fur Trapper", but the Information Age is somewhat less accomodating to hermit kooks. Maybe that was the unibomber's real reason for disliking technology.
vlc pwnz mplayer.
Let the vi/emacs style flamewar begin!
It's generally understood that IT pays "a lot" of money. Whenever there is an opportunity to make a good living at a job that's not back-breaking or dangerous, you are going to attract people who are pretty much only in it for the money.
On the other hand, nobody becomes a florist just for the money. The only people who become flortists are the sort of people who need to be doing a job that brings them contentment and happiness, and really like working with flowers, regardless of the low pay.
So, in my mind, the real shocking story is that 2 out of 3 florists hate their job.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm one of the 1 in 7. I enjoy IT office work.
That's a "slippery slope" argument, and I consider them invalid as a rule, because warnings of slippery slopes are nearly always used as a weapon of the extreme of one side or the other against the moderate position.
The FCC exists to regulate the public airwaves. You can say that it's a bad compromise between private industry and the public interest, but it's the one that our elected officials have opted for. Cable TV is privately-owned infrastructure, and falls outside the scope of the government's broadcast regulations, as it should.
Now can at last I can do exactly what I could already do with a slightly different interface.
Correct. However, you are not the only member of the public. If you were, then TV standards would conform to exactly what you want to see and not exclude anything if you were okay with it. However, the general consensus of the people (not just religious people - being an athiest does not mean you lack manners) is that public profanity is simply rude behavior.
Television broadcasters are allowed exclusive access to use our airwaves for free. In exchange for this incredibly valuable resource, which is collectively owned by The People, they are compelled to serve the public interest, which includes conforming to public standards of decent behavior.
It has been proposed many times by libertarians such as myself that TV signal bands should be auctioned off like real-estate to whoever is willing to pay for it, and then the FCC could collect a small tax from them for enforcement, but otherwise broadcasters could do whatever they like with the airwave spectrum they've purchased fair and square. The networks are addicted to free bandwidth, though, so they scream and wail every time it's brought up. Unless and until such a reform is made, they are accountable to the people, and the FCC is charges with enforcing the will of the people.
If you want to watch a show where people say "fuck" all the time, subscribe to HBO on cable. The Sopranos just recently got season 5 underway.
Just about every time you walk into a movie theater, you gamble about eight bucks on a film you have not seen, because a new experience is what you want. You make the best bet you can based on the reputation of the director & cast, the sales pitch of the previews, and the advice of critics & friends. Sometimes you will end up seeing a movie you don't like.
I feel the same way about albums. Bringing home (or downloading) the latest project from a favorite band is always a thrill. With some bands, it's a real crapshoot, but Yes releases enough albums like "The Ladder" to cause me to forgive them for albums like "Talk."
Okay, you like to have that "first experience" for free (or nearly free), and that's all well and good, but opening-day ticket sales of movies would not be anything like they are if they let you watch the movie before going to the theater.
What Congress really needs to hear is more people like us saying "their industry dieing is not a bad thing. It's the industry which regularilly promotes the instantly accessable over music which has any chance of enhancing your enjoyment of life. It's the industry which brought you the last half-dozen or so Superbowl Halftime show fiascos. It's the industry which regularilly puts the screws to moderately successful artists in order to afford the cost of constantly signing money-losing pop acts in order to blindly fish for The Next Big Thing. It's the industry which continues to corrupt radio with under-the-table payola schemes in spite of Congress's decades of efforts to prevent the practice. If the music industry as we know it dies, the state of music in Western Culture will probably be better off."
There will always be an indie music scene, and it will always operate outside the "protection" of the RIAA. When Joe Garage-band-player sells you a tape of his band, the full extent of copy protection he has is to tell you, "please don't bootleg this and pass it around to your friends or put it on the Internet or something. If I found out you have, I'll have to kick your ass." This site ammounts to the same thing. $0.99 per song, no DRM, and the band is basically saying "if you love us, please don't rip us off."
(Actually, if I wanted a song from this store, it would not be a factor. 192 VBR MP3 sounds just fine on my iPod... but there's at least one of you OGG cheerleaders saying the exact same thing about your favorite codec on Every Single God-Damned iTunes Music Store and/or iPod Thread, so I figured I should return the favor.)
Fingering, FTP, Newsgroups, academic web sites, etc. are all still there, all still being used. In fact, I would wager that there are more newsgroup users now than in '85, it's just that it's a slightly bigger fish in a much, much bigger pond. While some pre-HTML stuff has been usurped (Slashdot.org growing from a newsgroup, for example,) the commercial web mostly grew around the old Internet, not in place of it.
Whether you are talking about an old Macintosh, a jewelry box, a tool case, whatever... If you are just going to use it as the plastic walls around your garden-variety PC, your project is slightly less interesting than making a bong out of it.
NBC is no longer an independent company. It's owned by GE, a television manufacturer.
ABC was long-ago swallowed up by Disney.
How is becoming the next NBC/ABC a good thing?
Stay a hardware company that also does music distribution, and they could instead strive to be the next Sony. Then you're talking real money.
There really wasn't anything in "The Passion" that a typical American teen couldn't handle. The PG-13 rating was invented specifically for "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," a movie in which a man has his heart ripped one of the vilians is liquified by a rock crusher. The scenes of Christ being whipped, lugging the cross around, and bleeding all over everything were really no more shocking than that, especially when you consider that it was a depiction of recorded events which you really couldn't convincingly show any other way, rather than a summer action flick with buckets of blood added for pure shock value.
Unlike Tolkein himself, who milked the trilogy for something like five more full-length novels and a crapload of notes that were posthumously bundled and sold by his family... but that was IT! Oh yea, and Christopher Tolkein has made a career out of publishing books related to the original stories.
Come to think of it, of Hollywood only cranks out one crappy sequel, they will be showing far more restraint than the author did.
My nightmare is the inevitable "Lord of the Rings On Ice!" That or the rock opera that Tim Rice and Elton John could end up doing.
Videoke: 3 minutes in the spotlight while no music plays, so everybody must sit quietly while you and your loser drinking buddy attempt to play Mr. Pink and Mr. White from Resevior Dogs. If you act badly, it's beyond tedious. If you act well, nobody cares.
I think it's obvious which will still be around in 2 years.
In Everquest, my cleric used to keep a script that looked like this:
/stand
/gsay Fear not, %T, for by the power of the divine Mother Tunare, your wounds shall now be healed.
/cast 1
This served a useful purpose in the game, because from a position of sitting and meditating, I could just monitor the health of my party, and if one of them needs healing, it would just take me two key strokes: First, I hit a function key to target the person who needs healing. Second, I hit the hotkey assigned to that script, so I would break meditation (stand), then announce to the party that I'm casting a heal and who it is that I'm healing (knowing this is important in the chaos of combat... if a druid sees somebody's health going down, and is not alerted to the fact that I'm healing him, he might waste mana on a heal spell of his own which the other player doesn't need. Also, it reassures the tanks not to cut and run if they are reminded that the HP recharges are coming), then cast the spell. Then it's just ctrl-B to go back to meditating (and chatting with others) until the next time somebody needs me. Scripting made me a much more efficient cleric, and I miss being able to do stuff like that when I play MMORPG games which lack such functions.