And Michael Dell has also said about 100 times, that he was considering switching to AMD processors. He also said that Apple shareholders would be better off Apple shut down. He says things to promote himself or his company not because they are true. In this case, like the "we're thinking of going AMD" it's just about putting pressure on one of his suppliers to get a better deal. Anyone who takes this statement at face value is just not paying attention. Ain't gonna happen.
I don't think that would work. I'm pretty sure the costs for the OS are a hell of a lot higher than the $129 Apple currently charges - that's the biggest reason for their higher profit margins on hardware, to cover the losses on OS. I'm not sure what price point the retail version of OS X would have to be for Apple to make a profit and allow it to stand alone as a product, but I'm guessing it's a heck of a lot higher than people would be willing to pay. Let's face it, how many people actually pay for retail versions of Windows? It either gets pirated or it makes more sense to buy an new machine.
But it's not the millions of users & their apps problem entirely--the fact that an XP machine prior to SP 2 could be owned in minutes when connected to the interent wasn't a matter of users or their applications, that was how the machine shipped--the default install was just plain broken.
Copyright was originally supposed to be a contract between an artist and soceity, the deal is that your work will be protected for a period of time in order to encourage you to make further cultural contributions.
Two points that have been completely obliterated--what once was a balanced contract has absolutely no balance at all any more with the copyright holder getting everything. And the most clearly blatant abuse that there is no excuse for is extending copyright on already created works. It was simple language, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" So even a 10-year old could read that and understand that the reason for the exclusive Rights was to promote the creation. Once a work is created, extending it's copyright length does absolutely nothing to fulfill that purpose and is only robbing the public domain.
Companies have just as much if not more at stake in the political process, they pay taxes, but can not vote. This is the only way companies get any say in the political process.
But corporations also have virtually unlimited funds relative to the average voter. As far as paying taxes--some do and some don't. In real dollars, they generally pay a fraction of what most of us pay. I'm not necessarily saying this is a bad thing--I do find a great deal of truth to the quote about government not being able to tax businesses, but rather using businesses to help them tax people. The fine points on that are neither here nor there for this though, I just want to point out that assuming all companies pay taxes is not correct.
All this aside, I (and many others) believe that granting corporations the rights and protections of citizens is just plain wrong. I'll grant a corporations's right to vote and influence the political process and other rights of people when they accept the burdens that also come with it--such as going to prison for committing crimes and death after at most 100 years. What? That's silly? Well so is granting an imaginary, legal construct the rights of people.
Our employers call us at home and have us bring our work home on company-provided laptops because we, as a society, let them do it.
The problem is we as a society won't get fired if I push back I will. Externalities suck. In theory I suppose unionizing might be a solution but a. it will never happen, and b. I doubt it would work anyway because for the most part, unions have become an ineffective, inefficent societal tool anyway. But one thing that does seem to be helping--at least here in Wisconsin, self-employment is at an all-time high. More and more people are starting their own businesses every day, choosing to deal with the headaches of being their own boss over those that come with working for someone else. The state has realized this & there are more resources available than ever--not just money, but more importantly educational resources & advisors. If the problems with the healthcare system ever get figured out (like a single payer or something) things will really change. As is, most of us make it work by having a spouse who works for a big company.
You're not a victim of the march of technology, you're not even a victim of your boss (remember, you agreed to take the job). You're just a victim of rampant materialism.
I gotta disagree with that wholeheartedly. Nobody's a victim of rampant materialism, they willingly choose it. I just have no sympathy whatsoever for people who structure their lives around getting more, cooler stuff than their neighbors. I do however feel bad for their kids who don't know any better.
Out of curiosity, how many other office suites out there support the Open Document File formats?
A handful but with more coming soon. How many can and will? Anyone that wants to.
How many other office suites can support.doc,.xls &.ppt? None. Sure they've been reverse engineered & hacked so they're somewhat supported but always lagging behind and legally gray. The whole point is that if MS wants to, it will be absolutely trivial for them to support OpenDocument formats. At that point, it may well be that MS still makes the best Office Suite for a given situation. But with an open file format, everyone can compete on the same level and switching later on if the chosen vendor starts behaving poorly is easy.
An insightful comment--but one thing you may be forgetting is that even though the technology will pretty surely move in the direction you picture, IP laws will probably continue down the road they're on as well. Though it will be trivial in 10 years to convert between different file formats technically, it will most likely be illegal.
I just can't see requiring an open format for data as being anything other than a move that promotes competition. If MS were to fully open up and the specs to.doc and.xls, so that other vendors could suppport it, that would be a fine solution too, but they won't.
Exactly--like many "tech journalists" he doesn't seem to actually understand the words he uses. For example, in the very beginning, he talks about the mandate requiring Open Document File Formats. He even bolded the words. Then he turns around and writes pretty much the rest of the article as if OpenOffice were what is required and nothing else is allowed--which is absolutely false. The whole point is to require open formats so any vendor can create a competing product. Either he's just dumb and spitting out words or he's being intentionally misleading.
On a related note, are there more really bad "tech journalists" out there who just don't understand technology or are shills for some company or trade group than in other areas of journalism or does it just seem that way?
I almost always read the fsking articles I comment on, but I generally stop short of downloading a 900+ MB file to find out more. But hey, maybe that's just me.
The beautiful thing is, everything you create is just a.NET object that can be manipulated by the developer.
And every vector element in Flash can be manipulated as an object by Flash's programming language (EMCA Script-based ActionScript).
It means an artist can use an artist's toolset to create a beautiful fully functional front end, then pass it off to the developer to do the backend. No more mockups that can't be translated into a real application front end.
Artists can use the Flash IDE tools, or use Illustrator or Freehand to import the graphics as editable objects (either with the drawing tools or programmatically) in Flash. Hell with Freehand, you can just drag & drop vector art directly into Flash.
I'm not making any judgements on Sparkle yet (though I certainly don't have a lot of confidence in Microsoft's ability to deliver on betas or to make quality, stable software until 4 or 5 versions down the road) but I find your two main points supporting Sparkle!=Flash to be inaccurate and actually show more ways Sparkle is like Flash rather than different.
Not to mention the costs of employee healthcare. This is by no means meant to be a boo-hoo for them or others but if $1500 of the cost for every car GM makes is employee/former employee healthcare, it's pretty reasonable that those costs contribute a significant amount to what it really costs Intel to make their products as well.
And it really doesn't matter anyway--keyboard layout really is unrelated to HCI--for the most part, it's not something that GUI designers, OS designers or even computer manufacturers can do something about. Keyboard layout is the same as typewriter layout because there's just too much momentum and built-in muscle memory for that layout. Gripe about mouse things, and even keyboard shortcuts but if he doesn't understand why the spacebar is what and where it is, then that's a pretty good indication the rest of his points aren't terribly insightful either.
The thing that really sucks is that for the overwhelming majority of protected IP, the profits are long since gone decades before it enters the public domain--if in fact it ever does which is a very much in question based on the "limited terms that are renewable forever are still limited terms" doctrine.
What's so sad isn't that no one will be able to freely copy Mickey Mouse cartoons, it's everything else that never makes it to the public domain.
I still think the best fix for copyright is an initial 20 years, renewable for small periods with increasing renewal fees--something like 1 year periods, $10 the first year and doubling every year after that. Making the people making money off locking up ideas actively do something and pay something to continue their monopoly.
I don't know that I would be using Ticketmaster as an example--I've been receiving spam from them for years--I've sent countless emails, closed my account with them, and actually talked to a CSR, everytime saying that they've removed my address from their database--though it might take a few weeks for the database to update.
I've tried to read the CAN-SPAM act but for the life of me, can't quite figure out what my options are--I'd love to collect a fine for every spam I get.
legitimate telemarketers had been using the DMA's do-not-call list for years
You can understand how people would be nervous submitting their name to an organization such as the DMA, right?
Here's a few things I know:
My state was one of the early ones to adopt a DNC list. After signing up for the list, the calls stopped coming. I have never once bought anything sold to me over the telephone and never will--if not because the goods & services sold in this manner are crap, then on principle, so telemarketing is never anything other than an annoying intrusion to me personally.
Like it or not, the legitimate telemarketers are trying to run a business
I don't think that's a given at all. I honestly do not know anyone who wants to be called by telemarketers--which makes me seriously question the validity of their business model. Given that, my guess is that businesses that depend heavily on telemarketing probably occupy a similar role in society to that of payday loan "businesses." They rely on the weakness or lack of intelligence of people rather than providing a legitimate good or service for the customers money.
I most certainly have no sympathy towards telemarketers being required to purchse the DNC list--no one has any sympathy for me becasue I have to buy a computer & software licenses for my business. It's a cost of doing business, if you don't like it, find another field.
I've always been a big supporter of states' rights and think that allowing states to determine not only what's right for them, but also to experiment (and sometimes fail) as a way to find better solutions to problems. If you want to do business with Wisconsin citizens, you have to follow the laws of the state of Wisconsin. If what you're selling is so valuable to us that we miss it (yeah right) we'll let our legislators know they've gone too far.
As others have said, the article explicitly says the injunction prevented them from reading the books they owned.
This quote just killed me:
"Copyright holders are entitled to protect their work. If the content of the book is confidential until July 16, which it is, why shouldn't someone who has the physical book be prevented from reading it and thereby obtaining the confidential information? "
When did copyright start meaning something totally different? I mean it's really not that hard to understand. Copy right--as in owning the rights to make copies of something. Not the right to control whether people can read it or not. And are they really calling the content of a children's book, that has been printed a few million times and in a few weeks, will be everywhere you turn, confidential?
You do realize you're in contempt of court for disclosing this information. The plot and characters were confindential and you just disclosed the plot so you best hide and ignore that knock on your front door.
It maybe true that the politicians involved are as you say--(I claim no knowledge about the politics of the people involved in this specific case). Though greed & corruption no longer have a consistent party affiliation. Campaign fundrasing info (from Open Secrets & others) has shown that at least the last two Presidential elections the Democratic party has become a member in good standing of the "corpratocracy."
But most certainly it's the left wing judges (plus Kennedy) who ruled that it is ok to take the homes away for use by private developers. It was the most right wing justices (O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas) who dissented believing exactly what you said that a strict interpretation of the Fifth Ammendment along with decades of precedent--that private property shouldn't be taken except for public works.
I used to be a faithful watcher of TechTV esp. TSS. I don't care for video games and sure as hell don't have any interest in watching other people play games on TV. I curse G4 for buying out TechTV--only to kill it all (I just don't get why they even bothered). Not to mention, at least in my market, they really screwed the pooch on the channel they got. At least for my Time Warner cable, TechTV was channel 44, G4 was 143. For a little while after the merger, they had both channels but after a bit, G4/TechTV got moved to 143 and they lost the much more prime channel 44 (to BET). I don't bother surfing all the way up to 143 (only channels beyond that for me is Fine Living Channel & a few home shopping channels.
Anyway, re: Sarah & Kevin, I still watch the clip evern now and then from the fill my box bit awhile back. Laugh out loud funny every time.
Not to mention turning out an insanely buggy product with Quark 4. While they were at 3.3x forever, and definitely needed new features, bottom line for most of the print industry is to be stable & predictable. When the paper needs to get out in 5 minutes, you can be messing around with crashes & bugginess.
Not to mention, it's always seemed to me that they had the exact opposite motto of Google's "do no evil."
Apple is popular in the film industry for a good reason; they look fantastic. Much the same reason as some actors I guess
But unlike actors, the quality actually actually goes beneath the surface.
One point you missed is the fact that Macs are very highly represented by the industry both in terms of use in video production and that Hollywood types use Macs in the personal lives as well. I tend to think that plays a role in their placement in the movies.
Not agreeing or defending the hyperbole you quoted from TFA but I think the situation is considerably different than DeCSS. CSS is so restrictive that many of the limitations it places on people who purchase the content are unreasonable. There are a number of legitimate uses that it prevents. iTunes DRM on the other hand, provides the ability to do a wide range of legitimate uses--installing on multiple computers, portables and burning to CD for playback on about as wide of platforms as a pressed CD. If you've paid for content from ITMS, what platform can you not access your content?
Maybe I'm missing something--while this is amusing as a clever hack, I don't get what legitimate use it gives that you don't otherwise have.
Us Authorware developers have been sitting back smugly with a great deal what's that word--schadenfreude. I swear the "Authorware's dead" stuff has been around forever.
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And Michael Dell has also said about 100 times, that he was considering switching to AMD processors. He also said that Apple shareholders would be better off Apple shut down. He says things to promote himself or his company not because they are true. In this case, like the "we're thinking of going AMD" it's just about putting pressure on one of his suppliers to get a better deal. Anyone who takes this statement at face value is just not paying attention. Ain't gonna happen.
I don't think that would work. I'm pretty sure the costs for the OS are a hell of a lot higher than the $129 Apple currently charges - that's the biggest reason for their higher profit margins on hardware, to cover the losses on OS. I'm not sure what price point the retail version of OS X would have to be for Apple to make a profit and allow it to stand alone as a product, but I'm guessing it's a heck of a lot higher than people would be willing to pay. Let's face it, how many people actually pay for retail versions of Windows? It either gets pirated or it makes more sense to buy an new machine.
But it's not the millions of users & their apps problem entirely--the fact that an XP machine prior to SP 2 could be owned in minutes when connected to the interent wasn't a matter of users or their applications, that was how the machine shipped--the default install was just plain broken.
Two points that have been completely obliterated--what once was a balanced contract has absolutely no balance at all any more with the copyright holder getting everything. And the most clearly blatant abuse that there is no excuse for is extending copyright on already created works. It was simple language, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" So even a 10-year old could read that and understand that the reason for the exclusive Rights was to promote the creation. Once a work is created, extending it's copyright length does absolutely nothing to fulfill that purpose and is only robbing the public domain.
But corporations also have virtually unlimited funds relative to the average voter. As far as paying taxes--some do and some don't. In real dollars, they generally pay a fraction of what most of us pay. I'm not necessarily saying this is a bad thing--I do find a great deal of truth to the quote about government not being able to tax businesses, but rather using businesses to help them tax people. The fine points on that are neither here nor there for this though, I just want to point out that assuming all companies pay taxes is not correct.
All this aside, I (and many others) believe that granting corporations the rights and protections of citizens is just plain wrong. I'll grant a corporations's right to vote and influence the political process and other rights of people when they accept the burdens that also come with it--such as going to prison for committing crimes and death after at most 100 years. What? That's silly? Well so is granting an imaginary, legal construct the rights of people.
The problem is we as a society won't get fired if I push back I will. Externalities suck. In theory I suppose unionizing might be a solution but a. it will never happen, and b. I doubt it would work anyway because for the most part, unions have become an ineffective, inefficent societal tool anyway. But one thing that does seem to be helping--at least here in Wisconsin, self-employment is at an all-time high. More and more people are starting their own businesses every day, choosing to deal with the headaches of being their own boss over those that come with working for someone else. The state has realized this & there are more resources available than ever--not just money, but more importantly educational resources & advisors. If the problems with the healthcare system ever get figured out (like a single payer or something) things will really change. As is, most of us make it work by having a spouse who works for a big company.
You're not a victim of the march of technology, you're not even a victim of your boss (remember, you agreed to take the job). You're just a victim of rampant materialism.
I gotta disagree with that wholeheartedly. Nobody's a victim of rampant materialism, they willingly choose it. I just have no sympathy whatsoever for people who structure their lives around getting more, cooler stuff than their neighbors. I do however feel bad for their kids who don't know any better.
A handful but with more coming soon. How many can and will? Anyone that wants to.
How many other office suites can support .doc, .xls & .ppt? None. Sure they've been reverse engineered & hacked so they're somewhat supported but always lagging behind and legally gray. The whole point is that if MS wants to, it will be absolutely trivial for them to support OpenDocument formats. At that point, it may well be that MS still makes the best Office Suite for a given situation. But with an open file format, everyone can compete on the same level and switching later on if the chosen vendor starts behaving poorly is easy.
An insightful comment--but one thing you may be forgetting is that even though the technology will pretty surely move in the direction you picture, IP laws will probably continue down the road they're on as well. Though it will be trivial in 10 years to convert between different file formats technically, it will most likely be illegal. I just can't see requiring an open format for data as being anything other than a move that promotes competition. If MS were to fully open up and the specs to .doc and .xls, so that other vendors could suppport it, that would be a fine solution too, but they won't.
On a related note, are there more really bad "tech journalists" out there who just don't understand technology or are shills for some company or trade group than in other areas of journalism or does it just seem that way?
I almost always read the fsking articles I comment on, but I generally stop short of downloading a 900+ MB file to find out more. But hey, maybe that's just me.
The beautiful thing is, everything you create is just a .NET object that can be manipulated by the developer.
And every vector element in Flash can be manipulated as an object by Flash's programming language (EMCA Script-based ActionScript).
It means an artist can use an artist's toolset to create a beautiful fully functional front end, then pass it off to the developer to do the backend. No more mockups that can't be translated into a real application front end.
Artists can use the Flash IDE tools, or use Illustrator or Freehand to import the graphics as editable objects (either with the drawing tools or programmatically) in Flash. Hell with Freehand, you can just drag & drop vector art directly into Flash.
I'm not making any judgements on Sparkle yet (though I certainly don't have a lot of confidence in Microsoft's ability to deliver on betas or to make quality, stable software until 4 or 5 versions down the road) but I find your two main points supporting Sparkle!=Flash to be inaccurate and actually show more ways Sparkle is like Flash rather than different.
Not to mention the costs of employee healthcare. This is by no means meant to be a boo-hoo for them or others but if $1500 of the cost for every car GM makes is employee/former employee healthcare, it's pretty reasonable that those costs contribute a significant amount to what it really costs Intel to make their products as well.
And it really doesn't matter anyway--keyboard layout really is unrelated to HCI--for the most part, it's not something that GUI designers, OS designers or even computer manufacturers can do something about. Keyboard layout is the same as typewriter layout because there's just too much momentum and built-in muscle memory for that layout. Gripe about mouse things, and even keyboard shortcuts but if he doesn't understand why the spacebar is what and where it is, then that's a pretty good indication the rest of his points aren't terribly insightful either.
The thing that really sucks is that for the overwhelming majority of protected IP, the profits are long since gone decades before it enters the public domain--if in fact it ever does which is a very much in question based on the "limited terms that are renewable forever are still limited terms" doctrine. What's so sad isn't that no one will be able to freely copy Mickey Mouse cartoons, it's everything else that never makes it to the public domain. I still think the best fix for copyright is an initial 20 years, renewable for small periods with increasing renewal fees--something like 1 year periods, $10 the first year and doubling every year after that. Making the people making money off locking up ideas actively do something and pay something to continue their monopoly.
I've tried to read the CAN-SPAM act but for the life of me, can't quite figure out what my options are--I'd love to collect a fine for every spam I get.
You can understand how people would be nervous submitting their name to an organization such as the DMA, right?
Here's a few things I know: My state was one of the early ones to adopt a DNC list. After signing up for the list, the calls stopped coming. I have never once bought anything sold to me over the telephone and never will--if not because the goods & services sold in this manner are crap, then on principle, so telemarketing is never anything other than an annoying intrusion to me personally.
Like it or not, the legitimate telemarketers are trying to run a business
I don't think that's a given at all. I honestly do not know anyone who wants to be called by telemarketers--which makes me seriously question the validity of their business model. Given that, my guess is that businesses that depend heavily on telemarketing probably occupy a similar role in society to that of payday loan "businesses." They rely on the weakness or lack of intelligence of people rather than providing a legitimate good or service for the customers money.
I most certainly have no sympathy towards telemarketers being required to purchse the DNC list--no one has any sympathy for me becasue I have to buy a computer & software licenses for my business. It's a cost of doing business, if you don't like it, find another field.
I've always been a big supporter of states' rights and think that allowing states to determine not only what's right for them, but also to experiment (and sometimes fail) as a way to find better solutions to problems. If you want to do business with Wisconsin citizens, you have to follow the laws of the state of Wisconsin. If what you're selling is so valuable to us that we miss it (yeah right) we'll let our legislators know they've gone too far.
This quote just killed me:
"Copyright holders are entitled to protect their work. If the content of the book is confidential until July 16, which it is, why shouldn't someone who has the physical book be prevented from reading it and thereby obtaining the confidential information? "
When did copyright start meaning something totally different? I mean it's really not that hard to understand. Copy right--as in owning the rights to make copies of something. Not the right to control whether people can read it or not. And are they really calling the content of a children's book, that has been printed a few million times and in a few weeks, will be everywhere you turn, confidential?
You do realize you're in contempt of court for disclosing this information. The plot and characters were confindential and you just disclosed the plot so you best hide and ignore that knock on your front door.
But most certainly it's the left wing judges (plus Kennedy) who ruled that it is ok to take the homes away for use by private developers. It was the most right wing justices (O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas) who dissented believing exactly what you said that a strict interpretation of the Fifth Ammendment along with decades of precedent--that private property shouldn't be taken except for public works.
Anyway, re: Sarah & Kevin, I still watch the clip evern now and then from the fill my box bit awhile back. Laugh out loud funny every time.
Not to mention turning out an insanely buggy product with Quark 4. While they were at 3.3x forever, and definitely needed new features, bottom line for most of the print industry is to be stable & predictable. When the paper needs to get out in 5 minutes, you can be messing around with crashes & bugginess. Not to mention, it's always seemed to me that they had the exact opposite motto of Google's "do no evil."
But unlike actors, the quality actually actually goes beneath the surface.
One point you missed is the fact that Macs are very highly represented by the industry both in terms of use in video production and that Hollywood types use Macs in the personal lives as well. I tend to think that plays a role in their placement in the movies.
Two tries...
I can't imagine it would have done much good, I mean if he had that many condoms on...
OR
Wow he must have wanted some really safe sex.
Maybe I'm missing something--while this is amusing as a clever hack, I don't get what legitimate use it gives that you don't otherwise have.
I think the real reason is that Adobe just copies Macromedia and Macromedia sues. Or Macromedia copies Adobe and Adobe sues. Lather, rinse repeat.
Us Authorware developers have been sitting back smugly with a great deal what's that word--schadenfreude. I swear the "Authorware's dead" stuff has been around forever.