Hmmm...Napter does well, CD sales do well. Napster is emasculated, CD sales begin to slip. Now, I realize one cannot prove causation from this, but if they are going to use the "Napster is to blame" game, then they should work it both ways and realize that by their logic, when Napster is rocking their sales improve.
I can provide some supporting evidence: a survey conducted by a cable music channel here in Australia. The big result: "86% of all respondents said that they HAD purchased a CD album as a direct result of downloading free tracks from it". There's an article about it here.
IAANZ (I am a New Zealander). NZ was just about the last country to be invaded/colonized by Europeans, the founding document (the Treaty of Waitangi) was signed just over 150 years ago. That document give the Maori people unparalleled rights. Far less oppression of the indigenous people occured in NZ than, for example, America or Australia. I'm not saying everything was rosy, though. There were land wars fought, and dodgy purchases of land (large tracks of land for some blankets and a few muskets type of thing). But the NZ government has made a genuine effort to provide restitution in the form of money, land, and rights granted to the various Maori tribes. Basically a tribe who feel they have a claim on something can voice that claim under the Treaty of Waitangi and the government will consider it. Some of these claims have been quite controversial, for example the land occupied by one of NZ universities was claimed and granted, claims have been made on radio and TV frequencies (sold to the tribes at a reduced rate), a big chunk of offshore fishing rights (granted), land which just happens to be occupied by large powerstations (not granted).
The point I'm trying to get to is that some Maori tribes have got into a habit of making claims on property not because they were cheated out of it by colonists but because that property is now comercially valuable. In the Lego case three tribes from the northern part of NZ are making these claims and if I were feeling cynical I'd say it's because they think they can get some money out of Lego. AFAICS Lego are not stealing or commodifying anyone's identity, they are just using a couple of Maori/Polynesian words (nothing specific to the Maori language at all) in a ficitional game. Here is an article from the Sydney Morning Herald which has specific details of the usage of the words in the game.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0106/01/text/world13.ht ml
The problem with the experiment is that the ads contained different text, and the author even identifies this in his analysis.
That's a big part of the problem but not all of it. The types of audiences the two sites have will be major factor. Another factor is the choice of keywords in Google. People looking at Google are generally searching for something specific, and usually free at that. An ad implies that someone wants to sell something (and the Google ad looks much more 'ad-like' so people will make that assumption more readily that the 'paid link' style of the other site). I doubt people searching for 'slavery' and 'modern' are looking to buy.
RobotWisdom, OTOH will tend to have a fairly well defined audience just like/. does. That audience will tend to be interested in the stuff that is put up there and are more likely to click through. I'm particularly talking about when the ad became a normal weblog item, but even when it was prefaced by Paid Link: it still appears much like a normal item. Also it seems that the guy running RobotWisdom has a fairly strict policy on ads, which will help because his audience will know that. Slashdot benefits from the same high level of targeting:/. is just about the only site I've clicked ads on in the last few years (I don't even look at the ads on other sites).
But despite these issues there are valid points to be taken from this experiment. In particular I think it indicates that targeted advertising is more effective (but that's already well known), and also the less 'ad-like' an ad is the more likely someone is to click through it. Of course if it becomes too deceptive it wont impress people looking for information who instead find themselves in a store.
Re:LOTR:FOTR trailer in downloadable Quicktime
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Lord of the Trailers
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Oh, and a hearty fuck you for the karma troll comment. Jealous?
No, drunk (thus the "troll" rather than the more usual "whore"). Not normally my style, so sorry about that.
Since the FAQ says it's up to the distributors, wouldn't they be the ones to ask? It's interesting they say that actually, it means that they are not going to do any ports themselves. It'll be up to someone like Loki to do the work should Hasbro decide to port it to Linux.
Re:Commercial software: A drain on the world econo
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And also cost software companies $175 billion annually so the total gain for businesses is 0, some gain some lose, it would also put 1.35 million people out of work and with $175 billion less being spent anually you have economic slowdown. Money saved is no good to the economy, but money spending is what makes for a vibrant and thriving economy
That $175 billion saved won't be just sitting around. Those companies will spend it on other goods and services or on expansion. Those companies are getting more for the same expenditure, or in other words they have increased their efficiency. That's good for them and good for the economy.
Re:Can't get rich selling GPL'ed SW
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He [Bob Young] has stated that Redhat will reduce the OS market by 80% in dollar terms.
Commoditizing things is good for the consumer. Of course I understand why Microsoft are concerned about this. What I don't understand is why they think I should care. They wave their hands and say it's bad for the economy, but I don't see it. After all every other company will be saving money.
Maybe they think they're doing Industry a favor, but by excluding the public from this decision, they're destroying the very market they wish to exploit. They won't sell any of them to me, that's for sure.
There are very few programs I watch at broadcast time. Without full quality digital timeshifting digital broadcasting is worthless to me and I wont buy it.
I already unconciously close popups before they've even finished loading.
Same here. As far as I'm concerned popup=ad and I close them as soon as the window is created. I occassionally miss useful stuff because of this, so note to web developers: don't put real stuff in popups. And also don't open new windows for me: I'm quite capable of using the browser command to that if I want it.
With all their supposed good intentions they still left an underdeveloped, bloated, unstable file manager (which is now officially part of GNOME! yay).
The only major problem I see with Nautilus is performance.
look at what future would-be investors in free software see! They see a company that robbed its investors and gives the product of their investments away completely.
Eazel didn't rob anyone of anything. They didn't deceive anyone. Anyone who invests in a company without understanding the companies business model and prospects is a moron taking a gamble.
Eazel's problem was that they were underfunded. It's too soon to tell if their business model would have worked.
I find that only 6 sites were complained against. I'm think that only 6 sites were shutdown after hundereds or thousands of complaints.
From the article: 290 complaints were made. 139 were found to be involve prohibited content (which indicates the intelligence of the people making complaints). Only 6 of those site were hosted in Australia. The EFF speculate (they only have access to a summary report, not the complaints themselves) that all 6 cases involved newsgroup content.
It was seen as "not realistic" because nobody needs those kind of servers... At least on Slashdot.
Well, the 4 machines SGI used cost around US$450,000. It is certainly reasonable to ask if a benchmark performed on that sort of hardware has any relevance to 99% of users. And they used RedHat 6.2 so it's hardly cutting-edge Linux technology.
I see it as interesting because previously no vendor had used Linux for a TPC benchmark (indeed I was under the impression that the TPC wouldn't allow it).
Anyone can saunter into the USPTO and peruse the files.
It's a very different question as to whether a government agency should be required to spend
taxpayer dollars to make their files freely available on the internet. The cost for doing so is non-trivial; many would argue that the people who use it should pay for it.
I think if the government is going to let the public access the information then it is not unreasonable to make it as widely available as possible. Having this sort of material online where it can be accessed almost instantly from anywhere is a great public service. It's exactly the sort of thing I like governments to spend money on. Not everyone lives next door to the USPTO.
For the record I mentioned the change to Deliphon last week. Should've submitted a story.
Yeah. Well, that is the problem with one line defintions. I think by "another computer" they mean something significantly different (i.e. hardware-wise). But they don't actually say that. Anyway my problem with both those definitions is that they are too broad. The AHD one is very broad, but even the M-W definition lets you define things like the Linux kernel and X as emulators. Sure you can do that if you want and claim that it's well and good, but if you do then you lose the ability to use "emulator" as a label for the class of programs that have traditionally been called emulators. So let's look at that class. UAE, MAME, Dosemu, VMWare, Plex86, Bochs, WINE (arguably). All of these are designed to run programs intended for one platform/environment in another environment. I think that's the basic statement that's missing from the dictionary definitions (and I know why: because they are trying to also cover the historical use of emulator as in "terminal emulator"). So WINE fits on that basis, but there are a few other characteristics that all the other programs share that WINE doesn't:
The others all run (or at least are capable of running) the native OS of the platform they are emulating.
The others all trap CPU instructions in the emulated programs. In the cases which emulate the CPU (UAE, MAME, Bochs) all instructions are trapped. VMware, Dosemu, and Plex86 only trap instructions that cannot be permitted to execute on the real CPU.
The others all emulate other hardware that is expected to be in the emulated platform. PICs, serial ports, hard drives, and sound cards are common.
Note that this definition elimiates lots of other things that people don't generally consider to be emulators but that fit under both of those dictionary defintions, such as JVMs.
So, to reiterate, while WINE has a similar purpose to other emulators (as defined above) it doesn't function in the same way that an emulator does. In fact it's much closer to something like XFree86: an implementation of an API.
You could make a distinction between hardware and software emulators and say that the above is a definition of hardware emulators and that WINE is instead a software emulator. I'd probably agree, although I'd argue that "software emulator" isn't a very good label, as we're really talking about reimplementation rather than emulation, and that generally that sort of thing is refered to as a clone (e.g. people refer to vi clones not vi emulators).
In the five or six pieces I've read about the footage only the BBC one mentions the declartion of goodwill. Even the BBC mention is just a single sentence with no information on the actual content of the thing. So maybe all this fuss over one sentence out of hundreds is a bit of an overreaction. Still, it's fun to speculate.
It seems to me that there are two likely possibilities for the content of the declaration. It could be a promise not to say anything negative. Since we haven't seen anything negative it's hard to dismiss this. However I would have expected at least someone to squeal long and loud about it if this were the case. All we've had is one line in a single story.
The other possibility is that the declaration was an agreement not to review the footage as it isn't finished. Something along the lines of "describe what you see here if you like, but please don't review it". This is something that the guy from New Line, and the director Peter Jackson who introduced the showing reportedly stressed. I hope and think this is more likely.
Dosemu only runs on x86. In other words, it won't permit a program to run on a computer that it can't already run on. How is this different than wine?
Since you obviously don't understand I'll explain it despite the thing about not continuing. You're still confusing "computer" with "CPU". They're not the same. Dosemu will let you run programs which require hardware you don't have, e.g. programs requiring sound with a soundcard that is not supported under DOS. Or a PIC that causes problems under DOS (I don't know if such a thing exists, DOS doesn't care that much about the interrupt controller). That's because Dosemu emulates hardware.
But to claim that KDE are the ones guilty of bashing in this saga is a weird distortion of history.
I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that now I see a lot of people bashing GNOME, for example in the news threads at gnome.org, and here. I don't see people bashing KDE anywhere near as much (except in response) on news.kde.org. I don't see journalists comming out with inflammatory anti-KDE articles like the recent anti-GNOME one by Dennis Powell on LinuxPower. Maybe GNOME people are doing it too and I'm just not seeing it.
If you like Gnome, use Gnome. If (like me) you prefer KDE, use KDE. But for heaven's sake stop bashing!
That's what I'm saying. I didn't say I won't use KDE, I said don't want to be part of the KDE community. It's not just GNOME and KDE either. I'm sure people have felt the same way about Linux and BSD advocates.
Don't be silly. WINE won't permit a program to run on a computer that it can't already run on. Dosemu will. Understand the difference? I realise you're arguing over what they mean by "another" but your defintion of emulate suffers from that same problem. Essentially you're arguing for a defintion of emulate that is so broad as to be meaningless. As was pointed out at the start of all this. So since we've come full circle on the arguments I'm sure you'll agree it's pointless to continue.
Slashdot Mirror
The point I'm trying to get to is that some Maori tribes have got into a habit of making claims on property not because they were cheated out of it by colonists but because that property is now comercially valuable. In the Lego case three tribes from the northern part of NZ are making these claims and if I were feeling cynical I'd say it's because they think they can get some money out of Lego. AFAICS Lego are not stealing or commodifying anyone's identity, they are just using a couple of Maori/Polynesian words (nothing specific to the Maori language at all) in a ficitional game. Here is an article from the Sydney Morning Herald which has specific details of the usage of the words in the game.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0106/01/text/world13.ht ml
RobotWisdom, OTOH will tend to have a fairly well defined audience just like /. does. That audience will tend to be interested in the stuff that is put up there and are more likely to click through. I'm particularly talking about when the ad became a normal weblog item, but even when it was prefaced by Paid Link: it still appears much like a normal item. Also it seems that the guy running RobotWisdom has a fairly strict policy on ads, which will help because his audience will know that. Slashdot benefits from the same high level of targeting: /. is just about the only site I've clicked ads on in the last few years (I don't even look at the ads on other sites).
But despite these issues there are valid points to be taken from this experiment. In particular I think it indicates that targeted advertising is more effective (but that's already well known), and also the less 'ad-like' an ad is the more likely someone is to click through it. Of course if it becomes too deceptive it wont impress people looking for information who instead find themselves in a store.
"Dead Alive" is the US title for Brain Dead. I've never heard of a film where the cast has been so inthusiastic.
Have you seen this trailer? It is so incredibly DARK. My God I'm impressed.
Troll. Terry Pratchett is the best author still alive.
Since the FAQ says it's up to the distributors, wouldn't they be the ones to ask? It's interesting they say that actually, it means that they are not going to do any ports themselves. It'll be up to someone like Loki to do the work should Hasbro decide to port it to Linux.
Eazel's problem was that they were underfunded. It's too soon to tell if their business model would have worked.
I see it as interesting because previously no vendor had used Linux for a TPC benchmark (indeed I was under the impression that the TPC wouldn't allow it).
For the record I mentioned the change to Deliphon last week. Should've submitted a story.
IBM's pages have a lot of info on SOI. Here's a few links:
Press release,
Introduction - the pdf linked to from this page is a little more indepth,
Appears to be the start of an html version of the pdf.
Yep. It's been amusing.
- The others all run (or at least are capable of running) the native OS of the platform they are emulating.
- The others all trap CPU instructions in the emulated programs. In the cases which emulate the CPU (UAE, MAME, Bochs) all instructions are trapped. VMware, Dosemu, and Plex86 only trap instructions that cannot be permitted to execute on the real CPU.
- The others all emulate other hardware that is expected to be in the emulated platform. PICs, serial ports, hard drives, and sound cards are common.
Note that this definition elimiates lots of other things that people don't generally consider to be emulators but that fit under both of those dictionary defintions, such as JVMs.So, to reiterate, while WINE has a similar purpose to other emulators (as defined above) it doesn't function in the same way that an emulator does. In fact it's much closer to something like XFree86: an implementation of an API.
You could make a distinction between hardware and software emulators and say that the above is a definition of hardware emulators and that WINE is instead a software emulator. I'd probably agree, although I'd argue that "software emulator" isn't a very good label, as we're really talking about reimplementation rather than emulation, and that generally that sort of thing is refered to as a clone (e.g. people refer to vi clones not vi emulators).
Anyhow, now I have some work to do.
It seems to me that there are two likely possibilities for the content of the declaration. It could be a promise not to say anything negative. Since we haven't seen anything negative it's hard to dismiss this. However I would have expected at least someone to squeal long and loud about it if this were the case. All we've had is one line in a single story.
The other possibility is that the declaration was an agreement not to review the footage as it isn't finished. Something along the lines of "describe what you see here if you like, but please don't review it". This is something that the guy from New Line, and the director Peter Jackson who introduced the showing reportedly stressed. I hope and think this is more likely.
Only if you could already run it via Windows, yes?
Don't be silly. WINE won't permit a program to run on a computer that it can't already run on. Dosemu will. Understand the difference? I realise you're arguing over what they mean by "another" but your defintion of emulate suffers from that same problem. Essentially you're arguing for a defintion of emulate that is so broad as to be meaningless. As was pointed out at the start of all this. So since we've come full circle on the arguments I'm sure you'll agree it's pointless to continue.