This is an utterly OTT approach to the problem. A campaign/advertisements around the park would have been great (though no/. coverage I guess), reminding parents that their supposed to be having family time, and when you leave work your supposed to stop working too.
Having said that, the UK populous is pretty damn stupid when it comes to the employee-employer relationship, so anything to help switch the balance back to the employee's is good.
Although I've got some sympathy for your case, I'm not sure its right. I hope that when you got Google to remove the competitor's ad's you also went after the competitor under the 'passing off' laws?
It is not Google's job or responsibility to protect your trademark (or even know it exists!), or for that matter to prevent people being confused by others 'passing off'. Those are all issues for the trademark and business owners and the law/trade bodies.
Your example solution above basically means that Google would need to a) know of every single trademark and their owners, b) be involved in every single trademark dispute and c) understand every countries trademark laws. Although they might be better than the current system, I'm not sure people would agree to Google being the defacto rulers of who owns what trademark!
Most of this is the ISP's fault in the first place. By mis-selling the speed and 'unlimitedityness' of their products, they've given the illusion that we should all be getting 20Mbit unlimited connections, when in fact their networks can't even deliver half of that.
I'm already paying for a 10Mbit connection, but I don't actually get a 10Mbit connection, and if I actually use it too much I get capped to an even slower speed.
The regulator's should force the ISP's to advertise what they can actually deliver, not this unlimited 20Mbit crap, that none of them can.
btw this post is uk based, so please adjust all figures for your relevant crackpot nation.
Why don't they just go the whole way and lock them up now? Not much use in spending money to teach, house or feed them if they are just going to turn out bad. Actually why lock them up? jail space is at a premium and costly...injections are probably much cheaper.
If the government want further info on how the policy should work, then I suggest they start reading the Judge Dredd strips in 2000AD. But then again they probably already do. As it looks like Judge Dredd and MegaCity 1 has already become the ideal utopia the UK government is aiming for.
They'll need to get over their fear of skyscrapers in cities though, and they'll need to rollout ID cards pronto...with a much larger all encompassing database than they were planning.
mmm, just wanted to point out that the UK's only cable company Virgin (was NTL & Telewest), has the least restrictive unFair usage policy and were the last of the major ISP's to introduce such a policy. It's the ADSL ISP's that have utterly crazy limits and hardly ever provide the speeds they advertise.
I thought the actual problem was Blu-Ray was originally a data storage format. Which meant that durability was important, but you could sacrifice ease of use for it...hence the first blu-ray had clunky cartridges. The DVD consortium knew that wouldn't fly with consumers and so started the HD-DVD spec (or at least took an existing fledgling spec and pushed it on). It was only when TDK came up with the durability layer, that the Blu-Ray as a dvd replacement really took off...and probly was the first time it was even considered for the PS3. But it took too long for it to arrive so HD-DVD was now in a more finished position than Blu-Ray was (and still is!;-) so it had to be released to have any hope of making back some of the money spent by Toshiba, MicroSoft etc.
Personally I think VBA went too far, it wasn't a simple macro language.
Which meant it was ripe for abuse and overuse. Too many companies have important, business critical functions/logic entombed in Excel 'macros', or Access 'applications'.
If I've understood MS's intentions, they want all office programming to be done within.net, which is fine. But I think they should then 'freely' distribute an Office specific version of say C# Express. I can't see many customers being happy if they forced to also buy full Visual Studio versions if they want to convert their Excel/Access apps, esp not the SMB's.
Very good post, and I hope it does turn out that way. Unfortunately I doubt it though, I think the libraries will end up as simple rental shops. Less knowledge and reference books, and more and more like Blockbusters/netflix etc.
I dunno if that business model would work though...given the size of books, cramming them into a typical retail store space doesn't seem likely.
Instead of screwing with the mastering/recording process, what they should have done is worked with the PC hardware and codec software writers to fix the actual problem.
However they didn't do that, why? because this articles premise is FUD, the loudness problem started before MP3's and its more likely that the in-car CD and growing use of mass music for adverts started it.
This article is half implies that the record companies were boosting the loudness to improve the sound of MP3's...what the same format that they've tried to ban and exterminate from existence.
In the UK we have a fairly decent marking system for roads, and most GPS devices will use that information. However one thing GPS can't allow for, is people parking on the road! I'm betting most of the problem is the fact the narrow road is made unpassable by parked cars, remove the cars and the trucks wouldn't have a problem.
However as you can't go around rebuilding every single village in the UK, then as some one already said, we need the government to step in and reclassify the roads.
There is a large number of people whining that Google's constant changing of adwords is killing their revenue or business, and that must be a sign the Google's evil.
Now I'm sorry (ish) that you may have lost money, but Google doesn't exist to keep your flawed business model alive. Adwords doesn't give any guarantees of a level of income, and never has.
So really the people to blame here are your business advisor's and bank managers, that thought that having your major income supply be total dependant on a third party would make good sound business sense!
That's because Sony release BluRay early, too early! HD-DVD had a fully finished spec from the get go, how many spec's has bluray had? and its not finished yet...we've still got profile 1.2 to come.
In fact the only saving grace to BluRay is the ps3, because its more of a computer, people are used to updating it every few months to fix the bugs, or in the case rollout features that should have been there at launch!
Though for some reason this never gets mentioned in the press/blogs, I'd have thought people would have really pissed at bluray making them buy about 4 players already!
if that were the actual reason, then what about all of the 3G handsets in Europe with equal or better battery life?
its got nowt to do with battery, but rather the market. The US doesn't have a widespread 3G network, therefore it was pointless to add it...your biggest user base doesn't care. Secondly we know that like the ipod there are going to be multiple generations. So iphone v1 has lots of crappy issues, or choices that apple made but weren't sure about. iphone v2 will be the fix.
The only real surprise is that the euro operators believe that the Apple brand will overcome the horrendously high premium the iphone asks.
Fair enough, but its Company B that should be held responsible, not Google or the newspaper. Similarly its Company A that should be policing and taking Company B to court. Google and newspapers etc should not be expected to know which trademarks belong to who, and neither should they need to police trademark law.
...it is the biggest weakness of Linux compared to Windows or OSX.
Obviously this isn't the easiest to 'fix', as a lot of it is subjective but even so the competitors have done it, so Linux has to as well.
Some of this is simple things: CLI tools should have simple memorable names that relate to their function and not some obscure geek humor. Then their parameters should be standardized, e.g. is it/?, -? or --? to get a brief help? Pick one, then remove all the other variations from every single CLI tool that gets distributed with the main distros.
CLI tools should be marginalized, there should not be a CLI tool without a fully functioning GUI equivalent, and in fact the GUI should be more powerful. You can add features to GUI's and keep them usable, but with CLI you end up with all the entire ascii set as valid parameter choices!
Remove duplication, there should only be 1 'architecture' for things like networking, printing, sound etc... This applies to the tools too, if there are two tools that do roughly the same, then either merge them or pick the best.
Hardware, as forcing the manufactures for drivers isn't 'achievable', you need a complete HCL (that's targeted at the basics, i.e. the default view only lists hardware you can go and buy today).
A single base desktop would be great, as it would focus attention onto usability and documentation. Obviously it can then be ported/copied into the various desktop flavors.
I think a lot of what I'm trying to say is pointing to this: Linux needs a drive to a state where there is one way of doing 90% what the user would ever want to do.
and one the best ways to do that is to remove choice, sometimes remove it completely, but most of the time move it to a config file.
"because instead of simply installing software that checks and validates your game, you're allowing a company access via network to your game where they can outright regulate whatever you do with it." sorry but that's just parnoia...steam has to have some level of drm in order to provide the service its users wants. You are downloading the entire cd/dvd, they have to be able to stop you simply copying it. All your saying is that you don't trust Valve at all, and you think that Steam allows them to go snoop your email and porn collection!
tbh bigger issue here, is that third party steam games aren't properly integrated into Steam. Steam is basically dumping the cd into a folder and altering a small part of the exe. This is fine for the old games appearing on it (like doom, call of duty). But they must have known they would be using Steam to distribute while they were building BioShock. So there is no excuse for it to be the hack job the others are.
Valve and 2k need to sort this issue out pronto!
btw given that securerom is 'working' with the steam install, they must have done the same thing the warez groups do to stop securerom checking for the cd/dvd???
From the consumers point of view its better: 1) No Region Coding 2) 1 Version of the Spec = More compatibility 3) Dualies (DVD & HD-DVD) 4) More features (due to 2, HDDVD's have always supported the full feature set)
Technically there is naff all between them, now the BluRay aren't using MPEG2, the audio codec support was always equal (just differed in what was 'required' to be on the disk)
The biggest con with HDDVD is the lack of support it seems to have by the backers, in the UK at least a lot of stores have a bluray section and naff all hddvd related:(
Personally I'm waiting for the Samsung Dually Player, as I'm not buying two devices!
As others have mentioned the UMPC was no use for real work and too big for portability. I think people that would be interested in this kind of device, would rather it was in their phone. Which is exactly what I'm looking for a phone with 3G/HSDPA, WiFi, a VGA screen and a keyboard. My reasoning is that there is no point in fast mobile internet if you can only read 'Slas' without scrolling:) Now I can find phones that have most of my requirements, what extra did the UMPC have? Storage, nope SD cards are going for £10 per gb. Speed, nope (see below!). Battery, nope.
The other thing that killed the UMPC was the OS, MS didn't put any where near as much effort into it as they did for say the media centre UI's. UMPC's needed an OS that boots as fast a phone, they needed an OS that could cope with the lack of screen res, they needed an OS without any unneeded bloat. XP/Vista just is not that OS, and I'm not sure if it could have been made into it either. And tbh fair, I don't think Linux would have cut it either...the effort to make it suitable might well be less though.
Isn't the reason the UK product is ok, is because of the food labelling laws? every product needs to state what it contains, and most state a nutritional breakdown as well. Dunno if this is an EC thing or not though, or how strict the testing is.
I know it certainly isn't that lame-ass excuse of 'testing methods'
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This is an utterly OTT approach to the problem. A campaign/advertisements around the park would have been great (though no /. coverage I guess), reminding parents that their supposed to be having family time, and when you leave work your supposed to stop working too.
Having said that, the UK populous is pretty damn stupid when it comes to the employee-employer relationship, so anything to help switch the balance back to the employee's is good.
The upcoming Nokia E71 would be good, its well built has a keyboard, isn't a massive brick like the E90.
An initial review is here http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/05/25/nokia-e71-review/
Although I've got some sympathy for your case, I'm not sure its right.
I hope that when you got Google to remove the competitor's ad's you also went after the competitor under the 'passing off' laws?
It is not Google's job or responsibility to protect your trademark (or even know it exists!), or for that matter to prevent people being confused by others 'passing off'. Those are all issues for the trademark and business owners and the law/trade bodies.
Your example solution above basically means that Google would need to a) know of every single trademark and their owners, b) be involved in every single trademark dispute and c) understand every countries trademark laws. Although they might be better than the current system, I'm not sure people would agree to Google being the defacto rulers of who owns what trademark!
Most of this is the ISP's fault in the first place. By mis-selling the speed and 'unlimitedityness' of their products, they've given the illusion that we should all be getting 20Mbit unlimited connections, when in fact their networks can't even deliver half of that.
I'm already paying for a 10Mbit connection, but I don't actually get a 10Mbit connection, and if I actually use it too much I get capped to an even slower speed.
The regulator's should force the ISP's to advertise what they can actually deliver, not this unlimited 20Mbit crap, that none of them can.
btw this post is uk based, so please adjust all figures for your relevant crackpot nation.
Why don't they just go the whole way and lock them up now? Not much use in spending money to teach, house or feed them if they are just going to turn out bad. Actually why lock them up? jail space is at a premium and costly...injections are probably much cheaper.
If the government want further info on how the policy should work, then I suggest they start reading the Judge Dredd strips in 2000AD. But then again they probably already do. As it looks like Judge Dredd and MegaCity 1 has already become the ideal utopia the UK government is aiming for.
They'll need to get over their fear of skyscrapers in cities though, and they'll need to rollout ID cards pronto...with a much larger all encompassing database than they were planning.
mmm, just wanted to point out that the UK's only cable company Virgin (was NTL & Telewest), has the least restrictive unFair usage policy and were the last of the major ISP's to introduce such a policy. It's the ADSL ISP's that have utterly crazy limits and hardly ever provide the speeds they advertise.
I thought the actual problem was Blu-Ray was originally a data storage format. ;-) so it had to be released to have any hope of making back some of the money spent by Toshiba, MicroSoft etc.
Which meant that durability was important, but you could sacrifice ease of use for it...hence the first blu-ray had clunky cartridges.
The DVD consortium knew that wouldn't fly with consumers and so started the HD-DVD spec (or at least took an existing fledgling spec and pushed it on).
It was only when TDK came up with the durability layer, that the Blu-Ray as a dvd replacement really took off...and probly was the first time it was even considered for the PS3.
But it took too long for it to arrive so HD-DVD was now in a more finished position than Blu-Ray was (and still is!
Personally I think VBA went too far, it wasn't a simple macro language.
.net, which is fine. But I think they should then 'freely' distribute an Office specific version of say C# Express. I can't see many customers being happy if they forced to also buy full Visual Studio versions if they want to convert their Excel/Access apps, esp not the SMB's.
Which meant it was ripe for abuse and overuse. Too many companies have important, business critical functions/logic entombed in Excel 'macros', or Access 'applications'.
If I've understood MS's intentions, they want all office programming to be done within
Very good post, and I hope it does turn out that way. Unfortunately I doubt it though, I think the libraries will end up as simple rental shops. Less knowledge and reference books, and more and more like Blockbusters/netflix etc.
I dunno if that business model would work though...given the size of books, cramming them into a typical retail store space doesn't seem likely.
Instead of screwing with the mastering/recording process, what they should have done is worked with the PC hardware and codec software writers to fix the actual problem.
However they didn't do that, why? because this articles premise is FUD, the loudness problem started before MP3's and its more likely that the in-car CD and growing use of mass music for adverts started it.
This article is half implies that the record companies were boosting the loudness to improve the sound of MP3's...what the same format that they've tried to ban and exterminate from existence.
In the UK we have a fairly decent marking system for roads, and most GPS devices will use that information.
However one thing GPS can't allow for, is people parking on the road! I'm betting most of the problem is the fact the narrow road is made unpassable by parked cars, remove the cars and the trucks wouldn't have a problem.
However as you can't go around rebuilding every single village in the UK, then as some one already said, we need the government to step in and reclassify the roads.
There is a large number of people whining that Google's constant changing of adwords is killing their revenue or business, and that must be a sign the Google's evil.
Now I'm sorry (ish) that you may have lost money, but Google doesn't exist to keep your flawed business model alive. Adwords doesn't give any guarantees of a level of income, and never has.
So really the people to blame here are your business advisor's and bank managers, that thought that having your major income supply be total dependant on a third party would make good sound business sense!
That's because Sony release BluRay early, too early! HD-DVD had a fully finished spec from the get go, how many spec's has bluray had? and its not finished yet...we've still got profile 1.2 to come.
In fact the only saving grace to BluRay is the ps3, because its more of a computer, people are used to updating it every few months to fix the bugs, or in the case rollout features that should have been there at launch!
Though for some reason this never gets mentioned in the press/blogs, I'd have thought people would have really pissed at bluray making them buy about 4 players already!
if that were the actual reason, then what about all of the 3G handsets in Europe with equal or better battery life?
its got nowt to do with battery, but rather the market. The US doesn't have a widespread 3G network, therefore it was pointless to add it...your biggest user base doesn't care. Secondly we know that like the ipod there are going to be multiple generations. So iphone v1 has lots of crappy issues, or choices that apple made but weren't sure about. iphone v2 will be the fix.
The only real surprise is that the euro operators believe that the Apple brand will overcome the horrendously high premium the iphone asks.
The tarrifs aren't really the issue, its that apple/o2 want 270 for the phone, and they want you pay 55 a month.
The Nokia n95, which is a high end phone, you can get it for free on all monthly plans cept for the very chepeast 24/20!
So you've got a massive upfront expense, on top of your usual tarrif.
Then you've got the missing 3g, lack of 3rd party software, double charges for ringtones etc etc.
Fair enough, but its Company B that should be held responsible, not Google or the newspaper. Similarly its Company A that should be policing and taking Company B to court. Google and newspapers etc should not be expected to know which trademarks belong to who, and neither should they need to police trademark law.
...it is the biggest weakness of Linux compared to Windows or OSX.
/?, -? or --? to get a brief help? Pick one, then remove all the other variations from every single CLI tool that gets distributed with the main distros.
Obviously this isn't the easiest to 'fix', as a lot of it is subjective but even so the competitors have done it, so Linux has to as well.
Some of this is simple things:
CLI tools should have simple memorable names that relate to their function and not some obscure geek humor. Then their parameters should be standardized, e.g. is it
CLI tools should be marginalized, there should not be a CLI tool without a fully functioning GUI equivalent, and in fact the GUI should be more powerful. You can add features to GUI's and keep them usable, but with CLI you end up with all the entire ascii set as valid parameter choices!
Remove duplication, there should only be 1 'architecture' for things like networking, printing, sound etc...
This applies to the tools too, if there are two tools that do roughly the same, then either merge them or pick the best.
Hardware, as forcing the manufactures for drivers isn't 'achievable', you need a complete HCL (that's targeted at the basics, i.e. the default view only lists hardware you can go and buy today).
A single base desktop would be great, as it would focus attention onto usability and documentation. Obviously it can then be ported/copied into the various desktop flavors.
I think a lot of what I'm trying to say is pointing to this:
Linux needs a drive to a state where there is one way of doing 90% what the user would ever want to do.
and one the best ways to do that is to remove choice, sometimes remove it completely, but most of the time move it to a config file.
"because instead of simply installing software that checks and validates your game, you're allowing a company access via network to your game where they can outright regulate whatever you do with it."
sorry but that's just parnoia...steam has to have some level of drm in order to provide the service its users wants. You are downloading the entire cd/dvd, they have to be able to stop you simply copying it. All your saying is that you don't trust Valve at all, and you think that Steam allows them to go snoop your email and porn collection!
tbh bigger issue here, is that third party steam games aren't properly integrated into Steam. Steam is basically dumping the cd into a folder and altering a small part of the exe. This is fine for the old games appearing on it (like doom, call of duty). But they must have known they would be using Steam to distribute while they were building BioShock. So there is no excuse for it to be the hack job the others are.
Valve and 2k need to sort this issue out pronto!
btw given that securerom is 'working' with the steam install, they must have done the same thing the warez groups do to stop securerom checking for the cd/dvd???
did you ask them to add it? and was it ratified as a license at the time?
Why do you think HD-DVD is worse?
From the consumers point of view its better:
1) No Region Coding
2) 1 Version of the Spec = More compatibility
3) Dualies (DVD & HD-DVD)
4) More features (due to 2, HDDVD's have always supported the full feature set)
Technically there is naff all between them, now the BluRay aren't using MPEG2, the audio codec support was always equal (just differed in what was 'required' to be on the disk)
The biggest con with HDDVD is the lack of support it seems to have by the backers, in the UK at least a lot of stores have a bluray section and naff all hddvd related:(
Personally I'm waiting for the Samsung Dually Player, as I'm not buying two devices!
lots of interest here!
either no-one cares, or no-one actually understands a word of the summary...
As others have mentioned the UMPC was no use for real work and too big for portability. I think people that would be interested in this kind of device, would rather it was in their phone. Which is exactly what I'm looking for a phone with 3G/HSDPA, WiFi, a VGA screen and a keyboard. My reasoning is that there is no point in fast mobile internet if you can only read 'Slas' without scrolling:) Now I can find phones that have most of my requirements, what extra did the UMPC have? Storage, nope SD cards are going for £10 per gb. Speed, nope (see below!). Battery, nope.
The other thing that killed the UMPC was the OS, MS didn't put any where near as much effort into it as they did for say the media centre UI's.
UMPC's needed an OS that boots as fast a phone, they needed an OS that could cope with the lack of screen res, they needed an OS without any unneeded bloat. XP/Vista just is not that OS, and I'm not sure if it could have been made into it either. And tbh fair, I don't think Linux would have cut it either...the effort to make it suitable might well be less though.
Do you use a upscaling DVD player? If not I'd get one, it makes a big difference, and a cheaper option esp if you've got a large dvd collection.
Isn't the reason the UK product is ok, is because of the food labelling laws? every product needs to state what it contains, and most state a nutritional breakdown as well. Dunno if this is an EC thing or not though, or how strict the testing is.
I know it certainly isn't that lame-ass excuse of 'testing methods'
1) You don't have to watch TV.
2) Its not real, yes even the news!
So stop your whinging, and let others enjoy it if they wish.
For the land of the free, some American's have strange ideas on what's allowed/right/wrong.