It seems that legal and marketing simply didn't talk to each other.
The legal department wanted to be sure they had the right to do everything they might do, even if they're not remotely likely to do so. Their only concern is that they don't get sued.
Unfortunately they didn't consider what the response public would be is someone actually read the legalese. Considering that isn;t their job. The public image of AOL is a marketting matter. Not a legal matter.
As is often the case in large companies, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.
Even for a rendering device, this is a pretty slow clock speed for a performance component. Unless this is targetted at handhelds, it seems strange. This sort of device can be pipelined easily, and a faster clock rate with a longer pipeline would seem to make more sense.
Obviously there's something I don't know since these guys made that design decision, and they probably know more about this that I do..
The examples I gave are typical economics examples for aggregation. Allow me to explain.
I must be stupid. I just don't see how going to a glorified, overbranded amusement park resembles reading an article about Bolivian politics.
It doesn't. It resembles a subscription. Disneyland is the typical example of this type of business model. A fixed cost for entry, and then all rides are free. People will pay more for entry to the park than they would on individual rides. They may ride more times since there's no additional cost but the extra cost of that is smaller than the increase in sales.
None of which force you to subscribe to read them. You do have to buy a whole issue at once, but that's the smallest unit that's practical in a newstand. Which is hardly true for online content.
Someone may be willing to spend 5c for the news and 10c for the sport. Someone else may be willing to pay 10c for the news and 5c for the sport. Sell news and sport separately, and you can charge 5c for each part, meaning both buyers will buy both parts (total income 20c), 10c each, neaning both buyers will buy 1 part each (total income 20c), or you can charge 15c for news and sport combined (total income 30c).
These are oversimplifications, but they illustrate the point that in many cases people are more willing to spend more money.
People spend a lot more money on amusement parks, newspapers, and channel packages that they do on individual fairground rides, single articles and pay per view.
You need to provide enough content for people to feel its worth it though. A $50 fee for a years' subscription is to much for most people because they're not convinced they'll get $50 worth of what they want over the course of the year.
They might be willing to pay a 50 cents for a day's access in principle, but in practice, the inconvenience of paying that much makes it unlikely.
A model that may have worked is a collaboration of
sites that offer people a lot of content, even though most will only be interested in a subset. Actually switching the web over to that sort of a business model would be difficult though. There's way too much competition from free sources.
But let's assume all sites do manage to go subscription only. The LA times may not be worth that $5 a month to you, but would that and a couple of dozen other sites that you would otherwise be unable to access be wrth that much? If they could offer enough to tempt you, that would be $5 profit shared between them, which however many ways you slice it is going to be higher than the $0 the LA Times is getting from you. This is the principle of aggregation. It's a very well established business model. The problem is that nobody has worked out a way to offer enough online content in one chunk to convince people to pay.
No picking up small amounts from each of a million suppliers.
Where I live, the rubbish collection also collects recyclables. They're going that way and collecting the stuff anyway. The extra weight of the recycling containers and the time with the engine running while the stuff is sorted adds costs but these are quite small.
But trees aren't treated with dyes specially designed to be hard to remove. It's much easier to get rid of a slight yellowish tinge in fresh wood pulp than to get rid of colour-fast inks.
The pro-recycling lobby claims that the environmental harm from this is lower than from processing raw materials. Don't know if this is true though. I'd quite like to see what processes are involved though.
I believe the biggest problem is that once you've used the stuff once, the fibers are mashed and broken, so turning it back into pulp, giving it a heavy chemical treatment and then into paper results in poor quality paper. The best use, other than bog-roll, is to mix it with new wood pulp to make it go further.
Well, that's true, but there's no reason not to use partially recycled paper. You'll need some fresh aterial anyway. Collection is not going to be anywhere near 100%.
Vague was probably the wrong term. I meant in the sense of being non-specific. Something along the lines of "I hereby give AOL permission to spy on me and waive all rights under {appropriate law}" as a seperate document would be a lot more likely to be considered valid.
Of course I wouldn't rely on this. This is not legal advice. Just my - probably flawed - understanding of contract law.
AOl probably has no intention of doing what they've demanded the rights to. It's prbably illegal anyway whatever the customer agrees to. What they do want is sufficient legal protection that they can avoid any spurious legal challenges that people might beempted to do based on the basic functionality of the system (including logging, temporary storage, occasional viewing of private messages during maintainance etc.)
Much as it may seem Slashdot is a hive mind, different people have different opinions.
Some people are quite outspoken about how they should have the right to pirate music from callous faceless large companies but aren't willing to be quite so vocal about a callous faceless large company doing the same, whereas others get very upset about people breaching the really quite reasonable restrictions on GPL code while they believe that the music industry is big enough to look after itself, and so tend to be less vocal about that.
Personally, I just get annoyed about emotive terms like stealing;)
We can't be 100% sure they aren't complying with the GPL. Not without acquiring a copy at least. For example, they may have hidden the licence and a written offer to supply the source somewhere in the documentation.
While it does seem unlikely, it is possible that they may have done something like this as the minimum possible to keep within the terms of the licence.
It sounds to me like the prosecutors used a law that was intended for use against large scale distributors aainst some guy who made a few copies for friends.
If this is the case, the court made the correct decision.
But he does come up with innovative concepts. Something highly undervalued by developers. Perhaps we shouldn't revere hm. We should instead look down on everyone else for their lack of innovation.
Actually it's not that there are no good ideas. Just that the publishers don't trust those with original ideas and no track record.
Data transfer rate is slower than a hard disk, but the real killer is seek time. Careful organisation of files can make a CD based game a lot faster. The reason they don't do this is because it's a lot easier to simply copy files to a hard disk.
It should be possible for most games to load segments on demand. Then speed doesn't matter too much as long as it's fast enough.
Your argument seemed to be that OSS reduces the demand for programmers. It was the part where you said " Thus, if you are correct OSS is reducing the demand for developers." that made me think you meant that.
I point out that typically this is not the case. The demand for programmers would remain roughly constant.
I brought in the concept of mass production to demonstrate a similar situation. One would expect that given an annual world demand of approximately 2000 cars, a factory that could produce 40 cars a week with fewer workers would saturate demand, and therefore would mean fewer car builders were required. This is sort of analogous to your argument that OSS would decrease the number of programmer hours available. Instead, what happened was demand went up because the product could be delivered more cheaply.
Automation of factories happened a long time before the invention of the robot. You can only have limited automation with cams and gears, but you can still automate large portions of the process. In fact the automated production line was conceived by Marc Brunel in the early 19th century.
A libellous story in a newspaper can do a lot of damage to a person. Possibly even more than a guilty judgement in a court of law. You shouldn't go around making allegations about people and presenting them as facts without being totally sure that they are facts. Why should the media be able to try and convict someone based on hearsay? They have a responsibility to be sure they report the truth.
If OJ Simpson had been tried in England, he would have been able to sue any newspaper that said he was a murderer. If they said he was an alleged murderer, or an accused murderer, then they would have been okay. The facts are there. In fact, adding the qualifiers makes it more honest.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that legal and marketing simply didn't talk to each other.
The legal department wanted to be sure they had the right to do everything they might do, even if they're not remotely likely to do so. Their only concern is that they don't get sued.
Unfortunately they didn't consider what the response public would be is someone actually read the legalese. Considering that isn;t their job. The public image of AOL is a marketting matter. Not a legal matter.
As is often the case in large companies, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.
WEll, yes, but if it could be run at 180MHz it would be twice as fast.
But as the other poster pointed out, this is an FPGA, so I gather such speeds aren't possible.
Not mindstorms, but you reminded me of this home made autochanger
Links on that page link to a lego version
Even for a rendering device, this is a pretty slow clock speed for a performance component. Unless this is targetted at handhelds, it seems strange. This sort of device can be pipelined easily, and a faster clock rate with a longer pipeline would seem to make more sense.
Obviously there's something I don't know since these guys made that design decision, and they probably know more about this that I do..
The examples I gave are typical economics examples for aggregation. Allow me to explain.
I must be stupid. I just don't see how going to a glorified, overbranded amusement park resembles reading an article about Bolivian politics.
It doesn't. It resembles a subscription. Disneyland is the typical example of this type of business model. A fixed cost for entry, and then all rides are free. People will pay more for entry to the park than they would on individual rides. They may ride more times since there's no additional cost but the extra cost of that is smaller than the increase in sales.
None of which force you to subscribe to read them. You do have to buy a whole issue at once, but that's the smallest unit that's practical in a newstand. Which is hardly true for online content.
Someone may be willing to spend 5c for the news and 10c for the sport. Someone else may be willing to pay 10c for the news and 5c for the sport. Sell news and sport separately, and you can charge 5c for each part, meaning both buyers will buy both parts (total income 20c), 10c each, neaning both buyers will buy 1 part each (total income 20c), or you can charge 15c for news and sport combined (total income 30c).
These are oversimplifications, but they illustrate the point that in many cases people are more willing to spend more money.
And your basis for that assertion is...?
Disneyland.
And most newspapers.
And Cable TV.
People spend a lot more money on amusement parks, newspapers, and channel packages that they do on individual fairground rides, single articles and pay per view.
You need to provide enough content for people to feel its worth it though. A $50 fee for a years' subscription is to much for most people because they're not convinced they'll get $50 worth of what they want over the course of the year.
They might be willing to pay a 50 cents for a day's access in principle, but in practice, the inconvenience of paying that much makes it unlikely.
A model that may have worked is a collaboration of sites that offer people a lot of content, even though most will only be interested in a subset. Actually switching the web over to that sort of a business model would be difficult though. There's way too much competition from free sources.
But let's assume all sites do manage to go subscription only. The LA times may not be worth that $5 a month to you, but would that and a couple of dozen other sites that you would otherwise be unable to access be wrth that much? If they could offer enough to tempt you, that would be $5 profit shared between them, which however many ways you slice it is going to be higher than the $0 the LA Times is getting from you. This is the principle of aggregation. It's a very well established business model. The problem is that nobody has worked out a way to offer enough online content in one chunk to convince people to pay.
No picking up small amounts from each of a million suppliers.
Where I live, the rubbish collection also collects recyclables. They're going that way and collecting the stuff anyway. The extra weight of the recycling containers and the time with the engine running while the stuff is sorted adds costs but these are quite small.
But trees aren't treated with dyes specially designed to be hard to remove. It's much easier to get rid of a slight yellowish tinge in fresh wood pulp than to get rid of colour-fast inks.
The pro-recycling lobby claims that the environmental harm from this is lower than from processing raw materials. Don't know if this is true though. I'd quite like to see what processes are involved though.
I believe the biggest problem is that once you've used the stuff once, the fibers are mashed and broken, so turning it back into pulp, giving it a heavy chemical treatment and then into paper results in poor quality paper. The best use, other than bog-roll, is to mix it with new wood pulp to make it go further.
Well, that's true, but there's no reason not to use partially recycled paper. You'll need some fresh aterial anyway. Collection is not going to be anywhere near 100%.
Cost of gathering the newspapers at the curb, transporting to the sorting facility
No different from cost of collecting it from the forest, and not even substantially higher than exisitng waste collection cost.
sorting
Most is already sorted. Corporate recycling is mostly photocopier paper, household is mostly newspaper
storage
Requires considerably less space than dedicated forests. And takes up lkess ladnfill space,
then extra processing to remove old ink.
Can be achieved by bleaching. Most paper is bleached whatever the source.
Don't see why. Surely the resources used are going to be pretty much the same regardless of raw materials, whether its wood, rags, or used paper.
Vague was probably the wrong term. I meant in the sense of being non-specific. Something along the lines of "I hereby give AOL permission to spy on me and waive all rights under {appropriate law}" as a seperate document would be a lot more likely to be considered valid.
Of course I wouldn't rely on this. This is not legal advice. Just my - probably flawed - understanding of contract law.
The payment barrier still sucks, i.e.: No valid micropayment system exists (STILL)
I don't think people like micropayments. Flat rate for a lot of stuff would appeal to a lot of people a whole lot more.
Perhaps, but I don't know if something so vague as the AOL TOS would be considered agreement under those laws.
Yup. You are if you're not using ot for anything
AOl probably has no intention of doing what they've demanded the rights to. It's prbably illegal anyway whatever the customer agrees to. What they do want is sufficient legal protection that they can avoid any spurious legal challenges that people might beempted to do based on the basic functionality of the system (including logging, temporary storage, occasional viewing of private messages during maintainance etc.)
No. Plagiarism is so much better a word. Much more fitting and has similar, if not greater negative connotations.
Much as it may seem Slashdot is a hive mind, different people have different opinions.
Some people are quite outspoken about how they should have the right to pirate music from callous faceless large companies but aren't willing to be quite so vocal about a callous faceless large company doing the same, whereas others get very upset about people breaching the really quite reasonable restrictions on GPL code while they believe that the music industry is big enough to look after itself, and so tend to be less vocal about that.
Personally, I just get annoyed about emotive terms like stealing;)
We can't be 100% sure they aren't complying with the GPL. Not without acquiring a copy at least. For example, they may have hidden the licence and a written offer to supply the source somewhere in the documentation.
While it does seem unlikely, it is possible that they may have done something like this as the minimum possible to keep within the terms of the licence.
It sounds to me like the prosecutors used a law that was intended for use against large scale distributors aainst some guy who made a few copies for friends.
If this is the case, the court made the correct decision.
But he does come up with innovative concepts. Something highly undervalued by developers. Perhaps we shouldn't revere hm. We should instead look down on everyone else for their lack of innovation.
Actually it's not that there are no good ideas. Just that the publishers don't trust those with original ideas and no track record.
Data transfer rate is slower than a hard disk, but the real killer is seek time. Careful organisation of files can make a CD based game a lot faster. The reason they don't do this is because it's a lot easier to simply copy files to a hard disk.
It should be possible for most games to load segments on demand. Then speed doesn't matter too much as long as it's fast enough.
Yup. Consoles do it all the way back to the early interactive CD systems. The Amiga did it (of course, it had no hard drive to install to).
Your argument seemed to be that OSS reduces the demand for programmers. It was the part where you said " Thus, if you are correct OSS is reducing the demand for developers." that made me think you meant that.
I point out that typically this is not the case. The demand for programmers would remain roughly constant.
I brought in the concept of mass production to demonstrate a similar situation. One would expect that given an annual world demand of approximately 2000 cars, a factory that could produce 40 cars a week with fewer workers would saturate demand, and therefore would mean fewer car builders were required. This is sort of analogous to your argument that OSS would decrease the number of programmer hours available. Instead, what happened was demand went up because the product could be delivered more cheaply.
Automation of factories happened a long time before the invention of the robot. You can only have limited automation with cams and gears, but you can still automate large portions of the process. In fact the automated production line was conceived by Marc Brunel in the early 19th century.
Yes. You do have a point there.
If those are really the statements the guy sued over, I see your point. I can't see anything there that's actually untrue.
A libellous story in a newspaper can do a lot of damage to a person. Possibly even more than a guilty judgement in a court of law. You shouldn't go around making allegations about people and presenting them as facts without being totally sure that they are facts. Why should the media be able to try and convict someone based on hearsay? They have a responsibility to be sure they report the truth.
If OJ Simpson had been tried in England, he would have been able to sue any newspaper that said he was a murderer. If they said he was an alleged murderer, or an accused murderer, then they would have been okay. The facts are there. In fact, adding the qualifiers makes it more honest.