I'm probably going to get modded down for being redundant, but Disney's blaming of Apple is based on the need to find a scapegoat, and nothing more.
This tactic is applied to all sort of situations, from losing one's job, a failed marriage, financial problems: everybody wants somebody to blame. They are usually less concerned about who's ACTUALLY responsible than they are about finding the easiest target to level blame upon. For example, the economy may be at fault for someone losing their job, but you can't pick on the economy.
This need for blame is sometimes emotional: pent-up frustration must be directed somewhere. This is sometimes political: somebody who could potentially be faulted for incompetence must save his/her job by taking the onus away from themselves.
Everyone agrees with the facts that the movie and recording industries aren't doing as well financially as they once were. What many people disagree about is the cause of this decline in financial results.
My personal opinion is that they industries are highly cyclical, depending upon either the state of the general economy or the presence of hit albums, songs or movies that bolster the bottom line. At the present time, the movie and recording industries seem to be at one of the lower ends of the cycle.
The reason why I think that Apple was singled out is because they represent a distinct vendor among an industry full of more or less homogeneous PC dealers. If you pick on Dell, you're probably going to have to deal with Compaq, Gateway, HP and a host of other PC dealers. A bully will pick on the nerdy, lonely kid at school, but he won't pick on a kid who's popular and has lots of friends to back him up.
So poor Apple is the loner of the computer biz that gets targeted by Disney, who, for all intents and purposes, IS the bully in question.
Well Quebec (as well as Louisiana) is the only juridiction in North America that uses the Civil Code system of justice, instead of Common Law, which is what everybody else on this continent uses.
In Quebec, as well as other Civil Code jurisdictions throughout Europe, laws are codified, and there's very little room for interpretation.
Common Law justice systems allow people to interpret judgements according to legal precedent, such as, for example, the Roe vs. Wade abortion case.
I'm not advocating either system over the other, just sharing my thoughts.
There will be two radically divergent outcomes in the next 5-10 years. Either the RIAA and MPAA succeed in passing the SSSCA, or some freakish sibling, or they will fail and slowly see their business deteriorate. I believe they will both fight tooth and nail to pass some extreme copyright law, with the full support of the Bush Administration. Support from Congress, however, is far from assured.
I urge all Americans on here to vote Democrat in the coming congressional elections, so as to allow the Democrats to retake the House and make life difficult for the Republican Administration. They can't sign a bill that Congress won't pass.
It seems that every week, we read about a new symptom of the ambiguities of the DMCA. Why do judges keep supporting this obviously flawed incoherent, and roughshod legislation that is the DMCA? IMO, the DMCA is a stack of legal cards that should have fallen apart years ago. Why is it still being upheld? Why has the judicial establishment squashed all coherent and legitimate legal challenges against it?
Some of you may disagree with me, but Sun has contriubuted a lot to the OpenSource community. They have programmers working on the Mozilla, GNOME and most especially OpenOffice projects. All of these projects seek to provide highly usable and OpenSource alternatives to Microsoft software, namely, InternetExplorer, Windows and MS Office, respectively. They have (in a highly restricted way) opened up the source code to Java and have offered the JDK and all other Java API's for Linux.
Now, ironically, Linux is eating into Sun's market share, to the delight of OpenSource zealots, who decry Sun simply for being a for-profit corporation. I get the sense that many OpenSourcers are rooting against Sun, and I believe that's an entirely counter-productive position to take.
Microsoft is the enemy of OpenSource, not Sun. Sun may not have open-sourced Java and Solaris, but, hey, they need to make money just like everybody else. Sun has many OpenSource products and has contributed much to the community.
OpenSource and Linux will lose a great deal if Sun goes out of business, and not vice-versa.
Mandrake 8.0 was the very first distro that I got to install cleanly right off the bat and allowed me to connect to my DSL immediately. I tried other distros, like Red Hat 6.2 and Mandrake 7.0, but I had serious problems.
8.0 was the PERFECT distro for a newbie like myself. It spared me the pain of having to configure my DSL and allowed me to immediately post questions and get responses from Linux help sites, like LinuxNewbie to get the answers I needed to my important questions. Although they are exlusive to Mandrake, I was quite impressed with the GUI tools, which, although I should really use the command-line equivalents, were of great help to me just starting out.
8.1 seemed even better than 8.0, but I later found out that it wouldn't automount my CD-ROM or floppy, and I couldn't use my CD-Writer at all. I tried all kinds of tricks, but nothing seemed to resolve the problem. Reluctantly, I switched back to 8.0, which I'm still using.
Now I'm debating whether to try out 8.2, or go for a more "pure" Linux distro, like Slackware. I feel as though I've hit a dead end as far as learning Linux goes. I have an old PC on hand, which will really help me to experiment.
I think even if I decide to switch to Slackware, I want to try Mandrake 8.2, for purely sentimental reasons:)
I presently use an NTmachine at work that was installed and configured before I got here. The machine has a 35Gb hard drive, with a 3Gb partition and a 25Gb parition. They are both Windows partitions. The idiots who installed the software on my machine decided to install Windows on the 3Gb harddrive and all the applications, including the critical, irreplaceable ones (they didn't give us the CDs or installation instructions) on the 25Gb harddrive. For some reason, they installed NT Server instead of NT Workstation on my machine, so I couldn't use ParitionMagic to split the 25Gb partition (which is mostly empty).
I spoke to my boss about my desire to run Linux, and he kept telling me I'd get another system. Then, he told me he'd simply get another harddrive for my existing system. Despite the fact that another harddrive would be dirt-cheap and easy to order, they kept stalling on getting it for me.
Fortunately, I got a call from one of my ex-coworkers who wanted to bring me to his new company. I mentioned installing Linux on my desktop, and they said no problem. I'm so excited, now I don't to deal with Windoze, an unstable system, or any of these crappy Windows applications. I'll be a web developer, so I don't have to deal with.doc or.xls files.
Because of the Linus bottleneck in the Linux kernel development process, how will any of this code end up in the Linux project and up directly benifiting the OpenSource community?
I'm wondering what difference AOL having its own operating system will make if Microsoft still has their exclusive arrangements with OEMs to force consumers to pay for Windows on their desktops. For instance, if I go out and pay for a Dell computer, and am forced to pay for Windows, what incentive will I have afterwards to use AOL's OS?
The software and the OS will have already been installed, and the only way to get AOL's OS on my system will be to reformat my harddrive and erase all the extra software that came with my system. Since I've already paid $100+ for the Windows license, I really have no incentive to install the AOL OS.
AOL is going to need a distribution mechanism for their new Linux operating system, otherwise, they'll be unable to capture even 1% of the market for desktop computers. They are going to HAVE to get a major OEM to agree to pre-install AOL Linux. I can't see anybody installing the CD just because they got it in the mail and it's free if they're already using Windows.
Hmmmm....I originally submitted this story this morning, about 6 hours before this story was posted on Slashdot, and it was promptly rejected.....
Anyway, if you talk to just about any serious Java developer, they will tell you the same thing I'm about to tell you now. Noone will buy M$'s assertion that C# will be cross-platform for the simple reason that it's Microsoft. Microsoft depends upon a Windows monopoly, and for that reason, it will do nothing to support other platforms. If they did, they would have made Linux versions of Office, Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc. Noone trusts them to make *ANY* product cross-platform. Their history clearly demonstrates this pattern.
The reason why most developers use Java is because they KNOW they can compile it on one platform, and then run it on another. I know it's not perfectly platform-independent, but it comes pretty close. Switching from Java makes no sense if this cross-platform utility is compromised, or even made uncertain.
Besides, Java has a proven track record and is *EXTREMELY* well documented. If I need info on any class, package or utility, it's just a few clicks away in the HTML javadocs. Also, I can document my all of my OWN code with only a single text command: javadoc. Thus everyone will be able to read my own documentation in the same format and with the same easy of use as the Sun Java documentation. Every product Microsoft has attempted to document, especially Visual Basic, has been very difficult to get pertinent information on.
I can run, compile and deploy a Java application using nothing but the free JDK and J2EE from the Sun site, a simple text editor, a command prompt (whether Windows or Linux), a text-line compiler (like Jakarta Ant), and a free application server (like Tomcat). I don't even need a GUI, save for the browser to test my web application. I don't have to shell out $1,000 for Visual Studio to learn, use, program and deploy a Java application. The web application I'm developing for my company has thus far cost us $0 in development costs (aside from my salary and maintaining the hardware it will run on).
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that Microsoft will make any of their prodocols and/or products truly open, documented or free. The openness, documentation and free cost of Java, as well as its cross-platform capabilities make Java and excellent development platform, and these three advantages, by their intrinsic nature, conflict with Microsoft's intrinsic nature and will never be successfully duplicated by that company.
you have heard the comparison to razors and disposable blades?
I haven't, but I'm paying way too much for mine, and I'm sure Gilette makes a health profit margin on those too. This is why I use up each razor blade I have until it's so dull that I still have stubble after I've shaven.
This is what companies LOVE to do. If you can make a totally non-generic but dirt-cheap (to them) component to one of your products, something that noone else can possibly duplicate, like a printer cartridge for an HP printer, or a razor blade for a gilette razor, then you will charge as much for it as possible. The same thinking goes for movie theatre popcorn.
It's this level of overcharging that has made Microsoft a multi-billion dollar corporation, but, in fact, is essential for many companies to simply SURVIVE. I'm sure a great many smaller movie theatres would have gone out of business were it not for charging too much for popcorn, and I'm dead certain HP would be in serious trouble were it not for these printer cartridges.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm probably going to get modded down for being redundant, but Disney's blaming of Apple is based on the need to find a scapegoat, and nothing more.
This tactic is applied to all sort of situations, from losing one's job, a failed marriage, financial problems: everybody wants somebody to blame. They are usually less concerned about who's ACTUALLY responsible than they are about finding the easiest target to level blame upon. For example, the economy may be at fault for someone losing their job, but you can't pick on the economy.
This need for blame is sometimes emotional: pent-up frustration must be directed somewhere. This is sometimes political: somebody who could potentially be faulted for incompetence must save his/her job by taking the onus away from themselves.
Everyone agrees with the facts that the movie and recording industries aren't doing as well financially as they once were. What many people disagree about is the cause of this decline in financial results.
My personal opinion is that they industries are highly cyclical, depending upon either the state of the general economy or the presence of hit albums, songs or movies that bolster the bottom line. At the present time, the movie and recording industries seem to be at one of the lower ends of the cycle.
The reason why I think that Apple was singled out is because they represent a distinct vendor among an industry full of more or less homogeneous PC dealers. If you pick on Dell, you're probably going to have to deal with Compaq, Gateway, HP and a host of other PC dealers. A bully will pick on the nerdy, lonely kid at school, but he won't pick on a kid who's popular and has lots of friends to back him up.
So poor Apple is the loner of the computer biz that gets targeted by Disney, who, for all intents and purposes, IS the bully in question.
My comment's there:
my comment
...and I don't care how much money they offer me to work in the US, I'm staying put!
The democrats are the party of Hollywood, just like the Republicans are the party of oil companies and other like-minded corporations.
I'm sure there will be a burgeoning market for black market PC's, just as there are for cable decoders and other illegal electronics.
One way or another, people will rebel against this.
Interesting. I didn't know that Mexico was a Civil Code country. My mistake.
Well Quebec (as well as Louisiana) is the only juridiction in North America that uses the Civil Code system of justice, instead of Common Law, which is what everybody else on this continent uses.
In Quebec, as well as other Civil Code jurisdictions throughout Europe, laws are codified, and there's very little room for interpretation.
Common Law justice systems allow people to interpret judgements according to legal precedent, such as, for example, the Roe vs. Wade abortion case.
I'm not advocating either system over the other, just sharing my thoughts.
I live in Montreal and want to voice my opposition to the Canadian DMCA in any way I can.
Please send me any information you have on these forums.
There will be two radically divergent outcomes in the next 5-10 years. Either the RIAA and MPAA succeed in passing the SSSCA, or some freakish sibling, or they will fail and slowly see their business deteriorate. I believe they will both fight tooth and nail to pass some extreme copyright law, with the full support of the Bush Administration. Support from Congress, however, is far from assured.
I urge all Americans on here to vote Democrat in the coming congressional elections, so as to allow the Democrats to retake the House and make life difficult for the Republican Administration. They can't sign a bill that Congress won't pass.
Now the US might be hurt by people paying more for exports, and it wants to go to the WTO. Does anyone else see this as blatant hypocracy?
Absolutely! The Americans don't understand that FREE Trade means trade that isn't lobsided in favour of the US.
This is LUDICROUS! I've downloaded gigabytes of Linux ISO's for free. If I were in Europe, would I then by TAXED on software I can download for free?
The people who've written this bill have absolutely NO understanding of the internet whatsoever!
What do you mean? Microsoft bought Evil from Satan.
It seems that every week, we read about a new symptom of the ambiguities of the DMCA. Why do judges keep supporting this obviously flawed incoherent, and roughshod legislation that is the DMCA? IMO, the DMCA is a stack of legal cards that should have fallen apart years ago. Why is it still being upheld? Why has the judicial establishment squashed all coherent and legitimate legal challenges against it?
Damn, I guess I'll have to remove the Canadian flag from my homepage.
Some of you may disagree with me, but Sun has contriubuted a lot to the OpenSource community. They have programmers working on the Mozilla, GNOME and most especially OpenOffice projects. All of these projects seek to provide highly usable and OpenSource alternatives to Microsoft software, namely, InternetExplorer, Windows and MS Office, respectively. They have (in a highly restricted way) opened up the source code to Java and have offered the JDK and all other Java API's for Linux.
Now, ironically, Linux is eating into Sun's market share, to the delight of OpenSource zealots, who decry Sun simply for being a for-profit corporation. I get the sense that many OpenSourcers are rooting against Sun, and I believe that's an entirely counter-productive position to take.
Microsoft is the enemy of OpenSource, not Sun. Sun may not have open-sourced Java and Solaris, but, hey, they need to make money just like everybody else. Sun has many OpenSource products and has contributed much to the community.
OpenSource and Linux will lose a great deal if Sun goes out of business, and not vice-versa.
I thought that URL was owned by Microsoft! :O
Thanks for the tip. Has this problem been resolved in the final version, or would it still be present if I downloaded the ISO today?
Mandrake 8.0 was the very first distro that I got to install cleanly right off the bat and allowed me to connect to my DSL immediately. I tried other distros, like Red Hat 6.2 and Mandrake 7.0, but I had serious problems.
:)
8.0 was the PERFECT distro for a newbie like myself. It spared me the pain of having to configure my DSL and allowed me to immediately post questions and get responses from Linux help sites, like LinuxNewbie to get the answers I needed to my important questions. Although they are exlusive to Mandrake, I was quite impressed with the GUI tools, which, although I should really use the command-line equivalents, were of great help to me just starting out.
8.1 seemed even better than 8.0, but I later found out that it wouldn't automount my CD-ROM or floppy, and I couldn't use my CD-Writer at all. I tried all kinds of tricks, but nothing seemed to resolve the problem. Reluctantly, I switched back to 8.0, which I'm still using.
Now I'm debating whether to try out 8.2, or go for a more "pure" Linux distro, like Slackware. I feel as though I've hit a dead end as far as learning Linux goes. I have an old PC on hand, which will really help me to experiment.
I think even if I decide to switch to Slackware, I want to try Mandrake 8.2, for purely sentimental reasons
Wow. I wouldn't mind having THAT many job offers. It would sure give me a lot of leverage when asking for a raise :)
I presently use an NTmachine at work that was installed and configured before I got here. The machine has a 35Gb hard drive, with a 3Gb partition and a 25Gb parition. They are both Windows partitions. The idiots who installed the software on my machine decided to install Windows on the 3Gb harddrive and all the applications, including the critical, irreplaceable ones (they didn't give us the CDs or installation instructions) on the 25Gb harddrive. For some reason, they installed NT Server instead of NT Workstation on my machine, so I couldn't use ParitionMagic to split the 25Gb partition (which is mostly empty).
.doc or .xls files.
:)
I spoke to my boss about my desire to run Linux, and he kept telling me I'd get another system. Then, he told me he'd simply get another harddrive for my existing system. Despite the fact that another harddrive would be dirt-cheap and easy to order, they kept stalling on getting it for me.
Fortunately, I got a call from one of my ex-coworkers who wanted to bring me to his new company. I mentioned installing Linux on my desktop, and they said no problem. I'm so excited, now I don't to deal with Windoze, an unstable system, or any of these crappy Windows applications. I'll be a web developer, so I don't have to deal with
This is so exciting!
Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.
:)
So why doesn't this story have the foot icon beside it?
Because of the Linus bottleneck in the Linux kernel development process, how will any of this code end up in the Linux project and up directly benifiting the OpenSource community?
I'm wondering what difference AOL having its own operating system will make if Microsoft still has their exclusive arrangements with OEMs to force consumers to pay for Windows on their desktops. For instance, if I go out and pay for a Dell computer, and am forced to pay for Windows, what incentive will I have afterwards to use AOL's OS?
The software and the OS will have already been installed, and the only way to get AOL's OS on my system will be to reformat my harddrive and erase all the extra software that came with my system. Since I've already paid $100+ for the Windows license, I really have no incentive to install the AOL OS.
AOL is going to need a distribution mechanism for their new Linux operating system, otherwise, they'll be unable to capture even 1% of the market for desktop computers. They are going to HAVE to get a major OEM to agree to pre-install AOL Linux. I can't see anybody installing the CD just because they got it in the mail and it's free if they're already using Windows.
Hmmmm....I originally submitted this story this morning, about 6 hours before this story was posted on Slashdot, and it was promptly rejected.....
Anyway, if you talk to just about any serious Java developer, they will tell you the same thing I'm about to tell you now. Noone will buy M$'s assertion that C# will be cross-platform for the simple reason that it's Microsoft. Microsoft depends upon a Windows monopoly, and for that reason, it will do nothing to support other platforms. If they did, they would have made Linux versions of Office, Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc. Noone trusts them to make *ANY* product cross-platform. Their history clearly demonstrates this pattern.
The reason why most developers use Java is because they KNOW they can compile it on one platform, and then run it on another. I know it's not perfectly platform-independent, but it comes pretty close. Switching from Java makes no sense if this cross-platform utility is compromised, or even made uncertain.
Besides, Java has a proven track record and is *EXTREMELY* well documented. If I need info on any class, package or utility, it's just a few clicks away in the HTML javadocs. Also, I can document my all of my OWN code with only a single text command: javadoc. Thus everyone will be able to read my own documentation in the same format and with the same easy of use as the Sun Java documentation. Every product Microsoft has attempted to document, especially Visual Basic, has been very difficult to get pertinent information on.
I can run, compile and deploy a Java application using nothing but the free JDK and J2EE from the Sun site, a simple text editor, a command prompt (whether Windows or Linux), a text-line compiler (like Jakarta Ant), and a free application server (like Tomcat). I don't even need a GUI, save for the browser to test my web application. I don't have to shell out $1,000 for Visual Studio to learn, use, program and deploy a Java application. The web application I'm developing for my company has thus far cost us $0 in development costs (aside from my salary and maintaining the hardware it will run on).
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that Microsoft will make any of their prodocols and/or products truly open, documented or free. The openness, documentation and free cost of Java, as well as its cross-platform capabilities make Java and excellent development platform, and these three advantages, by their intrinsic nature, conflict with Microsoft's intrinsic nature and will never be successfully duplicated by that company.
you have heard the comparison to razors and disposable blades?
I haven't, but I'm paying way too much for mine, and I'm sure Gilette makes a health profit margin on those too. This is why I use up each razor blade I have until it's so dull that I still have stubble after I've shaven.
This is what companies LOVE to do. If you can make a totally non-generic but dirt-cheap (to them) component to one of your products, something that noone else can possibly duplicate, like a printer cartridge for an HP printer, or a razor blade for a gilette razor, then you will charge as much for it as possible. The same thinking goes for movie theatre popcorn.
It's this level of overcharging that has made Microsoft a multi-billion dollar corporation, but, in fact, is essential for many companies to simply SURVIVE. I'm sure a great many smaller movie theatres would have gone out of business were it not for charging too much for popcorn, and I'm dead certain HP would be in serious trouble were it not for these printer cartridges.