Not likely. They're in the movie business to make money, anything their customers use for free is a threat, anything they use for free is more money.
And why should they think or behave any differently ? All that OSS advocates are entitled to demand here is that code these guys use and distribute adheres to all applicable licenses. If the license for, say, GIMP, demands redistribution of source, well then the movie companies should adhere to that license. Period.
The GPL or other license should have NOTHING to say about what one must do with code/content that is NOT under said license. Should the FSF be able to squawk if (say) Microsoft programmers use Emacs to type in the code that ends up sold (under closed licenses) as Excel ? Not under the present licenses that cover Emacs, anyways.
IF the content developed and owned by the MPAA were derivative of some work that is covered by some other viral (for lack of a better word) license like the GPL, then this kind of hyperbole or criticism would make some sense. As it is, movies and music are content whose licenses are owned wholly by their respective companies, and noone should feel entitled to violate those licenses, just like people who don't want to adhere to the GPL should not feel free to violate that license.
And noone should question someone else's rights to use software covered by the GPL or other OSS license, while releasing their own (non-derivative) content under a different license. All that people can ask is that companies adhere to the licenses that govern the products they use.
Spamming or Slashdotting her is just as bad a crime as her spamming us. If you do send her Spam, or you do try to participate in trying to DOS her, then you have no right complaining about the Spam in the first place.
Given the absolute profit margins on hard drives, and how cheap hard drives are now, I can barely imagine that it makes much financial sense for hard drive companies to implement recall systems. The automobile industry is different because the makers may be liable to huge judgements if someone is injured from a defect they are aware of. But has a hard drive manufacturer ever been liable for large judgements because of a defect in a hard drive ? I doubt it.
Certainly the widespread distribution of it is something made possible by P2P, isn't it ? Certainly the people who are distributing and "sharing" this/these files are partly to blame for the illegal distribution. And given that there is no way they could fairly own the content, NOONE could possibly be crying "fair use" here, now, could they ? Could it possibly be that some P2P users are "sharing" content they don't own and have no "fair use" rights to ? Heavens to Betsy !
Or was it Nybble ? This was an Apple II magazine that contained the complete source code for tons of cool, sometimes-commercial-level programs. Half the time the code was in BASIC, the other half of the time the code was in 6502 assembler. If you want to go blind, try entering 10-20 pages or more of straight-up hexadecimal. Ahh, the days
if proving to them that workstation performance is not the issue forces them to raise the real issue then at least you have a chance.
Why should bosses have to justify declining a request like this to employees ? Considering that:
there IS a performance hit, that might just be smaller than previously thought,
distributed clients WILL result in more energy usage, heat generation, and reduced component life,
employees WILL use some of their paid-for time installing the client, and
the company may suffer losses if a program crashes, perhaps compromising the integrity of data on the computer
the company will NOT receive any direct benefit
Aren't the above reasons good enough reasons why employees shouldn't be feeding their hobby and pet interests while being paid ? Even if all the above except 5) were wrong, isn't 5) enough that bosses shouldn't have to worry about justifying their decisions to people who are being paid to work on other projects ?
Slashdot does not have a unified view about this issue. This isn't some political party.
If you mean to say that everyone who reads Slashdot doesn't necessarily have the same view, then of course you're correct. But then your comment about political parties would be wrong, since in any party there are always dissenters about platforms central to the party (consider say, abortion, or capital punishment, or welfare, and the Democratic and Republican parties).
Almost certainly the original poster meant his comment as a form of shorthand, a reference to the dominant view (or at least the most vocal or up-moderated). Not everyone has the same view here, certainly. But there is a prevalent opinion that is propagated by the most up-moderated posts and the editors. If you can't see that, you're just blind.
He said that Corel would not be where it is today were it not for software piracy. ie. people pirating Corel's software, which generates more interest, and stimulates more people to actually buy it.
So what you and Cowpland are saying is, software piracy is responsible for the dire straits Corel now finds itself in ?
With open source if the devo team quits, folds, or stops supporting their software you still have all the information to continue to use and improve the software you're using.
This argument presupposes that companies want or are able to support the staff necessary to "continue to use and improve the software you're using". Most do not.
Most companies out there would prefer to take their chances on Microsoft's long term viability then they would on taking the chance that some Open Source project is going to continue to be actively developed. Why ? Because the costs associated with the (miniscule) chances of a Microsoft going under and abandoning (say) Office users whole-hog are very small compared to the costs associated with having to take on a developer or three to maintain some open-sourced program whose chances of dropping off the radar screen or having its developers lose interest are much, much higher.
the need to create a flexible and cheap solution for use in Pakistani Schools and Universities using commodity hardware
I just can't believe this is cost-effective for more than a 4-screen display. With quality video projectors costing less than $2-3000 USD, this solution doesn't save much money, and is far less convenient in terms of portability - how would you even move around an 8x8 grid of monitors -, which would seem to be key for application in schools and universities. Also, the whole array is visually distracting due to the breaks between the monitors.
Sometimes people get distracted by technology and forget about the constraints of the problem to be solved.
I don't know about other readers, but when I hear that a book has a section on Makefiles, I really wonder whether it is specialized and focused on a specific programming area (as "Linux Porgramming" would suggest), assuming general programming knowledge, or whether it is a general programming book aimed at capitalizing on interest in the particular subject area. Sounds like it is the latter. Is the book more about "Linux programming", or more about "programming on machines that happen to be running Linux" ??
Here's the acid test, does it contain a "Hello world" program or something similarly trivial ?
I wish these people the best of luck, but I doubt this is ever really going to work in any meaningful way. *If* Office under Linux ever gains any traction and Linux becomes any more of a threat as a result of having Office available on Linux, MS will do something to break it in their next version, sending all the people running Office on their Linux boxes back to buy Windows licenses, and making clearer then ever that Windows is where you run Microsoft Office. In the long run this might do more harm than good.
Short of having a native Office on Linux, the only thing that will be really useful to the Linux community IN THE LONG RUN is to have a viable Office suite that reads the same formats, or have a viable Office suite SUPPLANT MS Office on ALL desktops. Sadly, this day is far from here.
What politicians fail to understand is that the major draw to e-tailing is the lack of taxes.
No, the major draw to e-tailing is the incredible reduction in price some companies (say Amazon) can offer by virtue of their huge centralized warehouses and vast economies of scale coupled with relatively low overhead and miniscule labour and other costs relative to sales.
In Canada, where we still pay the same taxes at Amazon.ca as we would if we bought things at the local bookstore, Amazon.ca's prices are a good 30-40% LESS than they are at the bookstore and 30-40% less than the next biggest online bookseller. THAT'S why I buy my books at Amazon now, NOT because I'm saving tax (which I'm not).
The government should NEVER be in the business of favoring one segment over another.
Are you sure about this ? Don't you think it might make sense for government to offer subsidies to companies that face high development costs in industries the government thinks might be helpful to its citizens in the long run ? For instance, would you be opposed to government subsidies to support research into alternative energies ? Would you be opposed at government attempts to foster business projects in the inner cities ? What about government projects to encourage environmentally-friendly technology ?
Wouldn't all these be examples of government being "in the business of favoring one segment over another" ? And would you really say these are all bad ideas ?
Note there isn't any encoder yet, but who would like to encode into WMA while we have better and more open solutions?
I don't get it, on one hand the poster is trumpeting the availability of the WMA codec and on the other hand he's wondering why anyone would want WMA in the first place ? If WMA is so redundant/inferior as he suggests, then why does ANYONE need WMA or hacked/reverse engineered WMA codecs ? Why would this thread be interesting at all ? If WMA availability is interesting, then as far as I'm concerned this means that the ability to encode WMA must be desirable to at least some people, as well.
RIAA's claim that the industry and artists are hurt by free downloading is nonsense. Record companies were to provide a means for exposure; now that the Internet provides near-universal exposure at comparatively no cost, the record companies' utility has expired.
The above is nonsense.
The record companies don't care about "free downloading" per se. They care about free downloading of content owned by their members. BIG difference. Any war the record companies are waging upon filesharing is the result of the obvious fact that most of the music available on these networks belongs to RIAA members and the equally obvious fact that a significant amount of downloads are being done by people who don't have "fair-use" license of this content.
As for whether or not record companies serve a function, bands have been putting out their music for sale and download on the Net for years now, and there have been but a handful of modest success stories. I defy anyone to name more than 5 such bands, recognizable to an average guy on the street, who still maintain independence from traditional music distribution channels.
I am certain that if you were to survey the MP3 collections ("legal" and "shared" alike) of all Slashdot users (not just a perverse few), we would discover that the vast majority of MP3s are of artists signed to RIAA member companies. And I would bet you that these infinitely self-motivated musicians and bands will continue to be signed to said companies, because they serve thema function, just like these musicians and bands will continue to pay for artists.
Why not ask why other manufacturers (Sony, NEC etc.) are not represented as well ? I'm sure the reason is that these manufacturers did not see fit to send over a demo.
It is not open source software, nor is it optional to install.
If they're really interested in blocking cheaters, etc., how in the world could anyone see fit to question 1) why it is not open source, and 2) why it is not optional to install ? If it was either of these things, then 1) it would be trivial to alter the source to render the code useless, or 2) people just wouldn't install it and cheat anyways.
Agendas aside, people have to start using some common sense before whining about issues which make no sense.
You point out that you want to see the world before you are burdened down by the realities of life (i.e., wife, kids, mortgage, etc.). So why not go whole-hog and ditch the stuff that will likely dominate your life later on ?
There's plenty of time in life to work at a computer or do tech otherwise. Don't do it when you're young. It will get in the way.
Exactly what is so laughable about using WordStar and typewriters ? A competent WordStar user (and in the day, Wordstar was THE word processor for power users) could almost certainly outdo the best Microsoft Word or free-software-Word-clone user in 95% of the everyday typing tasks that people need to do.
And typewriters still DO have their place. A good typewriter is still the fastest way to fill out a form, or fill out a label to put on a file folder, or even, sometimes, whip out a quick letter.
Ridiculing tried-and-proven technology is about as arrogant as ridiculing conventional mail.
If this is such a big deal, and if people really care, then some other savvy manufacturer will continue or begin to offer longer warranties and charge a premium for it. If it's not a big deal then noone will move to supply this niche. My expectation is that people who are buying cheap IDE drives aren't likely going to pay a price premium for a longer warranty, and I'm sure this is what the drive companies believe as well.
Or, maybe these companies should look into selling their customers extended warranties with the drive, or maybe even a 3rd party could get into that. Everyone knows that the extended warranties offered at e.g. Circuit City and Best Buy are near sucker deals for the seller of the warranty, so this would be a great way for companies to recoup the cost of warranteeing products for longer. But IDE drives cost so little these days I wonder whether the administrative costs of maintaing such a plan are worth the small premiums chargeable on a small dollar item.
Either way, if you want a longer warranty SOMEONE is going to have to pay for it, and (rightly, I believe) that someone is always going to be the consumer.
Regardless of whether people here do or don't , most of the people who are buying Gateway-type computers LIKE the Microsoft suite of products. Most of these people, politics aside and given a choice, would take Word any day over WordPerfect and would take Excel any day over 1-2-3. That's the reality of the marketplace that MS Office dominates - in fact, it's the very reflection of MS Office dominance.
So what this means is that the Gateway PC is going to have to be cheaper - when you factor in the lost MS Office - then competitors. What's it worth having MS Office vs Corel's suite ? $100 ? $200 ? Whatever number you come up with, that's how much the Gateway is going to need to be cheaper (assuming an otherwise equivalent feature set).
If Gateway's PC is not cheaper on a feature-adjusted basis, then people are going to buy their PCs from Dell, or IBM, or HPQ, or whomever. LOTS of companies have been substituting other office suites in the past, and they did NOTHING to threaten MS hegemony, let alone provide a modicum of competition. IBM did it with their line of PCs years ago, bundling WordPro and 1-2-3 right after their Lotus acquisition and when MS Office was not nearly as dominant as it is now, and I'm sure their sales were hurt as a result. Now WordPro is history while MS Word rolls on.
This isn't news, it's just Gateway trying to cut their costs.
Slashdot Mirror
Not likely. They're in the movie business to make money, anything their customers use for free is a threat, anything they use for free is more money.
And why should they think or behave any differently ? All that OSS advocates are entitled to demand here is that code these guys use and distribute adheres to all applicable licenses. If the license for, say, GIMP, demands redistribution of source, well then the movie companies should adhere to that license. Period.
The GPL or other license should have NOTHING to say about what one must do with code/content that is NOT under said license. Should the FSF be able to squawk if (say) Microsoft programmers use Emacs to type in the code that ends up sold (under closed licenses) as Excel ? Not under the present licenses that cover Emacs, anyways.
IF the content developed and owned by the MPAA were derivative of some work that is covered by some other viral (for lack of a better word) license like the GPL, then this kind of hyperbole or criticism would make some sense. As it is, movies and music are content whose licenses are owned wholly by their respective companies, and noone should feel entitled to violate those licenses, just like people who don't want to adhere to the GPL should not feel free to violate that license.
And noone should question someone else's rights to use software covered by the GPL or other OSS license, while releasing their own (non-derivative) content under a different license. All that people can ask is that companies adhere to the licenses that govern the products they use.
Spamming or Slashdotting her is just as bad a crime as her spamming us. If you do send her Spam, or you do try to participate in trying to DOS her, then you have no right complaining about the Spam in the first place.
Given the absolute profit margins on hard drives, and how cheap hard drives are now, I can barely imagine that it makes much financial sense for hard drive companies to implement recall systems. The automobile industry is different because the makers may be liable to huge judgements if someone is injured from a defect they are aware of. But has a hard drive manufacturer ever been liable for large judgements because of a defect in a hard drive ? I doubt it.
Certainly the widespread distribution of it is something made possible by P2P, isn't it ? Certainly the people who are distributing and "sharing" this/these files are partly to blame for the illegal distribution. And given that there is no way they could fairly own the content, NOONE could possibly be crying "fair use" here, now, could they ? Could it possibly be that some P2P users are "sharing" content they don't own and have no "fair use" rights to ? Heavens to Betsy !
Or was it Nybble ? This was an Apple II magazine that contained the complete source code for tons of cool, sometimes-commercial-level programs. Half the time the code was in BASIC, the other half of the time the code was in 6502 assembler. If you want to go blind, try entering 10-20 pages or more of straight-up hexadecimal. Ahh, the days
Why should bosses have to justify declining a request like this to employees ? Considering that:
Aren't the above reasons good enough reasons why employees shouldn't be feeding their hobby and pet interests while being paid ? Even if all the above except 5) were wrong, isn't 5) enough that bosses shouldn't have to worry about justifying their decisions to people who are being paid to work on other projects ?
Slashdot does not have a unified view about this issue. This isn't some political party.
If you mean to say that everyone who reads Slashdot doesn't necessarily have the same view, then of course you're correct. But then your comment about political parties would be wrong, since in any party there are always dissenters about platforms central to the party (consider say, abortion, or capital punishment, or welfare, and the Democratic and Republican parties).
Almost certainly the original poster meant his comment as a form of shorthand, a reference to the dominant view (or at least the most vocal or up-moderated). Not everyone has the same view here, certainly. But there is a prevalent opinion that is propagated by the most up-moderated posts and the editors. If you can't see that, you're just blind.
He said that Corel would not be where it is today were it not for software piracy. ie. people pirating Corel's software, which generates more interest, and stimulates more people to actually buy it.
So what you and Cowpland are saying is, software piracy is responsible for the dire straits Corel now finds itself in ?
...since you posted a (well-articuled, at that) argument that OSS might not always be the cat's pyjamas, I'm willing to wager you're new here ?
With open source if the devo team quits, folds, or stops supporting their software you still have all the information to continue to use and improve the software you're using.
This argument presupposes that companies want or are able to support the staff necessary to "continue to use and improve the software you're using". Most do not.
Most companies out there would prefer to take their chances on Microsoft's long term viability then they would on taking the chance that some Open Source project is going to continue to be actively developed. Why ? Because the costs associated with the (miniscule) chances of a Microsoft going under and abandoning (say) Office users whole-hog are very small compared to the costs associated with having to take on a developer or three to maintain some open-sourced program whose chances of dropping off the radar screen or having its developers lose interest are much, much higher.
the need to create a flexible and cheap solution for use in Pakistani Schools and Universities using commodity hardware
I just can't believe this is cost-effective for more than a 4-screen display. With quality video projectors costing less than $2-3000 USD, this solution doesn't save much money, and is far less convenient in terms of portability - how would you even move around an 8x8 grid of monitors -, which would seem to be key for application in schools and universities. Also, the whole array is visually distracting due to the breaks between the monitors.
Sometimes people get distracted by technology and forget about the constraints of the problem to be solved.
I don't know about other readers, but when I hear that a book has a section on Makefiles, I really wonder whether it is specialized and focused on a specific programming area (as "Linux Porgramming" would suggest), assuming general programming knowledge, or whether it is a general programming book aimed at capitalizing on interest in the particular subject area. Sounds like it is the latter. Is the book more about "Linux programming", or more about "programming on machines that happen to be running Linux" ??
Here's the acid test, does it contain a "Hello world" program or something similarly trivial ?
I wish these people the best of luck, but I doubt this is ever really going to work in any meaningful way. *If* Office under Linux ever gains any traction and Linux becomes any more of a threat as a result of having Office available on Linux, MS will do something to break it in their next version, sending all the people running Office on their Linux boxes back to buy Windows licenses, and making clearer then ever that Windows is where you run Microsoft Office. In the long run this might do more harm than good.
Short of having a native Office on Linux, the only thing that will be really useful to the Linux community IN THE LONG RUN is to have a viable Office suite that reads the same formats, or have a viable Office suite SUPPLANT MS Office on ALL desktops. Sadly, this day is far from here.
What politicians fail to understand is that the major draw to e-tailing is the lack of taxes.
No, the major draw to e-tailing is the incredible reduction in price some companies (say Amazon) can offer by virtue of their huge centralized warehouses and vast economies of scale coupled with relatively low overhead and miniscule labour and other costs relative to sales.
In Canada, where we still pay the same taxes at Amazon.ca as we would if we bought things at the local bookstore, Amazon.ca's prices are a good 30-40% LESS than they are at the bookstore and 30-40% less than the next biggest online bookseller. THAT'S why I buy my books at Amazon now, NOT because I'm saving tax (which I'm not).
The government should NEVER be in the business of favoring one segment over another.
Are you sure about this ? Don't you think it might make sense for government to offer subsidies to companies that face high development costs in industries the government thinks might be helpful to its citizens in the long run ? For instance, would you be opposed to government subsidies to support research into alternative energies ? Would you be opposed at government attempts to foster business projects in the inner cities ? What about government projects to encourage environmentally-friendly technology ?
Wouldn't all these be examples of government being "in the business of favoring one segment over another" ? And would you really say these are all bad ideas ?
Note there isn't any encoder yet, but who would like to encode into WMA while we have better and more open solutions?
I don't get it, on one hand the poster is trumpeting the availability of the WMA codec and on the other hand he's wondering why anyone would want WMA in the first place ? If WMA is so redundant/inferior as he suggests, then why does ANYONE need WMA or hacked/reverse engineered WMA codecs ? Why would this thread be interesting at all ?
If WMA availability is interesting, then as far as I'm concerned this means that the ability to encode WMA must be desirable to at least some people, as well.
So what formats will it recognize over Firewire ? I wonder whether a S-Video In would be more useful than firewire....does it have that ?
RIAA's claim that the industry and artists are hurt by free downloading is nonsense. Record companies were to provide a means for exposure; now that the Internet provides near-universal exposure at comparatively no cost, the record companies' utility has expired.
The above is nonsense.
The record companies don't care about "free downloading" per se. They care about free downloading of content owned by their members. BIG difference. Any war the record companies are waging upon filesharing is the result of the obvious fact that most of the music available on these networks belongs to RIAA members and the equally obvious fact that a significant amount of downloads are being done by people who don't have "fair-use" license of this content.
As for whether or not record companies serve a function, bands have been putting out their music for sale and download on the Net for years now, and there have been but a handful of modest success stories. I defy anyone to name more than 5 such bands, recognizable to an average guy on the street, who still maintain independence from traditional music distribution channels.
I am certain that if you were to survey the MP3 collections ("legal" and "shared" alike) of all Slashdot users (not just a perverse few), we would discover that the vast majority of MP3s are of artists signed to RIAA member companies. And I would bet you that these infinitely self-motivated musicians and bands will continue to be signed to said companies, because they serve thema function, just like these musicians and bands will continue to pay for artists.
Why not ask why other manufacturers (Sony, NEC etc.) are not represented as well ? I'm sure the reason is that these manufacturers did not see fit to send over a demo.
It is not open source software, nor is it optional to install.
If they're really interested in blocking cheaters, etc., how in the world could anyone see fit to question 1) why it is not open source, and 2) why it is not optional to install ? If it was either of these things, then 1) it would be trivial to alter the source to render the code useless, or 2) people just wouldn't install it and cheat anyways.
Agendas aside, people have to start using some common sense before whining about issues which make no sense.
You point out that you want to see the world before you are burdened down by the realities of life (i.e., wife, kids, mortgage, etc.). So why not go whole-hog and ditch the stuff that will likely dominate your life later on ?
There's plenty of time in life to work at a computer or do tech otherwise. Don't do it when you're young. It will get in the way.
in 1989, I was told the HMAS Hobart had a combined computing power on the whole ship, of a Macintosh Classic.
That's interesting, because if I recall correctly (I may not), the Mac Classic hadn't been built in 1989.
Exactly what is so laughable about using WordStar and typewriters ? A competent WordStar user (and in the day, Wordstar was THE word processor for power users) could almost certainly outdo the best Microsoft Word or free-software-Word-clone user in 95% of the everyday typing tasks that people need to do.
And typewriters still DO have their place. A good typewriter is still the fastest way to fill out a form, or fill out a label to put on a file folder, or even, sometimes, whip out a quick letter.
Ridiculing tried-and-proven technology is about as arrogant as ridiculing conventional mail.
If this is such a big deal, and if people really care, then some other savvy manufacturer will continue or begin to offer longer warranties and charge a premium for it. If it's not a big deal then noone will move to supply this niche. My expectation is that people who are buying cheap IDE drives aren't likely going to pay a price premium for a longer warranty, and I'm sure this is what the drive companies believe as well.
Or, maybe these companies should look into selling their customers extended warranties with the drive, or maybe even a 3rd party could get into that. Everyone knows that the extended warranties offered at e.g. Circuit City and Best Buy are near sucker deals for the seller of the warranty, so this would be a great way for companies to recoup the cost of warranteeing products for longer. But IDE drives cost so little these days I wonder whether the administrative costs of maintaing such a plan are worth the small premiums chargeable on a small dollar item.
Either way, if you want a longer warranty SOMEONE is going to have to pay for it, and (rightly, I believe) that someone is always going to be the consumer.
Regardless of whether people here do or don't , most of the people who are buying Gateway-type computers LIKE the Microsoft suite of products. Most of these people, politics aside and given a choice, would take Word any day over WordPerfect and would take Excel any day over 1-2-3. That's the reality of the marketplace that MS Office dominates - in fact, it's the very reflection of MS Office dominance.
So what this means is that the Gateway PC is going to have to be cheaper - when you factor in the lost MS Office - then competitors. What's it worth having MS Office vs Corel's suite ? $100 ? $200 ? Whatever number you come up with, that's how much the Gateway is going to need to be cheaper (assuming an otherwise equivalent feature set).
If Gateway's PC is not cheaper on a feature-adjusted basis, then people are going to buy their PCs from Dell, or IBM, or HPQ, or whomever. LOTS of companies have been substituting other office suites in the past, and they did NOTHING to threaten MS hegemony, let alone provide a modicum of competition. IBM did it with their line of PCs years ago, bundling WordPro and 1-2-3 right after their Lotus acquisition and when MS Office was not nearly as dominant as it is now, and I'm sure their sales were hurt as a result. Now WordPro is history while MS Word rolls on.
This isn't news, it's just Gateway trying to cut their costs.