Can you point me to a single verified instance of Apple invoking the DMCA?
The only supposed instance of which I know was the OtherWorldComputing DVD burner issue. In that case, OWC's ceo claimed that Apple had invoked the DMCA, people asked him to provide documentation in the form of correspondence from Apple, and he suddenly got very quiet.
Do you know of additional instances or substantiation? I would think that one unsupported claim of a single instance is a bit too weak to say that they "love" this law, wouldn't you?
Virtual desktops and focus-follows-mouse are available from the spectacular CodeTek VirtualDesktop. No, I don't work for them, and yes, it is twenty bucks. An unquestionably worthwhile investment as far as I'm concerned.
As to the color fringing, I've never heard of osx doing that. I was actually under the impression that osx didn't do subpixel rendering at all, just very good full-pixel antialiasing. Perhaps it only occurs on displays which use the less popular ordering of subpixel elements? I've seen complaints from plenty of people who dislike antialiasing as a whole, but have never ever heard of this particular problem with anything other than Windows or X11.
X11's implicit copy may be faster... unless you count the time needed to select to the side of an delete any text you're planning on replacing. Or the time spent going back and re-copying because you accidentally dragged your click one pixel and clobbered your clipboard with one character from the destination. And perhaps if you ignore the inability to deal with anything other than unformatted text. (How fast is that X11 clipboard at copying and pasting snippets of sound or video? How about at copying formatted text, and having that formatted preserved when pasting into applications which can handle it, and getting clean text in applications which can't?)
I'm a big fan of virtual desktops myself. And the CodeTek VirtualDesktop product is the best implementation I've ever seen. It even offers focus-follows-mouse and decoupled focus and raise; I loathe both of them, even after years of exposure, but you sound like you're a fan.
I will grant you that I've never run into a way to do an unfocusing click with any macos. But, if used in conjunction with focus-follows-mouse, wouldn't that result in either focus going to a random window, or inconsistent behaviour in which the focused window is the one under the cursor only most of the time?
The placement of regularly used items on the corners and sides of the screen is an adherence to Fitt's Law. It is immensely faster to get to an infinitely large item on the far side of the screen than a finite-sized item right next to your cursor.
Mouse buttons sounds more like a hardware issue than a windowing system issue, but okay. It's trivially easy to map your middle mouse button to command-v and get the paste behaviour you enjoy.
I used linux as a desktop OS for about five years, which I ended with overwhelming relief when osx was released. I could yammer on for pages and pages about things osx does better than linux and/or X11, but I'll limit myself to pointing out that even for the very topics you chose, osx's functionality is a superset of X11's.
Well, to be really pedantic, there isn't a sound that maps directly to either the English R or L, there's a single sound that's about halfway in between the two. Hence the tendency of Japanese speakers to swap them in both directions; to someone who has spoken only Japanese, it seems like an arcane distinction between two tiny variants of the same sound.
Romanji tends to transcribe the sound as R, but they're both equally accurate.
You seem to be saying that these people have paid a lot of money for their systems, so they deserve extra-good support? The ibook is among the least expensive laptops one can get, and the bottom end of apple's product line.
Now, I'm not saying that that means apple is excused from offering support; I wouldn't've thought of the two issues as being related at all. But if you feel they are, keep in mind that the ibook is not a "premium" or "highend" product in the senses which I think you mean.
Apple's SEC filings indicate that they sell about 250,000 ibooks a quarter. The dual-usb model came out very nearly three years ago. So even if every one of those 1800 signatures is accurate and unique, that puts the incidence rate at around one in two thousand units.
That doesn't exactly sound like lawsuit time to me.
I bet HP is incredibly relieved by having that head start over Compaq. They've been nipping at their neels so closely for the last few years that it's getting hard to tell them apart.
The whole point of pdf has always been platform- and application-independence. I could be misremembering the extreme infancy of the format, but I really don't believe there's ever been a time when pdf existed but Adobe didn't offer Windows software for it.
(Now, if I can only figure out any tiny thing this has to do with the sodding story, I'll feel better...)
People who handle hundreds or thousands of bills a day are exactly the ones who will instantly notice small variations without even consciously checking. Even if your print looks "good enough", it almost certainly won't *feel* right.
Changing the currency probably only worsens the problem. If people get used to the idea that money changes all the time, they'll be willing to take any random thing you offer them. We've already got three versions of the same denomination in circulation right now; they'd better not change it again for at least a few decades.
That "high powered" linux server has dual 64-bit cpus, ecc ram, a 1GHz bus, two gigabit ethernet interfaces, is 1U, and has four-hour on-site service available, right? Cause I don't seem to see any such x86 servers available at any price.
Last time I looked, the absolute bargain basement price on a dual Itanium server was around $20-30K. Which makes that $3k look pretty tasty, actually.
If one has consulted the table of contents in order to be aware that it's there (an unusual requirement for a novel), then the Dramatis Personae can be somewhat helpful. But even it is an awkward tool, and more burdensome than this generally-unpleasant book seems to justify.
And yes, obviously I haven't read two thirds of the work, and it seems reasonable to assume that the originally-disparate characters will be tied together in some way. But the idea that I'd probably need to slog through _another_ three or four hundred pages of exposition regarding a new set of characters before having any hope of an actual plot is just too tiresome to contemplate actually doing.
Please understand, my complaint is not that the book is long or that it's complicated. It's of a perfectly reasonable length for a book; just not for _this_ book.
Reading many pages and correlating many small facts is a happy task when the book gives you anything in return for it. Compelling characters, fascinating ideas, stirring relationships, exciting developments, these make the process of reading and thinking about the text a joy. But Quicksilver offers none of these, leaving me exactly as satisfied as if I'd read the white pages and attempted to keep straight who lived where.
As Blaise Pascal put it (in French), "I have made this letter long only because I have not had time to make it shorter."
It was certainly rushed, and a more thorough job might well have produced a shorter work. Stephenson seems to have a terrible time finishing it, pushing back deadlines again and again; the result would probably have been much better if he'd been able to push it back another year or two.
Well, yeah, Stephenson can't end a book to save his life. Fantastic author, but endings have always been his weakness. They all come off feeling like they could've ended a hundred pages earlier or later with exactly the same effect.
I'm about as enthusiastic a Stephenson fan as they come; I have a hand-xerox'd copy of The Big U, _and_ actually enjoyed reading it. I set my alarm to wake up early and pick up a copy of Quicksilver on my way to work the day it was released.
And I found it to be the most pitiful drek I've picked up in years. I never officially gave up on it, but I put it down around page 300 and haven't picked it back up in some months.
Dozens of completely interchangeable and personality-free "characters" would be problematic enough if they weren't all referred to variously by their given names, their surnames, their titles, their ranks, their relationships to other faceless characters, and various ribald nicknames. I probably couldn't be bothered to keep this bland cast straight in my head even if they only had one name each, but giving them all half a dozen names just made the problem exponentially worse.
Having historical characters make predictions about the future which are either ironically accurate or comically inaccurate has no place outside horrid sitcoms. ("This 'tay' is fascinating, but I cannot imagine the English ever being interested in something so strange.")
The story was clearly intended to be tiered between the obvious, surface-level events, and the occluded, mysterious events driving them, which needed to be inferred by subtle cues. But the supposedly-obvious events were so dependant on endless tiny details of this moment and place in history that they were _also_ occluded, mysterious, and needed to be inferred by subtle details. It's possible that a specialist in post-Cromwell London wouldn't find this troublesome, but my slightly-better-than-average knowledge of the period was quite insufficient for the task.
And, most damningly, just when there was starting to be the vaguest hint that there might actually turn out to be the possibility of an actual plot somewhere on the horizon--that your effort slogging through hundreds of pages of drivel might be rewarded with something actually _happening_--he drops it all and starts over from the whole sodding beginning with an entirely unrelated set of characters.
In my experience, antivirus software is far more damaging and invasive than any virus from which it might protect you.
I've been using (and adminning) internet-connected macs for about ten years without any antivirus software. I think the only thing with which I've ever contended was the "concept" Word macro virus in 1997 or so. Which made saving some Word documents inconvenient until you ran a simple tool to clean it out. No system corruption, no reinstalling of anything. All told, less work (and money) than installing antivirus software even a single time would've been.
For them to release updates at the same time, they'd need to either 1) rush the later ones, involving less testing, or 2) delay the earlier ones, which you could easily do yourself.
According to Apple's SEC filings, iPod sales have quadrupled since the iTunes Music Store was launched.
"Q3 saw a record number of iPod sales: 304,000 units, way up from 85,000 sold in the March quarter."
"Q4 2003 was the iPod's strongest quarter yet, with 336,000 units sold, totaling $121 million in revenue."
$121M in quarterly revenue is real money. A fairly small percentage of Apple's total revenue, sure, but certainly enough to make it worth their while. And if some of those new iPod owners are converted to Mac owners, so much the better.
And that's all data from before the Windows version of iTunes was released. Given that about half of all iPod sales were for Windows before the store was opened, this should provide another huge jump in iPod sales.
So on the contrary, I'd say that Apple's model is the only one that will work. They can happily break even on the store and make money on iPods and Macs. If Napster et al have about the same pricing and about the same expenses, they'll also more or less break even, and get nothing for their trouble.
Yeah, or put him in a camp with a bunch of his buddies, and slowly gas them all to death! Or torture him until he confesses to being a witch, and burn him alive! Or nail him to some planks and let him hang there until he dies of exposure!
Um. Glorifying the horrible things that've been done to other people by suggesting them as appropriate consequences for writing a dumbass article seems like a little uncouth, eh?
This little collection of assertions is 1) made totally without support, and 2) not relevant to the discussion.
As to 1), you haven't clarified under what circumstances, if not all, you feel that diminishing the market for someone's product is wrong. You gave one example case and said it was okay, and gave another example cas and said it was "unfair", without any explanation of what the rules are and why.
But more importantly, no one in this thread is discussing whether copyright violation is right, or appropriate, or fair, or ethical. The discussion is whether it falls into the very specific category of "theft". I suspect that most or all of those arguing otherwise believe that it is both wrong and illegal, but that it is a different offense than theft is.
We could have a nice long debate about what types of competition or market-diminishment are fair and what types aren't. (And if we settled the question, we'd be the first.) But it would be completely unrelated to the current discussion.
Using the term "thief" to refer to "stealing" rights seems like a pointlessly vague definition. Do you feel that murderers are best described by the term "thief" because they "steal" their victims' rights to live?
You could certainly make a case that "stealing life" is what murder constitutes. But do you really feel that "thief" is the most effective term to use to convey to another human that you're talking about a murderer? Do you feel that "thief" should be the catchall term that refers to any criminal, and that there should be a more specific, narrower term that covers "someone who wrongfully causes me to no longer possess some tangible property"?
I have an idea: we should start calling copyright infringers Iefthays. This will give the "copyright infringement equals theft" camp the happy feeling of invoking the word thief, while making clear to everyone that we're not speaking any meaningful language when we do it.
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Can you point me to a single verified instance of Apple invoking the DMCA?
The only supposed instance of which I know was the OtherWorldComputing DVD burner issue. In that case, OWC's ceo claimed that Apple had invoked the DMCA, people asked him to provide documentation in the form of correspondence from Apple, and he suddenly got very quiet.
Do you know of additional instances or substantiation? I would think that one unsupported claim of a single instance is a bit too weak to say that they "love" this law, wouldn't you?
I've always found the holding-c thing to work, but I can't say I've ever tried it on twenty machines at once.
How about holding down option and selecting it from the openfirmware bootloader thingy?
Virtual desktops and focus-follows-mouse are available from the spectacular CodeTek VirtualDesktop. No, I don't work for them, and yes, it is twenty bucks. An unquestionably worthwhile investment as far as I'm concerned.
As to the color fringing, I've never heard of osx doing that. I was actually under the impression that osx didn't do subpixel rendering at all, just very good full-pixel antialiasing. Perhaps it only occurs on displays which use the less popular ordering of subpixel elements? I've seen complaints from plenty of people who dislike antialiasing as a whole, but have never ever heard of this particular problem with anything other than Windows or X11.
X11's implicit copy may be faster... unless you count the time needed to select to the side of an delete any text you're planning on replacing. Or the time spent going back and re-copying because you accidentally dragged your click one pixel and clobbered your clipboard with one character from the destination. And perhaps if you ignore the inability to deal with anything other than unformatted text. (How fast is that X11 clipboard at copying and pasting snippets of sound or video? How about at copying formatted text, and having that formatted preserved when pasting into applications which can handle it, and getting clean text in applications which can't?)
I'm a big fan of virtual desktops myself. And the CodeTek VirtualDesktop product is the best implementation I've ever seen. It even offers focus-follows-mouse and decoupled focus and raise; I loathe both of them, even after years of exposure, but you sound like you're a fan.
I will grant you that I've never run into a way to do an unfocusing click with any macos. But, if used in conjunction with focus-follows-mouse, wouldn't that result in either focus going to a random window, or inconsistent behaviour in which the focused window is the one under the cursor only most of the time?
The placement of regularly used items on the corners and sides of the screen is an adherence to Fitt's Law. It is immensely faster to get to an infinitely large item on the far side of the screen than a finite-sized item right next to your cursor.
Mouse buttons sounds more like a hardware issue than a windowing system issue, but okay. It's trivially easy to map your middle mouse button to command-v and get the paste behaviour you enjoy.
I used linux as a desktop OS for about five years, which I ended with overwhelming relief when osx was released. I could yammer on for pages and pages about things osx does better than linux and/or X11, but I'll limit myself to pointing out that even for the very topics you chose, osx's functionality is a superset of X11's.
Well, to be really pedantic, there isn't a sound that maps directly to either the English R or L, there's a single sound that's about halfway in between the two. Hence the tendency of Japanese speakers to swap them in both directions; to someone who has spoken only Japanese, it seems like an arcane distinction between two tiny variants of the same sound.
Romanji tends to transcribe the sound as R, but they're both equally accurate.
You seem to be saying that these people have paid a lot of money for their systems, so they deserve extra-good support? The ibook is among the least expensive laptops one can get, and the bottom end of apple's product line.
Now, I'm not saying that that means apple is excused from offering support; I wouldn't've thought of the two issues as being related at all. But if you feel they are, keep in mind that the ibook is not a "premium" or "highend" product in the senses which I think you mean.
Apple's SEC filings indicate that they sell about 250,000 ibooks a quarter. The dual-usb model came out very nearly three years ago. So even if every one of those 1800 signatures is accurate and unique, that puts the incidence rate at around one in two thousand units.
That doesn't exactly sound like lawsuit time to me.
I bet HP is incredibly relieved by having that head start over Compaq. They've been nipping at their neels so closely for the last few years that it's getting hard to tell them apart.
The whole point of pdf has always been platform- and application-independence. I could be misremembering the extreme infancy of the format, but I really don't believe there's ever been a time when pdf existed but Adobe didn't offer Windows software for it.
(Now, if I can only figure out any tiny thing this has to do with the sodding story, I'll feel better...)
Yeah, well, if we're already getting into the meaninglessly nitpicky, I'm pretty sure that's not "earth" they're seeing, wet or not.
Ever had a retail job?
People who handle hundreds or thousands of bills a day are exactly the ones who will instantly notice small variations without even consciously checking. Even if your print looks "good enough", it almost certainly won't *feel* right.
Changing the currency probably only worsens the problem. If people get used to the idea that money changes all the time, they'll be willing to take any random thing you offer them. We've already got three versions of the same denomination in circulation right now; they'd better not change it again for at least a few decades.
That "high powered" linux server has dual 64-bit cpus, ecc ram, a 1GHz bus, two gigabit ethernet interfaces, is 1U, and has four-hour on-site service available, right? Cause I don't seem to see any such x86 servers available at any price.
Last time I looked, the absolute bargain basement price on a dual Itanium server was around $20-30K. Which makes that $3k look pretty tasty, actually.
Yes, to "test" the systems.
The page to which you pointed examined and talked about the published specs of both cpus, but I didn't see any benchmarks there.
Those are both valuable and important processes, but they're not interchangeable.
It was Pepsi (the opposite of Coke), and that was Sculley (pretty much the opposite of Jobs).
So, what was your point again?
If one has consulted the table of contents in order to be aware that it's there (an unusual requirement for a novel), then the Dramatis Personae can be somewhat helpful. But even it is an awkward tool, and more burdensome than this generally-unpleasant book seems to justify.
And yes, obviously I haven't read two thirds of the work, and it seems reasonable to assume that the originally-disparate characters will be tied together in some way. But the idea that I'd probably need to slog through _another_ three or four hundred pages of exposition regarding a new set of characters before having any hope of an actual plot is just too tiresome to contemplate actually doing.
Please understand, my complaint is not that the book is long or that it's complicated. It's of a perfectly reasonable length for a book; just not for _this_ book.
Reading many pages and correlating many small facts is a happy task when the book gives you anything in return for it. Compelling characters, fascinating ideas, stirring relationships, exciting developments, these make the process of reading and thinking about the text a joy. But Quicksilver offers none of these, leaving me exactly as satisfied as if I'd read the white pages and attempted to keep straight who lived where.
Hah. Actually, I didn't know, so I asked google. Apparently the misconception is popular.
Thanks for the correction.
As Blaise Pascal put it (in French), "I have made this letter long only because I have not had time to make it shorter."
It was certainly rushed, and a more thorough job might well have produced a shorter work. Stephenson seems to have a terrible time finishing it, pushing back deadlines again and again; the result would probably have been much better if he'd been able to push it back another year or two.
Well, yeah, Stephenson can't end a book to save his life. Fantastic author, but endings have always been his weakness. They all come off feeling like they could've ended a hundred pages earlier or later with exactly the same effect.
I'm about as enthusiastic a Stephenson fan as they come; I have a hand-xerox'd copy of The Big U, _and_ actually enjoyed reading it. I set my alarm to wake up early and pick up a copy of Quicksilver on my way to work the day it was released.
And I found it to be the most pitiful drek I've picked up in years. I never officially gave up on it, but I put it down around page 300 and haven't picked it back up in some months.
Dozens of completely interchangeable and personality-free "characters" would be problematic enough if they weren't all referred to variously by their given names, their surnames, their titles, their ranks, their relationships to other faceless characters, and various ribald nicknames. I probably couldn't be bothered to keep this bland cast straight in my head even if they only had one name each, but giving them all half a dozen names just made the problem exponentially worse.
Having historical characters make predictions about the future which are either ironically accurate or comically inaccurate has no place outside horrid sitcoms. ("This 'tay' is fascinating, but I cannot imagine the English ever being interested in something so strange.")
The story was clearly intended to be tiered between the obvious, surface-level events, and the occluded, mysterious events driving them, which needed to be inferred by subtle cues. But the supposedly-obvious events were so dependant on endless tiny details of this moment and place in history that they were _also_ occluded, mysterious, and needed to be inferred by subtle details. It's possible that a specialist in post-Cromwell London wouldn't find this troublesome, but my slightly-better-than-average knowledge of the period was quite insufficient for the task.
And, most damningly, just when there was starting to be the vaguest hint that there might actually turn out to be the possibility of an actual plot somewhere on the horizon--that your effort slogging through hundreds of pages of drivel might be rewarded with something actually _happening_--he drops it all and starts over from the whole sodding beginning with an entirely unrelated set of characters.
In my experience, antivirus software is far more damaging and invasive than any virus from which it might protect you.
I've been using (and adminning) internet-connected macs for about ten years without any antivirus software. I think the only thing with which I've ever contended was the "concept" Word macro virus in 1997 or so. Which made saving some Word documents inconvenient until you ran a simple tool to clean it out. No system corruption, no reinstalling of anything. All told, less work (and money) than installing antivirus software even a single time would've been.
So what's huhu, cobber?
For them to release updates at the same time, they'd need to either 1) rush the later ones, involving less testing, or 2) delay the earlier ones, which you could easily do yourself.
Which one of these strikes you as a good idea?
$121M in quarterly revenue is real money. A fairly small percentage of Apple's total revenue, sure, but certainly enough to make it worth their while. And if some of those new iPod owners are converted to Mac owners, so much the better.
And that's all data from before the Windows version of iTunes was released. Given that about half of all iPod sales were for Windows before the store was opened, this should provide another huge jump in iPod sales.
So on the contrary, I'd say that Apple's model is the only one that will work. They can happily break even on the store and make money on iPods and Macs. If Napster et al have about the same pricing and about the same expenses, they'll also more or less break even, and get nothing for their trouble.
Yeah, or put him in a camp with a bunch of his buddies, and slowly gas them all to death! Or torture him until he confesses to being a witch, and burn him alive! Or nail him to some planks and let him hang there until he dies of exposure!
Um. Glorifying the horrible things that've been done to other people by suggesting them as appropriate consequences for writing a dumbass article seems like a little uncouth, eh?
This little collection of assertions is 1) made totally without support, and 2) not relevant to the discussion.
As to 1), you haven't clarified under what circumstances, if not all, you feel that diminishing the market for someone's product is wrong. You gave one example case and said it was okay, and gave another example cas and said it was "unfair", without any explanation of what the rules are and why.
But more importantly, no one in this thread is discussing whether copyright violation is right, or appropriate, or fair, or ethical. The discussion is whether it falls into the very specific category of "theft". I suspect that most or all of those arguing otherwise believe that it is both wrong and illegal, but that it is a different offense than theft is.
We could have a nice long debate about what types of competition or market-diminishment are fair and what types aren't. (And if we settled the question, we'd be the first.) But it would be completely unrelated to the current discussion.
Using the term "thief" to refer to "stealing" rights seems like a pointlessly vague definition. Do you feel that murderers are best described by the term "thief" because they "steal" their victims' rights to live?
You could certainly make a case that "stealing life" is what murder constitutes. But do you really feel that "thief" is the most effective term to use to convey to another human that you're talking about a murderer? Do you feel that "thief" should be the catchall term that refers to any criminal, and that there should be a more specific, narrower term that covers "someone who wrongfully causes me to no longer possess some tangible property"?
I have an idea: we should start calling copyright infringers Iefthays. This will give the "copyright infringement equals theft" camp the happy feeling of invoking the word thief, while making clear to everyone that we're not speaking any meaningful language when we do it.