"(I laugh at anyone who pays money for digital music.)"
What the fuck is the difference between paying for digital music or paying for cable or paying for a concert ticket?
They are all paying for entertainment in some form and if you actually had the guts to laugh to people's face, I can promise you that someone less forgiving than myself would laugh as they punched you in your face.
I do agree that we've taken it too far with airport security. Most of the regulations are utterly pointless and often ignored. As an example, think of the clear plastic bags to store your toiletries in. It isn't enough to just leave your toothpaste visible on top of your suitcase, it has to be visible INSIDE a clear plastic bag.
Having got used to this nonsense in the UK, I once went through security at a central European airport when heading back to Heathrow. Having lost my plastic bag on my trip, I asked the security guard if they had any plastic bags I could use. He pointed to his colleague and told me to ask him. This colleague was placed AFTER the security scanners. This airport had the exact same Airport regulation rules as in the UK, and all the security posters told me to use the bags, but they were obviously less anal about it. I just smiled, thanked the guy and didn't bother.
"What makes you think that history would play out differently next time?"
There is no guarantee of anything in this world but it would at least provide benefit for a while. Then we'd just have to use the past as evidence not to extend copyright again.
What if you buy a BMW 1201Whatever and later on this car becomes a classic collectors car, making it worth more money than it originally was? Shouldn't BMW get some of the money?
What if you buy a designer shirt from Le Whatever and later on this shirt becomes a "vintage" collectors shirt, making it worth more money than it originally was? Shouldn't Le Whatever get some of that money?
What if you buy a house and later on property prices go up and the house becomes worth more than what it was. Shouldn't the person who sold you that house get some of the money?
No. When you sell something, you've sold it. Meaning you've lost all claims to it. That is the risk of selling something. You may lose future income, but you have also protected yourself from the item losing value by realising its value in cold hard cash.
If the artists want to profit from future price rises, they should sell a share of the paintings. They can then still profit from future price rises, but obviously they have to take the risk of the painting actually decreasing in value over time.
The artist having the cake and eating it too is not fair. Not fair at all.
"Please explain how that is NOT slavery, even if a modern version of it."
Look, I am not saying this is not highly unethical, but since nobody is actually forcing the artists to work or create anything at all, it isn't slavery. Nobody is telling them to write music or be punished. The analogy completely falls short because of this.
It is much closer to theft. The closest analogy I can think of, is one of a window cleaner going around cleaning windows during the day and then going back to collect his payment when people have returned from work. Except, in between, the association of window cleaners have dropped by to collect money on his behalf, from which they will give him a small percentage under certain conditions.
Obviously in this case it isn't actually theft, since GEMA has been authorized by the government, so they have essentially been given the authority to "tax" musicians. But they have no proper democratic oversight to make this workable and keep them ethical.
"The idea of "give the creator the right to his creation" is well intended, but often very naive and unworkable. Sadly though, I have no solution how to improve on the idea to make it workable."
Is suspect a workable solution would include reducing the term that copyright and other intellectual "property" rights last. Copyright is meant to be a limited privilege afforded to the creator of a work, in order to reward the creator and thus encourage the creation of intellectual works. A noble intent, which has gotten lost over the years as corporations started receiving copyright and realised they could increase profits by lobbying the governments of this world to increase their copyright terms step by step until the current ridiculous system of decades of protection after the death of the artist.
It is now considered by many politicians to be inalienable rights and thus the original compromise between the freedom of expression and reward for authors/creators has been lost.
A workable solution would be to start from the assumption that there is no copyright any more and then reintroduce the original compromise in the context of modern society.
Also Apple is very unlikely to agree to make custom military units with whatever requirements the military has. It's just not their thing.
They'll be better served customising Android and should have no trouble finding a hardware vendor.
As a side note, knowing the military the requirements will be decided by committee, resulting in something in that weighs 5 pounds to satisfy all the criteria.
"This is the equivalent of being raped in a police station and then being happy that the cops admitted it happened and are very sorry about it."
No. Nothing like that. One of the cases you are talking about is a forgiveable error or misjudgement. The other is rape. I have no idea how you thought that was an acceptable analogy, but your use of the analogy was in itself a forgiveable error or misjudgement. So how others should react to it, depends on how you deal with your error. The correct way would be to apologise, correct the error and take better precautions the next time.
If people deal with mishaps in this way, I see no problem in forgiving them and moving on.
"Anyway, if you want the UI paradigm to continue as it has been, throw your weight behind MATE"
Please don't. The project is doomed to failure as extremely few original GNOME developers are interested, and GNOME is much larger than just the user visible desktop. Sooner or later (if it hasn't already), MATE will start to fall massively behind on things like security updates, dependency support, etc.
If you are really upset about how GNOME 3 behaves, then write extensions for it (like MGSE). You may not like the current UI, but the Javascript core is incredibly extensible.
It's the "stirp away everything else" part that bothers people who aren't in on the Jobsian cult.
You've found your "target market". Great. That's no damn reason to take away the choice.
So because someone likes products you don't, they are in a "cult"? And why the fuck should Apple products bother you? Just don't buy them or do you think someone forces you to buy several hundred quid gadgets?
I seriously hope you're not an engineer, because you'd suck badly at it. Every time you add a "choice" you add complexity and the problem is that not everyone agrees about which features and options are essential, so you'd have to add everything, and you end up with emacs.
Settle on a target market and provide what THEY want and nothing more and they will love your product. Settle on nothing, provide everything and nobody will love your product.
"Intentionally not supporting Apple at this point. Their entire product line is aimed at people who can barely power up their computers, "
Highly insulting and highly untrue. Lots of techies are Apple customers. Apple's entire product line is aimed at people who are okay with the feature set provided and want minimal fuss. Fanboys may think that people only buy Apple products because of the branding, but their competitors (i.e. Samsung, Google, HTC, etc.) certainly know better than to make this mistake. If they had, their battle would already be lost. Understanding what makes Apple sell are a major reason for Android doing well.
If we were talking about anyone but Apple, their product design would be lauded as "great engineering". I.e. find your target market, focus on making them happy, and strip away anything else. This approach makes their products more or less useless for many, but it greatly satisfies the very large group of people they do hit. This is the corner stone of engineering: know your target market and make your product work well for them. If you try to please everyone, chances are you'll end up pleasing nobody.
I can understand people's objections to Apple for moral reasons, but many on here really need an attitude change with regards to their products. I really don't care if you like them or not, that is down to personal taste and your own requirements, but the notion that the very large group of people that buy Apple products are somehow "dumb" or "sheep" is fucking insulting and downright trolling, even if it is "accepted wisdom" on here.
Some probably would upgrade. After all, some people have unlimited money for all intents and purposes in this discussion. But mainly I think it is a product differentiator for new customers or the old customers that are upgrading from an older iPhone to one of the newer ones.
I recently upgraded from an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 4. The reason I didn't go with the 4s is that it was more expensive and the faster CPU and Siri didn't really appeal to me.
I don't believe the faster CPU and GPU are a big sell on their own to the general public. Apple needed some VISIBLE new feature to differentiate the 4s. They came up with Siri, which TBH currently appears a little dumb to me.
I can't tell if you're a deluded Unity developer, or a Microsoft shill trying to push popular opinion towards a truly terrible GUI to Keep the Linux Man Down.
I CAN tell, however, that you are an utter arsehole that considers the opinion of others worth less than your own. I'm not the biggest unity fan but some people clearly like it.
If they got the offer to upgrade automatically they might well appreciate the new version.
This is what happens for apple users.
The problem here is not Google, rather the handset makers who would rather you buy a new phone and networks who like enticing you with a new phone to get you to Pay over the odds for line rental.
Google could have been more proactive at pushing these companies though. Apple's greatest achievement was convincing carriers to give up of lots of crap In order to get the iPhone.
"In 1994 linux users had to use something, whether konqueror, opera or any other browsers rose, a niche existed to be filled for a better web browser."
In 1994 there was hardly any Linux users. 1.0 was released that year and Slackware was the only player. Also the few Linux users out there did not "have" to have a browser. The web was just not that well established and Gopher was still popular.
In many ways the web was crucial in the history of the FOSS community and there is no guarantee we'd have Konqueror without Netscape. KDE wasn't founded until 1996 and the first release of Konqueror was years later than that.
RTFA again. The article simply shows that the iPhone and the iPhone 3G was supported and were given updates for three years after they were released. This is true.
"Second of all, the original iPhone 2G, which I have, is definitely not supported by iOS5, or even iOS4 for that matter. What are they smoking?"
They are simply stating that the iPhone 2G was supported and up to date for the first three years of its life. This is true. Support was dropped with iOS 4.0 which came out nearly exactly three years after the original iPhone.
The same goes for the iPhone 3G. Support and updates was dropped three years after it came out.
It is a fair point about the walled garden of the Apple ecosystem, but I'm willing to bet that at least 90% of all Android phone users will never install an App from outside the Android marketplace and will never, ever consider installing CyanogenMod or even know what it is.
Note to moderators: Do not mod something down simply because you disagree with it. It is somewhat outrageous to mod the parent down simply because you don't like Apple.
Apple HAVE been much better and more consistent at supporting software updates on their phones years after release than what any major Android handset maker has been. This is not me being a fanboy, this is true, and something the Android handset makers (and the networks) should learn from.
Not everyone has time to fiddle with CyanogenMod and are ok with going an unsupported way on their phone. I personally want my handset maker to provide me with automatic updates in a timely manner.
No, this does not mean Apple are great at everything. But please give some credit where it is due.
Note to moderators: Do not mod something down simply because you disagree with it.
Apple HAVE been much better and more consistent at supporting software updates on their phones years after release than what any major Android handset maker has been. This is not me being a fanboy, this is true, and something the Android handset makers (and the networks) should learn from.
Not everyone has time to fiddle with CyanogenMod and are ok with going an unsupported way on their phone. I personally want my handset maker to provide me with automatic updates in a timely manner.
I'm a long standing Mac user. Windows was superior to MacOS from the time Windows 95 (or at the very least since NT 4.0 in 1996) came out to the time OS X 10.2 Jaguar came out (2002). In the meantime, Windows had proper multitasking and memory protection (albeit limited in 9x/ME). This only arrived for MacOS with OS X, and the first two versions of OS X was pretty poor and buggy.
Outside these times (pre-1995 and after 2002, at least until Windows 7) MacOS was better.
"they are recommendations for building future development machines"
In which case this makes perfect sense. There is an absolutely massive difference between recommending a spec for a developer machine and stating requirements for building the source.
Given how cheap RAM is these days, there is no reason for a decent software company to give their developers machines with less than 16GB of RAM now, especially in order to fully utilise those multi-core workstations to run parallel builds. Any reduction in compilation time can be time spent debugging.
"China has their own GPS network already up and operating. Why not use them, as they're Europe's new BFF?"
What part of his post did you not understand? If it makes sense not to be too reliant on our friend the US, it sure does not make sense to be too reliant on our new "friend", China.
Slashdot Mirror
"(I laugh at anyone who pays money for digital music.)"
What the fuck is the difference between paying for digital music or paying for cable or paying for a concert ticket?
They are all paying for entertainment in some form and if you actually had the guts to laugh to people's face, I can promise you that someone less forgiving than myself would laugh as they punched you in your face.
I do agree that we've taken it too far with airport security. Most of the regulations are utterly pointless and often ignored. As an example, think of the clear plastic bags to store your toiletries in. It isn't enough to just leave your toothpaste visible on top of your suitcase, it has to be visible INSIDE a clear plastic bag.
Having got used to this nonsense in the UK, I once went through security at a central European airport when heading back to Heathrow. Having lost my plastic bag on my trip, I asked the security guard if they had any plastic bags I could use. He pointed to his colleague and told me to ask him. This colleague was placed AFTER the security scanners. This airport had the exact same Airport regulation rules as in the UK, and all the security posters told me to use the bags, but they were obviously less anal about it. I just smiled, thanked the guy and didn't bother.
"What makes you think that history would play out differently next time?"
There is no guarantee of anything in this world but it would at least provide benefit for a while. Then we'd just have to use the past as evidence not to extend copyright again.
No. It is a terrible idea.
What if you buy a BMW 1201Whatever and later on this car becomes a classic collectors car, making it worth more money than it originally was? Shouldn't BMW get some of the money?
What if you buy a designer shirt from Le Whatever and later on this shirt becomes a "vintage" collectors shirt, making it worth more money than it originally was? Shouldn't Le Whatever get some of that money?
What if you buy a house and later on property prices go up and the house becomes worth more than what it was. Shouldn't the person who sold you that house get some of the money?
No. When you sell something, you've sold it. Meaning you've lost all claims to it. That is the risk of selling something. You may lose future income, but you have also protected yourself from the item losing value by realising its value in cold hard cash.
If the artists want to profit from future price rises, they should sell a share of the paintings. They can then still profit from future price rises, but obviously they have to take the risk of the painting actually decreasing in value over time.
The artist having the cake and eating it too is not fair. Not fair at all.
"Please explain how that is NOT slavery, even if a modern version of it."
Look, I am not saying this is not highly unethical, but since nobody is actually forcing the artists to work or create anything at all, it isn't slavery. Nobody is telling them to write music or be punished. The analogy completely falls short because of this.
It is much closer to theft. The closest analogy I can think of, is one of a window cleaner going around cleaning windows during the day and then going back to collect his payment when people have returned from work. Except, in between, the association of window cleaners have dropped by to collect money on his behalf, from which they will give him a small percentage under certain conditions.
Obviously in this case it isn't actually theft, since GEMA has been authorized by the government, so they have essentially been given the authority to "tax" musicians. But they have no proper democratic oversight to make this workable and keep them ethical.
"The idea of "give the creator the right to his creation" is well intended, but often very naive and unworkable. Sadly though, I have no solution how to improve on the idea to make it workable."
Is suspect a workable solution would include reducing the term that copyright and other intellectual "property" rights last. Copyright is meant to be a limited privilege afforded to the creator of a work, in order to reward the creator and thus encourage the creation of intellectual works. A noble intent, which has gotten lost over the years as corporations started receiving copyright and realised they could increase profits by lobbying the governments of this world to increase their copyright terms step by step until the current ridiculous system of decades of protection after the death of the artist.
It is now considered by many politicians to be inalienable rights and thus the original compromise between the freedom of expression and reward for authors/creators has been lost.
A workable solution would be to start from the assumption that there is no copyright any more and then reintroduce the original compromise in the context of modern society.
Also Apple is very unlikely to agree to make custom military units with whatever requirements the military has. It's just not their thing.
They'll be better served customising Android and should have no trouble finding a hardware vendor.
As a side note, knowing the military the requirements will be decided by committee, resulting in something in that weighs 5 pounds to satisfy all the criteria.
"This is the equivalent of being raped in a police station and then being happy that the cops admitted it happened and are very sorry about it."
No. Nothing like that. One of the cases you are talking about is a forgiveable error or misjudgement. The other is rape. I have no idea how you thought that was an acceptable analogy, but your use of the analogy was in itself a forgiveable error or misjudgement. So how others should react to it, depends on how you deal with your error. The correct way would be to apologise, correct the error and take better precautions the next time.
If people deal with mishaps in this way, I see no problem in forgiving them and moving on.
"Anyway, if you want the UI paradigm to continue as it has been, throw your weight behind MATE"
Please don't. The project is doomed to failure as extremely few original GNOME developers are interested, and GNOME is much larger than just the user visible desktop. Sooner or later (if it hasn't already), MATE will start to fall massively behind on things like security updates, dependency support, etc.
If you are really upset about how GNOME 3 behaves, then write extensions for it (like MGSE). You may not like the current UI, but the Javascript core is incredibly extensible.
My phone, an HTC G2 came out in September 2010, got an OS update as recently as two weeks ago.
You do realise you're talking a little over a year here? Hardly anything to brag about.
It's the "stirp away everything else" part that bothers people who aren't in on the Jobsian cult.
You've found your "target market". Great. That's no damn reason to take away the choice.
So because someone likes products you don't, they are in a "cult"? And why the fuck should Apple products bother you? Just don't buy them or do you think someone forces you to buy several hundred quid gadgets?
I seriously hope you're not an engineer, because you'd suck badly at it. Every time you add a "choice" you add complexity and the problem is that not everyone agrees about which features and options are essential, so you'd have to add everything, and you end up with emacs.
Settle on a target market and provide what THEY want and nothing more and they will love your product. Settle on nothing, provide everything and nobody will love your product.
"Intentionally not supporting Apple at this point. Their entire product line is aimed at people who can barely power up their computers, "
Highly insulting and highly untrue. Lots of techies are Apple customers. Apple's entire product line is aimed at people who are okay with the feature set provided and want minimal fuss. Fanboys may think that people only buy Apple products because of the branding, but their competitors (i.e. Samsung, Google, HTC, etc.) certainly know better than to make this mistake. If they had, their battle would already be lost. Understanding what makes Apple sell are a major reason for Android doing well.
If we were talking about anyone but Apple, their product design would be lauded as "great engineering". I.e. find your target market, focus on making them happy, and strip away anything else. This approach makes their products more or less useless for many, but it greatly satisfies the very large group of people they do hit. This is the corner stone of engineering: know your target market and make your product work well for them. If you try to please everyone, chances are you'll end up pleasing nobody.
I can understand people's objections to Apple for moral reasons, but many on here really need an attitude change with regards to their products. I really don't care if you like them or not, that is down to personal taste and your own requirements, but the notion that the very large group of people that buy Apple products are somehow "dumb" or "sheep" is fucking insulting and downright trolling, even if it is "accepted wisdom" on here.
Some probably would upgrade. After all, some people have unlimited money for all intents and purposes in this discussion. But mainly I think it is a product differentiator for new customers or the old customers that are upgrading from an older iPhone to one of the newer ones.
I recently upgraded from an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 4. The reason I didn't go with the 4s is that it was more expensive and the faster CPU and Siri didn't really appeal to me.
I don't believe the faster CPU and GPU are a big sell on their own to the general public. Apple needed some VISIBLE new feature to differentiate the 4s. They came up with Siri, which TBH currently appears a little dumb to me.
I can't tell if you're a deluded Unity developer, or a Microsoft shill trying to push popular opinion towards a truly terrible GUI to Keep the Linux Man Down.
I CAN tell, however, that you are an utter arsehole that considers the opinion of others worth less than your own. I'm not the biggest unity fan but some people clearly like it.
If they got the offer to upgrade automatically they might well appreciate the new version.
This is what happens for apple users.
The problem here is not Google, rather the handset makers who would rather you buy a new phone and networks who like enticing you with a new phone to get you to Pay over the odds for line rental.
Google could have been more proactive at pushing these companies though. Apple's greatest achievement was convincing carriers to give up of lots of crap In order to get the iPhone.
"In 1994 linux users had to use something, whether konqueror, opera or any other browsers rose, a niche existed to be filled for a better web browser."
In 1994 there was hardly any Linux users. 1.0 was released that year and Slackware was the only player. Also the few Linux users out there did not "have" to have a browser. The web was just not that well established and Gopher was still popular.
In many ways the web was crucial in the history of the FOSS community and there is no guarantee we'd have Konqueror without Netscape. KDE wasn't founded until 1996 and the first release of Konqueror was years later than that.
RTFA again. The article simply shows that the iPhone and the iPhone 3G was supported and were given updates for three years after they were released. This is true.
"Second of all, the original iPhone 2G, which I have, is definitely not supported by iOS5, or even iOS4 for that matter. What are they smoking?"
They are simply stating that the iPhone 2G was supported and up to date for the first three years of its life. This is true. Support was dropped with iOS 4.0 which came out nearly exactly three years after the original iPhone.
The same goes for the iPhone 3G. Support and updates was dropped three years after it came out.
It is a fair point about the walled garden of the Apple ecosystem, but I'm willing to bet that at least 90% of all Android phone users will never install an App from outside the Android marketplace and will never, ever consider installing CyanogenMod or even know what it is.
Note to moderators: Do not mod something down simply because you disagree with it. It is somewhat outrageous to mod the parent down simply because you don't like Apple.
Apple HAVE been much better and more consistent at supporting software updates on their phones years after release than what any major Android handset maker has been. This is not me being a fanboy, this is true, and something the Android handset makers (and the networks) should learn from.
Not everyone has time to fiddle with CyanogenMod and are ok with going an unsupported way on their phone. I personally want my handset maker to provide me with automatic updates in a timely manner.
No, this does not mean Apple are great at everything. But please give some credit where it is due.
Note to moderators: Do not mod something down simply because you disagree with it.
Apple HAVE been much better and more consistent at supporting software updates on their phones years after release than what any major Android handset maker has been. This is not me being a fanboy, this is true, and something the Android handset makers (and the networks) should learn from.
Not everyone has time to fiddle with CyanogenMod and are ok with going an unsupported way on their phone. I personally want my handset maker to provide me with automatic updates in a timely manner.
I'm a long standing Mac user. Windows was superior to MacOS from the time Windows 95 (or at the very least since NT 4.0 in 1996) came out to the time OS X 10.2 Jaguar came out (2002). In the meantime, Windows had proper multitasking and memory protection (albeit limited in 9x/ME). This only arrived for MacOS with OS X, and the first two versions of OS X was pretty poor and buggy.
Outside these times (pre-1995 and after 2002, at least until Windows 7) MacOS was better.
"Seems like someone were overdue for a promotion" you mean. Now they may be overdue for the dole office.
"they are recommendations for building future development machines"
In which case this makes perfect sense. There is an absolutely massive difference between recommending a spec for a developer machine and stating requirements for building the source.
Given how cheap RAM is these days, there is no reason for a decent software company to give their developers machines with less than 16GB of RAM now, especially in order to fully utilise those multi-core workstations to run parallel builds. Any reduction in compilation time can be time spent debugging.
This story just reads like flamebait to me.
"China has their own GPS network already up and operating. Why not use them, as they're Europe's new BFF?"
What part of his post did you not understand? If it makes sense not to be too reliant on our friend the US, it sure does not make sense to be too reliant on our new "friend", China.