I'm not bashing, but I will make this observation...
StarOffice, Corel Office, and Applix Office happen to have consistent within themselves menus. Many of the other apps have menus that are consistent with the rest of things.
I'll bet your complaint is less that the menus aren't standard and more that they're not the way Windows presents them. But you never stop to think about that- you're so used to Windows you don't think about anything of the sort.
What makes you think they're going to bother with anything that lasts these days- that doesn't make as much money. If your argument held any water whatsoever, why do we have Britney or Backstreet in the first place?
They created music that most definitely lasts, but yet it had NO protection whatsoever (in some cases they bemoaned that fact, but produced anyway).
Protection for production of works for money does not produce better content- nor does production solely for the sake of money. I can point to numerous bands such as the Spice Girls to illustrate that point. Do you hear much of them or any of their music? No? Yet, you WILL hear one of the oft played Rolling Stones or Aerosmith songs on a rock station- they've technically not been a band for a while now (though Aerosmith's been back for a little a while back...).
While I've no illusions about either of the "classic" bands being there for the money, they were there as much for the music and it showed. The same can't be said for over 90% of the stuff that's playing today on the radio that the record companies are shoving down our throats.
As someone wise once said- you don't go into computer science for the money, you go into it because it's in your blood. If you do that, the money will follow. I believe with all my heart that this is the case for my chosen profession as well as almost every other- including being an author, actor or a musician.
Some people DO belong here on the old H-1 visa scheme and some do belong here under the H-1B. So many of the ones I've seen could have been filled by local people it's not funny.
If you've got a house, family, or both, it's easy to glibly say that- it's another thing to DO it. This is not to say that I wouldn't do it at the drop of a hat, if the need arose, but I'm not going to bolt from where I live just yet. Jobs aren't as plentiful as they once were, but they're still available in my area.
It costs something like $.75-1.50 a pop to make a CD with silk-screened artwork and jewel boxes packaged. That's in lots of 10k- it gets much cheaper in the hundreds of thousands that a major act ends up doing in a single pressing.
So let's run the numbers...
1.50 (Assume the most expensive)
1.00 (Assume marketing and production costs)
.25 (Assume the average royalty payout to
artist...)
----
2.75
Average cost of CD: $16 (Rounded...)
16.00
2.75
-----
13.25
That's a little over 13 dollars US that get divvied up amongst the likes of Best Buy (Who gets about 20 or so % of the total price on the disk- maybe a little more, maybe a little less...), the distributor (Ditto...), and the record company that collects some 40-60% of the shelf price of the record- for an outlay approximately $2-3 dollars per disc.
If it were production costs, they wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry. They're collecting most of that as profit.
The Radio Stations pay money to play the song, yes, but it doesn't amount to the money the band usually has to pay in the form of Independent Promotion. Only with the big ticket acts do you see the money flowing to the artists from radio play.
If you believe that the costs are huge, you're mistaken. Compared to what they rake in (and I don't mean the musicians) it's paltry. We are all being "strip-mined" for money by the entertainment industry. Ever once wondered why the apparent quality of the music has been going downhill and there always seems to be yet another new band? Ever wonder why they keep pumping out crap to the theatres instead of the rare quality work? Because it's cheaper to pump out stuff that the masses consider acceptable, if only just barely- even if the quality stuff produces awesome returns. It's not as high as they want them to be.
Ok, let's try this again- since you either didn't read my reply to you (And I did reply to you- your post uses the same argument, same calling people stupid.) or you're too focused on yourself to "get" it.
If the person would have never bought it- you made nothing to begin with. Doesn't matter if they copy it or not, if they like your stuff, they'll do something to put money in your pocket- usually by buying the CD, but also by attending concerts, etc. If they don't like it or don't know about your work (if they don't hear it on the radio or from someone playing it for them or near them) then they're not going to buy it from you no matter what you say about it being your music. If it's worth paying for, generally speaking, people will pay for it- because the product from the record companies is a higher quality and easier to use product than an MP3, except in highly portable contexts.
When you do a recording for a label and "bust your butt for it", unless you're someone like Ian Anderson, Michael Jackson, etc. you're doing work for that record company- and it is they that own it, not you. In many cases, the contract makes your work a work for hire, not yours- ever. If someone's stealing from someone when someone copies that work, it's not the person that made the music that the copier is "stealing" from, it's the record company.
Furthermore, unless a rather sizeable segment of the population buys the record, the artist sees nothing from the sales of the record because their cut is so small- something on the order of somewhere around $.25-.50US per CD that sells for $16-20US. Unless you're platinum, all you get from the radio spots and CD sales is exposure. An artist generally makes money selling paraphenalia that's licensed to a given concert, concert performances, and in the case of indies without any label per se, direct CD sales for $4-10US.
If he liked it, he'd be buying it. If he didn't, he wouldn't. Without the ability to try it out for little to no expense on his part, even if it was a "poor quality" copy, he'd probably not ever buy it. He's said as much. While I don't entirely agree with his modus operandi, I do agree with the sentiment. I don't trade, but I also don't buy a lot of records or books these days nor do I go to the movies often- because I can't really sample the stuff all that often and there's so much dross out there that it's almost not worth my bothering with it all.
With him, you'd never have a sale to begin with without the "copying" in the first place. He was never a "lost" sale no matter what. If you can't sell the stuff without some sort of samples being handed out for free one way or another (like radio, singles, mp3/DivX:-) trading, etc.) to convince people to purchase the whole book/album/movie/etc. you're going to have a hell of a time selling anything anyway.
I might suggest another line of work in that case.
Oh, and if you're going to call someone dumb, you might want to do it with a real account and not mis-spell words like "which".
"Two" is so much bunk it's not even funny. Electric distribution was developed in the US, first by Edison, later by Tesla. The incandescant light bulb came from Edison. The fluorescent light from Tesla. The AC motor came from Tesla. Do we have the unmitigated gall and audacity to tell the rest of the world what to do with their electric power distributiuon system, motors, lights, etc.? Nope- and we'd get told where to shove it if we dared to. Why should this be any different?
"Three" would depend on how much capability the "new" fork could muster. It might start out as a "piggyback", but it might just grow to be the main one. You just can't tell- it boils down to the ingenuity of the individuals building the alternate net (which is actually happening right now with Consume, etc.).
That's what a LOT of the big businesses possess It's greed without any sense of what tomorrow might bring. It's greed without any sense of propriety. It's greed without playing by any of the rules we've set for ourselves as individuals.
Unchecked greed ends up producing monsters that slowly gobble up all the competition. Unchecked greed creates the pollution we see in the skies over the cites we live in. Unchecked greed produces the pablum that we're force-fed in the form of pop music and pop television.
Not unethical? Some of what they're doing is unethical. Do you consider $0.25-0.50 profit earned by a recording artist per every $15-20 record ethical? Do you consider region coding on DVD's ethical? Do you consider keeping you from using a given media item such as a book or record being explicitly controlled by someone else ethical? I don't. Apparently your concept of ethical and mine are completely different.
The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist -- Verbal Kint, The Usual Suspects)
Love the quote.
Excellent movie. Unbelievable plot twist at the end- if you've not seen it, you probably ought to go see it; it's got one of those mind-bomb endings not unlike the one they did in Sixth Sense.
It's the book I used to first get up to speed with Linux driver development (this is what I do for a living now...:-). For many things, it will serve well, if they've kept it as good as the first edition- it assumes a decent level of proficiency in C coding and takes you through most of the nuances of the module's interface to the kernel and how to do things like bus-mastering, etc. in the manner Linux expects/allows.
Fair warning, while the coding is not hard, making drivers work the hardware and do it well is the actual hard part of making drivers for the kernel. Depending on the device it could be easy (The industrial I/O interface for 2.2.X kernels for the Versalogic VSBC-6 is simple- and was the first device driver that I successfully implemented...) or it could be rather complex (DRM modules for DRI support come immediately to mind...). It all depends on the device and what you want to do with it.
Without technical programming information (such as register level/MMIO/DMA programming info for things like 2D/3D chips) you're not going to be able to write anything without a long, arduous reverse engineering process- that might never produce results.
Broadcom's not giving out stuff- even though they HAVE a closed source driver for their HomePNA stuff. It's no different than CyberLink or InterVideo with their PowerDVD for Linux and LinDVD- you have to be an OEM or an embedded systems vendor to even get a copy of the software. This means that I could concievably get a copy of any of this stuff, but the general public can't- which is WRONG.
C) The company is so paranoid that the technical information needed to develop drivers will either allow a competitor to come up with a cheap knock-off product (Which was M-Systems excuse...) or allow enough knowlege of the internal workings of the device in question to allow an opening for a patent infringement suit.
These companies are so sold on "intellectual" property and they're afraid that any piece of what they consider is their intellectual propery is guarded like the crown jewels. SiS, while they gave away technical data for the 6328 3D chip, has chosen to require an NDA to get ANYTHING about the 300, 305, or 315 chips- even though they gave out an open source driver, without that information, you can't fix it. Thankfully, I'm going to be able to work on it because my employer's working with something that uses a 603 chipset that contains the 300- so I'm going to be able to fix the drivers for a while at least.
Next time you contact them, remind them that they were shipping Linux in the box with a lot of their products (TurboLinux) and that they have Linux support stamped on the boxes of their 10/100 NICs.
These all provide the same general functionality as Exchange/Outlook does.
Of them, Bynari works both on Windows and on Linux.
And, I'd beg to differ about the "hard to beat" since most companies can get the same functionality and most of them don't really use the thing to it's fullest anyhow.
Think small. A G4 tower takes up the space of 5 or so of these, it is only about 3 or so times faster. For a render or server farm, these make a lot more sense- I can wedge 3 or so of these into a single rack slot.
How often do you NEED such a thing under Linux?
How often do you NEED such a thing under Windows?
Windows API's are often complex (moresoand you end up needing more calls to the API to do things than you do under Linux/Unix. Don't bother countering with me not knowing what I'm talking about- I've been doing Windows and Unix coding for 12+ years now. I've written everything from business applications to device drivers under Windows and Linux is very much easier to code for.
And Andre Lamothe was the author of that one. It's a little thin for a person that's been coding for a while, but it had some pretty good stuff in it buried amongst the novice stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not bashing, but I will make this observation...
StarOffice, Corel Office, and Applix Office happen to have consistent within themselves menus. Many of the other apps have menus that are consistent with the rest of things.
I'll bet your complaint is less that the menus aren't standard and more that they're not the way Windows presents them. But you never stop to think about that- you're so used to Windows you don't think about anything of the sort.
What makes you think they're going to bother with anything that lasts these days- that doesn't make as much money. If your argument held any water whatsoever, why do we have Britney or Backstreet in the first place?
Did Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven, Handel, etc.?
No. They didn't did they?
They created music that most definitely lasts, but yet it had NO protection whatsoever (in some cases they bemoaned that fact, but produced anyway).
Protection for production of works for money does not produce better content- nor does production solely for the sake of money. I can point to numerous bands such as the Spice Girls to illustrate that point. Do you hear much of them or any of their music? No? Yet, you WILL hear one of the oft played Rolling Stones or Aerosmith songs on a rock station- they've technically not been a band for a while now (though Aerosmith's been back for a little a while back...).
While I've no illusions about either of the "classic" bands being there for the money, they were there as much for the music and it showed. The same can't be said for over 90% of the stuff that's playing today on the radio that the record companies are shoving down our throats.
As someone wise once said- you don't go into computer science for the money, you go into it because it's in your blood. If you do that, the money will follow. I believe with all my heart that this is the case for my chosen profession as well as almost every other- including being an author, actor or a musician.
Some people DO belong here on the old H-1 visa scheme and some do belong here under the H-1B. So many of the ones I've seen could have been filled by local people it's not funny.
If you've got a house, family, or both, it's easy to glibly say that- it's another thing to DO it. This is not to say that I wouldn't do it at the drop of a hat, if the need arose, but I'm not going to bolt from where I live just yet. Jobs aren't as plentiful as they once were, but they're still available in my area.
What production costs?
.25 (Assume the average royalty payout to
It costs something like $.75-1.50 a pop to make a CD with silk-screened artwork and jewel boxes packaged. That's in lots of 10k- it gets much cheaper in the hundreds of thousands that a major act ends up doing in a single pressing.
So let's run the numbers...
1.50 (Assume the most expensive)
1.00 (Assume marketing and production costs)
artist...)
----
2.75
Average cost of CD: $16 (Rounded...)
16.00
2.75
-----
13.25
That's a little over 13 dollars US that get divvied up amongst the likes of Best Buy (Who gets about 20 or so % of the total price on the disk- maybe a little more, maybe a little less...), the distributor (Ditto...), and the record company that collects some 40-60% of the shelf price of the record- for an outlay approximately $2-3 dollars per disc.
If it were production costs, they wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry. They're collecting most of that as profit.
The Radio Stations pay money to play the song, yes, but it doesn't amount to the money the band usually has to pay in the form of Independent Promotion. Only with the big ticket acts do you see the money flowing to the artists from radio play.
If you believe that the costs are huge, you're mistaken. Compared to what they rake in (and I don't mean the musicians) it's paltry. We are all being "strip-mined" for money by the entertainment industry. Ever once wondered why the apparent quality of the music has been going downhill and there always seems to be yet another new band? Ever wonder why they keep pumping out crap to the theatres instead of the rare quality work? Because it's cheaper to pump out stuff that the masses consider acceptable, if only just barely- even if the quality stuff produces awesome returns. It's not as high as they want them to be.
Ok, let's try this again- since you either didn't read my reply to you (And I did reply to you- your post uses the same argument, same calling people stupid.) or you're too focused on yourself to "get" it.
If the person would have never bought it- you made nothing to begin with. Doesn't matter if they copy it or not, if they like your stuff, they'll do something to put money in your pocket- usually by buying the CD, but also by attending concerts, etc. If they don't like it or don't know about your work (if they don't hear it on the radio or from someone playing it for them or near them) then they're not going to buy it from you no matter what you say about it being your music. If it's worth paying for, generally speaking, people will pay for it- because the product from the record companies is a higher quality and easier to use product than an MP3, except in highly portable contexts.
When you do a recording for a label and "bust your butt for it", unless you're someone like Ian Anderson, Michael Jackson, etc. you're doing work for that record company- and it is they that own it, not you. In many cases, the contract makes your work a work for hire, not yours- ever. If someone's stealing from someone when someone copies that work, it's not the person that made the music that the copier is "stealing" from, it's the record company.
Furthermore, unless a rather sizeable segment of the population buys the record, the artist sees nothing from the sales of the record because their cut is so small- something on the order of somewhere around $.25-.50US per CD that sells for $16-20US. Unless you're platinum, all you get from the radio spots and CD sales is exposure. An artist generally makes money selling paraphenalia that's licensed to a given concert, concert performances, and in the case of indies without any label per se, direct CD sales for $4-10US.
If he liked it, he'd be buying it. If he didn't, he wouldn't. Without the ability to try it out for little to no expense on his part, even if it was a "poor quality" copy, he'd probably not ever buy it. He's said as much. While I don't entirely agree with his modus operandi, I do agree with the sentiment. I don't trade, but I also don't buy a lot of records or books these days nor do I go to the movies often- because I can't really sample the stuff all that often and there's so much dross out there that it's almost not worth my bothering with it all.
With him, you'd never have a sale to begin with without the "copying" in the first place. He was never a "lost" sale no matter what. If you can't sell the stuff without some sort of samples being handed out for free one way or another (like radio, singles, mp3/DivX:-) trading, etc.) to convince people to purchase the whole book/album/movie/etc. you're going to have a hell of a time selling anything anyway.
I might suggest another line of work in that case.
Oh, and if you're going to call someone dumb, you might want to do it with a real account and not mis-spell words like "which".
If we're not trading OR buying, that would send a message, wouldn't you think.
My opinion is that they really thought that they'd just get the ISP or you to cave- whether or not they actually have a case or not.
Lawyers can tend to work that way, especially those working with big business.
Normally, I'd say "poetic justice", but I daresay AOL's little better at best.
I'll give you "one"...
"Two" is so much bunk it's not even funny. Electric distribution was developed in the US, first by Edison, later by Tesla. The incandescant light bulb came from Edison. The fluorescent light from Tesla. The AC motor came from Tesla. Do we have the unmitigated gall and audacity to tell the rest of the world what to do with their electric power distributiuon system, motors, lights, etc.? Nope- and we'd get told where to shove it if we dared to. Why should this be any different?
"Three" would depend on how much capability the "new" fork could muster. It might start out as a "piggyback", but it might just grow to be the main one. You just can't tell- it boils down to the ingenuity of the individuals building the alternate net (which is actually happening right now with Consume, etc.).
Unchecked greed is not a good thing.
That's what a LOT of the big businesses possess It's greed without any sense of what tomorrow might bring. It's greed without any sense of propriety. It's greed without playing by any of the rules we've set for ourselves as individuals.
Unchecked greed ends up producing monsters that slowly gobble up all the competition. Unchecked greed creates the pollution we see in the skies over the cites we live in. Unchecked greed produces the pablum that we're force-fed in the form of pop music and pop television.
Not unethical? Some of what they're doing is unethical. Do you consider $0.25-0.50 profit earned by a recording artist per every $15-20 record ethical? Do you consider region coding on DVD's ethical? Do you consider keeping you from using a given media item such as a book or record being explicitly controlled by someone else ethical? I don't. Apparently your concept of ethical and mine are completely different.
NT
If you're not spending your own money, you're spending your employer's on printing this beast out.
Put it in those terms and you'll "get it".
The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist -- Verbal Kint, The Usual Suspects)
Love the quote.
Excellent movie. Unbelievable plot twist at the end- if you've not seen it, you probably ought to go see it; it's got one of those mind-bomb endings not unlike the one they did in Sixth Sense.
It's the book I used to first get up to speed with Linux driver development (this is what I do for a living now... :-). For many things, it will serve well, if they've kept it as good as the first edition- it assumes a decent level of proficiency in C coding and takes you through most of the nuances of the module's interface to the kernel and how to do things like bus-mastering, etc. in the manner Linux expects/allows.
Fair warning, while the coding is not hard, making drivers work the hardware and do it well is the actual hard part of making drivers for the kernel. Depending on the device it could be easy (The industrial I/O interface for 2.2.X kernels for the Versalogic VSBC-6 is simple- and was the first device driver that I successfully implemented...) or it could be rather complex (DRM modules for DRI support come immediately to mind...). It all depends on the device and what you want to do with it.
Without technical programming information (such as register level/MMIO/DMA programming info for things like 2D/3D chips) you're not going to be able to write anything without a long, arduous reverse engineering process- that might never produce results.
Broadcom's not giving out stuff- even though they HAVE a closed source driver for their HomePNA stuff. It's no different than CyberLink or InterVideo with their PowerDVD for Linux and LinDVD- you have to be an OEM or an embedded systems vendor to even get a copy of the software. This means that I could concievably get a copy of any of this stuff, but the general public can't- which is WRONG.
As in...
C) The company is so paranoid that the technical information needed to develop drivers will either allow a competitor to come up with a cheap knock-off product (Which was M-Systems excuse...) or allow enough knowlege of the internal workings of the device in question to allow an opening for a patent infringement suit.
These companies are so sold on "intellectual" property and they're afraid that any piece of what they consider is their intellectual propery is guarded like the crown jewels. SiS, while they gave away technical data for the 6328 3D chip, has chosen to require an NDA to get ANYTHING about the 300, 305, or 315 chips- even though they gave out an open source driver, without that information, you can't fix it. Thankfully, I'm going to be able to work on it because my employer's working with something that uses a 603 chipset that contains the 300- so I'm going to be able to fix the drivers for a while at least.
This is news to me.
Next time you contact them, remind them that they were shipping Linux in the box with a lot of their products (TurboLinux) and that they have Linux support stamped on the boxes of their 10/100 NICs.
Bynari Insight client/server
Lotus Notes
GroupWise
These all provide the same general functionality as Exchange/Outlook does.
Of them, Bynari works both on Windows and on Linux.
And, I'd beg to differ about the "hard to beat" since most companies can get the same functionality and most of them don't really use the thing to it's fullest anyhow.
Think small. A G4 tower takes up the space of 5 or so of these, it is only about 3 or so times faster. For a render or server farm, these make a lot more sense- I can wedge 3 or so of these into a single rack slot.
How often do you NEED such a thing under Linux?
How often do you NEED such a thing under Windows?
Windows API's are often complex (moresoand you end up needing more calls to the API to do things than you do under Linux/Unix. Don't bother countering with me not knowing what I'm talking about- I've been doing Windows and Unix coding for 12+ years now. I've written everything from business applications to device drivers under Windows and Linux is very much easier to code for.
Not to complain, as $100 for a commercial engine rocks- but if I can't give a copy to someone else, it's most definitely NOT Free Software.
And Andre Lamothe was the author of that one. It's a little thin for a person that's been coding for a while, but it had some pretty good stuff in it buried amongst the novice stuff.