Similarly, I shed no tears for people who "demand" their "rights" to play the latest DVD on platform X.
Perhaps it would help if you thought of this as analogous to a company that submarines a patent while getting a standards board to adopt a technology reliant on that patent. Applying your viewpoint, you shed no tears for parties who want to use that technology once the patent has been revealed. What you seem to fail to account for is that the public has invested time and money on the apparent benefits that they THOUGHT a technology presented. Competing technologies that went by the wayside might have been adopted if there had been disclosure of how the technology would ultimately be controlled. There is now no practical alternative to DVDs. If I can only play the ones I purchased up til 2002 and none later, I will feel not just inconvenienced and disenfranchised, but very cheated by the entire underlying system.
Many users are just burnt out on ads. It's been said time and time again. When every show, every channel, every magazine, every newspaper, every website, every shopping cart, every building, every movie, every music CD, every box of cereal, basically every horizontal and vertical surface that a person sees is covered with an ad you get burn out.
Exactly. A friend of mine who's a UI designer once passed on the following UI credo: "When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing."
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Editors, PLEASE add value here
on
Fresco M1 Released
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
It would be nice if the slashdot editors would ensure that the slashdot blurbs convey - even generally - what a given project is about. From the slashdot blurb on this, I have no way of telling what "Fresco" is without reading the article. I'm supposing it's a software product (though it might be hardware). I have little idea whether it's a lightweight linux distro, a financial planning application, or a virtual porn site. I don't know if it's free or commercial. I *could* click the article and read it to find out. But I won't, because I'm not that intrigued by a product that I have no knowledge of; there are tons of those.
The replies to the parent post seem to run mostly in the vein of "it's a fantasy flick, get over it". Given that the parent poster did say that the movie was fun and that misgivings about the movie were on the level of discomfort, I find most of the reply posts to be oddly over-reactive. If the parent had said that nobody should feel good about this movie, or that he was unable to enjoy fantasy movies anymore, then THAT might have warranted a "get over it" reponse.
Suppose a child came up to you and confessed to feelings of inadequacy because of how dissimilar Harry P's life was to the child's. Some kids would be talking about the fact that they couldn't fly and turn invisible, and those kids would benefit from a talk about reality vs fantasy. But other kids would be talking about their inability to relate to the mindset and achievements of Harry... questions like: how does Harry know what to do all the time, or how can I be more popular like Harry? In these circumstances it would not be beneficial to lecture on the distinction between brooms and gravity. What's called for is an articulation of motivation, achievement, and what measures of worth should be applied to a person. Maybe the referred-to article went further than a broom-vs-gravity person would like, but to dismiss it altogether is to miss a real (like it or not) psychological dimension of the movie that has the potential to shape young minds. And if people at our age can't discuss it, even with a nod to having enjoyed the movie, then we're setting ourselves up to be empty handed when someone comes to us for advice.
I ask why we care (within reason) about what Microsoft says about Linux?
One big reason is that whatever Microsoft says is highly likely to be part of a PR campaign designed to sway government/legislators into outlawing (in fact or in effect) open source, via means such as the DMCA, patents on "trusted" (*gag*) platforms, and governmental contracts and policies. Sometimes such campaigns are squarely aimed at government officials (taking the form of lobbying) and sometimes such campaigns are targeted at "everyday folk"... partly in the hopes that the public will adopt linux more slowly, but perhaps more geared toward allowing legislators to read statistics suggesting they won't take a hit at the polls if they were to do something anti-linux.
I don't think [the recording industry] are worried about [digitizing analog signals]. It isn't bit for bit perfect.
Bitwise perfection has never been the goal. MP3 is a lossy compression scheme, i.e. it compromises the original digital recording (which itself was compromised by being discretely sampled). What's important to online distribution and consumption is that encoding a track to mp3 is a ONE TIME TRANSFORMATION, after which every copy will be a perfect copy of that transformed data. This applies equally well to analog signals which are digitized as they come out of a speaker wire. Heck, I've even heard some digitized vinyl records; excellent listening experience.
For all the bad press Java gets about being "slow", it is mostly old, outdated FUD. Newer virtual machines are often faster than C/C++ applications.
I have not experienced this. I've ported a large graphics-processing application from C++ to Java, and was unhappy to encounter an overall 6x performance degredation despite my best attempts to use memory efficiently. When I last looked on the web six months ago, performance tests comparing java and C++ uniformly indicated a similar performance penalty for java.
What I find really distasteful is the above phrase's incorporation of "MIT". Microsoft tries to pass it off as standing for "Mobile Internet Toolkit", but personally I believe it was intended to sound like (and evoke the favorable sentiments associated with) the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AND the associated, like-named OSS license.
To recite a parable from Raymond Smullyan (and retold by Douglas Hofstadter): Two boys are fighting over a piece of cake. Billy says he wants it all, Sammy says they should divide it equally. An adult comes along and asks what's wrong. The boys explain, and the adult says, "You should compromise -- Billy gets three quarters, Sammy gets one quarter".
Sadly, this is the state of current politics: that the outrageous claims are considered right alongside the fair-spirited ones.
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Re:What are you going to do? Beat cancer!
on
ECCp-109 Solved
·
· Score: 2
I'd *love* to switch from SETI to the cancer research program, but I'm definitely not switching to Windows to do it!
Also, I'm not going to OK a EULA that looks boringly long and like it was designed to let lawyers hassle me. State it in plain English, in a single short paragraph.
you will not get justice in this country unless you have the money for a team of attack lawyers.... Look at the prosecution and conviction rates for poor people compared to rich people for the exact same crime and similar evidence.
Where does someone get stats on "exact same crimes" differentiated only by poor vs rich?
Barring some website I don't know about, I'd say we're stuck with perhaps bemoaning the prosecution rates for poor vs rich, for which we'd probably have to acknowledge a greater actual crime rate amongst the poor.
MSFT took the photo of a youngish, attractive, but not overly sexy woman presented as a successful professional (our collective idealized version of a smart, competant, sexy woman), and pimped their product. Surprised? I'm not.
Nor am I, but just to make sure we're not burying an important related point: I'm still delighted that they were caught. There are many things that happen on a daily basis that don't surprise me yet I wish weren't the case: political corruption, impoliteness, murder, selling crappy software. Does any of it surprise me? No. Does my lack of surprise mean I want a corresponding lack of vigilance in trying to reduce the practice? Nope.
While Windows-based server computers are growing increasingly powerful and can cost 40 percent less than Unix systems, open- source programs have improved enough to replace Unix systems, investors said.
I totally don't get this statement. Can somebody please tell me how [hardware X + non-free-OS] can be cheaper than [hardware X + free-OS]?
Hmm, ten planets. This renders useless all those messages we've sent for aliens to find... the ones where a sun is shown with nine planets orbiting it, and a humanoid figure shown near the third one.
Zok: Hey, this looks like the place from the message, check it out: humanoids, single sun...
Glork: Oh wait though, there are ten planets. Let's keep looking.
Klork: Drat! I was so looking forward to bestowing the technological gift of perfectly realistic virtual porn on yet another race.
I'm not sure that documentation of prior art should be held as the sole measure of whether prior art exists. What about walking sideways, looking sideways, and skidding sideways in a car? I don't think these things should be patentable, and not just because they're not novel.
quantaman was right: this is a step in the right direction, much better than DRM.
garcia was also right: there is an even better alternative, that of much cheaper music, and easily downloadable.
Extrapolating even further along this line, I offer this point of view: that what I *REALLY* want is for music copyright to go away entirely, and for a completely different mode of thinking to arise regarding music and how and why it is shared and produced. I know this is radical, but I believe it is right.
if you don't like the price of Bruce Springsteen, you're not going to switch to Broos Sprigstein who might be cheaper.
Hey, what do you have against Broos anyhow? Granted his first two albums were cheap knockoffs of NSync, and his third album accidentally shipped before it was recorded by the studios, but since then he's been positively musical. I advise you to give him another listen.
The government investing in order to move technology along and/or to protect consumer rights is a fine thing. But it is not without the risk that competition will be harmed, which I take to be the significance (intended or not) of DP's post. I think it is correct to point out that a government entering the marketplace can hurt competition, just as it is valid to point out that a government leaving a marketplace to its own forces can leave corruption and self-interest unchecked.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it would help if you thought of this as analogous to a company that submarines a patent while getting a standards board to adopt a technology reliant on that patent. Applying your viewpoint, you shed no tears for parties who want to use that technology once the patent has been revealed. What you seem to fail to account for is that the public has invested time and money on the apparent benefits that they THOUGHT a technology presented. Competing technologies that went by the wayside might have been adopted if there had been disclosure of how the technology would ultimately be controlled. There is now no practical alternative to DVDs. If I can only play the ones I purchased up til 2002 and none later, I will feel not just inconvenienced and disenfranchised, but very cheated by the entire underlying system.
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Exactly. A friend of mine who's a UI designer once passed on the following UI credo: "When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing."
.
It would be nice if the slashdot editors would ensure that the slashdot blurbs convey - even generally - what a given project is about. From the slashdot blurb on this, I have no way of telling what "Fresco" is without reading the article. I'm supposing it's a software product (though it might be hardware). I have little idea whether it's a lightweight linux distro, a financial planning application, or a virtual porn site. I don't know if it's free or commercial. I *could* click the article and read it to find out. But I won't, because I'm not that intrigued by a product that I have no knowledge of; there are tons of those.
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The replies to the parent post seem to run mostly in the vein of "it's a fantasy flick, get over it". Given that the parent poster did say that the movie was fun and that misgivings about the movie were on the level of discomfort, I find most of the reply posts to be oddly over-reactive. If the parent had said that nobody should feel good about this movie, or that he was unable to enjoy fantasy movies anymore, then THAT might have warranted a "get over it" reponse.
:)
Suppose a child came up to you and confessed to feelings of inadequacy because of how dissimilar Harry P's life was to the child's. Some kids would be talking about the fact that they couldn't fly and turn invisible, and those kids would benefit from a talk about reality vs fantasy. But other kids would be talking about their inability to relate to the mindset and achievements of Harry... questions like: how does Harry know what to do all the time, or how can I be more popular like Harry? In these circumstances it would not be beneficial to lecture on the distinction between brooms and gravity. What's called for is an articulation of motivation, achievement, and what measures of worth should be applied to a person. Maybe the referred-to article went further than a broom-vs-gravity person would like, but to dismiss it altogether is to miss a real (like it or not) psychological dimension of the movie that has the potential to shape young minds. And if people at our age can't discuss it, even with a nod to having enjoyed the movie, then we're setting ourselves up to be empty handed when someone comes to us for advice.
Now I can't enjoy fantasy movies ever again.
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One big reason is that whatever Microsoft says is highly likely to be part of a PR campaign designed to sway government/legislators into outlawing (in fact or in effect) open source, via means such as the DMCA, patents on "trusted" (*gag*) platforms, and governmental contracts and policies. Sometimes such campaigns are squarely aimed at government officials (taking the form of lobbying) and sometimes such campaigns are targeted at "everyday folk"... partly in the hopes that the public will adopt linux more slowly, but perhaps more geared toward allowing legislators to read statistics suggesting they won't take a hit at the polls if they were to do something anti-linux.
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I think I may have heard this joke. In what order did you know the farmer and his wife? :)
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Bitwise perfection has never been the goal. MP3 is a lossy compression scheme, i.e. it compromises the original digital recording (which itself was compromised by being discretely sampled). What's important to online distribution and consumption is that encoding a track to mp3 is a ONE TIME TRANSFORMATION, after which every copy will be a perfect copy of that transformed data. This applies equally well to analog signals which are digitized as they come out of a speaker wire. Heck, I've even heard some digitized vinyl records; excellent listening experience.
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I have not experienced this. I've ported a large graphics-processing application from C++ to Java, and was unhappy to encounter an overall 6x performance degredation despite my best attempts to use memory efficiently. When I last looked on the web six months ago, performance tests comparing java and C++ uniformly indicated a similar performance penalty for java.
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What I find really distasteful is the above phrase's incorporation of "MIT". Microsoft tries to pass it off as standing for "Mobile Internet Toolkit", but personally I believe it was intended to sound like (and evoke the favorable sentiments associated with) the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AND the associated, like-named OSS license.
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To recite a parable from Raymond Smullyan (and retold by Douglas Hofstadter): Two boys are fighting over a piece of cake. Billy says he wants it all, Sammy says they should divide it equally. An adult comes along and asks what's wrong. The boys explain, and the adult says, "You should compromise -- Billy gets three quarters, Sammy gets one quarter".
Sadly, this is the state of current politics: that the outrageous claims are considered right alongside the fair-spirited ones.
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Also, I'm not going to OK a EULA that looks boringly long and like it was designed to let lawyers hassle me. State it in plain English, in a single short paragraph.
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Oh what the heck, all of Windows software.
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Where does someone get stats on "exact same crimes" differentiated only by poor vs rich?
Barring some website I don't know about, I'd say we're stuck with perhaps bemoaning the prosecution rates for poor vs rich, for which we'd probably have to acknowledge a greater actual crime rate amongst the poor.
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Nor am I, but just to make sure we're not burying an important related point: I'm still delighted that they were caught. There are many things that happen on a daily basis that don't surprise me yet I wish weren't the case: political corruption, impoliteness, murder, selling crappy software. Does any of it surprise me? No. Does my lack of surprise mean I want a corresponding lack of vigilance in trying to reduce the practice? Nope.
I totally don't get this statement. Can somebody please tell me how [hardware X + non-free-OS] can be cheaper than [hardware X + free-OS]?
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Balling and balling, eh? Sounds like this kid has life wired! :) I'd have felt sorry for him if he'd been bawling, but apparently no need.
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Hmm, ten planets. This renders useless all those messages we've sent for aliens to find... the ones where a sun is shown with nine planets orbiting it, and a humanoid figure shown near the third one.
Zok: Hey, this looks like the place from the message, check it out: humanoids, single sun...
Glork: Oh wait though, there are ten planets. Let's keep looking.
Klork: Drat! I was so looking forward to bestowing the technological gift of perfectly realistic virtual porn on yet another race.
You might want to warn her the first time you do it though...
I'm not sure that documentation of prior art should be held as the sole measure of whether prior art exists. What about walking sideways, looking sideways, and skidding sideways in a car? I don't think these things should be patentable, and not just because they're not novel.
There's a compelling article on GPL enforceability here, worth a read and a think.
quantaman was right: this is a step in the right direction, much better than DRM.
garcia was also right: there is an even better alternative, that of much cheaper music, and easily downloadable.
Extrapolating even further along this line, I offer this point of view: that what I *REALLY* want is for music copyright to go away entirely, and for a completely different mode of thinking to arise regarding music and how and why it is shared and produced. I know this is radical, but I believe it is right.
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Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of THESE?
"Wow, this cluster displays AOL advertisements and spam at ten times the rate of my old machine!"
Hey, what do you have against Broos anyhow? Granted his first two albums were cheap knockoffs of NSync, and his third album accidentally shipped before it was recorded by the studios, but since then he's been positively musical. I advise you to give him another listen.
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"Staying Alive" (sequel to SNF) harmed me in a lasting way.
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The government investing in order to move technology along and/or to protect consumer rights is a fine thing. But it is not without the risk that competition will be harmed, which I take to be the significance (intended or not) of DP's post. I think it is correct to point out that a government entering the marketplace can hurt competition, just as it is valid to point out that a government leaving a marketplace to its own forces can leave corruption and self-interest unchecked.
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