These are popular protests, not military coups. They don't necessarily have significant command and control structures. A mob doesn't have or need a head.
Closing internet access is more likely to make people both seek out friends in person, as well as make them seek in-person ways of keeping informed or expressing their opinions. When, what and where isn't really that tricky - most cities have centres and that's where people go, it's where people have gone for thousands of years.
Running Dalvik vm's in parallel with other applications is hardly a 'hack'. And the advantage of being able to run most linux applications means there already is a significant number of applications that otherwise require a netbook or other larger device to run.
Running a warmed over version of Windows Mobile on the other hand hardly solves their app problem... unless they're planning to run Dalvik on that. It doesn't improve their position, it puts them in a worse one as they have even fewer available options and even less third party support. It's not so much a shot as a shot through the head.
As a 3-5 years strategy it's the worst possible; there's no guarantee that WP will be more than barely usable within that timeframe, and certainly no guarantee of any significant developer interest. After that... considering Microsofts performance, Ballmer could be gone within that timeframe at which point the dedication of the company to work on any such product is utterly unknown.
The most pragmatic play available is, as many others have said, to simply enable running Android apps on MeeGo, technology that is available today, which gives them both diffrentiation and a vibrant ecosystem beyond the Linux one already available in MeeGo.
But WP? That's blowing the companies head off with a shotgun, after which they'll certainly be fighting for the life of the company. Well, at least some might, the rest will most likely be trying to put the remains out of their misery. It's not a risky strategy, it's suicide.
Meego is easily capable of running a Dalvik vm, and Alien Dalvik demonstrates the capability quite throughly. As that would leverage and extend the Android ecosystem, I can't quite see how it would be behind in any way. Essentially it would be the andoid+unlocked+rootable that you're looking for.
One can see why Microsoft wants Nokia, but for Nokia, going with WP is utter folly; they're dumping their whole current workable and fairly easily fixable lineup for something that nobody wants.
One can wonder what their plan is if WP gets canned with Ballmer in a not so far away future.
Re:As much as I wanted Nokia to adopt Android...
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 2
Doubtful. Microsoft has bought a little extension for the life of WP, but Nokias market share will be eviscerated.
Nokias best way forward would have been to simply acquire android capabilities for the meego platform to cater to the app crowd and run a mixed platform on the lower end.
Microsoft may gain a few more users due to the sheer clout of Nokias market presence, but it'll be one or two percent gain for every five percent that Nokia will lose. Still irrelevant, and probably not enough to save Ballmer. While Nokia will have a fraction of their market share today and even worse margin.
Nokia would even have been better off going with an all-out Android strategy. At least then their partner wouldn't have the trunk full of corpses from previous 'partnerships' pointing to the writing on the wall.
Re:This is way over the top
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"They're still one of the biggest handset makers in the world"
The interesting thing is that the leadership at Nokia seems to have forgotten about that part of their business. With the hardware requirements of WP, Nokia is going to go from 30-something percent to, if they're lucky, mid-to-high single digit marketshare, unless they're planning to sell their handsets at a significant loss. Their margin will be pitiful.
They seem quite desperate to get into the segment of 'cool' smartphones to obtain the margins of other players, yet miss the fact that their main customer segment won't have that money even if they have a product, and the customers they're after wouldn't consider a WP based device 'cool' if it came with its own liquid nitrogen system.
A strategy worthy of that other Steve who seems unable to do anything but try to emulate whomever he considers cool guy of the week.
Just because you're caught on a burning platform doesn't mean sticking a shotgun in your mouth and blowing your head off is the best way to move forward.
Eh, the N900 is Linux on a phone. You don't buy Linux enabled hardware because the hardware manufacturer is going to give it great support (when has that ever happened?). You buy it because when the hardware manufacturer quits supporting you, you're still running Linux and you have support and source elsewhere.
I'm certainly happy with my N900, there simply aren't any devices even close without a lot of serious hacking. If anything, this makes me think about getting another one as a spare.
If Nokia releases a Meego phone I might buy that; again, Linux devices don't depend on the manufacturer as much as others do. But I'm hardly about to buy a WP, because when Windows Phone is discontinued (which might happen any day, considering Ballmers luck), there ain't gonna be no community support on that.
Of course, that came as an utter surprise to Elop, and his loyalty remains utterly in the company in which he would have bought shares. If only he'd been allowed to.
Instead of waiting a few years for the request for state assistance, the Finnish state should simply go in and nationalize the company now, before it's utterly destroyed. The idea here is basically gutting the company, leaving it geared to simply be a me-too manufacturer, which will be the end of Nokia as a Finnish business anyway.
Yep, it's another Rick Belluzzo. Like all deals between someone and Microsoft it's probably a good deal for Microsoft. Just not a good deal for Nokia, which will most likely following the footsteps of SGI.
Copying someone elses property does not fall within the definition of 'taking'.
The damage caused by theft is demonstrable even without a legal system: In the absence of copyright law you cannot stand before a group of your peers and claim that you have lost anything because your neighbour copied your painting. Yet even without any law, if your painting is taken, you can demonstrate that you have lost something.
Copyright has no basis in natural law; its nature is to restrict the rights of people to do what they wish with their own property.
Legal defence in Sweden is paid by the state, and in the parts it wouldn't be, the TPB guys have been without counsel.
Only one defendant in the case, Carl Lundström, has any money and he inherited that money. As his only involvement with TPB seems to have been the donation of some rackspace and bandwidth, it appears likely that the only reason he's been included in the lawsuit at all has been that nobody else has any money.
Sweden was found to have violated the covenant against torture. A UN committee is not a court, nobody has been held responsible. Untouchable.
The settlement was to preclude a civil lawsuit. Nobody has been held responsible. No court case. Untouchable.
Violating human rights by sending people to be tortured is vile so as to be intolerable in a free democratic country, and should be followed by a criminal court case and incarceration of the complicit parties. Yet, in Sweden, nobody has been held responsible, the only thing that's happened has been that taxpayers have coughed up a pittance to protect politicians from a civil suit.
Well, the taxpayers have more where that came from, and the civil servants and politicians know that sending people to be tortured has no consequences for anyone, so they can do it as they please, at any time, for any reason.
Bound? As in 'we'll follow this unless we don't feel like it in which case we'll ignore it and we're untouchable?' That kind of bound?
Take a look at the case of Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery to see approximately how 'bound' Sweden feels by ECHR. Certainly not bound enough to even make a court case out of such violation of Swedish, European or international law.
In 2001 the Swedish police delivered two asylum seekers directly to CIA operatives at an airport in Stockholm and stood by as the operatives stripped them, stuck drug suppositories up their anuses, put them in diapers and overalls, chained them and put them on a plane for torture in Egypt.
Most likely it was done with the full knowledge of the minister of justice Thomas Bodström at the time. Who, coincidentally, runs the lawfirm with Borgström, the representative for the women in this case.
Nobody in the Swedish government has been held responsible for the complicity in that torture, so there certainly is no reason to think it wouldn't happen again.
"I am guessing that the people in Gitmo are die-hard enemies of the US"
Well, if they weren't when they were rendered, one can imagine that a decade of illegal imprisonment of even the most innocent man can probably make them a bit miffed.
And even handing them a load of money as an apology might not be entirely optimal; some who might not find money of adequate value to replace ten years of life could end up donating the funds to terrorists...
It's that age old problem. Once you start really screwing people over some of them can't seem to take a joke. So in trying to make the world 'safer', it ends up being both a worse and less safe world.
Ah, sorry, I consider supporting antidemocratic forces with money unethical. I'd rather pay for proxies and VPN tunnels.
<i>not having it probably won't hurt you much.</i>
Certainly not. But someone else might want it, in which case I can help them by sharing.
<i>In short, they are slowly tightening this noose</i>
Hardly. With nextgen f2f and darknets it'll slip permanently out of reach.
<i>Can we start to agree to stop playing this sick game with the content creators</i>
You misspelled content controllers. The content creators are on the sidelines as they, as a general rule, are already getting screwed out of any money by the industry.
This is not a game. The economic burden of IPR is unmaintainable in a free market economy and will become ever less bearable as production costs in the rest of the economy fall and the monopoly effects of IPR render the affected economies uncompetitive. The control burden is incompatible with free speech and freedom in general. The political burden of having private taxation rights like IPR automatically lead to corruption and alienation from voters.
As long as you're sure the visible data is fully random you can tailor the invisible data as much as you want and generate deterministic winners or losers anyway. Any algorithm where the visible data cannot, in some cases, be turned into a 'winner' or 'loser' by tailoring the desired hidden content gives away the same knowledge to any observer and is automatically flawed.
The thing that's never mentioned is that "innovation" is not a sustainable advantage
And for the purpose that the politicians intend to use it it's definitely not an advantage. Innovation doesn't create jobs, it removes them. The majority of the time, the whole point of innovating is reducing labour needed to accomplish a specific purpose, ultimately making accomplishing that cheaper, all the way to the end game when there's barely any human labour needed at all in the production chains.
The fact that the number of movies produced is constantly rising indicates otherwise. But with what, 11000 plus movies made last year (5000 in the US) according to IMDB, competition is murderous; especially with other media competing ever more.
In murderous competition most traditional stagnant corporations will retreat to least common denominator, particularly if they're mainly selling their advertising budget rather than any content. Add a few gimmicks to sell, but don't do anything risky in the content or you may scare away more people than you can trick into watching your film.
If you want interesting films you're better off watching indie films anyway, and their problem is more often getting screwed out of money by distributors than by filesharers. Ink, for example, actually seems to have recouped its $250k investment, most likely due to the publicity it got by getting as massively p2p'd as it did. In the interview I heard, the best distributor offer was $25k for basically perpetual rights...
Somehow I don't think that's a question that keeps lawmakers up at night. Their interest in social mobility seems strictly limited to preventing a downward slope in their own or, perhaps, their friends paths. As we progress into neofeudalism, one might expect inheritance, with a sprinkling of IPO 'knighting' and minor other rapid concentrators to remain the few approved ways of amassing such wealth.
It's not a level playing field, but it's not intended to be one.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright is a kind of government bailout. But I expect they will try to get more of it.
These are popular protests, not military coups. They don't necessarily have significant command and control structures. A mob doesn't have or need a head.
Closing internet access is more likely to make people both seek out friends in person, as well as make them seek in-person ways of keeping informed or expressing their opinions. When, what and where isn't really that tricky - most cities have centres and that's where people go, it's where people have gone for thousands of years.
Running Dalvik vm's in parallel with other applications is hardly a 'hack'. And the advantage of being able to run most linux applications means there already is a significant number of applications that otherwise require a netbook or other larger device to run.
Running a warmed over version of Windows Mobile on the other hand hardly solves their app problem... unless they're planning to run Dalvik on that. It doesn't improve their position, it puts them in a worse one as they have even fewer available options and even less third party support. It's not so much a shot as a shot through the head.
You got me a bit interested, but from the threads linked to it looks like the mplayer port is a bit half-baked and dubious in its GPL compliance.
As a 3-5 years strategy it's the worst possible; there's no guarantee that WP will be more than barely usable within that timeframe, and certainly no guarantee of any significant developer interest. After that... considering Microsofts performance, Ballmer could be gone within that timeframe at which point the dedication of the company to work on any such product is utterly unknown.
The most pragmatic play available is, as many others have said, to simply enable running Android apps on MeeGo, technology that is available today, which gives them both diffrentiation and a vibrant ecosystem beyond the Linux one already available in MeeGo.
But WP? That's blowing the companies head off with a shotgun, after which they'll certainly be fighting for the life of the company. Well, at least some might, the rest will most likely be trying to put the remains out of their misery. It's not a risky strategy, it's suicide.
Meego is easily capable of running a Dalvik vm, and Alien Dalvik demonstrates the capability quite throughly. As that would leverage and extend the Android ecosystem, I can't quite see how it would be behind in any way. Essentially it would be the andoid+unlocked+rootable that you're looking for.
One can see why Microsoft wants Nokia, but for Nokia, going with WP is utter folly; they're dumping their whole current workable and fairly easily fixable lineup for something that nobody wants.
One can wonder what their plan is if WP gets canned with Ballmer in a not so far away future.
Doubtful. Microsoft has bought a little extension for the life of WP, but Nokias market share will be eviscerated.
Nokias best way forward would have been to simply acquire android capabilities for the meego platform to cater to the app crowd and run a mixed platform on the lower end.
Microsoft may gain a few more users due to the sheer clout of Nokias market presence, but it'll be one or two percent gain for every five percent that Nokia will lose. Still irrelevant, and probably not enough to save Ballmer. While Nokia will have a fraction of their market share today and even worse margin.
Nokia would even have been better off going with an all-out Android strategy. At least then their partner wouldn't have the trunk full of corpses from previous 'partnerships' pointing to the writing on the wall.
"They're still one of the biggest handset makers in the world"
The interesting thing is that the leadership at Nokia seems to have forgotten about that part of their business. With the hardware requirements of WP, Nokia is going to go from 30-something percent to, if they're lucky, mid-to-high single digit marketshare, unless they're planning to sell their handsets at a significant loss. Their margin will be pitiful.
They seem quite desperate to get into the segment of 'cool' smartphones to obtain the margins of other players, yet miss the fact that their main customer segment won't have that money even if they have a product, and the customers they're after wouldn't consider a WP based device 'cool' if it came with its own liquid nitrogen system.
A strategy worthy of that other Steve who seems unable to do anything but try to emulate whomever he considers cool guy of the week.
Just because you're caught on a burning platform doesn't mean sticking a shotgun in your mouth and blowing your head off is the best way to move forward.
A hierarchy needs identifiers if it's led by merit of names rather than merit of message.
A hierarchy built on message can exhibit structure, yet be anonymous and without persistent leadership.
It could be something kept in reserve in case WP gets canned when Ballmer gets canned.
But I suspect it's mostly just words to keep Intel from blowing a fuse and to keep the ship jumping to a managable rate.
Eh, the N900 is Linux on a phone. You don't buy Linux enabled hardware because the hardware manufacturer is going to give it great support (when has that ever happened?). You buy it because when the hardware manufacturer quits supporting you, you're still running Linux and you have support and source elsewhere.
I'm certainly happy with my N900, there simply aren't any devices even close without a lot of serious hacking. If anything, this makes me think about getting another one as a spare.
If Nokia releases a Meego phone I might buy that; again, Linux devices don't depend on the manufacturer as much as others do. But I'm hardly about to buy a WP, because when Windows Phone is discontinued (which might happen any day, considering Ballmers luck), there ain't gonna be no community support on that.
Of course, that came as an utter surprise to Elop, and his loyalty remains utterly in the company in which he would have bought shares. If only he'd been allowed to.
Instead of waiting a few years for the request for state assistance, the Finnish state should simply go in and nationalize the company now, before it's utterly destroyed. The idea here is basically gutting the company, leaving it geared to simply be a me-too manufacturer, which will be the end of Nokia as a Finnish business anyway.
Yep, it's another Rick Belluzzo. Like all deals between someone and Microsoft it's probably a good deal for Microsoft. Just not a good deal for Nokia, which will most likely following the footsteps of SGI.
Copying someone elses property does not fall within the definition of 'taking'.
The damage caused by theft is demonstrable even without a legal system: In the absence of copyright law you cannot stand before a group of your peers and claim that you have lost anything because your neighbour copied your painting. Yet even without any law, if your painting is taken, you can demonstrate that you have lost something.
Copyright has no basis in natural law; its nature is to restrict the rights of people to do what they wish with their own property.
Legal defence in Sweden is paid by the state, and in the parts it wouldn't be, the TPB guys have been without counsel.
Only one defendant in the case, Carl Lundström, has any money and he inherited that money. As his only involvement with TPB seems to have been the donation of some rackspace and bandwidth, it appears likely that the only reason he's been included in the lawsuit at all has been that nobody else has any money.
Sweden was found to have violated the covenant against torture. A UN committee is not a court, nobody has been held responsible. Untouchable.
The settlement was to preclude a civil lawsuit. Nobody has been held responsible. No court case. Untouchable.
Violating human rights by sending people to be tortured is vile so as to be intolerable in a free democratic country, and should be followed by a criminal court case and incarceration of the complicit parties. Yet, in Sweden, nobody has been held responsible, the only thing that's happened has been that taxpayers have coughed up a pittance to protect politicians from a civil suit.
Well, the taxpayers have more where that came from, and the civil servants and politicians know that sending people to be tortured has no consequences for anyone, so they can do it as they please, at any time, for any reason.
Such guarantees are routinely ignored and the Swedish ministers in charge knew that very well.
Further, the actions on Swedish ground were illegal, and the police involved had a duty to stop it.
Bound? As in 'we'll follow this unless we don't feel like it in which case we'll ignore it and we're untouchable?' That kind of bound?
Take a look at the case of Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery to see approximately how 'bound' Sweden feels by ECHR. Certainly not bound enough to even make a court case out of such violation of Swedish, European or international law.
In 2001 the Swedish police delivered two asylum seekers directly to CIA operatives at an airport in Stockholm and stood by as the operatives stripped them, stuck drug suppositories up their anuses, put them in diapers and overalls, chained them and put them on a plane for torture in Egypt.
Most likely it was done with the full knowledge of the minister of justice Thomas Bodström at the time. Who, coincidentally, runs the lawfirm with Borgström, the representative for the women in this case.
Nobody in the Swedish government has been held responsible for the complicity in that torture, so there certainly is no reason to think it wouldn't happen again.
"I am guessing that the people in Gitmo are die-hard enemies of the US"
Well, if they weren't when they were rendered, one can imagine that a decade of illegal imprisonment of even the most innocent man can probably make them a bit miffed.
And even handing them a load of money as an apology might not be entirely optimal; some who might not find money of adequate value to replace ten years of life could end up donating the funds to terrorists...
It's that age old problem. Once you start really screwing people over some of them can't seem to take a joke. So in trying to make the world 'safer', it ends up being both a worse and less safe world.
if you want the content then pay for it.
Ah, sorry, I consider supporting antidemocratic forces with money unethical. I'd rather pay for proxies and VPN tunnels.
<i>not having it probably won't hurt you much.</i>
Certainly not. But someone else might want it, in which case I can help them by sharing.
<i>In short, they are slowly tightening this noose</i>
Hardly. With nextgen f2f and darknets it'll slip permanently out of reach.
<i>Can we start to agree to stop playing this sick game with the content creators</i>
You misspelled content controllers. The content creators are on the sidelines as they, as a general rule, are already getting screwed out of any money by the industry.
This is not a game. The economic burden of IPR is unmaintainable in a free market economy and will become ever less bearable as production costs in the rest of the economy fall and the monopoly effects of IPR render the affected economies uncompetitive. The control burden is incompatible with free speech and freedom in general. The political burden of having private taxation rights like IPR automatically lead to corruption and alienation from voters.
As long as you're sure the visible data is fully random you can tailor the invisible data as much as you want and generate deterministic winners or losers anyway. Any algorithm where the visible data cannot, in some cases, be turned into a 'winner' or 'loser' by tailoring the desired hidden content gives away the same knowledge to any observer and is automatically flawed.
The thing that's never mentioned is that "innovation" is not a sustainable advantage
And for the purpose that the politicians intend to use it it's definitely not an advantage. Innovation doesn't create jobs, it removes them. The majority of the time, the whole point of innovating is reducing labour needed to accomplish a specific purpose, ultimately making accomplishing that cheaper, all the way to the end game when there's barely any human labour needed at all in the production chains.
The fact that the number of movies produced is constantly rising indicates otherwise. But with what, 11000 plus movies made last year (5000 in the US) according to IMDB, competition is murderous; especially with other media competing ever more.
In murderous competition most traditional stagnant corporations will retreat to least common denominator, particularly if they're mainly selling their advertising budget rather than any content. Add a few gimmicks to sell, but don't do anything risky in the content or you may scare away more people than you can trick into watching your film.
If you want interesting films you're better off watching indie films anyway, and their problem is more often getting screwed out of money by distributors than by filesharers. Ink, for example, actually seems to have recouped its $250k investment, most likely due to the publicity it got by getting as massively p2p'd as it did. In the interview I heard, the best distributor offer was $25k for basically perpetual rights...
Somehow I don't think that's a question that keeps lawmakers up at night. Their interest in social mobility seems strictly limited to preventing a downward slope in their own or, perhaps, their friends paths. As we progress into neofeudalism, one might expect inheritance, with a sprinkling of IPO 'knighting' and minor other rapid concentrators to remain the few approved ways of amassing such wealth.
It's not a level playing field, but it's not intended to be one.