I can't believe there isn't a score 5 comment on the fact that this isn't about "omg stopping student rights to use kazaa" it's about fair use == bandwidth. Hosting movies and music collections from a dorm room SHOULD get you slapped.
There's lots of great research on the web, even with pretty pictures, about the percentages of campus bandwitdth (that you and I, the law abiding tax payer, cover) that goes to file swapping.
Now of course you and I don't mind people using kazaa to share Debian iso's, and using our tax money to pay for that bandwidth at state universities. But lets face it, I go to a Florida school, and I'll be damned if my student loans are funding someone elses 'Limp Biscuit' collection. It is excess that's driven the schools to this point. Back in 1996 it was like kids in the candy store - huge pipes, no saturation, people playing Quake at 15 pings, dudes running 0-day sites out of their dorms - but face it, that snowballed for years and has come to this. It used to be there were 1 or 2 wholesale pirates/traders on the campus network, but the rise of p2p has made practically everyone a trader. Resnets just can't keep up with that. They can either ask nicely (AUP), or they can start clamping down.
(If you dorm kids keep screwing it up the resnets will get shut off: sending you all back to the over-crowded labs.)
Legally speaking, the phrase "the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer" seems to place the burden of proof firmly on Apple: they have to show that they were doing, or definitely going to do, something along the same lines.
So Apple goes to the court and says "Our business is to develop software [to be used on hardware we produce]." This is pretty clear cut. I don't know anyone who would say otherwise.
At which point the judge asks the employee, "Did you develop software to be used on a Mac?"
He says "yes" and the case is closed.
I know it's 'spooky' or whatever, but this is how it is. I've written code that doesn't belong to me, and I bet zillions of other people have too.
The argument against using the center tag is pretty straight forward (and goes straight to the core of why CSS ought be used). Center is a layout tag, and not a markup tag. There is no reason to block the data inside the tag center, it's superfluous to the data. This is why it's depricated.
A more logical solution would be "why do I want this part centered? Is it because it's a heading? Maybe I should use a heading tag and style those headings align: center;". Or course if it's a special paragraph that needs to be centered class='special' and style it.
To move the discussion forward: One day we'll all be using xml anyhow, so these arguments will be moot. We'll be writing stylesheets or xslt's no matter what. At which point we won't be arguing about which browser is 'decaying' but about what sites we don't visit because they don't parse.
(oh and all that whitespace in your examples is unncessary if we are talking about being loose with the code:-)
There was another post to this commend that said "yer kidding, right?" and I kinda agree... I'd say a MAJORITY of music stores sell "non-DRM'd" music.
Maybe your argument is "I steal all my music from folks who bought it at a WMA store so I need a player that understands that format" VERSUS "I buy cd's from the countless brick and mortar and online music stores that provide non rights managed plastic and metal discs".
I'll also mention that most all players, DVD players, and some cd players READ MP3 FILES!~
Caveat - a normal CD player gets like 30-40 hours of playback on double aa's. Sony's high end discman gets 60 hours on a special (read expensive) rechargable. Their ATRAC3 player must have some special mojo to get 90 hours of CD playback. The CD format has a practical storage limit that works like this: 6 hours at an average of 256 kpbs, 12 hours at 128 kbps, 24 at 64, and so on.
I have an aiwa cdc-mp3 player in my car (old but solid), so I can vouch for the average of 10 to 12 hours per disc.
I'll also mention that the cheap CD medium is pretty nice for poor folks like me, but storing my whole collection on an one iPod is tempting. At least with that flexibility, I wouldn't have to choose between what 12 cd's/mixes I'll listen to in the car each month (which is about the frequency I can stand for selecting and burning new tunes for my car).
For some folks (which maybe the article should have pointed out) the battery life issue is mitigated by the fact most portable music listening is spent in a car (attached to a very large ICE battery charger:)
Oh - and don't you have to use sony's special software (SonicStage) to make the atrac3 discs... there's a non-Windows alternative to that right?
companies can't rely on conventional security methods to protect themselves from serious employee theft.
If security is really important, #1 rule is to make sure you trust the people who have the important data. Someone did this intentionally, either someone at Valve, or one of their partners. That person should probably not have been hired in the first place.
It seems the real solution here is to develop on UNIX and deploy on Windows, not these "watermark", or "encrypted codebase" sorts of plans. This is a classic 'weakest link' kinda scenario.
Still, on the bright side, the record company is paying good money (or it's ill-gotten gains, depending on how you look at it) to license the "copy protection," er... system, and it's associated software. Which means less money for them, and the RIAA! Hurrah!
In actuality they will just pass the "savings" on to us. The systems they engineer and licsense all end up on the price tag... and we the sheep (people) keep on payin'.
I mean, if they weren't going to pass the cost onto us, why would they do it in the first place?
I totally agree with all of this. I mean as it stands the only material entering the public domain is what, from 1914? While it is sure that some good sheet music, literature, and reference material on subjects that haven't advanced in 70 years have reached the public domain all of this predates the "multi-media boom" of the magnetic media era. It takes massive projects or eclectic efforts to get this material that exists in the public domain in a digital format that can be enjoyed over the internet (see silent film trading, mp3s from really old discs, Project Gutenberg).
If policy makers ever wake up and realize the benefits of a strong intellectual commons, maybe we'll have a hope of beating the next Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act. As a side effect this problem of wholesale copyright infringement will just go away.
The parent comment is accurate in the same way that HIV shouldn't spread. And yet... people aren't tested (or in the network sense, don't know they are comped) or are unsafe intentionally (the network rats).
It doesn't matter if you have five friends you trust. What if one of them has a friend of a friend that can't be trusted.
[grand parent] The one who are going to win are the ones who are going to make filesharing part of their OS or services. The winner will be Microsoft, Apple, and maybe AOL could be a distant second (in the MS space).
[parent]...If music trading is legalized (it'll take at least 2 years to happen), Apache on every desktop plus Google to catalog the files is all anyone will need.
Just a couple of trivial points: If every owner of a comuter paid 100 bucks or whatever at time of purchase (compulsory liscense, as in the television scenario that predates our current debacle) and this fee/tax was distributed by the manufacturer (or distributor in Wintel's case)/government to the content industries affected then the situation wouldn't have changed at all. File sharing would still happen, whether through the relative anonymity of your p2p networks or your very traceable ipv6 "Apache on every desktop". The only true difference is now the moral imperative to not infringe on copyrights is reduced further (since the point of the liscense aka 'tax' is to offset the 'loss' from piracy) AND the content industries are getting SUBSIDIZED (getting paid with your money even when you aren't infringing).
To me, both of those factors make compulsory liscensing a Bad Thing. The solution I would say is not more liscensing under existing law, but changing the ridiculous terms of copyright (in the U.S. anyway). If 10 year old music was going into the public domain, all of these factions wouldn't be going insane about eachother AND healthy new distribution industries could sprout up to fill demands for this new freedom... Imagine the electronic distribution sites competing for your eyeballs/money on features or selection with relevant public domain material. Imagine how much great stuff DVD's could contain if multiple distributors were competing on feature adds to "classic" movies.
And the other point: I'd like to mention that AOL already provides unlimited, liscensed 'download and burn' services through it's MusicNet subscription. AOL has been available to both Windows and Macintosh users for years and years, so if they are a distant second in this realm, it wouldn't be in just the MS space.
Haha, the ars comment was in jest regarding the God Box.
I didn't intend to imply everyone needed to be making dvd's on their laptops... but really, if a laptop is the only new computer you can afford, may as well enjoy the bells and whistles, right?
Only thing I've used a dvd burner for is backing 4.7gb worth of stuff.
I'd like to make dvd's out of my wedding videos and turn some of my other vhs stuff into dvd's as well... for convenience really. I don't have a "need".
The 'svg' in ui concept is an itch that's already been scratched. What we 'need' is for our popular tk's and apps and wm's based around them to just use display postscript too.
What I see in this thread is lots of reinventing the wheel. The concept of resolution independance has been floating around in UI theory for YEARS and has already been implemented in OSX. If anything OSS is exceptionally well suited to 'reverse engineering' something like a display postscript scheme, rather than starting from scratch with the vector graphics format du jour.
Also the more fluid widget layouts would help this too, as in Tk forms that are "packed" and not "placed".
I have to agree... if it can't burn DVD's it's not in the same class.
To quote ars technica, "...[burning dvds] isn't just a luxury, it's a requirement";-)
The 12" with DVD-R is $1,799.00 (and includes right off store.apple.com:
12.1-inch TFT Display
1024x768 resolution,
867MHz PowerPC G4,
256MB DDR266 SDRAM,
40GB Ultra ATA/100,
SuperDrive,
NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go
32MB DDR video memory,
10/100BASE-T Ethernet,
FireWire 400,
Bluetooth built-in,
VGA & S-Video out)
So compared to the Sony, you spend a 1.5 pounds more in weight to get ability to burn dvds, bigger display, bigger harddrive, more ram, os x, and with the difference in price you could buy an iSight and... gasp take stills and video. The review of the Sony puts battery life between 2.5 to 7 hours... the Powerbook is like 3 to 5 hours.
I guess what it comes down to is that if you are willing to pay more, you can look at a smaller screen and video conference for two extra hours (assuming the camera and iLink aren't what drags that battery down to the 2.5 hour mark)
I'm not sold on the editorial stance 'Powerbook Killer'.:-\
It's kinda true... as MSIE continues to be more and more absorbed back into the "OS" it's not really accurate to call it "market share". I mean unless you are are talking about the market share of the Windows brand.
We may misuse the term market share to talk about it when we are comparing it to say Mozilla or Safari or what not, but nor are those 'markets'. Who still sells browser software?
Maybe we need a new term like 'browser share', or 'client share', you could even use the extant 'mind share'.
Would you like to be able to buy just the action sequences from The Matrix Reloaded and not have to pay for any of the garbage filler that ruined an otherwise great piece of eye candy? I sure as hell would. But we can't. So why should we be allowed to pick apart the aural creation of someone who wishes it to be heard as a whole?
You're only really making the same argument here that drove us into this situation in the first place. I CAN have only the fight scenes and not the 'filler'. It's the same thing that makes megastars and their handlers scared... you guessed it. IP theft. Every single generator of IP from music to art to film should be concerned about whether information consumers can get their product through the channel/media that they desire, because when they stop providing that channel, and someone else picks it up, lawfully or unlawfully they still get zero.
So I present you with this argument, lets say I ran 'justthefightscenes.com'... and I served a lucrative, legal, liscensed market by selling the best 10 minutes of a given film would that be Better or Worse than just downloading the whole movie (or some 13 year olds cut and paste job) off the P2P dujour? (so the 200 people responsible for that scene get oh let's say nothing rather than something)
In other words, it may help you to see the point of the majority here by looking at music here as a product, not as 'art' (with all the lofty ideals that implies). Just product. There's no rule that says I have to buy a dozen eggs, I can just stop in a diner and have two. There's no reason all my appliances have to be Kenmore to fulfill some industrial designers VISION. I don't buy electricity by the year. These are product. I consume them. I buy as much or as little as I want or I don't buy it at all. It's very simple.
And of course my last gripe: iTunes sells complete albums dammit!! If all your fans love you so much, why wouldn't they buy the whole thing so you can make more money?! Don't they all want you to hit your third or fourth platinum album so you can live in luxury for the rest of your days?! Whatever. This isn't a charity. We don't buy music for you, we buy it for us. We consume it for us.
Be never 'dropped' their journaled file system. Maybe you are thinking of FAT compatibility of the "trial" Beos r5. It installs the BeFS as a giant file on the FAT partition. It's still journaled, it's just written on a non-native partition.
(Even with the "trial" version of Beos r5 you can still setup and install it onto a native partition, btw.)
And speaking of not being able to get work and struggling in the IT job market -- to top it all off, when you try and get a job (because at this point you'll do anything) at say, a helpdesk for an ISP, an associate admin, etc, they DON'T hire you because you are over-qualified. Even if you are asking for minimum salary or $10 bucks an hour.
I totally agree with this. Slashdot is one of the sites that gets banners RIGHT. The banners on Slashdot don't piss me off, and are something I like to see and are interested in.
I'm not saying I encourage slashdot/osdn to make annoying popup, popunder, etc. If there will be a subscription, I agree with the consensus that subscribers will get special features, including member forums for OT stuff.
As was mentioned earlier... Mpeg video is just not perfect. I have a TiVo (I love it of course), but I won't lie to you and say the quality is a "Perfect Digital Copy". I mean, you can see artifacting in motion at "High" quality, and of course artifacting in slow/still at "Best" quality. The quality issue is a red herring.
That being said, the argument really is that it's Just Too Easy. Just like it was with Napster. Music piracy is illegal, but that didn't stop anyone from 'sharing' music with napsters client software. Regardless how il/legal music sharing is, it's "just too easy", so it can't be stopped.
Let's be frank, it's just so easy to time shift a recording and then skip the commercials. Even when I'm watching "Live" tv, I pause it for 10 minutes to let it buffer up while I play video games or something, then go back to watching and fast forwarding commercials. To give everyone a fair shake, I will rewind to watch a commercial that caught my attention.
The entertainment industry should embrace the Tivolution now. If they don't, it really IS going to become napster for them too. Right now the distribution model is still pretty much the same (shows come on TV, we watch them, commercials too now and again). If they stop the PVR's from happening, video will end up just like music. P2P for video is already here... want to entrench it into the John Q. Internet-Luser: just make affordable PVR's impossible to own.
5. The students would learn programs and OSes that would different with what they would have when they go to college, go to work, etc. Since there are very few offices and colleges using entirely Linux, they would be at a disadvantage right away.
Not to cause strife or anything, but tonnes of colleges still use unix in their campus computing cocktail. Sure there's mac labs, and windows labs, etc... but kids leaving AP Compsci in highschool will be stepping straight into *nix enviornments (usually solaris or hp-ux) in college. It's a disservice to fledgling geeks to say they aren't going to be using linux in college- they will. When it comes to the non geeks, getting them a little aquainted with StarOffice in highschool won't hurt them any... they'll be able to use the solaris lab when the windows or mac labs are full:-)
Evil jet li seems Hsing-i Chuan (xing yi) the whole time, I agree.
Good Jet Li starts bagua while he's training and getting warmed up essentially (they show him doing forms at home), but when he goes to full on ass kicking mode at the end (after getting his ass good and tore up) he changes in to tai-chi chuan.
I think what's important to note, all of the above sites in italics are all AOL sites. AOL should be able to assure the same security, and same privacy level across all those sites.
Pardon me, I should say those are all AOL-Time-Warner properties. Microsoft is still only dreaming of owning that much brandspace.
Don't bother trying to make us earn the right to turn off ads, though, we're smart enough to do it ourselves already without having to jump through hoops. You have to offer something we don't already have.
I totally agree with this critique. The ad system has to be compelling enough that we turn the junkbuster off to take part in the network. The ads need to have value to us as readers, not just value to 'you' as advertisers.
2 - Popups should be easily closeable, not too big, and should not open new popups when they close
Moreover - Banner adds could easily be closed! Just imagine having a <span> tag with a class="adbanner" around each banner add (and it's adjoing link to "never see this again", and "comment on this add"). The style sheet, browser, or some script on the page could set the span.adbanner{display: none;}.
Man that would be so great, distracting ads (even non banner ads) could be hidden with a click.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe there isn't a score 5 comment on the fact that this isn't about "omg stopping student rights to use kazaa" it's about fair use == bandwidth. Hosting movies and music collections from a dorm room SHOULD get you slapped.
There's lots of great research on the web, even with pretty pictures, about the percentages of campus bandwitdth (that you and I, the law abiding tax payer, cover) that goes to file swapping.
Now of course you and I don't mind people using kazaa to share Debian iso's, and using our tax money to pay for that bandwidth at state universities. But lets face it, I go to a Florida school, and I'll be damned if my student loans are funding someone elses 'Limp Biscuit' collection. It is excess that's driven the schools to this point. Back in 1996 it was like kids in the candy store - huge pipes, no saturation, people playing Quake at 15 pings, dudes running 0-day sites out of their dorms - but face it, that snowballed for years and has come to this. It used to be there were 1 or 2 wholesale pirates/traders on the campus network, but the rise of p2p has made practically everyone a trader. Resnets just can't keep up with that. They can either ask nicely (AUP), or they can start clamping down.
(If you dorm kids keep screwing it up the resnets will get shut off: sending you all back to the over-crowded labs.)
So Apple goes to the court and says "Our business is to develop software [to be used on hardware we produce]." This is pretty clear cut. I don't know anyone who would say otherwise.
At which point the judge asks the employee, "Did you develop software to be used on a Mac?"
He says "yes" and the case is closed.
I know it's 'spooky' or whatever, but this is how it is. I've written code that doesn't belong to me, and I bet zillions of other people have too.
re: Just the center tag
The argument against using the center tag is pretty straight forward (and goes straight to the core of why CSS ought be used). Center is a layout tag, and not a markup tag. There is no reason to block the data inside the tag center, it's superfluous to the data. This is why it's depricated.
A more logical solution would be "why do I want this part centered? Is it because it's a heading? Maybe I should use a heading tag and style those headings align: center;". Or course if it's a special paragraph that needs to be centered class='special' and style it.
To move the discussion forward: One day we'll all be using xml anyhow, so these arguments will be moot. We'll be writing stylesheets or xslt's no matter what. At which point we won't be arguing about which browser is 'decaying' but about what sites we don't visit because they don't parse. (oh and all that whitespace in your examples is unncessary if we are talking about being loose with the code :-)
There was another post to this commend that said "yer kidding, right?" and I kinda agree... I'd say a MAJORITY of music stores sell "non-DRM'd" music.
Maybe your argument is "I steal all my music from folks who bought it at a WMA store so I need a player that understands that format" VERSUS "I buy cd's from the countless brick and mortar and online music stores that provide non rights managed plastic and metal discs".
I'll also mention that most all players, DVD players, and some cd players READ MP3 FILES!~
Yeah.
Caveat - a normal CD player gets like 30-40 hours of playback on double aa's. Sony's high end discman gets 60 hours on a special (read expensive) rechargable. Their ATRAC3 player must have some special mojo to get 90 hours of CD playback. The CD format has a practical storage limit that works like this: 6 hours at an average of 256 kpbs, 12 hours at 128 kbps, 24 at 64, and so on.
I have an aiwa cdc-mp3 player in my car (old but solid), so I can vouch for the average of 10 to 12 hours per disc.
I'll also mention that the cheap CD medium is pretty nice for poor folks like me, but storing my whole collection on an one iPod is tempting. At least with that flexibility, I wouldn't have to choose between what 12 cd's/mixes I'll listen to in the car each month (which is about the frequency I can stand for selecting and burning new tunes for my car).
For some folks (which maybe the article should have pointed out) the battery life issue is mitigated by the fact most portable music listening is spent in a car (attached to a very large ICE battery charger :)
Oh - and don't you have to use sony's special software (SonicStage) to make the atrac3 discs ... there's a non-Windows alternative to that right?
Only, in reality it appears this was not done by an employee. Gabe from Valve has commented on the leak/theft here.
Apparently this was illicit in every way.
It seems the real solution here is to develop on UNIX and deploy on Windows, not these "watermark", or "encrypted codebase" sorts of plans. This is a classic 'weakest link' kinda scenario.
In actuality they will just pass the "savings" on to us. The systems they engineer and licsense all end up on the price tag ... and we the sheep (people) keep on payin'.
I mean, if they weren't going to pass the cost onto us, why would they do it in the first place?
I totally agree with all of this. I mean as it stands the only material entering the public domain is what, from 1914? While it is sure that some good sheet music, literature, and reference material on subjects that haven't advanced in 70 years have reached the public domain all of this predates the "multi-media boom" of the magnetic media era. It takes massive projects or eclectic efforts to get this material that exists in the public domain in a digital format that can be enjoyed over the internet (see silent film trading, mp3s from really old discs, Project Gutenberg).
If policy makers ever wake up and realize the benefits of a strong intellectual commons, maybe we'll have a hope of beating the next Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act. As a side effect this problem of wholesale copyright infringement will just go away.
It doesn't matter if you have five friends you trust. What if one of them has a friend of a friend that can't be trusted.
Your sig is too long.
[parent]...If music trading is legalized (it'll take at least 2 years to happen), Apache on every desktop plus Google to catalog the files is all anyone will need.
Just a couple of trivial points: If every owner of a comuter paid 100 bucks or whatever at time of purchase (compulsory liscense, as in the television scenario that predates our current debacle) and this fee/tax was distributed by the manufacturer (or distributor in Wintel's case)/government to the content industries affected then the situation wouldn't have changed at all. File sharing would still happen, whether through the relative anonymity of your p2p networks or your very traceable ipv6 "Apache on every desktop". The only true difference is now the moral imperative to not infringe on copyrights is reduced further (since the point of the liscense aka 'tax' is to offset the 'loss' from piracy) AND the content industries are getting SUBSIDIZED (getting paid with your money even when you aren't infringing).
To me, both of those factors make compulsory liscensing a Bad Thing. The solution I would say is not more liscensing under existing law, but changing the ridiculous terms of copyright (in the U.S. anyway). If 10 year old music was going into the public domain, all of these factions wouldn't be going insane about eachother AND healthy new distribution industries could sprout up to fill demands for this new freedom... Imagine the electronic distribution sites competing for your eyeballs/money on features or selection with relevant public domain material. Imagine how much great stuff DVD's could contain if multiple distributors were competing on feature adds to "classic" movies.
And the other point: I'd like to mention that AOL already provides unlimited, liscensed 'download and burn' services through it's MusicNet subscription. AOL has been available to both Windows and Macintosh users for years and years, so if they are a distant second in this realm, it wouldn't be in just the MS space.
I didn't intend to imply everyone needed to be making dvd's on their laptops ... but really, if a laptop is the only new computer you can afford, may as well enjoy the bells and whistles, right?
I'd like to make dvd's out of my wedding videos and turn some of my other vhs stuff into dvd's as well... for convenience really. I don't have a "need".
What I see in this thread is lots of reinventing the wheel. The concept of resolution independance has been floating around in UI theory for YEARS and has already been implemented in OSX. If anything OSS is exceptionally well suited to 'reverse engineering' something like a display postscript scheme, rather than starting from scratch with the vector graphics format du jour.
Also the more fluid widget layouts would help this too, as in Tk forms that are "packed" and not "placed".
To quote ars technica, "...[burning dvds] isn't just a luxury, it's a requirement" ;-)
The 12" with DVD-R is $1,799.00 (and includes right off store.apple.com: 12.1-inch TFT Display 1024x768 resolution, 867MHz PowerPC G4, 256MB DDR266 SDRAM, 40GB Ultra ATA/100, SuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32MB DDR video memory, 10/100BASE-T Ethernet, FireWire 400, Bluetooth built-in, VGA & S-Video out)
So compared to the Sony, you spend a 1.5 pounds more in weight to get ability to burn dvds, bigger display, bigger harddrive, more ram, os x, and with the difference in price you could buy an iSight and ... gasp take stills and video. The review of the Sony puts battery life between 2.5 to 7 hours ... the Powerbook is like 3 to 5 hours.
I guess what it comes down to is that if you are willing to pay more, you can look at a smaller screen and video conference for two extra hours (assuming the camera and iLink aren't what drags that battery down to the 2.5 hour mark)
I'm not sold on the editorial stance 'Powerbook Killer'. :-\
It's kinda true... as MSIE continues to be more and more absorbed back into the "OS" it's not really accurate to call it "market share". I mean unless you are are talking about the market share of the Windows brand.
We may misuse the term market share to talk about it when we are comparing it to say Mozilla or Safari or what not, but nor are those 'markets'. Who still sells browser software?
Maybe we need a new term like 'browser share', or 'client share', you could even use the extant 'mind share'.
You're only really making the same argument here that drove us into this situation in the first place. I CAN have only the fight scenes and not the 'filler'. It's the same thing that makes megastars and their handlers scared... you guessed it. IP theft. Every single generator of IP from music to art to film should be concerned about whether information consumers can get their product through the channel/media that they desire, because when they stop providing that channel, and someone else picks it up, lawfully or unlawfully they still get zero.
So I present you with this argument, lets say I ran 'justthefightscenes.com'... and I served a lucrative, legal, liscensed market by selling the best 10 minutes of a given film would that be Better or Worse than just downloading the whole movie (or some 13 year olds cut and paste job) off the P2P dujour? (so the 200 people responsible for that scene get oh let's say nothing rather than something)
In other words, it may help you to see the point of the majority here by looking at music here as a product, not as 'art' (with all the lofty ideals that implies). Just product. There's no rule that says I have to buy a dozen eggs, I can just stop in a diner and have two. There's no reason all my appliances have to be Kenmore to fulfill some industrial designers VISION. I don't buy electricity by the year. These are product. I consume them. I buy as much or as little as I want or I don't buy it at all. It's very simple.
And of course my last gripe: iTunes sells complete albums dammit!! If all your fans love you so much, why wouldn't they buy the whole thing so you can make more money?! Don't they all want you to hit your third or fourth platinum album so you can live in luxury for the rest of your days?! Whatever. This isn't a charity. We don't buy music for you, we buy it for us. We consume it for us.
(Even with the "trial" version of Beos r5 you can still setup and install it onto a native partition, btw.)
And speaking of not being able to get work and struggling in the IT job market -- to top it all off, when you try and get a job (because at this point you'll do anything) at say, a helpdesk for an ISP, an associate admin, etc, they DON'T hire you because you are over-qualified. Even if you are asking for minimum salary or $10 bucks an hour.
I'm not saying I encourage slashdot/osdn to make annoying popup, popunder, etc. If there will be a subscription, I agree with the consensus that subscribers will get special features, including member forums for OT stuff.
That being said, the argument really is that it's Just Too Easy. Just like it was with Napster. Music piracy is illegal, but that didn't stop anyone from 'sharing' music with napsters client software. Regardless how il/legal music sharing is, it's "just too easy", so it can't be stopped.
Let's be frank, it's just so easy to time shift a recording and then skip the commercials. Even when I'm watching "Live" tv, I pause it for 10 minutes to let it buffer up while I play video games or something, then go back to watching and fast forwarding commercials. To give everyone a fair shake, I will rewind to watch a commercial that caught my attention.
The entertainment industry should embrace the Tivolution now. If they don't, it really IS going to become napster for them too. Right now the distribution model is still pretty much the same (shows come on TV, we watch them, commercials too now and again). If they stop the PVR's from happening, video will end up just like music. P2P for video is already here... want to entrench it into the John Q. Internet-Luser: just make affordable PVR's impossible to own.
Not to cause strife or anything, but tonnes of colleges still use unix in their campus computing cocktail. Sure there's mac labs, and windows labs, etc... but kids leaving AP Compsci in highschool will be stepping straight into *nix enviornments (usually solaris or hp-ux) in college. It's a disservice to fledgling geeks to say they aren't going to be using linux in college- they will. When it comes to the non geeks, getting them a little aquainted with StarOffice in highschool won't hurt them any... they'll be able to use the solaris lab when the windows or mac labs are full :-)
Good Jet Li starts bagua while he's training and getting warmed up essentially (they show him doing forms at home), but when he goes to full on ass kicking mode at the end (after getting his ass good and tore up) he changes in to tai-chi chuan.
Would you agree?
Pardon me, I should say those are all AOL-Time-Warner properties. Microsoft is still only dreaming of owning that much brandspace.
I totally agree with this critique. The ad system has to be compelling enough that we turn the junkbuster off to take part in the network. The ads need to have value to us as readers, not just value to 'you' as advertisers.
Penny-arcade.com is breaking the mold, maybe the OSDN can too.
Man that would be so great, distracting ads (even non banner ads) could be hidden with a click.