It's because it's acceptable to say "I'm too lazy to even try to learn it, please do it for me."
You don't get something in school, you pass anyway so that you aren't "traumatized". You get teachers pratically doing work for you so that you get good grades. People buy Ford because they always have, without research. They vote Democrat/Republican because they don't even bother seeing if there are other choices. They call tech support because they couldn't be bothered to read the manual. It just keeps going on.
It helps that you are more familiar with computers. It is no excuse when what someone is trying to do, but can't find, is both documented in the online and searchable help, and also explicitly named in an obvious menu.
Example:
Q: How do I put an envelope in this document?
A: Click the Insert menu, and then click Envelope.
1) You have illicitly obtained the song. You have not deprived anyone of the song by obtaining it, since you have a duplication without taking away the original.
2) The creator never had your money, so you cannot take it away from them.
If you took a CD from a store, then you have taken property and deprived the owner of it while simultaneously costing the store the money they could have sold the CD for. This is simply theft.
If you duplicate a friends CD, you have duplicated property and not deprived the owner of it. This is copyright infringment. Hence copyright infringment is not theft.
You can't steal something they don't have to begin with, which is why copyright infringment cannot be theft under the legal, or dictionary, definitions of theft. You decided not to pay someone for something. You found another way to obtain that something, without taking the owners something away. Due to current law, your method of obtaining that something is illegal, and termed copyright infringment.
Copyright infringment is *closer* to a victimless crime, but it can be argued either way. Insurance fraud is definitely not a victimless crime. By abusing insurance, you cost all other insured parties money by forcing the insurance company to raise their rates to cover the pay out.
I never said that copyright infringment was legal, or right; it is not either! Copyright provides additional incentive to create while enhancing the public domain. There are valid reasons for copyright to exist.
Simple, your act did not cost them anything. The only even slight argument there is that it cost them a non-existant "profit" that they never possessed to begin with. The argument is the same as "I didn't buy the new CD, but I didn't copy it either. However, by not buying it, I deprived the studio of their profit." Your duplication did not take anything that the creator already had.
Actually, marijuana was not made illegal for a good reason. It *is* illegal now, though, so you shouldn't be expecting the power that the government has as a result to be easily ceded. The group of bright stars that made marijuana illegal also tried making alcohol illegal, passed the terrible 17th and 18th amendments, and were fairly seriously owned by the paper lobbies. Now they are owned by the corn, paper, and oil lobbies. It was all to get hemp banned. If it was about the drug, they would have made THC illegal, instead of a general class of plant.
In the case of the deed, making the copy is forgery. Using the forged copy to take away your property is still theft, though.
This argument is getting very old. No, it is not theft, it is not dictionary defined as theft, it is not legally defined as theft. Most people, like you, do not know the difference, or have been successfully mis-taught by the copyright lobby that copyright infringment is theft. This clouds the issue and makes destroying the public domain much easier for them, all so they can make a couple of extra dollars.
Here is an example of one legal definition of theft: "the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving that person of it".
The current Merriam-Webster definition of theft is quite similar: "1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property"
None of these fits downloading music. You have not deprived anyone the *use* of the music by making the copy. You have, however, broken the law, under copyright statute. You have committed an act of copyright infringment.
Besides that, different parts of the world have different rules. It isn't either copyright infringment *or* theft in much of the world. Russia and Sweden have vastly different opinions on this as compared to the US or UK.
If 100% of people don't consider it stealing to be theft, the law gets changed and it isn't theft. The prosecuters wouldn't prosecute, juries wouldn't convict, judges wouldn't hear the cases. Fortunately, 100% of judges and lawyers don't think copyright infringment is theft. This is quite likely because the law says that it isn't.
I notice that the title is "Dell Pre-Installing Firefox in UK". I know that any of the Dell PCs that I get in the United States do not have any Mozilla program preinstalled, or Quicktime, Real Player, etc, for that matter. This is for any Optiplex, PowerEdge, Latitude, Inspiron, or Precision Mobile Workstation.
Try doing the same with Firefox or Opera preinstalled. Apparently, OEMs aren't allowed to install a competing product to something MS ships as part of Windows. This has been discussed repeatedly, and to death.
a) Go to their friends home b) Use the wired telephone in their parents home c) Socialize at school
or d) Chat over the Internet
Children don't need their own personal mobile telephone and associated telephone number. They have no entitlement to any particular toy, or any toys at all, and a cell phone is no different.
Whoops, looks like the power was out for a couple hours. Now you have no cell phone, laptop, PDA, wireless, or whatever. Shame about that whole thing with requiring the battery to stay charged for the device to be useful.
Power outages tend to last until after whatever weather condition caused them has passed. In much of the country, a blizzard lasts more than a few hours, as does a hurricane. A tornado ten miles away can take your power out for a few hours. A flood takes the power out for a few hours. Hell, someone running into a telephone pole can take the power out for a couple hours, depending on where it happens and the time.
Also, I would never use my laptop, a PDA, or a mobile phone in the subway. That's a great way to get something stolen or broken. Plus, I don't exactly want to kill my battery before the day has really started. Also, wireless connectivity doesn't tend to work all that well in a large concrete with steel cage tunnel, especially while riding in a large metal box.
Considering that all of my machines have 1GB, it isn't that. I have free memory, and I disabled the previous page cache. It's a well known flaw in Firefox.
There are two times that *I* am not running a browser, and most people I know are in the same boat. The two times are: rebooting the machine or Firefox crashed.
Also, if you leave FF open for a while without using it, it takes a couple of minutes (really, *minutes*) before you can use it. The UI doesn't update, and the machine is thrashing. This has gotten better over the last few releases, but it still happens, particularly under Windows.
Crashes occur most commonly for me because of Java, Flash, Acrobat, or the Flashblock extension. Java pretty consistently screws up the browser whenever it's started, as does Acrobat Reader. Flash is a random thing, so I'm not certain of how to reproduce it, but sometimes it will trash FF. Flashblock has a memory leak in its JS code. The biggest memory leaks seem to happen by just using the browser, though. Right now, on my Ubuntu box, it's using 256MB total virtual, and 154MB actual RAM.
As far as why you might do this... well, often you are looking at something, and have to leave. People that go and do thing that aren't sitting at the computer 24/7 often have this happen. I doubt even the most hardcore anti-social type on this site never leaves their computer. It's silly to clog up your bookmarks with something you only wanted to finish looking at, too. So, as you're going through things, you pop up a window, minimize it, and come back later. Later might be in a day or two.
Another reason might be that you're reading documentation, and haven't finished what you're doing. This is also rather common. You might have a few sets of documentation that have to be gone through to finish something, so you may even have *several* windows open, that you need to go through.
There are tons of reasons why you might leave the browser running. People leave their IM client open, a lot leave their email client open, you leave your UI open, and your OS running. Why should we have to restart our web browser when we don't restart any of those?
I hope you get modded up, actually. I think that firearm ownership is a necessary and important right. I also think that if you have guns, then you aren't protesting; you're rebelling.
As for people controlling themselves... freedom is also the freedom to make mistakes. You punish the mistakes, but don't restrict people to supposedly "prevent" them. That doesn't work. You can't use the government to fix a social problem.
The civil rights movement did use guns, as did suffrage, just not by the general population. The threat of government force through police actions was an important factor. The *protesters* did not use guns, though.
Once the government is willing to use guns against the populace, the populace needs a way to defend itself. Protest won't work at that point. History will show the use of deadly government force as heinous, but that does not help when you are in the thick of it. Your two examples are examples nearing that breaking point. People were protesting, the government used force, and in one case the people rebelled, in the other there was a lot of legal action, and additional protest.
On the subject of lower quality video vs. lower quality audio... people tend to be more picky about their audio. They still voluntarily listen to 128kbps CBR MP3 and think it sounds great, though. People tend to be even less picky about video quality. Look at some of the things that people don't worry about: cam-rip cinemas captures, 2 hr movies in 350MB files, digital artifacts off the mpeg stream from digital cable, etc. You start getting pops in audio, and people get annoyed quickly!
I have a feeling that while people will embrace some HD format, it is becoming increasingly less likely that it is going to be either Blu-ray *or* HD-DVD. You're still not talking about a huge jump in quality, and the costs are far too high for a set of formats that the enthusiasts aren't even buying. If PS3 sales are phenominal, which isn't set in stone for a $500-600 game system, then maybe Buy-ray will become popular.
Anyway, I know that HD looks better, and when you get to properly recorded content, it looks a whole lot better. I just don't care, since it isn't worth $1000+ to me. Show me a good $700 1080p DLP projector, and I might take notice, though.;-)
Um, "calling me out" on not knowing some dumb term doesn't look very good when you didn't manage to read my message information. You've never replied to me before. That was a different poster that pointed out that you were wrong in the GP, and then I pointed out how that poster was right.
So, LCD has color problems, viewing angle problems, and is expensive. CRT has excellent color, full field of view, and is cheap. Plasma has excellent color, full field of view, and is expensive. How is LCD not the worst of the group? For rear projection, DLP is still the winner, with LCD having problems, and LCoS having less problems than LCD, but more than DLP, and is more expensive than both.
The CRT will never die, since there are some things they are just the right answer for. It has just become less and less that one of those things is home theater.
As for the comments about DRM, no, you can't just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. That's how you get screwed. The media industry *wants* to use DRM, but for once recognized that they can't use it until everyone has DRM ready equipment. So you bought a fancy, high priced, HDTV, and you can't guarantee that your inputs will all work as soon as the MPAA decides enough people own HDTV equipment. That's just excellent; I'll stay away until that's sorted (which means easily bypassed).
So I didn't notice that the industry invented a new buzz-word to describe something that's been called a "TV" for fifty years. There's always been TVs, rear projection TVs, and projectors, since they all existed. Now you have direct view CRT/LCD/Plasma, RPTV LCD/DLP/LCoS, FPTV LCD/DLP/LCoS, five different types of inputs, several versions of the digital inputs, SDTV/HDTV, and HDCP DRM. Vendors don't list whether a display is a CRT or an LCD on half the sites out there, so you have to guess that if it's labelled "direct view" that it's probably a CRT. To make it worse, most people still can't manage to configure their HDTV to not screw up SDTV video, and have no idea what cables they'll need until they bring everything home and try to plug it in. Then they get to worry about what shape fiber optic cable they need, or maybe coax, or maybe RCA connectors.
BTW, a site called "Digital Lifestyles" is also a biased source. Try finding a source that doesn't have an agenda to push the latest and greatest. Also Q4 2005 is Christmas season. People are buying toys for themselves and others. This is different from replacing their broken TV. It still says that LCD is finally becoming a reasonable price, but it also doesn't mean that people are buying HDTV LCDs or 1080i/p displays.
In that same article, you notice they mention how CRT sales are *increasing*? So, given that LCDs are twice the price of CRTs, and $7.46 billion in CRT sales, and $10.09 billion in CRT sales, it looks like your source is giving the numbers for far more CRT sales, but instead saying something different.
That definition makes more sense to me, and it was my initial guess. I actually had to go looking for confirmation on what in the world this "direct view" bit meant, and everything said it means CRT.
Do a google for "definition direct view" and you'll see what I mean.;-)
I have noticed LCDs improving a great deal. My Samsung 912N LCD doesn't have the best refresh, but I'm generally happy with the color and black level, and for what I use it for, there isn't much motion. It could be better, but I also only spent $325 for it. Next to my Hitachi CM771 CRT, though, the color looks terrible on the LCD.
As others have mentioned, while the stills looks wonderful, it ends up not mattering when it goes FMV. You might remember a few years ago, ATI was tauting that they could do motion blur on their GPU. Having very highly detailed images that have discrete steps doesn't look right. People wanted to blur their high resolution renders when things were moving around, because it looks more correct to the eye.
In those comparisons, you notice that the up close visuals of people are nearly identical, but the backgrounds, where people aren't really looking, look much sharper. This could very likely be an artifact of the video compression on the DVD vs. the newer compression on the HD stream. The color space is noticably better on the HD version too, but that could be for the same reason.
And if you look around, you'll find that you can buy a nice 32" SD CRT for $300. You have to justify to the market why the $200 is worth spending to get a 5" smaller screen. The problem is that on a screen around 30", it just doesn't matter. When you go above that, then the HD looks a lot better, but you're also spending in the thousands of dollars range.
What a surprise, you can see more detail at 8' from a 42" TV than from an old 27" TV. You *do* know that most people are sitting about that far away, right? Try comparing the same sizes at the same distance.
Of course, you also probably paid over $1500 for your 42" TV, which is absolutely ridiculous. I paid $300 for my 31" CRT, and I'm much happier having the other $1200 to do things, like not sit stationary and ogle a TV. I wouldn't mind my HTPC driving the screen at a higher res than 480i, but when I'm watching a movie, I really don't care. Sure I know that HD looks better, it just doesn't look $1000 better.
If I go to the store, I see lots of CRTs, and about as many LCDs. I can go to Target and buy a 32" SDTV CRT with component inputs for around $330. I can buy a 30" SDTV LCD for $800. More than twice the price for a smaller screen with the same resolution and worse color. I'm up to around $900 for higher than 480p. That sucks.
Most people don't want to spend four digits amounts for a TV set. They go to the store, they see a $300 TV that's the size they want, and they buy it. Maybe they really want a LCD for some reason, so they buy the $450 20" LCD. Most people see the prices as 2x - 3x more than a CRT, and say forget it.
Extremely few people are willing to spend the $1800+ to have a 1080p TV. That's just an absurd price to pay for television. It's especially absurd when you realize that $1800 buys you the low end.
The basic sentiment from that page, and most others, is that LCD is getting cheap because it's the worst on tech on the market. My own experience confirms this, even. CRT looks better and is cheaper. DLP looks almost as good as CRT, and is comparably priced and sized to LCD.
Basically, people *don't* care about HDTV, and the early adopters *did* get screwed. All of that HD tech the big money spenders bought won't work right because it lacks the industry DRM infections. They industry then went and confused the hell out of the market with all different versions of HDMI, confusing terminology left and right, and different vendors abusing what *had* been established terms.
What in the world horrid CRT do you own? Color clarity is markedly inferior on LCD! The color accuracy of a LCD will probably never be as good as on a CRT, simply because of how the display works.
As an anecdotal response, I know of no person with a HDTV. Not my family, not my friends, not my coworkers. I know a few people who have travel LCDs; everyone else has SDTV CRTs. A lot of people have LCDs for their computer displays (that's what things come with now), and most of the people I know that upgraded specifically to a LCD run dual-head with a CRT for graphics work.
HDTV is really just another example of the industry killing it's upgrade path with stupidity. It's a noticable, but not incredible, increase in quality. They screwed the early adopters, it's still too expensive, and the entire product landscape is crippled by DRM. Who wants to spend three times more money to get a slightly better looking picture, but that they can't use to do what they can already do with their older equipment?
Also, the AV Science Forum isn't exactly unbiased, either.;-) The main page has stuff about outdoor TVs, why HDMI is already a pain to deal with, and lots of talk about which format is winning. Average people won't care about any of that.
Who needs a worm that shuts down networks for security holes to be a problem? If there is a way to gain unauthorized access, that is a huge problem. I recognize that software will likely always have security issues. They changed a bunch of code in Vista, including quite a bit in the network stack, and quite a number of services. It is a guarantee that Vista will have security flaws that will be exploited in short order. That's why you wait and let the suckers, er, early-adopters, get slammed, and let a service pack get released before you *every* use a MS product.
As far as NFS/SMB on OSX, as another poster pointed out, the NFS troubles are generally either a config change requirement on the remote side, or a procedure problem on the local side. They both result from the same issue of unpriviledges ports. SMB still is working fine; you do sometimes see problems with 2003 domains, due to changes on Microsoft's part. Samba had the same problems, especially when 2003 SP1 came out. There is an easy fix on the MS side to resolve this, or you can manually upgrade Samba on OSX, or patch the system.
The performance with Aero was as bad as I think. The system gets noticably slower on my Athlon64 3000+ with a GeForce 6600GT and 1GB RAM with Aero on vs. Aero off. It's also harder to get any work done with that UI in the way. I generally have 20-30 things running on my machine. Under WinXP, this is not a problem, but under Vista it is slower... under Vista w/ Aero, it is enough slower to actually bother me.
I don't see how I was illustrating anything by complaining about WinXP's "self-healing" annoyance. It doesn't work well there, and it doesn't work well on Vista. It still gets in the way, does things that I don't want, and generally makes the platform more annoying. It's a hack to try to work around a deficiency in the platform, rather than fixing the problem. The "self-optimization" is nice, in theory, except it's not really doing much useful, other than wasting electricity.
You brought up even more useless cruft, too. The speech recognition is a waste. People don't want to talk to their computer. This stuff has been around for decades, and it's annoying. The only way to be sure that the computer responds only to voice commands directed at it, is to be sitting at the computer already. This negates the purpose of voice command. Direct speech to text also is more annoying and typing. Many people type faster than they can clearly speak to a computer. It's horrid to have to go back and fix things because the computer doesn't understand context. Spell checks won't save you there. It won't be used.
The new driver model is already proving to be a problem. It's the third driver model in the NT line, and the fifth if you count releases since 3.0. It introduces piles of DRM, and the signed driver requirement. It will let you do *less* with your computer. Goodbye to things like Daemon Tools, the KX audio driver platform, legacy hardware support, etc.
The new security model has been covered ad nauseum. It would've been a nice way to fix the problems that MS created. As it stands now, it's useless. It is too intrusive, and there isn't good ways to work around all the flaws that it creates for legacy apps. You end up having to do the same annoying hacks as you do under 2000 and XP. This is because LUA is still broken, it's just less broken than under 2k/XP.
Performance reporting is not important. Users will never touch this. Most admins will never touch this. Some devs will make use of it, but they largely already have an app suite to do the same thing. It's cute, but that is all.
I know full well what Media Center is. Most people still don't use it. It's more cumbersome than just clicking My Documents. It's very pretty, though, and would be very nice if you weren't already right there at the computer, with a keyboard and mouse. It's nice that *you* use it, but in the many dozens of support calls that I've done to people's houses, not one even
*You're right*; the majority of Windows users will never even have a reason to wish they knew *how* to use NFS. Just like Media Center, the shiny new LUA, all of these "wonderful" performance and diagnostic reporting tools, half of the fancy new UI, all of the self-healing stuff, etc.
The only reason that NFS is even bundled in to Vista is because they bundled Services for UNIX. If I couldn't already get that as a separate package for Win2000/XP, SFU might even have been an upgrade point for me. I doubt it would've made up for all of the bad things MS is doing with the platform, but it would have been a point in it's favor. Even many of the actually _nice_ things about Vista are irrelevant for home users (ie: additional group policies). All home users will see is that they have to learn how to use Windows, and it's bundled apps, over again; oh, and that's it's shinier.
Re:Microsoft and/or Windows have hit the wall?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 2, Insightful
NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4, 5 (Win2000), 5.1 (WinXP), 5.2 (Win2003)(, someday Vista, likey at 5.3)
NT 3.1 through 4 did not see tremendous changes under the hood. MS removed functionality (OS2 subsystem), added the 95 GUI, and moved around a lot of the management interfaces. In NT4, they brought in OpenGL, and later, DirectX3.
Win2000 brought AD and DirectX5+, and a new driver model. WinXP brought a new GUI, and a bunch of bundled apps. Win2003 brought some GUI cleanup over 2000 Server, and some additional security, as well as extensions.
The changes become a lot smaller as you go through the products.
Given that the code base was so difficult that MS had to scrap the Longhorn tree based on XP, and start over again with the current version, the 2003 code base, it does not show well. They've patched and extended and patched again the code. They've moved piles of stuff into the kernel, and then took a lot of it back out. They've added in more and more basic APIs to do things, and they all have to be maintained. (GDI/GDI+, MFC,.NET, OLE, etc)
Vista, so far as any of us can tell, is not a huge change. They've made a lot of UI alterations. They've changed around the bundled applications. They've added yet more APIs to maintain. They mucked around a bit more moving things back out of the kernel. As I said, just that was so hard for them to do, that they had to scrap it once and start over again.
Bub, WHO CARES about Media Center? The majority of all Windows user will not use it. The majority of all Windows users will never plug their PC into a TV. Media Center is nearly irrelevant. It's just another piece of bundled MS crap that makes it harder for anyone to compete. It really should be a separate product.
Six years ago, MS said they would start paying more attention to security. Everything points to them doing business as usual, and changing nothing. They've made patches to critical vulnerability even more of a problem with their outright refusal to release patches out of their once a month cycle.
MS *is* using their old code base. They started out with the WinXP code base, and that didn't work. So they scrapped the entire Longhorn project, and started over again. This time they used the Win2003 code base. Vista is still using all the legacy code that's included in Win2003, which is nearly the same as WinXP, which is nearly the same as Win2000.
Many people that are bashing Vista *have* tried it. The UI is an outright nightmare to do productive work on. The requirements are far too high for the base OS. Aero will allow even more exploit of users by malware, thanks to the nearly useless sidebar. Of the two serious improvements that MS has managed to actually deliver, LUA is looking to be trash, though the additional group policies are very nice. If the world is very fortunate, they will manage to fix LUA before release.
Also, NFS support in Vista is only in Enterprise and Ultimate, which most people will not have. SMB and NFS both work on OSX, and that platform supports more networking than Vista will. The same is true of BSD and Linux. Vista just supports more MS proprietary network protocols and features. Many of those are supported under BSD/Linux/OSX by installing the right software.
Aero *does not* have a negligible impact, either. You must just have a fairly high end machine, is all. Load that machine down, then compare with Aero and without. You'll see a big performance boost without it.
All of that self diagnostic/self optimazation/self healing stuff that you mention is available under other platforms. A lot of that is even available under WinXP or 2003. You mention that it isn't available from a single source, but it *is* available. Having it in Windows by default seems nice, but it already gets in the way on WinXP. Try deleted a "critical system file" like Outlook Express under XP. There's part of your "self-healing" right there.
I think you having been around long enough, or don't have a good enough memory, to remember the previous big Windows releases. Win3.1 to Win95 was the biggest thing ever, as was 98, ME, XP, etc. MS says this every single time. 3.1 to 95 really was a big change. 9x to XP was arguable even bigger, since it was a switch to a real kernel, and actual protection. XP to Vista is yet more new APIs, a whole mess more annoying UI toys, some management improvements, a *LOT* of DRM, some poorly implemented security improvements, and some well implemented security improvements. However, like all new MS operating systems, the only reason that people will "upgrade" to it will be that it is the only choice on a new PC. Businesses will still be running Win2000 and 2000/2003 Server.
People that have had to deal with MS for the last 15 years know full well that they lie about the product all the way up to release, then the release is broken and missing half of the promised features, and after a service pack or two, it's usable. They also never get anything right the first two times. After that, they feature bloat the product until it's unusable.
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It's because it's acceptable to say "I'm too lazy to even try to learn it, please do it for me."
You don't get something in school, you pass anyway so that you aren't "traumatized". You get teachers pratically doing work for you so that you get good grades. People buy Ford because they always have, without research. They vote Democrat/Republican because they don't even bother seeing if there are other choices. They call tech support because they couldn't be bothered to read the manual. It just keeps going on.
It helps that you are more familiar with computers. It is no excuse when what someone is trying to do, but can't find, is both documented in the online and searchable help, and also explicitly named in an obvious menu.
Example:
Q: How do I put an envelope in this document?
A: Click the Insert menu, and then click Envelope.
No, those are two separate things.
1) You have illicitly obtained the song. You have not deprived anyone of the song by obtaining it, since you have a duplication without taking away the original.
2) The creator never had your money, so you cannot take it away from them.
If you took a CD from a store, then you have taken property and deprived the owner of it while simultaneously costing the store the money they could have sold the CD for. This is simply theft.
If you duplicate a friends CD, you have duplicated property and not deprived the owner of it. This is copyright infringment. Hence copyright infringment is not theft.
You can't steal something they don't have to begin with, which is why copyright infringment cannot be theft under the legal, or dictionary, definitions of theft. You decided not to pay someone for something. You found another way to obtain that something, without taking the owners something away. Due to current law, your method of obtaining that something is illegal, and termed copyright infringment.
Copyright infringment is *closer* to a victimless crime, but it can be argued either way. Insurance fraud is definitely not a victimless crime. By abusing insurance, you cost all other insured parties money by forcing the insurance company to raise their rates to cover the pay out.
I never said that copyright infringment was legal, or right; it is not either! Copyright provides additional incentive to create while enhancing the public domain. There are valid reasons for copyright to exist.
Simple, your act did not cost them anything. The only even slight argument there is that it cost them a non-existant "profit" that they never possessed to begin with. The argument is the same as "I didn't buy the new CD, but I didn't copy it either. However, by not buying it, I deprived the studio of their profit." Your duplication did not take anything that the creator already had.
Actually, marijuana was not made illegal for a good reason. It *is* illegal now, though, so you shouldn't be expecting the power that the government has as a result to be easily ceded. The group of bright stars that made marijuana illegal also tried making alcohol illegal, passed the terrible 17th and 18th amendments, and were fairly seriously owned by the paper lobbies. Now they are owned by the corn, paper, and oil lobbies. It was all to get hemp banned. If it was about the drug, they would have made THC illegal, instead of a general class of plant.
In the case of the deed, making the copy is forgery. Using the forged copy to take away your property is still theft, though.
This argument is getting very old. No, it is not theft, it is not dictionary defined as theft, it is not legally defined as theft. Most people, like you, do not know the difference, or have been successfully mis-taught by the copyright lobby that copyright infringment is theft. This clouds the issue and makes destroying the public domain much easier for them, all so they can make a couple of extra dollars.
Here is an example of one legal definition of theft: "the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving that person of it".
The current Merriam-Webster definition of theft is quite similar: "1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property"
None of these fits downloading music. You have not deprived anyone the *use* of the music by making the copy. You have, however, broken the law, under copyright statute. You have committed an act of copyright infringment.
Besides that, different parts of the world have different rules. It isn't either copyright infringment *or* theft in much of the world. Russia and Sweden have vastly different opinions on this as compared to the US or UK.
If 100% of people don't consider it stealing to be theft, the law gets changed and it isn't theft. The prosecuters wouldn't prosecute, juries wouldn't convict, judges wouldn't hear the cases. Fortunately, 100% of judges and lawyers don't think copyright infringment is theft. This is quite likely because the law says that it isn't.
I notice that the title is "Dell Pre-Installing Firefox in UK". I know that any of the Dell PCs that I get in the United States do not have any Mozilla program preinstalled, or Quicktime, Real Player, etc, for that matter. This is for any Optiplex, PowerEdge, Latitude, Inspiron, or Precision Mobile Workstation.
Try doing the same with Firefox or Opera preinstalled. Apparently, OEMs aren't allowed to install a competing product to something MS ships as part of Windows. This has been discussed repeatedly, and to death.
Go Daddy switched their domain parking from Apache vhosting to IIS. That alone accounts for most of the change.
Perhaps they can:
a) Go to their friends home
b) Use the wired telephone in their parents home
c) Socialize at school
or
d) Chat over the Internet
Children don't need their own personal mobile telephone and associated telephone number. They have no entitlement to any particular toy, or any toys at all, and a cell phone is no different.
Whoops, looks like the power was out for a couple hours. Now you have no cell phone, laptop, PDA, wireless, or whatever. Shame about that whole thing with requiring the battery to stay charged for the device to be useful.
Power outages tend to last until after whatever weather condition caused them has passed. In much of the country, a blizzard lasts more than a few hours, as does a hurricane. A tornado ten miles away can take your power out for a few hours. A flood takes the power out for a few hours. Hell, someone running into a telephone pole can take the power out for a couple hours, depending on where it happens and the time.
Also, I would never use my laptop, a PDA, or a mobile phone in the subway. That's a great way to get something stolen or broken. Plus, I don't exactly want to kill my battery before the day has really started. Also, wireless connectivity doesn't tend to work all that well in a large concrete with steel cage tunnel, especially while riding in a large metal box.
Considering that all of my machines have 1GB, it isn't that. I have free memory, and I disabled the previous page cache. It's a well known flaw in Firefox.
There are two times that *I* am not running a browser, and most people I know are in the same boat. The two times are: rebooting the machine or Firefox crashed.
Also, if you leave FF open for a while without using it, it takes a couple of minutes (really, *minutes*) before you can use it. The UI doesn't update, and the machine is thrashing. This has gotten better over the last few releases, but it still happens, particularly under Windows.
Crashes occur most commonly for me because of Java, Flash, Acrobat, or the Flashblock extension. Java pretty consistently screws up the browser whenever it's started, as does Acrobat Reader. Flash is a random thing, so I'm not certain of how to reproduce it, but sometimes it will trash FF. Flashblock has a memory leak in its JS code. The biggest memory leaks seem to happen by just using the browser, though. Right now, on my Ubuntu box, it's using 256MB total virtual, and 154MB actual RAM.
As far as why you might do this... well, often you are looking at something, and have to leave. People that go and do thing that aren't sitting at the computer 24/7 often have this happen. I doubt even the most hardcore anti-social type on this site never leaves their computer. It's silly to clog up your bookmarks with something you only wanted to finish looking at, too. So, as you're going through things, you pop up a window, minimize it, and come back later. Later might be in a day or two.
Another reason might be that you're reading documentation, and haven't finished what you're doing. This is also rather common. You might have a few sets of documentation that have to be gone through to finish something, so you may even have *several* windows open, that you need to go through.
There are tons of reasons why you might leave the browser running. People leave their IM client open, a lot leave their email client open, you leave your UI open, and your OS running. Why should we have to restart our web browser when we don't restart any of those?
I hope you get modded up, actually. I think that firearm ownership is a necessary and important right. I also think that if you have guns, then you aren't protesting; you're rebelling.
As for people controlling themselves... freedom is also the freedom to make mistakes. You punish the mistakes, but don't restrict people to supposedly "prevent" them. That doesn't work. You can't use the government to fix a social problem.
The civil rights movement did use guns, as did suffrage, just not by the general population. The threat of government force through police actions was an important factor. The *protesters* did not use guns, though.
Once the government is willing to use guns against the populace, the populace needs a way to defend itself. Protest won't work at that point. History will show the use of deadly government force as heinous, but that does not help when you are in the thick of it. Your two examples are examples nearing that breaking point. People were protesting, the government used force, and in one case the people rebelled, in the other there was a lot of legal action, and additional protest.
For an amusing adventure, google for "definition direct view" and you could see where people might get that impression. :P
On the subject of lower quality video vs. lower quality audio... people tend to be more picky about their audio. They still voluntarily listen to 128kbps CBR MP3 and think it sounds great, though. People tend to be even less picky about video quality. Look at some of the things that people don't worry about: cam-rip cinemas captures, 2 hr movies in 350MB files, digital artifacts off the mpeg stream from digital cable, etc. You start getting pops in audio, and people get annoyed quickly!
;-)
I have a feeling that while people will embrace some HD format, it is becoming increasingly less likely that it is going to be either Blu-ray *or* HD-DVD. You're still not talking about a huge jump in quality, and the costs are far too high for a set of formats that the enthusiasts aren't even buying. If PS3 sales are phenominal, which isn't set in stone for a $500-600 game system, then maybe Buy-ray will become popular.
Anyway, I know that HD looks better, and when you get to properly recorded content, it looks a whole lot better. I just don't care, since it isn't worth $1000+ to me. Show me a good $700 1080p DLP projector, and I might take notice, though.
Um, "calling me out" on not knowing some dumb term doesn't look very good when you didn't manage to read my message information. You've never replied to me before. That was a different poster that pointed out that you were wrong in the GP, and then I pointed out how that poster was right.
So, LCD has color problems, viewing angle problems, and is expensive. CRT has excellent color, full field of view, and is cheap. Plasma has excellent color, full field of view, and is expensive. How is LCD not the worst of the group? For rear projection, DLP is still the winner, with LCD having problems, and LCoS having less problems than LCD, but more than DLP, and is more expensive than both.
The CRT will never die, since there are some things they are just the right answer for. It has just become less and less that one of those things is home theater.
As for the comments about DRM, no, you can't just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. That's how you get screwed. The media industry *wants* to use DRM, but for once recognized that they can't use it until everyone has DRM ready equipment. So you bought a fancy, high priced, HDTV, and you can't guarantee that your inputs will all work as soon as the MPAA decides enough people own HDTV equipment. That's just excellent; I'll stay away until that's sorted (which means easily bypassed).
So I didn't notice that the industry invented a new buzz-word to describe something that's been called a "TV" for fifty years. There's always been TVs, rear projection TVs, and projectors, since they all existed. Now you have direct view CRT/LCD/Plasma, RPTV LCD/DLP/LCoS, FPTV LCD/DLP/LCoS, five different types of inputs, several versions of the digital inputs, SDTV/HDTV, and HDCP DRM. Vendors don't list whether a display is a CRT or an LCD on half the sites out there, so you have to guess that if it's labelled "direct view" that it's probably a CRT. To make it worse, most people still can't manage to configure their HDTV to not screw up SDTV video, and have no idea what cables they'll need until they bring everything home and try to plug it in. Then they get to worry about what shape fiber optic cable they need, or maybe coax, or maybe RCA connectors.
BTW, a site called "Digital Lifestyles" is also a biased source. Try finding a source that doesn't have an agenda to push the latest and greatest. Also Q4 2005 is Christmas season. People are buying toys for themselves and others. This is different from replacing their broken TV. It still says that LCD is finally becoming a reasonable price, but it also doesn't mean that people are buying HDTV LCDs or 1080i/p displays.
In that same article, you notice they mention how CRT sales are *increasing*? So, given that LCDs are twice the price of CRTs, and $7.46 billion in CRT sales, and $10.09 billion in CRT sales, it looks like your source is giving the numbers for far more CRT sales, but instead saying something different.
That definition makes more sense to me, and it was my initial guess. I actually had to go looking for confirmation on what in the world this "direct view" bit meant, and everything said it means CRT.
;-)
Do a google for "definition direct view" and you'll see what I mean.
I have noticed LCDs improving a great deal. My Samsung 912N LCD doesn't have the best refresh, but I'm generally happy with the color and black level, and for what I use it for, there isn't much motion. It could be better, but I also only spent $325 for it. Next to my Hitachi CM771 CRT, though, the color looks terrible on the LCD.
As others have mentioned, while the stills looks wonderful, it ends up not mattering when it goes FMV. You might remember a few years ago, ATI was tauting that they could do motion blur on their GPU. Having very highly detailed images that have discrete steps doesn't look right. People wanted to blur their high resolution renders when things were moving around, because it looks more correct to the eye.
In those comparisons, you notice that the up close visuals of people are nearly identical, but the backgrounds, where people aren't really looking, look much sharper. This could very likely be an artifact of the video compression on the DVD vs. the newer compression on the HD stream. The color space is noticably better on the HD version too, but that could be for the same reason.
And if you look around, you'll find that you can buy a nice 32" SD CRT for $300. You have to justify to the market why the $200 is worth spending to get a 5" smaller screen. The problem is that on a screen around 30", it just doesn't matter. When you go above that, then the HD looks a lot better, but you're also spending in the thousands of dollars range.
What a surprise, you can see more detail at 8' from a 42" TV than from an old 27" TV. You *do* know that most people are sitting about that far away, right? Try comparing the same sizes at the same distance.
Of course, you also probably paid over $1500 for your 42" TV, which is absolutely ridiculous. I paid $300 for my 31" CRT, and I'm much happier having the other $1200 to do things, like not sit stationary and ogle a TV. I wouldn't mind my HTPC driving the screen at a higher res than 480i, but when I'm watching a movie, I really don't care. Sure I know that HD looks better, it just doesn't look $1000 better.
If I go to the store, I see lots of CRTs, and about as many LCDs. I can go to Target and buy a 32" SDTV CRT with component inputs for around $330. I can buy a 30" SDTV LCD for $800. More than twice the price for a smaller screen with the same resolution and worse color. I'm up to around $900 for higher than 480p. That sucks.
Most people don't want to spend four digits amounts for a TV set. They go to the store, they see a $300 TV that's the size they want, and they buy it. Maybe they really want a LCD for some reason, so they buy the $450 20" LCD. Most people see the prices as 2x - 3x more than a CRT, and say forget it.
Extremely few people are willing to spend the $1800+ to have a 1080p TV. That's just an absurd price to pay for television. It's especially absurd when you realize that $1800 buys you the low end.
Also, direct view *MEANS* CRT.
Here is a page from May of this year: http://www.cnet.com/4520-7874_1-5108443-1.html
The basic sentiment from that page, and most others, is that LCD is getting cheap because it's the worst on tech on the market. My own experience confirms this, even. CRT looks better and is cheaper. DLP looks almost as good as CRT, and is comparably priced and sized to LCD.
Basically, people *don't* care about HDTV, and the early adopters *did* get screwed. All of that HD tech the big money spenders bought won't work right because it lacks the industry DRM infections. They industry then went and confused the hell out of the market with all different versions of HDMI, confusing terminology left and right, and different vendors abusing what *had* been established terms.
What in the world horrid CRT do you own? Color clarity is markedly inferior on LCD! The color accuracy of a LCD will probably never be as good as on a CRT, simply because of how the display works.
;-) The main page has stuff about outdoor TVs, why HDMI is already a pain to deal with, and lots of talk about which format is winning. Average people won't care about any of that.
As an anecdotal response, I know of no person with a HDTV. Not my family, not my friends, not my coworkers. I know a few people who have travel LCDs; everyone else has SDTV CRTs. A lot of people have LCDs for their computer displays (that's what things come with now), and most of the people I know that upgraded specifically to a LCD run dual-head with a CRT for graphics work.
HDTV is really just another example of the industry killing it's upgrade path with stupidity. It's a noticable, but not incredible, increase in quality. They screwed the early adopters, it's still too expensive, and the entire product landscape is crippled by DRM. Who wants to spend three times more money to get a slightly better looking picture, but that they can't use to do what they can already do with their older equipment?
Also, the AV Science Forum isn't exactly unbiased, either.
Who needs a worm that shuts down networks for security holes to be a problem? If there is a way to gain unauthorized access, that is a huge problem. I recognize that software will likely always have security issues. They changed a bunch of code in Vista, including quite a bit in the network stack, and quite a number of services. It is a guarantee that Vista will have security flaws that will be exploited in short order. That's why you wait and let the suckers, er, early-adopters, get slammed, and let a service pack get released before you *every* use a MS product.
As far as NFS/SMB on OSX, as another poster pointed out, the NFS troubles are generally either a config change requirement on the remote side, or a procedure problem on the local side. They both result from the same issue of unpriviledges ports. SMB still is working fine; you do sometimes see problems with 2003 domains, due to changes on Microsoft's part. Samba had the same problems, especially when 2003 SP1 came out. There is an easy fix on the MS side to resolve this, or you can manually upgrade Samba on OSX, or patch the system.
The performance with Aero was as bad as I think. The system gets noticably slower on my Athlon64 3000+ with a GeForce 6600GT and 1GB RAM with Aero on vs. Aero off. It's also harder to get any work done with that UI in the way. I generally have 20-30 things running on my machine. Under WinXP, this is not a problem, but under Vista it is slower... under Vista w/ Aero, it is enough slower to actually bother me.
I don't see how I was illustrating anything by complaining about WinXP's "self-healing" annoyance. It doesn't work well there, and it doesn't work well on Vista. It still gets in the way, does things that I don't want, and generally makes the platform more annoying. It's a hack to try to work around a deficiency in the platform, rather than fixing the problem. The "self-optimization" is nice, in theory, except it's not really doing much useful, other than wasting electricity.
You brought up even more useless cruft, too. The speech recognition is a waste. People don't want to talk to their computer. This stuff has been around for decades, and it's annoying. The only way to be sure that the computer responds only to voice commands directed at it, is to be sitting at the computer already. This negates the purpose of voice command. Direct speech to text also is more annoying and typing. Many people type faster than they can clearly speak to a computer. It's horrid to have to go back and fix things because the computer doesn't understand context. Spell checks won't save you there. It won't be used.
The new driver model is already proving to be a problem. It's the third driver model in the NT line, and the fifth if you count releases since 3.0. It introduces piles of DRM, and the signed driver requirement. It will let you do *less* with your computer. Goodbye to things like Daemon Tools, the KX audio driver platform, legacy hardware support, etc.
The new security model has been covered ad nauseum. It would've been a nice way to fix the problems that MS created. As it stands now, it's useless. It is too intrusive, and there isn't good ways to work around all the flaws that it creates for legacy apps. You end up having to do the same annoying hacks as you do under 2000 and XP. This is because LUA is still broken, it's just less broken than under 2k/XP.
Performance reporting is not important. Users will never touch this. Most admins will never touch this. Some devs will make use of it, but they largely already have an app suite to do the same thing. It's cute, but that is all.
I know full well what Media Center is. Most people still don't use it. It's more cumbersome than just clicking My Documents. It's very pretty, though, and would be very nice if you weren't already right there at the computer, with a keyboard and mouse. It's nice that *you* use it, but in the many dozens of support calls that I've done to people's houses, not one even
*You're right*; the majority of Windows users will never even have a reason to wish they knew *how* to use NFS. Just like Media Center, the shiny new LUA, all of these "wonderful" performance and diagnostic reporting tools, half of the fancy new UI, all of the self-healing stuff, etc.
The only reason that NFS is even bundled in to Vista is because they bundled Services for UNIX. If I couldn't already get that as a separate package for Win2000/XP, SFU might even have been an upgrade point for me. I doubt it would've made up for all of the bad things MS is doing with the platform, but it would have been a point in it's favor. Even many of the actually _nice_ things about Vista are irrelevant for home users (ie: additional group policies). All home users will see is that they have to learn how to use Windows, and it's bundled apps, over again; oh, and that's it's shinier.
NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4, 5 (Win2000), 5.1 (WinXP), 5.2 (Win2003)(, someday Vista, likey at 5.3)
.NET, OLE, etc)
NT 3.1 through 4 did not see tremendous changes under the hood. MS removed functionality (OS2 subsystem), added the 95 GUI, and moved around a lot of the management interfaces. In NT4, they brought in OpenGL, and later, DirectX3.
Win2000 brought AD and DirectX5+, and a new driver model. WinXP brought a new GUI, and a bunch of bundled apps. Win2003 brought some GUI cleanup over 2000 Server, and some additional security, as well as extensions.
The changes become a lot smaller as you go through the products.
Given that the code base was so difficult that MS had to scrap the Longhorn tree based on XP, and start over again with the current version, the 2003 code base, it does not show well. They've patched and extended and patched again the code. They've moved piles of stuff into the kernel, and then took a lot of it back out. They've added in more and more basic APIs to do things, and they all have to be maintained. (GDI/GDI+, MFC,
Vista, so far as any of us can tell, is not a huge change. They've made a lot of UI alterations. They've changed around the bundled applications. They've added yet more APIs to maintain. They mucked around a bit more moving things back out of the kernel. As I said, just that was so hard for them to do, that they had to scrap it once and start over again.
Bub, WHO CARES about Media Center? The majority of all Windows user will not use it. The majority of all Windows users will never plug their PC into a TV. Media Center is nearly irrelevant. It's just another piece of bundled MS crap that makes it harder for anyone to compete. It really should be a separate product.
Six years ago, MS said they would start paying more attention to security. Everything points to them doing business as usual, and changing nothing. They've made patches to critical vulnerability even more of a problem with their outright refusal to release patches out of their once a month cycle.
MS *is* using their old code base. They started out with the WinXP code base, and that didn't work. So they scrapped the entire Longhorn project, and started over again. This time they used the Win2003 code base. Vista is still using all the legacy code that's included in Win2003, which is nearly the same as WinXP, which is nearly the same as Win2000.
Many people that are bashing Vista *have* tried it. The UI is an outright nightmare to do productive work on. The requirements are far too high for the base OS. Aero will allow even more exploit of users by malware, thanks to the nearly useless sidebar. Of the two serious improvements that MS has managed to actually deliver, LUA is looking to be trash, though the additional group policies are very nice. If the world is very fortunate, they will manage to fix LUA before release.
Also, NFS support in Vista is only in Enterprise and Ultimate, which most people will not have. SMB and NFS both work on OSX, and that platform supports more networking than Vista will. The same is true of BSD and Linux. Vista just supports more MS proprietary network protocols and features. Many of those are supported under BSD/Linux/OSX by installing the right software.
Aero *does not* have a negligible impact, either. You must just have a fairly high end machine, is all. Load that machine down, then compare with Aero and without. You'll see a big performance boost without it.
All of that self diagnostic/self optimazation/self healing stuff that you mention is available under other platforms. A lot of that is even available under WinXP or 2003. You mention that it isn't available from a single source, but it *is* available. Having it in Windows by default seems nice, but it already gets in the way on WinXP. Try deleted a "critical system file" like Outlook Express under XP. There's part of your "self-healing" right there.
I think you having been around long enough, or don't have a good enough memory, to remember the previous big Windows releases. Win3.1 to Win95 was the biggest thing ever, as was 98, ME, XP, etc. MS says this every single time. 3.1 to 95 really was a big change. 9x to XP was arguable even bigger, since it was a switch to a real kernel, and actual protection. XP to Vista is yet more new APIs, a whole mess more annoying UI toys, some management improvements, a *LOT* of DRM, some poorly implemented security improvements, and some well implemented security improvements. However, like all new MS operating systems, the only reason that people will "upgrade" to it will be that it is the only choice on a new PC. Businesses will still be running Win2000 and 2000/2003 Server.
People that have had to deal with MS for the last 15 years know full well that they lie about the product all the way up to release, then the release is broken and missing half of the promised features, and after a service pack or two, it's usable. They also never get anything right the first two times. After that, they feature bloat the product until it's unusable.