News organizations provide a lot more "value" to reporters than just physical distribution. There is a whole editorial infrastructure in place to make the stories better -- fact checkers and copy editors to make sure the stories are well-written and not wildly off-base, and assignment editors whose job is to have sense of what the big stories are nudge reporters in the right directions. Many of these support editors have decades of experience in the region being covered, know the people who need to be called, can connect a current story with longer-term themes, etc.
Then there's the ad sales people whose existence helps insulate the journalists from potential conflicts of interest (if you're both reporting and selling ads, are you objective and believable?). And of course there's the fact that a large news organization is a pool of capital that allows news reporters to draw a steady paycheck/get benefits rather than just living ad sale to ad sale, which helps convince journalists to remain journalists instead of getting into a more lucrative line of work.
Journalism is changing and should change radically in the coming years. And in fact in the drive to cut costs many news organizations have been removing just the sort of infrastructure I described (which strikes me as silly because it's what differentiates them from dude-with-a-blog competiton). But to say that the only thing a news org offers to a journalist is "distribution" is silly.
If they claim it isn't a JVM then they have no patent protection since the patent licenses covering the JVM only protect JVM implementors.
Right. This is probably why Google's legal response to the patent claims in Oracle's suit is that the patents aren't valid (due to broadness or prior art, I forget which). They're also saying they didn't violate them, but obviously if they can get the patents invalidated that won't matter.
Ah, but technically Android doesn't include a JVM. It has a "Dalvik Virtual Machine," which processes Dalvik bytecode; there's a second set of tools that transforms standard Java bytecode (compiled from Java code written in the subset of the language that Android understands) to Dalvik bytecode.
It's all very confusing but it's part of the way that Google has gotten away with not making Android a real Java, and thus not subject to Oracle's rules for the platform.. It also means that in theory they could create another toolset that allowed any language to be compiled to Dalvik bytecode, though I think that would be a hassle.
Harmony is open and will remain open for the foreseeable future. Its not like BEA/Oracle/IBM were big supporters of harmony before this deal was inked...
Actually, you'll find in the article that most of the code in Harmony was written by IBM employees on company time, and now that IBM is switching its efforts to OpenJDK, the ASF folks are essentially saying that Harmony is dead. While we'd all like to believe that open source projects magically maintain themselves through the gumption of citizen-programmers, the fact is that the more complex and important ones are often maintained by corporate patronage.
Certainly the move isn't just an attack on Android -- all of the other things you list are true, and the JCP was desperately in need of reform. But the fact that it guts the basis for Android's Java compatibilty can't have caused anyone at Oracle to shed any tears. Look, one of their big Java ME guys is gloating.
Google collects a license fee from Java ME installs. Android isn't a Java ME implmenetation, obviously, and you can argue that Android is hindering the adoption of Java ME in the next generation smartphone world by absorbing the energies of the huge pool of Java programmers who might want to do mobile development. (You could also argue that Java ME was failing to catch on quite well on its own before Android showed up due to its own limitations.)
At most universities, publishing is the metric on which they're assessed. You can't get tenure without getting published. University administrations give lip service to teaching, but if the quantifiable goals professors are given involve publishing, obviously that's what they're going to focus on.
That second article has a cutaway view of what it would look like inside w/astronauts in it, to give you a sense of scale. Jesus, they're sure crammed in there, aren't they? What would the point of putting in so many people that they could barely move be? I suppose this thing isn't really for Shuttle-style science, just getting people to and from space stations, so they'd only have to be packed in like that for a day or two at a time...
Do you demand that every interaction you have with a fellow human being convey useful new information of some kind? Much of what goes on Twitter is either conversation between friends who know each other (i.e., what someone is doing on vacation may not be interesting to you, but might be interesting to their friends and family) or a sort of shared conversation about current events. In the World Cut example, the information about the sporting event might not be "useful" in the sense of replacing sports reporting, but is the online equivalent of people sitting at a bar watching a game saying "Oh, did you see that?"
It was literally hot. I've noticed that now that I've switched from the G5 to the laptop, my office is much colder in the winter and less oppressively hot in the summer. I considered continuing to use it as a winter heat source but then bought a $30 space heater instead -- probably more energy efficient.
You're missing my larger point. Blizzard is a business. Their goal is to make as much money as possible. "Blatantly screwing their users out of more money" is a meaningless phrase when you're talking about for-profit companies. They're only screwing you if they're not delivering the product or service that you've paid for. Did they promise you ad-free forums when you signed up?
I just don't get trying to inject the language of morality into into the ways companies try to make money (unless of course they're breaking laws or causing harm to people, but let me assure you that even the most annoying Flash ads are far, far, down the list of ways companies harm people in the quest to make money).
In this case, Blizzard may have overplayed their hand and the new ad-heavy forums might drive away paying customers, in which case they've made a business mistake. But the idea that there's some kind of social contract around advertising, and that you're only "allowed" to use advertising, or it's only "ethical" to do so, if your revenues or profits are below a certain level, is laughable. Blizzard has the right (within the law) to make as much money from their products as they can. I just don't get the attitude of "You are only allowed to try revenue stream X if you aren't already profiting from revenue stream Y." I'd say that you should abandon a site with irritating ads even if those were its only revenue source, if you found them irritating enough. And if you can look past them, well, who cares how else they're making money?
People strongly objected on the basis that nobody can post to those forums unless they already pay Blizzard money for an account, so why should paying customers be subjected to the advertisements?
So I suppose that you refuse to read newspapers and magazines that both have a cover price and have advertising inside -- which is to say virtually all of them?
They clearly didn't need advertising revenue to pay the bills, it was just a crass money-grab.
Who are you to tell a business how much money they should make? Is this a capitalist country or what?
For the record, I am 100 percent pro-ad blocking if ads annoy you (and I say this as someone who runs a site that makes money from advertising), and I'm not even a particularly enthusiastic cheerleader for capitalism. But statements like the above just sort of boggle my mind. Blizzard Entertainment is a for-profit company. It doesn't exist to provide a fun playground for your and your buddies; it exists so that Blizzard's investors and employees can buy as many nice things for themselves and their families as possible. Why do expect behavior out of them other than "crass money-grabbing" -- or, to use the language that any business would use, maximizing revenue?
If they're being dicks about it, stop buying their services. An ad-free WoW experience isn't a human right.
I read that article this morning and was baffled to hear SpaceX mentioned nowhere in it, considering they have a Progress/ATV-type unmanned cargo vessel on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral and plans to build a man-rated capsule in the next 2-3 years. Have they imploded recently or something?
I am near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other and have pretty poor depth perception as a result. I can tell 3-D movies are in 3-D when something is flying right at you out of the screen or whatever but otherwise they leave me totally cold. Glad to hear I'm not alone!
Also, I long ago stopped driving as a result of my vision problems, for which all of you should be thankful.
The last time I used a VCR to record things on a timer -- back in the '90s, maybe? -- you just set the time and channel information into the VCR itself. I can't imagine there have been great advances in VCR technology since then, so why can't you do that now?
I guess I didn't fully grasp what you're getting at because I was thinking more in terms of the original comment, which postulated that cheap ebooks will be more profitable as a whole for publishers, even if it results in lower paper book sales. This is what I am not buying. (I'm not not buying it, I just think that people often assert things based on their own experience rather than based on any kind of numbers. You seem to be saying that cheaper ebooks will displace more expensive ebooks, which, sure, that makes sense -- and now publishers will be able to price their books however they want, rather than having their distributors price them.
As to whether book publishers are power-hungry -- well, of course they are. They want total control over the products they sell. Why shouldn't they? Amazon also wants to set ebook prices based on their own needs and wants. Why isn't that being "power hungry"? This is how business works. Now that there's another ebook vendor on the horizon, Amazon doesn't have monopoly power, and the power in the market shifts.
You are not necessarily representative of the book-buying public at large, or even of the future of said public (remember, ebooks have been around for years at this point).
When I say "evidence" I mean "total sales numbers from publishers and/or ebook vendors," not anecdotal data points from Slashdot users who are more or less by definition early adopters.
I'm not arguing that book publishers are genuises or that they have an unerring sense of what will make them money as they transition from one platform to another -- I believe quite the opposite, in fact. I'm just saying that if it were as glaringly obvious that selling at $9.99 was their ticket to riches as proponents seem to think, publishers would keep doing it.
For that matter, there's nothing in this agreement that prevents them from selling at $9.99 or even less. The difference is that publishers now have the power to set the selling price of their book, not the distributors.
Of course there's also an enormous cost in switching between systems, and little direct benefit to anyone who was happy with the old system, which is why no one does it.
This sentence is correct if by "nobody" you mean "everyone on Earth at some point in history except for Americans." It's not like everyone in the world outside the US has been on metrics since time immemorial; they all managed to make the switchover at some point.
Apple is primarily a *hardware* company - it sells Macs and iPhones, which are physical devices. Yes, it has to write software to make that hardware useful, but the software is intentionally not sold separately... you can only get the software by getting the hardware. So comparing Apple to software organizations misses the point... they're not really doing the same thing.
I don't think this is quite right. Apple is a company that sells, to use an irritating word from the server world, hardware-software stacks, and the software is the impetus for the premium you pay on the hardware. My MacBook could run Windows if I wanted it to, but I could buy a comparable piece of Windows-running hardware for much cheaper if I wanted to run Windows, so there's no reason I would do that. But, on the flip side, I think OS X is preferable to Windows to the extent that I'm willing to pay more for hardware that will run it. I'm not paying "too much" for standard hardware; I'm paying extra for software I like.
A lot of people interpret this is as meaning that you're paying $500 extra (or whatever the discount is for assembling an "equivalent" computer on the Asus website) for the "Apple logo." People who think this either honestly don't prefer OS X to other options (in which case more power to you, you should buy the cheaper thing that runs your preferred OS, and you get a win-win), or they think that the quality of system software is unimportant. I think people in the latter camp are crazy. System software is what you spend your time interacting with. If you spend a lot of time on a computer, you should spend it using an OS you find enjoyable. Again, if you like Linux or Windows better, then you should use them, but I don't see the point of making fun of people who use something else.
And yes, of course, we could all have the best of both worlds if Apple just sold OS X software unbundled and capable on running on generic x86 hardware. But if it did that, Apple wouldn't have a sky-high stock price and a gajillion dollars in the bank, both of which are pretty much its reason for existence, it being a publicly traded corporation with employees and execs to pay and all.
If we privatise space flight that means less taxes... NASA should just provide funding via Grants/Loans/etc.
And what's going to be the source of the money for those grants and loans?
If we privatize space travel to the ISS (which is really what this is about), NASA and your tax dollars (along with Russian and European tax dollars) will still be paying for it. Heck, it's not like NASA's own spacecraft are built in-house by government employees. You're still talking about dealing with government contractors; you'll just be outsourcing the project management that NASA used to do. It may or may not be cheaper, but don't pretend you'll be handing spaceflight over to the magical free market. The government will be paying these private companies with your tax dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
News organizations provide a lot more "value" to reporters than just physical distribution. There is a whole editorial infrastructure in place to make the stories better -- fact checkers and copy editors to make sure the stories are well-written and not wildly off-base, and assignment editors whose job is to have sense of what the big stories are nudge reporters in the right directions. Many of these support editors have decades of experience in the region being covered, know the people who need to be called, can connect a current story with longer-term themes, etc.
Then there's the ad sales people whose existence helps insulate the journalists from potential conflicts of interest (if you're both reporting and selling ads, are you objective and believable?). And of course there's the fact that a large news organization is a pool of capital that allows news reporters to draw a steady paycheck/get benefits rather than just living ad sale to ad sale, which helps convince journalists to remain journalists instead of getting into a more lucrative line of work.
Journalism is changing and should change radically in the coming years. And in fact in the drive to cut costs many news organizations have been removing just the sort of infrastructure I described (which strikes me as silly because it's what differentiates them from dude-with-a-blog competiton). But to say that the only thing a news org offers to a journalist is "distribution" is silly.
If they claim it isn't a JVM then they have no patent protection since the patent licenses covering the JVM only protect JVM implementors.
Right. This is probably why Google's legal response to the patent claims in Oracle's suit is that the patents aren't valid (due to broadness or prior art, I forget which). They're also saying they didn't violate them, but obviously if they can get the patents invalidated that won't matter.
Ack! Yes, obviously. Sorry!
Ah, but technically Android doesn't include a JVM. It has a "Dalvik Virtual Machine," which processes Dalvik bytecode; there's a second set of tools that transforms standard Java bytecode (compiled from Java code written in the subset of the language that Android understands) to Dalvik bytecode.
It's all very confusing but it's part of the way that Google has gotten away with not making Android a real Java, and thus not subject to Oracle's rules for the platform.. It also means that in theory they could create another toolset that allowed any language to be compiled to Dalvik bytecode, though I think that would be a hassle.
Yes! I have many secret identities!
Harmony is open and will remain open for the foreseeable future. Its not like BEA/Oracle/IBM were big supporters of harmony before this deal was inked...
Actually, you'll find in the article that most of the code in Harmony was written by IBM employees on company time, and now that IBM is switching its efforts to OpenJDK, the ASF folks are essentially saying that Harmony is dead. While we'd all like to believe that open source projects magically maintain themselves through the gumption of citizen-programmers, the fact is that the more complex and important ones are often maintained by corporate patronage.
Certainly the move isn't just an attack on Android -- all of the other things you list are true, and the JCP was desperately in need of reform. But the fact that it guts the basis for Android's Java compatibilty can't have caused anyone at Oracle to shed any tears. Look, one of their big Java ME guys is gloating.
And Android isn't based on J2ME. It's a Java SE derivative.
Google collects a license fee from Java ME installs. Android isn't a Java ME implmenetation, obviously, and you can argue that Android is hindering the adoption of Java ME in the next generation smartphone world by absorbing the energies of the huge pool of Java programmers who might want to do mobile development. (You could also argue that Java ME was failing to catch on quite well on its own before Android showed up due to its own limitations.)
If you're interested in the background, here's an article I wrote about it a couple of months ago. (I'm the guy who wrote the article that got slashdotted, for what it's worth.)
...they'll play anything. I look forward to incomprehensible complaints about welding supplies popping up in my Facebook feed.
At most universities, publishing is the metric on which they're assessed. You can't get tenure without getting published. University administrations give lip service to teaching, but if the quantifiable goals professors are given involve publishing, obviously that's what they're going to focus on.
That second article has a cutaway view of what it would look like inside w/astronauts in it, to give you a sense of scale. Jesus, they're sure crammed in there, aren't they? What would the point of putting in so many people that they could barely move be? I suppose this thing isn't really for Shuttle-style science, just getting people to and from space stations, so they'd only have to be packed in like that for a day or two at a time...
Do you demand that every interaction you have with a fellow human being convey useful new information of some kind? Much of what goes on Twitter is either conversation between friends who know each other (i.e., what someone is doing on vacation may not be interesting to you, but might be interesting to their friends and family) or a sort of shared conversation about current events. In the World Cut example, the information about the sporting event might not be "useful" in the sense of replacing sports reporting, but is the online equivalent of people sitting at a bar watching a game saying "Oh, did you see that?"
It was literally hot. I've noticed that now that I've switched from the G5 to the laptop, my office is much colder in the winter and less oppressively hot in the summer. I considered continuing to use it as a winter heat source but then bought a $30 space heater instead -- probably more energy efficient.
Josh (author of the original article)
You're missing my larger point. Blizzard is a business. Their goal is to make as much money as possible. "Blatantly screwing their users out of more money" is a meaningless phrase when you're talking about for-profit companies. They're only screwing you if they're not delivering the product or service that you've paid for. Did they promise you ad-free forums when you signed up?
I just don't get trying to inject the language of morality into into the ways companies try to make money (unless of course they're breaking laws or causing harm to people, but let me assure you that even the most annoying Flash ads are far, far, down the list of ways companies harm people in the quest to make money).
In this case, Blizzard may have overplayed their hand and the new ad-heavy forums might drive away paying customers, in which case they've made a business mistake. But the idea that there's some kind of social contract around advertising, and that you're only "allowed" to use advertising, or it's only "ethical" to do so, if your revenues or profits are below a certain level, is laughable. Blizzard has the right (within the law) to make as much money from their products as they can. I just don't get the attitude of "You are only allowed to try revenue stream X if you aren't already profiting from revenue stream Y." I'd say that you should abandon a site with irritating ads even if those were its only revenue source, if you found them irritating enough. And if you can look past them, well, who cares how else they're making money?
People strongly objected on the basis that nobody can post to those forums unless they already pay Blizzard money for an account, so why should paying customers be subjected to the advertisements?
So I suppose that you refuse to read newspapers and magazines that both have a cover price and have advertising inside -- which is to say virtually all of them?
They clearly didn't need advertising revenue to pay the bills, it was just a crass money-grab.
Who are you to tell a business how much money they should make? Is this a capitalist country or what?
For the record, I am 100 percent pro-ad blocking if ads annoy you (and I say this as someone who runs a site that makes money from advertising), and I'm not even a particularly enthusiastic cheerleader for capitalism. But statements like the above just sort of boggle my mind. Blizzard Entertainment is a for-profit company. It doesn't exist to provide a fun playground for your and your buddies; it exists so that Blizzard's investors and employees can buy as many nice things for themselves and their families as possible. Why do expect behavior out of them other than "crass money-grabbing" -- or, to use the language that any business would use, maximizing revenue?
If they're being dicks about it, stop buying their services. An ad-free WoW experience isn't a human right.
I read that article this morning and was baffled to hear SpaceX mentioned nowhere in it, considering they have a Progress/ATV-type unmanned cargo vessel on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral and plans to build a man-rated capsule in the next 2-3 years. Have they imploded recently or something?
I am near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other and have pretty poor depth perception as a result. I can tell 3-D movies are in 3-D when something is flying right at you out of the screen or whatever but otherwise they leave me totally cold. Glad to hear I'm not alone!
Also, I long ago stopped driving as a result of my vision problems, for which all of you should be thankful.
The last time I used a VCR to record things on a timer -- back in the '90s, maybe? -- you just set the time and channel information into the VCR itself. I can't imagine there have been great advances in VCR technology since then, so why can't you do that now?
I guess I didn't fully grasp what you're getting at because I was thinking more in terms of the original comment, which postulated that cheap ebooks will be more profitable as a whole for publishers, even if it results in lower paper book sales. This is what I am not buying. (I'm not not buying it, I just think that people often assert things based on their own experience rather than based on any kind of numbers. You seem to be saying that cheaper ebooks will displace more expensive ebooks, which, sure, that makes sense -- and now publishers will be able to price their books however they want, rather than having their distributors price them.
As to whether book publishers are power-hungry -- well, of course they are. They want total control over the products they sell. Why shouldn't they? Amazon also wants to set ebook prices based on their own needs and wants. Why isn't that being "power hungry"? This is how business works. Now that there's another ebook vendor on the horizon, Amazon doesn't have monopoly power, and the power in the market shifts.
I, at least, bought substantially more ebooks
You are not necessarily representative of the book-buying public at large, or even of the future of said public (remember, ebooks have been around for years at this point).
When I say "evidence" I mean "total sales numbers from publishers and/or ebook vendors," not anecdotal data points from Slashdot users who are more or less by definition early adopters.
I'm not arguing that book publishers are genuises or that they have an unerring sense of what will make them money as they transition from one platform to another -- I believe quite the opposite, in fact. I'm just saying that if it were as glaringly obvious that selling at $9.99 was their ticket to riches as proponents seem to think, publishers would keep doing it.
For that matter, there's nothing in this agreement that prevents them from selling at $9.99 or even less. The difference is that publishers now have the power to set the selling price of their book, not the distributors.
Yes the $9.99 price point would hurt the sale of physical books, but you sell so many ebooks at that price that makes up for it tremendously.
Do you have any basis for this statement? My understanding is that physical book sales still outpace ebook sales by far.
...predicts that we'll soon buy ... newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
Well, it's true that nobody's buying newspapers over the Internet. Isn't that one of the newspapers' biggest problems?
Of course there's also an enormous cost in switching between systems, and little direct benefit to anyone who was happy with the old system, which is why no one does it.
This sentence is correct if by "nobody" you mean "everyone on Earth at some point in history except for Americans." It's not like everyone in the world outside the US has been on metrics since time immemorial; they all managed to make the switchover at some point.
Apple is primarily a *hardware* company - it sells Macs and iPhones, which are physical devices. Yes, it has to write software to make that hardware useful, but the software is intentionally not sold separately... you can only get the software by getting the hardware. So comparing Apple to software organizations misses the point... they're not really doing the same thing.
I don't think this is quite right. Apple is a company that sells, to use an irritating word from the server world, hardware-software stacks, and the software is the impetus for the premium you pay on the hardware. My MacBook could run Windows if I wanted it to, but I could buy a comparable piece of Windows-running hardware for much cheaper if I wanted to run Windows, so there's no reason I would do that. But, on the flip side, I think OS X is preferable to Windows to the extent that I'm willing to pay more for hardware that will run it. I'm not paying "too much" for standard hardware; I'm paying extra for software I like.
A lot of people interpret this is as meaning that you're paying $500 extra (or whatever the discount is for assembling an "equivalent" computer on the Asus website) for the "Apple logo." People who think this either honestly don't prefer OS X to other options (in which case more power to you, you should buy the cheaper thing that runs your preferred OS, and you get a win-win), or they think that the quality of system software is unimportant. I think people in the latter camp are crazy. System software is what you spend your time interacting with. If you spend a lot of time on a computer, you should spend it using an OS you find enjoyable. Again, if you like Linux or Windows better, then you should use them, but I don't see the point of making fun of people who use something else.
And yes, of course, we could all have the best of both worlds if Apple just sold OS X software unbundled and capable on running on generic x86 hardware. But if it did that, Apple wouldn't have a sky-high stock price and a gajillion dollars in the bank, both of which are pretty much its reason for existence, it being a publicly traded corporation with employees and execs to pay and all.
If we privatise space flight that means less taxes ... NASA should just provide funding via Grants/Loans/etc.
And what's going to be the source of the money for those grants and loans?
If we privatize space travel to the ISS (which is really what this is about), NASA and your tax dollars (along with Russian and European tax dollars) will still be paying for it. Heck, it's not like NASA's own spacecraft are built in-house by government employees. You're still talking about dealing with government contractors; you'll just be outsourcing the project management that NASA used to do. It may or may not be cheaper, but don't pretend you'll be handing spaceflight over to the magical free market. The government will be paying these private companies with your tax dollars.