Handing it out for $1 an episode would still be highly profitable, the distribution costs are absolutely trivial, that $1/viewer adds up quickly over millions of viewers, viewer numbers will increase with lower prices and they can still sell commercials because although a drm-free file would make it easy to remove them few people would bother.
Depending how many shows you watch, you could be paying effectively a lot less than $1/episode if you have a cable subscription...
I and many others have both paid for a subscription on which we can watch game of thrones (among other things) and yet still choose to download torrents in addition. If the service i had paid for offered me the same convenience as the torrents, i would not bother with the torrents.
If i, as a paying customer, could log in to a site provided by the tv operator and download a high quality drm-free mkv file made available as soon as the show airs then that's exactly what i would do. Instead, all they offer is a streaming-only service that doesn't work on linux.. I want to watch on my linux box, i want to download now and watch later when i will have limited or no connectivity.
I have paid a subscription, and can watch game of thrones (and all sorts of other stuff) legally, however i still regularly choose to download the torrents:
The supplied DVR keeps the content encrypted so you can't take it off the DVR... You can't use your own DVR with the service, you are stuck with the one they provide. The online services provided don't work on linux, and are streaming-only so don't work when you're on a slow connection or don't have a connection available when you want to watch. My connection is capped during the day, but unlimited late at night.
I regularly travel for work, so i'm often not at home to watch the shows i like, and the tv offering in hotels is usually crap plus the internet connection is often slow. I might download shows before i go, or leave them downloading overnight at the hotel, and then watch them in the evening in the hotel.. I will frequently watch a show on the train to work using a tablet, which goes in and out of tunnels so would have a slow/unreliable connection at best.
I pay for the service, i should be able to watch the shows i have paid for whenever, however and on whatever i want.
Your advocating manually hacking around with regedit to get a usable windows install, and they say linux is difficult because you might have to edit commented text files in a text editor?
Because it's MS, and people will be willing to pay extra for a brand they've heard of rather than going to some small shop they haven't, and which will be seen as dodgy. Also MS have a much larger marketing budget, so many customers will have no idea the smaller places exist. If this strategy fails to capture the market, they could just undercut the smaller places until they all go out of business.
If price were the only factor, MS would have lost out to Linux years ago.
The Linux drivers for most printers tend to ignore expiry dates and other user-hostile features in printers (like saying its out of ink and preventing further printing when theres some left, or preventing monochrome printing because one of the colours it out, or preventing scanning on a multifunction device because theres no ink!)..
Personally i just tend to go for postscript printers, they work with everything and no need to fuck around with drivers.
How many of those voting do you think actually bothered to check the facts of what they were voting for, rather than just listening to what the media told them? Big media is run by the same people, they want to keep the status quo because it benefits them.
Unfortunately, the only viable alternative is Labour, who are just as bad as the Tories... They are all just out to line their own pockets, and thanks to big business control of the media there will never be sufficient widespread publicity for any alternatives.
And if the patent is ultimately ruled invalid, who compensates the business that lost sales and marketshare due to their product not being on sale? Such a system is far too ripe for abuse, you will get a bunch of tiny shill companies setting up to file entirely frivolous suits and then tie them up for as long as possible for the sole purpose of harming a competitor... When the suit finally gets thrown out, the shill company has no money left and so cannot compensate their victim.
It does, any product must be "fit for purpose", if it has catastrophic showstopper bugs then its not fit for purpose... This is why most vendors supply patches for their existing products. It must be able to do what it claims to do, although it doesn't necessarily have to do it very well. Of course the difficult thing with software is that the vendor could (and usually does) claim your existing system was at fault and not the software.
Depends what the report is for, we have a lot of flexibility within the template (and multiple templates etc)... There is also the ability to modify the generated latex by hand before compiling it into a pdf.
FYI, not sure what content your reports have but we are writing pentest reports, which are a mix of common vulnerabilities found with scanning tools, and more specific stuff found by manual testing as well as a summary and cross referenced tables showing host information (ip addresses, os, open ports, associated vulnerabilities, any comments etc).
Also once the information is in the database, we have the ability to generate reports according to several templates (and other outputs such as a csv list etc), so we can generate a summary, a table of systems, a report indexed by (vulnerability|hostname|ip|time) etc without having to do anything more than choose an output template from a drop down list.
Our system is obviously set up for this kind of report, although the basic idea could be easily adaptable to many other scenarios.
And word is probably the worst tool for the job, libreoffice is quite a bit better (doesnt choke on large documents so readily, and can use macros in multiple languages some of which are actual useful reusable languages which aren't about to be deprecated), not that we'd want to use either.
Keeping an existing working system is bad for business, so you will never get a system like that from a commercial supplier unless they are charging you an ongoing subscription for it. If they sell it as a one off then they need to keep making new versions or the revenue stream will dry up.
Amusingly, many of these are copied from other systems, which in many cases have better implementations that are available right now in non beta versions...
2 - activity monitor under osx, and countless apps on linux have always been better than windows task manager, but at least the new version is better...
3 - linux/osx have had this ability forever, and windows is only just getting it in a version thats still in beta? come on...
4 - welcome to the world of linux, and in some cases osx (some versions of macos have actually run faster and with less resources than the versions they replaced)
7 - copying apple, who copied linux
12 - still seems to be playing catchup to unix...
15 - bad on two counts, first that an antivirus is needed at all, and second that having it built in will create a monoculture where malware only has a single target it needs to evade, so pretty soon all malware will have code to evade the built in av by default.
18 - again, a copy of the livecds linux has had for many years
28 - still playing catchup to linux (and amigaos even), wasnt there a story about 2 second boot times recently?
29 - doesnt windows 7 have native usb3? i guess not which is pretty weak, linux does tho.
"The best thing about windows 8 is that its finally catching up to linux in some areas"...
The third party tools don't work very well, primarily because they are hacks and 99% of software isn't designed to work with them, including the base window manager... OSX used to be the same, under 10.4 and earlier the virtual desktop hacks were buggy, didn't fit in well with the rest of the system and most apps didn't expect them to be running. Since spaces was included by default in 10.5, osx apps awareness of multiple desktops has improved massively. X11 has always had virtual desktops, so its support for them tends to be the best of the 3 by far.
I can understand how you would find virtual desktops less useful, having only used very poor implementations of them...
As someone who has access to a desktop with 4 screens, i actually find virtual desktops to be better than physical screens in most cases... Off the top of my head: Less head movement, all the virtual screens are in the same physical place so i dont have to keep adjusting my viewpoint and dont get distracted by movement out the corner of my eye... Works on laptops - i use a laptop for a lot of my work, and it would be impractical to carry a second screen around with it.. Lots more - you can have many virtual desktops - i tend to have 16, a similar number of physical screens becomes completely unwieldy both to physically look at, and to drive (you'd need a system full of videocards, or a cluster using something like xdmx).
Funny you should mention it, i just dug my Amiga 3000 and 4000 systems out of the closet today... They both still boot in under 10 seconds, loading programs is also pretty quick and the interactive response is very quick.
You're doing it wrong... We generate reports some of which are 5000+ pages long... When this was done in word ~6 years ago we had to split them up and often got buggy behaviour with such large documents... Now we use a web based system to enter data into a backend database, and then a latex based output which generates a nice looking pdf report which is cross referenced all over the place and usually has a large number of pictures and tables. Up until the last year, we were running this system on a 500mhz server, until the company finally realised just how much time we save with this system and were willing to invest in some newer hardware for it. Entering data was fine on the 500mhz box, but generating reports used to take a few minutes. Now we run exactly the same software, but a much faster system and the difference is huge.
Of course, the app will probably shit itself the first time someone puts a ' in their password, or else return the wrong information for passwords containing \
You're referring to sql injection or magic quotes, and those who rely on the latter to prevent the former. If coded properly (ie using prepared statements for the db calls!) this won't be a problem, and it's just as easy to write poor code in other languages.
The apparent lack of alternatives is precisely why they can get away with such behaviour... If there was a competitive market and they risked losing customers, they would never pull a stunt like this.
Generic uses like simple document creation aren't actually any quicker than they were years ago... Sure the hardware is quicker, but the software is considerably heavier resulting in a user experience that while prettier, is around the same speed as it always has been.
For most uses, the old software was actually perfectly adequate, and old lightweight software running on modern hardware would be the ideal scenario.
How are users supposed to know that "astonshell" exists? How are they supposed to know that "astonshell.com" is a genuine site, and not some scam site trying to steal their card details and infest their machine with malware?
With Ubuntu, the default install includes the software centre from which kde (or another wm) can be selected safe in the knowledge that it is being downloaded from a trusted source, and the default login dialog includes the ability to choose your session type. The only improvement, is that the default install should make it more clear to users that they are able to choose the interface that suits them.
The default windows install does not make any such ability available by default, you have to manually seek out and then manually install an alternative, assuming you are even aware that alternatives exist which most people aren't.
Would you enter your credit card details into a random site, and then download whatever binaries they offer you? Or would you choose from a list of software provided by an organisation that you already trust by virtue of having installed their os?
You will never have the accountability dreamt of by the article's author...
Not only are most cases of internet crime so petty that it would be a complete waste of resources to pursue them, but you have a global network with lots of different countries, all with their own set of rules. If someone in a non extradition country is attacking you, what can you do? What if someone is launching their attack from a country where their actions aren't illegal at all? If that's the case then they haven't actually done anything wrong, they are fully complying with the laws that apply in their jurisdiction.
The reason java is a good target is a combination of:
1, it's ubiquitous.. installed everywhere and on 99% of installs its the same code (eg unlike the browser market where there are now 3 major codebases to target)... 2, it's often not updated
the same reasons apply to flash and acrobat..
Issue 1 can be eased by opening up the market to have multiple implementations, much like what happened with web browsers...
Issue 2 is actually microsoft's fault for not providing a decent centralised update system. When i encounter linux or mac users, their java installs are almost always up to date (and if not, theres either an explicit reason or nothing at all is being updated) yet when i encounter windows users that is rarely the case, especially in corporate environments. Windows encourages kludges like the "java updater", a binary program which runs in the background checking for updates. Such a system is error prone, highly inefficient since you end up with lots of bloated background update checkers for all the different apps you have installed, and utterly useless in an environment where the logged in user doesn't have the necessary privileges to actually apply the update.
How are they not business friendly? There are very few businesses who will want to modify OO/LO and release derivative versions to third parties... Most companies simply want to use the software as-is, and a very small minority might want to modify it for internal use. For these uses, even the full blown GPL has no impact whatsoever.
Also the main competitors to OO/LO are licensed under considerably more restrictive terms than the GPL.. While the GPL may place restrictions on redistribution, the MS license prevents redistribution or modification at all under any terms.
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Handing it out for $1 an episode would still be highly profitable, the distribution costs are absolutely trivial, that $1/viewer adds up quickly over millions of viewers, viewer numbers will increase with lower prices and they can still sell commercials because although a drm-free file would make it easy to remove them few people would bother.
Depending how many shows you watch, you could be paying effectively a lot less than $1/episode if you have a cable subscription...
I and many others have both paid for a subscription on which we can watch game of thrones (among other things) and yet still choose to download torrents in addition. If the service i had paid for offered me the same convenience as the torrents, i would not bother with the torrents.
If i, as a paying customer, could log in to a site provided by the tv operator and download a high quality drm-free mkv file made available as soon as the show airs then that's exactly what i would do. Instead, all they offer is a streaming-only service that doesn't work on linux.. I want to watch on my linux box, i want to download now and watch later when i will have limited or no connectivity.
I'm in a similar boat...
I have paid a subscription, and can watch game of thrones (and all sorts of other stuff) legally, however i still regularly choose to download the torrents:
The supplied DVR keeps the content encrypted so you can't take it off the DVR...
You can't use your own DVR with the service, you are stuck with the one they provide.
The online services provided don't work on linux, and are streaming-only so don't work when you're on a slow connection or don't have a connection available when you want to watch.
My connection is capped during the day, but unlimited late at night.
I regularly travel for work, so i'm often not at home to watch the shows i like, and the tv offering in hotels is usually crap plus the internet connection is often slow. I might download shows before i go, or leave them downloading overnight at the hotel, and then watch them in the evening in the hotel.. I will frequently watch a show on the train to work using a tablet, which goes in and out of tunnels so would have a slow/unreliable connection at best.
I pay for the service, i should be able to watch the shows i have paid for whenever, however and on whatever i want.
Your advocating manually hacking around with regedit to get a usable windows install, and they say linux is difficult because you might have to edit commented text files in a text editor?
Because it's MS, and people will be willing to pay extra for a brand they've heard of rather than going to some small shop they haven't, and which will be seen as dodgy.
Also MS have a much larger marketing budget, so many customers will have no idea the smaller places exist.
If this strategy fails to capture the market, they could just undercut the smaller places until they all go out of business.
If price were the only factor, MS would have lost out to Linux years ago.
The Linux drivers for most printers tend to ignore expiry dates and other user-hostile features in printers (like saying its out of ink and preventing further printing when theres some left, or preventing monochrome printing because one of the colours it out, or preventing scanning on a multifunction device because theres no ink!)..
Personally i just tend to go for postscript printers, they work with everything and no need to fuck around with drivers.
How many of those voting do you think actually bothered to check the facts of what they were voting for, rather than just listening to what the media told them? Big media is run by the same people, they want to keep the status quo because it benefits them.
Unfortunately, the only viable alternative is Labour, who are just as bad as the Tories... They are all just out to line their own pockets, and thanks to big business control of the media there will never be sufficient widespread publicity for any alternatives.
And if the patent is ultimately ruled invalid, who compensates the business that lost sales and marketshare due to their product not being on sale?
Such a system is far too ripe for abuse, you will get a bunch of tiny shill companies setting up to file entirely frivolous suits and then tie them up for as long as possible for the sole purpose of harming a competitor... When the suit finally gets thrown out, the shill company has no money left and so cannot compensate their victim.
It does, any product must be "fit for purpose", if it has catastrophic showstopper bugs then its not fit for purpose...
This is why most vendors supply patches for their existing products. It must be able to do what it claims to do, although it doesn't necessarily have to do it very well. Of course the difficult thing with software is that the vendor could (and usually does) claim your existing system was at fault and not the software.
Depends what the report is for, we have a lot of flexibility within the template (and multiple templates etc)... There is also the ability to modify the generated latex by hand before compiling it into a pdf.
FYI, not sure what content your reports have but we are writing pentest reports, which are a mix of common vulnerabilities found with scanning tools, and more specific stuff found by manual testing as well as a summary and cross referenced tables showing host information (ip addresses, os, open ports, associated vulnerabilities, any comments etc).
Also once the information is in the database, we have the ability to generate reports according to several templates (and other outputs such as a csv list etc), so we can generate a summary, a table of systems, a report indexed by (vulnerability|hostname|ip|time) etc without having to do anything more than choose an output template from a drop down list.
Our system is obviously set up for this kind of report, although the basic idea could be easily adaptable to many other scenarios.
And word is probably the worst tool for the job, libreoffice is quite a bit better (doesnt choke on large documents so readily, and can use macros in multiple languages some of which are actual useful reusable languages which aren't about to be deprecated), not that we'd want to use either.
Keeping an existing working system is bad for business, so you will never get a system like that from a commercial supplier unless they are charging you an ongoing subscription for it. If they sell it as a one off then they need to keep making new versions or the revenue stream will dry up.
Amusingly, many of these are copied from other systems, which in many cases have better implementations that are available right now in non beta versions...
2 - activity monitor under osx, and countless apps on linux have always been better than windows task manager, but at least the new version is better...
3 - linux/osx have had this ability forever, and windows is only just getting it in a version thats still in beta? come on...
4 - welcome to the world of linux, and in some cases osx (some versions of macos have actually run faster and with less resources than the versions they replaced)
7 - copying apple, who copied linux
12 - still seems to be playing catchup to unix...
15 - bad on two counts, first that an antivirus is needed at all, and second that having it built in will create a monoculture where malware only has a single target it needs to evade, so pretty soon all malware will have code to evade the built in av by default.
18 - again, a copy of the livecds linux has had for many years
28 - still playing catchup to linux (and amigaos even), wasnt there a story about 2 second boot times recently?
29 - doesnt windows 7 have native usb3? i guess not which is pretty weak, linux does tho.
"The best thing about windows 8 is that its finally catching up to linux in some areas"...
The third party tools don't work very well, primarily because they are hacks and 99% of software isn't designed to work with them, including the base window manager...
OSX used to be the same, under 10.4 and earlier the virtual desktop hacks were buggy, didn't fit in well with the rest of the system and most apps didn't expect them to be running. Since spaces was included by default in 10.5, osx apps awareness of multiple desktops has improved massively.
X11 has always had virtual desktops, so its support for them tends to be the best of the 3 by far.
I can understand how you would find virtual desktops less useful, having only used very poor implementations of them...
As someone who has access to a desktop with 4 screens, i actually find virtual desktops to be better than physical screens in most cases... Off the top of my head:
Less head movement, all the virtual screens are in the same physical place so i dont have to keep adjusting my viewpoint and dont get distracted by movement out the corner of my eye...
Works on laptops - i use a laptop for a lot of my work, and it would be impractical to carry a second screen around with it..
Lots more - you can have many virtual desktops - i tend to have 16, a similar number of physical screens becomes completely unwieldy both to physically look at, and to drive (you'd need a system full of videocards, or a cluster using something like xdmx).
Funny you should mention it, i just dug my Amiga 3000 and 4000 systems out of the closet today...
They both still boot in under 10 seconds, loading programs is also pretty quick and the interactive response is very quick.
You're doing it wrong...
We generate reports some of which are 5000+ pages long... When this was done in word ~6 years ago we had to split them up and often got buggy behaviour with such large documents...
Now we use a web based system to enter data into a backend database, and then a latex based output which generates a nice looking pdf report which is cross referenced all over the place and usually has a large number of pictures and tables.
Up until the last year, we were running this system on a 500mhz server, until the company finally realised just how much time we save with this system and were willing to invest in some newer hardware for it.
Entering data was fine on the 500mhz box, but generating reports used to take a few minutes. Now we run exactly the same software, but a much faster system and the difference is huge.
Of course, the app will probably shit itself the first time someone puts a ' in their password, or else return the wrong information for passwords containing \
You're referring to sql injection or magic quotes, and those who rely on the latter to prevent the former.
If coded properly (ie using prepared statements for the db calls!) this won't be a problem, and it's just as easy to write poor code in other languages.
Europe, and the warranty applies for 2 years.
Taxes which he pays anyway, so going back for a second, third or even fourth visit isn't going to increase his tax rate.
The apparent lack of alternatives is precisely why they can get away with such behaviour... If there was a competitive market and they risked losing customers, they would never pull a stunt like this.
That's not an EULA, that's a re-iteration of copyright law. An EULA typically adds additional restrictions on top of the base copyright laws.
Generic uses like simple document creation aren't actually any quicker than they were years ago... Sure the hardware is quicker, but the software is considerably heavier resulting in a user experience that while prettier, is around the same speed as it always has been.
For most uses, the old software was actually perfectly adequate, and old lightweight software running on modern hardware would be the ideal scenario.
How are users supposed to know that "astonshell" exists?
How are they supposed to know that "astonshell.com" is a genuine site, and not some scam site trying to steal their card details and infest their machine with malware?
With Ubuntu, the default install includes the software centre from which kde (or another wm) can be selected safe in the knowledge that it is being downloaded from a trusted source, and the default login dialog includes the ability to choose your session type. The only improvement, is that the default install should make it more clear to users that they are able to choose the interface that suits them.
The default windows install does not make any such ability available by default, you have to manually seek out and then manually install an alternative, assuming you are even aware that alternatives exist which most people aren't.
Would you enter your credit card details into a random site, and then download whatever binaries they offer you?
Or would you choose from a list of software provided by an organisation that you already trust by virtue of having installed their os?
You will never have the accountability dreamt of by the article's author...
Not only are most cases of internet crime so petty that it would be a complete waste of resources to pursue them, but you have a global network with lots of different countries, all with their own set of rules. If someone in a non extradition country is attacking you, what can you do? What if someone is launching their attack from a country where their actions aren't illegal at all? If that's the case then they haven't actually done anything wrong, they are fully complying with the laws that apply in their jurisdiction.
The reason java is a good target is a combination of:
1, it's ubiquitous.. installed everywhere and on 99% of installs its the same code (eg unlike the browser market where there are now 3 major codebases to target)...
2, it's often not updated
the same reasons apply to flash and acrobat..
Issue 1 can be eased by opening up the market to have multiple implementations, much like what happened with web browsers...
Issue 2 is actually microsoft's fault for not providing a decent centralised update system. When i encounter linux or mac users, their java installs are almost always up to date (and if not, theres either an explicit reason or nothing at all is being updated) yet when i encounter windows users that is rarely the case, especially in corporate environments.
Windows encourages kludges like the "java updater", a binary program which runs in the background checking for updates. Such a system is error prone, highly inefficient since you end up with lots of bloated background update checkers for all the different apps you have installed, and utterly useless in an environment where the logged in user doesn't have the necessary privileges to actually apply the update.
How are they not business friendly?
There are very few businesses who will want to modify OO/LO and release derivative versions to third parties... Most companies simply want to use the software as-is, and a very small minority might want to modify it for internal use. For these uses, even the full blown GPL has no impact whatsoever.
Also the main competitors to OO/LO are licensed under considerably more restrictive terms than the GPL.. While the GPL may place restrictions on redistribution, the MS license prevents redistribution or modification at all under any terms.