I am not american, and was thinking more of DVD regions when i wrote the above reply, hence the thought about no demand...
So to clarify, i can forgive physical media like DVDs not being on sale in a given region due to genuine reasons like low demand...
But totally arbitrary restrictions are unforgivable, that includes DVD regions as well as any website that places arbitrary restrictions based on where it believes your source IP address is based. As i said above, basically Apartheid.
I should be able to view content online from anywhere. I should be able to buy and play physical media from anywhere, subject to reasonable shipping costs if buying from far away. I should be able to import media from other countries and resell it locally if noone else has bothered to fulfil the market demand.
It should certainly not be cheaper for me to buy an identical copy of something from another country, *and* pay to have it shipped *and* pay for the import taxes when it lands in the country.
"not available in your region" is one thing and could just be basic supply and demand ie little/no demand for it in your region, but "even if you buy it from another region your not allowed to play it" is insulting, basically a form of apartheid.
There are lots of highly mediocre movies out there that i'm not willing to pay any significant amount of money to watch, however i would consider watching if they were extremely cheap or free... Or if they came on tv at a time when i had nothing better to do.
I also have a monthly cap, but only during the day... Between midnight and 8am i can download as much as i like..
This means that streaming services are worthless to me unless i want to watch them during those hours, yet most torrent clients provide options to schedule downloads.
Depending on where you live... When the grainy cam rips first come out on bittorrent (all of which are labelled clearly as such), there may not be any alternative where you live and if there is, it will only be the cinema... Once the movie comes out on dvd/bluray anywhere, there will be good quality rips available, but again depending where you live you might not be able to get the dvd locally so torrent is again your only choice.
Because we live in a globally connected world now, the internet will be full of spoilers long before you even have the opportunity to see the movie via official channels.
Regional apartheid would be one thing if it came down to logistics, but the fact they explicitly go out of their way via region coding makes the system entirely evil. Torrents do not try to enforce these arbitrary restrictions, or any other onerous restrictions, therefore they provide a superior product. It's a far cry from the days when analog copies were grainy and inferior.
They look for non mobile user-agents in http requests mostly... You could VPN your traffic, gets around the smtp restrictions and hides what your doing.
How large is the majority of the winners? I doubt it was more than a few %... What percentage of people actually vote? I bet voted turnout is well under 50%... Also that 1% of population have friends and family, and many of those connections being shut off will be shared by multiple people in any case. Also losing 600k customers is gonna be pretty painful for the major ISPs.
The problem is that it requires an application... It should just provide the video over a standard protocol in a standard format so you can view it on any device you choose.... Until they provide this, i won't be signing up to any such services.
So you advocate throwing away all the dvd cases that all those movies originally came in? And 400 movies could easily fit on a modern HDD, which is considerably smaller than the binder, and be much easier to index/search.
Because cars are the most commonly used machines with large high speed moving parts, and which are operated by people with minimal training in public areas... Trains, buses and planes are driven by qualified people who had to undergo specific training for their job and yet people are still killed by these on a fairly regular basis. Horses have also always been fairly dangerous... Humans simply aren't designed to travel at very high speeds, and all the ways the exist for us to do so carry dangers.
And when criminals realise that transponder evidence is being used against them, they will work out how to feed a false image to the camera and then have someone else drive their car through some toll roads hundreds of miles away from the bank they're robbing in a stolen car with the camera ripped out.
While true, a partial open format is better than nothing (which was the status quo before) and a good first step... And the development process is open, people are free to join and contribute/suggest improvements.
OOXML is also severely lacking, but does not have an open development process and is not being improved.
The problem is with the teaching, people are taught very poorly... They are not taught general concepts, they are taught specific of particular applications so if they were to learn Libreoffice people would complain that it's not what working environments are using.
Instead they should be taught the general concepts of how such applications work, and how to apply those concepts to a range of different applications which perform the same basic tasks... After all, what workplaces are using now isn't necessarily what they will be using when these kids finish school (we were taught wordperfect for dos in school, i haven't seen any company using it since leaving school).
Average users outnumber power users pretty massively, and those average users could therefore save HUGE amounts of money by using the free alternatives.
Power users are a small niche, it makes no sense for millions of people to spend large sums of money for features that only a small niche of users require... Or would you advocate that everyone drive F1 cars because a small handful of race drivers can benefit from them?
Another idea would be to have a configure tool like the linux kernel menuconfig... Give users the option to turn features on/off at both compiletime and at runtime (via modules), as well as the ability to auto load features as required (eg if you open a document that uses them), with the base program being very slim and loading fast... I imagine this would be a _LOT_ of work to implement however.
ODF is inefficient, but part of that is out of necessity... What makes sense to humans, is inefficient to a computer. Doing a binary dump of the internal memory structures would be fast, but would result in a file thats not human readable, very difficult to interoperate with and very difficult to maintain going forwards.
Also a problem with the ribbon, and many other UI elements introduced by MS recently like the fatter startbar and fatter window borders... They take up a lot more vertical space than their predecessors did, and all this when modern screens are going widescreen and having less vertical space... It defies belief, soon the entire screen height will be taken up by window borders and ribbons and you won't have any space to view your document anymore. Wider screens should be encouraging toolbars at the side, and anything at the top/bottom to be reduced in size.. Otherwise the extra width is generally wasted (editing portrait mode documents, viewing fixed-width websites etc)
OSS is pretty much only marginal on the desktop... Everywhere else it's either significant or dominant.
As for firefox usage declining, yes it is but its being replaced by Chrome, which is also open source. OSS is not about a single product being dominant, its about people being able to switch easily if something better comes along.
Provide a skinnable UI, so people can choose between a classic interface, a ribbon interface or anything else that might work for them... LO feels specially heavy on Mac, it seems somewhat faster on Linux tho...
Traffic signs need to be seen at a glance, so they are bold simple shapes... Reading a piece of text at a glance would be hard. Most countries implement a driving test which you must pass before you can legally drive, one of the aspects of this test is knowledge of road signs. Road signs are standard, and are the same throughout a country and many are international.
Icons on a computer are not standardised, every vendor has their own set and they often change between versions (and as computers become more powerful and able to display better looking icons)... Icons are not always obvious, whereas text is obvious to anyone capable of reading.
Icons only really work for those who are already familiar with them.
A better way to label applications would be something like: Firefox (Web Browser) So you get both the name of the application, *and* the function that it performs...
But even with just the description, ala GNOME, chances are if you know what it was called you'd have run it directly, and if your searching through the menu you don't know what the program is called but you do know what functionality you require... Had there been a menu item called "Baobab" its unlikely a random user would have any idea what it does.
A menu isn't a bad thing, but the MS implementation of it was.. The structure was ridiculous, programs -> vendor name -> product name -> program... I often don't remember the vendor name, i can see why they would want to do it that way (self promotion), but its not intuitive at all. And what they did with XP onwards (by default), hiding the actual list of programs on a sub menu just made it worse...
OSX is slightly better, since the applications shortcut from the dock presents a big list of your apps (not your app vendors).
I much prefer the approach taken on most linux systems, where the applications are categorised according to what they do, at least that has some logic to it. Such a system also has an advantage over search if you aren't quite sure what an application is called (perhaps you don't use it very often) but you know what it should do and why you need it.
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I am not american, and was thinking more of DVD regions when i wrote the above reply, hence the thought about no demand...
So to clarify, i can forgive physical media like DVDs not being on sale in a given region due to genuine reasons like low demand...
But totally arbitrary restrictions are unforgivable, that includes DVD regions as well as any website that places arbitrary restrictions based on where it believes your source IP address is based. As i said above, basically Apartheid.
I should be able to view content online from anywhere.
I should be able to buy and play physical media from anywhere, subject to reasonable shipping costs if buying from far away.
I should be able to import media from other countries and resell it locally if noone else has bothered to fulfil the market demand.
It should certainly not be cheaper for me to buy an identical copy of something from another country, *and* pay to have it shipped *and* pay for the import taxes when it lands in the country.
"not available in your region" is one thing and could just be basic supply and demand ie little/no demand for it in your region, but "even if you buy it from another region your not allowed to play it" is insulting, basically a form of apartheid.
There are lots of highly mediocre movies out there that i'm not willing to pay any significant amount of money to watch, however i would consider watching if they were extremely cheap or free... Or if they came on tv at a time when i had nothing better to do.
I also have a monthly cap, but only during the day... Between midnight and 8am i can download as much as i like..
This means that streaming services are worthless to me unless i want to watch them during those hours, yet most torrent clients provide options to schedule downloads.
Depending on where you live...
When the grainy cam rips first come out on bittorrent (all of which are labelled clearly as such), there may not be any alternative where you live and if there is, it will only be the cinema...
Once the movie comes out on dvd/bluray anywhere, there will be good quality rips available, but again depending where you live you might not be able to get the dvd locally so torrent is again your only choice.
Because we live in a globally connected world now, the internet will be full of spoilers long before you even have the opportunity to see the movie via official channels.
Regional apartheid would be one thing if it came down to logistics, but the fact they explicitly go out of their way via region coding makes the system entirely evil. Torrents do not try to enforce these arbitrary restrictions, or any other onerous restrictions, therefore they provide a superior product. It's a far cry from the days when analog copies were grainy and inferior.
They look for non mobile user-agents in http requests mostly...
You could VPN your traffic, gets around the smtp restrictions and hides what your doing.
How large is the majority of the winners? I doubt it was more than a few %...
What percentage of people actually vote? I bet voted turnout is well under 50%...
Also that 1% of population have friends and family, and many of those connections being shut off will be shared by multiple people in any case. Also losing 600k customers is gonna be pretty painful for the major ISPs.
The problem is that it requires an application...
It should just provide the video over a standard protocol in a standard format so you can view it on any device you choose.... Until they provide this, i won't be signing up to any such services.
So you advocate throwing away all the dvd cases that all those movies originally came in?
And 400 movies could easily fit on a modern HDD, which is considerably smaller than the binder, and be much easier to index/search.
Because cars are the most commonly used machines with large high speed moving parts, and which are operated by people with minimal training in public areas...
Trains, buses and planes are driven by qualified people who had to undergo specific training for their job and yet people are still killed by these on a fairly regular basis.
Horses have also always been fairly dangerous... Humans simply aren't designed to travel at very high speeds, and all the ways the exist for us to do so carry dangers.
And when criminals realise that transponder evidence is being used against them, they will work out how to feed a false image to the camera and then have someone else drive their car through some toll roads hundreds of miles away from the bank they're robbing in a stolen car with the camera ripped out.
While true, a partial open format is better than nothing (which was the status quo before) and a good first step... And the development process is open, people are free to join and contribute/suggest improvements.
OOXML is also severely lacking, but does not have an open development process and is not being improved.
The problem is with the teaching, people are taught very poorly... They are not taught general concepts, they are taught specific of particular applications so if they were to learn Libreoffice people would complain that it's not what working environments are using.
Instead they should be taught the general concepts of how such applications work, and how to apply those concepts to a range of different applications which perform the same basic tasks... After all, what workplaces are using now isn't necessarily what they will be using when these kids finish school (we were taught wordperfect for dos in school, i haven't seen any company using it since leaving school).
Average users outnumber power users pretty massively, and those average users could therefore save HUGE amounts of money by using the free alternatives.
Power users are a small niche, it makes no sense for millions of people to spend large sums of money for features that only a small niche of users require... Or would you advocate that everyone drive F1 cars because a small handful of race drivers can benefit from them?
Perhaps Latex would be a far better choice if your dealing with a lot of mathematical formulae...
Another idea would be to have a configure tool like the linux kernel menuconfig... Give users the option to turn features on/off at both compiletime and at runtime (via modules), as well as the ability to auto load features as required (eg if you open a document that uses them), with the base program being very slim and loading fast...
I imagine this would be a _LOT_ of work to implement however.
ODF is inefficient, but part of that is out of necessity... What makes sense to humans, is inefficient to a computer. Doing a binary dump of the internal memory structures would be fast, but would result in a file thats not human readable, very difficult to interoperate with and very difficult to maintain going forwards.
Also a problem with the ribbon, and many other UI elements introduced by MS recently like the fatter startbar and fatter window borders... They take up a lot more vertical space than their predecessors did, and all this when modern screens are going widescreen and having less vertical space... It defies belief, soon the entire screen height will be taken up by window borders and ribbons and you won't have any space to view your document anymore.
Wider screens should be encouraging toolbars at the side, and anything at the top/bottom to be reduced in size.. Otherwise the extra width is generally wasted (editing portrait mode documents, viewing fixed-width websites etc)
OSS is pretty much only marginal on the desktop... Everywhere else it's either significant or dominant.
As for firefox usage declining, yes it is but its being replaced by Chrome, which is also open source. OSS is not about a single product being dominant, its about people being able to switch easily if something better comes along.
Provide a skinnable UI, so people can choose between a classic interface, a ribbon interface or anything else that might work for them...
LO feels specially heavy on Mac, it seems somewhat faster on Linux tho...
There are key differences...
Traffic signs need to be seen at a glance, so they are bold simple shapes... Reading a piece of text at a glance would be hard.
Most countries implement a driving test which you must pass before you can legally drive, one of the aspects of this test is knowledge of road signs.
Road signs are standard, and are the same throughout a country and many are international.
Icons on a computer are not standardised, every vendor has their own set and they often change between versions (and as computers become more powerful and able to display better looking icons)...
Icons are not always obvious, whereas text is obvious to anyone capable of reading.
Icons only really work for those who are already familiar with them.
And which a lot of XP users disabled, to go back to the 2000 style start menu.
Well the fact that most people don't use it should mean that it's no longer present by default, but should still be available for users who want it...
The problem for any mass market vendor is that one size does not fit all, so they have to try and cater to the majority of users.
Linux tries to provide choice, but then people complain there are too many choices... You really can't win.
A better way to label applications would be something like:
Firefox (Web Browser)
So you get both the name of the application, *and* the function that it performs...
But even with just the description, ala GNOME, chances are if you know what it was called you'd have run it directly, and if your searching through the menu you don't know what the program is called but you do know what functionality you require... Had there been a menu item called "Baobab" its unlikely a random user would have any idea what it does.
A menu isn't a bad thing, but the MS implementation of it was..
The structure was ridiculous, programs -> vendor name -> product name -> program...
I often don't remember the vendor name, i can see why they would want to do it that way (self promotion), but its not intuitive at all.
And what they did with XP onwards (by default), hiding the actual list of programs on a sub menu just made it worse...
OSX is slightly better, since the applications shortcut from the dock presents a big list of your apps (not your app vendors).
I much prefer the approach taken on most linux systems, where the applications are categorised according to what they do, at least that has some logic to it. Such a system also has an advantage over search if you aren't quite sure what an application is called (perhaps you don't use it very often) but you know what it should do and why you need it.