Well, it's a free country after all, and they have every right to target a particular customer base.
At the end of the day, the Linux customer base is much, much smaller than that of Windows, and a company is free to pursue their largest, most profitable market segment.
I don't know about this. Every time I walk down the street I'm sure there are about a thousand laws governing my behaviour, most of which I'm not even aware of.
Is it really the job of government to pass such narrow, precise laws like this? Or, instead, should they be passing higher-level laws which a) most of us can even keep in our heads to start with and b) cover a whole lot of smaller, more specific cases?
I wonder about the poster's motivation for this one. Copyright is good, and these efforts at law enforcement are a good thing? Copyright is bad, enforced by the evil corporations? Everything should be free, oh and by the way, pass the J, won't you?
Law enforcement agencies sharing information and teaching kids about why breaking the law is a bad thing. That honestly sounds like a good idea to me. Kids are taught that drugs are bad, that you don't shoot people - why not also teach them tearing away at the foundation of the economy is also a bad thing. Yes, the way the RIAA and MPAA approach things sucks, their business model is old, and they litigate to save themselves. But that doesn't mean that copyright is a bad thing, per se.
Around here, as much as people argue that open-source is the way for the world to go, every one of us has to admit that it's only our day jobs which allows us to spend our nights cutting code for open-source projects. Copyright is a Very, Very, Very Good Thing (TM). I don't think that fact is lessened by some idiotic laws which these guys have tried to pass in the past.
At the end of the day, you've really got to hand it to Bill. You don't become the richest person on earth by standing down by the train station and begging for money. You get there by being damn smart in everything you do, and the type of genius thinking that's going on at Microsoft regarding eHome is proof of how he got there. Ideas are cheap, actually getting something out the door is what really puts your balls on the line, and Microsoft is actually out there and doing it. Microsoft is always the one making us talk about them, what they're doing next. No other guy (expect perhaps Larry Ellison) causes such a stir when he talks.
Sure, Microsoft is a monster which breaks the law repeatedly, and does us all a world of harm in a lot of ways, but you have to give credit where it's due. Everything in this article sounds cool.
And what is perhaps most funny is that, at the end of the day, Microsoft may well be on our side when it comes to the way Hollywood wants to sell us our entertainment in the future.
Does it strike anybody else that sometimes device manufacturers are just a little too quick to market?
How is it that I can go down to Fry's and buy a wireless router which supports a standard which hadn't even been approved? Or a DVD writer that may or may not be supported tomorrow, and which may or may not work with my DVD player? Or a graphics card which I may be able to be heard over if I scream loud enough, or which may play my games without crashing me to the desktop every two seconds.
Sure, competing standards a A Good Thing, but only if the companies that espouse them are willing to stand by them until the consumer has gotten their money's worth out of them. I constantly worry that my growing DVD collection will only be useful as a set of dinner plates in the near future, because of some new and exciting standard which the industry wants to force on me.
Growth, prosperity, innovation, yakkety yak. All I want is to pay some money and have something useful for a number of years. How many people are getting rich suckering us into the latest and greatest technology every year?
I always enjoy the crowd that expects the government to provide services, but refuses to fund them with their taxes.
OK, so you don't agree with these charities. In 15 years, are you gonna shut your mouth when a bunch of kids with poor educations raid your house to steal money for food? Or how about when the rural communities in the US are being devastated by the lack of basic services? The government has to get its money somehow.
Yanky politically correct mouth? I'm an Australian. Let's all spell it out together. A-u-s-s-i-e.
The first thing that came to my mind was - well what are they going to spend it on?
About 85 percent of the fund's revenues are split between two causes: the "e-rate" program (40 percent), which subsidizes school and library Internet connections, and rural telephone companies (45 percent)
Amazingly, I discovered the other day that, in the UK, you're not allowed to specifically say that your product is better than some other company's. Instead, you apparently just have to go on about how great your own product is. Now if that doesn't take the heart and soul out of marketing, then I don't know what does.
I suppose you have to break down the argument into what a product -does- and what benefits it will give you. Perhaps lying about the actual features of a product is bad, but it seems a much more difficult problem to sort out who's lying about what the benefits of the existing features are. What beer isn't supposed to make you a sex god? Which software product isn't going to save you millions of dollars? Which car ad is going to tell you in big, bold letters on the screen that driving like that is going to get you some pretty serious jail time? Flat-out lies right there, but how could you call the companies on this?
If you're not allowed to hyperbolize about your product, then the entire marketing industry is doomed. I'm pretty damn sure that the folks at McDonalds couldn't give a flying proverbial at a rolling donut whether I'm smiling or not.....
Well, I wouldn't say -irrelevant-. The day your data center goes down in flames, and your db admin spills beer on your backup tapes is the day you remember why you spent so much money on the database - its enterprise features.
Bad - I can't imagine it's a whole lot of fun working for Peoplesoft right at the moment.
From what I've read, Oracle would lay off a large number of their employees. Given the state of the jobs market in Silicon Valley, and the fact that an entire company will disappear, with all of its associated technologies, processes, and so forth, what will the people there do?
Bad - I don't know about you, but I was pretty pissed off when AT&T sold their cable unit to Comcast. I got a call one Saturday morning from some company that I have never personally signed up with, offering to change my channel selection for me. Imagine paying a few hundred thousand dollars after having chosen Peoplesoft, only to have Oracle call you up one day, and say, 'hey, you're our new customer!'
Good - I suppose this'll be good for Oracle, and maybe, at the end of the day, customers will win because of the integration of two not-too-bad software suites.
If I'm sending secret information down the link, how does it help me if I know somebody is watching it as it goes past? Haven't they already got the information at that point?
Sure, perhaps I could send some sort of ping down the line to determine if anybody is watching before I start transmitting. But how do I know if they join at an arbitrary point in my transmission?
I wonder what 'superfluous' really means to the heads of giant media corporations though. Will users in rural areas be forgotten, even though they haven't got cable or satellite service, and aren't likely to get it?
I get the feeling that they should leave the spectrum in place for many years to come so that these people will always have access to the major stations. In Australia (I'm not sure if it's the same in the US), they forced the telephone company to service rural areas, because otherwise they simply aren't profitable.
As always, don't forget to remember the little guy.
A Chicken Catcher's Union?
on
Chicken Run
·
· Score: 1
Ok so if there's one thing that stands out about this story, it's that they were trying to form a chicken catcher's union?;)
I can see the list of demands already:
1. No chicken meat on the lunch menu.
2. Will not run more than 1000 meters per day in pursuit of chickens.
3. Safety equipment, including crotch protectors, in case the birds suddenly realise where in the hell they're going.
So the best people who can sign the NDA are precisely the people who won't be able to understand what they see?
Sure, I can program in C, but without an intimate knowledge of the Linux kernel, who the hell knows what goes on in there?
I once proved that God was a seven-headed Hydra by reading too much into a Shakespeare play I once read at school, so I'm wary of leaping to conclusions like this, but surely somebody at SCO must've realised that this would happen.
I'll never, ever understand this ordering of priorities. If I had to make a choice for my kids, would I rather they got out into the street and have sex with a lot of people, or go out into the street and shoot a lot of people? I know that sounds funny, but it's what we're ultimately talking about here.
To me, violence is far more obscene than sexually explicit material.
I'm really confused about this. How is sexually explicit material in a game any different from sexually explicit material on a DVD?
If I take 'Debbie Does Dallas 24' from a DVD, add some interactive components, like some sort of with-your-mallet-hit-the-boobs thing, can I suddenly go out and sell it to minors?
Perhaps I'll get modded as a troll, but I'm still not clear on what the value proposition is for Linux desktops which essentially attempt to copy Windows and Apple. Or is ultimately built just for the fun of it?
With Windows I get support for almost every application under the sun, gaming support. Everything. With Apple I get a long heritage of usability and user-interface innovation. With Ximian, I get what? Something for free? Is that enough to make me up and change my desktop? For me, not likely. For somebody else, perhaps, but I'm not convinced.
So ultimately, what's the elevator pitch for Ximian?
Knowing that customers are going to want to know how fast a card is in comparison to everything else, nVidia would be dumb to not try to optimize their products to the very measurements which bring them dollars.
Besides, pick any other industry, any other product, and companies are optimizing their products to run fast. J2EE and Databases performance testing comes first to my mind.
What fascinates me is how much intellectual property can you fit into 10 or 15 lines of code? There are only so many ways to structure data in the world, so many ways to allocate memory and so forth. How close does your code have to be to some other piece of code for it to infringe on intellectual property?
Sure, if Linux stole entire libraries of code, then that would be an issue. But how can you lay claim to component parts as small as this?
Does anybody else here worry about the fact that we don't know the first thing about the author of this review? Is he/she an employee of Sybex? Of Apple? Does he/she stand to gain financially from the type of exposure which only Slashdot can give to technical books?
I dunno about you, but there are a suspiciously large number of highly-rated reviews here on Slashdot. I think we're all being taken for a ride sometimes.
You know what? I think the law should start considering my computer desktop and my network connection as my personal property. Want to display a popup on my desktop? Sure, $5 a time. Want to send some bits on my behalf? Sure, $1 million a time. If you try and steal advertising space on my desktop, or steal some of the bits that I own, then you go to jail.
It's pretty obvious that this legislation is predicated on the possibility that I might commit an illegal act with an electronic device such as a cd burner. If this sort of reasoning were to be carried through to its logical conclusion, cars should be fitted with speed limiters, guns should have their triggers removed and I would need a license to buy kitchen knives.
I hate it when my bags are searched in department stores, since that implicity assumes that I might be a thief. I like even less the fact that the government assumes I'm a criminal - the police need a reason to pull me over, why can't the government be held to the same standards?
Slashdot Mirror
At the end of the day, the Linux customer base is much, much smaller than that of Windows, and a company is free to pursue their largest, most profitable market segment.
Is it really the job of government to pass such narrow, precise laws like this? Or, instead, should they be passing higher-level laws which a) most of us can even keep in our heads to start with and b) cover a whole lot of smaller, more specific cases?
Law enforcement agencies sharing information and teaching kids about why breaking the law is a bad thing. That honestly sounds like a good idea to me. Kids are taught that drugs are bad, that you don't shoot people - why not also teach them tearing away at the foundation of the economy is also a bad thing. Yes, the way the RIAA and MPAA approach things sucks, their business model is old, and they litigate to save themselves. But that doesn't mean that copyright is a bad thing, per se.
Around here, as much as people argue that open-source is the way for the world to go, every one of us has to admit that it's only our day jobs which allows us to spend our nights cutting code for open-source projects. Copyright is a Very, Very, Very Good Thing (TM). I don't think that fact is lessened by some idiotic laws which these guys have tried to pass in the past.
At the end of the day, you've really got to hand it to Bill. You don't become the richest person on earth by standing down by the train station and begging for money. You get there by being damn smart in everything you do, and the type of genius thinking that's going on at Microsoft regarding eHome is proof of how he got there. Ideas are cheap, actually getting something out the door is what really puts your balls on the line, and Microsoft is actually out there and doing it. Microsoft is always the one making us talk about them, what they're doing next. No other guy (expect perhaps Larry Ellison) causes such a stir when he talks.
Sure, Microsoft is a monster which breaks the law repeatedly, and does us all a world of harm in a lot of ways, but you have to give credit where it's due. Everything in this article sounds cool.
And what is perhaps most funny is that, at the end of the day, Microsoft may well be on our side when it comes to the way Hollywood wants to sell us our entertainment in the future.
How is it that I can go down to Fry's and buy a wireless router which supports a standard which hadn't even been approved? Or a DVD writer that may or may not be supported tomorrow, and which may or may not work with my DVD player? Or a graphics card which I may be able to be heard over if I scream loud enough, or which may play my games without crashing me to the desktop every two seconds.
Sure, competing standards a A Good Thing, but only if the companies that espouse them are willing to stand by them until the consumer has gotten their money's worth out of them. I constantly worry that my growing DVD collection will only be useful as a set of dinner plates in the near future, because of some new and exciting standard which the industry wants to force on me.
Growth, prosperity, innovation, yakkety yak. All I want is to pay some money and have something useful for a number of years. How many people are getting rich suckering us into the latest and greatest technology every year?
OK, so you don't agree with these charities. In 15 years, are you gonna shut your mouth when a bunch of kids with poor educations raid your house to steal money for food? Or how about when the rural communities in the US are being devastated by the lack of basic services? The government has to get its money somehow.
Yanky politically correct mouth? I'm an Australian. Let's all spell it out together. A-u-s-s-i-e.
About 85 percent of the fund's revenues are split between two causes: the "e-rate" program (40 percent), which subsidizes school and library Internet connections, and rural telephone companies (45 percent)
How is this a bad thing?
I suppose you have to break down the argument into what a product -does- and what benefits it will give you. Perhaps lying about the actual features of a product is bad, but it seems a much more difficult problem to sort out who's lying about what the benefits of the existing features are. What beer isn't supposed to make you a sex god? Which software product isn't going to save you millions of dollars? Which car ad is going to tell you in big, bold letters on the screen that driving like that is going to get you some pretty serious jail time? Flat-out lies right there, but how could you call the companies on this?
If you're not allowed to hyperbolize about your product, then the entire marketing industry is doomed. I'm pretty damn sure that the folks at McDonalds couldn't give a flying proverbial at a rolling donut whether I'm smiling or not.....
Well, I wouldn't say -irrelevant-. The day your data center goes down in flames, and your db admin spills beer on your backup tapes is the day you remember why you spent so much money on the database - its enterprise features.
Bad - I don't know about you, but I was pretty pissed off when AT&T sold their cable unit to Comcast. I got a call one Saturday morning from some company that I have never personally signed up with, offering to change my channel selection for me. Imagine paying a few hundred thousand dollars after having chosen Peoplesoft, only to have Oracle call you up one day, and say, 'hey, you're our new customer!'
Good - I suppose this'll be good for Oracle, and maybe, at the end of the day, customers will win because of the integration of two not-too-bad software suites.
Sure, perhaps I could send some sort of ping down the line to determine if anybody is watching before I start transmitting. But how do I know if they join at an arbitrary point in my transmission?
I get the feeling that they should leave the spectrum in place for many years to come so that these people will always have access to the major stations. In Australia (I'm not sure if it's the same in the US), they forced the telephone company to service rural areas, because otherwise they simply aren't profitable.
As always, don't forget to remember the little guy.
I can see the list of demands already: 1. No chicken meat on the lunch menu. 2. Will not run more than 1000 meters per day in pursuit of chickens. 3. Safety equipment, including crotch protectors, in case the birds suddenly realise where in the hell they're going.
I believe it's I am not a lawyer.
Sure, I can program in C, but without an intimate knowledge of the Linux kernel, who the hell knows what goes on in there?
I once proved that God was a seven-headed Hydra by reading too much into a Shakespeare play I once read at school, so I'm wary of leaping to conclusions like this, but surely somebody at SCO must've realised that this would happen.
To me, violence is far more obscene than sexually explicit material.
If I take 'Debbie Does Dallas 24' from a DVD, add some interactive components, like some sort of with-your-mallet-hit-the-boobs thing, can I suddenly go out and sell it to minors?
With Windows I get support for almost every application under the sun, gaming support. Everything. With Apple I get a long heritage of usability and user-interface innovation. With Ximian, I get what? Something for free? Is that enough to make me up and change my desktop? For me, not likely. For somebody else, perhaps, but I'm not convinced.
So ultimately, what's the elevator pitch for Ximian?
Besides, pick any other industry, any other product, and companies are optimizing their products to run fast. J2EE and Databases performance testing comes first to my mind.
What fascinates me is how much intellectual property can you fit into 10 or 15 lines of code? There are only so many ways to structure data in the world, so many ways to allocate memory and so forth. How close does your code have to be to some other piece of code for it to infringe on intellectual property?
Sure, if Linux stole entire libraries of code, then that would be an issue. But how can you lay claim to component parts as small as this?
Does anybody else here worry about the fact that we don't know the first thing about the author of this review? Is he/she an employee of Sybex? Of Apple? Does he/she stand to gain financially from the type of exposure which only Slashdot can give to technical books?
I dunno about you, but there are a suspiciously large number of highly-rated reviews here on Slashdot. I think we're all being taken for a ride sometimes.
You know what? I think the law should start considering my computer desktop and my network connection as my personal property. Want to display a popup on my desktop? Sure, $5 a time. Want to send some bits on my behalf? Sure, $1 million a time. If you try and steal advertising space on my desktop, or steal some of the bits that I own, then you go to jail.
It's pretty obvious that this legislation is predicated on the possibility that I might commit an illegal act with an electronic device such as a cd burner. If this sort of reasoning were to be carried through to its logical conclusion, cars should be fitted with speed limiters, guns should have their triggers removed and I would need a license to buy kitchen knives. I hate it when my bags are searched in department stores, since that implicity assumes that I might be a thief. I like even less the fact that the government assumes I'm a criminal - the police need a reason to pull me over, why can't the government be held to the same standards?