After all, if nobody did this and only did fair use copying, the companies wouldn't give a rat's ass.
Bullshit they wouldn't. The software companies realise they have a product that never gets old, never wears out and will perform the task it was purchased to do until hell freezes over unless they find a way of breaking it. Software companies have been trying to find ways of making software wear out for decades so they can rake a continuous income from their customers the way other manufacturers do. They use product activation to tie the non-wearing software to the fragile hardware for example, but their customers hate them for it.
The customer wants to buy a tool and use it forever, or until they no longer have a use for it, whichever comes first. We know damn well when they're being scammed, and want nothing to do with this license once and pay forever crap. We've tolerated buying the same product over and over again because we accepted we were paying for new features and improvements.
The cost of production of each copy of a program is nil, so the only controllable cost variable for a producer of software is the cost of development, the development of those features and improvements we've been paying for. If they can get away with using this DRM garbage to artificially obsolete programs, they won't need to keep improving the software, they'll have their continuous income without the cost of development. Say goodbye to software innovation.
Now, does anyone know of such a beast (OSS.pdf editor)?
I suspect it was marked offtopic because it is a pointless example of OSS in business. There are abundant OSS PDF writers and converters already, and the most common use of.pdfs is to export from an editable format like.odf or.doc to give a non-editable document to external organisations. That means there's not a huge incentive to create a utility to edit the files directly.
Anyone desperate to edit an existing pdf file can do so relatively easily by converting it to an editable format with a tool like Ghostscript. Having said that though, Pandaedit is the beginnings of a project to use the panda pdf libraries in a free editor. It doesn't look like it's getting much traction though.
I would say it's their PR dept that's been working fine, not their QA dept.
Actually, since they're getting bad PR now, but dozens of Random Q Slashdotters are saying that "tells me their QA was fine.", it means their shills are working hard, not that their PR department's working fine...
Access is the worst thing to ever happen to I.T. help desks.
Perhaps, but that's only because help desks are the worst thing to happen to most businesses. You see, if I have a business case to store data, the IT guys should either provide me with a database to store the information or enough advice to create a sensible one of my own.
Instead, the most common response is to ban the use of Access, then mock the user for using Excel to store data...
IMO, tools like Dreamweaver are best used by GUI designers to build mock-up which are then sent to development.
If you're using the Macromedia toolchain, Fireworks is the page designer's tool and Dreamweaver the site designer/coding/publishing tool. It's a handy set of tools once you get used to the workflow, and despite the naysayers, produces decent HTML. It's just a shame Macromedia went feral and started gouging their customers.
So, stories are running around Australian papers that the RSPCA has pushed through a law making it illegal to club a toad - offenders will get a huge fine
The law preventing cruelty to animals, including cane toads, exists and penalties are severe.
Clubbing toads is not illegal for people who are able to do so without inflicting excessive pain on the animal. However it is discouraged, partly because there were a lot of incidents where people had bufotoxin splash into their eyes. Freezing the toads is the recommended way of killing them. More here:
Maybe if you're a socialist, but sorry, everyone else puts it in the left side of the political spectrum.
That's mostly a historical perspective. Just as the Liberal party is no longer liberal, the Labor party used to represent workers, but has long since left its roots behind.
From the linked Wikipedia article:
The left says that Labor has abandoned its traditional base and values and that its policies are indistinguishable from those of the Coalition.
It's not only the left that says that now. Even our mainstream press takes the shift to the right pretty much for granted. There's a concise history here http://www.ozpolitics.info/parties/alp.htm, but to quote:
the Labor party become a catchall party with one overriding objective: to win the next election.
While the Left as a whole may not be terribly adept at presenting themselves as a viable governing authority, your attitude seems to match the American Democratic Party's line:
The Labor party isn't a left wing party - it's centrist with a number of right-wing factions. The reason they don't win elections has nothing to do with ideology, it's because they are more incompetent than the Liberals, which is an outstanding feat in itself...
I have owned a couple of Windows smartphones and they really, really sucked. They were bad phones, bad messaging devices, bad music players...you name it, they sucked at it.
That's the problem, and it's why RIM should (but won't) win this battle. I have an iMate Jam smartphone which has the potential to be the best phone/pda I've ever used, but falls short because of dumb and lazy design decisions.
Off the top of my head;
The brightness control is about 3 layers in under the steeings screen, so if the screen isn't bright enough in sunlight, you're stuffed.
The phone charges from USB, which is great. What's diabolical is that Activesync will wake up at random intervals, pop its screen to the front and grab focus and switch the phone on even when it's been turned off and sync switched to manual.
To save a phone number to the address book from a text message, you have to copy and paste.
The battery level readout is about three screens into the settings menu.
If you want to play music, you have to leave the phone on. That means all buttons and the touch screen are active... Not good for a pocket device.
There are dozens more similar problems, and it's intensely frustrating to see such a potentially useful device crippled by such a poor interface. I'd love to see a well-supported Open Source OS on this thing, but while manufacturers are in bed with Microsoft, that won't happen.
I have a sneaky suspicion that a sensibly designed hetrogenous computing environment would have the lowest TCO of all. Sadly, since these studies are inherently oppositional, they'll be more likely to polarise computer users into chosing one or the other. What sort of studies would measure and encourage interoperability instead?
tech people need to band together and make a MUTUAL BENEFIT tech company
This isn't about tech people. It's about art and business people.
Digital tech has cut the cost of video and music production to next to nothing, and there are plenty of artists who'd love to take advantage of that to make independant film, music etc. All that's lacking is the distribution channels, and the next generation of broadband should solve that. Then there will be potential for a boom for real musicians and video artists.
The business people are trying to stifle that. Their greatest fear is that artists will be able to get their creations directly to their fans and bypass the parasitic industry that's grown around the creative types. They're addicted to their high profits though and while in the short term, DRM will restrict the media available to consumers, it will be the heavily commercial art which is restricted, not the independants who just want to get good art out there.
Encourage DRM, it's big media's self-created suicide pill.
For example, I remember reading that a popular 17th-century puppet play by Chikamatsu glorified love suicides, and as a result there was a rash of them. This deep-set tendency has only been partially reduced by Western influence.
In Europe, Hungary has the reputation of being suicide obsessed. The song Gloomy Sunday by Rezsô Seress, a Hungarian composer, was blamed for many suicides http://www.phespirit.info/gloomysunday/, and is still known as a suicide song. Interestingly, their choice of methods is often rather brutal - defenestration was common, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
The cartoons didn't create anger. They revealed the anger which already existed.
I'm not trying to troll you or be flamebait
Yes you are.
Bullshit they wouldn't. The software companies realise they have a product that never gets old, never wears out and will perform the task it was purchased to do until hell freezes over unless they find a way of breaking it. Software companies have been trying to find ways of making software wear out for decades so they can rake a continuous income from their customers the way other manufacturers do. They use product activation to tie the non-wearing software to the fragile hardware for example, but their customers hate them for it.
The customer wants to buy a tool and use it forever, or until they no longer have a use for it, whichever comes first. We know damn well when they're being scammed, and want nothing to do with this license once and pay forever crap. We've tolerated buying the same product over and over again because we accepted we were paying for new features and improvements.
The cost of production of each copy of a program is nil, so the only controllable cost variable for a producer of software is the cost of development, the development of those features and improvements we've been paying for. If they can get away with using this DRM garbage to artificially obsolete programs, they won't need to keep improving the software, they'll have their continuous income without the cost of development. Say goodbye to software innovation.
I suspect it was marked offtopic because it is a pointless example of OSS in business. There are abundant OSS PDF writers and converters already, and the most common use of .pdfs is to export from an editable format like .odf or .doc to give a non-editable document to external organisations. That means there's not a huge incentive to create a utility to edit the files directly.
Anyone desperate to edit an existing pdf file can do so relatively easily by converting it to an editable format with a tool like Ghostscript. Having said that though, Pandaedit is the beginnings of a project to use the panda pdf libraries in a free editor. It doesn't look like it's getting much traction though.
Exactly. Reading the feature list if Vista is like thinking "Great! Bubba's going to use a bit more grease this time...
So what you're saying is "All You are Location Belonging to them Please?"
Compared to the XP fisher-price look?
Just be grateful, OK.
I would say it's their PR dept that's been working fine, not their QA dept.
Actually, since they're getting bad PR now, but dozens of Random Q Slashdotters are saying that "tells me their QA was fine.", it means their shills are working hard, not that their PR department's working fine...
Access is the worst thing to ever happen to I.T. help desks.
Perhaps, but that's only because help desks are the worst thing to happen to most businesses. You see, if I have a business case to store data, the IT guys should either provide me with a database to store the information or enough advice to create a sensible one of my own.
Instead, the most common response is to ban the use of Access, then mock the user for using Excel to store data...
IMO, tools like Dreamweaver are best used by GUI designers to build mock-up which are then sent to development.
If you're using the Macromedia toolchain, Fireworks is the page designer's tool and Dreamweaver the site designer/coding/publishing tool. It's a handy set of tools once you get used to the workflow, and despite the naysayers, produces decent HTML. It's just a shame Macromedia went feral and started gouging their customers.
There is no need to fragment support for these projects when excellent ones are already in place.
The more there are, the better. No single point of failure, no single point for governments to attack. Fragment away.
So, stories are running around Australian papers that the RSPCA has pushed through a law making it illegal to club a toad - offenders will get a huge fine
E R/IKMP/PW/VP/TOAD/CANETOAD_WELFARE.HTM
The law preventing cruelty to animals, including cane toads, exists and penalties are severe.
Clubbing toads is not illegal for people who are able to do so without inflicting excessive pain on the animal. However it is discouraged, partly because there were a lot of incidents where people had bufotoxin splash into their eyes. Freezing the toads is the recommended way of killing them. More here:
http://www.agric.wa.gov.au/pls/portal30/docs/FOLD
That's mostly a historical perspective. Just as the Liberal party is no longer liberal, the Labor party used to represent workers, but has long since left its roots behind. From the linked Wikipedia article: It's not only the left that says that now. Even our mainstream press takes the shift to the right pretty much for granted.
There's a concise history here http://www.ozpolitics.info/parties/alp.htm, but to quote: You might also like to look here http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au/index.htm to see how badly our democratic institutions are percieved by voting Australians.
Google is your friend: R&B Coffee.
That's a very diplomatic response. I belive this;
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/
is more traditional.
While the Left as a whole may not be terribly adept at presenting themselves as a viable governing authority, your attitude seems to match the American Democratic Party's line:
The Labor party isn't a left wing party - it's centrist with a number of right-wing factions. The reason they don't win elections has nothing to do with ideology, it's because they are more incompetent than the Liberals, which is an outstanding feat in itself...
My next door neighbor seems like a nice enough guy and all, but I'm not letting him watch my children.
That's OK. He prefers to watch you anyway.
That's the problem, and it's why RIM should (but won't) win this battle. I have an iMate Jam smartphone which has the potential to be the best phone/pda I've ever used, but falls short because of dumb and lazy design decisions.
Off the top of my head;
There are dozens more similar problems, and it's intensely frustrating to see such a potentially useful device crippled by such a poor interface. I'd love to see a well-supported Open Source OS on this thing, but while manufacturers are in bed with Microsoft, that won't happen.
I have a sneaky suspicion that a sensibly designed hetrogenous computing environment would have the lowest TCO of all. Sadly, since these studies are inherently oppositional, they'll be more likely to polarise computer users into chosing one or the other. What sort of studies would measure and encourage interoperability instead?
That's right. I had a feeling I'd got the wrong movie. Still,might have been seen as redundant...
Not only do they think in dupes
Yeah, anyone else read this and think "Not another interview with Darl McBride"?
Your proposal is acceptable to us.
tech people need to band together and make a MUTUAL BENEFIT tech company
This isn't about tech people. It's about art and business people.
Digital tech has cut the cost of video and music production to next to nothing, and there are plenty of artists who'd love to take advantage of that to make independant film, music etc. All that's lacking is the distribution channels, and the next generation of broadband should solve that. Then there will be potential for a boom for real musicians and video artists.
The business people are trying to stifle that. Their greatest fear is that artists will be able to get their creations directly to their fans and bypass the parasitic industry that's grown around the creative types. They're addicted to their high profits though and while in the short term, DRM will restrict the media available to consumers, it will be the heavily commercial art which is restricted, not the independants who just want to get good art out there.
Encourage DRM, it's big media's self-created suicide pill.
For example, I remember reading that a popular 17th-century puppet play by Chikamatsu glorified love suicides, and as a result there was a rash of them. This deep-set tendency has only been partially reduced by Western influence.
In Europe, Hungary has the reputation of being suicide obsessed. The song Gloomy Sunday by Rezsô Seress, a Hungarian composer, was blamed for many suicides http://www.phespirit.info/gloomysunday/, and is still known as a suicide song. Interestingly, their choice of methods is often rather brutal - defenestration was common, for example.
apparently you're someone that has no sense of humor, and takes everything literally
Hiya pot, I'm kettle. Nice to meet ya...
Ahh.. So that explains why cat people tend to be a little bit nuts ;)
--
Whenever I hear the word activist, I reach for my revolver.
I'm not a cat person myself, but I suspect most cat people would feel a little put out that someone with a sig like yours could call them nuts.
Having a multithreaded OS can only take you so far without properly written applications to take advantage of those OS features.
Virtualisation.