The next time Wyoming makes it onto front page news will likely be when the Yellowstone super-volcano caldera explodes. So, yeah, by all means, celebrate while you can.
anyone think it's funny that we don't allow other countries to have nukes?
I'm not sure what you mean by "funny".
Should the U.S and its allies encourage proliferation of thermonuclear weapons and delivery systems? I don't think so, personally. We aren't discussing tariffs or trade embargoes here, you know. Understand one thing: fairness doesn't matter. Never having them used in war, that's what matters. Also, lots of other countries have them, you know. We just don't like countries whose leaders are likely to drop them on us, or on our allies, to have them. We also don't like nations who are incapable of securing their weapons systems to have them, or who are so politically unstable that an atom bomb or two might get "lost" during the transfer of power to a new government.
I might add that we've reduced the sheer quantity of nuclear armaments (as well as conventional force levels, for that matter) considerably since the height of the Cold War. That 450 is a pitiful remnant of what we once believed we needed.
Deterrent against who? Against the terrarists? No, not really, you cannot really strike back at them with a nuke.
Against Putin? No, because Putin is not really interested in having a shooting war with the West right now, at least until his family lives there.
Against the Chinese? No, because international trade seems to be the better way to have each other by the balls.
Against the Japanese? Nah, not really, US has bases over there, and their prime minister resigns as soon as he hints about something Americans don't like.
Against Iran or North Korea then? How are they even a threat that would merit deterrent?
So nope, it looks like US nuclear arsenal is definitely not serving as an effective deterrent.
Is it deterring a massive strike from a bitter enemy with thousands of such weapons at his disposal? No, not so much. Is anyone else bothering to build even a fraction of our stock of the things? Nope: because to achieve even a fraction of the threat that the Soviet Union once posed would be far too costly. So I'd say you're wrong: the United States' nuclear arsenal is deterring anyone else from building anything similar: the barrier to entry is too high. I don't see that as a bad thing.
And if I'm wrong, well, then so are you. The global situation is changing and the current status quo will not be maintained forever. We may need them some day.
Some of us who weren't raised upon and thoroughly steeped in an overcomplicated GUI find that batch files, and scripting in general, very useful indeed.
The logical problem to your conclusion is the 'if' and 'only' parts.
I made no conclusion, merely commented on my observation of an obvious trend (and not only from Apple, Inc, I might add.) And yes, you're absolutely correct that "today you can get music from iTunes, CDs, Amazon, etc.", but that's due entirely to the historical openness of personal computing. But people forget, people can be convinced that there's "a better way", and the truth of this is evidenced by the millions of ostensibly happy iPhone users. Odd, though... I've encountered a surprising number of people that have dumped their iPhones and gone with an Android-based product, but not because they're geeks or anti-Apple or anything like that. It's just that there were things that the iPhone wouldn't let them do, that a more open platform would. So that's encouraging, and the fact that Android handsets are outselling iPhones by, well, a substantial margin even more so.
Apple, under Jobs, has exhibited no compunction whatsoever in exerting unprecedented control over users of its personal computers (for that's what an iPhone is, you know, a personal computer.) More to the point, Apple has made an enormous amount of money by exercising that control... I don't think it's beyond imagination that Jobs & Co. might, at some point, wish to extend their dominion to the desktop and their other portable platforms. Why do you perceive a modern smartphone as being intrinsically different from a personal computer? It's not you know: it's the same technologies squeezed into a smaller container, and all the negative aspects of vendor lock-in that affect an ordinary computer still exist in the smartphone world.
Of course the best piece of all is that you think Apple is schizophrenic, despite everyone of their new products being closed you think the desktop is completely different in every way shape and form despite sharing code base? Nicely done!
It's only different because of tradition, because the vast majority of computer users have been trained by decades of PC experience to expect that openness. The essential dichotomy here is that Apple has trained its own customers to incorrectly perceive smartphones as "appliances" or "gadgets", and not the pocket-sized personal computers that they really are. If you think of a smartphone as being a computer (and in fact, a computer that is a thousand times more powerful than the original Apple ][), you start to feel very much rubbed the wrong way by Apple's thinking here.
This is very much a "boil the frog slowly enough and he won't notice" situation. Apple is getting, has gotten, people accustomed to lock-down on their smartphones, and I cannot believe that the ultimate goal isn't to do the exact same thing with those machines that are more commonly known as "personal computers". And why shouldn't they? As long as you have a customers who don't really want to make the effort to learn anything about their computer, don't want to take any responsibility for it, who are happy being led around by that brass ring in their nose, this plan actually makes perfect sense.
In a way, it's the same mindset that drives big media: absolute, unquestioned control, from cradle to grave, in order to extract/extort money at every step. Now, the media outfits have largely failed in this, because they failed to consider the consumers' needs and wants at any level: just the familiar, authoritarian "do exactly what we tell you with our 'intellectual property' or we'll sue your ass, you sheep." Apple, on the other had, offers some real benefits to their customers, supplies a polished user experience backed by expert marketing, and is so smooth about it that users don't even know they're being taken for a ride.
Now, given the fact that Apple supplies an entire package, hardware, software and online services, they will very probably pull it off. And make billions in the process. If anyone wonders why Apple doesn't license the Mac operating system to any other hardware vendor, well, this is why. Control. Jobs has been waiting a long, long time for technology to catch up with his vision of what personal computing should be. I don't agree with it, myself, which is why I'm a Linux and Windows guy. But I know a lot of people who buy into it, and they seem generally happy about it. I'm not particularly worried about Apple suddenly taking over the personal computer market: Apple's always been a marginal operation and they've always been happy with that. What concerns me more is that the success Apple has been enjoying may give other vendors some very bad ideas.
It astonishes me that people can say there is no evidence for this when it is entirely consistent with Apple for as long as Steve Jobs has run the company going all the way back to Appletalk.
Goes back further than that. Out of the hacker world was the Apple ][ born, and users thus had very different expectations from their machines and the companies that supplied them. Once personal computing went more mainstream (and yes, Jobs and Apple did play a major part in that) and the Macintosh was released, Jobs referred to it as a " computing appliance." So his mindset was very clear even back then: it just took time, technology and the rise of a global, public network to make his drain-bamaged vision happen.
Was iOS ever open? No. It was always locked down and Apple from the beginning said it was going to be. Apple has not said that Mac Apps will be. They presented it only as an additional channel.
Should Sony, Samsung, and all the other television manufacturers also give the networks a cut of their profits? Surely one of the primary uses of any television is to watch shows put out by the networks.
Ha, well, I'm sure that the CEOs of all those companies would think that a great idea. They also know that it's patently ridiculous and would never happen.
Why? Because Google ( a business in the business of making money ) wants to make boat loads of money on their product without paying for it? The "crappy" shows you were not watching anyway are a product. If Google wants to make money off of them, than perhaps they should pay the networks a cut of the take? It sounds like a reasonable idea to me...
Nonsense. I remember a few years ago a BMG executive said that "he was waiting for Apple to share out some of the profits from iPod sales." That was a ridiculous statement then, and it hasn't changed now.
My guess, and I'm no lawyer, is that you can download programs without violating the law (or violating somebody's copyright), but that uploading is where you may run into some trouble.
In the US, both are illegal. It's just that it's far far easier to go after the uploaders, and even that isn't working out that well for the RIAA/MPAA.
I don't believe that's true. In the U.S. it is legal to download pretty much anything, it's just not legal to distribute copyrighted materials. That's why all the RIAA file-sharing cases have been against people who were sharing files, not those who were only downloading files. Turn off shared folders in your Gnutella client and that's that. It's also why Bit Torrent is inherently unsafe, from a legal perspective, because you don't have the option to not share data if you want to participate in the swarm. Well, some people run hacked clients that won't share or seed, but I don't know how common or effective that is.
Now, that doesn't make you safe from a lawsuit, because these guys don't really care about right and wrong. But it's the distributor who is the one who is committing copyright infringement.
And yet, on balance, he has done a lot of good. Consumers like his products. They are selling faster than Apple can make them in many cases. The majority of Apple's revenue comes from products that didn't exist 5 years ago at all. I can't say that my life is any worse for my Macbook Pro, my iPad and my Mac Mini which runs my media center. In fact, I'd say it's better. I don't have an iPhone - I think the Nexus One is an all-around better phone. But the other stuff? Rocks. All of it. Better than anything the competitors make.
Apples products, per se, aren't the issue, and never have been. It's what kind of ecosystem that Jobs plans to build (or to allow!) around it that is the question, and more to the point, if other companies begin to emulate those policies, will it be good for users? That's the real question. You didn't immediately buy into the iPhone hype because you felt that an Android device was a better fit for your needs. I applaud you for that open-mindedness, for it is not common among the Apple crowd. I also happen to agree with you there: Android suited my purposes better as well.
Huh? Since when did apple stand for freedom?? In old days they even did their best to stop people from installing alternative OSes like for example Linux.
Is this what you call freedom?
Dude, in the old days Linux hadn't been invented yet, and the Mac was still a gleam in Steve's eye. I'm talking 1977-78 here. You're not old enough.
. I am also surprised to see about half of Slashdot suddenly turning into RIAA spokespersons about piracy in China when usually it's fuck the RIAA!.
No, what you are seeing there are actual RIAA "spokespersons" (and I use the term loosely) using Slashdot to spew their garbage.
I disagree with you that China is the big country to hate. Americans, by and large, don't understand the nature of their own industrial economy, don't understand enough of what China has been doing to that economy (or Japan either, back in the day) to generate any real feelings. Not like we had for the Russians during the Cold War, like a lot of us feel towards Iran (not that Iran is exactly doing anything to assuage the fears upon which those feelings are based, quite the opposite in fact.)
Most of us don't even understand that the wealth and power we accumulated since the dawn of the Industrial Age was due to our ability to make stuff. Honestly, I think my fellow citizens believe that consumer goods fall from trees, or are assembled by little forest fairies that work for free. All we see is that everything we buy, from shoes to clothing to consumer electronics has "Made in China" stamped on it, and because we only care about cheap we don't worry too much about where it comes from, or what throwing away our domestic manufacturing is gong to cost us. China is too distant a threat for us to take to very seriously, even though we should. If we're going to do business with the Devil, we should make an effort to understand how the Devil does business. Maybe then we'll stop getting burned.
But claiming that the bulk of Americans hate China is just ridiculous. Hell, one of my local auto repair shops is run by a Chinese gentleman and his son (both immigrants). I take my car there all the time: they do good work for very reasonable prices, and they are always busy. I doubt that they'd be doing so well if we hated Chinese people.
Now, having said that, I think you'll find very few Americans who will take an admiring stance towards the China's form of government. That's very different from hating an individual because he was born in China, and a lot of people do seem to be able to make that distinction.
The irony is that China has done a lot more damage to American lives (in terms of its destructive influence upon our economy) than 9/11 did, so if we were rational in our expression of hatred maybe we would hate the Chinese more than the Middle Eastern terrorists who knocked down the towers.
While I agree with your main point, you can't deny they don't see copyright as we do, so from our (legal) point of view they ARE stealing movies.
Copyright troll, or media shill? From our (legal) point of view they are violating copyright, and not stealing anything.
It is, again, a fact that quite a few companies' ideas have been stolen.
So then they stopped writing them down in only one place, and now their ideas are only copied.
I think you are a shill. And a sneaky one. You are at minimum a tool, and yet another reason why AC posting should be disabled.
I'm honestly not sure if he's a media shill or just an idiot. The reason I say that is because I personally know some people who think that way, and have no connection whatever with big media.
or because they're too cheap to cough up for the developer license or sign the enterprise agreement that lets you put your own software on the iPad?
You want me to pay money, and sign away my firstborn to the devil, for the privilege of devoting my time & energy to developing software for your nasty little locked down platform? Gross man, just gross.
I agree. As someone who started out on an IBM 360 and graduated to an Apple ][ Standard in 1978 or thereabouts, well, this kinda makes me want to throw up. I really thought very highly of Apple and the Steves at the time, but after the way Jobs dumped the Apple// user base in favor of that "computing appliance" known as the Macintosh I switched to the IBM PC world for my career (industrial controls and what not) and never looked back.The Mac wasn't a "personal computer", a general-purpose device that could be molded into whatever was desired. It was the forerunner of the iPhone, a beige box that would do certain things very well, but wasn't about freedom to do what you want. You may laugh, but when I found out that the Mac didn't have slots, no way to plug in a peripheral card of any kind, I lost interest. Hell, at that time I'd done stuff with the Apple ][ that the Mac couldn't begin to do. One contract I had was for sampling four analog inputs (EEG amplifier outputs) at 100 Khz and displaying wire-frame 3D of the results. I ended up using two machines with 3.6 Mhz turbo cards, one using a custom high-speed digitizer board for sampling, the other used for display and control. The two communicated through a bi-directional parallel port (used a couple of 6521s, if I remember right.) That's what the personal computer was all about, to me anyway. I perceived the original Macintosh as a major step backwards in capability, no matter how polished the GUI.
What disturbs me is not Apple Computer itself: I haven't owned anything from that company in twenty five years (other than an iPod Nano that I got as a gift, and find to be one of the most irritating and limited media players out there. Why can't I set the goddamn equalizer bars the way I want them? My $30 Sanyo lets me do that.) but the fact that Apple is setting a very, very bad example. Other companies are following in their rather disturbing footsteps, and that's bad for users.
or because they're too cheap to cough up for the developer license or sign the enterprise agreement that lets you put your own software on the iPad?
Better questions: why should I pay a hardware manufacturer more money to write software for a portable computer that I just purchased? Why should I pay a hardware manufacturer for the privilege of distributing said software on the same portable computers that other people have purchased? You seem to be buying into this whole idea that we don't really own the equipment we purchase, that we are, at best, only buying the right to use said devices according to whatever terms a corporate entity deems acceptable. You want to rent me an iPad, that's one thing. In exchange for my monthly fee I get to use it under whatever terms are in the rental agreement. Sell it to me, on the other hand, and you had best accept that I will do with it as I please. Otherwise, if you have rigged your product to limit my activities to suit your whim, don't claim you're selling it to me because you're not. The essence of ownership is control, and even if your smooth-talking marketing folks have convinced me otherwise, if I can't run the software of my choice, do the things that I want to do with my computing system, then I'm not really in control, and you still own the equipment.
Developers do not benefit from this, users do not benefit from this, only Apple does. Apple has fifty billion dollars cash sitting the bank. Explain to me why I should give that schlock outfit another penny of my hard-earned money to restrict what I can do with my own property?. This is not rocket science. This is a slick operator feeding millions of people (including software developers who should know better) a line, a fabrication, a lie, and convincing them that really, it's for their own good.
I get enough of that from Congress. I don't need it from the technology world as well.
Why did Ubuntu get the credit for using this "open system" you speak of. Why not instead give credit to the other package managers that actually don't suck.
Because Ubuntu is about the highest-profile Linux distro out there right now. People I know who barely grasp the idea there is operating system other than Windows, or (if pressed) the Macintosh, seem to equate Ubuntu with Linux. Mention Mandriva, Opensuse, Mepis, etc. to these people, and they go "What?"
Jobs is turning Apple into the very thing he railed against in the early 80s. The hypocrisy is astounding.
Well, then again Jobs is an asshole. He was an asshole in the seventies, a bigger asshole in the 80's growing by leaps and bounds through the nineties and now he's completely unmanageable. But, has more money. A LOT more money. That's what makes me nervous, he has the power to do a lot of damage.
Longtime Apple developer Dave Winer was also concerned, tweeting during Apple's presentation 'Is this the end of the Mac as an open platform?'
If Apple is restricting operating system features to whitelisted applications, then it is, by definition, no longer an open platform. There are degrees of openness, of course, but given Apple's approach to the iPhone, my guess is that the Mac will eventually become a similar prison.
The news also prompted developer Anil Dash to call for an open alternative to the Mac App Store."
Rather, pick an open alternative to Apple. It's truly remarkable that Steve Jobs is finally starting to make Microsoft look good. And this comes at a time when Windows is, actually, looking halfway decent and MacOS is starting to look a little dated. If Ballmer has half a brain he'll exploit this to the max.
I guess Apple is expecting the same mindset that made the iPod and iPhone so phenomenally successful to carry over into the personal computer world. Time will tell, but truthfully I don't think much of the bulk of Macintosh users' hold on reality, so chances are, Jobs is going to be right once again. Enough people will stand for this that it will make a metric fuckton of money. That depresses me, somehow.
The amazing thing to me, speaking as someone who was in the ground floor of the personal computer revolution, and still has an Apple ][ Standard with the Integer ROM sitting on a shelf somewhere, is that it is Apple Computer that is pulling this crap on its users. It's the kind of thing that one would more reasonably have expected from the likes of the old IBM, or even MIcrosoft. But no, it comes from the company that once stood for freedom in computing.
No thanks. You've fallen a looong way, Mr. Jobs. What little respect I once had for you just jumped out the window.
In a world of does, Mac doesn't. How's that for a marketing tagline?
Some even say that stop motion is cheaper than computer generated animation
Cut out the director's and actors' Salaries from the movies, and guess which one had a higher budget: Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer or Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones.
I'm confused. I thought Attack of the Clones was stop motion.
It was. It stopped the motion of my hand reaching for my wallet to buy tickets.
Slashdot Mirror
The next time Wyoming makes it onto front page news will likely be when the Yellowstone super-volcano caldera explodes. So, yeah, by all means, celebrate while you can.
Ah, another Emmerich fan.
50 * 9 = 450 nukes
anyone think it's funny that we don't allow other countries to have nukes?
I'm not sure what you mean by "funny".
Should the U.S and its allies encourage proliferation of thermonuclear weapons and delivery systems? I don't think so, personally. We aren't discussing tariffs or trade embargoes here, you know. Understand one thing: fairness doesn't matter. Never having them used in war, that's what matters. Also, lots of other countries have them, you know. We just don't like countries whose leaders are likely to drop them on us, or on our allies, to have them. We also don't like nations who are incapable of securing their weapons systems to have them, or who are so politically unstable that an atom bomb or two might get "lost" during the transfer of power to a new government.
I might add that we've reduced the sheer quantity of nuclear armaments (as well as conventional force levels, for that matter) considerably since the height of the Cold War. That 450 is a pitiful remnant of what we once believed we needed.
But-- but-- what about the Mine Shaft Gap?
The mine collapsed a few weeks ago. It was in the news.
Deterrent against who? Against the terrarists? No, not really, you cannot really strike back at them with a nuke.
Against Putin? No, because Putin is not really interested in having a shooting war with the West right now, at least until his family lives there.
Against the Chinese? No, because international trade seems to be the better way to have each other by the balls.
Against the Japanese? Nah, not really, US has bases over there, and their prime minister resigns as soon as he hints about something Americans don't like.
Against Iran or North Korea then? How are they even a threat that would merit deterrent?
So nope, it looks like US nuclear arsenal is definitely not serving as an effective deterrent.
Is it deterring a massive strike from a bitter enemy with thousands of such weapons at his disposal? No, not so much. Is anyone else bothering to build even a fraction of our stock of the things? Nope: because to achieve even a fraction of the threat that the Soviet Union once posed would be far too costly. So I'd say you're wrong: the United States' nuclear arsenal is deterring anyone else from building anything similar: the barrier to entry is too high. I don't see that as a bad thing.
And if I'm wrong, well, then so are you. The global situation is changing and the current status quo will not be maintained forever. We may need them some day.
And for that, we thank them...
Some of us who weren't raised upon and thoroughly steeped in an overcomplicated GUI find that batch files, and scripting in general, very useful indeed.
The logical problem to your conclusion is the 'if' and 'only' parts.
I made no conclusion, merely commented on my observation of an obvious trend (and not only from Apple, Inc, I might add.) And yes, you're absolutely correct that "today you can get music from iTunes, CDs, Amazon, etc.", but that's due entirely to the historical openness of personal computing. But people forget, people can be convinced that there's "a better way", and the truth of this is evidenced by the millions of ostensibly happy iPhone users. Odd, though ... I've encountered a surprising number of people that have dumped their iPhones and gone with an Android-based product, but not because they're geeks or anti-Apple or anything like that. It's just that there were things that the iPhone wouldn't let them do, that a more open platform would. So that's encouraging, and the fact that Android handsets are outselling iPhones by, well, a substantial margin even more so.
... I don't think it's beyond imagination that Jobs & Co. might, at some point, wish to extend their dominion to the desktop and their other portable platforms. Why do you perceive a modern smartphone as being intrinsically different from a personal computer? It's not you know: it's the same technologies squeezed into a smaller container, and all the negative aspects of vendor lock-in that affect an ordinary computer still exist in the smartphone world.
Apple, under Jobs, has exhibited no compunction whatsoever in exerting unprecedented control over users of its personal computers (for that's what an iPhone is, you know, a personal computer.) More to the point, Apple has made an enormous amount of money by exercising that control
Even sadder is that Apple Computer no longer exists. The company is officially known as Apple Inc.
"What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
But you're absolutely right. Apple Computer hasn't existed for a long, long time.
Of course the best piece of all is that you think Apple is schizophrenic, despite everyone of their new products being closed you think the desktop is completely different in every way shape and form despite sharing code base? Nicely done!
It's only different because of tradition, because the vast majority of computer users have been trained by decades of PC experience to expect that openness. The essential dichotomy here is that Apple has trained its own customers to incorrectly perceive smartphones as "appliances" or "gadgets", and not the pocket-sized personal computers that they really are. If you think of a smartphone as being a computer (and in fact, a computer that is a thousand times more powerful than the original Apple ][), you start to feel very much rubbed the wrong way by Apple's thinking here.
This is very much a "boil the frog slowly enough and he won't notice" situation. Apple is getting, has gotten, people accustomed to lock-down on their smartphones, and I cannot believe that the ultimate goal isn't to do the exact same thing with those machines that are more commonly known as "personal computers". And why shouldn't they? As long as you have a customers who don't really want to make the effort to learn anything about their computer, don't want to take any responsibility for it, who are happy being led around by that brass ring in their nose, this plan actually makes perfect sense.
In a way, it's the same mindset that drives big media: absolute, unquestioned control, from cradle to grave, in order to extract/extort money at every step. Now, the media outfits have largely failed in this, because they failed to consider the consumers' needs and wants at any level: just the familiar, authoritarian "do exactly what we tell you with our 'intellectual property' or we'll sue your ass, you sheep." Apple, on the other had, offers some real benefits to their customers, supplies a polished user experience backed by expert marketing, and is so smooth about it that users don't even know they're being taken for a ride.
Now, given the fact that Apple supplies an entire package, hardware, software and online services, they will very probably pull it off. And make billions in the process. If anyone wonders why Apple doesn't license the Mac operating system to any other hardware vendor, well, this is why. Control. Jobs has been waiting a long, long time for technology to catch up with his vision of what personal computing should be. I don't agree with it, myself, which is why I'm a Linux and Windows guy. But I know a lot of people who buy into it, and they seem generally happy about it. I'm not particularly worried about Apple suddenly taking over the personal computer market: Apple's always been a marginal operation and they've always been happy with that. What concerns me more is that the success Apple has been enjoying may give other vendors some very bad ideas.
Hm. May be time to buy some Apple stock.
It astonishes me that people can say there is no evidence for this when it is entirely consistent with Apple for as long as Steve Jobs has run the company going all the way back to Appletalk.
Goes back further than that. Out of the hacker world was the Apple ][ born, and users thus had very different expectations from their machines and the companies that supplied them. Once personal computing went more mainstream (and yes, Jobs and Apple did play a major part in that) and the Macintosh was released, Jobs referred to it as a " computing appliance." So his mindset was very clear even back then: it just took time, technology and the rise of a global, public network to make his drain-bamaged vision happen.
Mm-hmm.
Yep. In this case, do you trust the guy pushing the buttons.
Dammit Chrome, stop hitting that stupid "Post Anonymously" checkbox for me.
You sounded totally rational until you throw your punchline.
Sorry if I didn't express myself well enough for you to get the point.
Should Sony, Samsung, and all the other television manufacturers also give the networks a cut of their profits? Surely one of the primary uses of any television is to watch shows put out by the networks.
Ha, well, I'm sure that the CEOs of all those companies would think that a great idea. They also know that it's patently ridiculous and would never happen.
It turns out the executives are just insane.
Why? Because Google ( a business in the business of making money ) wants to make boat loads of money on their product without paying for it? The "crappy" shows you were not watching anyway are a product. If Google wants to make money off of them, than perhaps they should pay the networks a cut of the take? It sounds like a reasonable idea to me...
Nonsense. I remember a few years ago a BMG executive said that "he was waiting for Apple to share out some of the profits from iPod sales." That was a ridiculous statement then, and it hasn't changed now.
My guess, and I'm no lawyer, is that you can download programs without violating the law (or violating somebody's copyright), but that uploading is where you may run into some trouble. In the US, both are illegal. It's just that it's far far easier to go after the uploaders, and even that isn't working out that well for the RIAA/MPAA.
I don't believe that's true. In the U.S. it is legal to download pretty much anything, it's just not legal to distribute copyrighted materials. That's why all the RIAA file-sharing cases have been against people who were sharing files, not those who were only downloading files. Turn off shared folders in your Gnutella client and that's that. It's also why Bit Torrent is inherently unsafe, from a legal perspective, because you don't have the option to not share data if you want to participate in the swarm. Well, some people run hacked clients that won't share or seed, but I don't know how common or effective that is.
Now, that doesn't make you safe from a lawsuit, because these guys don't really care about right and wrong. But it's the distributor who is the one who is committing copyright infringement.
Perhaps if Con Kolivas named his scheduler ...named his scheduler something else, it might gain more traction ...
x
Maybe it's like the BFG9000 in the original DOOM.
And yet, on balance, he has done a lot of good. Consumers like his products. They are selling faster than Apple can make them in many cases. The majority of Apple's revenue comes from products that didn't exist 5 years ago at all. I can't say that my life is any worse for my Macbook Pro, my iPad and my Mac Mini which runs my media center. In fact, I'd say it's better. I don't have an iPhone - I think the Nexus One is an all-around better phone. But the other stuff? Rocks. All of it. Better than anything the competitors make.
Apples products, per se, aren't the issue, and never have been. It's what kind of ecosystem that Jobs plans to build (or to allow!) around it that is the question, and more to the point, if other companies begin to emulate those policies, will it be good for users? That's the real question. You didn't immediately buy into the iPhone hype because you felt that an Android device was a better fit for your needs. I applaud you for that open-mindedness, for it is not common among the Apple crowd. I also happen to agree with you there: Android suited my purposes better as well.
Huh? Since when did apple stand for freedom?? In old days they even did their best to stop people from installing alternative OSes like for example Linux. Is this what you call freedom?
Dude, in the old days Linux hadn't been invented yet, and the Mac was still a gleam in Steve's eye. I'm talking 1977-78 here. You're not old enough.
. I am also surprised to see about half of Slashdot suddenly turning into RIAA spokespersons about piracy in China when usually it's fuck the RIAA!.
No, what you are seeing there are actual RIAA "spokespersons" (and I use the term loosely) using Slashdot to spew their garbage.
I disagree with you that China is the big country to hate. Americans, by and large, don't understand the nature of their own industrial economy, don't understand enough of what China has been doing to that economy (or Japan either, back in the day) to generate any real feelings. Not like we had for the Russians during the Cold War, like a lot of us feel towards Iran (not that Iran is exactly doing anything to assuage the fears upon which those feelings are based, quite the opposite in fact.)
Most of us don't even understand that the wealth and power we accumulated since the dawn of the Industrial Age was due to our ability to make stuff. Honestly, I think my fellow citizens believe that consumer goods fall from trees, or are assembled by little forest fairies that work for free. All we see is that everything we buy, from shoes to clothing to consumer electronics has "Made in China" stamped on it, and because we only care about cheap we don't worry too much about where it comes from, or what throwing away our domestic manufacturing is gong to cost us. China is too distant a threat for us to take to very seriously, even though we should. If we're going to do business with the Devil, we should make an effort to understand how the Devil does business. Maybe then we'll stop getting burned.
But claiming that the bulk of Americans hate China is just ridiculous. Hell, one of my local auto repair shops is run by a Chinese gentleman and his son (both immigrants). I take my car there all the time: they do good work for very reasonable prices, and they are always busy. I doubt that they'd be doing so well if we hated Chinese people.
Now, having said that, I think you'll find very few Americans who will take an admiring stance towards the China's form of government. That's very different from hating an individual because he was born in China, and a lot of people do seem to be able to make that distinction.
The irony is that China has done a lot more damage to American lives (in terms of its destructive influence upon our economy) than 9/11 did, so if we were rational in our expression of hatred maybe we would hate the Chinese more than the Middle Eastern terrorists who knocked down the towers.
While I agree with your main point, you can't deny they don't see copyright as we do, so from our (legal) point of view they ARE stealing movies.
Copyright troll, or media shill? From our (legal) point of view they are violating copyright, and not stealing anything.
It is, again, a fact that quite a few companies' ideas have been stolen.
So then they stopped writing them down in only one place, and now their ideas are only copied.
I think you are a shill. And a sneaky one. You are at minimum a tool, and yet another reason why AC posting should be disabled.
I'm honestly not sure if he's a media shill or just an idiot. The reason I say that is because I personally know some people who think that way, and have no connection whatever with big media.
or because they're too cheap to cough up for the developer license or sign the enterprise agreement that lets you put your own software on the iPad?
You want me to pay money, and sign away my firstborn to the devil, for the privilege of devoting my time & energy to developing software for your nasty little locked down platform? Gross man, just gross.
I agree. As someone who started out on an IBM 360 and graduated to an Apple ][ Standard in 1978 or thereabouts, well, this kinda makes me want to throw up. I really thought very highly of Apple and the Steves at the time, but after the way Jobs dumped the Apple // user base in favor of that "computing appliance" known as the Macintosh I switched to the IBM PC world for my career (industrial controls and what not) and never looked back.The Mac wasn't a "personal computer", a general-purpose device that could be molded into whatever was desired. It was the forerunner of the iPhone, a beige box that would do certain things very well, but wasn't about freedom to do what you want. You may laugh, but when I found out that the Mac didn't have slots, no way to plug in a peripheral card of any kind, I lost interest. Hell, at that time I'd done stuff with the Apple ][ that the Mac couldn't begin to do. One contract I had was for sampling four analog inputs (EEG amplifier outputs) at 100 Khz and displaying wire-frame 3D of the results. I ended up using two machines with 3.6 Mhz turbo cards, one using a custom high-speed digitizer board for sampling, the other used for display and control. The two communicated through a bi-directional parallel port (used a couple of 6521s, if I remember right.) That's what the personal computer was all about, to me anyway. I perceived the original Macintosh as a major step backwards in capability, no matter how polished the GUI.
What disturbs me is not Apple Computer itself: I haven't owned anything from that company in twenty five years (other than an iPod Nano that I got as a gift, and find to be one of the most irritating and limited media players out there. Why can't I set the goddamn equalizer bars the way I want them? My $30 Sanyo lets me do that.) but the fact that Apple is setting a very, very bad example. Other companies are following in their rather disturbing footsteps, and that's bad for users.
or because they're too cheap to cough up for the developer license or sign the enterprise agreement that lets you put your own software on the iPad?
Better questions: why should I pay a hardware manufacturer more money to write software for a portable computer that I just purchased? Why should I pay a hardware manufacturer for the privilege of distributing said software on the same portable computers that other people have purchased? You seem to be buying into this whole idea that we don't really own the equipment we purchase, that we are, at best, only buying the right to use said devices according to whatever terms a corporate entity deems acceptable. You want to rent me an iPad, that's one thing. In exchange for my monthly fee I get to use it under whatever terms are in the rental agreement. Sell it to me, on the other hand, and you had best accept that I will do with it as I please. Otherwise, if you have rigged your product to limit my activities to suit your whim, don't claim you're selling it to me because you're not. The essence of ownership is control, and even if your smooth-talking marketing folks have convinced me otherwise, if I can't run the software of my choice, do the things that I want to do with my computing system, then I'm not really in control, and you still own the equipment.
Developers do not benefit from this, users do not benefit from this, only Apple does. Apple has fifty billion dollars cash sitting the bank. Explain to me why I should give that schlock outfit another penny of my hard-earned money to restrict what I can do with my own property?. This is not rocket science. This is a slick operator feeding millions of people (including software developers who should know better) a line, a fabrication, a lie, and convincing them that really, it's for their own good.
I get enough of that from Congress. I don't need it from the technology world as well.
Why did Ubuntu get the credit for using this "open system" you speak of. Why not instead give credit to the other package managers that actually don't suck.
Because Ubuntu is about the highest-profile Linux distro out there right now. People I know who barely grasp the idea there is operating system other than Windows, or (if pressed) the Macintosh, seem to equate Ubuntu with Linux. Mention Mandriva, Opensuse, Mepis, etc. to these people, and they go "What?"
Jobs is turning Apple into the very thing he railed against in the early 80s. The hypocrisy is astounding.
Well, then again Jobs is an asshole. He was an asshole in the seventies, a bigger asshole in the 80's growing by leaps and bounds through the nineties and now he's completely unmanageable. But, has more money. A LOT more money. That's what makes me nervous, he has the power to do a lot of damage.
Longtime Apple developer Dave Winer was also concerned, tweeting during Apple's presentation 'Is this the end of the Mac as an open platform?'
If Apple is restricting operating system features to whitelisted applications, then it is, by definition, no longer an open platform. There are degrees of openness, of course, but given Apple's approach to the iPhone, my guess is that the Mac will eventually become a similar prison.
The news also prompted developer Anil Dash to call for an open alternative to the Mac App Store."
Rather, pick an open alternative to Apple. It's truly remarkable that Steve Jobs is finally starting to make Microsoft look good. And this comes at a time when Windows is, actually, looking halfway decent and MacOS is starting to look a little dated. If Ballmer has half a brain he'll exploit this to the max.
I guess Apple is expecting the same mindset that made the iPod and iPhone so phenomenally successful to carry over into the personal computer world. Time will tell, but truthfully I don't think much of the bulk of Macintosh users' hold on reality, so chances are, Jobs is going to be right once again. Enough people will stand for this that it will make a metric fuckton of money. That depresses me, somehow.
The amazing thing to me, speaking as someone who was in the ground floor of the personal computer revolution, and still has an Apple ][ Standard with the Integer ROM sitting on a shelf somewhere, is that it is Apple Computer that is pulling this crap on its users. It's the kind of thing that one would more reasonably have expected from the likes of the old IBM, or even MIcrosoft. But no, it comes from the company that once stood for freedom in computing.
No thanks. You've fallen a looong way, Mr. Jobs. What little respect I once had for you just jumped out the window.
In a world of does, Mac doesn't. How's that for a marketing tagline?
Some even say that stop motion is cheaper than computer generated animation
Cut out the director's and actors' Salaries from the movies, and guess which one had a higher budget: Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer or Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones.
I'm confused. I thought Attack of the Clones was stop motion.
It was. It stopped the motion of my hand reaching for my wallet to buy tickets.