for a property that has made New Line north of $1 billion in revenue...
Quite a bit north, actually. In point of fact, just shy of three billion dollars. And that's not considering merchandising tie-ins, DVD sales, and all the rest of the "film related" revenue.
So I guess we now know the answer to "what has it got in its pocketses?" A shitload of other people's money!
Some friends of mine currently work at IBM or did within the last year or two. They all used (Microsoft) Office.
I assume some departments of IBM eat their own dog food, but they definitely don't all do it.
There was, and probably still is, a powerful pro-Microsoft faction at IBM. That said, the office version your friends used, given the timing, was almost certainly not saving documents using MSOOXML.
This is about formats, not software packages. It doesn't matter if people use MS-Office. It matters that the default document format is properly standardised, and not under the control of a single vendor.
Neither is the issue about companies: IBM can use MS-Office all they like; it doesn't have the slightest bearing on this discussion.
As things go, you would be 'not stable' by definition if you can not cope with what is/will be rated 'normal':(
The trouble is that "stable" is a relative term, not an absolute one. "Stable" means stable in a given environment. The question we ought to consider here is how far this particular initiative is going to move the definition of stable away from the current baseline.
The worrying thing is that stability is most likely a bell curve. Which would mean that a small shift could result in a huge increase in instability in urban populations.
I think this is a valid cause for concern
Re:Privacy Invasion Repeller for Sale!
on
Will Privacy Sell?
·
· Score: 1
The advantage of your rock is that its hard to imagine a set of circumstances where it might sell my personal
data to spammers. Or to turn it over to various data mining spooks. Or burn everyone's data to an unencrypted cd and "accidentally" mail it to the wrong address. Or go bust and have its data bought by a company not that declines to honour agreements made by Ask.com. Or just plain lie about its privacy policy.
Not that I plan in investing in your scheme, either. But if I had to choose one, the rock would be looking very
appealing.
For keelhauling to be properly effective (as it was intended), you'd have to find an old ship with a barnacle encrusted hull.
I don't see that as being a problem.
All we need to do is haul him under a variety of different hulls until we find one that leave a sufficient number of
wounds on his back. Justice, research and entertainment, all rolled into one!
And I have to say that I'd side with Microsoft here. I mean, when it comes down to it, if the PC can run any version of Windows Vista then it's CAPABLE of running Vista.
Introducing VISTA NULL! All it does is wipe your hard drive and put up a big sign saying "your crappy old computer
is too old to run our fine software - go buy a new one right now" But it is guaranteed to will run on anything from an 8086 onwards.
There. Now they can use that sticker for anything they like. Send your suggestions to "Steve Ballmer, One Microsoft Way..."
Jack is someone who felt they found their cause in life,
it's just that his cause positions him such that he's an
opponent to those who partake in the enjoyment of action games.
Interesting. His actions may be motivated by his faith, but his actions
appear to routinely involve lies and deceit and it is these activities for
which he is being called to account.
I have to say, your defence of the man sounds an awful lot
like "the end justifies the means" to me.
Is that what you really mean to imply?
The correct terminology is never used there - I tried to summarize how the arguments might go.
Fair enough
No I don't. I don't want a DMCA either, or a restriction on fair use rights.
I wasn't keen on the idea of a broadcast flag, either. Or on this notion of Darl McBride's that with the right lawsuit he might seize the copyrights for Linux. The bad guys don't always win.
Why are you sure it would fail? People already put up with non-skipable sections of their DVDs, why wouldn't they swallow this, too?
Because people are starting to realise that they don't have to put up with all those ads? DVRs, adblock software, pirate content... I think people are starting to get a sense of how much they're being advertised at - and I think there's growing resentment at the amount of time ads waste, and at the overly intrusive and manipulative nature of their content.
you are a part of a tiny group who cares about this issue.
Could be. Or, he could be at the forefront of a tidal wave in public opinion.
By preventing the company from shoving misinformation down your throat, you are breaking the license agreement of the movie you are watching - in other words, you are stealing from the company.
They're infringing corporate copyright (let's use the correct terminology here) when they download pirate copies, too. Oddly enough it doesn't seem to discourage very many people.
Based on that it shouldn't be too hard to lobby for a law which takes your adminstrator access away.
What? You want a low to stop me having admin rights on my own computer because the guy next door might do something to eat into the profits of MGM or Paramount? Lots of luck with that one. Let's face it, if anyone thought that might work they'd have tried it to shut down bittorrent.
Remember: the DVD is cheaper this way.
Nah. The DVD costs as much as the market will bear. The cost of the disk in no way reflects the manufacturing costs, and the content has for the most part either been paid for by the box office takings, or else it's been written off. If it's enough of a commercial proposition to make it worth stocking on shelves in meatspace stores, then the chances are it's the former case.
They might drop the cost of the ad supported DVDs in the sort term to try and encourage adoption, but once the format approaches universal adoption, I can't see any reason why the prices wouldn't wind up about the same in the long run.
I think what they are going to try to do is make it so the commercials are quite bearable.
The trouble is: that's a content issue, and not a technical one. IBM can dictate the former, but it'll be the ad agencies who ultimately decide the latter. Even if the first ones are gentle and unobtrusive, it'll only be a matter of time before someone decides the medium is ripe for aggressive exploitation, and wham!
It's like the claptrap about selling at a cheaper price. It won't happen. Either the ads are accepted and we get DVDs at the old price plus ads, or they'll fail and vanish without trace. In either case, the DVD vendors are going to charge all the market can bear; it's not like the cost of a DVD is related to the cost of production in any meaningful way in the first place.
If you were to spend 10 years or so devoting your spare time to building a piece of software that was really good,
and that people really wanted to use, a big corporation might find it worth their while to employ you as well. That way you'd be able to work on your hobby full time, and your software would evolve faster.
I don't see how that changes the nature of the undertaking in any significant way. And if you're trying to suggest that the resources spent on developing Linux are in any comparable to the those MS sunk into developing Vista, or even the
8 billion TFA tells us they burnt on their consumer electronics division... well, you're
going to need a few more citations to establish your point, if that's the case.
I'm still not convinced about your use of the word "largely", either.
I have to disagree with your base premise, that the MS/Novel deal is the same as criminal behavior.
I suppose you could read it that way, but that wasn't what I sought to imply.
Supposing housebreaking were legal in your part of the world. Would that make
my hypothetical behaviour from my last post acceptable to you? Would you be
any more reassured by the excuse that I thought your locks too strong for the
burglar to gain access?
It should in theory also continue to get reciprocal help from the OSS community that it contributes to so helpfully
And in fact it is continuing to receive such help. However, in cases where the co-operation goes beyond the
terms of the GPL, they may find that co-operation is a little strained, a little less enthusiastic than once
it was. Novell's standing in the community has been (and continues to be) damaged by their actions in this
matter. And there's no real way around that; a company that was once considered a valued ally has distanced itself
from the community. It shouldn't surprise anyone if people are a little less trusting toward them. It seems
that Novell's helpfulness is rather more self serving than we might have hoped, and their respect for the GPL
extends only so far as the strict letter of the licence. They can't really complain if people's respect for
them operates on the same basis.
We should also bear in mind
that corporations are rarely of a single mind. It's entirely possible that there are both helpful Novell
people and also those who would willing sell the whole open source paradigm down the river if they thought it
would yield a short term profit. My concern is that Novell's CEO seems to favour the latter camp, which means
that the opinions of the helpful faction may not matter much in the long term.
To sum up, Novell gets, money from MS, legal safety net in the case that the US decides to shoot itself in the head, and allow the enforcement of software patents
Which would be all very well, but the US does allow the enforcement of software patents, and has done for some time.
And the movement for their abolition is starting to gather pace, I think it's a bit early to declare a done deal.
I think this deal has really helped on most fronts
I would like to share your optimism. Care to explain how it has helped? Or who? I'm genuinely curious.
So why not take the money, and laugh all the way to the bank?
Because there are more than just MS and Novell involved. And because there are issues of trust at stake.
Look at it this way: suppose you find out I've been talking to your neighborhood thief. Suppose you find out that I've taken money from him to keep lookout while he robs your house. Suppose I then turn around to you and say "it's all right, your house has good locks, he's never going to get. Why shouldn't I take his money and laugh all the way to the bank?". Would you find that reassuring?
Most people would not, I think, and rightly so. I've given no indication that, if the thief did get in, I would do anything to stop him; I've shown a willingness to collaborate with lawbreakers in your town; and I've demonstrated a worrying willingness to betray my associate that suggests I may betray others just as lightly. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
In Novell's case, they've demonstrated a worrying disdain for the community that developed most of the software they sell, and they've given themselves a financial incentive to include MS patents in the code they contribute.
And in doing so, they've lost the trust of a large portion of the community, trust which may prove difficult to regain. And while it's true that doesn't seem to particularly worry Novell, the fact that they hold the community in such low regard is worrying in itself.
What it boils down to, I think, is that stratagems that work well in purely commercial environments don't always work so well in the world of free software. That, for my money, is "why not".
Instead of saying "Microsoft sucks." (we all already know this)
hmmm... but the clever people at Redmond are constantly inventing new forms of suckage, and these need to be discussed. For instance the recent software updates that affected even machines that had disabled updates; that is something people need to know about because it brings into question a widely trusted subsystem of what is probably the world's most widely deployed O/S. Just to pick a single example.
Try saying "[Your flavor of OS] is great, here's why!" (perhaps we might learn something.)
Gentoo is really cool. It's the most flexible distro I've encountered, and great if you have a wide range of computing interests and like to push the envelope a little. That said, it's not for everyone, and the lamentable "ricer" mindset of early enthusiasts have given it a bit of a bad name in some circles. All the same, it suits me just fine.
None of that means we shouldn't also discuss Microsoft.
I can applaud your attempts to inject a little positivity into a debate that all too frequently descends into ritual mud-slinging, and certainly, I hope we can aspire to a higher standard of criticism than "Microsfot Sucks!". On the other hand, there are many valid reasons to discuss Microsoft. To keep silent in the face of their anti-competitive practices and abuses of trust serves MS far more than it does either the free software community or Microsoft's own user base.
M$ always gets in the news somehow, and only in the last 6 years have the geeks learned to substitute another name in its stead into OSS games, software, stories, etc. This is good, the less press they get, the better. It is about the only way to not advertise FOR them.
So, basically: "Don't say mean things about Microsoft, it only makes them stronger"
That's positively Orwellian. "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength; Silence is Criticism"
I don't know which of the Redmond spin doctors came up with that meme, but I hope they gave him a bonus for it.
seeing that they have a readily available closed solution that works with over 99% of their users, yes, I think they can justify it.
They have readily available open solutions that also work for over 99% of their users. I think they need a better justification for excluding tens of thousands of licence payers than "well, it was like, there, you know?"
changing to an open platform would be additional work for them with little apparent payout to them.
They had an open platform using Ogg. They changed that to a closed one, albeit one with a Linux client available. Oddly enough, the work involved doesn't seem to be a barrier when it excludes free operating systems. Even so they could keep the current real system in place for exactly zero effort. Yes, there'd be some wasted effort in terms of the iPlayer, but I don't we should accept failure to plan ahead as a reason for perpetuating stupid decisions.
Now, of course, they want to change to a system that's merely closed to a closed system from a hostile corporation that doesn't offer a client at all, although we'll probably get one with limited functionality. Someday. If we're good. Any bets on how long that'll last with MS in control of the protocol?
When was the last time the BBC had to justify a stupud decision?
I dunno... how about the Andrew Gilligan/David Kelly flap? Or the recent hoo-hah over phone-in lines. Hell, right now, BBC production staff can't even override a poll to choose the name of a kitten without heads having to roll. And that's just off the top of my head.
This lack of accountability is what you get from a company guaranteed money from anyone who watches a TV.
I don't see any way in which the commercial channels are accountable to me or any other member
of the public. If I don't like some decision by ITV, the answer is going to be, "you're not an advertiser, so we don't care". At least the BBC are supposed to be accountable to the British public.
Which of course is why the debate is happening at all, as opposed to us just being told to get lost, which is what would happen if this was a commercial broadcaster.
I still don't think that makes non Windows/MacOS support a priority for them
As a few people point out on the BBC site discussion, no one is asking the BBC to support Linux. What we are asking is that they don't lock us out by selecting a closed protocol, especially one from a company openly hostile to free software.
We're quite happy to organise our own support, thank you. All we ask is that the beeb picks a format where we can do so legally. I really don't see how they can justify any other course of action.
Well they say very clearly that they are partnering with the government and industry and will continue to help meet their needs.
There's an ambiguity in the way they phrase it. The word "their" could refer to the people at Microsoft just as easily as it could the Nigerian government or industry.
... and will continue to partner with government and industry to help meet their needs,"
And while we're at it, whose needs, specifically? Are they helping
the Nigerian government, or industry, or is it just the needs of Microsoft that are being met here?
Yeah, perhaps "amusing" was the wrong word. I'd have used "disturbing" if I actually gave a crap about the direction of gnome,
Sorry, that came across a bit more aggressive than I intended. I meant to have a go at the Gnome Foundation, not yourself.
That said, I don't really care about the direction of Gnome, either. What bothers me is that money that's been donated by people who wanted to help support an open source desktop is being diverted to help Microsoft push a closed standard. I very much doubt that this is what most of the donors had in mind when they contributed to the cause.
I'd suggest forking and following a direction more aligned to getting work done than wanking around with "usability" at the expense of that - but we already have plenty of other desktop environments out there.
Indeed, But I think some of the distros need to reconsider their choice of default environment. For example, maybe it's time Kubuntu was the default Ubuntu download. If Gnome is going to turn into an unpaid division of Microsoft then there are other concerns beyond the misuse of funds.
In any case, I think this needs to be challenged. Microsoft seem to have finally realised that open source is here to stay, and so they're working on subverting the development process in the same way as they'd try to corrupt, say, a standards committee. In which case, we needn't expect the process to be limited to Gnome. Suppose MS buy Trolltech, for instance? If it was just Gnome, I'd agree and say "small loss". But knowing MS, this is likely to be just the beginning.
KDE is what I use, but I'm really bummed that more progress doesn't seem to be getting made on GNUStep
Having used NeXTStep professionally for a year or so, I can sympathise. I use FVWM, but if I was going to go with a heavyweight DE, it'd be KDE.
But I still think we, as a community, would be foolish to abandon Gnome to Novell and their patent-pact buddies
Anyone find it amusing that one of the chief proponents of Gnome... is pushing a non-free standard?
I don't think "amusing" is the term I would have chosen. Anyone out there support the Gnome Foundation
with donations? How do you feel about the organisation using your money do provide free work for Microsoft?
I think we as a community need to think long and hard about our support for Gnome. I know that a lot of
people have an investment in Gnome, either in terms of code contributed, or simply because it's the desktop
they know best; but the further Gnome gets into bed with MS, the more I worry about the wisdom of supporting
the project.
As Queen Victoria might have put it: "we are not amused"
When I was a young boy, my family, like many families had a pet dog. He was good dog on the whole,
and I was very fond of him. He did however like to bark, and sometimes that grew wearisome.
And, as children will sometimes do, I one day found myself wondering about the dogs perspective
on family life. Did he, I wondered, yearn to take a deeper part in the daily discourse of the family?
Could it perhaps be the case that his incessant barking was his attempt to join the daily conversation?
And, young as I was, I thought this to be terribly sad. How tragic to yearn so desperately to communicate
with humans, and yet to find oneself hampered by such a sadly limited vocabulary, and by a brain
woefully unsuited to such forms of cogitation.
And I'm not even sure why I'm telling you this now, save that for some reason, the
memory keeps surfacing in my mind. I read your posts, and I find my mind recalled
to our old family dog, and how all he could do, day in and day out,
was bark, bark, bark, repeating the same forlorn
doggy syllables, over and over again.
You couldn't point out anything the MS-Novell deal did that was contrary to the GPL.
mmm.... but isn't the whole Web 2.0 (dubious term, I know) idea that users get to feed their input back into the system in
unexpected and creative ways? I mean, Slashdot already has a search function, and a "meta" category for Slashdot related stories.
Using the tag "yes" and "no" is pretty worthless in my book.
Of course, if you wanted to do research into which subjects has proven most controversial on/. over a given time period, you could always
search for articles tagged both "yes" and "no". Hard to see how anyone would get a reasonable metric for that, otherwise.
That said, I don't tend to use tags for searching, at least not on Slashdot, anyway. But really, if you control the tags too much,
you just wind up with a parallel set of keyword/section labels. I think it's much more interesting to leave it to the community and
watch how they use them.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite a bit north, actually. In point of fact, just shy of three billion dollars. And that's not considering merchandising tie-ins, DVD sales, and all the rest of the "film related" revenue.
So I guess we now know the answer to "what has it got in its pocketses?" A shitload of other people's money!
fair enough - my browse level hid the posts earlier to that so it looked like you were commenting on the discussion as a whole.
There was, and probably still is, a powerful pro-Microsoft faction at IBM. That said, the office version your friends used, given the timing, was almost certainly not saving documents using MSOOXML.
This is about formats, not software packages. It doesn't matter if people use MS-Office. It matters that the default document format is properly standardised, and not under the control of a single vendor.
Neither is the issue about companies: IBM can use MS-Office all they like; it doesn't have the slightest bearing on this discussion.
The trouble is that "stable" is a relative term, not an absolute one. "Stable" means stable in a given environment. The question we ought to consider here is how far this particular initiative is going to move the definition of stable away from the current baseline.
The worrying thing is that stability is most likely a bell curve. Which would mean that a small shift could result in a huge increase in instability in urban populations.
I think this is a valid cause for concern
The advantage of your rock is that its hard to imagine a set of circumstances where it might sell my personal data to spammers. Or to turn it over to various data mining spooks. Or burn everyone's data to an unencrypted cd and "accidentally" mail it to the wrong address. Or go bust and have its data bought by a company not that declines to honour agreements made by Ask.com. Or just plain lie about its privacy policy.
Not that I plan in investing in your scheme, either. But if I had to choose one, the rock would be looking very appealing.
I don't see that as being a problem.
All we need to do is haul him under a variety of different hulls until we find one that leave a sufficient number of wounds on his back. Justice, research and entertainment, all rolled into one!
Introducing VISTA NULL! All it does is wipe your hard drive and put up a big sign saying "your crappy old computer is too old to run our fine software - go buy a new one right now" But it is guaranteed to will run on anything from an 8086 onwards.
There. Now they can use that sticker for anything they like. Send your suggestions to "Steve Ballmer, One Microsoft Way..."
Interesting. His actions may be motivated by his faith, but his actions appear to routinely involve lies and deceit and it is these activities for which he is being called to account.
I have to say, your defence of the man sounds an awful lot like "the end justifies the means" to me. Is that what you really mean to imply?
Fair enough
I wasn't keen on the idea of a broadcast flag, either. Or on this notion of Darl McBride's that with the right lawsuit he might seize the copyrights for Linux. The bad guys don't always win.
Because people are starting to realise that they don't have to put up with all those ads? DVRs, adblock software, pirate content... I think people are starting to get a sense of how much they're being advertised at - and I think there's growing resentment at the amount of time ads waste, and at the overly intrusive and manipulative nature of their content.
Could be. Or, he could be at the forefront of a tidal wave in public opinion.
They're infringing corporate copyright (let's use the correct terminology here) when they download pirate copies, too. Oddly enough it doesn't seem to discourage very many people.
What? You want a low to stop me having admin rights on my own computer because the guy next door might do something to eat into the profits of MGM or Paramount? Lots of luck with that one. Let's face it, if anyone thought that might work they'd have tried it to shut down bittorrent.
Nah. The DVD costs as much as the market will bear. The cost of the disk in no way reflects the manufacturing costs, and the content has for the most part either been paid for by the box office takings, or else it's been written off. If it's enough of a commercial proposition to make it worth stocking on shelves in meatspace stores, then the chances are it's the former case.
They might drop the cost of the ad supported DVDs in the sort term to try and encourage adoption, but once the format approaches universal adoption, I can't see any reason why the prices wouldn't wind up about the same in the long run.
The trouble is: that's a content issue, and not a technical one. IBM can dictate the former, but it'll be the ad agencies who ultimately decide the latter. Even if the first ones are gentle and unobtrusive, it'll only be a matter of time before someone decides the medium is ripe for aggressive exploitation, and wham!
It's like the claptrap about selling at a cheaper price. It won't happen. Either the ads are accepted and we get DVDs at the old price plus ads, or they'll fail and vanish without trace. In either case, the DVD vendors are going to charge all the market can bear; it's not like the cost of a DVD is related to the cost of production in any meaningful way in the first place.
And your point is?
If you were to spend 10 years or so devoting your spare time to building a piece of software that was really good, and that people really wanted to use, a big corporation might find it worth their while to employ you as well. That way you'd be able to work on your hobby full time, and your software would evolve faster.
I don't see how that changes the nature of the undertaking in any significant way. And if you're trying to suggest that the resources spent on developing Linux are in any comparable to the those MS sunk into developing Vista, or even the 8 billion TFA tells us they burnt on their consumer electronics division ... well, you're
going to need a few more citations to establish your point, if that's the case.
I'm still not convinced about your use of the word "largely", either.
I suppose you could read it that way, but that wasn't what I sought to imply. Supposing housebreaking were legal in your part of the world. Would that make my hypothetical behaviour from my last post acceptable to you? Would you be any more reassured by the excuse that I thought your locks too strong for the burglar to gain access?
And in fact it is continuing to receive such help. However, in cases where the co-operation goes beyond the terms of the GPL, they may find that co-operation is a little strained, a little less enthusiastic than once it was. Novell's standing in the community has been (and continues to be) damaged by their actions in this matter. And there's no real way around that; a company that was once considered a valued ally has distanced itself from the community. It shouldn't surprise anyone if people are a little less trusting toward them. It seems that Novell's helpfulness is rather more self serving than we might have hoped, and their respect for the GPL extends only so far as the strict letter of the licence. They can't really complain if people's respect for them operates on the same basis.
We should also bear in mind that corporations are rarely of a single mind. It's entirely possible that there are both helpful Novell people and also those who would willing sell the whole open source paradigm down the river if they thought it would yield a short term profit. My concern is that Novell's CEO seems to favour the latter camp, which means that the opinions of the helpful faction may not matter much in the long term.
Which would be all very well, but the US does allow the enforcement of software patents, and has done for some time. And the movement for their abolition is starting to gather pace, I think it's a bit early to declare a done deal.
I would like to share your optimism. Care to explain how it has helped? Or who? I'm genuinely curious.
Because there are more than just MS and Novell involved. And because there are issues of trust at stake.
Look at it this way: suppose you find out I've been talking to your neighborhood thief. Suppose you find out that I've taken money from him to keep lookout while he robs your house. Suppose I then turn around to you and say "it's all right, your house has good locks, he's never going to get. Why shouldn't I take his money and laugh all the way to the bank?". Would you find that reassuring?
Most people would not, I think, and rightly so. I've given no indication that, if the thief did get in, I would do anything to stop him; I've shown a willingness to collaborate with lawbreakers in your town; and I've demonstrated a worrying willingness to betray my associate that suggests I may betray others just as lightly. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
In Novell's case, they've demonstrated a worrying disdain for the community that developed most of the software they sell, and they've given themselves a financial incentive to include MS patents in the code they contribute. And in doing so, they've lost the trust of a large portion of the community, trust which may prove difficult to regain. And while it's true that doesn't seem to particularly worry Novell, the fact that they hold the community in such low regard is worrying in itself.
What it boils down to, I think, is that stratagems that work well in purely commercial environments don't always work so well in the world of free software. That, for my money, is "why not".
hmmm... but the clever people at Redmond are constantly inventing new forms of suckage, and these need to be discussed. For instance the recent software updates that affected even machines that had disabled updates; that is something people need to know about because it brings into question a widely trusted subsystem of what is probably the world's most widely deployed O/S. Just to pick a single example.
Gentoo is really cool. It's the most flexible distro I've encountered, and great if you have a wide range of computing interests and like to push the envelope a little. That said, it's not for everyone, and the lamentable "ricer" mindset of early enthusiasts have given it a bit of a bad name in some circles. All the same, it suits me just fine.
None of that means we shouldn't also discuss Microsoft.
I can applaud your attempts to inject a little positivity into a debate that all too frequently descends into ritual mud-slinging, and certainly, I hope we can aspire to a higher standard of criticism than "Microsfot Sucks!". On the other hand, there are many valid reasons to discuss Microsoft. To keep silent in the face of their anti-competitive practices and abuses of trust serves MS far more than it does either the free software community or Microsoft's own user base.
And that's my two ha'porth.
So, basically: "Don't say mean things about Microsoft, it only makes them stronger"
That's positively Orwellian. "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength; Silence is Criticism" I don't know which of the Redmond spin doctors came up with that meme, but I hope they gave him a bonus for it.
They have readily available open solutions that also work for over 99% of their users. I think they need a better justification for excluding tens of thousands of licence payers than "well, it was like, there, you know?"
They had an open platform using Ogg. They changed that to a closed one, albeit one with a Linux client available. Oddly enough, the work involved doesn't seem to be a barrier when it excludes free operating systems. Even so they could keep the current real system in place for exactly zero effort. Yes, there'd be some wasted effort in terms of the iPlayer, but I don't we should accept failure to plan ahead as a reason for perpetuating stupid decisions.
Now, of course, they want to change to a system that's merely closed to a closed system from a hostile corporation that doesn't offer a client at all, although we'll probably get one with limited functionality. Someday. If we're good. Any bets on how long that'll last with MS in control of the protocol?
Enough is enough.
I dunno... how about the Andrew Gilligan/David Kelly flap? Or the recent hoo-hah over phone-in lines. Hell, right now, BBC production staff can't even override a poll to choose the name of a kitten without heads having to roll. And that's just off the top of my head.
I don't see any way in which the commercial channels are accountable to me or any other member of the public. If I don't like some decision by ITV, the answer is going to be, "you're not an advertiser, so we don't care". At least the BBC are supposed to be accountable to the British public.
Which of course is why the debate is happening at all, as opposed to us just being told to get lost, which is what would happen if this was a commercial broadcaster.
As a few people point out on the BBC site discussion, no one is asking the BBC to support Linux. What we are asking is that they don't lock us out by selecting a closed protocol, especially one from a company openly hostile to free software.
We're quite happy to organise our own support, thank you. All we ask is that the beeb picks a format where we can do so legally. I really don't see how they can justify any other course of action.
Do you?
There's an ambiguity in the way they phrase it. The word "their" could refer to the people at Microsoft just as easily as it could the Nigerian government or industry.
And while we're at it, whose needs, specifically? Are they helping the Nigerian government, or industry, or is it just the needs of Microsoft that are being met here?
As if we didn't know the answer.
Sorry, that came across a bit more aggressive than I intended. I meant to have a go at the Gnome Foundation, not yourself.
That said, I don't really care about the direction of Gnome, either. What bothers me is that money that's been donated by people who wanted to help support an open source desktop is being diverted to help Microsoft push a closed standard. I very much doubt that this is what most of the donors had in mind when they contributed to the cause.
Indeed, But I think some of the distros need to reconsider their choice of default environment. For example, maybe it's time Kubuntu was the default Ubuntu download. If Gnome is going to turn into an unpaid division of Microsoft then there are other concerns beyond the misuse of funds.
In any case, I think this needs to be challenged. Microsoft seem to have finally realised that open source is here to stay, and so they're working on subverting the development process in the same way as they'd try to corrupt, say, a standards committee. In which case, we needn't expect the process to be limited to Gnome. Suppose MS buy Trolltech, for instance? If it was just Gnome, I'd agree and say "small loss". But knowing MS, this is likely to be just the beginning.
Having used NeXTStep professionally for a year or so, I can sympathise. I use FVWM, but if I was going to go with a heavyweight DE, it'd be KDE. But I still think we, as a community, would be foolish to abandon Gnome to Novell and their patent-pact buddies
I don't think "amusing" is the term I would have chosen. Anyone out there support the Gnome Foundation with donations? How do you feel about the organisation using your money do provide free work for Microsoft?
I think we as a community need to think long and hard about our support for Gnome. I know that a lot of people have an investment in Gnome, either in terms of code contributed, or simply because it's the desktop they know best; but the further Gnome gets into bed with MS, the more I worry about the wisdom of supporting the project.
As Queen Victoria might have put it: "we are not amused"
Bizzaro-boy, let me share something with you.
When I was a young boy, my family, like many families had a pet dog. He was good dog on the whole, and I was very fond of him. He did however like to bark, and sometimes that grew wearisome.
And, as children will sometimes do, I one day found myself wondering about the dogs perspective on family life. Did he, I wondered, yearn to take a deeper part in the daily discourse of the family? Could it perhaps be the case that his incessant barking was his attempt to join the daily conversation?
And, young as I was, I thought this to be terribly sad. How tragic to yearn so desperately to communicate with humans, and yet to find oneself hampered by such a sadly limited vocabulary, and by a brain woefully unsuited to such forms of cogitation.
And I'm not even sure why I'm telling you this now, save that for some reason, the memory keeps surfacing in my mind. I read your posts, and I find my mind recalled to our old family dog, and how all he could do, day in and day out, was bark, bark, bark, repeating the same forlorn doggy syllables, over and over again.
Hark! I hear dogs, barking.
mmm.... but isn't the whole Web 2.0 (dubious term, I know) idea that users get to feed their input back into the system in unexpected and creative ways? I mean, Slashdot already has a search function, and a "meta" category for Slashdot related stories.
Of course, if you wanted to do research into which subjects has proven most controversial on /. over a given time period, you could always
search for articles tagged both "yes" and "no". Hard to see how anyone would get a reasonable metric for that, otherwise.
That said, I don't tend to use tags for searching, at least not on Slashdot, anyway. But really, if you control the tags too much, you just wind up with a parallel set of keyword/section labels. I think it's much more interesting to leave it to the community and watch how they use them.