And we think we're entitled to it because we are. Humans are inherently creative and all art and science is derivative. It is our human right to improve on what has gone before. It cannot be prevented regardless of what the law says.
So if they won't offer us what we want we'll take it anyway. It's not that people aren't willing to pay - it's that they're not willing to sell. But we'll have our progress whether they'll sell it or not.
The rod you use to measure whether an action is legal or not legal should be a public record. So if this device employs software to perform its function, the software must be in the public record or it should not be used. Noone would stand for secret units to measure the setback for homes, the width of pipes, the diameter of wires required to carry a particular amperage in your home. And nobody should stand for laws or courts that allow for a determination of guilt based on a scale that's not certified by NIST.
If they want to make the law such that aspirated alcohol be no more than x picograms per Liter measured on a scale with no more than +/- 5%, they can do that and get a certified measuring device that works in one pass. Absent that, if the measure is blood alcohol content they should measure the alcohol content of actual blood in a device certified to measure that unit.
Google. Apple. Companies that are on the upstroke. Not companies like MSFT that are flat or negative for the last decade.
And next year? Do you see Microsoft doing something differently this year? Are they about to release a wildly successful desktop OS? Is the next version of Office going to convince a billion people who make less than $1000/yr that they absolutely must do without food, housing and medical care to buy it? Do their server offerings look like the sweeping innovation that's going to convert the rest of the server world by storm? Are they alone in that field without competition that's both better and free? Are the people that made the company the nest egg for a generation even still in charge? No?
That to own your own home free of mortgage and lien is a treasure beyond price. If you can achieve above that an endowment that pays the tax you are ready to begin the next phase of wealth. A debt is a relentless taskmaster: It cares not if you lose your work, your crops, your wife, your car. It does not care if you're injured, disabled or dead. It does not care if the property you mortgaged becomes an unlivable swamp, a pile of ashes, a shamble of earthquake or tornado debris. What it cares about is that on the designated day the payment is due.
Fewer than one first mortgage in 20 is ever paid off in full. All of the rest are refinanced or end on the courthouse steps.
Playing the market with money borrowed from your roof is no different than gambling your rent.
What does this have to do with Microsoft borrowing money? I don't know. I think this action is more about Microsoft's execs hoping to convert from the growth model to the utility model of corporate governance. I don't think it will work. People generally expect a utility to have infrastructure that's out of their reach and expensive to replace. Microsoft's stuff doesn't meet either of those criteria. Server 2003 is not functionally equivalent to Hoover dam.
If you wanted a Linux computer, you should have bought one. You're not going to ever get what you want if you keep encouraging them to use the crap chips and subsystems with secret interfaces.
If you want a Linux laptop, buy a freaking Linux laptop. It's not like they're not all over the place. Here, for example.
If you quit paying them to jerk you around, they'll quit doing it. Capiche?
Since you're talking about the costs... printed matter for a book on, say, Algebra, that hasn't changed in 100 years is going to be cheaper to print once and be done with, than to buy the cheapest available text over and over every year or two. Heck, print it in indelible ink on Tyvek while you're at it and bind it with a lexan and carbon fiber composite.. That way it will last longer.
Hey, here's an idea. Why don't we just embed the software for what the content is supposed to do inside the content? That way we can just execute everything and the data will be able to take care of its own presentation and conversion needs.
What you do is, you put this usb stick in here. Then you push the reset button like this. Wait ten seconds and bang! You're in Linux. Now that you're in Linux you can get click happy without worrying that the next website is going to trash your whole PC.
I feel your pain. It will get much worse before it gets better. Look at the top appointments at US Justice. The content industries are girding for a tough battle and they'll take no prisoners. They intend nothing less than criminal punishments for imaginary offenses.
Thomas Macaulay actually foretold what would happen 150 years ago:
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
Now ask yourself... how many gigabytes on an iPod? Does your store take the 100packs of CDs and DVDs off the pallet, or they just leave the pallet in the aisle to save labor? What do you have that needs 7.5TB of storage in a consumer grade device? Photos? That's 2 million photos. Home movies? That's a lot of family picnics. He was right. People generally no longer care.
I looked over this list. Apparently part of their problem with Pakistan is that Pakistan authorizes the production of medicine for internal use without their permission. Let's see what the CIA has to say about Pakistan:
Pakistan, an impoverished and underdeveloped country, has suffered from decades of internal political disputes, low levels of foreign investment, and declining exports of manufactures. Faced with untenable budgetary deficits, high inflation, and haemorrhaging foreign exchange reserves, the government agreed to an International Monetary Fund Standby Arrangement in November 2008.
I can't bring myself to care that Pakistan makes medicine for its poor people without permission. To just let them die would be evil. I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way. That they can claim this is some "offense" reveals that they lack even the slightest hint of humanity. And so suddenly nobody cares what happens to them and their precious imaginary property.
But that doesn't help you in the here and now. Sorry.
Strangely enough, now I want to hear from Enderle and D'Idiot. I want to hear them whine about the unfainess of it all, how these saints were ridden out of town on a rail when their cause was just. I want to hear them tell the tale of the briefcase with millions of lines of copied code was pilfered from SCO's case in the thick of night.
It is not common for a company to long survive the retirement or loss of its founders. Such a thing is so rare as to be a statistical anomaly. When the founders retire a company loses its purpose, its vision. The replacements chosen are almost never worthy of anything but riding the company down to its demise.
And that was the precise moment when I realized... you're a script. You're a good bot, but no Turing Test win for you. You need to put some typos in there and the occasional grammar error, btw.
There is nothing virtuous about "homogeneous". Quite the opposite. A general purpose computer needs a variety of special purpose circuits. The heterogeneousness (heterogeneity?) of available platforms makes a ripe field in the market for the "suitable for any problem" problem. To get to the next level of adaptability we have to embrace the heterogeneous platform in our programming environment. That way our environment will be able to adapt to the heterogeneous environments they will live in in the future. Work on this is under way.
What Apple needed was somebody to bitch-slap the CPAs. Jobs was the Jobs for the job. And now that he's banished the beancounters to the kid's table the engineers are stepping up. And they're happy. God help you if you're competing against a happy engineer who's making good products because he thinks they're cool. Microsoft could learn a little here. Yeah, 90 hours a week is impressive brutality - but let your engineers get laid now and then and they'll make stuff that is good rather than stuff that meets spec.
Funny thing: now that the engineers are happy, the beancounters are orgasmic. Apple will pass Microsoft in Market Cap next year if current trends continue.
No doubt Apple's got some Moorestown goodness in store for next year. But except for this one quiet comment you won't see it coming, because that's how they roll in Cupertino.
The iPhone's potential for just about everything is pretty well proven at this point. We may have found the form factor + interface device for the 21st century. Now if only the damned thing had a projector in it so geezers like me wouldn't have to squint at our - er - videos... and bluetooth so we could use this neat keyboard, we'd be all set.
They've never allowed 2-version downgrades before. Why should they start? I actually thought that's why they went with the every-second-version is usable scheme in the first place. Think of the even numbered versions as betas and you'll do fine. One new working version every 6-10 years. They can't be expected to keep up with Linux: they only have money, not passion.
It may only be dumb luck that is separating us from a killer of 10s of millions.
Or it may be math. The prestrain has to infect a huge quantity of people so that it can get reproduction events up to a high enough number that an improbable critical evil mutation becomes likely. Because if you roll the dice enough times...
BTW, there are 6 times as many humans as there were then so it has to 12% as infectious or at infectious parity the evil mutation is 36 times more likely. We move around about 100 times as much so... yeah, we've got about six weeks.
Somewhere in here Reverend Malthus is having a big laugh.
In the 1918 pandemic the world was swept by a mild version that killed very few and infected many. And then in six months in the biomass of humanity the mutagenic properties of influenza found a superflu that killed, by some reports, 100 million or about 10% of all living people at that time. At that, some think we were lucky. It could have been muchworse.
Slashdot Mirror
And we think we're entitled to it because we are. Humans are inherently creative and all art and science is derivative. It is our human right to improve on what has gone before. It cannot be prevented regardless of what the law says.
So if they won't offer us what we want we'll take it anyway. It's not that people aren't willing to pay - it's that they're not willing to sell. But we'll have our progress whether they'll sell it or not.
It happens that the Net thinks Sony Pictures wasn't worth it too.
So the feeling is mutual.
We're about to see the end of per-processor licensing, so you may get your wish.
They're moving to per-core and per-VM now. That makes much better sense.
The rod you use to measure whether an action is legal or not legal should be a public record. So if this device employs software to perform its function, the software must be in the public record or it should not be used. Noone would stand for secret units to measure the setback for homes, the width of pipes, the diameter of wires required to carry a particular amperage in your home. And nobody should stand for laws or courts that allow for a determination of guilt based on a scale that's not certified by NIST.
If they want to make the law such that aspirated alcohol be no more than x picograms per Liter measured on a scale with no more than +/- 5%, they can do that and get a certified measuring device that works in one pass. Absent that, if the measure is blood alcohol content they should measure the alcohol content of actual blood in a device certified to measure that unit.
Google. Apple. Companies that are on the upstroke. Not companies like MSFT that are flat or negative for the last decade.
And next year? Do you see Microsoft doing something differently this year? Are they about to release a wildly successful desktop OS? Is the next version of Office going to convince a billion people who make less than $1000/yr that they absolutely must do without food, housing and medical care to buy it? Do their server offerings look like the sweeping innovation that's going to convert the rest of the server world by storm? Are they alone in that field without competition that's both better and free? Are the people that made the company the nest egg for a generation even still in charge? No?
Then what makes their stock look cheap to you?
That to own your own home free of mortgage and lien is a treasure beyond price. If you can achieve above that an endowment that pays the tax you are ready to begin the next phase of wealth. A debt is a relentless taskmaster: It cares not if you lose your work, your crops, your wife, your car. It does not care if you're injured, disabled or dead. It does not care if the property you mortgaged becomes an unlivable swamp, a pile of ashes, a shamble of earthquake or tornado debris. What it cares about is that on the designated day the payment is due.
Fewer than one first mortgage in 20 is ever paid off in full. All of the rest are refinanced or end on the courthouse steps. Playing the market with money borrowed from your roof is no different than gambling your rent.
What does this have to do with Microsoft borrowing money? I don't know. I think this action is more about Microsoft's execs hoping to convert from the growth model to the utility model of corporate governance. I don't think it will work. People generally expect a utility to have infrastructure that's out of their reach and expensive to replace. Microsoft's stuff doesn't meet either of those criteria. Server 2003 is not functionally equivalent to Hoover dam.
Maybe they're planning on buying the Justice Department outright to avoid any future "misunderstandings".
The Recording Industry isn't likely to sell their prize to Microsoft.
If you wanted a Linux computer, you should have bought one. You're not going to ever get what you want if you keep encouraging them to use the crap chips and subsystems with secret interfaces.
If you want a Linux laptop, buy a freaking Linux laptop. It's not like they're not all over the place. Here, for example.
If you quit paying them to jerk you around, they'll quit doing it. Capiche?
Since you're talking about the costs... printed matter for a book on, say, Algebra, that hasn't changed in 100 years is going to be cheaper to print once and be done with, than to buy the cheapest available text over and over every year or two. Heck, print it in indelible ink on Tyvek while you're at it and bind it with a lexan and carbon fiber composite.. That way it will last longer.
So you've not read a mainstream textbook lately then?
Of course without the supervision of a court the reason could be to find out who the cop's ex wife is fooling around with.
Hey, here's an idea. Why don't we just embed the software for what the content is supposed to do inside the content? That way we can just execute everything and the data will be able to take care of its own presentation and conversion needs.
What you do is, you put this usb stick in here. Then you push the reset button like this. Wait ten seconds and bang! You're in Linux. Now that you're in Linux you can get click happy without worrying that the next website is going to trash your whole PC.
I feel your pain. It will get much worse before it gets better. Look at the top appointments at US Justice. The content industries are girding for a tough battle and they'll take no prisoners. They intend nothing less than criminal punishments for imaginary offenses.
Thomas Macaulay actually foretold what would happen 150 years ago:
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
Now ask yourself... how many gigabytes on an iPod? Does your store take the 100packs of CDs and DVDs off the pallet, or they just leave the pallet in the aisle to save labor? What do you have that needs 7.5TB of storage in a consumer grade device? Photos? That's 2 million photos. Home movies? That's a lot of family picnics. He was right. People generally no longer care.
I looked over this list. Apparently part of their problem with Pakistan is that Pakistan authorizes the production of medicine for internal use without their permission. Let's see what the CIA has to say about Pakistan:
Pakistan, an impoverished and underdeveloped country, has suffered from decades of internal political disputes, low levels of foreign investment, and declining exports of manufactures. Faced with untenable budgetary deficits, high inflation, and haemorrhaging foreign exchange reserves, the government agreed to an International Monetary Fund Standby Arrangement in November 2008.
I can't bring myself to care that Pakistan makes medicine for its poor people without permission. To just let them die would be evil. I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way. That they can claim this is some "offense" reveals that they lack even the slightest hint of humanity. And so suddenly nobody cares what happens to them and their precious imaginary property.
But that doesn't help you in the here and now. Sorry.
On the domain names. SCO.COM is just begging to be another rotten.com, and caldera.com offers the potential for some intriguing third level domains.
That's the fat lady clearing her throat.
Strangely enough, now I want to hear from Enderle and D'Idiot. I want to hear them whine about the unfainess of it all, how these saints were ridden out of town on a rail when their cause was just. I want to hear them tell the tale of the briefcase with millions of lines of copied code was pilfered from SCO's case in the thick of night.
And then I want them to vanish into ignominy.
There's no way to cover the design costs off the miniscule number of chips compared to Intel and AMD.
On the other hand, AMD's market cap is $2.9B. Apple could buy them. Then the economy of scale would work out, wouldnt it?
It is not common for a company to long survive the retirement or loss of its founders. Such a thing is so rare as to be a statistical anomaly. When the founders retire a company loses its purpose, its vision. The replacements chosen are almost never worthy of anything but riding the company down to its demise.
Right up until here...
a homogeneous one
And that was the precise moment when I realized... you're a script. You're a good bot, but no Turing Test win for you. You need to put some typos in there and the occasional grammar error, btw.
There is nothing virtuous about "homogeneous". Quite the opposite. A general purpose computer needs a variety of special purpose circuits. The heterogeneousness (heterogeneity?) of available platforms makes a ripe field in the market for the "suitable for any problem" problem. To get to the next level of adaptability we have to embrace the heterogeneous platform in our programming environment. That way our environment will be able to adapt to the heterogeneous environments they will live in in the future. Work on this is under way.
But I'm a script too, so it's ok.
What Apple needed was somebody to bitch-slap the CPAs. Jobs was the Jobs for the job. And now that he's banished the beancounters to the kid's table the engineers are stepping up. And they're happy. God help you if you're competing against a happy engineer who's making good products because he thinks they're cool. Microsoft could learn a little here. Yeah, 90 hours a week is impressive brutality - but let your engineers get laid now and then and they'll make stuff that is good rather than stuff that meets spec.
Funny thing: now that the engineers are happy, the beancounters are orgasmic. Apple will pass Microsoft in Market Cap next year if current trends continue.
No doubt Apple's got some Moorestown goodness in store for next year. But except for this one quiet comment you won't see it coming, because that's how they roll in Cupertino.
The iPhone's potential for just about everything is pretty well proven at this point. We may have found the form factor + interface device for the 21st century. Now if only the damned thing had a projector in it so geezers like me wouldn't have to squint at our - er - videos... and bluetooth so we could use this neat keyboard, we'd be all set.
They've never allowed 2-version downgrades before. Why should they start? I actually thought that's why they went with the every-second-version is usable scheme in the first place. Think of the even numbered versions as betas and you'll do fine. One new working version every 6-10 years. They can't be expected to keep up with Linux: they only have money, not passion.
It may only be dumb luck that is separating us from a killer of 10s of millions.
Or it may be math. The prestrain has to infect a huge quantity of people so that it can get reproduction events up to a high enough number that an improbable critical evil mutation becomes likely. Because if you roll the dice enough times...
BTW, there are 6 times as many humans as there were then so it has to 12% as infectious or at infectious parity the evil mutation is 36 times more likely. We move around about 100 times as much so... yeah, we've got about six weeks.
Somewhere in here Reverend Malthus is having a big laugh.
In the 1918 pandemic the world was swept by a mild version that killed very few and infected many. And then in six months in the biomass of humanity the mutagenic properties of influenza found a superflu that killed, by some reports, 100 million or about 10% of all living people at that time. At that, some think we were lucky. It could have been much worse.
But don't panic.
Malthus was right.