Jeez, I could go on for days. Do you seriously wonder why there's so much religion-oriented trolling?
Stalin killed millions of people. He wasn't a religious fanatic. Neither was Mao. Extremists have been doing horrible things in the name of a lot of things since the beginning of time. I'll seed that more people have probably been killed over religion than anything else, but trust me, if tomorrow everybody was suddenly an atheist there would still be mass murder, terrorism and violence. It's human nature and group think that are the problem, not religion.
I had to be talked, wined, dined, and peer-pressured into buying my first MacBook Pro this past January.
Well therein lies the problem. When the author got his MacBook Pro in January, Tiger had been on the market for quite a while and Apple had plenty of time to work out the vast majority of the kinks. Problems in new operating systems, including Vista, should be expected. The old "wait for SP1" adage applied long before Windows and it's true for just about any piece of software. The bottom line is that no matter how much testing you do, the release version of software is sure to be installed on many more systems than a beta and there are sure to be problems that will be uncovered that weren't during the beta process.
If you want the best experience possible with a new OS, don't upgrade until it's been on the market for a while. Heck, I was told the same thing when I bought my first car. If it's a brand new model that's never been on the market before, wait until the second or third rev.
A lot of people (including myself) have held this position for a long time. Abortion is not mentioned, not even indirectly, in the federal constitution. Hence, like other unmentioned issues, it falls back to the individual states and the people.
Unless, of course, there is a amendment to the Constitution that could then trump the states. That's the beauty of the Constitution as it was originally written and interpreted. If the vast majority of the states (and thus the people) want it dealt with at the federal level then the Constitution can be amended (in several ways), otherwise the issue is dealt with individually by the states.
That, IMHO, is what is so unfortunate about the power grab initiated by the federal goverment and constantly perpetuated by the courts, states aren't free to deal with these issues as our forefathers intended. These social issues that divide our country wouldn't be national issues at all if the federal goverment kept out of it. They would be dealt with at the state level and with those issues out of the way, congressional and presidential elections could focus on more important issues.
You'd also have much greater ideological diversity in the parties on the national level. A Republican or Democrat from a conservative southern state would probably hold much different views on issues than a Republican or Democrat from a more liberal state. We'd have much more moderate national parties and IMHO that would be a good thing.
I thought the same thing when I read about this new device from Amazon. My iPhone already functions like an eBook reader when I'm reading long documents on the web and PDFs or Word Documents from the mail application. You'd think it would be rather trivial to add support for ebook's to iTunes.
If America sucks so badly, stop posting on an American technical site you whinny little Europeon (intentional misspelling) bitch. I laugh out loud at the Europeon "little brother" syndrome.
You show me a device that can do everything the iPhone can do, as easily as the iPhone can do it. Yeah, it's overpriced, but I've yet to see a cell phone / mp3 player / video player / mini PDA that is as easy and yes, as fun, to use as the iPhone. It doesn't do everything I'd like it to do, but it does the things that it does heads and tails better than any other phone I've used in the past and was incredibly easy to setup.
Does not having MMS suck? Yes. Is Edge slow? Yes. Could the camera be better? Yes. Does not having flash in the browser bother me? Sometimes, other times it's a feature. The bottom line is that I'll happily trade those for the slick, built in iPod, the ability to easily download and watch TV shows I missed or movies both on the phone with it's large, clear screen and on any TV (I bought the cable) and everything else it does (easily check the weather, browse my photos, check e-mail, browse the web in an actual browser, easily get directions and map routes, have a calendar and address book that syncs with my computer, etc).
I love the phone. Yes, I paid to much for it, yes there are other phones that can do all of the above and more, but none of them can do it in the way the iPhone does it.
It's the perfect phone / mp3 player / portable video player / smart phone for the average consumer.
Repeat after me, "Apple is a hardware company". One more time, "Apple is a hardware company". They could care less about selling you software. They want you to buy the complete platform from them so they can retain control over the entire user experience. I'd say their current stock price backs up that strategy pretty well. If you want OS X, buy a Mac, if you don't have the for a Mac then keep saving until you do.
You may spend twice as much as you want to spend, but you're computer will probably last you twice as long, so it even outs in the end.
While it's logical and not surprising, I find it quite shocking to see them be so cavalier, and even hypocritical, about it.
Why? Show a me a group or individual publicly campaigning for a cause that isn't cavalier and, in some cases, downright hypocritical. Both conservative and liberal groups and individuals do this all the time and I'm tired of it. Right wing "pro life" advocates who seem to have no problem supporting a war in which innocent people are dieing every day spring to mind. As does Al Gore and the host of other leftist celebrities who try and bring attention to global warming by traveling the world in private energy wasting jets and then get from event to event via SUV once they've landed.
I'm sick and tired of the "do as I say, not as I do crowd". Shut the hell up you shameless self promoters.
A proper clipboard would also be nice. The fact that you can't copy and paste more than text between applications is laughable, and even simple text can be iffy from time to time.
So one guy who owns an iPhone (and Apple stock) writes an argument, based on his own limited experiences with an iPhone and a Nokia, without any precise measurements, concluding that EDGE is better for mobile web browsing than 3G.
Clearly you didn't bother to RTFA. The author makes the argument that while 3G networks have more bandwidth than EDGE (they can transfer data at a faster rate), that higher bandwidth comes at a cost of higher latency (the time it takes for the transfer to begin) and more power consumption. He, correctly, points out that the higher latency of a 3G network can make your browsing experience slower than EDGE depending on the type of content you're browsing. If you're dealing with large files (think audio and video intensive sites) then having the higher bandwidth of 3G is an advantage but if your dealing with a typical website (made up of many small files) having the lower latency of EDGE is an advantage.
What's the point of having a connection that is twice as fast when transferring small files if the time it takes for that connection to begin is twice as long? The more small files being transfered, the "slower" things will seem.
My boss learned the difference in the late 90's the hard way. We were stuck sharing a dial-up connection at the office and my boss wanted a higher speed connection so he tried a satellite. I tried to explain the difference between bandwidth and latency and how they can affect your experience. He didn't get the difference and after the satellite was installed he complained like crazy when browsing the web because the connection didn't seem any faster than when using our old 56K modem. It was only when downloading large files from the web that you really felt the effects of the increased bandwidth.
The law is the law. If you don't like the law, change it at the ballots, not the jury box.
While I agree with that statement in principle as it pertains to truly democratic nations, I can no longer agree with it in practice as it pertains to the United States of American as I no longer believe that citizens have any real choice at the ballot box when it comes to many important issues. Both the Republican and Democrats are owned by corporations. They primarily choose to differentiate themselves on "wedge" social, environmental and foreign policy issues (and when one party or the other happens to come to power, not much in the way of the "wedge" issues that were campaigned upon ends up truly changing... see the 2006 Congressional elections and Iraq).
As far as I'm concerned they are two sides of the same coin. I read somewhere that the majority of Americans consider themselves fiscally conservative but socially liberal. That's how I'd describe myself. Where is the party that represents us?
"Making Available" was originally used by shoplifters to explain that it was the fault of the supermarket that they stole the goods. Id did not stand up then (1940's?) and sure as hell won't now in most countries, on account of this "prior art". In the USA, YMMV.
Thank you for successfully arguing my point. "Making Available" is different than copying (or in your example stealing). Simply because a store made an item "available" to be taken doesn't mean the store was giving permission for someone who didn't pay for the item to take it just as making a work "available" on a P2P network to be copied doesn't mean the end user making it available has given permission for someone to make a copy.
I always thought the "making available" claim was dubious at best. If I'm reading a book in a restaurant and I leave it there by mistake I can be sued by it's author because I've made the content available for someone to copy? That's absurd. That example is a vast oversimplification of the issue at hand but that's essentially what the RIAA was arguing and it's laughable.
Copyright is exactly that, your right (or lake thereof) to make a copy of something. Making something available to be copied is not the same thing as actually making a copy. There's a very important and practical line there. If you were guilty of copyright infringement every time you made something available to be copied you'd better carry every book or copyrighted piece of paper with you at all times or you'd be infringing copyright by making that document available for someone else to copy when it's not in your immediate possession. You better not go to sleep either. You're evil college aged brother or sister might steal said book or document it and copy it while you sleep.
You can argue all day long about the person's intent when they have music files on a P2P network but the intent to make something available for copying doesn't (yet) factor into the laws governing copyright infringement as many courts are interpreting them. The real question is how long will our laws stay that way? It's only a matter of time before intent becomes a crime. I bet the RIAA lawyer goons have already written the text of laws that factor in intent and are just waiting for a Senator and Congressman who owe them and have the ability to sneak it into the next copyright or patent "reform" act intended to "update" our laws so they "keep pace with the rapidly changing technological landscape" while "protecting" the rights of artists. That's always the kind of language used when politicians (corporations) want to further erode consumer rights.
Sucks to live in a backwater country. The rest of us are happy to download stupid Hollywood movies from Pirate Bay at 100 MBit/s using the municipal fiber network for 15$/month.:)
Those of us who live in the such a so cold "backwater country" laugh that you actually believe you're only paying $15 dollars a month when you're really paying much more than that to download those stupid Hollywood movies when you factor in the extra tax money collected from you and used to subsidize the infrastructure.
$15 dollars is a small percent of the actual cost you pay. You're just too stupid to understand that. You actually believe that when the goverment forcefully takes money from you and spends it to pay 80% of the cost of something and then charges you an additional 20% on top of that if you want to actually use what you've already partially paid for, that you're getting some kind of deal.
Every few years, I check in on how OpenOffice.org Writer compares to Microsoft Word. The first comparison came in 2002, the second in 2005. In those two comparisons, OpenOffice.org emerged as superior...
Or you could simply innovate and code things yourself and then not release the source at all. If you need to use another developers code be a man, pay the appropriate frees and license it. Oh and make it run on Vista only!
Yours Truly,
Steve Ballmer
You make a great point. I love the iPhone (I'm posting from it now) but the lack of an SDK (and thus easily installable 3rd party apps) is a draw back. I think Apple will release one. Even if they don't, I think the open source community will come up with a solution. The software to unlock and customize the phone and to install 3rd party apps is out there already. It won't be long until some hacker brings them all togather with a nice GUI so the less technically inclined can install apps themselves. Still, if Apple wants to compete with Windows mobile they'll need to release an SDK.
I see this as a positive step. DRM limits the devices and/or software you can use to play back the media you've purchased. It affects our fair use rights as consumers and therefore it needs to go. I think watermarking is a better solution for those of us who want to purchase our media in an unencumbered format to use in accordance with our fair use rights.
The only potential problem I can see is what happens if a device that you've got your legally purchased media on is stolen and the person who steals it uploads some or all of that content? What happens if, say, you buy a new PC, copy all of your legally purchased media to the new PC, delete it from your old PC and either give the old PC away or sell it and the new owner runs an undelete program and recovers the media and then uploads it?
I can see a lot of ways that watermarking could bite someone in the ass if they aren't careful with their files.
We've got a bunch of idiots running our public schools. Let's focus on getting 90% of kids reading, writing and thinking critically with math and science skills up to the proper pre-collegiate levels by the 12th grade before we even think about making them declare a major.
I've been out of college for several years now but when I was a freshmen I heard professor after professor bemoan the fact that more and more kids were enrolling without having mastered what they considered the "basics". So you had freshman taking courses at the college level learning things they should have been taught in high school. This wasn't a community college either, this was the public university with the highest admission standards in the state.
Not every piece of software someone may want to install on their Linux system will be included in the distro. Using that excuse is a major cop out therefore the original statement stands. Installing programs on Linux is much more complicated then installing software on Windows. Installing software that's "a part of the distro" is just as easy on Windows as it is on Linux Linux. Nice try.
Consistent copy and paste functionality beyond text between applications and sane software installation programs. Until Linux has the same it will remain a joke on the desktop.
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I'm not a pirate, I'm an undocumented customer.
Stalin killed millions of people. He wasn't a religious fanatic. Neither was Mao. Extremists have been doing horrible things in the name of a lot of things since the beginning of time. I'll seed that more people have probably been killed over religion than anything else, but trust me, if tomorrow everybody was suddenly an atheist there would still be mass murder, terrorism and violence. It's human nature and group think that are the problem, not religion.
Well therein lies the problem. When the author got his MacBook Pro in January, Tiger had been on the market for quite a while and Apple had plenty of time to work out the vast majority of the kinks. Problems in new operating systems, including Vista, should be expected. The old "wait for SP1" adage applied long before Windows and it's true for just about any piece of software. The bottom line is that no matter how much testing you do, the release version of software is sure to be installed on many more systems than a beta and there are sure to be problems that will be uncovered that weren't during the beta process.
If you want the best experience possible with a new OS, don't upgrade until it's been on the market for a while. Heck, I was told the same thing when I bought my first car. If it's a brand new model that's never been on the market before, wait until the second or third rev.
Unless, of course, there is a amendment to the Constitution that could then trump the states. That's the beauty of the Constitution as it was originally written and interpreted. If the vast majority of the states (and thus the people) want it dealt with at the federal level then the Constitution can be amended (in several ways), otherwise the issue is dealt with individually by the states.
That, IMHO, is what is so unfortunate about the power grab initiated by the federal goverment and constantly perpetuated by the courts, states aren't free to deal with these issues as our forefathers intended. These social issues that divide our country wouldn't be national issues at all if the federal goverment kept out of it. They would be dealt with at the state level and with those issues out of the way, congressional and presidential elections could focus on more important issues.
You'd also have much greater ideological diversity in the parties on the national level. A Republican or Democrat from a conservative southern state would probably hold much different views on issues than a Republican or Democrat from a more liberal state. We'd have much more moderate national parties and IMHO that would be a good thing.
I thought the same thing when I read about this new device from Amazon. My iPhone already functions like an eBook reader when I'm reading long documents on the web and PDFs or Word Documents from the mail application. You'd think it would be rather trivial to add support for ebook's to iTunes.
If America sucks so badly, stop posting on an American technical site you whinny little Europeon (intentional misspelling) bitch. I laugh out loud at the Europeon "little brother" syndrome.
Apparently that's not the case if you're from New Jersey. Voters their seem to have cast ballots from beyond the grave in previous elections.
You show me a device that can do everything the iPhone can do, as easily as the iPhone can do it. Yeah, it's overpriced, but I've yet to see a cell phone / mp3 player / video player / mini PDA that is as easy and yes, as fun, to use as the iPhone. It doesn't do everything I'd like it to do, but it does the things that it does heads and tails better than any other phone I've used in the past and was incredibly easy to setup.
Does not having MMS suck? Yes. Is Edge slow? Yes. Could the camera be better? Yes. Does not having flash in the browser bother me? Sometimes, other times it's a feature. The bottom line is that I'll happily trade those for the slick, built in iPod, the ability to easily download and watch TV shows I missed or movies both on the phone with it's large, clear screen and on any TV (I bought the cable) and everything else it does (easily check the weather, browse my photos, check e-mail, browse the web in an actual browser, easily get directions and map routes, have a calendar and address book that syncs with my computer, etc).
I love the phone. Yes, I paid to much for it, yes there are other phones that can do all of the above and more, but none of them can do it in the way the iPhone does it.
It's the perfect phone / mp3 player / portable video player / smart phone for the average consumer.
Repeat after me, "Apple is a hardware company". One more time, "Apple is a hardware company". They could care less about selling you software. They want you to buy the complete platform from them so they can retain control over the entire user experience. I'd say their current stock price backs up that strategy pretty well. If you want OS X, buy a Mac, if you don't have the for a Mac then keep saving until you do. You may spend twice as much as you want to spend, but you're computer will probably last you twice as long, so it even outs in the end.
Why? Show a me a group or individual publicly campaigning for a cause that isn't cavalier and, in some cases, downright hypocritical. Both conservative and liberal groups and individuals do this all the time and I'm tired of it. Right wing "pro life" advocates who seem to have no problem supporting a war in which innocent people are dieing every day spring to mind. As does Al Gore and the host of other leftist celebrities who try and bring attention to global warming by traveling the world in private energy wasting jets and then get from event to event via SUV once they've landed.
I'm sick and tired of the "do as I say, not as I do crowd". Shut the hell up you shameless self promoters.
A proper clipboard would also be nice. The fact that you can't copy and paste more than text between applications is laughable, and even simple text can be iffy from time to time.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Clearly you didn't bother to RTFA. The author makes the argument that while 3G networks have more bandwidth than EDGE (they can transfer data at a faster rate), that higher bandwidth comes at a cost of higher latency (the time it takes for the transfer to begin) and more power consumption. He, correctly, points out that the higher latency of a 3G network can make your browsing experience slower than EDGE depending on the type of content you're browsing. If you're dealing with large files (think audio and video intensive sites) then having the higher bandwidth of 3G is an advantage but if your dealing with a typical website (made up of many small files) having the lower latency of EDGE is an advantage.
What's the point of having a connection that is twice as fast when transferring small files if the time it takes for that connection to begin is twice as long? The more small files being transfered, the "slower" things will seem.
My boss learned the difference in the late 90's the hard way. We were stuck sharing a dial-up connection at the office and my boss wanted a higher speed connection so he tried a satellite. I tried to explain the difference between bandwidth and latency and how they can affect your experience. He didn't get the difference and after the satellite was installed he complained like crazy when browsing the web because the connection didn't seem any faster than when using our old 56K modem. It was only when downloading large files from the web that you really felt the effects of the increased bandwidth.
While I agree with that statement in principle as it pertains to truly democratic nations, I can no longer agree with it in practice as it pertains to the United States of American as I no longer believe that citizens have any real choice at the ballot box when it comes to many important issues. Both the Republican and Democrats are owned by corporations. They primarily choose to differentiate themselves on "wedge" social, environmental and foreign policy issues (and when one party or the other happens to come to power, not much in the way of the "wedge" issues that were campaigned upon ends up truly changing ... see the 2006 Congressional elections and Iraq).
As far as I'm concerned they are two sides of the same coin. I read somewhere that the majority of Americans consider themselves fiscally conservative but socially liberal. That's how I'd describe myself. Where is the party that represents us?
Thank you for successfully arguing my point. "Making Available" is different than copying (or in your example stealing). Simply because a store made an item "available" to be taken doesn't mean the store was giving permission for someone who didn't pay for the item to take it just as making a work "available" on a P2P network to be copied doesn't mean the end user making it available has given permission for someone to make a copy.
I always thought the "making available" claim was dubious at best. If I'm reading a book in a restaurant and I leave it there by mistake I can be sued by it's author because I've made the content available for someone to copy? That's absurd. That example is a vast oversimplification of the issue at hand but that's essentially what the RIAA was arguing and it's laughable.
Copyright is exactly that, your right (or lake thereof) to make a copy of something. Making something available to be copied is not the same thing as actually making a copy. There's a very important and practical line there. If you were guilty of copyright infringement every time you made something available to be copied you'd better carry every book or copyrighted piece of paper with you at all times or you'd be infringing copyright by making that document available for someone else to copy when it's not in your immediate possession. You better not go to sleep either. You're evil college aged brother or sister might steal said book or document it and copy it while you sleep.
You can argue all day long about the person's intent when they have music files on a P2P network but the intent to make something available for copying doesn't (yet) factor into the laws governing copyright infringement as many courts are interpreting them. The real question is how long will our laws stay that way? It's only a matter of time before intent becomes a crime. I bet the RIAA lawyer goons have already written the text of laws that factor in intent and are just waiting for a Senator and Congressman who owe them and have the ability to sneak it into the next copyright or patent "reform" act intended to "update" our laws so they "keep pace with the rapidly changing technological landscape" while "protecting" the rights of artists. That's always the kind of language used when politicians (corporations) want to further erode consumer rights.
Those of us who live in the such a so cold "backwater country" laugh that you actually believe you're only paying $15 dollars a month when you're really paying much more than that to download those stupid Hollywood movies when you factor in the extra tax money collected from you and used to subsidize the infrastructure.
$15 dollars is a small percent of the actual cost you pay. You're just too stupid to understand that. You actually believe that when the goverment forcefully takes money from you and spends it to pay 80% of the cost of something and then charges you an additional 20% on top of that if you want to actually use what you've already partially paid for, that you're getting some kind of deal.
From the article:
Oh, please ... I stopped reading right there.
Or you could simply innovate and code things yourself and then not release the source at all. If you need to use another developers code be a man, pay the appropriate frees and license it. Oh and make it run on Vista only! Yours Truly, Steve Ballmer
It reminds me of when Microsoft started adding ".NET" to everything a few years back. Stupid and confusing and ultimately, a waste of time and money.
You make a great point. I love the iPhone (I'm posting from it now) but the lack of an SDK (and thus easily installable 3rd party apps) is a draw back. I think Apple will release one. Even if they don't, I think the open source community will come up with a solution. The software to unlock and customize the phone and to install 3rd party apps is out there already. It won't be long until some hacker brings them all togather with a nice GUI so the less technically inclined can install apps themselves. Still, if Apple wants to compete with Windows mobile they'll need to release an SDK.
I see this as a positive step. DRM limits the devices and/or software you can use to play back the media you've purchased. It affects our fair use rights as consumers and therefore it needs to go. I think watermarking is a better solution for those of us who want to purchase our media in an unencumbered format to use in accordance with our fair use rights.
The only potential problem I can see is what happens if a device that you've got your legally purchased media on is stolen and the person who steals it uploads some or all of that content? What happens if, say, you buy a new PC, copy all of your legally purchased media to the new PC, delete it from your old PC and either give the old PC away or sell it and the new owner runs an undelete program and recovers the media and then uploads it?
I can see a lot of ways that watermarking could bite someone in the ass if they aren't careful with their files.
We've got a bunch of idiots running our public schools. Let's focus on getting 90% of kids reading, writing and thinking critically with math and science skills up to the proper pre-collegiate levels by the 12th grade before we even think about making them declare a major.
I've been out of college for several years now but when I was a freshmen I heard professor after professor bemoan the fact that more and more kids were enrolling without having mastered what they considered the "basics". So you had freshman taking courses at the college level learning things they should have been taught in high school. This wasn't a community college either, this was the public university with the highest admission standards in the state.
Not every piece of software someone may want to install on their Linux system will be included in the distro. Using that excuse is a major cop out therefore the original statement stands. Installing programs on Linux is much more complicated then installing software on Windows. Installing software that's "a part of the distro" is just as easy on Windows as it is on Linux Linux. Nice try.
Consistent copy and paste functionality beyond text between applications and sane software installation programs. Until Linux has the same it will remain a joke on the desktop.