It seems to me that most people are missing the point. This is not about having physical media or whatever, this is about the value we attach to intellectual property and how we handle revenue that is to be procured from it. Consider: if I were to visit an art gallery and buy a painting I like, I pay the painter indirectly for his/her artistic vision and labour in making something for me to enjoy. The PRODUCT of the vision becomes mine, the vision is the painter's. If we assume software to be an intellectual construct comparable to a painting, the problem with subscription services becomes obvious - you rent a product but never get to own it and may not enjoy it as you please. This would be comparable to the painter coming to your home and removing or changing the painting without your consent. The question is - do we want it to be like that? I for one wouldn't. There seems to be something inherently wrong with having people pay for subscription to a final product without actually ever getting to OWN the product -to be able to do with it as you please- it subverts every notion of property that I have.
If I were to do science in this way I would never publish my results; instead, my colleagues would have to subscribe to a results service and they would not be able to use the results unless I were to be paid handsomely. Obviously, that wouldn't work at all and halt all scientific progress. I agree with other posters in judging that making all games available as rentals will be the death of modifications. I think it would be the death of gaming as we know it. IMHO a good reason to go open source all the way. How do other/. readers feel about this?
When Faraday demonstrated his quaint finding of electricity to the Prince of Wales (even then, princes of Wales were not sure what to do with their lives), this royal twit wanted to know what it was good for. Faraday's answer was (I paraphrase) something like: "Well, your Highness, perhaps you can tax it someday".
"Nuff said I think.
I agree - but perhaps it is a good sign that there are now Linux users who need this kind of hand holding:) I remember that, in the old days (eg, a year ago or so) one was supposed to RTFM and figure it out. Not any more?
You're ignorant. Macs are NOT more expensive than peecees, get that misconception out of your head. Go to the Applestore and configure a nice PB. The configure a comparable Dell and see who's more expensive. Second: why should OSX (= a BSD UNIX lest you forget) users not want to participate in Open Source? I know I want to.
And by the way - I can afford a Mac but I refuse to buy Office to go with it - it would raise the price of my current mac by as much as 30-40 percent! I do not want to pay such an insane amount of money for a piece of crap. I guess many more mac users think that way.
This initiative sounds nice, but most if not all molecular biology techniques and tools are already accessible to anyone who can read. The basic techniques are described in a set of manuals that anyone can buy (the famous "Maniatis"), several computation tools (BLAST, Consed, Phred/Phrap, Clustal(X) and so on) are already freely available. Molecular biology kits are not free nor open source, but you don't really need those if you have the manual. Making the results of your research freely available (using for instance www.plos.org), THAT would be truly innovative and useful.
Seems like you all miss the point here (well, almost all). So, when Longhorn is coming, lots of stuff is gonna break. So MS is going to need some kind of backward compatibility layer, like Classic in OSX. As you know, Microsoft does not innovate. They don't write this stuff themselves, they BUY it (remember Spyglass?) and have themselves a more or less instant compatibility layer. If some competition (ugh! virtual machines!) is killed in the process, so much the better.
Uh, has everyone overlooked the fact that the Toshiba is just freakin' UGLY???
I wouldn't want one just because it is so ugly. And yes, I own a 17" Apple powerbook. Looks DO matter, you know.
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It seems to me that most people are missing the point. This is not about having physical media or whatever, this is about the value we attach to intellectual property and how we handle revenue that is to be procured from it. Consider: if I were to visit an art gallery and buy a painting I like, I pay the painter indirectly for his/her artistic vision and labour in making something for me to enjoy. The PRODUCT of the vision becomes mine, the vision is the painter's. If we assume software to be an intellectual construct comparable to a painting, the problem with subscription services becomes obvious - you rent a product but never get to own it and may not enjoy it as you please. This would be comparable to the painter coming to your home and removing or changing the painting without your consent. The question is - do we want it to be like that? I for one wouldn't. There seems to be something inherently wrong with having people pay for subscription to a final product without actually ever getting to OWN the product -to be able to do with it as you please- it subverts every notion of property that I have. If I were to do science in this way I would never publish my results; instead, my colleagues would have to subscribe to a results service and they would not be able to use the results unless I were to be paid handsomely. Obviously, that wouldn't work at all and halt all scientific progress. I agree with other posters in judging that making all games available as rentals will be the death of modifications. I think it would be the death of gaming as we know it. IMHO a good reason to go open source all the way. How do other /. readers feel about this?
When Faraday demonstrated his quaint finding of electricity to the Prince of Wales (even then, princes of Wales were not sure what to do with their lives), this royal twit wanted to know what it was good for. Faraday's answer was (I paraphrase) something like: "Well, your Highness, perhaps you can tax it someday". "Nuff said I think.
I agree - but perhaps it is a good sign that there are now Linux users who need this kind of hand holding :) I remember that, in the old days (eg, a year ago or so) one was supposed to RTFM and figure it out. Not any more?
You're ignorant. Macs are NOT more expensive than peecees, get that misconception out of your head. Go to the Applestore and configure a nice PB. The configure a comparable Dell and see who's more expensive. Second: why should OSX (= a BSD UNIX lest you forget) users not want to participate in Open Source? I know I want to.
And by the way - I can afford a Mac but I refuse to buy Office to go with it - it would raise the price of my current mac by as much as 30-40 percent! I do not want to pay such an insane amount of money for a piece of crap. I guess many more mac users think that way.
This initiative sounds nice, but most if not all molecular biology techniques and tools are already accessible to anyone who can read. The basic techniques are described in a set of manuals that anyone can buy (the famous "Maniatis"), several computation tools (BLAST, Consed, Phred/Phrap, Clustal(X) and so on) are already freely available. Molecular biology kits are not free nor open source, but you don't really need those if you have the manual. Making the results of your research freely available (using for instance www.plos.org), THAT would be truly innovative and useful.
Seems like you all miss the point here (well, almost all). So, when Longhorn is coming, lots of stuff is gonna break. So MS is going to need some kind of backward compatibility layer, like Classic in OSX. As you know, Microsoft does not innovate. They don't write this stuff themselves, they BUY it (remember Spyglass?) and have themselves a more or less instant compatibility layer. If some competition (ugh! virtual machines!) is killed in the process, so much the better.
Uh, has everyone overlooked the fact that the Toshiba is just freakin' UGLY??? I wouldn't want one just because it is so ugly. And yes, I own a 17" Apple powerbook. Looks DO matter, you know.