If you go to a larger, more heavy-traffic site like w3schools.com, you'll see that through 2005, Linux did lead Mac, but ever since the beginning of 2006, the fortunes of Mac have been rising while the fortunes of Linux have been pared back.
It's not surprising that web designers use more Macs.
Now, given the numbers from W3Schools can't be easily extrapolated worldwide, but you can't dismiss them with the claim that web designers use Mac, because their users preferred Linux to Mac for the first 2.75 years of the 4.5 year dataset.
That's actually counterintuitive because Linux has been getting MORE competitive with Mac on the design front rather than less... You'd assume more designers migrating from OSX to Linux than from Linux to OSX.
Both numbers were growing, at the expense of Windows, but Mac grew faster than Linux, and while Mac continued to grow this year, Linux started giving back some of its gains.
And those numbers are meaningful, no matter how much you try to magick it away with sweeping generalizations.
Nah. I can tell you... going through my server logs, I see Macs outpacing Linux by a large number. If you go to a larger, more heavy-traffic site like w3schools.com, you'll see that through 2005, Linux did lead Mac, but ever since the beginning of 2006, the fortunes of Mac have been rising while the fortunes of Linux have been pared back.
With the introduction of the Intel-based Macs, the "Apples to Oranges" comparisons diminished and on a price to performance comparison with similarly equipped Windows machines, Macs became competitive. They're still considered pricy because you can't get a bargain Mac laptop running a Celeron chip with PC 2700 DDR system RAM.
So, yes, some places have been installing Linux on older commodity hardware, but the number of people switching from Windows to Mac is outpacing the number switching from Windows to Linux while the number of people switching from Linux to Mac is outpacing the people switching from Mac to Linux.
The switch to Intel was the best thing Apple did. Windows and Linux people now own Macs, doing much of their browsing and e-mail on their Macs, and running Windows or Linux in virtualized windows at speeds close to or exceeding the older hardware they upgraded from... on the rare occasion they need an app from one of those OSes they can't run on their Mac directly.
Fuck you, you fucking racist twit. Any "point" you were trying to make is now lost, thanks to this unnecessary redneck 'jab'.
Racist twit? Let's look at the dictionary.com entry for "niggling". Not one entry states that it derives from the word you apparently think it does. And if you go to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it states the word most likely derives from a Norwegian root with no relation to the word you were thinking of.
I would cite things about myself to further prove I'm not a racist, but the basic fact is... I don't have to. You flew off the handle just because an unflattering word begins with "nigg" and you automatically made the assumption it was related to a racial epithet beginning with the same letters. Your assumption was wrong and you couldn't be bothered to check your facts before resorting to abusive name calling.
My first IT job was managing the POS system for my dad's restaurant. Given this was 1989 and everything would crash and burn if the dot matrix printer jammed during the nightly reporting run.
Still, with all the niggling little problems, that whole thing would have bricked within a month without a support contract.
My favorite little quirk of it was that when you logged into the system for the day (it was also the time clock), at the end of the process, you pushed the "print" button instead of the "enter" button. That was because at the end, it was supposed to print your daily ID code.
That was very non-intuitive. So, one day I get calld down to the restaurant floor from the admin offices upstairs. One of the terminals has locked up. One of the wait staff tried to log in, but the machine keeps giving them this error code that they've filled up the screen with. Half of the wait staff and even one of the cooks is at the terminal, trying to figure it out. To show me how the error message keeps coming up, they hit the "enter" button a few times.
I say "remember, when you're clocking in, you hit the 'print' button at the end, not 'enter'." I hit the "print" button, the screen clears, the waitperson's daily code is printed, and the terminal is back to normal.
Remember that POS is a mission critical, live-fire production system. If it crashes or starts hiccuping, you're looking at lost money, lost productivity, etc. You're looking at half your staff gathered around it, giving unhelpful suggestions and asking dumb questions until the person who knows how it works can fix it. Thats why, even with 20+ open source alternatives, closed source flourishes. No matter how good the open source project is reputed to be, if there's no local vendor who can provide timely on-site support, there will be a lot of businesses who want nothing to do with it.
First off, you really need to check SourceForge.net or FreshMeat.net first. There there are plenty of POS software projects listed at both. Find one that looks like what you're wanting to do and hasn't run out of steam, and give it a shot in the arm with some cash. Maybe spread your cash around two or three of them.
That said, the question of how you start and attract talent to an open source project... I'm not professor on the history of open source, but the most successful projects I've seen are ones where a coder or small group of coders put out an alpha of their project and it was playing with the alpha and seeing the possibilities in it that got people excited enough to come on board and start pushing things forward.
So, if you're not happy with any of the POS projects you can find on SourceForge or FreshMeat, and since you clami to know "little to nothing about programming," I'd suggest going over to eLance or RentACoder and spend a good chunk of your seed money on getting an offshore firm to build your alpha for you. While they're coding their hearts out for you (they'll want 2-3 months to work on your contract), take that time to get to know the open source community and how people launch their open source projects.
Then, when your offshore coders come back to you with a decent alpha, pick an open source license (BSD, GPL v2, GPL v3, etc.), and use the knowledge you've picked up in the prior few months to get the word out and spread the code around. If you did your homweork well and spread the word well, that seed you planted may well sprout.
But remember this, a strong open source project needs a strong leader who can handle the big picture outlook, keep all the volunteers in line and focused on the goal, and drive the project forward. You're going to have to approach some strong personalities one-on-one and try to recruit that project leader. Without a strong leader, failure is a definite possibility.
What Linux needs to take off is a decent OEM community backing it, providing hardware configurations that have been thoroughly tested against the included Linux distro so that your sound works well, your wireless LAN works well, your video works well, etc.
Linux is beginning to get "there" with apps, although it's still a little more DIY for multimedia than is good (i.e. less DIY, more happy "joe sixpack" users). But if you just buy a random computer and slap Linux on it, you're rolling the dice.
People just want their machine to work when they plug it in. Linux isn't going to get the number of hardware makers supporting it that Microsoft has, so the best way is to have big OEMs with big channels sell "made for Linux" boxes... and make the multimedia a little less DIY.
Why does Notepad still delete the entire rest of a line when I Ctrl-Del, and why does it still only support one Undo level?
Okay, I code and consider myself a pretty powerful power user and I've never run into the ctrl-del issue in notepad or needed multi-level delete. And I'll bet you real money I could ask 100 non-techie people if that bothered them and they'd say "huh?"
Twelve years ago, I sold TVs and VCRs at a Circuit City near a Leisure World retirement village. Have you ever tried to help a 75 year old granny figure out her TV remote over the phone? If you haven't, then you're coming into this argument as crippled as you think Windows is.
For your average user, playing DVDs, MP3s and Youtube are essential things. If Ubuntu can't do them "out of the box" on a system where it's been preinstalled by an OEM, then it's not "there" yet. I don't care about legalities, licensing issues. To quote the old people who were buying VCRs and TVs from me in 1995... Make it work or take it back and give me a refund.
Too true. A "yeah but" rebuttal means nothing. To be an attractive alternative to Windows, an OS has to be better than Windows is *now*, not better than Windows was when Windows was its age.
Linux is really awesome for certain uses, but it lacks the fit and polish of an OS that's had hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on smoothing out rough edges and strongarming hardware makers.
The sad thing is that Linux has been "almost there" for years, but the reasons why its not "there" yet is as much about the hardcore factions who do their damnedest to create a hostile environment for businesses and non-techies as it is about any minor technical rough edges.
The owners of the copyrighted material have a claim against anyone who is using their work in a means against the license. Wikia's belief that they are acting in good-faith is good at preventing punitive damages, but actual damages (the profit they make) could be awarded, and of course an injunction to stop violating the license would be awarded.
There are no punitive damages unless one of the contributors actually filed a copyright on their material within 90 days of publication. All the original authors can sue for is actual damages (of which there are none as they were not making commercial use of the material and prohibiting others from it) and to force Wikia to take down the content.
If you want to threaten someone with those $150,000 per copy statutory damages, you have to actually register your copyrighted material with the Library of Congress within 90 days of publication. Otherwise you can only claim actual damages.
It's a common misconception, one even I fall victim to. I've always thought a code of conduct based on religion was a moral code, and one based on reason was an ethical code. Apparently, according to the dictionary, there are many points of overlap. A moral code can be based on reason or ethics, and doesn't need a religious justification.
Intent can be as important to determining the degree or label for a crime as the act. Think about it, most American state penal codes have 6-8 different crimes you can be charged with when you kill someone... First through third degree murder, first and second degree manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, etc., etc.
In fact, if you're defending yourself, you can kill someone and not be charged with a crime. But the action is always the same... you killed someone.
Furthermore, "evil" is a moral judgement, so, even if you're not buying into a societal definition, such as exists in a penal code, you're basing it on a religious definition. And the fun part is that the religious definition isn't based on a holy book, it's based on how your particular sect interprets that holy book. There are Muslims who think strapping a bomb to yourself and setting it off inside a school full of children is "evil", but there are others who think that this is what God wants. And, according to most moral codes, what God wants is inherently good.
So, actions are not good or evil in and of themselves. We interpret them as good or evil based on our value sets. Quite often we ascribe those value sets to God, because "God says this is right and this is wrong" carries a lot more power than "I think this is right and this is wrong, but it's just my opinion." Much as it is with beauty, Good and Evil can be in the eye of the beholder too.
Now we can be notified about special offers and promotions that are disturbingly close to what we actually want!
This may be tongue-in-cheek, but it's disturbingly accurate too. Part of their AdWords algorithm is to start incrementally raising the price on cost-per-click ads that aren't performing well. And they break this down by keyword. So if your ad is getting a really poor clickthrough from a certain keyword, they'll make you pay more and more for the keyword until you either drop it or improve your ad's clickthrough rate.
While that business method optimizes/maximizes CPM for Google, it also means that people who just bid on 500 loosely related keywords are going to gradually whittle that down to just those keywords that are are actually performing in terms of CPC and conversion. It stands to reason that if an ad is generating more clicks and more conversions for a specific keyword, that ad is more appropriate for it. In a way, it's almost Darwinian. Ads die off in keywords where they don't succeed and flourish in ones where they do.
Finally "succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar"??? They gave in to Mammon quite a while ago.
Google displays video ads within a few different AdSense units. I've regularly seen video ads filling 336x280 ad spaces. Putting video ads in search results requires no technical advances. It's more a matter of laying out the search results to achieve the best balance of ad screenspace and content screenspace. So far, Google has done that pretty well with text ads in their search results.
If there's any news in this, it's watching the semantic argument that should result. People love to quote Google's tenet of "do no evil" and accuse Google of violating it wheneverGoogle opens up a new avenue for earning money. But it's not necessarily evil. It's just something they disagree with. And it's interesting, from a sociological perspective, to see how people can regard the opposing party viewpoint, in what are essentially minor disagreements, as "evil".
"Compassion is the inevitable result of empathy and empathy is the inevitable result of intelligence."
I'm sure the residents of Auschwitz, the "comfort women" forced into service by the Japanese, and basically anyone who became a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII (and survived) would disagree about compassion being inevitable.
Check your anthropology or even animal behavior textbooks... Compassion is learned!
zap2it is a subsidiary of Tribune Media Services, a subsidiary of the Tribune Corporation. Tribune owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and New York Newsday among many other print outlets. In TV they own 23 major market stations including KTLA Los Angeles and WGN Chicago. Fourteen of their 23 stations are CW affiliates.
TMS is a syndicator of news and information feeds, such as TV listings, which they supply to many, many clients who don't want to spend the time and energy to try and compile reasonably correct information for the hundreds and hundreds of different channels, as well as the hundreds of different cable and satellite line-ups around the country.
So you've got this overlong, poorly-written drivel on their front page and that's all that seems to exist. All the links into the site result in 404 errors.
Anyway, anyone knows that if you want a serial number, you download a keygen off a filesharing network. And make sure that you *don't virus scan it* or you could break it.
As my father-in-law would say... "And people in Hell want ice-water."
Content wanting to be free conflicts with the desires of content creators to be able to eat, live indoors, and enjoy other benefits of making a living.
This month I licensed a drawing of an alien dressed like John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever" for more than I paid the artist who drew it. The guy I licensed it to is going to use it on lighters and hats that he'll sell. OTOH, I also let people use the drawing for free if its for personal, non-commercial use.
So the content is free... for personal use. For commercial use, you have to give me a taste of the benefit you'll derive from it. And through that little arrangement, I make money, the artist gets regular work from me, and everyone is happy except for people who don't understand that content is an inanimate object. Content wants to be free as much as a shovel wants to be popular.
But he can sell his car - just like he ought to be able to sell his Windows CD, no matter what the EUL"A" says (and thankfully in most places, this is legally the case AFAIK).
Technically, he can sell the CD. The question is whether he can sell/transfer his license to use the software on it or access its content. So if he wants to scratch up Windows CDs and sell them as coasters, he's probably not going to get any pushback from Microsoft. If he wants to sell working Vista Premium installation CDs, then there might be more pushback.
First off, the first key phrase is "By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public..."
That means that they're not applying this to private content, just stuff you intended to be publicly available.
The second key phrase is "you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license..." Note the words "non-exclusive". That means that Google does not own your content. You own it. They just have the right to use it anywhere in the world for free. The remaining legalese covers their butts for the current methods that might be used to display or distribute the content, and any future methods they might use.
I used to manage the photo submissions at IMDb and we used similar phrasing in our TOS. That way when we created IMDbPro, it could use the photos, we could put them not only in photo galleries related directly to the actor or film, but in themed photo galleries, in news summaries related to the actor, etc. If Amazon sold IMDb, or we merged with another film site, or we started another spin-off site, we'd retain the rights to display and use the photos.
Technology changes quickly and you'll find most large companies that display user-submitted content have the same kind of release. It doesn't deprive the content's owner of ownership, but makes sure that a lot of potential headaches that could come up in relation to the use and display of that content over the years don't come up.
"So do I, until I remember that they're in China through choice."
Yes, but that choice is necessitated by the size and potential power of that market and the economic disadvantage of ignoring it due to moral concerns. It's like saying that a guy with a second job at Hostess should have quit as soon as he realized that Twinkies were contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic here in America.
Can you guarantee that if he quits the Hostess job, he'll find something better or equal before the loss of income begins to harm his family?
Can you guarantee that if Yahoo had refused to comply, its China-based employees would have been safe? Can you guarantee that the layoffs necessitated by Yahoo's withdrawal from the Chinese market would do less cumulative harm than the jailing that happened because they stayed and played ball?
Can you say for sure that Yahoo's long-term presence won't have a significant benefit, not just to Yahoo but to the Chinese people? Can you guarantee that if Yahoo left, the competitor who filled the vacuum of its departure would be more ethical/moral?
It's amazing how people are able to look at this as a simple moral choice, totally black and white, and not see all the finer implications. I'm not saying that what happened was good, right, or moral. But there are all sorts of difficulties with the other side of the coin too. In fact, it seems this coin is multi-faceted, rather than just having two sides.
Look at how many people were without phone service when Skype wen't down. Some were smart and either had a land line as a back-up to Skype or vice versa, but by creating a single central point of failure, thousands of businesses were inconvenienced and lost money.
Software as a Service (SaaS) creates all sorts of ripe opportunities for hackers, crackers, and other cyber criminals. It's been a cottage industry to blackmail online casinos, threatening DDOS attacks if you're not paid off. Since a half-day DDOS could cost the casino in the high five figures (or more), they pay the blackmail.
What if a large SaaS company had a 100,000 business customers... just 100,000? That's a ripe DDOS blackmail target if I ever saw one. And if you could hack the systems and gain access to the tax and banking spreadsheets of 100,000 clients? Can you say "low-hanging fruit" boys and girls? I knew you could.
And what if the company is being run by idiots who fake their numbers to make it seem like a sinking ship is just "settling in the water" until the ship suddenly capsizes without warning, going belly-up in the space of hours. All your docs and spreadsheets are offline... indefinitely. And if by some graceful foresight, you backed up your docs, if you can't find a piece of software that can both run locally and work with the proprietary formats the SaaS vendor used for their docs, you're still SOL.
Those are worst case scenarios, but you get the drift.
I actually feel bad for Yahoo in a way. They're in a bit of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't." Had they refused the Chinese government's request, their Chinese operations could have been shut down by the government. They might have even seen their employees arrested or harrassed by the government for failing to play ball.
So they play ball, and they get sued in the U.S.
Makes me think a bit of the situation in Cuba. Lots of U.S. firms would like to do business there, have it opened up to trade, see relations normalized. I mean we've normalized relations with Vietnam even though POW/MIA groups feel the country still hasn't been as forthcoming as it could be on the subject of missing servicemen from the war. But POW/MIA groups can't swing Florida in a presidential election, so every president has given in to a small special interest group, and kept a hard line on Cuba.
So, while American companies are denied access to Cuba as a market, a source for materials, and a source for goods, those benefits go to companies in countries where a small block of Cuban immigrants don't hold the disproportionate political sway they do here.
The same can be said about China. If we let human rights activists use lawsuits to penalize companies for following Chinese rules while doing business in China, it just opens the door for companies from countries where human rights aren't as important and suing isn't as easy.
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It's not surprising that web designers use more Macs. Now, given the numbers from W3Schools can't be easily extrapolated worldwide, but you can't dismiss them with the claim that web designers use Mac, because their users preferred Linux to Mac for the first 2.75 years of the 4.5 year dataset.
That's actually counterintuitive because Linux has been getting MORE competitive with Mac on the design front rather than less... You'd assume more designers migrating from OSX to Linux than from Linux to OSX.
Both numbers were growing, at the expense of Windows, but Mac grew faster than Linux, and while Mac continued to grow this year, Linux started giving back some of its gains.
And those numbers are meaningful, no matter how much you try to magick it away with sweeping generalizations.
Nah. I can tell you... going through my server logs, I see Macs outpacing Linux by a large number. If you go to a larger, more heavy-traffic site like w3schools.com, you'll see that through 2005, Linux did lead Mac, but ever since the beginning of 2006, the fortunes of Mac have been rising while the fortunes of Linux have been pared back.
With the introduction of the Intel-based Macs, the "Apples to Oranges" comparisons diminished and on a price to performance comparison with similarly equipped Windows machines, Macs became competitive. They're still considered pricy because you can't get a bargain Mac laptop running a Celeron chip with PC 2700 DDR system RAM.
So, yes, some places have been installing Linux on older commodity hardware, but the number of people switching from Windows to Mac is outpacing the number switching from Windows to Linux while the number of people switching from Linux to Mac is outpacing the people switching from Mac to Linux.
The switch to Intel was the best thing Apple did. Windows and Linux people now own Macs, doing much of their browsing and e-mail on their Macs, and running Windows or Linux in virtualized windows at speeds close to or exceeding the older hardware they upgraded from... on the rare occasion they need an app from one of those OSes they can't run on their Mac directly.
> Still, with all the niggling little problems,
Fuck you, you fucking racist twit. Any "point" you were trying to make is now lost, thanks to this unnecessary redneck 'jab'.
Racist twit? Let's look at the dictionary.com entry for "niggling". Not one entry states that it derives from the word you apparently think it does. And if you go to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it states the word most likely derives from a Norwegian root with no relation to the word you were thinking of.
I would cite things about myself to further prove I'm not a racist, but the basic fact is... I don't have to. You flew off the handle just because an unflattering word begins with "nigg" and you automatically made the assumption it was related to a racial epithet beginning with the same letters. Your assumption was wrong and you couldn't be bothered to check your facts before resorting to abusive name calling.
- Greg
If I had mod points, I'd mod parent up.
My first IT job was managing the POS system for my dad's restaurant. Given this was 1989 and everything would crash and burn if the dot matrix printer jammed during the nightly reporting run.
Still, with all the niggling little problems, that whole thing would have bricked within a month without a support contract.
My favorite little quirk of it was that when you logged into the system for the day (it was also the time clock), at the end of the process, you pushed the "print" button instead of the "enter" button. That was because at the end, it was supposed to print your daily ID code.
That was very non-intuitive. So, one day I get calld down to the restaurant floor from the admin offices upstairs. One of the terminals has locked up. One of the wait staff tried to log in, but the machine keeps giving them this error code that they've filled up the screen with. Half of the wait staff and even one of the cooks is at the terminal, trying to figure it out. To show me how the error message keeps coming up, they hit the "enter" button a few times.
I say "remember, when you're clocking in, you hit the 'print' button at the end, not 'enter'." I hit the "print" button, the screen clears, the waitperson's daily code is printed, and the terminal is back to normal.
Remember that POS is a mission critical, live-fire production system. If it crashes or starts hiccuping, you're looking at lost money, lost productivity, etc. You're looking at half your staff gathered around it, giving unhelpful suggestions and asking dumb questions until the person who knows how it works can fix it. Thats why, even with 20+ open source alternatives, closed source flourishes. No matter how good the open source project is reputed to be, if there's no local vendor who can provide timely on-site support, there will be a lot of businesses who want nothing to do with it.
- Greg
First off, you really need to check SourceForge.net or FreshMeat.net first. There there are plenty of POS software projects listed at both. Find one that looks like what you're wanting to do and hasn't run out of steam, and give it a shot in the arm with some cash. Maybe spread your cash around two or three of them.
That said, the question of how you start and attract talent to an open source project... I'm not professor on the history of open source, but the most successful projects I've seen are ones where a coder or small group of coders put out an alpha of their project and it was playing with the alpha and seeing the possibilities in it that got people excited enough to come on board and start pushing things forward.
So, if you're not happy with any of the POS projects you can find on SourceForge or FreshMeat, and since you clami to know "little to nothing about programming," I'd suggest going over to eLance or RentACoder and spend a good chunk of your seed money on getting an offshore firm to build your alpha for you. While they're coding their hearts out for you (they'll want 2-3 months to work on your contract), take that time to get to know the open source community and how people launch their open source projects.
Then, when your offshore coders come back to you with a decent alpha, pick an open source license (BSD, GPL v2, GPL v3, etc.), and use the knowledge you've picked up in the prior few months to get the word out and spread the code around. If you did your homweork well and spread the word well, that seed you planted may well sprout.
But remember this, a strong open source project needs a strong leader who can handle the big picture outlook, keep all the volunteers in line and focused on the goal, and drive the project forward. You're going to have to approach some strong personalities one-on-one and try to recruit that project leader. Without a strong leader, failure is a definite possibility.
Just my $0.02.
- Greg
Well, they wouldn't pass muster if they weren't standards compliant.
...welcome our future cyborg overlords.
What Linux needs to take off is a decent OEM community backing it, providing hardware configurations that have been thoroughly tested against the included Linux distro so that your sound works well, your wireless LAN works well, your video works well, etc.
Linux is beginning to get "there" with apps, although it's still a little more DIY for multimedia than is good (i.e. less DIY, more happy "joe sixpack" users). But if you just buy a random computer and slap Linux on it, you're rolling the dice.
People just want their machine to work when they plug it in. Linux isn't going to get the number of hardware makers supporting it that Microsoft has, so the best way is to have big OEMs with big channels sell "made for Linux" boxes... and make the multimedia a little less DIY.
- Greg
Why does Notepad still delete the entire rest of a line when I Ctrl-Del, and why does it still only support one Undo level?
Okay, I code and consider myself a pretty powerful power user and I've never run into the ctrl-del issue in notepad or needed multi-level delete. And I'll bet you real money I could ask 100 non-techie people if that bothered them and they'd say "huh?"
Twelve years ago, I sold TVs and VCRs at a Circuit City near a Leisure World retirement village. Have you ever tried to help a 75 year old granny figure out her TV remote over the phone? If you haven't, then you're coming into this argument as crippled as you think Windows is.
For your average user, playing DVDs, MP3s and Youtube are essential things. If Ubuntu can't do them "out of the box" on a system where it's been preinstalled by an OEM, then it's not "there" yet. I don't care about legalities, licensing issues. To quote the old people who were buying VCRs and TVs from me in 1995... Make it work or take it back and give me a refund.
Too true. A "yeah but" rebuttal means nothing. To be an attractive alternative to Windows, an OS has to be better than Windows is *now*, not better than Windows was when Windows was its age.
Linux is really awesome for certain uses, but it lacks the fit and polish of an OS that's had hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on smoothing out rough edges and strongarming hardware makers.
The sad thing is that Linux has been "almost there" for years, but the reasons why its not "there" yet is as much about the hardcore factions who do their damnedest to create a hostile environment for businesses and non-techies as it is about any minor technical rough edges.
- Greg
The owners of the copyrighted material have a claim against anyone who is using their work in a means against the license. Wikia's belief that they are acting in good-faith is good at preventing punitive damages, but actual damages (the profit they make) could be awarded, and of course an injunction to stop violating the license would be awarded.
There are no punitive damages unless one of the contributors actually filed a copyright on their material within 90 days of publication. All the original authors can sue for is actual damages (of which there are none as they were not making commercial use of the material and prohibiting others from it) and to force Wikia to take down the content.
If you want to threaten someone with those $150,000 per copy statutory damages, you have to actually register your copyrighted material with the Library of Congress within 90 days of publication. Otherwise you can only claim actual damages.
It's a common misconception, one even I fall victim to. I've always thought a code of conduct based on religion was a moral code, and one based on reason was an ethical code. Apparently, according to the dictionary, there are many points of overlap. A moral code can be based on reason or ethics, and doesn't need a religious justification.
Intent can be as important to determining the degree or label for a crime as the act. Think about it, most American state penal codes have 6-8 different crimes you can be charged with when you kill someone... First through third degree murder, first and second degree manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, etc., etc.
In fact, if you're defending yourself, you can kill someone and not be charged with a crime. But the action is always the same... you killed someone.
Furthermore, "evil" is a moral judgement, so, even if you're not buying into a societal definition, such as exists in a penal code, you're basing it on a religious definition. And the fun part is that the religious definition isn't based on a holy book, it's based on how your particular sect interprets that holy book. There are Muslims who think strapping a bomb to yourself and setting it off inside a school full of children is "evil", but there are others who think that this is what God wants. And, according to most moral codes, what God wants is inherently good.
So, actions are not good or evil in and of themselves. We interpret them as good or evil based on our value sets. Quite often we ascribe those value sets to God, because "God says this is right and this is wrong" carries a lot more power than "I think this is right and this is wrong, but it's just my opinion." Much as it is with beauty, Good and Evil can be in the eye of the beholder too.
- G
Now we can be notified about special offers and promotions that are disturbingly close to what we actually want!
This may be tongue-in-cheek, but it's disturbingly accurate too. Part of their AdWords algorithm is to start incrementally raising the price on cost-per-click ads that aren't performing well. And they break this down by keyword. So if your ad is getting a really poor clickthrough from a certain keyword, they'll make you pay more and more for the keyword until you either drop it or improve your ad's clickthrough rate.
While that business method optimizes/maximizes CPM for Google, it also means that people who just bid on 500 loosely related keywords are going to gradually whittle that down to just those keywords that are are actually performing in terms of CPC and conversion. It stands to reason that if an ad is generating more clicks and more conversions for a specific keyword, that ad is more appropriate for it. In a way, it's almost Darwinian. Ads die off in keywords where they don't succeed and flourish in ones where they do.
- Greg
Finally "succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar"??? They gave in to Mammon quite a while ago.
Google displays video ads within a few different AdSense units. I've regularly seen video ads filling 336x280 ad spaces. Putting video ads in search results requires no technical advances. It's more a matter of laying out the search results to achieve the best balance of ad screenspace and content screenspace. So far, Google has done that pretty well with text ads in their search results.
If there's any news in this, it's watching the semantic argument that should result. People love to quote Google's tenet of "do no evil" and accuse Google of violating it wheneverGoogle opens up a new avenue for earning money. But it's not necessarily evil. It's just something they disagree with. And it's interesting, from a sociological perspective, to see how people can regard the opposing party viewpoint, in what are essentially minor disagreements, as "evil".
- Greg
"Compassion is the inevitable result of empathy and empathy is the inevitable result of intelligence."
I'm sure the residents of Auschwitz, the "comfort women" forced into service by the Japanese, and basically anyone who became a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII (and survived) would disagree about compassion being inevitable.
Check your anthropology or even animal behavior textbooks... Compassion is learned!
- Greg
zap2it is a subsidiary of Tribune Media Services, a subsidiary of the Tribune Corporation. Tribune owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and New York Newsday among many other print outlets. In TV they own 23 major market stations including KTLA Los Angeles and WGN Chicago. Fourteen of their 23 stations are CW affiliates.
TMS is a syndicator of news and information feeds, such as TV listings, which they supply to many, many clients who don't want to spend the time and energy to try and compile reasonably correct information for the hundreds and hundreds of different channels, as well as the hundreds of different cable and satellite line-ups around the country.
So you've got this overlong, poorly-written drivel on their front page and that's all that seems to exist. All the links into the site result in 404 errors.
Anyway, anyone knows that if you want a serial number, you download a keygen off a filesharing network. And make sure that you *don't virus scan it* or you could break it.
- G
...but I do want a cheap burner I can throw 30GB at. Sell THAT to me at $150 and I'll buy.
<AOL>Me Too</AOL>
Don't be silly. Content wants to be FREE!!
As my father-in-law would say... "And people in Hell want ice-water."
Content wanting to be free conflicts with the desires of content creators to be able to eat, live indoors, and enjoy other benefits of making a living.
This month I licensed a drawing of an alien dressed like John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever" for more than I paid the artist who drew it. The guy I licensed it to is going to use it on lighters and hats that he'll sell. OTOH, I also let people use the drawing for free if its for personal, non-commercial use.
So the content is free... for personal use. For commercial use, you have to give me a taste of the benefit you'll derive from it. And through that little arrangement, I make money, the artist gets regular work from me, and everyone is happy except for people who don't understand that content is an inanimate object. Content wants to be free as much as a shovel wants to be popular.
-- Greg
But he can sell his car - just like he ought to be able to sell his Windows CD, no matter what the EUL"A" says (and thankfully in most places, this is legally the case AFAIK).
Technically, he can sell the CD. The question is whether he can sell/transfer his license to use the software on it or access its content. So if he wants to scratch up Windows CDs and sell them as coasters, he's probably not going to get any pushback from Microsoft. If he wants to sell working Vista Premium installation CDs, then there might be more pushback.
First off, the first key phrase is "By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public..."
That means that they're not applying this to private content, just stuff you intended to be publicly available.
The second key phrase is "you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license..." Note the words "non-exclusive". That means that Google does not own your content. You own it. They just have the right to use it anywhere in the world for free. The remaining legalese covers their butts for the current methods that might be used to display or distribute the content, and any future methods they might use.
I used to manage the photo submissions at IMDb and we used similar phrasing in our TOS. That way when we created IMDbPro, it could use the photos, we could put them not only in photo galleries related directly to the actor or film, but in themed photo galleries, in news summaries related to the actor, etc. If Amazon sold IMDb, or we merged with another film site, or we started another spin-off site, we'd retain the rights to display and use the photos.
Technology changes quickly and you'll find most large companies that display user-submitted content have the same kind of release. It doesn't deprive the content's owner of ownership, but makes sure that a lot of potential headaches that could come up in relation to the use and display of that content over the years don't come up.
"So do I, until I remember that they're in China through choice."
Yes, but that choice is necessitated by the size and potential power of that market and the economic disadvantage of ignoring it due to moral concerns. It's like saying that a guy with a second job at Hostess should have quit as soon as he realized that Twinkies were contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic here in America.
Can you guarantee that if he quits the Hostess job, he'll find something better or equal before the loss of income begins to harm his family?
Can you guarantee that if Yahoo had refused to comply, its China-based employees would have been safe? Can you guarantee that the layoffs necessitated by Yahoo's withdrawal from the Chinese market would do less cumulative harm than the jailing that happened because they stayed and played ball?
Can you say for sure that Yahoo's long-term presence won't have a significant benefit, not just to Yahoo but to the Chinese people? Can you guarantee that if Yahoo left, the competitor who filled the vacuum of its departure would be more ethical/moral?
It's amazing how people are able to look at this as a simple moral choice, totally black and white, and not see all the finer implications. I'm not saying that what happened was good, right, or moral. But there are all sorts of difficulties with the other side of the coin too. In fact, it seems this coin is multi-faceted, rather than just having two sides.
- Greg
Look at how many people were without phone service when Skype wen't down. Some were smart and either had a land line as a back-up to Skype or vice versa, but by creating a single central point of failure, thousands of businesses were inconvenienced and lost money.
Software as a Service (SaaS) creates all sorts of ripe opportunities for hackers, crackers, and other cyber criminals. It's been a cottage industry to blackmail online casinos, threatening DDOS attacks if you're not paid off. Since a half-day DDOS could cost the casino in the high five figures (or more), they pay the blackmail.
What if a large SaaS company had a 100,000 business customers... just 100,000? That's a ripe DDOS blackmail target if I ever saw one. And if you could hack the systems and gain access to the tax and banking spreadsheets of 100,000 clients? Can you say "low-hanging fruit" boys and girls? I knew you could.
And what if the company is being run by idiots who fake their numbers to make it seem like a sinking ship is just "settling in the water" until the ship suddenly capsizes without warning, going belly-up in the space of hours. All your docs and spreadsheets are offline... indefinitely. And if by some graceful foresight, you backed up your docs, if you can't find a piece of software that can both run locally and work with the proprietary formats the SaaS vendor used for their docs, you're still SOL.
Those are worst case scenarios, but you get the drift.
I actually feel bad for Yahoo in a way. They're in a bit of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't." Had they refused the Chinese government's request, their Chinese operations could have been shut down by the government. They might have even seen their employees arrested or harrassed by the government for failing to play ball.
So they play ball, and they get sued in the U.S.
Makes me think a bit of the situation in Cuba. Lots of U.S. firms would like to do business there, have it opened up to trade, see relations normalized. I mean we've normalized relations with Vietnam even though POW/MIA groups feel the country still hasn't been as forthcoming as it could be on the subject of missing servicemen from the war. But POW/MIA groups can't swing Florida in a presidential election, so every president has given in to a small special interest group, and kept a hard line on Cuba.
So, while American companies are denied access to Cuba as a market, a source for materials, and a source for goods, those benefits go to companies in countries where a small block of Cuban immigrants don't hold the disproportionate political sway they do here.
The same can be said about China. If we let human rights activists use lawsuits to penalize companies for following Chinese rules while doing business in China, it just opens the door for companies from countries where human rights aren't as important and suing isn't as easy.