I guess my real point here is, sure people should be able to make money from their work, but just because someone charges a high price for something, doesn't mean it's the best idea on their part (or even a good idea). In my view, the rampant piracy of Photoshop over the years is a direct result of them overpricing the product for a huge population of their potential customers.
That still missed my point. The vast majority of those people who pirated Photoshop would have been perfectly happy with Elements. Its available, and its dirt cheap ($50-70). Why didn't they buy it, if they're really just complaining about the price of Adobe software when they pirate? Or are you saying that $50 is still too expensive for something that powerful?
Or are people just rude pricks who don't like paying for anything they don't have to?
Ford produces the GT500, which costs, what, around $125,000. Let's ignore the fact that its also used as a rolling R&D bench to develop technologies that eventually make it into vehicles like the Fusion and the Escape.
The difference in price between it and a Fusion is huge - $100,000. If they sold it for $25,000, they wouldn't notice the profit difference on their bottom line.
Therefore its okay to steal the GT500 from your favorite Ford dealership. Or make them sell it to you for the price of a Fusion....
To put it bluntly, if the additional feature set you get by moving from Elements to Photoshop isn't worth $500 to you then don't buy it! It is to many people, but they can spend the money which funds the development of features that will shortly make it into your Elements product? How is this a bad thing for you as a potential Elements customer?
More seriously, how does the fact that they make a more expensive product in any way shape or form justify taking without paying it instead of just paying $50 for the less expensive one that does everything you need it to do anyway?
The nice thing about the auto-mounted units is... well, there are two nice things that apply here. First, they can always assume that your car is where you left it when you turned if off -- at least as a starting point. This may not be correct for ferry transport, but its pretty reasonable for everything else. Handhelds can't make that call. Also, they can use compass directions and wheel travel to determine approximate location in the absense of sattelite information, mostly mitigating the startup lag.
As long as companies like Adobe justify charging $700 for Photoshop, and rationalize it partially "to make up for the ten people who steal it", I will have no sympathy for companies who lose money to software piracy.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to call a bullshit on this one. The trouble with your theory is that to anyone using Photoshop commercially, $700 is money well spent. For almost everyone else, $50-70 for retail copy of Photoshop Elements is a pretty reasonable expense.
Besides, companies offer software at a certain price. If you don't like it, don't buy it, and don't use it. If it is worth it to you then pay the price and use the software. I still don't see the problem.
Other comments have made a lot of good points, but I'll add that it sounds like your center channel speaker could use some upgrading. It should ideally be identical to your L/R main speakers. Failing that it should at least use most of the same drivers. As an example, I run an older Infinity Compositions setup. The L/R speakers have a powered 12" sub, four 6.5" woofers, two 4" mids, and a single dome tweeter. The center speaker loses the sub and two of the woofers, but is otherwise identical. There are slight acoustic differences between the speakers, but I'm mnot anal enough to worry about them (much). Using noticably different pieces gives you serious problems when, for example, you're trying to pan sound across from left to right using a surround matrix.
A good center should be able to play full spectrum well, or at least handle everything that your sub doesn't (I run a nice 15" sub with mine). Now, music in mono is still crap, but it should be because its in mono not because your speaker drops the ball.
Hmm, let's see. The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is giving away more money than pretty much anyone else right now. Buffett advocates index funds for many people, and suggests making no more than 20 trades over a lifetime, in large part to reduce those frictional costs you're referring to (one of his more famous mottos is that in investing there are no called strikes - sit back and wait for the fat pitch, even if it takes a couple of years, then swing hard). Branson I don't know much about...
Excuse me but at my work, the mechnical engineers swear up and down over SolidWorks (and appearantly at other places which employ MEs). The same way kernel programmer swear over having an MMU.
Fair enough - I was coming from a Civil perspective, not an ME one. As they say, there is no One True Way.
I honestly believe that this entire topic has been blown out of proportion - congress is not interested in promoting free speech, they just want to spread democracy to the rest of the world.
Well, as long as that involves being willing to de-recognize countries that elect the "wrong" people, like Hamas. After all, its not real democracy if you don't vote the way that we want you to. Or something.
Dausha said (GGP post): Copyright infringement occurs only when you reproduce another's intellectual property for economic gain.
I disagreed, saying, "Copyright infringement rules say nothing whatsoever about gain."
Dausha then said (P post): Not quite. Copyright infringement also occurs when one publishes anothers intellectual property without their permission.
Well, yes, I agree with that. I wasn't trying to talk about every possible form of copyright infringement. I just mentioned that your GPP definition using the word "only" was incorrect. It sounds like you were actually agreeing with me, apart from the "Not quite," comment:)
Dausha also said: However, copying for one's own use is Fair Use as there is no "economic gain" involved.
Its generally fair use, yes. And I never said anything about that. But its not fair use because there's no economic gain, its fair use because the law and the courts have said that it is. Profit motive is a factor in determining fair use, but its not an exclusive one by any stretch of the imagination. Not all profitless uses are fair use, and not all profitable ones are prohibited.
AutoCAD is good at some things, great at others, not so good at yet more. Its used in all sorts of disciplines, by everyone from gear designers to subdivision planners. Saying that any app is better (or worse) than AutoCAD without giving a problem domain just doesn't make sense.
That's good, because you'll be writing a lot of big ones
Hmm. Not if you're an engineering firm. That's the rub - for those companies involved in commercial activities, the cost of software is pocket change compared to the cost of, oh, engineers. And plat copies. And all sorts of other common expenses.
All of which are pocket change compared to the expense of, for example, building a road - and the huge cost to redo it if there's even one cad-induced error (or an error that crept in because the cad package was slightly harder to use than its competitor).
Do it yourself at home and then ask an architect to help you finesse the result to meet local building code and permitting requirements.... It's hard to be an engineer if you have no tools.
Its orders of magnitude harder if you're not actually an Engineer.
Never mind fat rich Americans, think what might be done in the developing world
I would hazard a guess that if you were a real, solid, non-profit doing volunteer work down in some 3rd world country, that you could get gratis copies of AutoCAD donated to your organization. Heck, slightly out of date versions are dead cheap.
Autocad is, for better or for worse, the standard. Right now, there are no comparable products - its somewhat like suggesting that people use Write instead of Word. For simple stuff, yes, it works just fine (and indeed with just a few enhancements would probably be better than Word for most people). For anything more complex, like most real-world uses of AutoCad (as opposed to folk just doodling around in it), you need a full blown package.
I'm sure there are people running small shops off of [insert your favorite linux cad program here] who can't wait to tell us about them. However, if you're running even a moderate sized shop, you probably need the real thing. Besides, one of the real strengths of ACAD are all of the add ons, like Land Developer Desktop, that you certainly can't get for just any random cad-lite package.
Copyright infringement occurs only when you reproduce another's intellectual property for economic gain.
If this was true, there would never have been a SCO lawsuit. There would never have been a file sharing lawsuit, either, since the people uploading MP3s wouldn't be financially gaining from their actions (and, it follows, the people providing the services wouldn't have been supporting or encouraging an illegal activity). Copyright infringement rules say nothing whatsoever about gain.
Its a very bad process if there are any Windows 2000 machines in the mix. XP does a couple of orders of magnitude better. Not that I'm saying that the UNIX way doesn't rock, mind you.
Actually, that works well on Windows PCs as well. Heck, if it didn't, you couldn't have roaming profiles (which do have some minor issues, but work remarkably well) where you can log in on any machine and all of your files/settings/etc are visible to you. The only difference is that some Windows users love making random hidey-holes for their files instead of putting them under "/Documents and Settings/[Username]" in the appropriate Documents or Images or Whatever folders. There are some badly behaved apps that encourage this, and others that store settings in weird places, but those are the exception rather than the norm (and a MacPort of them would do exactly the same stupid shit).
This is basically using Google's storage as a BigAssDisk(tm) for you to move/wipe your machine. Think about what would happen if they didn't do this:
1) User "saves" his data to google. 2) User wipes and rebuilds his PC. 3) User loads his data from google, after which google immediately forgets it. 4) User realizes that his drive was set up incorrectly and repeats step 2. 5) User says, "Fuck. I thought I'd saved that!"
They're emulating a temporary backup tape in this case, so they're acting more like one. Destructing 30 days after last use is reasonable (it is a temporary tape) and indeed useful. Destructing 30 seconds after first use is potentially catestrophic.
Has anyone been able to stop by their local Apple store and see if they have display models out? I'm sure they won't have walk-in inventory for a while, until they free up their order backlog, but it would be nice to get a little hands-on time before plunking down real money.
Really? I think they can be legitimately criticized for being willing to assist in lending an air of credibility to the scam by issuing certs to a site with no legitimate purposes at all, merely because the scuzzbags who run the site are willing to cut them a cheque
So you would support having to share your business plan to get a cert, with certs costing thousands of $CUR just to pay for all of the investigation they would require? After all, in 15 minutes you could register mountain-america.net, set up a really crappy (but no worse than many) looking coffee-shop website, and say that you were going to sell coffee over the internet.
At least Verisign (years ago) made you provide some easily-mocked-up letterhead. It was crap, but they did something.
Re:The growth is all in women and girls
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Mario All Grown Up?
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· Score: 2, Funny
The growth is all in women and girls
So that's why Nintendo put the rumble pack into that new wand-shaped controller.
I keed, I keed...
Re:"Non-hard-core gamers" aren't playing anymore
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Mario All Grown Up?
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· Score: 1
To you I have only one thing to say. Well, two things. Alright, three including this declaration, but that's not important. First, well, you pretty much nailed it. Less gratuitous blood (reasonable blood is fine), more action and, dare I say it, thought. Although that's close to saying that music today should have a melody, damn these kids today... You were especially correct about the fact that you used to be able to sit and hang out with friends, casually playing Zelda/Mario/whatever, with moments of interesting (often to all around you) action. Not so any more, for the most part.
I don't expect it will actually deter determined pirates - nothing much will.
However it'd be a whole let less intrusive than DRM and would let normal law abiding users go about their business without having to make sure that all their hardware is completely compatible.
Right, but if you set the bar so low that it doesn't actually have to work, why do anything at all? After all, disemminating plain MP3s would be "a whole lot less intrusive than DRM" even though it wouldn't "actually deter determined pirates." And if ripping a CD is all that it takes to become a "determined" pirate, well...
1) "Obtain" stolen credit card. 2) Download, and pay for, tons of MP3s from public computer/wap. 3) Throw away credit card. 4) Share pirated MP3s to millions.
Or better yet, as long as a single frickin' CD is sold:
1) Buy CD for cash. 2) Rip CD. 3) Share MP3s.
With watermarks, even in every CD, this will be discouraged exactly how?
I mean, isn't it cheaper to let everybody know that you're watermarking the video files than it would be to actually watermark them? Maybe toss in a few random bits if you think that people would actually download two copies and diff them, to keep them guessing.
Social solutions to technical problems. Think of it as the, "Hey, I'll give you candy for your password," issue, but in reverse.
Er, man, don't use the "mute to vibrate" feature. I've got a RAZR (as does half the country, or so it seems). Settings -> Audio -> Style -> Vibrate works just fine. As does using the left side buttons.
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I guess my real point here is, sure people should be able to make money from their work, but just because someone charges a high price for something, doesn't mean it's the best idea on their part (or even a good idea). In my view, the rampant piracy of Photoshop over the years is a direct result of them overpricing the product for a huge population of their potential customers.
That still missed my point. The vast majority of those people who pirated Photoshop would have been perfectly happy with Elements. Its available, and its dirt cheap ($50-70). Why didn't they buy it, if they're really just complaining about the price of Adobe software when they pirate? Or are you saying that $50 is still too expensive for something that powerful?
Or are people just rude pricks who don't like paying for anything they don't have to?
Ford produces the GT500, which costs, what, around $125,000. Let's ignore the fact that its also used as a rolling R&D bench to develop technologies that eventually make it into vehicles like the Fusion and the Escape.
...
The difference in price between it and a Fusion is huge - $100,000. If they sold it for $25,000, they wouldn't notice the profit difference on their bottom line.
Therefore its okay to steal the GT500 from your favorite Ford dealership. Or make them sell it to you for the price of a Fusion.
To put it bluntly, if the additional feature set you get by moving from Elements to Photoshop isn't worth $500 to you then don't buy it! It is to many people, but they can spend the money which funds the development of features that will shortly make it into your Elements product? How is this a bad thing for you as a potential Elements customer?
More seriously, how does the fact that they make a more expensive product in any way shape or form justify taking without paying it instead of just paying $50 for the less expensive one that does everything you need it to do anyway?
The nice thing about the auto-mounted units is... well, there are two nice things that apply here. First, they can always assume that your car is where you left it when you turned if off -- at least as a starting point. This may not be correct for ferry transport, but its pretty reasonable for everything else. Handhelds can't make that call. Also, they can use compass directions and wheel travel to determine approximate location in the absense of sattelite information, mostly mitigating the startup lag.
So instead they torture with microwave weapons, voice-to-scull mind-control weapons...
Voice-to-scull mind control? Damn the government and their hatred of small rowing expeditions!
As long as companies like Adobe justify charging $700 for Photoshop, and rationalize it partially "to make up for the ten people who steal it", I will have no sympathy for companies who lose money to software piracy.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to call a bullshit on this one. The trouble with your theory is that to anyone using Photoshop commercially, $700 is money well spent. For almost everyone else, $50-70 for retail copy of Photoshop Elements is a pretty reasonable expense.
Besides, companies offer software at a certain price. If you don't like it, don't buy it, and don't use it. If it is worth it to you then pay the price and use the software. I still don't see the problem.
center channels are not meant for music
Other comments have made a lot of good points, but I'll add that it sounds like your center channel speaker could use some upgrading. It should ideally be identical to your L/R main speakers. Failing that it should at least use most of the same drivers. As an example, I run an older Infinity Compositions setup. The L/R speakers have a powered 12" sub, four 6.5" woofers, two 4" mids, and a single dome tweeter. The center speaker loses the sub and two of the woofers, but is otherwise identical. There are slight acoustic differences between the speakers, but I'm mnot anal enough to worry about them (much). Using noticably different pieces gives you serious problems when, for example, you're trying to pan sound across from left to right using a surround matrix.
A good center should be able to play full spectrum well, or at least handle everything that your sub doesn't (I run a nice 15" sub with mine). Now, music in mono is still crap, but it should be because its in mono not because your speaker drops the ball.
Hmm, let's see. The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is giving away more money than pretty much anyone else right now. Buffett advocates index funds for many people, and suggests making no more than 20 trades over a lifetime, in large part to reduce those frictional costs you're referring to (one of his more famous mottos is that in investing there are no called strikes - sit back and wait for the fat pitch, even if it takes a couple of years, then swing hard). Branson I don't know much about...
Excuse me but at my work, the mechnical engineers swear up and down over SolidWorks (and appearantly at other places which employ MEs). The same way kernel programmer swear over having an MMU.
Fair enough - I was coming from a Civil perspective, not an ME one. As they say, there is no One True Way.
I honestly believe that this entire topic has been blown out of proportion - congress is not interested in promoting free speech, they just want to spread democracy to the rest of the world.
Well, as long as that involves being willing to de-recognize countries that elect the "wrong" people, like Hamas. After all, its not real democracy if you don't vote the way that we want you to. Or something.
Dausha said (GGP post): Copyright infringement occurs only when you reproduce another's intellectual property for economic gain.
:)
I disagreed, saying, "Copyright infringement rules say nothing whatsoever about gain."
Dausha then said (P post): Not quite. Copyright infringement also occurs when one publishes anothers intellectual property without their permission.
Well, yes, I agree with that. I wasn't trying to talk about every possible form of copyright infringement. I just mentioned that your GPP definition using the word "only" was incorrect. It sounds like you were actually agreeing with me, apart from the "Not quite," comment
Dausha also said: However, copying for one's own use is Fair Use as there is no "economic gain" involved.
Its generally fair use, yes. And I never said anything about that. But its not fair use because there's no economic gain, its fair use because the law and the courts have said that it is. Profit motive is a factor in determining fair use, but its not an exclusive one by any stretch of the imagination. Not all profitless uses are fair use, and not all profitable ones are prohibited.
At doing what?
AutoCAD is good at some things, great at others, not so good at yet more. Its used in all sorts of disciplines, by everyone from gear designers to subdivision planners. Saying that any app is better (or worse) than AutoCAD without giving a problem domain just doesn't make sense.
That's good, because you'll be writing a lot of big ones
... It's hard to be an engineer if you have no tools.
Hmm. Not if you're an engineering firm. That's the rub - for those companies involved in commercial activities, the cost of software is pocket change compared to the cost of, oh, engineers. And plat copies. And all sorts of other common expenses.
All of which are pocket change compared to the expense of, for example, building a road - and the huge cost to redo it if there's even one cad-induced error (or an error that crept in because the cad package was slightly harder to use than its competitor).
Do it yourself at home and then ask an architect to help you finesse the result to meet local building code and permitting requirements.
Its orders of magnitude harder if you're not actually an Engineer.
Never mind fat rich Americans, think what might be done in the developing world
I would hazard a guess that if you were a real, solid, non-profit doing volunteer work down in some 3rd world country, that you could get gratis copies of AutoCAD donated to your organization. Heck, slightly out of date versions are dead cheap.
Autocad is, for better or for worse, the standard. Right now, there are no comparable products - its somewhat like suggesting that people use Write instead of Word. For simple stuff, yes, it works just fine (and indeed with just a few enhancements would probably be better than Word for most people). For anything more complex, like most real-world uses of AutoCad (as opposed to folk just doodling around in it), you need a full blown package.
I'm sure there are people running small shops off of [insert your favorite linux cad program here] who can't wait to tell us about them. However, if you're running even a moderate sized shop, you probably need the real thing. Besides, one of the real strengths of ACAD are all of the add ons, like Land Developer Desktop, that you certainly can't get for just any random cad-lite package.
Copyright infringement occurs only when you reproduce another's intellectual property for economic gain.
If this was true, there would never have been a SCO lawsuit. There would never have been a file sharing lawsuit, either, since the people uploading MP3s wouldn't be financially gaining from their actions (and, it follows, the people providing the services wouldn't have been supporting or encouraging an illegal activity). Copyright infringement rules say nothing whatsoever about gain.
Its a very bad process if there are any Windows 2000 machines in the mix. XP does a couple of orders of magnitude better. Not that I'm saying that the UNIX way doesn't rock, mind you.
Actually, that works well on Windows PCs as well. Heck, if it didn't, you couldn't have roaming profiles (which do have some minor issues, but work remarkably well) where you can log in on any machine and all of your files/settings/etc are visible to you. The only difference is that some Windows users love making random hidey-holes for their files instead of putting them under "/Documents and Settings/[Username]" in the appropriate Documents or Images or Whatever folders. There are some badly behaved apps that encourage this, and others that store settings in weird places, but those are the exception rather than the norm (and a MacPort of them would do exactly the same stupid shit).
This is basically using Google's storage as a BigAssDisk(tm) for you to move/wipe your machine. Think about what would happen if they didn't do this:
1) User "saves" his data to google.
2) User wipes and rebuilds his PC.
3) User loads his data from google, after which google immediately forgets it.
4) User realizes that his drive was set up incorrectly and repeats step 2.
5) User says, "Fuck. I thought I'd saved that!"
They're emulating a temporary backup tape in this case, so they're acting more like one. Destructing 30 days after last use is reasonable (it is a temporary tape) and indeed useful. Destructing 30 seconds after first use is potentially catestrophic.
Has anyone been able to stop by their local Apple store and see if they have display models out? I'm sure they won't have walk-in inventory for a while, until they free up their order backlog, but it would be nice to get a little hands-on time before plunking down real money.
Really? I think they can be legitimately criticized for being willing to assist in lending an air of credibility to the scam by issuing certs to a site with no legitimate purposes at all, merely because the scuzzbags who run the site are willing to cut them a cheque
So you would support having to share your business plan to get a cert, with certs costing thousands of $CUR just to pay for all of the investigation they would require? After all, in 15 minutes you could register mountain-america.net, set up a really crappy (but no worse than many) looking coffee-shop website, and say that you were going to sell coffee over the internet.
At least Verisign (years ago) made you provide some easily-mocked-up letterhead. It was crap, but they did something.
The growth is all in women and girls
So that's why Nintendo put the rumble pack into that new wand-shaped controller.
I keed, I keed...
To you I have only one thing to say. Well, two things. Alright, three including this declaration, but that's not important. First, well, you pretty much nailed it. Less gratuitous blood (reasonable blood is fine), more action and, dare I say it, thought. Although that's close to saying that music today should have a melody, damn these kids today... You were especially correct about the fact that you used to be able to sit and hang out with friends, casually playing Zelda/Mario/whatever, with moments of interesting (often to all around you) action. Not so any more, for the most part.
Second, for a stroll down memory lane: http://www.homestarrunner.com/disk4of12.html
I don't expect it will actually deter determined pirates - nothing much will.
However it'd be a whole let less intrusive than DRM and would let normal law abiding users go about their business without having to make sure that all their hardware is completely compatible.
Right, but if you set the bar so low that it doesn't actually have to work, why do anything at all? After all, disemminating plain MP3s would be "a whole lot less intrusive than DRM" even though it wouldn't "actually deter determined pirates." And if ripping a CD is all that it takes to become a "determined" pirate, well...
Except that the scenario would go like this:
1) "Obtain" stolen credit card.
2) Download, and pay for, tons of MP3s from public computer/wap.
3) Throw away credit card.
4) Share pirated MP3s to millions.
Or better yet, as long as a single frickin' CD is sold:
1) Buy CD for cash.
2) Rip CD.
3) Share MP3s.
With watermarks, even in every CD, this will be discouraged exactly how?
Why bother?
I mean, isn't it cheaper to let everybody know that you're watermarking the video files than it would be to actually watermark them? Maybe toss in a few random bits if you think that people would actually download two copies and diff them, to keep them guessing.
Social solutions to technical problems. Think of it as the, "Hey, I'll give you candy for your password," issue, but in reverse.
Er, man, don't use the "mute to vibrate" feature. I've got a RAZR (as does half the country, or so it seems). Settings -> Audio -> Style -> Vibrate works just fine. As does using the left side buttons.
Who thought of that?
You, apparently.