Most record deals specify the royalties as a percentage of retail price after deductions. This means that when a recording is discounted, the artist is doubly screwed. Artists (or in this case, their estates) traditionally get a much better deal when prices are up than when they're down. Whether iTunes has changed the situation or not, I don't know.
And that's all entirely applicable to the situation at hand. Loads of people disagree with the patenting of genes, but if we had access to a patentable gene and someone offered us a big yacht in exchange for it, wouldn't we say yes? That's the insidious thing about capitalism -- it offers immediate benefits to the individuals who have the power to make a decision, while taking away from the masses.
More to the point, Monsanto's dominant seed crops constitute a monoculture, which is a dangerous thing. For example, there has been a near monoculture in wheat since someone managed to selective breed a variety resistant to stem rust (a fungal disease). When stem rust eventually evolved to grow on modern crops, it quickly became an epidemic, and spread far more quickly than would have been possible in biodiverse crops. AFAIK, it's still a major problem, and they're still trying to find the solution.
Of course, Monsanto aren't worried about monoculture, because they can just invent and market a new monoculture later, and they'll get paid just the same. But for the farmers, the lost crops mean lost earnings, and for the rest of us, well... it isn't possible for a whole society to buy themselves out of a famine, only the privileged few.
I recall reading/watching something saying that organic farming still used pesticides, but none of the new, probably better, synthetic ones. I guess they were 'natural source' pesticides. I guess wikipedia has a list of some.
You may be thinking of the Soil Association, who've effectively monopolised the term "organic" in the UK.
I grew up with very heavy environmental leanings, but I'm not afraid to call the Soil Association a bunch of human-hating greenies. Their line was that pesticides that are toxic to humans were OK, because farmers won't use as much (because there are strict legal limits on their use), but that never less toxic ones were bad because farmers use more and poison river systems with them. All this while declaring that organic food is better for you because there's less pesticides used. Hypocritical human-hating hippies.
How many students in the UK do any prep for tutorials? I seem to recall doing most of mine on the bus to uni or sitting in the hall between lectures. One of the unsung benefits of the lecture is the dedicated timetable. You can't put it off till later, and you give it (almost) your full attention (when you're not writing stuff on the desks).
I took Thurn and Norvig's into to AI class and was pretty thoroughly disappointed. But I am also disappointed in most of what went on in my undergraduate school, and equally disappointed with myself when I was yapping in front of calculus students at the UC when I was lecturing there. The problem is that lecturing is really crappy for actually learning anything. However, it's the easiest thing to do, and scales remarkably well. Furthermore, adult learners love it. Especially those who have already learned something about the subject. The process usually goes: student learns something marginally well, hears a concise explanation/lecture on the subject later, things connect and click into place, and then the learner says "well why the hell didn't they just do that in the first place?!?". The answer is that it wouldn't have worked in the first place. It works now because of the scaffolding afforded by your earlier education (re your HS courses being blown out of the water).
I can't agree with that. I've done a heck of a lot of time as an undergrad, through various media.
I studied computing full time at one of Scotland's top unis. I studied two-and-a-half language degrees with the Open University of the UK -- one of the oldest and best-respected distance learning establishments in existence. I'm now doing mixed-mode study with one of Scotland's newest universities, the UHI.
I've studied by lecture, by book, by TV documentary, and by online text.
The best stuff I ever studied was book-and-TV, but that doesn't really count, because that was an English language course, and so the course designers really knew about how to connect with an audience. In general, I find lectures are better than books, and books are better than online. The reason for this is the density of the text. If you transcribed a good lecture, it would look really messy, and more than a little patronising, because a good lecturer talks around a subject to give you a feel for what's going on before sticking a name or a formula on it. He'll ask lots of rhetorical questions to start your brain contemplating the issues. He'll make passing reference to related concepts that you've previously encountered that are related to the topic under discussion. And you won't even realise that he's done it. What you remember after a good lecture is the target knowledge, not the teaching method.
But when the lecturer sits down to write a book, he focuses on the target knowledge -- there is very little done to prepare your mind for the new knowledge. This isn't just laziness, it's the nature of the medium -- you read faster than he lectures. The pauses, the gaps, the little bits of thinking time -- you can't put them down on paper.
Shift to online learning, and the target-knowledge focus is even tighter. Effectively you get a series of condensed lecture notes, but without the lecture before. Lecture notes only serve to remind you of what was said, not to say it to you. So the online courses are very difficult to learn from, and most of the "elearning" I've taken both in education and in the workplace is simply rote memorisation of a bunch of definitions, often being tested with "Goldilocks" type questions -- three answers: one "too hot", one "too cold", one "just right". Even if they don't use Goldilocks questions, your improvement is measured by answering the same questions again, which means that you don't have to learn why you were wrong, just that you were wrong and to give the correct answer next time.
I doubt lectures are better. I've no idea why Professors are finding it doesn't work -- I suspect ineptitude, indolence/a lack of will, and/or a lack of communication skills.
Many lectures are held with about 300 people sitting half-asleep in one room. On average they probably pay attention for the first 10 minutes, and maybe a few other minutes on and off through the hour. Most do not ask questions.
How can that possibly be better than to have the same information imparted via a video or audio show, which they can 1. Pause, 2. Rewind, and 3. Watch at a time when they are fully ready to concentrate? Especially since they will have the ability to email, facebook, or twat questions -- and may even have questions after fully taking in the entire lecture.
The real problem here is that teaching manuals are inadequate, and teacher training courses are in adequate. I've done a 4-week course in teaching English to foreigners, and what I noticed was that everything taught to me was superficial. I was told about various types of teaching techniques, methods, and tasks. I was told how to deliver and present them, but never was it explained to me why I should use a technique -- how to choose one. Never was I taught how to build a task from the ground up so that it was focused and coherent. All I was taught to do was commit arbitrary tasks to paper and get on with it.
But this wasn't just this course. I went through loads of books trying to find the information that was missing from my course. I went through all the standard textbooks for teachers, and it wasn't there. My father was a teacher, and in all his CPD it was missing too.
So this guys advice will be lacking in the same way. It won't tell you how to build the material meaningfully; it won't tell you when to do what -- all it will give you is a rough description of the shape of the tasks he does.
Now I believe face-to-face lectures still have one advantage that nothing else can replace: spontaneous and semi-spontaneous talk is messy, and as soon as you try to commit something to video, to paper, or to an on-line description, you eliminate that mess. But often that messiness serves a genuine pedagogical purpose. On the simplest level, it slows the language down, and gives the listener more time to process the content (which is new to the listener, remember). More subtely, it also helps the lecturer create a better structure in the students' minds to understand what's going on.
Here's a completely made-up example using false anatomy.
The book version
As can be seen in fig. 12, the whombombic nerve splits into the tremblific nerve and the gronoral nerve at the whombobic plexus. A trapped tremblific nerve can cause discomfort after periods of inactivity.
The lecture version
Have a look at this slide. You see here...? [waves pointer in a circle] Just there, above the... the area here, called the whombombic plexus, there's a nerve bundle, and it branches. The right branch goes down to the gronorus, so it calls.. erm we call we call it the gronoral nerve. The left branch heads off along the tremblus, and it's called the tremblific nerve. You might not know anything about the tremblific nerve, but have you ever had shooting pains down your left side when you've been lying in place too long? There's a good chance that's your tremblific.
I suspect that most objections to this are just stubbornness, laziness and fear of change. (Which also translates to fear of losing cash in Uni depts -- there really is far less reason for students to pay vast sums to go daily to over-large college buildings any more, nor reside in them either. And since Education is really a racket that's all about money, that's a reason to fear change.)
If this were true, then the lecture would only now be in use in the USA, because in much of the rest of the world, universities make their money from research grants and tuition is cappe
I do not see a problem. Nothing on Mac OS X can run on iOS, why should MSFT be any different.
What they really need to do is start looking at Servers differently from Workstations/Laptops differently from smartphones/tablets. One piece of software does not need to run across all 3 nor should it. I am so tired of people who think they are going to get a tablet to replace their computer and then whine about missing the keyboard.
If you disagree with the core of my argument, fine, disagree with it. But you've ignored it. My argument: desktop and mobile computing are converging. There will not be three platforms in 10 years time. A tablet will be a computer without a keyboard. A smartphone will be a tablet with a smaller screen. Plug your smartphone into a TV and whack on a keyboard, and you will be using it as your computer. The business traveller will love it, as it'll take that (heavy) laptop bag off his shoulders, and his hotel and destination office will provide him with the keyboard and screen. Hotdesking will be revitalised as it's "sit down anywhere and stick your phone in the cradle".
Do you think it's impossible? The average user doesn't need that much power in his pocket? Well, gamers don't need a fully powered business machine, but since the days of the C64 they have been buying them anyway. Your average Word-and-Excel desk jockey doesn't need a rig capable of rendering a 3D CAD model or a short animated film, but most have them. Granny only wants to email her grandson at college, and yet she's got a machine that's capable of running Crysis.
That's how general-purpose computing works -- sell one thing to everyone. It doesn't matter that most of us just want to play Angry Birds, watch YouTube vids and, y' know, phone people up; our smartphones will be fully capable business computers.
It's a different sort of license. The license in question here is "a license to reproduce the music". The important thing is that the label does less work, so gets less money. It doesn't matter whether the retail deal is "sale" or "license", in neither case is the label making any discs, storing any discs, replacing any stored discs etc. They aren't earning the money they're currently taking.
WOA has a chicken and egg problem. Which came first? The large number of third party apps / developers supporting WOA? Or the large end user base running WOA?
I think WOA is actually an attempt to avoid a future chicken-and-egg problem. As I said in another post, the current trend in computing is heading towards convergence of personal computing and mobile computing. No smartphones or smartphone-derived tablets currently have any real quantities of desktop-replacement apps. When the convergence comes, whichever OS has the most productivity software (as it was referred to way-back-when) will have a massive advantage.
In order for this to work, Microsoft don't need every vendor to port their software to WOA, they just need a few, because they just need more apps than their competitors. LibreOffice is being ported to Android and iOS. MS Office will be available for WOA, and will therefore be easily converted to run on post-convergence-Windows. Tie. Any apps beyond this are a bonus.
It's possible that this is the first step toward leaving 'Windows legacy applications' behind. They are going to have to do it sometime, and ARM isn't similar to x86 like Atom is, so this may be a logical starting point.
Exactly. It's legacy software that's tied mainstream computing to the x86 architecture for two decades. Tthe x86 is a power-hungry architecture best suited for desktop and rack computing, but recent trends are towards mobile computing. Laptops started to outsell desktops. Netbooks hit the market. Smartphones reached a level where they could be used as complete computers. And the Tablet PC concept, which had been bubbling under for over a decade, finally found it's niche as a "maxi-smartphone". x86 is dead, and MS need to encourage people to produce standardised, architecture-neutral code if they're going to migrate to another architecture.
If they don't migrate to another architecture, what happens? Smartphones with HDMI out (and a built-in focus-free laset picoprojector) and Bluetooth or USB for keyboards and mice displace the traditional computer. If Windows is still split between phone and desktop, Windows dies.
So why the separation between desktop and phone OS? Why WOA an not just maintain their ARM version as Windows Phone? Because right now, phone apps are phone apps, and desktop apps are desktop apps. An OS lives and dies on its third party software, and this move is calculated to ensure that there is a back catalogue of desktop software available when the two paradigms merge.
It's a smart move, and shows a lot of foresight. Google should take note, and start working on standardised compatibility layers that encourage Linux app developers to produce software that can be easily migrated to Android.
Ee gads, what a troll. I used Catalan as an example -- I am a native English speaker, so the finished product is going to be in MY language anyway. Catalan is neither artificial or invented, and how on Earth you think the Nazi's have anything to do with it is beyond me.
My point was that they are selling the product couched in vague terms: "more money means more languages (but we're not going to commit to anything)", "more money means more formats (but we're not going to commit to anything)". If the Kickstarter platform supported it, it would be great to have the opportunity to pledge for specific versions. It would help the donor, and it would help the developers, because it would act as market research. Everyone wins.
Oh, and your "exact" figures are wrong. Catalan is not only spoken in Spain. But bigotry is usually a sign of ignorance, so I didn't expect anything factually correct from you.
It's not an investment, it's patronage of the arts. It's a very old way of raising funds, but in the old days, funding arts was an ostentation. "Oh look at me, I funded an opera!" Also, there were such things as "subscriber lists" for books in days gone by. For things that were a bit "niche", a group would have a whipround to fund someone to put it together -- they were the "subscribers" and they'd all get listed inside the book. People did this because the books supported a cause that was close to their heart. Many books of Scottish Gaelic poetry were funded this way. Local history societies would do similar things to fund the publishing of books from their area.
But that's not a guarantee. I can put my money in wanting a Catalan Linux port, but they get my money whether they deliver it or not. If projects on this scale are going to go via Kickstarter, they're going to need to start adding conditions, like several concurrent minipledge drives.
Worth noting is that Microsoft was not allowed to present evidence of prior art at trial. Why that would be, I have no idea - I'm not a patent lawyer.
I'm not a lawyer or an American, but as I understand it (from previous discussions on Slashdot), in America you can only defend yourself by saying that you don't infringe the patent. If you want the patent declared invalid, you have to sue separately for invalidation (which Microsoft did) then appeal demanding that the original judgement is overturned. I believe that the US is the only place with this (frankly nuts) system.
While the Microsoft suit was underway, the company applied for a second patent, which it received on Oct. 6, 2009. The same day, Eolas filed suit — in East Texas — against more than 20 big companies
Let's have a look at some of the characteristics of software that make it suitable for open sourcing.
There's software like OpenOffice/LibreOffice and most of the open source games that are little more than direct reimplementation of existing, mature software models. "Reimplementing" a textbook in the same way would probably be hit as plagiarism.
Most modern software makes at least some use of reusable components (libraries and OS functions). This is only possible thanks to encapsulation and low coupling. A process takes a couple of inputs, and gives an output -- it shouldn't care what the rest of the software package does with it. However, a good textbook will exhibit extremely high coupling. Domain knowledge is inter-related, so no chapter in a textbook truly stands alone. To use a trivial example, we can't teach printf in C effectively without knowing whether the student already knows what \n means or not.
Those reusable components take little reworking. Maybe you'll need to alter the bubblesort comparison step if you're using a custom datatype, but that's a simple change that doesn't break anything, but there's no analogous "minor change" in text -- change one thing, and the sentence needs rewritten: reusable text components effectively take more time than just writing new text.
Hmmm... but if she refuses saying she's forgotten it and they bang her up until she gives it up, then theoretically if she was lying, she'd be at risk of contempt of court if she admitted the truth. So (and this may be twisted, but it's logical, so stick with me) sending her to prison indefinitely would essentially be an attempt to force her to incriminate herself for the accused contempt. Hence unconstitutional, even if the constitution allows the initial demand of the key.
If your customers aren't buying your products, please stop whining about customer behaviour and change your products to suit the market.
If your business model doesn't make money in the market you've chosen, please stop whining about the market and change your business model.
I'm not currently a mobile app developer, so your assumption that I'm just an unsuccessful whinger is invalid -- you can stuff your strawman you-know-where.
However, I am considering becoming a mobile app developer in the near future, and I'm looking at all the variables in order to try to find a viable strategy. Rovio's opinions provide no insight into how I can turn a healthy profit, given the field I work in (language education). Rovio's specific example provides an incredibly narrow, short-sighted view of value. Angry Birds is lowest common denominator stuff -- it's like the mobile app equivalent of reality TV: massively popular but of no real consequence.
A language learning app is of real-world value, but there is very little scope for a secondary income source unless you're very very big and can score a licensing deal to provide VoD as a learner resource. Obviously that's outside my reach.
Until I have some idea how I'm going to be able to sell it, I'm reluctant to make it....
Rovio's attitude stinks, because it just runs on the same lines as all appstore economics.
Rovio have made millions, but they're the exception -- most mobile apps get few or no sales. The profits in mobile apps, spread across all writers, would amount to a pretty pitiful wage. Losses to lower-order app developers mean loss of (already rubbish) income. Losses to Rovio mean little or nothing, considering the scale they're on.
Advertising? Well, three things:
1) It's well established that piracy tends to favour known and popular materials over unknown and unpopular, in all media. It therefore serves to further entrench the established players -- so it's great for Rovio, not much use for John A B Smith Software.
2) The entrenched players in mobile apps are supported by their appstore ratings, compiled from legal downloads. Even 100,000,000 downloads of a pirated game wouldn't get it above Angry Birds in the appstore charts, so it wouldn't get commercial discovery and success.
3) Angry Birds is a brand, and the toys and cartoons make lots of money. Most apps aren't merchandisable. PocketPlayPool -- are you going to market branded balls? GTCarsXXVII -- the manufacturers retain all likeness rights to their own models, so there's nothing to market. Same goes for EAProSportofchoice20xx and sports personalities/teams.
So what Rovio is supporting is market conditions that favour their particular product, which is very different from market conditions that ensure a robust and healthy competitive environment, or that ensure innovation and development.
They don't need to take it over. It's in UK territorial waters, and the only people who have ever inhabited it since the "settlement" are British Citizens or citizens of EU member-states, so all meet the residency requirements for UK territory. No illegal immigrants, therefore no need for evictions. Simple.
However, Sealand constructed its sovereignty when it was not UK territory, and thus has rights to establish its own sovereignty.
One could argue that when the UK extended its territorial waters from 6 miles to 12 miles, that it annexed Sealand, and Sealand is now properly territory of the UK, however this has not been established by any legal rulings, and the UK continues to not assert any jurisdiction over the territory, while Sealand continues to operate with de facto sovereignty.
Sealand declared its sovereignty, but "constructed"? It was never recognised by anyone.
It also declared its sovereignty before international laws were put in place declaring that buildings and constructions at see don't give any territorial rights, but again, it was never recognised. That the legislation doesn't make a named exception for Sealand means that, de jure, Sealand is not a country.
Way to be racist, dude. The important thing (as noted in multiple parts of this thread) is that C2DM is part of the Android Marketplace, not part of Android. If you don't have an Android Marketplace-compatible phone, you don't have C2DM. And that means that most Android devices in the world do not have C2DM.
Slashdot Mirror
Most record deals specify the royalties as a percentage of retail price after deductions. This means that when a recording is discounted, the artist is doubly screwed. Artists (or in this case, their estates) traditionally get a much better deal when prices are up than when they're down. Whether iTunes has changed the situation or not, I don't know.
And that's all entirely applicable to the situation at hand. Loads of people disagree with the patenting of genes, but if we had access to a patentable gene and someone offered us a big yacht in exchange for it, wouldn't we say yes? That's the insidious thing about capitalism -- it offers immediate benefits to the individuals who have the power to make a decision, while taking away from the masses.
More to the point, Monsanto's dominant seed crops constitute a monoculture, which is a dangerous thing. For example, there has been a near monoculture in wheat since someone managed to selective breed a variety resistant to stem rust (a fungal disease). When stem rust eventually evolved to grow on modern crops, it quickly became an epidemic, and spread far more quickly than would have been possible in biodiverse crops. AFAIK, it's still a major problem, and they're still trying to find the solution.
Of course, Monsanto aren't worried about monoculture, because they can just invent and market a new monoculture later, and they'll get paid just the same. But for the farmers, the lost crops mean lost earnings, and for the rest of us, well... it isn't possible for a whole society to buy themselves out of a famine, only the privileged few.
I recall reading/watching something saying that organic farming still used pesticides, but none of the new, probably better, synthetic ones. I guess they were 'natural source' pesticides. I guess wikipedia has a list of some.
You may be thinking of the Soil Association, who've effectively monopolised the term "organic" in the UK.
I grew up with very heavy environmental leanings, but I'm not afraid to call the Soil Association a bunch of human-hating greenies. Their line was that pesticides that are toxic to humans were OK, because farmers won't use as much (because there are strict legal limits on their use), but that never less toxic ones were bad because farmers use more and poison river systems with them. All this while declaring that organic food is better for you because there's less pesticides used. Hypocritical human-hating hippies.
How many students in the UK do any prep for tutorials? I seem to recall doing most of mine on the bus to uni or sitting in the hall between lectures. One of the unsung benefits of the lecture is the dedicated timetable. You can't put it off till later, and you give it (almost) your full attention (when you're not writing stuff on the desks).
I took Thurn and Norvig's into to AI class and was pretty thoroughly disappointed. But I am also disappointed in most of what went on in my undergraduate school, and equally disappointed with myself when I was yapping in front of calculus students at the UC when I was lecturing there. The problem is that lecturing is really crappy for actually learning anything. However, it's the easiest thing to do, and scales remarkably well. Furthermore, adult learners love it. Especially those who have already learned something about the subject. The process usually goes: student learns something marginally well, hears a concise explanation/lecture on the subject later, things connect and click into place, and then the learner says "well why the hell didn't they just do that in the first place?!?". The answer is that it wouldn't have worked in the first place. It works now because of the scaffolding afforded by your earlier education (re your HS courses being blown out of the water).
I can't agree with that. I've done a heck of a lot of time as an undergrad, through various media.
I studied computing full time at one of Scotland's top unis. I studied two-and-a-half language degrees with the Open University of the UK -- one of the oldest and best-respected distance learning establishments in existence. I'm now doing mixed-mode study with one of Scotland's newest universities, the UHI.
I've studied by lecture, by book, by TV documentary, and by online text.
The best stuff I ever studied was book-and-TV, but that doesn't really count, because that was an English language course, and so the course designers really knew about how to connect with an audience. In general, I find lectures are better than books, and books are better than online. The reason for this is the density of the text. If you transcribed a good lecture, it would look really messy, and more than a little patronising, because a good lecturer talks around a subject to give you a feel for what's going on before sticking a name or a formula on it. He'll ask lots of rhetorical questions to start your brain contemplating the issues. He'll make passing reference to related concepts that you've previously encountered that are related to the topic under discussion. And you won't even realise that he's done it. What you remember after a good lecture is the target knowledge, not the teaching method.
But when the lecturer sits down to write a book, he focuses on the target knowledge -- there is very little done to prepare your mind for the new knowledge. This isn't just laziness, it's the nature of the medium -- you read faster than he lectures. The pauses, the gaps, the little bits of thinking time -- you can't put them down on paper.
Shift to online learning, and the target-knowledge focus is even tighter. Effectively you get a series of condensed lecture notes, but without the lecture before. Lecture notes only serve to remind you of what was said, not to say it to you. So the online courses are very difficult to learn from, and most of the "elearning" I've taken both in education and in the workplace is simply rote memorisation of a bunch of definitions, often being tested with "Goldilocks" type questions -- three answers: one "too hot", one "too cold", one "just right". Even if they don't use Goldilocks questions, your improvement is measured by answering the same questions again, which means that you don't have to learn why you were wrong, just that you were wrong and to give the correct answer next time.
I doubt lectures are better. I've no idea why Professors are finding it doesn't work -- I suspect ineptitude, indolence/a lack of will, and/or a lack of communication skills.
Many lectures are held with about 300 people sitting half-asleep in one room. On average they probably pay attention for the first 10 minutes, and maybe a few other minutes on and off through the hour. Most do not ask questions.
How can that possibly be better than to have the same information imparted via a video or audio show, which they can 1. Pause, 2. Rewind, and 3. Watch at a time when they are fully ready to concentrate? Especially since they will have the ability to email, facebook, or twat questions -- and may even have questions after fully taking in the entire lecture.
The real problem here is that teaching manuals are inadequate, and teacher training courses are in adequate. I've done a 4-week course in teaching English to foreigners, and what I noticed was that everything taught to me was superficial. I was told about various types of teaching techniques, methods, and tasks. I was told how to deliver and present them, but never was it explained to me why I should use a technique -- how to choose one. Never was I taught how to build a task from the ground up so that it was focused and coherent. All I was taught to do was commit arbitrary tasks to paper and get on with it.
But this wasn't just this course. I went through loads of books trying to find the information that was missing from my course. I went through all the standard textbooks for teachers, and it wasn't there. My father was a teacher, and in all his CPD it was missing too.
So this guys advice will be lacking in the same way. It won't tell you how to build the material meaningfully; it won't tell you when to do what -- all it will give you is a rough description of the shape of the tasks he does.
Now I believe face-to-face lectures still have one advantage that nothing else can replace: spontaneous and semi-spontaneous talk is messy, and as soon as you try to commit something to video, to paper, or to an on-line description, you eliminate that mess. But often that messiness serves a genuine pedagogical purpose. On the simplest level, it slows the language down, and gives the listener more time to process the content (which is new to the listener, remember). More subtely, it also helps the lecturer create a better structure in the students' minds to understand what's going on.
Here's a completely made-up example using false anatomy.
The book version
As can be seen in fig. 12, the whombombic nerve splits into the tremblific nerve and the gronoral nerve at the whombobic plexus. A trapped tremblific nerve can cause discomfort after periods of inactivity.
The lecture version
Have a look at this slide. You see here...? [waves pointer in a circle] Just there, above the... the area here, called the whombombic plexus, there's a nerve bundle, and it branches. The right branch goes down to the gronorus, so it calls.. erm we call we call it the gronoral nerve. The left branch heads off along the tremblus, and it's called the tremblific nerve. You might not know anything about the tremblific nerve, but have you ever had shooting pains down your left side when you've been lying in place too long? There's a good chance that's your tremblific.
I suspect that most objections to this are just stubbornness, laziness and fear of change. (Which also translates to fear of losing cash in Uni depts -- there really is far less reason for students to pay vast sums to go daily to over-large college buildings any more, nor reside in them either. And since Education is really a racket that's all about money, that's a reason to fear change.)
If this were true, then the lecture would only now be in use in the USA, because in much of the rest of the world, universities make their money from research grants and tuition is cappe
I do not see a problem. Nothing on Mac OS X can run on iOS, why should MSFT be any different.
What they really need to do is start looking at Servers differently from Workstations/Laptops differently from smartphones/tablets. One piece of software does not need to run across all 3 nor should it. I am so tired of people who think they are going to get a tablet to replace their computer and then whine about missing the keyboard.
If you disagree with the core of my argument, fine, disagree with it. But you've ignored it. My argument: desktop and mobile computing are converging. There will not be three platforms in 10 years time. A tablet will be a computer without a keyboard. A smartphone will be a tablet with a smaller screen. Plug your smartphone into a TV and whack on a keyboard, and you will be using it as your computer. The business traveller will love it, as it'll take that (heavy) laptop bag off his shoulders, and his hotel and destination office will provide him with the keyboard and screen. Hotdesking will be revitalised as it's "sit down anywhere and stick your phone in the cradle".
Do you think it's impossible? The average user doesn't need that much power in his pocket? Well, gamers don't need a fully powered business machine, but since the days of the C64 they have been buying them anyway. Your average Word-and-Excel desk jockey doesn't need a rig capable of rendering a 3D CAD model or a short animated film, but most have them. Granny only wants to email her grandson at college, and yet she's got a machine that's capable of running Crysis.
That's how general-purpose computing works -- sell one thing to everyone. It doesn't matter that most of us just want to play Angry Birds, watch YouTube vids and, y' know, phone people up; our smartphones will be fully capable business computers.
It's a different sort of license. The license in question here is "a license to reproduce the music". The important thing is that the label does less work, so gets less money. It doesn't matter whether the retail deal is "sale" or "license", in neither case is the label making any discs, storing any discs, replacing any stored discs etc. They aren't earning the money they're currently taking.
WOA has a chicken and egg problem. Which came first? The large number of third party apps / developers supporting WOA? Or the large end user base running WOA?
I think WOA is actually an attempt to avoid a future chicken-and-egg problem. As I said in another post, the current trend in computing is heading towards convergence of personal computing and mobile computing. No smartphones or smartphone-derived tablets currently have any real quantities of desktop-replacement apps. When the convergence comes, whichever OS has the most productivity software (as it was referred to way-back-when) will have a massive advantage.
In order for this to work, Microsoft don't need every vendor to port their software to WOA, they just need a few, because they just need more apps than their competitors. LibreOffice is being ported to Android and iOS. MS Office will be available for WOA, and will therefore be easily converted to run on post-convergence-Windows. Tie. Any apps beyond this are a bonus.
It's possible that this is the first step toward leaving 'Windows legacy applications' behind. They are going to have to do it sometime, and ARM isn't similar to x86 like Atom is, so this may be a logical starting point.
Exactly. It's legacy software that's tied mainstream computing to the x86 architecture for two decades. Tthe x86 is a power-hungry architecture best suited for desktop and rack computing, but recent trends are towards mobile computing. Laptops started to outsell desktops. Netbooks hit the market. Smartphones reached a level where they could be used as complete computers. And the Tablet PC concept, which had been bubbling under for over a decade, finally found it's niche as a "maxi-smartphone". x86 is dead, and MS need to encourage people to produce standardised, architecture-neutral code if they're going to migrate to another architecture.
If they don't migrate to another architecture, what happens? Smartphones with HDMI out (and a built-in focus-free laset picoprojector) and Bluetooth or USB for keyboards and mice displace the traditional computer. If Windows is still split between phone and desktop, Windows dies.
So why the separation between desktop and phone OS? Why WOA an not just maintain their ARM version as Windows Phone? Because right now, phone apps are phone apps, and desktop apps are desktop apps. An OS lives and dies on its third party software, and this move is calculated to ensure that there is a back catalogue of desktop software available when the two paradigms merge.
It's a smart move, and shows a lot of foresight. Google should take note, and start working on standardised compatibility layers that encourage Linux app developers to produce software that can be easily migrated to Android.
Ee gads, what a troll. I used Catalan as an example -- I am a native English speaker, so the finished product is going to be in MY language anyway. Catalan is neither artificial or invented, and how on Earth you think the Nazi's have anything to do with it is beyond me.
My point was that they are selling the product couched in vague terms: "more money means more languages (but we're not going to commit to anything)", "more money means more formats (but we're not going to commit to anything)". If the Kickstarter platform supported it, it would be great to have the opportunity to pledge for specific versions. It would help the donor, and it would help the developers, because it would act as market research. Everyone wins.
Oh, and your "exact" figures are wrong. Catalan is not only spoken in Spain. But bigotry is usually a sign of ignorance, so I didn't expect anything factually correct from you.
It's not an investment, it's patronage of the arts. It's a very old way of raising funds, but in the old days, funding arts was an ostentation. "Oh look at me, I funded an opera!" Also, there were such things as "subscriber lists" for books in days gone by. For things that were a bit "niche", a group would have a whipround to fund someone to put it together -- they were the "subscribers" and they'd all get listed inside the book. People did this because the books supported a cause that was close to their heart. Many books of Scottish Gaelic poetry were funded this way. Local history societies would do similar things to fund the publishing of books from their area.
But that's not a guarantee. I can put my money in wanting a Catalan Linux port, but they get my money whether they deliver it or not. If projects on this scale are going to go via Kickstarter, they're going to need to start adding conditions, like several concurrent minipledge drives.
Worth noting is that Microsoft was not allowed to present evidence of prior art at trial. Why that would be, I have no idea - I'm not a patent lawyer.
I'm not a lawyer or an American, but as I understand it (from previous discussions on Slashdot), in America you can only defend yourself by saying that you don't infringe the patent. If you want the patent declared invalid, you have to sue separately for invalidation (which Microsoft did) then appeal demanding that the original judgement is overturned. I believe that the US is the only place with this (frankly nuts) system.
While the Microsoft suit was underway, the company applied for a second patent, which it received on Oct. 6, 2009. The same day, Eolas filed suit — in East Texas — against more than 20 big companies
No limitations here.
Let's have a look at some of the characteristics of software that make it suitable for open sourcing. There's software like OpenOffice/LibreOffice and most of the open source games that are little more than direct reimplementation of existing, mature software models. "Reimplementing" a textbook in the same way would probably be hit as plagiarism. Most modern software makes at least some use of reusable components (libraries and OS functions). This is only possible thanks to encapsulation and low coupling. A process takes a couple of inputs, and gives an output -- it shouldn't care what the rest of the software package does with it. However, a good textbook will exhibit extremely high coupling. Domain knowledge is inter-related, so no chapter in a textbook truly stands alone. To use a trivial example, we can't teach printf in C effectively without knowing whether the student already knows what \n means or not. Those reusable components take little reworking. Maybe you'll need to alter the bubblesort comparison step if you're using a custom datatype, but that's a simple change that doesn't break anything, but there's no analogous "minor change" in text -- change one thing, and the sentence needs rewritten: reusable text components effectively take more time than just writing new text.
Hmmm... but if she refuses saying she's forgotten it and they bang her up until she gives it up, then theoretically if she was lying, she'd be at risk of contempt of court if she admitted the truth. So (and this may be twisted, but it's logical, so stick with me) sending her to prison indefinitely would essentially be an attempt to force her to incriminate herself for the accused contempt. Hence unconstitutional, even if the constitution allows the initial demand of the key.
If your customers aren't buying your products, please stop whining about customer behaviour and change your products to suit the market.
If your business model doesn't make money in the market you've chosen, please stop whining about the market and change your business model.
I'm not currently a mobile app developer, so your assumption that I'm just an unsuccessful whinger is invalid -- you can stuff your strawman you-know-where.
However, I am considering becoming a mobile app developer in the near future, and I'm looking at all the variables in order to try to find a viable strategy. Rovio's opinions provide no insight into how I can turn a healthy profit, given the field I work in (language education). Rovio's specific example provides an incredibly narrow, short-sighted view of value. Angry Birds is lowest common denominator stuff -- it's like the mobile app equivalent of reality TV: massively popular but of no real consequence.
A language learning app is of real-world value, but there is very little scope for a secondary income source unless you're very very big and can score a licensing deal to provide VoD as a learner resource. Obviously that's outside my reach.
Until I have some idea how I'm going to be able to sell it, I'm reluctant to make it....
I'd be worried the polecats might harm the native Cane Toad population....
Rovio's attitude stinks, because it just runs on the same lines as all appstore economics.
Rovio have made millions, but they're the exception -- most mobile apps get few or no sales. The profits in mobile apps, spread across all writers, would amount to a pretty pitiful wage. Losses to lower-order app developers mean loss of (already rubbish) income. Losses to Rovio mean little or nothing, considering the scale they're on.
Advertising? Well, three things:
1) It's well established that piracy tends to favour known and popular materials over unknown and unpopular, in all media. It therefore serves to further entrench the established players -- so it's great for Rovio, not much use for John A B Smith Software.
2) The entrenched players in mobile apps are supported by their appstore ratings, compiled from legal downloads. Even 100,000,000 downloads of a pirated game wouldn't get it above Angry Birds in the appstore charts, so it wouldn't get commercial discovery and success.
3) Angry Birds is a brand, and the toys and cartoons make lots of money. Most apps aren't merchandisable. PocketPlayPool -- are you going to market branded balls? GTCarsXXVII -- the manufacturers retain all likeness rights to their own models, so there's nothing to market. Same goes for EAProSportofchoice20xx and sports personalities/teams.
So what Rovio is supporting is market conditions that favour their particular product, which is very different from market conditions that ensure a robust and healthy competitive environment, or that ensure innovation and development.
They don't need to take it over. It's in UK territorial waters, and the only people who have ever inhabited it since the "settlement" are British Citizens or citizens of EU member-states, so all meet the residency requirements for UK territory. No illegal immigrants, therefore no need for evictions. Simple.
US law doesn't apply in Guantanamo, which is why they used it.
However, Sealand constructed its sovereignty when it was not UK territory, and thus has rights to establish its own sovereignty.
One could argue that when the UK extended its territorial waters from 6 miles to 12 miles, that it annexed Sealand, and Sealand is now properly territory of the UK, however this has not been established by any legal rulings, and the UK continues to not assert any jurisdiction over the territory, while Sealand continues to operate with de facto sovereignty.
Sealand declared its sovereignty, but "constructed"? It was never recognised by anyone.
It also declared its sovereignty before international laws were put in place declaring that buildings and constructions at see don't give any territorial rights, but again, it was never recognised. That the legislation doesn't make a named exception for Sealand means that, de jure, Sealand is not a country.
Way to be racist, dude. The important thing (as noted in multiple parts of this thread) is that C2DM is part of the Android Marketplace, not part of Android. If you don't have an Android Marketplace-compatible phone, you don't have C2DM. And that means that most Android devices in the world do not have C2DM.