Observation: The palestinian people are not children.
I said that funding should not have been withdrawn. You said that they need to learn that actions have consequences. That pretty much illustrates my point that the US has said to the palestinian people if you use your democracy to elect someone we don't approve of, you will be punished. You've come out with some bland platitudes, but you're nevertheless correct: Actions do have consequences. In this case the consequence was the US demolishing the palestinian's financial infrastructure. I'm saying that this was bad on the US's part and I am disputing your unquestioning assumption that the US has the moral right to dictate elections.
You may not buy the method, but the person who headed up the survey for the Lancet is a very experienced person in this field and the same methodology has been used to estimate deaths from natural disasters without receiving the hail of criticism it suddenly did with something more politically charged.
For anyone who wants to know more about it, the guy in charge answers some of the questions people have asked here.
But to be frank, would you care less if it were only 300,000 people your invasion had killed?
Funding should not have been withdrawn. It plunged Palestine into an impossible situation. The large majority of palestinians who had voted were in favour of a two state solution and Israel's right to exist and that was the climate at the time. Regardless of any private feelings of members of the Hamas government, and I say private because they were publically stating their willingness to negotiate peacefully and were sustaining a ceasefire at the time, they were hardly about to engage in some program of wiping out Israel.
The best approach for the EU and the USA was to honour existing payments. Instead they sent the clear message that the palestinians choice was subject to US approval.
It really makes you wonder if they Israeli government wants a palestinian state, doesn't it?
Maybe it's just me, but I seem to find the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park a little less believable than a kid getting root.
I disagree. You see UNIX I know about. If they do something stupid that contradicts my knowledge then it damages my suspension of disbelief. Recombining DNA with modern day creatures? I don't know much about that. I know I don't see dinosaurs outside my window so I can deduce that there are major stumbling blocks that the movie glossed over, but it doesn't contradict my experience and knowledge in the same way as a kid getting root on the island's entire system.
I meant to say "because there's nothing wrong with what it means" rather than nothing wrong with the terms, but I didn't preview.
And many black people do use the term nigger and for the reason I gave - they see no reason why a word which means black should be offensive. Then again many black people object to the term and many others don't spare it any thought at all. It's ridiculous to generalize people's opinions based on something as arbitrary as skin colour. But it's also ridiculous that words should become terms of abuse when they mean something that isn't negative. That word is one such example as it wasn't originally an offensive term. Cretin and spastic are other examples, but I used that one as an example because some people have had the sense to reclaim the word as something other than an insult. Contrast it with the medical descriptions used for the mentally disabled which have changed three times in my living memory as if there's something terribly wrong and we have to keep finding different new ways of hiding it.
When an idiot with a prejudice against a group uses a ordinary and correct word as an insult, the problem is with that idiot and not with the word. Suddenly backing off from that word as if it were contaminated does not solve the problem of the idiot.
Certain words keep getting relegated to the ranks of "bad" words despite their accuracy, because some idiots consider it an insult and greater idiots hand the word over and scurry around trying to find a more round about way of saying the same thing. Retarded, cretin, spastic, oriental are examples. It's the same idiocy that has led to absurdities such as 'differently abled' and 'someone of colour.' It offends me because trying to avoid using a word with a correct meaning, is a tacit acceptance that there's something wrong with being that way. For example, I see the accepted descriptions of mentally disabled people change in a sort of five year cycle. Learning disabilities is the current vogue. I hate the way people keep washing their hands of the words. It makes it sound as though we're ashamed of someone.
The smart people reclaim the words. Why do lots of black people use the word nigger to refer themselves? Because there's nothing fucking wrong with it - it means black! Why were lots of gay people proudly using the word poof in the eighties? Because there's nothing fucking wrong with it. They, and lots of other groups, were making a stand saying that they had no problem with the term.
And there's nothing wrong with the word oriental, either. But unfortunately it's been used as an insult and many well-meaning idiots have scurried away from it in horror and tried to find ways to disguise the meaning. Which is even more insulting, to my mind.
That sounds like a comment straight out of the piracy community. Companies are looking to reduce their overhead, not eliminate it. Just getting a relief of half of the download would save enormous bandwidth.
That is correct and I was aware of it. But my point is actually how purchasing these files changes people's perception of community. There was a day-care nursery in Israel some years ago that had a few problems with parents not picking their children up on time. Someone always had to stay on a little longer to dispatch the last child. So they introduced a fine system in which if you were late, it cost you a few pounds more (or equivalent). The result was an instant increase in both the number of late parents and how late they were. The logic is obvious in retrospect - people no longer cared about putting people out, they were paying for the service. And what is more, when the nursery reverted to the old system, the lateness of parents didn't change back. They had lost it for good.
What I am saying is that for me, and I hope for others, there has always been something kind of nice about the co-operative spirit of the Bit Torrent protocol and I've been willing to donate bandwidth to give something back. A distribution model like this removes this spirit. It is something small and hard to notice, but it is there. Why should anyone do more than is necessary to download a DRM'd movie when they're paying for it? Why should anyone have to pay for the download above and beyond the cost of the movie anyway? This is a big saving for the media companies. Essentially, they are inviting the customer to replace all the packaging, delivery, storage and display costs themselves. Will there be a like saving passed on to the customer? I expect not. The DRM will probably lead to cost rises because you'll start to see pay-per-view models rather than buy to own.
Truth to tell, I think everyone should take a stand against DRM and I'm disappointed when someone in a position to make a fuss sells out.
When I'm getting a torrent of a Linux Distribution ISO, or whatever it is I'm after, I usually leave the torrent running for quite some time after I've got the download in order to give back somewhat to everyone else. If people are buying a DRM'd movie, then there's no motivation to have the same community spirit towards everyone else. Once you start paying for something, you get a sense of entitlement that undermines community goodwill. I always liked the way that the Bit Torrent protocol worked on co-operation and sharing.
And who advises grandma what to get? I have a around half a dozen people who will get an OS or not on my say so. That's personally, not business. I wont be advising anyone to get Vista. And in the business world, I would imagine many "geeks" are looking at the the fact that XP already does all that they need and will be advising against any premature upgrading, too.
This can be a big problem for Microsoft. If initial sales of Vista aren't high, then software makers keep making everything for XP compatibility. Which means no compelling reason to upgrade to Vista. I mean really, when you consider the advantages that Vista offers, they are very small. And when you consider the additional hardware requirements, they are pretty high. And people seem to be forgetting that even if you do have a fast processor and four gig of RAM, taking up a Gig of ram rather than less than half that still eats into the RAM available for photoshop, games, or whatever.
God! I have to find an excuse to go and see that bridge. I'm going to have to dig out a tour book and find something in the region that I can tell my partner we're going to see without giving away that I want to go to France so I can look at a bridge.:)
I've never looked at the source code and I don't know if it's a mess or not. But anyone that says code being a mess doesn't mean it isn't high-quality doesn't know what they're talking about.
Well those few companies only ensure their pre-eminence by changing the rules in their favour - software patents, extending copyrights, the introduction of licences to practice or manufacture etc. that are too high cost for new players to get, etc. Essentially, the free market model can work, if it remains free. One example of how that happens is by laws which prevent monopolies from abusing their power, such as in this case.
As for your other points, I agree. I spread the word about DRM when I find the right context, as I'm sure you do too. So my friends now have an understanding about what DRM is and why it is bad.,/blockquote>
I do indeed spread the word, and both our points are valid. Sorry if I came across as overly judgemental. It's just I probably was.;)
Well if Open Office starts using VBA macros routinely, then VBA becomes the de facto standard for these spreadsheet packages. That's bad in and of itself if you feel (as I do) that there are better languages. But it's even worse when you consider how this will work in practice. We will have a standard over which we have no control (it's Microsoft's), and which Open Office will always implement in an inferior way. Microsoft can always break compatibility with the addition of a few more bits and pieces as they did with javascript, should they choose to. Essentially, Open Office becomes the poor clone of Excel that can't quite compete. Picture the salesman demonstrating opening the same macro-filled file in both programs. One works seemlessly, the other throws glitches.
Regardless of the risk of a poison pill, Open Office should be wary of striving to be compatible for perfectly valid other reasons, too.
Regular people don't know or care about DRM.
Sure they do. If they could purchase an MP3 directly from a store online and stick it on whatever MP3 player they care to have purchased, then that's a much bigger market and that would be much more sales. I can't say how many more sales it would be, but I think my point that we can't say DRM doesn't hold it back is supportable.
Aside from that though, I find it a little patronising when people here on/. talk about "regular folk" or "Joe Sixpack". People are often very well informed about their purchases. Because people have applied their minds to other things, it doesn't mean that they're unable to understand things like DRM and lock-in. Not only that, but people who do have a very good grasp of technology are often opinion formers, writing reviews, offering opinions to their friends, etc. These all have knock on effects, so the publicity angle of DRM does affect sales beyond programmers and Linux users.
To answer the post though, I was talking about the market's first impressions as opposed to mine or Taco's. Quite frankly if the market shared my first impressions, they would achieve the first ever recorded negative sales figures in history. However, the iPod actually did quite well to begin with. There was an initial lag period when it first came out during which it sold moderately well, but then after about eight months it began to rise hugely. Now this could sound reassuring to the Zune lovers (are there any outside Redmond?), but with the iPod, Apple were breaking fairly new ground. MP3 players weren't as prevalent as they are today and nothing quite like the then new iPod was. So that lag time is the technology gathering acceptance, filtering into public awareness, etc. That work is done now and . The Zune is treading old ground and ought to start off with an advantage because of that. But from this story it isn't exactly taking a big chunk of those who are buying their first MP3 player. Furthermore it's trying to break into a very established market whereas the iPod had territory which, if it was fooling around with boys, still had its virginity intact for a little longer. But Jobs has popped that particular cherry and is now in a pretty steady relationship. If the Zune were to steal the girl as it were, it would need to have done better than this.
It has the backing of Microsoft. It probably wont die. But it's not going to be anything amazing and the one good feature it has is crippled with DRM. Others will replicate it soon enough and hopefully in a better way. As phones, PDAs, MP3 players et al., become more and more integrated, there's not going to be a future for an MP3 player that boasts "Hey, I can do wireless."
Define popular. You need a point of comparison, i.e. how well it would be doing if it didn't lock people in. It might have ten times the sales figures without the crappy DRM.
And does it have to be a choice? Sounds like you're making this a little extreme. I've managed to find time to install Open Office at work (which does MS Word documents fine, incidentally), and demonstrate it to a few colleagues. And I will sometimes be seen using Linux to get things done. Little by little, I'm converting the world I live in, into something better. And I certainly don't have to tell people how their college ideals will crumble once they get out into the "real world." I'll encourage those ideals and cling to them as much as possible.
Maybe they would have won more, though.;) Did you know that the DOW Jones has gone up with the results, in anticipation of a dead-locked government and no big changes ahead? That says a lot?
Slashdot Mirror
Observation: The palestinian people are not children.
I said that funding should not have been withdrawn. You said that they need to learn that actions have consequences. That pretty much illustrates my point that the US has said to the palestinian people if you use your democracy to elect someone we don't approve of, you will be punished. You've come out with some bland platitudes, but you're nevertheless correct: Actions do have consequences. In this case the consequence was the US demolishing the palestinian's financial infrastructure. I'm saying that this was bad on the US's part and I am disputing your unquestioning assumption that the US has the moral right to dictate elections.
You may not buy the method, but the person who headed up the survey for the Lancet is a very experienced person in this field and the same methodology has been used to estimate deaths from natural disasters without receiving the hail of criticism it suddenly did with something more politically charged.
For anyone who wants to know more about it, the guy in charge answers some of the questions people have asked here.
But to be frank, would you care less if it were only 300,000 people your invasion had killed?
Funding should not have been withdrawn. It plunged Palestine into an impossible situation. The large majority of palestinians who had voted were in favour of a two state solution and Israel's right to exist and that was the climate at the time. Regardless of any private feelings of members of the Hamas government, and I say private because they were publically stating their willingness to negotiate peacefully and were sustaining a ceasefire at the time, they were hardly about to engage in some program of wiping out Israel.
The best approach for the EU and the USA was to honour existing payments. Instead they sent the clear message that the palestinians choice was subject to US approval.
It really makes you wonder if they Israeli government wants a palestinian state, doesn't it?
I would spit my coffee if I had any. Whoever wrote this article doesn't know what he or she is talking about!
I disagree. You see UNIX I know about. If they do something stupid that contradicts my knowledge then it damages my suspension of disbelief. Recombining DNA with modern day creatures? I don't know much about that. I know I don't see dinosaurs outside my window so I can deduce that there are major stumbling blocks that the movie glossed over, but it doesn't contradict my experience and knowledge in the same way as a kid getting root on the island's entire system.
I meant to say "because there's nothing wrong with what it means" rather than nothing wrong with the terms, but I didn't preview.
And many black people do use the term nigger and for the reason I gave - they see no reason why a word which means black should be offensive. Then again many black people object to the term and many others don't spare it any thought at all. It's ridiculous to generalize people's opinions based on something as arbitrary as skin colour. But it's also ridiculous that words should become terms of abuse when they mean something that isn't negative. That word is one such example as it wasn't originally an offensive term. Cretin and spastic are other examples, but I used that one as an example because some people have had the sense to reclaim the word as something other than an insult. Contrast it with the medical descriptions used for the mentally disabled which have changed three times in my living memory as if there's something terribly wrong and we have to keep finding different new ways of hiding it.
When an idiot with a prejudice against a group uses a ordinary and correct word as an insult, the problem is with that idiot and not with the word. Suddenly backing off from that word as if it were contaminated does not solve the problem of the idiot.
Certain words keep getting relegated to the ranks of "bad" words despite their accuracy, because some idiots consider it an insult and greater idiots hand the word over and scurry around trying to find a more round about way of saying the same thing. Retarded, cretin, spastic, oriental are examples. It's the same idiocy that has led to absurdities such as 'differently abled' and 'someone of colour.' It offends me because trying to avoid using a word with a correct meaning, is a tacit acceptance that there's something wrong with being that way. For example, I see the accepted descriptions of mentally disabled people change in a sort of five year cycle. Learning disabilities is the current vogue. I hate the way people keep washing their hands of the words. It makes it sound as though we're ashamed of someone.
The smart people reclaim the words. Why do lots of black people use the word nigger to refer themselves? Because there's nothing fucking wrong with it - it means black! Why were lots of gay people proudly using the word poof in the eighties? Because there's nothing fucking wrong with it. They, and lots of other groups, were making a stand saying that they had no problem with the term.
And there's nothing wrong with the word oriental, either. But unfortunately it's been used as an insult and many well-meaning idiots have scurried away from it in horror and tried to find ways to disguise the meaning. Which is even more insulting, to my mind.
That is correct and I was aware of it. But my point is actually how purchasing these files changes people's perception of community. There was a day-care nursery in Israel some years ago that had a few problems with parents not picking their children up on time. Someone always had to stay on a little longer to dispatch the last child. So they introduced a fine system in which if you were late, it cost you a few pounds more (or equivalent). The result was an instant increase in both the number of late parents and how late they were. The logic is obvious in retrospect - people no longer cared about putting people out, they were paying for the service. And what is more, when the nursery reverted to the old system, the lateness of parents didn't change back. They had lost it for good.
What I am saying is that for me, and I hope for others, there has always been something kind of nice about the co-operative spirit of the Bit Torrent protocol and I've been willing to donate bandwidth to give something back. A distribution model like this removes this spirit. It is something small and hard to notice, but it is there. Why should anyone do more than is necessary to download a DRM'd movie when they're paying for it? Why should anyone have to pay for the download above and beyond the cost of the movie anyway? This is a big saving for the media companies. Essentially, they are inviting the customer to replace all the packaging, delivery, storage and display costs themselves. Will there be a like saving passed on to the customer? I expect not. The DRM will probably lead to cost rises because you'll start to see pay-per-view models rather than buy to own.
Truth to tell, I think everyone should take a stand against DRM and I'm disappointed when someone in a position to make a fuss sells out.
When I'm getting a torrent of a Linux Distribution ISO, or whatever it is I'm after, I usually leave the torrent running for quite some time after I've got the download in order to give back somewhat to everyone else. If people are buying a DRM'd movie, then there's no motivation to have the same community spirit towards everyone else. Once you start paying for something, you get a sense of entitlement that undermines community goodwill. I always liked the way that the Bit Torrent protocol worked on co-operation and sharing.
And who advises grandma what to get? I have a around half a dozen people who will get an OS or not on my say so. That's personally, not business. I wont be advising anyone to get Vista. And in the business world, I would imagine many "geeks" are looking at the the fact that XP already does all that they need and will be advising against any premature upgrading, too.
This can be a big problem for Microsoft. If initial sales of Vista aren't high, then software makers keep making everything for XP compatibility. Which means no compelling reason to upgrade to Vista. I mean really, when you consider the advantages that Vista offers, they are very small. And when you consider the additional hardware requirements, they are pretty high. And people seem to be forgetting that even if you do have a fast processor and four gig of RAM, taking up a Gig of ram rather than less than half that still eats into the RAM available for photoshop, games, or whatever.
God! I have to find an excuse to go and see that bridge. I'm going to have to dig out a tour book and find something in the region that I can tell my partner we're going to see without giving away that I want to go to France so I can look at a bridge.
I've never looked at the source code and I don't know if it's a mess or not. But anyone that says code being a mess doesn't mean it isn't high-quality doesn't know what they're talking about.
Safer, yes. Funnier... depends on your colleagues, I guess.
Well those few companies only ensure their pre-eminence by changing the rules in their favour - software patents, extending copyrights, the introduction of licences to practice or manufacture etc. that are too high cost for new players to get, etc. Essentially, the free market model can work, if it remains free. One example of how that happens is by laws which prevent monopolies from abusing their power, such as in this case.
Well if Open Office starts using VBA macros routinely, then VBA becomes the de facto standard for these spreadsheet packages. That's bad in and of itself if you feel (as I do) that there are better languages. But it's even worse when you consider how this will work in practice. We will have a standard over which we have no control (it's Microsoft's), and which Open Office will always implement in an inferior way. Microsoft can always break compatibility with the addition of a few more bits and pieces as they did with javascript, should they choose to. Essentially, Open Office becomes the poor clone of Excel that can't quite compete. Picture the salesman demonstrating opening the same macro-filled file in both programs. One works seemlessly, the other throws glitches.
Regardless of the risk of a poison pill, Open Office should be wary of striving to be compatible for perfectly valid other reasons, too.
And in the standard Ubuntu / Kubuntu repositories. So who do we ask to take it out again?
Regular people don't know or care about DRM.
/. talk about "regular folk" or "Joe Sixpack". People are often very well informed about their purchases. Because people have applied their minds to other things, it doesn't mean that they're unable to understand things like DRM and lock-in. Not only that, but people who do have a very good grasp of technology are often opinion formers, writing reviews, offering opinions to their friends, etc. These all have knock on effects, so the publicity angle of DRM does affect sales beyond programmers and Linux users.
Sure they do. If they could purchase an MP3 directly from a store online and stick it on whatever MP3 player they care to have purchased, then that's a much bigger market and that would be much more sales. I can't say how many more sales it would be, but I think my point that we can't say DRM doesn't hold it back is supportable.
Aside from that though, I find it a little patronising when people here on
Why thank you.
To answer the post though, I was talking about the market's first impressions as opposed to mine or Taco's. Quite frankly if the market shared my first impressions, they would achieve the first ever recorded negative sales figures in history. However, the iPod actually did quite well to begin with. There was an initial lag period when it first came out during which it sold moderately well, but then after about eight months it began to rise hugely. Now this could sound reassuring to the Zune lovers (are there any outside Redmond?), but with the iPod, Apple were breaking fairly new ground. MP3 players weren't as prevalent as they are today and nothing quite like the then new iPod was. So that lag time is the technology gathering acceptance, filtering into public awareness, etc. That work is done now and . The Zune is treading old ground and ought to start off with an advantage because of that. But from this story it isn't exactly taking a big chunk of those who are buying their first MP3 player. Furthermore it's trying to break into a very established market whereas the iPod had territory which, if it was fooling around with boys, still had its virginity intact for a little longer. But Jobs has popped that particular cherry and is now in a pretty steady relationship. If the Zune were to steal the girl as it were, it would need to have done better than this.
It has the backing of Microsoft. It probably wont die. But it's not going to be anything amazing and the one good feature it has is crippled with DRM. Others will replicate it soon enough and hopefully in a better way. As phones, PDAs, MP3 players et al., become more and more integrated, there's not going to be a future for an MP3 player that boasts "Hey, I can do wireless."
IMHO, of course.
Define popular. You need a point of comparison, i.e. how well it would be doing if it didn't lock people in. It might have ten times the sales figures without the crappy DRM.
That may be, and I don't know much about MP3 players, but I do know that first impressions count. If this is their strategy, then bad move Microsoft.
And does it have to be a choice? Sounds like you're making this a little extreme. I've managed to find time to install Open Office at work (which does MS Word documents fine, incidentally), and demonstrate it to a few colleagues. And I will sometimes be seen using Linux to get things done. Little by little, I'm converting the world I live in, into something better. And I certainly don't have to tell people how their college ideals will crumble once they get out into the "real world." I'll encourage those ideals and cling to them as much as possible.
And women will take over the World.
That's brilliant. I've done the same myself thinking back, but I don't think I was as systematics as that. I like the thinking.
Maybe they would have won more, though.