If the tax REALLY meant that we were free to download whatever we wanted, and the RIAA / MPAA extortion tax had already been paid, we could do away with all the ISP torrent throttling / shaping, and all the frivolous lawsuits (which lets face it, we pay for anyway in terms of other taxes).
Read TFA - its nothing as "fair" as directly compensating the industry for "lost" revenue: the proposed tax would fund a new agency which would (muffled buzzing and mumbling) between the entertainment industry and ISPs.
Supposedly mac users claim glossy monitors have a sharper image?
Or they may mean higher contrast. You can't see reflections in a matte screen, but ambient light still makes the background brighter.
I've used glossy and matte screens, and my impression is that it's swings and roundabouts: e.g. bright sunlight can render a matte screen completely unreadable. With a glossy screen, provided the sun isn't right behind you, most of the light is reflected away and you can still work. OTOH, if there is any moderately bright object behind you (or if you're wearing a white shirt) you get irritating reflections (but if you're an Apple fanboi you're wearing a black turtleneck, so that's OK)
Also, on a typical cluttered desktop I really don't notice reflections unless I turn the screen off - but if you're staring at full-screen photographs then that may be different. The "quarterbacks" photo in TFA is particularly pathological, with large areas of black and gentle gradients.
On balance, I'd say that I prefer glossy for general use, but can see why photographers might prefer matte. However, my advice to anybody complaining about doing serious colour-matched pre-press work on a MacBook in a room with bright ambient light is don't do that, then! - go buy one of those $3000 monitors with an S-IPS panel, and a hood!
What are you talking about? If someone undermines the market for soda pop, not selling to the government is not huge deal
Not sure about the soda pop market, but the public sector (to which the EU can and does dictate rules for procurement - maybe this would not work in the US) is a massive consumer of IT equipment and services.
what are you proposing they have to do?
Only supply software with validated support for open protocols and file formats.
Your plan makes no sense at all outside the context of the software services market.
Well, yes, I thought the situation in the tapir husbandry industry was a bit off-topic for slashdot (but you should still be obliged to use open formats when emailing your tender for tapir-related services to a municipal zoo).
Singling out one company? The EU has convicted many companies of antitrust abuses over the years, most of them european ones.
We're not talking about fines or little hoop-jumping unbundling exercises over specific infringements here: we're talking about grasping the nettle and taking drastic action to break up a monopoly which should never have been allowed to develop: basically, pronouncing a corporate death penalty. However much you sympathise with that, it would be a very, very difficult political sell.
You actually believe that nonsense MS has paid people to repeat?
Doesn't matter two beans whether I believe it. If faced with compulsory break-up, MS would lobby their socks off and, like it or lump it, that sort of thing has an effect on politicians. Requiring open standards is harder (not impossible of course) to put a negative spin on without sounding anticompetitive.
Isn't it simpler just to enforce the fricking law that has been working for a century already to protect competition?
You mean the fricking law which prevented one firm gaining almost total domination of the desktop operating systems market, and then leveraging that to take over the office productivity, web browser and other key markets?
Newsflash: The fricking law didn't fricking work and its 25 years too late to put that toothpaste back in the tube. Time for plan B.
What about markets where the government is not a purchaser?
True - all the firms that are sure they don't want to sell to government, military, education, healthcare (EU, remember), get money from EU development grants or otherwise nibble a slice of government pork, file tax returns, access government websites or do business with anyone else who wants to do these things will be able to ignore this completely. But, you never know, it might have some small influence on the market.
Until you remove the big lock in - proprietary file formats and protocols - any attempt to break up IT format monopolies will be pissing in the wind because non-slashdot-community customers will voluntarily choose the software that reliably opens their files.
...and, politically, "ensuring file interoperability for future generations" sounds like an easier sell than singling out one, successful (foreign) company and going mediaeval on their arse.
Technically, it is within their power, but they won't order it because of diplomatic reasons.
I Am Not A European Corporate Lawyer so maybe the EU could order this, maybe they couldn't, but in practice the EU demanding the breakup of a major US company just isn't going to happen.
The best strategy is not to try and interfere directly with any company's trade, but to mandate open data standards for all government contracts and subcontracts - and do it thoroughly with proper benchmarks for standards compliance and a robust definition of what is an "open standard" and requirements for schoools and universities to be "platform neutral". That might create a level playing field.
How 'bout requiring that each copy of Vista ship with a Ubuntu disk labeled 'Vista Service Pack 2'.
Caller: I installed SP2 and it comes up with something called Ubuntu
Support: Yes, its a new operating system with all the features of Windows Vista and Office 2007
Caller: but my desktop looks weird, and half my peripherals have stopped working! All the buttons in the word processor have changed, the formatting in my documents has gone funny and nobody can open the files I send them.
Support: As I said, all the features of Windows Vista and Office 2007...
Caller: but it won't run this new software called Conficker that everyone is talking about!
Support: Oh dear, that is a problem. I'll get a Windows XP disc in the post to you at once.
It's not about fixing anything. It's about being childish and spiteful.
Actually, its about not being able to fix the problem, but still being obliged to be seen to do something.
The solution would be to split Microsoft up into separate companies so you didn't have the guys with 90% of the operating system market also producing applications - but that isn't within the EU's power.
So instead you get these half-baked "counting coup" rulings. Betcha that every PC supplier "independently" decides to install IE "separately" due to "customer demand".
And yes, if Apple ever capture 90% of the operating system market they should be subject to the same sort of rules. They've got a long way to go yet - even iPod/iTunes doesn't compare to Windows' dominance of the personal computer market.
Whether, say, Canonical could even theoretically reach the same point with Ubuntu is more interesting. Maybe they'd have to offer versions with (say) other desktop managers than Gnome. Oh, wait...:-)
At most, you can say that no one has found evidence disproving a given theory,
Not quite: you can find evidence that strongly supports a theory too, e.g. by making and testing a prediction (which is what I really meant when I carelessly used the word "prove").
People say things like "scientists haven't proven evolution, so even they admit it's not a fact"
But lets get the argument right: that is that its a disingenuous statement which deliberately confuses the colloquial meaning of "proven" (i.e. supported by strong evidence) with its strict mathematical meaning. If, say, the law used "proof" in the mathematical sense, then it would be almost impossible to prove someone guilty of a crime because any possible defense, however unlikely, would refute the proof. (Oh, and since none of the laws of science have been absolutely proven, you have no way of determining whether something is "possible").
It's not like a high school freshman is going to be scarred for life by hearing two sides of an argument. "These people believe this for this reason. These other people believe this for this other reason."
They might not be scarred for life, but they won't learn much science. Scientific debate isn't about valuing everybody's opinion - its about objectivity, logic and evidence.
This isn't even about a debate between science and faith: its a debate between science and bogus pseudo-scientific FUD which attempts to dress religious fundamentalism up as science. Even mainstream religion thinks the debate is absurd.
There are almost certainly gaps and weaknesses in the Theory of Evolution. However, it still explains more than any other theory on offer, and you don't throw it out because it fails to dot a few "i"s - at least not until you have a new, better theory.
When Newton's theory of gravitation failed to accurately predict the orbit of Mercury, the scientific community didn't throw Principia on the fire and go back to crystal spheres and epicycles - it went on to make good use of the understanding given by what Newton's theories did predict, until that smart guy with the bad hair came up with a better theory which someone then went out and proved. That's how science is supposed to work.
PS: I'm all for books on evolution having a label in them which points out that its a theory with which some people disagree provided that, in return, every copy of the Bible is required to have a preface by Richard Dawkins. Fair's fair, eh?:-)
The iPhone is just a little computer that you can make phonecalls with.
No, its an appliance with a phone, media player, web browser and email client that you can also download approved games and other applications.
Plus, the App store doesn't seem to stop people doing cool geeky things: E.g. there are a already a couple of free remote control apps for MythTV (native apps, BTW - not webapps) up there. Its frustrating for a slashdotter not to be able to just write code for it, but its not really for slashdotters.
Of course, one thing that also gets overlooked is that you don't need Apple's blessing to write AJAX webapps, for which Safari is not a bad platform.
If Apple started to sell Macs on which you could only install new software using iTunes and the App store nobody would buy them.
...but maybe not for the reasons you think. Mac is established as a general-purpose "open" (to the extent of coming with free development tools as standard) computer with a substantial software industry around it. To suddenly "close" it and abandon all that would be risky.
However, if Apple ever produce the mythical tablet computer or enter the netbook market, I wouldn't be surprised if it were a closed "appliance" product running iLife/iWork/iTunes and with its own app store. That's not going to appeal to slashdotters, but it might be just the job for the masses.
Bear in mind that, from the point of view of the masses, Linux on netbooks etc. is pretty closed: The target user for the EEE PC would not be able to install anything not on the "Install Software" menu (even though the first thing you or I would do is to add the raw Debian repositories and/or set up a build environment). We never really got to see how that one played out before XP effectively took over the retail netbook market.
When you decide to play that game, either by taking a leadership role in a corporation or by buying a significant amount of stock you consent to the rules.
I didn't think the law could enforce unconscionable rules or contracts (pardon me if I haven't used the correct legal term: I'm talking about the "can't sell yourself into slavery" concept).
Also, the people responsible for enforcing other heavily-regulated areas of life (like that thing about not killing, raping and robbing people) seem to cope with the concept that there is a limit to what can be done in the name of regulation, even to the point of having to let an almost-but-not-quite-certainly-bad-guy go from time to time.
Of course, the integrity of publicly traded corporations is vastly more important than mere human life.
And if Jobs himself happens to be one of the stockholders, then it gets really interesting.
Got that Steve? You're not allowed to drop dead unless you're standing on stage at the AGM - and no naughty gentle breaking of bad news to your loved ones before it is publicly announced. Actually, fuck medical ethics, the markets are at stake: your doctors should report directly to the shareholders, not you.
Methinks (unless they've actually intercepted a phone call from the ER saying "Aaahhhggg! Short... APPL... [croak!]") the SEC should get a sense of perspective and go and harrass some investment bankers instead.
Windows XP has been out for -eight years-, can you name a Linux distro that old that you can still get support on?
First, bear in mind that there have been 3 XP "service packs" during that period, which were, in effect, pretty significant upgrades (not to mention 3-4 Internet Explorer versions which also tinkered with the core OS). Genuine question: can you get any XP support that doesn't start with the instruction "first install SP2 or later"?
Second, Open Source makes a difference: once Microsoft withdraws support for something, that's curtains. If an old version of an open source project is in widespread use, you're likely to find someone, somewhere backporting patches - or you can do it yourself. Not a solution for Joe Endluser, of course, but Microsoft doesn't do long-term support for Joe Endluser's benefit either.
Thirdly (and this is less of a defense and more of an explanation), XP is "just" the core operating system, GUI, admin tools, a few bare-bones apps and (until the EU gets its way) web browser. A typical linux distro is a full-blown, all singing, all dancing application and development suite, often with a choice of 2-3 GUIs, a couple of office suites, 2-3 DBMSs, various web and file sharing servers, TeX/Latex, PDF creation and viewing utilities, 1000 elephants and a hard-boiled egg. Its pretty inevitable that you can't support that lot for too long. If you really were looking for a long-term support solution, the "mugs eyeful" desktop distros might not be the best place to go.
I think this crosses the line. What next? Should companies publish regular updates on their CEO's blood pressure and cholesterol level so that shareholders can properly assess the odds of him popping an artery just before a crucial rights issue? Should we be told about their mother's cancer history? Heck, even if Jobs were perfectly healthy, he might wake up tomorrow and decide its time to chuck it all in and buy that armadillo ranch in Zambia that he's always dreamed of - perhaps the shareholders need to know his retirement plans in detail?
If it is your judgement that a particular firm is completely reliant on the personality of their CEO then that's really all you need to know before investing: all men are mortal.
You know, it's funny, maybe 5 or 6 years ago it would've been:
Windows 2000 = lean
Windows XP = bloated
Well, yes - because XP has been around for so long, hardware has overtaken it.
The other thing was that many people (probably the majority) skipped Win2K and the upgrade was straight from 98/ME to XP, so the extra "bloat" was justified by the move from a Mickey Mouse DOS-descended operating system to something substantially more solid.
You do want your TV to respond to your remote control, download it's clock-setting and other background data, and be ready to boot up in a timely manner? Don't ya?
Only after I've pushed the big red "on" button on the front. Its a hard, dirty, onerous job, but someone has gotta do it!
Even my homebrew MythTV box gets turned off when there's nothing on worth recording for 24 hours; and its not beyond the whit of technology to make this automatic on purpose-built consumer devices.
Ee, when I were a lad you had to switch the TV on 5 minutes early to let the valves warm up, and we was grateful!
Gained sales: those who bought the CD who otherwise wouldn't have bought it.
Lost sales: those who didn't buy the CD because they downloaded it.
The problem is that there is absolutely no way of knowing either of those figures because they relate to a hypothetical parallel world in which there is no "free" option.
But lets say, in the no copying world, 10,000 people buy the CD.
Now, if the download is available for free, say 1,000,000 download it, but only 1 in 50 of those people go on to buy the CD. That's twice as many sales! (Of course, there's other ways of "giving back" like buying other CDs, concert tickets, merchandise etc.)
Of course, I just pulled those numbers out of my ass, so you're free to make up your own numbers which show a loss. The problem is, using current recording industry logic, even my numbers would be reported as 80,000 "lost sales".
most [popular] music is available in some non-illegal form for trying, not the least of which is radio airplay
...and back in the days when most people had radio/cassette recorders people could (and did) tape it instead of buying the single. Oddly, enough people still bought enough records to ensure the pop music industry (and, consequently, the drugs industry, divorce lawyers, premium champagne makers and rehab clinics which depend on it) survived without schools being required to frisk kids for illegal mix tapes.
The software wasn't on floppies. It was on cartridge.
A true geek would have opened the cartridge to see if it contained UV EPROMs or proper ROMs. EPROMs still working after 24 years would be fairly impressive, too...
For everyone here claiming they run out and buy the CD when they download something they like, there's going to be hundreds of people that ask themselves why they should buy it when they already have it.
Yes, but many of them would never have bought the CD anyway, so they don't cost the industry a penny. On the other hand, some of the try-before-you-buyers would probably not have bought the CD unseen. What is likely is that many more people will download the album for free than would have paid up-front, and a proportion of those people will either go on to buy that CD, buy future CDs from the artist or go to gigs. Giving away recordings and making money off gigs, merchandise, "collectable" limited-edition CDs is a plausible business model - far more plausible than inventing foolproof, non-intrusive DRM.
Even if everyone who liked the song bought the CD (or purchased it in some other format), that still doesn't give people the right to infringe on other people's copyrights...
This isn't about giving downloaders a pat on the head and a lollipop: Its about not using ludicrous overestimates of "lost sales" as a pretext for intrusive DRM that penalises legitimate customers or throwing someone in jail for sharing a few Britney tracks.
Can't speak for the rest of/. but I have no objection to the RIAA going after serious counterfeiting operations or closing down industrial-scale file-sharing sites.
To prove this, try getting a cinema to open for free and ask for donations at the end of the movie. I bet a billion dollars that the takings go down,
Ok, but try and argue with a straight face that, if you offered "pay if you want" cinema seats that many, many more people wouldn't come and see the film: More people would see the ads, more people would recommend the film to others, and some people who would not have paid $10 to see the film will pay a couple of dollars (or at least buy some popcorn). Of course (before you leap back in) that won't work with a physical cinema because a cinema seat occupies valuable real estate and costs money to heat, clean and keep out of the rain, even before you lay on something for the occupant to watch. Most crucially, only one person can sit in it at a time so yes, if 500 people turn up and only 10% of them pay, you're screwed - and the cinema is full, so if other people turn up offering to pay, they can't.
However, if someone downloads your CD and decides not to pay, the cost to you is zero (if they got it from someone else) or negligible (if they downloaded from your servers*) while everyu person who does pay is money in the bank (which you can pass on to your developers/artists). Its like having a magic cinema with an inexhaustible number of seats, and entrances all around the world: in which case you probably could give away the seats and get rich on the popcorn sales.
*I think some people in the IT or the post-CD music industry fail to appreciate how tiny the "marginal costs" of distributing digital data are c.f. the manufacture and distribution of physical artefacts or providing 'physical' services - even pre-internet, getting discs duplicated was cheap and scaleable.
Maybe not a lost sale, but every openly available cheaper or free copy of your content certainly devalues your content
Translation: if I can't find an argument to show that illegal copying significantly damages sales, I'll invent an intangible, buzzword-compliant concept called "value" which I can define by fiat to include losses due to illegal copying.
Generally the poeple who hate copyright infringement being treated as theft are people who don't lose out any income due to copyright infringement.
Generally the people who think copyright should be treated as theft are the people who look at the number of illegal downloads, multiply by the RRP and somehow delude themselves that they had somehow "lost" that money.
I've made money from selling software and I know damn well that although some people must have obtained copies without paying, only a fraction of those represented genuine lost sales, and some even translated into new business. I also know that trying to get clever with DRM would have dramatically increased my support costs and probably lost customers.
If you run a live music venue and people constantly sneak in without paying, you lose money, you might make a loss, and lose your business.
True (if unlikely), but irrelevant: Sneaking into a music venue without paying is not copyright infringement. Attendance at a live performance is a finite resource, which costs you money to provide and which can be "stolen". However, if enough people sneak in without paying to seriously damage your business then you should really think about checking people's tickets at the door, or maybe locking the lavatory window - your legitimate customers won't mind.
If you run a store that sells Cds and people shoplift, you lose money, you might make a loss and lose your business.
True, but irrelevant: shoplifting is theft, copyright infringement is not. If you have 10 copies of a CD and a shoplifter steals one, then you only have 9 left and have inarguably lost money or property. However, if you are losing enough CDs to endanger the business then maybe you should think about just displaying empty cases and keeping the real CDs behind the counter - you'll find that your discerning customers prefer it that way.
If you make software or music and people downlaod it for free rather than buying, you might...
Odd: in neither of your two previous examples did you sneak in the condition "rather than buying" (and no, "sneak in without paying" is not the same thing). In the first two cases your bad guys have inescapably consumed some of your finite resources, even if they never had any intention of paying. In the final case your "loss" is entirely dependent on that "rather than buying" assertion - the simple fact that someone has an illegal download does not cost you a brass farthing.
You also ignore all the strong evidence (e.g. TFA and there's another one today) that any actual losses due to piracy (i.e. punters that would otherwise have paid) are offset by the gains from increased exposure resulting in new legitimate sales or sales of related items, not to mention from avoiding the potential losses due to intrusive DRM.
There's plenty of evidence that people will happily pay for things they think are worth paying for. When Radiohead did their "pay what you like" download, plenty of people paid voluntarily (and the physical CD still sold, too). People donate money to open source projects, even when they can legally use it for free. Heck, most of today's big software houses exploded out of garages and bedrooms despite massive unlicensed copying and only started worrying about piracy after they became huge corporations.
Its not that Slashdot loves piracy, its that many people on/. hate the idea of copyright infringement being treated as equivalent to theft of physical property, and they hate stupid DRM schemes that make life difficult for people who have acquired software legally but which the most serious, organised, pirates seem to have little difficulty circumventing.
I'm a software engineer and I'd be out on the streets if our customers illegally downloaded our software.
No, you'd be out on the streets if not enough of your customers paid for your software to keep the company profitable.
but most pirates are people who want to listen to music, watch movies, or play games for free.
In which case, they were never going to pay for your software anyway, so unless they physically stole a boxed copy which you had paid to manufacture, you have not lost a dime. Most software/recording industry scare stories make the ludicrous assumption that every pirate copy represents a lost sale.
Conversely, some people who pirate your software will go legal when the next version arrives (or someone checks up), recommend it to others or (if its serious software) acquire skills in using it which result in future sales.
Equally, if you try and stamp out piracy by treating your paying customers as potential criminals and using intrusive DRM, you will lose customers to the competition (be it pirates, other companies or open source).
Vista changed the way drivers needed to be written for security reasons, and because hardware vendors suck at writing drivers for whatever they make, there were all sorts of problems with hardware compatibility, ESPECIALLY with older hardware.
Or to summarise: (a) Vista was released and promoted before it was ready (poor driver support = not ready to replace XP); maybe it should never have been marketed as an upgrade for pre-2007 hardware.
(b) Microsoft missed a chance to get the security model right with NT/Win2K/XP (which also required mass rewriting of drivers and software).
The legacy hardware/software issue is a pain for MS, but its an even bigger pain for anybody else who wants to break into the market, so lets not shed too many tears for them.
Slashdot Mirror
If the tax REALLY meant that we were free to download whatever we wanted, and the RIAA / MPAA extortion tax had already been paid, we could do away with all the ISP torrent throttling / shaping, and all the frivolous lawsuits (which lets face it, we pay for anyway in terms of other taxes).
Read TFA - its nothing as "fair" as directly compensating the industry for "lost" revenue: the proposed tax would fund a new agency which would (muffled buzzing and mumbling) between the entertainment industry and ISPs.
Supposedly mac users claim glossy monitors have a sharper image?
Or they may mean higher contrast. You can't see reflections in a matte screen, but ambient light still makes the background brighter.
I've used glossy and matte screens, and my impression is that it's swings and roundabouts: e.g. bright sunlight can render a matte screen completely unreadable. With a glossy screen, provided the sun isn't right behind you, most of the light is reflected away and you can still work. OTOH, if there is any moderately bright object behind you (or if you're wearing a white shirt) you get irritating reflections (but if you're an Apple fanboi you're wearing a black turtleneck, so that's OK)
Also, on a typical cluttered desktop I really don't notice reflections unless I turn the screen off - but if you're staring at full-screen photographs then that may be different. The "quarterbacks" photo in TFA is particularly pathological, with large areas of black and gentle gradients.
On balance, I'd say that I prefer glossy for general use, but can see why photographers might prefer matte. However, my advice to anybody complaining about doing serious colour-matched pre-press work on a MacBook in a room with bright ambient light is don't do that, then! - go buy one of those $3000 monitors with an S-IPS panel, and a hood!
What are you talking about? If someone undermines the market for soda pop, not selling to the government is not huge deal
Not sure about the soda pop market, but the public sector (to which the EU can and does dictate rules for procurement - maybe this would not work in the US) is a massive consumer of IT equipment and services.
what are you proposing they have to do?
Only supply software with validated support for open protocols and file formats.
Your plan makes no sense at all outside the context of the software services market.
Well, yes, I thought the situation in the tapir husbandry industry was a bit off-topic for slashdot (but you should still be obliged to use open formats when emailing your tender for tapir-related services to a municipal zoo).
Singling out one company? The EU has convicted many companies of antitrust abuses over the years, most of them european ones.
We're not talking about fines or little hoop-jumping unbundling exercises over specific infringements here: we're talking about grasping the nettle and taking drastic action to break up a monopoly which should never have been allowed to develop: basically, pronouncing a corporate death penalty. However much you sympathise with that, it would be a very, very difficult political sell.
You actually believe that nonsense MS has paid people to repeat?
Doesn't matter two beans whether I believe it. If faced with compulsory break-up, MS would lobby their socks off and, like it or lump it, that sort of thing has an effect on politicians. Requiring open standards is harder (not impossible of course) to put a negative spin on without sounding anticompetitive.
Isn't it simpler just to enforce the fricking law that has been working for a century already to protect competition?
You mean the fricking law which prevented one firm gaining almost total domination of the desktop operating systems market, and then leveraging that to take over the office productivity, web browser and other key markets?
Newsflash: The fricking law didn't fricking work and its 25 years too late to put that toothpaste back in the tube. Time for plan B.
What about markets where the government is not a purchaser?
True - all the firms that are sure they don't want to sell to government, military, education, healthcare (EU, remember), get money from EU development grants or otherwise nibble a slice of government pork, file tax returns, access government websites or do business with anyone else who wants to do these things will be able to ignore this completely. But, you never know, it might have some small influence on the market.
Until you remove the big lock in - proprietary file formats and protocols - any attempt to break up IT format monopolies will be pissing in the wind because non-slashdot-community customers will voluntarily choose the software that reliably opens their files.
...and, politically, "ensuring file interoperability for future generations" sounds like an easier sell than singling out one, successful (foreign) company and going mediaeval on their arse.
Technically, it is within their power, but they won't order it because of diplomatic reasons.
I Am Not A European Corporate Lawyer so maybe the EU could order this, maybe they couldn't, but in practice the EU demanding the breakup of a major US company just isn't going to happen.
The best strategy is not to try and interfere directly with any company's trade, but to mandate open data standards for all government contracts and subcontracts - and do it thoroughly with proper benchmarks for standards compliance and a robust definition of what is an "open standard" and requirements for schoools and universities to be "platform neutral". That might create a level playing field.
How 'bout requiring that each copy of Vista ship with a Ubuntu disk labeled 'Vista Service Pack 2'.
Caller: I installed SP2 and it comes up with something called Ubuntu
Support: Yes, its a new operating system with all the features of Windows Vista and Office 2007
Caller: but my desktop looks weird, and half my peripherals have stopped working! All the buttons in the word processor have changed, the formatting in my documents has gone funny and nobody can open the files I send them.
Support: As I said, all the features of Windows Vista and Office 2007...
Caller: but it won't run this new software called Conficker that everyone is talking about!
Support: Oh dear, that is a problem. I'll get a Windows XP disc in the post to you at once.
It's not about fixing anything. It's about being childish and spiteful.
Actually, its about not being able to fix the problem, but still being obliged to be seen to do something.
The solution would be to split Microsoft up into separate companies so you didn't have the guys with 90% of the operating system market also producing applications - but that isn't within the EU's power.
So instead you get these half-baked "counting coup" rulings. Betcha that every PC supplier "independently" decides to install IE "separately" due to "customer demand".
And yes, if Apple ever capture 90% of the operating system market they should be subject to the same sort of rules. They've got a long way to go yet - even iPod/iTunes doesn't compare to Windows' dominance of the personal computer market.
Whether, say, Canonical could even theoretically reach the same point with Ubuntu is more interesting. Maybe they'd have to offer versions with (say) other desktop managers than Gnome. Oh, wait... :-)
At most, you can say that no one has found evidence disproving a given theory,
Not quite: you can find evidence that strongly supports a theory too, e.g. by making and testing a prediction (which is what I really meant when I carelessly used the word "prove").
People say things like "scientists haven't proven evolution, so even they admit it's not a fact"
But lets get the argument right: that is that its a disingenuous statement which deliberately confuses the colloquial meaning of "proven" (i.e. supported by strong evidence) with its strict mathematical meaning. If, say, the law used "proof" in the mathematical sense, then it would be almost impossible to prove someone guilty of a crime because any possible defense, however unlikely, would refute the proof. (Oh, and since none of the laws of science have been absolutely proven, you have no way of determining whether something is "possible").
Nitpick: science can't prove anything, by definition.
Who let the bloody mathematicians in here? :-)
It's not like a high school freshman is going to be scarred for life by hearing two sides of an argument. "These people believe this for this reason. These other people believe this for this other reason."
They might not be scarred for life, but they won't learn much science. Scientific debate isn't about valuing everybody's opinion - its about objectivity, logic and evidence.
This isn't even about a debate between science and faith: its a debate between science and bogus pseudo-scientific FUD which attempts to dress religious fundamentalism up as science. Even mainstream religion thinks the debate is absurd.
There are almost certainly gaps and weaknesses in the Theory of Evolution. However, it still explains more than any other theory on offer, and you don't throw it out because it fails to dot a few "i"s - at least not until you have a new, better theory.
When Newton's theory of gravitation failed to accurately predict the orbit of Mercury, the scientific community didn't throw Principia on the fire and go back to crystal spheres and epicycles - it went on to make good use of the understanding given by what Newton's theories did predict, until that smart guy with the bad hair came up with a better theory which someone then went out and proved. That's how science is supposed to work.
PS: I'm all for books on evolution having a label in them which points out that its a theory with which some people disagree provided that, in return, every copy of the Bible is required to have a preface by Richard Dawkins. Fair's fair, eh? :-)
The iPhone is just a little computer that you can make phonecalls with.
No, its an appliance with a phone, media player, web browser and email client that you can also download approved games and other applications.
Plus, the App store doesn't seem to stop people doing cool geeky things: E.g. there are a already a couple of free remote control apps for MythTV (native apps, BTW - not webapps) up there. Its frustrating for a slashdotter not to be able to just write code for it, but its not really for slashdotters.
Of course, one thing that also gets overlooked is that you don't need Apple's blessing to write AJAX webapps, for which Safari is not a bad platform.
If Apple started to sell Macs on which you could only install new software using iTunes and the App store nobody would buy them.
...but maybe not for the reasons you think. Mac is established as a general-purpose "open" (to the extent of coming with free development tools as standard) computer with a substantial software industry around it. To suddenly "close" it and abandon all that would be risky.
However, if Apple ever produce the mythical tablet computer or enter the netbook market, I wouldn't be surprised if it were a closed "appliance" product running iLife/iWork/iTunes and with its own app store. That's not going to appeal to slashdotters, but it might be just the job for the masses.
Bear in mind that, from the point of view of the masses, Linux on netbooks etc. is pretty closed: The target user for the EEE PC would not be able to install anything not on the "Install Software" menu (even though the first thing you or I would do is to add the raw Debian repositories and/or set up a build environment). We never really got to see how that one played out before XP effectively took over the retail netbook market.
When you decide to play that game, either by taking a leadership role in a corporation or by buying a significant amount of stock you consent to the rules.
I didn't think the law could enforce unconscionable rules or contracts (pardon me if I haven't used the correct legal term: I'm talking about the "can't sell yourself into slavery" concept).
Also, the people responsible for enforcing other heavily-regulated areas of life (like that thing about not killing, raping and robbing people) seem to cope with the concept that there is a limit to what can be done in the name of regulation, even to the point of having to let an almost-but-not-quite-certainly-bad-guy go from time to time.
Of course, the integrity of publicly traded corporations is vastly more important than mere human life.
And if Jobs himself happens to be one of the stockholders, then it gets really interesting.
Got that Steve? You're not allowed to drop dead unless you're standing on stage at the AGM - and no naughty gentle breaking of bad news to your loved ones before it is publicly announced. Actually, fuck medical ethics, the markets are at stake: your doctors should report directly to the shareholders, not you.
Methinks (unless they've actually intercepted a phone call from the ER saying "Aaahhhggg! Short... APPL... [croak!]") the SEC should get a sense of perspective and go and harrass some investment bankers instead.
Windows XP has been out for -eight years-, can you name a Linux distro that old that you can still get support on?
First, bear in mind that there have been 3 XP "service packs" during that period, which were, in effect, pretty significant upgrades (not to mention 3-4 Internet Explorer versions which also tinkered with the core OS). Genuine question: can you get any XP support that doesn't start with the instruction "first install SP2 or later"?
Second, Open Source makes a difference: once Microsoft withdraws support for something, that's curtains. If an old version of an open source project is in widespread use, you're likely to find someone, somewhere backporting patches - or you can do it yourself. Not a solution for Joe Endluser, of course, but Microsoft doesn't do long-term support for Joe Endluser's benefit either.
Thirdly (and this is less of a defense and more of an explanation), XP is "just" the core operating system, GUI, admin tools, a few bare-bones apps and (until the EU gets its way) web browser. A typical linux distro is a full-blown, all singing, all dancing application and development suite, often with a choice of 2-3 GUIs, a couple of office suites, 2-3 DBMSs, various web and file sharing servers, TeX/Latex, PDF creation and viewing utilities, 1000 elephants and a hard-boiled egg. Its pretty inevitable that you can't support that lot for too long. If you really were looking for a long-term support solution, the "mugs eyeful" desktop distros might not be the best place to go.
I think this crosses the line. What next? Should companies publish regular updates on their CEO's blood pressure and cholesterol level so that shareholders can properly assess the odds of him popping an artery just before a crucial rights issue? Should we be told about their mother's cancer history? Heck, even if Jobs were perfectly healthy, he might wake up tomorrow and decide its time to chuck it all in and buy that armadillo ranch in Zambia that he's always dreamed of - perhaps the shareholders need to know his retirement plans in detail?
If it is your judgement that a particular firm is completely reliant on the personality of their CEO then that's really all you need to know before investing: all men are mortal.
You know, it's funny, maybe 5 or 6 years ago it would've been:
Windows 2000 = lean Windows XP = bloated
Well, yes - because XP has been around for so long, hardware has overtaken it.
The other thing was that many people (probably the majority) skipped Win2K and the upgrade was straight from 98/ME to XP, so the extra "bloat" was justified by the move from a Mickey Mouse DOS-descended operating system to something substantially more solid.
You do want your TV to respond to your remote control, download it's clock-setting and other background data, and be ready to boot up in a timely manner? Don't ya?
Only after I've pushed the big red "on" button on the front. Its a hard, dirty, onerous job, but someone has gotta do it!
Even my homebrew MythTV box gets turned off when there's nothing on worth recording for 24 hours; and its not beyond the whit of technology to make this automatic on purpose-built consumer devices.
Ee, when I were a lad you had to switch the TV on 5 minutes early to let the valves warm up, and we was grateful!
Gained sales: those who bought the CD who otherwise wouldn't have bought it.
Lost sales: those who didn't buy the CD because they downloaded it.
The problem is that there is absolutely no way of knowing either of those figures because they relate to a hypothetical parallel world in which there is no "free" option.
But lets say, in the no copying world, 10,000 people buy the CD.
Now, if the download is available for free, say 1,000,000 download it, but only 1 in 50 of those people go on to buy the CD. That's twice as many sales! (Of course, there's other ways of "giving back" like buying other CDs, concert tickets, merchandise etc.)
Of course, I just pulled those numbers out of my ass, so you're free to make up your own numbers which show a loss. The problem is, using current recording industry logic, even my numbers would be reported as 80,000 "lost sales".
most [popular] music is available in some non-illegal form for trying, not the least of which is radio airplay
...and back in the days when most people had radio/cassette recorders people could (and did) tape it instead of buying the single. Oddly, enough people still bought enough records to ensure the pop music industry (and, consequently, the drugs industry, divorce lawyers, premium champagne makers and rehab clinics which depend on it) survived without schools being required to frisk kids for illegal mix tapes.
The software wasn't on floppies. It was on cartridge.
A true geek would have opened the cartridge to see if it contained UV EPROMs or proper ROMs. EPROMs still working after 24 years would be fairly impressive, too...
For everyone here claiming they run out and buy the CD when they download something they like, there's going to be hundreds of people that ask themselves why they should buy it when they already have it.
Yes, but many of them would never have bought the CD anyway, so they don't cost the industry a penny. On the other hand, some of the try-before-you-buyers would probably not have bought the CD unseen. What is likely is that many more people will download the album for free than would have paid up-front, and a proportion of those people will either go on to buy that CD, buy future CDs from the artist or go to gigs. Giving away recordings and making money off gigs, merchandise, "collectable" limited-edition CDs is a plausible business model - far more plausible than inventing foolproof, non-intrusive DRM.
Even if everyone who liked the song bought the CD (or purchased it in some other format), that still doesn't give people the right to infringe on other people's copyrights...
This isn't about giving downloaders a pat on the head and a lollipop: Its about not using ludicrous overestimates of "lost sales" as a pretext for intrusive DRM that penalises legitimate customers or throwing someone in jail for sharing a few Britney tracks.
Can't speak for the rest of /. but I have no objection to the RIAA going after serious counterfeiting operations or closing down industrial-scale file-sharing sites.
To prove this, try getting a cinema to open for free and ask for donations at the end of the movie. I bet a billion dollars that the takings go down,
Ok, but try and argue with a straight face that, if you offered "pay if you want" cinema seats that many, many more people wouldn't come and see the film: More people would see the ads, more people would recommend the film to others, and some people who would not have paid $10 to see the film will pay a couple of dollars (or at least buy some popcorn). Of course (before you leap back in) that won't work with a physical cinema because a cinema seat occupies valuable real estate and costs money to heat, clean and keep out of the rain, even before you lay on something for the occupant to watch. Most crucially, only one person can sit in it at a time so yes, if 500 people turn up and only 10% of them pay, you're screwed - and the cinema is full, so if other people turn up offering to pay, they can't.
However, if someone downloads your CD and decides not to pay, the cost to you is zero (if they got it from someone else) or negligible (if they downloaded from your servers*) while everyu person who does pay is money in the bank (which you can pass on to your developers/artists). Its like having a magic cinema with an inexhaustible number of seats, and entrances all around the world: in which case you probably could give away the seats and get rich on the popcorn sales.
*I think some people in the IT or the post-CD music industry fail to appreciate how tiny the "marginal costs" of distributing digital data are c.f. the manufacture and distribution of physical artefacts or providing 'physical' services - even pre-internet, getting discs duplicated was cheap and scaleable.
Maybe not a lost sale, but every openly available cheaper or free copy of your content certainly devalues your content
Translation: if I can't find an argument to show that illegal copying significantly damages sales, I'll invent an intangible, buzzword-compliant concept called "value" which I can define by fiat to include losses due to illegal copying.
Generally the poeple who hate copyright infringement being treated as theft are people who don't lose out any income due to copyright infringement.
Generally the people who think copyright should be treated as theft are the people who look at the number of illegal downloads, multiply by the RRP and somehow delude themselves that they had somehow "lost" that money.
I've made money from selling software and I know damn well that although some people must have obtained copies without paying, only a fraction of those represented genuine lost sales, and some even translated into new business. I also know that trying to get clever with DRM would have dramatically increased my support costs and probably lost customers.
If you run a live music venue and people constantly sneak in without paying, you lose money, you might make a loss, and lose your business.
True (if unlikely), but irrelevant: Sneaking into a music venue without paying is not copyright infringement. Attendance at a live performance is a finite resource, which costs you money to provide and which can be "stolen". However, if enough people sneak in without paying to seriously damage your business then you should really think about checking people's tickets at the door, or maybe locking the lavatory window - your legitimate customers won't mind.
If you run a store that sells Cds and people shoplift, you lose money, you might make a loss and lose your business.
True, but irrelevant: shoplifting is theft, copyright infringement is not. If you have 10 copies of a CD and a shoplifter steals one, then you only have 9 left and have inarguably lost money or property. However, if you are losing enough CDs to endanger the business then maybe you should think about just displaying empty cases and keeping the real CDs behind the counter - you'll find that your discerning customers prefer it that way.
If you make software or music and people downlaod it for free rather than buying, you might...
Odd: in neither of your two previous examples did you sneak in the condition "rather than buying" (and no, "sneak in without paying" is not the same thing). In the first two cases your bad guys have inescapably consumed some of your finite resources, even if they never had any intention of paying. In the final case your "loss" is entirely dependent on that "rather than buying" assertion - the simple fact that someone has an illegal download does not cost you a brass farthing.
You also ignore all the strong evidence (e.g. TFA and there's another one today) that any actual losses due to piracy (i.e. punters that would otherwise have paid) are offset by the gains from increased exposure resulting in new legitimate sales or sales of related items, not to mention from avoiding the potential losses due to intrusive DRM.
There's plenty of evidence that people will happily pay for things they think are worth paying for. When Radiohead did their "pay what you like" download, plenty of people paid voluntarily (and the physical CD still sold, too). People donate money to open source projects, even when they can legally use it for free. Heck, most of today's big software houses exploded out of garages and bedrooms despite massive unlicensed copying and only started worrying about piracy after they became huge corporations.
Its not that Slashdot loves piracy, its that many people on /. hate the idea of copyright infringement being treated as equivalent to theft of physical property, and they hate stupid DRM schemes that make life difficult for people who have acquired software legally but which the most serious, organised, pirates seem to have little difficulty circumventing.
I'm a software engineer and I'd be out on the streets if our customers illegally downloaded our software.
No, you'd be out on the streets if not enough of your customers paid for your software to keep the company profitable.
but most pirates are people who want to listen to music, watch movies, or play games for free.
In which case, they were never going to pay for your software anyway, so unless they physically stole a boxed copy which you had paid to manufacture, you have not lost a dime. Most software/recording industry scare stories make the ludicrous assumption that every pirate copy represents a lost sale.
Conversely, some people who pirate your software will go legal when the next version arrives (or someone checks up), recommend it to others or (if its serious software) acquire skills in using it which result in future sales.
Equally, if you try and stamp out piracy by treating your paying customers as potential criminals and using intrusive DRM, you will lose customers to the competition (be it pirates, other companies or open source).
Vista changed the way drivers needed to be written for security reasons, and because hardware vendors suck at writing drivers for whatever they make, there were all sorts of problems with hardware compatibility, ESPECIALLY with older hardware.
Or to summarise: (a) Vista was released and promoted before it was ready (poor driver support = not ready to replace XP); maybe it should never have been marketed as an upgrade for pre-2007 hardware.
(b) Microsoft missed a chance to get the security model right with NT/Win2K/XP (which also required mass rewriting of drivers and software).
The legacy hardware/software issue is a pain for MS, but its an even bigger pain for anybody else who wants to break into the market, so lets not shed too many tears for them.