IIRC Apple had already been trying to get the labels to agree to a music store in iTunes, and it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that this would eventually happen. It was just a matter of how long before the record labels finally realised their choice was "join them or die". Besides which, Apple are a big company who could happily have tied the labels up in court for years.
Brennan, OTOH, are a much smaller company who couldn't have kept a court case going for so long and would be vanishingly unlikely to set up a licensing deal for a music store. Their ads are clearly aimed at a generation that doesn't know about the iPod (and wouldn't be terribly interested in it if they did) but do have a significant music collection, much of which simply doesn't get listened to much.
Depends. If they piss us off any more than they have I don't rule out a possible repeat of French history. Our civility is remarkably connected to the quality of our lives. There are an awful lot of idealists and philosophers out there, but it's amazing how ugly humanity can get when pressed and the fancy little civilization we build falls. Mob mentality is a bitch.
I see what you're driving at, but I think you're wrong.
IME, the sort of thing that generally leads to revolution is indeed quality of life - but the definition of what constitutes quality of life is generally the basics - access to food, shelter & water. (The American revolution was a bit of an anomaly in that regard - and to be fair there is a POV that says the US founding fathers didn't necessarily care that much about full independence. Autonomy while still calling the King of England their figurehead - much like the modern Commonwealth - would probably have been fine)
If there is a revolution in the Western world, it won't be because people can't listen to their MP3s without being sued. It'll be because ever-increasing inflation combined with wages that are decreasing in real terms mean that more and more people have to choose between paying for the roof over their head and food in their stomach.
The Streisand effect is generally associated with people doing something silly, realising their mistake and then trying to shut the door after the proverbial horse has bolted.
In this case, I think the thing most likely to invoke the Streisand effect would be if the blogger tried to cover up the whole sorry episode by trying to bully sites mentioning either the original article or the subsequent debunking. I reckon Samsung, OTOH, could sue the blogger with relatively little fear of Streisanding. As long as they didn't try to sue everyone else for reporting the story.
I've used VIPRE for years now. It actually is a quality product.
Except for when it false-positives over the presence of an empty folder which is actually a part of a correct Windows installation in certain circumstances.
(Having said that, if I were to blacklist a piece of software every time I found one stupid bug, I'd very soon run out of software I could run)
That's a possible scenario but I don't think it's a desirable one.
We've seen what happens to technology when there's no serious competition for years. It's called Internet Explorer 6. It's called Windows XP. It's called Office versions 97-2003.
None of these would have remained so strong for so long if there had been serious competition - Office only started to see some serious work going in when lots of large organisations started to publicly announce plans involving OpenOffice; IE only started to see serious improvement when Firefox gained traction and Windows only started to see serious work when it became apparent that Microsoft couldn't ignore Apple forever.
The biggest difference in the mobile phone market is that it's a much more fickle one - people update their handsets fairly often, expect to have to get used to a new UI with a new handset and don't really care too much about interoperability with other handset users. With any luck, this will be enough to prevent another monopoly appearing.
All joking aside, I keep hearing about "pebble bed reactors" as being the Power thats Going to Save the World.
But it's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that nobody on the planet has yet succeeded in building one that's actually worked, let alone a commercially successful one.
I think the entire company is systemically set up with a lot of different units pulling in different directions with no cohesive plan for how any given unit is going to help the business - if the interview I had was anything to go by, the unit itself wasn't entirely sure how its plans were going to help the business!
I don't think Nokia actually have a cohesive strategy - or if they do, they're not engaging their own staff with it.
It's anecdotal - and I won't go into detail because I don't think it's entirely appropriate - but I've interviewed there and my impression was very much a company running around like the proverbial headless chicken trying desperately to come up with an idea that would enjoy some serious success, but seldom with any thought or strategy behind those ideas.
True or not, defending an industry which is widely perceived as being responsible for wholesale global economic collapse and that industry then having to go cap-in-hand to the taxpayer in many countries worldwide lest the problem get even worse (and getting away with it, largely because the average taxpayer cannot afford to see his bank go out of business) is really not going to win friends and influence people.
Well, ostensibly the radio was an advertisement for the album. The radio plays one or two songs from the album and people hear it and want to hear more from the album. The problem facing todays music industry is that they seem to be unable to find any artists that can actually put an albums worth of music together, let alone one that has any real staying power. So they are getting desperate and looking anywhere they can for revenue.
I really think that's vanishingly unlikely. What, the world supply of talented musicians has just dried up?
What I think is more likely is the beancounters and the svengalis running the record companies have become so obsessed with finding the Next Big Thing there's nobody left working at a record company who understands the idea of nurturing talent over the course of many years. Which means they've become remarkably talented at finding and pushing the next Rebecca Black (intentionally stupid example before anyone points it out) and remarkably bad at developing a strong pool of musicians who start out with a hell of a lot of promise but still very rough around the edges.
Don't believe me? See if you can dig out early studio recordings by Blondie. I mean really early - the stuff that never made it to a release. Debbie Harry sounds dire, and if she was on the X factor today Simon Cowell would probably tell her to go and become a truck driver.
but anyone who's ever been involved in a hiring process - particularly one where there's no HR department to throw away blatantly useless applications - will know what I mean.
Hiring people is easy. Seriously, I can put out an advert tomorrow and I'll be buried in CVs (.uk doesn't use the term "resume") by the end of the week. I've seen CVs for entry-level positions advertised in the local newspaper come in from the other side of the world.
Hiring decent people - people who'll fit in with the team, people who can do the job, people who won't give up at the first hurdle but instead dig around to enhance their understanding to solve a problem, people who, when faced with what should be a simple problem (someone earlier mentioned opening a file, writing a string to it and closing it in ASP.NET) that winds up being two hours of work and 50 lines of code doesn't sit back and think "There. Done it." but instead thinks "That's ludicrous. There must be a better way...". Hiring people like this is surprisingly hard.
So when you've got one opening and a hundred CVs (which is entirely possible in the current economy) - you probably only have time for about 5-8 interviews. You develop shortcuts allowing you to eliminate candidates before you even speak to them. Some of those shortcuts will be similar no matter what company you're applying to: Advert said "Write to Mr. Brown", covering letter says "Dear Sir/Madam" - bin. If they can't be bothered to read the advert properly, they don't get an interview.
Other shortcuts - particularly if the person doing the screening has developed experience which suggests that by and large, a particular trait is a big minus point - are inevitable. It sounds like this guy has done exactly this - he's interviewed one too many people who's spent years doing nothing but business applications in Visual <Language> and can't think outside the framework that imposes.
Maybe you have a point. The people who treat software as a religion may or may not comprise the majority of developers, but they're certainly a major influencing force on a lot of F/OSS projects (including, I'm sad to say, projects which aren't terribly well known to the general public but nevertheless are important to the underlying system - as a result you wind up with fundamentally broken functionality). Possibly because they're the noisiest.
The full list of insanity that's appeared in F/OSS development is far too long to discuss here - besides which, much of it's already discussed on that tmrepository site and I daresay you've heard it all or you wouldn't be posting like that.
I'm reminded of "The God Delusion" - in which Dawkins argues that being nicey-nicey-politically-correct around religion allows it to continue to exist where it's been responsible for many atrocities in history, and instead we should be stamping it out with all force.
Having said all that, there's more than one way to skin a cat and IME a "STFU you're wrong I'm right" tone tends to cement exactly the opposite view in the other person's mind. Which doesn't mean you can't contradict them or present them with a contrary worldview, it just means there are more effective ways to word it.
While I don't think your tone is going to win over any admirers, you have a point. There seems to be some sort of disease - it happens in IT a fair bit, but F/OSS seems particularly vulnerable - whereby terminology is decided according to the following method:
1. Decide what it is you're describing.
2. Find an English word which has two meanings. One of which is what you're describing, the other meaning is quite different and not what you're driving at at all.
Here's the important bit: the second meaning - the one you're not intending - should be far and away the most common meaning of the word when used colloquially and the term as a whole should make perfect sense regardless of which meaning is interpreted. For best results, this alternate meaning of the term should have pejorative overtones to a lay person.
(Another word commonly abused in exactly this fashion is "Open", but at least "Open" may raise the question "What's open about it?". "Free" is going to result in assumptions).
3. Spend half your life explaining to people what you mean. The other half you spend watching people walk away before they even give you a chance to explain because they think they know what you mean.
I don't believe it's physically possible to use commercial software in any but the smallest of organisations and at the same time be 100% correct in your licensing of it.
Except by over-licencing, buying more cover than you actually need.
Well and good if it's something you want on every PC anyway. Niche software is the killer - as a rule of thumb, the tighter the niche, the more each license costs (and the less likely you'll find a viable F/OSS alternative) - and we could easily be talking thousands per license.
It only takes a single slip - maybe you're a small business without tight processes dictating that all PCs are wiped prior to reuse - and you're noncompliant. It was exactly this sort of thing that led to that old chestnut about Stirling Ball migrating everything to Linux.
Yeah, so Xen has all these fancy features. So does KVM. So does VirtualBox. So does VMWare.
The underlying features aren't really the important point - they haven't been for some time and that isn't going to change with this release. The important features right now are manageability - is there a pretty GUI to show the managers? A programmable, easily scriptable API? - and full feature-parity with the likes of VMWare. (Doesn't have to be parity with the enterprise versions, just parity with the free VMWare server will do).
And by feature parity I do not mean "feature parity in theory but it doesn't work in practise because we worked it out by looking at the names of all the features, guessing what they meant and replicated them. Further investigation shows our guesses were wrong in a few places, but hey..."
Let us be honest here, politicians seldom come up with particularly original technical ideas.
The idea that a group of politicians got together and said "Say, I know. If someone were to invent some sort of box which sits in the car, records mileage and reports back to some central system we could tax everyone based on the miles they've driven" - to me that's vanishingly unlikely.
What I think is rather more likely is a manufacturer of little black boxes contacted a bunch of politicians and said "Say, we've invented some sort of box which sits in the car, records mileage and reports back to a central system. You could legislate to make this box compulsory in all cars and then tax people based on the miles they've driven".
I'm not sure what the purpose of this law is other than to act as a rather larger stick to beat companies with.
Consider this: the legalese for most software licenses is borderline incomprehensible at the best of times. It's not simply a matter of "one license per PC", you've got Client Access Licenses, you've got products which are essentially the same but the difference lies in the licensing, you've got products which explicitly allow you to install them on more than one PC in certain circumstances (hello Adobe), you've got products which are straightforward enough in their own right but in order to use them you require some other product which is also licensed.
I don't believe it's physically possible to use commercial software in any but the smallest of organisations and at the same time be 100% correct in your licensing of it.
If you're prepared to accept this, then laws such as this start to sound dangerously close to legalised extortion : "Nice company you've got here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it."
Well of course they have. But if they'd built out their networks without any thought given to routing everything through a central system to block these things, one could reasonably argue that they don't have the technology to do that but could do so given a certain amount of work.
While some claims against Android can be dismissed outright, Google and its partners still must fend off patent lawsuits filed by rivals Microsoft and Oracle.
While that's the sort of thing that people love to trot out on/., it's mostly misinformed.
For the most part, the people who make money out of lawsuits are the lawyers. As far as many other businesses are concerned, taking someone to court is a damage-limitation exercise. You don't do it to make money, you do it to recoup some of your losses and/or to make a public example of the fact that you are prepared to do so.
There's a bunch of reasons for this, but the biggest one is simple: While you've got people dealing with a legal issue, those people aren't doing anything particularly constructive but you're still paying them - and the legal system tends to drag on very slowly. Hence why settling out of court is still a very common resolution.
Put it this way, if Darl McBride had put a quarter the money into making SCO Unix relevant in the modern world that he did into litigation, the name probably wouldn't be the object lesson it is today. (Yes I know it's a bad example, I know all the theories that the investment he got was only because of the lawsuit etc. etc. Nevertheless, I hope you get the idea.)
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In that case, there's one obvious solution.
Don't tax burgers, bacon and booze. Tax oatmeal and cereal bars, fresh fruit, mineral water and anything with "whole" in the name.
I'm not sure they're really a different side. After all, neither could exist without the other.
It's not the product that's been banned, it's the advert for it.
IIRC Apple had already been trying to get the labels to agree to a music store in iTunes, and it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that this would eventually happen. It was just a matter of how long before the record labels finally realised their choice was "join them or die". Besides which, Apple are a big company who could happily have tied the labels up in court for years.
Brennan, OTOH, are a much smaller company who couldn't have kept a court case going for so long and would be vanishingly unlikely to set up a licensing deal for a music store. Their ads are clearly aimed at a generation that doesn't know about the iPod (and wouldn't be terribly interested in it if they did) but do have a significant music collection, much of which simply doesn't get listened to much.
Depends. If they piss us off any more than they have I don't rule out a possible repeat of French history. Our civility is remarkably connected to the quality of our lives. There are an awful lot of idealists and philosophers out there, but it's amazing how ugly humanity can get when pressed and the fancy little civilization we build falls. Mob mentality is a bitch.
I see what you're driving at, but I think you're wrong.
IME, the sort of thing that generally leads to revolution is indeed quality of life - but the definition of what constitutes quality of life is generally the basics - access to food, shelter & water. (The American revolution was a bit of an anomaly in that regard - and to be fair there is a POV that says the US founding fathers didn't necessarily care that much about full independence. Autonomy while still calling the King of England their figurehead - much like the modern Commonwealth - would probably have been fine)
If there is a revolution in the Western world, it won't be because people can't listen to their MP3s without being sued. It'll be because ever-increasing inflation combined with wages that are decreasing in real terms mean that more and more people have to choose between paying for the roof over their head and food in their stomach.
The Streisand effect is generally associated with people doing something silly, realising their mistake and then trying to shut the door after the proverbial horse has bolted.
In this case, I think the thing most likely to invoke the Streisand effect would be if the blogger tried to cover up the whole sorry episode by trying to bully sites mentioning either the original article or the subsequent debunking. I reckon Samsung, OTOH, could sue the blogger with relatively little fear of Streisanding. As long as they didn't try to sue everyone else for reporting the story.
I've used VIPRE for years now. It actually is a quality product.
Except for when it false-positives over the presence of an empty folder which is actually a part of a correct Windows installation in certain circumstances.
(Having said that, if I were to blacklist a piece of software every time I found one stupid bug, I'd very soon run out of software I could run)
That's a possible scenario but I don't think it's a desirable one.
We've seen what happens to technology when there's no serious competition for years. It's called Internet Explorer 6. It's called Windows XP. It's called Office versions 97-2003.
None of these would have remained so strong for so long if there had been serious competition - Office only started to see some serious work going in when lots of large organisations started to publicly announce plans involving OpenOffice; IE only started to see serious improvement when Firefox gained traction and Windows only started to see serious work when it became apparent that Microsoft couldn't ignore Apple forever.
The biggest difference in the mobile phone market is that it's a much more fickle one - people update their handsets fairly often, expect to have to get used to a new UI with a new handset and don't really care too much about interoperability with other handset users. With any luck, this will be enough to prevent another monopoly appearing.
All joking aside, I keep hearing about "pebble bed reactors" as being the Power thats Going to Save the World.
But it's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that nobody on the planet has yet succeeded in building one that's actually worked, let alone a commercially successful one.
I don't think it's as simple as that.
I think the entire company is systemically set up with a lot of different units pulling in different directions with no cohesive plan for how any given unit is going to help the business - if the interview I had was anything to go by, the unit itself wasn't entirely sure how its plans were going to help the business!
I don't think Nokia actually have a cohesive strategy - or if they do, they're not engaging their own staff with it.
It's anecdotal - and I won't go into detail because I don't think it's entirely appropriate - but I've interviewed there and my impression was very much a company running around like the proverbial headless chicken trying desperately to come up with an idea that would enjoy some serious success, but seldom with any thought or strategy behind those ideas.
Who needs to win friends and influence people when you can buy them.
With their own money.
True or not, defending an industry which is widely perceived as being responsible for wholesale global economic collapse and that industry then having to go cap-in-hand to the taxpayer in many countries worldwide lest the problem get even worse (and getting away with it, largely because the average taxpayer cannot afford to see his bank go out of business) is really not going to win friends and influence people.
Well, ostensibly the radio was an advertisement for the album. The radio plays one or two songs from the album and people hear it and want to hear more from the album. The problem facing todays music industry is that they seem to be unable to find any artists that can actually put an albums worth of music together, let alone one that has any real staying power. So they are getting desperate and looking anywhere they can for revenue.
I really think that's vanishingly unlikely. What, the world supply of talented musicians has just dried up?
What I think is more likely is the beancounters and the svengalis running the record companies have become so obsessed with finding the Next Big Thing there's nobody left working at a record company who understands the idea of nurturing talent over the course of many years. Which means they've become remarkably talented at finding and pushing the next Rebecca Black (intentionally stupid example before anyone points it out) and remarkably bad at developing a strong pool of musicians who start out with a hell of a lot of promise but still very rough around the edges.
Don't believe me? See if you can dig out early studio recordings by Blondie. I mean really early - the stuff that never made it to a release. Debbie Harry sounds dire, and if she was on the X factor today Simon Cowell would probably tell her to go and become a truck driver.
but anyone who's ever been involved in a hiring process - particularly one where there's no HR department to throw away blatantly useless applications - will know what I mean.
Hiring people is easy. Seriously, I can put out an advert tomorrow and I'll be buried in CVs (.uk doesn't use the term "resume") by the end of the week. I've seen CVs for entry-level positions advertised in the local newspaper come in from the other side of the world.
Hiring decent people - people who'll fit in with the team, people who can do the job, people who won't give up at the first hurdle but instead dig around to enhance their understanding to solve a problem, people who, when faced with what should be a simple problem (someone earlier mentioned opening a file, writing a string to it and closing it in ASP.NET) that winds up being two hours of work and 50 lines of code doesn't sit back and think "There. Done it." but instead thinks "That's ludicrous. There must be a better way...". Hiring people like this is surprisingly hard.
So when you've got one opening and a hundred CVs (which is entirely possible in the current economy) - you probably only have time for about 5-8 interviews. You develop shortcuts allowing you to eliminate candidates before you even speak to them. Some of those shortcuts will be similar no matter what company you're applying to: Advert said "Write to Mr. Brown", covering letter says "Dear Sir/Madam" - bin. If they can't be bothered to read the advert properly, they don't get an interview.
Other shortcuts - particularly if the person doing the screening has developed experience which suggests that by and large, a particular trait is a big minus point - are inevitable. It sounds like this guy has done exactly this - he's interviewed one too many people who's spent years doing nothing but business applications in Visual <Language> and can't think outside the framework that imposes.
Maybe you have a point. The people who treat software as a religion may or may not comprise the majority of developers, but they're certainly a major influencing force on a lot of F/OSS projects (including, I'm sad to say, projects which aren't terribly well known to the general public but nevertheless are important to the underlying system - as a result you wind up with fundamentally broken functionality). Possibly because they're the noisiest.
The full list of insanity that's appeared in F/OSS development is far too long to discuss here - besides which, much of it's already discussed on that tmrepository site and I daresay you've heard it all or you wouldn't be posting like that.
I'm reminded of "The God Delusion" - in which Dawkins argues that being nicey-nicey-politically-correct around religion allows it to continue to exist where it's been responsible for many atrocities in history, and instead we should be stamping it out with all force.
Having said all that, there's more than one way to skin a cat and IME a "STFU you're wrong I'm right" tone tends to cement exactly the opposite view in the other person's mind. Which doesn't mean you can't contradict them or present them with a contrary worldview, it just means there are more effective ways to word it.
While I don't think your tone is going to win over any admirers, you have a point. There seems to be some sort of disease - it happens in IT a fair bit, but F/OSS seems particularly vulnerable - whereby terminology is decided according to the following method:
1. Decide what it is you're describing.
2. Find an English word which has two meanings. One of which is what you're describing, the other meaning is quite different and not what you're driving at at all.
Here's the important bit: the second meaning - the one you're not intending - should be far and away the most common meaning of the word when used colloquially and the term as a whole should make perfect sense regardless of which meaning is interpreted. For best results, this alternate meaning of the term should have pejorative overtones to a lay person.
(Another word commonly abused in exactly this fashion is "Open", but at least "Open" may raise the question "What's open about it?". "Free" is going to result in assumptions).
3. Spend half your life explaining to people what you mean. The other half you spend watching people walk away before they even give you a chance to explain because they think they know what you mean.
I don't believe it's physically possible to use commercial software in any but the smallest of organisations and at the same time be 100% correct in your licensing of it.
Except by over-licencing, buying more cover than you actually need.
Well and good if it's something you want on every PC anyway. Niche software is the killer - as a rule of thumb, the tighter the niche, the more each license costs (and the less likely you'll find a viable F/OSS alternative) - and we could easily be talking thousands per license.
It only takes a single slip - maybe you're a small business without tight processes dictating that all PCs are wiped prior to reuse - and you're noncompliant. It was exactly this sort of thing that led to that old chestnut about Stirling Ball migrating everything to Linux.
Yeah, so Xen has all these fancy features. So does KVM. So does VirtualBox. So does VMWare.
The underlying features aren't really the important point - they haven't been for some time and that isn't going to change with this release. The important features right now are manageability - is there a pretty GUI to show the managers? A programmable, easily scriptable API? - and full feature-parity with the likes of VMWare. (Doesn't have to be parity with the enterprise versions, just parity with the free VMWare server will do).
And by feature parity I do not mean "feature parity in theory but it doesn't work in practise because we worked it out by looking at the names of all the features, guessing what they meant and replicated them. Further investigation shows our guesses were wrong in a few places, but hey..."
Let us be honest here, politicians seldom come up with particularly original technical ideas.
The idea that a group of politicians got together and said "Say, I know. If someone were to invent some sort of box which sits in the car, records mileage and reports back to some central system we could tax everyone based on the miles they've driven" - to me that's vanishingly unlikely.
What I think is rather more likely is a manufacturer of little black boxes contacted a bunch of politicians and said "Say, we've invented some sort of box which sits in the car, records mileage and reports back to a central system. You could legislate to make this box compulsory in all cars and then tax people based on the miles they've driven".
So, who makes such boxes?
Seriously, Motorola did that?
Wow.
I've heard of managing-by-Dilbert but I never thought it'd actually happen.
I'm not sure what the purpose of this law is other than to act as a rather larger stick to beat companies with.
Consider this: the legalese for most software licenses is borderline incomprehensible at the best of times. It's not simply a matter of "one license per PC", you've got Client Access Licenses, you've got products which are essentially the same but the difference lies in the licensing, you've got products which explicitly allow you to install them on more than one PC in certain circumstances (hello Adobe), you've got products which are straightforward enough in their own right but in order to use them you require some other product which is also licensed.
I don't believe it's physically possible to use commercial software in any but the smallest of organisations and at the same time be 100% correct in your licensing of it.
If you're prepared to accept this, then laws such as this start to sound dangerously close to legalised extortion : "Nice company you've got here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it."
Well of course they have. But if they'd built out their networks without any thought given to routing everything through a central system to block these things, one could reasonably argue that they don't have the technology to do that but could do so given a certain amount of work.
From TFS:
While some claims against Android can be dismissed outright, Google and its partners still must fend off patent lawsuits filed by rivals Microsoft and Oracle.
While that's the sort of thing that people love to trot out on /., it's mostly misinformed.
For the most part, the people who make money out of lawsuits are the lawyers. As far as many other businesses are concerned, taking someone to court is a damage-limitation exercise. You don't do it to make money, you do it to recoup some of your losses and/or to make a public example of the fact that you are prepared to do so.
There's a bunch of reasons for this, but the biggest one is simple: While you've got people dealing with a legal issue, those people aren't doing anything particularly constructive but you're still paying them - and the legal system tends to drag on very slowly. Hence why settling out of court is still a very common resolution.
Put it this way, if Darl McBride had put a quarter the money into making SCO Unix relevant in the modern world that he did into litigation, the name probably wouldn't be the object lesson it is today. (Yes I know it's a bad example, I know all the theories that the investment he got was only because of the lawsuit etc. etc. Nevertheless, I hope you get the idea.)