Current day Microsoft has been slapped around enough by the EU over antitrust issues that they don't dare pull that sort of shit anymore. Free MS from their anti-trust shackles, however, and they would very quickly move in a dominate the phone market if they cared to.
I disagree - the iPhone was released long after most of the antitrust issues, and lots of smartphones ran Windows Mobile then.
Frankly, they weren't very popular outside of businesses. (And inside of businesses, Blackberry devices were generally just as popular if not more so). And with good reason - while I'm aware it's a totally different product, Microsoft somehow managed to take most of the annoyances of Windows and implement them in Windows Mobile. When it works it's fine, when it doesn't - which affects everyone sooner or later - it seems to go out of its way to make fixing the problem difficult. Yet Microsoft continued to sell this supremely mediocre product with little sign of planning to give it the thorough overhaul it needed, and it wasn't until Apple basically appeared out of nowhere and said to the world "Here's our new phone. Do you like it?" that Microsoft sat up and realised that they would have to compete if they wanted to remain in the market.
a couple of weeks after I was born, there was an episode of Yes Minister on television about the creation of a 'Big Brother' database with inadequate privacy safeguards. Plus ca change...
You really do have a remarkable memory. The earliest thing I can remember is "Baa Baa Black Sheep".
If it goes to court WB will probably have to open up their claims & records on piracy, counterfeiting, etc to examination and scrutiny. This could be a valuable crack in their "pandora's box" of exaggerated statistics.
Purely out of curiosity, does anyone know of a single instance in any Western country of a major record or film company taking a member of the general public to court, the defendant putting forward a robust defence and the issue left to the court to resolve rather than either the defendant or the plaintiff eventually folding?
Many companies (naming no names) produce such truly appalling maps that it would be hard to tell the difference between deliberate mistakes and genuine ones.
IME, the only parts of the world where this is not a huge problem are where there already exists a very good mapping agency that licenses data to other companies (such as the Ordnance Survey in the UK).
Probably because you quite often only make a couple of % on such a trade, which means it's very difficult to make thousands unless you're investing millions. Tack on the fact that you or I will pay a lot more in commission, and that couple of percent is soon eliminated altogether.
Let us assume for the time being that the Times' website is losing money hand over fist. This is a perfectly valid assumption - hell, the print version of the times hasn't made money in years.
In which case, switching to a paid subscription will do a few things:
1. Drastically reduce traffic to the website. This may actually be a good thing because it means all of a sudden the amount of infrastructure (and associated cost) required to host it will plummet.
2. Give a consistent, known amount of revenue per reader. Mr. Murdoch probably only needs a few thousand customers worldwide for it to have been worthwhile - and if he's got any brains at all, he'll have streamlined the operation such that news that is printed is selected and brought into the website in a fairly automatic process which means the site just sits there doing its thing 90% of the time. Considering the amount it costs to buy a UK paper abroad (usually three or four times the cover price, assuming you can find one and it isn't a week old), there may well be enough ex-pats who think that £2/week is a good deal.
Put another way, do you as a/. reader think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot? He's an idiot who is almost certainly worth about a million times what you are, and I guarantee quite a few businesses which put news content on the web will be watching this very closely. If he's right (and I accept it's a big if), he'll turn the website from a loss-leader into a quiet little machine that just sits in the corner ticking over and making a fair bit of money. Once that happens, there won't be a quiet movement of other news sites going pay-as-you-read. There'll be a stampede.
Very similar - may even have been the same narrator - but I specifically remember that one of the comparisons included "Ob-la-di" by the Beatles and that he went to great pains to explain that he didn't think it was an intentional knock-off on the grounds that you'd have to be nuts to knock off one of the best known pop bands of all time.
Not that it matters that much - the video you linked to makes the point just as well.
No, it was a single person explaining directly to the listeners rather than an allegorical story and he used examples comparing modern pop with remarkably similar riffs used by the likes of the Beatles - the point being that in order to sound even half-decent, pop has some fairly strict rules and there's only so many combinations of notes that sound good.
Don't even need to do that, just substantially lower the bar on how different something has to be before it's considered a separate work rather than plagiarised.
Right now if you take just a few musical notes at random that sound good together, there's a very strong chance you'll wind up with something that has already been done, is still under copyright protection and has a pack of hungry lawyers to prove it. There was a podcast somewhere which explained this and pointed out the absurdity complete with examples, but I've forgotten where it was and a quick search doesn't reveal anything particularly helpful.
The video addresses exactly this point, and appears to have been made with reference to speaking to big hitters in the fashion industry who've been working in it for decades.
Briefly, it raises a number of points:
1. The people who are buying the knock-offs probably wouldn't be buying the really expensive designer clothes anyway. 2. Industries with relatively low IP protection are much larger than industries with a lot of IP protection. (Though I think this is a bit of a disingenuous point - the industries at the top of the scale are selling things that are necessities rather than luxuries in today's society, so of course they're going to be huge. Specifically, they're food, fashion - remember even a £3 Primark T-shirt comes under the heading of "fashion" - and cars.) 3. IP protection would be really difficult because it's very hard to establish precisely what makes a design original. Set the bar too high and nobody can claim copyright on a design because it's practically impossible to prove that you really were the first to come up with the idea, set it too low and the tiniest change means it's no longer a knock-off. We already see exactly this problem in the music industry when an artist is accused of plagiarising another artists' tune - the resulting legal wrangles go on for years. (cf. "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree/Down Under") 4. Whether you like it or not, it forces people within the industry to work harder. The fashion industry thrives on constantly finding the Next Big Thing, and makes a nice chunk of cash doing so. Who wants to buy the Next Big Thing when it's almost identical to the Last Big Thing which is still sitting in the wardrobe and is in pretty good repair?
Lots of applications - Windows and Mac - have their own inbuilt update mechanism. The upshot is you find that you're never quite sure which applications are updating, which ones aren't and how you go about checking because it varies on a per-application basis.
What is needed is a mechanism for applications to register with the system updater a URL where updated packages may be found, a frequency to check and a public key against which signatures may be checked. Frankly, Linux could do with this as well - it'd go some way to reducing the reliance on applications being packaged specifically for the distribution. Existing system updaters are simply GUI wrappers around apt-get update; apt-get upgrade (on dpkg based systems) and usually yum-update on RPM based systems.
That's very nice for you, but neither Windows nor OS X allow third-party applications to be updated via the built-in updater.
(Actually, that's not strictly true, I believe there was talk of Microsoft allowing it in Windows but I don't know of many applications taking advantage of that).
This is broadly speaking exactly what browsers did do a couple of years ago. The padlock icon was typically shown slightly differently to demonstrate that there was something odd going on, and there may have been a dialog box thrown up saying "This page may be insecure. Click OK to continue or cancel to leave the site".
Many people just take the phrase "this site is secure" on a web page at face value, or they look for the padlock in the wrong place (like in the web page), or they take for granted they're on a secure site (well, the link their bank sent them in email wouldn't have been to an insecure site, would it?). The purpose of the big red "THIS MAY NOT BE SAFE" page is to tackle precisely this problem - to put up a big, singing, dancing warning that you just can't ignore or click OK to in a Pavlovian manner.
Not really what I had in mind, though I perhaps could have worded it better.
IMV, there is a huge difference between saying "Android is superior to iPhone because of xxx" and "iPhone is lame because of xxx and because of this Apple should die horribly and Steve Jobs should be left in poverty, begging for spare change with a mangy dog on a piece of string".
Seriously, I have no problem with anyone saying that they prefer product X over product Y for reason Z. But when people start saying they want product X to die horribly for no reason other than they don't like it, that's when you descend into becoming a hateboi.
The iPhone's development (and for that matter OS X) have settled into a reasonably predictable pattern:
1. Release major version. This major version may have a few obvious features missing, it may in principle not do anything particularly new but the overall feel (once you get over that) is so well polished that most of the competitors are now looking fairly silly. Note that Apple have never attempted to sell the cheapest product in the market, so you're probably well advised to put a fairly low weight on whether or not you perceive it offering value for money.
2. Competitors start playing catch up.
3. Release new version. It'll probably be hyped to buggery, but ATEOTD it's not a huge upgrade.
And on/. we have reverse fanbois (hatebois?), who don't look at what people are purchasing, don't consider that using it may be enjoyable and don't think anybody is getting good value for money.
These hatebois are so ardently rabid that they want the manufacturer of this product to be wiped off the map, without considering that possibly - just possibly - having competition in the market is a good thing.
What you are seeing is not the result of a number of clearly made business decisions. What you are seeing is the result of a business which is being mismanaged from the top down.
Let me give you a very rough rule of thumb. It doesn't account for the entire organisation, but by and large, the easier a company is to work with (as a consumer, a business client, partner or whatever), the easier they are to work for (as an employee). This cuts both ways - a company where the staff are royally shat upon day after day will sooner or later find that their staff don't really care about their customers.
When you're a very large company (or you occupy a very strong position in the market), you can afford to let this happen for some time before it seriously affects your bottom line. Which means that if you're fairly disconnected from the grassroots end of the business (as rather a lot of CEOs are - I guarantee you that no cable CEO has been kept waiting for a technician to show up), you wouldn't necessarily know there was anything wrong. It's only when you find your position weakening (generally because there's suddenly much more competition in the market) that customers start leaving in droves. Now you either figure out what the hell is wrong and fix it (as is happening here) or sooner rather than later you'll find you've got a nationwide infrastructure but nothing like the number of customers such an infrastructure needs to operate.
As others have pointed out, GPLs 2 and 3 both require the release of the build-prerequisites. If, as one of the unnamed companies claims, they used GPL code and proprietary build prerequisites that they cannot legally release, than their lawyer(s) fucked up big.
Couple of issues with that statement:
1. Not every company insists on having a lawyer in every meeting and going through every aspect of preparing and launching a product. In many ways it may actually be a bad idea to do this because it'll cost a small fortune in legal fees and if your lawyer picks up on something, you either fix it or take the risk that if you wind up in court, you can no longer say in good faith "oops, sorry, our mistake".
2. The lawyer is an expert in law, not in technology. He's not about to attempt to build a new firmware image based on the gpl_compliance.zip file you've placed on your website just to make sure you really are compliant - and he's also going to give his client the benefit of the doubt if they say "that's all we need".
Slashdot Mirror
Current day Microsoft has been slapped around enough by the EU over antitrust issues that they don't dare pull that sort of shit anymore. Free MS from their anti-trust shackles, however, and they would very quickly move in a dominate the phone market if they cared to.
I disagree - the iPhone was released long after most of the antitrust issues, and lots of smartphones ran Windows Mobile then.
Frankly, they weren't very popular outside of businesses. (And inside of businesses, Blackberry devices were generally just as popular if not more so). And with good reason - while I'm aware it's a totally different product, Microsoft somehow managed to take most of the annoyances of Windows and implement them in Windows Mobile. When it works it's fine, when it doesn't - which affects everyone sooner or later - it seems to go out of its way to make fixing the problem difficult. Yet Microsoft continued to sell this supremely mediocre product with little sign of planning to give it the thorough overhaul it needed, and it wasn't until Apple basically appeared out of nowhere and said to the world "Here's our new phone. Do you like it?" that Microsoft sat up and realised that they would have to compete if they wanted to remain in the market.
I know one person who had a Windows mobile device - my own line manager.
He now has a Blackberry. 'Nuff said.
The DVD box set isn't too pricey.
a couple of weeks after I was born, there was an episode of Yes Minister on television about the creation of a 'Big Brother' database with inadequate privacy safeguards. Plus ca change...
You really do have a remarkable memory. The earliest thing I can remember is "Baa Baa Black Sheep".
If it goes to court WB will probably have to open up their claims & records on piracy, counterfeiting, etc to examination and scrutiny. This could be a valuable crack in their "pandora's box" of exaggerated statistics.
Purely out of curiosity, does anyone know of a single instance in any Western country of a major record or film company taking a member of the general public to court, the defendant putting forward a robust defence and the issue left to the court to resolve rather than either the defendant or the plaintiff eventually folding?
Many companies (naming no names) produce such truly appalling maps that it would be hard to tell the difference between deliberate mistakes and genuine ones.
IME, the only parts of the world where this is not a huge problem are where there already exists a very good mapping agency that licenses data to other companies (such as the Ordnance Survey in the UK).
Within a fortnight they'd get used to the red bar and wouldn't think twice about it.
Probably because you quite often only make a couple of % on such a trade, which means it's very difficult to make thousands unless you're investing millions. Tack on the fact that you or I will pay a lot more in commission, and that couple of percent is soon eliminated altogether.
Not necessarily.
Let us assume for the time being that the Times' website is losing money hand over fist. This is a perfectly valid assumption - hell, the print version of the times hasn't made money in years.
In which case, switching to a paid subscription will do a few things:
1. Drastically reduce traffic to the website. This may actually be a good thing because it means all of a sudden the amount of infrastructure (and associated cost) required to host it will plummet.
2. Give a consistent, known amount of revenue per reader. Mr. Murdoch probably only needs a few thousand customers worldwide for it to have been worthwhile - and if he's got any brains at all, he'll have streamlined the operation such that news that is printed is selected and brought into the website in a fairly automatic process which means the site just sits there doing its thing 90% of the time. Considering the amount it costs to buy a UK paper abroad (usually three or four times the cover price, assuming you can find one and it isn't a week old), there may well be enough ex-pats who think that £2/week is a good deal.
Put another way, do you as a /. reader think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot? He's an idiot who is almost certainly worth about a million times what you are, and I guarantee quite a few businesses which put news content on the web will be watching this very closely. If he's right (and I accept it's a big if), he'll turn the website from a loss-leader into a quiet little machine that just sits in the corner ticking over and making a fair bit of money. Once that happens, there won't be a quiet movement of other news sites going pay-as-you-read. There'll be a stampede.
Very similar - may even have been the same narrator - but I specifically remember that one of the comparisons included "Ob-la-di" by the Beatles and that he went to great pains to explain that he didn't think it was an intentional knock-off on the grounds that you'd have to be nuts to knock off one of the best known pop bands of all time.
Not that it matters that much - the video you linked to makes the point just as well.
No, it was a single person explaining directly to the listeners rather than an allegorical story and he used examples comparing modern pop with remarkably similar riffs used by the likes of the Beatles - the point being that in order to sound even half-decent, pop has some fairly strict rules and there's only so many combinations of notes that sound good.
It's the riff that was the bone of contention: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqOIdtKZTG4&feature=related
Don't even need to do that, just substantially lower the bar on how different something has to be before it's considered a separate work rather than plagiarised.
Right now if you take just a few musical notes at random that sound good together, there's a very strong chance you'll wind up with something that has already been done, is still under copyright protection and has a pack of hungry lawyers to prove it. There was a podcast somewhere which explained this and pointed out the absurdity complete with examples, but I've forgotten where it was and a quick search doesn't reveal anything particularly helpful.
The video addresses exactly this point, and appears to have been made with reference to speaking to big hitters in the fashion industry who've been working in it for decades.
Briefly, it raises a number of points:
1. The people who are buying the knock-offs probably wouldn't be buying the really expensive designer clothes anyway.
2. Industries with relatively low IP protection are much larger than industries with a lot of IP protection. (Though I think this is a bit of a disingenuous point - the industries at the top of the scale are selling things that are necessities rather than luxuries in today's society, so of course they're going to be huge. Specifically, they're food, fashion - remember even a £3 Primark T-shirt comes under the heading of "fashion" - and cars.)
3. IP protection would be really difficult because it's very hard to establish precisely what makes a design original. Set the bar too high and nobody can claim copyright on a design because it's practically impossible to prove that you really were the first to come up with the idea, set it too low and the tiniest change means it's no longer a knock-off. We already see exactly this problem in the music industry when an artist is accused of plagiarising another artists' tune - the resulting legal wrangles go on for years. (cf. "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree/Down Under")
4. Whether you like it or not, it forces people within the industry to work harder. The fashion industry thrives on constantly finding the Next Big Thing, and makes a nice chunk of cash doing so. Who wants to buy the Next Big Thing when it's almost identical to the Last Big Thing which is still sitting in the wardrobe and is in pretty good repair?
Lots of applications - Windows and Mac - have their own inbuilt update mechanism. The upshot is you find that you're never quite sure which applications are updating, which ones aren't and how you go about checking because it varies on a per-application basis.
What is needed is a mechanism for applications to register with the system updater a URL where updated packages may be found, a frequency to check and a public key against which signatures may be checked. Frankly, Linux could do with this as well - it'd go some way to reducing the reliance on applications being packaged specifically for the distribution. Existing system updaters are simply GUI wrappers around apt-get update; apt-get upgrade (on dpkg based systems) and usually yum-update on RPM based systems.
That's very nice for you, but neither Windows nor OS X allow third-party applications to be updated via the built-in updater.
(Actually, that's not strictly true, I believe there was talk of Microsoft allowing it in Windows but I don't know of many applications taking advantage of that).
This is broadly speaking exactly what browsers did do a couple of years ago. The padlock icon was typically shown slightly differently to demonstrate that there was something odd going on, and there may have been a dialog box thrown up saying "This page may be insecure. Click OK to continue or cancel to leave the site".
Many people just take the phrase "this site is secure" on a web page at face value, or they look for the padlock in the wrong place (like in the web page), or they take for granted they're on a secure site (well, the link their bank sent them in email wouldn't have been to an insecure site, would it?). The purpose of the big red "THIS MAY NOT BE SAFE" page is to tackle precisely this problem - to put up a big, singing, dancing warning that you just can't ignore or click OK to in a Pavlovian manner.
And the artists insisted on printer ink. (I always wondered if it was sterile...) They must have a reason.
You ever tried to wash that stuff off?
Yes, I accept that.
So where in the law of the land does it say that someone - anyone - has to provide broadband access?
Not really what I had in mind, though I perhaps could have worded it better.
IMV, there is a huge difference between saying "Android is superior to iPhone because of xxx" and "iPhone is lame because of xxx and because of this Apple should die horribly and Steve Jobs should be left in poverty, begging for spare change with a mangy dog on a piece of string".
Seriously, I have no problem with anyone saying that they prefer product X over product Y for reason Z. But when people start saying they want product X to die horribly for no reason other than they don't like it, that's when you descend into becoming a hateboi.
Sounds about right.
The iPhone's development (and for that matter OS X) have settled into a reasonably predictable pattern:
1. Release major version. This major version may have a few obvious features missing, it may in principle not do anything particularly new but the overall feel (once you get over that) is so well polished that most of the competitors are now looking fairly silly. Note that Apple have never attempted to sell the cheapest product in the market, so you're probably well advised to put a fairly low weight on whether or not you perceive it offering value for money.
2. Competitors start playing catch up.
3. Release new version. It'll probably be hyped to buggery, but ATEOTD it's not a huge upgrade.
4. Competitors finally start to achieve parity.
5. Go to 1.
And on /. we have reverse fanbois (hatebois?), who don't look at what people are purchasing, don't consider that using it may be enjoyable and don't think anybody is getting good value for money.
These hatebois are so ardently rabid that they want the manufacturer of this product to be wiped off the map, without considering that possibly - just possibly - having competition in the market is a good thing.
It doesn't help your business.
What you are seeing is not the result of a number of clearly made business decisions. What you are seeing is the result of a business which is being mismanaged from the top down.
Let me give you a very rough rule of thumb. It doesn't account for the entire organisation, but by and large, the easier a company is to work with (as a consumer, a business client, partner or whatever), the easier they are to work for (as an employee). This cuts both ways - a company where the staff are royally shat upon day after day will sooner or later find that their staff don't really care about their customers.
When you're a very large company (or you occupy a very strong position in the market), you can afford to let this happen for some time before it seriously affects your bottom line. Which means that if you're fairly disconnected from the grassroots end of the business (as rather a lot of CEOs are - I guarantee you that no cable CEO has been kept waiting for a technician to show up), you wouldn't necessarily know there was anything wrong. It's only when you find your position weakening (generally because there's suddenly much more competition in the market) that customers start leaving in droves. Now you either figure out what the hell is wrong and fix it (as is happening here) or sooner rather than later you'll find you've got a nationwide infrastructure but nothing like the number of customers such an infrastructure needs to operate.
I think soldering anything to a cat puts the solderer at greater risk than the solderee.
As others have pointed out, GPLs 2 and 3 both require the release of the build-prerequisites. If, as one of the unnamed companies claims, they used GPL code and proprietary build prerequisites that they cannot legally release, than their lawyer(s) fucked up big.
Couple of issues with that statement:
1. Not every company insists on having a lawyer in every meeting and going through every aspect of preparing and launching a product. In many ways it may actually be a bad idea to do this because it'll cost a small fortune in legal fees and if your lawyer picks up on something, you either fix it or take the risk that if you wind up in court, you can no longer say in good faith "oops, sorry, our mistake".
2. The lawyer is an expert in law, not in technology. He's not about to attempt to build a new firmware image based on the gpl_compliance.zip file you've placed on your website just to make sure you really are compliant - and he's also going to give his client the benefit of the doubt if they say "that's all we need".