If you come right out and say "someone else is offering me more money. GIve me a big raise or I'm leaving.", then you'll sound like an ass and like your trying to extort money from them.
However, try explaining to them why you are worth more, and request a raise, and don't mention the other job, and you won't be taken as if you're trying to hold them hostage. Don't make threats to leave - they could make similar threats to you to fire you all throughout your employment, and you wouldn't have liked that or put up with it. If they give you enough that you feel happy being there still, great... keep that job (IMO, it doesn't have to be as much as the next company is offering if I'm actually happy with my current job, cause that happiness has a HUGE value, and the other job is an unknown).
All that said, the poster said the old job was 45min away, and the new job is at his front door. I'm lazy. I'd take that new job. You can do the same number of hours of work at the new job with about 20% less time devoted to the job (travel time). Bonus - you can go home for lunch and grill a steak.
What specs? The linked article has less info on that than the summary (where'd the summary get that info?). I'd agree that $35 for a 7" touchscreen that does anything is pretty good, and maybe it is worth $60, but I can't find any specs to support that.
Why does "practical" require "manual". Have you ever filled up your car by manually lifting up buckets of gas and pouring them in? And if so, I'd say that wasn't very "practical" either, but we came up with an easy way to get the gas into your car via a pump.
This is part of the "figure out how to switch a battery pack (or two) in a couple minutes" the GP was talking about.
How about: * set a standard battery size. * make them accessible via an opening on either side of the car via a pull out tray type thing * have a little station that replaces them one by one (line it up, hit a button).
Sure, that'd impose a design limitation on cars, and we'd have to come up with the standards, and the stations would need to be designed/produced/built/installed, but that's all feasible and practical, and not a significant change from the norm. Gas cars all have to have a hole somewhere that takes gravity fed gas into a standard intake size, and no one seems to be very bothered by that limitation, and there are LOTS of pumps all over the place in various designs, and people keep making new ones and replacing/installing them, so installing some new stations is not absurd.
Um, no. In America the top 1% pay 38% of all Income Tax...
While his numbers are still very incorrect, this is a completely different ratio comparison.
You both start with top 1% of earners.
He's comparing the percentage taken from the money the 1% makes. You're comparing the total sum of money taken from the 1% that goes to the global sum of income tax (which includes money from all other brackets).
The later comparison inflates the percentage number for the rich in this case. Assuming the previous commenter (msauve) is correct, that %38 of all income taxes is actually a rate of %28 of their income (or some bucket of money).
IMO, the truth is that it's nearly impossible to put a figure on any of it because of the large difference in wealth making, storing, hiding, investing, etc that is available to the wealthy. On the poor side, it's a fairly easy percentage to read (income in, income tax on it all, left over money out for basic needs and occasional entertainment/etc extras, with zero or less left over (debt)).
Sales tax seems like the only thing that might be able to be applied in a fixed nature and serve all classes near equally, but it will have the same problems once people start deciding what constitutes a "sale". On the low end, food and clothing may be exempt (which makes sense to me), but that opens it up to other exemptions - is buying stock a "sale"? are non-profits taxed? if a "company" buys something, is there a different tax? Plenty of loopholes will be made, and we'll be right back to where we are before we even started.
Income tax would be fair too, if "income" was defined very broadly and you got rid of all loopholes, including the current definition of "company" as its own entity.
They didn't patent it (AFAIK). WTF does prior art have to do with it?
And "How is this any different..."? uh, just read about it. Off the top of my head, it's based on Amazon EC2 and ties into that entire network - I'm not intimately familiar with Operas solution, but I doubt they have as much hardware real estate on the server side. Similar? maybe a lot, but it's not the same, and it's still something that will end up being a very new experience and thing to most people.
It's still new tech, even if done before elsewhere. New as in relative to time, as opposed to "brand new" or first time in use.
Participating in free software like Linux and this are very different things.
Only by participating in free software do you realize its full potential; by translating text for free for a closed company you get no benefit at all.
Different, sure. "Very" different, no.
Let's assume that Valve isn't willing to fork out the money to translate their platform to those other languages. As the article estimates, it's expensive (and I agree it's expensive... a company I worked for paid about 26k per translation of the software they developed internally, and some languages are much more expensive than others, and those are usually the ones that have fewer users). So that'd make some sense, since their market may not be as large in those areas - more so, their market of people that can't read English in those areas may not justify the cost and effort to create and maintain the translations themselves.
However, if there's still some market there, why not let that market justify itself... they provide the translation, and they get to reap the benefits (able to use Steam and view some games in their native tongue). That sure does sound like a nice benefit to me.
I am a free software proponent, and I would agree that it would be more beneficial to society if Steam itself was an open source platform. But that's not required to make this still be a good thing.
IMO, it's simply an understanding level. Explains Windows and iPod/iPad too.
When you put something together yourself, you'll gain an understanding of said thing. If you understand it, you'll appreciate it more in comparison to a black box.
Lots of people have used Windows enough to have a better understanding of its quirks and how stuff works in the Windows world than they do the unknown of Linux (or Macs, for that matter).
Understanding something rather than just having something takes up a bigger chunk of the brain, so it seems natural that one would have a stronger connection to those things. Doesn't mean you have to build it to gain understanding, but that's one way that'd help.
If you're just talking about it being an epub file (which I'd be slightly surprised if the books you can borrow on Kindle are DRM'd epub's, but maybe they are - I'm too lazy to research that):
Calibre.
If you're already going through the trouble of running something to strip DRM, pumping that through an format conversion is almost zero extra work by comparison. You don't even need to install anything if you use one of the many online services to do it.
Not sure why you said "But not Kindle". They won't run as an app on iPhone either, and none of the popular epub eink readers will read a mobi file either, but that doesn't mean you can't do a very very simple conversion and read it perfectly fine on those devices (iPhone via installing an epub reader app; Kindle by converting $source_format_x to mobi or pdf or images (comic books); Nook + others by converting $whatever_format to epub).
Like Miramax and Lionsgate, both of which made streaming deals with Netflix this year.
IMO, those two have far better titles to offer than I've ever seen from starz on Netflix streaming in the past. Maybe starz does have some content I'd like, but I've seen little to none of it on Netflix.... I'm not expecting to lose much.
Take that with a grain of salt though - I think their past and present streaming selection is damn small and lacking lots of content that should be there (ex. they have the first two seasons of Dexter for streaming, but nothing newer... those others are years old now). I'm sure that's mostly due to content providers, but the end result is a sub-par library of movies.
What I don't get is how losing starz is all that big a deal. It's been mentioned far too often, as if it's the end of the line for them. The selection already sucked, and starz doesn't make much of an impact (especially with the recent addition of Miramax and Lionsgate etc).
Price change did piss some (vocal) people off (irritated people are always more vocal than those that don't feel like anything has changed), but it seems there's as many (if not more) that either like the new pricing, or are ok with it.
Time will tell... but if Netflix goes away, there's a really good chance we'll be in for years of a much worse situation. I'm betting networks and/or studios and/or cable companies etc will start their own little streaming nooks and each will expect us to pay about the same, if not more, for just their titles. Then we'd have to have a whole bunch of broken ass clients talking to disparate services each with their own quirks and prices.... making bittorrent all the more attractive to the average joe once again.
Which is why we must continue to defend our freedoms, rather than roll over like a coward and pay MS/Apple/Whomever for whatever they decide is best for us. Do you think America bought its freedom? or did they claim it and fight for it (stepping on some other people along the way)?
...force people who use GPL'ed code to contribute back...
FALSE - users of GPL software are under no obligations to contribute. Even if said user modified the code to use themselves, they are still under no obligation to contribute that code.
...he assigns freedom to the code itself which is an inanimate object...
FALSE - the freedom is assigned to the user of the software by the means of relaxed restrictions on standard copyright, providing them the freedom to not only modify the software, but freedom to redistribute it or the modified version. The license assures that other users down the line are given the same rights to the software.
Only people or organizations representing people should have rights.
OT - there's a whole other debate there. IMO, organizations should not have equal or even similar rights as people have.
Code is "property".
WRONG - "property" is something that, if it were taken from you, you would no longer have. How can you call property that which can be duplicated and distributed perfectly without any loss to you? Air could more easily be thought of as property. The physical electrons and bits of your hard drive and such where the software resides and lives can be property because they are a physical thing. Pure thought stuff, pure math, ideas, software, etc, is not property.
I have no problem with someone requiring effort in as "payment" in lieu of money...
That's all fine and dandy that you feel that way, but that has nothing to do with the GPL or Linux.
...it is somehow more "freedom" than writing someone a check for a reasonable fee.
As inaccurate as your statement is, where was that original claim? It is more freedom because you are free to user, modify, and redistribute the software. "free as in beer" has nothing to do with it.
...then I should be willing to pay for software other people write.
No one is stopping you. Heck,it'd be awesome if you actually paid the people that wrote the all the stuff you use every day, but you don't. Maybe you paid for some of it, mostly wrapped up and given to some big company, but there's an awful lot of that and other software out there you're using every day that you're not paying for. You're here, for example - have you paid for Apache, Linux, Perl, Slashdot, etc etc etc?
Way to miss the point, AC. Art is a form of expression with the intention to create an emotional response. That could be a picture of a building, a family portrait my kid drew, or even an object used in a way that differs from its intended purpose, such as making a statement.
Sure, and philosophy arguments can boil down to "I think therefore I am", leaving no other situations as valid. Ex. it's perfectly fine (morally, to ones self) to murder/rape/etc others if you honestly believe that the only existence that can be proven is your own - you can't prove I murdered anyone if you can't prove they ever existed.
There has to be some common understanding of what we'll accept as real, or in this case, as art. If art is simply defined by its intent (which, technically, does not have to be to provoke an emotional response - it could be to provoke an intellectual response, or to be just to be), then it's anything and everything, including that cute little kitten.
Maybe that's valid, but I think the point is that this thing is just a mass manufactured external drive (assuming it even contains a hard drive, let alone the data). Reminds me of Du Champ's "Fountain" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_%28Duchamp%29). Plenty of people in the art world consider it art, and would/do consider this hard drive to be art, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a more classical view of art that is prevalent in society.
I think the kitten comment is sport on the point - are we, and are lawyers, expected to consider this art?
You're correct (the display is static once set), but regardless of how the image is rendered, you still have to drive the display. IE. lots of electrical connections. Tiling may help, but it's a matter of designing that thing that handles that.
Parent is absolutely correct. I have several ebooks from O'Rielly that have footnotes throughout that link to notes at the end of the chapter. They all have forward and back references. The Kindle handles them perfectly. Select it from text, and it goes to the note; select the note, and it goes to the text. Easy to bounce back and forth (easier than manually page flipping a real book to find the end of chapter).
The kindle also gained page number support (on supporting books). If the ebook was designed with page numbers in it, you can easily jump to a page number (and/or character offset). So if the note only references a page number, use the "menu->go to->page number" option. I'll admit, that *may* be a little slower than thumbing through a book, but not significantly. Again, the fault of the ebook publisher if they don't include the page number support.
I respect your opinion, but I really really really hope there are enough people left that do not feel that way that there is enough market to keep the e-ink readers alive when the tablets start dropping in price.
My g/f has a color nook, and I've the v3 kindle 6". There are some nice things about the nook, but I think anyone using both for at least a month each would be hard pressed not to love the battery life of the Kindle and the readability of the screen. On the nook side, I was quite surprised at how much easier it was to find a book from my library (which is only about 50 books), so I'd completely agree that there is something to be said for being able to easily scroll through a library. It's not often I have to pick a new book or find an old one though, so that doesn't really help the primary use of reading books.
While reading, I don't want to scroll (and neither of them does, AFAICT). The minor delay in the page turn on the Kindle has not been a problem, and takes less time than turning a physical book page. The color nook was actually worse for turning pages - failing to register finger presses or swipes on the screen, but that's a hardware/software issue, and not the fault of an LCD screen. For reading real books, the Kindle (and I suspect this is the same for all/most e-ink readers) is far far better for me.
I am worried that the majority of people will drown out the benefits of the e-ink readers with "needs" such as those you listed (color, video, animation, scrolling, drag/drop). As a real world example, a friend of mine wrote a children's book recently, and wanted help e-publishing it. The kindle is just not up to the task. Sadly, the iPad isn't a great choice either, simply because they make it difficult to get a book on their store. We pushed to the nook (for nook color) and kindle (for the PC/Mac/Android/iPad software versions). This color e-ink would really help to bridge that gap in the one major area the kindle is lacking (but I think we're still getting ahead of ourselves... who's going to give an e-reader or tablet or ipad to a 3-5 year old to read?).
The other color needs would be magazines and comics. There's definitely a market here, but I wonder if it's enough to justify a kindle with color e-ink. As for all the other app support, I really could care less about it. I wouldn't mind some very dumbed down simple apps (email, web browser, calculator, notepad, ssh client... most of which already exist), but I don't need angry birds on my Kindle:-)
The Guardian journalist had to set up the PGP encryption system on his laptop at home across the other side of London. Then he could feed in a password. Assange wrote down on a scrap of paper:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
"That's the password," he said. "But you have to add one extra word when you type it in. You have to put in the word 'XXXXXXX' before the word 'XXXXXX' [WikiLeaks: so if the paper were seized, the password would not work without Leigh's co-operation] Can you remember that?" "I can remember that." Leigh set off home, and successfully installed the PGP software.
Every time I see or read of VR-ish glasses, I get a little exciting, then quickly realize that, while I am often looking around at various stuff and displays, I'm not turning my entire head, and I can still make use of the periphery. I'm sure they'd be nice for some use cases (watching a movie on the plane), but once you tack on the high price they're just not worth it (oh, any why hasn't that price went down? I've been looking at similar glasses for 10 years now!)
Augmented reality has a better chance of getting mainstream. Lot's of the barriers have been breached already: * carry a computer around? most already do (iThing, Android, etc) * wear a funny bulge on the side of your head? I still see loads of people wearing blutooth earpieces. * Augmented reality doesn't need head tracking. * glasses - they just have to integrate it into some normal-ish looking ones, or provide a little overlay for people with prescriptions glasses. -OR- maybe they have to make it look like an iPod for your face. Anyway, this should be the easy part....and I think that'd be cheaper as well (only really need the one eye, and a black-n-white version would be fine for starters.
One could release code under a permissive license without having any real desire to see open code everywhere - or at least no desire to push this as an agenda.
One could, and people do, but it doesn't make sense to me; it does not follow; I guess that makes it a non sequitur as well:-)
Look, I'm happy people contribute in as open a way as they are willing to do. I've used licenses other than GPL/LGPL myself at times when I thought it made more sense (ex. perl modules and the artistic license), and I'm not saying that GPL is always the best choice. I just don't get how people arrive at the decision to use BSD license outside an environment flooded with other BSD licensed code, such as contributing to FreeBSD. Based on the comments all over slashdot, it seems many people don't get why authors choose GPL either (not implying you're one of them).
IMO, anyone distributing code under a Free Software license (both BSD and GPL included) should be applauded. But when I read sentences like
I can give code away under a BSD license, with the hope that people will submit improvements, but not wanting to impose limits to force that behavior
in the context of a GPL discussion, I can't help but think that there may be a misunderstanding of the GPL, or at least that others may read that as implying that the GPL does impose limits to force users to submit their improvements back to the author. You probably already know this, but one can take someone GPL code from anywhere, make changes, distribute it, and not send the changes to the original author. You want to give the code away, but not under GPL provisions, that's certainly your right.
Whenever I hear BSD vs GPL discussions, it reminds me of $Christian_sect_A vs $Christian_sect_B discussions. There's way more in common than in the differences, but they firmly maintain their individuality.
Just curious... why BSD rather than placing the code into the public domain?
Would MS Windows sell as well if anyone could have Windows running on any old PC? Oh yeah, they do sell quite well and can run on any PC!
Granted, there's a flaw to that (Windows isn't open source), but the "on any old tablet" is totally bunk.
Webkit (used by Safari) may have been a better example, and Apple does give back to webkit, which reduces the amount of work they have to do to maintain patches against the mainline which is also getting improvements from Chrome, KDE, and others, and that's exactly what the article is about.
And you do not have to do so. GPL and LGPL only require making the source available upon request (and only if you distribute the binaries), and do not even require that to be a free transaction. You could just bundle the source with your app. Or bundle a tiny text file saying "send a postal letter here if you want the source, along with $x dollars for postage". The GPL makes no rule that says you have to take a loss while distributing the code or changes. If you didn't even modify the original, it's not even up to you to distribute the code - just include the original license and info.
Most people put their changes up on a public site. It's pretty easy to do these days, and often monetarily free. But just because that's the norm doesn't mean it's the rule.
You skipped the next step - BSD code that is re-licensed under a proprietary license and distributed to an end user results in that end user not having access to that source.
I'll grant that the original BSD licensed code allows more options to do as you wish with it on that first distribution step (assuming the author makes the code available at all, which is no required of the BSD licensed code). As soon as it's locked down, the end user loses.
GPL is meant to ensure that the end user always has access to the source for software they are actively using (assuming said software is GPL licensed). So if the parent company or author goes away, there is still the option of keeping the software up to date and working.
I understand the arguments for proprietary licensed code, though I disagree with them. It lets the author keep things secret and may allow them to monopolize on that codebase and make a few bucks or some fame or something. I don't get the argument for BSD licensed works. If one supports BSD licensing and/or placing code under public domain, the next logical connection would seem to be that they would support having open code everywhere.... but they're specifically endorsing a system where that option is allowed to be taken away at any time. Why would one want code that descends from your codebase to end up closed to the world if your original intention was to provide more freedom to the end user?
I really want to bash this and point out how poorly WP7 is doing, how large the iOS market is, and how much Android is growing, like the other replies.
But I made the same mistake judging the xbox. Loads of people thought MS didn't stand a chance against the established game consoles (especially the PS3), but they've done alright. I like the think that wouldn't have happened if Sony didn't make so many bad decisions, and continues to do so.
(totally off topic - why isn't there a good music jukebox for PS3? Seems all the parts are there, and yet it just sucks at that! And why don't they let you mount a network drive? seems like that'd be trivial to add, and would open it up to all kinds of cloud-storage and such. It's been around long enough, but I just got one, and can't figure out why there's so much that seems like it'd be completely obvious to have there that just isn't available.)
Yes, "The GPL does however prevent people from distributing derivative works without the source", but how is that not a positive thing for the community, the users, and other developers? Copyright, all by itself, prohibits distributing both the work and derivative works with or without the source. Only public domain goods and BSD-ish licenses have fewer restrictions (ie. virtually all the Windows/Apple/etc software have more restrictions).
Anything you do with closed source software and libraries you can also do with GPL software. IE. negotiate your licensing terms with the author(s), and if you both agree on something, great. If not, you're stuck with the default license. For closed source stuff, that means you can't do squat about it. For GPL stuff, you can still use it if you agree to the GPL (or LGPL, as is often the case with libraries - which allows linking to closed source stuff).
Someone else already covered the tivoization, so I'll skip that.
Some might consider the ability to link in GPL code in otherwise non-GPL code and vice versa to be a fundamental freedom that open source is supposed to provide.
Really? Like what? If you're just doing it for yourself, you're allowed, so this implies that you must be talking about distribution (or you simply have no idea what you're talking about to begin with). If you're talking about distribution, then what non-GPL code are you referring to? If it's stuff you wrote and you want to make use of GPL code that you did not write, then you simply have to license your code the same way (under GPL)... why would one think they can just nab it and do whatever the hell they please with it? If one is of that mindset, then they already have no regard for copyright (same mindset that thinks its fine to distribute hacked closed source stuff as well), so why would the GPL give them any pause for concern?
If you're talking about linking to some other closed source stuff, you should really be going after the closed source camp. You'd already have to have some licensing agreement in place to distribute the closed source stuff, so why would they presume there are no rules for other software they are including?
A third possibility is that you're referring to one of the few incompatible open source licenses. Those cases are unfortunate, but authors are often willing to work with people to make exceptions and/or dual license. This is, IMO, the only valid complaint here but, in practice, this rarely comes up and, when it does, is often easily remedied. The only big one that comes to mind for me is "ZFS" and the Linux Kernel. There's an easy immediate solution (using fuse), a recompile option (users can compile it in themselves - it just can't be distributed linked-in), and a redevelopment effort (ext4's growing feature set), and either party could change licenses if it was really that critical (in a smaller project, that'd probably have happened).
Maybe by "some" you meant an extremely small minority? Which is why I think your post should be +5 Troll rather than Insightful - it is a very good Troll, if that was your intention:-)
Well, that's half right... The following domains that you listed are NOT available: miller.net miller.org miller.info miller.me miller.mobi miller.biz miller.us
One thing you implied before remains true - we're not running out of domain names, and I agree with that. There are around 1.2+e89 possible names under the.com TLD. Single dictionary word.com domains are basically all taken, but there's plenty of room for easily remembered names still... and that's the point of these names - something people can remember better than an IP address. For that reason, I have no interest in miller.net.ag, cause few in my family/friends would remember that, but they can remember "deadbodystorage.com" (which was one of my favorites from back in the day).
Good point... at first I kinda liked the idea that domain names could be "owned" by the person that registers them (assuming registrar can still charge maintenance fees like a Co-Op landlord), but that last phrase of yours made me think of something...
...in a DNS system
What about other DNS systems? Anyone can setup their own root-server. For more cases, "somedomain.com" is a unique property on the net, but that's not technically accurate - it's only a unique property on a given DNS server (or possibly extended to that DNS network, though any server can hijack the name somewhat legitimately). Domain name hijacking is one of the techniques that parental control systems use... would that be a violation?
So you're saying one should just come up with some other name then? I have my own site, and multiple domains... that's not a problem. I'm just saying your assumption that first.middle.last.TLD will always be available is very flawed.
FWIW, my last name is "Miller", which is not only very common, but is also the name of a famous beer company with plenty of money to buy up all the miller.TLD's, and there's no way they're giving away or selling subdomains.
I'm fine with using a domain that's not my common name, but that's besides the point - your assumption is wrong. You can try it... go grab a list of last names (phonebook?) and first names, and start running combinations through whois or dig. There will be available ones, but there's A WHOLE LOT of them that are taken.
Slashdot Mirror
Sort of... it's all in the way it's portrayed.
If you come right out and say "someone else is offering me more money. GIve me a big raise or I'm leaving.", then you'll sound like an ass and like your trying to extort money from them.
However, try explaining to them why you are worth more, and request a raise, and don't mention the other job, and you won't be taken as if you're trying to hold them hostage. Don't make threats to leave - they could make similar threats to you to fire you all throughout your employment, and you wouldn't have liked that or put up with it. If they give you enough that you feel happy being there still, great... keep that job (IMO, it doesn't have to be as much as the next company is offering if I'm actually happy with my current job, cause that happiness has a HUGE value, and the other job is an unknown).
All that said, the poster said the old job was 45min away, and the new job is at his front door. I'm lazy. I'd take that new job. You can do the same number of hours of work at the new job with about 20% less time devoted to the job (travel time). Bonus - you can go home for lunch and grill a steak.
What specs? The linked article has less info on that than the summary (where'd the summary get that info?).
I'd agree that $35 for a 7" touchscreen that does anything is pretty good, and maybe it is worth $60, but I can't find any specs to support that.
Why does "practical" require "manual". Have you ever filled up your car by manually lifting up buckets of gas and pouring them in? And if so, I'd say that wasn't very "practical" either, but we came up with an easy way to get the gas into your car via a pump.
This is part of the "figure out how to switch a battery pack (or two) in a couple minutes" the GP was talking about.
How about:
* set a standard battery size.
* make them accessible via an opening on either side of the car via a pull out tray type thing
* have a little station that replaces them one by one (line it up, hit a button).
Sure, that'd impose a design limitation on cars, and we'd have to come up with the standards, and the stations would need to be designed/produced/built/installed, but that's all feasible and practical, and not a significant change from the norm. Gas cars all have to have a hole somewhere that takes gravity fed gas into a standard intake size, and no one seems to be very bothered by that limitation, and there are LOTS of pumps all over the place in various designs, and people keep making new ones and replacing/installing them, so installing some new stations is not absurd.
Um, no. In America the top 1% pay 38% of all Income Tax...
While his numbers are still very incorrect, this is a completely different ratio comparison.
You both start with top 1% of earners.
He's comparing the percentage taken from the money the 1% makes.
You're comparing the total sum of money taken from the 1% that goes to the global sum of income tax (which includes money from all other brackets).
The later comparison inflates the percentage number for the rich in this case. Assuming the previous commenter (msauve) is correct, that %38 of all income taxes is actually a rate of %28 of their income (or some bucket of money).
IMO, the truth is that it's nearly impossible to put a figure on any of it because of the large difference in wealth making, storing, hiding, investing, etc that is available to the wealthy. On the poor side, it's a fairly easy percentage to read (income in, income tax on it all, left over money out for basic needs and occasional entertainment/etc extras, with zero or less left over (debt)).
Sales tax seems like the only thing that might be able to be applied in a fixed nature and serve all classes near equally, but it will have the same problems once people start deciding what constitutes a "sale". On the low end, food and clothing may be exempt (which makes sense to me), but that opens it up to other exemptions - is buying stock a "sale"? are non-profits taxed? if a "company" buys something, is there a different tax? Plenty of loopholes will be made, and we'll be right back to where we are before we even started.
Income tax would be fair too, if "income" was defined very broadly and you got rid of all loopholes, including the current definition of "company" as its own entity.
They didn't patent it (AFAIK). WTF does prior art have to do with it?
And "How is this any different..."? uh, just read about it. Off the top of my head, it's based on Amazon EC2 and ties into that entire network - I'm not intimately familiar with Operas solution, but I doubt they have as much hardware real estate on the server side. Similar? maybe a lot, but it's not the same, and it's still something that will end up being a very new experience and thing to most people.
It's still new tech, even if done before elsewhere. New as in relative to time, as opposed to "brand new" or first time in use.
Participating in free software like Linux and this are very different things.
Only by participating in free software do you realize its full potential; by translating text for free for a closed company you get no benefit at all.
Different, sure. "Very" different, no.
Let's assume that Valve isn't willing to fork out the money to translate their platform to those other languages. As the article estimates, it's expensive (and I agree it's expensive... a company I worked for paid about 26k per translation of the software they developed internally, and some languages are much more expensive than others, and those are usually the ones that have fewer users). So that'd make some sense, since their market may not be as large in those areas - more so, their market of people that can't read English in those areas may not justify the cost and effort to create and maintain the translations themselves.
However, if there's still some market there, why not let that market justify itself... they provide the translation, and they get to reap the benefits (able to use Steam and view some games in their native tongue). That sure does sound like a nice benefit to me.
I am a free software proponent, and I would agree that it would be more beneficial to society if Steam itself was an open source platform. But that's not required to make this still be a good thing.
Not sure why I didn't see this mentioned...
IMO, it's simply an understanding level. Explains Windows and iPod/iPad too.
When you put something together yourself, you'll gain an understanding of said thing. If you understand it, you'll appreciate it more in comparison to a black box.
Lots of people have used Windows enough to have a better understanding of its quirks and how stuff works in the Windows world than they do the unknown of Linux (or Macs, for that matter).
Understanding something rather than just having something takes up a bigger chunk of the brain, so it seems natural that one would have a stronger connection to those things. Doesn't mean you have to build it to gain understanding, but that's one way that'd help.
Huh? Why not?
If you're just talking about it being an epub file (which I'd be slightly surprised if the books you can borrow on Kindle are DRM'd epub's, but maybe they are - I'm too lazy to research that):
Calibre.
If you're already going through the trouble of running something to strip DRM, pumping that through an format conversion is almost zero extra work by comparison. You don't even need to install anything if you use one of the many online services to do it.
Not sure why you said "But not Kindle". They won't run as an app on iPhone either, and none of the popular epub eink readers will read a mobi file either, but that doesn't mean you can't do a very very simple conversion and read it perfectly fine on those devices (iPhone via installing an epub reader app; Kindle by converting $source_format_x to mobi or pdf or images (comic books); Nook + others by converting $whatever_format to epub).
Like Miramax and Lionsgate, both of which made streaming deals with Netflix this year.
IMO, those two have far better titles to offer than I've ever seen from starz on Netflix streaming in the past. Maybe starz does have some content I'd like, but I've seen little to none of it on Netflix.... I'm not expecting to lose much.
Take that with a grain of salt though - I think their past and present streaming selection is damn small and lacking lots of content that should be there (ex. they have the first two seasons of Dexter for streaming, but nothing newer... those others are years old now). I'm sure that's mostly due to content providers, but the end result is a sub-par library of movies.
What I don't get is how losing starz is all that big a deal. It's been mentioned far too often, as if it's the end of the line for them. The selection already sucked, and starz doesn't make much of an impact (especially with the recent addition of Miramax and Lionsgate etc).
Price change did piss some (vocal) people off (irritated people are always more vocal than those that don't feel like anything has changed), but it seems there's as many (if not more) that either like the new pricing, or are ok with it.
Time will tell... but if Netflix goes away, there's a really good chance we'll be in for years of a much worse situation. I'm betting networks and/or studios and/or cable companies etc will start their own little streaming nooks and each will expect us to pay about the same, if not more, for just their titles. Then we'd have to have a whole bunch of broken ass clients talking to disparate services each with their own quirks and prices.... making bittorrent all the more attractive to the average joe once again.
Horribly inaccurate FUD spreading.
Freedom is never free in the real world...
Which is why we must continue to defend our freedoms, rather than roll over like a coward and pay MS/Apple/Whomever for whatever they decide is best for us. Do you think America bought its freedom? or did they claim it and fight for it (stepping on some other people along the way)?
...force people who use GPL'ed code to contribute back...
FALSE - users of GPL software are under no obligations to contribute. Even if said user modified the code to use themselves, they are still under no obligation to contribute that code.
...he assigns freedom to the code itself which is an inanimate object...
FALSE - the freedom is assigned to the user of the software by the means of relaxed restrictions on standard copyright, providing them the freedom to not only modify the software, but freedom to redistribute it or the modified version. The license assures that other users down the line are given the same rights to the software.
Only people or organizations representing people should have rights.
OT - there's a whole other debate there. IMO, organizations should not have equal or even similar rights as people have.
Code is "property".
WRONG - "property" is something that, if it were taken from you, you would no longer have. How can you call property that which can be duplicated and distributed perfectly without any loss to you? Air could more easily be thought of as property. The physical electrons and bits of your hard drive and such where the software resides and lives can be property because they are a physical thing. Pure thought stuff, pure math, ideas, software, etc, is not property.
I have no problem with someone requiring effort in as "payment" in lieu of money...
That's all fine and dandy that you feel that way, but that has nothing to do with the GPL or Linux.
...it is somehow more "freedom" than writing someone a check for a reasonable fee.
As inaccurate as your statement is, where was that original claim? It is more freedom because you are free to user, modify, and redistribute the software. "free as in beer" has nothing to do with it.
...then I should be willing to pay for software other people write.
No one is stopping you. Heck,it'd be awesome if you actually paid the people that wrote the all the stuff you use every day, but you don't. Maybe you paid for some of it, mostly wrapped up and given to some big company, but there's an awful lot of that and other software out there you're using every day that you're not paying for. You're here, for example - have you paid for Apache, Linux, Perl, Slashdot, etc etc etc?
Way to miss the point, AC. Art is a form of expression with the intention to create an emotional response. That could be a picture of a building, a family portrait my kid drew, or even an object used in a way that differs from its intended purpose, such as making a statement.
Sure, and philosophy arguments can boil down to "I think therefore I am", leaving no other situations as valid. Ex. it's perfectly fine (morally, to ones self) to murder/rape/etc others if you honestly believe that the only existence that can be proven is your own - you can't prove I murdered anyone if you can't prove they ever existed.
There has to be some common understanding of what we'll accept as real, or in this case, as art. If art is simply defined by its intent (which, technically, does not have to be to provoke an emotional response - it could be to provoke an intellectual response, or to be just to be), then it's anything and everything, including that cute little kitten.
Maybe that's valid, but I think the point is that this thing is just a mass manufactured external drive (assuming it even contains a hard drive, let alone the data). Reminds me of Du Champ's "Fountain" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_%28Duchamp%29). Plenty of people in the art world consider it art, and would/do consider this hard drive to be art, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a more classical view of art that is prevalent in society.
I think the kitten comment is sport on the point - are we, and are lawyers, expected to consider this art?
You're correct (the display is static once set), but regardless of how the image is rendered, you still have to drive the display. IE. lots of electrical connections. Tiling may help, but it's a matter of designing that thing that handles that.
Parent is absolutely correct. I have several ebooks from O'Rielly that have footnotes throughout that link to notes at the end of the chapter. They all have forward and back references. The Kindle handles them perfectly. Select it from text, and it goes to the note; select the note, and it goes to the text. Easy to bounce back and forth (easier than manually page flipping a real book to find the end of chapter).
The kindle also gained page number support (on supporting books). If the ebook was designed with page numbers in it, you can easily jump to a page number (and/or character offset). So if the note only references a page number, use the "menu->go to->page number" option. I'll admit, that *may* be a little slower than thumbing through a book, but not significantly. Again, the fault of the ebook publisher if they don't include the page number support.
FWIW, here's an example of a book with page number support: http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-ebook/dp/B000FC11A6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1315318756&sr=1-1
In the product details:
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0380788624
I love that they list the ISBN the page numbers come from, so you have a physical version to compare with.
I respect your opinion, but I really really really hope there are enough people left that do not feel that way that there is enough market to keep the e-ink readers alive when the tablets start dropping in price.
My g/f has a color nook, and I've the v3 kindle 6". There are some nice things about the nook, but I think anyone using both for at least a month each would be hard pressed not to love the battery life of the Kindle and the readability of the screen. On the nook side, I was quite surprised at how much easier it was to find a book from my library (which is only about 50 books), so I'd completely agree that there is something to be said for being able to easily scroll through a library. It's not often I have to pick a new book or find an old one though, so that doesn't really help the primary use of reading books.
While reading, I don't want to scroll (and neither of them does, AFAICT). The minor delay in the page turn on the Kindle has not been a problem, and takes less time than turning a physical book page. The color nook was actually worse for turning pages - failing to register finger presses or swipes on the screen, but that's a hardware/software issue, and not the fault of an LCD screen. For reading real books, the Kindle (and I suspect this is the same for all/most e-ink readers) is far far better for me.
I am worried that the majority of people will drown out the benefits of the e-ink readers with "needs" such as those you listed (color, video, animation, scrolling, drag/drop). As a real world example, a friend of mine wrote a children's book recently, and wanted help e-publishing it. The kindle is just not up to the task. Sadly, the iPad isn't a great choice either, simply because they make it difficult to get a book on their store. We pushed to the nook (for nook color) and kindle (for the PC/Mac/Android/iPad software versions). This color e-ink would really help to bridge that gap in the one major area the kindle is lacking (but I think we're still getting ahead of ourselves... who's going to give an e-reader or tablet or ipad to a 3-5 year old to read?).
The other color needs would be magazines and comics. There's definitely a market here, but I wonder if it's enough to justify a kindle with color e-ink. As for all the other app support, I really could care less about it. I wouldn't mind some very dumbed down simple apps (email, web browser, calculator, notepad, ssh client... most of which already exist), but I don't need angry birds on my Kindle :-)
That was well covered in the last story. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/01/0153200/WikiLeaks-Sues-the-Guardian-Over-Leak
From: http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2011/09/01/3307488.htm
The Guardian journalist had to set up the PGP encryption system on his laptop at home across the other side of London. Then he could feed in a password. Assange wrote down on a scrap of paper:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
"That's the password," he said. "But you have to add one extra word when you type it in. You have to put in the word 'XXXXXXX' before the word 'XXXXXX' [WikiLeaks: so if the paper were seized, the password would not work without Leigh's co-operation] Can you remember that?" "I can remember that." Leigh set off home, and successfully installed the PGP software.
Agreed.
Every time I see or read of VR-ish glasses, I get a little exciting, then quickly realize that, while I am often looking around at various stuff and displays, I'm not turning my entire head, and I can still make use of the periphery. I'm sure they'd be nice for some use cases (watching a movie on the plane), but once you tack on the high price they're just not worth it (oh, any why hasn't that price went down? I've been looking at similar glasses for 10 years now!)
Augmented reality has a better chance of getting mainstream. Lot's of the barriers have been breached already: ...and I think that'd be cheaper as well (only really need the one eye, and a black-n-white version would be fine for starters.
* carry a computer around? most already do (iThing, Android, etc)
* wear a funny bulge on the side of your head? I still see loads of people wearing blutooth earpieces.
* Augmented reality doesn't need head tracking.
* glasses - they just have to integrate it into some normal-ish looking ones, or provide a little overlay for people with prescriptions glasses. -OR- maybe they have to make it look like an iPod for your face. Anyway, this should be the easy part.
One could release code under a permissive license without having any real desire to see open code everywhere - or at least no desire to push this as an agenda.
One could, and people do, but it doesn't make sense to me; it does not follow; I guess that makes it a non sequitur as well :-)
Look, I'm happy people contribute in as open a way as they are willing to do. I've used licenses other than GPL/LGPL myself at times when I thought it made more sense (ex. perl modules and the artistic license), and I'm not saying that GPL is always the best choice. I just don't get how people arrive at the decision to use BSD license outside an environment flooded with other BSD licensed code, such as contributing to FreeBSD. Based on the comments all over slashdot, it seems many people don't get why authors choose GPL either (not implying you're one of them).
IMO, anyone distributing code under a Free Software license (both BSD and GPL included) should be applauded. But when I read sentences like
I can give code away under a BSD license, with the hope that people will submit improvements, but not wanting to impose limits to force that behavior
in the context of a GPL discussion, I can't help but think that there may be a misunderstanding of the GPL, or at least that others may read that as implying that the GPL does impose limits to force users to submit their improvements back to the author. You probably already know this, but one can take someone GPL code from anywhere, make changes, distribute it, and not send the changes to the original author. You want to give the code away, but not under GPL provisions, that's certainly your right.
Whenever I hear BSD vs GPL discussions, it reminds me of $Christian_sect_A vs $Christian_sect_B discussions. There's way more in common than in the differences, but they firmly maintain their individuality.
Just curious... why BSD rather than placing the code into the public domain?
Would MS Windows sell as well if anyone could have Windows running on any old PC? Oh yeah, they do sell quite well and can run on any PC!
Granted, there's a flaw to that (Windows isn't open source), but the "on any old tablet" is totally bunk.
Webkit (used by Safari) may have been a better example, and Apple does give back to webkit, which reduces the amount of work they have to do to maintain patches against the mainline which is also getting improvements from Chrome, KDE, and others, and that's exactly what the article is about.
... maintaining a public fork isn't free, either.
And you do not have to do so. GPL and LGPL only require making the source available upon request (and only if you distribute the binaries), and do not even require that to be a free transaction. You could just bundle the source with your app. Or bundle a tiny text file saying "send a postal letter here if you want the source, along with $x dollars for postage". The GPL makes no rule that says you have to take a loss while distributing the code or changes. If you didn't even modify the original, it's not even up to you to distribute the code - just include the original license and info.
Most people put their changes up on a public site. It's pretty easy to do these days, and often monetarily free. But just because that's the norm doesn't mean it's the rule.
You skipped the next step - BSD code that is re-licensed under a proprietary license and distributed to an end user results in that end user not having access to that source.
I'll grant that the original BSD licensed code allows more options to do as you wish with it on that first distribution step (assuming the author makes the code available at all, which is no required of the BSD licensed code). As soon as it's locked down, the end user loses.
GPL is meant to ensure that the end user always has access to the source for software they are actively using (assuming said software is GPL licensed). So if the parent company or author goes away, there is still the option of keeping the software up to date and working.
I understand the arguments for proprietary licensed code, though I disagree with them. It lets the author keep things secret and may allow them to monopolize on that codebase and make a few bucks or some fame or something. I don't get the argument for BSD licensed works. If one supports BSD licensing and/or placing code under public domain, the next logical connection would seem to be that they would support having open code everywhere.... but they're specifically endorsing a system where that option is allowed to be taken away at any time. Why would one want code that descends from your codebase to end up closed to the world if your original intention was to provide more freedom to the end user?
I really want to bash this and point out how poorly WP7 is doing, how large the iOS market is, and how much Android is growing, like the other replies.
But I made the same mistake judging the xbox. Loads of people thought MS didn't stand a chance against the established game consoles (especially the PS3), but they've done alright. I like the think that wouldn't have happened if Sony didn't make so many bad decisions, and continues to do so.
(totally off topic - why isn't there a good music jukebox for PS3? Seems all the parts are there, and yet it just sucks at that! And why don't they let you mount a network drive? seems like that'd be trivial to add, and would open it up to all kinds of cloud-storage and such. It's been around long enough, but I just got one, and can't figure out why there's so much that seems like it'd be completely obvious to have there that just isn't available.)
How the hell you got +5 Insightful is beyond me!
Yes, "The GPL does however prevent people from distributing derivative works without the source", but how is that not a positive thing for the community, the users, and other developers? Copyright, all by itself, prohibits distributing both the work and derivative works with or without the source. Only public domain goods and BSD-ish licenses have fewer restrictions (ie. virtually all the Windows/Apple/etc software have more restrictions).
Anything you do with closed source software and libraries you can also do with GPL software. IE. negotiate your licensing terms with the author(s), and if you both agree on something, great. If not, you're stuck with the default license. For closed source stuff, that means you can't do squat about it. For GPL stuff, you can still use it if you agree to the GPL (or LGPL, as is often the case with libraries - which allows linking to closed source stuff).
Someone else already covered the tivoization, so I'll skip that.
Some might consider the ability to link in GPL code in otherwise non-GPL code and vice versa to be a fundamental freedom that open source is supposed to provide.
Really? Like what? If you're just doing it for yourself, you're allowed, so this implies that you must be talking about distribution (or you simply have no idea what you're talking about to begin with). If you're talking about distribution, then what non-GPL code are you referring to? If it's stuff you wrote and you want to make use of GPL code that you did not write, then you simply have to license your code the same way (under GPL)... why would one think they can just nab it and do whatever the hell they please with it? If one is of that mindset, then they already have no regard for copyright (same mindset that thinks its fine to distribute hacked closed source stuff as well), so why would the GPL give them any pause for concern?
If you're talking about linking to some other closed source stuff, you should really be going after the closed source camp. You'd already have to have some licensing agreement in place to distribute the closed source stuff, so why would they presume there are no rules for other software they are including?
A third possibility is that you're referring to one of the few incompatible open source licenses. Those cases are unfortunate, but authors are often willing to work with people to make exceptions and/or dual license. This is, IMO, the only valid complaint here but, in practice, this rarely comes up and, when it does, is often easily remedied. The only big one that comes to mind for me is "ZFS" and the Linux Kernel. There's an easy immediate solution (using fuse), a recompile option (users can compile it in themselves - it just can't be distributed linked-in), and a redevelopment effort (ext4's growing feature set), and either party could change licenses if it was really that critical (in a smaller project, that'd probably have happened).
Maybe by "some" you meant an extremely small minority? Which is why I think your post should be +5 Troll rather than Insightful - it is a very good Troll, if that was your intention :-)
Well, that's half right...
The following domains that you listed are NOT available:
miller.net
miller.org
miller.info
miller.me
miller.mobi
miller.biz
miller.us
One thing you implied before remains true - we're not running out of domain names, and I agree with that. There are around 1.2+e89 possible names under the .com TLD. Single dictionary word .com domains are basically all taken, but there's plenty of room for easily remembered names still... and that's the point of these names - something people can remember better than an IP address. For that reason, I have no interest in miller.net.ag, cause few in my family/friends would remember that, but they can remember "deadbodystorage.com" (which was one of my favorites from back in the day).
Good point... at first I kinda liked the idea that domain names could be "owned" by the person that registers them (assuming registrar can still charge maintenance fees like a Co-Op landlord), but that last phrase of yours made me think of something...
...in a DNS system
What about other DNS systems? Anyone can setup their own root-server. For more cases, "somedomain.com" is a unique property on the net, but that's not technically accurate - it's only a unique property on a given DNS server (or possibly extended to that DNS network, though any server can hijack the name somewhat legitimately). Domain name hijacking is one of the techniques that parental control systems use... would that be a violation?
So you're saying one should just come up with some other name then? I have my own site, and multiple domains... that's not a problem. I'm just saying your assumption that first.middle.last.TLD will always be available is very flawed.
FWIW, my last name is "Miller", which is not only very common, but is also the name of a famous beer company with plenty of money to buy up all the miller.TLD's, and there's no way they're giving away or selling subdomains.
I'm fine with using a domain that's not my common name, but that's besides the point - your assumption is wrong. You can try it... go grab a list of last names (phonebook?) and first names, and start running combinations through whois or dig. There will be available ones, but there's A WHOLE LOT of them that are taken.