The defenders of P2P for LEGITIMATE use lose their credibility if they are not equally realistic and aggressive in condemning and thinking of ways to stop illegitimate use.
We already did - but for some strange reason, telling the music & movie industry "Stop pricing discs to earn a dollar profit for every cent you spend and you'll remove the incentive for piracy" didn't get greeted with much enthusiasm!:o)
Go read some of Linus's LKML or Usenet posts. He is conversationally fluent in English. You would have no way to tell he is not from an English-speaking country if you didn't know beforehand.
You would if you heard him speak - he completely mis-pronounces the word "Linux", for example;o)
Hey, our laws in these situations aren't as bad as you seem to think!
For starters, in the UK, you cannot sign away your rights. That means that a clause that specifies something like #6 in the original post, something like "By using this product, you agree that you cannot hold Sony liable for more than $5", is completely worthless over here.
In fact, even if you write a letter in your own blood, signed & witnessed by God and all his angels, that says "I give up all my rights to ever sue or even say anything nasty about Sony", you would still be within your full legal rights to immediately afterwards say "The thoughtless ******s screwed up my PC with crappy malware, I'll sue them down to scorched Earth!" - nothing you can do, say, or write ever takes away your rights to do something.
Google don't compete with Microsoft in the same way as Netscape didn't - MS didn't have their own browser in Netscape's day, after all. MS still acted swiftly to destroy them utterly.
Google, like Netscape, are cross-platform, free, and significantly reduce the impact of what OS you run and what software you have installed. And MS are fanatics about protecting their OS from any such reductions, however indirect.
You can play games, find information, browse images, send email, and find your way from A to B, all via Google. There was a time when you'd have had to buy & install software to do any of that. Software that only ran on Windows, software that had cost you money and wouldn't work on a competitor's OS.
Google might not provide an office suite online yet, but it's easy to forget just how many things you can do via a browser that used to need locally-installed software to accomplish.
Taking a none digital medium and transcoding it to digital, then disitributing it on the web is not what fair use had in mind,
The flaw in your argument is there: They won't be distributing the work on the web. You'll see no more on a Google Book Search than you do on a Google Web Search: A couple of lines that contain your search term(s).
They want to make books searchable - not downloadable. If you want to read the book that Google finds, you'll still have to buy it or go to your local library.
How are Microsoft going to be able to tell people "There's no money in Open Source" if their best & brightest keep getting lured away by companies based on it?:o)
Re:emacs and vim are too difficult to use
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Why do you have to have an insert mode? This "feature" came from vi but for me it is exactly like bolting primitive editing behaviors on to more or less
Try this: Go into Microsoft Windows, press the "Alt" button once, and then try to type Hello, world.
Funnily enough, instead of the key presses resulting in text going into the document, it'll navigate the menus. Why? Because it's just gone from Insert mode to a Command mode. It's exactly the same principle as Vi - sometimes you want key presses to result in text on the screen, and sometimes you want it to do something. It's not "primitive editing behaviour", it's exactly the same behaviour as is used in the most advanced word processors available. (And MS Word as well;o) It's just not a visible, GUI-based Command mode in vi, is all.
So for me people use vi(m) and emacs out of habit.
I don't - I came to Linux a few years ago, needed a text editor, tried a few and settled on vi. Well, vim actually. It's a really good text editor once you learn it.
it is through this that games will attain the sensation of a lucid dream.
As a side-effect of meditation, I've had quite a few ucid dreams, and can confidently say that mere photo-realism will get you nowhere near to duplicating the LD experience of "Hey, I'm dreaming! This is great, I'm in a world created by my own mind, I can see anything, do anything, be anything. . . Damn, I've woken up!"
Most ads, popups in particular but plenty others too, are incredibly annoying. Advertisers seem to have lost their minds when it comes to the Internet - they throw good sense out of the window and aim for the most obtrusive, annoying adverts they can think of. Flashing colours, animation, NOISE, or just obscuring the parts of the page I actually want to look at. Less annoying ads, such as Google's, I don't block - I even click on google ads occasionally, because they have a high chance of being something I'm actually interested in.
Every website I regularly use that offers the option, I'm a paying subscriber of - such as slashdot - or a supporter of indirectly - such as Dilbert.com, which I Adblock with a clear conscience since I own every Dilbert comic strip ever published in a book.
I don't buy ANYTHING on the strength of an advert. Advertisers lie. Before I cough up cash, I look for feedback from consumers.
Many years ago, before Adblocker appeared on the scene, I made a resolution never to click on any advert that used annoying tactics like pretending to be a system message, flashing colors, whatever. So if I'm not going to click on it, why waste my and the advertisers bandwidth looking at it?
Slashdot often links to sites that have posted sensational lies in order to get lots of people visiting their page & giving them a boost in advertising. Blocking the ads on their site means sites I specifically DON'T support don't get money from peddling their tripe.
And with what?
Firefox's adblocker, the AdBlock extension, and a list of the worst advertising offenders in a "block stuff from these" file.
Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads?
Yes: I hardly ever watch TV, and when I do, I almost entirely watch the BBC - which has no ads.
More to the point, TV ads don't use up my paid-for bandwidth, and are kept rigidly separate from the programmes: You don't get banner ads plastered across the top of the screen in climactic moments of the TV show, but you frequently encounter them on web pages.
Lastly, TV ads aren't specifically created to be annoying and hard to get rid of. They're generally quite entertaining. Many TV ads have made me laugh, for example. No internet advert ever has.
What about in a magazine? Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?
Don't buy magazines very often. . . But when I do, I'm happy for them to have ads. They don't have "peel off this ad to view the actual content" ads stuck all over the pages, or ads with flashing lights or so-called humerous noises. They have well-designed, undemanding ads that are relevant to the rest of the content.
It all really boils down to: Most internet ads seem to have been designed for no other purpose than wasting my time and pissing me off. So I block those ads. If that makes life hard for a website I use, then they should either: Offer a "pay for ad-free pages" like Slashdot does; or find advertisers who aren't determined to push ads that will alienate the very users the site depends upon.
how exactly is this a threat to Microsoft and its Office family?
Look at it this way: There are two main users of MS Office, home users and business users.
Mass. is leading the way in switching away from MS Office formats, and all signs are that many other governements (and subsequenly many businesses) are intending to make the same switch. That means MS is very worried about keeping business users.
Now Google and Sun team up and start working on pushing alternative office suites to home users. With Google's high visibility and good reputation, a "Google Office" could become the Next Big Thing very easily if it's done right.
That's why MS is threatened by this. The OpenDocument standard coming into use at the same time as a free, OD-supporting "Google Office" makes its debut aims a hefty, possibly even fatal, double-blow against MS's biggest cash cow.
Just a thought, but this could just be about building Web software into OpenOffice, rather than the other way around. . .
Something like, for instance, I create a document on my PC in OO, then can "export" it to the web where others can "import" it to their own OO.
This would be great for documents that must be created collaboratively, and would also save me having to do things like creating a document in one program and then emailing it out via another.
Assuming they could do it securely enough, that is. . .
I'd be far more impressed with this sort of feature than a Firefox-accessed word processor.
Well, when Mass. did their working out, the total cost of upgrading to Office 12 was estimated at $50 million, while the total cost of switching to OO was $5 million - that includes all the training, software, and hardware considerations. . .
I guess especially with Microsoft's radical changes in the Office 12 UI, training will be even more of an issue.
Yep, that was specifically highlighted by MA: OpenOffice will probably be easier for most people to use than Office 12, because of the extensive redesign MS has given it.
For example, this statement is pretty silly "citizens who want to take advantage of online services will potentially have to purchase, install and learn new software to comply with the policy." if the most prominent suite supporting OpenDocument is free. His point about training is perfectly valid though.
Did you take the time to listen to the recent meeting MA had with software representatives? If you had, you might have heard an interesting bit of information from a MA representative.
They had two ways to go for an XML document that everybody (even MS) agrees IS the best way to go: MS's XML format as in MS Office 12, or OpenDocument from various other office suites.
The estimated cost of upgrading to MS Office 12, including all OS upgrades, hardware upgrades, and training costs: $50 million
The estimated cost of switching to, for example, OpenOffice, including all training and upgrades: $5 million.
His point about training (and cost) is garbage. MA, after years of research and evaluation, says it will be cheaper and easier to upgrade to OpenDocument than to upgrade to MS. That's what people keep forgetting, it is NOT 'Pay to switch to OpenDocument or stay put for free', it's 'Pay $5million to switch to OpenDocument or pay $50 million to switch to a new version of a proprietary office suite'
People like James should bear that in mind before touting the (IMHO) biased garbage that his article contained.
There's a VERY good reason for MS to not support "Save as OO" as an option.
Imagine you're a typical corporation: You have thousands of documents, they're all in.doc format. So everybody has MS Office installed.
You hear about a free alternative, but it doesn't support the.doc format reliably enough to switch - your thousands of documents would have to be manually edited, one at a time. This is a big expense that stops OO being free. Or you'd have to keep MS Office available, in which case you might just as well not switch.
In other words: Nobody with more than a few.doc documents can switch from Ms Office to OpenOffice. Result: $$$ for MS
Now imagine MS Word could save reliably in OO's format. And it can obviously open.doc files reliably.
A company could now run a batch job that opens.doc files and saves them in OO format. MS Word converts all the company documents into OO format. Company then throws away MS Word, and happily uses OO.
Result: MS looses customers.
MS will fight to the last to stop people being able to do this. If this function were implemented, most people would not need MS Office any more. And if you don't need Office, you don't really need Windows. And if you don't need either of those, why do you need MS?
I've been less than impressed with the anti-fog. I've tried a couple types, and I just find my spit works better. It's also a lot more convienient.:)
It's also cheaper & impossible to forget or run out of:o)
But the anti-fog from my local shop is actually better than spit - my spare mask always, but always, fogs up. It's had every cleaning treatment known to man, but no amount of spit stops it fogging.
A few drops of anti-fog, however, and it behaves itself perfectly. Annoying, but true!
You spit in it whether it's dry or not. Then you rub it into the glass with a finger, and give it as much of a dunking as you like in whatever water is around. Then it'll stay fog-free unless you allow it to dry out - so either put it on & trap the moisture in, or leave your mask laying flat with some water inside.
Of course even the best tempered glass will fog: tempering isn't supposed to provide anti-fog properties, it's used as a safety measure.
Lastly, it's not like you can't buy bottles of anti-fog from any half-decent dive shop that'll do at least as good a job.
(As a UK diver, I might add that one downside of spitting in your mask is that on very cold winter dives, your spit will freeze solid on the glass before you can do anything useful with it;o)
I reckon if Microsoft (or anybody else) does ever manage to wipe out Google, its dying act will be to release all the search engine source code to the world under the GPL.
Imagine the look of sick horror on BG's face when he realises that by killing Google, he's turned their search technology into a FOSS project.
How come they are one of the most opaque companies on wall street in telling their shareholders what's going on? How come all their projects are so top secret despite the fact they end up just being another jabber knock off?
Because one of their competitors is Microsoft, who have a long history of finding out what their competitors are going to do, and then either beating them to it or making it very hard to do.
Google is so ubiquitous it's easy to forget that, in many ways, they're still the little guy in comparison to some of their competitors. Keeping quiet about what they're doing is a valuable survival stategy, they'd be idiots not to use it.
I'm sure a system could be set up to avoid the loophole you mention. If nothing else, the paperwork would be a nightmare:o)
But I quite like your idea too - it's still free for small inventors, it still encourages people not to have gratuitous patents, and it still encourages people to divest themselves of unprofitable patents rather than keeping them "just in case".
Simple enough ideas, I wonder why Congress hasn't thought of them yet?:o)
Slashdot Mirror
The defenders of P2P for LEGITIMATE use lose their credibility if they are not equally realistic and aggressive in condemning and thinking of ways to stop illegitimate use.
We already did - but for some strange reason, telling the music & movie industry "Stop pricing discs to earn a dollar profit for every cent you spend and you'll remove the incentive for piracy" didn't get greeted with much enthusiasm! :o)
Go read some of Linus's LKML or Usenet posts. He is conversationally fluent in English. You would have no way to tell he is not from an English-speaking country if you didn't know beforehand.
You would if you heard him speak - he completely mis-pronounces the word "Linux", for example ;o)
Apologies: I misread the your consumer laws are generally weaker than the EU's bit as meaning weaker protection for the consumer.
Hey, our laws in these situations aren't as bad as you seem to think!
For starters, in the UK, you cannot sign away your rights. That means that a clause that specifies something like #6 in the original post, something like "By using this product, you agree that you cannot hold Sony liable for more than $5", is completely worthless over here.
In fact, even if you write a letter in your own blood, signed & witnessed by God and all his angels, that says "I give up all my rights to ever sue or even say anything nasty about Sony", you would still be within your full legal rights to immediately afterwards say "The thoughtless ******s screwed up my PC with crappy malware, I'll sue them down to scorched Earth!" - nothing you can do, say, or write ever takes away your rights to do something.
Just so you know. It's not all bad over here!
Google don't compete with Microsoft in the same way as Netscape didn't - MS didn't have their own browser in Netscape's day, after all. MS still acted swiftly to destroy them utterly.
Google, like Netscape, are cross-platform, free, and significantly reduce the impact of what OS you run and what software you have installed. And MS are fanatics about protecting their OS from any such reductions, however indirect.
You can play games, find information, browse images, send email, and find your way from A to B, all via Google. There was a time when you'd have had to buy & install software to do any of that. Software that only ran on Windows, software that had cost you money and wouldn't work on a competitor's OS.
Google might not provide an office suite online yet, but it's easy to forget just how many things you can do via a browser that used to need locally-installed software to accomplish.
Taking a none digital medium and transcoding it to digital, then disitributing it on the web is not what fair use had in mind,
The flaw in your argument is there: They won't be distributing the work on the web. You'll see no more on a Google Book Search than you do on a Google Web Search: A couple of lines that contain your search term(s).
They want to make books searchable - not downloadable. If you want to read the book that Google finds, you'll still have to buy it or go to your local library.
How are Microsoft going to be able to tell people "There's no money in Open Source" if their best & brightest keep getting lured away by companies based on it? :o)
Why do you have to have an insert mode? This "feature" came from vi but for me it is exactly like bolting primitive editing behaviors on to more or less
Try this: Go into Microsoft Windows, press the "Alt" button once, and then try to type Hello, world.
Funnily enough, instead of the key presses resulting in text going into the document, it'll navigate the menus. Why? Because it's just gone from Insert mode to a Command mode. It's exactly the same principle as Vi - sometimes you want key presses to result in text on the screen, and sometimes you want it to do something. It's not "primitive editing behaviour", it's exactly the same behaviour as is used in the most advanced word processors available. (And MS Word as well ;o) It's just not a visible, GUI-based Command mode in vi, is all.
So for me people use vi(m) and emacs out of habit.
I don't - I came to Linux a few years ago, needed a text editor, tried a few and settled on vi. Well, vim actually. It's a really good text editor once you learn it.
it is through this that games will attain the sensation of a lucid dream.
As a side-effect of meditation, I've had quite a few ucid dreams, and can confidently say that mere photo-realism will get you nowhere near to duplicating the LD experience of "Hey, I'm dreaming! This is great, I'm in a world created by my own mind, I can see anything, do anything, be anything. . . Damn, I've woken up!"
why do you block ads?
Well:
And with what?
Firefox's adblocker, the AdBlock extension, and a list of the worst advertising offenders in a "block stuff from these" file.
Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads?
What about in a magazine? Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?
Don't buy magazines very often. . . But when I do, I'm happy for them to have ads. They don't have "peel off this ad to view the actual content" ads stuck all over the pages, or ads with flashing lights or so-called humerous noises. They have well-designed, undemanding ads that are relevant to the rest of the content.
It all really boils down to: Most internet ads seem to have been designed for no other purpose than wasting my time and pissing me off. So I block those ads. If that makes life hard for a website I use, then they should either: Offer a "pay for ad-free pages" like Slashdot does; or find advertisers who aren't determined to push ads that will alienate the very users the site depends upon.
how exactly is this a threat to Microsoft and its Office family?
Look at it this way: There are two main users of MS Office, home users and business users.
Mass. is leading the way in switching away from MS Office formats, and all signs are that many other governements (and subsequenly many businesses) are intending to make the same switch. That means MS is very worried about keeping business users.
Now Google and Sun team up and start working on pushing alternative office suites to home users. With Google's high visibility and good reputation, a "Google Office" could become the Next Big Thing very easily if it's done right.
That's why MS is threatened by this. The OpenDocument standard coming into use at the same time as a free, OD-supporting "Google Office" makes its debut aims a hefty, possibly even fatal, double-blow against MS's biggest cash cow.
Something like, for instance, I create a document on my PC in OO, then can "export" it to the web where others can "import" it to their own OO.
This would be great for documents that must be created collaboratively, and would also save me having to do things like creating a document in one program and then emailing it out via another.
Assuming they could do it securely enough, that is. . .
I'd be far more impressed with this sort of feature than a Firefox-accessed word processor.
Well, when Mass. did their working out, the total cost of upgrading to Office 12 was estimated at $50 million, while the total cost of switching to OO was $5 million - that includes all the training, software, and hardware considerations. . .
Yep, that was specifically highlighted by MA: OpenOffice will probably be easier for most people to use than Office 12, because of the extensive redesign MS has given it.
For example, this statement is pretty silly "citizens who want to take advantage of online services will potentially have to purchase, install and learn new software to comply with the policy." if the most prominent suite supporting OpenDocument is free. His point about training is perfectly valid though.
Did you take the time to listen to the recent meeting MA had with software representatives? If you had, you might have heard an interesting bit of information from a MA representative.
They had two ways to go for an XML document that everybody (even MS) agrees IS the best way to go: MS's XML format as in MS Office 12, or OpenDocument from various other office suites.
The estimated cost of upgrading to MS Office 12, including all OS upgrades, hardware upgrades, and training costs: $50 million
The estimated cost of switching to, for example, OpenOffice, including all training and upgrades: $5 million.
His point about training (and cost) is garbage. MA, after years of research and evaluation, says it will be cheaper and easier to upgrade to OpenDocument than to upgrade to MS. That's what people keep forgetting, it is NOT 'Pay to switch to OpenDocument or stay put for free', it's 'Pay $5million to switch to OpenDocument or pay $50 million to switch to a new version of a proprietary office suite'
People like James should bear that in mind before touting the (IMHO) biased garbage that his article contained.
Technology: The cause of, and the solution to, all the world's problems
GamePark created the GP32. It didn't do so well, so they open-sourced it. Then it did pretty well, selling to hackers.
So then Gamepark wanted to make a successor. They argued over whether or not to make it open-source again.
They couldn't agree, so they split up into Gamepark & Gamepark Holdings.
GP went on to develop the XGP, a closed-source, high-powered console. GPH created the GP2X/GPX2, a less-powerful but open-source console.
They're both successors to the GP32, but very different concepts, made by two different companies.
Hope that helped. . .
Well, in the case of the GP32, because it ran emulators of all the old computers that have hundreds of games. . .
Next up: TCOOO (Total Cost of Open Office Ownership) studies.
Actually, I look forward to the Total Cost Of Workforce Migration to OpenOffice.org
Alos known as a T. C.O.W. M.O.O.O study ;o)
Imagine you're a typical corporation: You have thousands of documents, they're all in .doc format. So everybody has MS Office installed.
You hear about a free alternative, but it doesn't support the .doc format reliably enough to switch - your thousands of documents would have to be manually edited, one at a time. This is a big expense that stops OO being free. Or you'd have to keep MS Office available, in which case you might just as well not switch.
In other words: Nobody with more than a few .doc documents can switch from Ms Office to OpenOffice. Result: $$$ for MS
Now imagine MS Word could save reliably in OO's format. And it can obviously open .doc files reliably.
A company could now run a batch job that opens .doc files and saves them in OO format. MS Word converts all the company documents into OO format. Company then throws away MS Word, and happily uses OO.
Result: MS looses customers.
MS will fight to the last to stop people being able to do this. If this function were implemented, most people would not need MS Office any more. And if you don't need Office, you don't really need Windows. And if you don't need either of those, why do you need MS?
I've been less than impressed with the anti-fog. I've tried a couple types, and I just find my spit works better. It's also a lot more convienient. :)
It's also cheaper & impossible to forget or run out of :o)
But the anti-fog from my local shop is actually better than spit - my spare mask always, but always, fogs up. It's had every cleaning treatment known to man, but no amount of spit stops it fogging.
A few drops of anti-fog, however, and it behaves itself perfectly. Annoying, but true!
You spit in it whether it's dry or not. Then you rub it into the glass with a finger, and give it as much of a dunking as you like in whatever water is around. Then it'll stay fog-free unless you allow it to dry out - so either put it on & trap the moisture in, or leave your mask laying flat with some water inside.
Of course even the best tempered glass will fog: tempering isn't supposed to provide anti-fog properties, it's used as a safety measure.
Lastly, it's not like you can't buy bottles of anti-fog from any half-decent dive shop that'll do at least as good a job.
(As a UK diver, I might add that one downside of spitting in your mask is that on very cold winter dives, your spit will freeze solid on the glass before you can do anything useful with it ;o)
I reckon if Microsoft (or anybody else) does ever manage to wipe out Google, its dying act will be to release all the search engine source code to the world under the GPL.
Imagine the look of sick horror on BG's face when he realises that by killing Google, he's turned their search technology into a FOSS project.
As if Linux didn't worry him enough already. . .
:o)
How come they are one of the most opaque companies on wall street in telling their shareholders what's going on? How come all their projects are so top secret despite the fact they end up just being another jabber knock off?
Because one of their competitors is Microsoft, who have a long history of finding out what their competitors are going to do, and then either beating them to it or making it very hard to do.
Google is so ubiquitous it's easy to forget that, in many ways, they're still the little guy in comparison to some of their competitors. Keeping quiet about what they're doing is a valuable survival stategy, they'd be idiots not to use it.
But I quite like your idea too - it's still free for small inventors, it still encourages people not to have gratuitous patents, and it still encourages people to divest themselves of unprofitable patents rather than keeping them "just in case".
Simple enough ideas, I wonder why Congress hasn't thought of them yet? :o)