Well first, even if you take the RIAA's side fully, a reasonable person would admit that it's copyright infringement, and not "theft". You can argue that copyright infringement is as bad as theft, but it's not theft.
Second, the complaint isn't that they're trying to fight copyright infringement, but rather their methods of fighting copyright infringement. Surely methods and means can matter. I can fight against injustice using methods that are themselves unjust.
Can we agree to that much, at least? At least as a starting point to discuss exactly how immoral copyright infringement is, and whether the RIAA's methods are just or unjust?
Since 2009 is the Year of the Linux Desktop (!), the number of Ubuntu users is probably going to continue to grow. While this is great, these statistics show that an Ubuntu user is not (yet) as useful to the community as a Debian user.
I understand what you're saying, but I'd like to put a slightly different slant on it: People defecting to Linux may be "doing their part" (i.e. being "useful"), even if they don't contribute code.
I don't want to under value real contributors that have improved the quality of the code in various important projects. On the other hand, I think there are lots of roles to play in this game. You might be a tester, or you might file helpful bug reports-- but that's not really what I'm talking about either. I want to point out that even users who just use Linux are helping in a real way.
Think about that "n00b" who wants to use Linux. He decides he wants to buy a new computer, so he goes to Best Buy and one of his first questions is, "Can I get this with Ubuntu installed?" He doesn't have to know jack about what Ubuntu really is-- if thinks he wants it, he might ask that question. If you get a lot of people like that going into Best Buy and asking for Linux, Best Buy is going to start carrying more Linux-based computers.
Now you have a bunch of people running around with Linux installed, and having Linux installed is no longer considered "weird" or "different". Now our "n00b" goes back to Best Buy, and he says, "I want to buy Photoshop and Quickbooks, and while I'm here I'll buy [some new piece of hardware]."
So he goes home with that stuff and asks his techie neighbor to help him install it all, and the neighbor says, "Sorry man, but this stuff won't work. These companies don't support Linux, and the company that makes this hardware doesn't release Linux drivers." Mr. n00b gets a bit annoyed with that, and decides to call the support lines for those companies. After complaining loudly and being told they can't help him, he takes everything back to Best Buy for a refund.
Repeat that enough times, and you'll see more support for Linux from major vendors.
Keep going, and you'll see Linux in pop culture. You'll see it on the news. When businesses do market research, they'll find that Linux has a big enough install base that it shouldn't be taken for granted.
So while there are things that simple "n00b" users aren't contributing, they're contributing something else by just increasing the user base. I don't think it makes sense to marginalize those people, turn them away, or make them regret their attempts to try "this Linux thing".
Oh, please don't feed the trolls. Responding to people like this only gives them what they want: to start trouble.
Please, let's all just ignore this person and this topic. Wouldn't it be more fun to talk about how nice it would be to be able to install Debian on your phone?
I would remove that particular OpenOffice.org installation from my system and delete the install files. I would then disregard that and all subsequent communication from those scammers, and would go seek out the official, free installation.
Sounds like a normal sort of thing to do, but the question that pops into my mind is, what did this person actually agree to on the scam site? It sounds like she agreed to some subscription, so the next question is, what are the terms of this subscription? Third question: what does German law have to say about it?
I know in the US there are at least some consumer-protection laws (though sometimes not enough). For example, with most products you buy, the seller is required to allow you to return it within 30 days. I would be asking someone lawyerly (rather than techs/geeks) whether I'm legally permitted to cancel the subscription within some timeframe and therefore not pay, or whether the agreement allows for cancellation.
Of course, I'd expect that actually hiring a lawyer would cost more than 98 Euro, so I wouldn't be surprised if she just had to eat the loss and move on. But what I would *not* do is ignore it. I would at least cancel this "subscription" to make sure it didn't auto-renew and charge me another 98 Euro next year.
See really the other players like the Nomad were light years ahead but failed to due to marketing. Never mind that its interface was cumbersome. Never mind that it was larger than a portable CD player. Never mind that the Nomad could not be used as portable HD. Never mind it took many steps and hours for it to sync up. Never mind that it had a 45 min battery life. The iPod beat it on pure marketing.
Now admittedly I'm being a little pedantic, but it depends on what you mean by "marketing". According to some definitions of "marketing", it implied things like "product development". In that sense, recognizing a market for MP3 players, but realizing that they're failing due to bad interfaces, slow connections to the computer, poor battery life, and small storage capacity, and then developing a product to meet the needs/desires of that market-- that stuff *is* marketing.
In that sense, it might be fair to say that Apple has succeeded due to superior marketing, but in that sense, I don't believe that's any kind of an insult to Apple. What you're basically saying is, "Apple has succeeded because they've developed products that people want with features that people want, rather than developing products that people don't want."
And I think this is an appropriate way to view Apple's success. One of the things that the Slashdot crowd fails to recognize is that the product with the greatest number of features is not necessarily the product that people are interested in. In software, more features tend to mean a greater complexity in the UI. More hardware features (as a rule) tend to increase size, weight, and price, while decreasing battery life. While some people might argue that [MP3 player X] is superior to the iPod because it has [Feature Y], which the iPod doesn't have, a good marketing/product development team has to ask what the trade-offs of adding Feature Y are, and whether their target audience would want that feature badly enough to accept the trade-offs.
So I guess what I'm saying is, Apple is successful not just for what they include in their products, but also for what they don't include. If you include those decisions under the umbrella of "marketing", then I think it's a fair observation.
That's more or less what I came in here to say. From everything I've seen and read over the years, Jobs' role in making Apple successful has not been as a charismatic salesperson, and also not as a brilliant inventor who designed things himself, but rather as the guy who tells his development team, "Redo this. It's not good enough."
That sort of thing takes both a strong sense of what makes a "good product" (and having a taste in products that many people will flock to), but also the confidence, or perhaps even assholeishness, to tell someone, "I don't like your work, so you need to redo it."
If Apple can find someone with equivalent tastes and confidence, then they may be able to find someone to fill Jobs' shoes (more or less). If not, then the culture at Apple will probably change, for better or worse.
Maybe you did miss the news, because as the summary notes, Jobs has taken leave from his day-to-day responsibilities at Apple. It may be temporary, but apparently his health is not very good. This leave may become permanent, or may at least lead to a long-term reduction in his role at Apple.
Do they really? I'd like to see some polls to figure out who wants this, how much they want it, and why. Most people I know don't reboot their computers very often. A 30 second delay every few weeks doesn't seem to annoy people that much.
so just make the damn cut-over and wait for the inevitable news stories about people being left without TV.
Especially since the worst-case scenario is that someone will be left without TV for a little while. Yeah, they won't be able to watch the news, which is a sort of concern, but the news these days has limited informational value anyway.
Although IMAP IDLE can theoretically do it, I have yet to see it in the wild.
I have. It works great.
The deficiency in IMAP is that (unlike RIM's NOC or Exchange Direct Push + SCMDM) the encrypted permanent connection is used for device management as well (OTA provisioning, remote wipe if the device is stolen, etc.)
Ok, so we've identified one potential winner. If you want remote wipe, you need to either use Exchange or Blackberry or something more than IMAP. I'll give you that one. Still, that's really not helpful the whole rest of the time that you haven't lost your phone.
Also, the question I was really trying to ask was, "Does RIM still force you to send traffic over their network in order to get it to a Blackberry, and if so, how would this benefit me as a customer?" RIM's network shouldn't be necessary for remote wiping.
It's about the fact that those communications go from any BlackBerry to the RIM NOC and straight to the other BlackBerry. The whole Internet could disappear and as long as the RIM NOC (which links directly to the packet networks of the major cell carriers) is there you can still send messages between BlackBerries
Ok, so the big benefit here is that if there is a catastrophe (nuclear war?) and the entire Internet gets destroyed, but somehow your cell network and RIM's network survives, then you'll definitely be able to send someone an email. Assuming you both have Blackberries. And if you happen to know their obscure PIN. Great.
Because of that permanent stateful connection to RIM's NOC, your e-mail is pushed to the device automatically rather when needed.
I've heard Blackberry fans make a big deal of this, but that's not exactly a unique feature. Exchange does it. IMAP servers can do it (though not all do).
On top of that, it allows BlackBerries to communicate with each other via a unique PIN address so even if your mail server/BlackBerry Enterprise Server is slammed or out of commission, you can still communicate with any other BlackBerry user if you know their PIN address.
That doesn't sound like much of a feature to me. I could do the same thing by auto-forwarding all of my work e-mail to a Gmail account and setting my phone up to check that Gmail account. Or I could just set my phone up to have my work account *and* my gmail account, which makes even more sense.
The articles mention RIM's network in all that, which causes me pause-- Is RIM still forcing people to send information to their servers? If so, can anyone give me a single good reason for that, and why I, as a customer, would want that rather than a normal IMAP+SSL connection to my own mail server?
Ok, that aside, I'm just wondering... isn't there some point at which we admit that e-mail sent over the internet, as things operate today, is just an inherently insecure method of communication? I mean, I guess you could encrypt all your messages (PGP-style), but nobody does that, and short of doing that, there's nothing to prevent someone from eavesdropping.
There's a lot to talk about here, but I hope Obama keeps fighting for his Blackberry-- not for his own sake, but it makes sense in concert with his promise to improve Internet infrastructure. If the secret service can't figure out a way for the President to have a secure smartphone, then we should be asking "what needs to happen to make that possible?" From there, the next question should be, "What needs to happen to make it possible for consumers to have access to secure smartphones?"
Why is a 50% reduction in failures a useful stat? The schools want a certain amount of failures in these large "weeder" classes, because giving a diploma to everyone who pays waters down the value of the diploma...if you can't learn because the environment isn't as cozy as it could be, I'm not sure it is completely the school's job to fix that for you.
I think your right, but I think it's a bit trickier than that. What I mean is, there's a great temptation to say, "As a college, it's not MIT's job to *make* every student succeed, regardless of whether they're lazy, stupid, or emotionally disturbed." There's definite truth to that. On the other hand, MIT has an interest is helping their students succeed. That's part of their proper role, and it works in favor of their own benefit for their students to be happy and successful.
I don't mean to bring up too much of a tangent, but it reminds me of when people say, "I don't want my tax dollars going to government programs for education and poverty. It's not my job to pay for that stuff for other people, and if they can't do it for themselves, then tough." Again, there's some value in that sentiment. People ought to be responsible for themselves. On the other hand, high poverty rates and a poorly educated citizenry don't help anyone.
I'm all for personal responsibility, and to some degree allowing people to sink or swim based on their own merits. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's always worth trying to orchestrate systems to punish or neglect those who aren't doing well-- or aren't doing the "correct" things-- on their own. It can end up resembling cutting off your nose to spite your face. I think people get so worked up focusing on the idea that "everyone should get what they deserve" and punish those who aren't good, and ignore the reality that the more people in our society are doing well, the better off we'll all be.
Rant over. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to brace myself for the flames, trolls, and angry responses.
I think I agree with you. I get the feeling sometimes that, in many ways, people have come to think of college as an advanced summer camp where their darling little snowflakes can learn how to behave themselves out on their own, "in real life". Of course, their concept of the best way to do that is to seclude them in a community where practically no one has real-life experience outside of academia.
That's not to say that you can't learn about social interaction in college, and I think there is value in having some kind of transitional space between childhood and adulthood. It just seems to me that sometimes real education gets lost in the shuffle.
It didn't say that it was popular because of piracy, but only that it was "the video format of choice for 'grey' content", i.e. that it's popular among pirates. There's a difference.
I will say, however, that I don't see DivX being used frequently for legitimate commercial purposes. Maybe I'm missing something. But even if that's the case-- that it's popular among pirates and no one else-- then to me the interesting question is "why is it popular among pirates?" I would think that there'd be some other encoder that would do a better job. If you can answer that, then my next question would be "why isn't it popular in other settings?"
That is, assuming that it's true, that it's popular among pirates and no one else. I'm somewhat clueless as to why people use DivX.
including surrendering the right to ever sue for patent infringement for implementing the standard.
The governmental definition of an "open standard" should, by law, include that anyone can implement it for free, legally, for any purpose. If that doesn't mean leaving out patented techniques or surrendering related patented techniques, then there should be an official procedure whereby they provide a blanket license to anyone using their patents in the implementation of that standard.
If Microsoft tries to backdoor some other restrictions that prevent people from using things freely, then you have to adjust the law.
Ultimately you could complain about the same thing with the government pushing open source-- Microsoft might screw with the definition of "open source", meeting the official definition but otherwise being useless. But that's how it goes with any laws. If you're not careful in how you write it, it'll get abused.
Yes, obviously you're right. After all, Microsoft wasn't making any money until Vista was released and Activation became mandatory. Maybe if they just make Windows completely non-functional, no one will pirate it and they can make infinity dollars!
You keep harping on about going back to XP, when you people had the exact same ditribe about XP when it first came out.
I still think people were right to complain about XP. It was an upgrade where, for the most part, the new features didn't benefit users. There were artificial distinctions made to push people to the new OS, like how Microsoft refused to release the updated Windows Media Player on Win2000 even though they could have. But ignoring things like that, bug fixes and support for newer hardware, there weren't really new features that made people want to upgrade.
That they've done this for two releases in a row doesn't make things much better.
What you're missing is that, especially for enterprise software products, popular opinion isn't important, because the users are not the ones making the purchasing decisions. The people making purchasing decisions for that crap are CTOs and other management types...
What you might be missing is that those CTOs and management types might just be the very people responding to this poll, especially if the cluelessness of the answers is any indication. If the vote were really based on general populous, then lots of those companies wouldn't be on the list. What laymen would think to vote for VMware or Juniper?
If Microsoft is going to learn a lesson from Apple, I wish it were a lesson from one of the recent developments from the iTMS: ditch the DRM.
Honestly, I've had Vista installed on a machine since it was in beta, and now I have Windows 7 installed. It's only for testing purposes, and other than that one computer, I'm sticking with XP. Neither Vista nor Windows 7 are all that bad. They have some improvements, and I might even consider upgrading to Windows 7 at some point-- except for one little detail, which is I absolutely hate "Activation".
And you know, there are probably people reading this who are going to say, "Oh, activation isn't that bad! What's the big deal?" I just don't want to deal with it. Yes, I've had instances when I've upgraded hardware and had software products (Windows and others) that require activation stop working. I've had fresh installs of products that require activation simply refuse to work until I called the developer on the telephone, waited on hold for an hour, and got some kind of unlock code.
If I'm buying a piece of software that uses activation, then I see if they have a volume licensing version that doesn't require activation. If their corporate version requires activation, then I usually won't buy that product. There are enough problems with software not working that I don't think developers need to be building in DRM that arbitrarily stops it from working. It's even worse when that product is the operating system. And Microsoft wants me to set up an activation server in order to allow me to do imaging on my clients? Sorry, but screw you Microsoft.
So until Microsoft drops activation, I'm sticking with my volume licensed version of XP. When I can't use XP anymore, I'll evaluate my options and probably find another operating system that will meet my needs.
That's all for now, for this off-topic little rant.
Is there some sensible reason why the GUI needs to be so substantially changed?
I think Microsoft has decided to employ a development philosophy where they use the principles of evolution, i.e. make a bunch of random mutations, keep what works, kill what doesn't work. In UI terms, this means shuffling things around with each release.
I'm kind of joking, but I've read that Microsoft's UI design relies heavily on user testing. They apparently spend a lot of time watching what users do, asking users about the experience, shuffling things around, and then testing again how users respond to the UI with the changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Well first, even if you take the RIAA's side fully, a reasonable person would admit that it's copyright infringement, and not "theft". You can argue that copyright infringement is as bad as theft, but it's not theft.
Second, the complaint isn't that they're trying to fight copyright infringement, but rather their methods of fighting copyright infringement. Surely methods and means can matter. I can fight against injustice using methods that are themselves unjust.
Can we agree to that much, at least? At least as a starting point to discuss exactly how immoral copyright infringement is, and whether the RIAA's methods are just or unjust?
Maybe if apt-get is available, and such devices become popular, people will bother to make more binaries available?
Since 2009 is the Year of the Linux Desktop (!), the number of Ubuntu users is probably going to continue to grow. While this is great, these statistics show that an Ubuntu user is not (yet) as useful to the community as a Debian user.
I understand what you're saying, but I'd like to put a slightly different slant on it: People defecting to Linux may be "doing their part" (i.e. being "useful"), even if they don't contribute code.
I don't want to under value real contributors that have improved the quality of the code in various important projects. On the other hand, I think there are lots of roles to play in this game. You might be a tester, or you might file helpful bug reports-- but that's not really what I'm talking about either. I want to point out that even users who just use Linux are helping in a real way.
Think about that "n00b" who wants to use Linux. He decides he wants to buy a new computer, so he goes to Best Buy and one of his first questions is, "Can I get this with Ubuntu installed?" He doesn't have to know jack about what Ubuntu really is-- if thinks he wants it, he might ask that question. If you get a lot of people like that going into Best Buy and asking for Linux, Best Buy is going to start carrying more Linux-based computers.
Now you have a bunch of people running around with Linux installed, and having Linux installed is no longer considered "weird" or "different". Now our "n00b" goes back to Best Buy, and he says, "I want to buy Photoshop and Quickbooks, and while I'm here I'll buy [some new piece of hardware]."
So he goes home with that stuff and asks his techie neighbor to help him install it all, and the neighbor says, "Sorry man, but this stuff won't work. These companies don't support Linux, and the company that makes this hardware doesn't release Linux drivers." Mr. n00b gets a bit annoyed with that, and decides to call the support lines for those companies. After complaining loudly and being told they can't help him, he takes everything back to Best Buy for a refund.
Repeat that enough times, and you'll see more support for Linux from major vendors.
Keep going, and you'll see Linux in pop culture. You'll see it on the news. When businesses do market research, they'll find that Linux has a big enough install base that it shouldn't be taken for granted.
So while there are things that simple "n00b" users aren't contributing, they're contributing something else by just increasing the user base. I don't think it makes sense to marginalize those people, turn them away, or make them regret their attempts to try "this Linux thing".
Probably not, but being able to run apt-get is a big step in being able to run anything you damn well please.
Oh, please don't feed the trolls. Responding to people like this only gives them what they want: to start trouble.
Please, let's all just ignore this person and this topic. Wouldn't it be more fun to talk about how nice it would be to be able to install Debian on your phone?
I would remove that particular OpenOffice.org installation from my system and delete the install files. I would then disregard that and all subsequent communication from those scammers, and would go seek out the official, free installation.
Sounds like a normal sort of thing to do, but the question that pops into my mind is, what did this person actually agree to on the scam site? It sounds like she agreed to some subscription, so the next question is, what are the terms of this subscription? Third question: what does German law have to say about it?
I know in the US there are at least some consumer-protection laws (though sometimes not enough). For example, with most products you buy, the seller is required to allow you to return it within 30 days. I would be asking someone lawyerly (rather than techs/geeks) whether I'm legally permitted to cancel the subscription within some timeframe and therefore not pay, or whether the agreement allows for cancellation.
Of course, I'd expect that actually hiring a lawyer would cost more than 98 Euro, so I wouldn't be surprised if she just had to eat the loss and move on. But what I would *not* do is ignore it. I would at least cancel this "subscription" to make sure it didn't auto-renew and charge me another 98 Euro next year.
See really the other players like the Nomad were light years ahead but failed to due to marketing. Never mind that its interface was cumbersome. Never mind that it was larger than a portable CD player. Never mind that the Nomad could not be used as portable HD. Never mind it took many steps and hours for it to sync up. Never mind that it had a 45 min battery life. The iPod beat it on pure marketing.
Now admittedly I'm being a little pedantic, but it depends on what you mean by "marketing". According to some definitions of "marketing", it implied things like "product development". In that sense, recognizing a market for MP3 players, but realizing that they're failing due to bad interfaces, slow connections to the computer, poor battery life, and small storage capacity, and then developing a product to meet the needs/desires of that market-- that stuff *is* marketing.
In that sense, it might be fair to say that Apple has succeeded due to superior marketing, but in that sense, I don't believe that's any kind of an insult to Apple. What you're basically saying is, "Apple has succeeded because they've developed products that people want with features that people want, rather than developing products that people don't want."
And I think this is an appropriate way to view Apple's success. One of the things that the Slashdot crowd fails to recognize is that the product with the greatest number of features is not necessarily the product that people are interested in. In software, more features tend to mean a greater complexity in the UI. More hardware features (as a rule) tend to increase size, weight, and price, while decreasing battery life. While some people might argue that [MP3 player X] is superior to the iPod because it has [Feature Y], which the iPod doesn't have, a good marketing/product development team has to ask what the trade-offs of adding Feature Y are, and whether their target audience would want that feature badly enough to accept the trade-offs.
So I guess what I'm saying is, Apple is successful not just for what they include in their products, but also for what they don't include. If you include those decisions under the umbrella of "marketing", then I think it's a fair observation.
That's more or less what I came in here to say. From everything I've seen and read over the years, Jobs' role in making Apple successful has not been as a charismatic salesperson, and also not as a brilliant inventor who designed things himself, but rather as the guy who tells his development team, "Redo this. It's not good enough."
That sort of thing takes both a strong sense of what makes a "good product" (and having a taste in products that many people will flock to), but also the confidence, or perhaps even assholeishness, to tell someone, "I don't like your work, so you need to redo it."
If Apple can find someone with equivalent tastes and confidence, then they may be able to find someone to fill Jobs' shoes (more or less). If not, then the culture at Apple will probably change, for better or worse.
Did Steve Jobs die?
Maybe you did miss the news, because as the summary notes, Jobs has taken leave from his day-to-day responsibilities at Apple. It may be temporary, but apparently his health is not very good. This leave may become permanent, or may at least lead to a long-term reduction in his role at Apple.
People want this.
Do they really? I'd like to see some polls to figure out who wants this, how much they want it, and why. Most people I know don't reboot their computers very often. A 30 second delay every few weeks doesn't seem to annoy people that much.
so just make the damn cut-over and wait for the inevitable news stories about people being left without TV.
Especially since the worst-case scenario is that someone will be left without TV for a little while. Yeah, they won't be able to watch the news, which is a sort of concern, but the news these days has limited informational value anyway.
Although IMAP IDLE can theoretically do it, I have yet to see it in the wild.
I have. It works great.
The deficiency in IMAP is that (unlike RIM's NOC or Exchange Direct Push + SCMDM) the encrypted permanent connection is used for device management as well (OTA provisioning, remote wipe if the device is stolen, etc.)
Ok, so we've identified one potential winner. If you want remote wipe, you need to either use Exchange or Blackberry or something more than IMAP. I'll give you that one. Still, that's really not helpful the whole rest of the time that you haven't lost your phone.
Also, the question I was really trying to ask was, "Does RIM still force you to send traffic over their network in order to get it to a Blackberry, and if so, how would this benefit me as a customer?" RIM's network shouldn't be necessary for remote wiping.
It's about the fact that those communications go from any BlackBerry to the RIM NOC and straight to the other BlackBerry. The whole Internet could disappear and as long as the RIM NOC (which links directly to the packet networks of the major cell carriers) is there you can still send messages between BlackBerries
Ok, so the big benefit here is that if there is a catastrophe (nuclear war?) and the entire Internet gets destroyed, but somehow your cell network and RIM's network survives, then you'll definitely be able to send someone an email. Assuming you both have Blackberries. And if you happen to know their obscure PIN. Great.
Because of that permanent stateful connection to RIM's NOC, your e-mail is pushed to the device automatically rather when needed.
I've heard Blackberry fans make a big deal of this, but that's not exactly a unique feature. Exchange does it. IMAP servers can do it (though not all do).
On top of that, it allows BlackBerries to communicate with each other via a unique PIN address so even if your mail server/BlackBerry Enterprise Server is slammed or out of commission, you can still communicate with any other BlackBerry user if you know their PIN address.
That doesn't sound like much of a feature to me. I could do the same thing by auto-forwarding all of my work e-mail to a Gmail account and setting my phone up to check that Gmail account. Or I could just set my phone up to have my work account *and* my gmail account, which makes even more sense.
The articles mention RIM's network in all that, which causes me pause-- Is RIM still forcing people to send information to their servers? If so, can anyone give me a single good reason for that, and why I, as a customer, would want that rather than a normal IMAP+SSL connection to my own mail server?
Ok, that aside, I'm just wondering... isn't there some point at which we admit that e-mail sent over the internet, as things operate today, is just an inherently insecure method of communication? I mean, I guess you could encrypt all your messages (PGP-style), but nobody does that, and short of doing that, there's nothing to prevent someone from eavesdropping.
There's a lot to talk about here, but I hope Obama keeps fighting for his Blackberry-- not for his own sake, but it makes sense in concert with his promise to improve Internet infrastructure. If the secret service can't figure out a way for the President to have a secure smartphone, then we should be asking "what needs to happen to make that possible?" From there, the next question should be, "What needs to happen to make it possible for consumers to have access to secure smartphones?"
Why is a 50% reduction in failures a useful stat? The schools want a certain amount of failures in these large "weeder" classes, because giving a diploma to everyone who pays waters down the value of the diploma...if you can't learn because the environment isn't as cozy as it could be, I'm not sure it is completely the school's job to fix that for you.
I think your right, but I think it's a bit trickier than that. What I mean is, there's a great temptation to say, "As a college, it's not MIT's job to *make* every student succeed, regardless of whether they're lazy, stupid, or emotionally disturbed." There's definite truth to that. On the other hand, MIT has an interest is helping their students succeed. That's part of their proper role, and it works in favor of their own benefit for their students to be happy and successful.
I don't mean to bring up too much of a tangent, but it reminds me of when people say, "I don't want my tax dollars going to government programs for education and poverty. It's not my job to pay for that stuff for other people, and if they can't do it for themselves, then tough." Again, there's some value in that sentiment. People ought to be responsible for themselves. On the other hand, high poverty rates and a poorly educated citizenry don't help anyone.
I'm all for personal responsibility, and to some degree allowing people to sink or swim based on their own merits. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's always worth trying to orchestrate systems to punish or neglect those who aren't doing well-- or aren't doing the "correct" things-- on their own. It can end up resembling cutting off your nose to spite your face. I think people get so worked up focusing on the idea that "everyone should get what they deserve" and punish those who aren't good, and ignore the reality that the more people in our society are doing well, the better off we'll all be.
Rant over. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to brace myself for the flames, trolls, and angry responses.
I think I agree with you. I get the feeling sometimes that, in many ways, people have come to think of college as an advanced summer camp where their darling little snowflakes can learn how to behave themselves out on their own, "in real life". Of course, their concept of the best way to do that is to seclude them in a community where practically no one has real-life experience outside of academia.
That's not to say that you can't learn about social interaction in college, and I think there is value in having some kind of transitional space between childhood and adulthood. It just seems to me that sometimes real education gets lost in the shuffle.
And i WAS NOT able to figure out how to successfully add Ubuntu
Just wondering-- does Windows 7 not allow you to use grub or something as your bootloader, and have grub load Windows?
I don't think I've ever tried to have a Windows bootloader load Linux.
It didn't say that it was popular because of piracy, but only that it was "the video format of choice for 'grey' content", i.e. that it's popular among pirates. There's a difference.
I will say, however, that I don't see DivX being used frequently for legitimate commercial purposes. Maybe I'm missing something. But even if that's the case-- that it's popular among pirates and no one else-- then to me the interesting question is "why is it popular among pirates?" I would think that there'd be some other encoder that would do a better job. If you can answer that, then my next question would be "why isn't it popular in other settings?"
That is, assuming that it's true, that it's popular among pirates and no one else. I'm somewhat clueless as to why people use DivX.
Right now governments push for open standards and Microsoft redefines open standards as patent-encumbered. Better aim higher.
That's why I said:
including surrendering the right to ever sue for patent infringement for implementing the standard.
The governmental definition of an "open standard" should, by law, include that anyone can implement it for free, legally, for any purpose. If that doesn't mean leaving out patented techniques or surrendering related patented techniques, then there should be an official procedure whereby they provide a blanket license to anyone using their patents in the implementation of that standard.
If Microsoft tries to backdoor some other restrictions that prevent people from using things freely, then you have to adjust the law.
Ultimately you could complain about the same thing with the government pushing open source-- Microsoft might screw with the definition of "open source", meeting the official definition but otherwise being useless. But that's how it goes with any laws. If you're not careful in how you write it, it'll get abused.
Yes, obviously you're right. After all, Microsoft wasn't making any money until Vista was released and Activation became mandatory. Maybe if they just make Windows completely non-functional, no one will pirate it and they can make infinity dollars!
You keep harping on about going back to XP, when you people had the exact same ditribe about XP when it first came out.
I still think people were right to complain about XP. It was an upgrade where, for the most part, the new features didn't benefit users. There were artificial distinctions made to push people to the new OS, like how Microsoft refused to release the updated Windows Media Player on Win2000 even though they could have. But ignoring things like that, bug fixes and support for newer hardware, there weren't really new features that made people want to upgrade.
That they've done this for two releases in a row doesn't make things much better.
What you're missing is that, especially for enterprise software products, popular opinion isn't important, because the users are not the ones making the purchasing decisions. The people making purchasing decisions for that crap are CTOs and other management types...
What you might be missing is that those CTOs and management types might just be the very people responding to this poll, especially if the cluelessness of the answers is any indication. If the vote were really based on general populous, then lots of those companies wouldn't be on the list. What laymen would think to vote for VMware or Juniper?
If Microsoft is going to learn a lesson from Apple, I wish it were a lesson from one of the recent developments from the iTMS: ditch the DRM.
Honestly, I've had Vista installed on a machine since it was in beta, and now I have Windows 7 installed. It's only for testing purposes, and other than that one computer, I'm sticking with XP. Neither Vista nor Windows 7 are all that bad. They have some improvements, and I might even consider upgrading to Windows 7 at some point-- except for one little detail, which is I absolutely hate "Activation".
And you know, there are probably people reading this who are going to say, "Oh, activation isn't that bad! What's the big deal?" I just don't want to deal with it. Yes, I've had instances when I've upgraded hardware and had software products (Windows and others) that require activation stop working. I've had fresh installs of products that require activation simply refuse to work until I called the developer on the telephone, waited on hold for an hour, and got some kind of unlock code.
If I'm buying a piece of software that uses activation, then I see if they have a volume licensing version that doesn't require activation. If their corporate version requires activation, then I usually won't buy that product. There are enough problems with software not working that I don't think developers need to be building in DRM that arbitrarily stops it from working. It's even worse when that product is the operating system. And Microsoft wants me to set up an activation server in order to allow me to do imaging on my clients? Sorry, but screw you Microsoft.
So until Microsoft drops activation, I'm sticking with my volume licensed version of XP. When I can't use XP anymore, I'll evaluate my options and probably find another operating system that will meet my needs.
That's all for now, for this off-topic little rant.
Can you elaborate on that? What does it do?
Is there some sensible reason why the GUI needs to be so substantially changed?
I think Microsoft has decided to employ a development philosophy where they use the principles of evolution, i.e. make a bunch of random mutations, keep what works, kill what doesn't work. In UI terms, this means shuffling things around with each release.
I'm kind of joking, but I've read that Microsoft's UI design relies heavily on user testing. They apparently spend a lot of time watching what users do, asking users about the experience, shuffling things around, and then testing again how users respond to the UI with the changes.