After stepping back for a moment, however, I realized that the problem isn't as complex as it seems. In fact, I think it highlights something I've been saying for a while: Package systems under Linux are a broken concept.
Funny, but when I stepped back for a moment, I didn't see a problem anymore.
It seems to me that there are people who like Firefox and see this as some kind of an attack from Debian people. There are people who like Debian and see this as Mozilla trying to inhibit their freedom. People get angry, and yadda yadda yadda, people start coming up with wild theories and yelling at each other on Slashdot.
I'm not a developer. I try to keep current on what's going on, but I have no special insight. After reading the news on this, and trying to look at the big picture, I don't see why some people are freaking out. Am I missing something?
As I understand it the Debian people wanted to do certain things with Firefox, and the Mozilla people said, "Well, you can't do that and still call it Firefox." And then the Debian people said, "Ok. We'll call it something else then." Both parties are satisfied. Who's hurt by this again?
Ah... the open source community is "fragmented". Right. But this happens all the time. The Linux kernel is modified by different distributions. Some people use KDE, while some use Gnome. Some people use OOo for word processing, some use Abiword. Konquerer, Firefox, Epiphany, etc. Diversity is one of the strengths of open-source software. I'm glad. If Iceweasel ends up being very similar, most people won't know the difference. If it's very different, then people will use whichever is better for them. If Iceweasel becomes substantially better, then we can all benefit from the improvements.
So what is the problem here again? Anyway, it's BAD if we all use the same browser. It encourages web developers to use browser specific hacks. It makes that single browser an easy target for malware writers. The best possible scenario isn't one open-source browser taking the place of IE, but that IE's market share gets divided up among many browsers. It doesn't matter which ones, so long as they're all standards-compliant so that web developers will be encouraged to write standard HTML/CSS.
One thing I find noteworthy here is that, if Microsoft were really were making a business out of selling a superior OS, Apple wouldn't really be a threat to them-- at least not any more than Dell is a threat to Microsoft for offering Wordperfect with their computers. In a lot of ways, Apple's switch to Intel should have been a happy day for Microsoft, since it essentially turned Apple into another vendor of hardware for which Windows could be sold.
The real problem is, "producing superior operating systems" hasn't been Microsoft's core business for years now. Instead they've been riding off of vendor lock-in. And so, just like W.I.N.E., Apple is a threat to Microsoft simply by giving users an option of running Photoshop (and other software not present on open-source operating systems) without buying Windows. The mere existence of an alternative is a serious threat to Microsoft's business model, a model which consists mainly of vendor lock-in. Microsoft can't afford to let users have any choice, or they'll lose market share.
I'm having trouble finding examples. I'll admit, sometimes I have trouble figuring out where Google is making their money. Google Talk, for example-- there aren't ads in their chat client. Are they just making money from collecting info from my chats somehow? I'm not sure. But it works. I'm in the market for that service. It continues to be refined.
Did the judge actually rule in any way to stop Rockstar/Take Two from doing anything? At least from the summary and the linked blog, it seems that the judge is only asking to see the game. I mean, he asked with some force behind it, sure, but still-- if someone is trying to bring a case regarding the game's content, it seems reasonable for the judge to want to see the content, don't you think? If games reviewers have already seen the game, is it so difficult for someone to produce a copy for a judge?
Well, so far as these stats are able to measure OS market share. I'm not sure what's left out here. What sites are the measuring, and what about computers which aren't used to browse the web often enough to register here? I don't know which way this measurement would skew the results.
However, assuming that measuring people browsing the web is a good way to approximate OS market share, the number would probably be low due to the fact that a significant number of OSX users use Firefox. At least that's been my experience.
Actually I can't find a source, or else I'd have specifics, but I think they guy is referencing a case where Panasonic (or whoever holds the CD trademark) threatened to revoke trademarks-- and I'm not sure, but I believe some related patent licenses-- from anyone who was distributing CDs that weren't within spec. It would have made it very hard for those people to distribute their not-quite-CDs, and would cause them marketing problems as well because they couldn't even call them CDs. The offending parties backed down.
I'm no expert, but I was of the impression that it wasn't the actual speed of the signal, but the... well, the bandwidth. Something like, only so much information can be carried at a given frequency, and the big issue between fiber and copper was how wide a variation in frequency can they transmit without difficulties, and how much information those frequencies can carry.
I'm not trying to sound smart here, because i don't really know what I'm talking about. But I think your on the wrong track.
I think I want to take what you're talking about and make it short and glib: As you have all these small devices generating and gathering more and more data, you're only increasing the need for a central point where that data can be gathered, processed and made useful. Hence, a data center.
The project is sometimes referred to as OSX86, I think. They release updates just about every time Apple has a major update, and at least very recently you could get a version of OSX that could run on generic x86 hardware, at the same version as what's available on Macs.
From what I understand, the difficulty of all this really isn't replacing the kernel, but more like ensuring there are good drivers for non-Apple hardware. In any event, the situation seems very different to me, between Apple locking OSX to Apple hardware and Microsoft locking the kernel in general.
I also wonder if there's more going on. Right around the same time that Google buys YouTube, this quote comes out of Disney:
So we understand piracy now as a business model. It exists to serve a need in the marketplace specifically for consumers who want TV content on demand and it competes for consumers the same way we do, through high-quality, price and availability and we don't like the model. But we realize it's effective enough to make piracy a key competitor going forward. And we've created a strategy to address this threat with attractive, easy to use ways to for viewers to get the content they want from us legally; in other words, keeping honest people honest.
Could it be that "rights holders" are starting to change their perspective on these things? Might Google have been in contact with some of these people, enough to know that they'll be working on ways to make the YouTube content legal? Warner has already struck a deal with YouTube. Maybe there are more deals in the works?
Creepy, isn't it? It seems like this is happening more and more-- instead of finding a demand and figuring out how to fill it, companies are finding out what they can make and then figuring out how to generate demand.
I'm not saying get rid of B&M, I'm saying if Wallmart won't sell DVDs anymore, you'll still have Best Buy, various record stores, Amazon, Blockbuster, and loads of other ways for people to buy normal DVDs. I don't think Wallmart will actually drop DVDs, though, because they get their strength from the idea that you can buy ANYTHING at Wallmart. I think they're bluffing.
Of course, I'm not expert, and you could accuse me of underestimating Wallmart's stranglehold on distribution channels.
What you're saying makes sense, and I haven't really thought about that. At the same time, these complaints seem unfounded since it's a different distribution method entirely distributing what is in many ways a different product. I can understand why Wallmart and Target wouldn't like it, but at the same time, it seems a little crazy for them to be threatening this way.
The way I figure it, people love TV and movies. They're going to want to see them. The studios love making them and love selling them and love buying them. Now a couple of your middle-men are complaining that they're being undercut, when they're accustomed to being the ones who undercut other middlemen. They're threatening to stop being middlemen. I say, there's a supply and there's a demand, and if they don't want to make the money of being a middleman (which is all they do), then find someone else who does want that job. There are other brick and mortar retailers, other online retailers who will still sell the box, and now these digital retailers. There are cable companies with their video on demand. There are PLENTY of routes to distribute movies. Just go ahead and tell Wallmart to go frack themselves.
Am I underestimating the 800 lbs gorilla? Maybe. But if we're really at the point where one retailer is so dominant that they can bully whole industries into refusing to distribute through competing channels, then I think we have a bigger problem.
And a video with lower picture quality and audio quality than the DVD, with no DVD extras, etc. But you know what? And what's with the threat, anyway? "If you take an action that might possibly hurt our DVD sales business, we'll cut ourselves out of the DVD sales revenue completely!" If I were the movie studio, I'd call this bluff.
No, I'm not in the UK. Our news is less.... um, good? Worthwhile? Whatever.
You're correct to note that they were accused of something that was a crime in both places. Extradition is a particular process that's difficult in cases where there is a wide variance in laws concerning the alleged crime. Extradition preserves jurisdiction of each country over its own people, as it's a voluntary turnover of people whom both countries believe to be criminals, to a country in which they've committed crimes. Therefore, it isn't a case of one country imposing its jurisdiction on another country's citizenry.
They aren't talking about cryogenics, they're talking about slowing metabolic processes for medical procedures. One way to accomplish this is to induce hypothermia, i.e. lower the body temperature. However, it is difficult to accomplish this safely, so it's not something we tend to do to people on purpose.
Well it depends. If it's used for space travel, I guess it depends on how common space travel becomes in the future. On the other hand, many of the real-life uses for suspended animation I've heard of are for things like surgery, where the doctor wants to operate on the heard, but it would be a lot easier if it weren't doing that pesky beating thing.
I'm going a little off-topic here, but I've noticed this happening before and wondered the same thing. Word for word copies of other/. posts, sometimes reposted in stories that are completely unrelated to the subject matter in the original post. At first I wondered if it was a clever spambot, but there weren't any links inserted anywhere. If it is a script, I don't understand what the point is.
Well, it's not so slippery if you just stipulate that "crimes against humanity" are a special case, which AFAIK Spamhaus isn't accused of. In fact, it seems to me that it's a slippery slope in the opposite direction. If I can sue someone in the UK for doing something that's legal in the UK (I'm in the US, BTW), then it implies that UK citizens in the UK are subject to US jurisdiction. Follow that slope very far, and you end up with the US ruling the world (or at least trying to).
I mean, I guess some people want that, but if you ask me, it's the surest way to destroy the US.
There is also a new level of stability in Vista. For example the WDDM video drivers are not only User level (for the most part), but you can literally unplug your Video card, the computer will make the plug and play sound and screen will go blank, and then plug in another video card or the same one while the system is running, and Vista will not fail and if needed restart the Video driver or install the new and just keep going. This is something that would have been impossible in previous versions of Windows, and still is impossible in most other consumer OSes.
Is that safe from the hardware side of things? I think I'd be hesitant to pull a PCI card from a live motherboard whether my OS could cope with it or not.
Well, I don't really pretend to know, but although HBO makes a profit in general, they still have to pay for licensing for the movies they show, and I don't know whether it's profitable enough to pay for all their original programming as a loss-leader. But even if it is, or if they make up the money from DVD sales, it still seems to me that whatever they're doing might be mimicked for direct online sales for series that don't air elsewhere. The series would just need to be loss-leaders for something else, or slightly more expensive per episode. Either way, if HBO is getting $10 a month from me for the whole channel, and I get 4 episodes of Sopranos in that month, you're already close to the $2 per episode price point if I were just paying for that series.
I'm not pretending to be a business genius here, but it just seems like a business genius should be able to make something out of this emerging market.
Where does it say that e360insight is a spammer? I think that Spamhaus should have to present proof that e360insight is an illegitimate spamming business. I think that's important.
It may be an expedient move in this particular case, but as a general rule, it doesn't seem to make sense that another country can prosecute me in court for something that I do in my own country when that action is legal in my own country. I suppose I just mean to point out that there's a larger issue here. In principle, do we want spammers to be able to bring people to court for putting them in a blacklist? Remember, even if you win a court case, it still costs a lot of money.
Slashdot Mirror
After stepping back for a moment, however, I realized that the problem isn't as complex as it seems. In fact, I think it highlights something I've been saying for a while: Package systems under Linux are a broken concept.
Funny, but when I stepped back for a moment, I didn't see a problem anymore.
It seems to me that there are people who like Firefox and see this as some kind of an attack from Debian people. There are people who like Debian and see this as Mozilla trying to inhibit their freedom. People get angry, and yadda yadda yadda, people start coming up with wild theories and yelling at each other on Slashdot.
I'm not a developer. I try to keep current on what's going on, but I have no special insight. After reading the news on this, and trying to look at the big picture, I don't see why some people are freaking out. Am I missing something?
As I understand it the Debian people wanted to do certain things with Firefox, and the Mozilla people said, "Well, you can't do that and still call it Firefox." And then the Debian people said, "Ok. We'll call it something else then." Both parties are satisfied. Who's hurt by this again?
Ah... the open source community is "fragmented". Right. But this happens all the time. The Linux kernel is modified by different distributions. Some people use KDE, while some use Gnome. Some people use OOo for word processing, some use Abiword. Konquerer, Firefox, Epiphany, etc. Diversity is one of the strengths of open-source software. I'm glad. If Iceweasel ends up being very similar, most people won't know the difference. If it's very different, then people will use whichever is better for them. If Iceweasel becomes substantially better, then we can all benefit from the improvements.
So what is the problem here again? Anyway, it's BAD if we all use the same browser. It encourages web developers to use browser specific hacks. It makes that single browser an easy target for malware writers. The best possible scenario isn't one open-source browser taking the place of IE, but that IE's market share gets divided up among many browsers. It doesn't matter which ones, so long as they're all standards-compliant so that web developers will be encouraged to write standard HTML/CSS.
One thing I find noteworthy here is that, if Microsoft were really were making a business out of selling a superior OS, Apple wouldn't really be a threat to them-- at least not any more than Dell is a threat to Microsoft for offering Wordperfect with their computers. In a lot of ways, Apple's switch to Intel should have been a happy day for Microsoft, since it essentially turned Apple into another vendor of hardware for which Windows could be sold.
The real problem is, "producing superior operating systems" hasn't been Microsoft's core business for years now. Instead they've been riding off of vendor lock-in. And so, just like W.I.N.E., Apple is a threat to Microsoft simply by giving users an option of running Photoshop (and other software not present on open-source operating systems) without buying Windows. The mere existence of an alternative is a serious threat to Microsoft's business model, a model which consists mainly of vendor lock-in. Microsoft can't afford to let users have any choice, or they'll lose market share.
Name the Google products which:
I'm having trouble finding examples. I'll admit, sometimes I have trouble figuring out where Google is making their money. Google Talk, for example-- there aren't ads in their chat client. Are they just making money from collecting info from my chats somehow? I'm not sure. But it works. I'm in the market for that service. It continues to be refined.
Did the judge actually rule in any way to stop Rockstar/Take Two from doing anything? At least from the summary and the linked blog, it seems that the judge is only asking to see the game. I mean, he asked with some force behind it, sure, but still-- if someone is trying to bring a case regarding the game's content, it seems reasonable for the judge to want to see the content, don't you think? If games reviewers have already seen the game, is it so difficult for someone to produce a copy for a judge?
Well, so far as these stats are able to measure OS market share. I'm not sure what's left out here. What sites are the measuring, and what about computers which aren't used to browse the web often enough to register here? I don't know which way this measurement would skew the results.
However, assuming that measuring people browsing the web is a good way to approximate OS market share, the number would probably be low due to the fact that a significant number of OSX users use Firefox. At least that's been my experience.
Actually I can't find a source, or else I'd have specifics, but I think they guy is referencing a case where Panasonic (or whoever holds the CD trademark) threatened to revoke trademarks-- and I'm not sure, but I believe some related patent licenses-- from anyone who was distributing CDs that weren't within spec. It would have made it very hard for those people to distribute their not-quite-CDs, and would cause them marketing problems as well because they couldn't even call them CDs. The offending parties backed down.
Nah, users won't have any problems playing the pirated copies they download.
I'm no expert, but I was of the impression that it wasn't the actual speed of the signal, but the... well, the bandwidth. Something like, only so much information can be carried at a given frequency, and the big issue between fiber and copper was how wide a variation in frequency can they transmit without difficulties, and how much information those frequencies can carry.
I'm not trying to sound smart here, because i don't really know what I'm talking about. But I think your on the wrong track.
I think I want to take what you're talking about and make it short and glib: As you have all these small devices generating and gathering more and more data, you're only increasing the need for a central point where that data can be gathered, processed and made useful. Hence, a data center.
The project is sometimes referred to as OSX86, I think. They release updates just about every time Apple has a major update, and at least very recently you could get a version of OSX that could run on generic x86 hardware, at the same version as what's available on Macs.
From what I understand, the difficulty of all this really isn't replacing the kernel, but more like ensuring there are good drivers for non-Apple hardware. In any event, the situation seems very different to me, between Apple locking OSX to Apple hardware and Microsoft locking the kernel in general.
I also wonder if there's more going on. Right around the same time that Google buys YouTube, this quote comes out of Disney:
Could it be that "rights holders" are starting to change their perspective on these things? Might Google have been in contact with some of these people, enough to know that they'll be working on ways to make the YouTube content legal? Warner has already struck a deal with YouTube. Maybe there are more deals in the works?
Creepy, isn't it? It seems like this is happening more and more-- instead of finding a demand and figuring out how to fill it, companies are finding out what they can make and then figuring out how to generate demand.
I'm not saying get rid of B&M, I'm saying if Wallmart won't sell DVDs anymore, you'll still have Best Buy, various record stores, Amazon, Blockbuster, and loads of other ways for people to buy normal DVDs. I don't think Wallmart will actually drop DVDs, though, because they get their strength from the idea that you can buy ANYTHING at Wallmart. I think they're bluffing.
Of course, I'm not expert, and you could accuse me of underestimating Wallmart's stranglehold on distribution channels.
What you're saying makes sense, and I haven't really thought about that. At the same time, these complaints seem unfounded since it's a different distribution method entirely distributing what is in many ways a different product. I can understand why Wallmart and Target wouldn't like it, but at the same time, it seems a little crazy for them to be threatening this way.
The way I figure it, people love TV and movies. They're going to want to see them. The studios love making them and love selling them and love buying them. Now a couple of your middle-men are complaining that they're being undercut, when they're accustomed to being the ones who undercut other middlemen. They're threatening to stop being middlemen. I say, there's a supply and there's a demand, and if they don't want to make the money of being a middleman (which is all they do), then find someone else who does want that job. There are other brick and mortar retailers, other online retailers who will still sell the box, and now these digital retailers. There are cable companies with their video on demand. There are PLENTY of routes to distribute movies. Just go ahead and tell Wallmart to go frack themselves.
Am I underestimating the 800 lbs gorilla? Maybe. But if we're really at the point where one retailer is so dominant that they can bully whole industries into refusing to distribute through competing channels, then I think we have a bigger problem.
And a video with lower picture quality and audio quality than the DVD, with no DVD extras, etc. But you know what? And what's with the threat, anyway? "If you take an action that might possibly hurt our DVD sales business, we'll cut ourselves out of the DVD sales revenue completely!" If I were the movie studio, I'd call this bluff.
Yes, I mean like that. From that description, it doesn't make any sense.
No, I'm not in the UK. Our news is less.... um, good? Worthwhile? Whatever.
You're correct to note that they were accused of something that was a crime in both places. Extradition is a particular process that's difficult in cases where there is a wide variance in laws concerning the alleged crime. Extradition preserves jurisdiction of each country over its own people, as it's a voluntary turnover of people whom both countries believe to be criminals, to a country in which they've committed crimes. Therefore, it isn't a case of one country imposing its jurisdiction on another country's citizenry.
They aren't talking about cryogenics, they're talking about slowing metabolic processes for medical procedures. One way to accomplish this is to induce hypothermia, i.e. lower the body temperature. However, it is difficult to accomplish this safely, so it's not something we tend to do to people on purpose.
Well it depends. If it's used for space travel, I guess it depends on how common space travel becomes in the future. On the other hand, many of the real-life uses for suspended animation I've heard of are for things like surgery, where the doctor wants to operate on the heard, but it would be a lot easier if it weren't doing that pesky beating thing.
Yeah, I guess that's cool, but I don't think I'd ever use it... ever.
Are you a script?
I'm going a little off-topic here, but I've noticed this happening before and wondered the same thing. Word for word copies of other /. posts, sometimes reposted in stories that are completely unrelated to the subject matter in the original post. At first I wondered if it was a clever spambot, but there weren't any links inserted anywhere. If it is a script, I don't understand what the point is.
Does anyone know?
Well, it's not so slippery if you just stipulate that "crimes against humanity" are a special case, which AFAIK Spamhaus isn't accused of. In fact, it seems to me that it's a slippery slope in the opposite direction. If I can sue someone in the UK for doing something that's legal in the UK (I'm in the US, BTW), then it implies that UK citizens in the UK are subject to US jurisdiction. Follow that slope very far, and you end up with the US ruling the world (or at least trying to).
I mean, I guess some people want that, but if you ask me, it's the surest way to destroy the US.
Is that safe from the hardware side of things? I think I'd be hesitant to pull a PCI card from a live motherboard whether my OS could cope with it or not.
Well, I don't really pretend to know, but although HBO makes a profit in general, they still have to pay for licensing for the movies they show, and I don't know whether it's profitable enough to pay for all their original programming as a loss-leader. But even if it is, or if they make up the money from DVD sales, it still seems to me that whatever they're doing might be mimicked for direct online sales for series that don't air elsewhere. The series would just need to be loss-leaders for something else, or slightly more expensive per episode. Either way, if HBO is getting $10 a month from me for the whole channel, and I get 4 episodes of Sopranos in that month, you're already close to the $2 per episode price point if I were just paying for that series.
I'm not pretending to be a business genius here, but it just seems like a business genius should be able to make something out of this emerging market.
Where does it say that e360insight is a spammer? I think that Spamhaus should have to present proof that e360insight is an illegitimate spamming business. I think that's important.
It may be an expedient move in this particular case, but as a general rule, it doesn't seem to make sense that another country can prosecute me in court for something that I do in my own country when that action is legal in my own country. I suppose I just mean to point out that there's a larger issue here. In principle, do we want spammers to be able to bring people to court for putting them in a blacklist? Remember, even if you win a court case, it still costs a lot of money.