This irks me. If somebody employees me to create a tool for them I am happy to do so and will hand it over to them copyright an all. If somebody employes me to do something for them, and I choose to automate that task using a tool, using skills that I have aquired to build that tool, then the tool should belong to me, not that company - so when I leave that company the tool leaves with me. Otherwise where is the bean counter incentive to keep me on?
I once had a job in a call centre for Dell (groan). They job was tedious. I was told I had to take data from a disk, print it out, then input it into a seperate program. They employed me as a call centre grunt, so I wasn't getting paid geek wages. I created a macro, and did a weeks worth of work in under an hour (the restriction was bandwidth). What am I ethically obliged to do in that situation? I tried telling my super, but they weren't interested as it threatend their jobs. In essence I had made myself, and my coworkers redundant in a little under a morning. Should I ask for more work when I was already doing more than they were employing me for? When I left I took the macro with me.
There are many reasons why women arn't targeted by games manufacturers
Women arn't stupid enough to keep buying the same game. Women know that bigger numbers doesn't mean better gameplay.
Women arn't interested in scoring points, or winning in the same, obsessive way men are. In their eyes they've already won, by not playing the game in the first place.
Women have hightened color perception and perceive virtual worlds differently to men, in that they often get motion sickness from playing FPS. Being sick isn't fun.
Women know that virtually blowing somebody on the other side of the planet is not real human interaction. If you want to interact they would rather use a phone. In the eyes of many women - talking to the 13 year old that just whooped your ass is sad.
So what would women play? Sims was a classic female mind friendly game. Building relationships with no agenda makes a lot of sense to women. Nearly all the women I know love puzzle games, especially quick pick-ups like solitare, mine sweeper and tetris. However, deep stratergy like Chess, don't seem to stick (I guess its because you are actively competing in chess). I know a lot of women who love card games in the real world, but shy away from their online equivalent - because women play the people not the game.
You won't get women playing games until there is an all women programming house. People write games for fun, so you write games that are fun to you. Until women are actively programming games in large numbers, I don't think we'll see a gender shift - and to be honest I don't think that we'll ever see it happen - hardcore gaming just isn't a female thing to do.
of consoles the dedicated, standardised and predicatable hardware? Licensing the software will either degrade the quality of the games produced, as developers are forced to support a wider range of hardware, or worse, a broken end user experience, as people struggle with the boxes, trying to decide if game X will run on console X. Its a stupid idea, so I expect Microsoft to get behind it 100% in a failed attempt to prove everybody wrong.
Java should be great, but it isn't. For all the 'writeonce, run anywhere' gumpf that the marketing department came up with it failed in the most important test: usability. I can code pretty well in most languages, but as I work with Java, and was trained in Java at Uni, its the language I think most clearly in... unfortunately.
The fact is I can code a quick app in Java on my Mac, compile and send it my Dad on his Wintel and he won't have a clue what to do with it. I then have to spend 5 minutes on the phone explaining either how to install the JRE, or how to run it from the CLI. Whats worse is that once its running, it looks like I can't code, as Java, by default runs noticably slower as you wait for the JRE to bootstrap and then for the JIT to get all the important bits compiled. Why would I do that to myself?
Java is a great concept. But it has systematically failed on the desktop. What I want is a write once, compile anywhere. Same scenario, I want to have a compiler that I can target a Wintel platform from my mac and just send my dad the executable or installer, so all he has to do is double click - like he would any other app, and it run as well as a VB app (ie a little slower than native is fine). I would keep a few things from Java. I love GC for quick hack apps, fine grained memeory management has its place, but you can often feel like you reinventing the wheel, and its a gapping whole for the script kiddies to drive their payload through. I also love the central API. I can see the purists arguing against exceptions, but they do make debugging very easy, and they're not that expensive really. I also like the ease you can do threads. I don't like the GUI performance or the end user experience.
If MS isn't going to play ball, and support various runtime environments from a fresh install, or if Java continue on insisting on a 20MB JRE download I can't see anyway around the byte code problem except to distribute binaries. Qt is a good start. Mono and C# are good candidates, but to be honest I'd be tempted to take Java, bolt Qt onto it, and use GCC to create targeted binaries. Is that out of the question?
well not exactly. Its handsfree, I just talk in to the phone, the phone automagically turns the sound in to a series of 1s and 0s (dots and dashes) then converts them back into a sound at the other end! Fantastic! No learning curve, just instant messaging.
I live in the UK, so I'm more than aware of the actual use of SMS, I use it myself, but is it really worth devoting a week of my life to learning a code, that if I get really good at, may let me do 50 CHARACTORS a MINUTE! No. I know T9 isn't perfect, but its good enough esp as SMS is limited to 160 chars.
The technology I'm interested in is projected keyboards. I don't see why a bar code reader couldn't be modified to create a keyboard image that could be trasmited from a phone. You could detect breaking the lines, and thus know which key was pressed.
Lets assume that I can buy video from iTMS. Do I buy a video that fills my nice 20" widescreen (1080i), or do I buy one that suites my iPod (480p)?
Being Apple its going to come in H.264. Thats great. I love playing back H.264. What I don't love is encoding it. It took me over 24 hours to encode a 2 hour DVD. As my G5 can only just handle playing 1080i there seems little chance of an iPod handling it in the near future (hell, my powerbook can't do it). So do I download the 1080i then re-encode for my iPod, or do I download the 1080i version and get the 480p version for free? I don't think so. It seems more likely that Apple will charge us twice, or not offer the 1080i version. As for re-encoding, that seems unlikely too - unless the iPod has re-encoder built into it.
As this is obviously a post designed to generate speculation...
iTMS is not a good place to get movies. A good movie requires 2 hours on continuos attention, and on average I'll watch a purchased DVD twice. Music can be enjoyed in the background and I'll listen to a good song twice a day for a month. DVD is not even like books. In general, you can (even though its hard) put a good book down at any point and still enjoy it as much. Also, DVD take up too much space. iTunes is good, because I don't have to look for a CD anymore. Everything is in one place and instantly accessable. To be equivalent, 1080 would require home users to have close to 1TB of storage. Not unlikely, but not now.
iTMS is a great place for TV. I wouldn't mind picking up a 480p TV show. I watch TV exactly once. I know this, so I don't mind deleting it once I'm done - it hurt at first, but I haven't regretted it once (I'm a natural hoarder). I consume TV differently to DVD. I wouldn't mind there being advertisements. I wouldn't mind them tracking my viewing habits and giving me adverts that I want. I would like to be able to tell my iPod that I'm interested in a product and to add the products site to my 'adverts' bookmark folder. In this respect I'd expect Apple to step into the same role as a conventional network - just with a much larger audience. But in return I'd expect the content to be free. They could sell me an add free 1080i, as long as it had no adverts and I was free to burn it to Blu-ray and the cost was similar to a song. File size aside - $5 for a 60 minute show, that I watch once seems expensive - $20 a month all you can eat, now your talking.
I was doing some research for a "Green Diesel" company, O2 Diesel and examine their competitors: Diesel+water, Diesel+ethanol, FT Diesel (from coal), Natural Gas (converted to diesel), Vegetable Oil. Every single time I looked at the figures, vegetable oil seemed to make the most sense. It is totally renewable, there is capacity (just about) and it has lower emissions at source(not as good as pure ethanol, but better than fossil oil) and, because your growing more foods, the total emmission cycle was significantly better. The real problem was that it took more diesel to farm the land than you got out of it, and that was before processing and refining. It turns out this is well known and widely accepted.
So what can we do? Hybrid Tractors with solar panels? Actually thats probably not such a bad idea... i'm off to the patent office.
I'm not exactly an Apple Fan boi. I understand that they have their flaws etc but the move to x86 still doesn't fit right in my head and this news just crystalizes it for me.
In the past, we could all group around the fact that it was impossible to really tell if PPC was actually any good when compared to x86. We knew games sucked, but were confident in the fact that the desktop apps we owned 'felt snappier' and that we were more productive as a result. Now we're being told that actually x86 is probably about as good as PPC, and in the future it will be better. Thats fine. As long as I'm running on the best hardware for my Mac and I don't have to start waiting for the x86 version of my favourite apps to become available I don't care. But the problem is that we all know that Intel isn't the best at making x86 chips. So when I buy my 'Intel inside' Mac, I'm going to know that Joe 'AMD' Linux, with his fancy new 128bit, 1024 core, $15 AMD can, and will, actually toast my Mac, no questions asked, with verifiable benchmarks to prove it and I'm powerless to do anything about it without breaking the EULA. That sucks.
Bottom line: Apples hardware should be the best platform to run OS X. If that means using AMD, I want AMD in my Mac - and at the moment boy do I want one of those suckers in my Mac!
I'm not even sure its that. I know the US has the DMCA, but many countries don't. In many ways you can see MP3, DivX etc as an interpretation of a work, and therefore not covered by the original copyright. In many ways MP3 and DivX are equivalent to a synopsis of a work, where only the plot and few nuances are captured (lossy compression). The work is the creation of the compressor, if they choose to release it in to the public domain what is to stop them?
Is it fair that people be able to give these to each other for free? I can think of many times I've read the synopsis of a book and decided that I didn't want to buy it. Such is the free market. Is this analogy flawed? Well yes and no. In the case of music, the quality of a CD is clearly greater than an MP3, plus you get the album art etc... if I feel strongly enough about a song I'll buy the CD much like a book. But unlike a reading a synopsis, listening to a MP3 provides me with a similar experiance to listening to the original. So I need to be motivated by a sense of duty to actually buy a CD, rather than a desire to achieve the fully experience. What I think people are missing is that CDs arn't the product, music is. The real music experiance is a live performance - you simply cannot bottle that. CDs are adverts for performances. The fact that they've convinced us that they have value is a standing testament to creative marketing.
Its DVDs that I almost feel sorry for. Cult directors like Kevin Smith nearly always fail in the cinema (the performace in this context) but make a killing in the home DVD market. They may recoup some costs in TV viewings but rarely the millions that they see in DVD sales. The fact is that as much as I adore his movies, they don't require the big screen cinema experience unlike Starwars or a good Bond movie.
As far as software piracy is concerned, I'm not worried. FOSS is more than doing enough for me not to have to worry. Commercial, home user software is a dying art. If you want to make money out of software you have to sell your time to people willing to pay you to improve FOSS software. Requirements will always change, so software will always change. The only time I expect not to make a living out of code is if it becomes so trivial that people can program computers as easily as they program each other.
As my previous post clearly demonstrated IANAB(anker). You are right, I clearly overlooked fraud, and I have no idea how much that protection should cost. However, there does seem to be a gap in the market for a caveat emptor solution for micropayments that is equivalent to cash.
Fraud protection and the instant insurance benefits that I receive on large purchases over the internet via my credit card are services that I feel I pay for via either the annual subscription, or interest on repayment. If there is a cost involved in that transfer, that payment has been made by me through my descision to use that medium. Why should the vendor pay for my descision to protect my purchase? It is a service that I am very please with, but it is over kill for micorpayments, that I would, in the real world, use cash for.
Where is the service, like cash, where the transaction is secure from account to account, but there is no fraud protection. If I pay £0.20 for something, and I don't get it I won't mind if I don't get the money refunded by my bank until the money is recovered (if it ever is) and learn from the experience. I'm quite happy to hand the details of my transaction over to local authorities and let the fraud protection that I pay for with taxes (the police) handle this in there own time.
Can you see banks ever providing this service without legislation?
I can see that the best way for banks to introduce this would be to have a "Wallet" account. You agree to keep a minimum ammount in your wallet account (say £20-50) transactions made from that account are free, otherwise the bank may recoup a fee in the form of either a monthly fee, or a transaction fee of ~£0.20p. I know there was a trial of a similar card service, Mondex, that worked for micropayments in the real world, but the cost of terminals etc stopped the system from being cost effective. This would be different, in that there would be no need for terminals. Would this be viable?
This is damning to the banking industry. The age where they can get away with bank charges should be dead and burried. The idea that there are 10s of clerks monitoring each transaction, and therefore incurring a service fee is archaic and false. We are now paying to maintain a computer system, which if it was commisioned properly should have its costs covered by the interest they gain from investments they make with the money the hold for their clients.
In the UK at least, consumers are free to transfer money between accounts for free. But it takes between 3 and 5 days so they can gain interest (what were they doing the previous x days when it was in my account?). Businesses are routinely charged £0.20 a transaction and the transfers still take 3 to 5 days!!! How is this fair?
Banks have enough ways to generate money without charging buisnesses for micropayments.
I've always found changing my email address to be rather cathartic. People are used to others changing email addresses and if the messages arn't getting through there are still many other ways to communicate and ask for your new email address.
I've found that the worse thing you can do is have two accounts running at the same time. Its important that mail to the old address gets bounced, this spurs people to phone, jabber, check your website to find out what your new address is. If you leave the old account open, delays and lost mail worsen the problem. What I've found is that if people don't try and find out your new address... it probably wasn't that important. This applied to my business addresses as well as my personal ones.
I know how to 'steal' music but I don't because it simple isn't worth the hassel. For £0.79 a song I can find the song I want instantly, have it in my library with artwork at a guarenteed quality within a matter of seconds. I don't have to worry about spyware, malware or viruses and better yet I know that at least a couple of pence is going to towards the artist and I don't have to worry about getting arrested.
However laziness has led us into a situation which is probably worse - a digital music monopoly. It simply isn't worth the hassle of me to buy DRM music from another store and then rip out the DRM and convert it to AAC for the sake of a few pence per song. The only way I'll start shopping around is if I can point iTunes at differnt web stores. I can't see why, given the interface or protocols involved, this couldn't be easily achieved and still be as intuituative. I can see why it will be another 'hell has frozen over' moment before it happens (that or a court ruling).
If there is one thing you can rely on with a tool as widely used as an office suite is that it won't be used how you expect. In my short time on this earth I have seen:
Using Word as a drawing package
Using Word as a web dev environment
Using Word as a spreedsheet
Using PowerPoint to generate a company website
Using Excel as a database
Using publisher... yuck
But this should be expected and embrassed. The boundaries of word processor and desktop publisher have always been blurred. If you can put words on a printed page and pictures on a printed page, why shouldn't a word processor do both as easily as each other? Thats the nice thing about Pages. Joe Sixpack probably doesn't want a dedicated Word Processor and definately doesn't want a dedicated DTP package, what they want is software that lets them get words and pictures on to a page quickly, without reading a manual. Pages does that.
If Apple really are developing a spreedsheet, I hope that they see that Joe Sixpack, doesn't know the difference between a database and a spreedsheet... nor should they have to (for the data they'll be collating). Perhaps what they should really be developing is 'Tables'. All the Joe Sixpacks I know really want is a simple way of tabluating data making it look as pretty as possible - for boss points, and letting them graph it with little more than a button press. Excel, almost does this, but still too spreedsheety and gets very annoyed when you want to do things like put bullet points in the tables, or start using SQL to lookup data or worse still, format the pages to look pretty (nigh impossible).
But don't they do this already in their retail outlets?
I guess the states has three options:
Give up on sales tax for online vendors
Charge sales tax for the state where the US HQ are (Delaware becomes the the centre of the online shopping universe)
Charge sales tax for the destination address
Option three looks to be the biggest headache for online vendors, but its also the fairest. Like the GP said, 4500 tax rules is nothing, and there is nothing stopping a central service from providing this calculation for the smaller online companies, just like there are central services that handle card payment.
If you take a copy of something, but don't profit finacially from that product, where is the harm?
As I see there are three ways of making money out of software
Give it away and sell support
A commision
Selling a license to profit
Its the last one that I'd like to focus on. If you create a generic tool, that requires little support, perhaps the only way you can profit is by selling a licence to profit. By this I mean giving away the software and source code under a licence that prohibits the modification and use of that software for profit. This way people are free to use and learn a product before being commited to buy a product. If you are caught using the software for profit you can be sued, but normal business practice should be to procure a licence once the product has been approved for use.
Doesn't that feel fairer? I mean, if Joe Student downloads a copy of Final Cut Pro, uses it to create the movie that gets him noticed... he's gonna buy Final Cut Pro when he gets paid. Why should he pay upfront for software that he has no idea if he'll like, or will do what he needs, especially when the amount of money is more than he earns in a year.
Bean counters will hate this, but seriously software makes no money if there is no market. The more people that use the software the bigger the market. The only people who should pay to use a tool that costs you nothing to make or distribute, but $millions to develop are thoses that profit from it themselves. Charging the little guy to learn to use your product is stupid. Charging the big guys to teach you that product and provide it as a tool... thats good money.
The question is how do you get them to pay? Honesty and litigation - the same as we do now.
I'm a developer and I spend my whole life in front of a keyboard and I can't touch type.
I've tried DVORAK and QWERTY. Both times I said I'd go two weeks with nothing but touch typing. Both times at the end of the trial period I was still slower than tapping. What has suprised me is that now I'm working in a team of developers, nobody else touch types either. The only people that do are the secretaries.
Now I'm asking myself if its is worth the hassle - as even though I might be able to type faster with QWERTY touch typing I'll no doubt get RSI and have learn go back to tapping.
I can bearly justify Tigers hefty price tag to myself and thats for a well established, stable, powerful operating system that is supported by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft.
How can this compete with Linux and BSD with a 99 Euro price tag and limited application set? That has to be a typo right?
I worked as an office junior for a guy once who refused to by branded cartridges once he found out about them - in this case Epsom. The cartriges were about 2/3 of the price and when they worked were pretty close to the quality of the original... when they worked. Between increased maintenance, broken printers and destroyed print outs I can't see how the TCO was much less than double the price of the branded inks.
I can't blame the Police for wanting this so badly. It must seem to the uninformed, or technically optomistic as some sort of panacea.
Go to a crime seen
Collect biometric evidence
compare against the national database
Job done
This would be greate if biometric evidence couldn't be planted or national databases couldn't be hacked.
It would also be good if they could come up with a card that can 100% identify you as who you say you are. Douglas Adams had great fun with this concept in Mostly Harmless. I'm sure organized crime will have even more fun. If it is statically stored on a chip it can be read, unencrypted and faked. The more faith that is put in a system like this, the more it can and will be abused.
I just can't see any way that this can help the British public. I work for one of the large computer projects that they are citing as a failure in the article. The problem here is that we take our job, keeping private information private, very seriously. This means that what could normally be a very simple application is often a megalythic nightmare. This results in slow development time and high costs, and perceived inefficiency. This is all well and good if application is essential to reducing our already expensive beurocracy, I can't imagine what would happen when they're creating a system to actively increase the it.
Traditional languages that have had threads bolted on like C/C++ make threading more challenging than it needs to be. Java, as long as you understand the principles of concurrency, makes it a breeze. I would be interested to see weather a well coded JVM / JIT could outperform traditional languages on these new CPUs - especially if you could dedicate a couple of the hardware threads to JIT, and GC threads.
I know several people who would benefit from having a computer in their home. Until recently the barrier has been price, but now, even at $300 they're still reluctant and I don't blame them. It is entirely because they are still paying for more than they need. All they want is:
Web Browser
The odd micro game
Word Processing / Spreedsheets
Store / Display my photos
VoIP
Store / Play Back DivX/DVD and at a push H.264
Store / Play Back music
What we need is Palm OS x86. The only reason I wouldn't recomend a Palm to these people is they don't need to pay a premium for a low res LCD screen and a lithium battery and don't need to make do with portable input devices, a keyboard and trackball would be more than adequate (if a mouse is needed at all). If they could pick up a device that did all this, but was as easy to use as their phone I'm pretty sure they could be very marketable.
The problem with copyright is that its becoming a commodity. How long until artists can float copyright on an open market? That seems to be the end game for media corporations who consider copyrighted works stock.
But thats not what copyright was for. Copyright was designed to protect artists from having their works exploited without fair remuneration i.e. stop this kind of thing happening. It seems to me that this current legislation will do nothing but further enslave the creative - as their works become the property of someone else for longer, instead of being free to inspire more arts in the public domain.
Artists should be remunerated at every point at which their art is used for financial profit, not entertainment and education.
Artists should not be able to sell their copyright.
Copyright lasts as long as the artist - after that the works are public domain.
Why would a company employ an artist in these situations? Supply and demand. If you are producing a work for someone you are doing them a favor, not the other way around. If they could do it themselves, they would - such is the nature of a free market. Why people who pay for the works think they own it, is beyond me. You commision a painting you own the painting. You copy the painting, no harm is done. You sell the copy, you owe the artist an agreed percentage/lump sum.
Apple have understood that iPods arn't a geek application, they are a user application. In order to make them successful you need the holy trinity:
Player
Library
Store
All of these must work well individually, but when applied in unison, must absolutely rock. The only reason that Apple have succeeded is because they control each and everyone of these, allowing them to fine tune the user experience to such an extent that even a first time user can use them all as if they are a single application - because they are.
Apple are not winning because their store is the cheapest or most complete, it isn't. They are not winning because their player is the best, it isn't. They are not winning because their library is best, although it is. They are wining because it is easy, and people don't feel threatend by jargon and choice - they plug and play.
To acheive the choice that Microsoft knows we want, we would need:
A standard file format
A standard protocol between library and player
A standard protocol between library and store
A google like superstore that allows you to search the various stores, and compare the costs
This could possibly be achieved if the RIAA defined them and enforced them on pain of loosing distribution rights. People might then have the freedom to buy a new player and know it will work with the library they like and the store thats the cheapest. Until then Microsoft opening a new store, will make no difference at all.
Slashdot Mirror
This irks me. If somebody employees me to create a tool for them I am happy to do so and will hand it over to them copyright an all. If somebody employes me to do something for them, and I choose to automate that task using a tool, using skills that I have aquired to build that tool, then the tool should belong to me, not that company - so when I leave that company the tool leaves with me. Otherwise where is the bean counter incentive to keep me on?
I once had a job in a call centre for Dell (groan). They job was tedious. I was told I had to take data from a disk, print it out, then input it into a seperate program. They employed me as a call centre grunt, so I wasn't getting paid geek wages. I created a macro, and did a weeks worth of work in under an hour (the restriction was bandwidth). What am I ethically obliged to do in that situation? I tried telling my super, but they weren't interested as it threatend their jobs. In essence I had made myself, and my coworkers redundant in a little under a morning. Should I ask for more work when I was already doing more than they were employing me for? When I left I took the macro with me.
No really it was! Somebodies grand kids are never going to here the end of this!
There are many reasons why women arn't targeted by games manufacturers
Women arn't stupid enough to keep buying the same game. Women know that bigger numbers doesn't mean better gameplay.
Women arn't interested in scoring points, or winning in the same, obsessive way men are. In their eyes they've already won, by not playing the game in the first place.
Women have hightened color perception and perceive virtual worlds differently to men, in that they often get motion sickness from playing FPS. Being sick isn't fun.
Women know that virtually blowing somebody on the other side of the planet is not real human interaction. If you want to interact they would rather use a phone. In the eyes of many women - talking to the 13 year old that just whooped your ass is sad.
So what would women play? Sims was a classic female mind friendly game. Building relationships with no agenda makes a lot of sense to women. Nearly all the women I know love puzzle games, especially quick pick-ups like solitare, mine sweeper and tetris. However, deep stratergy like Chess, don't seem to stick (I guess its because you are actively competing in chess). I know a lot of women who love card games in the real world, but shy away from their online equivalent - because women play the people not the game.
You won't get women playing games until there is an all women programming house. People write games for fun, so you write games that are fun to you. Until women are actively programming games in large numbers, I don't think we'll see a gender shift - and to be honest I don't think that we'll ever see it happen - hardcore gaming just isn't a female thing to do.
of consoles the dedicated, standardised and predicatable hardware? Licensing the software will either degrade the quality of the games produced, as developers are forced to support a wider range of hardware, or worse, a broken end user experience, as people struggle with the boxes, trying to decide if game X will run on console X. Its a stupid idea, so I expect Microsoft to get behind it 100% in a failed attempt to prove everybody wrong.
Java should be great, but it isn't. For all the 'writeonce, run anywhere' gumpf that the marketing department came up with it failed in the most important test: usability. I can code pretty well in most languages, but as I work with Java, and was trained in Java at Uni, its the language I think most clearly in... unfortunately.
The fact is I can code a quick app in Java on my Mac, compile and send it my Dad on his Wintel and he won't have a clue what to do with it. I then have to spend 5 minutes on the phone explaining either how to install the JRE, or how to run it from the CLI. Whats worse is that once its running, it looks like I can't code, as Java, by default runs noticably slower as you wait for the JRE to bootstrap and then for the JIT to get all the important bits compiled. Why would I do that to myself?
Java is a great concept. But it has systematically failed on the desktop. What I want is a write once, compile anywhere. Same scenario, I want to have a compiler that I can target a Wintel platform from my mac and just send my dad the executable or installer, so all he has to do is double click - like he would any other app, and it run as well as a VB app (ie a little slower than native is fine). I would keep a few things from Java. I love GC for quick hack apps, fine grained memeory management has its place, but you can often feel like you reinventing the wheel, and its a gapping whole for the script kiddies to drive their payload through. I also love the central API. I can see the purists arguing against exceptions, but they do make debugging very easy, and they're not that expensive really. I also like the ease you can do threads. I don't like the GUI performance or the end user experience.
If MS isn't going to play ball, and support various runtime environments from a fresh install, or if Java continue on insisting on a 20MB JRE download I can't see anyway around the byte code problem except to distribute binaries. Qt is a good start. Mono and C# are good candidates, but to be honest I'd be tempted to take Java, bolt Qt onto it, and use GCC to create targeted binaries. Is that out of the question?
well not exactly. Its handsfree, I just talk in to the phone, the phone automagically turns the sound in to a series of 1s and 0s (dots and dashes) then converts them back into a sound at the other end! Fantastic! No learning curve, just instant messaging. I live in the UK, so I'm more than aware of the actual use of SMS, I use it myself, but is it really worth devoting a week of my life to learning a code, that if I get really good at, may let me do 50 CHARACTORS a MINUTE! No. I know T9 isn't perfect, but its good enough esp as SMS is limited to 160 chars. The technology I'm interested in is projected keyboards. I don't see why a bar code reader couldn't be modified to create a keyboard image that could be trasmited from a phone. You could detect breaking the lines, and thus know which key was pressed.
Lets assume that I can buy video from iTMS. Do I buy a video that fills my nice 20" widescreen (1080i), or do I buy one that suites my iPod (480p)?
Being Apple its going to come in H.264. Thats great. I love playing back H.264. What I don't love is encoding it. It took me over 24 hours to encode a 2 hour DVD. As my G5 can only just handle playing 1080i there seems little chance of an iPod handling it in the near future (hell, my powerbook can't do it). So do I download the 1080i then re-encode for my iPod, or do I download the 1080i version and get the 480p version for free? I don't think so. It seems more likely that Apple will charge us twice, or not offer the 1080i version. As for re-encoding, that seems unlikely too - unless the iPod has re-encoder built into it.
As this is obviously a post designed to generate speculation...
iTMS is not a good place to get movies. A good movie requires 2 hours on continuos attention, and on average I'll watch a purchased DVD twice. Music can be enjoyed in the background and I'll listen to a good song twice a day for a month. DVD is not even like books. In general, you can (even though its hard) put a good book down at any point and still enjoy it as much. Also, DVD take up too much space. iTunes is good, because I don't have to look for a CD anymore. Everything is in one place and instantly accessable. To be equivalent, 1080 would require home users to have close to 1TB of storage. Not unlikely, but not now.
iTMS is a great place for TV. I wouldn't mind picking up a 480p TV show. I watch TV exactly once. I know this, so I don't mind deleting it once I'm done - it hurt at first, but I haven't regretted it once (I'm a natural hoarder). I consume TV differently to DVD. I wouldn't mind there being advertisements. I wouldn't mind them tracking my viewing habits and giving me adverts that I want. I would like to be able to tell my iPod that I'm interested in a product and to add the products site to my 'adverts' bookmark folder. In this respect I'd expect Apple to step into the same role as a conventional network - just with a much larger audience. But in return I'd expect the content to be free. They could sell me an add free 1080i, as long as it had no adverts and I was free to burn it to Blu-ray and the cost was similar to a song. File size aside - $5 for a 60 minute show, that I watch once seems expensive - $20 a month all you can eat, now your talking.
I was doing some research for a "Green Diesel" company, O2 Diesel and examine their competitors: Diesel+water, Diesel+ethanol, FT Diesel (from coal), Natural Gas (converted to diesel), Vegetable Oil. Every single time I looked at the figures, vegetable oil seemed to make the most sense. It is totally renewable, there is capacity (just about) and it has lower emissions at source(not as good as pure ethanol, but better than fossil oil) and, because your growing more foods, the total emmission cycle was significantly better. The real problem was that it took more diesel to farm the land than you got out of it, and that was before processing and refining. It turns out this is well known and widely accepted.
So what can we do? Hybrid Tractors with solar panels? Actually thats probably not such a bad idea... i'm off to the patent office.
I'm not exactly an Apple Fan boi. I understand that they have their flaws etc but the move to x86 still doesn't fit right in my head and this news just crystalizes it for me.
In the past, we could all group around the fact that it was impossible to really tell if PPC was actually any good when compared to x86. We knew games sucked, but were confident in the fact that the desktop apps we owned 'felt snappier' and that we were more productive as a result. Now we're being told that actually x86 is probably about as good as PPC, and in the future it will be better. Thats fine. As long as I'm running on the best hardware for my Mac and I don't have to start waiting for the x86 version of my favourite apps to become available I don't care. But the problem is that we all know that Intel isn't the best at making x86 chips. So when I buy my 'Intel inside' Mac, I'm going to know that Joe 'AMD' Linux, with his fancy new 128bit, 1024 core, $15 AMD can, and will, actually toast my Mac, no questions asked, with verifiable benchmarks to prove it and I'm powerless to do anything about it without breaking the EULA. That sucks.
Bottom line: Apples hardware should be the best platform to run OS X. If that means using AMD, I want AMD in my Mac - and at the moment boy do I want one of those suckers in my Mac!
I'm not even sure its that. I know the US has the DMCA, but many countries don't. In many ways you can see MP3, DivX etc as an interpretation of a work, and therefore not covered by the original copyright. In many ways MP3 and DivX are equivalent to a synopsis of a work, where only the plot and few nuances are captured (lossy compression). The work is the creation of the compressor, if they choose to release it in to the public domain what is to stop them?
Is it fair that people be able to give these to each other for free? I can think of many times I've read the synopsis of a book and decided that I didn't want to buy it. Such is the free market. Is this analogy flawed? Well yes and no. In the case of music, the quality of a CD is clearly greater than an MP3, plus you get the album art etc... if I feel strongly enough about a song I'll buy the CD much like a book. But unlike a reading a synopsis, listening to a MP3 provides me with a similar experiance to listening to the original. So I need to be motivated by a sense of duty to actually buy a CD, rather than a desire to achieve the fully experience. What I think people are missing is that CDs arn't the product, music is. The real music experiance is a live performance - you simply cannot bottle that. CDs are adverts for performances. The fact that they've convinced us that they have value is a standing testament to creative marketing.
Its DVDs that I almost feel sorry for. Cult directors like Kevin Smith nearly always fail in the cinema (the performace in this context) but make a killing in the home DVD market. They may recoup some costs in TV viewings but rarely the millions that they see in DVD sales. The fact is that as much as I adore his movies, they don't require the big screen cinema experience unlike Starwars or a good Bond movie.
As far as software piracy is concerned, I'm not worried. FOSS is more than doing enough for me not to have to worry. Commercial, home user software is a dying art. If you want to make money out of software you have to sell your time to people willing to pay you to improve FOSS software. Requirements will always change, so software will always change. The only time I expect not to make a living out of code is if it becomes so trivial that people can program computers as easily as they program each other.
As my previous post clearly demonstrated IANAB(anker). You are right, I clearly overlooked fraud, and I have no idea how much that protection should cost. However, there does seem to be a gap in the market for a caveat emptor solution for micropayments that is equivalent to cash.
Fraud protection and the instant insurance benefits that I receive on large purchases over the internet via my credit card are services that I feel I pay for via either the annual subscription, or interest on repayment. If there is a cost involved in that transfer, that payment has been made by me through my descision to use that medium. Why should the vendor pay for my descision to protect my purchase? It is a service that I am very please with, but it is over kill for micorpayments, that I would, in the real world, use cash for.
Where is the service, like cash, where the transaction is secure from account to account, but there is no fraud protection. If I pay £0.20 for something, and I don't get it I won't mind if I don't get the money refunded by my bank until the money is recovered (if it ever is) and learn from the experience. I'm quite happy to hand the details of my transaction over to local authorities and let the fraud protection that I pay for with taxes (the police) handle this in there own time.
Can you see banks ever providing this service without legislation?
I can see that the best way for banks to introduce this would be to have a "Wallet" account. You agree to keep a minimum ammount in your wallet account (say £20-50) transactions made from that account are free, otherwise the bank may recoup a fee in the form of either a monthly fee, or a transaction fee of ~£0.20p. I know there was a trial of a similar card service, Mondex, that worked for micropayments in the real world, but the cost of terminals etc stopped the system from being cost effective. This would be different, in that there would be no need for terminals. Would this be viable?
This is damning to the banking industry. The age where they can get away with bank charges should be dead and burried. The idea that there are 10s of clerks monitoring each transaction, and therefore incurring a service fee is archaic and false. We are now paying to maintain a computer system, which if it was commisioned properly should have its costs covered by the interest they gain from investments they make with the money the hold for their clients.
In the UK at least, consumers are free to transfer money between accounts for free. But it takes between 3 and 5 days so they can gain interest (what were they doing the previous x days when it was in my account?). Businesses are routinely charged £0.20 a transaction and the transfers still take 3 to 5 days!!! How is this fair?
Banks have enough ways to generate money without charging buisnesses for micropayments.
I've always found changing my email address to be rather cathartic. People are used to others changing email addresses and if the messages arn't getting through there are still many other ways to communicate and ask for your new email address.
I've found that the worse thing you can do is have two accounts running at the same time. Its important that mail to the old address gets bounced, this spurs people to phone, jabber, check your website to find out what your new address is. If you leave the old account open, delays and lost mail worsen the problem. What I've found is that if people don't try and find out your new address... it probably wasn't that important. This applied to my business addresses as well as my personal ones.
People may be cheap, but they sure is lazy.
I know how to 'steal' music but I don't because it simple isn't worth the hassel. For £0.79 a song I can find the song I want instantly, have it in my library with artwork at a guarenteed quality within a matter of seconds. I don't have to worry about spyware, malware or viruses and better yet I know that at least a couple of pence is going to towards the artist and I don't have to worry about getting arrested.
However laziness has led us into a situation which is probably worse - a digital music monopoly. It simply isn't worth the hassle of me to buy DRM music from another store and then rip out the DRM and convert it to AAC for the sake of a few pence per song. The only way I'll start shopping around is if I can point iTunes at differnt web stores. I can't see why, given the interface or protocols involved, this couldn't be easily achieved and still be as intuituative. I can see why it will be another 'hell has frozen over' moment before it happens (that or a court ruling).
If there is one thing you can rely on with a tool as widely used as an office suite is that it won't be used how you expect. In my short time on this earth I have seen:
But this should be expected and embrassed. The boundaries of word processor and desktop publisher have always been blurred. If you can put words on a printed page and pictures on a printed page, why shouldn't a word processor do both as easily as each other? Thats the nice thing about Pages. Joe Sixpack probably doesn't want a dedicated Word Processor and definately doesn't want a dedicated DTP package, what they want is software that lets them get words and pictures on to a page quickly, without reading a manual. Pages does that.
If Apple really are developing a spreedsheet, I hope that they see that Joe Sixpack, doesn't know the difference between a database and a spreedsheet... nor should they have to (for the data they'll be collating). Perhaps what they should really be developing is 'Tables'. All the Joe Sixpacks I know really want is a simple way of tabluating data making it look as pretty as possible - for boss points, and letting them graph it with little more than a button press. Excel, almost does this, but still too spreedsheety and gets very annoyed when you want to do things like put bullet points in the tables, or start using SQL to lookup data or worse still, format the pages to look pretty (nigh impossible).
But don't they do this already in their retail outlets?
I guess the states has three options:
Option three looks to be the biggest headache for online vendors, but its also the fairest. Like the GP said, 4500 tax rules is nothing, and there is nothing stopping a central service from providing this calculation for the smaller online companies, just like there are central services that handle card payment.
If you take a copy of something, but don't profit finacially from that product, where is the harm?
As I see there are three ways of making money out of software
Its the last one that I'd like to focus on. If you create a generic tool, that requires little support, perhaps the only way you can profit is by selling a licence to profit. By this I mean giving away the software and source code under a licence that prohibits the modification and use of that software for profit. This way people are free to use and learn a product before being commited to buy a product. If you are caught using the software for profit you can be sued, but normal business practice should be to procure a licence once the product has been approved for use.
Doesn't that feel fairer? I mean, if Joe Student downloads a copy of Final Cut Pro, uses it to create the movie that gets him noticed... he's gonna buy Final Cut Pro when he gets paid. Why should he pay upfront for software that he has no idea if he'll like, or will do what he needs, especially when the amount of money is more than he earns in a year.
Bean counters will hate this, but seriously software makes no money if there is no market. The more people that use the software the bigger the market. The only people who should pay to use a tool that costs you nothing to make or distribute, but $millions to develop are thoses that profit from it themselves. Charging the little guy to learn to use your product is stupid. Charging the big guys to teach you that product and provide it as a tool... thats good money.
The question is how do you get them to pay? Honesty and litigation - the same as we do now.
I'm a developer and I spend my whole life in front of a keyboard and I can't touch type.
I've tried DVORAK and QWERTY. Both times I said I'd go two weeks with nothing but touch typing. Both times at the end of the trial period I was still slower than tapping. What has suprised me is that now I'm working in a team of developers, nobody else touch types either. The only people that do are the secretaries.
Now I'm asking myself if its is worth the hassle - as even though I might be able to type faster with QWERTY touch typing I'll no doubt get RSI and have learn go back to tapping.
I can bearly justify Tigers hefty price tag to myself and thats for a well established, stable, powerful operating system that is supported by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft. How can this compete with Linux and BSD with a 99 Euro price tag and limited application set? That has to be a typo right?
I worked as an office junior for a guy once who refused to by branded cartridges once he found out about them - in this case Epsom. The cartriges were about 2/3 of the price and when they worked were pretty close to the quality of the original... when they worked. Between increased maintenance, broken printers and destroyed print outs I can't see how the TCO was much less than double the price of the branded inks.
I can't blame the Police for wanting this so badly. It must seem to the uninformed, or technically optomistic as some sort of panacea.
This would be greate if biometric evidence couldn't be planted or national databases couldn't be hacked.
It would also be good if they could come up with a card that can 100% identify you as who you say you are. Douglas Adams had great fun with this concept in Mostly Harmless. I'm sure organized crime will have even more fun. If it is statically stored on a chip it can be read, unencrypted and faked. The more faith that is put in a system like this, the more it can and will be abused.
I just can't see any way that this can help the British public. I work for one of the large computer projects that they are citing as a failure in the article. The problem here is that we take our job, keeping private information private, very seriously. This means that what could normally be a very simple application is often a megalythic nightmare. This results in slow development time and high costs, and perceived inefficiency. This is all well and good if application is essential to reducing our already expensive beurocracy, I can't imagine what would happen when they're creating a system to actively increase the it.
Traditional languages that have had threads bolted on like C/C++ make threading more challenging than it needs to be. Java, as long as you understand the principles of concurrency, makes it a breeze. I would be interested to see weather a well coded JVM / JIT could outperform traditional languages on these new CPUs - especially if you could dedicate a couple of the hardware threads to JIT, and GC threads.
I know several people who would benefit from having a computer in their home. Until recently the barrier has been price, but now, even at $300 they're still reluctant and I don't blame them. It is entirely because they are still paying for more than they need. All they want is:
What we need is Palm OS x86. The only reason I wouldn't recomend a Palm to these people is they don't need to pay a premium for a low res LCD screen and a lithium battery and don't need to make do with portable input devices, a keyboard and trackball would be more than adequate (if a mouse is needed at all). If they could pick up a device that did all this, but was as easy to use as their phone I'm pretty sure they could be very marketable.
The problem with copyright is that its becoming a commodity. How long until artists can float copyright on an open market? That seems to be the end game for media corporations who consider copyrighted works stock.
But thats not what copyright was for. Copyright was designed to protect artists from having their works exploited without fair remuneration i.e. stop this kind of thing happening. It seems to me that this current legislation will do nothing but further enslave the creative - as their works become the property of someone else for longer, instead of being free to inspire more arts in the public domain.
Why would a company employ an artist in these situations? Supply and demand. If you are producing a work for someone you are doing them a favor, not the other way around. If they could do it themselves, they would - such is the nature of a free market. Why people who pay for the works think they own it, is beyond me. You commision a painting you own the painting. You copy the painting, no harm is done. You sell the copy, you owe the artist an agreed percentage/lump sum.
All of these must work well individually, but when applied in unison, must absolutely rock. The only reason that Apple have succeeded is because they control each and everyone of these, allowing them to fine tune the user experience to such an extent that even a first time user can use them all as if they are a single application - because they are.
Apple are not winning because their store is the cheapest or most complete, it isn't. They are not winning because their player is the best, it isn't. They are not winning because their library is best, although it is. They are wining because it is easy, and people don't feel threatend by jargon and choice - they plug and play.
To acheive the choice that Microsoft knows we want, we would need:
This could possibly be achieved if the RIAA defined them and enforced them on pain of loosing distribution rights. People might then have the freedom to buy a new player and know it will work with the library they like and the store thats the cheapest. Until then Microsoft opening a new store, will make no difference at all.