The webcam was given to me, the modem came from the ISP (I use my own router any way), and I don't really care that the phone isn't supported. The only thing I need to hook it up for is installing apps, and I only do that very occasionally, so rebooting is no great hardship. I selected the phone on other grounds. Which, really, is my point. Every phones software works with windows. "Is it compatible with my OS is not an issue for windows users. Despite all the strides made in the last few years, it still is for Linux users.
I am so fed up of reading this. Yes, Linux has more drivers installed "out of the box" than windows. Big deal. Every single piece of hardware I have ever bought came with a CD that had drivers for windows. Yes, it's a bit of pain having to install them all manually after reinstalling the OS, but you only have to do it once. It's far more of a pain to find that you shiny new toy has no working drivers for Linux.
I use Linux as my desktop OS, but I am no prepared to ignore it's shortcomings. From where I'm sitting right now I can see three devices that do not work with Linux. All of them have drivers for XP (not sure about vista).
I see hardware support like this. If a driver exists for Linux, then the support is generally far better than windows. You plug it in, it works. If, however, your distro does not have a driver, then you are very probably shit out of luck. The device will either not work at all, or require hours of fiddling. Windows on the other hand, has virtually no "out of the box" support. Plug anything in and prepare to be met with yellow exclamation marks in the device manager. The difference is that unless it's some ancient or obscure bit of kit, it will either come with a driver disk or have a driver available on the manufactures web site. Every piece of hardware you could buy works with windows.*
And since you asked:
My PCLine webcam, my Nokia phone, and the USB modem my ISP gave me. Now to be fair, it might be possible to coax all of these devices into working if you know the correct incantations and rituals, but in every case they failed to work "out of the box".
* Before someone replies to me with an example of a device that won't work in windows, allow me to qualify this. I'm referring to to desktop hardware, manufactured in the last, ooh, lets say seven years. I defy you to find anything on PC world's shelves that is not Windows XP compatible ( I have never used Vista, so in a break with Slashdot tradition, I'm not going to spout off about something I know nothing about). I'll bet you a months salary I can find something that won't work with Linux.
I'm not too sure I agree with you here. Prior to the printing press, as you point out, literacy was a skill set very few people possessed, and the scarcity of texts certainly helped to perpetuate this state of affairs. With the advent of the printing press, texts became far more common place, and hence there was more incentive and opportunity to learn to read.
In a similar fashion, programming is a skill set possessed by relatively few people, but I don't think scarcity of available code or a lack of opportunity to learn is the reason. Ever since the advent of home computers, every bookshop and library has carried text books, crammed with examples and information that will teach you to code. The first computer I ever owned came with a built in basic interpreter and a manual that taught you how to program it. GCC is a huge boon to anyone wanting to learn to program, but you can download a compiler for free form MS's web site and learn with that ( admittedly, their are restrictions on what you can do with programs compiled by it).
I can see why you might want to draw the comparison , but it's a fatally flawed analogy in my opinion. Stick to cars.
. People claiming it "bricks" their machine are just trying to spread the FUD as its VERY easy to fix with your xp cd (and with zero data loss) - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184 will show how.
Several people have pointed this out, but here's a question for you: What if you don't have an XP disc? A lot of OEM machines only come with a "restore disc", which are normally just a disc image. Running one of these will normally wipe the entire contents of the HDD as well, causing, well, data loss.
Also, to your claim that the machines are not actually "bricked", I would say that they might as well be to a lot of users. I have plenty of friends who play a lot of MMOs, and most of them would not have the first clue what to do if confronted with this problem.
Because the whole argument has nothing to do with quality, file size, or even, when we get right down to it, cost. It all comes down to market share. If a web store opens up selling WMAs, no one with an ipod will be able to play them, so seventy percent of the market is now closed to them. If they opt for AAC the sure, they get the iPod as well as the Zune ( I think the Creative players as well, but I'm not sure), but plenty of other devices don't support AAC. If they picked ogg, they would be limiting their market even further, to around two people, give or take ( Just kidding ).
MP3 on the other hand, is supported by everything. Every audio player, car stereo, phone, PDA, DVD player, console, everything, they all play MP3s. MP3 is the epitome of "good enough", for everyone except the real hardcore audiophiles.
Well, I've never used photoshop on a Mac, but I have used GIMP on Linux, and I'll explain very simply why I despise the interface with such a pasion that I would rather reboot the computer than use it.
Lets say I have a document open in the GIMP. Now, if I click on the taskbar icon representing that document, their is a very good chance that I will be wanting to, oh, I don't know, maybe edit the image. But I can't right away, because all the editing tools are in another window, so I have to click on a separate taskbar icon to get at them. Then, having having selected my required tool, I have to click on another taskbar icon to bring up the Layers pallette. Three separate buttons buttons to click just to get all my tools to come up.
I actually quite like the idea of having separate windows, and I'm not by any means a slave to the MDI paradigm, but that one annoyance drives me up the wall. If I click on an image, the tools to edit that image should be brought to the top as well. Why else would I have an image open in GIMP other than to edit it?
I might be missing something, but that seems to back up the parents assertion. He's talking about bbc.co.uk, the front page of the site, not the iPlayer specific pages
A while back I was listening to a Bill Hicks stand up routine from the early nineties. It was full of jokes about the war in Iraq, George Bush, and how Clinton was going to win the election.
Just incase you don't want to click on the link, they have vista at 7.3 percent and Macs at 6.5. If you go to the precious month, Vista had 6.2, Macs had 6.3, so Vista would seem to be growing faster than Mac OS, largely, it appears, at the expense of XP. Really though, this is inevitable, since virtually every new PC sold comes with Vista. Still, judging from the trends, you ought to stop making that claim. It's already debatable, and it's only going to get more wrong as time goes by.
For, I would speculate, the following two reasons.
One, because the famed "it just works" appeal of OSX might be a little harder to maintain if they had to support every piece of shitty third party hardware out there.
Two, because they would really like to keep selling lots of Macbooks, iMacs and Mac Pros. If anyone can just build a knock off case and load OSX on any hardware, Apple would soon find themselves being undercut.
Personally, I'm waiting for the hack that lets it play xvid encoded videos. Once that's taken care of, I'll be buying one of these. Which will make it the first apple product I have ever owned.
I didn't realise they did season bundles. They don't support my platform, so I couldn't install itunes to check.
Even so, that amounts to a one pound saving. In return for that one pound you get physical copies, a nice box, all the extra features, and in a format you can rip to disk and do whatever you like with.I still maintain that the pricing on itunes is straight up insane. I would be willing to pay a maximum of 50p for an episode on itunes, which makes a season cost about one third what the DVDs cost. I'm convinced that would be a fair price, because it takes into the lower value of a download as opposed to a physical copy, and the fact that their costs for a download must be far lower.
What happens if you copy a tv show on a vcr tape and lend the copy to a friend?
Well, where I live (UK), that's copyright infringement, and technically illegal.Not that you would get prosecuted for it.
In the digital world capture it to file send to friend over bittorrent or email or something. I don't see the difference in the 2 methods?
Under UK law, also illegal.
Also a good point is capturing it in one location and watching it another remotely? If i have a big enough atenna i can watch broadcasts 100's of miles away. With internet if i have a tv capture card in somepart of the world i can watch it remotely over the internet from anywhere i am at
Probably not copyright infringement, since you are not making a copy, although there may be other legal issues.
I agree with everything you say, but in my opinion the prices for these downloads are just insane, and that's at least as off putting as the DRM. itunes sell episodes of, say, Greys Anatomy (hate that show) for £1.89. So, a twenty two episode season will cost £41.58. Well, for £34 I can have the same twenty two episodes delivered to my door.
So, for less money I can get a better product (nice box, extra features, physical copies, I can rip it to any format I want.). Why the hell would I choose to pay more for less?
If these are shows that are broadcast over the airwaves, don't you have the legal right to receive them? If you _download_ a show that you already have rights to watch as an OTA broadcast, how is it copyright infringement?
Even though you have the right to receive them over the airwaves, you do NOT have the right to redistribute them. And since someone has to redistribute them in order for you to download them, there is clearly copyright infringement taking place.
Even if you could argue "I have the right to a copy of it because it was freely broadcast" (which you probably can't, but lets pretend for a second) you certainly can't argue that because they broadcast it freely you have the right to distribute copies.
Not that I give a fuck. I download every show I watch from TV Torrents.
I think when he said USB, he was talking about USB devices in general. Sure, flash drives work, but I personally own four USB devices (all fairly new) which just don't work, at all, with Linux.
And when he said video, I'm assuming he was talking about capturing and editing video, not playing WMV files. I have heard this is an area where Linux lags far behind XP and OSX, but it's also an area about which I am completely ignorant .
That article clearly suggests Dell make around $50 to $60 by having all those ISP trials and software demos pre-loaded. All OEMs put the same crap on their machines, so it's fairly reasonable to assume that they all make broadly similar amounts. Now, purely for the sake of argument, lets pretend that the only cost differential between a Dell with FreeDOS and a Dell with Windows is the OS licence (it isn't of course, but what the hell).
So, Dell lose $60 of revenue from having no "craplets". They then gain back whatever the Windows licence would have cost them, but I doubt they pay retail price. If they were paying less than $60 for a windows licence, a figure which is not too unlikely, then the FreeDOS machine SHOULD cost more, and that's before you factor in the cost of adapting the production line to produce machines without Windows pre-installed.
Except that it's not. The fact that a product is available does not imply that you have aright to own a copy, nor does it imply that the producers of that show have an obligation to sell it you. You are quite right to point out that without the consumers the TV stations are nothing. So abstain from buying their products and make them nothing. But to pretend that you have the absolute right to own a copy own copy of Dexter is ludicrous.
Incidentely, I do own a copy of Dexter season one, which I downloaded illegally. I just don't feel any need to pretend that the producers owed me a copy on my terms.
OH MY GOD!!! WAIT TILL THE END OF THE SEASON!!! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Seriously, what on earth makes you think you have the right to get the shows you want, when you want them, in exactly the format you want? Do book buyers have a right to demand paperback versions of books are released at the same time as hard backs rather than six months later?
Personally, I illegally download every TV show I watch. I just don't feel the need to pretend I have a right to do so.
Admittedly, I'm being a little facetious there. A promise isn't legally binding as such, but if you rely on someones promise not enforce a copyright, and as a result of that reliance breach their copyright, they will almost certainly be prevented from enforcing that copyright by the doctrine of promissory estoppel.
I'm only familiar with the doctrine as it is applied in English law, but Wikipedia seems to indicate that US law is pretty similar.
Slashdot Mirror
The webcam was given to me, the modem came from the ISP (I use my own router any way), and I don't really care that the phone isn't supported. The only thing I need to hook it up for is installing apps, and I only do that very occasionally, so rebooting is no great hardship. I selected the phone on other grounds. Which, really, is my point. Every phones software works with windows. "Is it compatible with my OS is not an issue for windows users. Despite all the strides made in the last few years, it still is for Linux users.
I am so fed up of reading this. Yes, Linux has more drivers installed "out of the box" than windows. Big deal. Every single piece of hardware I have ever bought came with a CD that had drivers for windows. Yes, it's a bit of pain having to install them all manually after reinstalling the OS, but you only have to do it once. It's far more of a pain to find that you shiny new toy has no working drivers for Linux.
I use Linux as my desktop OS, but I am no prepared to ignore it's shortcomings. From where I'm sitting right now I can see three devices that do not work with Linux. All of them have drivers for XP (not sure about vista).
I see hardware support like this. If a driver exists for Linux, then the support is generally far better than windows. You plug it in, it works. If, however, your distro does not have a driver, then you are very probably shit out of luck. The device will either not work at all, or require hours of fiddling. Windows on the other hand, has virtually no "out of the box" support. Plug anything in and prepare to be met with yellow exclamation marks in the device manager. The difference is that unless it's some ancient or obscure bit of kit, it will either come with a driver disk or have a driver available on the manufactures web site. Every piece of hardware you could buy works with windows.*
And since you asked:
My PCLine webcam, my Nokia phone, and the USB modem my ISP gave me. Now to be fair, it might be possible to coax all of these devices into working if you know the correct incantations and rituals, but in every case they failed to work "out of the box".
* Before someone replies to me with an example of a device that won't work in windows, allow me to qualify this. I'm referring to to desktop hardware, manufactured in the last, ooh, lets say seven years. I defy you to find anything on PC world's shelves that is not Windows XP compatible ( I have never used Vista, so in a break with Slashdot tradition, I'm not going to spout off about something I know nothing about). I'll bet you a months salary I can find something that won't work with Linux.
I think you're quoting Richard Branson. The correct quote, if memory serves, was actually:
Questioner "Mr Branson, how can someone become a millionaire?"
Branson "It's easy. Just become a billionaire, then buy an airline."
I'm not too sure I agree with you here. Prior to the printing press, as you point out, literacy was a skill set very few people possessed, and the scarcity of texts certainly helped to perpetuate this state of affairs. With the advent of the printing press, texts became far more common place, and hence there was more incentive and opportunity to learn to read.
In a similar fashion, programming is a skill set possessed by relatively few people, but I don't think scarcity of available code or a lack of opportunity to learn is the reason. Ever since the advent of home computers, every bookshop and library has carried text books, crammed with examples and information that will teach you to code. The first computer I ever owned came with a built in basic interpreter and a manual that taught you how to program it. GCC is a huge boon to anyone wanting to learn to program, but you can download a compiler for free form MS's web site and learn with that ( admittedly, their are restrictions on what you can do with programs compiled by it).
I can see why you might want to draw the comparison , but it's a fatally flawed analogy in my opinion. Stick to cars.
. People claiming it "bricks" their machine are just trying to spread the FUD as its VERY easy to fix with your xp cd (and with zero data loss) - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184 will show how.
Several people have pointed this out, but here's a question for you: What if you don't have an XP disc? A lot of OEM machines only come with a "restore disc", which are normally just a disc image. Running one of these will normally wipe the entire contents of the HDD as well, causing, well, data loss.
Also, to your claim that the machines are not actually "bricked", I would say that they might as well be to a lot of users. I have plenty of friends who play a lot of MMOs, and most of them would not have the first clue what to do if confronted with this problem.
Because the whole argument has nothing to do with quality, file size, or even, when we get right down to it, cost. It all comes down to market share. If a web store opens up selling WMAs, no one with an ipod will be able to play them, so seventy percent of the market is now closed to them. If they opt for AAC the sure, they get the iPod as well as the Zune ( I think the Creative players as well, but I'm not sure), but plenty of other devices don't support AAC. If they picked ogg, they would be limiting their market even further, to around two people, give or take ( Just kidding ).
MP3 on the other hand, is supported by everything. Every audio player, car stereo, phone, PDA, DVD player, console, everything, they all play MP3s. MP3 is the epitome of "good enough", for everyone except the real hardcore audiophiles.
No, in the "good old days", we called that an alpha.
Started badly, tailed off a little in the middle, and the less said about the ending the better.
Well, I've never used photoshop on a Mac, but I have used GIMP on Linux, and I'll explain very simply why I despise the interface with such a pasion that I would rather reboot the computer than use it.
Lets say I have a document open in the GIMP. Now, if I click on the taskbar icon representing that document, their is a very good chance that I will be wanting to, oh, I don't know, maybe edit the image. But I can't right away, because all the editing tools are in another window, so I have to click on a separate taskbar icon to get at them. Then, having having selected my required tool, I have to click on another taskbar icon to bring up the Layers pallette. Three separate buttons buttons to click just to get all my tools to come up.
I actually quite like the idea of having separate windows, and I'm not by any means a slave to the MDI paradigm, but that one annoyance drives me up the wall. If I click on an image, the tools to edit that image should be brought to the top as well. Why else would I have an image open in GIMP other than to edit it?
Actually, I think the article may have printed 400 instead of 40,000, or something like that, because 400 out of 17.6 million seems insanely low.
I might be missing something, but that seems to back up the parents assertion. He's talking about bbc.co.uk, the front page of the site, not the iPlayer specific pages
A while back I was listening to a Bill Hicks stand up routine from the early nineties. It was full of jokes about the war in Iraq, George Bush, and how Clinton was going to win the election.
Today, more people are using OSX than Vista, and at Vista's current growth rates, this may inevitably remain a fact
I found that a little dubious, so I looked ip some figures. The first thing I came across was this:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
Just incase you don't want to click on the link, they have vista at 7.3 percent and Macs at 6.5. If you go to the precious month, Vista had 6.2, Macs had 6.3, so Vista would seem to be growing faster than Mac OS, largely, it appears, at the expense of XP. Really though, this is inevitable, since virtually every new PC sold comes with Vista. Still, judging from the trends, you ought to stop making that claim. It's already debatable, and it's only going to get more wrong as time goes by.
For, I would speculate, the following two reasons.
One, because the famed "it just works" appeal of OSX might be a little harder to maintain if they had to support every piece of shitty third party hardware out there.
Two, because they would really like to keep selling lots of Macbooks, iMacs and Mac Pros. If anyone can just build a knock off case and load OSX on any hardware, Apple would soon find themselves being undercut.
Personally, I'm waiting for the hack that lets it play xvid encoded videos. Once that's taken care of, I'll be buying one of these. Which will make it the first apple product I have ever owned.
I didn't realise they did season bundles. They don't support my platform, so I couldn't install itunes to check.
Even so, that amounts to a one pound saving. In return for that one pound you get physical copies, a nice box, all the extra features, and in a format you can rip to disk and do whatever you like with.I still maintain that the pricing on itunes is straight up insane. I would be willing to pay a maximum of 50p for an episode on itunes, which makes a season cost about one third what the DVDs cost. I'm convinced that would be a fair price, because it takes into the lower value of a download as opposed to a physical copy, and the fact that their costs for a download must be far lower.
What happens if you copy a tv show on a vcr tape and lend the copy to a friend?
Well, where I live (UK), that's copyright infringement, and technically illegal.Not that you would get prosecuted for it.
In the digital world capture it to file send to friend over bittorrent or email or something. I don't see the difference in the 2 methods?
Under UK law, also illegal.
Also a good point is capturing it in one location and watching it another remotely? If i have a big enough atenna i can watch broadcasts 100's of miles away. With internet if i have a tv capture card in somepart of the world i can watch it remotely over the internet from anywhere i am at
Probably not copyright infringement, since you are not making a copy, although there may be other legal issues.
I agree with everything you say, but in my opinion the prices for these downloads are just insane, and that's at least as off putting as the DRM. itunes sell episodes of, say, Greys Anatomy (hate that show) for £1.89. So, a twenty two episode season will cost £41.58. Well, for £34 I can have the same twenty two episodes delivered to my door.
So, for less money I can get a better product (nice box, extra features, physical copies, I can rip it to any format I want.). Why the hell would I choose to pay more for less?
If these are shows that are broadcast over the airwaves, don't you have the legal right to receive them? If you _download_ a show that you already have rights to watch as an OTA broadcast, how is it copyright infringement?
Even though you have the right to receive them over the airwaves, you do NOT have the right to redistribute them. And since someone has to redistribute them in order for you to download them, there is clearly copyright infringement taking place.
Even if you could argue "I have the right to a copy of it because it was freely broadcast" (which you probably can't, but lets pretend for a second) you certainly can't argue that because they broadcast it freely you have the right to distribute copies.
Not that I give a fuck. I download every show I watch from TV Torrents.
I think when he said USB, he was talking about USB devices in general. Sure, flash drives work, but I personally own four USB devices (all fairly new) which just don't work, at all, with Linux.
And when he said video, I'm assuming he was talking about capturing and editing video, not playing WMV files. I have heard this is an area where Linux lags far behind XP and OSX, but it's also an area about which I am completely ignorant .
Take a look at this.
That article clearly suggests Dell make around $50 to $60 by having all those ISP trials and software demos pre-loaded. All OEMs put the same crap on their machines, so it's fairly reasonable to assume that they all make broadly similar amounts. Now, purely for the sake of argument, lets pretend that the only cost differential between a Dell with FreeDOS and a Dell with Windows is the OS licence (it isn't of course, but what the hell).
So, Dell lose $60 of revenue from having no "craplets". They then gain back whatever the Windows licence would have cost them, but I doubt they pay retail price. If they were paying less than $60 for a windows licence, a figure which is not too unlikely, then the FreeDOS machine SHOULD cost more, and that's before you factor in the cost of adapting the production line to produce machines without Windows pre-installed.
you must be new here.
Except that it's not. The fact that a product is available does not imply that you have aright to own a copy, nor does it imply that the producers of that show have an obligation to sell it you. You are quite right to point out that without the consumers the TV stations are nothing. So abstain from buying their products and make them nothing. But to pretend that you have the absolute right to own a copy own copy of Dexter is ludicrous.
Incidentely, I do own a copy of Dexter season one, which I downloaded illegally. I just don't feel any need to pretend that the producers owed me a copy on my terms.
4. So I need to wait until the end of the season.
OH MY GOD!!! WAIT TILL THE END OF THE SEASON!!! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Seriously, what on earth makes you think you have the right to get the shows you want, when you want them, in exactly the format you want? Do book buyers have a right to demand paperback versions of books are released at the same time as hard backs rather than six months later?
Personally, I illegally download every TV show I watch. I just don't feel the need to pretend I have a right to do so.
Promissory estoppel.
Learn something new every day huh?
Admittedly, I'm being a little facetious there. A promise isn't legally binding as such, but if you rely on someones promise not enforce a copyright, and as a result of that reliance breach their copyright, they will almost certainly be prevented from enforcing that copyright by the doctrine of promissory estoppel.
I'm only familiar with the doctrine as it is applied in English law, but Wikipedia seems to indicate that US law is pretty similar.