2: Apple are quite happy to let you rip their music to cd, and then to mp3. It's no different, and sounds no different from ripping a bought music cd.
This isn't quite true. Most music on iTunes is lower quality than a CD and in a different format. Burning it to CD results in a slightly lower quality yet and significantly lower than a purchased CD. Ripping it to a new format will depend upon what quality you normally rip content at, but it will be less than what is available on a purchased CD and worse than a purchased iTunes song.
That said, the quality may be acceptable, and in fact I don't have a problem with the audio quality of songs ripped in this way. I'd further argue that the way most CDs are mastered these days results in a much bigger hit to actual audio quality than anything Apple is doing.
3: The iPod only has DRM on it because Apple new they would get sued to fuck if they didn't, or if they went around allowing direct circumvention. By allowing copying to audio cd they avoid this via the fair use claim.
This is just untrue. Apple not including DRM does not give them any real legal liability, even for contributory copyright infringement. Apple included DRM to get buy in from the RIAA. Without that buy in, the iPod would have had a much slower uptake and been less popular. They needed a way to buy and load mainstream music easier than going to the store and for that, they needed the cooperation of the RIAA... hence DRM. Fair use has basically nothing to do with Apple themselves.
4: A *lot* of available iPod content is not DRM'd anyway.
This is true for audio, and Apple has been pushing hard to get rid of it, both for ease of use reasons to sell more iPods and because it is a potential antitrust issue.
I filed the first two years ago. I haven't filed any in a while because they don't have a bug report feature built into the program and to file bugs requires you to register an account, (including your personal info) with Sun.
Yeah, but how long is it going to take before some douche bag starts whining about how it doesn't "feel like a 'real' Mac application?" Probably in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . ..
Ooooh! I want to be that douche bag!
Seriously, this is a great step forwards, but like most ports it is still seriously lacking in real functionality, especially when it comes to features that OS X offers, but other OS's do not. These include:
- spell checking - OO.org claims to support OS X's built in spell checker, but as of the beta still flags words as misspelled that every other application knows are not because I added them. Training two, separate spell checkers to know all the technical terms I use daily are not misspellings is a hassle and is "not native." Hopefully this will be fixed by the time the final version ships.
- system services - OO.org cannot use any OS X system services including the built in, universal grammar checker, language translation services, or any of the dozen or so services I use in MS Word, Pages, InDesign, TextEdit, mail.app, etc., etc.
- responsiveness - whether it is because it is a port, or just because it is bloated, OO.org is still a dog for performance. I sometimes see visible lag when tying in word processing documents and it really, really hogs resources. MS Word is slow and a hog, but OO.org is really the only application I use regularly that is worse in that regard.
- keyboard shortcuts - OO.org does not use the standardized keyboard shortcuts for all functions, but does use them for some. For example, copy and paste uses the standard (cmd-c, and cmd-v) but increasing the font size does not use the same (cmd+) that native apps do. Sticking with one set across all platforms makes sense as a standard. Using the standards on a platform makes sense. Going halfway in between, however, means I have to guess if a given feature will be like a "real Mac application" or like OO.org on Windows or something else entirely.
Please note. These don't mean OO.org sucks or the developers are lazy or anything else. It just means that there is a real usability and functionality concern when comparing a not quite polished port to a native application. One of the drawbacks of cross-platform applications (especially when they are not designed as cross-platform initially, but try to port to new platforms) is they tend to miss things and also tend to become a least common denominator when it comes to features. Windows and Linux don't have a universal grammar checker, so if you use OO.org on OS X (which does) it is ignored, despite being implemented by default in all native applications.
I will probably get crucified for this, but one of the new features seems to be support for VBA! I don't understand why people think that OpenOffice gets better the more it's like MS Office.
In this particular instance, this is a real and useful feature, especially for people looking to perform a large migration to OpenOffice and away from MS Office. Simply put, this feature means less work for people trying to perform such a migration and that is better than more work. That seems quite understandable to me.
It bloody is comparing the two - it's not just bits and bytes that differ, MS is comparing the total solution.
No it isn't. It provides a few quotes from reference customers who were not evaluating Windows versus Linux at all, but simply upgrading Windows. It barely even mentions Linux. Did you even read what you're supposed to be talking about?
The example table in TFA has a light gray outline around every cell. I'm not sure if the table used in the experiment did, but I wouldn't doubt that the thin horizontal lines between each row/column can help "guide" the eyes the same way that zebra striping supposedly would.
The striped table used in the experiment (as shown in the screenshot in the paper) does not have any cell borders at all. They provide no image of the non-striped table, however. From the usability studies I've read in the past, they favor having cell borders and using colored stripes for every other or every fifth line or column. Also, they recommend using a different, primary color probably a bit darker than the very light grey used. I don't think I've ever seen one recommend doing away with cell borders as that makes it harder to follow the columns and lines. Without a picture of the non-striped table, this paper is useless.
Put the table on a plain white background with no borders, and I bet the results would be different.
This paper needs some serious peer review and critique. It seems inconclusive in the results, but not in the expressed opinion of those results. It also only tested one table, rather than a variety of table sizes and styles (with and without striping). I guess my real question is, why is this on Slashdot? There are plenty of peer reviewed and through usability and UI studies, but I don't think I've ever seen them here. Why this one?
I disagree. The DMCA takedown and "Safe Harbor" process is the one thing about the DMCA that's good. You have to fully understand it, though.
I disagree with your disagreement.
The way it works is that if a service provider immediately complies with the takedown request, they are granted "Safe Harbor" status, meaning they cannot be held accountable for the infringement.
Service providers act as and have most of the powers of common carriers. Why should they be held accountable for one of their customer's infringements anyway? They should be just as immune to legal issues for hosting copyrighted materials as the phone company is when I sing "happy birthday" over the phone.
The party that put the content up, however, can respond with a counter-notice, and the service provider can then put the material back up but does not lose Safe Harbor status.
So, as in this case, perfectly legal content can be removed at the whim of, well anyone, temporarily disrupting its availability. It's like if I thought your art gallery was violating pornography laws I could go remove them from your gallery, legally, until such a time as you made a counter claim and waited a few weeks. How is this a good thing for anyone?
The beauty of this system is that infringements can be shut down without involving a court...
I consider that a violation of due process. If I can restrict your free speech, even temporarily without involving the courts, that is not a good thing.
Further, as long as the service provider complies with the notice and counter-notice in a timely fashion, they are completely safe from any infringement suit...
Which as common carriers they should be safe from anyway.
You might think that this process lends itself to abuse, with people issuing takedown notices for material upon which they don't hold copyright, but there's a protection against that.
There is no protection from that. There are repercussions for that, but if you have enough money those repercussions are fairly weak. If you care more about knocking down some offering temporarily, it allows you to abuse the system.
I guess I don't see how you can argue that a law which just resulted in a completely legal software offering being made unavailable because of false claims from one of their competitors is a good thing. What's wrong with actually requiring them to prove their case in court BEFORE the ISP is legally obligated to remove the content... you know like our legal system has required for every other form of media for the last hundred years.
Obviously MS's own website is going to be biased towards their software, but I would expect the same level of bias from a Linux vendor.
There is a difference between "bias" and "lies." Bias is presenting a comparison of Windows and Linux that favors Windows in a way that is not objective. Lying is when you claim it is a comparison between the two, then don't compare the two. However you try to explain it away, it is a lie. I don't care if it is Microsoft or Redhat, if the title includes the words Windows, Linux, and comparison, it bloody well better compare Windows and Linux or it is a lie.
No, you are making the same old mistake. McDonalds is the most popular restaurant, and it is the most successful restaurant, but those are not at all the same thing as being the "best".
You two are simply using the term best in reference to different qualities. You're referring to the best quality of product, whereas the previous poster was referring to the best fit for the demands of the market. One does not preclude nor imply the other.
But the fact that McDonalds is more popular and more successful than any other fast-food chain does not mean that it actually scores better on any of these metrics: it just means that people think it does.
Accurate information is prerequisite for an efficient, capitalist market. Marketing does work to change what is believed rather than what is. That said, it is hard to argue McDonalds succeeds in the market because their marketing department is so much better than that of Burger King or Wendy's. They're all competing and marketing at once and it is only smaller players in more niche markets that do not have significant, traditional marketing.
And it's not even a great analogy, because the fast food market is very competitive, while the computer operating system market is about as uncompetitive as they come.
Agreed. This is a very important differentiator. You can look at the fast food business as a success for the capitalist market, whereas the desktop OS market is an abysmal failure. I would add to your comments that because of antitrust law enforcement, most people assume a free market is operating, even when it is not. As such, they assume that large market share is an indicator of whether or not a product is suited to the market and end users. This is not true for markets that are being abused by monopolists.
I think the point that MS is making is that they are actually developing new features into the new server software that provide additional functionality for businesses, considering not just the server OS but also application servers.
I'm not sure how your comments are supposed to relate to the discussion. MS put up articles with titles like "âoeFind out how Windows Server compares to Linux" but which don't actually compare Windows and Linux... and are hence dishonest.
While users and everyone in the computing industry would like to see that happen, it doesn't make sense from a business perspective. MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. Investing in that same market will result in less return than in pretty much any other market. This assumes that your monopoly will stay that way. All businesses have to defend their marketshare and profit margins, or seek new ones (or shrink/die).
I also wrote, "...a tiny investment in breaking compatibility with others and adding in new lock-in technologies will retain pretty much all your users..." I don't assume they will keep their monopoly. I state that it is cheaper to retain their monopoly by artificially breaking competitors and using lock-in strategies than it is investing in improving their product. Take a look at Vista and the features that actually made it in. How many of them are not actually detrimental to the end user (anti-feature like DRM) and aren't moving into new markets MS has not already dominated (like antivirus)? Very, very few of them.
Instead they play defense by marginally ethical activities, acquiring other companies and generally playing whack-a-mole against real innovators. This strategy fails hard when you're trying to whack that mole-on-steroids, the new 600 lb gorilla (Google).
Google is limited by MS's leverage with the IE Web browser and with MS Office. MS has been doing everything they can with that regard. Buying up competing Web services is good business for MS and they can then artificially break Google's competing services. This has been MS's primary business strategy for over a decade.
Maybe their retracted Yahoo bid is the sound of Ballmer putting down the chair?
MS will stop abusing their monopolies and start competing on product merits when the courts effectively stop them, or when they lose enough market share in all their monopolies that their strategy is no longer working. So far, there have been no signs of either.
i value on-hand, colloquial experience as much as objective analysis. In that regard, Apple has screwed up.
Apple hasn't screwed up. You're just not good at understanding what a reasonable sample size is. Fewer Apple customers are experiencing hardware failures than customers of any other vendor (according to the best numbers). A significant number of those users who do have problems, regardless of the vendor, will be upset about it and assume that vendor makes poor quality equipment, even if they are the one in a thousand fluke. So there are fewer people like you, who have decided Apple hardware is bad, than there are people with the same opinion about Lenovo or Sony or Dell. Sorry, but as angry as you may be, you're not relevant to people who make rational decisions.
If Apple gets big into the corporate market, their ads are going to have to change. When you're selling to businessmen in suits instead of unshaven hipsters in jeans, you can't exactly continue with the current ads.
I take it you managed to use an electric drill to destroy the part of your brain that contained all memory of the "Dell Dude." Congratulations, I considered that myself.
What happens when all the "creative" people discover that Apple is now marketing to The Man? Will we start seeing more Wintel laptops in the coffee shops?
Given the percentage of people that switch back after trying a Mac, I don't think Apple is too worried about that possibility.
Flannel? You mean wool? Unless we're talking about corporate pajamas...
Technically, flannel is made of wool. Although often it is used to refer to a wool/cotton or wool/synthetic blend. In the states people use the term to refer to all cotton clothing sometimes.
HP and Dell send technicians onsite to service problems like this, no questions asked. It's like pulling teeth to get repairs out of your people. Until you figure out how to fit into business customer's needs, you will self-limit your reach.
I've worked at several companies that use Dell, HP, and Apple machines. We don't get any onsite service from any of them. When a machine breaks, we give the user a spare and ship the broken one back to the company. If the machine is functional enough, we migrated the data and config to the spare (where practical). I'm sure for big iron, this is different, but not for end user systems.
Of the 4 new Macs I've worked on in the past year, 1 Macbook, 3 silver towers, 3 of the machines had hardware problems out of the box or within 1 week of unpacking. Specifically the broken speakers and dead Firewire ports. FIX YOUR QA PROBLEMS, CUPERTINO.
Your anecdotes are great and all, but according to objective, independent testing Apple hardware has lower failure rates for both laptops and desktops than, well any other major OEM. The only one close is Sony. We all have hardware problems occasionally, but I'm going to have to go with an objective, formal study from Consumer Reports and backed up by several other companies, when deciding which vendor has a QA problem.
In the meantime I will be recommending HP, Lenovo or other for laptops and desktops.
Congrats on recommending hardware with lower reliability based upon your lack of research. P.S. Strangely Dell laptops are actually near the top of the heap for reliability, a big change from about a year ago. Hopefully anyone really making purchasing decisions for a living will actually do their homework.
I can't imagine what it would be like having to fight that shiny white plastic in able to swap out parts... No Thanks.
Who does their own repairs anymore? When a user's machine breaks, you give them one of the spares, pull the data across if it is possible, and ship the broken one to Apple (or whoever). Everyplace I've worked in since 2000 has done this, and some were cash strapped startups.
Your little scenario misses the point. Of coarse[sic] a developer will get defensive over their own project. It's understandable to be a fanboy if you fucking wrote it, it's your baby.
Heh, regular users that speak up are worse yet, in my experience. Linux developers tend to be educated at least about Linux. Users have just as strong or stronger resistance to learning about anything "wrong" with Linux, but it takes five times as long to get them to understand the technical difference to some other OS, if that is even possible.
What's remarkable is the degree to which regular Mac users take any criticism of Apple or its products personally.
As I said, in my opinion, Linux on the desktop users are actually the worst for this. I think it relates to how far outside the mainstream you are. It seems the fewer people in your "tribe" the more defensive and emotional people get over their choices.
A few years ago people complained that OS X didn't have virtual desktops by default (in a discussion here). Most users understood that and agreed it would be nice. Many pointed out the third party solutions (most of which were freeware, scratch an itch ones). Compare that to discussions about lack of an expose clone in Ubuntu. There are such clones these days, although none included by default and none of the major Linux distros seem to have any plans to include one by default. From what I can tell, this is not because they are still immature or unstable, but rather because the core developers of those projects still have trouble admitting it might be useful and a real advance for some workflows.
From my perspective in the former case, users were less defensive, submitted bug requests, and the OS advanced as a result. In the latter case users were very defensive, very few files bug requests, and all the major distros are still lacking that feature.
Maybe that's not the exact chain of events, only the way it seemed to me. That said, I don't think asserting that Mac users are more defensive, in any way proves that point. Linux users are plenty emotional and defensive to annoy me (as do Mac users upon occasion). Either could be "more defensive" but it is something for both communities to address when it happens.
When AOL was so bloated with cash they didn't know what to do with it, they bought time. It was a marriage made in hell. Time didn't have anything that AOL needed and AOL couldn't offer Time anything.
Actually, they were potentially a very good match. AOL had Web services, technology, subscribers, and data infrastructure. Time-Warner had cable subscribers and numerous media content producers. Together they could have delivered mainstream TV content over the internet years before anyone else and pretty much been the established channel for such content, even if they'd locked it down to their own portal or format or DRM. That is in fact what they pitched to investors. They had potential, their management was just failed miserably to deliver because of infighting and politics.
When the dot bomb crash happened, AOL lost value quickly to eventually become the struggling company today that only exists because of a legacy of users who never switched to better offers.
That's because AOL failed to innovate and create anything new and failed to leverage that existing base into something better. Doubtless MS would real kill innovation at Yahoo, but rather than weigh them down, it would allow MS to leverage that base to lock in users, because frankly that is what MS is good at.
Instead, you should invest that money in your operating system...
While users and everyone in the computing industry would like to see that happen, it doesn't make sense from a business perspective. MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. Investing in that same market will result in less return than in pretty much any other market. It doesn't matter how crappy Windows is, because a tiny investment in breaking compatibility with others and adding in new lock-in technologies will retain pretty much all your users without investing any more money. MS makes more money leveraging their monopolies into new markets (like Web services).
From appearances Yahoo seems to be a terrible acquisition target; it is large and healthy enough to be very expensive and burdensome, but not growing rapidly or successful enough to be a major asset to someone like Microsoft.
Yahoo combined with MS's own Web and internet services would have been enough to give MS majority market share in several new markets. More importantly, many of yahoo's services are pretty decent and doing quite well. For some other company they might not be a good acquisition, but for a company like MS that has several monopolies and is not at all shy about illegally leveraging them, Yahoo makes a lot of sense. When you have 25% market share, breaking compatibility with everyone else hurts you more than them. When you have 52% and it is growing because it is tied to Windows and MS Office and IE, breaking compatability with everyone else hurts them more.
One theory I've heard floated is that they didn't actually want Yahoo, but by making a show of trying to acquire it hoped to bait Google into buying Yahoo on the basis of denying it to Microsoft, with the net result of burning a chunk of Google's resources and bogging them down with the process of absorbing something that large.
It sounds unlikely to me. If that was their plan, it probably backfired. All it seems to have done is to get Google and Yahoo talking and making technology partnerships.
Given that that kid actually got enough knowledge about computers from his XO that he would be capable of such a task, do you really think he could have learned it from looking at source code?
What? Why would he have to? This isn't about him learning programming. The built in program for learning Python (Pippy) is there for that purpose. Then maybe using it to modify applications. All that is about getting them started with programming early on. Did my parent's Apple II's basic interpreter allow me to do any serious programming? No. Did it get me started with learning useful programming? Yes, it sure did.
I work with programming and if there is one thing I can tell you, it is that looking at source code never teaches anyone anything.
Yes, looking at source code can teach you useful things, which is why Deitel and Deitel with all the example code is such a popular text.
I think you're missing the main point in my example. Having the source to the base OS didn't make it significantly easier for our kid to learn to modify the OS. It did make it possible for him to modify the OS for the benefit of all the kids ten years later, because he doesn't have to get a job at Microsoft and then convince them to let him make the change and give the change away to the OLPC project for free. Get it?
The only sad thing about it is that Mac fans are often very loyal to the platform no matter what Apple does. It makes it very difficult to level any constructive criticism at Apple, as Apple fans will often deny the criticism.
You could make this claim with regard to pretty much any OS and have plenty of evidence to support it. Applying it to Mac users, I'd actually say they are more likely to complain and file bug reports with Apple than say, most Linux users. I've had numerous conversations with Linux on the desktop developers that run as follows:
Me: I have this problem on Linux.
Developer: That isn't a problem.
Me: Here's the use case and why it fails.
Developer: Okay it is a problem, but no other OS is any better.
Me: Here is how some other OS handles it better.
Developer: Linux does that.
Me: Here's what Linux does and why that is different.
Developer: Linux is better anyway because of *unrelated Linux feature*.
Me: Gee that feature is great and all, but doesn't help me any.
Developer: The problem is that you want to do that. Change your behavior to only use OSS products, or not interoperate with that system or make use of this lengthy and difficult solution that involves writing my own scripts and constantly updating them.
Me: Umm, yeah, sure. I filed the bug report including this transcript.
I mean seriously, Apple users complain all the time and most of them except the real newbies are wiling to admit the deficiencies and commiserate with people that run afoul of them. Why do you think Apple added virtual desktops, for example? Apple does a lot of things users don't like and neglect doing things their users want. For the most part, however, they are better about responding to users than any other OS vendor I know of and has enough advantages that most users simply don't want switch despite the problems... because it is still a better user experience than they get from any other OS. (At least for many home users it certainly is.)
What are the odds that any kid would ever-ever-ever have a look at the source code of, for example the network stack and have even the slightest clue of anything going on?
Compare the odds. Suppose that fifteen years from now a kid who got an XO laptop yesterday wants to extend the networking capabilities of the educational computers they have deployed throughout their country. Is it more likely that MS will do this to Windows for them, for free, or is it more likely that they will be able to do it cheaply themselves because they are all running on an OSS base? Apply this same logic to every single facet of operating systems. Will MS add an indexed filesystem for free down the road or will they require all these cash strapped educational facilities to pay for it?
The OSS base isn't about letting some random kid hack the network stack today, it is about making sure these kids are not beholden to MS for improvements in two years or five or ten or fifty.
After the emancipation proclamation all the freed slaves were given 40 acres and a mule. Sure mules were economical, just as Windows might be today if MS is ponying up cash for the project. The problem is, mules are also sterile, making them a dead end and a terrible basis for a long term future. It might live for 30 years, but you'll never breed it with your neighbors' animals and you kids had better hope you making hard cash so you can buy another one when it dies. Windows is the same way. It might work for now, but in the long term you're just building up lock-in and making it harder to ever have a sustainable system not beholden to foreign, commercial interests.
Huh? How exactly are laptops going to help build up poorer nations? So they can know everything and still not be able to use it because there are virtually no natural resources to use to build an economy?
If you have a laptop and a network (both provided by OLPC) and education (facilitated by the OLPC especially via the included ebooks) then you can build an economy on that. You can solve captchas for enough to get by on. You can create and sell songs and stories and other media content. You can program software, edit books, test Web pages or whatever. You can make more money doing this than in any of the career options these people have today and the cost to bootstrapping it is cheaper than trying to outfit an entire country with say, the chemicals and machinery needed to compete in modern agriculture, even if foreign governments weren't undercutting the market with subsidies for their own farmers.
If you know of a more effective and cheaper way to provide them with a functional economy, lets hear it.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't quite true. Most music on iTunes is lower quality than a CD and in a different format. Burning it to CD results in a slightly lower quality yet and significantly lower than a purchased CD. Ripping it to a new format will depend upon what quality you normally rip content at, but it will be less than what is available on a purchased CD and worse than a purchased iTunes song.
That said, the quality may be acceptable, and in fact I don't have a problem with the audio quality of songs ripped in this way. I'd further argue that the way most CDs are mastered these days results in a much bigger hit to actual audio quality than anything Apple is doing.
3: The iPod only has DRM on it because Apple new they would get sued to fuck if they didn't, or if they went around allowing direct circumvention. By allowing copying to audio cd they avoid this via the fair use claim.This is just untrue. Apple not including DRM does not give them any real legal liability, even for contributory copyright infringement. Apple included DRM to get buy in from the RIAA. Without that buy in, the iPod would have had a much slower uptake and been less popular. They needed a way to buy and load mainstream music easier than going to the store and for that, they needed the cooperation of the RIAA... hence DRM. Fair use has basically nothing to do with Apple themselves.
4: A *lot* of available iPod content is not DRM'd anyway.This is true for audio, and Apple has been pushing hard to get rid of it, both for ease of use reasons to sell more iPods and because it is a potential antitrust issue.
I filed the first two years ago. I haven't filed any in a while because they don't have a bug report feature built into the program and to file bugs requires you to register an account, (including your personal info) with Sun.
...can I finally open a spreadsheet with more than 256 columns or more than 65535 rows?Yes, you can. It has been expanded to 1024 columns.
Ooooh! I want to be that douche bag!
Seriously, this is a great step forwards, but like most ports it is still seriously lacking in real functionality, especially when it comes to features that OS X offers, but other OS's do not. These include:
Please note. These don't mean OO.org sucks or the developers are lazy or anything else. It just means that there is a real usability and functionality concern when comparing a not quite polished port to a native application. One of the drawbacks of cross-platform applications (especially when they are not designed as cross-platform initially, but try to port to new platforms) is they tend to miss things and also tend to become a least common denominator when it comes to features. Windows and Linux don't have a universal grammar checker, so if you use OO.org on OS X (which does) it is ignored, despite being implemented by default in all native applications.
In this particular instance, this is a real and useful feature, especially for people looking to perform a large migration to OpenOffice and away from MS Office. Simply put, this feature means less work for people trying to perform such a migration and that is better than more work. That seems quite understandable to me.
No it isn't. It provides a few quotes from reference customers who were not evaluating Windows versus Linux at all, but simply upgrading Windows. It barely even mentions Linux. Did you even read what you're supposed to be talking about?
The striped table used in the experiment (as shown in the screenshot in the paper) does not have any cell borders at all. They provide no image of the non-striped table, however. From the usability studies I've read in the past, they favor having cell borders and using colored stripes for every other or every fifth line or column. Also, they recommend using a different, primary color probably a bit darker than the very light grey used. I don't think I've ever seen one recommend doing away with cell borders as that makes it harder to follow the columns and lines. Without a picture of the non-striped table, this paper is useless.
Put the table on a plain white background with no borders, and I bet the results would be different.This paper needs some serious peer review and critique. It seems inconclusive in the results, but not in the expressed opinion of those results. It also only tested one table, rather than a variety of table sizes and styles (with and without striping). I guess my real question is, why is this on Slashdot? There are plenty of peer reviewed and through usability and UI studies, but I don't think I've ever seen them here. Why this one?
I disagree with your disagreement.
The way it works is that if a service provider immediately complies with the takedown request, they are granted "Safe Harbor" status, meaning they cannot be held accountable for the infringement.Service providers act as and have most of the powers of common carriers. Why should they be held accountable for one of their customer's infringements anyway? They should be just as immune to legal issues for hosting copyrighted materials as the phone company is when I sing "happy birthday" over the phone.
The party that put the content up, however, can respond with a counter-notice, and the service provider can then put the material back up but does not lose Safe Harbor status.So, as in this case, perfectly legal content can be removed at the whim of, well anyone, temporarily disrupting its availability. It's like if I thought your art gallery was violating pornography laws I could go remove them from your gallery, legally, until such a time as you made a counter claim and waited a few weeks. How is this a good thing for anyone?
The beauty of this system is that infringements can be shut down without involving a court...I consider that a violation of due process. If I can restrict your free speech, even temporarily without involving the courts, that is not a good thing.
Further, as long as the service provider complies with the notice and counter-notice in a timely fashion, they are completely safe from any infringement suit...Which as common carriers they should be safe from anyway.
You might think that this process lends itself to abuse, with people issuing takedown notices for material upon which they don't hold copyright, but there's a protection against that.There is no protection from that. There are repercussions for that, but if you have enough money those repercussions are fairly weak. If you care more about knocking down some offering temporarily, it allows you to abuse the system.
I guess I don't see how you can argue that a law which just resulted in a completely legal software offering being made unavailable because of false claims from one of their competitors is a good thing. What's wrong with actually requiring them to prove their case in court BEFORE the ISP is legally obligated to remove the content... you know like our legal system has required for every other form of media for the last hundred years.
There is a difference between "bias" and "lies." Bias is presenting a comparison of Windows and Linux that favors Windows in a way that is not objective. Lying is when you claim it is a comparison between the two, then don't compare the two. However you try to explain it away, it is a lie. I don't care if it is Microsoft or Redhat, if the title includes the words Windows, Linux, and comparison, it bloody well better compare Windows and Linux or it is a lie.
You two are simply using the term best in reference to different qualities. You're referring to the best quality of product, whereas the previous poster was referring to the best fit for the demands of the market. One does not preclude nor imply the other.
But the fact that McDonalds is more popular and more successful than any other fast-food chain does not mean that it actually scores better on any of these metrics: it just means that people think it does.Accurate information is prerequisite for an efficient, capitalist market. Marketing does work to change what is believed rather than what is. That said, it is hard to argue McDonalds succeeds in the market because their marketing department is so much better than that of Burger King or Wendy's. They're all competing and marketing at once and it is only smaller players in more niche markets that do not have significant, traditional marketing.
And it's not even a great analogy, because the fast food market is very competitive, while the computer operating system market is about as uncompetitive as they come.Agreed. This is a very important differentiator. You can look at the fast food business as a success for the capitalist market, whereas the desktop OS market is an abysmal failure. I would add to your comments that because of antitrust law enforcement, most people assume a free market is operating, even when it is not. As such, they assume that large market share is an indicator of whether or not a product is suited to the market and end users. This is not true for markets that are being abused by monopolists.
I'm not sure how your comments are supposed to relate to the discussion. MS put up articles with titles like "âoeFind out how Windows Server compares to Linux" but which don't actually compare Windows and Linux... and are hence dishonest.
I also wrote, "...a tiny investment in breaking compatibility with others and adding in new lock-in technologies will retain pretty much all your users..." I don't assume they will keep their monopoly. I state that it is cheaper to retain their monopoly by artificially breaking competitors and using lock-in strategies than it is investing in improving their product. Take a look at Vista and the features that actually made it in. How many of them are not actually detrimental to the end user (anti-feature like DRM) and aren't moving into new markets MS has not already dominated (like antivirus)? Very, very few of them.
Instead they play defense by marginally ethical activities, acquiring other companies and generally playing whack-a-mole against real innovators. This strategy fails hard when you're trying to whack that mole-on-steroids, the new 600 lb gorilla (Google).Google is limited by MS's leverage with the IE Web browser and with MS Office. MS has been doing everything they can with that regard. Buying up competing Web services is good business for MS and they can then artificially break Google's competing services. This has been MS's primary business strategy for over a decade.
Maybe their retracted Yahoo bid is the sound of Ballmer putting down the chair?MS will stop abusing their monopolies and start competing on product merits when the courts effectively stop them, or when they lose enough market share in all their monopolies that their strategy is no longer working. So far, there have been no signs of either.
Apple hasn't screwed up. You're just not good at understanding what a reasonable sample size is. Fewer Apple customers are experiencing hardware failures than customers of any other vendor (according to the best numbers). A significant number of those users who do have problems, regardless of the vendor, will be upset about it and assume that vendor makes poor quality equipment, even if they are the one in a thousand fluke. So there are fewer people like you, who have decided Apple hardware is bad, than there are people with the same opinion about Lenovo or Sony or Dell. Sorry, but as angry as you may be, you're not relevant to people who make rational decisions.
I take it you managed to use an electric drill to destroy the part of your brain that contained all memory of the "Dell Dude." Congratulations, I considered that myself.
What happens when all the "creative" people discover that Apple is now marketing to The Man? Will we start seeing more Wintel laptops in the coffee shops?Given the percentage of people that switch back after trying a Mac, I don't think Apple is too worried about that possibility.
Technically, flannel is made of wool. Although often it is used to refer to a wool/cotton or wool/synthetic blend. In the states people use the term to refer to all cotton clothing sometimes.
I've worked at several companies that use Dell, HP, and Apple machines. We don't get any onsite service from any of them. When a machine breaks, we give the user a spare and ship the broken one back to the company. If the machine is functional enough, we migrated the data and config to the spare (where practical). I'm sure for big iron, this is different, but not for end user systems.
Of the 4 new Macs I've worked on in the past year, 1 Macbook, 3 silver towers, 3 of the machines had hardware problems out of the box or within 1 week of unpacking. Specifically the broken speakers and dead Firewire ports. FIX YOUR QA PROBLEMS, CUPERTINO.Your anecdotes are great and all, but according to objective, independent testing Apple hardware has lower failure rates for both laptops and desktops than, well any other major OEM. The only one close is Sony. We all have hardware problems occasionally, but I'm going to have to go with an objective, formal study from Consumer Reports and backed up by several other companies, when deciding which vendor has a QA problem.
In the meantime I will be recommending HP, Lenovo or other for laptops and desktops.Congrats on recommending hardware with lower reliability based upon your lack of research. P.S. Strangely Dell laptops are actually near the top of the heap for reliability, a big change from about a year ago. Hopefully anyone really making purchasing decisions for a living will actually do their homework.
Who does their own repairs anymore? When a user's machine breaks, you give them one of the spares, pull the data across if it is possible, and ship the broken one to Apple (or whoever). Everyplace I've worked in since 2000 has done this, and some were cash strapped startups.
Heh, regular users that speak up are worse yet, in my experience. Linux developers tend to be educated at least about Linux. Users have just as strong or stronger resistance to learning about anything "wrong" with Linux, but it takes five times as long to get them to understand the technical difference to some other OS, if that is even possible.
What's remarkable is the degree to which regular Mac users take any criticism of Apple or its products personally.As I said, in my opinion, Linux on the desktop users are actually the worst for this. I think it relates to how far outside the mainstream you are. It seems the fewer people in your "tribe" the more defensive and emotional people get over their choices.
A few years ago people complained that OS X didn't have virtual desktops by default (in a discussion here). Most users understood that and agreed it would be nice. Many pointed out the third party solutions (most of which were freeware, scratch an itch ones). Compare that to discussions about lack of an expose clone in Ubuntu. There are such clones these days, although none included by default and none of the major Linux distros seem to have any plans to include one by default. From what I can tell, this is not because they are still immature or unstable, but rather because the core developers of those projects still have trouble admitting it might be useful and a real advance for some workflows.
From my perspective in the former case, users were less defensive, submitted bug requests, and the OS advanced as a result. In the latter case users were very defensive, very few files bug requests, and all the major distros are still lacking that feature.
Maybe that's not the exact chain of events, only the way it seemed to me. That said, I don't think asserting that Mac users are more defensive, in any way proves that point. Linux users are plenty emotional and defensive to annoy me (as do Mac users upon occasion). Either could be "more defensive" but it is something for both communities to address when it happens.
Actually, they were potentially a very good match. AOL had Web services, technology, subscribers, and data infrastructure. Time-Warner had cable subscribers and numerous media content producers. Together they could have delivered mainstream TV content over the internet years before anyone else and pretty much been the established channel for such content, even if they'd locked it down to their own portal or format or DRM. That is in fact what they pitched to investors. They had potential, their management was just failed miserably to deliver because of infighting and politics.
When the dot bomb crash happened, AOL lost value quickly to eventually become the struggling company today that only exists because of a legacy of users who never switched to better offers.That's because AOL failed to innovate and create anything new and failed to leverage that existing base into something better. Doubtless MS would real kill innovation at Yahoo, but rather than weigh them down, it would allow MS to leverage that base to lock in users, because frankly that is what MS is good at.
While users and everyone in the computing industry would like to see that happen, it doesn't make sense from a business perspective. MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. Investing in that same market will result in less return than in pretty much any other market. It doesn't matter how crappy Windows is, because a tiny investment in breaking compatibility with others and adding in new lock-in technologies will retain pretty much all your users without investing any more money. MS makes more money leveraging their monopolies into new markets (like Web services).
Yahoo combined with MS's own Web and internet services would have been enough to give MS majority market share in several new markets. More importantly, many of yahoo's services are pretty decent and doing quite well. For some other company they might not be a good acquisition, but for a company like MS that has several monopolies and is not at all shy about illegally leveraging them, Yahoo makes a lot of sense. When you have 25% market share, breaking compatibility with everyone else hurts you more than them. When you have 52% and it is growing because it is tied to Windows and MS Office and IE, breaking compatability with everyone else hurts them more.
One theory I've heard floated is that they didn't actually want Yahoo, but by making a show of trying to acquire it hoped to bait Google into buying Yahoo on the basis of denying it to Microsoft, with the net result of burning a chunk of Google's resources and bogging them down with the process of absorbing something that large.It sounds unlikely to me. If that was their plan, it probably backfired. All it seems to have done is to get Google and Yahoo talking and making technology partnerships.
What? Why would he have to? This isn't about him learning programming. The built in program for learning Python (Pippy) is there for that purpose. Then maybe using it to modify applications. All that is about getting them started with programming early on. Did my parent's Apple II's basic interpreter allow me to do any serious programming? No. Did it get me started with learning useful programming? Yes, it sure did.
I work with programming and if there is one thing I can tell you, it is that looking at source code never teaches anyone anything.Yes, looking at source code can teach you useful things, which is why Deitel and Deitel with all the example code is such a popular text.
I think you're missing the main point in my example. Having the source to the base OS didn't make it significantly easier for our kid to learn to modify the OS. It did make it possible for him to modify the OS for the benefit of all the kids ten years later, because he doesn't have to get a job at Microsoft and then convince them to let him make the change and give the change away to the OLPC project for free. Get it?
You could make this claim with regard to pretty much any OS and have plenty of evidence to support it. Applying it to Mac users, I'd actually say they are more likely to complain and file bug reports with Apple than say, most Linux users. I've had numerous conversations with Linux on the desktop developers that run as follows:
Me: I have this problem on Linux.
Developer: That isn't a problem.
Me: Here's the use case and why it fails.
Developer: Okay it is a problem, but no other OS is any better.
Me: Here is how some other OS handles it better.
Developer: Linux does that.
Me: Here's what Linux does and why that is different.
Developer: Linux is better anyway because of *unrelated Linux feature*.
Me: Gee that feature is great and all, but doesn't help me any.
Developer: The problem is that you want to do that. Change your behavior to only use OSS products, or not interoperate with that system or make use of this lengthy and difficult solution that involves writing my own scripts and constantly updating them.
Me: Umm, yeah, sure. I filed the bug report including this transcript.
I mean seriously, Apple users complain all the time and most of them except the real newbies are wiling to admit the deficiencies and commiserate with people that run afoul of them. Why do you think Apple added virtual desktops, for example? Apple does a lot of things users don't like and neglect doing things their users want. For the most part, however, they are better about responding to users than any other OS vendor I know of and has enough advantages that most users simply don't want switch despite the problems... because it is still a better user experience than they get from any other OS. (At least for many home users it certainly is.)
Compare the odds. Suppose that fifteen years from now a kid who got an XO laptop yesterday wants to extend the networking capabilities of the educational computers they have deployed throughout their country. Is it more likely that MS will do this to Windows for them, for free, or is it more likely that they will be able to do it cheaply themselves because they are all running on an OSS base? Apply this same logic to every single facet of operating systems. Will MS add an indexed filesystem for free down the road or will they require all these cash strapped educational facilities to pay for it?
The OSS base isn't about letting some random kid hack the network stack today, it is about making sure these kids are not beholden to MS for improvements in two years or five or ten or fifty.
After the emancipation proclamation all the freed slaves were given 40 acres and a mule. Sure mules were economical, just as Windows might be today if MS is ponying up cash for the project. The problem is, mules are also sterile, making them a dead end and a terrible basis for a long term future. It might live for 30 years, but you'll never breed it with your neighbors' animals and you kids had better hope you making hard cash so you can buy another one when it dies. Windows is the same way. It might work for now, but in the long term you're just building up lock-in and making it harder to ever have a sustainable system not beholden to foreign, commercial interests.
If you have a laptop and a network (both provided by OLPC) and education (facilitated by the OLPC especially via the included ebooks) then you can build an economy on that. You can solve captchas for enough to get by on. You can create and sell songs and stories and other media content. You can program software, edit books, test Web pages or whatever. You can make more money doing this than in any of the career options these people have today and the cost to bootstrapping it is cheaper than trying to outfit an entire country with say, the chemicals and machinery needed to compete in modern agriculture, even if foreign governments weren't undercutting the market with subsidies for their own farmers.
If you know of a more effective and cheaper way to provide them with a functional economy, lets hear it.