They don't need to do either. They just need to label the retail copies with the big word "Upgrade", and make it clear that it is an upgrade version for an earlier OS X only.
You're probably right. I imagine that would change the situation from a legal perspective. They certainly have options to make such reselling illegal if it does not prove to be as they are now shipping.
I have heard through the rumor-mill that the reason for binary protection on OS X does not have to do with Apple technology but has to do with license agreements for third-party technology.
Similar rumors have ben floating around with regard to Quicktime licensing for many years. They certainly could be true and it would make for some significant liabilities for Apple, although not necessarily ones that cannot be overcome. It would be an antitrust issue if MS did have such an agreement with Apple, but it would not be their first such illegal contract.
I don't disagree. But I'm not calling for that -- I'm calling for a Mac Pro Jr., because hardly anyone actually NEEDS a Mac Pro as it currently exists.
This could happen some day, but for now I assume my particular wants (and I would purchase just such a machine) probably do not reflect the sales opportunity. I'm assuming that Apple's formal research into potential new systems is probably a lot more thorough than my or your wish that it would sell enough to make them money and grow their install base.
he fact that people buy them doesn't mean it matches their needs - just that it has a feature set that is greater than what they need.
I own a Mac pro tower. It is 8 years old and has been running constantly aside from moves and sees daily use as a home server for fileserver, music, DVR, DVD player, guest terminal, and media download/streaming. At the time of purchase it was their midrange offering and it was expensive. That said, it has actually proved itself quite a bargain. 10.5 is the last version of OS X that will support its dual G4, 533Mhz processors so I'll probably retire it in the next four years and give it to my nieces as a Web and e-mail box.
If Apple had offered a minitower at the time, I probably would have bought it. If they offered one now, I'd probably choose it as my replacement mini-server. That said, I'm not really sure Apple's market strategy has not worked out for both of us so far.
The 'clones" weren't using lower quality components when Apple sold their OS and ROMs.
Independent testing at the time said otherwise. While Apple's hardware reliability ratings were not as high then as now, they were still above average. Some of the clone makers (notably Radius and Daystar) had decent hardware reliability, but numerous driver issues. Others, like Umax and APS had some of the worst hardware reliability of any computer at the time. Sure they shipped the same size hard drive, but it was from the cheapest, least reliable manufacturer of the day.
I 've seen no evidence to suggest that the old Mac clones were less reliable than Apple's own machines, or that people blamed the OS for any failures that occurred with them.
You should have read the periodicals of the time. "Brand poisoning" was a huge concern at Apple and Consumer Reports has always been pretty good when it comes to hardware reliability comparisons.
The problem was that the Apple which existed in the period between Jobs getting ousted and coming back again was unable to find a way to differentiate its own large range of far from universally wonderful machines from the cheaper and frequently better clones, and the licensing revenues they were earning from those manufacturing them weren't enough to offset the impact they were having on Apple's hardware sales.
Apple had built their entire business model on using hardware sales to fund the development of their OS and application business. They still have that strategy. The problem of the day was not that Apple had nothing to offer, but that they underpriced their OS in an attempt to "get it out there" but overestimated the consumer's ability to differentiate hardware and software quality. At the same time they completely misunderstood MS's monopoly position and its ramification on the industry. Apple thought clones would lead to more sales and an MS like business model. What they found was sales were nearly flat since so many users were already unable to choose anything but Windows because of application availability, software purchases as an asset, and other incompatibilities. MS's influence was very strong, but Apple assumed it was still a free and competitive capitalist market. Instead of growing their OS business they found it was flat and instead they were just losing a chunk of their hardware business.
Now if Apple had been "the best" at hardware among all entrants, this might have been different, but it still would not have gained them much market share, if any. The clone makers were able to target their sales and make niche systems that appealed to specific customers. Daystar even developed and installed custom applications for a big customer and Apple was not able to compete with that, not with a market that was artificially restricted from growth.
It would be even harder for Apple to to differentiate themselves today if they licensed OS X, because they're now selling X86-based PCs that use commodity hardware which other manufacturers can buy off the shelf.
That is actually less of a concern today. Apple has other income sources with the iPod and iPhone and applications business. They could strategically absorb a hit to grow the install base. The problem is, MS's lock in is much, much, much stronger today than ever, having grown to four long standing monopolies and dozens of significant abuses in other markets. Apple licensing their OS today would mean even less ability to benefit by growing their OS share. They'd be better off investing in a partnership with a Linux on the desktop developer and contributing to a low-end version of Linux that is compatible with OS X.
but it would be extremely difficult to claim that it's objectively better than some of the kit that's available from the likes of Lenovo, Sony, and even HP, who have a higher priced range of business computers that's much better in quality terms than their co
I want the Mac Apple refuses to sell me: an upgradeable machine that...
Yup. Apple won't sell into markets that won't make them profitable. Why do you suppose the market doesn't correct for that problem?
Jobs refuses to sell it because he knows people will buy it.
Jobs, quite correctly, sells only a small selection of hardware because they cannot become over extended into the hardware market, given their limited resources. They have about the same number of offerings of other OEMs with comparable market share. They don't have the same number of offerings as all the rest of the PC hardware vendors combined. This is unlikely to change anytime soon.
He also is under the delusion that creating a Mac upgradeable prosumer desktop will somehow "Dell-ize" Apple.
Umm, I don't think Apple is trying to be like Dell. Dell makes most of their money on the low end and Apple has too much invested in their brand to do the same. Dell just buys respected brands (like Alienware) and uses them until they are ruined, then moves on. Actually, though, to be fair Dell has made some real strides in the last year with regard to laptops, pulling their reliability from near the bottom to better than average.
The reality, which most Mac users understand, is that what is actually valuable about Macs is not their different-ness, but the fact that they run OS X, which is the best consumer operating system on the market.
Apple has other value than just their OS, but I think most people agree OS X is their crown jewels. The thing is, the desktop OS market is monopolized. Trying to sell OS X by itself is economic suicide. MS can and does simply manufacture incompatibilities and given their market share, momentum, and lock-in that amounts to artificially breaking OS X at will. Other OS's such as BeOS were superior to Windows at the time. We all know how well they faired.
Apple survives investing resources into the desktop OS market by enforcing bundling. They bypass the desktop OS market and compete instead in the computer system market (which is fairly healthy and competitive). Make no mistake, if this company is ruled within their rights, Apple will have no choice but to respond and that may mean pulling OS X from retail sale altogether and simply offering it with their computers and providing free upgrades to owners of Apple hardware. Alternately, they could roll out paid upgrades via a system that requires users to agree to the contract before they get the OS, so no more boxed copies in retail outlets. What they won't do, is allow another company to leverage Apple's own significant investment in OS X for the cost Apple charges for upgrades. Before that, Apple would abandon OS X development entirely as no longer profitable.
Mac hardware is not special. It got even less special after 2005.
To be fair, independent testing shows Apple as the most reliable hardware vendor on the market, with very few vendors even coming close. Apple's hardware is not magical or anything but it is very well engineered, especially for the price. Apple's margins are higher than the industry as a whole, but less than the two vendors who come even close to Apple's low failure rates.
Mac SOFTWARE is what is special.
Again, I agree, but the desktop OS market is monopolized. MS still has way too much of the install base for Apple to even consider unbundling their OS and hardware. They will bundle or they will have to make the OS X division actually profitable, which would mean something closer to $150 a copy and no more cheap upgrades and serious copy protection/licensing. It would also probably mean Apple abandoning it altogether.
The sad truth is, unless MS loses their monopoly, that is the reality of the economic situation. I'd love to be able to install OS X on whiteboxes too, but not if that means Apple stops developing it. The solution is to fix the dam
Anyone who claims Microsoft does not make good products doesn't use Office.
I use MS Office. It is by no means the best of breed solution for many use cases. It also has long standing bugs that have never been corrected, particularly with regard to corruption of large documents. It also has formats that change so often and between different versions that there is no guarantee of a document looking the same on two different versions, or even using the same version on the same OS, but plugged into different printers.
but Office (and Excel in particular) is the best office suite out there.
Office is the most popular by far. Remove the interoperability problems with office formats and there are plenty of contenders. Office holds the market through intentional failure to interoperate and by bundling it all together so that better solutions for the individual components are hard to get approved as corporate purchases.
Right? But the idea was that you (the user) would do the install of OS X and be the ones breaking the EULA. Seeing that Psystar isn't installing it for you, they aren't the ones breaking the license.
If you RTFA you'd see, "...and we will preinstall Leopard for free so you can begin to use your computer right out of the box."
It's more likely a case of Jobs remembering what happened the last time Apple offered MacOS to OEMs, who ended up competing with them in the existing Mac market instead of expanding it as Apple had hoped.
It is more or less the same thing. The market for Macs is limited by OEMs afraid of retaliation by MS and by users who are locked into Windows. Apple has great brand recognition for mid and high end systems. This leaves only bargain machines. Bargain machines are marketed mostly by touting the low price and trying to make it seem like you're getting the same product as a more expensive system. Just like last time their would be bullet points and number comparisons that tried to make a system look like what Apple offers, but using lower quality components. This means more failures, many of which are blamed on the OS, and tarnishes Apple's brand, while at the same time stealing some of their sales.
MSFT 'attacks' other pieces of the market because of its near monopoly on the desktop and in Office apps. Linux can do the same.
MS has been gaining market share in the server space by intentionally making it as hard as possible for Linux servers to interoperate with Windows desktops. They can do this, because they control the desktop space. Linux does not monopolize any market and even if it did, there are numerous Linux distributions so breaking compatibility would have to somehow incorporate a change into all the distros is such a way that MS did not have access to the same information. Basically, because Linux is open source and different distros interoperate via open standards, Linux can never leverage their influence in one market to give it the same type of advantage in a new market (as MS has done repeatedly to take over new markets).
Linux is the major player in several segments then it can leverage that strength to gain others.
Linux cannot "leverage" their strength in the same way MS leverages their monopoly power. At best, Linux will always be fighting on a level playing field in some markets and in one skewed against them in others.
In a different way, however, Linux can leverage their main advantages into the desktop that have kept them alive on the server. Development costs are shared and overall costs are less. This means Linux can undercut the price of MS's other markets. In fact, if antitrust laws were enforced effectively Linux would probably slowly gain ground in most markets until it had significant share, then grow very rapidly. The main disadvantage from a business perspective is Linux will never allow any given company to extract as much money as MS does. Still, in a fair market, companies will settle for a share of a smaller pie, than no share at all.
It'll take a nimble, energetic core of developers to drive and make decisions that are innovative and exciting to users. "Nimble" is not really Linux's strength. There is no one person to make decisions that will extend to all Linux desktops. Revolutionary changes are very hard because so many people have to get onboard and incompatibility with other distros is a huge negative. Really, it will probably take a serious investor willing to make such choices and break compatibility with other Linux distros to really bring it into the desktop space effectively.
Always playing catchup is probably not the way to go.
I think this mischaracterizes Linux. It is not always playing catchup, even in the desktop space. There are numerous areas where Linux is the best desktop offering. This is certainly not all of them, but the poster child OS X, which has been gaining install base, has certainly copied a lot from Linux.
Meanwhile, if Linux dominates at the Big Iron/Appliance/Server areas, then it will become easier for the desktop driven folks to achieve their goals.
This is very true, in that it gives MS one less near monopoly to leverage and it provides for more cross-pollination.
This is particularly so in a world where the buzz words are virtualisation, "in-the-cloud" etc, that remove many applications from directly being on the desktop, as application adoption and readiness for the desktop is one of the high barriers to Linux becoming a force on the desktop.
I don't have a lot of confidence in this... not because the benefits are not real, but because MS's intentional crippling of the Web via their control of IE keeps these solutions second class. Web developers have been excellent at hacking partially implemented 8 year old Web standards to do new and better things, but in the end they are still partially implemented 8 year old technologies and will always be crufty.
The computer desktop is not a major source of revenue for anyone. Don't whip out Microsoft on me here because their desktop business is through resellers like DELL and HP. Their retail product is costly as hell compared to a reseller like HP or Dell. Compare Vista sales through Dell versus how many retail licenses were purchased at Worst Buy.
I'm not sure I follow your logic. What does it matter who MS sells their desktop OS to? They make a buttload selling it to OEMs for pre-install. While they don't make much selling it at boxed at Best Buy, they do brisk trade selling site licenses to enterprise business and government organizations. All of that is money spent that could be going to someone else or be saved by the OEMs and big site license customers.
2. Backend/Big Iron is where the most dollar opportunity are with Linux.
Currently Linux developers do make money selling servers and using Linux to facilitate the sale. That, however, is not the only way people are making money by a long shot. Linux for appliances is used to sell everything from cell phones to industrial robots. Support and services for Linux deployments, both on the server and desktop, also pull in some big bucks. It makes IBM more cash than their server hardware business.
3. The desktop problems are much more difficult to solve and the payoff in dollars is worth maybe a nice dinner.
There certainly are some hard tasks to making a good consumer desktop, but a lot of those have more to do with MS's monopoly influence on the market (and intentional breaking of compatibility) than making a good desktop being a lot harder than making a good server. There is momentum to overcome, since there is lot more experience using Linux as a server and there is the question of what happens when some fundamental change is really needed for Linux on the desktop, but is detrimental to Linux as a server. It may be that the userspace will have to fork eventually.
Desktops? Not so much. What's the last legitimately different desktop environment you, or anyone else has tried?
OS X.
I can't agree with your implication. There is a whole lot of room for improvement in the desktop space and someone may well make a whole lot of money doing it. Imagine getting a nice multi-year contract to supply all the new desktops to the government of Germany. That can be a lot of cash for long time and a high visibility reference customer that can really open up other big sales. Realistically OS X, Vista, and Ubuntu all have useful features and capabilities the others do not. Simply setting some developers to clone all of the missing features into a Linux desktop, do some extensive usability testing and supply some closed source end user software and hooks to your services and you could really be in a good place. It can happen and might start with low-end machines like the XO laptop or even lower down with cell phones that slowly gain more and more functionality of normal desktops. Or maybe Lenovo or HP or Dell will finally be confident the antitrust laws will be enforced against MS (at least in the EU) and will take the plunge and invest in an alternative Linux based desktop to undercut the competition. Heck, it might even be Walmart that does it. Eventually though, someone will probably do it.
One of the biggest problems with CinePaint is that it is a fork of GIMP. That means it hasn't kept up with improvements in GIMP, while they've added a lot of useful features for the film industry by going their own direction.
That's true, but since the previous poster was claiming their use case was working with frames of film, it is likely more suited to his or her needs than GIMP. Especially in that it did have all the features he had complained were missing from GIMP.
I certainly would not recommend CinePaint to the average person looking to work on/touch up photographs and the like.
Personally I use GIMP for automated batch jobs that GraphicConverter can't handle. For the rest I use Photoshop, although I've been playing with Pixelmator a lot as well and it seems to be a contender for some use cases, especially at the much lower price point than PS (although not GIMP or course).
And why exactly shouldn't Apple count? Don't get me wrong, I'm not fanboi and I've never been tempted to "swing on that side" except for my iPod, but Apple should be counted.
I don't know what the previous poster was intending. OS X and Linux are both being used on the desktop. In the US they count together as something nearing 10%. They count even more if you're counting all the new devices, like smart phones, that are starting to take over some of the tasks traditionally reserved for the desktop (Web browsing).
On the other hand, if you're looking at things in terms of markets, neither OS X nor Linux counts as part of the "desktop OS" market the EU is referring to in their antitrust actions against MS. The main customers for desktop OS's are large organizations (business and government) and even larger PC OEMs. Apple refuses to sell their OS into this market because it monopolized and there is no business case. Linux is licensed such that it is not salable. Most Linux development shops do so because they are users and use it to sell other products, in many cases support and services using Linux or (like Apple) hardware that ships with Linux pre-installed.
So considering the latter perspective, no Linux and OS X do not count in terms of whether the desktop OS market is monopolized, but they certainly do count if you're just trying to figure out install base for other reasons.
Granted, it's a different business model and a different product offering from Linux but if anything Apple should show that the mythical Windows stranglehold on the desktop is just that, mythical.
It is true that MS is slowly losing install share to Apple and for that matter to Linux on the desktop, although that is really just getting started in the mainstream. This should not, however, dissuade one from understanding that it is a poor investment to try to compete in the desktop OS market. The ROI is terrible because unlike healthy markets your investment is partly wasted chasing MS's intentional un-interoperability. Further, since MS has multiple monopolies you have to commit to investing in all the markets they influence or finding partners to do so. This includes server OS's, hardware, end user applications, some services, media downloads, gaming systems, etc.
If anything the target users that Linux was suppose to rope in went Apple. I think that it's important for the Linux community to understand why and how.
I have personally seen a big move to OS X on the desktop from former Linux on the desktop users. In the security industry it has been a revolution. I can think of several reasons why this seems to be including:
- Most pertinent to this article, the main use of Linux has been on the server and Linux on the desktop has been unable to make revolutionary changes that might cause any disadvantage for Linux's use as a server (often this is simply in the name of preventing "bloat" and instability).
- Linux development is dispersed among many companies with less organization and much, much less hierarchy. There is no Steve Jobs of Linux to make a decision and make everyone go along. (This can be good and bad.) It is good because you have more choices and customizability, KDE or Gnome, RPMs or.debs, and so on. It is also a disadvantage in that developers and users don't focus on just one thing so there is duplicated effort and incompatibility problems.
- The development cultures are very different and I'd argue that at this point Linux on the Desktop is less open to borrowing from other cultures or even technologies. I can think of a dozen features Apple has more or less copied from Linux, Solaris, *BSD, and even Windows. I can't really think of any of the new features Apple has introduced that have been successfully copied and made part of default Linux distros. There are plenty of projects designed to clone OS X features, but very few if any that are incorporated and turned on
Slashdot is in desperate need of a (-1, Misinformed) or (-1, Incorrect) or (-1, Complete BS) mod option, and has been forever. I can't begin to count the number of posts filled with complete rubbish that get modded up here. Sometimes the posts in question are made sincerely, without the poster being aware that what they're posting is inaccurate. So, the traditional negative mods of Redundant, Flamebait and Troll don't apply.
You are correct that the mods don't apply, but I believe that is by design. What is and is not factually correct is often a matter of debate. As such, if one person posts an opinion, such as "gun laws lead to more violent crime" do you really think it is useful to have Slashdot users "vote" on if this is correct by modding it "informative" or "incorrect" and seeing which gets more votes? Is it not more useful to have a real discussion where people can explain their opinions. The whole point of a debate (as opposed to an argument) is that it is supposed to lead to common ground and find the fundamental source of the disagreement. At that point if the fundamental disagreement is factual, one can discuss the pros and cons of the data collection methods. If the disagreement is moral, then at least people can have a clear understanding of the positions and form or change their own opinion based upon that moral difference.
There's Interesting, Informative and Insightful, but where's the Incorrect mod to counter these?
The correct way to deal with a post that is factually incorrect is to either post a reply that contains the facts, or find a reply and mod it informative. As much as I might have liked to have had a "-1, factually incorrect" mod in the past, that is a crutch and leads to lack of discussion. It is too easy for people to simply "vote" in accordance with their current opinion and then let the majority feel justified that their belief was reinforced by the mob. This is fairly useless and actually is harmful in that it dissuades people from real discussion that might reveal actual, verifiable facts and lead to a change of opinion.
The closest mod that could apply to an innacurate quote would be Redundant, but that's not entirely true either.
Redundant applies only if someone has already posted that comment before. This is, in fact, the most commonly abused mod in my opinion. People often use "redundant" to mod down comments they disagree with, but which have not been stated by someone already. They rely upon meta-moderator's laziness in not bothering to check the context, which is of course required to make such a determination. I'm lazy too, but if I don't look at the context, I don't meta-moderate posts marked redundant. In fact, it would probably be a good idea to toss out any meta moderation that marks a redundant post either way unless the user clicked on the context link.
And posting a reply with a correction almost never balances things out, because the incorrect post almost invariably remains modded highly, and quite often, the correction remains unmodded.
This can and does happen, but that does not mean no one reads the unmodded replies. I've also seen factual correction modded up quite often. Certainly it is not perfect, but I still think it is better than having an "factually incorrect" mod option.
So, the only negative mod that can be applied to inaccurate statements is (-1, Overrated), because most of the time, using any other negative mod gets nailed in metamoderation, because the post isn't necessarily flamebait or trolling.
They should, of course, be nailed in metamoderation. If you read the moderator guidelines you'll notice they ask people to focus on upward moderation. I'd argue it is a waste to mod a statement "-1, overrated" in most cases because it does nothing to further the discussion. I will wait until someone makes a reply that corrects it and mod that, or make a reply myself. The only time I mod so
Okay, I had never heard of this site. From reading the Q&A, I'm not sure I'll ever want to visit it. I like the idea of exposing bias in news reporting, but I really don't see a lot of value in what they seem to be contributing here.
I'd enjoy a site where they fact check and even where they point out additional pertinent facts that may have been accidentally or intentionally left out of an article. I'd enjoy discussion where the methodology of fact collection and analysis was discussed and the relevance of data with regard to specific policies, other news events, etc.
From what I can tell based upon the answers given though, this seems more like a site populated by people polarized to one cultural view who are highly motivated and self identify with a polarized "liberal" or "conservative" political stance (as defined by mainstream media). So they "rate" articles based upon if they are supporting or opposing a given political party's platform? That sounds, well, idiotic. A completely objective study on the effects of gun control laws on crime rates might be rated as "conservative" simply because the political party's platform is supported by the data. Not to be crude but, why they hell would I care? Unless you're not interested in being accurately informed and are just looking for articles to support whatever group you've already decided to support, this site sounds completely useless. How is this any different than just finding the most biased news sites you can (in whatever direction) and just watching their spin on things?
Maybe I'm just misinterpreting the Q&A. Has anybody used the site and actually found it useful for finding objective information and helping to discover what is and is not accurate end relevant?
As those are features I use on pretty much every image I guess I won't be using it yet. Same with a pretty large portion of anybody else who scans film.
You might want to try CinePaint (formerly called Film Gimp). It is a fork of Gimp aimed specifically at touching up frames of film. It supports 8, 16, and 32 bit color, CMYK, HDR, Onion skinning, etc.
It is mainly developed by film production, special effects companies and has been used on many major motion pictures (Harry Potter, Spider Man, etc.).
It may well be more what you're looking for if you're working with film images.
If we had more than one major encyclopedia online that was supported by advertisements or Federal funding to source information from it would be a boon for everyone.
Britannica and Encarta are online and ad supported. They are, of course, commercial enterprises. That means they try to compile material as cheaply as possible, just like print encyclopedias. That also generally means no real peer review resulting in significant bias and error rates. For general information, they have higher rates of incorrect information than Wikipedia has according to independent evaluations.
If it is government funded that probably means I'm spending tax dollars to do the same as above, except it will cost more to do given bureaucracy and the executive branch will either make it "fix" the entries about creationism and evolution, or who knows what other politically based nonsense.
I mean, if they'll spend thousands for hardly used encyclopedias for public libraries...
That's pretty much up to the libraries themselves, isn't it? If libraries feel print encyclopedias are not worth while, they can certainly subscribe to an online one or just let people access a free one. If, however, a library decides enough of their users would benefit from having a print version, that is there call too. Some people still don't use the internet you know.
Okay, now all is clear. You are using BETA software that isn't released yet.
Bullcrap. I'm using Hardy Heron because it has features I need. Using that version has had nothing to do with accomplishing any of the tasks I mentioned. I had a failure of my package manager hose my install three times over the last two years, only the last of which was using a beta release.
Any computer professional knows that you don't use beta software on a computer you care about.
Do you even know what beta means? It means feature complete, but not fully tested and debugged. Sure it might cause instability, but it should have absolutely nothing to do with any of the problems I listed since they were due to missing features, not features that malfunctioned (sans the example above which I've had with both the beta and a stable Linux release).
It is very dishonest of you to complain about this and not mention you were using beta software.
No it isn't unless you can point out how any of the points I listed are different and better on a "stable" release.
Your goal is simply to make Linux look bad and you will go to any extremes to do it. It is obvious you have an agenda.
I can only suppose your agenda is one of two things. Either you're trying to defend deficiencies of Linux because you are afraid they reflect on your choice to use it, which is a threat to your ego. Or, you're intentionally trying to ignore and belittle problems with Linux because you actively want to try to help prevent them from being addressed. I suspect the former.
While I agree with free speech, I think that access to such information should be limited to those who have sufficient information to prove themselves non-suicidal -- exactly like getting a gun license.
So what you're saying is you think your own post should be illegal because you can't be trusted not to say what you just did? What an, umm, interesting concept.
You misunderstand. I meant the protections only on web-sites whose sole purpose is to disseminate suicide techniques and are biased in favor of using them. I'm not telling anyone to kill themselves.
First, "protections on sites"? I think you mean "restrictions on sites." Second, you do understand that what you propose is impossible to legislate, right? Both the criteria you list as restrictions are subjective and dependent upon the intent of the site operator. Who is to say what is biased in favor and what is simply informative? It speaks to the mental state of the person who created the site, a so called "thought crime" law. Who is to say if a site's sole purpose is to disseminate suicide techniques? If they also have one article about what their favorite food is, does that mean they can ignore this law?
I didn't say banned, I said "controlled", and only in the instance of sites that promote suicide and furthermore only in the instance that the user is suicidal.
So how exactly is a site operator supposed to determine if a given user is suicidal? How do you stop suicidal people from going to a site without restricting it to other people? Note, this has to pass constitutional muster such that it cannot allow the government to monitor who reads it because it cannot potentially create a "chilling effect" as per other supreme court ruling on free speech.
you should start setting an example and stop your own speech on the matter first.
See my comments above.
I did, but maybe it is my opinion that your real intent was just to inform people how to commit suicide. Maybe you're trying to encourage suicide under the guise of doing the opposite. Since we cannot read your thoughts, who is to say?
I'm also not sure you can claim to be in favor of free speech and then propose a huge restriction on free speech.
I was referring to a very small subset of speech, and any one who is non-suicidal would be free to access it.
Yes, that is what everyone who wants to restrict free speech says. No one wants to stop people from talking. They just want to make it illegal to print blasphemy in order to save people's souls. Or maybe they're in favor of free speech, they just want to ban speech about granting "negros" freedom from slavery, since such speech is unnatural and promotes illegal acts like theft of slaves. All other speech is fine.
Being in favor of free speech means it applies to both speech you like and speech you don't like. If you don't support the rights of people to say things you completely disagree with and think are horrible, then you are not in favor of free speech at all.
I believe that such a license ( like a drinking license ) is necessary because suicide is usually the result of psychotic depression -- which was induced by bipolar disorder in this case.
So you propose restricting everyone's rights to prevent the mentally ill from hearing things, and you think this would work?
Firstly, you are pulling a straw man by referring to the mentally ill -- most of the mentally ill are not suicidal. And again, I was not referring to everyone, but only to the suicidal, and only in the very restricted sense of accessing web sites that promote suicide.
You specifically called out the mentally ill by claiming that most people who commit suicide suffer from the mental illness of psychotic depression.
Exactly. More african-americans are poor, and video games are a very cheap form of entertainment. Also, poor people have less educational opportunities. This is not about color, this is about money.
That certainly is a major factor, but I'm not convinced it is the only one. There is a lot of self-segregation in many industries. This is not to say that people are consciously being racist, just that race is also a social/cultural differentiator. I've worked places where one project team or division was almost entirely immigrants from Malaysia. Another place I worked had greater than 50% of the team graduated from the same University... one 600 miles away. Programming is one of those industries where people are often hired through personal networks and although I went to a university that had a large number of ethnic groups, it was not at all uncommon to see large groups that tended to associate only (or primarily) with people of the same race.
In some of the best places I've worked the workforce was much less homogenous and I don't think that was a coincidence. Among some of the most brilliant people I've worked with I've seen a tendency to hire people based upon their intelligence, talent, and experience almost to the exclusion of any social factors. For the video game programming industry, however, a lot of the time it seems to be people who are less competent. Most of the really intelligent people I know quickly got out of the game segment as the wages were relatively low, benefits weak, hours long and stress high. It would not surprise me at all to find that such a market segment was more prone to hiring people based upon social aspects more than skills.
While I agree with free speech, I think that access to such information should be limited to those who have sufficient information to prove themselves non-suicidal -- exactly like getting a gun license.
So what you're saying is you think your own post should be illegal because you can't be trusted not to say what you just did? What an, umm, interesting concept. If you think such speech should be banned, maybe you should start setting an example and stop your own speech on the matter first. I'm also not sure you can claim to be in favor of free speech and then propose a huge restriction on free speech.
I believe that such a license ( like a drinking license ) is necessary because suicide is usually the result of psychotic depression -- which was induced by bipolar disorder in this case.
So you propose restricting everyone's rights to prevent the mentally ill from hearing things, and you think this would work? Are you proposing a great internet firewall of the US, like the one China has, to protect us from all this free information on the internet? Do you think the danger this poses in terms of potential censorship and misinformation is less important than keeping suicidal people from having this information?
Also, committing suicide is a crime in the U.S.,although I don't know how the authorities will penalize you when you're dead, so maybe it should be attempted suicide.
Suicide is not a crime in the US. Attempted suicide is a crime... although maybe we should ask if it should be.
As such, web sites that disseminate this information are complicit in murder.
First, suicide or attempted suicide and murder are not the same things. We also have Web sites that give specific advice on how to commit murders, but they are perfectly legal. To be complicit in murder you have to specifically be involved in a murder, not simply provide information.
I wish I could find out where she gathered the Advil advice and crack the skull of whomever put it up.
Yeah, there is no better tribute to a person who killed themselves than to kill someone else who told them how to do it less painfully. I suspect you're feeling more than thinking rationally. I suspect that you have not thought this through.
America was founded on the idea of personal freedom. The only reason attempted suicide is a crime is because of the religious ramifications, something which is unconstitutional in principal, if not in the letter of how it is written. I feel that adults may rationally decide to end their own lives. It is not insane to want to end your own life when you, for example, you are slowly and painfully dying of an incurable disease. I further believe that for other people to try to take responsibility for your actions in such a case and prevent you frm accurate access to information on how to do it effectively sickens me.
But here they put people in jail for posting information on suicide.
Where is "here?"
Land of the free, provided you're not contemplating ending your life.
In the US contemplating suicide is not illegal, nor committing it. Attempted suicide is for some bizarre reason.
If we really had a free country people would be able to kill themselves and broadcast it on national TV.
I'm of two minds about this, sort of like the selling organs thing. In general I favor personal freedom, even to the extent of allowing suicide. I'm not sure about commercially motivated suicide (like organ donation). It can be a very twisted society when commercial interests end up forcing you to commit suicide or sell a kidney in order to feed your family and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how we could get there.
Sort of like a political ad I saw tonight where the candidate proclaimed he was "pro life and pro gun". I'm not entirely sure how you reconcile those positions.
While I find "pro life" to be an absurd position as stated I don't see that it is incompatible with "pro gun" On the face, anyone who eats animal or vegetable matter of who does not take immunosuppressants to protect attacking organisms from oneself cannot claim to be "pro life." As for being in favor of banning abortions, well I don't see why that is incompatible with being in favor of gun ownership or being opposed to laws that restrict gun ownership.
The problem is humans have a natural tendency to categorise things, and when a subject is controversial, it's easier to opt for comfort, and narrow those categories into classifications using emotional criteria.
I'm not sure how that relates to my comment. How does human classification of suicide relate to search engines that provide information that does not relate directly to the search terms?
Complexity requires thinking, and that demands a grasp of the issues and an ability to discuss those issues. By opting for the simple and comfortable we can dispense with all that and choose a position. Given that different people will choose different positions, we end up with a "for it" or "against" false dichotomy, from which arises erroneous notions of bias by the other side.
Again, I'm not sure I see how this relates to the points I made. People don't have to be for or against suicide in order to be searching for something like "pain-less suicide method." They could be either or neither or undecided or completely uninterested. Maybe they are just researching a painless method so they can have a character in a novel make use of it, but don't really care one way or another if real people kill themselves.
Anti suicide sites? I'm not sure what means, but I'll assume that's a site where someone decided to promote a specific advocacy position on the subject. Which means every other site is most certainly a "pro" suicide site.
Let me clarify. Anti-suicide refers to a site that is opposed to suicide. Pro-suicide is a site that encourages suicide. This does not preclude the existence of sites that neither advocate nor oppose suicide and which have multiple view points or are simply informational.
#1 - take a six shot revolver and six cartridges (bullets). Load 5 cartridges into the revolver and set to one side. Take the remaining cartridge and place it on a table in front of you. Slam your forehead down on it with all the force you can muster. Hopefully die knowing you will have confused the hell out of the forensic guy.
#2 - obtain a trenchcoat and some explosives; pipe bombs or dynamite with shrapnel attached or whatever. Use detonators or get good at timing a wick. Strap explosives all over yourself and put on the trenchcoat. Find a very public area downtown and climb out on a ledge. Wait until gawkers gather around below, waiting for you to jump, then jump. Set off the explosives about 20 feet above the crowd. Die knowing you took some un-empathic fucks with you and covered a lot of people with your shredded remains.
Interesting. Looks like somebody cut down a regular.45 for use in those cowboy competitions. Thanks for the link. It's always good to learn something new.
Slashdot Mirror
You're probably right. I imagine that would change the situation from a legal perspective. They certainly have options to make such reselling illegal if it does not prove to be as they are now shipping.
Similar rumors have ben floating around with regard to Quicktime licensing for many years. They certainly could be true and it would make for some significant liabilities for Apple, although not necessarily ones that cannot be overcome. It would be an antitrust issue if MS did have such an agreement with Apple, but it would not be their first such illegal contract.
This could happen some day, but for now I assume my particular wants (and I would purchase just such a machine) probably do not reflect the sales opportunity. I'm assuming that Apple's formal research into potential new systems is probably a lot more thorough than my or your wish that it would sell enough to make them money and grow their install base.
he fact that people buy them doesn't mean it matches their needs - just that it has a feature set that is greater than what they need.I own a Mac pro tower. It is 8 years old and has been running constantly aside from moves and sees daily use as a home server for fileserver, music, DVR, DVD player, guest terminal, and media download/streaming. At the time of purchase it was their midrange offering and it was expensive. That said, it has actually proved itself quite a bargain. 10.5 is the last version of OS X that will support its dual G4, 533Mhz processors so I'll probably retire it in the next four years and give it to my nieces as a Web and e-mail box.
If Apple had offered a minitower at the time, I probably would have bought it. If they offered one now, I'd probably choose it as my replacement mini-server. That said, I'm not really sure Apple's market strategy has not worked out for both of us so far.
The 'clones" weren't using lower quality components when Apple sold their OS and ROMs.
Independent testing at the time said otherwise. While Apple's hardware reliability ratings were not as high then as now, they were still above average. Some of the clone makers (notably Radius and Daystar) had decent hardware reliability, but numerous driver issues. Others, like Umax and APS had some of the worst hardware reliability of any computer at the time. Sure they shipped the same size hard drive, but it was from the cheapest, least reliable manufacturer of the day.
I 've seen no evidence to suggest that the old Mac clones were less reliable than Apple's own machines, or that people blamed the OS for any failures that occurred with them.
You should have read the periodicals of the time. "Brand poisoning" was a huge concern at Apple and Consumer Reports has always been pretty good when it comes to hardware reliability comparisons.
The problem was that the Apple which existed in the period between Jobs getting ousted and coming back again was unable to find a way to differentiate its own large range of far from universally wonderful machines from the cheaper and frequently better clones, and the licensing revenues they were earning from those manufacturing them weren't enough to offset the impact they were having on Apple's hardware sales.
Apple had built their entire business model on using hardware sales to fund the development of their OS and application business. They still have that strategy. The problem of the day was not that Apple had nothing to offer, but that they underpriced their OS in an attempt to "get it out there" but overestimated the consumer's ability to differentiate hardware and software quality. At the same time they completely misunderstood MS's monopoly position and its ramification on the industry. Apple thought clones would lead to more sales and an MS like business model. What they found was sales were nearly flat since so many users were already unable to choose anything but Windows because of application availability, software purchases as an asset, and other incompatibilities. MS's influence was very strong, but Apple assumed it was still a free and competitive capitalist market. Instead of growing their OS business they found it was flat and instead they were just losing a chunk of their hardware business.
Now if Apple had been "the best" at hardware among all entrants, this might have been different, but it still would not have gained them much market share, if any. The clone makers were able to target their sales and make niche systems that appealed to specific customers. Daystar even developed and installed custom applications for a big customer and Apple was not able to compete with that, not with a market that was artificially restricted from growth.
It would be even harder for Apple to to differentiate themselves today if they licensed OS X, because they're now selling X86-based PCs that use commodity hardware which other manufacturers can buy off the shelf.
That is actually less of a concern today. Apple has other income sources with the iPod and iPhone and applications business. They could strategically absorb a hit to grow the install base. The problem is, MS's lock in is much, much, much stronger today than ever, having grown to four long standing monopolies and dozens of significant abuses in other markets. Apple licensing their OS today would mean even less ability to benefit by growing their OS share. They'd be better off investing in a partnership with a Linux on the desktop developer and contributing to a low-end version of Linux that is compatible with OS X.
but it would be extremely difficult to claim that it's objectively better than some of the kit that's available from the likes of Lenovo, Sony, and even HP, who have a higher priced range of business computers that's much better in quality terms than their co
I want the Mac Apple refuses to sell me: an upgradeable machine that...
Yup. Apple won't sell into markets that won't make them profitable. Why do you suppose the market doesn't correct for that problem?
Jobs refuses to sell it because he knows people will buy it.
Jobs, quite correctly, sells only a small selection of hardware because they cannot become over extended into the hardware market, given their limited resources. They have about the same number of offerings of other OEMs with comparable market share. They don't have the same number of offerings as all the rest of the PC hardware vendors combined. This is unlikely to change anytime soon.
He also is under the delusion that creating a Mac upgradeable prosumer desktop will somehow "Dell-ize" Apple.
Umm, I don't think Apple is trying to be like Dell. Dell makes most of their money on the low end and Apple has too much invested in their brand to do the same. Dell just buys respected brands (like Alienware) and uses them until they are ruined, then moves on. Actually, though, to be fair Dell has made some real strides in the last year with regard to laptops, pulling their reliability from near the bottom to better than average.
The reality, which most Mac users understand, is that what is actually valuable about Macs is not their different-ness, but the fact that they run OS X, which is the best consumer operating system on the market.
Apple has other value than just their OS, but I think most people agree OS X is their crown jewels. The thing is, the desktop OS market is monopolized. Trying to sell OS X by itself is economic suicide. MS can and does simply manufacture incompatibilities and given their market share, momentum, and lock-in that amounts to artificially breaking OS X at will. Other OS's such as BeOS were superior to Windows at the time. We all know how well they faired.
Apple survives investing resources into the desktop OS market by enforcing bundling. They bypass the desktop OS market and compete instead in the computer system market (which is fairly healthy and competitive). Make no mistake, if this company is ruled within their rights, Apple will have no choice but to respond and that may mean pulling OS X from retail sale altogether and simply offering it with their computers and providing free upgrades to owners of Apple hardware. Alternately, they could roll out paid upgrades via a system that requires users to agree to the contract before they get the OS, so no more boxed copies in retail outlets. What they won't do, is allow another company to leverage Apple's own significant investment in OS X for the cost Apple charges for upgrades. Before that, Apple would abandon OS X development entirely as no longer profitable.
Mac hardware is not special. It got even less special after 2005.
To be fair, independent testing shows Apple as the most reliable hardware vendor on the market, with very few vendors even coming close. Apple's hardware is not magical or anything but it is very well engineered, especially for the price. Apple's margins are higher than the industry as a whole, but less than the two vendors who come even close to Apple's low failure rates.
Mac SOFTWARE is what is special.
Again, I agree, but the desktop OS market is monopolized. MS still has way too much of the install base for Apple to even consider unbundling their OS and hardware. They will bundle or they will have to make the OS X division actually profitable, which would mean something closer to $150 a copy and no more cheap upgrades and serious copy protection/licensing. It would also probably mean Apple abandoning it altogether.
The sad truth is, unless MS loses their monopoly, that is the reality of the economic situation. I'd love to be able to install OS X on whiteboxes too, but not if that means Apple stops developing it. The solution is to fix the dam
I use MS Office. It is by no means the best of breed solution for many use cases. It also has long standing bugs that have never been corrected, particularly with regard to corruption of large documents. It also has formats that change so often and between different versions that there is no guarantee of a document looking the same on two different versions, or even using the same version on the same OS, but plugged into different printers.
but Office (and Excel in particular) is the best office suite out there.Office is the most popular by far. Remove the interoperability problems with office formats and there are plenty of contenders. Office holds the market through intentional failure to interoperate and by bundling it all together so that better solutions for the individual components are hard to get approved as corporate purchases.
If you RTFA you'd see, "...and we will preinstall Leopard for free so you can begin to use your computer right out of the box."
It is more or less the same thing. The market for Macs is limited by OEMs afraid of retaliation by MS and by users who are locked into Windows. Apple has great brand recognition for mid and high end systems. This leaves only bargain machines. Bargain machines are marketed mostly by touting the low price and trying to make it seem like you're getting the same product as a more expensive system. Just like last time their would be bullet points and number comparisons that tried to make a system look like what Apple offers, but using lower quality components. This means more failures, many of which are blamed on the OS, and tarnishes Apple's brand, while at the same time stealing some of their sales.
MS has been gaining market share in the server space by intentionally making it as hard as possible for Linux servers to interoperate with Windows desktops. They can do this, because they control the desktop space. Linux does not monopolize any market and even if it did, there are numerous Linux distributions so breaking compatibility would have to somehow incorporate a change into all the distros is such a way that MS did not have access to the same information. Basically, because Linux is open source and different distros interoperate via open standards, Linux can never leverage their influence in one market to give it the same type of advantage in a new market (as MS has done repeatedly to take over new markets).
Linux is the major player in several segments then it can leverage that strength to gain others.Linux cannot "leverage" their strength in the same way MS leverages their monopoly power. At best, Linux will always be fighting on a level playing field in some markets and in one skewed against them in others.
In a different way, however, Linux can leverage their main advantages into the desktop that have kept them alive on the server. Development costs are shared and overall costs are less. This means Linux can undercut the price of MS's other markets. In fact, if antitrust laws were enforced effectively Linux would probably slowly gain ground in most markets until it had significant share, then grow very rapidly. The main disadvantage from a business perspective is Linux will never allow any given company to extract as much money as MS does. Still, in a fair market, companies will settle for a share of a smaller pie, than no share at all.
It'll take a nimble, energetic core of developers to drive and make decisions that are innovative and exciting to users. "Nimble" is not really Linux's strength. There is no one person to make decisions that will extend to all Linux desktops. Revolutionary changes are very hard because so many people have to get onboard and incompatibility with other distros is a huge negative. Really, it will probably take a serious investor willing to make such choices and break compatibility with other Linux distros to really bring it into the desktop space effectively. Always playing catchup is probably not the way to go.I think this mischaracterizes Linux. It is not always playing catchup, even in the desktop space. There are numerous areas where Linux is the best desktop offering. This is certainly not all of them, but the poster child OS X, which has been gaining install base, has certainly copied a lot from Linux.
Meanwhile, if Linux dominates at the Big Iron/Appliance/Server areas, then it will become easier for the desktop driven folks to achieve their goals.This is very true, in that it gives MS one less near monopoly to leverage and it provides for more cross-pollination.
This is particularly so in a world where the buzz words are virtualisation, "in-the-cloud" etc, that remove many applications from directly being on the desktop, as application adoption and readiness for the desktop is one of the high barriers to Linux becoming a force on the desktop.I don't have a lot of confidence in this... not because the benefits are not real, but because MS's intentional crippling of the Web via their control of IE keeps these solutions second class. Web developers have been excellent at hacking partially implemented 8 year old Web standards to do new and better things, but in the end they are still partially implemented 8 year old technologies and will always be crufty.
I'm not sure I follow your logic. What does it matter who MS sells their desktop OS to? They make a buttload selling it to OEMs for pre-install. While they don't make much selling it at boxed at Best Buy, they do brisk trade selling site licenses to enterprise business and government organizations. All of that is money spent that could be going to someone else or be saved by the OEMs and big site license customers.
2. Backend/Big Iron is where the most dollar opportunity are with Linux.Currently Linux developers do make money selling servers and using Linux to facilitate the sale. That, however, is not the only way people are making money by a long shot. Linux for appliances is used to sell everything from cell phones to industrial robots. Support and services for Linux deployments, both on the server and desktop, also pull in some big bucks. It makes IBM more cash than their server hardware business.
3. The desktop problems are much more difficult to solve and the payoff in dollars is worth maybe a nice dinner.There certainly are some hard tasks to making a good consumer desktop, but a lot of those have more to do with MS's monopoly influence on the market (and intentional breaking of compatibility) than making a good desktop being a lot harder than making a good server. There is momentum to overcome, since there is lot more experience using Linux as a server and there is the question of what happens when some fundamental change is really needed for Linux on the desktop, but is detrimental to Linux as a server. It may be that the userspace will have to fork eventually.
Desktops? Not so much. What's the last legitimately different desktop environment you, or anyone else has tried?OS X.
I can't agree with your implication. There is a whole lot of room for improvement in the desktop space and someone may well make a whole lot of money doing it. Imagine getting a nice multi-year contract to supply all the new desktops to the government of Germany. That can be a lot of cash for long time and a high visibility reference customer that can really open up other big sales. Realistically OS X, Vista, and Ubuntu all have useful features and capabilities the others do not. Simply setting some developers to clone all of the missing features into a Linux desktop, do some extensive usability testing and supply some closed source end user software and hooks to your services and you could really be in a good place. It can happen and might start with low-end machines like the XO laptop or even lower down with cell phones that slowly gain more and more functionality of normal desktops. Or maybe Lenovo or HP or Dell will finally be confident the antitrust laws will be enforced against MS (at least in the EU) and will take the plunge and invest in an alternative Linux based desktop to undercut the competition. Heck, it might even be Walmart that does it. Eventually though, someone will probably do it.
That's true, but since the previous poster was claiming their use case was working with frames of film, it is likely more suited to his or her needs than GIMP. Especially in that it did have all the features he had complained were missing from GIMP.
I certainly would not recommend CinePaint to the average person looking to work on/touch up photographs and the like.
Personally I use GIMP for automated batch jobs that GraphicConverter can't handle. For the rest I use Photoshop, although I've been playing with Pixelmator a lot as well and it seems to be a contender for some use cases, especially at the much lower price point than PS (although not GIMP or course).
And why exactly shouldn't Apple count? Don't get me wrong, I'm not fanboi and I've never been tempted to "swing on that side" except for my iPod, but Apple should be counted.
I don't know what the previous poster was intending. OS X and Linux are both being used on the desktop. In the US they count together as something nearing 10%. They count even more if you're counting all the new devices, like smart phones, that are starting to take over some of the tasks traditionally reserved for the desktop (Web browsing).
On the other hand, if you're looking at things in terms of markets, neither OS X nor Linux counts as part of the "desktop OS" market the EU is referring to in their antitrust actions against MS. The main customers for desktop OS's are large organizations (business and government) and even larger PC OEMs. Apple refuses to sell their OS into this market because it monopolized and there is no business case. Linux is licensed such that it is not salable. Most Linux development shops do so because they are users and use it to sell other products, in many cases support and services using Linux or (like Apple) hardware that ships with Linux pre-installed.
So considering the latter perspective, no Linux and OS X do not count in terms of whether the desktop OS market is monopolized, but they certainly do count if you're just trying to figure out install base for other reasons.
Granted, it's a different business model and a different product offering from Linux but if anything Apple should show that the mythical Windows stranglehold on the desktop is just that, mythical.
It is true that MS is slowly losing install share to Apple and for that matter to Linux on the desktop, although that is really just getting started in the mainstream. This should not, however, dissuade one from understanding that it is a poor investment to try to compete in the desktop OS market. The ROI is terrible because unlike healthy markets your investment is partly wasted chasing MS's intentional un-interoperability. Further, since MS has multiple monopolies you have to commit to investing in all the markets they influence or finding partners to do so. This includes server OS's, hardware, end user applications, some services, media downloads, gaming systems, etc.
If anything the target users that Linux was suppose to rope in went Apple. I think that it's important for the Linux community to understand why and how.
I have personally seen a big move to OS X on the desktop from former Linux on the desktop users. In the security industry it has been a revolution. I can think of several reasons why this seems to be including:
Slashdot is in desperate need of a (-1, Misinformed) or (-1, Incorrect) or (-1, Complete BS) mod option, and has been forever. I can't begin to count the number of posts filled with complete rubbish that get modded up here. Sometimes the posts in question are made sincerely, without the poster being aware that what they're posting is inaccurate. So, the traditional negative mods of Redundant, Flamebait and Troll don't apply.
You are correct that the mods don't apply, but I believe that is by design. What is and is not factually correct is often a matter of debate. As such, if one person posts an opinion, such as "gun laws lead to more violent crime" do you really think it is useful to have Slashdot users "vote" on if this is correct by modding it "informative" or "incorrect" and seeing which gets more votes? Is it not more useful to have a real discussion where people can explain their opinions. The whole point of a debate (as opposed to an argument) is that it is supposed to lead to common ground and find the fundamental source of the disagreement. At that point if the fundamental disagreement is factual, one can discuss the pros and cons of the data collection methods. If the disagreement is moral, then at least people can have a clear understanding of the positions and form or change their own opinion based upon that moral difference.
There's Interesting, Informative and Insightful, but where's the Incorrect mod to counter these?
The correct way to deal with a post that is factually incorrect is to either post a reply that contains the facts, or find a reply and mod it informative. As much as I might have liked to have had a "-1, factually incorrect" mod in the past, that is a crutch and leads to lack of discussion. It is too easy for people to simply "vote" in accordance with their current opinion and then let the majority feel justified that their belief was reinforced by the mob. This is fairly useless and actually is harmful in that it dissuades people from real discussion that might reveal actual, verifiable facts and lead to a change of opinion.
The closest mod that could apply to an innacurate quote would be Redundant, but that's not entirely true either.
Redundant applies only if someone has already posted that comment before. This is, in fact, the most commonly abused mod in my opinion. People often use "redundant" to mod down comments they disagree with, but which have not been stated by someone already. They rely upon meta-moderator's laziness in not bothering to check the context, which is of course required to make such a determination. I'm lazy too, but if I don't look at the context, I don't meta-moderate posts marked redundant. In fact, it would probably be a good idea to toss out any meta moderation that marks a redundant post either way unless the user clicked on the context link.
And posting a reply with a correction almost never balances things out, because the incorrect post almost invariably remains modded highly, and quite often, the correction remains unmodded.
This can and does happen, but that does not mean no one reads the unmodded replies. I've also seen factual correction modded up quite often. Certainly it is not perfect, but I still think it is better than having an "factually incorrect" mod option.
So, the only negative mod that can be applied to inaccurate statements is (-1, Overrated), because most of the time, using any other negative mod gets nailed in metamoderation, because the post isn't necessarily flamebait or trolling.
They should, of course, be nailed in metamoderation. If you read the moderator guidelines you'll notice they ask people to focus on upward moderation. I'd argue it is a waste to mod a statement "-1, overrated" in most cases because it does nothing to further the discussion. I will wait until someone makes a reply that corrects it and mod that, or make a reply myself. The only time I mod so
Okay, I had never heard of this site. From reading the Q&A, I'm not sure I'll ever want to visit it. I like the idea of exposing bias in news reporting, but I really don't see a lot of value in what they seem to be contributing here.
I'd enjoy a site where they fact check and even where they point out additional pertinent facts that may have been accidentally or intentionally left out of an article. I'd enjoy discussion where the methodology of fact collection and analysis was discussed and the relevance of data with regard to specific policies, other news events, etc.
From what I can tell based upon the answers given though, this seems more like a site populated by people polarized to one cultural view who are highly motivated and self identify with a polarized "liberal" or "conservative" political stance (as defined by mainstream media). So they "rate" articles based upon if they are supporting or opposing a given political party's platform? That sounds, well, idiotic. A completely objective study on the effects of gun control laws on crime rates might be rated as "conservative" simply because the political party's platform is supported by the data. Not to be crude but, why they hell would I care? Unless you're not interested in being accurately informed and are just looking for articles to support whatever group you've already decided to support, this site sounds completely useless. How is this any different than just finding the most biased news sites you can (in whatever direction) and just watching their spin on things?
Maybe I'm just misinterpreting the Q&A. Has anybody used the site and actually found it useful for finding objective information and helping to discover what is and is not accurate end relevant?
You might want to try CinePaint (formerly called Film Gimp). It is a fork of Gimp aimed specifically at touching up frames of film. It supports 8, 16, and 32 bit color, CMYK, HDR, Onion skinning, etc.
It is mainly developed by film production, special effects companies and has been used on many major motion pictures (Harry Potter, Spider Man, etc.).
It may well be more what you're looking for if you're working with film images.
Britannica and Encarta are online and ad supported. They are, of course, commercial enterprises. That means they try to compile material as cheaply as possible, just like print encyclopedias. That also generally means no real peer review resulting in significant bias and error rates. For general information, they have higher rates of incorrect information than Wikipedia has according to independent evaluations.
If it is government funded that probably means I'm spending tax dollars to do the same as above, except it will cost more to do given bureaucracy and the executive branch will either make it "fix" the entries about creationism and evolution, or who knows what other politically based nonsense.
I mean, if they'll spend thousands for hardly used encyclopedias for public libraries...That's pretty much up to the libraries themselves, isn't it? If libraries feel print encyclopedias are not worth while, they can certainly subscribe to an online one or just let people access a free one. If, however, a library decides enough of their users would benefit from having a print version, that is there call too. Some people still don't use the internet you know.
Bullcrap. I'm using Hardy Heron because it has features I need. Using that version has had nothing to do with accomplishing any of the tasks I mentioned. I had a failure of my package manager hose my install three times over the last two years, only the last of which was using a beta release.
Any computer professional knows that you don't use beta software on a computer you care about.Do you even know what beta means? It means feature complete, but not fully tested and debugged. Sure it might cause instability, but it should have absolutely nothing to do with any of the problems I listed since they were due to missing features, not features that malfunctioned (sans the example above which I've had with both the beta and a stable Linux release).
It is very dishonest of you to complain about this and not mention you were using beta software.No it isn't unless you can point out how any of the points I listed are different and better on a "stable" release.
Your goal is simply to make Linux look bad and you will go to any extremes to do it. It is obvious you have an agenda.I can only suppose your agenda is one of two things. Either you're trying to defend deficiencies of Linux because you are afraid they reflect on your choice to use it, which is a threat to your ego. Or, you're intentionally trying to ignore and belittle problems with Linux because you actively want to try to help prevent them from being addressed. I suspect the former.
While I agree with free speech, I think that access to such information should be limited to those who have sufficient information to prove themselves non-suicidal -- exactly like getting a gun license.
So what you're saying is you think your own post should be illegal because you can't be trusted not to say what you just did? What an, umm, interesting concept.
You misunderstand. I meant the protections only on web-sites whose sole purpose is to disseminate suicide techniques and are biased in favor of using them. I'm not telling anyone to kill themselves.
First, "protections on sites"? I think you mean "restrictions on sites." Second, you do understand that what you propose is impossible to legislate, right? Both the criteria you list as restrictions are subjective and dependent upon the intent of the site operator. Who is to say what is biased in favor and what is simply informative? It speaks to the mental state of the person who created the site, a so called "thought crime" law. Who is to say if a site's sole purpose is to disseminate suicide techniques? If they also have one article about what their favorite food is, does that mean they can ignore this law?
I didn't say banned, I said "controlled", and only in the instance of sites that promote suicide and furthermore only in the instance that the user is suicidal.
So how exactly is a site operator supposed to determine if a given user is suicidal? How do you stop suicidal people from going to a site without restricting it to other people? Note, this has to pass constitutional muster such that it cannot allow the government to monitor who reads it because it cannot potentially create a "chilling effect" as per other supreme court ruling on free speech.
you should start setting an example and stop your own speech on the matter first.
See my comments above.
I did, but maybe it is my opinion that your real intent was just to inform people how to commit suicide. Maybe you're trying to encourage suicide under the guise of doing the opposite. Since we cannot read your thoughts, who is to say?
I'm also not sure you can claim to be in favor of free speech and then propose a huge restriction on free speech.
I was referring to a very small subset of speech, and any one who is non-suicidal would be free to access it.
Yes, that is what everyone who wants to restrict free speech says. No one wants to stop people from talking. They just want to make it illegal to print blasphemy in order to save people's souls. Or maybe they're in favor of free speech, they just want to ban speech about granting "negros" freedom from slavery, since such speech is unnatural and promotes illegal acts like theft of slaves. All other speech is fine.
Being in favor of free speech means it applies to both speech you like and speech you don't like. If you don't support the rights of people to say things you completely disagree with and think are horrible, then you are not in favor of free speech at all.
I believe that such a license ( like a drinking license ) is necessary because suicide is usually the result of psychotic depression -- which was induced by bipolar disorder in this case.
So you propose restricting everyone's rights to prevent the mentally ill from hearing things, and you think this would work?
Firstly, you are pulling a straw man by referring to the mentally ill -- most of the mentally ill are not suicidal. And again, I was not referring to everyone, but only to the suicidal, and only in the very restricted sense of accessing web sites that promote suicide.
You specifically called out the mentally ill by claiming that most people who commit suicide suffer from the mental illness of psychotic depression.
That certainly is a major factor, but I'm not convinced it is the only one. There is a lot of self-segregation in many industries. This is not to say that people are consciously being racist, just that race is also a social/cultural differentiator. I've worked places where one project team or division was almost entirely immigrants from Malaysia. Another place I worked had greater than 50% of the team graduated from the same University... one 600 miles away. Programming is one of those industries where people are often hired through personal networks and although I went to a university that had a large number of ethnic groups, it was not at all uncommon to see large groups that tended to associate only (or primarily) with people of the same race.
In some of the best places I've worked the workforce was much less homogenous and I don't think that was a coincidence. Among some of the most brilliant people I've worked with I've seen a tendency to hire people based upon their intelligence, talent, and experience almost to the exclusion of any social factors. For the video game programming industry, however, a lot of the time it seems to be people who are less competent. Most of the really intelligent people I know quickly got out of the game segment as the wages were relatively low, benefits weak, hours long and stress high. It would not surprise me at all to find that such a market segment was more prone to hiring people based upon social aspects more than skills.
So what you're saying is you think your own post should be illegal because you can't be trusted not to say what you just did? What an, umm, interesting concept. If you think such speech should be banned, maybe you should start setting an example and stop your own speech on the matter first. I'm also not sure you can claim to be in favor of free speech and then propose a huge restriction on free speech.
I believe that such a license ( like a drinking license ) is necessary because suicide is usually the result of psychotic depression -- which was induced by bipolar disorder in this case.So you propose restricting everyone's rights to prevent the mentally ill from hearing things, and you think this would work? Are you proposing a great internet firewall of the US, like the one China has, to protect us from all this free information on the internet? Do you think the danger this poses in terms of potential censorship and misinformation is less important than keeping suicidal people from having this information?
Also, committing suicide is a crime in the U.S.Suicide is not a crime in the US. Attempted suicide is a crime... although maybe we should ask if it should be.
As such, web sites that disseminate this information are complicit in murder.First, suicide or attempted suicide and murder are not the same things. We also have Web sites that give specific advice on how to commit murders, but they are perfectly legal. To be complicit in murder you have to specifically be involved in a murder, not simply provide information.
I wish I could find out where she gathered the Advil advice and crack the skull of whomever put it up.Yeah, there is no better tribute to a person who killed themselves than to kill someone else who told them how to do it less painfully. I suspect you're feeling more than thinking rationally. I suspect that you have not thought this through.
America was founded on the idea of personal freedom. The only reason attempted suicide is a crime is because of the religious ramifications, something which is unconstitutional in principal, if not in the letter of how it is written. I feel that adults may rationally decide to end their own lives. It is not insane to want to end your own life when you, for example, you are slowly and painfully dying of an incurable disease. I further believe that for other people to try to take responsibility for your actions in such a case and prevent you frm accurate access to information on how to do it effectively sickens me.
Where is "here?"
Land of the free, provided you're not contemplating ending your life.In the US contemplating suicide is not illegal, nor committing it. Attempted suicide is for some bizarre reason.
If we really had a free country people would be able to kill themselves and broadcast it on national TV.I'm of two minds about this, sort of like the selling organs thing. In general I favor personal freedom, even to the extent of allowing suicide. I'm not sure about commercially motivated suicide (like organ donation). It can be a very twisted society when commercial interests end up forcing you to commit suicide or sell a kidney in order to feed your family and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how we could get there.
Sort of like a political ad I saw tonight where the candidate proclaimed he was "pro life and pro gun". I'm not entirely sure how you reconcile those positions.While I find "pro life" to be an absurd position as stated I don't see that it is incompatible with "pro gun" On the face, anyone who eats animal or vegetable matter of who does not take immunosuppressants to protect attacking organisms from oneself cannot claim to be "pro life." As for being in favor of banning abortions, well I don't see why that is incompatible with being in favor of gun ownership or being opposed to laws that restrict gun ownership.
I'm not sure how that relates to my comment. How does human classification of suicide relate to search engines that provide information that does not relate directly to the search terms?
Complexity requires thinking, and that demands a grasp of the issues and an ability to discuss those issues. By opting for the simple and comfortable we can dispense with all that and choose a position. Given that different people will choose different positions, we end up with a "for it" or "against" false dichotomy, from which arises erroneous notions of bias by the other side.Again, I'm not sure I see how this relates to the points I made. People don't have to be for or against suicide in order to be searching for something like "pain-less suicide method." They could be either or neither or undecided or completely uninterested. Maybe they are just researching a painless method so they can have a character in a novel make use of it, but don't really care one way or another if real people kill themselves.
Anti suicide sites? I'm not sure what means, but I'll assume that's a site where someone decided to promote a specific advocacy position on the subject. Which means every other site is most certainly a "pro" suicide site.Let me clarify. Anti-suicide refers to a site that is opposed to suicide. Pro-suicide is a site that encourages suicide. This does not preclude the existence of sites that neither advocate nor oppose suicide and which have multiple view points or are simply informational.
Okay I have to favorites I read long, long ago.
#1 - take a six shot revolver and six cartridges (bullets). Load 5 cartridges into the revolver and set to one side. Take the remaining cartridge and place it on a table in front of you. Slam your forehead down on it with all the force you can muster. Hopefully die knowing you will have confused the hell out of the forensic guy.
#2 - obtain a trenchcoat and some explosives; pipe bombs or dynamite with shrapnel attached or whatever. Use detonators or get good at timing a wick. Strap explosives all over yourself and put on the trenchcoat. Find a very public area downtown and climb out on a ledge. Wait until gawkers gather around below, waiting for you to jump, then jump. Set off the explosives about 20 feet above the crowd. Die knowing you took some un-empathic fucks with you and covered a lot of people with your shredded remains.
Interesting. Looks like somebody cut down a regular .45 for use in those cowboy competitions. Thanks for the link. It's always good to learn something new.
I doubt it. I do, however have a sudden urge to dig out a copy of "Heathers" and re-watch it.