That's because instead of using the built-in Windows font smoothing (eg. ClearType) they decided to implement some bastardized version of the OSX font smoothing.
Maybe now the Marketing people will stop asking us in engineering to take screenshots of Web sites and interfaces for them. I'm tired of "but it looks better when you take them." I wish those guys would just buy their own Macs. Who ever heard of marketing people using Windows?
The font smoothing on OSX is very nice, but Safari on Windows looks like crap!
Enough people have already pointed out how to get functionality you want. I just thought I'd mention that the Safari 3 beta also includes a "Web Inspector" that allows you to right click on any element and get more information than you ever wanted to know about a link or other Web element. We're not just talking the link address here, but a snippet of the HTML, all the CSS info, all the layout properties, and a page or more of other properties in a pop-up. This is going to really kick ass for debugging Web sites.
Anyways, if anyone has additional info about Safari on Windows, I think that would make for some interesting discussion. And if anyone can tell me how to get it to mimic Firefox keyboard shortcuts, I think I will switch over entirely.
I'm always amazed by how difficult it is to map keys to functions on Windows. Every 6 months or so I try to do this before realizing Windows support for this is still in the early 80s. I blew away Vista and am waiting for it to stabilize, but does anyone know if it is any better?
Which tells the phb that only IE matters as the rest are niche players that do not make significant marketshare to be worth the investment.
If developing for IE is one task and developing for Safari+Firefox+misc is another, I don't think it really matters what makes up that second category, and that has been my development experience. Anyway, Safari for Windows eases iPhone app development. Between Safari on the iPhone and Opera on a huge number of other phones and PDAs, any PHB looking only at desktop computers for their Web share is a dinosaur soon to die. IE will only become compliant with specs when most Web sites are, which is to say after IE loses most of the market share. Until IE is below 40% of the market, there is no point hoping for a standards compliant IE. The task is to make IE lose that much market share first.
Hmm... in my experience, coding to IE was much easier because it was much better at interpreting how you wanted something to look like without worrying about being 100% 'standards compliant'.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You don't have to worry about being standards compliant? How do you write pages? Do you just make up your own version of the standard and write to that and IE happens to read it magically, somehow?
When I generate code, I look at the spec and implement it, then I test it. I'm not always perfect at it, but I basically make things work the way the documented standard claims it should look. Then I test it. Generally it works in every browser (Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Konquerer, OmniWeb, etc.) except IE. Then I try to add hacks to get it to look "okay" in various versions of IE all of which break the standard and all or which break it differently. I certainly can and do blame IE for being the only browser that can't work as the spec designates.
If a site didn't work in FF and worked fine in IE, that was more due to FF not knowing what to do with your code unless you put it together perfectly.
Generally, I find that when a site does not work in FF it is because I screwed up and did not get it to spec. Generally when it does not work in IE, it is because I did things right, but IE either implements the spec incorrectly and differently than all the other browsers, or because IE is 6-8 years behind the times and is still using a partial implementation of an ancient spec.
Either way, the only reason the 'standards' got put together was because the minorities needed some way to differentiate themselves from IE.
Are you trolling? The spec predates any implementation and MS participated in writing most of them.
More power to them, we need the competition, but I don't think it's fair to bash IE for not complying.
I think it is more than fair to bash the single largest, wealthiest company for failing to match the quality of a half dozen smaller companies and another half dozen projects funded by hobbyists. MS does not comply with the specs because it is in their best interests to derail the standards and hold back Web development to help maintain their OS monopoly. They are breaking the standards for personal profit and if you don't see that I have a lovely, historic bridge you might be interested in purchasing.
Seriously, how can you stand to use Firefox alongside real Mac applications?
I'm running Firefox 3 Alpha1 and it is actually quite a bit better than previous versions. It incorporates native text handling so all the services work, which was most of my problem with 2.0. There are some nice new features in Safari 3 Beta though... damn I'm bleeding edge today... so it is a tough call. I imagine I'll switch back and forth just like I have been.
I tend to enjoy "fancy" CSS designs, and I have found differences in basically every browser as a result. As soon as margins, line-height, and other "formatting" of the sort gets involved, things just get nasty.
That's odd. I automatically generate some XHTML with CSS that includes line-height margins and some other odd formatting bits and it is pretty smooth. I think there was a slight difference between Safari and Firefox for the line height, but not enough to matter. IE completely drops the ball and degrades to plain HTML, but luckily I'm one of those niche people that can incredulously say "you're using IE?" to a customer, at which point they look ashamed and admit it was on an ancient lab machine an not any real workstations they use.
No, Apple is not trying to replicate iTunes' success.
I think you're more right than you know. I think Apple is trying to replicate the iPod's success. They used iTunes to help sell the iPod to Windows users. I think they're porting Safari to try to help sell the iPhone to Windows users. The iPhone is running OS X and a version of Safari. It runs Web 2.0 applications in Safari. This release means Windows developers don't need OS X in order to develop and test for the iPhone. It also makes testing for Safari easier for Windows only Web developers.
Personally, I bounce back and forth between Firefox and Safari. Safari is faster and has some really nice features (support for services). Safari 3 has some things to offer too. I'm using it right now and the ability to just resize this text field kicks ass. I hope every other browser steals the idea. The Web inspector is nice too.
Screw Safari, I never hacked for it and I don't want to start. Hacking for IE is bad enough.
You have to "hack" to get IE to work. If you code to standards, generally Safari, Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, etc. all just work. We've found a few Safari specific bugs here, but all of them turned out to be bugs in our HTML, which were just handled a little better by Firefox.
The question then is whether they can show the digital copy to more than one person at a time, and if they can still do so when the book is checked out. Many books say no reproduction for any use but it seems to me that libraries may require some additional legal protections so they can advance into the 20th century.
What a book says you can do, and what the law says you can do are different things. If I publish a book and the first page says "you cannot copy excerpts from this book in the states of California or Idaho" nothing legally stops people from doing so. As for legal protections for libraries, they are actually pretty extensive. The problem is, the fair use doctrine is very vague and interpretable, and our court system is very wealth dependent. According to most precedent, if you're providing a work for educational purposes, there is not a lot you can't do, including large scale, public presentations of the work (multiple viewers online).
I'm all for the book indexing, but still, you can't put a robots.txt on a book. This is an important difference which allows website operators to opt out of web indexing.
Respecting robots.txt is a courtesy from those crawling the pages. Some engines ignore them. Legally, robots.txt means very little. Google is providing a way for book publishers to opt out of Google books, and many people criticize them for their method of so doing, without realizing they do so as a courtesy. Legally, they can tell book publishers to go bugger themselves and index them anyway, if they are so inclined.
Book copyright owners are apparently being denied the privilege of opting out of having their books indexed.
No, book copyright owners have slightly more work to exercise their privilege (not this is a privilege not a right, legally, they do not have this right). Beggars should not try to be choosers.
People already have online access to 'the sum total of human knowledge,' provided you are able to pay for it (usually through your university or R&D company account). Those who need it (scientists, doctors, students, researchers, etc.), already have access.
I understand where you're coming from, but your assertion is patently false. There are repositories of literature on certain subjects, but the truth is the vast majority of copyrighted works from the last 200 years, are no longer available for purchase or rental anywhere. In many cases the last copy of a work has been lost or destroyed, or only a few copies remain in private collections. The library of congress has not collected reference copies for a long, long time. Looking at the example of music performances, take a look at Motown records. They have copyright on something like 90% of all american soul music ever published, yet have only a few percent of that catalog available for sale. A few private collectors might have recordings, but that art is lost to the american people because of the way our copyright system works.
Using public funds to pay for universal access is a horrible idea, however, since some incompetent asshole will invariably be in charge of deciding what gets funded.
I agree for the most part. I think works created with public funds (from the federal government or publicly funded universities) should be public domain. Aside from that, we need the innovation and good decision making and motivation of capitalism for the creation of works. What needs to be reformed, in my opinion, is the aftermath. Copyright durations are absurdly long. 99% of all copyrighted works don't make any money after the first 4 years. A tiny fraction of those are making money after 10 years, and most are not even available for purchase. We need to shorten copyright durations to 10 years at the maximum and we need to add a clause that says any work not currently for sale by the publisher, at a normal market value, enters the public domain 1 year later.
This would make a small blip in the profits of publishers, but make a huge difference to our society.
I find it funny that they are saying the material will be provided in a manner consistent with copyright law when the article also mentions there is a lawsuit pending regarding the appropriate use of copyrighted material.
Would it be fair to say that your post is consistent with decency laws in the US? Yet, I can still sue you for emotional damage I received when you used the word "material" after the word "funny" which I find to be obscene and evil. I can bring a lawsuit against you for anything I feel like. That does not mean I will win said lawsuit, nor does it mean that your post is of questionable legality until the courts rule on my pending suit.
We assume the copyright owner is the person/entity who has final say over who can read their work and under which circumstances.
Basing your argument on a false premise is not a good start. Copyright law decides who can make copies of copyrighted works, not the copyright holder. In some cases only the copyright holder can authorize some reproduction/republishing, while in others they have no legal right to restrict others.
In this case, we readily see that copyright owners do not have complete and easy control over their work anymore.
They never did have. I can take excerpts of their works and republish them without consent and that has always been the case. You might note that I can do this whether or not some Web page author has set the robots.txt file.
Whether what Google is doing is fair use is a different matter, for the courts to decide at the moment.
Fair use is inherent in what Google is doing. They're making complete copies for the purpose of providing excerpts. Since that has been ruled fair use in numerous precedent setting cases, it seems fairly clearly to be fair use. The only thing Google is doing differently is they are copying text, as opposed to source code (machine readable text), images, and audio all of which have been ruled to be fair use.
...if you completely replace everything with linux or other free alternatives you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad.
Except Linux and other free software relies upon open standards and open code. That means most of the very negative effects of a monoculture are de-fanged. Users are never locked in, because they can always buy or create something else that adheres to the standard. If the software they use changes for the worse, or does not change in the way they need, they can fork it. Imagine if the Windows monoculture that exists today was suddenly all based upon open standards and the code was open. Within a year you'd see higher security forks of Windows aimed at both home users and businesses. You'd see most of the people running old, outdated, insecure versions of Windows upgrade to small footprint, secure versions because it was free as in beer. You'd see users transitioning to other alternatives to insecure or broken applications because they could without having to somehow translate all their data.
Removing a monoculture is not a goal in and of itself. It is one way to solve a big problem we have, but an "OSS monoculture" solves most of those problems as well.
At my workplace engineering is heavily into Linux and the BSDs and in the last few years, OS X (powerbooks are now the default new machine for new employees in the engineering group). The IT department is based out of another city and mainly interacts with sales and administration. They are a bunch of Windows folk and don't really get anything else. The last time they had two open slots for new administrators, the company as a whole vetoed their prime choice because he did not have any OS X experience. For the second slot, it was added as an official requirement. If you don't know Windows, Linux, and OS X these days and you're an administrator, I recommend investing in a few boxes and running a mixed network at home pronto. Mixed networks are definitely on the rise in a number of industries.
This is the same old Slashdot wishful thinking. The extent to which antitrust officials can regulate a monopoly is limited by law and the courts.
Yes, MS has been convicted multiple times, but the courts punished them very little. MS has since broken the law numerous times, but the executive branch officials that are supposed to be prosecuting them, have ignored those actions and the EU courts have picked up the ball. The US government could do a great deal more to stop MS's illegal actions like charging them with crimes instead of waiting for civil suits to escalate to that point or for foreign countries to prosecute them. Everything MS did that they were convicted of by the EU courts is just as illegal in the US, but it has been ignored. MS could and should be broken up based upon their repeated offenses if our government was not so blatantly for sale. I blame everyone who does not vote or who votes for republicans and democrats. Our government is in serious need of reform and legalized bribes via lobbying need to be stopped. That won't happen while nay of the incumbents are in power.
I disagree. We need to hold all vendors to the same standards.
That is exactly what is happening. The law says it is illegal to leverage a monopoly in certain ways that break capitalism. MS is a monopoly in the desktop OS market, thus they cannot take those actions. Apple is not a monopoly in that market (hence they cannot be leveraging that monopoly) so they can do what they want.
What happens if Apple gets Microsoft's market share someday? Do we then tell them they have to disable half their OS? It's a little late then.
If they ever gain such market share (they are close in the ipod market), then they are restricted from tying and bundling products in existing, separate markets. Since a market for indexed search exists via Google, Apple would have to make provisions to include those as a plug-in from other parties and would have to include those by default, if they are including their own. Alternately, they could pull their own out of the product and offer it as a download.
The Bush administration effectively dropped Microsoft's DoJ case. That told Apple, Google and Microsoft that they could do whatever they want and get away with it.
No, that advertised that the government was for sale to the highest bidder (given MS sudden, huge campaign contributions). The fact that the Bush administration was not voted out, told the world, including US politicians that the American people don't know or care.
Google is the search leader and they want help entering a new space which is a clear extension of their existing space. Evil.
I like the way you try to conflate "leader" with "monopoly." It demonstrates, perhaps, that you don't understand what antitrust law is all about. Antitrust law is about mitigating a problem. You see, capitalism and the free market are great for motivating innovation and good decision making. The problem is, when one company gains sufficient influence in a given market (usually called monopoly influence) they can use that influence to affect other markets. By leveraging a monopoly you can insure a given product takes over that market, despite it not being the best or cheapest or most well suited to customers needs. You do this by tying it to your existing monopoly. The quick answer to this is to make such tying illegal, which is exactly what antirust law does.
Google has 40% or so of the online search market and no real tying anyone has seen. They have a great deal less of the advertising market. They are not a monopoly. If they want to enter a new market, like desktop search, it is perfectly legal for them to tie that product to some other. Microsoft has something like 90% of the desktop OS market and are a monopoly as determined by courts around the world, moreover they have a long history of illegally abusing that monopoly. When they want to move into the desktop search market, they are forbidden from doing so via bundling, but they did anyway, just like they did in many other markets. Their business model is just to break the law and rely upon campaign contributions and lengthy legal proceedings, and paying off lawsuits. Google is trying to compete against someone who just blatantly broke the law, for the umpteenth time. It is perfectly reasonable for them to ask the government agents assigned to watch MS's behavior to take some action.
Now Apple ships their own "free" browser and desktop search benefiting from the rules set by MS.
I'm not sure if you're understanding the reason why the same action taken in different circumstances can be very different. Here's an analogy. Murder is illegal. Assuming the action to commit murder is firing a pistol consider this case. I go to the shooting range and pull the trigger on a pistol. The end result is holes appear in paper. A psycho goes to a playground and pulls the trigger on a pistol. The end result is dead children. The former is legal while the latter is illegal.
Besides, if they did, someone might start asking awkward questions of Google and Apple as to why Google is the only search provider option you have in Safari... and we wouldn't want that, would we?
Why would those questions be awkward? Either Apple chose to make that the only option for simplicity or they made a deal to do so. Neither Apple nor Google are monopolies in this regard. They can do whatever they want.
If a person uploads a file to a network, that constitutes republication according to US (and most other) laws. Republication, without the permission of the copyright holder is a violation of copyright law (except in a few fair use instances). The vast majority of the time, yes that action is illegal. Downloading music, has never been shown to be illegal and almost certainly is not, but that is something else entirely.
And i suspect that was part of the RIAA's gameplan, so apparently they're not so stupid, they've managed to brainwash an entire generation of media consumers with this load of propaganda that somehow file-sharing is wrong.
Of course that is their plan, but "wrong" and "illegal" are two different things. Right now republishing a song onto a public network is illegal. Whether people believe it is wrong or not, does not change that fact.
And i suspect that was part of the RIAA's gameplan, so apparently they're not so stupid, they've managed to brainwash an entire generation of media consumers with this load of propaganda that somehow file-sharing is wrong.
You should talk to a lawyer. I have. The non-commercial copying clause was removed from copyright law in the 70s. Since that time, it has been illegal.
Article focuses on how quickly the tactics are worked around, and how nasty the latest one is: purchased iTunes now have your personal data in them.
Holy crap! I haven't seen this poorly of researched or obviously clueless article in a while. Apple isn't suddenly adding your personal data to songs. They've always done that. They just did not remove that when they pulled the DRM.
Author suspects that this is to prevent you uploading them to a network."
Well since such behavior would be illegal in almost every country Apple does business, I'm not sure why people should be so concerned about it. If you're obeying the law, this affects you not at all. If you're breaking the law, well, you're probably not paying to buy music in the first place so you won't have any of this music. If for some reason you are buying songs and intentionally republishing them without a license, well hopefully you're not so idiotic that you can't strip this data off. This data is nothing to worry about in my opinion. It is plaintext and easily removable. If you are a criminal you should be worrying about watermarking of files, which Apple may or may not be doing and which all the other music stores may or may not be doing. That is something a lot harder to detect.
Personally, I'm just not illegally publishing copyrighted works (and not buying from Apple either) so I don't see why I'd care. Note, this is not DRM in any way. DRM stops you from taking actions. This simply might make it easier to discover who took an action after the fact. This is no more DRM than your own upload logs are.
What about Mac os X spotlight? Google also has a desktop search for the Mac but they aren't asking for Spotlight to be remove or disabled.
You expect Google to ask antitrust officials to look into Apple's activities with regard to OS X? Apple does not have a monopoly and they certainly have not been convicted of abusing that monopoly to the point where antitrust officials are supposed to be regulating their behavior.
I thought what it means to be a Christian was settled by the various Ecumenical Councils. Specifically Councils one through seven.
I strongly disagree. That was simply a group of christian organizations trying to create some rules. I'd argue, in fact, that individual followers of the teachings of Jesus who actually adhere to the older teachings are unlikely to be willing to join an organized religion that purports to be following Jesus. That is like a bunch of universities with commercial interest in making money from degrees getting to together and deciding a definition for "educated" that requires one of them to be paid.
If you just follow the teachings of Christ but do not subscribe to the beliefs expressed in the first seven councils, the rest of Christianity considers you to be a heretic.
Actually some of them consider you a heretic (especially catholics) and some of them simply consider you a different sect of christianity. Regardless of who considers you what, why should only a subset of people who call themselves christians have a place in defining what the definition for what a christian is? The word has an older root and meaning and I think it is a much better one than modern attempts to hijack the word and exclude some groups/individuals for political reasons.
Actually, dell IS overpriced before you factor in their "deals," which is what I said -- most people do get in on their marketing gimmick sales.
Rather than guessing how much you think things cost by looking at examples and then guessing how many people use rebates or sales specials, why don't you just look at the sales numbers. Consumer reports has a fine yearly summary of who charges how much for what.
Thus, their statistics and lack of experience are used to "prove" their opinion and do nothing to debunk anything.
What statistics are you basing your opinions on? I follow the consumer reports listings and a private report our IT subscribes to. There have been several studies broken down by machine type. The most credible I saw put Apple at about 12% more expensive than the market average overall, and slightly cheaper than others in the market with the same levels of reliability and support. That is from professional third parties with no interest in who's "winning."
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Maybe now the Marketing people will stop asking us in engineering to take screenshots of Web sites and interfaces for them. I'm tired of "but it looks better when you take them." I wish those guys would just buy their own Macs. Who ever heard of marketing people using Windows?
The font smoothing on OSX is very nice, but Safari on Windows looks like crap!So you're saying no they won't huh?
Enough people have already pointed out how to get functionality you want. I just thought I'd mention that the Safari 3 beta also includes a "Web Inspector" that allows you to right click on any element and get more information than you ever wanted to know about a link or other Web element. We're not just talking the link address here, but a snippet of the HTML, all the CSS info, all the layout properties, and a page or more of other properties in a pop-up. This is going to really kick ass for debugging Web sites.
I'm always amazed by how difficult it is to map keys to functions on Windows. Every 6 months or so I try to do this before realizing Windows support for this is still in the early 80s. I blew away Vista and am waiting for it to stabilize, but does anyone know if it is any better?
If developing for IE is one task and developing for Safari+Firefox+misc is another, I don't think it really matters what makes up that second category, and that has been my development experience. Anyway, Safari for Windows eases iPhone app development. Between Safari on the iPhone and Opera on a huge number of other phones and PDAs, any PHB looking only at desktop computers for their Web share is a dinosaur soon to die. IE will only become compliant with specs when most Web sites are, which is to say after IE loses most of the market share. Until IE is below 40% of the market, there is no point hoping for a standards compliant IE. The task is to make IE lose that much market share first.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You don't have to worry about being standards compliant? How do you write pages? Do you just make up your own version of the standard and write to that and IE happens to read it magically, somehow?
When I generate code, I look at the spec and implement it, then I test it. I'm not always perfect at it, but I basically make things work the way the documented standard claims it should look. Then I test it. Generally it works in every browser (Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Konquerer, OmniWeb, etc.) except IE. Then I try to add hacks to get it to look "okay" in various versions of IE all of which break the standard and all or which break it differently. I certainly can and do blame IE for being the only browser that can't work as the spec designates.
If a site didn't work in FF and worked fine in IE, that was more due to FF not knowing what to do with your code unless you put it together perfectly.Generally, I find that when a site does not work in FF it is because I screwed up and did not get it to spec. Generally when it does not work in IE, it is because I did things right, but IE either implements the spec incorrectly and differently than all the other browsers, or because IE is 6-8 years behind the times and is still using a partial implementation of an ancient spec.
Either way, the only reason the 'standards' got put together was because the minorities needed some way to differentiate themselves from IE.Are you trolling? The spec predates any implementation and MS participated in writing most of them.
More power to them, we need the competition, but I don't think it's fair to bash IE for not complying.I think it is more than fair to bash the single largest, wealthiest company for failing to match the quality of a half dozen smaller companies and another half dozen projects funded by hobbyists. MS does not comply with the specs because it is in their best interests to derail the standards and hold back Web development to help maintain their OS monopoly. They are breaking the standards for personal profit and if you don't see that I have a lovely, historic bridge you might be interested in purchasing.
I'm running Firefox 3 Alpha1 and it is actually quite a bit better than previous versions. It incorporates native text handling so all the services work, which was most of my problem with 2.0. There are some nice new features in Safari 3 Beta though... damn I'm bleeding edge today... so it is a tough call. I imagine I'll switch back and forth just like I have been.
That's odd. I automatically generate some XHTML with CSS that includes line-height margins and some other odd formatting bits and it is pretty smooth. I think there was a slight difference between Safari and Firefox for the line height, but not enough to matter. IE completely drops the ball and degrades to plain HTML, but luckily I'm one of those niche people that can incredulously say "you're using IE?" to a customer, at which point they look ashamed and admit it was on an ancient lab machine an not any real workstations they use.
It works fine for me, and some of the new features are nice. I love the drag-able tabs and resizable text fields.
I think you're more right than you know. I think Apple is trying to replicate the iPod's success. They used iTunes to help sell the iPod to Windows users. I think they're porting Safari to try to help sell the iPhone to Windows users. The iPhone is running OS X and a version of Safari. It runs Web 2.0 applications in Safari. This release means Windows developers don't need OS X in order to develop and test for the iPhone. It also makes testing for Safari easier for Windows only Web developers.
Personally, I bounce back and forth between Firefox and Safari. Safari is faster and has some really nice features (support for services). Safari 3 has some things to offer too. I'm using it right now and the ability to just resize this text field kicks ass. I hope every other browser steals the idea. The Web inspector is nice too.
You have to "hack" to get IE to work. If you code to standards, generally Safari, Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, etc. all just work. We've found a few Safari specific bugs here, but all of them turned out to be bugs in our HTML, which were just handled a little better by Firefox.
What a book says you can do, and what the law says you can do are different things. If I publish a book and the first page says "you cannot copy excerpts from this book in the states of California or Idaho" nothing legally stops people from doing so. As for legal protections for libraries, they are actually pretty extensive. The problem is, the fair use doctrine is very vague and interpretable, and our court system is very wealth dependent. According to most precedent, if you're providing a work for educational purposes, there is not a lot you can't do, including large scale, public presentations of the work (multiple viewers online).
Respecting robots.txt is a courtesy from those crawling the pages. Some engines ignore them. Legally, robots.txt means very little. Google is providing a way for book publishers to opt out of Google books, and many people criticize them for their method of so doing, without realizing they do so as a courtesy. Legally, they can tell book publishers to go bugger themselves and index them anyway, if they are so inclined.
Book copyright owners are apparently being denied the privilege of opting out of having their books indexed.No, book copyright owners have slightly more work to exercise their privilege (not this is a privilege not a right, legally, they do not have this right). Beggars should not try to be choosers.
I understand where you're coming from, but your assertion is patently false. There are repositories of literature on certain subjects, but the truth is the vast majority of copyrighted works from the last 200 years, are no longer available for purchase or rental anywhere. In many cases the last copy of a work has been lost or destroyed, or only a few copies remain in private collections. The library of congress has not collected reference copies for a long, long time. Looking at the example of music performances, take a look at Motown records. They have copyright on something like 90% of all american soul music ever published, yet have only a few percent of that catalog available for sale. A few private collectors might have recordings, but that art is lost to the american people because of the way our copyright system works.
Using public funds to pay for universal access is a horrible idea, however, since some incompetent asshole will invariably be in charge of deciding what gets funded.I agree for the most part. I think works created with public funds (from the federal government or publicly funded universities) should be public domain. Aside from that, we need the innovation and good decision making and motivation of capitalism for the creation of works. What needs to be reformed, in my opinion, is the aftermath. Copyright durations are absurdly long. 99% of all copyrighted works don't make any money after the first 4 years. A tiny fraction of those are making money after 10 years, and most are not even available for purchase. We need to shorten copyright durations to 10 years at the maximum and we need to add a clause that says any work not currently for sale by the publisher, at a normal market value, enters the public domain 1 year later.
This would make a small blip in the profits of publishers, but make a huge difference to our society.
Would it be fair to say that your post is consistent with decency laws in the US? Yet, I can still sue you for emotional damage I received when you used the word "material" after the word "funny" which I find to be obscene and evil. I can bring a lawsuit against you for anything I feel like. That does not mean I will win said lawsuit, nor does it mean that your post is of questionable legality until the courts rule on my pending suit.
Basing your argument on a false premise is not a good start. Copyright law decides who can make copies of copyrighted works, not the copyright holder. In some cases only the copyright holder can authorize some reproduction/republishing, while in others they have no legal right to restrict others.
In this case, we readily see that copyright owners do not have complete and easy control over their work anymore.They never did have. I can take excerpts of their works and republish them without consent and that has always been the case. You might note that I can do this whether or not some Web page author has set the robots.txt file.
Whether what Google is doing is fair use is a different matter, for the courts to decide at the moment.Fair use is inherent in what Google is doing. They're making complete copies for the purpose of providing excerpts. Since that has been ruled fair use in numerous precedent setting cases, it seems fairly clearly to be fair use. The only thing Google is doing differently is they are copying text, as opposed to source code (machine readable text), images, and audio all of which have been ruled to be fair use.
Except Linux and other free software relies upon open standards and open code. That means most of the very negative effects of a monoculture are de-fanged. Users are never locked in, because they can always buy or create something else that adheres to the standard. If the software they use changes for the worse, or does not change in the way they need, they can fork it. Imagine if the Windows monoculture that exists today was suddenly all based upon open standards and the code was open. Within a year you'd see higher security forks of Windows aimed at both home users and businesses. You'd see most of the people running old, outdated, insecure versions of Windows upgrade to small footprint, secure versions because it was free as in beer. You'd see users transitioning to other alternatives to insecure or broken applications because they could without having to somehow translate all their data.
Removing a monoculture is not a goal in and of itself. It is one way to solve a big problem we have, but an "OSS monoculture" solves most of those problems as well.
At my workplace engineering is heavily into Linux and the BSDs and in the last few years, OS X (powerbooks are now the default new machine for new employees in the engineering group). The IT department is based out of another city and mainly interacts with sales and administration. They are a bunch of Windows folk and don't really get anything else. The last time they had two open slots for new administrators, the company as a whole vetoed their prime choice because he did not have any OS X experience. For the second slot, it was added as an official requirement. If you don't know Windows, Linux, and OS X these days and you're an administrator, I recommend investing in a few boxes and running a mixed network at home pronto. Mixed networks are definitely on the rise in a number of industries.
Yes, MS has been convicted multiple times, but the courts punished them very little. MS has since broken the law numerous times, but the executive branch officials that are supposed to be prosecuting them, have ignored those actions and the EU courts have picked up the ball. The US government could do a great deal more to stop MS's illegal actions like charging them with crimes instead of waiting for civil suits to escalate to that point or for foreign countries to prosecute them. Everything MS did that they were convicted of by the EU courts is just as illegal in the US, but it has been ignored. MS could and should be broken up based upon their repeated offenses if our government was not so blatantly for sale. I blame everyone who does not vote or who votes for republicans and democrats. Our government is in serious need of reform and legalized bribes via lobbying need to be stopped. That won't happen while nay of the incumbents are in power.
I disagree. We need to hold all vendors to the same standards.
That is exactly what is happening. The law says it is illegal to leverage a monopoly in certain ways that break capitalism. MS is a monopoly in the desktop OS market, thus they cannot take those actions. Apple is not a monopoly in that market (hence they cannot be leveraging that monopoly) so they can do what they want.
What happens if Apple gets Microsoft's market share someday? Do we then tell them they have to disable half their OS? It's a little late then.
If they ever gain such market share (they are close in the ipod market), then they are restricted from tying and bundling products in existing, separate markets. Since a market for indexed search exists via Google, Apple would have to make provisions to include those as a plug-in from other parties and would have to include those by default, if they are including their own. Alternately, they could pull their own out of the product and offer it as a download.
The Bush administration effectively dropped Microsoft's DoJ case. That told Apple, Google and Microsoft that they could do whatever they want and get away with it.
No, that advertised that the government was for sale to the highest bidder (given MS sudden, huge campaign contributions). The fact that the Bush administration was not voted out, told the world, including US politicians that the American people don't know or care.
Google is the search leader and they want help entering a new space which is a clear extension of their existing space. Evil.
I like the way you try to conflate "leader" with "monopoly." It demonstrates, perhaps, that you don't understand what antitrust law is all about. Antitrust law is about mitigating a problem. You see, capitalism and the free market are great for motivating innovation and good decision making. The problem is, when one company gains sufficient influence in a given market (usually called monopoly influence) they can use that influence to affect other markets. By leveraging a monopoly you can insure a given product takes over that market, despite it not being the best or cheapest or most well suited to customers needs. You do this by tying it to your existing monopoly. The quick answer to this is to make such tying illegal, which is exactly what antirust law does.
Google has 40% or so of the online search market and no real tying anyone has seen. They have a great deal less of the advertising market. They are not a monopoly. If they want to enter a new market, like desktop search, it is perfectly legal for them to tie that product to some other. Microsoft has something like 90% of the desktop OS market and are a monopoly as determined by courts around the world, moreover they have a long history of illegally abusing that monopoly. When they want to move into the desktop search market, they are forbidden from doing so via bundling, but they did anyway, just like they did in many other markets. Their business model is just to break the law and rely upon campaign contributions and lengthy legal proceedings, and paying off lawsuits. Google is trying to compete against someone who just blatantly broke the law, for the umpteenth time. It is perfectly reasonable for them to ask the government agents assigned to watch MS's behavior to take some action.
Now Apple ships their own "free" browser and desktop search benefiting from the rules set by MS.
I'm not sure if you're understanding the reason why the same action taken in different circumstances can be very different. Here's an analogy. Murder is illegal. Assuming the action to commit murder is firing a pistol consider this case. I go to the shooting range and pull the trigger on a pistol. The end result is holes appear in paper. A psycho goes to a playground and pulls the trigger on a pistol. The end result is dead children. The former is legal while the latter is illegal.
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Why would those questions be awkward? Either Apple chose to make that the only option for simplicity or they made a deal to do so. Neither Apple nor Google are monopolies in this regard. They can do whatever they want.
If a person uploads a file to a network, that constitutes republication according to US (and most other) laws. Republication, without the permission of the copyright holder is a violation of copyright law (except in a few fair use instances). The vast majority of the time, yes that action is illegal. Downloading music, has never been shown to be illegal and almost certainly is not, but that is something else entirely.
And i suspect that was part of the RIAA's gameplan, so apparently they're not so stupid, they've managed to brainwash an entire generation of media consumers with this load of propaganda that somehow file-sharing is wrong.Of course that is their plan, but "wrong" and "illegal" are two different things. Right now republishing a song onto a public network is illegal. Whether people believe it is wrong or not, does not change that fact.
And i suspect that was part of the RIAA's gameplan, so apparently they're not so stupid, they've managed to brainwash an entire generation of media consumers with this load of propaganda that somehow file-sharing is wrong.You should talk to a lawyer. I have. The non-commercial copying clause was removed from copyright law in the 70s. Since that time, it has been illegal.
Holy crap! I haven't seen this poorly of researched or obviously clueless article in a while. Apple isn't suddenly adding your personal data to songs. They've always done that. They just did not remove that when they pulled the DRM.
Author suspects that this is to prevent you uploading them to a network."Well since such behavior would be illegal in almost every country Apple does business, I'm not sure why people should be so concerned about it. If you're obeying the law, this affects you not at all. If you're breaking the law, well, you're probably not paying to buy music in the first place so you won't have any of this music. If for some reason you are buying songs and intentionally republishing them without a license, well hopefully you're not so idiotic that you can't strip this data off. This data is nothing to worry about in my opinion. It is plaintext and easily removable. If you are a criminal you should be worrying about watermarking of files, which Apple may or may not be doing and which all the other music stores may or may not be doing. That is something a lot harder to detect.
Personally, I'm just not illegally publishing copyrighted works (and not buying from Apple either) so I don't see why I'd care. Note, this is not DRM in any way. DRM stops you from taking actions. This simply might make it easier to discover who took an action after the fact. This is no more DRM than your own upload logs are.
You expect Google to ask antitrust officials to look into Apple's activities with regard to OS X? Apple does not have a monopoly and they certainly have not been convicted of abusing that monopoly to the point where antitrust officials are supposed to be regulating their behavior.
I strongly disagree. That was simply a group of christian organizations trying to create some rules. I'd argue, in fact, that individual followers of the teachings of Jesus who actually adhere to the older teachings are unlikely to be willing to join an organized religion that purports to be following Jesus. That is like a bunch of universities with commercial interest in making money from degrees getting to together and deciding a definition for "educated" that requires one of them to be paid.
If you just follow the teachings of Christ but do not subscribe to the beliefs expressed in the first seven councils, the rest of Christianity considers you to be a heretic.Actually some of them consider you a heretic (especially catholics) and some of them simply consider you a different sect of christianity. Regardless of who considers you what, why should only a subset of people who call themselves christians have a place in defining what the definition for what a christian is? The word has an older root and meaning and I think it is a much better one than modern attempts to hijack the word and exclude some groups/individuals for political reasons.
Rather than guessing how much you think things cost by looking at examples and then guessing how many people use rebates or sales specials, why don't you just look at the sales numbers. Consumer reports has a fine yearly summary of who charges how much for what.
Thus, their statistics and lack of experience are used to "prove" their opinion and do nothing to debunk anything.What statistics are you basing your opinions on? I follow the consumer reports listings and a private report our IT subscribes to. There have been several studies broken down by machine type. The most credible I saw put Apple at about 12% more expensive than the market average overall, and slightly cheaper than others in the market with the same levels of reliability and support. That is from professional third parties with no interest in who's "winning."