The answer lies in a question: Would you want to undergo quadruple bypass heart surgery in a US hospital or one in Asia?
Having met some really, really, really scary medical students who were near graduation at a prestigious school in the U.S. I can honestly say I think I'll go to Europe for any surgeries. When a med student does not understand why you should wear gloves while handling DNA samples and equipment and calls his mother to ask what he should do when his car gets a flat tire you sort of lose confidence in the general intelligence and competence of the profession. This is more than backed up by the experiences of me and mine in medicine, with more than 75% of issues being misdiagnosed at least once before a correct diagnosis is reached.
Um, they are doing us a favor. Would you prefer them to NOT do it?
Yeah, they're doing us a favor like giving someone better tasting poison, while loudly proclaiming "poison free, no poison here folks" is doing people a favor. What favor, pray tell, are they doing for us? Giving us a format they call, "open" even though it is both patent encumbered and has vital information encoded in the header in an undocumented, closed, binary format. The point of an XML format is ease of use, openness, standardization, mature tools, and easy transformation to other formats. No one wants a format because its XML, they want it because of those advantages. Now MS makes their own XML formats specifically designed to remove most of those advantages. And people like you call it a favor. It is lies, damned lies, and marketing and you bought it. How many politicians and corporate decision makers will also buy it? Luckily those in MA were smart enough to see that the format is not open, which is why it was not approved as one of the open formats they were considering.
The truth is different chip makers offer different chips with different price/speed/power/functionality at different times. Apple and MS each buy the chips that they think are the best deal for their purpose and offer the best road map. Apple went with IBM because they liked the chips. The g5 was top of the heap in performance, it just did not maintain that lead. The cell processors are great for certain applications and pretty good for consoles, but not so hot for general purpose computing. There is no conspiracy. It is not as though company X has the best product for all applications and always will. Different chips are released that are better for different things and are adopted by different companies who market the advantages while downplaying the disadvantages.
I'd say that at least a third of the population condones non-commercial copyright infringement... The point is, when an act is accepted by a significant proportion of the population, chances are that act is ethical
So obviously Sony (or the company that wrote the code if you want to get pedantic) is right to have infringed upon DVD Jon's code.
How is this copyright infringement non-commercial? It was done for profit by an organization whose stated goal is to make money.
So it all comes down to slashdot isn't the place to go to if you want to hear intelligent debate about copyright laws.
True enough, but only because there are so many people like you don't seem able to comprehend the arguments put forth. A significant number of people infringe copyright non-commercially and that indicates that the will of the people might be that it should be legal. A significant number of people do not commercially infringe copyrights or condone it. I'd agree with that argument, as would many people. But to claim it is hypocritical is ridiculous. It is called a false dichotomy. There is no hypocrisy in believing that non commercial copyright infringement should be legal, but commercial should be illegal. There is no hypocrisy in believing our copyright system is corrupt and counter productive, but still believing a copyright system that is better designed can be useful. There is no hypocrisy in believing business and software patents are garbage, but traditional patents are a good idea. There is no hypocrisy in believing Toyota makes reliable cars but Ford does not. Please take the time to actually read and understand an argument someone puts forth before declaring them a hypocrite and ascribing a whole lot of motives to them, even though you obviously have no way of knowing them.
Ha Ha! you still get spam! That is soooo 90's. Between some blacklist and simple filtering on the server, expiring addresses for commercial receipts, and my bayesian filter on my client I haven't seen a spam in my mailbox in years from any of my many e-mail accounts (except my spam box where I intentionally collect spam for research). Anyway spam is not an exploit, it is just proper behavior of the protocol that you happen to not like. If you'd like to move to a whitelist for e-mail nothing is stopping you, but I prefer the option of getting mail from new, unexpected people.
But, if your friends are already all using one protocol, switching to another, just because it is technically superior may not make a difference.
But then again, it might. Jabber supports bridging to other protocols so if you run or find a Jabber server, you can still chat with all those people and you only have to manage one account for your client, connect on one port through your firewall, and your communications are encrypted between yourself and the server in all cases and client to client for those that support it. Obviously you're already using a limited Jabber service (googletalk beta) and that is a start. What really would improve chatting for everyone, however, is persuading enough people (some of those friends you mentioned) to move to Jabber. Once it has enough critical mass the other companies maintaining chat services will be forced to standardize, to the benefit of end users.
Is your buddy list NOT stored on AOL's servers for an AIM ID?
Mine is, actually, but some clients allow you to keep your list client side, rather than storing the info on the chat server.
They are providing you this service for free. Why can they not try to earn some ad revenue from their user base?
I never said they can't, but it is still spam, regardless who sends it. What if your ISP provided mail account was regularly spammed with messages from companies who paid them? What if there was no standard SMTP protocol so the only way you could send mail to or get mail from your mother was to use that particular ISP? Sure AOL can spam their own customers all they want, but that does not mean I (and anyone else) should not find it annoying and look for a better solution. Jabber is to chat as SMTP is to e-mail and I certainly think it is in nearly all user's best interest to migrate.
On the other hand, won't such a single standard utopia be open to exploitation, virii, and all the other "bad stuff" that comes with a non-diverse system?
How many exploits do you know of that target the SMTP protocol itself? I know of worms and exploits for particular implementations of that protocol, and many for particular, poorly designed, mail client software, but not any against the protocol itself. A standard protocol does not mean only having one implementation of the client or server. There are already dozens of implementations of the client and several for the server for the Jabber protocol. So to answer your question, No.
Except that it auto adds them to GAIM also. I just logged in with gaim to check. It adds them to everyone's account when the log back in, regardless of what you use to access it.
This does not seem to be true. I have an AIM account to supplement my Jabber account and I am using iChat. Nothing was added. Ditto for a friend using Adium and another using Trillian. I'm not sure they added this to everyone, but it does seem to be mostly the standard AOL client and GAIM users that are affected.
I'm just surprised that AOL has taken this long to begin sending you advertisements via AIM. They have a near-monopoly on IM communications...
AOL has 56% last time I looked. 56% a monopoly does not make.
As an aside, can we please move out of the dark ages of text chatting? Multiple, incompatible formats on different networks, without publicly available bridging is pathetic. Please everyone, switch to Jabber and set up a bridge until it gains most of the market. It's as if MSN users could not e-mail AOL users who could not e-mail Yahoo users. Remember when the internet used to be about standards and used for communication, instead of lock-ins and sending you ads?
Of course it would be a total shame to see this make Mass. switch, but if OSS developers want adoption by government institutions, they'd better make accessability a consideration, otherwise this will always be a roadblock, and one that government institutions can't help but acknowledge.
The sad thing is, using Windows+Word is only a very short term benefit to the disabled. Accessibility features of Windows and Word are both terrible when compared to Gnome or OS X and any given program. The only way Word wins is when a third party program specifically designed to hack it's way around Window's and Word's broken support for the disabled is introduced. Since Windows+Word has such huge market share (we won't go into why) such programs exist, but the Windows platform itself absolutely sucks in terms of support for the disabled. To see it entrenched even more despite MS's shabby treatment of the disabled and refusal to acknowledge the problems is very sad indeed.
On the other hand, I don't see why this should be a barrier to the switch (other than as a political speaking point) With the switch to the open standard disabled employees can either use an alternate OS with an alternate word processor (which in the case of many disabilities is a big improvement) or the state can let them continue to use word and then run their files through a conversion script. OpenOffice can easily open and rewrite 99% of Word files. Further, with the money saved in the long-term by the state on licensing they could pay for the development of better open source programs that hack around Window's half-assed disability features with respect to OpenOffice and other programs that support Open Document.
In the Massachusetts case it doesn't just have to be OSS in use. Surely some office software vendor will provide support for OpenDocument AND accessibility.
The problem isn't that Word "supports accessibility" and that the various Open Document format word processors don't. The issue is that Windows support for the disabled sucks ass and the hooks, API's, and display features needed for the disabled are not available at all. The result is third party companies write hacks like JAWS that are really a way to make MS Office support certain usability features (even though most of the rest of the programs on Windows can't take advantage of the same features). Some have generic elements that try to work for all applications and succeed partially for some. Since Word is the dominant program developers of these hacks focus their efforts there.
The result of all this is OpenOffice on Windows has lesser accessibility until someone writes a hack that specifically targets it. All, however, is not lost. Word processors that support Open Document are also available on non-Windows platforms. Both Gnome and OS X provide some really nice, OS level accessibility features that work on all programs, not just the targeted ones. That is because the OS itself is designed with the disabled in mind. Apple's often mocked decision to keep their interface designed for only one mouse button, for example, means that all the functionality is provided in the menus, by the same method and is easily discoverable and accessible to people using voice, and other alternative interfaces. Contrast this with Windows programs who often include functionality only in a right-click contextual menu that alternative interfaces usually cannot access. By migrating some disabled users to other platforms they can actually improve usability over Windows+MS Office for many kinds of disabilities. For non-employees who do not want to change, OpenOffice still reads and writes Word files, so there is no problem with communication.
Basically, moving to an open standard may require some changes, but all in all it is not a real barrier and may bring long-term wins to disabled users.
This is true enough, although I'm not sure the difference is enough to matter in most cases. I wonder if their user testing included programs with long and short names? I wonder if a medium length name actually makes a usability difference under OS X?
One is that when there is a violation, there is not currently anyone willing to spend the huge dollars needed to litigate the issue.
Yup no lawyers ready to work on commission and sue the pants off of Sony for a huge fee... what you say there are 400 waiting outside asking to talk to anyone with any of the copyrights involved? Oh, never-mind.
Another interesting point I see is that someone, sooner or later is going to challenge the legality of Open Source under the 'free' standard and litigate that it is tantamount to price fixing, i.e. antitrust.
First for antitrust you have to have a company, individual, or group dominating a market. How is that going to happen with Open Source software, considering any other company can come along and sell it as well? Second, no forces anyone to set any price for the software. You can charge as much as you want. Third, the license only applies to companies reselling copyrighted material which is of course a government sanctioned monopoly on that product and perfectly legit.
Open Source has driven the industry in a very good direction. I would hate to see it fall because it can't support itself, financially, when and where it is needed. Justice is NOT free, in fact the costs are enormous to obtain justice.
Companies that use and provide support and services for open source tools have been pretty effective litigating on behalf of the copyright holders. e.g. IBM.
Do you know why the language you use makes a difference? It doesn't seem to make sense to me.
For two reasons, one because it is easier to make fine movements up and down with a mouse for most people and secondly because languages that traditionally read top to bottom or bottom to top use more spacing between characters and more often run into the limitation of the screen height, than horizontal languages do the screen width. Note, this is wholly a general usability guideline and depends upon the user input device, screen size, number of menus, etc. The one thing I've learned for certain is until you test a particular task with users, you don't know what is the best way. I've seen some pretty unintuitive results of testing.
Well, usually I find if a program needs too much to fit comfortably on a right-click menu, it's probably trying to do too much, and it's hard to remember exactly where the option is in the menubar anyway; there's probably a better solution than just adding an extra menu.
Looking at InDesign (a professional layout program) it has ten top level menus with an average of about twenty menus in each and maybe as many again in secondary menus from those top menus. So that is about 400 functions you can select from the menus. Pretty much all of those features are used by some users regularly. That sort of functionality is hard to fit into a contextual menu.
Now, I'd say about forty of those features are fairly standard, that is they show up in many programs. Things like saving, quitting, copying, pasting, etc. are good examples. Since these functions appear in the same place in pretty much all the programs that use them, they are easy to find. Most power user activate some of these functions using keyboard shortcuts, or a contextual menu, but it is important that they also appear in the menus so that alternate interfaces, can access those functions easily. The rest of the functions are somewhat self-documenting in that a user can look through the menus and find functions easily, and because they are grouped by function (which is better than in a usable contextual list).
I find it as hard to stop in the right place when "flicking up" as going to some random place near the top, because I rarely if ever flick straight up. If you flick at an angle, once you reach the top, you keep travelling horizontally till you actually do stop.
It is indeed common to access menus by moving upwards at an angle, but most users don't "flick" the mouse, per-se. For me, I twitch my hand and it goes to the right place. This is because my reflexes have learned what to do to get me to a specific location. Using an unfamiliar location, I do sometimes have to slide the mouse either left or right (or up or down for menus on the side) but doing so is only a correction in two dimensions not three (as is required with maximized windows applications) and I don't have to worry about minimized windows. Also, given the windows interface I have to travel down and over a given means going to more places in general and thus slowing the conditioning of muscle memory. One of the most surprising things you learn when you start researching UI design is how long it takes to navigate menus. Because you're concentrating on moving the mouse, subjectively it seems to take little time, but when you actually time how long it takes for various tasks using software to track or by watching a video the difference really stands out.
I assume you mean "GNU/Linux distributions", but I'm not sure how. For the most part, they package either Gnome or KDE as their default, and both of those emulate the Windows way of doing things.
Both Gnome and KDE allow the user to customize the contextual menu, Windows requires it to be defined by the developer. Since a developer has less knowledge of an individual's workflow than the user, they often include functions that are not needed and fail to include functions that are needed. This is a minor usability win for the Linux d
Your arguments about federalism are all well and good, but have nothing to do with the topic at hand. This is not about the UN taking responsibility for local matters this is about who makes entries into the global "phonebook." Since it is the standard used by all different countries to communicate via DNS it is, by definition, a global, not a local matter. Basically they don't want any one country to be able to shut off DNS unexpectedly for some other country. The UN is an open system, and there is little chance that all parties will agree to take such action. Even if they did, at least then it would be representative of the wishes of the world, not just the U.S. No one trusts the U.S. these days. We've been caught outright lying too many times. They would not trust us to control the assignment and directing of global telephone area codes (which is managed by a UN commission) and they don't trust us to run the DNS root. This is, in my opinion, exactly the kind of task the UN is ideally suited for. It is something that is global, needs to be reliable and open, and does not need rapid change.
Indeed, and even Fitt's law says that right here is quicker to get to than the edges of the screen. Thus, we should all be using right-click menus. (They've got other advantages besides.)
As someone who has studied usability extensively and is well read on the topic, you're 50% right. Chorded menus, like the right click menu are faster to access than menus at the edge of the screen, provided there is only one of them and provided you are working in a language that normally reads horizontally. The problem with them is that you can only have one, relatively short menu, which is either very big, or has many levels to fit the same number of items as can exist along the top of the screen. Having a list of items a hundred long sucks. Having to select from among many choices, not lined up along a screen edge is also difficult since you have to navigate in 2 dimensions instead of one. Additionally, contextual menus, while usable, are not as easily learnable. Studies have shown that new users, and users who compute casually or sporadically often click the wrong button or both buttons at once. It is hard to learn to use multiple buttons and many users never get it right. It is great for more advanced users, but is less usable when assigned by the OS or app developer than when definable by the end user.
And you can't just "fling your mouse" anyway, because you have to pick which menu you want, so once you've flung it, you have to re-aim.
Actually, muscle memory makes it easy to quickly hit the same target along an edge from anywhere. It is one of those hardwired things.
If (as is common on Windows) you run your windows all maximised anyway, the menubar is just slightly below the top of the screen; the re-aiming needed to find the right menu item isn't a whole lot more than it is on the Mac.
On the mac you can click at the top of the screen and it opens a menu. With Windows apps, you must move down the screen and to where you want and because the window can be a different size or place it may be a moving target, hindering the ability to train muscle memory.
I've read extensively on this topic, taken classes back in college, and attended lectures and conferences since that time. There are literally hundreds of papers on these topics and many, many user studies. The verdict has been in for quite a while. Anecdotally, as someone who uses multiple OS's daily and who has done usability studies with others it is much faster to learn using a single mouse, it is faster to select menus when they are on a border, it is faster to accomplish tasks using user definable context menus. These are three areas where Windows has fallen behind the curve. Various Windows distributions often win out on one of these. OS X, wins on all of them.
Don't you think it is more than a little deceptive to take a quote like "the internet is five days away from total collapse as governments are finally forced into a corner and told to agree on a framework for future Internet governance." completely out of its context? The original quote from the article is, "If a certain US senator and a certain EU commissioner are to be believed, the internet is five days away from total collapse..." To take a quote like that and crop out the fact that it is qualified with a statement that it is propaganda from two particular individuals and try to pass it off as a premise of this article is wholly dishonest.
The rest of your post is either poorly informed and considered garbage, or an attempt to troll. Just a few choice samples:
Let every ISP decide. The competition will allow the creation of new ways to excel.
Ignoring that in the majority of the world, including the US there exist government enforced monopolies on transmission lines, and thus there is no free competition.
putting all into a head nodding "we can all control our citizens equally" concert.
Assigning villainous motives to people trying to decide upon a communication standard between them. It has nothing to do with controlling people, just agreeing on an equitable way to communicate with one another.
Meaning that they will generalize everything in vague definitions easily adjusted to their situation.
Something specifically addressed as false by the article, but which this poster chooses not to address since it is easier to post this FUD.
They have no clue what to control next, but surely there must be more taxes, regulations and restrictions added to the lawbooks.
Crap pulled from his anus. This was about agreeing upon principals of how they will communicate and has nothing to do with taxes.
etc., etc. etc.
This is one of those posts where you wish a "-1 complete lies and fabrications" mod existed.
Further, if you bought stock in a company, would you support a regulation that you could only sell it for 150% of what you bought it for, or that after the dividents had brought in 150% of your purchase price you had to give it away? Corporations exist to make money. This money goes into making new things and providing money to the owners.
Yes, but copyright laws exist "to promote science and useful arts" ostensibly, "for the good of the people." How does the current copyright scheme do that? What justification is there for laws that only transfer money to middle men, for no additional benefit to the people whose freedom of speech is being curtailed for this good?
The shows I saw listed were all created within the past few decades, within copyright protectiong long before there were masses of rich lobbyists extending copyright laws.
Originally, copyrights lasted up to 14 years. That was with the distribution and marketing of works taking much longer due to 1700's era shipping and communication. Given the dramatic advances in shipping an distribution since that time, (trucks, trains, planes, broadcast em transmissions, the internet, etc. Those times should be much shorter than 14 years, hence most of this should be in the public domain by now.
I speak with over a decade of professional experience... Your qualifications are?
I can use Google and do math. Do you have any numbers to back up your assertions or are you just pissing in the wind? I've seen plenty of great amateur stuff, much of which is available freely.
OK, prove it... And that's supposed to include the cost of distributing the content to the users on DVD too? I think their math is a little suspect. Perhaps they set out with an assumption and looked for "evidence" to prove it?
Let's see the BBC list their average cost per hour of programming at 710K, so we'll use that for a baseline. That is not all that much more than what you calculated as an available cost. Now your assertion that the average cable subscriber gets 150 channels is a bit too high. Nielsen says it is about at 100 for the US and lower most everywhere else. The cost of creation for DVDs is very, very low these days, when produced en masse, actually the shipping is much higher. What does all this sloppy math show? Not too much except that the figures are in the right ballpark.
Slashdot favourite, Farscape, cost somewhere around $2 Million per episode, just to make it.
And if you recall it was cancelled because the costs were so high compared to other shows. Special effects cost money, but not all TV needs a lot of special effects.
Actually it is - the artists involved get residuals from old shows.
Yeah, the average, professional actor gets between 5K-7K in royalties a year. Of course now there is a new cap for unlimited cable TV for 2.5K. That sure does give them incentive to work more, but not in the acting business and not making more content for the people to view.
None. But your question is broken because no matter what (within the realm of likely possibility), no more episodes of "The Prisoner" will ever be made.
Then how does keeping it copyrighted help the people of the U.S.? By funneling money to some distributors so they have less need to make new works?
What is more important is whether anyone would fund making more shows LIKE the Prisoner, based on the behaviour of the fans of existing shows. I can assure you that reducing copyright to 7 years would cause media production of all kinds to fall drastically.
Let's see, last time a read the statistics less than a tenth of a percent of commercial, copyrighted works made reported any significant profit after 7 years. Are you saying all those companies funding shows will stop doing so if they no longer have the incentive of that profit on less than a tenth of a percent? To put it simply, bullshit.
The reason we have long copyrights is not because i
I still can't understand what Apple is thinking. Yes, I know, they want to sell their hardware bundled with OS X. That currently makes them money. However, they're missing the boat on a lot of people that would love to install OS X hassle-free on their own choice of hardware. If Apple were to allow this, the sale of their OS could easily eclipse the profit provided by their hardware sales. Mac people will still likely continue to buy their hardware, as their hardware is "fashionable," and also because AppleCare provides decent hardware warranty service.
Your claim that selling the OS by itself would yield significant profit is not well supported and your claim that mac users would still buy mac hardware is also unsupported. Apple can't sell to companies that pre-install because their exclusive contracts with MS preclude it. The market for people who install OS's after the fact is tiny, probably about 2%. Apple already licensed their OS for other manufacturers, who built crappy machines. It seriously hurt both their profits and their reputation for a reliable OS. By the numbers, Apple would have to more than 30% of the OS market to break even on losing their hardware market in the U.S.
So without any major OEMs pre-installing OS X, do you really think Apple should risk the whole company on the hope that they can grab more than 30% of the market from MS from people who buy machines with Windows already on them and then also buy and install OS X? Remember, this is the US market do you really think nearly one third of all people, companies, and govt. organization computer purchasers would also buy a copy of OS X and install it? I have yet to see that business case presented in a way that makes sense and seems reasonable.
A lot of geeks in particular would love to be able to buy OS X and install it on white boxes, but a lot do not want to actually pay for a copy and even if they all did, they are a tiny market. Most people that argue for Apple selling to that market do so because they want Apple to do it, not because it makes sense for Apple to do it. Sure, it would increase market share, but all indications are also that it would lose Apple a whole lot of money.
Content costs money to create, particularly movies/TV. If you've never been involved in TV (let alone Movie) quality production, you might be surprise at how hard it can be. Despite the hype, you can't make a decent show with a DV Cam and a Powerbook.
These are old shows that have long since been paid for. In fact, most of them should have entered the public domain long ago if our copyright system were not corrupted by dirty politicians being bribed by rich lobbyists. People can make good shows for much less than you think, the problem is getting those shows to end users. Right now the networks control the access and have all the contacts with marketing, but this trial will show the possibility of doing and end run around those networks and selling direct via the internet. The only thing stopping it is last mile bandwidth and advertising those shows to the public efficiently.
Take a look some time at the numbers for the production cost of TV shows. The last time I saw the numbers some people worked it out that to pay for the production, manufacturing, and distribution to give every cable and satellite subscriber every show on cable on DVD, without ads, would cost about eight dollars a month. This is not about rewarding artists so they will make more content. How many more episodes of "The Prisoner" are going to be made that would not be made is copyrights were cut down to 7 years? To summarize; copyright is broken, greedy middle men are overcharging, this may or may not be a step towards ameliorating that.
It's not TRADE if it's free. It's also not commerce. And that's what the US of A is built upon.
I assume you are arguing it is not trade if the item costs no money, not if the source is available as no one in their right mind would argue freedom is opposed to the U.S. founding principals. In which case, you're dead wrong anyway. Barter is a concept that predates money. People who use open source software, especially GNU software must agree to the license and abide by it's terms in exchange for the right to copy and redistribute it. In the case of the BSD license, all the user is asking for is credit, which is a form of advertising. In the case of GNU licensed materials the copyright holder(s) are demanding access to free labor from people who want to use it in particular ways. This is called trade.
Microsoft has a trademark on the term "Microsoft Windows" because they were denied a trademark on the term "Windows." They claimed he was infringing in their trademark, even though he did not call his product "Microsoft Windows Defender" just "Windows Defender" which is outside the scopeofF MS's trademark. All this is because MS named their product after an already common feature of computer GUIs with a generic name. MS makes up for their lack of creativity by bullying small companies and lying.
You're wrong. Microsoft has a trademark on the term "Microsoft Windows" because they were denied a trademark on the term "Windows." Stop spreading FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer lies in a question: Would you want to undergo quadruple bypass heart surgery in a US hospital or one in Asia?
Having met some really, really, really scary medical students who were near graduation at a prestigious school in the U.S. I can honestly say I think I'll go to Europe for any surgeries. When a med student does not understand why you should wear gloves while handling DNA samples and equipment and calls his mother to ask what he should do when his car gets a flat tire you sort of lose confidence in the general intelligence and competence of the profession. This is more than backed up by the experiences of me and mine in medicine, with more than 75% of issues being misdiagnosed at least once before a correct diagnosis is reached.
Um, they are doing us a favor. Would you prefer them to NOT do it?
Yeah, they're doing us a favor like giving someone better tasting poison, while loudly proclaiming "poison free, no poison here folks" is doing people a favor. What favor, pray tell, are they doing for us? Giving us a format they call, "open" even though it is both patent encumbered and has vital information encoded in the header in an undocumented, closed, binary format. The point of an XML format is ease of use, openness, standardization, mature tools, and easy transformation to other formats. No one wants a format because its XML, they want it because of those advantages. Now MS makes their own XML formats specifically designed to remove most of those advantages. And people like you call it a favor. It is lies, damned lies, and marketing and you bought it. How many politicians and corporate decision makers will also buy it? Luckily those in MA were smart enough to see that the format is not open, which is why it was not approved as one of the open formats they were considering.
what's the truth here?
The truth is different chip makers offer different chips with different price/speed/power/functionality at different times. Apple and MS each buy the chips that they think are the best deal for their purpose and offer the best road map. Apple went with IBM because they liked the chips. The g5 was top of the heap in performance, it just did not maintain that lead. The cell processors are great for certain applications and pretty good for consoles, but not so hot for general purpose computing. There is no conspiracy. It is not as though company X has the best product for all applications and always will. Different chips are released that are better for different things and are adopted by different companies who market the advantages while downplaying the disadvantages.
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I'd say that at least a third of the population condones non-commercial copyright infringement... The point is, when an act is accepted by a significant proportion of the population, chances are that act is ethical
So obviously Sony (or the company that wrote the code if you want to get pedantic) is right to have infringed upon DVD Jon's code.
How is this copyright infringement non-commercial? It was done for profit by an organization whose stated goal is to make money.
So it all comes down to slashdot isn't the place to go to if you want to hear intelligent debate about copyright laws.
True enough, but only because there are so many people like you don't seem able to comprehend the arguments put forth. A significant number of people infringe copyright non-commercially and that indicates that the will of the people might be that it should be legal. A significant number of people do not commercially infringe copyrights or condone it. I'd agree with that argument, as would many people. But to claim it is hypocritical is ridiculous. It is called a false dichotomy. There is no hypocrisy in believing that non commercial copyright infringement should be legal, but commercial should be illegal. There is no hypocrisy in believing our copyright system is corrupt and counter productive, but still believing a copyright system that is better designed can be useful. There is no hypocrisy in believing business and software patents are garbage, but traditional patents are a good idea. There is no hypocrisy in believing Toyota makes reliable cars but Ford does not. Please take the time to actually read and understand an argument someone puts forth before declaring them a hypocrite and ascribing a whole lot of motives to them, even though you obviously have no way of knowing them.
Ha Ha! you still get spam! That is soooo 90's. Between some blacklist and simple filtering on the server, expiring addresses for commercial receipts, and my bayesian filter on my client I haven't seen a spam in my mailbox in years from any of my many e-mail accounts (except my spam box where I intentionally collect spam for research). Anyway spam is not an exploit, it is just proper behavior of the protocol that you happen to not like. If you'd like to move to a whitelist for e-mail nothing is stopping you, but I prefer the option of getting mail from new, unexpected people.
But, if your friends are already all using one protocol, switching to another, just because it is technically superior may not make a difference.
But then again, it might. Jabber supports bridging to other protocols so if you run or find a Jabber server, you can still chat with all those people and you only have to manage one account for your client, connect on one port through your firewall, and your communications are encrypted between yourself and the server in all cases and client to client for those that support it. Obviously you're already using a limited Jabber service (googletalk beta) and that is a start. What really would improve chatting for everyone, however, is persuading enough people (some of those friends you mentioned) to move to Jabber. Once it has enough critical mass the other companies maintaining chat services will be forced to standardize, to the benefit of end users.
Is your buddy list NOT stored on AOL's servers for an AIM ID?
Mine is, actually, but some clients allow you to keep your list client side, rather than storing the info on the chat server.
They are providing you this service for free. Why can they not try to earn some ad revenue from their user base?
I never said they can't, but it is still spam, regardless who sends it. What if your ISP provided mail account was regularly spammed with messages from companies who paid them? What if there was no standard SMTP protocol so the only way you could send mail to or get mail from your mother was to use that particular ISP? Sure AOL can spam their own customers all they want, but that does not mean I (and anyone else) should not find it annoying and look for a better solution. Jabber is to chat as SMTP is to e-mail and I certainly think it is in nearly all user's best interest to migrate.
On the other hand, won't such a single standard utopia be open to exploitation, virii, and all the other "bad stuff" that comes with a non-diverse system?
How many exploits do you know of that target the SMTP protocol itself? I know of worms and exploits for particular implementations of that protocol, and many for particular, poorly designed, mail client software, but not any against the protocol itself. A standard protocol does not mean only having one implementation of the client or server. There are already dozens of implementations of the client and several for the server for the Jabber protocol. So to answer your question, No.
Except that it auto adds them to GAIM also. I just logged in with gaim to check. It adds them to everyone's account when the log back in, regardless of what you use to access it.
This does not seem to be true. I have an AIM account to supplement my Jabber account and I am using iChat. Nothing was added. Ditto for a friend using Adium and another using Trillian. I'm not sure they added this to everyone, but it does seem to be mostly the standard AOL client and GAIM users that are affected.
I'm just surprised that AOL has taken this long to begin sending you advertisements via AIM. They have a near-monopoly on IM communications...
AOL has 56% last time I looked. 56% a monopoly does not make.
As an aside, can we please move out of the dark ages of text chatting? Multiple, incompatible formats on different networks, without publicly available bridging is pathetic. Please everyone, switch to Jabber and set up a bridge until it gains most of the market. It's as if MSN users could not e-mail AOL users who could not e-mail Yahoo users. Remember when the internet used to be about standards and used for communication, instead of lock-ins and sending you ads?
Of course it would be a total shame to see this make Mass. switch, but if OSS developers want adoption by government institutions, they'd better make accessability a consideration, otherwise this will always be a roadblock, and one that government institutions can't help but acknowledge.
The sad thing is, using Windows+Word is only a very short term benefit to the disabled. Accessibility features of Windows and Word are both terrible when compared to Gnome or OS X and any given program. The only way Word wins is when a third party program specifically designed to hack it's way around Window's and Word's broken support for the disabled is introduced. Since Windows+Word has such huge market share (we won't go into why) such programs exist, but the Windows platform itself absolutely sucks in terms of support for the disabled. To see it entrenched even more despite MS's shabby treatment of the disabled and refusal to acknowledge the problems is very sad indeed.
On the other hand, I don't see why this should be a barrier to the switch (other than as a political speaking point) With the switch to the open standard disabled employees can either use an alternate OS with an alternate word processor (which in the case of many disabilities is a big improvement) or the state can let them continue to use word and then run their files through a conversion script. OpenOffice can easily open and rewrite 99% of Word files. Further, with the money saved in the long-term by the state on licensing they could pay for the development of better open source programs that hack around Window's half-assed disability features with respect to OpenOffice and other programs that support Open Document.
In the Massachusetts case it doesn't just have to be OSS in use. Surely some office software vendor will provide support for OpenDocument AND accessibility.
The problem isn't that Word "supports accessibility" and that the various Open Document format word processors don't. The issue is that Windows support for the disabled sucks ass and the hooks, API's, and display features needed for the disabled are not available at all. The result is third party companies write hacks like JAWS that are really a way to make MS Office support certain usability features (even though most of the rest of the programs on Windows can't take advantage of the same features). Some have generic elements that try to work for all applications and succeed partially for some. Since Word is the dominant program developers of these hacks focus their efforts there.
The result of all this is OpenOffice on Windows has lesser accessibility until someone writes a hack that specifically targets it. All, however, is not lost. Word processors that support Open Document are also available on non-Windows platforms. Both Gnome and OS X provide some really nice, OS level accessibility features that work on all programs, not just the targeted ones. That is because the OS itself is designed with the disabled in mind. Apple's often mocked decision to keep their interface designed for only one mouse button, for example, means that all the functionality is provided in the menus, by the same method and is easily discoverable and accessible to people using voice, and other alternative interfaces. Contrast this with Windows programs who often include functionality only in a right-click contextual menu that alternative interfaces usually cannot access. By migrating some disabled users to other platforms they can actually improve usability over Windows+MS Office for many kinds of disabilities. For non-employees who do not want to change, OpenOffice still reads and writes Word files, so there is no problem with communication.
Basically, moving to an open standard may require some changes, but all in all it is not a real barrier and may bring long-term wins to disabled users.
This is true enough, although I'm not sure the difference is enough to matter in most cases. I wonder if their user testing included programs with long and short names? I wonder if a medium length name actually makes a usability difference under OS X?
One is that when there is a violation, there is not currently anyone willing to spend the huge dollars needed to litigate the issue.
Yup no lawyers ready to work on commission and sue the pants off of Sony for a huge fee... what you say there are 400 waiting outside asking to talk to anyone with any of the copyrights involved? Oh, never-mind.
Another interesting point I see is that someone, sooner or later is going to challenge the legality of Open Source under the 'free' standard and litigate that it is tantamount to price fixing, i.e. antitrust.
First for antitrust you have to have a company, individual, or group dominating a market. How is that going to happen with Open Source software, considering any other company can come along and sell it as well? Second, no forces anyone to set any price for the software. You can charge as much as you want. Third, the license only applies to companies reselling copyrighted material which is of course a government sanctioned monopoly on that product and perfectly legit.
Open Source has driven the industry in a very good direction. I would hate to see it fall because it can't support itself, financially, when and where it is needed. Justice is NOT free, in fact the costs are enormous to obtain justice.
Companies that use and provide support and services for open source tools have been pretty effective litigating on behalf of the copyright holders. e.g. IBM.
Do you know why the language you use makes a difference? It doesn't seem to make sense to me.
For two reasons, one because it is easier to make fine movements up and down with a mouse for most people and secondly because languages that traditionally read top to bottom or bottom to top use more spacing between characters and more often run into the limitation of the screen height, than horizontal languages do the screen width. Note, this is wholly a general usability guideline and depends upon the user input device, screen size, number of menus, etc. The one thing I've learned for certain is until you test a particular task with users, you don't know what is the best way. I've seen some pretty unintuitive results of testing.
Well, usually I find if a program needs too much to fit comfortably on a right-click menu, it's probably trying to do too much, and it's hard to remember exactly where the option is in the menubar anyway; there's probably a better solution than just adding an extra menu.
Looking at InDesign (a professional layout program) it has ten top level menus with an average of about twenty menus in each and maybe as many again in secondary menus from those top menus. So that is about 400 functions you can select from the menus. Pretty much all of those features are used by some users regularly. That sort of functionality is hard to fit into a contextual menu.
Now, I'd say about forty of those features are fairly standard, that is they show up in many programs. Things like saving, quitting, copying, pasting, etc. are good examples. Since these functions appear in the same place in pretty much all the programs that use them, they are easy to find. Most power user activate some of these functions using keyboard shortcuts, or a contextual menu, but it is important that they also appear in the menus so that alternate interfaces, can access those functions easily. The rest of the functions are somewhat self-documenting in that a user can look through the menus and find functions easily, and because they are grouped by function (which is better than in a usable contextual list).
I find it as hard to stop in the right place when "flicking up" as going to some random place near the top, because I rarely if ever flick straight up. If you flick at an angle, once you reach the top, you keep travelling horizontally till you actually do stop.
It is indeed common to access menus by moving upwards at an angle, but most users don't "flick" the mouse, per-se. For me, I twitch my hand and it goes to the right place. This is because my reflexes have learned what to do to get me to a specific location. Using an unfamiliar location, I do sometimes have to slide the mouse either left or right (or up or down for menus on the side) but doing so is only a correction in two dimensions not three (as is required with maximized windows applications) and I don't have to worry about minimized windows. Also, given the windows interface I have to travel down and over a given means going to more places in general and thus slowing the conditioning of muscle memory. One of the most surprising things you learn when you start researching UI design is how long it takes to navigate menus. Because you're concentrating on moving the mouse, subjectively it seems to take little time, but when you actually time how long it takes for various tasks using software to track or by watching a video the difference really stands out.
I assume you mean "GNU/Linux distributions", but I'm not sure how. For the most part, they package either Gnome or KDE as their default, and both of those emulate the Windows way of doing things.
Both Gnome and KDE allow the user to customize the contextual menu, Windows requires it to be defined by the developer. Since a developer has less knowledge of an individual's workflow than the user, they often include functions that are not needed and fail to include functions that are needed. This is a minor usability win for the Linux d
Your arguments about federalism are all well and good, but have nothing to do with the topic at hand. This is not about the UN taking responsibility for local matters this is about who makes entries into the global "phonebook." Since it is the standard used by all different countries to communicate via DNS it is, by definition, a global, not a local matter. Basically they don't want any one country to be able to shut off DNS unexpectedly for some other country. The UN is an open system, and there is little chance that all parties will agree to take such action. Even if they did, at least then it would be representative of the wishes of the world, not just the U.S. No one trusts the U.S. these days. We've been caught outright lying too many times. They would not trust us to control the assignment and directing of global telephone area codes (which is managed by a UN commission) and they don't trust us to run the DNS root. This is, in my opinion, exactly the kind of task the UN is ideally suited for. It is something that is global, needs to be reliable and open, and does not need rapid change.
Indeed, and even Fitt's law says that right here is quicker to get to than the edges of the screen. Thus, we should all be using right-click menus. (They've got other advantages besides.)
As someone who has studied usability extensively and is well read on the topic, you're 50% right. Chorded menus, like the right click menu are faster to access than menus at the edge of the screen, provided there is only one of them and provided you are working in a language that normally reads horizontally. The problem with them is that you can only have one, relatively short menu, which is either very big, or has many levels to fit the same number of items as can exist along the top of the screen. Having a list of items a hundred long sucks. Having to select from among many choices, not lined up along a screen edge is also difficult since you have to navigate in 2 dimensions instead of one. Additionally, contextual menus, while usable, are not as easily learnable. Studies have shown that new users, and users who compute casually or sporadically often click the wrong button or both buttons at once. It is hard to learn to use multiple buttons and many users never get it right. It is great for more advanced users, but is less usable when assigned by the OS or app developer than when definable by the end user.
And you can't just "fling your mouse" anyway, because you have to pick which menu you want, so once you've flung it, you have to re-aim.
Actually, muscle memory makes it easy to quickly hit the same target along an edge from anywhere. It is one of those hardwired things.
If (as is common on Windows) you run your windows all maximised anyway, the menubar is just slightly below the top of the screen; the re-aiming needed to find the right menu item isn't a whole lot more than it is on the Mac.
On the mac you can click at the top of the screen and it opens a menu. With Windows apps, you must move down the screen and to where you want and because the window can be a different size or place it may be a moving target, hindering the ability to train muscle memory.
I've read extensively on this topic, taken classes back in college, and attended lectures and conferences since that time. There are literally hundreds of papers on these topics and many, many user studies. The verdict has been in for quite a while. Anecdotally, as someone who uses multiple OS's daily and who has done usability studies with others it is much faster to learn using a single mouse, it is faster to select menus when they are on a border, it is faster to accomplish tasks using user definable context menus. These are three areas where Windows has fallen behind the curve. Various Windows distributions often win out on one of these. OS X, wins on all of them.
Don't you think it is more than a little deceptive to take a quote like "the internet is five days away from total collapse as governments are finally forced into a corner and told to agree on a framework for future Internet governance." completely out of its context? The original quote from the article is, "If a certain US senator and a certain EU commissioner are to be believed, the internet is five days away from total collapse..." To take a quote like that and crop out the fact that it is qualified with a statement that it is propaganda from two particular individuals and try to pass it off as a premise of this article is wholly dishonest.
The rest of your post is either poorly informed and considered garbage, or an attempt to troll. Just a few choice samples:
Let every ISP decide. The competition will allow the creation of new ways to excel.
Ignoring that in the majority of the world, including the US there exist government enforced monopolies on transmission lines, and thus there is no free competition.
putting all into a head nodding "we can all control our citizens equally" concert.
Assigning villainous motives to people trying to decide upon a communication standard between them. It has nothing to do with controlling people, just agreeing on an equitable way to communicate with one another.
Meaning that they will generalize everything in vague definitions easily adjusted to their situation.
Something specifically addressed as false by the article, but which this poster chooses not to address since it is easier to post this FUD.
They have no clue what to control next, but surely there must be more taxes, regulations and restrictions added to the lawbooks.
Crap pulled from his anus. This was about agreeing upon principals of how they will communicate and has nothing to do with taxes.
etc., etc. etc.
This is one of those posts where you wish a "-1 complete lies and fabrications" mod existed.
Further, if you bought stock in a company, would you support a regulation that you could only sell it for 150% of what you bought it for, or that after the dividents had brought in 150% of your purchase price you had to give it away? Corporations exist to make money. This money goes into making new things and providing money to the owners.
Yes, but copyright laws exist "to promote science and useful arts" ostensibly, "for the good of the people." How does the current copyright scheme do that? What justification is there for laws that only transfer money to middle men, for no additional benefit to the people whose freedom of speech is being curtailed for this good?
The shows I saw listed were all created within the past few decades, within copyright protectiong long before there were masses of rich lobbyists extending copyright laws.
Originally, copyrights lasted up to 14 years. That was with the distribution and marketing of works taking much longer due to 1700's era shipping and communication. Given the dramatic advances in shipping an distribution since that time, (trucks, trains, planes, broadcast em transmissions, the internet, etc. Those times should be much shorter than 14 years, hence most of this should be in the public domain by now.
I speak with over a decade of professional experience... Your qualifications are?
I can use Google and do math. Do you have any numbers to back up your assertions or are you just pissing in the wind? I've seen plenty of great amateur stuff, much of which is available freely.
OK, prove it... And that's supposed to include the cost of distributing the content to the users on DVD too? I think their math is a little suspect. Perhaps they set out with an assumption and looked for "evidence" to prove it?
Let's see the BBC list their average cost per hour of programming at 710K, so we'll use that for a baseline. That is not all that much more than what you calculated as an available cost. Now your assertion that the average cable subscriber gets 150 channels is a bit too high. Nielsen says it is about at 100 for the US and lower most everywhere else. The cost of creation for DVDs is very, very low these days, when produced en masse, actually the shipping is much higher. What does all this sloppy math show? Not too much except that the figures are in the right ballpark.
Slashdot favourite, Farscape, cost somewhere around $2 Million per episode, just to make it.
And if you recall it was cancelled because the costs were so high compared to other shows. Special effects cost money, but not all TV needs a lot of special effects.
Actually it is - the artists involved get residuals from old shows.
Yeah, the average, professional actor gets between 5K-7K in royalties a year. Of course now there is a new cap for unlimited cable TV for 2.5K. That sure does give them incentive to work more, but not in the acting business and not making more content for the people to view.
None. But your question is broken because no matter what (within the realm of likely possibility), no more episodes of "The Prisoner" will ever be made.
Then how does keeping it copyrighted help the people of the U.S.? By funneling money to some distributors so they have less need to make new works?
What is more important is whether anyone would fund making more shows LIKE the Prisoner, based on the behaviour of the fans of existing shows. I can assure you that reducing copyright to 7 years would cause media production of all kinds to fall drastically.
Let's see, last time a read the statistics less than a tenth of a percent of commercial, copyrighted works made reported any significant profit after 7 years. Are you saying all those companies funding shows will stop doing so if they no longer have the incentive of that profit on less than a tenth of a percent? To put it simply, bullshit.
The reason we have long copyrights is not because i
I still can't understand what Apple is thinking. Yes, I know, they want to sell their hardware bundled with OS X. That currently makes them money. However, they're missing the boat on a lot of people that would love to install OS X hassle-free on their own choice of hardware. If Apple were to allow this, the sale of their OS could easily eclipse the profit provided by their hardware sales. Mac people will still likely continue to buy their hardware, as their hardware is "fashionable," and also because AppleCare provides decent hardware warranty service.
Your claim that selling the OS by itself would yield significant profit is not well supported and your claim that mac users would still buy mac hardware is also unsupported. Apple can't sell to companies that pre-install because their exclusive contracts with MS preclude it. The market for people who install OS's after the fact is tiny, probably about 2%. Apple already licensed their OS for other manufacturers, who built crappy machines. It seriously hurt both their profits and their reputation for a reliable OS. By the numbers, Apple would have to more than 30% of the OS market to break even on losing their hardware market in the U.S.
So without any major OEMs pre-installing OS X, do you really think Apple should risk the whole company on the hope that they can grab more than 30% of the market from MS from people who buy machines with Windows already on them and then also buy and install OS X? Remember, this is the US market do you really think nearly one third of all people, companies, and govt. organization computer purchasers would also buy a copy of OS X and install it? I have yet to see that business case presented in a way that makes sense and seems reasonable.
A lot of geeks in particular would love to be able to buy OS X and install it on white boxes, but a lot do not want to actually pay for a copy and even if they all did, they are a tiny market. Most people that argue for Apple selling to that market do so because they want Apple to do it, not because it makes sense for Apple to do it. Sure, it would increase market share, but all indications are also that it would lose Apple a whole lot of money.
Content costs money to create, particularly movies/TV. If you've never been involved in TV (let alone Movie) quality production, you might be surprise at how hard it can be. Despite the hype, you can't make a decent show with a DV Cam and a Powerbook.
These are old shows that have long since been paid for. In fact, most of them should have entered the public domain long ago if our copyright system were not corrupted by dirty politicians being bribed by rich lobbyists. People can make good shows for much less than you think, the problem is getting those shows to end users. Right now the networks control the access and have all the contacts with marketing, but this trial will show the possibility of doing and end run around those networks and selling direct via the internet. The only thing stopping it is last mile bandwidth and advertising those shows to the public efficiently.
Take a look some time at the numbers for the production cost of TV shows. The last time I saw the numbers some people worked it out that to pay for the production, manufacturing, and distribution to give every cable and satellite subscriber every show on cable on DVD, without ads, would cost about eight dollars a month. This is not about rewarding artists so they will make more content. How many more episodes of "The Prisoner" are going to be made that would not be made is copyrights were cut down to 7 years? To summarize; copyright is broken, greedy middle men are overcharging, this may or may not be a step towards ameliorating that.
It's not TRADE if it's free. It's also not commerce. And that's what the US of A is built upon.
I assume you are arguing it is not trade if the item costs no money, not if the source is available as no one in their right mind would argue freedom is opposed to the U.S. founding principals. In which case, you're dead wrong anyway. Barter is a concept that predates money. People who use open source software, especially GNU software must agree to the license and abide by it's terms in exchange for the right to copy and redistribute it. In the case of the BSD license, all the user is asking for is credit, which is a form of advertising. In the case of GNU licensed materials the copyright holder(s) are demanding access to free labor from people who want to use it in particular ways. This is called trade.
Microsoft has a trademark on the term "Microsoft Windows" because they were denied a trademark on the term "Windows." They claimed he was infringing in their trademark, even though he did not call his product "Microsoft Windows Defender" just "Windows Defender" which is outside the scopeofF MS's trademark. All this is because MS named their product after an already common feature of computer GUIs with a generic name. MS makes up for their lack of creativity by bullying small companies and lying.
the Windows trademark is strong and defensible.
You're wrong. Microsoft has a trademark on the term "Microsoft Windows" because they were denied a trademark on the term "Windows." Stop spreading FUD.