All the Xbox stuff you mention has been done before... on the PC. I won't argue with the fact that MS offered it first on their console, but it can hardly be called revolutionary. In fact, it's rather fairly obvious.
MS are doing it right on the 360 (so I hear) so that's good, and that's why they're succeeding. I think that what is most important of all, they have a great library of games. For each PS3 game, there are 10 360 games of equal quality.
From my experience, you don't have to access the "command" any more, or at least a lot less then before.
Debian/Ubuntu has apt, and has loads of stuff in their repositories. Ubuntu even enables multiverse by default, as far as I know. If not, it's a click away. If it's not in the repositories, it can be packaged as a.deb by the package maintainer, and yes you can double click those, fill in your password and it installs, without any need for the "command." Software developers for Windows now make elaborate installers, making a deb and an rpm won't cost them any more time.
I understand why people get directed to the command line a lot though. Linux is still a power user OS, and power users often use the command line, because it gets things done faster and more efficiently in a lot of cases. So, this is what they know. They know how to set up X by editing xorg.conf. They'd rather use apt-get than synaptic. So, if you have a problem with your Linux install and ask the average user, you're likely to get a power user answer and it involves opening up the command prompt. I do feel that Ubuntu is a step in the right direction. A lot of the howtos on their wiki and forum are focused on the GUI.
Isn't that the entire point though? No-one knows what the actual damages are. Not even the RIAA!
So, how can they stick a number on and get away with it in a court of law? Especially when it's not fixed, the summary speaks of the usual $750, but also mentions $9250 and $200. That's a bit wild, isn't it? It almost seems like they're making those numbers up.
You are calling out NYCL for his dollar figures; I am calling out the RIAA for the same thing. Let them prove, without a doubt, that there even were damages, and then we can get on with it.
Oh really? I distinctly remember the time I left my work computer running a long task overnight, coming to the office in the morning and finding it had rebooted because of an update. It didn't save anything, it didn't ask anything, it just rebooted in the middle of my (unattended) work. The IT mister sets the updater on our Windows computers, so it wasn't even my fault. This was perhaps six months ago, using XP SP2.
That was the morning I took two coffees instead of my usual just single.
You're assuming that if you ban IM, people will be more productive. I don't think that's true: they'll just find something else to be unproductive with.
Workers need time off besides lunch and coffee breaks. Either way you'll get the unproductiveness, either through sloppy work at the end of the day or by them having their mini breaks. If that time is spent chatting to their girlfriends, that's fine.
On the other hand, when they are being productive, they can easily save time by sending bits of code or whatever through IM. This increases their productivity.
I don't see the problem, except for if I would find myself working for a person who is this restrictive about my life, I'd quit in a heartbeat.
Running a website like SOMA FM costs a lot of money. Just think of the bandwidth these guys must have. Doesn't come free!
To break even, they have to get money from somewhere. Ads? Gifts? Donations? Subscription service? Doesn't matter.
In the end, you have a side that says: we made $x, and we spent $y, and this pretty much evens out so there's no profit. (A not-for-profit institution can make profit, btw.) The RIAA are now saying: in the above calculation, you have to add 10.5% of $x to $y.
It's an easy kill for the RIAA, because even when the radio stations operate at a loss, it's not feasible for them to have no income at all because they'd go bankrupt soon. This RIAA tax just makes it harder to operate a business. How's that for economic growth!
Because corporations cannot create copyrightable copy. The "music industry" does not write songs. People do. The economic value that was meant to go along with a monopoly on distribution (which is all that copyright is: the right to copy) was supposed to encourage the creator to make more copy and enrich culture for everyone. If the creator does not have time for writing songs because he needs to grow vegetables in his garden, culture will not grow.
Now we're in a situation where copyright can be transferred to other people or to corporations. This is not necessarily bad, because the corps can rid the copywriters of a lot of overhead. If the artists has no time to paint a picture because he's busy chasing copyright violators, culture will not grow.
The point is: copyright should encourage artists to create more art.
Corporations don't create art. It is absurd to think that a dead copywriter could create more copy, so why is the copyright still held after the creator's death? When alive, why does copyright need to be transferred to be upheld by a corporation? There are lots of cases where the creator holds the right and other people go after the violations.
With the system we have now, where copyright extends for ages and ages, usually long after even the death of the artist, the artist has no reason to create more art. This does not grow culture, so it's not why we have copyright.
If, instead of cultural growth, copyright is now intended to help economic growth, you should come out and say that, and stop romanticizing artistry and the poor musician and all that other crap, and regulate just like other industries. If the artists are wage slaves anyway, why treat the industry any different than the software industry, for example?
I understand your point, but I think you're cutting corners here.
"selling copies of things people want" This is not what they do. The record companies depend on a monopoly of distribution. This used to be true, and it explains why the radio will only play "popular" songs. The record companies have a deal with the radio stations: you play this, you get that. This is what makes a song popular.
The iron grip on distribution of music is slipping away. We can now distribute music for a flat fee: our internet access account is all we need. The bytes are essentially free to distribute.
The record companies saw this too late. They are too slow to adapt to these new tubes. Now we have itunes music store, and for all its faults, it's the most successful music distributor today (according to Steve Jobs at the latest iPod event.) They can even dictate prices to the usic industry!
The music companies are desperately holding on to the "distribution costs money" idea. This is the outdated model people are talking about. It really is outdated, see the itms.
What I don't get is why you are so upset. If the record companies are really going under, do you think there won't be any music? Do you really think people will stop being entertained by music? If there is a market for it, people will sell. The profit just won't rely on distribution anymore, which is a very good thing.
GP: "it must also have significant supporting evidence for it to get to the theory stage, otherwise it is a hypothesis"
Your example is a hypothesis, since you haven't actually seen any black sheep. Next step is you set out to look for black sheep. Assuming you find some, you now upgrade to theory level. What's more, it's a fact instead of a theory, since you have seen black sheep so it can never be disproved by an observation; you cannot unobserve the black sheep.
> An adaptation isn't preinstalling software on a machine.
Says who?
Apple could argue they are selling a package: Apple hardware with OSX software. The package has been adapted, now it's regular hardware with OSX software. The leap of logic here is that the copyright extends over the entire package, which I don't think it does.
I get what you're saying and I agree with the sentiment, but for most users, Open Office would be more than enough. Yes, the interface can be clunky sometimes and it's not exactly like MS Office, but for most uses, it will suffice.
The price tag also creates perceived value. "This costs more than that, so it'll be better for me."
I don't want to get into an Open > MS debate. This is about perceived value. There was a very insightful post a while back about people who want to use Windows because they can get it for free. Ubuntu would do for a lot of home users, but it's not what they know and they can get Windows for free as well, so why bother?
If free == adequate and pay == has more functionality / is better, people will always get the one for $ is they can get it pirated. No-one is going to pirate the light, home, stripped edition. They all get the enterprise pro one, even though that would be geared more towards enterprises (gasp) instead of home use.
Just saying: this is not an argument in the battle who is better than the other, FOS or MS/Apple.
I know it's a pretty alien thing to say on a primarily American forum, but I would suggest that the government make the voting machines. They pay for them now anyway, and the process could be open then. Just spec it to be open, let Diebold or some other company make the machines through public bidding. Some things do not need to be free-marketised, especially the ones that are crucial to your democracy.
If the government would design them (or pay designers to do it for them, more likely) then there would be no reason to keep the design a secret because the government does not need to compete.
It would be interesting to know who thought it was a good idea to have voting machines created by a company who has shareholder value as its bottom line instead of upholding democracy.
I'm using AppTrap (which is free) and Steermouse (which was $20 or so.)
Especially the mouse thing is just wrong. Acceleration settings are perfect for the touchpad, but for an external mouse (which is not Apple's, in my case) it's just annoyingly bad. I could not get used to it. Steermouse made the mouse usable again, nice and snappy but not overly sensitive.
> But he's a right-wing "free market" advocate! Right!
That's entirely in the line of expectation then, isn't it? He's free to manipulate the market in any way possible, and being head of the state puts him in the position to do exactly that.
The free market isn't all that ideal. More like the free-for-all market, double points for head shots.
Slashdot Mirror
All the Xbox stuff you mention has been done before... on the PC. I won't argue with the fact that MS offered it first on their console, but it can hardly be called revolutionary. In fact, it's rather fairly obvious.
MS are doing it right on the 360 (so I hear) so that's good, and that's why they're succeeding. I think that what is most important of all, they have a great library of games. For each PS3 game, there are 10 360 games of equal quality.
Can we stop calling it the cloud? Somehow, that makes me all itchy.
From my experience, you don't have to access the "command" any more, or at least a lot less then before.
Debian/Ubuntu has apt, and has loads of stuff in their repositories. Ubuntu even enables multiverse by default, as far as I know. If not, it's a click away. If it's not in the repositories, it can be packaged as a .deb by the package maintainer, and yes you can double click those, fill in your password and it installs, without any need for the "command."
Software developers for Windows now make elaborate installers, making a deb and an rpm won't cost them any more time.
I understand why people get directed to the command line a lot though. Linux is still a power user OS, and power users often use the command line, because it gets things done faster and more efficiently in a lot of cases. So, this is what they know. They know how to set up X by editing xorg.conf. They'd rather use apt-get than synaptic. So, if you have a problem with your Linux install and ask the average user, you're likely to get a power user answer and it involves opening up the command prompt.
I do feel that Ubuntu is a step in the right direction. A lot of the howtos on their wiki and forum are focused on the GUI.
Isn't that the entire point though? No-one knows what the actual damages are. Not even the RIAA!
So, how can they stick a number on and get away with it in a court of law? Especially when it's not fixed, the summary speaks of the usual $750, but also mentions $9250 and $200. That's a bit wild, isn't it? It almost seems like they're making those numbers up.
You are calling out NYCL for his dollar figures; I am calling out the RIAA for the same thing. Let them prove, without a doubt, that there even were damages, and then we can get on with it.
Oh really? I distinctly remember the time I left my work computer running a long task overnight, coming to the office in the morning and finding it had rebooted because of an update. It didn't save anything, it didn't ask anything, it just rebooted in the middle of my (unattended) work. The IT mister sets the updater on our Windows computers, so it wasn't even my fault. This was perhaps six months ago, using XP SP2.
That was the morning I took two coffees instead of my usual just single.
[citation needed]?
It sure makes your Slashdot comment non-standard!
Wow.
Second post and you already invoked Godwin's law, and even on a party totally unrelated to the post.
My hat is off to you.
You're assuming that if you ban IM, people will be more productive. I don't think that's true: they'll just find something else to be unproductive with.
Workers need time off besides lunch and coffee breaks. Either way you'll get the unproductiveness, either through sloppy work at the end of the day or by them having their mini breaks. If that time is spent chatting to their girlfriends, that's fine.
On the other hand, when they are being productive, they can easily save time by sending bits of code or whatever through IM. This increases their productivity.
I don't see the problem, except for if I would find myself working for a person who is this restrictive about my life, I'd quit in a heartbeat.
Running a website like SOMA FM costs a lot of money. Just think of the bandwidth these guys must have. Doesn't come free!
To break even, they have to get money from somewhere. Ads? Gifts? Donations? Subscription service? Doesn't matter.
In the end, you have a side that says: we made $x, and we spent $y, and this pretty much evens out so there's no profit. (A not-for-profit institution can make profit, btw.)
The RIAA are now saying: in the above calculation, you have to add 10.5% of $x to $y.
It's an easy kill for the RIAA, because even when the radio stations operate at a loss, it's not feasible for them to have no income at all because they'd go bankrupt soon. This RIAA tax just makes it harder to operate a business. How's that for economic growth!
Because corporations cannot create copyrightable copy. The "music industry" does not write songs. People do. The economic value that was meant to go along with a monopoly on distribution (which is all that copyright is: the right to copy) was supposed to encourage the creator to make more copy and enrich culture for everyone. If the creator does not have time for writing songs because he needs to grow vegetables in his garden, culture will not grow.
Now we're in a situation where copyright can be transferred to other people or to corporations. This is not necessarily bad, because the corps can rid the copywriters of a lot of overhead. If the artists has no time to paint a picture because he's busy chasing copyright violators, culture will not grow.
The point is: copyright should encourage artists to create more art.
Corporations don't create art. It is absurd to think that a dead copywriter could create more copy, so why is the copyright still held after the creator's death?
When alive, why does copyright need to be transferred to be upheld by a corporation? There are lots of cases where the creator holds the right and other people go after the violations.
With the system we have now, where copyright extends for ages and ages, usually long after even the death of the artist, the artist has no reason to create more art. This does not grow culture, so it's not why we have copyright.
If, instead of cultural growth, copyright is now intended to help economic growth, you should come out and say that, and stop romanticizing artistry and the poor musician and all that other crap, and regulate just like other industries. If the artists are wage slaves anyway, why treat the industry any different than the software industry, for example?
I understand your point, but I think you're cutting corners here.
"selling copies of things people want"
This is not what they do. The record companies depend on a monopoly of distribution. This used to be true, and it explains why the radio will only play "popular" songs. The record companies have a deal with the radio stations: you play this, you get that. This is what makes a song popular.
The iron grip on distribution of music is slipping away. We can now distribute music for a flat fee: our internet access account is all we need. The bytes are essentially free to distribute.
The record companies saw this too late. They are too slow to adapt to these new tubes. Now we have itunes music store, and for all its faults, it's the most successful music distributor today (according to Steve Jobs at the latest iPod event.) They can even dictate prices to the usic industry!
The music companies are desperately holding on to the "distribution costs money" idea. This is the outdated model people are talking about. It really is outdated, see the itms.
What I don't get is why you are so upset. If the record companies are really going under, do you think there won't be any music? Do you really think people will stop being entertained by music? If there is a market for it, people will sell. The profit just won't rely on distribution anymore, which is a very good thing.
My point is: don't worry.
GP:
"it must also have significant supporting evidence for it to get to the theory stage, otherwise it is a hypothesis"
Your example is a hypothesis, since you haven't actually seen any black sheep.
Next step is you set out to look for black sheep. Assuming you find some, you now upgrade to theory level.
What's more, it's a fact instead of a theory, since you have seen black sheep so it can never be disproved by an observation; you cannot unobserve the black sheep.
So, not a theory.
> An adaptation isn't preinstalling software on a machine.
Says who?
Apple could argue they are selling a package: Apple hardware with OSX software. The package has been adapted, now it's regular hardware with OSX software.
The leap of logic here is that the copyright extends over the entire package, which I don't think it does.
I get what you're saying and I agree with the sentiment, but for most users, Open Office would be more than enough. Yes, the interface can be clunky sometimes and it's not exactly like MS Office, but for most uses, it will suffice.
The price tag also creates perceived value. "This costs more than that, so it'll be better for me."
I don't want to get into an Open > MS debate. This is about perceived value. There was a very insightful post a while back about people who want to use Windows because they can get it for free. Ubuntu would do for a lot of home users, but it's not what they know and they can get Windows for free as well, so why bother?
If free == adequate and pay == has more functionality / is better, people will always get the one for $ is they can get it pirated. No-one is going to pirate the light, home, stripped edition. They all get the enterprise pro one, even though that would be geared more towards enterprises (gasp) instead of home use.
Just saying: this is not an argument in the battle who is better than the other, FOS or MS/Apple.
I am not a US citizen so I'm not allowed to vote over there, but if I were, I would consider myself an "interested party" for sure.
That's why it should be open to scrutiny by the public / a third party entity / the other party / international overseers.
Who are those guys that go to Eastern European and African countries to make sure the elections are fair? You could use some of those guys.
I love how you, your parent poster and a lot of other people on here declare Obama to be leftist.
He's not.
(I daresay, "You keep using that word...")
I know it's a pretty alien thing to say on a primarily American forum, but I would suggest that the government make the voting machines. They pay for them now anyway, and the process could be open then. Just spec it to be open, let Diebold or some other company make the machines through public bidding. Some things do not need to be free-marketised, especially the ones that are crucial to your democracy.
If the government would design them (or pay designers to do it for them, more likely) then there would be no reason to keep the design a secret because the government does not need to compete.
It would be interesting to know who thought it was a good idea to have voting machines created by a company who has shareholder value as its bottom line instead of upholding democracy.
I know about the drivers, but I also hear that at least the MS one is built on top of Steermouse. It's free, though.
Still, I didn't want to risk MS bullshit on my shiny Mac (etc, Apple fanboi speak)
I'm using AppTrap (which is free) and Steermouse (which was $20 or so.)
Especially the mouse thing is just wrong. Acceleration settings are perfect for the touchpad, but for an external mouse (which is not Apple's, in my case) it's just annoyingly bad. I could not get used to it. Steermouse made the mouse usable again, nice and snappy but not overly sensitive.
Except with Doom 3, you could put in the home baked Duct tape mod.
No such thing for Windows.
They just go through the motions of mentioning Ballmer on the assumption that it's "funny".
Have you ever SEEN the man? The developers developers developers bit? The sweat? The monkey boy routine?
This man is entirely made out of funny! He is one 100% fun.
P.S. the chair is funny, too.
Listen, personally I don't give a damn. I'm one of those euro-guys, you know, with the fast internet?
You might want to give the old google a spin, though.
google. use it.
> But he's a right-wing "free market" advocate! Right!
That's entirely in the line of expectation then, isn't it? He's free to manipulate the market in any way possible, and being head of the state puts him in the position to do exactly that.
The free market isn't all that ideal. More like the free-for-all market, double points for head shots.