Ask him since copyright infringement is allowed to be called stealing then shouldn't charging people for the same thing again and again on different formats, making it illegal for them to do it themselves, be called stealing too? Also, ask him since it is acceptable to call copyright infringers pirates, ie. murdering rapists who rob cargo at gunpoint on the high seas, whether similar names for abusive publishing companies should become mainstream to even things out a bit. I suggest, along the lines of MAFIAA, gangsters (organised cartels of evil-doers who own the law through bribery, offer dubious goods to the public under ridiculous terms with extremely over-the-top punishment for non-compliance, use brute force and persuasion to keep business restricted to a small number of people, etc.), or possibly cannibals (those who eat their own flesh and blood [ie. customers]).
I'd love to see mainstream news stories saying "Movie studios say losses to pirates are in the billions" instead say "Gangsters say they are losing billions due to infringement of their copyright". The issue takes on a whole new meaning by fiddling with the words, trouble is that publishing companies by their very nature are able to control the mainstream media and shape the debates in their favour from the very beginning. As it is anyone opposed to the current system has to spend their entire argument on the matter crawling out of the hole dug for them, rather than actually making any sort of case, plus at the end of it they seem like a petty, smallminded criminal trying to get away with a crime due to technicalities.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. Instead of being an easy way to destroy perfect (and hard to take) photographs it is an easy way to improve flawed (and easier to take) photographs. Since a photo can't be retaken it is better to move as much as possible into the computer, in this case composition, which can then be fiddled about with any way the artist likes. If realism is not the point of a picture then this could prove very useful to, for example, remove masses of ugly low-quality houses from a city scape and bring the widely distributed landmarks closer together. Remember, that's just a quick example I thought of, there are many more uses for this.
I'm hoping it can be implemented in a non-destructive way for image editors (like GEGL, the nondestructive engine for the GIMP we've been promised), since I feel guilty merging layers in the GIMP already, it sacrifices creative flexibility to gain UI managability.
I know DRM is bad, blah blah blah (I'm having serious problems trying to archive the hundreds of Amiga floppies I have collected over the years due to copy protection, bad news since the disks are all dying), but a lot of demos these days actually include the full thing, just waiting for a valid activation code. I know this is one of those 10 DVD, hundred billion dollar, probably-plays-crap-just-like-the-last-50-but-with -more-detailed-graphics type of things, so there's no way the demo includes the whole game, but for many smaller games this would at least have a logical explanation (other than 'IM IN UR BOXEN STOPIN YUR COPYRITE INFRINGEMENT')
Just as an issue to note, I sent somebody a relatively important email recently from my Gmail account (accessed using Evolution via POP3 and SMTP). Around a week later I was at someone else's house and couldn't be bothered set my laptop up with their wireless system (their network is encumbered by encryption algorithms) so I used Google's webmail system to check my email. Sitting in the 'Spam' folder was a failed delivery notice from the important email I'd sent earlier (turns out the address I had used hadn't been in use for a while), it had been marked as spam only because it was a failed delivery message. Luckily the issue had already been resolved elsewhere, but with people relying on email for important communications something like this is unacceptable.
Remember that there are probably lots of parts which Microsoft can't actually document. The problem with proprietary binary formats is that nobody can work out what they're doing, and I'd bet that there are a few awkward hacks within Microsoft Office which manage to keep it hanging together. Well, why else would a dump of Microsoft Office's internal data structures (otherwise known as OOXML) have hacks like "UseWord95Spacing" and stuff inside it? The code that handles those things is probably voodoo. This is not defense of OOXML, merely speculation about how Microsoft Office actually does the things OOXML is claimed to describe. If Microsoft wants to keep their voodoo code secret then there's no way OOXML should ever be considered an open standard. If they are willing to share code which can implement these areas of the specification, well that's one box ticked but a hell of a lot more to go.
I respect India's decision here, but I will reserve judgement on the whole matter until the outcome is set in stone, since there has been a lot of Microsoft-ditching to lower Microsoft's prices and this might turn out to be another. We'll see.
Your complaints are like telling a Linux hacker "It's not a bug, it's just that the wording on these buttons should be changed". To a Linux hacker everything is either a bug or some vague hand-wavey thing. To a technical committee everything is a technical issue or some vague hand-wavey thing.
Technical issues can be fixed by changing the text, whilst General Comments (vague hand-wavey things) will be taken on board. Everything you mention could be classed as a technical issue, even the existance of OOXML could be considered a technical issue with ODF (whether OOXML actually offers anything over ODF is debatable, but a serious technical discussion would take on board the points raised by the OOXML text and look for the best resolution. Of course, it is hard to have a serious technical discussion when Microsoft are paying most of the members). General comments can be useful too (for example, a general comment could ask voting members to keep in mind that there is not a single working implementation of OOXML, not even Microsoft Office supports it, thus the market dominance of Microsoft Office and the disruption caused by any change of this does not work in OOXML's favour any more than ODF's, since both can be implemented in Microsoft Office if Microsoft bothered to do it but at the moment neither are. This kind of thing is important to mention, even though it is not a problem with the text of the specification).
I would encourage anyone who can to send comments to their representative body, visit http://www.noooxml.org/ to find out yours (I live in the UK and sadly our deadline passed months ago)
"Imagine what people might learn from data we're getting now from the two rovers on mars."
Not much, it's in OOXML. In 20-30 years scientists'll be running Windows Vista in virtual machines so they can view it in Office 2007 as it was originally meant to be.
Quantum porn will never catch on, since it swings both ways until you look at it. Whilst alright for bisexuals, this could result in some potentially fatal lower whiplash for the unprepared.
I remember watching an episode of the Computer Chronicles on the Internet Archive from about 1991, and in the news segment they mentioned a computer chip which had over 1000 processors arranged in 3D. Of course, we're not all using these chips because, like the MHz wars of the past, there is more to a computer than the number of processing cores it has (and sadly these days the deciding factor on computer technology seems to be x86 compatibility, because if it doesn't run Windows it must therefore be crap).
There is a difference between "lock-in" and "standard". Windows is a case of lock-in, whilst the Internet is based on standards. When I read about these "new Internet" ideas I take it as given that connecting it to the current Internet is part of the plan, since that's completely feasable, and therefore it's not really a "new" Internet so much as an upgraded Internet, where the question of the data available becomes irrelevant.
I think a better example than Windows would be something like Debian. Let's say Debian was the vastly dominant OS, and some random developers decide to replace the Linux kernel as default with the FreeBSD kernel (as an example), since there have been experiments in this area. Some people would be saying "Developers are working on a new Linux", whereas the actual case would be "Developers are upgrading Debian" (don't take that literally, the two kernels mentioned are just analogies), since the implementation isn't the point, the key things are the stuff it enables us to do. Since Linux is known and documented and can be tinkered with by anyone, those random developers could (given enough resources) make the FreeBSD Linux emulationy thing almost 100% accurate. Then the question of "What programs will be available on it?" doesn't make sense, since it is exactly like the other Debian, and compatible (and presumably if the FreeBSD version was successful then there would be some pretty accurate FreeBSD emulation for the Linux version). The whole thing just ends up as alternative implementations of the same system. The most important thing to ensure in any of these developments is that the "new Internet" proposed will be as documented, open and standardised as the current system, and if not it should be avoided like the plague.
I think Microsoft knows perfectly well what Open Source is. One has to be pretty stupid to fall for one's own propaganda, and MS didn't get where they are by being stupid. Admittedly companies have different departments which deal with different things, but the word from the top seems to be that Open Source should be killed. I'd say it's not wise to approach someone with a gift in their right hand if they're going to stab you with their left hand, even if the right hand was sincere. I would tell Microsoft that their license does not contain enough differences to existing licenses to warrant the incompatibilities it causes, and then use this as the start of a license reform within the OSI to somehow get rid of unneeded licenses (maybe declaring that anything copyrighted under such licenses after 2008 does not qualify as Open Source but the previous stuff does, I don't know IANAL). That way they should be able to retain credibility (especially since the recent CPAL license disgruntled some people) and whittle down the approved licenses to just a few (with allowable exceptions/conditions to let very picky companies get all the current options but with fewer licenses). Then it wouldn't be picking on Microsoft, instead Microsoft would be in the same boat as many other companies, and the OSI could "Thank Microsoft for showing the defieciencies in the previous licensing strategy" (ie. approve anything which qualifies, rather than keeping the number down through the use of exceptions and the like)
"In Europe this wouldn't work for more than a week or so."
Evidently you've never heard of the "fair usage guidelines" which are mentioned in pretty much every broadband contract, yet aren't actually available to read if you want to see whether your usage is 'fair'. Personally I would say 'fair usage' would mean not exceeding the bandwidth I am paying for, whereas my ISP seems to think differently based on the emails I have received from them about getting put on a list of 'high usage users' and subsequently being put into a pool of other 'high usage' customers who have to share the same bandwidth during peak hours, causing daytime browsing to crawl (I just end up running MLDonkey at night for the distro ISOs I download, since I make sure my local Free Software User Group always has the latest releases of any popular distro available to burn)
From a fundamental point of view no hypothesis or theory can be thrown out until it is disproven. The problem with religious 'theories' is that they use a blanket approach of 'God did it' to cover everything, which even applies to evidence against it, such as 'You fool, God put it there to trick you', which means that it can never be disproven. People used to think Heaven was in the sky, until we went there, then maybe in space somewhere ('the heavens'), then we went there too, and the current ideas seem to be metaphysical 'heaven is inside/all around you' and a few weirdos who think that maybe heaven is in a parallel universe.
The fundamental problem with all of this is that it does no good whatsoever to advancing mankind's understanding and ability. A scientific theory should act as an understandable analogue to the real world, useful for making predictions in the real world. For instance, many people say that things like light are a particle and a wave, whereas in actual fact light is light, and if we can find an inaccurate yet useful analogue to describe its behaviur in different situations then that is useful, we can make TV sets and computers and things. We understad more through the analogy, even though we know it is not the truth (if there is such a thing). Religion on the other hand claims to be truth but serves no practical purpose (other than being a handy excuse for pretty much anything).
This is the position I take whenever I am about to get drawn into a religious debate with one of my Muslim friends, since I am too good of a person to denounce their religion in front of them, and also I have better things to do than memorise comebacks and counter-arguments for any Quran-based evidence that might crop up. I just say that the Quran might or might not describe how an embryo develops in the womb, but when it was written there wasn't a major advancement in medical science and biology since such a message can only be found when looking with hindsight by someone who already knows, so as such it is not a useful basis for describing things. Similarly Newtonian physics isn't used as the one truth about the Universe, since it already known to be false, but it is still useful for the vast majority of ballistic calculations.
Just as a side note, how effective are all of those Get Firefox buttons that can be found on half of the world's blogs and a lot more besides? Either Firefox users aren't the type to suffer an ad kindly, and thus wouldn't click them ('Get Firefox' to me doesn't sound like 'Try our free web browser which has good ad blocking'), or the impact of those buttons has been massive because all of those click-happy iPod-winner-wannabes have stumbled across Firefox through an ad and are using it.
Trust me I am all for Firefox (although I prefer Epiphany and Konqueror. Yay choice!) but with trolls like those in TFA about it's suprising nobody has compared Firefox+AdBlock to all of those "Stop spam forever" spam messages (Get Firefox and you won't see anymore ads like me!)
The Phillips engineer they quote keeps saying over and over again how CDs took off because they were designed openly by companies sharing ideas. Goes to show why the FairPlay/PlaysForSure/etc. du jour don't take off (CDs are still more popular than downloads).
Because MSN Messenger comes with most desktop computers, masses of people use the MSN thus making its closed system attractive for other people to join, new computers usually come with an "MSN Browser" on the desktop, most desktops come with Hotmail and other MSN bookmarks filling their bundled browser, MSN is often the homepage of these bundled browsers, the bundled media player has MSN built into it, etc. People might not like it, but it is forced down their throats anyway, and once that's been done most people won't go through the hasle of using an alternative.
DIY is destroying the building industry! And it's cheap!
I hate the fact that people are labelled by their jobs. "Hi I'm Bob and I'm a plumber.", that's how people sum themselves up. This, combined with the masses of beurocracy, sucking of corporate genetalia and even anti-terror laws are making it impossible to do anything besides 'what you're told damnit'.
That's one reason I like computers and Free Software. I can do pretty much what I want, and get my hands on libraries and tools to help me do it. If I want to carry on the great British tradition of the garden shed inventor I'd need all kinds of licenses for equipment handling, permissions to possess certain chemicals, etc.
The difference is that these days it's a choice between Microsoft Office or Something Else. If the decision to not use Microsoft is taken then chances are OpenOffice or some other FOSS program will be used, therefore trying to run a business based on selling an office suite is pretty much limited to Microsoft, even if everything is done right (support and other things are of course possible, but that is not the discussion here).
Online office applications are new territory, and I think that any product that can be installed on a company server and accessed by any number of machines for one price will stand a chance of getting off the ground if they get everything else right (which probably means making it behave as much like 'classic' Microsoft Office as physically possible). Isn't this what Google is doing?
"You had to hand it to human beings. They had one of the strangest powers in the universe.... No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom." Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to see mainstream news stories saying "Movie studios say losses to pirates are in the billions" instead say "Gangsters say they are losing billions due to infringement of their copyright". The issue takes on a whole new meaning by fiddling with the words, trouble is that publishing companies by their very nature are able to control the mainstream media and shape the debates in their favour from the very beginning. As it is anyone opposed to the current system has to spend their entire argument on the matter crawling out of the hole dug for them, rather than actually making any sort of case, plus at the end of it they seem like a petty, smallminded criminal trying to get away with a crime due to technicalities.
If you're going to use that system remember to make sure there's at least one problem per day.....
I'm hoping it can be implemented in a non-destructive way for image editors (like GEGL, the nondestructive engine for the GIMP we've been promised), since I feel guilty merging layers in the GIMP already, it sacrifices creative flexibility to gain UI managability.
____def __init__(self):
________self.phaseOne()
________time.sleep(999)
________self.phaseTwo()
________time.sleep(999)
________self.phaseThree()
____private undocumented phaseOne(self):
________super(embrace)
________self.assignOwnership(MSFT)
________print 'pwned'
____public void phaseTwo(self):
________super(extend)
________print '????'
____private cash phaseThree(self):
________super(extinguish)
________while True:
____________self.profit += 1
I know DRM is bad, blah blah blah (I'm having serious problems trying to archive the hundreds of Amiga floppies I have collected over the years due to copy protection, bad news since the disks are all dying), but a lot of demos these days actually include the full thing, just waiting for a valid activation code. I know this is one of those 10 DVD, hundred billion dollar, probably-plays-crap-just-like-the-last-50-but-with -more-detailed-graphics type of things, so there's no way the demo includes the whole game, but for many smaller games this would at least have a logical explanation (other than 'IM IN UR BOXEN STOPIN YUR COPYRITE INFRINGEMENT')
Just as an issue to note, I sent somebody a relatively important email recently from my Gmail account (accessed using Evolution via POP3 and SMTP). Around a week later I was at someone else's house and couldn't be bothered set my laptop up with their wireless system (their network is encumbered by encryption algorithms) so I used Google's webmail system to check my email. Sitting in the 'Spam' folder was a failed delivery notice from the important email I'd sent earlier (turns out the address I had used hadn't been in use for a while), it had been marked as spam only because it was a failed delivery message. Luckily the issue had already been resolved elsewhere, but with people relying on email for important communications something like this is unacceptable.
I respect India's decision here, but I will reserve judgement on the whole matter until the outcome is set in stone, since there has been a lot of Microsoft-ditching to lower Microsoft's prices and this might turn out to be another. We'll see.
Technical issues can be fixed by changing the text, whilst General Comments (vague hand-wavey things) will be taken on board. Everything you mention could be classed as a technical issue, even the existance of OOXML could be considered a technical issue with ODF (whether OOXML actually offers anything over ODF is debatable, but a serious technical discussion would take on board the points raised by the OOXML text and look for the best resolution. Of course, it is hard to have a serious technical discussion when Microsoft are paying most of the members). General comments can be useful too (for example, a general comment could ask voting members to keep in mind that there is not a single working implementation of OOXML, not even Microsoft Office supports it, thus the market dominance of Microsoft Office and the disruption caused by any change of this does not work in OOXML's favour any more than ODF's, since both can be implemented in Microsoft Office if Microsoft bothered to do it but at the moment neither are. This kind of thing is important to mention, even though it is not a problem with the text of the specification).
I would encourage anyone who can to send comments to their representative body, visit http://www.noooxml.org/ to find out yours (I live in the UK and sadly our deadline passed months ago)
Not much, it's in OOXML. In 20-30 years scientists'll be running Windows Vista in virtual machines so they can view it in Office 2007 as it was originally meant to be.
That was a joke by the way :)
First thing's first, if Linus leaves the kernel then he needs to be hunted down and killed. Benevolent dictator for life remember.
Quantum porn will never catch on, since it swings both ways until you look at it. Whilst alright for bisexuals, this could result in some potentially fatal lower whiplash for the unprepared.
Before anyone goes throwing their money away, I just found a much better deal! http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sinclair-ZX-Spectrum-48k-99- NEW-and-BOXED_W0QQitemZ270156223485QQihZ017QQcateg oryZ11994QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
I remember watching an episode of the Computer Chronicles on the Internet Archive from about 1991, and in the news segment they mentioned a computer chip which had over 1000 processors arranged in 3D. Of course, we're not all using these chips because, like the MHz wars of the past, there is more to a computer than the number of processing cores it has (and sadly these days the deciding factor on computer technology seems to be x86 compatibility, because if it doesn't run Windows it must therefore be crap).
I think a better example than Windows would be something like Debian. Let's say Debian was the vastly dominant OS, and some random developers decide to replace the Linux kernel as default with the FreeBSD kernel (as an example), since there have been experiments in this area. Some people would be saying "Developers are working on a new Linux", whereas the actual case would be "Developers are upgrading Debian" (don't take that literally, the two kernels mentioned are just analogies), since the implementation isn't the point, the key things are the stuff it enables us to do. Since Linux is known and documented and can be tinkered with by anyone, those random developers could (given enough resources) make the FreeBSD Linux emulationy thing almost 100% accurate. Then the question of "What programs will be available on it?" doesn't make sense, since it is exactly like the other Debian, and compatible (and presumably if the FreeBSD version was successful then there would be some pretty accurate FreeBSD emulation for the Linux version). The whole thing just ends up as alternative implementations of the same system. The most important thing to ensure in any of these developments is that the "new Internet" proposed will be as documented, open and standardised as the current system, and if not it should be avoided like the plague.
I think Microsoft knows perfectly well what Open Source is. One has to be pretty stupid to fall for one's own propaganda, and MS didn't get where they are by being stupid. Admittedly companies have different departments which deal with different things, but the word from the top seems to be that Open Source should be killed. I'd say it's not wise to approach someone with a gift in their right hand if they're going to stab you with their left hand, even if the right hand was sincere. I would tell Microsoft that their license does not contain enough differences to existing licenses to warrant the incompatibilities it causes, and then use this as the start of a license reform within the OSI to somehow get rid of unneeded licenses (maybe declaring that anything copyrighted under such licenses after 2008 does not qualify as Open Source but the previous stuff does, I don't know IANAL). That way they should be able to retain credibility (especially since the recent CPAL license disgruntled some people) and whittle down the approved licenses to just a few (with allowable exceptions/conditions to let very picky companies get all the current options but with fewer licenses). Then it wouldn't be picking on Microsoft, instead Microsoft would be in the same boat as many other companies, and the OSI could "Thank Microsoft for showing the defieciencies in the previous licensing strategy" (ie. approve anything which qualifies, rather than keeping the number down through the use of exceptions and the like)
Evidently you've never heard of the "fair usage guidelines" which are mentioned in pretty much every broadband contract, yet aren't actually available to read if you want to see whether your usage is 'fair'. Personally I would say 'fair usage' would mean not exceeding the bandwidth I am paying for, whereas my ISP seems to think differently based on the emails I have received from them about getting put on a list of 'high usage users' and subsequently being put into a pool of other 'high usage' customers who have to share the same bandwidth during peak hours, causing daytime browsing to crawl (I just end up running MLDonkey at night for the distro ISOs I download, since I make sure my local Free Software User Group always has the latest releases of any popular distro available to burn)
(I live in the United "CCTV Land" Kindom BTW)
The fundamental problem with all of this is that it does no good whatsoever to advancing mankind's understanding and ability. A scientific theory should act as an understandable analogue to the real world, useful for making predictions in the real world. For instance, many people say that things like light are a particle and a wave, whereas in actual fact light is light, and if we can find an inaccurate yet useful analogue to describe its behaviur in different situations then that is useful, we can make TV sets and computers and things. We understad more through the analogy, even though we know it is not the truth (if there is such a thing). Religion on the other hand claims to be truth but serves no practical purpose (other than being a handy excuse for pretty much anything).
This is the position I take whenever I am about to get drawn into a religious debate with one of my Muslim friends, since I am too good of a person to denounce their religion in front of them, and also I have better things to do than memorise comebacks and counter-arguments for any Quran-based evidence that might crop up. I just say that the Quran might or might not describe how an embryo develops in the womb, but when it was written there wasn't a major advancement in medical science and biology since such a message can only be found when looking with hindsight by someone who already knows, so as such it is not a useful basis for describing things. Similarly Newtonian physics isn't used as the one truth about the Universe, since it already known to be false, but it is still useful for the vast majority of ballistic calculations.
Are you sure you weren't using Gnash? :)
Trust me I am all for Firefox (although I prefer Epiphany and Konqueror. Yay choice!) but with trolls like those in TFA about it's suprising nobody has compared Firefox+AdBlock to all of those "Stop spam forever" spam messages (Get Firefox and you won't see anymore ads like me!)
The Phillips engineer they quote keeps saying over and over again how CDs took off because they were designed openly by companies sharing ideas. Goes to show why the FairPlay/PlaysForSure/etc. du jour don't take off (CDs are still more popular than downloads).
Because MSN Messenger comes with most desktop computers, masses of people use the MSN thus making its closed system attractive for other people to join, new computers usually come with an "MSN Browser" on the desktop, most desktops come with Hotmail and other MSN bookmarks filling their bundled browser, MSN is often the homepage of these bundled browsers, the bundled media player has MSN built into it, etc. People might not like it, but it is forced down their throats anyway, and once that's been done most people won't go through the hasle of using an alternative.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but don't roommates share a room?
I hate the fact that people are labelled by their jobs. "Hi I'm Bob and I'm a plumber.", that's how people sum themselves up. This, combined with the masses of beurocracy, sucking of corporate genetalia and even anti-terror laws are making it impossible to do anything besides 'what you're told damnit'.
That's one reason I like computers and Free Software. I can do pretty much what I want, and get my hands on libraries and tools to help me do it. If I want to carry on the great British tradition of the garden shed inventor I'd need all kinds of licenses for equipment handling, permissions to possess certain chemicals, etc.
Online office applications are new territory, and I think that any product that can be installed on a company server and accessed by any number of machines for one price will stand a chance of getting off the ground if they get everything else right (which probably means making it behave as much like 'classic' Microsoft Office as physically possible). Isn't this what Google is doing?
"You had to hand it to human beings. They had one of the strangest powers in the universe. ... No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom." Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett