However, living in a world of new digital economy does not mean that one can break all business rules.... The rights of creators and the protection of their intellectual property require permission and compensations... Quality contents should pay back their creators; and not just the intermediaries. They ought not to be nor should they be seen as being available for free. Such appearances are demeaning to creators and producers, authors and developers, and they deny them the fruits of their efforts and work.
This was extracted from the document under discussion. I would have expected this forum to be much more upset about this transparent advocacy of DRM than it would be about some trifling changes regarding free software. If I didn't know better I might think the disclosure that Microsoft had the "free software" language stricken from the document was done deliberately to draw attention away from it's other content. But we in/. too smart to fall for that little diversion, aren't we?
Actually, I am certain cell phones and portable music devices will merge. The Moto iTunes phone was heavily compromised, no doubt at Apple's insistence so as not to cannibalize iPod sales. Someone else will come along and do it right. In fact there are already some better music phones out there -- check out Sprint's offerings. An open SD slot can accomodate a 1GB card which has enough capacity for 1000 songs (AAC+ @32kbps). Adding the ability to play music to a cell phone costs next to nothing - a better, stereo audio channel and a storage slot -- it will happen and become commonplace. Nokia could have led this emergence, but now, sadly for them, they will be an also-ran.
At the time the NGage came out I was doing mobile development (cell phone music downloads). We begged Nokia to build a decent music phone. All we wanted was 16 bit 44KHz stereo audio and room for an SD/MMC card -- nothing exotic. All of their phones, even the Symbian "open OS" phones, were handicapped with mono 16KHz audio which basically stinks for music. Actually, some had 8KHz mono.
When I first saw the NGage I couldn't contain my laughter... and to hear high level officials of Nokia pronounce that they "would own the portable gaming space" was beyond funny. Any game machine you have to shut off and take apart to change games was not designed by people with a clue. Anyhow, I couldn't help but notice that *NOW* they are going to concentrate on music phones. Unfortunately for them, that horse has already left the barn. They had a golden opportunity, but blew it.
So then, factoring in the time element, we *should* be able to watch and see whether it's evolution or intelligent design? Now that's what I call reality TV!
We really don't have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle, create a practice, get the team "gelled" etc.
I have seen this before. I once interviewed for a job with a small group of wunderkinds who had done "all the feasibility work" and had all the "IP in place" and "just needed to hire some developers to productize". I ran screaming from the building as fast as I could. It was abundantly clear they viewed the development job as just converting their brilliance into code, as if coding was a very low value-added activity. I could see the future very clearly just talking to them -- "what do you mean it's going to take that long?! We already figured that out, just do this..." "Can't you just use this chunk of code we already wrote? Just write a simple wrapper -- make it work!" And then, when the first version is delivered, "that isn't what we meant!" "this thing is too slow!"
There is no substitute for having the "inventors" also be involved in the actual, day-to-day development. There are several reasons for this: First, the original intent will be preserved. Second, there will be inevitable tradeoffs to be made and it is far better for the originators to have the information they need to make those decisions. Third, invention can continue -- just building it will spawn new ideas as long as the creative types (the originators) are in a position to do that. If you have a "spec" then every change becomes a "negotiation" and a schedule slip and cost overrun -- which in the end puts a damper on the whole thing.
My advice: bite the bullet, build a team, make the product. Before you know it you will have built a company.
Virtually everyone in this forum says they would never pay $2.49 for a SONG. Duh! Nobody in this forum thinks you should have to pay for software either. Welcome to capitalism and open markets.
The price will settle where it optimizes revenue. If $2.49 is too high someone else will come along at $1.99 and steal sales away. Sprint is taking advantage of being the first in the market (in the US) to offer such a service. Personally I think they are being foolish -- given the whole DRM situation and the potential to lock-in customers who don't want to lose their music collection by switching phone carriers, I would think they would lowball the price. Further, they *should* make it more widely known that they provide software that allows users to transcode their MP3 files to put them on their phone as well. This is a feature of the service that few seem to know about. I suspect Sprint is not pushing that aspect because they want the revenue from song sales, and they don't want to alienate the labels. But frankly, if they could get everyone hooked^h^h^h^h^h^h accustomed to having a substantial music collection available at all times on their phone they will have created a large installed base and a strong incentive for customers to stay with Sprint.
It seems to me that, until we can make document file formats (think MSOffice versus OpenDoc) not matter, talking about the whole OS not mattering is a bit premature. We live in a time when we discuss at great length file formats and the future readability of Word documents. Solving *that* problem (any word processor can figure out any other word processor's file format) would appear to be a much simpler problem than abstracting the OS. Walk, then run.
Actually, I really think he didn't realize - in other words he got snookered by his source. When he installed Sandra he seemed delighted. That gave him a way to make sure HE wasn't being taken advantage of.
It seems to me this *would* be a smart move. Clearly there are areas where AMD is superior (servers, gaming rigs, multicore high end workstations) and areas where Intel is superior (laptops, mid-range to low-end desktops, content-encoding workstations). The only reason *not* to do something like this is if Intel gives Dell significant financial incentives (or dis-incentives)... which I would certainly not rule out.
So if a big complex of mirrors is set up, they will create a large shadow behind them. Can we assume there isn't some other town or single family home (with fewer political connections) ending up in that shadow? I can see it now as these mirror farms spring up all over the place, different settlements stealing sunlight from other settlements. Sort of like the old days of living downstream...
This is why I always run Sandra (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/) benchmarks on every system I build. I remember one time I bought a motherboard/CPU combo and when I ran Sandra it came out to be about 3 speed grades lower than I had paid for. I brought it back and the fellow at the store (who also built whitebox machines) wanted to know how I knew. Then of course he apologized profusely and gave me what I'd paid for in the first place.
nobody's going to use this service because the truth is that people don't want their music player inside of their cell phone. cell phones are more often than not tied to the service because of 2 year contracts, and they are disposable trash to most people, whereas people want to keep their MP3 players for a long time (they cost more than CD players, hold more music, so they should last longer)
Well I can speak from experience, having carried a cell phone with 1GB of music inside (about 1000 songs). It was wonderfully convenient. I always had my cell phone with me, and I kept it charged religiously BECAUSE it was my phone. I have also owned MP3 players and they forever had dead batteries. And many times I didn't have my MP3 player with me when I felt like listening to some tunes, but of course I always had my cell.
I do agree though, that cell phones don't last more than 2 years and it is IMPERITIVE that I be able to move my purchased music to my next phone when I upgrade it.
For what it's worth, I did an experiment once. I loaded my Smartphone with a bunch of music and played it all day long. The phone ran for 7 hours straight, and even then there was still enough battery left to make and receive calls. The big drain on cell phone batteries is the GSM/CDMA radio. The next biggest drain is the backlit display. After that, the CPU and audio don't draw much current.
Second: No-one outside the U.S. will ever buy music just for their cell phones
Actually, I read that the number 2 legal (ie pay-for) digital music download service in the UK is Orange Mobile's music download service. I believe iTunes was #1. So not only to people outside the U.S. do this, but they apparently do it quite a lot. ImAgine a wireless download service being the second largest service in the UK.
I wonder if you know why it is in the US that companies provide healthcare for their workers? The roots of this policy are interesting and informative. Back during WWII FDR instituted wage and price controls. As is so often the case with government "solutions" to problems, this one had a very interesting and unintended side affect. Companies, in order to attract and keep good workers, offered to pay for their health insurance, as this was a way around the strict government rules. Well, one thing led to another... any company that needed workers was forced into matching that offer. That leads us to today - a hodgepodge where companies are forced to offer health insurance.
Now there are those that think the government can "fix this" with a big, government-run single-payer system. Indeed there are many examples of this, varying greatly in effectiveness. I on the other hand do not think the government is well suited to fixing much of anything. Rather, I think we should get back to the time when people bought their own health insurance, just like they now buy their own life and auto insurance. To enable this type of dramatic switchover, everyone with health coverage today would be given a raise equivalent to the company's expenses in providing that insurance. This approach will introduce some competition into the marketplace. It will also teach people to pick and choose their medical services. In the long run I think this would be vastly more successful than any government-run bureaucratic massive agency.
Windows to this puppy. It probably wouldn't be a big job. Microsoft has lots of tools available for getting Windows CE running in an embedded environment. That would be tres cool - a $100 laptop running Windows! Hey, this is sort of like the FOSS movement returning the favor -- playing a major role in spawning a cheap, standardized hardware platform.
In a perfect democracy, software patents would already be history.
What could be the reasoning behind this statement? If a perfect democracy means that the issue would be put up to a vote, with the majority opinion carrying the day, I'm not quite as sure as you that software patents would be history. Consider all those people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - we know how they would vote. Now consider the software developers themselves (a tiny demographic) - I would guess that most would vote to abolish software patents, but some (maybe even many) would vote to keep them in place (after all, they write code and may not want others to use it freely). That leaves the big blob of people who know nothing about the issue. How would they vote? I would suggest they would be easily swayed by "campaign" advertising. Now, who has the money to run the campaign - the ones with the vested interest or the software developers?
Now perhaps you believe that a perfect democracy does not leave room for campaigning or advertising to sway opinions. If that were the case, given the large unwashed mass's lack of understanding of the issue one would have to assume their vote would split 50/50. So, in the end I don't see a perfect democracy changing anything.
It's not quite as "duh" as you might think. I did mobile application development for 3 years on Windows (and I also did some embedded Linux and a tiny bit of Symbian and BREW) and I can attest that the Windows platform is far and away the most advanced from an application developer's perspective. The tools are excellent (and free, I might add) and the added benefit of being able to do most of my development on a Windows desktop target (yes, the same source built and ran for a Windows XP desktop, a Pocket PC, and a Smartphone) was a tremedous productivity boost. That said, when I did my embedded Linux work I was also able to do functional development on a desktop, so I think Linux will give Windows a run for its money in this space. And of course, access to the source code is gravy. You just can't appreciate how painful device-based development can be relative to desktop development until you experience it firsthand. Symbian (and Microsoft) both offer emulators which are helpful, but in my experience they fall far short of the advantages that derive from actually developing the code in a desktop environment.
This will be a boon to mobile application developers! Symbian is basically controlled by one vendor - Nokia, and Windows Mobile obviously is controlled by Microsoft. Both OSes have their advantages and their problems. Symbian typically requires a unique executable to be built for every device. Windows needs a *slightly* beefier hardware platform (8MB minimum). Tools-wise Windows is in much better shape than Symbian. Embedded Linux could give both a run for their money. It will offer better tools (by far) than Symbian - almost on a par with Windows tools most likely -- and it will offer lighter resource requirements than Windows. The smart phone vendors should be all over this. It will be really interesting to see how Nokia reacts given their tremendous investment in, and control of, Symbian.
Yet another example of how the rules are different for the ruling class. How many times have we seen this type of thing? Of course none can top the Social Security hypocrisy (federal workers do not have to participate - they have their own retirement plan that, guess what, allows them to invest in the *dangerous* stock market) as we in the unwashed masses are taken for the big ride.
I think you haven't grasped exactly what I was saying. The game doesn't have to be identical - I would think the next generation of the "same" game (eg Madden 2006 for a Madden 2004 tradein) would make people very happy. The vendor could decide what the tradein was - Microsoft could "mandate" (ie subsidize) that *some* title was offered in trade for every old XBOX title (and when I say in trade I mean for a significant discount, not for free). For zealots who want the exact same gameplay, well they will just have to stick to their old XBOX because even an emulator isn't going to achieve that.
The could offer some sort of trade-in program where you could get the new version of the game on the cheap if you turned in your old disk. Of course most of these games are non-Microsoft products, so such a program would need to be offered by lots of different companies. In the long run this would probably have been cheaper than trying to implement backwards compatibility. Many times the best solution to a technical problem isn't technical.
Actually it looks to me like Google is trying to take over the world. And Yahoo. As was Sun once upon a time. And IBM. And don't tell me Apple isn't interested. In fact it seems to me that the FOSS movement is trying to take over the world. As any company would. And most countries for that matter... that hardly separates Microsoft from the pack, except that they are perhaps more successful than the others I mentioned in their pursuit.
Slashdot Mirror
However, living in a world of new digital economy does not mean that one can break all business rules. ... The rights of creators and the protection of their intellectual property require permission and compensations ... Quality contents should pay back their creators; and not just the intermediaries. They ought not to be nor should they be seen as being available for free. Such appearances are demeaning to creators and producers, authors and developers, and they deny them the fruits of their efforts and work.
/. too smart to fall for that little diversion, aren't we?
This was extracted from the document under discussion. I would have expected this forum to be much more upset about this transparent advocacy of DRM than it would be about some trifling changes regarding free software. If I didn't know better I might think the disclosure that Microsoft had the "free software" language stricken from the document was done deliberately to draw attention away from it's other content. But we in
Let's remove all favourable references to microsoft off slashdot then.
Both of them?
Actually, I am certain cell phones and portable music devices will merge. The Moto iTunes phone was heavily compromised, no doubt at Apple's insistence so as not to cannibalize iPod sales. Someone else will come along and do it right. In fact there are already some better music phones out there -- check out Sprint's offerings. An open SD slot can accomodate a 1GB card which has enough capacity for 1000 songs (AAC+ @32kbps). Adding the ability to play music to a cell phone costs next to nothing - a better, stereo audio channel and a storage slot -- it will happen and become commonplace. Nokia could have led this emergence, but now, sadly for them, they will be an also-ran.
At the time the NGage came out I was doing mobile development (cell phone music downloads). We begged Nokia to build a decent music phone. All we wanted was 16 bit 44KHz stereo audio and room for an SD/MMC card -- nothing exotic. All of their phones, even the Symbian "open OS" phones, were handicapped with mono 16KHz audio which basically stinks for music. Actually, some had 8KHz mono.
... and to hear high level officials of Nokia pronounce that they "would own the portable gaming space" was beyond funny. Any game machine you have to shut off and take apart to change games was not designed by people with a clue. Anyhow, I couldn't help but notice that *NOW* they are going to concentrate on music phones. Unfortunately for them, that horse has already left the barn. They had a golden opportunity, but blew it.
When I first saw the NGage I couldn't contain my laughter
So then, factoring in the time element, we *should* be able to watch and see whether it's evolution or intelligent design? Now that's what I call reality TV!
We really don't have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle, create a practice, get the team "gelled" etc.
..." "Can't you just use this chunk of code we already wrote? Just write a simple wrapper -- make it work!" And then, when the first version is delivered, "that isn't what we meant!" "this thing is too slow!"
I have seen this before. I once interviewed for a job with a small group of wunderkinds who had done "all the feasibility work" and had all the "IP in place" and "just needed to hire some developers to productize". I ran screaming from the building as fast as I could. It was abundantly clear they viewed the development job as just converting their brilliance into code, as if coding was a very low value-added activity. I could see the future very clearly just talking to them -- "what do you mean it's going to take that long?! We already figured that out, just do this
There is no substitute for having the "inventors" also be involved in the actual, day-to-day development. There are several reasons for this: First, the original intent will be preserved. Second, there will be inevitable tradeoffs to be made and it is far better for the originators to have the information they need to make those decisions. Third, invention can continue -- just building it will spawn new ideas as long as the creative types (the originators) are in a position to do that. If you have a "spec" then every change becomes a "negotiation" and a schedule slip and cost overrun -- which in the end puts a damper on the whole thing.
My advice: bite the bullet, build a team, make the product. Before you know it you will have built a company.
and we look out far enough, will we see ourselves?
Virtually everyone in this forum says they would never pay $2.49 for a SONG. Duh! Nobody in this forum thinks you should have to pay for software either. Welcome to capitalism and open markets.
The price will settle where it optimizes revenue. If $2.49 is too high someone else will come along at $1.99 and steal sales away. Sprint is taking advantage of being the first in the market (in the US) to offer such a service. Personally I think they are being foolish -- given the whole DRM situation and the potential to lock-in customers who don't want to lose their music collection by switching phone carriers, I would think they would lowball the price. Further, they *should* make it more widely known that they provide software that allows users to transcode their MP3 files to put them on their phone as well. This is a feature of the service that few seem to know about. I suspect Sprint is not pushing that aspect because they want the revenue from song sales, and they don't want to alienate the labels. But frankly, if they could get everyone hooked^h^h^h^h^h^h accustomed to having a substantial music collection available at all times on their phone they will have created a large installed base and a strong incentive for customers to stay with Sprint.
It seems to me that, until we can make document file formats (think MSOffice versus OpenDoc) not matter, talking about the whole OS not mattering is a bit premature. We live in a time when we discuss at great length file formats and the future readability of Word documents. Solving *that* problem (any word processor can figure out any other word processor's file format) would appear to be a much simpler problem than abstracting the OS. Walk, then run.
Actually, I really think he didn't realize - in other words he got snookered by his source. When he installed Sandra he seemed delighted. That gave him a way to make sure HE wasn't being taken advantage of.
It seems to me this *would* be a smart move. Clearly there are areas where AMD is superior (servers, gaming rigs, multicore high end workstations) and areas where Intel is superior (laptops, mid-range to low-end desktops, content-encoding workstations). The only reason *not* to do something like this is if Intel gives Dell significant financial incentives (or dis-incentives) ... which I would certainly not rule out.
So if a big complex of mirrors is set up, they will create a large shadow behind them. Can we assume there isn't some other town or single family home (with fewer political connections) ending up in that shadow? I can see it now as these mirror farms spring up all over the place, different settlements stealing sunlight from other settlements. Sort of like the old days of living downstream ...
This is why I always run Sandra (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/) benchmarks on every system I build. I remember one time I bought a motherboard/CPU combo and when I ran Sandra it came out to be about 3 speed grades lower than I had paid for. I brought it back and the fellow at the store (who also built whitebox machines) wanted to know how I knew. Then of course he apologized profusely and gave me what I'd paid for in the first place.
nobody's going to use this service because the truth is that people don't want their music player inside of their cell phone. cell phones are more often than not tied to the service because of 2 year contracts, and they are disposable trash to most people, whereas people want to keep their MP3 players for a long time (they cost more than CD players, hold more music, so they should last longer)
Well I can speak from experience, having carried a cell phone with 1GB of music inside (about 1000 songs). It was wonderfully convenient. I always had my cell phone with me, and I kept it charged religiously BECAUSE it was my phone. I have also owned MP3 players and they forever had dead batteries. And many times I didn't have my MP3 player with me when I felt like listening to some tunes, but of course I always had my cell.
I do agree though, that cell phones don't last more than 2 years and it is IMPERITIVE that I be able to move my purchased music to my next phone when I upgrade it.
For what it's worth, I did an experiment once. I loaded my Smartphone with a bunch of music and played it all day long. The phone ran for 7 hours straight, and even then there was still enough battery left to make and receive calls. The big drain on cell phone batteries is the GSM/CDMA radio. The next biggest drain is the backlit display. After that, the CPU and audio don't draw much current.
Second: No-one outside the U.S. will ever buy music just for their cell phones
Actually, I read that the number 2 legal (ie pay-for) digital music download service in the UK is Orange Mobile's music download service. I believe iTunes was #1. So not only to people outside the U.S. do this, but they apparently do it quite a lot. ImAgine a wireless download service being the second largest service in the UK.
I wonder if you know why it is in the US that companies provide healthcare for their workers? The roots of this policy are interesting and informative. Back during WWII FDR instituted wage and price controls. As is so often the case with government "solutions" to problems, this one had a very interesting and unintended side affect. Companies, in order to attract and keep good workers, offered to pay for their health insurance, as this was a way around the strict government rules. Well, one thing led to another ... any company that needed workers was forced into matching that offer. That leads us to today - a hodgepodge where companies are forced to offer health insurance.
Now there are those that think the government can "fix this" with a big, government-run single-payer system. Indeed there are many examples of this, varying greatly in effectiveness. I on the other hand do not think the government is well suited to fixing much of anything. Rather, I think we should get back to the time when people bought their own health insurance, just like they now buy their own life and auto insurance. To enable this type of dramatic switchover, everyone with health coverage today would be given a raise equivalent to the company's expenses in providing that insurance. This approach will introduce some competition into the marketplace. It will also teach people to pick and choose their medical services. In the long run I think this would be vastly more successful than any government-run bureaucratic massive agency.
Windows to this puppy. It probably wouldn't be a big job. Microsoft has lots of tools available for getting Windows CE running in an embedded environment. That would be tres cool - a $100 laptop running Windows! Hey, this is sort of like the FOSS movement returning the favor -- playing a major role in spawning a cheap, standardized hardware platform.
In a perfect democracy, software patents would already be history.
What could be the reasoning behind this statement? If a perfect democracy means that the issue would be put up to a vote, with the majority opinion carrying the day, I'm not quite as sure as you that software patents would be history. Consider all those people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - we know how they would vote. Now consider the software developers themselves (a tiny demographic) - I would guess that most would vote to abolish software patents, but some (maybe even many) would vote to keep them in place (after all, they write code and may not want others to use it freely). That leaves the big blob of people who know nothing about the issue. How would they vote? I would suggest they would be easily swayed by "campaign" advertising. Now, who has the money to run the campaign - the ones with the vested interest or the software developers?
Now perhaps you believe that a perfect democracy does not leave room for campaigning or advertising to sway opinions. If that were the case, given the large unwashed mass's lack of understanding of the issue one would have to assume their vote would split 50/50. So, in the end I don't see a perfect democracy changing anything.
It's not quite as "duh" as you might think. I did mobile application development for 3 years on Windows (and I also did some embedded Linux and a tiny bit of Symbian and BREW) and I can attest that the Windows platform is far and away the most advanced from an application developer's perspective. The tools are excellent (and free, I might add) and the added benefit of being able to do most of my development on a Windows desktop target (yes, the same source built and ran for a Windows XP desktop, a Pocket PC, and a Smartphone) was a tremedous productivity boost. That said, when I did my embedded Linux work I was also able to do functional development on a desktop, so I think Linux will give Windows a run for its money in this space. And of course, access to the source code is gravy. You just can't appreciate how painful device-based development can be relative to desktop development until you experience it firsthand. Symbian (and Microsoft) both offer emulators which are helpful, but in my experience they fall far short of the advantages that derive from actually developing the code in a desktop environment.
This will be a boon to mobile application developers! Symbian is basically controlled by one vendor - Nokia, and Windows Mobile obviously is controlled by Microsoft. Both OSes have their advantages and their problems. Symbian typically requires a unique executable to be built for every device. Windows needs a *slightly* beefier hardware platform (8MB minimum). Tools-wise Windows is in much better shape than Symbian. Embedded Linux could give both a run for their money. It will offer better tools (by far) than Symbian - almost on a par with Windows tools most likely -- and it will offer lighter resource requirements than Windows. The smart phone vendors should be all over this. It will be really interesting to see how Nokia reacts given their tremendous investment in, and control of, Symbian.
Yet another example of how the rules are different for the ruling class. How many times have we seen this type of thing? Of course none can top the Social Security hypocrisy (federal workers do not have to participate - they have their own retirement plan that, guess what, allows them to invest in the *dangerous* stock market) as we in the unwashed masses are taken for the big ride.
I think you haven't grasped exactly what I was saying. The game doesn't have to be identical - I would think the next generation of the "same" game (eg Madden 2006 for a Madden 2004 tradein) would make people very happy. The vendor could decide what the tradein was - Microsoft could "mandate" (ie subsidize) that *some* title was offered in trade for every old XBOX title (and when I say in trade I mean for a significant discount, not for free). For zealots who want the exact same gameplay, well they will just have to stick to their old XBOX because even an emulator isn't going to achieve that.
The could offer some sort of trade-in program where you could get the new version of the game on the cheap if you turned in your old disk. Of course most of these games are non-Microsoft products, so such a program would need to be offered by lots of different companies. In the long run this would probably have been cheaper than trying to implement backwards compatibility. Many times the best solution to a technical problem isn't technical.
Actually it looks to me like Google is trying to take over the world. And Yahoo. As was Sun once upon a time. And IBM. And don't tell me Apple isn't interested. In fact it seems to me that the FOSS movement is trying to take over the world. As any company would. And most countries for that matter ... that hardly separates Microsoft from the pack, except that they are perhaps more successful than the others I mentioned in their pursuit.