I disagree. Not with the windows critique, per-se, but with your other point.
Fitt's law, which the mac zealots love to quote, says that the easiest thing to operate on the screen is the one that you have to move the shortest distance to.
Well, right under where your mouse already is, is the shortest: zero. Right-click makes that location accessible for more than one operation.
This is a good thing.
In general, I think a good ui designer will make an area have one primary purpose, and correspond that to the normal "click". Right-click should function as a sort of "what else can I do with this area".
To say that right click is a kludge that the mac designers simply out-designed around is a tough position to defend... especially since they do have extensive right-click support and it makes all of their apps easier to use.
Perhaps the point was made rudely, but I think that you missed it.
I've been a web developer for 9 years, too, and my own pattern is to develop for standards, not for any particular browser, and then test and tweak.
In fact, IE cannot be "the standard" because it is internally inconsistent. This is the real killer. If IE worked the same under all conditions, you could document it and use it, but it's different in each version, and on each windows version.
So, there is no "the standard" even if you are willing to make the argument that there is a de-facto standard. The only sane approach seems to be to code to the rules, and then add cruft to your code to make it work in browsers that don't follow the rules.
Unless you're on an intranet/extranet situation, then you can just code to IE and screw standards. But that has its own punishments...
This is merely a practical matter; not one of ideology or politics. While I resent the crappy aspects of IE, and the problems that it causes my colleagues, friends, family, and the net, I am enough of a professional to know that the market is what the market is.
As for me personally, I use Firefox. I used to use Opera, but Firefox with good extensions rocks.
I've tried it under 2.6 on a couple of laptops (Fujitsu w/Transmeta and a big ugly Sony). No dice. I tried it under 2.4 with acpi patch on both. No dice. I tried it on a couple of non-laptops, too. No dice.
The word on the Fujitsu is that it is actually working properly, but that the PCI bus and/or radeon card doesn't refresh properly upon wake-up.
This is not a version of "working properly" that works very well for me. No screen, no network. Tough to work with. I think swsusp is the stand-in du jour.
I was hoping that the new Knoppix would help me get this going.
Good luck to you. I'm sure that those smart kernel hackers will bring us this good stuff eventually.
There's also "session saver" which is WAY more reliable than tab extensions for doing that. Tab extensions does about a bazillion other cool things, but it can't seem to reliably save the tabs when you close/crash.
Session saver is so smart that it can figure out when you have multiple windows with multiple tabs and your browser crashes.
We probably spend more money on this 'raid' than on the funding that this school gets in a month for books, phys-ed, and the like. Is business the only point in our society? Even if it *is*, it's better to have a well-educated consumer class than not. Bah.
What a waste. Doesn't the FBI have more important things to do?
Ignoring for a moment the tired argument about whether copyright infringement is a crime,
I've been doing web design and such for about 8 years, and have always used CorelDraw.
It's alignment tools, grids, and other precision "stuff" is just better than illustrator, and it can do multi-page layouts (imagine that!). It's like having part of cad, but not all of it.
Set your mind to "100dpi" and you can just make a 8in by 10in template to mockup with; you can even make up a quick suite of form primitives to copy from. You can rip them to bitmaps easily to show clients or print out...
works great.
Yes, Corel. The shovel-ware company. Draw is still good stuff.
That's great; I've been using it in 3 or 4 network deployments for a few years now. Since it's python, it's easy to hack on.
You mentioned not wanting to do streaming; this does a kind of streaming; not icecast (ie- re-encoding) but it does allow the client player to "open" an URL; in effect streaming the file over an http connection. This works great, and even allows for seeking.
The interface itself for edna is pretty simple, but as I said, it's python, so it's easy to hack!
Coupled with Amazon's web services and a bit of hacking to get album covers, you can get a pretty good user experience.
I bought one of these about 4 months ago; it's not as sturdy "feeling" as an ibook, and its windows (at least stock), but the Fujitsu is very well made.
It's also super-duper light, has very flexible batter options, has the best lcd screen I've seen anywhere, etc. etc. etc.
Normally, non-apple laptops are cheesy feeling; this one has a metal shell, and is made in Japan rather than malaysia or some other place, so it's really quite well built.
I live in New York City. I had a monitor (non-working, beyond repair) to dispose of. I tried the following:
1. I called about 10 computer repair shops, asking them what to do, and if I could PAY them to dispose of it properly. No.
2. I called the City's garbage/recycling department to ask them what to do. They had no special information, and instructed me to put it out with the trash.
3. I called the local branch of the EPA, asking what to do, since I know that it contains toxic waste. They said that there were no special disposal method that I could do, but that it was technically illegal for me to throw it away. I asked her what I should do... she recommended that I just throw it away.
Yes, yes, I did do a Google search. This was 2 years ago, and there weren't any relevant results.
I hope this is better now.
It's a problem when someone like me, who spent about an hour trying to find the right thing to do, cannot find the right thing to do.
IF they really start to clamp down on the big P2P users with huge illegal catalogs, so we can get all the infringing crap off the P2P networks. Once it's all legal and above board, you can start running real marketing analysis and do the business case studies that you need to make it a real sales market and distribution channel.
The problem is that this is NOT what they want. What they want is to destroy this "market" and this mode of distribution. They're not really all that worried about copyright infringement, precisely because of all the logical arguments one always reads here.
They KNOW that it doesn't hurt sales. They MAY KNOW that it helps sales. They don't care. They don't want to change their position, their market, their channels of income.
They definitely don't want the ecology of rock-stardom to change. If it was easy for Joe Schmoe to get famous by sharing his non-label music with folks for 50 cents a download, that hurts them a lot more than people copying Brittney.
Think about it. This is a classic strawman argument. They choose not to compete fairly, and since there's no other logical way that they can "outlaw" music sharing via digital networks, they have to ghettoize them with crackdowns on "copyright infringement".
This way they will try and scare non-techies away from the networks (it's a haven for crime; watch out! you might get caught!). It is their goal to erode these networks before they truly become mainstream and destroy their way of business
Right or wrong, it's ridiculous. It seems to be one of those "last desperate act" things that an empire (or an administration) does before dying.
There are more and more of these things all the time... TIPS, PATRIOT, Drug War, Missle Defense shield... things that will do NO GOOD, as demonstrated by countless non-ideologues.
But, they make us (or our corporate sponsors) feel good, so we do 'em. Better to do a futile something than nothing? Not in my book, not when taxes pay for it and there aren't enough taxes to go around.
I agree with the philosophy of coding to the standards; I've been _trying_ to do that for 7 years.
Unfortunately, nobody really hits the standards. Sure, Mozilla and Opera and IE all hit 85% or so, maybe even higher for "two year old" standards.
But they hit/different/ 85 percents.
IE doesn't even get the CSS box model right. On ANY version. Even 6. That's a fundamental deal, that's not frosting like rollovers and hover tags.
Mozilla and Opera have different ideas of what lots of the fundamentals mean. Who's right? I don't know. After a while, you realize that it doesn't matter. It should, but it doesn't. The code itself can validate against strict w3c rules, but it works differently in all three browsers.
What I do is try and code for Mozilla and/or Opera as the standard, get it "done" and then see how broken it is in IE, and fix it accordingly.
If you start with IE and go the other way, it seems to be a much longer and harder journey, since IE is so loopy with the standards.
can't do these things with a typewriter. Modern technology allows us to stream more information at people than ever before, and while this does have its obvious and many downsides, I don't think that the fact can be ignored.
You're completely right. Tech allows new things to happen that were either very difficult (scatter charts) or impossible (3d animation) before.
But that's another interesting paradox; all of these supposed efficiency gains are swallowed up by all of these new things that we can do. Which means more is getting done, or does it?
less, we would. But we don't, and we can't. The overall psyche of the nation is tooled in such a way that we have to work 60, 70, and 80 hour workweeks on average, no matter the consequences. This isn't because of technology, it's the modern mindset that is the cause of this, which runs far deeper.
That's absolutely true. But I still pointed it out because of the (now) obvious fallacy of those ideas that were common in the 60's. We still tend to think that technology will solve most problems, even though it hasn't necessarily done so in the past. It has solved some problems, made other problems possible, moved other problems over, etc.
Bill Gates (love him or hate him) really hit the nail on the head in his book Business @ The Speed of Thought. It really outlines how technology can be used to increase the flow of information, while at the same time reducing the cost associated with acting on that information.
I believe that lots of research has in fact proved this to be false. I don't have any urls, so this is a pretty weak point, but let me try and illustrate a simple example.
In the old days, there was a typing pool. There were young ladies (yes, this was sexist) who typed. That's all they did. They had little gizmos in their ears that told them what to type. They were basically cyborgs.
The typewriters had one font. One size. One color. No graphics. None of that stuff. They did one thing, reliably, and simply. The ladies typed up the report, probably on carbon paper, and that was it.
Now, we've got Word. Computers make things easier and more efficient, right? Wrong. Now, we change the font 6 times, re-do the headings, jimmy with the margins, send it around for collaborative revisions, have a meeting on it, and all this while, we print it out 10 or more times.
The artifact of the work: the document - the physical manifestation of information in the real world has now taken lots more work, lots more electricity, and lots more angst than it used to.
This ties into the ideas that we had in the 60's that in the near future, things would be so much more efficient that we would all be working 20 hour weeks instead of 40 hour weeks. Well, wrong, we're all working 50-80 hour weeks, and that's the white collar jobs, not the blue collar.
Somehow, all this efficiency has bred greater work.
If you try to make it a hardware device, I won't buy it, or people that buy preassembled PCs will pay a geek to remove it.
This is the EXACT reason why big corps are so threatened by Free Software. It removes the possibility of "Technological Solution" to their troubles... whatever they can do, we can do better, or we can simply remove.
That leaves them only with legal, socio-coercive (don't drink and drive type of things) and legislative.
Legislative is tough because there aren't laws that apply well to the whole globe (but they're sure trying!)...
Socio-coercive is a pretty tough sell: they've tried to make my Mom feel like a criminal for using Napster, but she clearly know's that she's not.
Legal: Aha. Now we see why they're doing stupid things like suing Fenton and putting Skylarov in jail. It's their only workable option.
And even that is looking fishy.
It's the desperation of a final-stage empire, clearly.
The natural tendency of free market capitalism is "winner takes all". This is a fact. This is basically the goal of each business... to become the biggest/best/whatever. If you're too successful, it endangers the very market that you used to become successful... it's a paradox.
It's difficult to NOT think about these things in moral terms, but it's not a right/wrong issue. It's not a big bad corporation (Verizon) against cool little corporations (Speakeasy) in a fight for our rights.
No, it's a large, publicly traded, publicly owned company that must keep its profits/market share growing to appease stockholders. Those stockholders just want their $500 to become $550, they don't care about the long term business practices of either of the companies.
The relationship is intrinsically amoral. NOT immoral - amoral.
So, what we have now is indeed the end stage of "free market" capitalism in the telco/broadband sector. You have major players that have already become dominant in their fields (AOL/TW, Verizon) using their advantages to, well, their advantage, to keep their stock prices up.
Once you're near to being "the winner" who "takes all" it's very difficult for new players to play the game. As a society, we don't really believe in "free markets" though we claim to. We believe in regulated markets. We want the new players to be able to play, because we believe that it benefits US, the society.
What always gets confused is about that benefit... idealogues seem to think that it's "right" to let the free market benefit the players. No, the free market is supposed to benefit the containing society with increased competition, better products and services, and better prices. It's not to help those nice folks at Verizon get better xmas bonusses.
This is the kind of thing that "The Market" is supposed to solve, right? If the Roche would rather not sell than lower its prices, surely some other company should be able to sell to that market.
The patent is the obstacle. Nobody else can manufacture the drug, because it's Roche's patented drug. Sure, they (probably) deserve to have a TEMPORARY monopoly on the drug to recoop their R&D costs, but this is a situation where the market is COMPLETELY FAILING. All of the religion about the "Free Market" this and that completely breaks down if monopolies are involved, even temporary ones.
1. The public good is not being served (drugs not reaching sick people
2. Roche isn't making money, because they're not selling to this market
In this situation, everyone loses. So, Brazil's government is basically saying, well, we tried proper channels, and it didn't work. We still have sick people, so we're forced to break the law.
Governments all over the world have a long history of throwing aside the rules and morality when an "emergency" is deemed. Sometimes those emergencies are crap (flag burning, kiddie porn, Reefer madness, protecting Kuwait) and sometimes they're not. Of course, that's according to my beliefs. I expect other citizens would disagree.
It's sad, because you want to believe that at the very least, the governments of the world would obey their own rules, but COME ON! That doesn't happen.
I for one am glad to see that this time the rules and "what is Right" is being shoved aside in the interests of ACTUAL CITIZENRY rather than big oil or credit card companies.
Slashdot Mirror
PXES is pretty much what you need. I've used it to boot right into NX client. Works great.
http://www.2x.com/pxes/
Or, you could use authbind to do this without iptables:
d
http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/authbin
I disagree. Not with the windows critique, per-se, but with your other point.
Fitt's law, which the mac zealots love to quote, says that the easiest thing to operate on the screen is the one that you have to move the shortest distance to.
Well, right under where your mouse already is, is the shortest: zero. Right-click makes that location accessible for more than one operation.
This is a good thing.
In general, I think a good ui designer will make an area have one primary purpose, and correspond that to the normal "click". Right-click should function as a sort of "what else can I do with this area".
To say that right click is a kludge that the mac designers simply out-designed around is a tough position to defend... especially since they do have extensive right-click support and it makes all of their apps easier to use.
Actually, as far as I can tell, Ubuntu *USES* the new Debian installer.
So, while fleeing might be nice (Ubuntu rocks) it won't bring a better installer.
Perhaps the point was made rudely, but I think that you missed it.
I've been a web developer for 9 years, too, and my own pattern is to develop for standards, not for any particular browser, and then test and tweak.
In fact, IE cannot be "the standard" because it is internally inconsistent. This is the real killer. If IE worked the same under all conditions, you could document it and use it, but it's different in each version, and on each windows version.
So, there is no "the standard" even if you are willing to make the argument that there is a de-facto standard. The only sane approach seems to be to code to the rules, and then add cruft to your code to make it work in browsers that don't follow the rules.
Unless you're on an intranet/extranet situation, then you can just code to IE and screw standards. But that has its own punishments...
This is merely a practical matter; not one of ideology or politics. While I resent the crappy aspects of IE, and the problems that it causes my colleagues, friends, family, and the net, I am enough of a professional to know that the market is what the market is.
As for me personally, I use Firefox. I used to use Opera, but Firefox with good extensions rocks.
I've tried it under 2.6 on a couple of laptops (Fujitsu w/Transmeta and a big ugly Sony). No dice. I tried it under 2.4 with acpi patch on both. No dice. I tried it on a couple of non-laptops, too. No dice.
The word on the Fujitsu is that it is actually working properly, but that the PCI bus and/or radeon card doesn't refresh properly upon wake-up.
This is not a version of "working properly" that works very well for me. No screen, no network. Tough to work with. I think swsusp is the stand-in du jour.
I was hoping that the new Knoppix would help me get this going.
Good luck to you. I'm sure that those smart kernel hackers will bring us this good stuff eventually.
There's also "session saver" which is WAY more reliable than tab extensions for doing that. Tab extensions does about a bazillion other cool things, but it can't seem to reliably save the tabs when you close/crash.
Session saver is so smart that it can figure out when you have multiple windows with multiple tabs and your browser crashes.
What has our society come to...
We probably spend more money on this 'raid' than on the funding that this school gets in a month for books, phys-ed, and the like. Is business the only point in our society? Even if it *is*, it's better to have a well-educated consumer class than not. Bah.
What a waste. Doesn't the FBI have more important things to do?
Ignoring for a moment the tired argument about whether copyright infringement is a crime,
DON'T THEY HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO!!?!?!?
</rant>
edna.sourceforge.net
A simple web server made from python that catalogs your music collection, makes a nice page, and streams when you click on titles.
I've been using it for just what you ask for years.
It's pretty simple, but that's kindof why it works so well. And all it needs is python.
I've been doing web design and such for about 8 years, and have always used CorelDraw.
It's alignment tools, grids, and other precision "stuff" is just better than illustrator, and it can do multi-page layouts (imagine that!). It's like having part of cad, but not all of it.
Set your mind to "100dpi" and you can just make a 8in by 10in template to mockup with; you can even make up a quick suite of form primitives to copy from. You can rip them to bitmaps easily to show clients or print out...
works great.
Yes, Corel. The shovel-ware company. Draw is still good stuff.
Ah yes, the life lessons in high-end design that can be learned from Charles in Charge...
edna.sourceforge.net
That's great; I've been using it in 3 or 4 network deployments for a few years now. Since it's python, it's easy to hack on.
You mentioned not wanting to do streaming; this does a kind of streaming; not icecast (ie- re-encoding) but it does allow the client player to "open" an URL; in effect streaming the file over an http connection. This works great, and even allows for seeking.
The interface itself for edna is pretty simple, but as I said, it's python, so it's easy to hack!
Coupled with Amazon's web services and a bit of hacking to get album covers, you can get a pretty good user experience.
Enjoy.
I bought one of these about 4 months ago; it's not as sturdy "feeling" as an ibook, and its windows (at least stock), but the Fujitsu is very well made.
It's also super-duper light, has very flexible batter options, has the best lcd screen I've seen anywhere, etc. etc. etc.
Normally, non-apple laptops are cheesy feeling; this one has a metal shell, and is made in Japan rather than malaysia or some other place, so it's really quite well built.
I live in New York City. I had a monitor (non-working, beyond repair) to dispose of. I tried the following:
1. I called about 10 computer repair shops, asking them what to do, and if I could PAY them to dispose of it properly. No.
2. I called the City's garbage/recycling department to ask them what to do. They had no special information, and instructed me to put it out with the trash.
3. I called the local branch of the EPA, asking what to do, since I know that it contains toxic waste. They said that there were no special disposal method that I could do, but that it was technically illegal for me to throw it away. I asked her what I should do... she recommended that I just throw it away.
Yes, yes, I did do a Google search. This was 2 years ago, and there weren't any relevant results.
I hope this is better now.
It's a problem when someone like me, who spent about an hour trying to find the right thing to do, cannot find the right thing to do.
IF they really start to clamp down on the big P2P users with huge illegal catalogs, so we can get all the infringing crap off the P2P networks. Once it's all legal and above board, you can start running real marketing analysis and do the business case studies that you need to make it a real sales market and distribution channel.
The problem is that this is NOT what they want. What they want is to destroy this "market" and this mode of distribution. They're not really all that worried about copyright infringement, precisely because of all the logical arguments one always reads here.
They KNOW that it doesn't hurt sales. They MAY KNOW that it helps sales. They don't care. They don't want to change their position, their market, their channels of income.
They definitely don't want the ecology of rock-stardom to change. If it was easy for Joe Schmoe to get famous by sharing his non-label music with folks for 50 cents a download, that hurts them a lot more than people copying Brittney.
Think about it. This is a classic strawman argument. They choose not to compete fairly, and since there's no other logical way that they can "outlaw" music sharing via digital networks, they have to ghettoize them with crackdowns on "copyright infringement".
This way they will try and scare non-techies away from the networks (it's a haven for crime; watch out! you might get caught!). It is their goal to erode these networks before they truly become mainstream and destroy their way of business
Right or wrong, it's ridiculous. It seems to be one of those "last desperate act" things that an empire (or an administration) does before dying.
There are more and more of these things all the time... TIPS, PATRIOT, Drug War, Missle Defense shield... things that will do NO GOOD, as demonstrated by countless non-ideologues.
But, they make us (or our corporate sponsors) feel good, so we do 'em. Better to do a futile something than nothing? Not in my book, not when taxes pay for it and there aren't enough taxes to go around.
What a waste.
I agree with the philosophy of coding to the standards; I've been _trying_ to do that for 7 years.
/different/ 85 percents.
Unfortunately, nobody really hits the standards. Sure, Mozilla and Opera and IE all hit 85% or so, maybe even higher for "two year old" standards.
But they hit
IE doesn't even get the CSS box model right. On ANY version. Even 6. That's a fundamental deal, that's not frosting like rollovers and hover tags.
Mozilla and Opera have different ideas of what lots of the fundamentals mean. Who's right? I don't know. After a while, you realize that it doesn't matter. It should, but it doesn't. The code itself can validate against strict w3c rules, but it works differently in all three browsers.
What I do is try and code for Mozilla and/or Opera as the standard, get it "done" and then see how broken it is in IE, and fix it accordingly.
If you start with IE and go the other way, it seems to be a much longer and harder journey, since IE is so loopy with the standards.
can't do these things with a typewriter. Modern technology allows us to stream more information at people than ever before, and while this does have its obvious and many downsides, I don't think that the fact can be ignored.
You're completely right. Tech allows new things to happen that were either very difficult (scatter charts) or impossible (3d animation) before.
But that's another interesting paradox; all of these supposed efficiency gains are swallowed up by all of these new things that we can do. Which means more is getting done, or does it?
less, we would. But we don't, and we can't. The overall psyche of the nation is tooled in such a way that we have to work 60, 70, and 80 hour workweeks on average, no matter the consequences. This isn't because of technology, it's the modern mindset that is the cause of this, which runs far deeper.
That's absolutely true. But I still pointed it out because of the (now) obvious fallacy of those ideas that were common in the 60's. We still tend to think that technology will solve most problems, even though it hasn't necessarily done so in the past. It has solved some problems, made other problems possible, moved other problems over, etc.
Bill Gates (love him or hate him) really hit the nail on the head in his book Business @ The Speed of Thought. It really outlines how technology can be used to increase the flow of information, while at the same time reducing the cost associated with acting on that information.
I believe that lots of research has in fact proved this to be false. I don't have any urls, so this is a pretty weak point, but let me try and illustrate a simple example.
In the old days, there was a typing pool. There were young ladies (yes, this was sexist) who typed. That's all they did. They had little gizmos in their ears that told them what to type. They were basically cyborgs.
The typewriters had one font. One size. One color. No graphics. None of that stuff. They did one thing, reliably, and simply. The ladies typed up the report, probably on carbon paper, and that was it.
Now, we've got Word. Computers make things easier and more efficient, right? Wrong. Now, we change the font 6 times, re-do the headings, jimmy with the margins, send it around for collaborative revisions, have a meeting on it, and all this while, we print it out 10 or more times.
The artifact of the work: the document - the physical manifestation of information in the real world has now taken lots more work, lots more electricity, and lots more angst than it used to.
This ties into the ideas that we had in the 60's that in the near future, things would be so much more efficient that we would all be working 20 hour weeks instead of 40 hour weeks. Well, wrong, we're all working 50-80 hour weeks, and that's the white collar jobs, not the blue collar.
Somehow, all this efficiency has bred greater work.
Food for thought.
It's already in jpeg.
Almost no software supports it, but if you take a picture with a digital camera, all that kind of stuff is stuck into the file somehow.
I believe that ACDSee supports it.
If you try to make it a hardware device, I won't buy it, or people that buy preassembled PCs will pay a geek to remove it.
This is the EXACT reason why big corps are so threatened by Free Software. It removes the possibility of "Technological Solution" to their troubles... whatever they can do, we can do better, or we can simply remove.
That leaves them only with legal, socio-coercive (don't drink and drive type of things) and legislative.
Legislative is tough because there aren't laws that apply well to the whole globe (but they're sure trying!)...
Socio-coercive is a pretty tough sell: they've tried to make my Mom feel like a criminal for using Napster, but she clearly know's that she's not.
Legal: Aha. Now we see why they're doing stupid things like suing Fenton and putting Skylarov in jail. It's their only workable option.
And even that is looking fishy.
It's the desperation of a final-stage empire, clearly.
The natural tendency of free market capitalism is "winner takes all". This is a fact. This is basically the goal of each business... to become the biggest/best/whatever. If you're too successful, it endangers the very market that you used to become successful... it's a paradox.
It's difficult to NOT think about these things in moral terms, but it's not a right/wrong issue. It's not a big bad corporation (Verizon) against cool little corporations (Speakeasy) in a fight for our rights.
No, it's a large, publicly traded, publicly owned company that must keep its profits/market share growing to appease stockholders. Those stockholders just want their $500 to become $550, they don't care about the long term business practices of either of the companies.
The relationship is intrinsically amoral. NOT immoral - amoral.
So, what we have now is indeed the end stage of "free market" capitalism in the telco/broadband sector. You have major players that have already become dominant in their fields (AOL/TW, Verizon) using their advantages to, well, their advantage, to keep their stock prices up.
Once you're near to being "the winner" who "takes all" it's very difficult for new players to play the game. As a society, we don't really believe in "free markets" though we claim to. We believe in regulated markets. We want the new players to be able to play, because we believe that it benefits US, the society.
What always gets confused is about that benefit... idealogues seem to think that it's "right" to let the free market benefit the players. No, the free market is supposed to benefit the containing society with increased competition, better products and services, and better prices. It's not to help those nice folks at Verizon get better xmas bonusses.
$300 a pair, quite excellent nearfield monitors... I'm so happy with them that I'm considering buying 4 more for my living room.
http://www.tannoy.com/product.cfm?D=2&ID=47
Also, the Pentagon had its' ground-breaking exactly 60 years ago on the 11th.
This is the kind of thing that "The Market" is supposed to solve, right? If the Roche would rather not sell than lower its prices, surely some other company should be able to sell to that market.
The patent is the obstacle. Nobody else can manufacture the drug, because it's Roche's patented drug. Sure, they (probably) deserve to have a TEMPORARY monopoly on the drug to recoop their R&D costs, but this is a situation where the market is COMPLETELY FAILING. All of the religion about the "Free Market" this and that completely breaks down if monopolies are involved, even temporary ones.
1. The public good is not being served (drugs not reaching sick people
2. Roche isn't making money, because they're not selling to this market
In this situation, everyone loses. So, Brazil's government is basically saying, well, we tried proper channels, and it didn't work. We still have sick people, so we're forced to break the law.
Governments all over the world have a long history of throwing aside the rules and morality when an "emergency" is deemed. Sometimes those emergencies are crap (flag burning, kiddie porn, Reefer madness, protecting Kuwait) and sometimes they're not. Of course, that's according to my beliefs. I expect other citizens would disagree.
It's sad, because you want to believe that at the very least, the governments of the world would obey their own rules, but COME ON! That doesn't happen.
I for one am glad to see that this time the rules and "what is Right" is being shoved aside in the interests of ACTUAL CITIZENRY rather than big oil or credit card companies.