If they're any good, that already happens, law or no.
Yeah, but it raises the bar of what, exactly, constitutes being "any good". With copyright, you're relying on normal people infringing on the law to keep a copy of it in case the studio neglects it, however without copyright you not only have normal people making copies but libraries and universities as well, and they've got the storage capacity to be a *lot* less picky.
Sure, even when we had books they could be destroyed, but to me it seems that our current medium is just a bit more fragile compared to books - which basically will last a LONG time absent fire or flood.
Sure, but again, the ease of copying and negligible costs of storage make keeping redundant copies around the world a *lot* more feasible than it was with physical media such as books. And without copyright you're not relying on the copyright owner to do so, losing your entire electronic library in a flood in New Orleans is irrelevant as long as you can afford to repurchase the storage capacity (ie, loads and loads of disks) and have unrestricted access to the electronic library of, say, an university in Sydney or Leeds.
As Linus Torvalds once said, "real men don't use backup, they upload their stuff to FTP and let the world mirror it".
When a mobile phone has the same power as your current general purpose computer, what do you think the sales of general purpose computers is going to look like?
Pretty good, actually. Of course, general purpose computers will be sold in a phone form factor and have the ability to make calls, but still.
We already saw that with servers. Once desktop PCs were powerful enough to compete with them, servers didn't die, they just shrunk to a desktop form factor and got GUIs slapped on top of its OS. Other than that, though, they continued to sell just fine.
I must note, also, that they continued being proper servers, with server-oriented CPUs, server-oriented OSes and server-worthy prices. And the same will happen with PCs and phones, whatever comes next will necessarily be a general computing device, otherwise it'll never capture a significant enough portion of the market to displace the average grey box from its place at the top of the computing food chain.
I do. Do *you* understand why said IP laws don't apply to Mathematics?
It's not a matter of a simple "if it costs effort to make, it should be protected". There's a *lot* more variables to consider, which you're completely ignoring.
Much like all the advancement and innovation that we've seen since Mathematics was first created grinded to a halt once it was deemed unpatentable and uncopyrightable.
The biggest problem of your doomsday scenario is that, simply put, it conflicts with reality.
Does it make sense to transcode or store all the H.264 videos these cameras output as Theora or VP8? Probably not.
It makes as much sense as it does to transcode all the RAW photos to JPEG images or uncompressed audio to MP3, both of which we do all the time.
Plus, what are you going to do once there are h.265 cameras out there? leave h.264 users in the dust and switch all to the newest shiny? no business would drop almost its entire customer base just to cater to the technophile, so they'd transcode regardless. Or are you going to force manufacturers *not* to use the better codec for their products? yeah, sure.
Standards are so because they are unchanging. Cutting-edge technology is so because it is perpetually moving forwards. They're inherently incompatible with each other, and if they've managed to overlap these recent years in the video arena it's merely by sheer luck but it won't be so forever, and as long as the cutting edge moves forward again (and it *will* move fowards, soon most likely) you'll have all the problems Theora would have plus all those that are specific to h.264.
Do cows use quantum entanglement? no. Do sheep? no. Plants do. Why would I eat the *smarter* lifeform?
In fact, I'd celebrate with a burger if it weren't for the fact that lettuces are a plant. Anybody know of a meat-based replacement for a plant-friendly person such as myself?
2.) Not everyone is going to care that they can't play Flash games or that they occasionally can't used some old site.
Exactly. Just witness how many people switched overnight from IE to Mozilla once they saw how much better it was. No need for year-long campaigns to get devs to code against the standard instead of IE, no need for full-page ads in major newspapers and forking the entire codebase to produce a browser that wasn't just better, it was *so* above IE in quality, performance and security that people waited for longer than a day before replacing it with IE to browse their IE-only websites.
Of course none of that ever came to pass, and Mozilla's global dominance was only threatened when Opera released an even better browser a month later and 90% of the world switched to it instead.
4.) MobileMe.com, Time Capsule, Apple TV.
"Ohh, you want to *store* documents? here's this beautiful Apple TV, yours only for $229!". Yeah, that one is going to fly *so* well with most people...
And the nerd refuses to acknowledge the fact that, if it's not meant to parse HTML5 content it's irrelevant in the discussion of HTML5.
Remove all devices that don't have a reason to care about HTML5 from your list, and what are you left with? mobile phones, IE and Apple's sorry excuse of a browser.
You may not but most people do. That's how MS-DOS came to dominate the world over the home-oriented Amigas and Macintosh back then, because at the end of the day the most important thing for home users isn't for their computers to be 'fun' or 'simple', it's to allow them to do their jobs.
No, not really, the steak dinner is still the more appropiate analogy.
Having hand cranks wouldn't serve much (if any) purpose on a modern car, so truly most people *wouldn't* want it. Steak dinners, however, are actually desireable and there's a sizeable market for them still. In the case of PCs they're the corporate world, which may love to lock down their employees' computers but despise having them locked from *them*, and for the variety of tasks corporations need computers for, an Apple toy (sorry, "appliance") will never be enough.
But Jobs' and the Apple fans' dismissal of the business sector isn't surprising. That's why Microsoft considers Linux, and not Apple, its biggest threat: because Apple's ideology of dividing the world between 'geeks' and 'consumers', refusing to even acknowledge the existence of the corporate market, is what ultimately locks them from being more than an 'also ran' first to IBM and now to Microsoft.
Wake me up when the corporate world abandons regular computers in favor of Apple's toys. But not before.
We do, but only when reffering to people of the whole continent (for instance, "we Americans should follow Europe's example and make an American Union"), which doesn't occur often in day-to-day usage.
And minor and independant game developers have already moved in to cover that niche.
Chances are, if developers start moving en-masse to mobile platforms, the same will happen to the desktop market. Neither market will be killed, there'll just be more developers overall than before.
This is because Apple, like all right-thinking people, realizes how stupid and hard-to-use a case-sensitive filesystem is. (Debate below.:) Reply to This
While us, left-thinking people see how useful and simple it is and continue along just fine;)
Getting screwed in exchange for getting a few perks you wouldn't otherwise have, on the other hand, is called "prostitution" and is accepted as a valid profession in most of the world;)
Here's a better idea: don't buy PC games that are apt to have these functions removed in the first place, don't support scum developers regardless of whether they develop for the PC or consoles.
You're vastly underestimating the effort it takes to pay through one of these things. I was once a very happy Magnatune customer, until they had problems with their CC company and, as such, accepted only Paypal. Between the horror stories I heard about it and all the hassles I had trying to register due to my country of origin, I ended up switching to Jamendo instead and started being a cheap-ass.
I was similarly gonna pass on this deal because of Paypal until I saw it also supported Google Checkout and decided to give it a try. Fortunately it worked fairly easily for me, but for anybody that doesn't (due to their country, privacy preferences or whatever) I'm willing to understand if they decide to skip the whole ordeal instead, download it off BitTorrent and, hopefully, donate some money through other means.
Plus in my book paying less than a dollar (and *particularly* a single penny) for these games is even worse than outright piracy, at least in the latter case you aren't wasting the devs' bandwidth, only your own.
I missed the part of your post where you explained why we need games like Modern Warfare 2 to be made. And before you reply with "normal people" and all that crap, let me remind you that the world's most popular game is Solitaire, followed by Minesweeper.
In a world where over 90% of people are illiterate, yeah, that'd be a valid hypothesis.
Face it, pretending a significant percentage of iPhone buyers did so out of appreciation for its design is as senseless as pretending that a significant percentage of Android buyers did so out of a desire to download its source-code and hack it. The overwhelming majority of the world's population can't program worth shit, and similarly the overwhelming majority of the world's population does not have a degree in industrial design.
Admit it, both platforms are succeeding because of marketing. You know, the field whose entire purpose is to sway people to purchase a specific product? yeah. Not enlightenment or whatever.
Re:My review--it hasn't improved
on
Hacking Vim 7.2
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yeah, I realize I could put in a little effort and get much further, but I've already wasted more time just in this session than I could possibly gain back in the next the years by knowing VI inside and out.
And therein lies the crux of your problem. You're simply not a serious programmer.
Think of Vim as a mainframe: for those that require heavy computing power the investment pays for itself practically the moment you turn it on, but for a regular Joe a mainframe is nothing but an insanely expensive computer that you can't even use to browse Facebook on.
I don't recommend mainframes to regular Joes looking to browse the web, I don't recommend Hasselblads to grandmas looking to photograph their grandchildren, and I don't recommend Vim to people that need to make slight changes in a plaintext file only sporadically. But that doesn't mean they don't have a market out there.
If only. Take MS Office, for instance: most people can do the basics on it well enough, but even after years of using them, if you were to ask them "how would you set up separate 'profiles' each with a different default formatting?" for instance, they'd go menu hunting *everywhere* rather than replying with a conscise "if it can be done, it should be over here".
Something similar happens with Eclipse and Photoshop but it's not as bad. Though I suspect it's due to the relatively higher level of competence from its users rather than an objectively better interface.
And just before anybody thinks I'm just flaming Microsoft, let me state that in my opinion Visual Studio is one of the best IDEs in that respect. It does things in its own, slightly unusual way (though nowhere near as quirky as Emacs or Vim), but once you 'grok' it you can pretty much tell where everything is or should be.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're any good, that already happens, law or no.
Yeah, but it raises the bar of what, exactly, constitutes being "any good". With copyright, you're relying on normal people infringing on the law to keep a copy of it in case the studio neglects it, however without copyright you not only have normal people making copies but libraries and universities as well, and they've got the storage capacity to be a *lot* less picky.
Sure, even when we had books they could be destroyed, but to me it seems that our current medium is just a bit more fragile compared to books - which basically will last a LONG time absent fire or flood.
Sure, but again, the ease of copying and negligible costs of storage make keeping redundant copies around the world a *lot* more feasible than it was with physical media such as books. And without copyright you're not relying on the copyright owner to do so, losing your entire electronic library in a flood in New Orleans is irrelevant as long as you can afford to repurchase the storage capacity (ie, loads and loads of disks) and have unrestricted access to the electronic library of, say, an university in Sydney or Leeds.
As Linus Torvalds once said, "real men don't use backup, they upload their stuff to FTP and let the world mirror it".
When a mobile phone has the same power as your current general purpose computer, what do you think the sales of general purpose computers is going to look like?
Pretty good, actually. Of course, general purpose computers will be sold in a phone form factor and have the ability to make calls, but still.
We already saw that with servers. Once desktop PCs were powerful enough to compete with them, servers didn't die, they just shrunk to a desktop form factor and got GUIs slapped on top of its OS. Other than that, though, they continued to sell just fine.
I must note, also, that they continued being proper servers, with server-oriented CPUs, server-oriented OSes and server-worthy prices. And the same will happen with PCs and phones, whatever comes next will necessarily be a general computing device, otherwise it'll never capture a significant enough portion of the market to displace the average grey box from its place at the top of the computing food chain.
You don't understand why we have IP laws?
I do. Do *you* understand why said IP laws don't apply to Mathematics?
It's not a matter of a simple "if it costs effort to make, it should be protected". There's a *lot* more variables to consider, which you're completely ignoring.
Much like all the advancement and innovation that we've seen since Mathematics was first created grinded to a halt once it was deemed unpatentable and uncopyrightable.
The biggest problem of your doomsday scenario is that, simply put, it conflicts with reality.
Does it make sense to transcode or store all the H.264 videos these cameras output as Theora or VP8? Probably not.
It makes as much sense as it does to transcode all the RAW photos to JPEG images or uncompressed audio to MP3, both of which we do all the time.
Plus, what are you going to do once there are h.265 cameras out there? leave h.264 users in the dust and switch all to the newest shiny? no business would drop almost its entire customer base just to cater to the technophile, so they'd transcode regardless. Or are you going to force manufacturers *not* to use the better codec for their products? yeah, sure.
Standards are so because they are unchanging. Cutting-edge technology is so because it is perpetually moving forwards. They're inherently incompatible with each other, and if they've managed to overlap these recent years in the video arena it's merely by sheer luck but it won't be so forever, and as long as the cutting edge moves forward again (and it *will* move fowards, soon most likely) you'll have all the problems Theora would have plus all those that are specific to h.264.
Do cows use quantum entanglement? no. Do sheep? no. Plants do. Why would I eat the *smarter* lifeform?
In fact, I'd celebrate with a burger if it weren't for the fact that lettuces are a plant. Anybody know of a meat-based replacement for a plant-friendly person such as myself?
2.) Not everyone is going to care that they can't play Flash games or that they occasionally can't used some old site.
Exactly. Just witness how many people switched overnight from IE to Mozilla once they saw how much better it was. No need for year-long campaigns to get devs to code against the standard instead of IE, no need for full-page ads in major newspapers and forking the entire codebase to produce a browser that wasn't just better, it was *so* above IE in quality, performance and security that people waited for longer than a day before replacing it with IE to browse their IE-only websites.
Of course none of that ever came to pass, and Mozilla's global dominance was only threatened when Opera released an even better browser a month later and 90% of the world switched to it instead.
4.) MobileMe.com, Time Capsule, Apple TV.
"Ohh, you want to *store* documents? here's this beautiful Apple TV, yours only for $229!". Yeah, that one is going to fly *so* well with most people...
Much like having optional slavery introduces more choice to the job market than was previously available.
Some people can see farther than 5 minutes ahead. Pity you aren't one of them.
And the nerd refuses to acknowledge the fact that, if it's not meant to parse HTML5 content it's irrelevant in the discussion of HTML5.
Remove all devices that don't have a reason to care about HTML5 from your list, and what are you left with? mobile phones, IE and Apple's sorry excuse of a browser.
You may not but most people do. That's how MS-DOS came to dominate the world over the home-oriented Amigas and Macintosh back then, because at the end of the day the most important thing for home users isn't for their computers to be 'fun' or 'simple', it's to allow them to do their jobs.
No, not really, the steak dinner is still the more appropiate analogy.
Having hand cranks wouldn't serve much (if any) purpose on a modern car, so truly most people *wouldn't* want it. Steak dinners, however, are actually desireable and there's a sizeable market for them still. In the case of PCs they're the corporate world, which may love to lock down their employees' computers but despise having them locked from *them*, and for the variety of tasks corporations need computers for, an Apple toy (sorry, "appliance") will never be enough.
But Jobs' and the Apple fans' dismissal of the business sector isn't surprising. That's why Microsoft considers Linux, and not Apple, its biggest threat: because Apple's ideology of dividing the world between 'geeks' and 'consumers', refusing to even acknowledge the existence of the corporate market, is what ultimately locks them from being more than an 'also ran' first to IBM and now to Microsoft.
Wake me up when the corporate world abandons regular computers in favor of Apple's toys. But not before.
We do, but only when reffering to people of the whole continent (for instance, "we Americans should follow Europe's example and make an American Union"), which doesn't occur often in day-to-day usage.
And minor and independant game developers have already moved in to cover that niche.
Chances are, if developers start moving en-masse to mobile platforms, the same will happen to the desktop market. Neither market will be killed, there'll just be more developers overall than before.
This is because Apple, like all right-thinking people, realizes how stupid and hard-to-use a case-sensitive filesystem is. (Debate below. :)
Reply to This
While us, left-thinking people see how useful and simple it is and continue along just fine ;)
Getting screwed in exchange for getting a few perks you wouldn't otherwise have, on the other hand, is called "prostitution" and is accepted as a valid profession in most of the world ;)
Here's a better idea: don't buy PC games that are apt to have these functions removed in the first place, don't support scum developers regardless of whether they develop for the PC or consoles.
You're vastly underestimating the effort it takes to pay through one of these things. I was once a very happy Magnatune customer, until they had problems with their CC company and, as such, accepted only Paypal. Between the horror stories I heard about it and all the hassles I had trying to register due to my country of origin, I ended up switching to Jamendo instead and started being a cheap-ass.
I was similarly gonna pass on this deal because of Paypal until I saw it also supported Google Checkout and decided to give it a try. Fortunately it worked fairly easily for me, but for anybody that doesn't (due to their country, privacy preferences or whatever) I'm willing to understand if they decide to skip the whole ordeal instead, download it off BitTorrent and, hopefully, donate some money through other means.
Plus in my book paying less than a dollar (and *particularly* a single penny) for these games is even worse than outright piracy, at least in the latter case you aren't wasting the devs' bandwidth, only your own.
I missed the part of your post where you explained why we need games like Modern Warfare 2 to be made. And before you reply with "normal people" and all that crap, let me remind you that the world's most popular game is Solitaire, followed by Minesweeper.
Well, here it's much easier.
Just because an interface looks simple doesn't mean it looks faster. Who thinks like that?
The same people who think a music file sounds 'better' when played a bit louder.
In other words, pretty much everybody lacking the technical knowledge to judge it on other merits.
On the other hand, Chrome has grabbed 20% market share in one year which is no small feat.
Source? even W3Schools.com which has been traditionally biased towards non-IE browsers only gives it ~13%.
In a world where over 90% of people are illiterate, yeah, that'd be a valid hypothesis.
Face it, pretending a significant percentage of iPhone buyers did so out of appreciation for its design is as senseless as pretending that a significant percentage of Android buyers did so out of a desire to download its source-code and hack it. The overwhelming majority of the world's population can't program worth shit, and similarly the overwhelming majority of the world's population does not have a degree in industrial design.
Admit it, both platforms are succeeding because of marketing. You know, the field whose entire purpose is to sway people to purchase a specific product? yeah. Not enlightenment or whatever.
Yeah, I realize I could put in a little effort and get much further, but I've already wasted more time just in this session than I could possibly gain back in the next the years by knowing VI inside and out.
And therein lies the crux of your problem. You're simply not a serious programmer.
Think of Vim as a mainframe: for those that require heavy computing power the investment pays for itself practically the moment you turn it on, but for a regular Joe a mainframe is nothing but an insanely expensive computer that you can't even use to browse Facebook on.
I don't recommend mainframes to regular Joes looking to browse the web, I don't recommend Hasselblads to grandmas looking to photograph their grandchildren, and I don't recommend Vim to people that need to make slight changes in a plaintext file only sporadically. But that doesn't mean they don't have a market out there.
People who need a different 5%.
Though still, browse the user scripts section of vim.org, and I guarantee you that percentage will at *least* double ;)
Isn't that true for anything?
If only. Take MS Office, for instance: most people can do the basics on it well enough, but even after years of using them, if you were to ask them "how would you set up separate 'profiles' each with a different default formatting?" for instance, they'd go menu hunting *everywhere* rather than replying with a conscise "if it can be done, it should be over here".
Something similar happens with Eclipse and Photoshop but it's not as bad. Though I suspect it's due to the relatively higher level of competence from its users rather than an objectively better interface.
And just before anybody thinks I'm just flaming Microsoft, let me state that in my opinion Visual Studio is one of the best IDEs in that respect. It does things in its own, slightly unusual way (though nowhere near as quirky as Emacs or Vim), but once you 'grok' it you can pretty much tell where everything is or should be.