Apple take a 30% cut of all revenue - you choose a price, sell it, they take 30%.
Here, Canonical are splitting (75/25) of a 10% affiliate award. So they're taking 7.5%, GNOME gets 2.5%. The other 90% is also then split between the record label and Amazon (I don't know what ratio that is - probably variable).
The cut they get on a £10 record versus the cut Apple would get on a £10 app is chicken feed.
It should also be noted that Canonical run their own music store (Ubuntu One). They have decided to also split their own profits in the same manner. This has nothing to do with Banshee or Amazon so is purely a good will gesture. Or if you're cynical, a PR exercise.
It's also irrelevant. Whether the users know or not, whether they gave permission or not, Bing is still receiving *and using* direct search data from another search engine! The click-through is monitoring two pieces of data and then providing that back to Bing - the search term entered into Google, and the page the user goes to after the results page is returned.
Let's go back here a bit. Google builds up it's search results by a variety of methods, but mainly through: * Web crawling and categorising web sites. * Recoding what results people pick whne they do a search on google.
This is more or less how we expect every search engine to work. The success of the engine hinges on the methods and algorithms used to piece all that data together in a meaningful way, thus providing useful results that keep us coming back for our search needs.
In this case, Bing has, in essence, spied on another search engine. It's taken this data deliberately (the tool bar or the server that processes the data that is monitoring the end user would need to be aware of how a search term is entered for google. It has to have been coded for this).
The fact that Google did this deliberately is irrelevant to the simple, plain fact that Bing is indeed deliberately recording Google search terms and results. And they aren't even checking such data against their own database in any meaningful way. If their own web crawling and search data was halfway competent it would have identified that the search terms didn't match the results in any meaningful way - from a simple text index to a multi-faceted category/semantic classification approach, this was a nonsense phrase unassociated with the page in question.
Are you arguing that the way this data is obtained means it's not stealing? It's only the difference between looking for something yourself or asking someone else to do the looking for you. Either way, they are relying on the results of other search engines to bolster or ammend their own. There's a degree of dishonesty and desperation about that.
Yes, but like many others here this misses the point of this particular "experiment" - this wasn't about which group of players had better twitch skills (where the keyboard/mouse combo does have an advantage) but simply about which platform had more team oriented players.
The reward was for performing team actions. Like stand next to comrade, press one key or controller button to give them a medkit. There were nearly twice as many console players as PC players yet the PC players raked in the achievements so much faster.
The implication has nothing to do with the FPS twitch skills of console gamers vs PC users but all to do with the difference in attitudes.
My initial thoughts would be that a PC user is more likely to be older, possibly with a job that involves responsibility or teamwork since a gaming PC is usually a bigger investment than a console. This translates into players who are more used to working together to achieve long-term aims vs. the instant gratification approach of potentially more selfish console players. As ever, this is a gross generalisation of course.
The.org thing was both silly and annoying but there's a reason. Shortly after becoming OpenOffice, they found out that there was already a pre-existing product with the same name. A few legal minutes later, and they decided to add the.org, deeming this small modification to the existing name would be less disruptive than renaming the entire project - product, website and marketing materials.
Whether they made the right choice is moot now though!
One of the key points of CSS is the ability to override/disable styles on the client side.
You want that site in plain text? Turn off CSS altogether. Instead of embedding fonts tags, italics, background images and so on in the HTML, it's all removed to the CSS file. Makes the HTML more useful as raw information. Makes it easier to make seepintg changes to the layout of a whole site (change one shared CSS file and voila!) and allows users to override the sites style and layout anyway they choose.
CSS makes it easier to get at the raw information and makes it easier to manage the style and layout of entire websites. If IE played nicely with the spec, then I'd be happy as pie.
Ah, much as I'm disinclined to rush to Apple's defense, they didn't "leave out" multitasking. Full pre-emptive multitasking is part of the Darwin kernel already. What Apple did was deliberately spend effort modifying the API to *hide* this capability. They made a conscious choice to not allow third party apps to multitaks, believing that this would result in a better user expierience. Tru multitasking is only available to the core OS - such as playing music in the background and the various daemons that monitor and control the phone hardware.
Whether you agree or not is another matter. But that's also why the new "multitasking" features are still not true preemptive multitasking.
Unfortunately, if you're serious about boycotting a company then that means avoiding the good as well as the bad. If you say "I'll never but from Sony again. Except this eReader" then you're not really serious about boycotting.
I agree - their e-Readers are great devices and I'd be very happy to own one but, like the grandparent, I've been burnt and put off by the antics of other parts of the company to ever hand them any of my hard earned money again.
It's not just the rendering model though. A lot of these crappy intranet products use custom ActiveX components that simply will not work with IE7 or above - sometimes due to architectural changes, other times due to security blocks (ActiveX Killbits). IE 8 already has a "Compatability mode" for rendering but this is not enough.
ActiveX. Because running arbitrary non-sandboxed code direct from websites is a Good Idea!(tm)
I remember seeing a post from one of the devs on the WoW forums (can't seem to find it atm) - they basically said that although they have no intention to create Linux native ports at this time they do acknowledge that a proportion of their fans like to run their games on a Linux based OS. So they try to keep their software Wine friendly/OS agnostic where they can. That and their codebase is probably already port-friendly by having to support OS X and Windows simultaneously as mentioned above seems to keep their software running with little to no trouble on WINE.
I suspect we'll see the same for Source games. Even more likeley we already have - they've been developing a Mac version for sometime so it's safe to assume that the Windows version already benefits from similair OS agnostic design considerations, D3D reliance asside.
Yes, but once you have that list of results you're wide open to snooping again - those URLs you visit can be snooped the same way a Google search string can be.
The rest of the web is as as open and interceptable as a plain Google search. Far better to do your dodgy web activities from an anonymous location or via something like Tor.
In either case, this is a site that's piggybacking on another company's services for free. Google haven't deliberately blocked them and whatever my personal opinion of the company may be, they are under no obligation to check if their updates break these kinds of sites.
Performance on it's own isn't meaningful for everyone. If I'm setting up a server or better yet a data center, performance against cost has to be considered. And that's not just the cost of the hardware but also things like MTBF and power costs.
I'm not implying that one is better than the other here, but a raw performance comparisson between like-for-like processors is not enough information to make spending decsion with. It may be better value to buy the system with poor performance and spend the savings elsewhere for example.
Don't Google offer an appliance for in-house use? Basically a rack mount server - plug in, config and away you go. Get the benefit of a web-based office suite with none of the security and legal concerns.
Of course that implies that you have full control over the server - I've never worked with one so I can't say if that's so.
I'll also add this in response to the grandparent:
At no point did they say they want to make non-commercial infringement *legal*. They want to de-criminalise it. Most countries in the world draw a line between criminal acts and civil violations. I fully agree that sharing files for personal use should not result in jail time, that police time and effort should not be spent safeguarding movies and music. However if someone wants to bring forward a civil suit against someone who's been filling their shelves with torrented music and video then fine. I may have that wrong but that's how I interpreted that (although in some nations civil lawsuits are way out of control as well).
All in all I find their aims reasonable, acheiveable and good for society - and not particularly detrimental to honest business either.
Irrelevant. How an open standard is defined is not the point (unless it's seriously lacking in functionality - but then it would never be used anyway).
If a standard is open it means that
a:) Somewhere there is publicly available definition of how to implement that standard. Like a list of all HTML tags, what they mean and guidelines on hwo to render them.
b:) No patents or licencing restrictions. A particular library or implementation may be protected (Opera's paid for web browser, for example), but I and others are free to choose other software that also follows the standard or implement our own.
c:) Documents and data based on the standard are interchangeable - I can view an HTML document in nearly any browser and still read and view it.
Ultimately, encouraging the use of open standards limits noone (be it company or individual) and empowers end users and society in general. In the case of a format like ODF for example, nothing at all prevents MS fully supporting it - that they do so half heartedly is their choice.
What a widely used open standard does do, however, is force sofware implementations to compete - be it on value for money, features, reliability, speed etc. That's only bad for those companies or groups that simply lack the ability to compete fairly.
So no, it matters not how the standard was defined - if it's solid, useable and open then it's all good. Needless to say, it's often better to have multiple open standards for certain things to allow competition between the formats themsleves.
Of course they (the publishers) see that as someone else choosing to spend $45 on a used game instead of buying a new game from them.
The re-seller in your example may purchase more new games with the extra money from his old games, but that doesn't equal the "lost sale" that the publishers perceive. And it's slight worse than that - most newly released games are already available second hand within a few days of release - and at only a very slight discount. In exchange for a paltry discount on a breaking new game, the publisher loses a sale. I see brand-new, just released games already in the second-hand game bin 24 hours after it hit the shelves and usually only 2 or 3 pounds cheaper. And unlike most physical goods, there's less of a stigma about used games - there is no degredation of quality in used software. Most of us are not concerned with having a shiny new copy of the DVD as long as it works, unlike - for example - walking around in a second hand suit.
I sound like I'm on their side, don't I? Well I'm not. I do empaphise - this immediate undercutting must put a dent in their sales. But it's part and parcel of commerce. Any non-disposable product you produce is subject to be resold, given away, shared etc. You take that into account. You make the idea of owning the shiny new one more attractive. You don't start using kill switches or disposable components.
I dislike the way the games stores have pushed and grown the second-hand market to it's current state. Second hand used to mean getting an older game a few weeks or months later at a reasonable price. Now it means cutting out the publisher for hardly any benefit to me. £3 off a £50 is nothing, really. But it's still going to beat the full price new copies.
But the publishers approach to this is equally deplorable - one-shot DLC? DRM (since that what's it's really for nowadays)? Non-transferable online components in a single player game? It's like trying to fix a problem by making your products worse, not better.
My initial response is "how callous, how cold" but stepping back I can't argue that your're completely wrong. I see many "how can you justify killing a child" type responses below and once again I find myself gritting my teeth at how we all want and need simple black and white answers to complex moral dilemmas.
Is a child's life worth a few hundred dollars or whatever? Of course not. Will capitulating to such a demand encourage such acts in the future? Very likely.
What's the answer? I don't think there is one. I both envy and fear the fact that you can make such a judgement call so solidly but I think I'd never be able to make such a decision until I was thrust into such a position for real.
Scale it up from a singel criminal versus a man and child to whole countries, communities and nations and it gets more complex, not less.
Well, all Macs have remote ssh support so if you were so inclined, you could spend 3 minutes wrting a shell script to restart a service or rename 500 macs. Out of the box (assuming you configured each appropriately when setting them up on your LAN, as you would have to do with Windows as well).
If you're working at that level, there's not a lot of difference between platforms to be honest. If you're referring to GUI level tools and utilities though then yes, OS X is lacking in that regard compared to Windows (OTB).
Slashdot Mirror
You're a little off target.
Apple take a 30% cut of all revenue - you choose a price, sell it, they take 30%.
Here, Canonical are splitting (75/25) of a 10% affiliate award. So they're taking 7.5%, GNOME gets 2.5%. The other 90% is also then split between the record label and Amazon (I don't know what ratio that is - probably variable).
The cut they get on a £10 record versus the cut Apple would get on a £10 app is chicken feed.
It should also be noted that Canonical run their own music store (Ubuntu One). They have decided to also split their own profits in the same manner. This has nothing to do with Banshee or Amazon so is purely a good will gesture. Or if you're cynical, a PR exercise.
It's also irrelevant. Whether the users know or not, whether they gave permission or not, Bing is still receiving *and using* direct search data from another search engine! The click-through is monitoring two pieces of data and then providing that back to Bing - the search term entered into Google, and the page the user goes to after the results page is returned.
Let's go back here a bit. Google builds up it's search results by a variety of methods, but mainly through:
* Web crawling and categorising web sites.
* Recoding what results people pick whne they do a search on google.
This is more or less how we expect every search engine to work. The success of the engine hinges on the methods and algorithms used to piece all that data together in a meaningful way, thus providing useful results that keep us coming back for our search needs.
In this case, Bing has, in essence, spied on another search engine. It's taken this data deliberately (the tool bar or the server that processes the data that is monitoring the end user would need to be aware of how a search term is entered for google. It has to have been coded for this).
The fact that Google did this deliberately is irrelevant to the simple, plain fact that Bing is indeed deliberately recording Google search terms and results. And they aren't even checking such data against their own database in any meaningful way. If their own web crawling and search data was halfway competent it would have identified that the search terms didn't match the results in any meaningful way - from a simple text index to a multi-faceted category/semantic classification approach, this was a nonsense phrase unassociated with the page in question.
Are you arguing that the way this data is obtained means it's not stealing? It's only the difference between looking for something yourself or asking someone else to do the looking for you. Either way, they are relying on the results of other search engines to bolster or ammend their own. There's a degree of dishonesty and desperation about that.
Yes, but like many others here this misses the point of this particular "experiment" - this wasn't about which group of players had better twitch skills (where the keyboard/mouse combo does have an advantage) but simply about which platform had more team oriented players.
The reward was for performing team actions. Like stand next to comrade, press one key or controller button to give them a medkit. There were nearly twice as many console players as PC players yet the PC players raked in the achievements so much faster.
The implication has nothing to do with the FPS twitch skills of console gamers vs PC users but all to do with the difference in attitudes.
My initial thoughts would be that a PC user is more likely to be older, possibly with a job that involves responsibility or teamwork since a gaming PC is usually a bigger investment than a console. This translates into players who are more used to working together to achieve long-term aims vs. the instant gratification approach of potentially more selfish console players. As ever, this is a gross generalisation of course.
The .org thing was both silly and annoying but there's a reason. Shortly after becoming OpenOffice, they found out that there was already a pre-existing product with the same name. A few legal minutes later, and they decided to add the .org, deeming this small modification to the existing name would be less disruptive than renaming the entire project - product, website and marketing materials.
Whether they made the right choice is moot now though!
One of the key points of CSS is the ability to override/disable styles on the client side.
You want that site in plain text? Turn off CSS altogether. Instead of embedding fonts tags, italics, background images and so on in the HTML, it's all removed to the CSS file. Makes the HTML more useful as raw information. Makes it easier to make seepintg changes to the layout of a whole site (change one shared CSS file and voila!) and allows users to override the sites style and layout anyway they choose.
CSS makes it easier to get at the raw information and makes it easier to manage the style and layout of entire websites. If IE played nicely with the spec, then I'd be happy as pie.
Ah, much as I'm disinclined to rush to Apple's defense, they didn't "leave out" multitasking. Full pre-emptive multitasking is part of the Darwin kernel already. What Apple did was deliberately spend effort modifying the API to *hide* this capability. They made a conscious choice to not allow third party apps to multitaks, believing that this would result in a better user expierience. Tru multitasking is only available to the core OS - such as playing music in the background and the various daemons that monitor and control the phone hardware.
Whether you agree or not is another matter. But that's also why the new "multitasking" features are still not true preemptive multitasking.
Unfortunately, if you're serious about boycotting a company then that means avoiding the good as well as the bad. If you say "I'll never but from Sony again. Except this eReader" then you're not really serious about boycotting.
I agree - their e-Readers are great devices and I'd be very happy to own one but, like the grandparent, I've been burnt and put off by the antics of other parts of the company to ever hand them any of my hard earned money again.
It's not just the rendering model though. A lot of these crappy intranet products use custom ActiveX components that simply will not work with IE7 or above - sometimes due to architectural changes, other times due to security blocks (ActiveX Killbits). IE 8 already has a "Compatability mode" for rendering but this is not enough.
ActiveX. Because running arbitrary non-sandboxed code direct from websites is a Good Idea!(tm)
Uerghhh....
It reminded me of the Matrix, where the first movie was more sci-fi and the second and third were all a bunch of confused pseudo-religious nonsense.
Ahh, sorry - you've lost me. There was only ever one Matrix movie.
Don't cross the stre^H^H^H^H pacmen!
If you have a friend on hand (or some serious ambidextrous skills....) click "Inser Coin" twice and use the WASD keys to control MsPacman!
I remember seeing a post from one of the devs on the WoW forums (can't seem to find it atm) - they basically said that although they have no intention to create Linux native ports at this time they do acknowledge that a proportion of their fans like to run their games on a Linux based OS. So they try to keep their software Wine friendly/OS agnostic where they can. That and their codebase is probably already port-friendly by having to support OS X and Windows simultaneously as mentioned above seems to keep their software running with little to no trouble on WINE.
I suspect we'll see the same for Source games. Even more likeley we already have - they've been developing a Mac version for sometime so it's safe to assume that the Windows version already benefits from similair OS agnostic design considerations, D3D reliance asside.
Yes, but once you have that list of results you're wide open to snooping again - those URLs you visit can be snooped the same way a Google search string can be.
The rest of the web is as as open and interceptable as a plain Google search. Far better to do your dodgy web activities from an anonymous location or via something like Tor.
In either case, this is a site that's piggybacking on another company's services for free. Google haven't deliberately blocked them and whatever my personal opinion of the company may be, they are under no obligation to check if their updates break these kinds of sites.
Performance on it's own isn't meaningful for everyone. If I'm setting up a server or better yet a data center, performance against cost has to be considered. And that's not just the cost of the hardware but also things like MTBF and power costs.
I'm not implying that one is better than the other here, but a raw performance comparisson between like-for-like processors is not enough information to make spending decsion with. It may be better value to buy the system with poor performance and spend the savings elsewhere for example.
Don't Google offer an appliance for in-house use? Basically a rack mount server - plug in, config and away you go. Get the benefit of a web-based office suite with none of the security and legal concerns.
Of course that implies that you have full control over the server - I've never worked with one so I can't say if that's so.
If the market was fair and the populace well informed. People don't choose Flash - they have Flash thrust upon them.
I'll also add this in response to the grandparent:
At no point did they say they want to make non-commercial infringement *legal*. They want to de-criminalise it. Most countries in the world draw a line between criminal acts and civil violations. I fully agree that sharing files for personal use should not result in jail time, that police time and effort should not be spent safeguarding movies and music.
However if someone wants to bring forward a civil suit against someone who's been filling their shelves with torrented music and video then fine. I may have that wrong but that's how I interpreted that (although in some nations civil lawsuits are way out of control as well).
All in all I find their aims reasonable, acheiveable and good for society - and not particularly detrimental to honest business either.
Irrelevant. How an open standard is defined is not the point (unless it's seriously lacking in functionality - but then it would never be used anyway).
If a standard is open it means that
a:) Somewhere there is publicly available definition of how to implement that standard. Like a list of all HTML tags, what they mean and guidelines on hwo to render them.
b:) No patents or licencing restrictions. A particular library or implementation may be protected (Opera's paid for web browser, for example), but I and others are free to choose other software that also follows the standard or implement our own.
c:) Documents and data based on the standard are interchangeable - I can view an HTML document in nearly any browser and still read and view it.
Ultimately, encouraging the use of open standards limits noone (be it company or individual) and empowers end users and society in general. In the case of a format like ODF for example, nothing at all prevents MS fully supporting it - that they do so half heartedly is their choice.
What a widely used open standard does do, however, is force sofware implementations to compete - be it on value for money, features, reliability, speed etc. That's only bad for those companies or groups that simply lack the ability to compete fairly.
So no, it matters not how the standard was defined - if it's solid, useable and open then it's all good. Needless to say, it's often better to have multiple open standards for certain things to allow competition between the formats themsleves.
Of course they (the publishers) see that as someone else choosing to spend $45 on a used game instead of buying a new game from them.
The re-seller in your example may purchase more new games with the extra money from his old games, but that doesn't equal the "lost sale" that the publishers perceive. And it's slight worse than that - most newly released games are already available second hand within a few days of release - and at only a very slight discount. In exchange for a paltry discount on a breaking new game, the publisher loses a sale. I see brand-new, just released games already in the second-hand game bin 24 hours after it hit the shelves and usually only 2 or 3 pounds cheaper. And unlike most physical goods, there's less of a stigma about used games - there is no degredation of quality in used software. Most of us are not concerned with having a shiny new copy of the DVD as long as it works, unlike - for example - walking around in a second hand suit.
I sound like I'm on their side, don't I? Well I'm not. I do empaphise - this immediate undercutting must put a dent in their sales. But it's part and parcel of commerce. Any non-disposable product you produce is subject to be resold, given away, shared etc. You take that into account. You make the idea of owning the shiny new one more attractive. You don't start using kill switches or disposable components.
I dislike the way the games stores have pushed and grown the second-hand market to it's current state. Second hand used to mean getting an older game a few weeks or months later at a reasonable price. Now it means cutting out the publisher for hardly any benefit to me. £3 off a £50 is nothing, really. But it's still going to beat the full price new copies.
But the publishers approach to this is equally deplorable - one-shot DLC? DRM (since that what's it's really for nowadays)? Non-transferable online components in a single player game? It's like trying to fix a problem by making your products worse, not better.
Sorry, my response was to parent. Fat-fingered click-itis today....
My initial response is "how callous, how cold" but stepping back I can't argue that your're completely wrong. I see many "how can you justify killing a child" type responses below and once again I find myself gritting my teeth at how we all want and need simple black and white answers to complex moral dilemmas.
Is a child's life worth a few hundred dollars or whatever? Of course not.
Will capitulating to such a demand encourage such acts in the future? Very likely.
What's the answer? I don't think there is one. I both envy and fear the fact that you can make such a judgement call so solidly but I think I'd never be able to make such a decision until I was thrust into such a position for real.
Scale it up from a singel criminal versus a man and child to whole countries, communities and nations and it gets more complex, not less.
I don't think I've ever seen this idea explained in such a succint and clear manner - truly a comment worthy of the label "Insightful".
No! No! Making me exhale coffee through my nose is bad! Bad! For both me and my screen!
Save the worlds nostrils! Protect monitors! Mod parent down!
(Funniest 4 words all week, kudos sir!)
Better yet, the bug is 17 years old - the bug existed before XP was a twinkle in lil 'ol Gates' eye....
For the sake of fairness...
Well, all Macs have remote ssh support so if you were so inclined, you could spend 3 minutes wrting a shell script to restart a service or rename 500 macs. Out of the box (assuming you configured each appropriately when setting them up on your LAN, as you would have to do with Windows as well).
If you're working at that level, there's not a lot of difference between platforms to be honest. If you're referring to GUI level tools and utilities though then yes, OS X is lacking in that regard compared to Windows (OTB).