I'm no fan of Microsoft (particularly what with the OOXML vote in Sweden), but I'm also not a fan of sensational journalism.
Microsoft has expressly backed the CCIA's complaint regarding fair use. This makes economic sense for them, as they have some media related products that depend on fair use in order to be legal (as far as Microsoft cares about being legal).
They have also backed the Copyright Alliance, which generally benefits them because without copyright laws, they'd have little ability to prevent people from freely distributing their product. There's nothing to suggest that Microsoft supports this particular opinion piece from one representative (albeit the executive director) of the Copyright Alliance.
There's no duplicity here. Just because Microsoft generally agrees with the platform of the Copyright Alliance does not mean they agree with all of the overzealous statements made by its representatives. I know plenty of people who support open source, but disagree with RMS when he gets a bit overzealous.
I did. I used to play quite a few games in my spare time. I got sick enough of windows that the Windows based games I used to enjoy weren't enough to hold me on the platfrom.
When I switched to Linux, Flash 7 was all that was available. It was fairly unreliable, and unsupported by more recent stuff, so even flash gaming was more or less out of the question.
If there were a wider variety of games that were stable on Linux (even using WINE), I might pick up a game now and then. Then again, I might have gotten used to not gaming to the point where I just keep not gaming (at least on the PC).
OpenOffice and KOffice would have OOXML support before Microsoft... Microsoft are having enough problems themselves supporting their own format... they don't even have a compliant application available yet...
But when people save an OOXML file with MS Office and it doesn't render properly in OpenOffice and KOffice, they are going to assume the problem is with KOffice and OOo, since Microsoft specified the standard. Unless Microsoft gets sued for claiming they're standards compliant when they aren't, you're going to have a tough time convincing consumers that the Open Source alternatives do a better job at implementing OOXML than Microsoft.
The burden of proof in a civil case is only "a preponderance of evidence" i.e. enough evidence to convince a judge/jury you're probably at fault.
This is something of a concern to me. I am at one of the universities targeted by the RIAA this year. I've been somewhat concerned that they would send settlement letters to random students. If I refused to settle, they'd get a chance to look at my computer. Now, I haven't partaken in file sharing since napster got shut down by the 9th circuit court, but I do have ~20 GB of purchased music on my hard drives, and I don't know that I could produce receipts or CDs for all of them (probably around 90%).
My concern subsequently becomes, is attending school at one of the top 20 file sharing universities, having 20 GB of music, and not being able to prove where I got some of it enough to convince a judge or jury that I'm probably at fault?
Bullet-proof-X has been on the to-do list for Ubuntu for at least two or three releases. I agree we probably should have seen it sooner, but I don't think this is something that could have been provided by a simple little script - it needed some significant advancements from Xorg, and that took time.
He then used Viacom's derivative work, but, it seems, didn't provide any commentary on the clip you uploaded to YouTube.
Here's an interesting caveat with YouTube and fair use. The submitter said he posted the video on YouTube so he could put it up on his own blog - making use of YouTube as a file host. Assuming the blogger did make (written) commentary on his own blog, but the video is also available on YouTube without commentary, where would fair use come down on the issue? (I'm also assuming it was not an entire work from Viacom, simply a section of a TV show that talked about his ad.)
Even before "Hot Date" you could get two Sims with a high enough "friendship/love" rating (either male/female or female/female but for some reason not male/male), to go to the bed, take off their clothes (behind a blur, of course, just like when they shower or go to the toilet), get in to the bed together, cuddle up to each other and then slide completely under the blankets. The blankets would then bounce up and down for a several seconds and the Sims would emerge with much higher "social" and "fun" scores.
And let's not forget a much lowered cleanliness score. But as I recall in the sims 1, you couldn't "Play in bed" or "woohoo" until hot date introduced the big bed with the heart. The Sims 2 allowed sims to "Woohoo!" in any bed, hot tub, etc. But the Sims 1 was much more limited.
So judges in this country can't reason if I don't hire a $200/hr lawyer? What if I've got 5 kids to feed and don't have money for a lawyer?
You're being sued for $40,000. While $200/hr for a lawyer is expensive, it's not as expensive as bing found liable (particularly if you can pursue damages later). If you are incapable of producing the money for a lawyer, then such a suit would probably bankrupt you, in which case the RIAA isn't getting money out of you anyway.
While I agree that a lawyer shouldn't be strictly necessary, the cost of a lawyer will almost certainly be less than the expenses, so if you can pay for one, it wouldn't be wise not to.
This seems like an OO WTF. Why is linuxDistro an array object? Shouldn't it be instantiated by something along the lines of linuxDistro = LinuxDistro.new("Ubuntu")?
The reason Comcast doesnt tell you is if they did, asshat downloaders would lawyer the total and if lets say it was 100, they'd use 99.9999 then whine if they were denied that much.
I don't think Comcast's concern is asshats. If they had to specify a set limit, it would have to be something they could meet for all (or nearly all) of their customers. Maybe they could give every customer 100 GB/month. They have to allot that much to the torrenters, the gamers, the occasional youtube browser, and the grandma who gets pictures e-mailed to her of the grandkids.
Alternatively, they could not specify a hard limit (though I think their contract should mention a fuzzy limit), and let the torrenters and gamers tap into a bit of the unused bandwidth from the youtube guy and the grandma. I'd be careful demanding a hard limit, because it's going to be a lot lower than the fuzzy limit.
Incidentally, I happen to have 300 GB of video on my computer that I've recorded with MythTV. To be exact, 315 GB is 13 days, 19 hours, and 36 minutes worth of television. Consider 30 days in the average month, and most people spend 1/3 of their time sleeping, that's 20 days worth of hours in which to function. If you're downloading 315 GB/month and watching everything, you've only got about 6 days left out of your month to do things such as pick torrents to download and work to pay for food and your broadband connection.
Admittedly, if you're torrenting you're also uploading, so you may end up with 150 GB worth of video for every 300 GB worth of bandwidth, but 300 GB should be plenty for most legitimate home uses.
Don't Knoppix and other live CDs allow users of Windows OS to approximate the frustration levels of the distributions that they're based on?
I find LiveCD's to be quite useful for recovery purposes and occasionally testing purposes, but I don't think they come close to giving a feel for the operating system.
For starters, you have to load it into memory, which means it's far slower than the system would be installed. Second, it resets every time you reboot, which means you can't (permanently) configure the system at all. Unless the LiveCD comes with proprietary graphics and wireless drivers, most people won't be able to gauge the frustration level of getting drivers working.
Sure, you can tell Gentoo from Mepis using the LiveCD, but LiveCD's hardly give an accurate measure of what the OS is like installed.
Hrmm... Should've used preview. What it should have been:
But if macOSX.getFrustration() windows.getFrustration(), then we have a switcher.
But for a windows user, windows.getFrustration() is a known value, while macOSX.getFrustration() and linuxDistro[i].getFrustration() have unknown values. Now, I've worked with Windows, OSX, and Ubuntu, and I find the frustration level of Windows to be an order of magnitude higher than either of the others, but to someone who can't measure the frustration levels of the alternatives easily, windows.getFrustration() may have to get very high before a user will switch.
But for a windows user, windows.getFrustration() is a known value, while macOSX.getFrustration() and linuxDistro[i].getFrustration() have unknown values. Now, I've worked with Windows, OSX, and Ubuntu, and I find the frustration level of Windows to be an order of magnitude higher than either of the others, but to someone who can't measure the frustration levels of the alternatives easily, windows.getFrustration() may have to get very high before a user will switch.
I agree. This may not have been the original intent that spawned the phrase, but you can't say that people are wrong to put words together in an order that makes sense because those words in that order have been defined to have a different meaning.
The word "begs" has a definition of "to make a humble or urgent plea." If one is to make a humble or urgent plea for a question, they are begging a question - no matter what other definition people try to claim "begging the question" has.
If I were to claim "going to the store" had a definition relatively unrelated to that combination of words, it might be acceptable to use that definition, but it's absurd to suggest that people should stop using the phrase "going to the store" in relation to running over to the supermarket.
On one hand I agree that it's unfair and unscientific to disregard someone's evidence because they have a history of dabbling in the dubious. On the other hand, I'm much less likely to accept this at face value knowing the author's other undertakings, and more likely to insist on more evidence before making a decision on the subject.
I have to wonder if the six month extension exists specifically so some third party can create a workaround for the DRM, allowing people to keep their videos forever. Google obviously can't release such a thing without violating contracts with the media providers, but they might be able to make it very easy for such a thing to get produced.
Lots of people seem to object on the grounds that it's not open source. Generally, I prefer to use open source alternatives where available, but Gnash isn't up to speed for playing flash videos.
My big question is, where is the open source competitor to Flash? There may be something I'm unaware of, but look at the different media formats. MP3 has Ogg Vorbis as a Free competitor, GIF has PNG, MPG has Theora, ODF covers the gamut for office formats, Mono is a free alternative to.Net, and the list goes on. While it's nice to have interpreters for the formats that are de facto standards, I see as much or more value in projects with similar goals that aren't exactly clones. Where is the open source attempt to replace flash?
What if this new major program prevented (via scheduling, resource, and location conflicts) the students ability to be engaged in multiple interests?
This was my thinking exactly. Aside from the fact that I didn't figure out what I wanted to do with my life until my sophomore year in high school (still early for most kids), I was a theater kid in high school. I enjoyed acting (to a degree), directing, and the technical aspects of putting on shows. I took every theatre class that was offered (I even took one of them twice). It was a great deal of fun and I can't imagine highschool without it, but I also knew there was no career in it for me.
Now, I still took every computer science class offered (except one, which I tested out of) plus an independent study in CS. I was also in the highest level physics offered and the second highest math course.
Basically, highschool was my opportunity to figure out what I wanted to do with myself. Lot's of my classmates didn't know what they wanted to do by graduation, much less by enrollment. This just strikes me as a terrible idea.
What's the point of it being open source if people can't use it?
To learn from it? When I was first learning to code, I used all sorts of sample code that couldn't be implemented directly, but was quite useful from a learning perspective. This is why I don't oppose Tivoisation. While users may not be able to use the code directly, it may be possible to implement the code for other similar purposes and still benefit from open source.
This is a good point... even if you're still stuck on 128kbps/44.1kHz audio, unless you're talking a real high-quality stereo with high-quality speakers with perfect linearity and a flat response, you're not going to hear the difference.
I beg to differ. I'm not one to claim perfect ears that can distinguish the tiniest imperfections, but I can tell you that on my iPod headphones I can definitely hear the difference between a 128 kbps mp3 and a CD. Most of my music is encoded at 192 kbps, though recently I've started encoding a bit higher.
I agree that the issue of lossy audio compression is way overblown, but 128 kbps is low enough quality to be noticeable on average speakers.
Plausible deniability. By pointing to third party repositories, the Automatix author can try to avoid responsibility or lawsuit for providing the restricted packages, such as libdvdcss and w32codecs.
Valid point, but there are already third party repositories that offer debs they could use rather than their current methods. If that won't work for whatever reason, why not do something similar to how the non-free flash is installed. Create a deb that runs a script that grabs a tarball from somewhere else and installs the software from that. It should also be able to comply with "remove" orders as well.
The point is, it wouldn't be too difficult to implement a system that used repositories and didn't have to break with a dist-upgrade.
You should also respect them for publicly claiming that Linux "violates" X patents owned by Microsoft.
And that anyone using Linux (unless specially licensed) owes Microsoft some money.
And for Microsoft's continuing attempts to kill / marginalize the ODF standard.
Yes, Microsoft deserves your respect and not your disgust. So says an executive from a company that has purchased a "partnership" with Microsoft.
Exactly. I can accept that Microsoft doesn't have to fail for Linux to succeed, but I'm not going to respect Microsoft so long as they're not playing fair.
I will begin to respect Microsoft when they: stop making specious claims of patent violations (or making other claims that Linux users owe them), stop using their monopoly to break established standards and create their own proprietary standards (furthering their monopoly), and stop abusing the legal system so they can keep a wide user base without putting their time into developing a solid operating system.
I won't really respect Microsoft until they start treating their users as their customers rather than criminals. Their activation system is disrespectful to their customers and a pain for honest computer users. The DRM they've pushed forward also treats honest users as criminals.
In short, I'll stop complaining about Microsoft when they accept the competition and allow Linux to exist without paying them for "protection". I will respect Microsoft when they start earning their customers honestly.
If Canonical themselves can't make an update system that works, how do they expect Automatix to do it?
I've had problems with updates as well, but it can usually be tracked down to third party repositories or software I installed from source. On systems where I stuck strictly to the official repositories, I've had no problems with upgrades.
The main criticism of Automatix is that it makes things unnecessarily complicated. Why not just create an Automatix repository and have their program direct apt to install the programs and dependencies. Then it could continue to be managed by the repositories. There might be a few programs offered by Automatix that this wouldn't be practical, but for the majority it would work fine. Canonical may have a few problems with system updates, but Automatix doesn't even attempt to keep the package system in order.
As many have pointed out, we pay lab fees, so I'm don't think that accounts for the difference.
One thing to consider is that if a person with an engineering degree can earn more than a person with a liberal arts degree, you probably have to pay the engineering professors more than liberal arts professors. Most professors definitely have an interest in pure research, but if they could be making $100,000 a year more by going into the field instead of teaching, they've got a good bargaining chip for their salary. On the flip side, a liberal arts professor (particularly in some areas) might be hard pressed to make as much money in the field as they can as a professor.
Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. Many of my classmates are paying their way through school on student loans. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should take an engineering student as long to pay off their loans as a music major - and with the availability of loans, I don't imagine this will keep students from pursuing their interests.
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Microsoft has expressly backed the CCIA's complaint regarding fair use. This makes economic sense for them, as they have some media related products that depend on fair use in order to be legal (as far as Microsoft cares about being legal).
They have also backed the Copyright Alliance, which generally benefits them because without copyright laws, they'd have little ability to prevent people from freely distributing their product. There's nothing to suggest that Microsoft supports this particular opinion piece from one representative (albeit the executive director) of the Copyright Alliance.
There's no duplicity here. Just because Microsoft generally agrees with the platform of the Copyright Alliance does not mean they agree with all of the overzealous statements made by its representatives. I know plenty of people who support open source, but disagree with RMS when he gets a bit overzealous.
When I switched to Linux, Flash 7 was all that was available. It was fairly unreliable, and unsupported by more recent stuff, so even flash gaming was more or less out of the question.
If there were a wider variety of games that were stable on Linux (even using WINE), I might pick up a game now and then. Then again, I might have gotten used to not gaming to the point where I just keep not gaming (at least on the PC).
But when people save an OOXML file with MS Office and it doesn't render properly in OpenOffice and KOffice, they are going to assume the problem is with KOffice and OOo, since Microsoft specified the standard. Unless Microsoft gets sued for claiming they're standards compliant when they aren't, you're going to have a tough time convincing consumers that the Open Source alternatives do a better job at implementing OOXML than Microsoft.
This is something of a concern to me. I am at one of the universities targeted by the RIAA this year. I've been somewhat concerned that they would send settlement letters to random students. If I refused to settle, they'd get a chance to look at my computer. Now, I haven't partaken in file sharing since napster got shut down by the 9th circuit court, but I do have ~20 GB of purchased music on my hard drives, and I don't know that I could produce receipts or CDs for all of them (probably around 90%).
My concern subsequently becomes, is attending school at one of the top 20 file sharing universities, having 20 GB of music, and not being able to prove where I got some of it enough to convince a judge or jury that I'm probably at fault?
Bullet-proof-X has been on the to-do list for Ubuntu for at least two or three releases. I agree we probably should have seen it sooner, but I don't think this is something that could have been provided by a simple little script - it needed some significant advancements from Xorg, and that took time.
Here's an interesting caveat with YouTube and fair use. The submitter said he posted the video on YouTube so he could put it up on his own blog - making use of YouTube as a file host. Assuming the blogger did make (written) commentary on his own blog, but the video is also available on YouTube without commentary, where would fair use come down on the issue? (I'm also assuming it was not an entire work from Viacom, simply a section of a TV show that talked about his ad.)
And let's not forget a much lowered cleanliness score. But as I recall in the sims 1, you couldn't "Play in bed" or "woohoo" until hot date introduced the big bed with the heart. The Sims 2 allowed sims to "Woohoo!" in any bed, hot tub, etc. But the Sims 1 was much more limited.
You're being sued for $40,000. While $200/hr for a lawyer is expensive, it's not as expensive as bing found liable (particularly if you can pursue damages later). If you are incapable of producing the money for a lawyer, then such a suit would probably bankrupt you, in which case the RIAA isn't getting money out of you anyway.
While I agree that a lawyer shouldn't be strictly necessary, the cost of a lawyer will almost certainly be less than the expenses, so if you can pay for one, it wouldn't be wise not to.
I don't think Comcast's concern is asshats. If they had to specify a set limit, it would have to be something they could meet for all (or nearly all) of their customers. Maybe they could give every customer 100 GB/month. They have to allot that much to the torrenters, the gamers, the occasional youtube browser, and the grandma who gets pictures e-mailed to her of the grandkids.
Alternatively, they could not specify a hard limit (though I think their contract should mention a fuzzy limit), and let the torrenters and gamers tap into a bit of the unused bandwidth from the youtube guy and the grandma. I'd be careful demanding a hard limit, because it's going to be a lot lower than the fuzzy limit.
Incidentally, I happen to have 300 GB of video on my computer that I've recorded with MythTV. To be exact, 315 GB is 13 days, 19 hours, and 36 minutes worth of television. Consider 30 days in the average month, and most people spend 1/3 of their time sleeping, that's 20 days worth of hours in which to function. If you're downloading 315 GB/month and watching everything, you've only got about 6 days left out of your month to do things such as pick torrents to download and work to pay for food and your broadband connection.
Admittedly, if you're torrenting you're also uploading, so you may end up with 150 GB worth of video for every 300 GB worth of bandwidth, but 300 GB should be plenty for most legitimate home uses.
I find LiveCD's to be quite useful for recovery purposes and occasionally testing purposes, but I don't think they come close to giving a feel for the operating system.
For starters, you have to load it into memory, which means it's far slower than the system would be installed. Second, it resets every time you reboot, which means you can't (permanently) configure the system at all. Unless the LiveCD comes with proprietary graphics and wireless drivers, most people won't be able to gauge the frustration level of getting drivers working.
Sure, you can tell Gentoo from Mepis using the LiveCD, but LiveCD's hardly give an accurate measure of what the OS is like installed.
But for a windows user, windows.getFrustration() is a known value, while macOSX.getFrustration() and linuxDistro[i].getFrustration() have unknown values. Now, I've worked with Windows, OSX, and Ubuntu, and I find the frustration level of Windows to be an order of magnitude higher than either of the others, but to someone who can't measure the frustration levels of the alternatives easily, windows.getFrustration() may have to get very high before a user will switch.
The word "begs" has a definition of "to make a humble or urgent plea." If one is to make a humble or urgent plea for a question, they are begging a question - no matter what other definition people try to claim "begging the question" has.
If I were to claim "going to the store" had a definition relatively unrelated to that combination of words, it might be acceptable to use that definition, but it's absurd to suggest that people should stop using the phrase "going to the store" in relation to running over to the supermarket.
On one hand I agree that it's unfair and unscientific to disregard someone's evidence because they have a history of dabbling in the dubious. On the other hand, I'm much less likely to accept this at face value knowing the author's other undertakings, and more likely to insist on more evidence before making a decision on the subject.
I have to wonder if the six month extension exists specifically so some third party can create a workaround for the DRM, allowing people to keep their videos forever. Google obviously can't release such a thing without violating contracts with the media providers, but they might be able to make it very easy for such a thing to get produced.
My big question is, where is the open source competitor to Flash? There may be something I'm unaware of, but look at the different media formats. MP3 has Ogg Vorbis as a Free competitor, GIF has PNG, MPG has Theora, ODF covers the gamut for office formats, Mono is a free alternative to
This was my thinking exactly. Aside from the fact that I didn't figure out what I wanted to do with my life until my sophomore year in high school (still early for most kids), I was a theater kid in high school. I enjoyed acting (to a degree), directing, and the technical aspects of putting on shows. I took every theatre class that was offered (I even took one of them twice). It was a great deal of fun and I can't imagine highschool without it, but I also knew there was no career in it for me.
Now, I still took every computer science class offered (except one, which I tested out of) plus an independent study in CS. I was also in the highest level physics offered and the second highest math course.
Basically, highschool was my opportunity to figure out what I wanted to do with myself. Lot's of my classmates didn't know what they wanted to do by graduation, much less by enrollment. This just strikes me as a terrible idea.
To learn from it? When I was first learning to code, I used all sorts of sample code that couldn't be implemented directly, but was quite useful from a learning perspective. This is why I don't oppose Tivoisation. While users may not be able to use the code directly, it may be possible to implement the code for other similar purposes and still benefit from open source.
I beg to differ. I'm not one to claim perfect ears that can distinguish the tiniest imperfections, but I can tell you that on my iPod headphones I can definitely hear the difference between a 128 kbps mp3 and a CD. Most of my music is encoded at 192 kbps, though recently I've started encoding a bit higher.
I agree that the issue of lossy audio compression is way overblown, but 128 kbps is low enough quality to be noticeable on average speakers.
Valid point, but there are already third party repositories that offer debs they could use rather than their current methods. If that won't work for whatever reason, why not do something similar to how the non-free flash is installed. Create a deb that runs a script that grabs a tarball from somewhere else and installs the software from that. It should also be able to comply with "remove" orders as well.
The point is, it wouldn't be too difficult to implement a system that used repositories and didn't have to break with a dist-upgrade.
Exactly. I can accept that Microsoft doesn't have to fail for Linux to succeed, but I'm not going to respect Microsoft so long as they're not playing fair.
I will begin to respect Microsoft when they: stop making specious claims of patent violations (or making other claims that Linux users owe them), stop using their monopoly to break established standards and create their own proprietary standards (furthering their monopoly), and stop abusing the legal system so they can keep a wide user base without putting their time into developing a solid operating system.
I won't really respect Microsoft until they start treating their users as their customers rather than criminals. Their activation system is disrespectful to their customers and a pain for honest computer users. The DRM they've pushed forward also treats honest users as criminals.
In short, I'll stop complaining about Microsoft when they accept the competition and allow Linux to exist without paying them for "protection". I will respect Microsoft when they start earning their customers honestly.
I've had problems with updates as well, but it can usually be tracked down to third party repositories or software I installed from source. On systems where I stuck strictly to the official repositories, I've had no problems with upgrades.
The main criticism of Automatix is that it makes things unnecessarily complicated. Why not just create an Automatix repository and have their program direct apt to install the programs and dependencies. Then it could continue to be managed by the repositories. There might be a few programs offered by Automatix that this wouldn't be practical, but for the majority it would work fine. Canonical may have a few problems with system updates, but Automatix doesn't even attempt to keep the package system in order.
One thing to consider is that if a person with an engineering degree can earn more than a person with a liberal arts degree, you probably have to pay the engineering professors more than liberal arts professors. Most professors definitely have an interest in pure research, but if they could be making $100,000 a year more by going into the field instead of teaching, they've got a good bargaining chip for their salary. On the flip side, a liberal arts professor (particularly in some areas) might be hard pressed to make as much money in the field as they can as a professor.
Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. Many of my classmates are paying their way through school on student loans. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it should take an engineering student as long to pay off their loans as a music major - and with the availability of loans, I don't imagine this will keep students from pursuing their interests.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been under the impression that having a contract with invalid conditions does not invalidate the entire contract.