Though this may be recent scientifically released info it is simply a rehash of what was analyzed 10-15 years ago. We all knew the issue was with identity and with distance. Again, this is just a rehash of what we knew long long ago and is not news.
I agree, the phone is hard to type on and slow. Other aspects of the phone are sped up such as choosing music, selecting photos, listening to voicemail, pausing/playing, scrolling a web page, etc. But typing is very much slowed and highly error prone. I had nothing to assess it against so I thought only that the difficulties were normal. Live and learn.
One thing that would help alot would be to allow us to turn the phone so that we get use of the wider keyboard. When you turn the phone horizontally and then choose to type in a web address you get a wider keyboard where the letters are spread out, but you have to turn the iphone before you begin typing. Not all applications support this, particularly the email application does NOT. They should have had that in there from the beginning.
Microsoft would go away. Evaporate into thin air. Thus freeing up the market for true competition. Pay homage for 20 years of raping and pillaging the market. Moreover just fucking disappear because they are the most untrustworthy company in recent history. We'd rather just provide everyone an alternative to Windows and let the world move on. Any direction has to be better than the direction Microsoft is headed.
The impact is that I was willing to use Novell products in the past, but now I'm not interested in anything they have or will do. I also tell others not to purchase nor use any Novell product. I don't want them to bastardize Linux because we worked hard on this and we don't desire to have Microsoft come in and fuck it up.
These countries building their technologies need to try at least to understand the negative impact of vendor lock in. With open source the road is full bright and open, like a true vista. With windows you condemn your nation to Microsoft's spyware. (As Vista has 47 programs that collect information about you and send it back to Microsoft, not counting the WGA/WGN. This process is essentially the equivalent of say having Walmart coming to your home on any given Sunday morning asking to search your belongings to ensure that those items in your home that come from Walmart are legally purchased, just because you are a shopper at Walmart. Because Microsoft does it with hidden programs (or hidden cameras) makes no difference. You wouldn't allow Walmart to place hidden cameras in your home).
We all know about the vendor lock ins such as DirectX which keep you playing on and paying for Windows. With true OpenGL development you could find games on a number of platforms. There are many more lock in technologies and DRM was Microsoft's most important one until everyone revolted over it. It is still their number one hope to lock you into the Windows platform.
So, let's hope that Nigeria has the experienced personnel in the right positions of influence capable of understanding what is happening to ensure that it doesn't happen there. If so, let's hope other regional governments learn from the negatives of vendor lock in and the sometimes illegal influences Microsoft exerts.
90% of all people can benefit from Linux in that it does what those people need it to do, day in and day out. It is solid, safe, trusted, proven, performs very well, and is attractive. Most of the popular distros have taken the approach of ease of use for the customer, the development cycle for open source is superior to the closed source development cycle. The access to the programming code is also an incredible benefit unavailable (likely never will be available) to the government and the peoples of the world, whereas with open source if there's a conflict bug you can look at both project's code and resolve your issue yourself (as a programmer for some group).
Hopefully we'll see that other governments understand that it is important to put measures into place that secure them from the influences and lock ins created by using Microsoft products.
It is not a linux client if you have to use cedega, which is total crap. Crap that they abuse linux this way, crap that the can't figure out linux opengl, crap game anyway, crap the think we linux users are stupid.
The article states it comes with open office and a lot more local software (as they put it). So, don't go saying that this thing is a dead weight. The processor is essentially the same class as an athlon 2000+, 2400+, and even 2500+ processor. Those processors play games very well with an average video card.
What they are implying about gaming is 1) it is not a gaming machine because DirectX games don't run on Linux very well, and not at all without programs such as cedega or wine. 2) they are probably saying that it doesn't run games because it probably doesn't support an add-in video card. If it does I'll be shocked. If it does, it would make fine workstations for gaming and video with the right software.
1.5ghz is a solidly performing processor. 512mb of ram is sufficient for most every productivity program. 80gigs of storage is adequate for a large amount of information for the average home user. A DVD burner makes it a overall a solid box for home users.
I'll be it is filled with Maxtor hard drives. Unfortunately, I never buy Maxtor any longer because of their poor customer service. Seagate, which is owned by Maxtor, is still a separate company and does things right. Western Digital is a solid HDD manufacturer. So, I'd like to see something in there besides Maxtor drives.
He means 2 gig, but he's wrong. It was in the mid 90s that we saw regular use of 2 gig drives. The bios and OS had difficulty supporting 2 gigs and often you had to partition it.
Actually in 1990/1 we were just leaving the realm of 486s. We'd been using pentium machines for a while but they were extremely limited in the range of 33 to 133. In 1995 we still had p233, PIIs, PIIIs. Around 2000 the average person had an 700-1000mhz machine.
Back in the early 70s we didn't really even have the NEC v20 let alone a solid 8088/8086.
He's way off in his example. 3 decades is about right.
But 1.5ghz is a much more modern processor than back then. It still is pretty weak by todays standards, not because of the hardware but because of the bloated Windows software. This runs well because its linux OS runs well on it. 512mb of ram, 80gig hdd, a DVD burner are all pretty nice. I do wonder tho if it plays DVDs out of the box. Does it play mp3s? Did they license it properly?
First, the idea of more compatibility with OOXML is not even remotely the issue. These are separate specifications. They are by nature incompatible. One format is not compatible with another. Second, you don't pull the rug out from underneath an existing format that has been approved by the organizations that matter, and Microsoft is not one of those that matter. As far as performance goes, what is he talking about? Milliseconds, adoption?
This whole thing sounds like complete malarkey to me. Something is awry. If you can't buy the standard organizations I guess they can buy the ODF key players.
One can only say that about the US. But it isn't that we can't play them legally, it is that no one is selling a package of decoders for Linux.
In other countries it is legal and hence your point is moot. But yes, because the powers that be are intentionally disregarding the demand for a legal decoder on Linux many in the US have to resort to less than total legitimacy for DVD playback.
This doesn't mean that the DVDs are stolen, it just means that the codec isn't available, or at least not widely known.
In XP and some Vistas you still can't legally play a DVD without purchasing a 3rd party decoder. Also, keep in mind that Microsoft has 47 different programs under Vista that collect information about your computer and report that back to their offices. In Linux you don't have those privacy violations. Then, on top of all that privacy violation you still have WGA/WGN, the high price tag, and the true lack of any real reason to upgrade. When you are done considering that you have to consider why those codecs may have been provided--as a means to ensure you use those tools that give Microsoft's DRM and the content creators control of your computer. What I'm saying is you can't trust to use those products and would be better off buying another brand. I won't use the media player in XP or Vista because the license agreement tells me that I must allow Microsoft to monitor the content.
I'd rather have a small violation of a non-legit codec then to have this ginormous company that was convicted of illegal monopolistic predatory practices telling me what I can and can't do with my computer.
As many as are necessary to wake up people to the idea that there are other OSes that are as good if not better than Windows. I often read the headlines and see the word "Microsoft" listed several times a day. That's free publicity. When I see articles such as this it says "free publicity". Linux is good, Feisty was great. Gutsy is even better. 6 months from now when the next release is out we'll see even more improvement. In a couple years *everyone* will be wondering why they are paying for Windows. The smart ones are writing articles to let others know they have a choice. The vast majority of people don't know that Linux exists and hence because they don't know it they don't have a choice. This is how Microsoft likes to have it.
The more we speak about it, the more we demo it, the more we encourage others and the better the product gets the better chance we have of bringing to light to a greater audience that Linux is a valid, reliable, privacy-protected, secure, competent and capable choice for everyone.
I believe I downloaded them a few years ago and they were just horrific so I tossed the CD. Turbolinux is apparently at position 75 on distrowatch.com. We can watch it drop quickly.
What they are doing is taking the infusion of cash to make a quick profit for the founders and they don't care if Turbolinux itself dies.
Of course no one really believes Turbolinux has any patents or other intellectual property to deal with so one must ask how they got Microsoft to agree. One must conclude that Microsoft is desperate to get any so they can make it look like they are being buddies with the community when they are sued again for very aggrievous monopoly infractions of the law. It is coming boys and girls. Another huge suit that ultimately will brake up Microsoft. Now that's just my opinion but I think it will happen. Probably in the next 5 years. I think Microsoft knows it. They are doing everything to make it appear like they are working with this or that.
Honestly tho how do you explain several Microsoft employees leaving Microsoft to join a company which has the sole purpose of suing for IP? Then think about how that company sued Novell whom Microsoft said they wouldn't sue. Let's get real here. Microsoft is doing a ropadope. Just watch out for that left hook people. In this field of IP too much paranoia is not enough.
Microsoft has created shill company that collects patents and sues. So, even though Microsoft hasn't sued Novell it's shill company did. How's that for a pact?
Of course that number is wrong. Not by a huge amount, but it is wrong. Some unlocked them but still activated with AT&T and some held the phones for gifts for friends, such as Wozniak who bought several and held them for gifts. I'm sure there are quite a few people in the same boat.
Actually firefox numbers are based on web page hit percentages not on downloads, per se.
But yes, some people do download firefox multiple times. That's not a number that matters because when you calculate the number of people that spread that downloaded copy around you make up for the anomaly of multiple downloads per person.
But in the case of Radiohead the system does not work that way. You add the item to your cart, then you pay for it, then you download. People are not going to pay for it and then download it multiple times because it doesn't work that way. Besides, the firefox anomaly has to take place over a long period of time to even be measurable. The Radiohead distribution of the 1.2 million is over a short period of time. It should make the record company shake, rattle, and roll at this record number.
I was just thinking that the record companies will somehow want to tax the internet (like they do CDs) in order to recoup costs. I thought that because I know they are planning on trying to get some percentage of sales when *most* artists decide to take this direction.
Any artists not taking this route would have to be FUCKING INSANE to pass up millions in exchange for a recording contract that nets them very little of the actual sales.
An artist generally makes $.07 per song on any given album. If an album were to sell a million copies the artist would have made $70,000. Given the tax bracket the artist would have probably paid close to 50% in taxes. That leads to a $35,000 income off a million copies of an album sold. Even if the tax bracket is lower you can see that the artist just didn't make much money. In the past the artist used record sales as an advertising path for their concerts. That allowed them to make up for 93% of the income off those record sales that went to the record company.
Now you consider $8.00 per album and the $6 to $10 million made and you know this was the right move for them. It opens up the world for them. It breaks the cartel set up by the recording industry and essentially issues a pink slip to all of them and any employee that promoted that decadent system to begin with. No more billionaire recording company, instead the artist gets the benefit of their artistic talents.
This is really incredible because if they have made that much money they have changed the whole structure of how music will be sold. It is a very glorious day that the recording companies are now going to be removed as the middle man. It also means that if music distribution becomes primarily done through this mechanism we'll see a major shift away from those recording taxes on everyone that buys CD blanks, etc.
Now consider this, no more lawsuits against Radiohead customers, none of their money going to the RIAA to allow them to fund lawsuits against old ladies, the disabled, and even the dead. Just amazing if other artists recognize the value of this and move to this same model. Hey, I might start buying music again.
What a wonder the internet is. All the recording industry can say is "bad internet, bad bad". But the artists can say "good internet, good good" because they can now make the money the deserve from their efforts. This is total unequivocal proof that the recording industry, the content rights holders, and their lobbyists are wrong.
Wozniak was a prankster, joker and all round rowdy kid in high school. He was even criminal in making and selling blue boxes. Today he's a billionaire and he is able to get the attention of celebrities due to that money. Consider Kathy Lee from the Larry King Live show. That was pretty bad. Sounds quite decadent. I'm very liberal and I could care less about their actions. What I dislike are the contradictions. Woz does wax nostalgic and I can relate but he's not the same guy that was involved in the start up of the company that put out the 1984 commercial.
I'd venture a guess that Apple's anti-consumer iPhone debacle is 1984 x 10. Imagine how that commercial was supposed to relate the Apple ideology. It was meant to show that big business (big brother) takes to extremes the control of their machines to the point of making those that use them zombie operators. Consider now how Apple has become hostile toward iPhone customers that unlock their phones (which is a right granted by the Library Of Congress as an exemption to the DMCA). Yet Apple still pushes consumers as if they are robots to be controlled and that they have no choice in what they can do with their phones. They are claiming IP yet while they developed the Macintosh they took every idea they could from other places and they hacked every device they could get their hands on.
I just have lost respect for Woz for not standing up and telling Jobs publicly how he feels that Apple's behavior is a violation of everything that the 1984 commercial stood for.
And Ballmer says "If you switch to Linux, your 13 year old daughter will have to still pay us."
I'm sure he wasn't getting any jollies off on that lambasting. Ballmer needs to grow up. I think he's met his match with that quick witted mother. What the hell is wrong with Ballmer trying to say she got value from it. What a total idiot. The man is so out of touch. Typical of almost all of Microsoft. If that wasn't the case we wouldn't have Vista to begin with. We'd have a product the consumer could be proud of.
Back to XP. Back to XP. There you go. Back to XP. Screw Microsoft and their Vista even with SP1.
Yep, I'd second that. There's nothing in linspire that I don't have already in Ubuntu 7.04. Linspire might want to start fighting where the fight is. Think of it as a battle line. What Linspire is doing is fighting behind the lines. As if it were fighting a personal battle against someone on their own side. They should move their asses to the front lines and start fighting Microsoft--where the battle belongs.
I expect commercial apps on linux. Gaming companies aren't going to develop their games for free use on linux. Period. Not at least and have them competitive with commercial games.
I use Linux all day every day. It is my primary OS. I expect to have the same level of programs as I would find in the commercial market. For the most part, with the OS itself and with the productivity apps such as Open Office, Firefox, media players, etc., I get that. It's there. Kudos to the hard working people that bring them to me.
BUT...
Gaming is something different altogether. Games are important to me and they need to be modern and something that can keep my attention. I'm not saying that this is impossible nor that there are no games available for Linux. On the contrary. There are games, but they are not plentiful. I play UT, Doom, ET, NWN, etc. But I really want to see current games being released with Linux clients from commercial gaming companies. That is the ONE thing that I see currently holding back Linux from being picked up by a larger segment of users.
I don't want a proprietard's OS. I don't want to have to worry about my privacy being violated, about DRM being implemented against the will of the community. About monitoring programs such as found in MS WGA/WGN utilities. I don't want content creators nor those selling the DRM schemes telling me what I can and can't do with my computer.
So, the OS must be free and Open. But the end user apps such as productivity and gaming can go either way for me. I don't concern myself with it much other than to ensure that they are there.
Even so, I will NEVER EVER support a company that gets into bed with the evil empire at MS. No way. They knew they were being a pawn in the battle to divide the community. The purpose behind those agreements with Xandros, Linspire, Novell were to divide the community. Luckily the community is resilient and has easily overcome the pressures. Kudos to those companies that didn't fall to the false foul mouthed jerk off known as Steve Ballmer.
The problem won't go away by ignoring it. It is better to know then not. If there are patents the open source community wants more than anything to know which violations there are so they can remove them.
As well, many of those that they hold so dear would probably be invalidated or it would take years to get them re-validated. Either way, hopefully the world would have moved on past them or the patents would become invalidated just through the normal process of time (patents don't last forever).
Yes, at least in part. They are claiming the disclosure would have very Linux hack challenging each patent thus overwhelming the company.
What people should be doing is issuing certified letters to Microsoft requesting full disclosure with the notice that if they don't respond with the IP in question then all users are indemnified of all patents. Give them a time frame in which to proceed. Specifically state that the IP and Patents must explicitly be stated or the indemnification is automatic and global.
Slashdot Mirror
Though this may be recent scientifically released info it is simply a rehash of what was analyzed 10-15 years ago. We all knew the issue was with identity and with distance. Again, this is just a rehash of what we knew long long ago and is not news.
I agree, the phone is hard to type on and slow. Other aspects of the phone are sped up such as choosing music, selecting photos, listening to voicemail, pausing/playing, scrolling a web page, etc. But typing is very much slowed and highly error prone. I had nothing to assess it against so I thought only that the difficulties were normal. Live and learn.
One thing that would help alot would be to allow us to turn the phone so that we get use of the wider keyboard. When you turn the phone horizontally and then choose to type in a web address you get a wider keyboard where the letters are spread out, but you have to turn the iphone before you begin typing. Not all applications support this, particularly the email application does NOT. They should have had that in there from the beginning.
Microsoft would go away. Evaporate into thin air. Thus freeing up the market for true competition. Pay homage for 20 years of raping and pillaging the market. Moreover just fucking disappear because they are the most untrustworthy company in recent history. We'd rather just provide everyone an alternative to Windows and let the world move on. Any direction has to be better than the direction Microsoft is headed.
The impact is that I was willing to use Novell products in the past, but now I'm not interested in anything they have or will do. I also tell others not to purchase nor use any Novell product. I don't want them to bastardize Linux because we worked hard on this and we don't desire to have Microsoft come in and fuck it up.
These countries building their technologies need to try at least to understand the negative impact of vendor lock in. With open source the road is full bright and open, like a true vista. With windows you condemn your nation to Microsoft's spyware. (As Vista has 47 programs that collect information about you and send it back to Microsoft, not counting the WGA/WGN. This process is essentially the equivalent of say having Walmart coming to your home on any given Sunday morning asking to search your belongings to ensure that those items in your home that come from Walmart are legally purchased, just because you are a shopper at Walmart. Because Microsoft does it with hidden programs (or hidden cameras) makes no difference. You wouldn't allow Walmart to place hidden cameras in your home).
We all know about the vendor lock ins such as DirectX which keep you playing on and paying for Windows. With true OpenGL development you could find games on a number of platforms. There are many more lock in technologies and DRM was Microsoft's most important one until everyone revolted over it. It is still their number one hope to lock you into the Windows platform.
So, let's hope that Nigeria has the experienced personnel in the right positions of influence capable of understanding what is happening to ensure that it doesn't happen there. If so, let's hope other regional governments learn from the negatives of vendor lock in and the sometimes illegal influences Microsoft exerts.
90% of all people can benefit from Linux in that it does what those people need it to do, day in and day out. It is solid, safe, trusted, proven, performs very well, and is attractive. Most of the popular distros have taken the approach of ease of use for the customer, the development cycle for open source is superior to the closed source development cycle. The access to the programming code is also an incredible benefit unavailable (likely never will be available) to the government and the peoples of the world, whereas with open source if there's a conflict bug you can look at both project's code and resolve your issue yourself (as a programmer for some group).
Hopefully we'll see that other governments understand that it is important to put measures into place that secure them from the influences and lock ins created by using Microsoft products.
It is not a linux client if you have to use cedega, which is total crap. Crap that they abuse linux this way, crap that the can't figure out linux opengl, crap game anyway, crap the think we linux users are stupid.
Screw eve.
The article states it comes with open office and a lot more local software (as they put it). So, don't go saying that this thing is a dead weight. The processor is essentially the same class as an athlon 2000+, 2400+, and even 2500+ processor. Those processors play games very well with an average video card.
What they are implying about gaming is 1) it is not a gaming machine because DirectX games don't run on Linux very well, and not at all without programs such as cedega or wine. 2) they are probably saying that it doesn't run games because it probably doesn't support an add-in video card. If it does I'll be shocked. If it does, it would make fine workstations for gaming and video with the right software.
1.5ghz is a solidly performing processor. 512mb of ram is sufficient for most every productivity program. 80gigs of storage is adequate for a large amount of information for the average home user. A DVD burner makes it a overall a solid box for home users.
I'll be it is filled with Maxtor hard drives. Unfortunately, I never buy Maxtor any longer because of their poor customer service. Seagate, which is owned by Maxtor, is still a separate company and does things right. Western Digital is a solid HDD manufacturer. So, I'd like to see something in there besides Maxtor drives.
He means 2 gig, but he's wrong. It was in the mid 90s that we saw regular use of 2 gig drives. The bios and OS had difficulty supporting 2 gigs and often you had to partition it.
Actually in 1990/1 we were just leaving the realm of 486s. We'd been using pentium machines for a while but they were extremely limited in the range of 33 to 133. In 1995 we still had p233, PIIs, PIIIs. Around 2000 the average person had an 700-1000mhz machine.
Back in the early 70s we didn't really even have the NEC v20 let alone a solid 8088/8086.
He's way off in his example. 3 decades is about right.
But 1.5ghz is a much more modern processor than back then. It still is pretty weak by todays standards, not because of the hardware but because of the bloated Windows software. This runs well because its linux OS runs well on it. 512mb of ram, 80gig hdd, a DVD burner are all pretty nice. I do wonder tho if it plays DVDs out of the box. Does it play mp3s? Did they license it properly?
First, the idea of more compatibility with OOXML is not even remotely the issue. These are separate specifications. They are by nature incompatible. One format is not compatible with another. Second, you don't pull the rug out from underneath an existing format that has been approved by the organizations that matter, and Microsoft is not one of those that matter. As far as performance goes, what is he talking about? Milliseconds, adoption?
This whole thing sounds like complete malarkey to me. Something is awry. If you can't buy the standard organizations I guess they can buy the ODF key players.
That's an old video. There are many more newer ones that are much more impressive.
One can only say that about the US. But it isn't that we can't play them legally, it is that no one is selling a package of decoders for Linux.
In other countries it is legal and hence your point is moot. But yes, because the powers that be are intentionally disregarding the demand for a legal decoder on Linux many in the US have to resort to less than total legitimacy for DVD playback.
This doesn't mean that the DVDs are stolen, it just means that the codec isn't available, or at least not widely known.
In XP and some Vistas you still can't legally play a DVD without purchasing a 3rd party decoder. Also, keep in mind that Microsoft has 47 different programs under Vista that collect information about your computer and report that back to their offices. In Linux you don't have those privacy violations. Then, on top of all that privacy violation you still have WGA/WGN, the high price tag, and the true lack of any real reason to upgrade. When you are done considering that you have to consider why those codecs may have been provided--as a means to ensure you use those tools that give Microsoft's DRM and the content creators control of your computer. What I'm saying is you can't trust to use those products and would be better off buying another brand. I won't use the media player in XP or Vista because the license agreement tells me that I must allow Microsoft to monitor the content.
I'd rather have a small violation of a non-legit codec then to have this ginormous company that was convicted of illegal monopolistic predatory practices telling me what I can and can't do with my computer.
As many as are necessary to wake up people to the idea that there are other OSes that are as good if not better than Windows. I often read the headlines and see the word "Microsoft" listed several times a day. That's free publicity. When I see articles such as this it says "free publicity". Linux is good, Feisty was great. Gutsy is even better. 6 months from now when the next release is out we'll see even more improvement. In a couple years *everyone* will be wondering why they are paying for Windows. The smart ones are writing articles to let others know they have a choice. The vast majority of people don't know that Linux exists and hence because they don't know it they don't have a choice. This is how Microsoft likes to have it.
The more we speak about it, the more we demo it, the more we encourage others and the better the product gets the better chance we have of bringing to light to a greater audience that Linux is a valid, reliable, privacy-protected, secure, competent and capable choice for everyone.
I believe I downloaded them a few years ago and they were just horrific so I tossed the CD. Turbolinux is apparently at position 75 on distrowatch.com. We can watch it drop quickly.
What they are doing is taking the infusion of cash to make a quick profit for the founders and they don't care if Turbolinux itself dies.
Of course no one really believes Turbolinux has any patents or other intellectual property to deal with so one must ask how they got Microsoft to agree. One must conclude that Microsoft is desperate to get any so they can make it look like they are being buddies with the community when they are sued again for very aggrievous monopoly infractions of the law. It is coming boys and girls. Another huge suit that ultimately will brake up Microsoft. Now that's just my opinion but I think it will happen. Probably in the next 5 years. I think Microsoft knows it. They are doing everything to make it appear like they are working with this or that.
Honestly tho how do you explain several Microsoft employees leaving Microsoft to join a company which has the sole purpose of suing for IP? Then think about how that company sued Novell whom Microsoft said they wouldn't sue. Let's get real here. Microsoft is doing a ropadope. Just watch out for that left hook people. In this field of IP too much paranoia is not enough.
Microsoft has created shill company that collects patents and sues. So, even though Microsoft hasn't sued Novell it's shill company did. How's that for a pact?
Of course that number is wrong. Not by a huge amount, but it is wrong. Some unlocked them but still activated with AT&T and some held the phones for gifts for friends, such as Wozniak who bought several and held them for gifts. I'm sure there are quite a few people in the same boat.
Actually firefox numbers are based on web page hit percentages not on downloads, per se.
But yes, some people do download firefox multiple times. That's not a number that matters because when you calculate the number of people that spread that downloaded copy around you make up for the anomaly of multiple downloads per person.
But in the case of Radiohead the system does not work that way. You add the item to your cart, then you pay for it, then you download. People are not going to pay for it and then download it multiple times because it doesn't work that way. Besides, the firefox anomaly has to take place over a long period of time to even be measurable. The Radiohead distribution of the 1.2 million is over a short period of time. It should make the record company shake, rattle, and roll at this record number.
I was just thinking that the record companies will somehow want to tax the internet (like they do CDs) in order to recoup costs. I thought that because I know they are planning on trying to get some percentage of sales when *most* artists decide to take this direction.
Any artists not taking this route would have to be FUCKING INSANE to pass up millions in exchange for a recording contract that nets them very little of the actual sales.
An artist generally makes $.07 per song on any given album. If an album were to sell a million copies the artist would have made $70,000. Given the tax bracket the artist would have probably paid close to 50% in taxes. That leads to a $35,000 income off a million copies of an album sold. Even if the tax bracket is lower you can see that the artist just didn't make much money. In the past the artist used record sales as an advertising path for their concerts. That allowed them to make up for 93% of the income off those record sales that went to the record company.
Now you consider $8.00 per album and the $6 to $10 million made and you know this was the right move for them. It opens up the world for them. It breaks the cartel set up by the recording industry and essentially issues a pink slip to all of them and any employee that promoted that decadent system to begin with. No more billionaire recording company, instead the artist gets the benefit of their artistic talents.
This is really incredible because if they have made that much money they have changed the whole structure of how music will be sold. It is a very glorious day that the recording companies are now going to be removed as the middle man. It also means that if music distribution becomes primarily done through this mechanism we'll see a major shift away from those recording taxes on everyone that buys CD blanks, etc.
Now consider this, no more lawsuits against Radiohead customers, none of their money going to the RIAA to allow them to fund lawsuits against old ladies, the disabled, and even the dead. Just amazing if other artists recognize the value of this and move to this same model. Hey, I might start buying music again.
What a wonder the internet is. All the recording industry can say is "bad internet, bad bad". But the artists can say "good internet, good good" because they can now make the money the deserve from their efforts. This is total unequivocal proof that the recording industry, the content rights holders, and their lobbyists are wrong.
Wozniak was a prankster, joker and all round rowdy kid in high school. He was even criminal in making and selling blue boxes. Today he's a billionaire and he is able to get the attention of celebrities due to that money. Consider Kathy Lee from the Larry King Live show. That was pretty bad. Sounds quite decadent. I'm very liberal and I could care less about their actions. What I dislike are the contradictions. Woz does wax nostalgic and I can relate but he's not the same guy that was involved in the start up of the company that put out the 1984 commercial.
I'd venture a guess that Apple's anti-consumer iPhone debacle is 1984 x 10. Imagine how that commercial was supposed to relate the Apple ideology. It was meant to show that big business (big brother) takes to extremes the control of their machines to the point of making those that use them zombie operators. Consider now how Apple has become hostile toward iPhone customers that unlock their phones (which is a right granted by the Library Of Congress as an exemption to the DMCA). Yet Apple still pushes consumers as if they are robots to be controlled and that they have no choice in what they can do with their phones. They are claiming IP yet while they developed the Macintosh they took every idea they could from other places and they hacked every device they could get their hands on.
I just have lost respect for Woz for not standing up and telling Jobs publicly how he feels that Apple's behavior is a violation of everything that the 1984 commercial stood for.
And Ballmer says "If you switch to Linux, your 13 year old daughter will have to still pay us."
I'm sure he wasn't getting any jollies off on that lambasting. Ballmer needs to grow up. I think he's met his match with that quick witted mother. What the hell is wrong with Ballmer trying to say she got value from it. What a total idiot. The man is so out of touch. Typical of almost all of Microsoft. If that wasn't the case we wouldn't have Vista to begin with. We'd have a product the consumer could be proud of.
Back to XP. Back to XP. There you go. Back to XP. Screw Microsoft and their Vista even with SP1.
Yep, I'd second that. There's nothing in linspire that I don't have already in Ubuntu 7.04. Linspire might want to start fighting where the fight is. Think of it as a battle line. What Linspire is doing is fighting behind the lines. As if it were fighting a personal battle against someone on their own side. They should move their asses to the front lines and start fighting Microsoft--where the battle belongs.
I expect commercial apps on linux. Gaming companies aren't going to develop their games for free use on linux. Period. Not at least and have them competitive with commercial games.
I use Linux all day every day. It is my primary OS. I expect to have the same level of programs as I would find in the commercial market. For the most part, with the OS itself and with the productivity apps such as Open Office, Firefox, media players, etc., I get that. It's there. Kudos to the hard working people that bring them to me.
BUT...
Gaming is something different altogether. Games are important to me and they need to be modern and something that can keep my attention. I'm not saying that this is impossible nor that there are no games available for Linux. On the contrary. There are games, but they are not plentiful. I play UT, Doom, ET, NWN, etc. But I really want to see current games being released with Linux clients from commercial gaming companies. That is the ONE thing that I see currently holding back Linux from being picked up by a larger segment of users.
I don't want a proprietard's OS. I don't want to have to worry about my privacy being violated, about DRM being implemented against the will of the community. About monitoring programs such as found in MS WGA/WGN utilities. I don't want content creators nor those selling the DRM schemes telling me what I can and can't do with my computer.
So, the OS must be free and Open. But the end user apps such as productivity and gaming can go either way for me. I don't concern myself with it much other than to ensure that they are there.
Even so, I will NEVER EVER support a company that gets into bed with the evil empire at MS. No way. They knew they were being a pawn in the battle to divide the community. The purpose behind those agreements with Xandros, Linspire, Novell were to divide the community. Luckily the community is resilient and has easily overcome the pressures. Kudos to those companies that didn't fall to the false foul mouthed jerk off known as Steve Ballmer.
All yours.
The problem won't go away by ignoring it. It is better to know then not. If there are patents the open source community wants more than anything to know which violations there are so they can remove them.
As well, many of those that they hold so dear would probably be invalidated or it would take years to get them re-validated. Either way, hopefully the world would have moved on past them or the patents would become invalidated just through the normal process of time (patents don't last forever).
Yes, at least in part. They are claiming the disclosure would have very Linux hack challenging each patent thus overwhelming the company.
What people should be doing is issuing certified letters to Microsoft requesting full disclosure with the notice that if they don't respond with the IP in question then all users are indemnified of all patents. Give them a time frame in which to proceed. Specifically state that the IP and Patents must explicitly be stated or the indemnification is automatic and global.