Ubuntu offers support huge amount of software, but handbrake currently isn't one of them. Software doesn't naturally "just work", you have to have programmers and QA staff work to support something, so that it does work.
Personally I'm quite comfortable with CMMI. I find that this is a good solution for a lot of bleeding edge software (using another distro that focuses on new software like Arch Linux is usually more productive, but sometimes you have to compile from the latest source code no matter what). If you are not comfortable with it, you'll have to wait for official support from your distro of choice, or for a third party to step in and do it, or pay someone to do so.
Seriously, it's not hard to find people complaining about it, or any other open source project.
What various open source projects tend to lack are enough people to perform triage on bug reports, people that know how to produce bug reports that are actually useful to developers, and people willing to pay developers to work on issues that matter to them and to provide their fixes upstream.
... is unlikely to increase sales significantly. Making good games on the other hand most definitely will.
Spend your time making games I want to play and I'll buy them. The people pirating your games usually either can't afford them, will never buy them anyway, or simply want a demo that isn't too short or extremely buggy.
As you've noted, what you'd like doesn't exist. Due to this you have a couple options (assuming that the goal is massive reduction in greenhouse emissions):
1. Move somewhere that does not require you to drive a personal car to work.
2. Ride a motorcycle to work.
3. Carpool.
The enemy of the perfect should not be the enemy of future generations. If you truly believe that your lifestyle is unsustainable you should take action accordingly.
It's actually easier to argue the point with cancer drugs. People die of cancer every day. The process of dying of cancer costs the government and insurance companies lots and lots of money as they try to treat cancer patients (even if drugs were basically free, doctors, nurses, physical equipment, etc. are not).
In addition, there are lots of people that want to cure cancer because they feel a need to help society (if doctors were in it for the money they'd be lawyers). Hence:
- There are people willing to spend decades of their lives pursing a cure for cancer.
- There are organizations willing to spend millions of dollars paying people to find a cure.
Just because you eliminate one possible source of revenue (copyright) doesn't mean you remove supply and demand. And the great thing is that once they're done doing one thing, they'll go on to do other things that they'll also get paid for.
I also noticed you had some possession there. You maybe have a few too many, so the government might just take a few if that's ok.
I apologize, this post is far longer than I intended. TL;DR Making a copy of something doesn't destroy your copy of something.
For the sake of the argument, assume that a chair exists. Let us say that you own this particular chair, and that you made it. You didn't come up with the concept of using wood to make furniture, using four legs, a base and a back with metal screws and bolts, forging metal, harvesting wood, making saws, etc. etc. but you did come up with the idea for this particular chair. You then sold it to someone, and they put up a magical camera that transmits information about the chair on the Internet.
Next, let's assume that I can make a perfect copy of the chair you made by running a command in a terminal: "wget hctp://example.com/chair.chr" (hctp = hyper chair transfer protocol).
Making a copy of a chair does not invalidate the fact that the chair you sold is still a chair. Making a copy of this chair incurred you no opportunity cost as I did not even need to touch a chair you physically control to make this magical copy. Whatever money you gained by selling the chair is still yours, regardless if I made the copy of the chair or not.
However, I am poorer if I never downloaded the chair, or if I had to work harder to pay for getting the chair the old fashioned and less efficient way (driving to a store to pick up one made by good old fashioned slave labor in the far east). You very likely made a small amount of money from this sale, but the majority of it was made by people who's job is essentially to deliver a copy of the chair to me, people who if I had gotten the chair more efficiently might actually be doing something productive (such as making new kinds of chairs).
Continuing the chair theme, arguing for copyright today as the only way for an idea to benefit it's creator and society as a whole works on the assumption that:
- There are a limited amount of asses on planet earth for chairs to sit on, and that my selling or giving a chair to someone prevents you from doing the same thing.
- Creators will not make new chairs unless they can get a monopoly on a particular kind of chair they make.
- Customers will not demand new kinds of chairs based on changes to their environment or simple novelty.
- Preventing means of distribution that involve a marginal cost of zero will create and distribute more chairs than allowing people to do what they want with the chairs that they have already purchased.
If this entire post seems like an excerpt from Bob Vila Making Chairs in Wonderland, it's because justifying IP today really is mad as a hatter.
What I like is the implication that you somehow have a right to their work
The same reason you have the right to use the English language.
The same reason you can use ideas that you've heard elsewhere and repeat them verbatim or modify them based on other ideas that you've heard/read or thought up. All without paying someone for the use of an idea that they "came up with". How on earth can we have conversations if people that come up with ideas aren't paid a licensing fee each time they're used?
No one would ever think about something and speak their mind without direct monetary compensation! In fact, I'm not really posting an idea that has been rehashed on slashdot again and again and again, I'm really just a twitter sockpuppet.
... of transmitting a music video from one computer to another is roughly zero.
However, when multiplied by significant numbers of users (10s of millions in the case of Youtube), this actually does turn into a real number that is larger than zero.
If the PRS is unwilling to work with a distribution model that they can collect some small royalty on (revenue collected from ads), people will find other methods of getting the same content at the marginal cost (which rounded down equals zero).
TL;DR Don't compete with free by charging more than the market will bare.
A dream that one day every man, woman and child can read, listen, watch and create derivative works from, this great cultural engine that we call the Internet.
I have a dream that one day children will watch cartoons, take the audio out of them and make music videos from them.
I have a dream that one day college students will take video from news sources of corrupt politicians and lambaste them with whatever culturally relevant changes they see fit.
I have a dream that one day adults will download movies, watch them with their friends who may or may not be in the same room and write about what they thought about it afterwards, with clips from the parts they see as important.
I have a dream that every poor child in the world who can get to a library with Internet access will be able to download every book they need to learn, not just to be more economically productive, but so that they can expand their minds wherever they wish to take them.
I have a dream today.
Why do I have this dream today? Because I have been to this place. I have grown up in it. I have seen the attempts to stifle it with the law, with lawyers and with money. But not just information wants to be free, people want to be free too. I see people trying to build this, share this, today. The technology we need to do this is here right now and just as people forsook the chains of the quill and ink for the printing press, so will people forsake the chains of the printing press for the Internet.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of humanity, black men and white men, Jews and Palestinians, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Why learn an arcane language like sh when you can learn a nice well structured language like Python and write better scripts?
Where I work pretty much everything has bash already (I install cygwin on all the Windows boxes. Of course, Python is usually there too:) ).
If you already have a bash script (or find one via the Google), changing it is usually simpler than porting it to Python.
If you work with people that already know bash scripting but don't know Python using the lowest common denominator can be easier than training.
There is less memory overhead for a simple shell script than there is for a simple Python script.
This being said, I try to keep my bash scripts under 40 lines and port them to python if they get more complex and I know the machine I'm going to be using them on has Python.
You mention not being able to purchase an eBook on Amazon without a Kindle but I am not seeing why you'd want to. The Amazon-purchased books are locked to the device -- no device, nothing to lock to, right? What's the point of selling them to you then?
So they can read them on the devices of their choosing, and pay Amazon for delivering the file to them. I believe that business types call this a win-win situation.
how do you expect telling a non tech (even linux) savvy average joe/jane all about these ?
I don't. When I have questions about cars I either do some research or ask professionals that I trust.
This doesn't mean that Ford should stop selling trucks just because people might confuse them with SUVs, or that manual transmission cars shouldn't be sold because some people don't know how to drive them.
When I buy cereal I have to decide between many brands. Same for toothpaste and for mouthwash. This isn't a bad thing.
Marketplaces are loud, noisy things filled with confusion, different ideas and ideals. The competition in the marketplace is what keeps people honest and allows people to bring new products and ideas to market. It isn't normal to not have choice.
We need a main, reliable, one size fits all DESKTOP distro. that's what we need.
We basically do at this point. Like Gnome and Apt? use Ubuntu (Sorry, not a huge fan of Kubuntu). Like Gnome or KDE and Yast? use OpenSuse. Like Gnome or KDE and Yum? Use Fedora.
How is this any more confusing than having to decide between a chicken sandwich with fries or a cheeseburger with onion rings?
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me why I like cron.
Ubuntu offers support huge amount of software, but handbrake currently isn't one of them. Software doesn't naturally "just work", you have to have programmers and QA staff work to support something, so that it does work.
Personally I'm quite comfortable with CMMI. I find that this is a good solution for a lot of bleeding edge software (using another distro that focuses on new software like Arch Linux is usually more productive, but sometimes you have to compile from the latest source code no matter what). If you are not comfortable with it, you'll have to wait for official support from your distro of choice, or for a third party to step in and do it, or pay someone to do so.
Just like any other OS.
t reeks of "We know you're playing by the rules, but we don't like the rules, so we'll buy off a few senators to get the rules changed."
The term you're looking for is called "Rent Seeking".
Seriously, it's not hard to find people complaining about it, or any other open source project.
What various open source projects tend to lack are enough people to perform triage on bug reports, people that know how to produce bug reports that are actually useful to developers, and people willing to pay developers to work on issues that matter to them and to provide their fixes upstream.
Every story concerning piracy takes the pirates POV
This isn't piracy (no one is selling it at the moment, AFAIK). It's copyright infringement.
... is unlikely to increase sales significantly. Making good games on the other hand most definitely will.
Spend your time making games I want to play and I'll buy them. The people pirating your games usually either can't afford them, will never buy them anyway, or simply want a demo that isn't too short or extremely buggy.
Accidentally?
Yes, the pedestrians.
FTP is so 1990's, real men use torrents. Real men with neckbeards use jigdo.
Clicking the Start Button to shutdown is what you're used to. Clicking the Shutdown button is intuitive.
As you've noted, what you'd like doesn't exist. Due to this you have a couple options (assuming that the goal is massive reduction in greenhouse emissions):
1. Move somewhere that does not require you to drive a personal car to work.
2. Ride a motorcycle to work.
3. Carpool.
The enemy of the perfect should not be the enemy of future generations. If you truly believe that your lifestyle is unsustainable you should take action accordingly.
It's actually easier to argue the point with cancer drugs. People die of cancer every day. The process of dying of cancer costs the government and insurance companies lots and lots of money as they try to treat cancer patients (even if drugs were basically free, doctors, nurses, physical equipment, etc. are not).
In addition, there are lots of people that want to cure cancer because they feel a need to help society (if doctors were in it for the money they'd be lawyers). Hence:
- There are people willing to spend decades of their lives pursing a cure for cancer.
- There are organizations willing to spend millions of dollars paying people to find a cure.
Just because you eliminate one possible source of revenue (copyright) doesn't mean you remove supply and demand. And the great thing is that once they're done doing one thing, they'll go on to do other things that they'll also get paid for.
French press coffee tastes horrible. The coffee at Denny's tastes better.
Also, get off my lawn.
I also noticed you had some possession there. You maybe have a few too many, so the government might just take a few if that's ok.
I apologize, this post is far longer than I intended. TL;DR Making a copy of something doesn't destroy your copy of something.
For the sake of the argument, assume that a chair exists. Let us say that you own this particular chair, and that you made it. You didn't come up with the concept of using wood to make furniture, using four legs, a base and a back with metal screws and bolts, forging metal, harvesting wood, making saws, etc. etc. but you did come up with the idea for this particular chair. You then sold it to someone, and they put up a magical camera that transmits information about the chair on the Internet.
Next, let's assume that I can make a perfect copy of the chair you made by running a command in a terminal: "wget hctp://example.com/chair.chr" (hctp = hyper chair transfer protocol).
Making a copy of a chair does not invalidate the fact that the chair you sold is still a chair. Making a copy of this chair incurred you no opportunity cost as I did not even need to touch a chair you physically control to make this magical copy. Whatever money you gained by selling the chair is still yours, regardless if I made the copy of the chair or not.
However, I am poorer if I never downloaded the chair, or if I had to work harder to pay for getting the chair the old fashioned and less efficient way (driving to a store to pick up one made by good old fashioned slave labor in the far east). You very likely made a small amount of money from this sale, but the majority of it was made by people who's job is essentially to deliver a copy of the chair to me, people who if I had gotten the chair more efficiently might actually be doing something productive (such as making new kinds of chairs).
Continuing the chair theme, arguing for copyright today as the only way for an idea to benefit it's creator and society as a whole works on the assumption that:
- There are a limited amount of asses on planet earth for chairs to sit on, and that my selling or giving a chair to someone prevents you from doing the same thing.
- Creators will not make new chairs unless they can get a monopoly on a particular kind of chair they make.
- Customers will not demand new kinds of chairs based on changes to their environment or simple novelty.
- Preventing means of distribution that involve a marginal cost of zero will create and distribute more chairs than allowing people to do what they want with the chairs that they have already purchased.
If this entire post seems like an excerpt from Bob Vila Making Chairs in Wonderland, it's because justifying IP today really is mad as a hatter.
What I like is the implication that you somehow have a right to their work
The same reason you have the right to use the English language.
The same reason you can use ideas that you've heard elsewhere and repeat them verbatim or modify them based on other ideas that you've heard/read or thought up. All without paying someone for the use of an idea that they "came up with". How on earth can we have conversations if people that come up with ideas aren't paid a licensing fee each time they're used?
No one would ever think about something and speak their mind without direct monetary compensation! In fact, I'm not really posting an idea that has been rehashed on slashdot again and again and again, I'm really just a twitter sockpuppet.
Am I the only person laughing at the concept of copyright on jazz music?
... of transmitting a music video from one computer to another is roughly zero.
However, when multiplied by significant numbers of users (10s of millions in the case of Youtube), this actually does turn into a real number that is larger than zero.
If the PRS is unwilling to work with a distribution model that they can collect some small royalty on (revenue collected from ads), people will find other methods of getting the same content at the marginal cost (which rounded down equals zero).
TL;DR Don't compete with free by charging more than the market will bare.
...can break into libraries, confiscate their books, detain their employees and say that it is in the name of justice.
This isn't justice. This is modern day book burning.
I'm not sure I understand the overwhelmingly negative reaction to javascript in pdf files.
Please read the 10 immutable laws of security. The one you're looking for is the first one on the list:
"If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore."
Where's the party who doesn't want any of this shit and thinks the government has much, much more important stuff on its plate right now?
The Pirate party, of course. Vote Pirate, vote for a better future! ;)
A dream that one day every man, woman and child can read, listen, watch and create derivative works from, this great cultural engine that we call the Internet.
I have a dream that one day children will watch cartoons, take the audio out of them and make music videos from them.
I have a dream that one day college students will take video from news sources of corrupt politicians and lambaste them with whatever culturally relevant changes they see fit.
I have a dream that one day adults will download movies, watch them with their friends who may or may not be in the same room and write about what they thought about it afterwards, with clips from the parts they see as important.
I have a dream that every poor child in the world who can get to a library with Internet access will be able to download every book they need to learn, not just to be more economically productive, but so that they can expand their minds wherever they wish to take them.
I have a dream today.
Why do I have this dream today? Because I have been to this place. I have grown up in it. I have seen the attempts to stifle it with the law, with lawyers and with money. But not just information wants to be free, people want to be free too. I see people trying to build this, share this, today. The technology we need to do this is here right now and just as people forsook the chains of the quill and ink for the printing press, so will people forsake the chains of the printing press for the Internet.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of humanity, black men and white men, Jews and Palestinians, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Why learn an arcane language like sh when you can learn a nice well structured language like Python and write better scripts?
Where I work pretty much everything has bash already (I install cygwin on all the Windows boxes. Of course, Python is usually there too :) ).
If you already have a bash script (or find one via the Google), changing it is usually simpler than porting it to Python.
If you work with people that already know bash scripting but don't know Python using the lowest common denominator can be easier than training.
There is less memory overhead for a simple shell script than there is for a simple Python script.
This being said, I try to keep my bash scripts under 40 lines and port them to python if they get more complex and I know the machine I'm going to be using them on has Python.
You mention not being able to purchase an eBook on Amazon without a Kindle but I am not seeing why you'd want to. The Amazon-purchased books are locked to the device -- no device, nothing to lock to, right? What's the point of selling them to you then?
So they can read them on the devices of their choosing, and pay Amazon for delivering the file to them. I believe that business types call this a win-win situation.
It's a simple procedure, and should be cake for anyone with enough skills to use a linux box :)
I try to avoid violating the DMCA when possible. If a company wants my business, don't make me break the law.
how do you expect telling a non tech (even linux) savvy average joe/jane all about these ?
I don't. When I have questions about cars I either do some research or ask professionals that I trust.
This doesn't mean that Ford should stop selling trucks just because people might confuse them with SUVs, or that manual transmission cars shouldn't be sold because some people don't know how to drive them.
When I buy cereal I have to decide between many brands. Same for toothpaste and for mouthwash. This isn't a bad thing.
Marketplaces are loud, noisy things filled with confusion, different ideas and ideals. The competition in the marketplace is what keeps people honest and allows people to bring new products and ideas to market. It isn't normal to not have choice.
We need a main, reliable, one size fits all DESKTOP distro. that's what we need.
We basically do at this point. Like Gnome and Apt? use Ubuntu (Sorry, not a huge fan of Kubuntu). Like Gnome or KDE and Yast? use OpenSuse. Like Gnome or KDE and Yum? Use Fedora.
How is this any more confusing than having to decide between a chicken sandwich with fries or a cheeseburger with onion rings?