Posts by Neil Lewis
122 posts • joined Thursday 19th April 2007 23:23 GMT
Oh really
So this will be a "world-leading hub for the digital and creative industries"?
Given that the government's plans for so-called 'orphan works' is likely to decimate the actual creative industries while benefiting those who merely copy and re-use, perhaps he really means this will be a "world-leading hub for those who rip-off the creative industries on an industrial scale".
Re: tax avoidance may be the legal kind but
Not wishing to disagree with your underlying principle, but 'paying the minimum tax you can get away with' is exactly what every individual is *expected* to do. That's why you fill in a tax return.
Why Groupon is failing
It's quite simply because the whole 'crazy level of discount' voucher idea is exactly that - crazy and unsustainable. Not to mention deliberately dishonest. It's nothing but a marketing scam designed to prey on the unwary.
Those businesses which sign up know perfectly well that they can't provide the goods/services at the discounted price and stay in business. The voucher is never more than bait to lure in the naive and unsuspecting in order to hard-sell them loads more and make the deal viable to the business.
The trouble is, people who actually think about it realise that and aren't taken in. They either ignore the vouchers completely, or ignore the hard sell.
People who are genuinely stupid/naive enough to fall for the bait in the short term tell their friends what a scam it was afterwards. So the number of naive punters drops off pretty fast.
Either way, the basic premise for the company working with Groupon becomes untenable. They stop using Groupon or go out of business. Or both. Groupon then find they have no vouchers to sell, so their 'business model' goes up in a puff of smoke, too.
Re: But what can it do?
'Well the cost is in one's time, even for a home user.'
- which was precisely my point about not actually needing to spend any time at all on upgrading with a system like this. Install once and you can 'upgrade' it on a permanently rolling basis for year after year without having to spend any time doing so. That's real saving of your time. Upgrading is only an annoyance when it's a faff, and a Linux system is usually a no-brainer to keep properly up to date.
Re: But what can it do?
While the question is undoubtedly valid for a commercial OS, i.e. one you pay for and therefore expect to provide better to be worth the cost of upgrading, free software doesn't really have the same limitation.
In fact, I'd go further than that. With commercial OSs, there *has* to be a long list of questionable 'new' features just to persuade anyone to buy, irrespective of whether any of those features are actually useful or even wanted.
With a free OS like Linux, and Debian in particular, those considerations simply don't apply. The updates and improvements may only be incremental, but since it's not costing you anything, any improvements are just that - improvements. They're not simply marketing tools intended to hoodwink you into getting your wallet out. I said 'Debian in particular' for a reason, by the way. That reason is the fact that most users of Debian (and many other Linux distros) will hardly ever reinstall from scratch to get the latest and greatest version anyway. If it's set up to do so, an installed system can update itself seamlessly from one version to another with the user hardly even noticing. It won't even need a reboot unless there was a kernel update.
That's precisely why a super-stable, incrementally upgraded system like this is perfect for actual production use, not just for geeks. It quietly gets on with doing it's job (or gets out of the way of you doing yours) more or less forever instead of insisting on regular user intervention.
Re: When will we able to define *which* WiFi connection to download apps over
Presumably you're in control of the device when the original download is done, so you should know which type of connection you're using and whether or not it's costing you per MB.
When it comes to updates, Android has, for as long as I can recall, provided a setting to disable them for 3G connections. As an 'ultimate' control over metered data, you can also set all updates to ask first before downloading.
Government fining itself?
Oh really.
1 The government only has money it gets from us.
2 The people signing the cheques to pay the fines aren't paying with their own money, but with ours.
3 No-one in government ever takes any personal responsibility for anything.
Hence the government fining itself for breaching it's own rules is meaningless. No-one gives a toss. At least in a private company, someone will possibly get fired for causing the problem. Though they're probably a scapegoat, sacrificed to protect the arse of an executive's who really caused the problem.
Perhaps not quite so hypocritical
Yes, it's very easy, moderately funny even, to criticise Eric Schmidt (and by extension Google) for complaining about private surveillance by drones when they use fleets of Streetview cars as part of their business plan, but there is actually a glaringly obvious problem with that criticism.
Streetview cars only drive on the public roads. That means anything photographed by them is already visible by the general public.
A drone flying over your home could peer into nooks and crannies quite invisible from the viewpoint of a Streetview car; into areas you would normally quite legitimately expect to be private.
Can the author of this article really not understand the distinction? Eric Schmidt says a lot of questionable things, but this does not seem to be one of them.
Re: And yet, and yet ...
Yes, of course you can. I've been doing so since 2008 or thereabouts. My business is photography with many associated design activities - not exactly the kinds of thing Linux is best known for - and for sure there were times when it was a little more effort in some areas, but that was then and this is now. Today, I have more power, better features and much better stability at my disposal than my proprietary-OS-using competitors. I tend to view them with a degree of pity, having painted themselves into a single vendor dependent corner with rather limited options.
Re: good for the soul..
All those are certainly examples of alternative presentation applications, and I'm certainly no MS apologist, but I can't help noticing they are *all* also bundled as part of a suite. Surely all htose companies were playing the same game, trying to bundle enough stuff together to make it all viable as a combined proposition. MS were able to win because they had an OS monopoly, not an office applications monopoly. That's still largely true today, though current trends in mobile may change the rules a little.
That Adobe also managed to gain such a huge monopoly mindshare in graphics software is largely down to their early footholds on the early Macs and the continuing dominance of Macs in that area to this day.
BTW, I'm a pro photographer employing a small staff who all use Linux exclusively. LibreOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, KDEnlive, Blender and suchlike all perform exactly as I need and I have absolutely no problem producing saleable, publishable work. There is another way. And it does work very well indeed.
Re: Her Mutt
Journalists regularly use demeaning and/or insulting language to describe almost any profession (apart from journalism, of course) in an attempt to be funny.
Re: Samsung GT-I5510
Likewise my Motorola Pro Plus. People seem confused by the fact it has both keyboard and touchscreen and runs Android, but usually appreciate the functionality pretty quickly.
Re: patents
'Why isn't 'intellectual property' taxed like other property - for instance like business rates?'
In a sense, it is. At least, the income from ownership of intellectual property is taxed just like any other income.
When the owner licences a patent or grants a right to copy, the income from that is taxed in the same way as income from the rental of property is taxed. So profits from the ownership of copyrights or a patents is dealt with in a broadly similar way to profits from the ownership of bricks and mortar property.
Business rates are charged to the occupant, not necessarily the owner of the property. And at least in theory they are charged for the provision of services, not just as a tax on occupation. The equivalent would be to tax users for paying licensing fees.
Re: "Notebooks were incredibly popular when they came with Linux."
I recently suggested a Chromebook to a friend who has always had problems managing a regular computer of any sort. Managing software in particular. Strangely enough given their reputation for ease of use, he'd also had enormous problems making his iPhone do what he wanted, but he's been a very happy bunny since switching to an Android 'phone.
He wanted something lightweight but with reasonable power, mainly for web browsing and related activities and one of the Samsung-branded Chromebooks caught his eye once I'd mentioned the term. He bought that and proudly brought it round to show me a few days later. Happy? Certainly. It does everything he wants and even he can understand how to make it do what he needs. He even had a suitable cloud-based printer already, so found setting that up a doddle.
So there you go. I've 'seen one in the wild' and it works very well indeed. It won't suit 'power users' but Google seems to have understood ChromeOS target market perfectly.
Re: VAT = Turnover tax!!
"The only companies in Britain that pay VAT are financial businesses since they cannot reclaim VAT in the main." is quite simply wrong.
The vast majority of businesses are required to act as unpaid tax collectors for HMRC, paying the VAT they collect from customers minus the VAT they pay to suppliers. This applies to all businesses having a turnover greater than the current VAT threshold.
If a business is making a profit, it is inevitably charging more VAT to customers than it pays to suppliers, hence there is usually an amount of VAT to be paid.
Re: Cookies?
The main reason there was a lot of back-pedalling over the cookies issue is simply that many sites people want to use simply cannot function without them. After the cookie regulations were passed, it soon became obvious that the the rules were practically unworkable.
Cookies are not primarily used to send information about your browsing habits to third parties, but to allow the site you're using to provide the interactiveness you expect. They are not really necessary for simply browsing a news site or reading a forum, but as soon as you want to manage e.g. a shopping cart, a favourites list or even just individual user preferences then they are needed. Some things can be got around using data passed with page requests, but that's a very limited approach.
KDE/Plasma is a much better contender
Really, if your idea of Linux as a touch OS is a variant of Ubuntu or Red Hat using Gnome or Unity, then it's no wonder you'd think it's a hopeless quest. One of the things the KDE team did right a few years ago when transitioning to KDE4 was to rebuild from the ground up so that the environment could be easily redesigned to suit many and varied paradigms without needing further redesign of the underlying system. Plasma is a fantastic touch interface, more modern and arguably better than iOS, Android or Metro.
As usual with any attempt to get Linux into the mainstream, it's not the quality or usability which will be the problem but the inertia and vested interests of device manufacturers and consumers.
Re: Curious...
Open XML format? There was a huge outcry a few years ago when MS managed to 'persuade' ISO to count them as an open standard, despite being no more than an XML wrapper for a secret, proprietary, binary format. Open it is not.
Impressive ex-pat statistic
'*503 million Europeans in the EU plus 312 million in the USA' - that's a helluvalot of ex-pats!
Re: Seems that by dropping ActiveSync, Google dropped a bomb on Microsoft
Actually, in some ways it seems less a move to reduce interoperability and more a move to marginalise those protocols which were intended to not to be interoperable. Sure, MS may licence ActiveSync, but Google are standardising on a free protocol. There is no reason MS could not make WinPhone use the free protocols as well as ActiveSync. As far as I can see, the only reason for that is a desire to lock people into ActiveSync, so this is bad for MS, but good for everyone else.
Re: mmmm
I'm also a photographer and have been for all 32 years of my working life. I moved 100% to digital back in 1999 and my business was a Windows-based one. I switched to Linux a few years later and have had no need to look back.
Monitor calibrations? Certainly there are perfectly acceptable Linux tools for the job. The only really important application for strictly photographic use would be a good bitmap editor and a good filing/management system. Linux has no shortage of excellent filing/management systems, e.g. digiKam is excellent and GIMP is perfectly viable as an alternative to Photoshop. Yes, I have used Photoshop quite extensively. In some areas it exceeds GIMP's capabilities, in a some others GIMP is superior.
In short, there is *no* specific reason why I as a very experienced, full time pro photographer cannot use Linux as his sole OS. I've been doing so for years.
Re: Let me fix part of that for you
...and the punchline is; under current laws the extra payment they are offering actually *is voluntary*.
Posted in Google enables private Play stores
Re: Competing app stores?
As far as Google is concerned, you have always been able to do exactly that. Users simply need to tick the box in Android software settings to allow installation from sources other than Google's own store.
Apple and MS, not a chance in hell.
Cheap Chinese Knock-offs
It's a huge mistake to underestimate or dismiss the 'cheap Chinese knock-offs' in comparisons with either the Nexus or this new iPad Mini.
There are a huge number of not-very-tech-savvy people about who crave a small tablet device but can't or won't pay even £160 or so for one. They just cannot justify the cost for something which even the technical semi-literate recognise as having limited practical use.
I actually have just such a cheap Chinese knockoff. It has a display resolution the same as this new iPad Mini. It has only 8GB internal, but a micro SD slot means it was very cheap and very easy to add another 16GB to that. It has HDMI, WiFi and USB and runs the latest Android release with full access to Google Play. It cost under £60 including shipping from a UK seller. When I've used it to show e.g. photographs to clients, they are (a) completely unaware that it's such a cheap device and (b) most often sufficiently impressed when told the price to immediately ask where they can buy one.
That's real people looking at actual physical devices, in their own hands and seeing a use for them. Not fanboys of various sorts having a pissing contest.
Re: Patently obvious
Agreed 100%. I had (and still have, boxed way) an early G1 and found the trackball very useful indeed. Even now, it's a bit of a pain using a touchscreen device on a web site with drop down menus; there is no easy way to differentiate a mouseover event from a tap or hold without a trackball.
It's the same old scam
The one cynical abusers always employ. "Do this for free and you'll get a credit". "Do this for nothing and I'll pay double next time". "Do this for free for me and I'll recommend all my friends".
Anyone in any line of business soon learns that such promises are worth as much as the fee. And twice as much as the value placed on their services by their 'patron'.
How do we know she is the daughter?
It could just be that the original Ms Vision hasn't aged...
IE user inertia is MS own fault
In earlier times, MS made a point of breaking web standards so that sites would *have* to be coded for IE, presumably in the hope/expectation that desktop dominance would lead to a web which only worked properly for the Windows/IE combo.
Those millions of remaining (particularly corporate) IE6 users are there precisely because of MS earlier determination to lock out other browsers with ActiveX. Now that strategy has come back to bite them in the bum for the reasons outlined in this article.
Ebay/Banks/BBC and such will of course continue to support older IE versions for now, but that is actually irrelevant. All those things also work on alternatives, so IE has no advantage. If newer 'must have' sites stop supporting IE's quirks, then it will suffer an increasing disadvantage compared to the alternatives.
Re: not to mention
No, it won't happen while MS can perceive a competitive advantage in keeping DX just for Windows. In the past, that's been an ace in the hole, especially for games use and hence the personal/home desktop PC. I do think that if Valve actually come through on porting Steam and the major part of their catalogue to Linux, then MS may well have a problem, but I seriously doubt they'd rethink opening up DX anyway. I just can't see any commercial advantage.
Re: GL faster than DX
What about a Red Hat/Fedora SLED/OpenSUSE style setup where a commercial distro is provided by the company, with the much of the distro-specific development work being done by those who want to use it?
Re: prior art possibly.
It's probably just the magic words '...on a mobile device...' that convinced the USPTO this was new and innovative.
Re: 4S was all profit
Yes, that business plan is called complacency and it's the way to ruin.
In case you hadn't noticed, Apple has recently seen it's smartphone business being eroded with increasing rapidity as Android in particular gains serious traction worldwide. Apple needs to do something truly magical to avoid becoming an also ran in the near future, not rest on it's laurels.
It's also looking like the same could happen to tablet devices before too long. That Nexus thingy looks damn good...
Re: Or maybe
Oh, you mean like most Linux distros have done it for the last decade or so?
Compare and contrast
MS release 'upgrades' to persuade you to part with yet more cash.
Google charge nothing for Android.
Dying industry
Odd viewpoint, given that if the industry actually did die, there would be nothing left to torrent.
So many uses...
...reminds one of string.
I'm just waiting...
...for Google to get a 7" iPad banned from sale in the US because it looks too much like a Nexus...
Got to love the legal system's lack of accountability!
"Apple needs to hand over $2.6m for a bond to cover a potential damages payment to Samsung if the court eventually finds that the ban was wrongly granted."
...so if the Court gets it wrong, it's not the Court that gets to humbly apologise and pay damages. Oh no. Judges can never, ever be seen to make a mistake, can they.
Has anyone, anywhere ever been able to sue a judge or a court to hold them responsible for making a blatantly stupid decision which caused serious harm?
Thought not.
"...43 per cent of the population have medium or high internet skills – meaning they can make a phone call online or create a web page..."
Trouble is, even that figure is vastly inflated by those who think they can create a web page because they can use some brain-dead hosting company tool which lets them choose from a few templates and set their own colours.
The trouble is, we still live in a society where it's seen as more 'cool' to be able to kick a ball or mime to an auto-tuned song than to understand the technology that makes our world function. A damn sight better paid, too.
Re: Eroding Copyright?
I've upvoted your post because I too disagree with the creeping extension of copyright terms. I say that as a photographer who has spent his working life building a business which depends upon owning the copyright of my own work in order to make a living. But that also perhaps gives me a slightly different viewpoint on the argument about copyright (and hence earnings ability) being passed on to children. Like any small business owner, I do want my children to benefit from the fruits of my life's work of building my business into something valuable and viable.
In my case, that's as more about the copyright in the work I have already done as it is in the bricks, mortar and equipment and even the client list I've accumulated over the years. Why should my valuable copyright legacy be any less capable of being inherited than any of my physical properly?
Re: Does this mean automation?
One might almost suggest that MS could see flooding Google with takedown requests as a valid attack on a competitor. Almost like a legally sanctioned DOS...
Re: Remove the content
I do think it's a huge overreaction to compare copyright infringement to murder, but to continue your analogy, removing a link to infringing material is more like taking away the weapons from a serial killer.
Taking action against an infringer to remove content is slow, expensive and seldom practical, particularly if the infringer is located in a different jurisdiction. And most of the time, any action not backed up by the threat of legal consequences will be met with no response at all.
Conspicuous by absence
In this article about the 'creative industries' is any mention of anyone who actually creates stuff. This seems once again to be about the publishers and distributors trying to hang on to their old business models again.
I'm a photographer and have been in the business for over 35 years. I've yet to have any contact with any of those named in the article which hasn't been about them trying to steal work from myself and people like myself, e.g. music publishers using my images in a commercial context without permission to illustrate and market their products.
The individual creator always gets the short straw while the corporations scream about infringement. It's that imbalance which needs to be sorted out.
Re: Open source zero cost?
The FUD is the implied suggestion that non-free/proprietary systems need less support than free software systems. As a long-term Linux user in my business who has also seen friends and family use both, I'd have to say that's just not true in my experience.
Those using Windows tend to need regular hand-holding when viruses or other malware strike and when things they have blindly installed mess up their systems. The free software users in contrast tend to have none of these issues. Stuff just works.
Win, Mac and Linux users are just as likely to need help with specific applications or functions such as burning a CD/DVD or managing email.
Those free software users I'm talking about range from the very young to the elderly and from those with zero technical knowledge to those who are quite proficient.
That's why the suggestions that free software is somehow less free because users need support is just misdirection.
Re: Serious Question
It goes a lot deeper than just the browser.
MS were slow on the WWW uptake, but jumped in with both feet when Bill Gates realised how central it would become to PC users experience of the OS. The plan with IE was then to use the browser as a lever to prevent other OSs being considered as an option.
Essentially, if every user needed 'the internet' and 'the internet' could be made to only work properly on IE, then since IE is only available on Windows, Windows would force out *all* competition as a matter of course. IE was made a permanent part of Windows and given exclusive access to Windows-only technologies such as ActiveX to achieve that advantage.
The fact so many business and government PC are still stuck on long-obsolete versions of IE is a testament to how close MS got to achieving their ultimate goal of permanent lock-in.
Accounting can be very creative
IANAL nor am I an accountant, but it would seem that Google could easily claim to be losing money hand over fist with Android as a project in it's own right - pays for developers, then it gives it away after all - while still raking in the ad money from it's use as a part of it's quite separate advertising business.
It's apparently a valid argument in court, even if the rest of the world is fully aware of the game being played. But then, when did the courts have anything to do with the real world?
Re: What's it called?
Hmmm. I must be unusual then because I find sitting in a comfortable chair at home with a laptop on my lap a very easy and relaxing way to work. Never tried it while falling downstairs though. Maybe that would help too.
Not sure there's a problem here
As far as I can see from the article, it's not suggested that these employers ever agreed *not to hire* an employee from one of the others, only that they would not go cold-calling for them.
In other words, if the employees were in demand and could be bothered to go look for another job, they could find one. So they'd have to be sufficiently career-motivated to get off their butts and go look for a better job instead of just being offered one on a plate.
This is a problem how exactly?
Re: NOT Visa failing - It's AMAZON failing.
There's a sensible reason why many companies insist on shipping only to the billing address. It helps prevent a stolen card (or stolen details) being used by a third party to get valuable goods delivered to themselves while billing you for them. Presumably you'd recognise that as a good idea if you stopped to think about it...
...currently sitting at an Aspire 5920 which I've been using regularly for over three years with no problems. It's well travelled, runs OpenSUSE and gets used for development as well as general web/office stuff.
