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Comment: I'm sure they'll keep the Twilight franchise going (Score 1) 421

by alizard (#38856765) Attached to: Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Controls
so you can go back to sleep.

At the low-budget end of the film market, Kickstarter is already replacing Hollywood angel investors and YCombinatot is bringing in more conventional VC startup money. What I'm proposing here would simply accelerate the process.

As for legacy content, even MICROSOFT can figure out that masters of films or records in archival storage that just sit there make the owner no money. There's a lot of long-tail potential in the vaults of Universal. Why should a movie or record EVER go out of print?

But those concerns are for grownups. You can go back to dreaming of being sparkly. And hope the next VAMPYRE you see isn't carrying a Zune.

Comment: the tech giants can make this go away forever (Score 1) 421

by alizard (#38856507) Attached to: Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Controls
by pooling their petty cash and simply buying up the big mass market content providers. And probably manage the Hollywood IP portfolio more efficiently and profitably than Hollywood can.

We can hope that everyone actively involved has figured this out and the real Net war in progress is over how much Hollywood is going to get paid to go away. Perhaps Hollywood should get what it wants to ensure that these people get an early start on partying themselves to death.

Comment: the "nuclear option" doesn't go nearly far enough (Score 1) 507

by alizard (#38568782) Attached to: Net Companies Consider the "Nuclear Option" To Combat SOPA
The Net Coalition can make Hollywood effectively disappear from the Web.

And that is exactly what they should do.

No advertising or product sales or even a visible presence until the stock prices of these companies drops far enough that the members of the Net Coalition can buy the biggest MPAA studios and RIAA labels out of petty cash. Then fire the management of these companies and replace them with people who know something about music in thel digital age. I believe that the tech industry can probably manage the IP portfolios more rationally and profitably than the jackass incumbents in any case.

The *AA wants censorship? I think they should get it. Enough of it to destroy them.

Comment: I fully support the efforts of Apple and Google (Score 1) 139

by alizard (#38555132) Attached to: HP Wanted $1.2B For WebOS and Palm
to get each other's mobile OSs banned from public sale. In the meantime, it would be a bright idea for some patent attorneys to look at the 'abandoned' mobile OSs to see if they conflict with the Apple / Google / M$ IP portfolios.

One of these days, a lawsuit-proof mobile OS might prove extremely valuable. Imagine the next generation of mobile OS products based on WebOS and Maemo rather than banned-from-sale iOS and Android.

And an object lesson as to why tech companies should compete on technology and marketing ability rather than on the ability to suppress competitor's products via legal means would also be a good thing, and better it be that companies I am not involved with provide it.

Comment: what's good about WebOS? (Score 1) 99

by alizard (#37997040) Attached to: HP Pondering Sale of WebOS
The people who have actually used it, myself included find the UI very good indeed.

Nobody is suing about it.

For a tablet/smartphone manufacturer, having a superior UI backed with lawsuit-proof code is the way out of the legal clusterfuck involving Apple, Google, and even Micro$oft . . . which appear to have collectively concluded that since they can't compete on superior technology, that their road to future growth is to sue its competing OSs out of existence.

Personally, I hope Apple and Google and Microsoft succeed in blowing each other out of the mobile market.

Comment: IMO, the best response to "some discomfort" (Score 1) 798

by alizard (#37904246) Attached to: Are Power Users Too Cool For Ubuntu Unity?
is user pushback followed by voting with one's feet if the vendor still doesn't get the message. I plck a UI to maximize my efficiency, and I saw nothing in Unity that would help me do that on a desktop. I wouldn't mind trying Unity on a tablet or smartphone. If Shuttleworth wants happy Unity users, he needs to convince OEMs to put it on tablets and smartphones.

So I run Kubuntu on all 4 of my machines, including the netbook. If some way is found to make it impossible to run KDE on Ubuntu, I'll go back to Debian.

But because all the OSes are going to be extended to the mobile, all the vendors are making changes to the DE at the expense of some discomfort of the users.

Desktops are not smartphones,. The main differences are far more screen real estate (true even on a netbook with the screen the size of a tablet ...netbooks don't need virtual keyboards or touchscreen cursor control), a physical pointing device, and a physical keyboard. Optimising a desktop with a smartphone UI is a great reason to change distros or operating systems.

Certainly, a single unified UI is convenient for developers. But if the price of developer convenience is mass migration to the competition, it's not worth paying.

Comment: perhaps the problem is with (Score 1) 798

by alizard (#37903868) Attached to: Are Power Users Too Cool For Ubuntu Unity?
you and Shuttleworth and others who think You Know What Is Best For Us.

You and others who think like you do should feel free to run your ideas up the flagpole, but if they do not fit our perceived needs, don't be surprised if the salute you get is a raised middle finger if you are annoying enough about pushing it.

Comment: in the real world (Score 1) 798

by alizard (#37903786) Attached to: Are Power Users Too Cool For Ubuntu Unity?
geeks who intend to get the bills paid spend more time with word processors and spreadsheets and e-mail than doing the fun things one can do inside a terminal window. If you want to create ECAD designs by banging out Gerber files character by character in vi in a terminal in pursuit of geek cred, go for it. It won't work, but we'll get lots of entertainment if you put your efforts on YouTube.

For routine desktop productivity of the sort required to be able to afford the geek lifestyle, desktops matter.

Comment: there's an inherent speed problem (Score 3, Interesting) 362

by alizard (#37300706) Attached to: Weak Typing &mdash; the Lost Art of the Keyboard
75 word per minute world record for thumb typing



Comment: the UI has been drastically improved (Score 1) 487

by alizard (#36717880) Attached to: Have American Businesses Been Stranded By the MBAs?
I found GIMP useless except for special effects a couple of years ago. Now, I use it routinely. There are lots of people who need more than MTPaint but don't need the capability of several hundred bucks worth of graphics software. Who need capabilities like manipulating photos, making simple web page graphics, posters. GIMP is just fine for that kind of situation. Sure, it's got a learning curve. But so does anything above the MSPaint level.
