And how are they breaking the law? They are going through the proper legal channels. They have lots of expensive lawyers making sure they are complying with the law, and despite what you may read on Groklaw, they really arent doing anything illegal. I suppose you could try to make some argument about how looking at what someone is sharing on a P2P network is illegal somehow, but I think thats a huge stretch. I am sure there are some other technicalities that I am unaware of that could be stretched if you really tried hard to make it look like they were technically violating the law somehow. But at the very least they are complying with the spirit of copyright law imho.
Im sure noone else will defend the RIAA here, so I may as well be the one to point out the obvious.
From what I understand here the RIAA didnt really want to bankrupt this woman. They really just wanted to assert their IP rights, they typically dont want whatever money would be awarded from a trial against some random individual. The cost of running this whole operation dramatically exceeds whatever they could make in settlements and verdicts. They arent doing it to extort as some claim, they are doing it to deter people from copying their stuff. They dont need the publicity of forcing a woman and her kid to be homeless. Despite what groklaw may say they arent going after people that they dont have fairly good cases against. (and you know perfectly well there are tons of people who they can make good cases against)
This woman should just leave it alone, she already caught a break with the charges being dropped.
Come on, you are complaining about how they left out all the exceptions and nuances of it? Do you seriously expect them to just regurgitate the entire thing? The basic spirit of it is captured pretty well in that one sentence which is far better than the summary I just read here on Slashdot. I cant even begin to count the number of times I have read a summary on here which was horribly misleading or flat out false. I think this is a pretty classis case of the pot implying that the kettle could be a little less black.
Remember the anti-trust thing? Microsoft assumed that as long as they werent some contracter trying to bribe the government for pork they didnt need to lobby. Politicians love to pick on big companies, but they go after the ones that arent spending money lobbying them. MS wasnt sending out bribes so they got attacked by politicians. Google is now recongizing that they have the potential to be hounded for privacy concerns, intellectual property violations, unfairly leveraging their dominant search engine, etc. So they arent going to fall into the same trap MS did and assume that just because they arent breaking any laws grandstanding politicians and their lawyers wont go after them.
*gasp* Google paying out the nose for influence in Washington? Its almost like they are your standard multi billion international corporation.
Lets give it a rest already, this doesnt make Google evil. It just means that they are like any other company which is something nonfanboys have known all along. Do we need to see a headline every time a tech company hires a handful of lobbyists? What makes Google special?
I just read through all those emails, I have a real hard time feeling sorry for this guy. MS went way out of their way to try to work things out with him. Multiple conference calls, a jillion pages of emails, etc. In the end its pretty simple, he was enabling access to a feature that isnt available in the free version. Hes trying to confuse the issue by claiming that the API is public, which it is for the pay version. Its pretty obvious that he is violating the license. You can harp about how all software should be free and the pay features should be available in the free version I guess. If you want that you should not use MS's products. You should respect the license you agree to, whether it be the GPL or one of MS's EULAs.
I kind of feel bad for this MS manager, he really went out of his way to be nice to this guy who was clearly violating the license. Now people on slashdot are going to say all kinds of nasty stuff about him without actually looking closely at the issue and seeing that he was pretty clearly in the right.
I look at those screenshots and they look exactly like a SC1 battle with better resolution. Seriously, with one or two exceptions you can pick out every unit and its SC1 equivalent in those screenshots. The terran bunkers, the mutalisks, the zerglings, etc.
I know SC1 was an awesome game and they dont want to do anything to mess up the legacy, but come on, its like a decade later, lets do something besides new graphics. I've always been a huge fan of Blizzard, I hope there is more to the new starcraft than what I've seen so far would suggest. Right now it just looks like an expansion pack with a few new units and updated graphics.
MS is a massive company with a lot of different projects. There are cult followings for some products, but not so much for the company as a whole. I think its analagous to Sony, there are people who are members of the cult of Playstation, but there is no cult of sony. Companies like Apple and Google have a much more narrow focus, so its not much of a leap to go from being a google search fanboy to being a google fanboy.
The open source thing mentioned in summary is a little different, it isnt a single company that people are loyal to.
That being said I think there is a lack of passion at MS. It seems like everyone who goes there to work as Program Manager (the folks who control the direction of the companies products) isnt tremdously passionate about technology or knowledgable, they tend to be the more 'good at playing big corporate politics' type. They have got a ton of great engineers who are very passionate, but those arent really the guys who control whats going on. Personally, I have always thought that PMs should be mostly made up of engineering types, those guys just seem to be more passionate about the technology in general.
Well duh, look at what website you are visiting. Thats like saying everything you heard about the United States on Al-Jazeera is bad so obviously they deserve to be blown up. Why dont you use it and try to develop your own opinions objectively rather than believing everything you read on an enourmously biased website? There are certainly good and bad elements to Vista, but if you are going to flame them it should at least be based on something better than reading a bunch of negative stuff on slashdot.
Why should it matter what the creaters want? They agreed to produce the content (for a huge sum of money by the way) for Viacom. If they didnt want Viacom to own it they shouldnt have agreed to it. Viacom owns it, they can do as they wish. And yes, this copyright system ensures that people like John Stewart who enter into these agreements get compensated.
If you hire me to build you a house should I be able to come back later and tell you that I think you should allow someone to stay in one of the rooms of your house for free? Of course not, you paid me to create it and now you own it.
All this is is some negative publicity for Viacom, the bottom line is it doesnt matter what these artists want nor should it. If they arent comfortable with someone else owning what they create then they should give up their huge salaries and go create all the infrastructure necessary to run a succcesfull TV channel themselves so that they can then give their content away for free to whomever they please.
Whether or not it is in Viacom's best interest to allow Google to do whatever they want with their intellectual property is beside the point. The question is whether or not Google is profiting off of Viacom's content without an agreement in place to allow them to do so. You can argue until you are blue in the face about how Viacom ought to run their business, it has no bearing on whether or not Google has the right to make money off of Viacom's content without their permission.
I'm not saying that Viacom is right or that Google is right, just that there are a lot of articles on Slashdot trying to find excuses for Google that miss point entirely.
Haha, you google fan boys crack me up. Multi billion dollar companies dont enter fake bids. They are serious about buying.
It really is surprising to me that everyone here seems to come up with conspiracy theories to rationalize their worldview of doublclick as 'bad' and google as 'good'. They are both companies in business to make money. Doubleclick uses annoying ads because they make money. Google uses unobtrusive ads because they make billions. The 'dont be evil' thing is just good marketing.
> Could it be that that there are no clear cut top universities for learning to program in India - i.e. they are all reasonable?
I dont think this is the case. IIT is generally regarded as one of the best engineering univerisities in the world. Everyone who wants to be an engineer/scientist in India applies there. If anything, the best engineering undergrads in India are more concentrated than the best engineering undergrads in the US.
He knows exactly what he is talking about. The format will support both lossless and lossy compression as he said. The different methods have different effects on image quality. One degrades it some the other does not. Seems like a good laymans explanation to me.
If they did that they would have the all the driver nightmare problems that windows has. Currently they have a good reputation for reliability because they have the luxury of knowing exactly what the hardware looks like when they develop for it. If they allow people to start plugging in video cards with just-released-yesterday drivers they will be staring at the same problem MS has been dealing with for decades.
MS even has a few advantages here that Apple would not have:
1) They have a very large testing infrastructure set up to assist third party developers already in place.
2) Third party developers are going to be more interested in getting their drivers to work well on windows and its likely that the mac will be a second priority.
So the article is saying that because Apple charges more for their computers, resulting in higher profit margins, MS is doomed? The article tries to make it sound like Apple is making more because they arent paying license fees to MS, but in reality they are charging a HUGE premium for their operating system. Compare the price differential of a mac with an equivalent hardware dell, its quite large.
There are so many things in this article that make no sense.
The author claims that the ipod and iphone are going to be major factors in killing the windows monopoly.
The author actually claims that consumers are willing to pay more for laptops because of resale value. I reread that like 5 times to make sure I wasnt reading it wrong.
This sounds like just another fanboy who wants to see Apple win and is grasping at straws for reasons why it will happen.
OK, so what aspect of Vista do you think needs to be reverse engineered? I'll grant you that reverse engineering may have been necessary a decade ago, but to my knowledge, it is not now.
I'm not denying it because I am not a huge fan of OneCare. It will likely get better over time, its a new product. But right now I certainly wouldnt buy it. MS has some good products, I use the ones I like, I use alternatives when I dont, I am not a zealot on either side. But I often come across as an MS fanboy here because I respond when I see arguments against them that I think are flawed, such as yours.
"You don't agree that being the creators of the source-code would give you at least a slight advantage?"
No, I dont. Say for the sake of argument that your claim that OneCare developers have windows source in front of them is true. Explain to me how it would help.
1) Umm... Because Microsoft makes the operating system which allows the virus problems in the first place. Just because they make a different product doesn't mean that that particular software team is completely isolated from the rest of Microsoft (well to be fair the MS Entourage team was apparently banned from looking at the code that Outlook uses to talk with Exchange servers but I digress).
Several other people have responded to me that they think the team working on OneCare has an advantage because they work at MS. Even if they were talking to windows devs every day (which they probably are not) what do you think they would gain? How would this give them an advantage over their competitors in catching a higher percentage of viruses? People here keep saying that it does, but when I ask how noone responds.
2) Really? The argument is that Microsoft has money to burn and hence if they can't make a decent product then perhaps they should spend more to fix it. If throwing money at the problem can't fix it because they need better stock options then perhaps we should consider this when purchasing MS products. As in... The real argument says that MS cares more about making money than about fixing their customers problems.
OK, I think you are trying to argue that they are underfunding development here as opposed to having more funding as the GP claimed. (am I misunderstanding you?) I think the truth is that they are in the middle somewhere, their funding is probably less than that of Norton, but it is still more than adequate. That would be consistant with what they have done in the past.
3) If it comes with the computer, then no one will buy anything else. This is how IE killed Netscape. Even if you give away a better product for free, it has to be extremely better (say like Firefox) before it will take hold.
This is another thing I keep hearing. It isnt bundled with windows. OneCare isnt free. This is a common misconception that I keep seeing here. The other AV companies have deals with OEMs like dell that arent about to disappear overnight. This isnt the same thing as IE vs Netscape.
The government isnt evil for collecting taxes as above posters are claiming.
Google isnt evil for using a perfectly legal accounting system that works within the bounds of the law to pay as little taxes as they can.
Everyone takes as many deductions as they are legally allowed on their tax returns. Would we think that people claiming an exemption for having a kid are 'evil'? Really not much difference.
"The sad thing is OneCare is just another "check-the-block" feature, and average Joe won't know how awful it is or even care. They'll see it has security software bundled in and think that's all they need."
I responded to one of your posts above. Maybe the problem you are having is just that you dont understand the situation. OneCare is not bundled with windows as you are claiming in this post.
Frankly, based on your comments I would think that the average Joe's judgement of how "awful" a product is would be about as well informed as your own.
"Because Microsoft is easily 10x bigger than all the other companies combined, and Microsoft creates the OS, so their results could stand to be a little better."
People keep making these two arguments and I just dont thiknk they make sense.
1)"Microsoft is easily 10x bigger than all the other companies combined"
MS may be bigger than all they other companies across all their business groups but it isnt like all that money goes into one product. Do you really believe that they are funding OneCare with billions? Thats what their competitors are worth here. If MS funded every product they make with billions of dollars they would go bankrupt pretty fast. Generally speaking, in areas where they are not the market leader their product is not as well funded as that of their competitors.
2) "Microsoft creates the OS"
OK, I have to ask: What advantage do you think they gain by this? Everyone keeps refering to it and since you did too I have to assume you have some logical reason for thinking this provides an advantage. What is it? How would this "make their results a little better"?
Slashdot Mirror
And how are they breaking the law? They are going through the proper legal channels. They have lots of expensive lawyers making sure they are complying with the law, and despite what you may read on Groklaw, they really arent doing anything illegal. I suppose you could try to make some argument about how looking at what someone is sharing on a P2P network is illegal somehow, but I think thats a huge stretch. I am sure there are some other technicalities that I am unaware of that could be stretched if you really tried hard to make it look like they were technically violating the law somehow. But at the very least they are complying with the spirit of copyright law imho.
Its not intended as a troll. What is wrong with my arguments? Anything pro-RIAA == troll around here?
Im sure noone else will defend the RIAA here, so I may as well be the one to point out the obvious.
From what I understand here the RIAA didnt really want to bankrupt this woman. They really just wanted to assert their IP rights, they typically dont want whatever money would be awarded from a trial against some random individual. The cost of running this whole operation dramatically exceeds whatever they could make in settlements and verdicts. They arent doing it to extort as some claim, they are doing it to deter people from copying their stuff. They dont need the publicity of forcing a woman and her kid to be homeless. Despite what groklaw may say they arent going after people that they dont have fairly good cases against. (and you know perfectly well there are tons of people who they can make good cases against)
This woman should just leave it alone, she already caught a break with the charges being dropped.
Come on, you are complaining about how they left out all the exceptions and nuances of it? Do you seriously expect them to just regurgitate the entire thing? The basic spirit of it is captured pretty well in that one sentence which is far better than the summary I just read here on Slashdot. I cant even begin to count the number of times I have read a summary on here which was horribly misleading or flat out false. I think this is a pretty classis case of the pot implying that the kettle could be a little less black.
Remember the anti-trust thing? Microsoft assumed that as long as they werent some contracter trying to bribe the government for pork they didnt need to lobby. Politicians love to pick on big companies, but they go after the ones that arent spending money lobbying them. MS wasnt sending out bribes so they got attacked by politicians. Google is now recongizing that they have the potential to be hounded for privacy concerns, intellectual property violations, unfairly leveraging their dominant search engine, etc. So they arent going to fall into the same trap MS did and assume that just because they arent breaking any laws grandstanding politicians and their lawyers wont go after them.
*gasp* Google paying out the nose for influence in Washington? Its almost like they are your standard multi billion international corporation.
Lets give it a rest already, this doesnt make Google evil. It just means that they are like any other company which is something nonfanboys have known all along. Do we need to see a headline every time a tech company hires a handful of lobbyists? What makes Google special?
I just read through all those emails, I have a real hard time feeling sorry for this guy. MS went way out of their way to try to work things out with him. Multiple conference calls, a jillion pages of emails, etc. In the end its pretty simple, he was enabling access to a feature that isnt available in the free version. Hes trying to confuse the issue by claiming that the API is public, which it is for the pay version. Its pretty obvious that he is violating the license. You can harp about how all software should be free and the pay features should be available in the free version I guess. If you want that you should not use MS's products. You should respect the license you agree to, whether it be the GPL or one of MS's EULAs.
I kind of feel bad for this MS manager, he really went out of his way to be nice to this guy who was clearly violating the license. Now people on slashdot are going to say all kinds of nasty stuff about him without actually looking closely at the issue and seeing that he was pretty clearly in the right.
I look at those screenshots and they look exactly like a SC1 battle with better resolution. Seriously, with one or two exceptions you can pick out every unit and its SC1 equivalent in those screenshots. The terran bunkers, the mutalisks, the zerglings, etc.
I know SC1 was an awesome game and they dont want to do anything to mess up the legacy, but come on, its like a decade later, lets do something besides new graphics. I've always been a huge fan of Blizzard, I hope there is more to the new starcraft than what I've seen so far would suggest. Right now it just looks like an expansion pack with a few new units and updated graphics.
MS is a massive company with a lot of different projects. There are cult followings for some products, but not so much for the company as a whole. I think its analagous to Sony, there are people who are members of the cult of Playstation, but there is no cult of sony. Companies like Apple and Google have a much more narrow focus, so its not much of a leap to go from being a google search fanboy to being a google fanboy.
The open source thing mentioned in summary is a little different, it isnt a single company that people are loyal to.
That being said I think there is a lack of passion at MS. It seems like everyone who goes there to work as Program Manager (the folks who control the direction of the companies products) isnt tremdously passionate about technology or knowledgable, they tend to be the more 'good at playing big corporate politics' type. They have got a ton of great engineers who are very passionate, but those arent really the guys who control whats going on. Personally, I have always thought that PMs should be mostly made up of engineering types, those guys just seem to be more passionate about the technology in general.
"Everything I've heard about Vista is bad"
Well duh, look at what website you are visiting. Thats like saying everything you heard about the United States on Al-Jazeera is bad so obviously they deserve to be blown up. Why dont you use it and try to develop your own opinions objectively rather than believing everything you read on an enourmously biased website? There are certainly good and bad elements to Vista, but if you are going to flame them it should at least be based on something better than reading a bunch of negative stuff on slashdot.
Why should it matter what the creaters want? They agreed to produce the content (for a huge sum of money by the way) for Viacom. If they didnt want Viacom to own it they shouldnt have agreed to it. Viacom owns it, they can do as they wish. And yes, this copyright system ensures that people like John Stewart who enter into these agreements get compensated.
If you hire me to build you a house should I be able to come back later and tell you that I think you should allow someone to stay in one of the rooms of your house for free? Of course not, you paid me to create it and now you own it.
All this is is some negative publicity for Viacom, the bottom line is it doesnt matter what these artists want nor should it. If they arent comfortable with someone else owning what they create then they should give up their huge salaries and go create all the infrastructure necessary to run a succcesfull TV channel themselves so that they can then give their content away for free to whomever they please.
Whether or not it is in Viacom's best interest to allow Google to do whatever they want with their intellectual property is beside the point. The question is whether or not Google is profiting off of Viacom's content without an agreement in place to allow them to do so. You can argue until you are blue in the face about how Viacom ought to run their business, it has no bearing on whether or not Google has the right to make money off of Viacom's content without their permission.
I'm not saying that Viacom is right or that Google is right, just that there are a lot of articles on Slashdot trying to find excuses for Google that miss point entirely.
Haha, you google fan boys crack me up. Multi billion dollar companies dont enter fake bids. They are serious about buying.
It really is surprising to me that everyone here seems to come up with conspiracy theories to rationalize their worldview of doublclick as 'bad' and google as 'good'. They are both companies in business to make money. Doubleclick uses annoying ads because they make money. Google uses unobtrusive ads because they make billions. The 'dont be evil' thing is just good marketing.
> Could it be that that there are no clear cut top universities for learning to program in India - i.e. they are all reasonable?
I dont think this is the case. IIT is generally regarded as one of the best engineering univerisities in the world. Everyone who wants to be an engineer/scientist in India applies there. If anything, the best engineering undergrads in India are more concentrated than the best engineering undergrads in the US.
He knows exactly what he is talking about. The format will support both lossless and lossy compression as he said. The different methods have different effects on image quality. One degrades it some the other does not. Seems like a good laymans explanation to me.
If they did that they would have the all the driver nightmare problems that windows has. Currently they have a good reputation for reliability because they have the luxury of knowing exactly what the hardware looks like when they develop for it. If they allow people to start plugging in video cards with just-released-yesterday drivers they will be staring at the same problem MS has been dealing with for decades.
MS even has a few advantages here that Apple would not have:
1) They have a very large testing infrastructure set up to assist third party developers already in place.
2) Third party developers are going to be more interested in getting their drivers to work well on windows and its likely that the mac will be a second priority.
So the article is saying that because Apple charges more for their computers, resulting in higher profit margins, MS is doomed? The article tries to make it sound like Apple is making more because they arent paying license fees to MS, but in reality they are charging a HUGE premium for their operating system. Compare the price differential of a mac with an equivalent hardware dell, its quite large.
There are so many things in this article that make no sense.
The author claims that the ipod and iphone are going to be major factors in killing the windows monopoly.
The author actually claims that consumers are willing to pay more for laptops because of resale value. I reread that like 5 times to make sure I wasnt reading it wrong.
This sounds like just another fanboy who wants to see Apple win and is grasping at straws for reasons why it will happen.
OK, so what aspect of Vista do you think needs to be reverse engineered? I'll grant you that reverse engineering may have been necessary a decade ago, but to my knowledge, it is not now.
I'm not denying it because I am not a huge fan of OneCare. It will likely get better over time, its a new product. But right now I certainly wouldnt buy it. MS has some good products, I use the ones I like, I use alternatives when I dont, I am not a zealot on either side. But I often come across as an MS fanboy here because I respond when I see arguments against them that I think are flawed, such as yours.
"You don't agree that being the creators of the source-code would give you at least a slight advantage?"
No, I dont. Say for the sake of argument that your claim that OneCare developers have windows source in front of them is true. Explain to me how it would help.
Everyone keeps saying this and I dont understand the logic behind it.
Even if it were true that they had access to windows source, how would this help them? Everyone has claimed that it does, but noone has explained how.
1) Umm... Because Microsoft makes the operating system which allows the virus problems in the first place. Just because they make a different product doesn't mean that that particular software team is completely isolated from the rest of Microsoft (well to be fair the MS Entourage team was apparently banned from looking at the code that Outlook uses to talk with Exchange servers but I digress).
Several other people have responded to me that they think the team working on OneCare has an advantage because they work at MS. Even if they were talking to windows devs every day (which they probably are not) what do you think they would gain? How would this give them an advantage over their competitors in catching a higher percentage of viruses? People here keep saying that it does, but when I ask how noone responds.
2) Really? The argument is that Microsoft has money to burn and hence if they can't make a decent product then perhaps they should spend more to fix it. If throwing money at the problem can't fix it because they need better stock options then perhaps we should consider this when purchasing MS products. As in... The real argument says that MS cares more about making money than about fixing their customers problems.
OK, I think you are trying to argue that they are underfunding development here as opposed to having more funding as the GP claimed. (am I misunderstanding you?) I think the truth is that they are in the middle somewhere, their funding is probably less than that of Norton, but it is still more than adequate. That would be consistant with what they have done in the past.
3) If it comes with the computer, then no one will buy anything else. This is how IE killed Netscape. Even if you give away a better product for free, it has to be extremely better (say like Firefox) before it will take hold.
This is another thing I keep hearing. It isnt bundled with windows. OneCare isnt free. This is a common misconception that I keep seeing here. The other AV companies have deals with OEMs like dell that arent about to disappear overnight. This isnt the same thing as IE vs Netscape.
The government isnt evil for collecting taxes as above posters are claiming.
Google isnt evil for using a perfectly legal accounting system that works within the bounds of the law to pay as little taxes as they can.
Everyone takes as many deductions as they are legally allowed on their tax returns. Would we think that people claiming an exemption for having a kid are 'evil'? Really not much difference.
"The sad thing is OneCare is just another "check-the-block" feature, and average Joe won't know how awful it is or even care. They'll see it has security software bundled in and think that's all they need."
I responded to one of your posts above. Maybe the problem you are having is just that you dont understand the situation. OneCare is not bundled with windows as you are claiming in this post.
Frankly, based on your comments I would think that the average Joe's judgement of how "awful" a product is would be about as well informed as your own.
"Because Microsoft is easily 10x bigger than all the other companies combined, and Microsoft creates the OS, so their results could stand to be a little better."
People keep making these two arguments and I just dont thiknk they make sense.
1)"Microsoft is easily 10x bigger than all the other companies combined"
MS may be bigger than all they other companies across all their business groups but it isnt like all that money goes into one product. Do you really believe that they are funding OneCare with billions? Thats what their competitors are worth here. If MS funded every product they make with billions of dollars they would go bankrupt pretty fast. Generally speaking, in areas where they are not the market leader their product is not as well funded as that of their competitors.
2) "Microsoft creates the OS"
OK, I have to ask: What advantage do you think they gain by this? Everyone keeps refering to it and since you did too I have to assume you have some logical reason for thinking this provides an advantage. What is it? How would this "make their results a little better"?