If you don't like copyright, don't use copyrighted things at all. People create works because they understand that under US law they will be protected by copyright. Your position is one of convenience rather than principle. If you were some sort of performer or writer and people were willing to pay for your creative works and you decided to turn down the money, then your position would hold water. You just want free MP3s.
The parent is right on target. I'm surprised that so few slashdotters realize the facts he lays out.
Of course, I think many slashdotters believe they are simply entitled to freely access all copyrighted works... This is an anarchistic twist on the FSF's notion that software patents are morally wrong.
The parent wisely points out that simply by letting the current system be enforced, the beneftits of alternative licenses will begin to be clear to everyone.
I'm looking forward to the first update to OpenOffice that takes into consideration all of the information in the schemas.
OO looks great these days, btw, for anyone who hasn't used it lately. Still looks ugly on screen for bulleted lists in the word processor, but it's getting pretty darn good.
There is nothing communistic about Open Source. It's just a method of creating standards, much like the ISO or ANSI, and a licensing arrangement that facilitates the ongoing evolution of the spec.
Free Software (as in the FSF) is communistic, in my opinion, and should not be confused with Open Source, which is perfectly compatible with capitalism.
I just downloaded the latest OpenOffice the other day and used it to open some spreadsheets and word processing documents. Admittedly there are some weird design issues (such as why OO decided to make the format cell screen entirely different from Microsoft Office and why they left off the 'wrap text' option)... And in the word processor bulleted lists look terrible on screen (though they print fine)...
But all in all I was quite impressed by the feel of both programs, and I decided that I'll be booting into Windows a lot less often because of it.
Baseless is right. Microsoft doesn't care about you, they just want to sell ads, just like Google and tons of other companies.
If you don't like the idea of anyone knowing that you watched desperate housewives in HD over IPTV, the watch it over the air or don't watch it at all!
It would be nice if states actually competed for residents. That was the way the USA was supposed to work, with the Federal government serving a well-defined and limited role. Since the amount that an individual pays in state taxes is deducted from his/her Federal tax burden, there is really very little incentive for states to lower taxes.
Ironically, the framers imagined the majority of a person's tax burden coming from the state and little or no Federal taxation.
You do have a point in mentioning that competition does exist between states and countries in terms of attracting taxable residents and businesses, but there is a great deal of competition in the software industry, and contrary to taxation people willingly part with their dollars. Note the absence of automatic payroll deduction for software fees, jail terms for people who choose not to buy particular software, etc.
The cynicism is understandable, but your example about hot dogs is simply false. The last time I bought hot dogs there were the same number of dogs as there were buns.
Do you know the purpose of all of the transistors in your television? You paid for them so you must have wanted them, right?
Yes... it's interesting what a misnomer that is... indicative of how little people understand about the economics of their own behavior. It's like being upset that your PC came with 4 USB slots when you only needed one. Of course, products are packaged for the majority of users not the minority.
If you had been able to save money by not obtaining those CDs, you would have. Therefore you saved money by obtaining them as part of a discounted package or got them for free. QED.
I think we're all happy to pay some taxes... but whereas Microsoft is forced to charge low prices in order to stay competitive, governments have very little fiscal accountability... of course, we're all at fault for this, but the difference is striking.
Bzzt. Nope, people buy computers with Microsoft software pre-loaded because they're cheaper than computers that don't have it pre-loaded.
If you want to take the time to learn to build a PC from parts, or if you want to order a server configuration that is sold w/o an OS, you can do so, and you can even buy a PC from a local vendor who built it from parts... but all of the options are in some way more expensive to the typical person than just calling up Dell and ordering a $399 PC with an included flat screen and 6 months of free internet access.
I can't believe that Pat thinks he was flamed for self-diagnosing. The point of those who advised him to get himself to a qualified doctor was that one's health is too important to risk. He was visiting small town family practice doctors when he should have been going to the ER of a major research hospital and then subsequently to the appropriate specialists.
Pat, we all hope you get better. But (no flame intended) you still shouldn't have waited so long to get yourself to a specialist.
The problem was that Netscape failed to see the handwriting on the wall fast enough to do something about it. Netscape began to lose market share with IE 2.0, but still held the vast majority all the way through IE 3.0, which was the first IE that didn't suck.
Netscape would have done better for shareholder value if it had actually been willing to spend the money needed to push the envelope and beat Microsoft. Netscape wasn't, which is why it died. Microsoft was simply wanted to win the browser war more than Netscape did. I am sure that a lot of people would have happily bought Netscape shares at $15 if it looked like Netscape was ready to take the competition seriously. Sadly, Netscape was pitching its server solutions rather than building what consumers wanted, which was a better browser.
Microsoft had a marketing advantage b/c of new windows desktops being sold, but up through IE3 it was a lot harder to update IE than it was to simply download Netscape,... in fact, if you recall everyone called IE Netscape then too... the product was so ubiquitous IE didn't even have name recognition.
Netscape was a tech startup that made some initially good technology but failed at the business aspect of things, Microsoft happens to be very good at business.
Interesting... maybe the mini or a successor will prove to be a formidable competitor for the next generation x-box, which is likely to include full PVR functionality and on-demand capability. Microsoft has been trying to get into the TV business for a long time, and I believe the X-Box II is going to be the first salvo that the marketplace sees.
Apple needs to create some apps that make people want to buy minis and hook them up to their TVs...
It was the first that I bought since my TERRIBLE experience with a Powerbook 5300 back in college. I vowed I'd never buy another piece of Apple hardware, but I couldn't resist. It's fantastic.
This reminds me of my undergrad days. The Solaris system was configured to display the contents of the.plan file whenever a user was fingered.
I set up my.plan file with a message that said that the user's finger priviliges had been revoked for my uniquename, that the request had been logged, and to contact the IT department with any questions.
I had a few friends come up to me and ask if everything was allright between us... not to mention some weird looks from some people who I suspected had been using finger to keep track of my whereabouts.
Soon after the university stopped including.plan in the finger output.
The industry does not conspire to give us slow chips. It just simply does not make business sense for AMD or Intel or IBM or any of the others to spend the required R&D dollars unless there is going to be a return on those dollars in the form of a couple of years of CPU sales.
Suppose you could start a microprossor company that could release chips on the schedule you mention. The question to ask is, how much money would they need to charge for those chips to pay for the continued R&D needed to make the next generation?
The reason we have the current status quo is because people are not willing to pay enough for the bleeding edge to justify more frequent product releases.
Sure, some small percentage of microprocessor purchasers would benefit from being able to pay a lot of money for faster improvement, but there aren't enough of them to make it a good business proposition for Intel. Think about it, if there were a 10GHZ chip available right now, how many computing clusters would not have been built becuase well, the 10GHZ chip was fast enough to not require a clustering solution... ?
In reality, most computing clusters are built using not the latest bleeding edge processors but using dual proc configurations of 6 month old technology. Why, because the incremental difference for most parallelizable problems won't be significant enough to justify the cost of using 100 10GHZ machines instead of simply using 25 dual proc 2GHZ machines.
What remains is a small niche: hard to parallelize cluster computation (which is really why people buy Cray's etc) and high end workstations. Still, for many workstation tasks, increasing L2 cache, speeding up RAM, etc., have made sufficient improvements to keep customers unwilling to drop multi-thousands of dollars for something like a 10GHZ processor.
Linux actually gets faster the longer your system has been running. This is due to filesystem caching. My desktop workstation has the most recently used 3GB of files cached in RAM, which makes for some impressive "filesystem" performance. Sure, if I loaded a memory hog application the system would swap out some of the cached files (which would take some time), but overall the performance of the system is enhanced by the swapping/caching regime that Linux uses.
Also, you can adjust the swappiness parameter if you want to always keep a certain percentage of RAM free for programs that you might want to open.
This stuff all works extremely well in Kernel 2.6. If you are using an older kernel you may not be benefitting from all of the latest enhancements to the vm system.
Also, if you want to see what the current state of the art is in Linux, try Gnome with Ximian, OpenOffice, etc. It's not as seamless as Windows XP in terms of an easily configurable user experience, but it's getting extremely close.
I would bet that Orkut remains written in ASP.NET. They're doubling it up with a squid proxy for extra performance, last time I got an uncensored error message. The concept behind high availability installations of ASP.NET is the same as the way Google designs its own filesystem: redundancy redundancy redundancy. Orkut has experienced tons of growth and has been able to scale way better than any of the similar social networking sites while providing better features and more images/data/etc.
The explosion of apps isn't necessarily going to be in office suites. Sure, it may be a while before an application as complex as MS Office can be written in.NET and still be as fast as the c++ version. It's about choosing the right tool for the job.
The explosion is going to be in the apps that rarely got written well: medium complexity, ui-dependent, relatively complex business rules/logic. Microsoft's.NET framework is perfect for such apps.
There will always be times when the speed you gain from coding in c will be more valuable than the time you save coding in c#, but there are a lot of times when the time saved is more valuable, particularly as hardware gets faster/cheaper.
Personally, i use c for some stuff and c# for other stuff. I'm very stoked about Mono, and I think it will empower a whole bunch more developers to take on serious projects in their spare time b/c frankly their minimal time will go further toward creating a usable app.
We ARE the progress in the IT world, in case you have been sleeping the last decade. How many new ideas have come from Redmond lately? Or any closed shop?
Consider the innovation that has come from Google. Orkut, Google's new social networking site, is built using Microsoft's innovative new product, ASP.NET, and utilizes the rich kind of client side scripting that is the hallmark of Microsoft's initiative to help people build better web apps. Google isn't using it because the programmers it has on staff learned VB in a couple of weeks, they chose it because it offers the best performance, developer productivity, and scalability of any available option.
There will be an explosion of great apps soon after Mono finishes its windows forms layer. They had to redo it because they relied on wine for the first version, and wine became its Achilles heel.
Download the latest version of Mono and MonoDevelop, skim some documentation, try gtk#, and see how easy it is to create fantastic cross platform (mac, windows, linux) apps using Mono.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like copyright, don't use copyrighted things at all. People create works because they understand that under US law they will be protected by copyright. Your position is one of convenience rather than principle. If you were some sort of performer or writer and people were willing to pay for your creative works and you decided to turn down the money, then your position would hold water. You just want free MP3s.
The parent is right on target. I'm surprised that so few slashdotters realize the facts he lays out.
Of course, I think many slashdotters believe they are simply entitled to freely access all copyrighted works... This is an anarchistic twist on the FSF's notion that software patents are morally wrong.
The parent wisely points out that simply by letting the current system be enforced, the beneftits of alternative licenses will begin to be clear to everyone.
Well, if Microsoft put in place fee collection measures like those used by governments, everyone would consider them draconian.
I'm looking forward to the first update to OpenOffice that takes into consideration all of the information in the schemas.
OO looks great these days, btw, for anyone who hasn't used it lately. Still looks ugly on screen for bulleted lists in the word processor, but it's getting pretty darn good.
There is nothing communistic about Open Source. It's just a method of creating standards, much like the ISO or ANSI, and a licensing arrangement that facilitates the ongoing evolution of the spec.
Free Software (as in the FSF) is communistic, in my opinion, and should not be confused with Open Source, which is perfectly compatible with capitalism.
I just downloaded the latest OpenOffice the other day and used it to open some spreadsheets and word processing documents. Admittedly there are some weird design issues (such as why OO decided to make the format cell screen entirely different from Microsoft Office and why they left off the 'wrap text' option)... And in the word processor bulleted lists look terrible on screen (though they print fine)...
But all in all I was quite impressed by the feel of both programs, and I decided that I'll be booting into Windows a lot less often because of it.
Baseless is right. Microsoft doesn't care about you, they just want to sell ads, just like Google and tons of other companies.
If you don't like the idea of anyone knowing that you watched desperate housewives in HD over IPTV, the watch it over the air or don't watch it at all!
It would be nice if states actually competed for residents. That was the way the USA was supposed to work, with the Federal government serving a well-defined and limited role. Since the amount that an individual pays in state taxes is deducted from his/her Federal tax burden, there is really very little incentive for states to lower taxes.
Ironically, the framers imagined the majority of a person's tax burden coming from the state and little or no Federal taxation.
You do have a point in mentioning that competition does exist between states and countries in terms of attracting taxable residents and businesses, but there is a great deal of competition in the software industry, and contrary to taxation people willingly part with their dollars. Note the absence of automatic payroll deduction for software fees, jail terms for people who choose not to buy particular software, etc.
The cynicism is understandable, but your example about hot dogs is simply false. The last time I bought hot dogs there were the same number of dogs as there were buns.
Do you know the purpose of all of the transistors in your television? You paid for them so you must have wanted them, right?
Yes... it's interesting what a misnomer that is... indicative of how little people understand about the economics of their own behavior. It's like being upset that your PC came with 4 USB slots when you only needed one. Of course, products are packaged for the majority of users not the minority.
If you had been able to save money by not obtaining those CDs, you would have. Therefore you saved money by obtaining them as part of a discounted package or got them for free. QED.
I think we're all happy to pay some taxes... but whereas Microsoft is forced to charge low prices in order to stay competitive, governments have very little fiscal accountability... of course, we're all at fault for this, but the difference is striking.
Bzzt. Nope, people buy computers with Microsoft software pre-loaded because they're cheaper than computers that don't have it pre-loaded.
If you want to take the time to learn to build a PC from parts, or if you want to order a server configuration that is sold w/o an OS, you can do so, and you can even buy a PC from a local vendor who built it from parts... but all of the options are in some way more expensive to the typical person than just calling up Dell and ordering a $399 PC with an included flat screen and 6 months of free internet access.
if the cost of not having office is greater than the cost of having it, you save money by buying it.
It's odd to compare Microsoft's revenue to tax revenue... but consider the following:
Everyone who paid Microsoft a dime did so voluntarily, while people who paid the state of New York did so to stay out of jail.
I can't believe that Pat thinks he was flamed for self-diagnosing. The point of those who advised him to get himself to a qualified doctor was that one's health is too important to risk. He was visiting small town family practice doctors when he should have been going to the ER of a major research hospital and then subsequently to the appropriate specialists.
Pat, we all hope you get better. But (no flame intended) you still shouldn't have waited so long to get yourself to a specialist.
The problem was that Netscape failed to see the handwriting on the wall fast enough to do something about it. Netscape began to lose market share with IE 2.0, but still held the vast majority all the way through IE 3.0, which was the first IE that didn't suck.
Netscape would have done better for shareholder value if it had actually been willing to spend the money needed to push the envelope and beat Microsoft. Netscape wasn't, which is why it died. Microsoft was simply wanted to win the browser war more than Netscape did. I am sure that a lot of people would have happily bought Netscape shares at $15 if it looked like Netscape was ready to take the competition seriously. Sadly, Netscape was pitching its server solutions rather than building what consumers wanted, which was a better browser.
Microsoft had a marketing advantage b/c of new windows desktops being sold, but up through IE3 it was a lot harder to update IE than it was to simply download Netscape,... in fact, if you recall everyone called IE Netscape then too... the product was so ubiquitous IE didn't even have name recognition.
Netscape was a tech startup that made some initially good technology but failed at the business aspect of things, Microsoft happens to be very good at business.
Interesting... maybe the mini or a successor will prove to be a formidable competitor for the next generation x-box, which is likely to include full PVR functionality and on-demand capability. Microsoft has been trying to get into the TV business for a long time, and I believe the X-Box II is going to be the first salvo that the marketplace sees.
Apple needs to create some apps that make people want to buy minis and hook them up to their TVs...
It was the first that I bought since my TERRIBLE experience with a Powerbook 5300 back in college. I vowed I'd never buy another piece of Apple hardware, but I couldn't resist. It's fantastic.
This reminds me of my undergrad days. The Solaris system was configured to display the contents of the .plan file whenever a user was fingered.
.plan file with a message that said that the user's finger priviliges had been revoked for my uniquename, that the request had been logged, and to contact the IT department with any questions.
.plan in the finger output.
I set up my
I had a few friends come up to me and ask if everything was allright between us... not to mention some weird looks from some people who I suspected had been using finger to keep track of my whereabouts.
Soon after the university stopped including
The industry does not conspire to give us slow chips. It just simply does not make business sense for AMD or Intel or IBM or any of the others to spend the required R&D dollars unless there is going to be a return on those dollars in the form of a couple of years of CPU sales.
... ?
Suppose you could start a microprossor company that could release chips on the schedule you mention. The question to ask is, how much money would they need to charge for those chips to pay for the continued R&D needed to make the next generation?
The reason we have the current status quo is because people are not willing to pay enough for the bleeding edge to justify more frequent product releases.
Sure, some small percentage of microprocessor purchasers would benefit from being able to pay a lot of money for faster improvement, but there aren't enough of them to make it a good business proposition for Intel. Think about it, if there were a 10GHZ chip available right now, how many computing clusters would not have been built becuase well, the 10GHZ chip was fast enough to not require a clustering solution
In reality, most computing clusters are built using not the latest bleeding edge processors but using dual proc configurations of 6 month old technology. Why, because the incremental difference for most parallelizable problems won't be significant enough to justify the cost of using 100 10GHZ machines instead of simply using 25 dual proc 2GHZ machines.
What remains is a small niche: hard to parallelize cluster computation (which is really why people buy Cray's etc) and high end workstations. Still, for many workstation tasks, increasing L2 cache, speeding up RAM, etc., have made sufficient improvements to keep customers unwilling to drop multi-thousands of dollars for something like a 10GHZ processor.
Linux actually gets faster the longer your system has been running. This is due to filesystem caching. My desktop workstation has the most recently used 3GB of files cached in RAM, which makes for some impressive "filesystem" performance. Sure, if I loaded a memory hog application the system would swap out some of the cached files (which would take some time), but overall the performance of the system is enhanced by the swapping/caching regime that Linux uses.
Also, you can adjust the swappiness parameter if you want to always keep a certain percentage of RAM free for programs that you might want to open.
This stuff all works extremely well in Kernel 2.6. If you are using an older kernel you may not be benefitting from all of the latest enhancements to the vm system.
Also, if you want to see what the current state of the art is in Linux, try Gnome with Ximian, OpenOffice, etc. It's not as seamless as Windows XP in terms of an easily configurable user experience, but it's getting extremely close.
I would bet that Orkut remains written in ASP.NET. They're doubling it up with a squid proxy for extra performance, last time I got an uncensored error message. The concept behind high availability installations of ASP.NET is the same as the way Google designs its own filesystem: redundancy redundancy redundancy. Orkut has experienced tons of growth and has been able to scale way better than any of the similar social networking sites while providing better features and more images/data/etc.
.NET and still be as fast as the c++ version. It's about choosing the right tool for the job.
.NET framework is perfect for such apps.
The explosion of apps isn't necessarily going to be in office suites. Sure, it may be a while before an application as complex as MS Office can be written in
The explosion is going to be in the apps that rarely got written well: medium complexity, ui-dependent, relatively complex business rules/logic. Microsoft's
There will always be times when the speed you gain from coding in c will be more valuable than the time you save coding in c#, but there are a lot of times when the time saved is more valuable, particularly as hardware gets faster/cheaper.
Personally, i use c for some stuff and c# for other stuff. I'm very stoked about Mono, and I think it will empower a whole bunch more developers to take on serious projects in their spare time b/c frankly their minimal time will go further toward creating a usable app.
You got taken to school.
We ARE the progress in the IT world, in case you have been sleeping the last decade. How many new ideas have come from Redmond lately? Or any closed shop?
Consider the innovation that has come from Google. Orkut, Google's new social networking site, is built using Microsoft's innovative new product, ASP.NET, and utilizes the rich kind of client side scripting that is the hallmark of Microsoft's initiative to help people build better web apps. Google isn't using it because the programmers it has on staff learned VB in a couple of weeks, they chose it because it offers the best performance, developer productivity, and scalability of any available option.
There will be an explosion of great apps soon after Mono finishes its windows forms layer. They had to redo it because they relied on wine for the first version, and wine became its Achilles heel.
Download the latest version of Mono and MonoDevelop, skim some documentation, try gtk#, and see how easy it is to create fantastic cross platform (mac, windows, linux) apps using Mono.
Mod the parent up! This is rarely spoken wisdom that /. readers should embrace!
Class is evidently now in session.