difficult to port since it is tied into a x86-only features.
Linux itself was x86 only at a deep level, and I seem to recall Linus saying at some point that it would probably never be ported.
I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I simply don't see this as a valid arguement. If this project produces something that people want it WILL be ported, and the x86-only parts will be replaced. To say otherwise is to ignore the history of just about every successful open source app out there.
Chill out. Learning word processing on an Apple IIe hasn't prevented me from figuring out how to use any of the various other word processing apps I've used over the course of my life.
It will always come down to the individual. If you're one of those people who seems to be only capable of memorizing procedures, than yeah, I guess that's a little sad, but at least you'd be learning the app you're most likely going to encounter in the real world. If you're someone who's capable of taking what they learn and adapting it to whatever environment you're faced with, than it isn't going to matter what app you learned on.
All it really requires is the understanding to realize that it's just a tool. The sad thing is, most teachers don't have that understanding with anything related to computers, so how can we expect them to teach it?
I have to agree with the other responder; the sickening thing is that they're buying all these MS licenses rather than hiring enough teachers to effectively handle the number of students they have, or even just training the teachers better.
I would assume that SCO has the same rights regarding SysV as they have to its predecessors which they released under a BSD-like license without any complaints from anyone else. From that it is reasonable to infer that they could do the same with SysV or they could sell someone else the rights to do so.
The only party which would have any basis for complaint would be Novell, and they are clearly opposed to what SCO is doing.
They have, at least in theory, the rights to Unix SysV. Unless SysV gets ruled public domain that's going to be worth something, and THAT is what has me worried.
If SCO goes under SysV doesn't just disappear, somebody will own it, and as long as that somebody isn't releasing it under an open source license the possibility remains for this same situation to come up yet again.
I agree that shorting SCO right now is probably a bad idea since things are very uncertain in the short run. Your long term analysis, however, is fatally flawed, and this is the flaw:
the GPL, which has no real legal ground yet
If you knew as much about copyright and contract law as you know about trading stocks, you would know that the GPL is one of the strongest licenses ever written. To say that it has no legal ground is blatantly false and a gross misrepresentation of the law.
You could say that it has never been tested in court, and that would certainly be true, but then your analysis would still be ignoring a critical point: it has never needed to be. Every single time, and there have been many, a company has been faced with defending themselves against the GPL they have chosen to settle, the vast majority of the time they do so without a suit ever being filed, because their lawyers tell them point blank that there is no way they can win.
Yeah, IANAL, but Eben Moglen has a doctorate in law, specializes in copyright law, and is the lawyer responsible for enforcing the GPL, and I'm just paraphrasing what he has said on more than one occasion.
You can argue windmills and solar all you want, but there is not enough surface area to have environmentally correct energy, and, it probably takes more nasty chemicals to make solar panels and windmills anyway.
Look around. I'm sure you'll be able to spot several rooftops that aren't doing much of anything. Now extrapolate that across the country. Are you still honestly going to try and tell me that there's not enough surface area for wind and solar to be viable? I think you know my response to that.
Before you go off on all the various other arguements against solar, you should know that I live in a solar home for 20 years. Most of the arguements against it that I see on/. are bunk. Solar has two issues that need to be solved. The first is volume production, which as we all know would lower the cost (this is for both panels and phase-match inverters). The second is good long-term storage, and I think this is an area where fuel cells can really shine.
Finally, there's the "solar panels are only foo% efficient" arguement. Well, that seems to be plenty. We have less than 20ft^2 of panel, those panels are pushing 25 years in their current installation, and IIRC the weren't new when we bought them. They're still kicking out enough juice to power the house. With newer technologies, such as the shingle and sheet-roofing type panels which make it practical to use the entire surface area of the roof, and both of which are more efficient than the panels at my family home, I don't think the alleged lack of efficiency is more than a straw man, especially when you factor in the reduced line-loss due to the electricity being generated in the same location most of it is being used.
Oh yeah, and most of that power is generated during the "peak hours" when our current system is most strained.
According to the vendor we get our raids from (Clariion, now EMC^2) they are RAID 3. I don't know why that was chosen, as I know that RAID 5 would be better, though not for the reason you list. You see, in our application it isn't the parity drive that's the bottleneck, in fact the parity drive is considerably less stressed than the data drives (as such, we don't consider drives run in the parity slot as tested).
it's probably not the resolution limitation of the telecine
You clearly don't know what a telecine is or what it does. A telecine is, in effect, a high speed scanner. It scans film and converts it to an electronic medium such as analog PAL or NTSC, for TV broadcast or 'print' to VHS, and/or various digital formats such as serial digital, MPEG, MJPEG, etc, again for broadcast or 'print' to DVD or other media. The only time a telecine would have an effect on the theater experience is when a scene needed to have CG effects added to it.
As such I didn't, and wouldn't, blame the fuzzyness on the resolution of the telecine, since more often than not the image I'm seeing on the screen has never been through a telecine and more importantly, as I've already stated, the resolution of currently available professional level telecine equipment excedes the resolution of film, and has for some years now.
*The shot was not completely in focus *Motion blur *CG effects over-processed to "look like film" *It was a bad print *The projection monkey wasn't doing his job very well
I accept all those as potential components of the problem, but none of then fully address the issue I'm talking about. A complete high budget film is not going to be shot slightly out of focus. Motion blur isn't going to effect 'talking head' scenes. Certainly over-processed CG, bad prints, and incompetent projectionists could cause such problems, but I doubt that any or all of those would be such consistent components of my movie theater experience.
Consider the possibility that the grain of the film might be visible when projected to the size of a large movie screen. A process or technology which provides higher resolution than is currently available from film would fix that aspect of the problem.
Capitalizing either of them would change my intended meaning. I know exactly what I meant to say, and that meaning is properly conveyed the way I have written it.
You're the one trying to force my statement into the meaning you want. I say that makes you the idiot.
I repair high end digital video servers. Here are my thoughts on the subject:
First, they probably are using MPEG or MPEG2, or maybe MJPEG, but that's pretty unlikely these days. Just because they're using the codec doesn't mean they're going to use the full compression it allows them. Remember that there's a trade-off there; the more it's compressed the more quality they lose. The bottom line is, if they want to show off the technology they will be compressing it as little as possible, because the degradation will be visible to someone who's an expert.
One of the things that has hampered digital technology in filmmaking is the quality of the final image. At 2k lines digital becomes competitive, in fact with a 2k telecine (converts film to video) you can just start to make out the grain of the film. At 4k digital is better than film, and thats going to win over a lot of directors and producers who never would have considered it otherwise. For myself, movies in the theater look a little fuzzy to me. Not bad, but noticable. I would welcome the improved quality this tech will bring.
I strongly suspect that's the market this tech is aimed at, because nobody is going to be broadcasting uncompressed 4k video.
Additionally, the rule in the industry is that you never compress your source material. A lot of that is superstition at this point IMHO, but the fact remains that there is going to be a need for this. That stance is kind of ironic, considering that most broadcasters will compress what they're sending out as much as they can get away with.
I very much doubt that the problem is scaling processing power to do the compression. Any pro-level setup has dedicated hardware to do that, and if one encoder chip can't handle the bandwidth itself than they just use multiple chips. Moving the data around the rest of the system is a bigger design challenge than the compression is.
One more point (bordering on OT, but it is related), video is the most demanding application that hard drives are used in. I have to torture test every single drive we send out myself, using our own methods, because none of the standard drive testing tools/suites even compare to what we consider "normal" use of our product.
For most data applications one only needs to worry about capacity and bandwidth. Latency is rarely considered at all, it doesn't matter if the data arrives 500ms late. For video, that isn't the case, latency is a very big issue. That 500ms delay represents a very annoying glitch on the output.
Here's some numbers to chew on: What we consider high quality standard definition NTSC video is about 50Mbps (that's about 100,000 bits per field for MJPEG, double that for MPEG), TV broadcasts are typically in the 10-15Mbps range. A 5 drive RAID3 (4 data drives + 1 parity drive) array of 73GB Seagate Cheetah Vs (10kRPM) attached by fibrechannel can handle simultaneous record and playback of 2 50Mbps streams, with about 12 hours of record time total (less than that actually, since it's highly recommended that you leave about 10% of the drive free). That doesn't include audio, and I honestly don't know what accompanies the video on that stream, but I do know that there is some vertical synch info added to make editing MPEG less of a PITA.
I don't work on HD stuff right now, but I can tell you that we typically run it at 70Mbps and the RAID described above cannot handle 2 of those streams.
Finally, while I don't know all the details, my company does offer a 4k telecine, and IIRC it uses 16 1Gbps fibreoptic cables in parralell to move all the data around.
I wasn't saying that it was evil in itself, just that it was unreasonable, and the kind of exploitive thinking that leads to the evil currently being perpetrated by SCO. Love clearly pointed the way to SCOs current path, but it's nice to hear that he thought it led somewhere else.
Incidentally, I have no problem per-seat support contracts, that just makes sense, but that is NOT how Love presented it when he first broached the idea. It was presented as per-seat licensing for Linux itself, which is entirely unacceptable. Maybe he really meant the former and just has difficulty clearly communicating his ideas? I don't know, but I do know how his ideas were perceived by the community as a whole, and he did not make a good impression.
Actually, it works either way. The point is that there is no real difference between capitalism and communism, the end results are the same. Men exploit other men for personal gain. The only difference is the official titles of the few who end up on top.
Really, that's true of any socio-economic system. Capitalism and communism are simply the most popular ones lately, and people have been fond of argueing that they're somehow different. Clearly they are not, which is the entire point of the quote.
You can also use multiple mice on USB or USB and PS/2. It works fine in Linux, anyway, and I don't expect it would be a problem for Windows. I don't recommend having a 3-year-old on the other mouse, though.
It seems so out of character considering some of the statements he's made in the past (per-seat Linux licensing, anyone?). I think this is the first interview with him I've read where he comes off as a reasonable human being.
Moral fibre is not something I would have expected from him. Sometimes it's nice to be suprised.
Commercial speech has never enjoyed the same level of First Amendment protection as political or religious speech. The judge is clearly contradicting long established precedent with this ruling. Like it or not, some forms of speech ARE more equal than others, and I expect this judges ruling will be overturned on those grounds.
Your first guffaw will occur when you read that United Linux is causing Red Hat to have to play catch-up in "the enterprise space":
"We believe SCO is the top of the food chain in a Red Hat/SCO Group universe".
I love this part, because to anyone who even spent a minute on research it was obvious that SCO wasn't even at the top of the food chain within UnitedLinux. SuSE was calling the shots there, and of course we all know how UL has completely overshadowed Red Hat... NOT!
What is up with all the whiners who think "The current economic situation" is synonomous with "must let any prospective employer take you from behind". You don't want to work for someone who thinks it's OK to treat their employees that way.
Despite all the whining, there are plenty of other employers out there, and many of them don't have such clauses in their contracts. In fact, I have never seen an employment contract that had such a clause, and I do read them. I was just hired at a large tech company with a large and very valuable IP portfolio and when I told the HR person who was going over the contract and other paperwork with me of my concerns she was quite shocked that a company would even think about trying to take ownership of something I did in my spare time.
One final note on the lack of jobs: just because nobody's hiring doesn't mean the work doesn't still need to get done. Companys are making up for their self-imposed workforce shortage by bringing in temps, and that has worked out just fine for me. I entered the full-time workforce 4 years ago, and about 2/3 of that time I've been working as a temp. I've never been out of work for more than a week at a time or more than 3 weeks total per year, and I've never had a problem paying my bills or supporting my family.
Re:Something you can do this Sunday: Re:What to do
on
Lobbying For Linux
·
· Score: 1
Id you know a European language it is very helpful if you could translate part of the thing on Sunday.
I have a friend who is a Mac guy. Several years ago he wanted to go to a big LAN party, but at the time pretty much every game anybody was playing wasn't available for MAC. His solution? He went to Fry's on Friday and put a nice gaming system on his credit card, loaded it up with pirated games he got from his brother, went to the LAN party, and on Monday took it back for a full refund.
People really do that kind of stuff.
I know plenty of people who would happily buy a PC game, install it, run the no-cd crack, and take it back for a refund. In that context, it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me that many stores won't take back software in an opened box. It sucks for those of us that are honest, but unfortunately that's the world we live in.
Slashdot Mirror
difficult to port since it is tied into a x86-only features.
Linux itself was x86 only at a deep level, and I seem to recall Linus saying at some point that it would probably never be ported.
I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I simply don't see this as a valid arguement. If this project produces something that people want it WILL be ported, and the x86-only parts will be replaced. To say otherwise is to ignore the history of just about every successful open source app out there.
Chill out. Learning word processing on an Apple IIe hasn't prevented me from figuring out how to use any of the various other word processing apps I've used over the course of my life.
It will always come down to the individual. If you're one of those people who seems to be only capable of memorizing procedures, than yeah, I guess that's a little sad, but at least you'd be learning the app you're most likely going to encounter in the real world. If you're someone who's capable of taking what they learn and adapting it to whatever environment you're faced with, than it isn't going to matter what app you learned on.
All it really requires is the understanding to realize that it's just a tool. The sad thing is, most teachers don't have that understanding with anything related to computers, so how can we expect them to teach it?
I have to agree with the other responder; the sickening thing is that they're buying all these MS licenses rather than hiring enough teachers to effectively handle the number of students they have, or even just training the teachers better.
I didn't say public domain, I said open source.
OPEN SOURCE != PUBLIC DOMAIN
I would assume that SCO has the same rights regarding SysV as they have to its predecessors which they released under a BSD-like license without any complaints from anyone else. From that it is reasonable to infer that they could do the same with SysV or they could sell someone else the rights to do so.
The only party which would have any basis for complaint would be Novell, and they are clearly opposed to what SCO is doing.
Someday they'll release it for a platform I'll use... At which point, maybe I'll care.
My thoughts exactly.
I'm not gonna hold my breath, though.
They have, at least in theory, the rights to Unix SysV. Unless SysV gets ruled public domain that's going to be worth something, and THAT is what has me worried.
If SCO goes under SysV doesn't just disappear, somebody will own it, and as long as that somebody isn't releasing it under an open source license the possibility remains for this same situation to come up yet again.
I agree that shorting SCO right now is probably a bad idea since things are very uncertain in the short run. Your long term analysis, however, is fatally flawed, and this is the flaw:
the GPL, which has no real legal ground yet
If you knew as much about copyright and contract law as you know about trading stocks, you would know that the GPL is one of the strongest licenses ever written. To say that it has no legal ground is blatantly false and a gross misrepresentation of the law.
You could say that it has never been tested in court, and that would certainly be true, but then your analysis would still be ignoring a critical point: it has never needed to be. Every single time, and there have been many, a company has been faced with defending themselves against the GPL they have chosen to settle, the vast majority of the time they do so without a suit ever being filed, because their lawyers tell them point blank that there is no way they can win.
Yeah, IANAL, but Eben Moglen has a doctorate in law, specializes in copyright law, and is the lawyer responsible for enforcing the GPL, and I'm just paraphrasing what he has said on more than one occasion.
You can argue windmills and solar all you want, but there is not enough surface area to have environmentally correct energy, and, it probably takes more nasty chemicals to make solar panels and windmills anyway.
/. are bunk. Solar has two issues that need to be solved. The first is volume production, which as we all know would lower the cost (this is for both panels and phase-match inverters). The second is good long-term storage, and I think this is an area where fuel cells can really shine.
Look around. I'm sure you'll be able to spot several rooftops that aren't doing much of anything. Now extrapolate that across the country. Are you still honestly going to try and tell me that there's not enough surface area for wind and solar to be viable? I think you know my response to that.
Before you go off on all the various other arguements against solar, you should know that I live in a solar home for 20 years. Most of the arguements against it that I see on
Finally, there's the "solar panels are only foo% efficient" arguement. Well, that seems to be plenty. We have less than 20ft^2 of panel, those panels are pushing 25 years in their current installation, and IIRC the weren't new when we bought them. They're still kicking out enough juice to power the house. With newer technologies, such as the shingle and sheet-roofing type panels which make it practical to use the entire surface area of the roof, and both of which are more efficient than the panels at my family home, I don't think the alleged lack of efficiency is more than a straw man, especially when you factor in the reduced line-loss due to the electricity being generated in the same location most of it is being used.
Oh yeah, and most of that power is generated during the "peak hours" when our current system is most strained.
It isn't really free speech then as I am paying for it, right?
You seem to have your "free as in speech" mixed up with your "free as in beer".
They are not the same.
No, you've just failed your reading comprehension.
To be fair, the First Amendment is something that has always been defended against, rather than preserved by, the FBI.
And it's not like nobody has ever won that battle before!
Capitalism != Democracy.
Fascism is totalitarian capitalism, and there are certainly fascist states which have famines.
Similarly, there are plenty of democratic, but not capitalist, states that don't have famines.
According to the vendor we get our raids from (Clariion, now EMC^2) they are RAID 3. I don't know why that was chosen, as I know that RAID 5 would be better, though not for the reason you list. You see, in our application it isn't the parity drive that's the bottleneck, in fact the parity drive is considerably less stressed than the data drives (as such, we don't consider drives run in the parity slot as tested).
it's probably not the resolution limitation of the telecine
You clearly don't know what a telecine is or what it does. A telecine is, in effect, a high speed scanner. It scans film and converts it to an electronic medium such as analog PAL or NTSC, for TV broadcast or 'print' to VHS, and/or various digital formats such as serial digital, MPEG, MJPEG, etc, again for broadcast or 'print' to DVD or other media. The only time a telecine would have an effect on the theater experience is when a scene needed to have CG effects added to it.
As such I didn't, and wouldn't, blame the fuzzyness on the resolution of the telecine, since more often than not the image I'm seeing on the screen has never been through a telecine and more importantly, as I've already stated, the resolution of currently available professional level telecine equipment excedes the resolution of film, and has for some years now.
*The shot was not completely in focus
*Motion blur
*CG effects over-processed to "look like film"
*It was a bad print
*The projection monkey wasn't doing his job very well
I accept all those as potential components of the problem, but none of then fully address the issue I'm talking about. A complete high budget film is not going to be shot slightly out of focus. Motion blur isn't going to effect 'talking head' scenes. Certainly over-processed CG, bad prints, and incompetent projectionists could cause such problems, but I doubt that any or all of those would be such consistent components of my movie theater experience.
Consider the possibility that the grain of the film might be visible when projected to the size of a large movie screen. A process or technology which provides higher resolution than is currently available from film would fix that aspect of the problem.
Capitalizing either of them would change my intended meaning. I know exactly what I meant to say, and that meaning is properly conveyed the way I have written it.
You're the one trying to force my statement into the meaning you want. I say that makes you the idiot.
I repair high end digital video servers. Here are my thoughts on the subject:
First, they probably are using MPEG or MPEG2, or maybe MJPEG, but that's pretty unlikely these days. Just because they're using the codec doesn't mean they're going to use the full compression it allows them. Remember that there's a trade-off there; the more it's compressed the more quality they lose. The bottom line is, if they want to show off the technology they will be compressing it as little as possible, because the degradation will be visible to someone who's an expert.
One of the things that has hampered digital technology in filmmaking is the quality of the final image. At 2k lines digital becomes competitive, in fact with a 2k telecine (converts film to video) you can just start to make out the grain of the film. At 4k digital is better than film, and thats going to win over a lot of directors and producers who never would have considered it otherwise. For myself, movies in the theater look a little fuzzy to me. Not bad, but noticable. I would welcome the improved quality this tech will bring.
I strongly suspect that's the market this tech is aimed at, because nobody is going to be broadcasting uncompressed 4k video.
Additionally, the rule in the industry is that you never compress your source material. A lot of that is superstition at this point IMHO, but the fact remains that there is going to be a need for this. That stance is kind of ironic, considering that most broadcasters will compress what they're sending out as much as they can get away with.
I very much doubt that the problem is scaling processing power to do the compression. Any pro-level setup has dedicated hardware to do that, and if one encoder chip can't handle the bandwidth itself than they just use multiple chips. Moving the data around the rest of the system is a bigger design challenge than the compression is.
One more point (bordering on OT, but it is related), video is the most demanding application that hard drives are used in. I have to torture test every single drive we send out myself, using our own methods, because none of the standard drive testing tools/suites even compare to what we consider "normal" use of our product.
For most data applications one only needs to worry about capacity and bandwidth. Latency is rarely considered at all, it doesn't matter if the data arrives 500ms late. For video, that isn't the case, latency is a very big issue. That 500ms delay represents a very annoying glitch on the output.
Here's some numbers to chew on: What we consider high quality standard definition NTSC video is about 50Mbps (that's about 100,000 bits per field for MJPEG, double that for MPEG), TV broadcasts are typically in the 10-15Mbps range. A 5 drive RAID3 (4 data drives + 1 parity drive) array of 73GB Seagate Cheetah Vs (10kRPM) attached by fibrechannel can handle simultaneous record and playback of 2 50Mbps streams, with about 12 hours of record time total (less than that actually, since it's highly recommended that you leave about 10% of the drive free). That doesn't include audio, and I honestly don't know what accompanies the video on that stream, but I do know that there is some vertical synch info added to make editing MPEG less of a PITA.
I don't work on HD stuff right now, but I can tell you that we typically run it at 70Mbps and the RAID described above cannot handle 2 of those streams.
Finally, while I don't know all the details, my company does offer a 4k telecine, and IIRC it uses 16 1Gbps fibreoptic cables in parralell to move all the data around.
I wasn't saying that it was evil in itself, just that it was unreasonable, and the kind of exploitive thinking that leads to the evil currently being perpetrated by SCO. Love clearly pointed the way to SCOs current path, but it's nice to hear that he thought it led somewhere else.
Incidentally, I have no problem per-seat support contracts, that just makes sense, but that is NOT how Love presented it when he first broached the idea. It was presented as per-seat licensing for Linux itself, which is entirely unacceptable. Maybe he really meant the former and just has difficulty clearly communicating his ideas? I don't know, but I do know how his ideas were perceived by the community as a whole, and he did not make a good impression.
Actually, it works either way. The point is that there is no real difference between capitalism and communism, the end results are the same. Men exploit other men for personal gain. The only difference is the official titles of the few who end up on top.
Really, that's true of any socio-economic system. Capitalism and communism are simply the most popular ones lately, and people have been fond of argueing that they're somehow different. Clearly they are not, which is the entire point of the quote.
Linus is married and has, IIRC, 4 children.
It's like he's achieved some sort of transendental geek state.
You can also use multiple mice on USB or USB and PS/2. It works fine in Linux, anyway, and I don't expect it would be a problem for Windows. I don't recommend having a 3-year-old on the other mouse, though.
It seems so out of character considering some of the statements he's made in the past (per-seat Linux licensing, anyone?). I think this is the first interview with him I've read where he comes off as a reasonable human being.
Moral fibre is not something I would have expected from him. Sometimes it's nice to be suprised.
Commercial speech has never enjoyed the same level of First Amendment protection as political or religious speech. The judge is clearly contradicting long established precedent with this ruling. Like it or not, some forms of speech ARE more equal than others, and I expect this judges ruling will be overturned on those grounds.
Your first guffaw will occur when you read that United Linux is causing Red Hat to have to play catch-up in "the enterprise space":
"We believe SCO is the top of the food chain in a Red Hat/SCO Group universe".
I love this part, because to anyone who even spent a minute on research it was obvious that SCO wasn't even at the top of the food chain within UnitedLinux. SuSE was calling the shots there, and of course we all know how UL has completely overshadowed Red Hat... NOT!
What is up with all the whiners who think "The current economic situation" is synonomous with "must let any prospective employer take you from behind". You don't want to work for someone who thinks it's OK to treat their employees that way.
Despite all the whining, there are plenty of other employers out there, and many of them don't have such clauses in their contracts. In fact, I have never seen an employment contract that had such a clause, and I do read them. I was just hired at a large tech company with a large and very valuable IP portfolio and when I told the HR person who was going over the contract and other paperwork with me of my concerns she was quite shocked that a company would even think about trying to take ownership of something I did in my spare time.
One final note on the lack of jobs: just because nobody's hiring doesn't mean the work doesn't still need to get done. Companys are making up for their self-imposed workforce shortage by bringing in temps, and that has worked out just fine for me. I entered the full-time workforce 4 years ago, and about 2/3 of that time I've been working as a temp. I've never been out of work for more than a week at a time or more than 3 weeks total per year, and I've never had a problem paying my bills or supporting my family.
Id you know a European language it is very helpful if you could translate part of the thing on Sunday.
I know English, does that help?
(Sorry, I couldn't help myself.)
You have to consider the other side of it though.
I have a friend who is a Mac guy. Several years ago he wanted to go to a big LAN party, but at the time pretty much every game anybody was playing wasn't available for MAC. His solution? He went to Fry's on Friday and put a nice gaming system on his credit card, loaded it up with pirated games he got from his brother, went to the LAN party, and on Monday took it back for a full refund.
People really do that kind of stuff.
I know plenty of people who would happily buy a PC game, install it, run the no-cd crack, and take it back for a refund. In that context, it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me that many stores won't take back software in an opened box. It sucks for those of us that are honest, but unfortunately that's the world we live in.