That is a big argument for.NET or another system like it. If you were to pay a resonable subscription for a customized set of services that provide the content that you want you would probably do it by the sounds of it. Maybe we should explore this whole topic again in 5 years and see what our opinions are then.
One thing I never want to be forced to pay for though is documentation for devices that I've purchased. Unfortunately many manufacturers aren't spending the money to keep an online archive of documentation for thier product (compaq for instance has dropped most all of the documentation for digital computers *sigh*).
If the way that sites got paid was by the users that read them, we might have less stupid sites on the web because they would not be able to support themselves.
This could be useful if you had a mix of nt4 and win2k servers in your farm. You could tell at a glance what ones were win2k.
Honestly this should be a non-issue if you have resonable naming conventions. For instance there was always a different set of names for the nt4 boxes and the win2k boxes so you never mixed them up.
The article about MS leaving winXP RC1 on the web wasn't particularily clear what it meant by code. I assume they mean the binary distribution of winXP but it would be a much bigger story if it was source code. I don't have any idea why MS would release any source code in the first place though.
Also as far as copyright issue with the leaked code, would MS have any protection in this case or is it required that there be minimal protection of the IP before any of the laws apply?
Again I say if thier agreement says you have to keep the car under 80mph then that is up to them. Its thier car and they should be able to impose the terms of use.
On the other hand you as a consumer and user have the right to say fuck off and rent from a different car company. Thats the way business should work.
So that means that we must condemn a company that tries to do a socially responsible thing? If its benificial to other people and gives them a profit thats like win-win isn't it?
This totally comes down to a contract issue. They will change the contract and do the same thing and I will support them the whole way. There is no reason to speed in the first place, let alone do it in someone elses vehicle.
As far as it only being the police's place to impose fines for this I totally disagree. Thats like saying the library has no right to fine you for turning in a book late.
It is the rental agencies perogative to protect thier investment (the car) so tracking and controling speed should be a right they have. If you want to speed and all that kind of shit do it in your own car. When you are in thier car you should feel compelled to follow thier rules.
Its a sad day in this world when we try to defend illegal actions that put another persons property at risk. Furthermore its sad when we attempt to take away ways that the person has to protect thier own property.
The rental company should only have to put in thier contract the exact terms and if you want to rent that car you should be required to agree to those terms.
It states at a deep level that you can't use the SDK with anything potentially viral. This we both agree on. The reason that editors are considered potentially viral is because of licences with editors that say anything developed with the editor needs to be GPL'd (I forget which editor says that anymore). Of course that means that you couldn't use the SDK with the editor because any project you made with the SDK could not be GPL'd by definition of the GPL.
Now you are getting a taste of what the GPL does to a closed source shop as far as developing goes. Imagine a GPL SDK and try using that in a closed source shop. It doesn't work because any software you created using the SDK would have to be GPL'd.
The MS license is a taste of the GPL medicine bumped up a notch, mainly becasue the GPL has been worked into tools in tricky ways such as previously mentioned. Thats why the GPL is not a good licence unless your goal is to make ALL source open and ALL source free (as in beer). Obviously this is the stated goals of the creators of the GPL and so it all fits the plan but its also good reason to critisize the licence itself.
If innovation is your goal then you licence needs to empower EVERYONE to create new software based on the code you wrote. I have no problem with you requiring that a copy of your original source code be passed on to the rest of the world but requiring the person using your code to pass on his derivative work is a bit much and it makes it hard to earn a living from the work that person is doing.
Where I work they almost would rather you didn't have any specific "tools". Its easier for them to get someone that can think and solve problems and then teach them a specific application. Thats why they hire so many people straight out of college.
Its easy to see why they would do this. Considering we are in a world where unless you are MS you can't make money on an OS, it makes sense to drop your OS costs to as near to zero as you can.
All the companies you listed sell hardware as thier main expertise, I doubt they would even worry about OS at all if a commodity OS would run "just right" on thier hardware. The jump to linux is to get free work done. The price of the hardware in the "enterprise" class doesn't change much based on operating system so you might as well throw on a free one if it does the job.
The paradigm shift is not to "open source is better" but instead to "free OS's make us more money on hardware". I'm not sure if that is good or bad but I guess we will see soon.
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PROVIDE PERSONAL INFO.
The above poster is perfectly correct, if it is company info put the company info in the passport, its probably already in the MSDN subscription anyways. MS is just consolidating log in so they don't have a new system to do it on every web server they own.
The passport need only be linked to your developer account. You DO NOT need to supply any ID for the passport except (if I understand right) country, zip, age, and gender. It also does not have to be the same passport that you use for personal web use.
PASSPORT IS JUST A SECURE ID NUMBER THAT MS CAN TRACK YOU BY.
This given, fill out the passport page with the EXACT SAME info that is in your MSDN subscription. Now the Passport ID will match the MSDN subscription. You will be 100% compliant and not have given any personal info that you hadn't already given.
Basically MS wants to have a single infrastrutcture for indentification. That does not mean they need a single ID for each user. It is so much easier if every single site that MS owns can have its data stored in the same way and identified in the same way.
Basically this is a privacy non-issue because you have already given MS the info for the MSDN subscription and that is ALL that needs to be transfered to the passport. Bam now 2 ids say the same thing. Eventually MS will discontinue the MSDN subscription id and the passport will be all that points to that MSDN account. Quit spreading fud and start looking to understand what is necessary.
Also quit bringing up the whole lieing issue because its fully unecessary to lie in this situation.
Main remember that its not 1 passport per person or 1 person per passport. Its just an id number like the one you used originally.
It seems possible to apply this technology as a more general filter. If you take data encoded by a process and the result, make a great number of training sets, then it should be possible to take some result and go "backwards" through the encryption process to get the result. The problem is there isn't nearly as direct of a link between the decrypted and encrypted code as there is between the old visual object and the new visual object.
I guess I'm just curious of how much this is limited to the "visual" world and whether it could be applied to create abstract digital filters.
$5000 is too much punative damages in a case where a company could easily be shown to be in breach of contract and yet a guy that started smoking knowing that it was dangerous, smoked his whole life knowing that it was killing him (he admitted this in court) and ended up with cancer and some other complications and sued a tobacco company and got awarded like 3.5 billion dollars in punative damages and people seemed to say "yes the tobacco companies deserved that" God do I love contradictions in popular thought.
I think that $5000 is resonable to make a company go "hey we did something wrong" and yet not actually damage the company in any serious way. This is a.com type company though maybe $5000 is more than thier profit this year:) Really though $5000 is almost nothing to a resonable business and I just hope its enough to get the attention of the provider and let them know that when they promise a level of service they must live up to the promise or compensate users for the loss. If nothing else they need to get a customer support staff that is competant, caring and fast.
From what I read the judge in question only withheld money for the period of time that he/she was without service. I think that there needs to be regulation on uptime required from a provider. Some are good but some are terrible. My provider was going to force me to pay for a full month of service when because of a mistake they made I was without service 2 weeks of that month. I pushed the issue and got a refund for the month.
This isn't a case of not paying for services recieved but instead a case of demanding to get what you pay for or not be required to pay for it. I think (and I am sure the judge knows) that this case will hold up in court because roger's was in breach of contract. I think what you will see is a change in the roger's contract stating that there is no garuntee of service and I wonder what controversy that will start.
It has to do with distance boy. It takes a few months to go to mars (I forget how many) but it takes a few years (i think) to get to get to jupiter. We being human like instant gratification so we send lots of cheaper probes to the planet near to us.
This also has practical implications for getting further away from earth. If probes got to start at mars for the trip to jupiter they would take significantly less time. As I see it we will move out from earth in bite sized hops rather than it great bounds.
That gives me an interesting idea. Time to see if I can write a profile for the MS game voice to allow me to play my favorite text based adventure by voice:)
32mb is enough to hold all the atari 2600 games ever made like 30 times:)
You must remember that the basic atari 2600 cartidge was 4k and the really super advanced paging schemes were limited I think at 32k or 64k. Most all games were made at 4k though with another fair sized group at 8k and 16k and like just a very few larger than that.
I think I was able to zip all the atari games plus an emulator for dos onto a single 1.44meg floppy disk with room left over. I think I also got pkunzip on there:)
At that point I think the cell phone memory wise is perfect medium. And come on, what other arcade game can you pay 70cents for to play as many times as you want until you need to make a phone call. Sure better than plunking quarters in the machine at a real arcade. The only thing that beats it in value is purchasing a REAL atari 2600 because you can own the system for about $20 and buy games for $1 to $3 each on auction sites and garage sales:)
True but the people with that knowledge are going to be hard to defeat anyways. You just need to make the protection scheme difficult enough that most people don't take the time to make copies and cracks.
Even given that fact if you put 10% of the functionality of the application on a secure server its going to be impossible to "steal" time on the program unless you duplicate the missing functionality on your own servers. At that point the way people will try to solve the problem is hacking accounts to steal time and we are half way decent at stoping unauthorized access to servers (no not perfect but better than we are at stoping people from cracking software).
Anyways this is far off my initial point was that people are upset at the idea of "intellectual property" because they feel that the software is virtual and does not have value. For this reason I advocate having software be a service where you pay for the amount you use. This way benifit can be correlated to benifit recieved, not to amount of material recieved.
I mean you pay a car wash or a doctor or mechanic for services and never expect any physical result in return so why can't that apply to software? I guess people will still argue that letting 2 people use the software doesn't cost any more than letting 1 person use it so the second person should get to use it for free. Unfortunately you will always have consumers wanting more for less but in a free economy the suppliers want to make less and get more for it. The key is to let the natural balance happen because this maximises the total value in the system (by removing the surplus or shortages).
You either require authentication to a central location to use the program and make it hard to crack, or you never let the software sit on the users computer in the first place. Both distribution methods were not possible prior to the existance of the internet but now are perfectly feasable.
Sorry for the second post but I just thought this out a bit more.
The way to "get" the record company is to NOT buy any cd's from the company. Granted that will get the band dumped but once they are off contract you need to start buying music from the artist directly. In this world of easy communication the record company is not necessarily necessary for distribution or promotion. Once we can buy directly from the artist we cut out the huge profits that the record corp was getting and the artist ends up with more money in the end.
Unfortunately most concert tour proceeds go to the record company and not the artist. The artist is an employee on a salary working for the record company more or less.
Which is why software needs to become a service. Since there is not tangeble "product" just a way to get a task done easier.
If a software company were to rent out the use of the software tool to get the job done then the software provider can earn money without causing a great conundrum of intellectual property laws. If another company figured out how to make a tool that did the same job then kudos to them and they can compete in the industry to be a provider of that service. Otherwise the original provider of the service would keep knowledge of doing the task to itself.
In the end though this is what software is about anyways, just people imagine it as property and want to "own" it. That or they think because to make a new copy of the software it costs nothing extra that the software should be released for the good of everyone because the person that made it would lose nothing. The problem with that is you would not have nearly as many people willing to give the software away.
In the end we need to reward software providers monitarily for the work they do providing software because the result gives benifit to the people that use the software. Thats the way trade works.
This is somewhat redundant but because the other post I read it in will never get modded up to the point that anyone will read it I will mention it again.
MS is only trying to completely avoid any implication that any of there software could ever be obligated to be open source. Viral software (though not well enough defined I guess) seems to only include libraries or source or tools that would obligate that MS release source to thier code.
The thing is most open source licenses have clauses dealing with closed source libraries either explicitly not allowing thier use in a product under that licence (which is the case with the GPL last I understood but I might be way wrong) or giving special dispensation to closed source libraries and not requiring thier disclosure.
I think MS could have said the same thing without being so imflamitory by basically saying that the MS SDK is not and will not be open source and cannot be used in any situation that would require the MS product to be open source. They should also mention that the modules included with the SDK are not for redistribution but must be obtained 1st hand from MS by the person using the product using them.
I love how all the/.ers are getting upset by this when they openly and with no shame bash MS at any chance yet when MS bashes open source with equally silly arguments you scream and run around like ninnies. Thing is MS wants its software definitely closed source and this license should fully protect them from being required to distrubte thier source.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I never want to be forced to pay for though is documentation for devices that I've purchased. Unfortunately many manufacturers aren't spending the money to keep an online archive of documentation for thier product (compaq for instance has dropped most all of the documentation for digital computers *sigh*).
If the way that sites got paid was by the users that read them, we might have less stupid sites on the web because they would not be able to support themselves.
Honestly this should be a non-issue if you have resonable naming conventions. For instance there was always a different set of names for the nt4 boxes and the win2k boxes so you never mixed them up.
Also as far as copyright issue with the leaked code, would MS have any protection in this case or is it required that there be minimal protection of the IP before any of the laws apply?
On the other hand you as a consumer and user have the right to say fuck off and rent from a different car company. Thats the way business should work.
This totally comes down to a contract issue. They will change the contract and do the same thing and I will support them the whole way. There is no reason to speed in the first place, let alone do it in someone elses vehicle.
As far as it only being the police's place to impose fines for this I totally disagree. Thats like saying the library has no right to fine you for turning in a book late.
Its a sad day in this world when we try to defend illegal actions that put another persons property at risk. Furthermore its sad when we attempt to take away ways that the person has to protect thier own property.
The rental company should only have to put in thier contract the exact terms and if you want to rent that car you should be required to agree to those terms.
Now you are getting a taste of what the GPL does to a closed source shop as far as developing goes. Imagine a GPL SDK and try using that in a closed source shop. It doesn't work because any software you created using the SDK would have to be GPL'd.
The MS license is a taste of the GPL medicine bumped up a notch, mainly becasue the GPL has been worked into tools in tricky ways such as previously mentioned. Thats why the GPL is not a good licence unless your goal is to make ALL source open and ALL source free (as in beer). Obviously this is the stated goals of the creators of the GPL and so it all fits the plan but its also good reason to critisize the licence itself.
If innovation is your goal then you licence needs to empower EVERYONE to create new software based on the code you wrote. I have no problem with you requiring that a copy of your original source code be passed on to the rest of the world but requiring the person using your code to pass on his derivative work is a bit much and it makes it hard to earn a living from the work that person is doing.
Where I work they almost would rather you didn't have any specific "tools". Its easier for them to get someone that can think and solve problems and then teach them a specific application. Thats why they hire so many people straight out of college.
All the companies you listed sell hardware as thier main expertise, I doubt they would even worry about OS at all if a commodity OS would run "just right" on thier hardware. The jump to linux is to get free work done. The price of the hardware in the "enterprise" class doesn't change much based on operating system so you might as well throw on a free one if it does the job.
The paradigm shift is not to "open source is better" but instead to "free OS's make us more money on hardware". I'm not sure if that is good or bad but I guess we will see soon.
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PROVIDE PERSONAL INFO. The above poster is perfectly correct, if it is company info put the company info in the passport, its probably already in the MSDN subscription anyways. MS is just consolidating log in so they don't have a new system to do it on every web server they own.
PASSPORT IS JUST A SECURE ID NUMBER THAT MS CAN TRACK YOU BY.
This given, fill out the passport page with the EXACT SAME info that is in your MSDN subscription. Now the Passport ID will match the MSDN subscription. You will be 100% compliant and not have given any personal info that you hadn't already given.
Basically MS wants to have a single infrastrutcture for indentification. That does not mean they need a single ID for each user. It is so much easier if every single site that MS owns can have its data stored in the same way and identified in the same way.
Basically this is a privacy non-issue because you have already given MS the info for the MSDN subscription and that is ALL that needs to be transfered to the passport. Bam now 2 ids say the same thing. Eventually MS will discontinue the MSDN subscription id and the passport will be all that points to that MSDN account. Quit spreading fud and start looking to understand what is necessary.
Also quit bringing up the whole lieing issue because its fully unecessary to lie in this situation.
Main remember that its not 1 passport per person or 1 person per passport. Its just an id number like the one you used originally.
I guess I'm just curious of how much this is limited to the "visual" world and whether it could be applied to create abstract digital filters.
I think that $5000 is resonable to make a company go "hey we did something wrong" and yet not actually damage the company in any serious way. This is a .com type company though maybe $5000 is more than thier profit this year :) Really though $5000 is almost nothing to a resonable business and I just hope its enough to get the attention of the provider and let them know that when they promise a level of service they must live up to the promise or compensate users for the loss. If nothing else they need to get a customer support staff that is competant, caring and fast.
This isn't a case of not paying for services recieved but instead a case of demanding to get what you pay for or not be required to pay for it. I think (and I am sure the judge knows) that this case will hold up in court because roger's was in breach of contract. I think what you will see is a change in the roger's contract stating that there is no garuntee of service and I wonder what controversy that will start.
This also has practical implications for getting further away from earth. If probes got to start at mars for the trip to jupiter they would take significantly less time. As I see it we will move out from earth in bite sized hops rather than it great bounds.
World of Eamon here I come!
You must remember that the basic atari 2600 cartidge was 4k and the really super advanced paging schemes were limited I think at 32k or 64k. Most all games were made at 4k though with another fair sized group at 8k and 16k and like just a very few larger than that.
I think I was able to zip all the atari games plus an emulator for dos onto a single 1.44meg floppy disk with room left over. I think I also got pkunzip on there :)
At that point I think the cell phone memory wise is perfect medium. And come on, what other arcade game can you pay 70cents for to play as many times as you want until you need to make a phone call. Sure better than plunking quarters in the machine at a real arcade. The only thing that beats it in value is purchasing a REAL atari 2600 because you can own the system for about $20 and buy games for $1 to $3 each on auction sites and garage sales :)
Heck that goes back to before the Apple/MS war :)
Even given that fact if you put 10% of the functionality of the application on a secure server its going to be impossible to "steal" time on the program unless you duplicate the missing functionality on your own servers. At that point the way people will try to solve the problem is hacking accounts to steal time and we are half way decent at stoping unauthorized access to servers (no not perfect but better than we are at stoping people from cracking software).
Anyways this is far off my initial point was that people are upset at the idea of "intellectual property" because they feel that the software is virtual and does not have value. For this reason I advocate having software be a service where you pay for the amount you use. This way benifit can be correlated to benifit recieved, not to amount of material recieved.
I mean you pay a car wash or a doctor or mechanic for services and never expect any physical result in return so why can't that apply to software? I guess people will still argue that letting 2 people use the software doesn't cost any more than letting 1 person use it so the second person should get to use it for free. Unfortunately you will always have consumers wanting more for less but in a free economy the suppliers want to make less and get more for it. The key is to let the natural balance happen because this maximises the total value in the system (by removing the surplus or shortages).
You either require authentication to a central location to use the program and make it hard to crack, or you never let the software sit on the users computer in the first place. Both distribution methods were not possible prior to the existance of the internet but now are perfectly feasable.
The way to "get" the record company is to NOT buy any cd's from the company. Granted that will get the band dumped but once they are off contract you need to start buying music from the artist directly. In this world of easy communication the record company is not necessarily necessary for distribution or promotion. Once we can buy directly from the artist we cut out the huge profits that the record corp was getting and the artist ends up with more money in the end.
Unfortunately most concert tour proceeds go to the record company and not the artist. The artist is an employee on a salary working for the record company more or less.
If a software company were to rent out the use of the software tool to get the job done then the software provider can earn money without causing a great conundrum of intellectual property laws. If another company figured out how to make a tool that did the same job then kudos to them and they can compete in the industry to be a provider of that service. Otherwise the original provider of the service would keep knowledge of doing the task to itself.
In the end though this is what software is about anyways, just people imagine it as property and want to "own" it. That or they think because to make a new copy of the software it costs nothing extra that the software should be released for the good of everyone because the person that made it would lose nothing. The problem with that is you would not have nearly as many people willing to give the software away.
In the end we need to reward software providers monitarily for the work they do providing software because the result gives benifit to the people that use the software. Thats the way trade works.
MS is only trying to completely avoid any implication that any of there software could ever be obligated to be open source. Viral software (though not well enough defined I guess) seems to only include libraries or source or tools that would obligate that MS release source to thier code.
The thing is most open source licenses have clauses dealing with closed source libraries either explicitly not allowing thier use in a product under that licence (which is the case with the GPL last I understood but I might be way wrong) or giving special dispensation to closed source libraries and not requiring thier disclosure.
I think MS could have said the same thing without being so imflamitory by basically saying that the MS SDK is not and will not be open source and cannot be used in any situation that would require the MS product to be open source. They should also mention that the modules included with the SDK are not for redistribution but must be obtained 1st hand from MS by the person using the product using them.
I love how all the /.ers are getting upset by this when they openly and with no shame bash MS at any chance yet when MS bashes open source with equally silly arguments you scream and run around like ninnies. Thing is MS wants its software definitely closed source and this license should fully protect them from being required to distrubte thier source.