What other people have been saying still holds true. Unfortunately for software publishers, it makes a certain amount of sense to measure piracy in terms of lost profits (how else would you measure it as a monetary figure?), but the fact is that the vast majority of pirates are opportunitists who simply wouldn't use the software if they were forced to pay. A few would, of course, but a very small proportion of the total.
The classic example of this behavior is Microsoft, who now has such a vast majority of the market that they have to look into other avenues to expand -- and have aimed their guns at the pirates with the registration in Windows XP. But they're missing the key point: People who are pirating XP aren't going to pay for it if you magically force them to stop pirating. (Any antipiracy system is exploitable, anyway.) So the net effect after all is said and done is very little change in revenue, and a bunch of inconvenienced customers. Wasn't there a time when a company was supposed to provide a service to its customers for a profit, not put shackles on preexisting customers who have coughed up the dough?
For the record, I've purchased two shareware titles in the last month: Ricochet and Uplink.
Sounds like there's a terminology error here. "Public domain" means absolutely all copyrights are waived and anything at all can be done with the material. If they're trying to keep the material closed source, then releasing the binaries in the public domain is a seriously self-defeating move -- anyone can do anything with them now, including claiming them as their own, disassembling them and releasing the source, etc.
The power of gcc is not its raw speed. Raw speed, as we all know, is becoming less and less of an issue these days. What makes gcc valuable is its portability, its extensive warning facilities (try comparing them to Visual C++ to see how awful another compiler's warning facilities can be), and its Standards compliance (less so with C++ but improving). Pure number crunching is not the final word in any kind of software, and has not been for a while.
Not really all that surprising, when you think about it. Consider that these are the same guys who thought it was a good idea to start work on a port of Postal -- a completely unremarkable game except that stirred up a moderate amount of controversy in its day. Making a port of Postal is like the remake of Psycho -- it's completely without purpose.
One of these claims comes up about every year, and some papers print it. It's no surprise that there's another one this year. And there'll be another one next year.
Crap drifts past the Earth all the time. You want to get worried when an object ~100 m in size (large enough to cause significant regional destruction on land, or widespread coastal destruction if it lands in an ocean, which is likely) passes within the Earth-Moon distance (384000 km). This was only about 600000 km at closest approach.
Get a life, guys. Episode I was absolutely awful; Episode II is shaping up to be even worse. Just goes to show that once fans buy into a franchise, cognitive dissonance prevents them from even admitting to themselves that it's time to move on. How many die-hard Star Trek fans, for instance, like Star Trek V?
Memory is usually indicated in 2^10 prefixes, but hard disk capacity is usually measured in 10^3 prefixes, and so generally is bandwidth. It's not as simple as switching wholesale over to another prefix; the problem is that when someone says "megabyte," sometimes they mean 2^20 bytes and sometimes they mean 10^6. Furthermore, given that SI already defines the prefixes to be rigidly powers of 10, there's an incompatibility with common usage and SI, in addition to the inherent ambiguity. The binary prefixes solve all that.
I've personally been using the binary prefixes for years now, they always clear things up easily. [Not sure why the Slashdot poster strips SUP and SUB HTML tags, though...]
What's the point?
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not clear to me what the point of reviewing well-thought-of science fiction classics is. Couldn't they all be accurately summed up with, "This is a really good book. Read it"?
Like it or not, Microsoft has a valid point. Trademark infringement is intended to protect companies with registered trademarks (of which Microsoft is obviously one) by preventing others from making similar products with similar names. Trademarks are for preventing someone from creating a similar product and giving it a similar name and then attempting to make money either by confusing the consumer or by attemping to ride the coattails of the original name.
Like it or not, naming a Windows emulator Lindows is a pretty clear case of the latter. Of course they're attempting to invoke th concept of Linux-on-Windows with the name -- why else would they have chosen it?
Here's the bottom line for people who are interested in making clones or emulators of other programs -- don't name them something similar to the original! That's the time to choose original, clever names, not the original names with one letter changed.
There's another issue which most people aren't aware of, and in which trademark and copyright law differ. Unlike copyrights, a trademark holder must defend his/her trademarks. Not actively defending one's trademarks (when brought to one's attention, of course) can be used as a defense by a future infringer. In some sense, when you commit clear trademark infringement, you are giving the trademark holder no choice but to threaten action -- because if they don't do it to you, they may lose it in the future.
This is true, I was being theatrical. Typical tallies of visible matter, however, do only count matter that is glowing in visible light, not in infrared.
That's because there are two types of dark matter.
The first we know is there, from looking at galactic velocity curves; things are rotating faster than they should be given a tally of all the luminous matter. At the simplest, this is just matter which is not glowing, which isn't all that exotic. Most of the matter you interact with in everyday life does not emit light. You, for instance, are dark matter. (And who said astronomy was unapproachable?)
There is a second type of dark matter, one that theoretically might close the Universe (or bring it fairly close to the critical point). This is theoretical, in the sense that we don't know whether the Universe is closed or near-closed. The amount of dark matter of this second type is far greater than the first time, because there's got to be a lot more hidden matter throughout the Universe -- not just in galaxies -- to close or almost close the Universe.
Arguments from particle physics show that perhaps some of the first kind -- but almost all of the second kind -- of dark matter must be "non-baryonic," that is, not composed of protons and neutrons like the normal matter we interact with. Whether that would render it truly invisible remains to be seen, but if they're WIMPs (weakly-interacting massive particles) then the dark matter would be hazy subatomic particles that interact so weakly with other matter it's hard to detect them by other than their gravity.
No, one second is defined in terms a specified number of transitions of a certain atomic state. One metre is the distance which light travels in a given fraction of one second. If you're going to nitpick, at least be accurate.
The world already has scooters, and they haven't revolutionized cities or society. They certainly aren't the most revolutionary invention since the computer, that's for sure...
If something is sensitive, it shouldn't be publicly available to everyone through HTTP. Search engines aren't causing security problems, they're exposing them.
That's clear and blatant copyright infringement, and Infograms is well within their rights to defend it. Get up in arms about true injustices, not people don't ill-advised things and then getting in legal hot water for it.
I go0t and played GBA DOOM (which has some modifications from the original) and got on a DOOM kick where in the last week I've replayed DOOM, DOOM II, Ultimate DOOM (original DOOM plus an extra episode), and Final DOOM is on its way. What great games.
It's true that the original quote did not contain the emphasis. The Brownshirts reference is extremely sleazy, this is true, but in truth there isn't much difference between "X is the threat" and "X is the threat."
I'm no fan of altering quotes (at least they did add the emphasis note), but a definite article is a definite article.
Slashdot Mirror
What other people have been saying still holds true. Unfortunately for software publishers, it makes a certain amount of sense to measure piracy in terms of lost profits (how else would you measure it as a monetary figure?), but the fact is that the vast majority of pirates are opportunitists who simply wouldn't use the software if they were forced to pay. A few would, of course, but a very small proportion of the total.
The classic example of this behavior is Microsoft, who now has such a vast majority of the market that they have to look into other avenues to expand -- and have aimed their guns at the pirates with the registration in Windows XP. But they're missing the key point: People who are pirating XP aren't going to pay for it if you magically force them to stop pirating. (Any antipiracy system is exploitable, anyway.) So the net effect after all is said and done is very little change in revenue, and a bunch of inconvenienced customers. Wasn't there a time when a company was supposed to provide a service to its customers for a profit, not put shackles on preexisting customers who have coughed up the dough?
For the record, I've purchased two shareware titles in the last month: Ricochet and Uplink.
Sounds like there's a terminology error here. "Public domain" means absolutely all copyrights are waived and anything at all can be done with the material. If they're trying to keep the material closed source, then releasing the binaries in the public domain is a seriously self-defeating move -- anyone can do anything with them now, including claiming them as their own, disassembling them and releasing the source, etc.
If it's released into the public domain, what does it matter if it's rereleased as open source?
The power of gcc is not its raw speed. Raw speed, as we all know, is becoming less and less of an issue these days. What makes gcc valuable is its portability, its extensive warning facilities (try comparing them to Visual C++ to see how awful another compiler's warning facilities can be), and its Standards compliance (less so with C++ but improving). Pure number crunching is not the final word in any kind of software, and has not been for a while.
Not really all that surprising, when you think about it. Consider that these are the same guys who thought it was a good idea to start work on a port of Postal -- a completely unremarkable game except that stirred up a moderate amount of controversy in its day. Making a port of Postal is like the remake of Psycho -- it's completely without purpose.
One of these claims comes up about every year, and some papers print it. It's no surprise that there's another one this year. And there'll be another one next year.
State driver's licenses/IDs already are effectively federal ID cards. The time to get all up in arms about such a thing was many decades ago.
Crap drifts past the Earth all the time. You want to get worried when an object ~100 m in size (large enough to cause significant regional destruction on land, or widespread coastal destruction if it lands in an ocean, which is likely) passes within the Earth-Moon distance (384000 km). This was only about 600000 km at closest approach.
Get a life, guys. Episode I was absolutely awful; Episode II is shaping up to be even worse. Just goes to show that once fans buy into a franchise, cognitive dissonance prevents them from even admitting to themselves that it's time to move on. How many die-hard Star Trek fans, for instance, like Star Trek V?
It got horrible reviews, guys.
Good lord, people. Get a more constructive hobby.
Memory is usually indicated in 2^10 prefixes, but hard disk capacity is usually measured in 10^3 prefixes, and so generally is bandwidth. It's not as simple as switching wholesale over to another prefix; the problem is that when someone says "megabyte," sometimes they mean 2^20 bytes and sometimes they mean 10^6. Furthermore, given that SI already defines the prefixes to be rigidly powers of 10, there's an incompatibility with common usage and SI, in addition to the inherent ambiguity. The binary prefixes solve all that.
I've personally been using the binary prefixes for years now, they always clear things up easily. [Not sure why the Slashdot poster strips SUP and SUB HTML tags, though ...]
It's not clear to me what the point of reviewing well-thought-of science fiction classics is. Couldn't they all be accurately summed up with, "This is a really good book. Read it"?
Like it or not, Microsoft has a valid point. Trademark infringement is intended to protect companies with registered trademarks (of which Microsoft is obviously one) by preventing others from making similar products with similar names. Trademarks are for preventing someone from creating a similar product and giving it a similar name and then attempting to make money either by confusing the consumer or by attemping to ride the coattails of the original name.
Like it or not, naming a Windows emulator Lindows is a pretty clear case of the latter. Of course they're attempting to invoke th concept of Linux-on-Windows with the name -- why else would they have chosen it?
Here's the bottom line for people who are interested in making clones or emulators of other programs -- don't name them something similar to the original! That's the time to choose original, clever names, not the original names with one letter changed.
There's another issue which most people aren't aware of, and in which trademark and copyright law differ. Unlike copyrights, a trademark holder must defend his/her trademarks. Not actively defending one's trademarks (when brought to one's attention, of course) can be used as a defense by a future infringer. In some sense, when you commit clear trademark infringement, you are giving the trademark holder no choice but to threaten action -- because if they don't do it to you, they may lose it in the future.
This is true, I was being theatrical. Typical tallies of visible matter, however, do only count matter that is glowing in visible light, not in infrared.
That's because there are two types of dark matter.
The first we know is there, from looking at galactic velocity curves; things are rotating faster than they should be given a tally of all the luminous matter. At the simplest, this is just matter which is not glowing, which isn't all that exotic. Most of the matter you interact with in everyday life does not emit light. You, for instance, are dark matter. (And who said astronomy was unapproachable?)
There is a second type of dark matter, one that theoretically might close the Universe (or bring it fairly close to the critical point). This is theoretical, in the sense that we don't know whether the Universe is closed or near-closed. The amount of dark matter of this second type is far greater than the first time, because there's got to be a lot more hidden matter throughout the Universe -- not just in galaxies -- to close or almost close the Universe.
Arguments from particle physics show that perhaps some of the first kind -- but almost all of the second kind -- of dark matter must be "non-baryonic," that is, not composed of protons and neutrons like the normal matter we interact with. Whether that would render it truly invisible remains to be seen, but if they're WIMPs (weakly-interacting massive particles) then the dark matter would be hazy subatomic particles that interact so weakly with other matter it's hard to detect them by other than their gravity.
No, one second is defined in terms a specified number of transitions of a certain atomic state. One metre is the distance which light travels in a given fraction of one second. If you're going to nitpick, at least be accurate.
The only two big names that haven't slipped until 2002 are Civilization 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Both are excellent.
The world already has scooters, and they haven't revolutionized cities or society. They certainly aren't the most revolutionary invention since the computer, that's for sure ...
If something is sensitive, it shouldn't be publicly available to everyone through HTTP. Search engines aren't causing security problems, they're exposing them.
That's clear and blatant copyright infringement, and Infograms is well within their rights to defend it. Get up in arms about true injustices, not people don't ill-advised things and then getting in legal hot water for it.
I go0t and played GBA DOOM (which has some modifications from the original) and got on a DOOM kick where in the last week I've replayed DOOM, DOOM II, Ultimate DOOM (original DOOM plus an extra episode), and Final DOOM is on its way. What great games.
Maybe you should get both sides of the story before posting it to Slashdot in the first place?
The first thing you do is contact Slashdot. Why, I don't know.
It's true that the original quote did not contain the emphasis. The Brownshirts reference is extremely sleazy, this is true, but in truth there isn't much difference between "X is the threat" and "X is the threat."
I'm no fan of altering quotes (at least they did add the emphasis note), but a definite article is a definite article.