Do you see how silly that is? Imagine walking into a car dealer, and you have to agree to a contract saying you will never remove the engine and put it in another car. If you want an engine that you are allowed to remove, you can buy another engine and put it in the car, but you cannot buy a car without an engine. Instead, you must throw the OEM engine away.
I'm not advocating turning abandonware into "free as in speach" software.
Exactly how could you interpret my statements as saying they should give up rights in other markets? I said nothing of the sort.
Where did I say anything about support? Support is not the issue. Sales is the issue.
I'm not saying that this piracy shouldn't be stopped either. Under the current legal framework, it's illegal. I *am* saying that we should look into revising the law so that the phrase "you can't get that anymore" becomes less common.
Most Windows users have OEM versions, not full retail.
Here is a direct quote from the OEM license to Windows95: "You may permanently transfer all of your rights under this EULA only as part of a sale or transfer of the COMPUTER..."
I was not talking about *copying* Windows. I was talking about *moving* windows. The EULA does not even allow you to even *move* Windows, even if you agree to forfeit tech support.
As for the rest of what you are saying, I am not saying that the authors forfeit rights to their work. Notice that I said the abandonware distributor can make *no* profit, and must cease and desist on order of the author.
I fully agree with the "don't buy, don't get" concept, but what we have is a situation where certain distributors are taking the ability to buy out of that equation. That is no better than price-fixing
The larger issue here is planned obsolescence, which has never been dealt with as a legal issue as far as I know. REPEAT: I DO NOT EXPECT PEOPLE TO JUST GIVE AWAY THEIR WORK.
There are very good reasons "abandonware" should not be expected to be free.
1. We are not talking about source code here. Abandonware is binary only. If source were available, people would be maintaining it via patches, and there would be no issues.
2. Waiting until a package no longer makes money to take it would *not* damage the profit motive, because by definition, the profit motive is already gone. Notice that I asserted the right of the author to issue a cease and desist and resume sales whenever they want. Alternatively, destributors could be allowed to sell the product simply by sending a standard royalty to the author/publisher without a contract. DO YOU REALLY STAND IN DEFENSE OF PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE???
1. Not being able to get an old piece of software is like not being allowed to fab a part for a classic car. My prefered model for software has always been "software as product" where we simply treat it as a physical, destructable product, even though it isn't. Now, since the company that oroginally made the product is no longer manufacturing it, and refuses to do so, I believe it's fair game to allow others to "fab parts" as best they can.
This, by the way, is the same reason I hate Microsoft's EULA. Not being allowed to move Windows to another box is like not being allowed to pull a Chevy V8 and put it in another car.
2. If the authors aren't selling, they aren't losing money. In this case, the only argument they can make that they are losing money is that it interferes with their planned obsolecence plans. That's a poor excuse.
Another reason I side with abandonware is that I'm sure there have been many companies that have been bought for some reason, and then the purchaser decided they didn't want to develop the product.
If we want to extend the whole "piracy on the high seas" analogy, there is a precedent in maritime law. IANAL, but aren't people allowed to "salvage" ships abandoned at sea? I think this is very similar.
Now, how could we legislate to make abandonware legit?
Well, the five year rule is one good guideline. I would also say that the distributors of abandonware should not be allowed to sell it for any more than the cost of distribution. If the original manufacturer decides to start selling it again, they should be allowed to re-start sales at no more than the original retail price of the package, and the abandonware distributor should cease and desist.
one of the biggest missed opportunities in the industry
At the time, I was a student at UVa and had access to the Sun workstations, which ran X.
A small room full of NeXT stations were donated and hooked to the network, and I could access my account from those too.
Apple's famous increased ease of use wasn't there. It was just a different *NIX with some fancy crap on it. What really turned me off was that after logging in through that workstation, my home directory had some kind of wierd Library directory in it that I didn't put there.
So, I went back to using the Sun stations.
That said, I was never trained on them. I don't recall if any training was offered. If there were advantages, they were unknown to me. They simply plonked the boxes in a room to see if anybody would use them. I didn't see that many people using them.
This is the subject of much debate in the press, and unfortunately there is way too much politics for anybody to really be informed either way. Just when you think you've found an objective study, there is usually a money trail leading someplace, and the leftists are no less guilty of this than the rightists.
Your argument is similar to the left wing argument. The counterargument is that without profit motive the drug won't be developed to begin with.
The counter-counter argument to that is that we are placing economics above public health.
The counter-counter-counter argument to that is that economics *is* public health; i.e. a world where researchers at Pfizer have to live paycheck-to-paycheck is actually less healthier (at least for those researchers).
In the final analysis, we need some way to determine the proper balance, or "equilibrium" between the profit motive of the drug company and the profit motive of the drug company customers.
Under an the extreme left approach, socialization results in a decreased ability for the company to deliver a drug. Under an extreme right approach, economic circumstances prohibit the lower classes from receiving the drug.
Now, the trick is to determine the situation that maximizes delivery of the drug, which lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.
There is nothing particularly honourable about giving drugs away if you can only do it for a little while, just so you can go bankrupt and/or cut research staff. It is far more honourable to maximize delivery. So far, the limited life drug patent is the best method we have come up with to do this.
But with these companies potentially looking forward to a healthy cut in the profits of any new drugs developed etc., should us plebs look towards more honourable projects,
This is the side of the Free Software movement that makes me sick. Theres a vindictive attitude towards capitalism, and especially any capitalism that involves intellectual property.
If some drug company makes money *and* cures cancer using my CPU cycles, I'll be happy. Who knows, it might be my cancer they cure.
This is only a very small beginning. We need much more work in this area. We need small, fast, secure VMs that can run *any* language on *any* machine. EiC comes close to meeting the any machine part, but not the any language part.
Have you been paying any attention at all? This isn't
being dealt with by anti-trust law...
Decreased revenues due to open source competition can't be the only thing driving down Microsoft's stock price. It's about 50% off its high before the antitrust rulings.
Epsilon Eridani is a little pansy orange dwarf that couldn't blow the atmosphere off of this Jupiter-type planet as close as the asteroid belt.
No, but it could blow the atmosphere off one of the closer-in smaller planets. Like the planet Vulcan, where it is hot and the atmosphere is thin. Obviously the atmosphere is not thin because most of it was blown off. The atmosphere was blown off during the early stages of the Epsilon Eridani system formation. Later, gases were released from the planet's interior as it cooled.
I was gonna say: MacOS. All you have to do is tap the nose and it gives precisely one gallong of milk. There isn't any way to get different ammounts because that's not part of The Vision.
This is the sacred cow of Slashdot. You dare not criticize it.
*BSD
Gives 500 gallons of milk a day. Nobody notices.
Windows 95/98/2k:
It's a cash cow.
Solaris
Used to be a cash cow, now it just gives milk like a regular cow.
BeOS
Pervasive multithreading allows it to swat flies with its tail, chew cud and whistle tunes while giving chocalate, strawberry, whole and lowfat milk from each of the four teats. Nobody is impressed.
Windows NT
This is not a cow. It's bull.
GNU HURD
Might be a herd of cows, but so far all we hear is thundering in the distance.
I still have Netscape 0.96 installed on my machine. I use it for testing purposes. I figure that if my pages display OK on that, they will display on anything. Also, it's good to see that your NOFRAMES and NOSCRIPT tags are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing.
I tried/. with it just now. It displayed for a minute, then the browser GPF'd. You can't get much more authentic than that!
Wow! MacOS X rules. Out of all these, it's probably easiest to set up too. That's not based on experience, since I've never set one up. Although, if it's anything like running the webserver on the iMac, I'm sold. All I had to do was enable it, and drag files there.
Was OS X always based on BSD? That would explain the tight correlation.
Does anybody here see the similarity between Linux distributors and recording companies?
The recording companies at least pretend to be interested in paying the artists, even though many of them manipulate contracts so that it doesn't happen, and many artists don't see a dime. Linux Distributors may talk about "giving back to the community" but few programmers see much of anything.
Yet the recording labels are monsters while the Linux distros are perceived as "getting it" and being "cool", "hip" or whatever teenagers say these days.
This is not a troll. Can anybody explain the difference? In some alternative universe, is there a website where musicians extoll the virtues of General Public Music while blasting software distributors for not paying programmers or allowing them to copy software?
Remember, the mouse was intended to slow a user down
Can you cite a source for that? Whether or not the mouse slows you down or speeds you up depends on how you use it.
Speed-up example: Double-clicking a program to launch it vs. actually typing in the command.
Slow-down example: del *.txt (when the directory has 1000 text files in it).
I've found there are some things the mouse does well, and some things the keyboard does better.
For example, when I need to highlight text, I do it with the mouse rather than moving the cursor with the keyboard and using shift-arrow. This is faster because the mouse can leap over text without any repeat-rate restrictions (and yes, my repeat rate is maxed out). But then when I copy the text, I ctrl-C ctrl-V, because that is plainly faster than the menu.
So, if the mouse was intended to slow users down, it was not successful.
1. There is no security model because we don't need one. What?! Well, I'm sitting here in a house, anybody who walks by is a relative, so I've got nothing to worry about there. I don't have a static IP or run a server. The network is read-only. I am both user and admin. A security model integrated into the OS would just be cruft. We don't need no steenking chmod.
2. The designers of Windows didn't sit around making assumptions about the intelligence of users. They simply set out to make things easy. There is a subtle distinction there.
3. I'm not aware of any OS that can be separated from the UI. Exactly what would *NIX without a shell look like?:)
OK, enough rebuttals to your arguments, here are some of my own: *NIX people often fail to understand the circumstances underwhich Windows evolved. In fact, the keyword here is *evolved*. Windows evolved from DOS, which was originally designed to run on woefully underpowered PCs. *NIX had the luxury of running on some pretty powerful hardware right from the start. It wasn't until the 386 that *NIX on a PC even began to be practical.
DOS/Win is the real hobbiest OS. When MS was serving the PC community, *NIX was still just for business.
The fact that Windows crashes as often as it does is, surprisingly, also not that important. Why? Because Windows users are not server operators. Uptime is not nearly as important for the typical PC user. Also, most Windows users turn their boxes on and off regularly anyway.
In other words, 90% of the PC users are not using Windows because they are "brainwashed". Windows is a *good* idea.
That said, I agree that attempts to duplicate Windows are misguided. Because it is an evolved system, they are doomed right from the start, not having participated in the last 20 years of evolution. They can also never overcome the fact that Windows is a de-facto standard. Also, the Free Software philosophy is either unimportant or at odds with many Windows developers, who like the MS bu$iness model very much.
Or, to paraphrase a quotation that the *NIX community loves to cite: Those who fail to understand Windows are condemned to reinvent it--poorly.
Those who know me know that I am a supporter of intellectual property rights, but if they are shut down, it's wrong.
Why? Because they are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.
Eewww... I've done it. I've "joined the other side". Ok, maybe not, but I think you get the idea. If *I* can say "Napster OK, RIAA sucks", this is kind of like Nixon going to China... on a smaller scale.
Hardcore/. Open Source poseurs should take note of course, that I expect constitutional protections to be granted uniformly. That means that I don't think MS should be punished until all their appeals are exhausted either.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you see how silly that is? Imagine walking into a car dealer, and you have to agree to a contract saying you will never remove the engine and put it in another car. If you want an engine that you are allowed to remove, you can buy another engine and put it in the car, but you cannot buy a car without an engine. Instead, you must throw the OEM engine away.
I'm not advocating turning abandonware into "free as in speach" software.
Exactly how could you interpret my statements as saying they should give up rights in other markets? I said nothing of the sort.
Where did I say anything about support? Support is not the issue. Sales is the issue.
I'm not saying that this piracy shouldn't be stopped either. Under the current legal framework, it's illegal. I *am* saying that we should look into revising the law so that the phrase "you can't get that anymore" becomes less common.
Most Windows users have OEM versions, not full retail.
Here is a direct quote from the OEM license to Windows95: "You may permanently transfer all of your rights under this EULA only as part of a sale or transfer of the COMPUTER..."
I wonder what changed their minds.
If they didn't change their minds, then they would probably lose any sympathy they are getting from artists at this point.
The extent to which the RIAA makes things better for the artists who sign with them is the extent to which the artists will agree with them.
Turn artists into wage-slaves, and kiss your coalition good-bye.
Did you actually read anything I said????
I was not talking about *copying* Windows. I was talking about *moving* windows. The EULA does not even allow you to even *move* Windows, even if you agree to forfeit tech support.
As for the rest of what you are saying, I am not saying that the authors forfeit rights to their work. Notice that I said the abandonware distributor can make *no* profit, and must cease and desist on order of the author.
I fully agree with the "don't buy, don't get" concept, but what we have is a situation where certain distributors are taking the ability to buy out of that equation. That is no better than price-fixing
The larger issue here is planned obsolescence, which has never been dealt with as a legal issue as far as I know. REPEAT: I DO NOT EXPECT PEOPLE TO JUST GIVE AWAY THEIR WORK.
There are very good reasons "abandonware" should not be expected to be free.
1. We are not talking about source code here. Abandonware is binary only. If source were available, people would be maintaining it via patches, and there would be no issues.
2. Waiting until a package no longer makes money to take it would *not* damage the profit motive, because by definition, the profit motive is already gone. Notice that I asserted the right of the author to issue a cease and desist and resume sales whenever they want. Alternatively, destributors could be allowed to sell the product simply by sending a standard royalty to the author/publisher without a contract. DO YOU REALLY STAND IN DEFENSE OF PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE???
I side with the abandonware pirates. Here's why:
1. Not being able to get an old piece of software is like not being allowed to fab a part for a classic car. My prefered model for software has always been "software as product" where we simply treat it as a physical, destructable product, even though it isn't. Now, since the company that oroginally made the product is no longer manufacturing it, and refuses to do so, I believe it's fair game to allow others to "fab parts" as best they can.
This, by the way, is the same reason I hate Microsoft's EULA. Not being allowed to move Windows to another box is like not being allowed to pull a Chevy V8 and put it in another car.
2. If the authors aren't selling, they aren't losing money. In this case, the only argument they can make that they are losing money is that it interferes with their planned obsolecence plans. That's a poor excuse.
Another reason I side with abandonware is that I'm sure there have been many companies that have been bought for some reason, and then the purchaser decided they didn't want to develop the product.
If we want to extend the whole "piracy on the high seas" analogy, there is a precedent in maritime law. IANAL, but aren't people allowed to "salvage" ships abandoned at sea? I think this is very similar.
Now, how could we legislate to make abandonware legit?
Well, the five year rule is one good guideline. I would also say that the distributors of abandonware should not be allowed to sell it for any more than the cost of distribution. If the original manufacturer decides to start selling it again, they should be allowed to re-start sales at no more than the original retail price of the package, and the abandonware distributor should cease and desist.
one of the biggest missed opportunities in the industry
At the time, I was a student at UVa and had access to the Sun workstations, which ran X.
A small room full of NeXT stations were donated and hooked to the network, and I could access my account from those too.
Apple's famous increased ease of use wasn't there. It was just a different *NIX with some fancy crap on it. What really turned me off was that after logging in through that workstation, my home directory had some kind of wierd Library directory in it that I didn't put there.
So, I went back to using the Sun stations.
That said, I was never trained on them. I don't recall if any training was offered. If there were advantages, they were unknown to me. They simply plonked the boxes in a room to see if anybody would use them. I didn't see that many people using them.
This is the subject of much debate in the press, and unfortunately there is way too much politics for anybody to really be informed either way. Just when you think you've found an objective study, there is usually a money trail leading someplace, and the leftists are no less guilty of this than the rightists.
Your argument is similar to the left wing argument. The counterargument is that without profit motive the drug won't be developed to begin with.
The counter-counter argument to that is that we are placing economics above public health. The counter-counter-counter argument to that is that economics *is* public health; i.e. a world where researchers at Pfizer have to live paycheck-to-paycheck is actually less healthier (at least for those researchers).
In the final analysis, we need some way to determine the proper balance, or "equilibrium" between the profit motive of the drug company and the profit motive of the drug company customers.
Under an the extreme left approach, socialization results in a decreased ability for the company to deliver a drug. Under an extreme right approach, economic circumstances prohibit the lower classes from receiving the drug.
Now, the trick is to determine the situation that maximizes delivery of the drug, which lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.
There is nothing particularly honourable about giving drugs away if you can only do it for a little while, just so you can go bankrupt and/or cut research staff. It is far more honourable to maximize delivery. So far, the limited life drug patent is the best method we have come up with to do this.
But with these companies potentially looking forward to a healthy cut in the profits of any new drugs developed etc., should us plebs look towards more honourable projects,
This is the side of the Free Software movement that makes me sick. Theres a vindictive attitude towards capitalism, and especially any capitalism that involves intellectual property.
If some drug company makes money *and* cures cancer using my CPU cycles, I'll be happy. Who knows, it might be my cancer they cure.
please include an alternate method of running untrusted software on your local computer!
http://vrml3d.com/open/#name5
This is only a very small beginning. We need much more work in this area. We need small, fast, secure VMs that can run *any* language on *any* machine. EiC comes close to meeting the any machine part, but not the any language part.
Have you been paying any attention at all? This isn't being dealt with by anti-trust law...
Decreased revenues due to open source competition can't be the only thing driving down Microsoft's stock price. It's about 50% off its high before the antitrust rulings.
Epsilon Eridani is a little pansy orange dwarf that couldn't blow the atmosphere off of this Jupiter-type planet as close as the asteroid belt.
No, but it could blow the atmosphere off one of the closer-in smaller planets. Like the planet Vulcan, where it is hot and the atmosphere is thin. Obviously the atmosphere is not thin because most of it was blown off. The atmosphere was blown off during the early stages of the Epsilon Eridani system formation. Later, gases were released from the planet's interior as it cooled.
Now hurry up and invent the warp-drive.
D#%$ it. I knew I forgot something.
I was gonna say: MacOS. All you have to do is tap the nose and it gives precisely one gallong of milk. There isn't any way to get different ammounts because that's not part of The Vision.
Linux
This is the sacred cow of Slashdot. You dare not criticize it.
*BSD
Gives 500 gallons of milk a day. Nobody notices.
Windows 95/98/2k:
It's a cash cow.
Solaris
Used to be a cash cow, now it just gives milk like a regular cow.
BeOS
Pervasive multithreading allows it to swat flies with its tail, chew cud and whistle tunes while giving chocalate, strawberry, whole and lowfat milk from each of the four teats. Nobody is impressed.
Windows NT
This is not a cow. It's bull.
GNU HURD
Might be a herd of cows, but so far all we hear is thundering in the distance.
I still have Netscape 0.96 installed on my machine. I use it for testing purposes. I figure that if my pages display OK on that, they will display on anything. Also, it's good to see that your NOFRAMES and NOSCRIPT tags are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing.
I tried /. with it just now. It displayed for a minute, then the browser GPF'd. You can't get much more authentic than that!
Wow! MacOS X rules. Out of all these, it's probably easiest to set up too. That's not based on experience, since I've never set one up. Although, if it's anything like running the webserver on the iMac, I'm sold. All I had to do was enable it, and drag files there.
Was OS X always based on BSD? That would explain the tight correlation.
One person was chosen as the "VP" (the Pres was the prof), and had to manage a lot of stuff, as well as do some work
Spoken like a true non-manager.
you idiot women don't have penises
Delores! Delores! --Seinfeld
Does anybody here see the similarity between Linux distributors and recording companies?
The recording companies at least pretend to be interested in paying the artists, even though many of them manipulate contracts so that it doesn't happen, and many artists don't see a dime. Linux Distributors may talk about "giving back to the community" but few programmers see much of anything.
Yet the recording labels are monsters while the Linux distros are perceived as "getting it" and being "cool", "hip" or whatever teenagers say these days.
This is not a troll. Can anybody explain the difference? In some alternative universe, is there a website where musicians extoll the virtues of General Public Music while blasting software distributors for not paying programmers or allowing them to copy software?
Which got me thinking, *NIX is evolved too, it's just a different branch. Remember what people were saying here about X being "crufty"?
Remember, the mouse was intended to slow a user down
Can you cite a source for that? Whether or not the mouse slows you down or speeds you up depends on how you use it.
Speed-up example: Double-clicking a program to launch it vs. actually typing in the command.
Slow-down example: del *.txt (when the directory has 1000 text files in it).
I've found there are some things the mouse does well, and some things the keyboard does better.
For example, when I need to highlight text, I do it with the mouse rather than moving the cursor with the keyboard and using shift-arrow. This is faster because the mouse can leap over text without any repeat-rate restrictions (and yes, my repeat rate is maxed out). But then when I copy the text, I ctrl-C ctrl-V, because that is plainly faster than the menu.
So, if the mouse was intended to slow users down, it was not successful.
Windows is *not* a bad idea.
1. There is no security model because we don't need one. What?! Well, I'm sitting here in a house, anybody who walks by is a relative, so I've got nothing to worry about there. I don't have a static IP or run a server. The network is read-only. I am both user and admin. A security model integrated into the OS would just be cruft. We don't need no steenking chmod.
2. The designers of Windows didn't sit around making assumptions about the intelligence of users. They simply set out to make things easy. There is a subtle distinction there.
3. I'm not aware of any OS that can be separated from the UI. Exactly what would *NIX without a shell look like? :)
OK, enough rebuttals to your arguments, here are some of my own: *NIX people often fail to understand the circumstances underwhich Windows evolved. In fact, the keyword here is *evolved*. Windows evolved from DOS, which was originally designed to run on woefully underpowered PCs. *NIX had the luxury of running on some pretty powerful hardware right from the start. It wasn't until the 386 that *NIX on a PC even began to be practical.
DOS/Win is the real hobbiest OS. When MS was serving the PC community, *NIX was still just for business.
The fact that Windows crashes as often as it does is, surprisingly, also not that important. Why? Because Windows users are not server operators. Uptime is not nearly as important for the typical PC user. Also, most Windows users turn their boxes on and off regularly anyway.
In other words, 90% of the PC users are not using Windows because they are "brainwashed". Windows is a *good* idea.
That said, I agree that attempts to duplicate Windows are misguided. Because it is an evolved system, they are doomed right from the start, not having participated in the last 20 years of evolution. They can also never overcome the fact that Windows is a de-facto standard. Also, the Free Software philosophy is either unimportant or at odds with many Windows developers, who like the MS bu$iness model very much.
Or, to paraphrase a quotation that the *NIX community loves to cite: Those who fail to understand Windows are condemned to reinvent it--poorly.
Look, I got a side! Oh... %#$ @#+\ cube!!!
Assuming they could do that without any copyright issues, why would they want to do that?
Bandwidth costs money. /. is mostly text. Text has a great Bandwidth/Advertising ratio. A bunch of fat screen shots don't. Case closed.
I feel like I have to weigh in on this one.
Those who know me know that I am a supporter of intellectual property rights, but if they are shut down, it's wrong.
Why? Because they are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.
Eewww... I've done it. I've "joined the other side". Ok, maybe not, but I think you get the idea. If *I* can say "Napster OK, RIAA sucks", this is kind of like Nixon going to China... on a smaller scale.
Hardcore /. Open Source poseurs should take note of course, that I expect constitutional protections to be granted uniformly. That means that I don't think MS should be punished until all their appeals are exhausted either.