It did way back in the day, with copy "protected" floppies. And then abandoning it, and using more copy "protection" and abandoning it, etc.
The computer world keeps learning, and then forgetting.
I remember, in the floppy era, reading an article about a study that concluded that games that are too hard to copy actually sold *less* that games that were easy to copy because they didn't benefit from the viral marketing associated with pirating.
I wonder if this still holds true in the internet era.
There is also no doubt that the PC gaming industry as a whole benefited from piracy in the early days. I'm sure I'm not the only Slashdotter that got addicted to games by playing pirated games at an age where I simply just couldn't afford to buy the games. Now that I'm older and employed, I often spend $100 or more on games a month.
The same goes for music and films.
This also makes the whole "we lost xxx gazillion dollars to piracy" a joke.
Just a note: Selling pirated games/software/music in my eyes is always wrong, because there is real money involved. But just copying from friends? I'm not convinced.
It's not so simple as "US vs. rest of world"--it's a balance between "how much do you trust the US to be a fair custodian" vs. "how much do you trust an organization giving weight to what Libya and South Africa and Papua New Guinea want to be a fair custodian".
I can understand your problem with Libya, but what's wrong with South Africa and Papua New Guinea? Both are democracies.
The good thing about the UN is that everybody has a say in the decisions and it's therefore hard for one country to dominate. All countries depend on the internet these days, so it's maybe not a good idea to let one country run the show.
The bad thing is that everything in the U.N. happens slooowly.
I dunno - maybe i'm wrong and these two books are crackin' good - but if they poured their guts into it, they'd want money. They're probably just cast offs or other stuff they couldnt get published elsewhere.
This book, like all Cory Doctorow's other books, are published in paper form as well. If you don't like getting them for free, hop over to Amazon and buy them.
I've heard nothing but good things about 'Ubuntu'... But for some reason I can't bring myself to try it out because of the funny name.
I realise you're saying this tongue in cheek, but Ubuntu is an extremely fitting name. The concept of Ubuntu embodies exactly what the FOSS movement is/should be about.
Being South African myself I'm also very proud that someone like Mark Shuttleworth is putting us on the FOSS map.
FWIW, mass transit just isn't looking as appealing as it used to. Let's see 9/11 (4 planes). Madrid (multiple trains). London (trains and bus). Israel (buses on a regular basis).
All in all, driving my own SUV or car-pooling with the neighbor is really looking pretty attractive.
Ok, let's look at this. So far 37 people are confirmed dead. More people than that die in car crashes in the UK every week.
4 million people use the London underground every day. These were the first deaths in years. You are much safer there than in a car.
I, for one, would pay a lot of money to get copies of my old games that Just Work on my newer machines.
I've often thought that the way to do it would be through something like Valve's Steam You pay for the game you want, it gets downloaded and it just works. Once you've paid for it you can always download it again, even if you move to a new computer.
Buy a song that has DRM (most online music stores anyway) and which takes away the freedom that you had when buying an album.
Yup, that's why I'll never buy (actually it's more like renting than buying) DRM'ed music.
I'll keep on buying CDs.
I also believe in supporting online music stores that don't use DRM. I've been using eMusic for a few months now and I'm very happy with them. Yes you won't find the latest hits there, but I've found lots of music there that is in my mind better than that crap anyway.
The revolutionary war is a good exmaple, but the rest I'm afraid don't count - those were conventional wars. It was not the people on the streets who took up arms against because they were unhappy about something, it was the leaders who decided to go to war and then recruited the population into conventioanl armies. The thing that makes a conventional war easier to win is that as soon as the opposing commanders surrender, the war is over.
Were talking about terrorism (or asymmetric warfare). The problem is that if ordinary people are pissed of enough that they are willing to fight by themselves with any means they have (even home made weapons), and keep on fighting no matter what, it is almost impossible for an opposing force to ever "win" outright.
A lot of arab-muslims seem to be bugged by the fact that we do not govern ourselves by Sharia law, women in the US vote, drive, and sometimes dress immodestly, we are a nation of infidels etc. etc. -- perhaps we should become an Islamic state to appease them...
Repeat after me: The terrorists don't give a shit what happens inside America. The terrorists don't give a shit what happens inside America.
Got that?
They are bugged by U.S. foreign policy. They are bugged by U.S. military bases in the Middle East. The are bugged by the support that the U.S. gives to Israel etc. etc.
This "they hate us because of our freedoms" is 100% bullshit.
The problem is also not only subjectivity, but fashion. Films go in and out of fashion with critics. A few good examples:
Birth of a Nation (1915): No single movie has ever had a greater impact on the way films are made. The first true movie epic, and it topped most best movie lists for years and years. There is a snag however: The heroes of the movie are the KKK. Oops. Most critics were willing to look past this initially, but by the 70's it had fallen from favour. My opinion: By not having this movie in a a top 100 list, you are denying a very important part of film history. That said, the problems with the subject matter cannot be ignored, so it would be in the bottom 50 of my list.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928): From the time it was made to the 70's it was often in the top 10 in these kinds of lists, since then people seem to have forgotten about it. My opinion: It's a brilliant movie and it would be in my top 10.
Last Tango in Paris: It Often made the top 5 in the 70's and 80's because it was so daring for the time it was made. It didn't age well and you won't find it on most top 100 lists at all anymore. My opinion: Not only is this not a great movie, it is down right bad. The only reason it ever made these lists was because of the politics of the times it was made in.
Will some nation eventually deploy weapons in space? I'd say there's a high liklihood. To me then, the question boils down to, do you want to be first or attempt to be second?
President Merkin Muffley: But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you *build* such a thing? Ambassador de Sadesky: There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
The "someone else is going to do it first" argument has been used by the military many times to justify the development of new weapons. The problem is that it is less of a reason, and more of a self fullfilling prophecy.
So far the Outer Space Treaty has worked well to prevent the militarization of space, and it will keep working until someone breaks it. Your argument is probably the worst possible reason you can have for breaking it.
Is an original oil painting more beautiful than a copy? No, it's the same picture. But the value of the original is higher. The difference in value comes from the possibility of detecting the uniqueness of the original. If the copy was a true identical copy, their values would also be identical.
On the one had your analogy does work well. Whenever you have the case where something value is based on it's rarity, there is a big incentive to come up with forgeries. (Of course with diamonds the rarity is artificially created by De Beers, but for the moment we'll ignore that.)
Eventually it gets to the stage where the forgeries are indistinguishable from the original - and this is a problem in the art world and the diamond market.
Many art forgeries are basically impossible to detect - even by experts. This is especially true of works of art that were created in the past 200 years or so, because for the most part the same materials that was used by the artist are also available to the forger. Of course art experts try to convince us that they can tell the difference because their livelihood depends on it. There is usually also a financial incentive for the expert to declare it real rather than fake.
I saw a program on tv recently (sorry forgot the name) where they tested a few experts by letting them distinguish between originals and fakes - all supposedly by the same artist. The fakes were supplied by a known, convicted and supposedly reformed forger. Not one of them scored 100%. Remember these are the people who can by their say-so increase or decrease the value of a painting hundred-fold.
Exactly the same is happening with De Beers at the moment. They are spending huge amounts of money on research to tell natural diamonds apart from lab-created ones. In the long run this is a losing battle, but I suspect that they will, like art experts, continue to tell us that they can tell the difference long after they can't really reliably do so any more.
First, I have to say I'm a big fan of Delphi. I've done dozens of projects with it in the last 10 years.
I'm a big fan of Delphi too. I have experience in using lots of other development environments for Windows, and Delphi is simply THE best possible tool for Windows development - especially if you are working in a big development team.
I really believe that once a programmer knows the ins/outs of Object Pascal (the language used by Delphi) he/she can be more productive than in any other language for Windows. Unfortunately many developers never get to that stage. This is of course a problem not exclusive to Delphi - It seems like in many courses for "Visual" languages all the time is spent on learning how to make nice looking forms, and not enough on the core language and proper OO programming - be it Basic, c# or whatever - but I digress.
Another interesting fact - Java may look like C++, but if you look a bit deeper it has a lot more in common with Object Pascal. E.g. All objects are references, there is a single base class from which all other classes are derived etc. I've seen that because of this it's much easier for a Delphi developer to become a good Java developer than it is for a C++ developer to become one. A new syntax is easy to learn - a new programming philosophy is harder.
The only reason that the use of Delphi has not become more common seems to be Borland's bad marketing. I once read a editorial in a Delphi magazine where the editor lamented about this. His conclusion was something like this: "It seems that Borland decided let's develop the best tool out there for Windows development, and then keep it a secret"
It is even possible to make faithful movie adaptations of books that at first glance seem impossible to translate to film. Example: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Yes the movie was a box office bomb, but it was a very faithful translation of Hunter S. Thompson's ideas.
What did this movie have in common with Fight Club, American Psycho and Trainspotting (which are all great adaptations in my opinion)? A voice over by a narrator.
This is something that can really make or break a movie version of a book - especially if the book was written in the first person
Co-op whas my favourite part of Doom, Doom2 and Quake. Duke Nukem 3D also had co-op that was fun, but after that, co-op seems to have gone out of fashion.
Everything is just deatmatch, or some variant of it, and I really miss co-op. I am sick & tired of deatmatch, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
This is a minor point, but South Africa's involvement is not at all surprising
Indeed, it is not surprising at all 1. After SA's nuclear weapons project shut down, there were a lot of nuclear physisists that needed work. 2. South Africa has the world's cheapest electricity, and the SA government would like to keep it that way since it is good for the expansion of electricity hungry industries like aluminium smelting. 3. The design that was developed in SA would make it possible for these reactors to be mass produced. It is hoped that these reactors will become a big export.
From the Wikipedia article on pebble bed reactors: Eskom in South Africa may be the current technology leader. It is developing a modular pebble-bed reactor.....
The modular design allows a small reactor to be mass-produced, reducing the life-cycle costs of safety-certification and design qualification. Sites that require larger generation capacity can simply install more reactors. The cooling system to cool the turbine's exhaust must be adapted to the site. The module is 165 MWe. The reactor could be a significant export item for South Africa.
Construction on the first reactor would have already started, but Earthlife Africa got a court order to (at least temporarily) stop construction.
The original, and in my opinion still the best. They seem to get better with every release.
Old versions of Knoppix didn't work properly on my laptop. Recently I tried it on my laptop again, and I was amazed. I basically tested how quickly I could get everything working.
About 15 minutes later I had succesfully set up my local network, internet via ADSL, printer, Samba, and Cd-Writer. As an encore I connected to the internet through GPRS via my cellphone, via the ir port - something that I have never been able to do in Windows.
Best of all: I saved the configuration to a USB key, so now everything is set up correctly as soon as I boot.
Slashdot Mirror
It did way back in the day, with copy "protected" floppies. And then abandoning it, and using more copy "protection" and abandoning it, etc.
The computer world keeps learning, and then forgetting.
I remember, in the floppy era, reading an article about a study that concluded that games that are too hard to copy actually sold *less* that games that were easy to copy because they didn't benefit from the viral marketing associated with pirating.
I wonder if this still holds true in the internet era.
There is also no doubt that the PC gaming industry as a whole benefited from piracy in the early days. I'm sure I'm not the only Slashdotter that got addicted to games by playing pirated games at an age where I simply just couldn't afford to buy the games. Now that I'm older and employed, I often spend $100 or more on games a month.
The same goes for music and films.
This also makes the whole "we lost xxx gazillion dollars to piracy" a joke.
Just a note: Selling pirated games/software/music in my eyes is always wrong, because there is real money involved. But just copying from friends? I'm not convinced.
I forgot to mention, I am actually South African, and this country is not going down the tubes and we are not going the way of Zimbabwe.
The people who say differently are usually either conspiracy theorists, racists or both.
Yes we do have our problems, but in general things are on the up.
It's not so simple as "US vs. rest of world"--it's a balance between "how much do you trust the US to be a fair custodian" vs. "how much do you trust an organization giving weight to what Libya and South Africa and Papua New Guinea want to be a fair custodian".
I can understand your problem with Libya, but what's wrong with South Africa and Papua New Guinea? Both are democracies.
The good thing about the UN is that everybody has a say in the decisions and it's therefore hard for one country to dominate. All countries depend on the internet these days, so it's maybe not a good idea to let one country run the show.
The bad thing is that everything in the U.N. happens slooowly.
I dunno - maybe i'm wrong and these two books are crackin' good - but if they poured their guts into it, they'd want money. They're probably just cast offs or other stuff they couldnt get published elsewhere.
This book, like all Cory Doctorow's other books, are published in paper form as well. If you don't like getting them for free, hop over to Amazon and buy them.
Same goes for Charles Stross
First thought:
You mean different from the tried and tested one proton, one electron recipe?
Beating up hookers: OK
Having sex with them: BAD
I've heard nothing but good things about 'Ubuntu'... But for some reason I can't bring myself to try it out because of the funny name.
I realise you're saying this tongue in cheek, but Ubuntu is an extremely fitting name. The concept of Ubuntu embodies exactly what the FOSS movement is/should be about.
Being South African myself I'm also very proud that someone like Mark Shuttleworth is putting us on the FOSS map.
Thanks Mark!
FWIW, mass transit just isn't looking as appealing as it used to. Let's see 9/11 (4 planes). Madrid (multiple trains). London (trains and bus). Israel (buses on a regular basis).
All in all, driving my own SUV or car-pooling with the neighbor is really looking pretty attractive.
Ok, let's look at this. So far 37 people are confirmed dead. More people than that die in car crashes in the UK every week.
4 million people use the London underground every day. These were the first deaths in years. You are much safer there than in a car.
note that the culture of the time placed equal weight on adoptive and biological fatherhood
Do you have a reference to back that up?
While you're at it please explain why there are two completely different genealogies for Jesus in the Bible
I, for one, would pay a lot of money to get copies of my old games that Just Work on my newer machines.
I've often thought that the way to do it would be through something like Valve's Steam You pay for the game you want, it gets downloaded and it just works. Once you've paid for it you can always download it again, even if you move to a new computer.
Buy a song that has DRM (most online music stores anyway) and which takes away the freedom that you had when buying an album.
Yup, that's why I'll never buy (actually it's more like renting than buying) DRM'ed music.
I'll keep on buying CDs.
I also believe in supporting online music stores that don't use DRM. I've been using eMusic for a few months now and I'm very happy with them. Yes you won't find the latest hits there, but I've found lots of music there that is in my mind better than that crap anyway.
The revolutionary war is a good exmaple, but the rest I'm afraid don't count - those were conventional wars. It was not the people on the streets who took up arms against because they were unhappy about something, it was the leaders who decided to go to war and then recruited the population into conventioanl armies. The thing that makes a conventional war easier to win is that as soon as the opposing commanders surrender, the war is over.
Were talking about terrorism (or asymmetric warfare). The problem is that if ordinary people are pissed of enough that they are willing to fight by themselves with any means they have (even home made weapons), and keep on fighting no matter what, it is almost impossible for an opposing force to ever "win" outright.
A lot of arab-muslims seem to be bugged by the fact that we do not govern ourselves by Sharia law, women in the US vote, drive, and sometimes dress immodestly, we are a nation of infidels etc. etc. -- perhaps we should become an Islamic state to appease them...
Repeat after me: The terrorists don't give a shit what happens inside America. The terrorists don't give a shit what happens inside America.
Got that?
They are bugged by U.S. foreign policy. They are bugged by U.S. military bases in the Middle East. The are bugged by the support that the U.S. gives to Israel etc. etc.
This "they hate us because of our freedoms" is 100% bullshit.
At what point do they STOP being bugged?
A little study of history shows us that point comes at no reasonable compromise.
I can think of quite a few cases where compromises have been reached:
1. The end of apartheid in South Africa
2. Northern Ireland
Neither of those two solutions were perfect, but in both cases terrorism was effectively stopped by the two parties making a compromise.
Now please name a few cases from history where a compromise could not be reached and where terrorism was then stopped by all out warfare.
The problem is also not only subjectivity, but fashion. Films go in and out of fashion with critics. A few good examples:
Birth of a Nation (1915): No single movie has ever had a greater impact on the way films are made. The first true movie epic, and it topped most best movie lists for years and years. There is a snag however: The heroes of the movie are the KKK. Oops. Most critics were willing to look past this initially, but by the 70's it had fallen from favour. My opinion: By not having this movie in a a top 100 list, you are denying a very important part of film history. That said, the problems with the subject matter cannot be ignored, so it would be in the bottom 50 of my list.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928): From the time it was made to the 70's it was often in the top 10 in these kinds of lists, since then people seem to have forgotten about it. My opinion: It's a brilliant movie and it would be in my top 10.
Last Tango in Paris: It Often made the top 5 in the 70's and 80's because it was so daring for the time it was made. It didn't age well and you won't find it on most top 100 lists at all anymore. My opinion: Not only is this not a great movie, it is down right bad. The only reason it ever made these lists was because of the politics of the times it was made in.
Will some nation eventually deploy weapons in space? I'd say there's a high liklihood.
To me then, the question boils down to, do you want to be first or attempt to be second?
You sound like a character from Dr. Strangelove:
President Merkin Muffley: But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you *build* such a thing?
Ambassador de Sadesky: There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
The "someone else is going to do it first" argument has been used by the military many times to justify the development of new weapons. The problem is that it is less of a reason, and more of a self fullfilling prophecy.
So far the Outer Space Treaty has worked well to prevent the militarization of space, and it will keep working until someone breaks it. Your argument is probably the worst possible reason you can have for breaking it.
Is an original oil painting more beautiful than a copy? No, it's the same picture. But the value of the original is higher. The difference in value comes from the possibility of detecting the uniqueness of the original. If the copy was a true identical copy, their values would also be identical.
On the one had your analogy does work well. Whenever you have the case where something value is based on it's rarity, there is a big incentive to come up with forgeries. (Of course with diamonds the rarity is artificially created by De Beers, but for the moment we'll ignore that.)
Eventually it gets to the stage where the forgeries are indistinguishable from the original - and this is a problem in the art world and the diamond market.
Many art forgeries are basically impossible to detect - even by experts. This is especially true of works of art that were created in the past 200 years or so, because for the most part the same materials that was used by the artist are also available to the forger. Of course art experts try to convince us that they can tell the difference because their livelihood depends on it. There is usually also a financial incentive for the expert to declare it real rather than fake.
I saw a program on tv recently (sorry forgot the name) where they tested a few experts by letting them distinguish between originals and fakes - all supposedly by the same artist. The fakes were supplied by a known, convicted and supposedly reformed forger. Not one of them scored 100%. Remember these are the people who can by their say-so increase or decrease the value of a painting hundred-fold.
Exactly the same is happening with De Beers at the moment. They are spending huge amounts of money on research to tell natural diamonds apart from lab-created ones. In the long run this is a losing battle, but I suspect that they will, like art experts, continue to tell us that they can tell the difference long after they can't really reliably do so any more.
First, I have to say I'm a big fan of Delphi. I've done dozens of projects with it in the last 10 years.
I'm a big fan of Delphi too. I have experience in using lots of other development environments for Windows, and Delphi is simply THE best possible tool for Windows development - especially if you are working in a big development team.
I really believe that once a programmer knows the ins/outs of Object Pascal (the language used by Delphi) he/she can be more productive than in any other language for Windows. Unfortunately many developers never get to that stage. This is of course a problem not exclusive to Delphi - It seems like in many courses for "Visual" languages all the time is spent on learning how to make nice looking forms, and not enough on the core language and proper OO programming - be it Basic, c# or whatever - but I digress.
Another interesting fact - Java may look like C++, but if you look a bit deeper it has a lot more in common with Object Pascal. E.g. All objects are references, there is a single base class from which all other classes are derived etc. I've seen that because of this it's much easier for a Delphi developer to become a good Java developer than it is for a C++ developer to become one. A new syntax is easy to learn - a new programming philosophy is harder.
The only reason that the use of Delphi has not become more common seems to be Borland's bad marketing. I once read a editorial in a Delphi magazine where the editor lamented about this. His conclusion was something like this: "It seems that Borland decided let's develop the best tool out there for Windows development, and then keep it a secret"
It is even possible to make faithful movie adaptations of books that at first glance seem impossible to translate to film. Example: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Yes the movie was a box office bomb, but it was a very faithful translation of Hunter S. Thompson's ideas.
What did this movie have in common with Fight Club, American Psycho and Trainspotting (which are all great adaptations in my opinion)? A voice over by a narrator.
This is something that can really make or break a movie version of a book - especially if the book was written in the first person
Good quality midi is difficult to distinguish from the real thing. See how good you are by trying MIDI or virtuoso
Unfortunately the you need Real Player to listen to the files.
Co-op whas my favourite part of Doom, Doom2 and Quake. Duke Nukem 3D also had co-op that was fun, but after that, co-op seems to have gone out of fashion.
Everything is just deatmatch, or some variant of it, and I really miss co-op. I am sick & tired of deatmatch, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
No, you can't DoS the keyspace.
You don't need to DoS the whole keyspace, or even any significant fraction of it. You only need to DoS the keys that are actually in use.
Imagine there are 100 different models of DVD player on the market. You just get those 100 keys revoked and suddenly no-one can watch any DVDs
It works fine in the VLC Media Player. VLC is a great program - it plays just about any video and you never have to download codecs
This is a minor point, but South Africa's involvement is not at all surprising
....
Indeed, it is not surprising at all
1. After SA's nuclear weapons project shut down, there were a lot of nuclear physisists that needed work.
2. South Africa has the world's cheapest electricity, and the SA government would like to keep it that way since it is good for the expansion of electricity hungry industries like aluminium smelting.
3. The design that was developed in SA would make it possible for these reactors to be mass produced. It is hoped that these reactors will become a big export.
From the Wikipedia article on pebble bed reactors:
Eskom in South Africa may be the current technology leader. It is developing a modular pebble-bed reactor.
The modular design allows a small reactor to be mass-produced, reducing the life-cycle costs of safety-certification and design qualification. Sites that require larger generation capacity can simply install more reactors. The cooling system to cool the turbine's exhaust must be adapted to the site. The module is 165 MWe. The reactor could be a significant export item for South Africa.
Construction on the first reactor would have already started, but Earthlife Africa got a court order to (at least temporarily) stop construction.
The original, and in my opinion still the best. They seem to get better with every release.
Old versions of Knoppix didn't work properly on my laptop. Recently I tried it on my laptop again, and I was amazed. I basically tested how quickly I could get everything working.
About 15 minutes later I had succesfully set up my local network, internet via ADSL, printer, Samba, and Cd-Writer. As an encore I connected to the internet through GPRS via my cellphone, via the ir port - something that I have never been able to do in Windows.
Best of all: I saved the configuration to a USB key, so now everything is set up correctly as soon as I boot.