The only way a pirated piece of software is "theft" is if the person who uses it would have OTHERWISE bought the product. IF someone tries it out and then discards it and never would have bought the product, then the software company has not experienced damage-- they got some free advertising and didn't happen to pick up a customer.
It may not be theft, but it's enabling theft...
There are basically two types of people out there in the warez world: Leeches and crackers. Leeches would also include all those who buy a VCD for 80 cents in China as well. The leeches would be totally SOL without the crackers and their work.
The crackers just want the challenge. They don't do anything wrong by your logic, but the leeches would never be able to pirate the appz without their help, not to mention they're too lazy, and don't even really care whether they pirate or not -- they just want the best price. Therefore, crackers do bear responsibility for what happens. Drug growers do bear responsibility for the lives that are ruined by heroin.
So I was thinking that it would be cool to start one... Does anyone know how they would actually set up the PCs to minimize people's screwing up the system?
Would you set up a real windows network, and give everyone a login? Would you pre-install the most popular games and apply all patches yourself? How would you prevent them from installing stuff that would screw up the machine, while still allowing them to download plug-ins for IE, etc...
I assume that this stuff would actually be pretty easy, but I'm not sure how to do it...
Sounds more to me like you'll just have to migrate the data from your old drive. I don't think any solution will fly unless we can use old data that hasn't been signed or approved.
As well, considering that 99% of/.ers seem to be against any form of DRM, I'd like to raise the point that the western world, and particularly the U.S. won't make any real money on software from China until we do have good DRM. Anyone care to counter?;)
Yes, their system guides are great, but I don't believe they actually build their systems, because I did, and ran into an annoying problem.
The first system I built, a couple of years ago, I mostly took from their specs -- dual p3 800s, etc, and the top soundblaster with the live drive...
The problem is that soundblaster has NO drivers that work well on dual proc machines. I can't use EAX, and sometimes certain games don't work well, but for the most part the sound is OK, but that's not what I bargained for...
Another thing, Crucial.com is nice because their RAM is high quality, and you know it's compatible with your motherboard, cause you can search by motherboard...
No kidding. Last time I was there (98), I saw a guy working under a car with his body sticking out into the road, cars flying past.
No construction areas were blocked off -- pedestrians would just pick their way through cranes, pits, and piles of broken stone and concrete to get to the other side...
A cab we were in crashed into a bicycler in the street, and the policeman picked him up, dusted him off, and sent him on his way bleeding on his rickety bike.
On the way to ChangBaiShan we saw a number of overturned trucks along the side of the road, and finally flew off the road ourselves and flipped and crashed. This was after over an hour of imploring our insane driver to slow down.
When it comes to safety, the Chinese are still totally systematically insane.
Anecdotal evidence it may be, but my wife's grandfather invented tons of stuff in Korea. He had his ideas stolen by big corporations when he proposed the ideas to them, not understanding the patent system at the time... They took his ideas and never called him back, making tons of money from them. I've heard about this happening over and over, even when the inventors made them sign NDAs, etc.
Leonardo never was able to produce most of his so-called inventions. He wrote them in his journals, and sometimes built models for his jollies. He never really made money from his more innovative creations, but rather from his painting.
It is a fact that we need protection for inventors, not just to protect corporate inventors, but to protect individual inventors from greedy corporations...
BTW, it's 'Da Vinci', not 'De'Vinci'. Are you an "imbecile" as well?
Not everyone who has a patent prevents others from using their invention. Software development would not "grind to a halt," as you suggest, because most patent holders licence their patents to others for a fee. This fee is not usually unreasonable. If you want to use someone else's invention, you must pay them. If the invention doesn't deserve that protection, prove it, and you'll have your free use.
Yeah -- they're a real waste of money when drug companies make $10,000,000 more because of one more day of patent protection. It could make the difference between profit or loss for a research project. What a waste.
"...just because another company's product isn't taking over the market like they hoped it would?"
This is a serious mischaracterization of the situation. You may think flash is a great product, but that doesn't mean that Adobe's motives are anything but justified.
In this country, inventors of innovative systems have a right to control their use, if they get a patent. If you invent something, patent it, and Macromedia steals it and makes a hit, you have a right to fight to regain control of your invention. This is not immoral.
Why is the bias on slashdot so anti-inventor? Inventors created it, so they have the right to do what they want with it.
Quark had versions for traditional and simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, but you're right: piracy was a huge concern there. I worked specifically on all these versions of QuarkXPress, and I can tell you that there were a lot of things we wanted to do that were thrown out because of piracy issues.
I always wanted to have a single east-asian product, and enable people to mix up use of different languages in the same document. You might think that this would be a rare need, but you should see the hell that Sony has to go through to print their manuals. We couldn't do it, the argument being that separate versions would limit piracy...
the idea that elders are superior hasn't developed in "recent years"
I meant to emphasize the assume in that sentence. In so-called primitive cultures, many times the elders are always the wise ones, but sometimes they aren't, and at those times, a younger leader usually takes over the tribe, because he commands the respect that the elder doesn't deserve. Our problem is that our present culture tells us we must assume that the older people are wiser, even though many of them are not.
everybody deserves respect; it's polite to show it even if you don't feel it.
I think you're talking about courtesy here, rather than real respect. If that's the case, I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I don't think everyone old deserves real respect.
kids are too inexperienced to even tell in many cases whether an adult has something to pass on or not
In some cases I'm sure this is true, but I believe that the vast majority of kids, even from a very very young age, can tell who is really wise and who isn't. There's an aura about them. A knowing smile, but never condescending...
Some of their elders do have things to teach them, but we have a fundamental problem with this: Our society has developed in recent years to assume that elders are superior, rather than expect them to become wise, and then share their wisdom with others.
Most adults today have the perception that it's ok to just be a member of society, work, save, have a family, and die, and that's it! They don't think about the fact that they have a chance to really gain some profound knowledge during their lifetime, and pass it on to others... They don't have a concept of the "Elder", because most of them didn't have anyone like that to guide them.
Does anyone realize that this is precisely the problem with our schools today? Why don't kids respect teachers or other adults? It's not really because they don't understand technology or the latest game. It's because they don't have any profound knowledge to pass on. They're not wise. They don't have the self-confidence of a proud grandfather, so kids don't feel any reason to respect them.
Some of this has become clear to me through my practice of martial arts -- my teacher is truly wise, and his son respects him, not because he's his father, but because he knows so much, and knows he knows it;) He is a shining example of the wise old man, and he can beat the crap out of any frat-boy football player in his prime...
People must command respect. They can't just expect people (even kids) to respect them simply because they're older. Many seem to have forgotten this basic truth of our instinctive culture.
To fix the icon problem, all they have to do is make a shortcut with the desired icon, and expose that to the user via the desktop, or the start menu... Shortcuts can have any icon, regardless of the file they point to...
The only way to sandbox ActiveX controls is to provide an entirely emulated x86 architecture for it to live in. All COM objects are native code, and can do whatever they want.
Some degree of encapsulation can be had through the implementation of the emulated Win32 API that will be required to get controls to work under Linux, but they could still mess with any valid memory in their address space, etc...
You should not expect corporations to be "fair". That's not how it works. Corporations should be expected to do whatever it takes to succeed within the constraints of the law. That's the motivation that drives our economy.
It sounds like you want corporations to police themselves... This is not how our system is designed, and I'm glad. Why? Because it could never work, as this case illustrates.
The government has the power to police these companies, and if it creates loopholes for them to exploit, we should expect the companies to take full advantage of those loopholes.
Please tell me why slashdotters continually act surprised when they see that corporations act in their own self-interest...
Isn't it a given that AOL will try to turn these terms to their advantage in _some_ way? Isn't that OK in a capitalist system? If so, stop your griping.
I have to say, I'm really sick of all the paranoid rants that pass for educated opinion on slashdot... What is the major problem with Passport? You don't have to give out credit card info; you don't even have to give your real information...
Take a chill pill, guys -- Microsoft just wants to consolidate all their services and make things easier. Passport simplifies things for them, and for their users. "But Nooo, I can't give out my email address, even if it's a fake one for spam!"... argh. Grow up already...
There are some good comments here, clarifying why this article is fundamentally wrong in its assumption that Unicode only encodes 2^16 characters. This is the first reason why this article is wrong.
The other reasons are more subtle, and I'm not sure that everyone here understands what's going on with CJK characters, so here's a little background.
The characters we're talking about originated in china, and spread to Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Vietnam has switched to a western alphabet now, so let's leave them out.;) At one point, although there have always been alternative forms for some characters, there was a reasonably standard set of Chinese characters used throughout these countries (recorded in the KangXi dictionary)...
The Japanese invented a number of their own characters, which I'm sure number less than 1000. Up until World War II, this was basically the situation. (So at this time, the required number of characters to encode would have been less than 50,000 -- Chinese characters and Japanese additions.) Then all hell broke loose, so to speak.
The Japanese simplified a large number of their characters systematically, immediately following WWII (
So they started substituting simpler characters for the disallowed ones in these compounds, and thereby subtly changed the meaning of the words.
On to China -- they also began a campaign of character simplification, which would span quite a few years, although theirs was much more radical than the Japanese approach. In fact, some of the simplified versions the government came out with were so repulsive, they were eventually retracted because everyone refused to use them.;) So they ended up with a few thousand (
Finally, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong-Kong basically kept the traditional chinese characters.
So, that gives us the basic 40,000, plus 3000 Japanese (kokuji and shinjitai), plus maybe 10,000 chinese (jiantizi), plus some other stuff not mentioned here, giving a grand estimate of around 55,000.
The key to this is that the vast majority of characters used are common among all 5 locales. This was the only reason that anyone even attempted to encode the CJK characters in the first place. The re-unification of all the disparate character sets was called Han-Unification during the Unicode development process.
This, combined with the surrogate encoding area, ensures that there will be plenty of space for everyone...:)
And of course, companies involved in nuclear power production will always do what's best, because the government will always be watching them.
Right.
Just to let you know, here in Colorado there's an area above Denver's aquifer where tons of radioactive and toxic waste was clandestinely dumped. Gee, how did that happen?
Why should we support nuclear power, just because coal is worse? Nuclear power is horrible too. What we need to support are renewable energy sources. Solar, wind, water, and hydrogen as a transport medium.
Nuclear and coal both produce waste. The others don't. They're better.
Ok, this might be funny or scary -- I don't know which anymore...
When I was in college for CS at CMU, there were times I couldn't sleep for a few days, or didn't get much sleep for weeks...
One time, I had to get up in the morning for a test, and my girlfriend was trying to get me up. I couldn't understand what she was saying to me. I knew they were words, but I couldn't connect them to any meaning...
I started to see everything as numbers -- her words as sound waves that were varying in amplitude and wavelength, the sensations from my body as electrical pulses of different strengths... Basically I just saw numbers everywhere, and couldn't get to the meaning behind any of it, so I started to freak out... I was actually crying, I think... It took me at least half an hour to get back to normal.
I'm not saying you can't, I'm just saying that there are a lot of companies out there who make it a goal to get as much out of a programmer as possible, regardless of the cost to his life, happiness, or health. People need to realize that the company is not usually on their side when it comes to these things...
I used to have to work about 8hrs a day during lulls, and 16/day + weekends for 2-3 months at a time during crunches...
Needless to say, it really sucked (web consulting company). So I started contracting, and now I get paid by the hour. Much nicer.;) I really wonder why more people don't do it...
But the thing that really concerns me is how many companies take serious advantage of their programmers, by forcing them to work egregiously long hours, with no bonuses or any extra compensation. I've watched people burn out and experienced it myself -- it sucks.
I think that there should be an upper limit on the number of hours that a salaried employee can be required to work, simply for mental and physical health reasons. It doesn't make sense that programmers can be forced to work arbitrarily long hours with no compensation...
... Not to mention the fact that most managers think that somehow programmers can do anything at all, in any amount of time, as long as they're working hard... . How many of you have worked somewhere where the suits get props for coming in at 7am and not doing $#!+, while the coders who come in at 11 and leave at midnight get harassed for coming in late...
First, if you have a whole library of mp3s, just copy some over to another directory, convert, and put 'em on a memory stick. no problem.
Second, I think that everyone has to begin to realize that free formats such as mp3 are NOT going to survive in hardware players indefinitely. MDs used ATRAC, and I've been using mine for 6+ years... and it's been great. You just have to weigh the trade-off between cool gear and a little format conversion -- in the end, most people will take the cool gear. It's just a fact of life..........
Slashdot Mirror
There are basically two types of people out there in the warez world: Leeches and crackers. Leeches would also include all those who buy a VCD for 80 cents in China as well. The leeches would be totally SOL without the crackers and their work.
The crackers just want the challenge. They don't do anything wrong by your logic, but the leeches would never be able to pirate the appz without their help, not to mention they're too lazy, and don't even really care whether they pirate or not -- they just want the best price. Therefore, crackers do bear responsibility for what happens. Drug growers do bear responsibility for the lives that are ruined by heroin.
So I was thinking that it would be cool to start one... Does anyone know how they would actually set up the PCs to minimize people's screwing up the system?
Would you set up a real windows network, and give everyone a login? Would you pre-install the most popular games and apply all patches yourself? How would you prevent them from installing stuff that would screw up the machine, while still allowing them to download plug-ins for IE, etc...
I assume that this stuff would actually be pretty easy, but I'm not sure how to do it...
"Digital Dark Age"...?
/.ers seem to be against any form of DRM, I'd like to raise the point that the western world, and particularly the U.S. won't make any real money on software from China until we do have good DRM. Anyone care to counter? ;)
Sounds more to me like you'll just have to migrate the data from your old drive. I don't think any solution will fly unless we can use old data that hasn't been signed or approved.
As well, considering that 99% of
Yes, their system guides are great, but I don't believe they actually build their systems, because I did, and ran into an annoying problem.
The first system I built, a couple of years ago, I mostly took from their specs -- dual p3 800s, etc, and the top soundblaster with the live drive...
The problem is that soundblaster has NO drivers that work well on dual proc machines. I can't use EAX, and sometimes certain games don't work well, but for the most part the sound is OK, but that's not what I bargained for...
Another thing, Crucial.com is nice because their RAM is high quality, and you know it's compatible with your motherboard, cause you can search by motherboard...
No kidding. Last time I was there (98), I saw a guy working under a car with his body sticking out into the road, cars flying past.
No construction areas were blocked off -- pedestrians would just pick their way through cranes, pits, and piles of broken stone and concrete to get to the other side...
A cab we were in crashed into a bicycler in the street, and the policeman picked him up, dusted him off, and sent him on his way bleeding on his rickety bike.
On the way to ChangBaiShan we saw a number of overturned trucks along the side of the road, and finally flew off the road ourselves and flipped and crashed. This was after over an hour of imploring our insane driver to slow down.
When it comes to safety, the Chinese are still totally systematically insane.
Sorry, bud, this is not true.
Anecdotal evidence it may be, but my wife's grandfather invented tons of stuff in Korea. He had his ideas stolen by big corporations when he proposed the ideas to them, not understanding the patent system at the time... They took his ideas and never called him back, making tons of money from them. I've heard about this happening over and over, even when the inventors made them sign NDAs, etc.
Leonardo never was able to produce most of his so-called inventions. He wrote them in his journals, and sometimes built models for his jollies. He never really made money from his more innovative creations, but rather from his painting.
It is a fact that we need protection for inventors, not just to protect corporate inventors, but to protect individual inventors from greedy corporations...
BTW, it's 'Da Vinci', not 'De'Vinci'. Are you an "imbecile" as well?
Not everyone who has a patent prevents others from using their invention. Software development would not "grind to a halt," as you suggest, because most patent holders licence their patents to others for a fee. This fee is not usually unreasonable. If you want to use someone else's invention, you must pay them. If the invention doesn't deserve that protection, prove it, and you'll have your free use.
Yeah -- they're a real waste of money when drug companies make $10,000,000 more because of one more day of patent protection. It could make the difference between profit or loss for a research project. What a waste.
"...just because another company's product isn't taking over the market like they hoped it would?"
This is a serious mischaracterization of the situation. You may think flash is a great product, but that doesn't mean that Adobe's motives are anything but justified.
In this country, inventors of innovative systems have a right to control their use, if they get a patent. If you invent something, patent it, and Macromedia steals it and makes a hit, you have a right to fight to regain control of your invention. This is not immoral.
Why is the bias on slashdot so anti-inventor? Inventors created it, so they have the right to do what they want with it.
Quark had versions for traditional and simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, but you're right: piracy was a huge concern there. I worked specifically on all these versions of QuarkXPress, and I can tell you that there were a lot of things we wanted to do that were thrown out because of piracy issues.
I always wanted to have a single east-asian product, and enable people to mix up use of different languages in the same document. You might think that this would be a rare need, but you should see the hell that Sony has to go through to print their manuals. We couldn't do it, the argument being that separate versions would limit piracy...
I meant to emphasize the assume in that sentence. In so-called primitive cultures, many times the elders are always the wise ones, but sometimes they aren't, and at those times, a younger leader usually takes over the tribe, because he commands the respect that the elder doesn't deserve. Our problem is that our present culture tells us we must assume that the older people are wiser, even though many of them are not.
everybody deserves respect; it's polite to show it even if you don't feel it.
I think you're talking about courtesy here, rather than real respect. If that's the case, I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I don't think everyone old deserves real respect.
kids are too inexperienced to even tell in many cases whether an adult has something to pass on or not
In some cases I'm sure this is true, but I believe that the vast majority of kids, even from a very very young age, can tell who is really wise and who isn't. There's an aura about them. A knowing smile, but never condescending...
Most adults today have the perception that it's ok to just be a member of society, work, save, have a family, and die, and that's it! They don't think about the fact that they have a chance to really gain some profound knowledge during their lifetime, and pass it on to others... They don't have a concept of the "Elder", because most of them didn't have anyone like that to guide them.
Does anyone realize that this is precisely the problem with our schools today? Why don't kids respect teachers or other adults? It's not really because they don't understand technology or the latest game. It's because they don't have any profound knowledge to pass on. They're not wise. They don't have the self-confidence of a proud grandfather, so kids don't feel any reason to respect them.
Some of this has become clear to me through my practice of martial arts -- my teacher is truly wise, and his son respects him, not because he's his father, but because he knows so much, and knows he knows it ;) He is a shining example of the wise old man, and he can beat the crap out of any frat-boy football player in his prime...
People must command respect. They can't just expect people (even kids) to respect them simply because they're older. Many seem to have forgotten this basic truth of our instinctive culture.
Some degree of encapsulation can be had through the implementation of the emulated Win32 API that will be required to get controls to work under Linux, but they could still mess with any valid memory in their address space, etc...
It sounds like you want corporations to police themselves... This is not how our system is designed, and I'm glad. Why? Because it could never work, as this case illustrates.
The government has the power to police these companies, and if it creates loopholes for them to exploit, we should expect the companies to take full advantage of those loopholes.
Isn't it a given that AOL will try to turn these terms to their advantage in _some_ way? Isn't that OK in a capitalist system? If so, stop your griping.
Take a chill pill, guys -- Microsoft just wants to consolidate all their services and make things easier. Passport simplifies things for them, and for their users. "But Nooo, I can't give out my email address, even if it's a fake one for spam!" ... argh. Grow up already...
My only question is -- why doesn't slashdot allow UTF-8 posts? They are rejected by the filters...
The other reasons are more subtle, and I'm not sure that everyone here understands what's going on with CJK characters, so here's a little background.
The characters we're talking about originated in china, and spread to Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Vietnam has switched to a western alphabet now, so let's leave them out. ;) At one point, although there have always been alternative forms for some characters, there was a reasonably standard set of Chinese characters used throughout these countries (recorded in the KangXi dictionary)...
The Japanese invented a number of their own characters, which I'm sure number less than 1000. Up until World War II, this was basically the situation. (So at this time, the required number of characters to encode would have been less than 50,000 -- Chinese characters and Japanese additions.) Then all hell broke loose, so to speak.
The Japanese simplified a large number of their characters systematically, immediately following WWII ( So they started substituting simpler characters for the disallowed ones in these compounds, and thereby subtly changed the meaning of the words.
On to China -- they also began a campaign of character simplification, which would span quite a few years, although theirs was much more radical than the Japanese approach. In fact, some of the simplified versions the government came out with were so repulsive, they were eventually retracted because everyone refused to use them. ;) So they ended up with a few thousand (
Finally, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong-Kong basically kept the traditional chinese characters.
So, that gives us the basic 40,000, plus 3000 Japanese (kokuji and shinjitai), plus maybe 10,000 chinese (jiantizi), plus some other stuff not mentioned here, giving a grand estimate of around 55,000.
The key to this is that the vast majority of characters used are common among all 5 locales. This was the only reason that anyone even attempted to encode the CJK characters in the first place. The re-unification of all the disparate character sets was called Han-Unification during the Unicode development process.
This, combined with the surrogate encoding area, ensures that there will be plenty of space for everyone... :)
Right.
Just to let you know, here in Colorado there's an area above Denver's aquifer where tons of radioactive and toxic waste was clandestinely dumped. Gee, how did that happen?
Why should we support nuclear power, just because coal is worse? Nuclear power is horrible too. What we need to support are renewable energy sources. Solar, wind, water, and hydrogen as a transport medium.
Nuclear and coal both produce waste. The others don't. They're better.
When I was in college for CS at CMU, there were times I couldn't sleep for a few days, or didn't get much sleep for weeks...
One time, I had to get up in the morning for a test, and my girlfriend was trying to get me up. I couldn't understand what she was saying to me. I knew they were words, but I couldn't connect them to any meaning...
I started to see everything as numbers -- her words as sound waves that were varying in amplitude and wavelength, the sensations from my body as electrical pulses of different strengths... Basically I just saw numbers everywhere, and couldn't get to the meaning behind any of it, so I started to freak out... I was actually crying, I think... It took me at least half an hour to get back to normal.
That really sucked...
(BTW, I don't take drugs. ;)
I'm not saying you can't, I'm just saying that there are a lot of companies out there who make it a goal to get as much out of a programmer as possible, regardless of the cost to his life, happiness, or health. People need to realize that the company is not usually on their side when it comes to these things...
Needless to say, it really sucked (web consulting company). So I started contracting, and now I get paid by the hour. Much nicer. ;) I really wonder why more people don't do it...
But the thing that really concerns me is how many companies take serious advantage of their programmers, by forcing them to work egregiously long hours, with no bonuses or any extra compensation. I've watched people burn out and experienced it myself -- it sucks.
I think that there should be an upper limit on the number of hours that a salaried employee can be required to work, simply for mental and physical health reasons. It doesn't make sense that programmers can be forced to work arbitrarily long hours with no compensation...
Second, I think that everyone has to begin to realize that free formats such as mp3 are NOT going to survive in hardware players indefinitely. MDs used ATRAC, and I've been using mine for 6+ years... and it's been great. You just have to weigh the trade-off between cool gear and a little format conversion -- in the end, most people will take the cool gear. It's just a fact of life..........