Amiga (which was definitely killed by bad [un]management, not because it was closed (which it wasn't)
Yes and no. Commodore was killed by bad management. The Amiga was killed by its dependence on Commodore, because the OS was closed, so no one was able to take up its maintenance and port it to immortality of hardware agnosticism.
The painful lesson for users: never buy a machine with a proprietary OS. I'm not sure if that's why open wins in the long run (or even if open really does win), but as a user/customer, it's a reason to go with open.
if you think that's why it managed to cleared over $100 million in ad and subscription fees in its lifetime from legitimate, author-sourced file distro, you're hopelessly naive
Obama. Romney.
I'll call your $100 million of blatant corruption and raise you an Imperial Fuckload which which makes your miserable $100M look like children's lemonaide stand money.
Seriously, you're using revenue figures as evidence of a crime? I'd laugh, but I guess that number itself, is more substantial evidence than anything the FBI or NZ government had. So far, your case is better than theirs.
They searched and seized. They apparently found nothing. I can't believe Megaupload was legit either, but the government is signalling that they're shocked to have discovered it actually was. Let's think a minute here: on one side, we have 100 million persuasive arguments that Megaupload is a criminal enterprise. On the other side, we have 1) people are stupid and spend money on stupid shit 2) the government's lack of evidence after searching and siezing.
No matter which side you pick, you're going to look like a moron. So get over it, and rush to judgment anyway. You will look like a moron but you still might be right. And "Dotcom is innocent" as improbable as it might be, is more believable at this point.
FBI spying paranoia concerned, that's just plain wrong. FBI did nearly the worst thing they could do: they masked the problem from the users.
If they had allowed the DNS lookups to fail, the problem would have been over in a few days, and dns changer would have been a complete non-story and nearly forgotten a week after the fraudulent servers were taken down.
Instead, they got involved for no good reason that anyone has explained, somebody spent extra money dealing with it, and the media is talking about trivial stuff that should have been under the radar and forgotten years ago, and users were denied incentive for dealing with the problem. (About that last one: yes, I realize Vixie is saying that incentive is useless.)
It means he uses buffer overflows and other exploits that Sumerian goddesses merely dabbled in, not to merely DoS other systems, but to get those systems to execute code which performs "buy x."
But _ine contain_ the letter _ and everyone know_ that _tand_ _or _uck, ju_t a_ word_ containing _ are a re_erence to the vulgar word _hit!
We need to eliminate all the_e o__en_ive letter_ le_t the internet de_cend into a terrible toilet o_ gutter conver_ation. I don't know what the big deal i_; even without _ and _ we _till have twenty _our letter_ which which to _pell word_. Although now that I think o_ it, if we go by the George Carlin li_t (_hit, _i__, _u_k, _unt, _o_k_u_ker, _other_u_ker, and _i__) i_ _hould be _wen_y.
"TFA" instead of "TA". Let's go easy on all the pro_anity, as it it o__ends some people. There's no reason immediately drop the _ bomb. I think i_ we try hard, we can all learn to type without that _ucking letter.
Under "normal" circumstances, it's totally snappy enough. There's no click and wait. ..
You won't see that with, say, web browsing though.
I have to take that back. One the downright infuriating things about the browser, is that sometimes I'll have something stupid loading that I don't want (usually from a mis-click) and the close-tab widget can be unresponsive for many seconds. It's not just that it takes a long time for the tab to close, but it's a long time before there's even any visual feedback that it "heard" my click, which is particular important on a touch device since they're so fumblesome to begin with, compared to mice and pointers. Once a page is loaded, things seem ok, but during loading.. ugh.
Even so, though, I think this is mostly Android shittiness or its browser's shittiness, not just a limitation of the hardware. Nevertheless, it's part of the overall experience and I don't like it. If you're a "snappiness fanatic" (I mean that in the nicest way possible; we all have our own peeves and tolerances) I think you wouldn't like this machine. OTOH, I can't fit a netbook in my pocket.
He doesn't know jack about getting around DRM or how to "crack" software, all he actually does know is how to use a torrent program.
The funniest part about all that, is that he uses the torrent program because he doesn't know how to get around the DRM (or doesn't have the patience for that). Lose the DRM, and he has less incentive to torrent.
"OTA TV show is on at 8pm and so is an HBO show. Oops, except I won't be at home at 8pm. No problem, that's what the PVR and dual-channel tuner is for. So I'll just record the OTA TV show and watch it when I get home, and also record the HBO show and watch it when I get home. Hey wait, why doesn't HBO work? Oh right: it doesn't work, because I stupidly paid for it. If I torrent the shows instead of paying for a broken service which doesn't work, then I can watch the shows. Yay, bittorrent fixes HBO!" Someone at HBO ought to be facepalming over that.
And like you say, there's always someone out there who does have the patience and knowledge to fix the DRM, which is what makes the torrent so reliable, at the same time that the pay service fails.
What you need to understand is this: "Fuck you and your fucking money. We don't want your fucking money. We're not here to make money. Fuck the stockhol-- wait, don't tell them I said that!!!"
So ny question is, why do you think you should be immune from this?
(Where "this" is something like a patent on using the touchscreen on a device for which the touchscreen is the only human IO device, to activate the device, right?) I should be immune to it for the same reason that everyone else should: because this government intervention is harmful and offers no mitigating excuse for existing.
If you have a new product, good luck to you. If it's just riding on someone else's coattails, why should you be allowed to get away with it?
The point is that most of the time with these patent cases, nobody was trying to ride on someone else's coat tails. With software, someone is just working toward some goal (e.g. "The device is in a limited UI state, has one and only one human input device, and your job is to implement a way for the user to command the device to switch from the limited UI to fully interactive UI."), and they do what anyone would do, but the intermediate steps are patented. In situations like that, you can only hope that either they were patented over 20 years ago, or that nobody notices that you had the audacity to bring a product to market.
Unless Slashdot has a decent-sized contingent of law geeks, these constant stories about patents are really inappropriate here.
What Slashdot has, is a decent-size contingent of people who routinely solve problems. Think of us all, even the newbiest programmers, as full-time inventors and architects. No, I'm not saying we're in Tesla's league. If we had to be, then there wouldn't be much of a problem! But the low barrier to software creation, means that now many millions of people have to deal with the same bullshit (and contribute to the same bullshit) that only the well-financed "elites" a century ago could.
That's how awesome software is, and also how awful and archaic software patents are.
It used to be there were only a few active industrial geniuses, and for every hour they worked, the industry could afford ten lawyer hours to patent search everything they did. Now that's impossible, and ten hours of lawyer time per hour of tech time, isn't enough lawyer anymore anyway.
If you're a programmer or designer, then patents matter. And the fact that every hour of your job, you may be violating any numbers of patents, which you'll only find out about many years later if your work ever gets noticed, is a real problem. Patents aren't just some intellectual game that lawyers play, it's a thing they do where force is sometimes used against us, by our own government.
That makes patent stories appropriate. Especially stupid patents. Remember that even though HTC won, they had to spend money to defend themselves. Some day, it may be your innocent ass either spending money on defense, or closing your business because you can't afford "justice."
It hasn't always been complete bullshit. Software business deals actually happen in several different ways.
Sometimes you buy it and then you (or someone you give it to) later open the box and possibly spot a license. Surprise! The Blizzard judge says that box's contents cause some kind of mystical time travel, where the title to the box and its contents retroactively transfer or didn't transfer, with your knowledge so that there wasn't fraud, at the earlier point of "sale" depending on the eigenstate of the box's contents.
But sometimes you actually have a sales contract between the informed and knowing customer and the developer, where no software is delivered nor is any payment made, until after the contract is agreed upon. I made paychecks for 18 years in a business like that, and sometimes there were even actual negotiations and changes to the contracts (it wasn't a contract of adhesion), because the customer had the balls to insist on what they wanted (if only we could all be like that), and we still wanted their money. Shrinkwrap EULA software sellers like to pretend they're running that sort of business, despite all obvious differences in what you see actually happening if you observe the transaction.
It looks like this is similar to what Oracle was doing, except for the negotiating and sometimes changing the contracts part; Oracle's contracts were "Agree or else we would rather no sale happen." But adhesion or not, an actual license, rather than software, is what was sold. The court even uses that wording in this decision -- they write about selling a license. This is a very different kind of transaction than what you normally do when buying software retail or mail order, where anyone who hasn't been bribed by Blizzard can plainly see you are really buying a physical item.
And yet, this EU court is treating it much like a retail transaction for goods. They're treating the license not as terms and conditions for the sale, but just a proxy for the item itself. There's a big dose of common sense and fairness there, but how they justify it legally isn't clear to me. Whether that's because it's a contract of adhesion, or if they would do this regarding all contracts (and if so, why just software?), would be interesting to know.
Question: How does it handle?.. I tried a tablet last year and the whole "click and wait" thing drove me nuts.
Under "normal" circumstances, it's totally snappy enough. There's no click and wait.
When it's busy, though, things can get rougher. And busy includes any concurrent large-scale I/O, in a way that a "real computer" (i.e. my home server) would laugh at. It's possible this is because of the app I was using (haven't really checked it out or done comparisons yet) but when downloading a few-gigabytes file from a Samba share to the SD card, the overall performance of the machine becomes pretty bad (i.e. there is some real clicking and waiting), as though the wifi and/or SD writing used programmed I/O or something like that.
You won't see that with, say, web browsing though.
For me, netbooks are not sufficiently portable. (It's not about weight; it's about size. If it won't fit in my front pants pocket (or jacket pocket in winter), then I'm not going to get into habit of carrying it. And yes, I realize other people's circumstances are different. If you're already carrying a briefcase or backpack, your situation is very different and even a 10" tablet might be acceptable.)
Also, a netbook would be "merely useful"; using one would never give me any insight into why some people like tablets. I already know why netbooks are popular; it's tablets (and also their relatively horrible OSes; why am I using an app to read a Samba share, instead of just mounting it? (and yes I know I can mount it, but that's not considered the "normal" way to use this platform)) where the attraction still mystifies me.
Not because I really wanted a tablet, but because I wanted to know why anyone wants a tablet. I had to admit "go learn something" damn well applied to me. Up to now I've avoided tablets because I haven't been able to tolerate the too-weak-for-a-laptop and too-big-for-a-phone form factor. But 7" diag is just at the limits of what fits in the my pocket, so I figured it wouldn't just collect dust, and I'd actually end up doing some learning.
I've had the device for about a week now, and as I suspected, except for one thing about it, I'm not terribly impressed. I sort of knew it would work out like that. Maybe I'm just not a tablet guy, but I'm trying.
But what's that one thing about it that impressed me? I'll give you a hint: it's the same thing that made buying a thing which I suspected I wouldn't like much, not be a crazy thing to do.
It cost me less than a hundred dollars, that's what. It's hardly an awesome computer, but it's a lot of computer for $89. As far as I'm concerned, Google's new $200 tablet is high end and the companies who want $600 for machines that are less capable than an Atom notebook, and less portable than a phone (i.e. not as good as $200 tablets!), are fucking dreaming. $1000 for a tablet? You're off by an order of magnitude, dude.
"People were happy with the Apple menu through Mac OS 9 but now that they're using Mac OS X, they prefer to use the dock, and the Apple menu no longer works as an application launcher. So now we're going to have our users use the dock too. Oops, I mean the start menu and the taskbar! Forget what I said about that fruit company's name and the nautical term."
From THEN on out. It's not like, in 2012, the government started charging people more or less income tax depending on whether or not they do business with mortgage banks.
The Income Tax amendment has decades and decades of precedent and acceptance by the public, for broad interpretation where any condition or expression, not just the amount of income you have, can be part of the function for how much tax you owe.
If we didn't like this, we should have challenged it nearly a century ago. But that's how it is, now. If you don't want the federal government to have this power, then whether we're talking in 2012 or 1962, the situation hasn't changed at all, and you can still advocate a new amendment that is more explicit about the fed's taxing powers.
They got the megaupload servers offline, with much publicity, even if the whole thing is overturned there's no way it's returning in its old form. I'm sure the US authorities are thinking, 'job done'.
But.. but.. that's impossible. The US government would never use force to create fear of vigilante justice in the minds of civilians, for purposes of effecting political or behavioral changes. Why? Because US government is against terrorism.
The pres should not be held responsible for what the judge decided, unless it is OBVIOUS pandering to his OVERT policy.
Unless the judge screwed up, then somebody elected should be held responsible. Otherwise we'd be de-politicizing a political act. If you want to frame this as a Boener issue ("Why didn't you introduce legislation into the House, to end this madness?") that's cool, but I think Obama is weaker and has more cameras on him. Congress in invicible right now. They know everyone hates them and they don't care. The presidential candidates care, though.
SOME ideologies? I'd characterize it as much more than some.
But is patent policy one of them?
And combining the party names into one is an oversimplification, at best
Everything is an oversimplification. Calling them Democrats or Republicans is an oversimplification too. The reason we associate politicians with their parties is that it helps us generalize and say things that aren't precisely true.
And I declare that ridiculous.
D'oh! You dodged the issue by calling what I said ridiculous, instead of calling the law ridiculous and putting politicians into the hot seat to defend or condemn the current partisan policies. That's just the kind of thing that.. [roll dice] *clatter*.. Obama would do!
In regard to the useless "Republicrat" term - I'm sick of it. The parties are further and further apart every day. They may both be beholden to money, but their ideologies are polar opposite.
The do have some different ideologies, but there are still a great many [at least] two -sided issues where those two parties combine on one side while we the people are on the other. It is a particularly apropos term when discussing IP policy. Republicans and Democrats have moved as One on this. Corrupt IP law is currently part of the Republicrat behavior. Even if you hate the word, you gotta admit the previous sentence is highly accurate.
The chance that Obama had ANYTHING to do with decision is infinitesimally small.
I know that, but you can say the same about a majority of important political issues; presidents aren't involved in most policy making. They do get some big important ones (e.g. "should we start a war today?") but they're mostly on the sidelines. The way to get reform is to make them have something to do with such decisions, even if indirectly (e.g. have them appoint decent cabinet secretaries, judges, etc). Holding top administrators (especially elected ones) accountable for their underlings' actions is a good idea.
When you do that, you give politicians a way to distinguish themselves from their rivals. And when you don't do that, you make it so that your opinion can be safely ignored. Seriously, have you heard Obama or Romney or Johnson say anything substantial about patents? Why would they, if you are not willing to frame it as the divisive political issue that it actually is?
I want Romney to hear people talking about 15 year old legislation as "Obama's DMCA" so that maybe he'll spend a few million dollars of his warchest buying advertisements for DMCA is a Democrat conspiracy to put socialism in your DVD player. (He's gotta spend the money on something, why not something half-sane?) I want Obama to characterize patent case law radicalization as a Bush legacy, and maybe spend a few million dollars of his warchest advertising that Yes We Can persuade Congress to overrule those decisions, but only if we re-elect him instead of electing someone who would veto reform. I want Johnson to characterize the status quo as the unprincipled corruption that it is, and spend.. um.. twenty dollars on a month of hosting, for a podcast explaining that an actually ideological approach to law would be superior to highest-bidder policy making.
Therefore I declare that it's Obama's fault, until he comes out against it and makes it be Boener's fault (and by association, Romney's fault).
Maybe he (we) should, since it is, without a doubt, a political issue. The Republicrat party advocates, enacts, broadly interprets, and enforces some pretty weird IP policies, many of which are contrary to what a lot of people say they want. Wouldn't you vote for people running on the Broad Patents Are Bullshit party ticket?
Do you think there's any chance of the situation getting better, if people don't politicize it? I'd actually like politicians making IP reform one of their talking points, and for people who didn't try to repeal the current laws to have very visible mud on them.
Yeah, and all those Ubuntu users will be happy one day when their key gets revoked, after it turns out some rootkit uses it to infect the MBR.
Yeah, I thought about that. There are interesting wrinkles, though.
1) Most of those Ubuntu users would be uneffected. The revocation can only happen if you perform a Windows update. If you never go out of your way to run MS code, they can't damage your computer's operation by revoking your permission to run Ubuntu.
But some people do dual-boot, or may wish to install Ubuntu on a used computer which previously had run Windows plus an update. Here is where it gets really fun.
2) The revocation will have been done by Ubuntu's commercial competitor. Furthermore, Ubuntu paid to have their software certified, and regardless of whatever happened, Ubuntu's bootloader isn't the malware, so Ubuntu has likely not violated any terms. Ubuntu now has a claim against whoever (Microsoft) is maliciously transmitting revocations against harmeless bootloaders. I smell action. OTOH, if these signatures are only offered by signing something saying you won't ever sue if Microsoft for misconduct, then proceed to step 4, below.
3) Furthermore, a user whose computer was damaged by the update, has a claim against MS. For those who run Windows or otherwise get bound by the EULA, the new arbitration thing adds an interesting wrinkle, but not everyone who is harmed by Microsoft will be a Windows user or ever clicked an "I agree" so courts could still get involved.
4) Microsoft has to be offering this cheap ($99) signing service to deal with antitrust fears. If they start revoking competitor's certs for reasons as frivilous as the example you gave, they might as well have faced the antitrust risk head-on.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. Commodore was killed by bad management. The Amiga was killed by its dependence on Commodore, because the OS was closed, so no one was able to take up its maintenance and port it to immortality of hardware agnosticism.
The painful lesson for users: never buy a machine with a proprietary OS. I'm not sure if that's why open wins in the long run (or even if open really does win), but as a user/customer, it's a reason to go with open.
Obama. Romney.
I'll call your $100 million of blatant corruption and raise you an Imperial Fuckload which which makes your miserable $100M look like children's lemonaide stand money.
Seriously, you're using revenue figures as evidence of a crime? I'd laugh, but I guess that number itself, is more substantial evidence than anything the FBI or NZ government had. So far, your case is better than theirs.
They searched and seized. They apparently found nothing. I can't believe Megaupload was legit either, but the government is signalling that they're shocked to have discovered it actually was. Let's think a minute here: on one side, we have 100 million persuasive arguments that Megaupload is a criminal enterprise. On the other side, we have 1) people are stupid and spend money on stupid shit 2) the government's lack of evidence after searching and siezing.
No matter which side you pick, you're going to look like a moron. So get over it, and rush to judgment anyway. You will look like a moron but you still might be right. And "Dotcom is innocent" as improbable as it might be, is more believable at this point.
FBI spying paranoia concerned, that's just plain wrong. FBI did nearly the worst thing they could do: they masked the problem from the users.
If they had allowed the DNS lookups to fail, the problem would have been over in a few days, and dns changer would have been a complete non-story and nearly forgotten a week after the fraudulent servers were taken down.
Instead, they got involved for no good reason that anyone has explained, somebody spent extra money dealing with it, and the media is talking about trivial stuff that should have been under the radar and forgotten years ago, and users were denied incentive for dealing with the problem. (About that last one: yes, I realize Vixie is saying that incentive is useless.)
If Google had the power to do that, then nobody would want Android.
It means he uses buffer overflows and other exploits that Sumerian goddesses merely dabbled in, not to merely DoS other systems, but to get those systems to execute code which performs "buy x."
But _ine contain_ the letter _ and everyone know_ that _tand_ _or _uck, ju_t a_ word_ containing _ are a re_erence to the vulgar word _hit!
We need to eliminate all the_e o__en_ive letter_ le_t the internet de_cend into a terrible toilet o_ gutter conver_ation. I don't know what the big deal i_; even without _ and _ we _till have twenty _our letter_ which which to _pell word_. Although now that I think o_ it, if we go by the George Carlin li_t (_hit, _i__, _u_k, _unt, _o_k_u_ker, _other_u_ker, and _i__) i_ _hould be _wen_y.
__ _____ __ ______ ____ ____ ___, ____ __ __ ______ ____.
"TFA" instead of "TA". Let's go easy on all the pro_anity, as it it o__ends some people. There's no reason immediately drop the _ bomb. I think i_ we try hard, we can all learn to type without that _ucking letter.
I think it's swell that people look for memory leaks and that newer software sometimes fixes leaks in old versions.
But if you're measuring memory "efficiency" right after closing tabs rather than right before you close them, then you're doing it wrong.
"My hash table is as memory efficient as your sorted array, because after the program completes, it uses the same amount of memory!"
You're not really asking why Sean Connery's character robbed the train, are you?
I have to take that back. One the downright infuriating things about the browser, is that sometimes I'll have something stupid loading that I don't want (usually from a mis-click) and the close-tab widget can be unresponsive for many seconds. It's not just that it takes a long time for the tab to close, but it's a long time before there's even any visual feedback that it "heard" my click, which is particular important on a touch device since they're so fumblesome to begin with, compared to mice and pointers. Once a page is loaded, things seem ok, but during loading .. ugh.
Even so, though, I think this is mostly Android shittiness or its browser's shittiness, not just a limitation of the hardware. Nevertheless, it's part of the overall experience and I don't like it. If you're a "snappiness fanatic" (I mean that in the nicest way possible; we all have our own peeves and tolerances) I think you wouldn't like this machine. OTOH, I can't fit a netbook in my pocket.
The funniest part about all that, is that he uses the torrent program because he doesn't know how to get around the DRM (or doesn't have the patience for that). Lose the DRM, and he has less incentive to torrent.
"OTA TV show is on at 8pm and so is an HBO show. Oops, except I won't be at home at 8pm. No problem, that's what the PVR and dual-channel tuner is for. So I'll just record the OTA TV show and watch it when I get home, and also record the HBO show and watch it when I get home. Hey wait, why doesn't HBO work? Oh right: it doesn't work, because I stupidly paid for it. If I torrent the shows instead of paying for a broken service which doesn't work, then I can watch the shows. Yay, bittorrent fixes HBO!" Someone at HBO ought to be facepalming over that.
And like you say, there's always someone out there who does have the patience and knowledge to fix the DRM, which is what makes the torrent so reliable, at the same time that the pay service fails.
What you need to understand is this: "Fuck you and your fucking money. We don't want your fucking money. We're not here to make money. Fuck the stockhol-- wait, don't tell them I said that!!!"
So why did you use a trademark example?
(Where "this" is something like a patent on using the touchscreen on a device for which the touchscreen is the only human IO device, to activate the device, right?) I should be immune to it for the same reason that everyone else should: because this government intervention is harmful and offers no mitigating excuse for existing.
The point is that most of the time with these patent cases, nobody was trying to ride on someone else's coat tails. With software, someone is just working toward some goal (e.g. "The device is in a limited UI state, has one and only one human input device, and your job is to implement a way for the user to command the device to switch from the limited UI to fully interactive UI."), and they do what anyone would do, but the intermediate steps are patented. In situations like that, you can only hope that either they were patented over 20 years ago, or that nobody notices that you had the audacity to bring a product to market.
What Slashdot has, is a decent-size contingent of people who routinely solve problems. Think of us all, even the newbiest programmers, as full-time inventors and architects. No, I'm not saying we're in Tesla's league. If we had to be, then there wouldn't be much of a problem! But the low barrier to software creation, means that now many millions of people have to deal with the same bullshit (and contribute to the same bullshit) that only the well-financed "elites" a century ago could.
That's how awesome software is, and also how awful and archaic software patents are.
It used to be there were only a few active industrial geniuses, and for every hour they worked, the industry could afford ten lawyer hours to patent search everything they did. Now that's impossible, and ten hours of lawyer time per hour of tech time, isn't enough lawyer anymore anyway.
If you're a programmer or designer, then patents matter. And the fact that every hour of your job, you may be violating any numbers of patents, which you'll only find out about many years later if your work ever gets noticed, is a real problem. Patents aren't just some intellectual game that lawyers play, it's a thing they do where force is sometimes used against us, by our own government.
That makes patent stories appropriate. Especially stupid patents. Remember that even though HTC won, they had to spend money to defend themselves. Some day, it may be your innocent ass either spending money on defense, or closing your business because you can't afford "justice."
It hasn't always been complete bullshit. Software business deals actually happen in several different ways.
Sometimes you buy it and then you (or someone you give it to) later open the box and possibly spot a license. Surprise! The Blizzard judge says that box's contents cause some kind of mystical time travel, where the title to the box and its contents retroactively transfer or didn't transfer, with your knowledge so that there wasn't fraud, at the earlier point of "sale" depending on the eigenstate of the box's contents.
But sometimes you actually have a sales contract between the informed and knowing customer and the developer, where no software is delivered nor is any payment made, until after the contract is agreed upon. I made paychecks for 18 years in a business like that, and sometimes there were even actual negotiations and changes to the contracts (it wasn't a contract of adhesion), because the customer had the balls to insist on what they wanted (if only we could all be like that), and we still wanted their money. Shrinkwrap EULA software sellers like to pretend they're running that sort of business, despite all obvious differences in what you see actually happening if you observe the transaction.
It looks like this is similar to what Oracle was doing, except for the negotiating and sometimes changing the contracts part; Oracle's contracts were "Agree or else we would rather no sale happen." But adhesion or not, an actual license, rather than software, is what was sold. The court even uses that wording in this decision -- they write about selling a license. This is a very different kind of transaction than what you normally do when buying software retail or mail order, where anyone who hasn't been bribed by Blizzard can plainly see you are really buying a physical item.
And yet, this EU court is treating it much like a retail transaction for goods. They're treating the license not as terms and conditions for the sale, but just a proxy for the item itself. There's a big dose of common sense and fairness there, but how they justify it legally isn't clear to me. Whether that's because it's a contract of adhesion, or if they would do this regarding all contracts (and if so, why just software?), would be interesting to know.
Under "normal" circumstances, it's totally snappy enough. There's no click and wait.
When it's busy, though, things can get rougher. And busy includes any concurrent large-scale I/O, in a way that a "real computer" (i.e. my home server) would laugh at. It's possible this is because of the app I was using (haven't really checked it out or done comparisons yet) but when downloading a few-gigabytes file from a Samba share to the SD card, the overall performance of the machine becomes pretty bad (i.e. there is some real clicking and waiting), as though the wifi and/or SD writing used programmed I/O or something like that.
You won't see that with, say, web browsing though.
For me, netbooks are not sufficiently portable. (It's not about weight; it's about size. If it won't fit in my front pants pocket (or jacket pocket in winter), then I'm not going to get into habit of carrying it. And yes, I realize other people's circumstances are different. If you're already carrying a briefcase or backpack, your situation is very different and even a 10" tablet might be acceptable.)
Also, a netbook would be "merely useful"; using one would never give me any insight into why some people like tablets. I already know why netbooks are popular; it's tablets (and also their relatively horrible OSes; why am I using an app to read a Samba share, instead of just mounting it? (and yes I know I can mount it, but that's not considered the "normal" way to use this platform)) where the attraction still mystifies me.
About a week and a half ago here on Slashdot, ozmanjusri said "Go learn something" in reference to 7" Allwinner SoC-based tablets.
So I bought one.
Not because I really wanted a tablet, but because I wanted to know why anyone wants a tablet. I had to admit "go learn something" damn well applied to me. Up to now I've avoided tablets because I haven't been able to tolerate the too-weak-for-a-laptop and too-big-for-a-phone form factor. But 7" diag is just at the limits of what fits in the my pocket, so I figured it wouldn't just collect dust, and I'd actually end up doing some learning.
I've had the device for about a week now, and as I suspected, except for one thing about it, I'm not terribly impressed. I sort of knew it would work out like that. Maybe I'm just not a tablet guy, but I'm trying.
But what's that one thing about it that impressed me? I'll give you a hint: it's the same thing that made buying a thing which I suspected I wouldn't like much, not be a crazy thing to do.
It cost me less than a hundred dollars, that's what. It's hardly an awesome computer, but it's a lot of computer for $89. As far as I'm concerned, Google's new $200 tablet is high end and the companies who want $600 for machines that are less capable than an Atom notebook, and less portable than a phone (i.e. not as good as $200 tablets!), are fucking dreaming. $1000 for a tablet? You're off by an order of magnitude, dude.
"People were happy with the Apple menu through Mac OS 9 but now that they're using Mac OS X, they prefer to use the dock, and the Apple menu no longer works as an application launcher. So now we're going to have our users use the dock too. Oops, I mean the start menu and the taskbar! Forget what I said about that fruit company's name and the nautical term."
From THEN on out. It's not like, in 2012, the government started charging people more or less income tax depending on whether or not they do business with mortgage banks.
The Income Tax amendment has decades and decades of precedent and acceptance by the public, for broad interpretation where any condition or expression, not just the amount of income you have, can be part of the function for how much tax you owe.
If we didn't like this, we should have challenged it nearly a century ago. But that's how it is, now. If you don't want the federal government to have this power, then whether we're talking in 2012 or 1962, the situation hasn't changed at all, and you can still advocate a new amendment that is more explicit about the fed's taxing powers.
But.. but.. that's impossible. The US government would never use force to create fear of vigilante justice in the minds of civilians, for purposes of effecting political or behavioral changes. Why? Because US government is against terrorism.
Unless the judge screwed up, then somebody elected should be held responsible. Otherwise we'd be de-politicizing a political act. If you want to frame this as a Boener issue ("Why didn't you introduce legislation into the House, to end this madness?") that's cool, but I think Obama is weaker and has more cameras on him. Congress in invicible right now. They know everyone hates them and they don't care. The presidential candidates care, though.
But is patent policy one of them?
Everything is an oversimplification. Calling them Democrats or Republicans is an oversimplification too. The reason we associate politicians with their parties is that it helps us generalize and say things that aren't precisely true.
D'oh! You dodged the issue by calling what I said ridiculous, instead of calling the law ridiculous and putting politicians into the hot seat to defend or condemn the current partisan policies. That's just the kind of thing that .. [roll dice] *clatter* .. Obama would do!
The do have some different ideologies, but there are still a great many [at least] two -sided issues where those two parties combine on one side while we the people are on the other. It is a particularly apropos term when discussing IP policy. Republicans and Democrats have moved as One on this. Corrupt IP law is currently part of the Republicrat behavior. Even if you hate the word, you gotta admit the previous sentence is highly accurate.
I know that, but you can say the same about a majority of important political issues; presidents aren't involved in most policy making. They do get some big important ones (e.g. "should we start a war today?") but they're mostly on the sidelines. The way to get reform is to make them have something to do with such decisions, even if indirectly (e.g. have them appoint decent cabinet secretaries, judges, etc). Holding top administrators (especially elected ones) accountable for their underlings' actions is a good idea.
When you do that, you give politicians a way to distinguish themselves from their rivals. And when you don't do that, you make it so that your opinion can be safely ignored. Seriously, have you heard Obama or Romney or Johnson say anything substantial about patents? Why would they, if you are not willing to frame it as the divisive political issue that it actually is?
I want Romney to hear people talking about 15 year old legislation as "Obama's DMCA" so that maybe he'll spend a few million dollars of his warchest buying advertisements for DMCA is a Democrat conspiracy to put socialism in your DVD player. (He's gotta spend the money on something, why not something half-sane?) I want Obama to characterize patent case law radicalization as a Bush legacy, and maybe spend a few million dollars of his warchest advertising that Yes We Can persuade Congress to overrule those decisions, but only if we re-elect him instead of electing someone who would veto reform. I want Johnson to characterize the status quo as the unprincipled corruption that it is, and spend .. um .. twenty dollars on a month of hosting, for a podcast explaining that an actually ideological approach to law would be superior to highest-bidder policy making.
Therefore I declare that it's Obama's fault, until he comes out against it and makes it be Boener's fault (and by association, Romney's fault).
Maybe he (we) should, since it is, without a doubt, a political issue. The Republicrat party advocates, enacts, broadly interprets, and enforces some pretty weird IP policies, many of which are contrary to what a lot of people say they want. Wouldn't you vote for people running on the Broad Patents Are Bullshit party ticket?
Do you think there's any chance of the situation getting better, if people don't politicize it? I'd actually like politicians making IP reform one of their talking points, and for people who didn't try to repeal the current laws to have very visible mud on them.
Yeah, I thought about that. There are interesting wrinkles, though.
1) Most of those Ubuntu users would be uneffected. The revocation can only happen if you perform a Windows update. If you never go out of your way to run MS code, they can't damage your computer's operation by revoking your permission to run Ubuntu.
But some people do dual-boot, or may wish to install Ubuntu on a used computer which previously had run Windows plus an update. Here is where it gets really fun.
2) The revocation will have been done by Ubuntu's commercial competitor. Furthermore, Ubuntu paid to have their software certified, and regardless of whatever happened, Ubuntu's bootloader isn't the malware, so Ubuntu has likely not violated any terms. Ubuntu now has a claim against whoever (Microsoft) is maliciously transmitting revocations against harmeless bootloaders. I smell action. OTOH, if these signatures are only offered by signing something saying you won't ever sue if Microsoft for misconduct, then proceed to step 4, below.
3) Furthermore, a user whose computer was damaged by the update, has a claim against MS. For those who run Windows or otherwise get bound by the EULA, the new arbitration thing adds an interesting wrinkle, but not everyone who is harmed by Microsoft will be a Windows user or ever clicked an "I agree" so courts could still get involved.
4) Microsoft has to be offering this cheap ($99) signing service to deal with antitrust fears. If they start revoking competitor's certs for reasons as frivilous as the example you gave, they might as well have faced the antitrust risk head-on.