Crusoe's big selling point is that it uses less power. But it only saves about 60% of what intels use in most circumstances; moreover, laptops spend most of their energy on displays.. so why is crusoe useful?
yes it does. At least you have to steal a license key to pirate closed source programs like that. So there is some barrier. And redhat has no IP to protect, so of course they make it easy to copy their shit. A stupid, obtuse response like this is about what I expected.
It is that simple. Without a closed binary distribution, there is no way companies can add, for instance, a license key thing, like Mathematica has, as an example. Anyone can take the source code, file off the serial numbers, compile and sell. Or, if they have to release the source code, they can always permute it and sell a new version. But since this is such an easy task, what would happen is that servers would pop up in sweden or wherever from which you could download license free, anonymous copies of anything.
How many people here would honestly still pay for the software? Not many. This would be an end of an era. There would be no more startup VC, no more new software companies. The software industry would end, with a bang.
I wonder, how much of the open source/free software movement is about what it claims to be, and how much is simply about getting lots of software cheaply and conveniently from an anonymous server in sweden? Only the most asinine open source proponent would be unable to realize that mandating open source, in any way, would lead to this.
This column was an act of cowardice. Look through it- Katz starts by saying that piracy is wrong, but then goes on about freedom for several paragraphs, and then about the impossibility of protecting copyright laws. Finally, he moves into a mini-rant about how corporations are infringing on our freedom. What are we to draw out of this? What could we possibly conclude, except that it is acceptable to steal mp3's, source code, or whatever else, since this makes us more free, it can't be stopped regardless, and corporations are evil anyway? But of course, you're not advocating piracy, are you Katz. You said so at the very start. Remember the context, that this is the same columnist who several weeks ago condemned metallica for trying to protect their property. So basically, here is a pro-piracy piece that is masquerading, with the help of some irelevant material from Jefferson, as some sort of paeon to freedom. This is cowardly because he is advocating the actions of mp3 bootleggers, etc., without being prepared to admit to it. If the notion of copyright is truly dead and unenforceable, then we are in a lot of trouble.
First of all, I think the laws under which MS has done illegal things are immoral. But that is besides the point. The original poster stated that copyright was a government-granted monopoly, the only purpose of which is to make altruism profitable (whatever the hell that means). Copyright is not a special privilege (similar to a patent) but a claim of an entity on their work. A property right. (I know, patents are considered property rights, but I think you can see the difference here. Note that the process for obtaining patents and copyrights are very different. A copyright prevents others from copying my work, while a patent prevents others from making something, even if they didn't refer to my work in their activities)
Taking away Microsoft's copyright based on the fact that what they are doing is not for a social good (note that the poster did _not_ say anything illegal) is not at all comparable to the drug confiscation laws, which, by the way, I am against. And furthermore, you are wrong as to the nature of these confiscation laws. It is not even necessary to convict the owner to confiscate their property, which is another reason I am against them. But, the fact that I was not out in the streets protesting these laws does not invalidate my right to point out how full of shit slashdot is, not does doing this make me a hypocrite, and who the fuck are you to tell me what to do? If you're such a guardian of morality, then why weren't you out protesting when the Berlin wall came down, and the capitalist exploiters moved into E. Germany? After all, the philosophy you are trying to further is socialism.
What a load of horse shit. Copyright is a property law and has nothing to do with social benefit (whether forcing MS to give up copyright law is even a social benefit is another question). The kind of confiscatory policies you're advocating have no place in a capitalist society- but then you almost certainly prefer socialism anyway.
There is something called an inalienable right. Microsoft has an inalienable right to the IP it has produced. That means that you can't simply step in and take it because you don't like what they are doing. This is not an "artificial monopoly". One could argue that patents are an artificial monopoly, because they prevent other entities from producing a certain type of work, but this is certainly not the case with an actual product, and copyright monopolies, such as windows. Anyone is free to write a competitor to windows. By your argument, if I use my car in some way that does not maximize what you perceive to be social gain, then the government can come into my home, beat the crap out of me, and relieve me of my "illegal monopoly" on my car.
There are countries where there are not inalienable rights: countries such as Cuba, China and Russia. Why don't you go there and try living in a place where the government can take anything it wants from you if it thinks it will help society?
So, if I may paraphrase, your reasoning is that since MS has more money to spend on product development, even if it does make better products, it should still be punished. It seems to me that if this is the case, we should be thanking microsoft. After all, what if they had not spent the money they made on product development, but just paid it to their executives in dividends? But, in the long run their company would then be worth less- and we would not have MS office...
I don't really see how R&D costs mean anything in this context. One can argue that MS is ineffecient and spends more R&D than it should have to, but it is hard to make this pronouncement, since in the case of MS Office and IE, no one has produced anything better.
Never before have I seen such a collection of unbridled arrogance. There seem to be a subset of three general points in all the posts that were moderated up.
1) If MS is prevented from running their business as they do now, consumers will benefit.
2) It is good that the government is stepping in.
3) Bill Gates should be ripped up/executed/shot.
Hopefully 3) was mainly done in jest or to get attention. The posts that related this should have been (4; Funny) at best, not (4; Informative). But people who post shit like this probably aren't interested in a discussion about MS, so I'll ignore that group.
As for 1) and 2), ask yourself this: where is a non-MS, decent Office Suite? StarOffice? It is a mess. I don't know about your experiences with it, but it crashes all the time on my machine (Redhat 6.1 PII with 96 Megs of RAM), leaks memory like a spaghetti drainer, and similar to netscape, leaves zombie processes floating around that eat up all your cpu time, and must be hunted down. A serious piece of software should not do that. Now, MS office certainly has its share of bugs, but not as badly as Staroffice. We can go back and forth about which one is slightly better, but that isn't even the point. If they are at least comparable, then how can all of you say that MS has hindered development? If Staroffice is the best that the rest of the software industry can do, then maybe there _is_ something to the claim that MS's technology is at least partially the reason for their success.
Netscape is another good example. It is clearly inferior to IE, in my opinion. Well, you say, that is because MS has access to all the Windows internal calls. But what about netscape on Mac/UNIX? It is a piece of shit. Netscape is so unstable on some of my machines that I have to ssh and run it remotely when I am on them. I have used IE on mac, not UNIX, but there I have found it to be far better. (It goes without saying that it is far better on windows)
I'm sure MS has secret backdoors into windows for better performance. And I'm sure that they make a policy of embracing and extending anything they can. But before you decide they are so evil, that the government should come in and strip their rights away, think about this: they _do_ have good technology. ESR may not think that their OS is elegant like Be's, but it works, and works well. And their office suite is an accomplishment that has yet to be matched by anyone, open source or commercial.
I won't get into the debate of what specific antitrust measures are justified against them, but consider this: if MS is such a powerful monopoly and so dangerous, then why were they utterly unable to make a successful online service? They certainly bundled MSN into windows, they had all sorts of promotions, and they did the best they could with it, but by any measure AOL has clobbered them. Why was this? Could it be that AOL had better "technology"? (Technology in this context means a system that is easy for people to use and thus helps them get shit done) This unconfortable fact has been glossed over by most anti-MS zealots.
Everyone seems so eager to accept government intervention. A countermeasure that everyone here seems to want is a measure forcing MS to publish the prices it charges all of its PC customers, or perhaps even a measure forcing MS to charge a certain, uniform price for windows. OK, fine. But what about next year, when the government decides that Redhat has no right to give slashdot users a 10% discount on redhat linux, because Redhat holds a monopoly on that? Will you still support government intervention then?
Everyone here seems to think that MS needs regulation. That's fine; everyone has their own opinion. But what is so amazingly arrogant is that everyone here assumes a few set things about the case, and that therefore all sorts of drastic government measures are justified.
Are you aware that throughout the late 80's, the average price for a macintosh was about twice that as opposed to an MS based PC? At the same time, Apple's profit margins were about 100%. What were MS's margins? Less than this, I'm sure. If there is any company who "gouged" the consumer, Apple is it. Apple had better technology than MS and better machines than MS, but were greedy and paid the price. If MS had done something similar, they would be where apple is now.
As for all the monopoly crap, most of those laws were passed as an answer to communist agitation at the start of the century. I won't debate their wisdom at the time, but in my opinion the biggest monopoly danger does not presently come from "predatory" pricing, but absurdly low government patent standards, which create legalized monopolies and lawsuit factories.
trikyguy, I could not agree with you more. Finally a recognition of Microsoft's unique contributions. The Linux community has long disgusted me with its pseudo-communist rhetoric.
What the open source community needs to realize is that the majority of contributions have come from proprietary software companies. This is especially true for the less visable parts of the software economy, such as engineering software. The Gnu-Linux system is a nice system to learn on, but thoroughly second rate in most regards.
I can tell you that in the scientific computing community, the mass market of powerful PCs, generated mainly by the prolification of Windows, has revolutionized the way research is done, in many fields. We are doing simulations currently that no one would have dreamed of doing a decade or more ago. Clusters of cheap, fast, PCs are an amazing asset, as is the internet, and it is mainly thanks to Microsoft. Humanity owes MS a great debt, and I for one am voting for Bush solely because of his pro-MS stance.
Think about what this means, and what an injustice the microsoft trial is. Although..
Fuck this, it isn't even worth arguing. Slashdot is full of a bunch of whiny children who sit around all day and stroke each other off over clever repartees to microsoft and posts like this. The real irony, however, is Slashdot's holding company, Andover.net, is now worth a billion dollars. The whole situation disgusts me- what a perversion of capitalism. I'm never coming back here, ever. Fuck all of you.
Ok, so which open source companies are making a lot of money, or even breaking even? Not RedHat. Not anytime soon.
Consider the following problem with the support contract model: Redhat pays programmers competitive salaries to produce open source software, releases it in essense for free, and then charges for support. But what stops linuxcare from coming along and scooping that market from them? Nothing. Redhat invests the money to create a product, linuxcare receives the benefit. See the problem? This model punishes the company that creates the useful item.
Profit is not an evil thing. Profit means the creation of wealth, which is the creation of something valuable. When a company invests money in creating their software, they deserve to make money, and a lot of money, if that software is useful to people, because they have created something valuable. The idea that this is intrinsically wrong is absurd.
A bucnch of quotes of how respected people think Joy might be right does not consitute an argument. Other than the plotline to every other scifi flick, what is actually in this article? Not a whole lot.
It will be like Pokemon battle on steroids. It'll be an embaressment to the entire FF universe. It is going to be so unbelievably awful that anyone who goes will probably walk out early in embarassment.
It's not just that non-interactivity doesn't translate well onto the screen; it is that the final fantasy battles, if you don't control them, are stupid, one dimensional, and amazingly boring. Have you ever tried watching someone else play final fantasy?
It also doesn't help that the fucking Japs are getting all touchy feely about the plot lines. What is the deal with the guy in charge of the story line? I read an interview on the SS fansite, and he went on about his wife dying and how this was reflected in his games. I'll say. They've all gone to shit, ever since FF6. Love? Emotion? It's pathetic; the site sounds like a page from a self-help book =)
The only way I can see the FF movie being anything other than a major disaster is for the CG to be so good that everyone forgets that every other aspect sucks dick. But I don't think there _is_ CG that good...
Poorly researched and obscenely biased. Tell me, editors, did you bother to actually read the article? What they did actually _is_ innovative. I'll be the first to admit, usually when MS brags about an innovation, it is a thinly disguised patent land grab, but not this time. It sounds like a very good idea that was slightly misunderstood by the reporter.
The software that blocks all sites that don't contain porn. This will prevent me from wasting valuable time looking an non-pornographic material and increase my wanking effeciency.
In theory this is a good idea, but there aren't enough calories. I probably eat about 3000 a day, so I'd need to eat many, many of these to make up for the usual, pasta. Some of us work out, Scott..
Slashdot Mirror
Crusoe's big selling point is that it uses less power. But it only saves about 60% of what intels use in most circumstances; moreover, laptops spend most of their energy on displays.. so why is crusoe useful?
yes it does. At least you have to steal a license key to pirate closed source programs like that. So there is some barrier. And redhat has no IP to protect, so of course they make it easy to copy their shit. A stupid, obtuse response like this is about what I expected.
How many people here would honestly still pay for the software? Not many. This would be an end of an era. There would be no more startup VC, no more new software companies. The software industry would end, with a bang.
I wonder, how much of the open source/free software movement is about what it claims to be, and how much is simply about getting lots of software cheaply and conveniently from an anonymous server in sweden? Only the most asinine open source proponent would be unable to realize that mandating open source, in any way, would lead to this.
This column was an act of cowardice. Look through it- Katz starts by saying that piracy is wrong, but then goes on about freedom for several paragraphs, and then about the impossibility of protecting copyright laws. Finally, he moves into a mini-rant about how corporations are infringing on our freedom. What are we to draw out of this? What could we possibly conclude, except that it is acceptable to steal mp3's, source code, or whatever else, since this makes us more free, it can't be stopped regardless, and corporations are evil anyway? But of course, you're not advocating piracy, are you Katz. You said so at the very start. Remember the context, that this is the same columnist who several weeks ago condemned metallica for trying to protect their property. So basically, here is a pro-piracy piece that is masquerading, with the help of some irelevant material from Jefferson, as some sort of paeon to freedom. This is cowardly because he is advocating the actions of mp3 bootleggers, etc., without being prepared to admit to it. If the notion of copyright is truly dead and unenforceable, then we are in a lot of trouble.
Taking away Microsoft's copyright based on the fact that what they are doing is not for a social good (note that the poster did _not_ say anything illegal) is not at all comparable to the drug confiscation laws, which, by the way, I am against. And furthermore, you are wrong as to the nature of these confiscation laws. It is not even necessary to convict the owner to confiscate their property, which is another reason I am against them. But, the fact that I was not out in the streets protesting these laws does not invalidate my right to point out how full of shit slashdot is, not does doing this make me a hypocrite, and who the fuck are you to tell me what to do? If you're such a guardian of morality, then why weren't you out protesting when the Berlin wall came down, and the capitalist exploiters moved into E. Germany? After all, the philosophy you are trying to further is socialism.
There is something called an inalienable right. Microsoft has an inalienable right to the IP it has produced. That means that you can't simply step in and take it because you don't like what they are doing. This is not an "artificial monopoly". One could argue that patents are an artificial monopoly, because they prevent other entities from producing a certain type of work, but this is certainly not the case with an actual product, and copyright monopolies, such as windows. Anyone is free to write a competitor to windows. By your argument, if I use my car in some way that does not maximize what you perceive to be social gain, then the government can come into my home, beat the crap out of me, and relieve me of my "illegal monopoly" on my car.
There are countries where there are not inalienable rights: countries such as Cuba, China and Russia. Why don't you go there and try living in a place where the government can take anything it wants from you if it thinks it will help society?
The soundtrack from Final Fantasy Tactics- you can get the mp3s from most ss sites.
I don't really see how R&D costs mean anything in this context. One can argue that MS is ineffecient and spends more R&D than it should have to, but it is hard to make this pronouncement, since in the case of MS Office and IE, no one has produced anything better.
1) If MS is prevented from running their business as they do now, consumers will benefit.
2) It is good that the government is stepping in.
3) Bill Gates should be ripped up/executed/shot.
Hopefully 3) was mainly done in jest or to get attention. The posts that related this should have been (4; Funny) at best, not (4; Informative). But people who post shit like this probably aren't interested in a discussion about MS, so I'll ignore that group.
As for 1) and 2), ask yourself this: where is a non-MS, decent Office Suite? StarOffice? It is a mess. I don't know about your experiences with it, but it crashes all the time on my machine (Redhat 6.1 PII with 96 Megs of RAM), leaks memory like a spaghetti drainer, and similar to netscape, leaves zombie processes floating around that eat up all your cpu time, and must be hunted down. A serious piece of software should not do that. Now, MS office certainly has its share of bugs, but not as badly as Staroffice. We can go back and forth about which one is slightly better, but that isn't even the point. If they are at least comparable, then how can all of you say that MS has hindered development? If Staroffice is the best that the rest of the software industry can do, then maybe there _is_ something to the claim that MS's technology is at least partially the reason for their success.
Netscape is another good example. It is clearly inferior to IE, in my opinion. Well, you say, that is because MS has access to all the Windows internal calls. But what about netscape on Mac/UNIX? It is a piece of shit. Netscape is so unstable on some of my machines that I have to ssh and run it remotely when I am on them. I have used IE on mac, not UNIX, but there I have found it to be far better. (It goes without saying that it is far better on windows)
I'm sure MS has secret backdoors into windows for better performance. And I'm sure that they make a policy of embracing and extending anything they can. But before you decide they are so evil, that the government should come in and strip their rights away, think about this: they _do_ have good technology. ESR may not think that their OS is elegant like Be's, but it works, and works well. And their office suite is an accomplishment that has yet to be matched by anyone, open source or commercial.
I won't get into the debate of what specific antitrust measures are justified against them, but consider this: if MS is such a powerful monopoly and so dangerous, then why were they utterly unable to make a successful online service? They certainly bundled MSN into windows, they had all sorts of promotions, and they did the best they could with it, but by any measure AOL has clobbered them. Why was this? Could it be that AOL had better "technology"? (Technology in this context means a system that is easy for people to use and thus helps them get shit done) This unconfortable fact has been glossed over by most anti-MS zealots.
Everyone seems so eager to accept government intervention. A countermeasure that everyone here seems to want is a measure forcing MS to publish the prices it charges all of its PC customers, or perhaps even a measure forcing MS to charge a certain, uniform price for windows. OK, fine. But what about next year, when the government decides that Redhat has no right to give slashdot users a 10% discount on redhat linux, because Redhat holds a monopoly on that? Will you still support government intervention then?
Everyone here seems to think that MS needs regulation. That's fine; everyone has their own opinion. But what is so amazingly arrogant is that everyone here assumes a few set things about the case, and that therefore all sorts of drastic government measures are justified.
Not much more to say.
Earlier my comment was moderated as "funny".
As for all the monopoly crap, most of those laws were passed as an answer to communist agitation at the start of the century. I won't debate their wisdom at the time, but in my opinion the biggest monopoly danger does not presently come from "predatory" pricing, but absurdly low government patent standards, which create legalized monopolies and lawsuit factories.
What the open source community needs to realize is that the majority of contributions have come from proprietary software companies. This is especially true for the less visable parts of the software economy, such as engineering software. The Gnu-Linux system is a nice system to learn on, but thoroughly second rate in most regards.
I can tell you that in the scientific computing community, the mass market of powerful PCs, generated mainly by the prolification of Windows, has revolutionized the way research is done, in many fields. We are doing simulations currently that no one would have dreamed of doing a decade or more ago. Clusters of cheap, fast, PCs are an amazing asset, as is the internet, and it is mainly thanks to Microsoft. Humanity owes MS a great debt, and I for one am voting for Bush solely because of his pro-MS stance.
Fuck this, it isn't even worth arguing. Slashdot is full of a bunch of whiny children who sit around all day and stroke each other off over clever repartees to microsoft and posts like this. The real irony, however, is Slashdot's holding company, Andover.net, is now worth a billion dollars. The whole situation disgusts me- what a perversion of capitalism. I'm never coming back here, ever. Fuck all of you.
Consider the following problem with the support contract model: Redhat pays programmers competitive salaries to produce open source software, releases it in essense for free, and then charges for support. But what stops linuxcare from coming along and scooping that market from them? Nothing. Redhat invests the money to create a product, linuxcare receives the benefit. See the problem? This model punishes the company that creates the useful item.
Profit is not an evil thing. Profit means the creation of wealth, which is the creation of something valuable. When a company invests money in creating their software, they deserve to make money, and a lot of money, if that software is useful to people, because they have created something valuable. The idea that this is intrinsically wrong is absurd.
A bucnch of quotes of how respected people think Joy might be right does not consitute an argument. Other than the plotline to every other scifi flick, what is actually in this article? Not a whole lot.
It's not just that non-interactivity doesn't translate well onto the screen; it is that the final fantasy battles, if you don't control them, are stupid, one dimensional, and amazingly boring. Have you ever tried watching someone else play final fantasy?
It also doesn't help that the fucking Japs are getting all touchy feely about the plot lines. What is the deal with the guy in charge of the story line? I read an interview on the SS fansite, and he went on about his wife dying and how this was reflected in his games. I'll say. They've all gone to shit, ever since FF6. Love? Emotion? It's pathetic; the site sounds like a page from a self-help book =)
The only way I can see the FF movie being anything other than a major disaster is for the CG to be so good that everyone forgets that every other aspect sucks dick. But I don't think there _is_ CG that good...
Poorly researched and obscenely biased. Tell me, editors, did you bother to actually read the article? What they did actually _is_ innovative. I'll be the first to admit, usually when MS brags about an innovation, it is a thinly disguised patent land grab, but not this time. It sounds like a very good idea that was slightly misunderstood by the reporter.
The software that blocks all sites that don't contain porn. This will prevent me from wasting valuable time looking an non-pornographic material and increase my wanking effeciency.
In theory this is a good idea, but there aren't enough calories. I probably eat about 3000 a day, so I'd need to eat many, many of these to make up for the usual, pasta. Some of us work out, Scott..
Let me think... no.