The argument (as I understand it) is that in order to install the software to a hard drive, you must make a copy of it, and in order to run it, you must make a copy of it (into RAM). Copyright law forbids you from making these copies without the express permission of the copyright holder, hence an EULA is required to grant that permission.
Of course, copyright law doesn't require all the extra crap that is often thrown into an EULA as well (eg no publishing benchmarks)...
As the original respondent said, just because content is on the web doesn't mean that it's in the public domain. It's publicly accessible, but that's a very different thing to being in the public domain.
Secondly, unless its changed since I last bothered with it, robots.txt can't allow indexing but prevent caching, and nor can it actually prevent anything. Robots.txt is a *request* to a user agent to not enter certain parts of a domain. User agents are perfectly at liberty to ignore the request, although doing so is obviously somewhat rude. Even if the user agent abides by the request, though, it'll mean that the excluded sections won't be indexed, not that they just won't be cached.
What can "publishers" do to prevent indexing? Robot.txt files, of course. But if they somehow feel these simple files telling others not to index their content do not do enough
To be fair, robots.txt is only a request; search engines can ignore it (and I believe that some do).
We've seen this before every time a new process or invention has threatend to make an old way of doing business obsolete, and we'll see it every time it happens in the future. People smashed looms when they were introduced, because they put people out of work; people here have moaned and wailed about offshoring; the recording industry wails about electronic distrribution of media; now a bricks and mortar retailer is threatening suppliers over a perceived threat to its current way of making money.
Distribution channels have nothing to do with it; it's all about money and a perceived threat to someone's way of making it. "The more things change, the more they stay the same..."
for him the simplest task, like installing Firefox (where's the package?)was torture
Downloading the installer from mozilla.com and clicking "Run" (or double-clicking the exe) is torture? That's nothing to do with the OS, that's just an inability to adapt to a new environment.
I became so frustrated with ctrl-esc,r yielding a "r" in the ever-so-laggy search sub-start dialogue (instead of a run window) tonight that I just blew out the whole partition.
A change of shortcut was enough for you to nuke the install? Look, I don't mean to be rude, but you have to expect changes when you upgrade to a new version - that's true for any piece of software, so why not the OS? (Besides, I'd never even have thought of using ctrl-esc r, I always use win-r)
I found Vista to be too heavy on the eye candy
So disable it.
it seemed that "power tools" and control panel received heavy design attention, while the ~deeper~ apps like regedit and msconfig are the same old barf
You mean "plain but functional"? I don't use msconfig much, but I'm pretty familiar with regedit and I can honestly say that I can't think of a single time I've thought "If only I could do $task!!". What changes would you make to it?
Vista = skinned XP != new OS. Meh. Shiny? Yes. New? No.
Ah yes, because if a change doesn't make a visible difference it doesn't exist. Whole swathes of the OS have been rewritten. True, lots of promised functionality (such as WinFS or monad) didn't make it in, but there are a lot of under-the-hood changes.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that Vista is perfect - far from it. From my experiences with Beta 2, it was very pretty (which is utterly subjective, of course) but a complete pig, running irritatingly slowly on my machine with an X2 4400+, 2GB of RAM and a 7800GTX. I also utterly failed to get my wireless USB dongle to work (thanks, Netgear, for refusing to even think of providing drivers, either for Vista or XP64, and welcome to my list of companies to think twice about buying from). However writing it off simply because you don't like the new interface and can't see any other changes seems a little premature...
(Me, I wrote it off because of the speed and wireless issues, but will try RC1, as and when I can be bothered)
What you'll end up with then is something that looks as out of place as iTunes or Quicktime.
MS's guidelines have two purposes - to help you create a usable interface is only one of them. The other is to create one that blends in with the overall look and feel of Vista, and so helps to enhance the entire system experience.
Following Apple's guidelines might satisfy the first of those, but it'll completely stuff up the second.
An even better example of what not to do is to install critical updates that require a reboot, then never reboot.
Whatever you're working on can be saved - sure, getting back to where you were after the reboot may be a pain, but I'm betting that recovering a rooted system because you couldn't be bothered to restart it would be even more of a pain.
Simple things like being able to scroll down a page before it completely loads
One thing that does irritate me about FF is that it won't fill-in username and password fields until the page has completely finished loading (at least not in my Windows/1.5.0.7 install). That's a pain when the site is slow, or includes a slow-to-download third part resource (I'm looking at you, google analytics...) - do I start typing now, and risk FF filling in stuff along side it, or just wait?
I'm not sure you get the OP's point. Take me, for example - I have a 9-5:30 job, an hour long commute either way, and a family. Between that and the need to eat, sleep and do chores, etc, I get maybe 2 hours per night to myself. That I have to split between everything I want to do - code, watch TV, socialise, etc. I imagine that most working family people are in the same position.
If I were coding on an OSS project, they'd get maybe a handful of hours per week out of me. Perhaps that's enough, perhaps it isn't. If I were being paid to work on it, and paid enough to do it full time, suddenly that goes from maybe 10 hours/week to 40 or 50.
It's not a question of interest, it's a question of time - there are only a certain number of hours available, and when you have a fulltime job and a family, you "lose" almost all of them to those commitments.
He's not saying that any given person should be paid because they deserve it, just that if people were to be paid, they could devote much more time to it.
...what's to stop me from replacing it with a non-functional facade which leaves your box wide open to attack? One that reports that all is well while in fact everything is deactivated?
Perhaps some things *need* to be hard or impossible to replace, to prevent bad guys from replacing them?
No it does not. The GPL forbids you from distributing binaries without making an offer of source availability, and making that source available more or less "at cost" - eg cost of media and reasonable handling charges.
You are free to charge whatever you want for the software itself - I could sell you gcc for $1,000,000 if I wanted to (and you were willing to pay it). What I can't do is prevent you from selling it for $100,000, and similarly you can't prevent your customers from selling it for $10,000, and so on.
Making a living selling GPLed software is hard, as you can't prevent your customers from destroying your market. There is nothing in the GPL that forbids you from trying, however, as long as your customers receive the full rights afforded them by the GPL. (It's precisely that clause that makes it so difficult, of course)
A related question - if someone suspects you of infinging their software patent, but you claim closed source, trade secret status, how can they prove you infringed, if you don't allow them to reverse engineer your software, under penalty of the DMCA?
I imagine that if they were able to convince a judge that there was reasonable cause to believe you were infringing, the court would compell you to reveal your source. Refusing to do so would likely land you in trouble for contempt of court.
ObDisclaimer: I can barely even spell lawyer, and I'm certainly not one.
Now all you need to do is stand behind me and see my PIN, or if you work at the store - have the security camera trained at the keypad then either lift my wallet or clone my card.
As opposed to before, when all they had to do was lift your wallet and spend a couple of minutes practicing the signature helpfully provided on the reverse? (Not that anyone ever checked them in my experience anyway - I actually managed to buy something on my gf's card once when I grabbed the wrong one on my way out of the house, and only noticed when I went to replace it in my wallet having successfully signed for my purchase...)
The contract is with the state, and it is binding for life. It is no different from an NDA. You agree to the contract and in exchange you get access to priviledged information, that you agree not to divulge to anyone without permission.
It's not clear whether you're talking about the US or the UK, but certainly in the UK that's not the case. The Official Secrets Act is a law, and is binding on you whether you know it or not. When you apply for security clearance you do indeed sign a bit of paper confirming your understanding of your responsibilities. However, certainly when I signed it, the sponsor was quick to point out that the Act applied whether we signed or not; not signing just meant not getting security clearance.
He would never say anything about it, because he had signed the official secrets act and it ment something.
If nothing else, it's a law, so it potentially means a criminal prosecution. Of course, like all laws, some people take it more seriously than others; it's good to see that your grandfather was one of the responsible ones.
...because by the time your current player finally dies, that's all that's available?
This idea is a complete non-starter in any case - are they really saying that I won't be able to burn my crappy home movies of my daughter to DVD to post to my parents?
So I guess at least it's in keeping with the source of the article...
If you RTFA, you'll find that 7 (or 148) cameras in one town (Middlesbrough) are having loud speakers fitted as part of an experiment. While the headline isn't entirely inaccurate, it's definitely misleading as it implies that this is a general thing.
If you start to win too consistently, then yeah, the house may well become suspicious. However, the old adage that the house always wins is only true generally. In specific cases, the house will lose - someone will beat it from time to time. The point is that the chances of it being *you*, *this* time are pretty damn low.
If it was actually impossible to win, very few people would play. There has to be the occasional big win to give people something to hope for.
While I agree with you, this example isn't a good one:
A car mechanic who does a bad job can waste money and cause inconvenience.
Said car mechanic could potentially cause death and destruction, if their work screws up the car's brakes or accelerator, etc. In fact, even the bad floor tile installer could lead to someone being injured (or even killed, if particularly unlucky), if they slip or trip on the tiles.
All the examples you quote could lead to people dying. I agree, though, that in terms of maximum likely damage, lawyers have greater potential to do harm.
Well, I've been in the business for 7.5 years and I've never met any. The closest I've got is a small handful of excellent interface developers who are willing and able to do some simple JSP work, set up new tiles definitions, etc, as well as use Photoshop, do HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. I've yet to meet any who have any interest at all in doing "real" programming (ie Java, C, etc).
I'd be very tempted to say that the two things are almost diametrically opposed, or at least so different that there aren't more than a small handful of people who are truly a master at both - much like artists tend not to make good scientists, and vice versa.
You're almost right, but I think you don't quite go far enough. I don't believe that the average user spends *any* effort on considering what OS to get, beyond "PC or Mac? Huh, I can't use my software on a Mac - PC it is". They'll pick a PC based on some criteria (size of hard drive, look of case/monitor, etc) and accept whatever version of Windows ships with it (almost certainly XP Home).
Slashdot Mirror
The argument (as I understand it) is that in order to install the software to a hard drive, you must make a copy of it, and in order to run it, you must make a copy of it (into RAM). Copyright law forbids you from making these copies without the express permission of the copyright holder, hence an EULA is required to grant that permission.
Of course, copyright law doesn't require all the extra crap that is often thrown into an EULA as well (eg no publishing benchmarks)...
As the original respondent said, just because content is on the web doesn't mean that it's in the public domain. It's publicly accessible, but that's a very different thing to being in the public domain.
Secondly, unless its changed since I last bothered with it, robots.txt can't allow indexing but prevent caching, and nor can it actually prevent anything. Robots.txt is a *request* to a user agent to not enter certain parts of a domain. User agents are perfectly at liberty to ignore the request, although doing so is obviously somewhat rude. Even if the user agent abides by the request, though, it'll mean that the excluded sections won't be indexed, not that they just won't be cached.
What can "publishers" do to prevent indexing? Robot.txt files, of course. But if they somehow feel these simple files telling others not to index their content do not do enough
To be fair, robots.txt is only a request; search engines can ignore it (and I believe that some do).
We've seen this before every time a new process or invention has threatend to make an old way of doing business obsolete, and we'll see it every time it happens in the future. People smashed looms when they were introduced, because they put people out of work; people here have moaned and wailed about offshoring; the recording industry wails about electronic distrribution of media; now a bricks and mortar retailer is threatening suppliers over a perceived threat to its current way of making money.
Distribution channels have nothing to do with it; it's all about money and a perceived threat to someone's way of making it. "The more things change, the more they stay the same..."
for him the simplest task, like installing Firefox (where's the package?)was torture
Downloading the installer from mozilla.com and clicking "Run" (or double-clicking the exe) is torture? That's nothing to do with the OS, that's just an inability to adapt to a new environment.
I became so frustrated with ctrl-esc,r yielding a "r" in the ever-so-laggy search sub-start dialogue (instead of a run window) tonight that I just blew out the whole partition.
A change of shortcut was enough for you to nuke the install? Look, I don't mean to be rude, but you have to expect changes when you upgrade to a new version - that's true for any piece of software, so why not the OS? (Besides, I'd never even have thought of using ctrl-esc r, I always use win-r)
I found Vista to be too heavy on the eye candy
So disable it.
it seemed that "power tools" and control panel received heavy design attention, while the ~deeper~ apps like regedit and msconfig are the same old barf
You mean "plain but functional"? I don't use msconfig much, but I'm pretty familiar with regedit and I can honestly say that I can't think of a single time I've thought "If only I could do $task!!". What changes would you make to it?
Vista = skinned XP != new OS. Meh. Shiny? Yes. New? No.
Ah yes, because if a change doesn't make a visible difference it doesn't exist. Whole swathes of the OS have been rewritten. True, lots of promised functionality (such as WinFS or monad) didn't make it in, but there are a lot of under-the-hood changes.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that Vista is perfect - far from it. From my experiences with Beta 2, it was very pretty (which is utterly subjective, of course) but a complete pig, running irritatingly slowly on my machine with an X2 4400+, 2GB of RAM and a 7800GTX. I also utterly failed to get my wireless USB dongle to work (thanks, Netgear, for refusing to even think of providing drivers, either for Vista or XP64, and welcome to my list of companies to think twice about buying from). However writing it off simply because you don't like the new interface and can't see any other changes seems a little premature...
(Me, I wrote it off because of the speed and wireless issues, but will try RC1, as and when I can be bothered)
What you'll end up with then is something that looks as out of place as iTunes or Quicktime.
MS's guidelines have two purposes - to help you create a usable interface is only one of them. The other is to create one that blends in with the overall look and feel of Vista, and so helps to enhance the entire system experience.
Following Apple's guidelines might satisfy the first of those, but it'll completely stuff up the second.
An even better example of what not to do is to install critical updates that require a reboot, then never reboot.
Whatever you're working on can be saved - sure, getting back to where you were after the reboot may be a pain, but I'm betting that recovering a rooted system because you couldn't be bothered to restart it would be even more of a pain.
Simple things like being able to scroll down a page before it completely loads
One thing that does irritate me about FF is that it won't fill-in username and password fields until the page has completely finished loading (at least not in my Windows/1.5.0.7 install). That's a pain when the site is slow, or includes a slow-to-download third part resource (I'm looking at you, google analytics...) - do I start typing now, and risk FF filling in stuff along side it, or just wait?
No, it's not a big problem, but it's irritating.
I'm not sure you get the OP's point. Take me, for example - I have a 9-5:30 job, an hour long commute either way, and a family. Between that and the need to eat, sleep and do chores, etc, I get maybe 2 hours per night to myself. That I have to split between everything I want to do - code, watch TV, socialise, etc. I imagine that most working family people are in the same position.
If I were coding on an OSS project, they'd get maybe a handful of hours per week out of me. Perhaps that's enough, perhaps it isn't. If I were being paid to work on it, and paid enough to do it full time, suddenly that goes from maybe 10 hours/week to 40 or 50.
It's not a question of interest, it's a question of time - there are only a certain number of hours available, and when you have a fulltime job and a family, you "lose" almost all of them to those commitments.
He's not saying that any given person should be paid because they deserve it, just that if people were to be paid, they could devote much more time to it.
...what's to stop me from replacing it with a non-functional facade which leaves your box wide open to attack? One that reports that all is well while in fact everything is deactivated?
Perhaps some things *need* to be hard or impossible to replace, to prevent bad guys from replacing them?
(Actually, the GPL forbids it...)
No it does not. The GPL forbids you from distributing binaries without making an offer of source availability, and making that source available more or less "at cost" - eg cost of media and reasonable handling charges.
You are free to charge whatever you want for the software itself - I could sell you gcc for $1,000,000 if I wanted to (and you were willing to pay it). What I can't do is prevent you from selling it for $100,000, and similarly you can't prevent your customers from selling it for $10,000, and so on.
Making a living selling GPLed software is hard, as you can't prevent your customers from destroying your market. There is nothing in the GPL that forbids you from trying, however, as long as your customers receive the full rights afforded them by the GPL. (It's precisely that clause that makes it so difficult, of course)
I've not used WiMP 11, but in WiMP 10 go to Tools -> Rip Music then either select mp3, or uncheck the "copy protect music" checkbox.
I can't confirm that this works for WiMP 11, but from the linked article:
which implies that it can't be disabled.
What exactly is the YRO topic for? I've seen stories that I thought didn't fit posted under it, but I could always see a (to me) tenuous link.
This one has me completely stumped, however.
A related question - if someone suspects you of infinging their software patent, but you claim closed source, trade secret status, how can they prove you infringed, if you don't allow them to reverse engineer your software, under penalty of the DMCA?
I imagine that if they were able to convince a judge that there was reasonable cause to believe you were infringing, the court would compell you to reveal your source. Refusing to do so would likely land you in trouble for contempt of court.
ObDisclaimer: I can barely even spell lawyer, and I'm certainly not one.
Now all you need to do is stand behind me and see my PIN, or if you work at the store - have the security camera trained at the keypad then either lift my wallet or clone my card.
As opposed to before, when all they had to do was lift your wallet and spend a couple of minutes practicing the signature helpfully provided on the reverse? (Not that anyone ever checked them in my experience anyway - I actually managed to buy something on my gf's card once when I grabbed the wrong one on my way out of the house, and only noticed when I went to replace it in my wallet having successfully signed for my purchase...)
The contract is with the state, and it is binding for life. It is no different from an NDA. You agree to the contract and in exchange you get access to priviledged information, that you agree not to divulge to anyone without permission.
It's not clear whether you're talking about the US or the UK, but certainly in the UK that's not the case. The Official Secrets Act is a law, and is binding on you whether you know it or not. When you apply for security clearance you do indeed sign a bit of paper confirming your understanding of your responsibilities. However, certainly when I signed it, the sponsor was quick to point out that the Act applied whether we signed or not; not signing just meant not getting security clearance.
He would never say anything about it, because he had signed the official secrets act and it ment something.
If nothing else, it's a law, so it potentially means a criminal prosecution. Of course, like all laws, some people take it more seriously than others; it's good to see that your grandfather was one of the responsible ones.
It's a nice step in the right direction, but remember one thing: music videos are supposed to be adverts for the artists and songs that they feature.
...because by the time your current player finally dies, that's all that's available?
This idea is a complete non-starter in any case - are they really saying that I won't be able to burn my crappy home movies of my daughter to DVD to post to my parents?
So I guess at least it's in keeping with the source of the article...
If you RTFA, you'll find that 7 (or 148) cameras in one town (Middlesbrough) are having loud speakers fitted as part of an experiment. While the headline isn't entirely inaccurate, it's definitely misleading as it implies that this is a general thing.
How do you know what is or is not an untrusted site.
That's easy. If you have to ask yourself "do I trust this site?" then the answer is no.
If you start to win too consistently, then yeah, the house may well become suspicious. However, the old adage that the house always wins is only true generally. In specific cases, the house will lose - someone will beat it from time to time. The point is that the chances of it being *you*, *this* time are pretty damn low.
If it was actually impossible to win, very few people would play. There has to be the occasional big win to give people something to hope for.
While I agree with you, this example isn't a good one:
A car mechanic who does a bad job can waste money and cause inconvenience.
Said car mechanic could potentially cause death and destruction, if their work screws up the car's brakes or accelerator, etc. In fact, even the bad floor tile installer could lead to someone being injured (or even killed, if particularly unlucky), if they slip or trip on the tiles.
All the examples you quote could lead to people dying. I agree, though, that in terms of maximum likely damage, lawyers have greater potential to do harm.
Well, I've been in the business for 7.5 years and I've never met any. The closest I've got is a small handful of excellent interface developers who are willing and able to do some simple JSP work, set up new tiles definitions, etc, as well as use Photoshop, do HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. I've yet to meet any who have any interest at all in doing "real" programming (ie Java, C, etc).
I'd be very tempted to say that the two things are almost diametrically opposed, or at least so different that there aren't more than a small handful of people who are truly a master at both - much like artists tend not to make good scientists, and vice versa.
You're almost right, but I think you don't quite go far enough. I don't believe that the average user spends *any* effort on considering what OS to get, beyond "PC or Mac? Huh, I can't use my software on a Mac - PC it is". They'll pick a PC based on some criteria (size of hard drive, look of case/monitor, etc) and accept whatever version of Windows ships with it (almost certainly XP Home).
For what it's worth, that's how they're pronounced in the UK too; the US pronounciations have always grated a little on my ears, to be honest.