Accept the fact that people have the right to record their television shows
Yes, they do - that's specifically allowed for in copyright law.
don't complain when they trade them
That doesn't follow. Just because I'm allowed to record a TV show for the purposes of time-shifting doesn't mean that I'm allowed to copy it and give it to you. The copyright holder still retains copyright over it. Also, what people seem to forget is that while you are allowed to time-shift broadcasts, you're not actually allowed to keep them indefinitely (at least under UK copyright law).
Now, I'm not saying that there's really any point to complaining about people trading recordings of broadcasts, but they're within their legal rights to do so. If you don't like that, don't moan about the studios, moan about the law that allows them to do it, and work to get it changed. You can't really blame them for acting within their rights.
Oh rubbish. I don't know a single person who doesn't own at least one TV, and in many cases a number of them. Sure, lots of people grumble about the TV licence, but I don't know a single person who actually objects enough to not own a TV.
Hell, it's only £10 a month - in London, that's often not enough for a round of drinks down the pub.
People are downloading TV shows because they miss them (perhaps they hear about them too late), because they didn't/can't record them and they're not available on DVD/video yet, or because they are and they're too cheap or too poor to buy them. The TV licence has absolutely nothing to do with it.
That's great in theory, but there are a few problems with your "desktop cluster" idea:
1) not all tasks are paralellisable (in fact most aren't), so for the majority of desktop users it would be wasted 2) it'd be very much more expensive than a traditional PC 3) it'd be *huge*
Don't get me wrong, I think that at the moment at least, multi-CPU machines are increasingly looking to be the way to go for those of us who will take as much processing power as we can get. A cluster that size, however, isn't the way to go. I don't want a PC the size of a fridge-freezer or wardrobe.
which is obviously a missing html item that specifies the location of the text
Yes and no - it's a rendering bug. It mostly seems to happen on slower computers with faster connections. For example, at work (3GHz P4, 100Mbps link) it almost never happens, at home (2.4GHz P4, 512Kbps link) it almost never happens, here at my parents' house (2.5GHz Celeron, 2Mpbs link) it happens on every single page load.
If you resize the text (eg ctrl-mouse wheel up, ctrl-mouse wheel down) it sorts itself out, but it's irritating, if funny. Slashdot, main bastion of Free software, doesn't render correctly in Firefox, main Free web browser, for a sizable proportion of the readership...
You can get TV on televisions, and not just DVDs? What will they think of next...
On the other hand, I do agree on one point - fifteen grand just for a TV?! I'd rather have my house extended/refurbished/whatever... Then again, I'm not the sort of person who can afford 15k on anything, let alone a TV.
I think most people on either side of the debate are talking at cross purposes. GPL advocates speaking of freedom are refering to the code, while BSD licence advocates are referring to the developer.
GPLed code is freer, as it cannot be incorporated into non-Free software and redistributed. Developers using BSD licenced code are freer, as they can do whatever they want with it without restriction.
The GPL is less free than the BSD licence because it imposes extra restrictions on people who receive the software. Now, those restrictions are there to ensure that the software remains Free, but that does not change the fact that the licence is more restrictive - it allows you to do less things with the software than the BSD licence does.
(Note that I'm not arguing the relative merits of the two licences, I'm just arguing semantics)
It reads like something customers are supposed to see, talking about "customer focus" and other such nonsense.
That's pretty common - we had a number of speeches and other internal communications where I work a year or two ago about how we had to become "more customer focussed", amongst other things. None of them were expected to be seen publicly; executives really do just talk and think that way.
Look at it this way - no executive or manager is going to tell their staff to care *less* about customers, are they?
My company recently posted its third quarter earnings statement. Internally, the CEO was upbeat, singing the praises of the results, but with the by now mandatory "but we've still got a lot of work to do, don't get complacent" bit at the end.
The City got a rather different speech - verging on apologising for the poor results, it was very much lower-key.
Which is more accurate? Well, I'm no accountant or investor, but the results didn't look that great to me. The point is that just because something's said internally doesn't make it true, *especially* when it's communicated to the employees in general.
Ah, the old "they're not doing it, so there's no point me doing it" attitude...
Look, it's perfectly simple. The more countries sign up, the better. Yes, it would be preferable to get every country in the world to sign up and adhere to the treaty, but that's not going to happen right away. Failing that, the more the better. Even if a couple of major polluters don't sign up, those that do can still make a positive difference.
Hey, not everyone obeys inconvenient laws like not killing people, not stealing stuff, not dumping toxic waste into rivers, and so on - that doesn't mean that no-one should bother.
There is nothing "fundamental" about selling softwares---bunches of codes that can be copied at a fraction of a cent.
Yes, duplication and distribution is so cheap as to essentially be free, but the cost of initial creation is far from cheap. When you buy software, you're not just paying for the duplication, you're paying for the years's worth of effort that went into getting to the point where it can be duplicated for you. I personally think that's worth paying for (if the software is any good, of course); YMMV.
When one discovers something in science (say, the technique of optical pumping, or nuclear magnetic resonance) it gets published in peer review journal and everyone gets to test (read: "use") it in their own laboratory.
Yes, but the idea on its own is no good without the time and materials to create the equipment. A description of a new experimental technique is not really analogous to a completed application, it's closer to a description of a new algotrithm.
we would have had to wait until 1960 until the end of WWII!
How on earth would patents in Physics have delayed the creation of the atomic bomb? What proof do you have that the nuking of Japan was the only thing that ended the war, and that it would have continued (indefinitely?) had it not happened? Even if it were the case that the Manhaten Project was impeded by patents, the world was at war - who on earth would have stood up and prevented the development of the atom bomb by shouting "Oy, I have a patent on that!"? I know what you're trying to say, but please, choose a realistic example next time...
What is going on with softwares is an aberration
It's not an aberration that people are paid for their time and effort. Selling software commercially isn't the only way of doing that, but it's a valid way. Software patents are wrong, overly-restrictice EULAs are wrong, but the answer isn't to completely throw away commercial software. The answer is to educate the software-buying public so that they reject such excesses. If there is enough demand for less restrictive practices, that demand will be supplied, and not just by Free software.
I should buy all of my buggy, virus riddled software from the richest man on the planet
Two things:
1) Windows isn't "virus-riddled" when you buy it, so yo're not buying virus-riddled software. If you then allow your machine to become infected, you have only yourself and the virus writers to blame.
2) According to this Yahoo! News story, Ingvar Kamprad is the world's richest man; Gates is second. Besides, what does personal wealth have to do with it? People aren't allowed to be successful now?
Other than that, I agree with you - the Us does seem to be peculiar in its almost blanket dismissal of anyone that can be labeled a communist, even if their political beliefs have nothing to do with the issue at hand.
"Idiots"? People are idiots because they lack knowledge and experience in computers? A little less arrogance might be a good idea...
As for why IE became the dominant browser, you're only telling half the story. IE up to and including version 3 sucked big time; Netscape Navigator wiped the floor with it. Then IE 4 was released, and suddenly Navigator was the one looking a bit sick. Netscape then compounded its problems by throwing away the codebase and starting again from scracth; by the time they finally managed to get NN 6 out, it was far too late. Everyone but a small hardcore group of us had switched to IE, and with good reason. IE 4 was at least as good as NN4, but IE 5 trounced it (and I speak as someone who went NN->Mozilla->Firefox; I have *never* used IE as my primary browser). NN4 crashed frequently, had to reload the page to resize it, choked on moderately complex table structures, and the rendering engine was dog slow for all but trivial pages.
In short, IE became dominant for two reasons:
1) it's bundled with Windows, so every Windows user already has it 2) it was just plain better than the alternatives for a long time
Sorry to burst your superiority complex, but people being idiots had nothing to do with it.
Personally, I believe that an application should be complete and self-contained. By all means, support downloadable extensions, but the core app should be complete and self-contained without them, and the extensions should be self-contained in as far as that is possible (obviously, they're useless without the core app).
To my mind, Firefox is *not* self-contained. There are a number of settings (of which that is an example) that I cannot change without reference to third party documentation. The settings and their meanings should be documented, either in the main Help pages or in a seperate help section accessible from about:config.
In that sense, about:config is unusable without that extra documentation. Yes, it's a simple explanation, but it should be explained by Firefox itself, not some random guy on the Internet (with all due respect to said random guy)
until they make it into the update/recommended download it's not really patched for most people.
You are correct. If my parents use FF, they're not going to check security advisory websites to see if they should download a nightly build. They're not going to download a damn thing until something or someone tells them to.
Hell, *I'm* not going to, either - I have better things to do with my time than track every little announcement about every piece of software that I use. If I know there's a new version out, I'll probably give it a spin. If I'm notified of available patches, I'll install them. I'm not going to check a handful of websites per app just to make sure, though.
Yes - go nuts trying to work out how to control the frequency with which firefox checks documents in its cache against those on the originating server, for instance. The option is browser.cache.check_doc_frequency, but it's an integer. So, what is "check every time I visit the page"? 1? 89?
Sure, I could google - but I shouldn't have to. (Yes, I did - there's an explanation here. That doesn't change my opinion that it's unusable as it stands)
Except that there's stuff that's easily configured in Mozilla (such as browser cache checking behaviour) that's buried in about:config in Firefox, with no indication of acceptable values or what they'd mean.
I dont use a computer slow enough, nor have internet fast enough (only a T1) to notice any damn difference.
At work we have a 100Mbps link to the net and I don't notice any difference between the various browsers I use. That's not to say that there isn't a difference in speed, but as I have a 3GHz CPU there'd be something wrong if I did notice one, I think.
And if your not using windows why would you ever shut off your browser?
To free up memory for something else, perhaps? I've seen Firefox use 100meg+ on many an occasion; sometimes I want that RAM back.
While that's true, there's one thing I think you may be forgetting - if a company is sued too many times, then either no-one will insure them, or their premiums will go through the roof. Eventually, the company will *have* to mend its ways (or get better at not getting caught...)
Granted, a lot of it was a problem of how the applications were written,
No, the problem is *entirely* with how the apps are written. Almost all the software I use at work does not require admin privilegs, because it was specifically targetted at the NT line. How software, however, has always been targetted at the 9x line, where security was a bad joke. The upshot of this is that we have a lot of programmers and companies that know next to nothing about writing Windows software correctly, at least with respect to security and access privileges. That is slowly changing, but it's not going to happen over night.
I agree that MS should have pushed the concept of non-admin account use harder; but they're hands are somewhat tied by the above. I would expect Longhorn to go a lot further in this respect, but am ready to be disappointed...
Actually that's a common failure of management who can't achieve the same results correctly.
No disagreement here - note that I didn't say that it was an *effective* strategy, merely that it's a common one. I also loathe the term "human resources", hence my dig at the end.
The poster is trying to say that if you take something that the owner was going to destroy, you can use that fact as a defence if you're arrested for/charged with theft. Ie, "But he was only going to destroy it anyway, he didn't even want it any more!"
I'm not 100% certain that that's the case, though. Certainly, here in the UK, if I throw something away *it is still legally mine*. For example, if I hire a skip and chuck crap into it, you are *not* allowed to just come along and take stuff. That's presumably because I might change my mind, and to stop people from just taking things I leave outside my house, and claiming that they thought it was rubbish.
For a first offence, though, I can certainly see someone just being told to return the item(s) and let off with a slap on the wrist.
Slashdot Mirror
Accept the fact that people have the right to record their television shows
Yes, they do - that's specifically allowed for in copyright law.
don't complain when they trade them
That doesn't follow. Just because I'm allowed to record a TV show for the purposes of time-shifting doesn't mean that I'm allowed to copy it and give it to you. The copyright holder still retains copyright over it. Also, what people seem to forget is that while you are allowed to time-shift broadcasts, you're not actually allowed to keep them indefinitely (at least under UK copyright law).
Now, I'm not saying that there's really any point to complaining about people trading recordings of broadcasts, but they're within their legal rights to do so. If you don't like that, don't moan about the studios, moan about the law that allows them to do it, and work to get it changed. You can't really blame them for acting within their rights.
Oh rubbish. I don't know a single person who doesn't own at least one TV, and in many cases a number of them. Sure, lots of people grumble about the TV licence, but I don't know a single person who actually objects enough to not own a TV.
Hell, it's only £10 a month - in London, that's often not enough for a round of drinks down the pub.
People are downloading TV shows because they miss them (perhaps they hear about them too late), because they didn't/can't record them and they're not available on DVD/video yet, or because they are and they're too cheap or too poor to buy them. The TV licence has absolutely nothing to do with it.
That's great in theory, but there are a few problems with your "desktop cluster" idea:
1) not all tasks are paralellisable (in fact most aren't), so for the majority of desktop users it would be wasted
2) it'd be very much more expensive than a traditional PC
3) it'd be *huge*
Don't get me wrong, I think that at the moment at least, multi-CPU machines are increasingly looking to be the way to go for those of us who will take as much processing power as we can get. A cluster that size, however, isn't the way to go. I don't want a PC the size of a fridge-freezer or wardrobe.
which is obviously a missing html item that specifies the location of the text
Yes and no - it's a rendering bug. It mostly seems to happen on slower computers with faster connections. For example, at work (3GHz P4, 100Mbps link) it almost never happens, at home (2.4GHz P4, 512Kbps link) it almost never happens, here at my parents' house (2.5GHz Celeron, 2Mpbs link) it happens on every single page load.
If you resize the text (eg ctrl-mouse wheel up, ctrl-mouse wheel down) it sorts itself out, but it's irritating, if funny. Slashdot, main bastion of Free software, doesn't render correctly in Firefox, main Free web browser, for a sizable proportion of the readership...
You can get TV on televisions, and not just DVDs? What will they think of next...
On the other hand, I do agree on one point - fifteen grand just for a TV?! I'd rather have my house extended/refurbished/whatever... Then again, I'm not the sort of person who can afford 15k on anything, let alone a TV.
I think most people on either side of the debate are talking at cross purposes. GPL advocates speaking of freedom are refering to the code, while BSD licence advocates are referring to the developer.
GPLed code is freer, as it cannot be incorporated into non-Free software and redistributed. Developers using BSD licenced code are freer, as they can do whatever they want with it without restriction.
At least, that's the way I see it.
The GPL is less free than the BSD licence because it imposes extra restrictions on people who receive the software. Now, those restrictions are there to ensure that the software remains Free, but that does not change the fact that the licence is more restrictive - it allows you to do less things with the software than the BSD licence does.
(Note that I'm not arguing the relative merits of the two licences, I'm just arguing semantics)
It reads like something customers are supposed to see, talking about "customer focus" and other such nonsense.
That's pretty common - we had a number of speeches and other internal communications where I work a year or two ago about how we had to become "more customer focussed", amongst other things. None of them were expected to be seen publicly; executives really do just talk and think that way.
Look at it this way - no executive or manager is going to tell their staff to care *less* about customers, are they?
My company recently posted its third quarter earnings statement. Internally, the CEO was upbeat, singing the praises of the results, but with the by now mandatory "but we've still got a lot of work to do, don't get complacent" bit at the end.
The City got a rather different speech - verging on apologising for the poor results, it was very much lower-key.
Which is more accurate? Well, I'm no accountant or investor, but the results didn't look that great to me. The point is that just because something's said internally doesn't make it true, *especially* when it's communicated to the employees in general.
In other words, might makes right? How very immature of you.
Ah, the old "they're not doing it, so there's no point me doing it" attitude...
Look, it's perfectly simple. The more countries sign up, the better. Yes, it would be preferable to get every country in the world to sign up and adhere to the treaty, but that's not going to happen right away. Failing that, the more the better. Even if a couple of major polluters don't sign up, those that do can still make a positive difference.
Hey, not everyone obeys inconvenient laws like not killing people, not stealing stuff, not dumping toxic waste into rivers, and so on - that doesn't mean that no-one should bother.
There is nothing "fundamental" about selling softwares---bunches of codes that can be copied at a fraction of a cent.
Yes, duplication and distribution is so cheap as to essentially be free, but the cost of initial creation is far from cheap. When you buy software, you're not just paying for the duplication, you're paying for the years's worth of effort that went into getting to the point where it can be duplicated for you. I personally think that's worth paying for (if the software is any good, of course); YMMV.
When one discovers something in science (say, the technique of optical pumping, or nuclear magnetic resonance) it gets published in peer review journal and everyone gets to test (read: "use") it in their own laboratory.
Yes, but the idea on its own is no good without the time and materials to create the equipment. A description of a new experimental technique is not really analogous to a completed application, it's closer to a description of a new algotrithm.
we would have had to wait until 1960 until the end of WWII!
How on earth would patents in Physics have delayed the creation of the atomic bomb? What proof do you have that the nuking of Japan was the only thing that ended the war, and that it would have continued (indefinitely?) had it not happened? Even if it were the case that the Manhaten Project was impeded by patents, the world was at war - who on earth would have stood up and prevented the development of the atom bomb by shouting "Oy, I have a patent on that!"? I know what you're trying to say, but please, choose a realistic example next time...
What is going on with softwares is an aberration
It's not an aberration that people are paid for their time and effort. Selling software commercially isn't the only way of doing that, but it's a valid way. Software patents are wrong, overly-restrictice EULAs are wrong, but the answer isn't to completely throw away commercial software. The answer is to educate the software-buying public so that they reject such excesses. If there is enough demand for less restrictive practices, that demand will be supplied, and not just by Free software.
I should buy all of my buggy, virus riddled software from the richest man on the planet
Two things:
1) Windows isn't "virus-riddled" when you buy it, so yo're not buying virus-riddled software. If you then allow your machine to become infected, you have only yourself and the virus writers to blame.
2) According to this Yahoo! News story, Ingvar Kamprad is the world's richest man; Gates is second. Besides, what does personal wealth have to do with it? People aren't allowed to be successful now?
Other than that, I agree with you - the Us does seem to be peculiar in its almost blanket dismissal of anyone that can be labeled a communist, even if their political beliefs have nothing to do with the issue at hand.
"Idiots"? People are idiots because they lack knowledge and experience in computers? A little less arrogance might be a good idea...
As for why IE became the dominant browser, you're only telling half the story. IE up to and including version 3 sucked big time; Netscape Navigator wiped the floor with it. Then IE 4 was released, and suddenly Navigator was the one looking a bit sick. Netscape then compounded its problems by throwing away the codebase and starting again from scracth; by the time they finally managed to get NN 6 out, it was far too late. Everyone but a small hardcore group of us had switched to IE, and with good reason. IE 4 was at least as good as NN4, but IE 5 trounced it (and I speak as someone who went NN->Mozilla->Firefox; I have *never* used IE as my primary browser). NN4 crashed frequently, had to reload the page to resize it, choked on moderately complex table structures, and the rendering engine was dog slow for all but trivial pages.
In short, IE became dominant for two reasons:
1) it's bundled with Windows, so every Windows user already has it
2) it was just plain better than the alternatives for a long time
Sorry to burst your superiority complex, but people being idiots had nothing to do with it.
Personally, I believe that an application should be complete and self-contained. By all means, support downloadable extensions, but the core app should be complete and self-contained without them, and the extensions should be self-contained in as far as that is possible (obviously, they're useless without the core app).
To my mind, Firefox is *not* self-contained. There are a number of settings (of which that is an example) that I cannot change without reference to third party documentation. The settings and their meanings should be documented, either in the main Help pages or in a seperate help section accessible from about:config.
In that sense, about:config is unusable without that extra documentation. Yes, it's a simple explanation, but it should be explained by Firefox itself, not some random guy on the Internet (with all due respect to said random guy)
until they make it into the update/recommended download it's not really patched for most people.
You are correct. If my parents use FF, they're not going to check security advisory websites to see if they should download a nightly build. They're not going to download a damn thing until something or someone tells them to.
Hell, *I'm* not going to, either - I have better things to do with my time than track every little announcement about every piece of software that I use. If I know there's a new version out, I'll probably give it a spin. If I'm notified of available patches, I'll install them. I'm not going to check a handful of websites per app just to make sure, though.
Yes - go nuts trying to work out how to control the frequency with which firefox checks documents in its cache against those on the originating server, for instance. The option is browser.cache.check_doc_frequency, but it's an integer. So, what is "check every time I visit the page"? 1? 89?
Sure, I could google - but I shouldn't have to. (Yes, I did - there's an explanation here. That doesn't change my opinion that it's unusable as it stands)
Except that there's stuff that's easily configured in Mozilla (such as browser cache checking behaviour) that's buried in about:config in Firefox, with no indication of acceptable values or what they'd mean.
I dont use a computer slow enough, nor have internet fast enough (only a T1) to notice any damn difference.
At work we have a 100Mbps link to the net and I don't notice any difference between the various browsers I use. That's not to say that there isn't a difference in speed, but as I have a 3GHz CPU there'd be something wrong if I did notice one, I think.
And if your not using windows why would you ever shut off your browser?
To free up memory for something else, perhaps? I've seen Firefox use 100meg+ on many an occasion; sometimes I want that RAM back.
While that's true, there's one thing I think you may be forgetting - if a company is sued too many times, then either no-one will insure them, or their premiums will go through the roof. Eventually, the company will *have* to mend its ways (or get better at not getting caught...)
Granted, a lot of it was a problem of how the applications were written,
No, the problem is *entirely* with how the apps are written. Almost all the software I use at work does not require admin privilegs, because it was specifically targetted at the NT line. How software, however, has always been targetted at the 9x line, where security was a bad joke. The upshot of this is that we have a lot of programmers and companies that know next to nothing about writing Windows software correctly, at least with respect to security and access privileges. That is slowly changing, but it's not going to happen over night.
I agree that MS should have pushed the concept of non-admin account use harder; but they're hands are somewhat tied by the above. I would expect Longhorn to go a lot further in this respect, but am ready to be disappointed...
P2P social revolution
Not that you're biased at all...
Actually that's a common failure of management who can't achieve the same results correctly.
No disagreement here - note that I didn't say that it was an *effective* strategy, merely that it's a common one. I also loathe the term "human resources", hence my dig at the end.
The poster is trying to say that if you take something that the owner was going to destroy, you can use that fact as a defence if you're arrested for/charged with theft. Ie, "But he was only going to destroy it anyway, he didn't even want it any more!"
I'm not 100% certain that that's the case, though. Certainly, here in the UK, if I throw something away *it is still legally mine*. For example, if I hire a skip and chuck crap into it, you are *not* allowed to just come along and take stuff. That's presumably because I might change my mind, and to stop people from just taking things I leave outside my house, and claiming that they thought it was rubbish.
For a first offence, though, I can certainly see someone just being told to return the item(s) and let off with a slap on the wrist.
That's true enough, but at least they're well-produced, polished ripoff versions of commercial software.
Well, after the first couple of patches have been released to fix the initial bugs, anyway...