But from that one DVD copy of the film you steal, you can rip it to divx or whatever and still distribute it to millions of people, and at higher quality than a shakey-cam copy.
Well, considering that we have precision wesapons NOW that are as accurate, and with much greater range (The Tomahawk cruise missile, for one), it's easy to imagine.
Yes, but cruise missles are guided, and can make course corrections in-flight - the rail is balistic, so if your aim is a little off when you fire, tough, you'll miss.
I know it was just an off the cuff example, but really, if your website is bringing in $1m/hour, it's worth a *lot* more than a couple of mil to secure it...
Yes, that slipped my mind as I was replying; obviously, if the guy's not been using Windows for that long there's little point in him helping with Windows-specific problems.
On the other hand, what he *can* do is educate people with regards to keeping hteir systems up to date, not running untrusted executables, etc. So, while no he can't give specific advice (like how to enable the XP firewall), he can give more general advice.
The same effect is possible if you hack the registry; I've not done it myself (I don't use IE), but a workmate did. I imagine that the Power Toys accessory just automates the process.
A virus can spread around a largue net with a hole that able him to copy to other computer
No, that's a worm. A virus piggy-backs on an executable file, and is launched when the executable is run. At that point the virus will generally seek out other executables to infect; if it can access mapped drives/Samba shares (etc), then it can spread from machine to machine. Recently, viruses have also started emailing themselves around. In both cases, however, the victim has to run the file that they receive in order for it to propagate.
In contrast, a worm is self-replicating; once it's been written and the first copy is run (either by the author/an accomplice, or some poor sap being tricked into it), it seeks out further hosts, infects them, and continues, all without user intervention. They rely on weaknesses in computers systems to propogate.
Option 1: Keep Windows, reinstall every few months and suffer through every malware that comes along
Bullshit. I've been running XP Pro at home and at work for a couple of years now, and I have reinstalled zero times, and had zero problems with malware, viruses and the like.
How? Simple. I don't use IE, I only use Outlook at work and then only because I have to, and I don't run unknown executables from untrusted sources. Throw (free) AV software and a software firewall in there with timely updating and I'm as safe running Windows as you are running Linux.
Windows has some pretty dire consequences
Only if you don't know what you're doing. You appear to have a clue; I think your efforts would be better spent educating users on how to protect their systems, rather than trying to convince them to change OS. Should Linux gain significant market share, virus and malware authors will start targetting it. Users will get used to running as root or entering their root password to install stuff, so will not think twice about doing so when prompted. A lot of malware piggy-backs on the installers for other software (eg Kazaa), and running Linux cannot protect you from that. Please don't try to tell me that open source alternatives will save people - there are open source p2p clients for Windows (eg eMule), yet people still use the closed-source, malware-ridden ones.
Getting people to switch OS is a short term fix at best. They need to be educated out of their bad habits, or they'll fall prey to the same tricks again in the end.
I for one am getting sick and tired of the attitude of a lot of people here to the possibility of non-Windows viruses, malware and exploits. It really does smack of either some kind of misplaced superiority complex ("All OSS programmers are better than closed source programmers, so we won't have those problems!") or simply being in denial ("Viruses?! La la la, I can't hear you!!!").
As you say, the facts of the matter are rather different. The vast majority of these things require some kind of user action to install and/or spread. My AV software has caught a couple of infected executables, and you know what? Without me running them, they just sit there doing nothing. Of the few self-propagating exploits that have been found over the last couple of years (at least), all the holes have already been patched. Keep your system up to date, and you have little to fear from them. Not patching regularly enough is not unique to Windows - if and when Windows users move to Linux or OS X, they'll fail to keep those systems up to date too.
XP is easing people into the transition to not running as an admin-level account. Right now, the only reason to do so is because lazy programming teams don't write their software properly; no user-space program should require admin access to run. I fully expect an upcoming release of Windows to "protect" admin access from users in much the same way as OS X, and if your software won't run like that, well then people just won't buy it, and good riddance.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - if "alternative" OSes start to make real headway on the desktop, then virus and malware writers will come. It's already starting to happen in other areas - IE is king of the browsers, and so has a lot of malware plugins and extensions targetted at it. However, I've seen a couple of sites recently that pop up extension installation dialogues when I visited them in Mozilla. They may not be malicious (no, I didn't install them), but believe me, it's coming.
As for the name calling, that's beneath contempt, and speaks of an immaturity that has no place in rational, mature discussions.
Nobody is being killed for copyright violations (yet?).
Well, in some parts of the world copyright infringement is big business for organised crime gangs; I'd be surprised if there haven't been more than a few deaths due to turf/gang wars at least indirectly linked to copyright infringement.
Windows forces you to buy stuff from Symantec, when a free IPTABLES script from the net can do the same job on Linux for free.
By the same token, there are a number of free firewalls available for personal use - I use Sygate's one, for example, which also does per-application egress checking, something I never did get working under Linux (not that I tried very hard, I admit).
When that happens, Microsoft will have abandoned the Windows 32 bit platform for Longhorn. Then Linux + WINE will be very valuable for people with new machines who can only run Longhorn or Linux.
Let me get this straight - you think that with the next release of Windows, MS are going to completely break compatibility with almost every single Windows application in existence?
It'll never happen. Over time, and the next few releases, they will almost certainly push very hard to get people away from the Win32 API and onto.NET, but it's going to be a *very* long time before they can drop support for Win32 apps.
And even then, it's server-side Java, which is meaning less when you talk about it as a day-to-day dev language (ie; creating standalone client-side apps).
There's no such thing as "server-side Java", other than to distinguish between what I do (writing code that runs on a web server) from what some other people might do (eg creating apps like JBuilder, or applets, etc). The -server switch just tells the JVM to behave in a way that's more appropriate for a long-lived application - take a performance hit on startup, use more memory, change the behaviour of the garbage collector, etc, so as to improve performance in the long run. If your code is only going to run for a few minutes, then it's probably not worth it. If it's going to be hanging around for a while, then it most certianly is.
That doesn't mean that it can only be used on a server, though - for example, I use JBuilder at work, which is regularly running for weeks on end. That's a good example of a client app that would definitely benefit from running under a JVM with the -server switch (which reminds me, I really ought to see if it does...)
make a plausible case they don't count as an implementation since they're just source code
That's a horribly thin semantic argument though. To my mind, source code is an implementation of a specification (or requirements document, process flow chart, whatever). The hard bit is going from the document to the source. Once you have the source, compiling it is essentially trivial, especially with build and configure scripts, makefiles, etc.
I think you'd be very hard pressed indeed to convince anyone that it's not an implementation until you've typed in a single command (or clicked a single icon/button) and waited a few minutes for it to compile, especially when so much more work happens before that stage than during it.
While the first point is true enough, the second is trivial to overcome. Just make "reset all settings" toggle between what you last saved and the default. So, tweak stuff, hit "ok", and "reset all settings" takes you back to the defaults. Hit it again, and you get all your changes back (perhaps change the text to "restore.." instead of "reset" in that case).
Not perfect, as if you reset them, change one, then hit reset again, you lose your previous setup, but a good compromise.
On the other hand, I'm no usability guru, and I don't recall having seen this implemented in any software I've used, so perhaps I'm missing something...
If you have the habit of leaving the machine on for extended periods, you will not receive notification of new updates until you cycle power
That is incorrect. My girlfriend's PC is on most of the time, and it notifies us about updates at the same time as mine does (which is switched off most nights).
It may even by synchronizing data in the background all the time.
Only one server is every active at any given time
No; you said yourself that the backup may be synchronising data, ready to takeover in the event of the primary failing. If that's the case then the machine *is* in use, it's just not serving data to clients.
That doesn't make this new licensing scheme bad, it just means that it's not appropriate for your use (or ours, as it happens, as we tend to set things up as you describe too)
If the servers have to be turned off until they are needed and the original servers are running Windows, how often do you think the backup servers be turned on?
In my experience, of a modern, well-admined Windows server OS, on stable hardware, almost never. At work, we have production Windows machines with up times to rival the Linux ones; all it takes is someone who knows what they're doing.
Sorry, was that not the answer you were looking for?
But it looks as if this law could have been tailored to make GPL graphics programs illegal.
No; it's just a side-effect. Don't forget that most of the people involved with drafting and considering laws like this don't really understand software, at least not how it's created. They may vaguely be aware of Linux, and open source software, and so on, but it won't have occurred to them that they would be affected by this.
There's no way they sat around a table discussing this, until someone said "Oh, and it'll really screw up GPL image software too, of course! Bonus!!" They simply won't have made the connection. We have, because that sort of thing is amongst our concerns; their concerns are making it harder to forge currency.
The Laws don't change at all. You may or may not have noticed that there have been no new Laws of Physics in at least a hundred years, if not longer. Physics the science has long since recognised that there are few if any absolutes, and so stopped calling things "laws" a long time ago. Even Relativity (very actively investigated, yet to be disproved) is "only" a theory.
The UK is indeed an exception; there is no fair use clause in UK copyright law. Technically, I can't make backups or format shift my music.
In reality, no-one is ever going to be dragged through the courts for ripping their CD collection to mp3/ogg/whatever, but that's not the point. A bad law is a bad law, whether it's enforced or not.
For what it's worth, though, I assume that the poster was referring to a licence to use. Fair use or not, I can't believe that you're entitled to buy a single copy of software then install it on as many machines, for as many people, as you like. That would make a mockery of the concept of copyright.
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But from that one DVD copy of the film you steal, you can rip it to divx or whatever and still distribute it to millions of people, and at higher quality than a shakey-cam copy.
Well, considering that we have precision wesapons NOW that are as accurate, and with much greater range (The Tomahawk cruise missile, for one), it's easy to imagine.
Yes, but cruise missles are guided, and can make course corrections in-flight - the rail is balistic, so if your aim is a little off when you fire, tough, you'll miss.
I know it was just an off the cuff example, but really, if your website is bringing in $1m/hour, it's worth a *lot* more than a couple of mil to secure it...
He says he's been running Linux for years
Yes, that slipped my mind as I was replying; obviously, if the guy's not been using Windows for that long there's little point in him helping with Windows-specific problems.
On the other hand, what he *can* do is educate people with regards to keeping hteir systems up to date, not running untrusted executables, etc. So, while no he can't give specific advice (like how to enable the XP firewall), he can give more general advice.
The same effect is possible if you hack the registry; I've not done it myself (I don't use IE), but a workmate did. I imagine that the Power Toys accessory just automates the process.
A virus can spread around a largue net with a hole that able him to copy to other computer
No, that's a worm. A virus piggy-backs on an executable file, and is launched when the executable is run. At that point the virus will generally seek out other executables to infect; if it can access mapped drives/Samba shares (etc), then it can spread from machine to machine. Recently, viruses have also started emailing themselves around. In both cases, however, the victim has to run the file that they receive in order for it to propagate.
In contrast, a worm is self-replicating; once it's been written and the first copy is run (either by the author/an accomplice, or some poor sap being tricked into it), it seeks out further hosts, infects them, and continues, all without user intervention. They rely on weaknesses in computers systems to propogate.
But in this case it's an audio CD, so no DRM software, no problem...
Option 1: Keep Windows, reinstall every few months and suffer through every malware that comes along
Bullshit. I've been running XP Pro at home and at work for a couple of years now, and I have reinstalled zero times, and had zero problems with malware, viruses and the like.
How? Simple. I don't use IE, I only use Outlook at work and then only because I have to, and I don't run unknown executables from untrusted sources. Throw (free) AV software and a software firewall in there with timely updating and I'm as safe running Windows as you are running Linux.
Windows has some pretty dire consequences
Only if you don't know what you're doing. You appear to have a clue; I think your efforts would be better spent educating users on how to protect their systems, rather than trying to convince them to change OS. Should Linux gain significant market share, virus and malware authors will start targetting it. Users will get used to running as root or entering their root password to install stuff, so will not think twice about doing so when prompted. A lot of malware piggy-backs on the installers for other software (eg Kazaa), and running Linux cannot protect you from that. Please don't try to tell me that open source alternatives will save people - there are open source p2p clients for Windows (eg eMule), yet people still use the closed-source, malware-ridden ones.
Getting people to switch OS is a short term fix at best. They need to be educated out of their bad habits, or they'll fall prey to the same tricks again in the end.
Hear, hear.
I for one am getting sick and tired of the attitude of a lot of people here to the possibility of non-Windows viruses, malware and exploits. It really does smack of either some kind of misplaced superiority complex ("All OSS programmers are better than closed source programmers, so we won't have those problems!") or simply being in denial ("Viruses?! La la la, I can't hear you!!!").
As you say, the facts of the matter are rather different. The vast majority of these things require some kind of user action to install and/or spread. My AV software has caught a couple of infected executables, and you know what? Without me running them, they just sit there doing nothing. Of the few self-propagating exploits that have been found over the last couple of years (at least), all the holes have already been patched. Keep your system up to date, and you have little to fear from them. Not patching regularly enough is not unique to Windows - if and when Windows users move to Linux or OS X, they'll fail to keep those systems up to date too.
XP is easing people into the transition to not running as an admin-level account. Right now, the only reason to do so is because lazy programming teams don't write their software properly; no user-space program should require admin access to run. I fully expect an upcoming release of Windows to "protect" admin access from users in much the same way as OS X, and if your software won't run like that, well then people just won't buy it, and good riddance.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - if "alternative" OSes start to make real headway on the desktop, then virus and malware writers will come. It's already starting to happen in other areas - IE is king of the browsers, and so has a lot of malware plugins and extensions targetted at it. However, I've seen a couple of sites recently that pop up extension installation dialogues when I visited them in Mozilla. They may not be malicious (no, I didn't install them), but believe me, it's coming.
As for the name calling, that's beneath contempt, and speaks of an immaturity that has no place in rational, mature discussions.
I'm also pretty sure that holding shift when you put the cd in will do the same thing.
Yes, it does, at least as of Win2k, although I'm pretty sure that it worked from Win95 onwards.
Nobody is being killed for copyright violations (yet?).
Well, in some parts of the world copyright infringement is big business for organised crime gangs; I'd be surprised if there haven't been more than a few deaths due to turf/gang wars at least indirectly linked to copyright infringement.
Windows forces you to buy stuff from Symantec, when a free IPTABLES script from the net can do the same job on Linux for free.
By the same token, there are a number of free firewalls available for personal use - I use Sygate's one, for example, which also does per-application egress checking, something I never did get working under Linux (not that I tried very hard, I admit).
When that happens, Microsoft will have abandoned the Windows 32 bit platform for Longhorn. Then Linux + WINE will be very valuable for people with new machines who can only run Longhorn or Linux.
.NET, but it's going to be a *very* long time before they can drop support for Win32 apps.
Let me get this straight - you think that with the next release of Windows, MS are going to completely break compatibility with almost every single Windows application in existence?
It'll never happen. Over time, and the next few releases, they will almost certainly push very hard to get people away from the Win32 API and onto
I like STFW - Search The Fucking Web
And even then, it's server-side Java, which is meaning less when you talk about it as a day-to-day dev language (ie; creating standalone client-side apps).
There's no such thing as "server-side Java", other than to distinguish between what I do (writing code that runs on a web server) from what some other people might do (eg creating apps like JBuilder, or applets, etc). The -server switch just tells the JVM to behave in a way that's more appropriate for a long-lived application - take a performance hit on startup, use more memory, change the behaviour of the garbage collector, etc, so as to improve performance in the long run. If your code is only going to run for a few minutes, then it's probably not worth it. If it's going to be hanging around for a while, then it most certianly is.
That doesn't mean that it can only be used on a server, though - for example, I use JBuilder at work, which is regularly running for weeks on end. That's a good example of a client app that would definitely benefit from running under a JVM with the -server switch (which reminds me, I really ought to see if it does...)
make a plausible case they don't count as an implementation since they're just source code
That's a horribly thin semantic argument though. To my mind, source code is an implementation of a specification (or requirements document, process flow chart, whatever). The hard bit is going from the document to the source. Once you have the source, compiling it is essentially trivial, especially with build and configure scripts, makefiles, etc.
I think you'd be very hard pressed indeed to convince anyone that it's not an implementation until you've typed in a single command (or clicked a single icon/button) and waited a few minutes for it to compile, especially when so much more work happens before that stage than during it.
Is pick the fights you can win. Right now, this isn't one of them.
Get the technology in place to make anonymously spamming people harder, and you can start thinking about this again.
While the first point is true enough, the second is trivial to overcome. Just make "reset all settings" toggle between what you last saved and the default. So, tweak stuff, hit "ok", and "reset all settings" takes you back to the defaults. Hit it again, and you get all your changes back (perhaps change the text to "restore.." instead of "reset" in that case).
Not perfect, as if you reset them, change one, then hit reset again, you lose your previous setup, but a good compromise.
On the other hand, I'm no usability guru, and I don't recall having seen this implemented in any software I've used, so perhaps I'm missing something...
If you have the habit of leaving the machine on for extended periods, you will not receive notification of new updates until you cycle power
That is incorrect. My girlfriend's PC is on most of the time, and it notifies us about updates at the same time as mine does (which is switched off most nights).
It may even by synchronizing data in the background all the time.
Only one server is every active at any given time
No; you said yourself that the backup may be synchronising data, ready to takeover in the event of the primary failing. If that's the case then the machine *is* in use, it's just not serving data to clients.
That doesn't make this new licensing scheme bad, it just means that it's not appropriate for your use (or ours, as it happens, as we tend to set things up as you describe too)
If the servers have to be turned off until they are needed and the original servers are running Windows, how often do you think the backup servers be turned on?
In my experience, of a modern, well-admined Windows server OS, on stable hardware, almost never. At work, we have production Windows machines with up times to rival the Linux ones; all it takes is someone who knows what they're doing.
Sorry, was that not the answer you were looking for?
GD, Imagemagick, etc
All of which would also be declared illegal, of course...
But it looks as if this law could have been tailored to make GPL graphics programs illegal.
No; it's just a side-effect. Don't forget that most of the people involved with drafting and considering laws like this don't really understand software, at least not how it's created. They may vaguely be aware of Linux, and open source software, and so on, but it won't have occurred to them that they would be affected by this.
There's no way they sat around a table discussing this, until someone said "Oh, and it'll really screw up GPL image software too, of course! Bonus!!" They simply won't have made the connection. We have, because that sort of thing is amongst our concerns; their concerns are making it harder to forge currency.
"Insightful", hmmm...
The Laws don't change at all. You may or may not have noticed that there have been no new Laws of Physics in at least a hundred years, if not longer. Physics the science has long since recognised that there are few if any absolutes, and so stopped calling things "laws" a long time ago. Even Relativity (very actively investigated, yet to be disproved) is "only" a theory.
The UK is indeed an exception; there is no fair use clause in UK copyright law. Technically, I can't make backups or format shift my music.
In reality, no-one is ever going to be dragged through the courts for ripping their CD collection to mp3/ogg/whatever, but that's not the point. A bad law is a bad law, whether it's enforced or not.
For what it's worth, though, I assume that the poster was referring to a licence to use. Fair use or not, I can't believe that you're entitled to buy a single copy of software then install it on as many machines, for as many people, as you like. That would make a mockery of the concept of copyright.