So instead of spending money on copy protection, now software companies have invested in better ways of providing software
No, some companies have given up on copy prevention, but most of the ones I deal with haven't. Most games either require a CD key or the CD to be present in the drive, or both. A lot of professional software requries registration - Borland's JBuilder, for example, cannot be run until you've registered with them and received a licence file. I don't think I even have to mention MS's product activation stuff, and they're by no means alone in using that sort of thing to (try to) combat piracy.
The simple fact is that while these things cost money, and the vast majority of people are not wealthy beyond their ability to spend it, people will copy stuff, whether it be music or software. It will *always* be an arms race between the producers and the pirates.
Don't keep trying to prevent us from copying something that we are entitled to use!!
You're entitled to use it, but are you entitled to copy it? Here in the UK for instance, I'm not - technically, I can't create backups or even rip my music to electronic format without the copyright holder's permission.
Not open source in what sense? By the capitalsation, I assume that you're equating "Open Source" to be more than just "access to the source code", but that's adding more to the definition than is present in the words themselves.
You had the source of the program; I'd say it was open source. No, it wasn't GPL licensed (or BSD, or whatever), but it certainly wasn't "closed" either.
Silly perhaps, but I took my girlfriend and daughter to see the new Harry Potter film last night (opening night), and before it started there was a notice displayed on screen about the use of night-vision goggles, as well as the usual "do not record this, or else!" gumpf.
You know what? It didn't inconvenience me in the slightest. I saw no evidence of any such activity, no-one was stopped, questioned or searched; we all just enjoyed the film.
So as far as I'm concerned, if they want to pay people to watch a cinema full of people staring at the film, stuffing their faces with popcorn, they can. Yes, it's silly, and a waste of their time and money, but it is their time and their money. Until and unless they actually inconvenience the film-watching public, who cares?
Well, if you're going to be that paranoid, then you need some way of confirming that the code running on the machine you're about to cast your vote with is indeed the code that you have access to. Also, you need to know that the hardware isn't compromised.
Said company must allow you access to the source code of said program, by ether letting you download the source code, OR for a nominal fee (cost of a cd + shipping) provide the source code, but THATS ALL.
No. You forgot one very important consequence of the GPL - said company cannot prevent the recipients of its software from redistributing it themselves, whether for free or for money.
That is why it is so hard to sell GPL software, and why most that do (eg RedHat) actually sell something else with it, such as support or upgrades.
Microsoft offer a similar licensing scheme for their products, if you wish to buy them that way. Also, when you buy an MSDN subscription, you get new versions of the included products for as long as your subscription lasts, and have for as long as I've been aware of it.
Well, I'm a Brit who's been living here all his life (29 years), and I can assure you that I most certainly do have the right to defend myself.
The only time I might be in trouble is if it appears that either I did not believe myself to be in danger, or I used excessive or unreasonable force. Other than that, I have every right to defend myself, or those around me, if I believe there to be an imminent danger of being attacked.
No, you have the right to ensure your personal safety. Those "few swift kicks when he's in a puddle on the street" are almost certainly excessive force even if kicking the shit out of him isn't, and so may well land you in legal trouble (and rightly so - self defence does not mean teaching them a damn good lesson).
Touché. In this case, however, I'm appealing to the authority that actually determines what is and is not binding with respsect to these agreements. That's a little different to saying "these well known, intelligent people say so, although it's not up to them and they're not actually lawyers or judges".
Exactly what I was going to say. I know that apparently the majority of/. readers are in the US, but that still leaves a sizeable (and growing, I'd have thought) minority of us that aren't. That sort of comment doesn't exactly make me feel welcome, and adds nothing to the story.
A few years ago, I bought my first PC (second hand, from a friend of a friend). It came with a 600meg hard drive, which was plenty - even with a couple of games installed, I had space to spare.
Now, I have a 60 gig hard drive, and with UT2k4 ordered and on its way, I'm going to have to decide what to delete to make enough space for its 5.5gig install size. That's ignoring the 11gig or so of music I have.
Hell, for that matter, I remember the 50meg Amiga hard drives; I never bought one because I simply didn't have a use for that much space. Or the whopping 3 meg RAM upgrade I did splash out for for my Amiga; I was swimming in RAM! I had more than I knew what to do with! Nowadays, I view 512meg as an absolute minimum.
One final example: the laser was sat around in research labs for a decade or two before anyone thought of a practical use for it. Hands up who here doesn't have one? Thought so.
I don't remember a single exploit for the last couple of years at least that used a hole that wasn't patched before the exploit made it into the wild. The problem is not so much the lack of code inspection, as the sheer number of users that don't keep their systems up to date. That will be just as true if people are using Linux as it is now - with 2K and XP, critical updates can even be downloaded and installed automatically, and yet people still get hit by patched holes!
A fair number aren't too keen on the GPL, the Free (as opposed to free) software movement, and particularly RMS. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine groups of pissed-off MS fanboys cooking up Linux exploits should it attain desktop dominance. For that matter, I think you vastly overestimate the people behind these things. There is no noble cause driving them, it's vandalism and anti-social behaviour, pure and simple. These are the sorts of people who'd be shoplifting and spraying graffiti if they weren't quite so good with computers. For them, the target platform is just whatever's the most popular (= highest chance of finding a soft enough target), and/or whatever they can download attack scripts for.
The same is true of a fully-installed Linux system, and the average home user is no more equipped to pare it down than they are to switch off non-essential Windows services.
This is true; however, should Linux attain a sizeable share of the desktop market, you'll find that only a small handful of the most user-friendly distros are used. I can see it coming down to Mandrake, Fedora and SUSE being in the vast majority. That lessens the effect you describe, although the situation is clearly still better than for Windows. However, most of the distros (in my experience) ship with pretty-much the same stuff - they'll supply different config tools, put config files in different places, ship with minor/teeny differences in package revisions, etc. Whenever security holes are posted here that affect Linux, however, it's generally the case that all the major distros are affected. I think that Linux viruses and exploits will have wider applicability than you think.
Basically, it all comes down to opinion. I actually agree with you in part, that Linux is more resistant to these things than Windows. However, I don't think that it's immune, and I don't think that the script kiddies, virus writers and crackers will just give up and find something else to do if Linux supplants Windows on the desktop. Only time will tell, however.
A few Britons were released from Guantanamo Bay and shipped back here. We don't appear to have had any bloodshed because of it.
Incaraceration is not proof of guilt; why is it so many people here forget about due process just because we're talking about terrorism, or one of the other cause celebres (eg paedophilia, spamming, etc)?
You are kidding yourself if you think that people buy MS Office because they think it's the best choice or value around
I didn't say that that was what I thought - I was merely trying to point out that in the grand scheme of software pricing, MS Office is (relatively speaking) extremely cheap. No, it's not as cheap as Star/Open Office, but...
they may have to retrain their employees
To take a slightly extreme case, say my company migrated from MS Office to either Star or Open Office, and retrained us all. Now, I'm a programmer, so it's unlikely they'd retrain me (they don't seem too worried about training us full stop...), but let's say they do. I'm charged out to our clients at about 800GBP/day (roughly $1500USD/day). Let's say that we take a day out of that to do the training - by your figures, that just cost us the equivalent of about 3 copies of Office, or equivalently, 3 upgrades. Now, we're still using Office 2000, so on that kind of (non) upgrade cycle, you're looking at roughly a decade's worth of software cost spent to retrain me. That's ignoring the fact that a day's worth of retraining could only begin to point out the differences...
Also, while I realise that I referred to MS Office as "consumer software", it isn't really in the traditional sense. It's a sort of half-way thing, part way between consumer (eg DVD/media player, personal firewall, games, etc) and business. Compared to other consumer software, yes it's very expensive. Compared to other business software, it's very cheap indeed. Hell, there are third-party plugins for Visual Studio that cost a comparable amount!
I run JBuilder X Enterprise on a 3GHz machine with a gig of RAM, and as you'd hope, it's perfectly responsive. Previous to that, I ran JB 7 Ent on a 1.9GHz machine with 3/4 gig of RAM, and that too was perfectly responsive.
JB 4 on a 400MHz machine, now that was slow:-\ Fortunately we (eventually...) managed to persuade management that 3 year old machines that were mid-range when new, and bought to be essentially dumb terminals used for web browsing, email and telnet sessions to the dev server (for C/C++) were not up to the job of running JBuilder + resin + normal desktop apps.
Hugely expensive software? MS Office? I have personally used software costing in excess of 100,000 GBP (roughly $180,000 USD). Every single day at work, I use software costing around 2,000 GBP (~ $3,600 USD).
And you think Office is "hugely expensive"? For the amount you get, it's actually comparatively very cheap. You should take a look at professional software prices, then see if you still think that consumer software is expensive.
Or pay someone to write a patch. I'll wager that it'd be cheaper than a SQL server license.
I wager you'd be wrong, if you actually hired someone to do it (as opposed to just offering a bounty of a couple of hundred dollars). Contractors are expensive; ones you'd actually trust to do something like this right doubly so.
in larger sites, esp. those that have site licenses for things like sql server and oracle, some developers will just install it because they think its what they need to do their job
No developer should ever install mission-critical servers or services. The company I work for has about 80 people (not counting the thousands employed by our owners, with whom we're busily merging), and we have two full-time DBAs. We (programmers) don't even get logins on the db boxes, or on the staging and live web servers. (Well, not the Linux ones - when it comes to Windows, our systems department suddenly becomes completely clueless... Even then, though, we don't set them up)
If programmers are installing anything important, then either they or the management that lets it happen need a damn good talking to.
Disney's films are just shiny enough to sucker little kids into building Disney themed Christmas lists.
Oh how right you are. I have a four-year old daughter, and she's simply nuts about Disney Princesses (Snow White, Belle, Sleeping Beauty, etc). It doesn't help that her mum is similarly taken with Disney films in general. Between that, and Barbie, I'm probably keeping a couple of executives in ivory back-scratchers...
MS tends to be very wary of making changes that they know for certain will break a great many applications - if they do, they'll have a lot of people ripping in to them about it. Sure, we'll love it, but let's face it, the slashdot readership isn't exactly a large fraction of their customer base...
Expect it to be gone completely eventually, once people have had time to change existing apps. In the same way, I also expect XP's asinine "all accounts are admin and passwordless by default" behaviour to change, once enough home users get used to *having* an account, and programmers get used to not having write access to the entire hard drive. (Perhaps not in XP, but certainly in Longhorn)
Hardcoding connect strings is an unwise thing to do.
It's a bloody stupid thing to do - that sort of thing should be in one config file. Even with "old" asp, you could use the global.asa file for it. There's no excuse for peppering your code with db connection strings.
It seems that some people insist that Windows is rock solid even real life proof shoved in their face.
Conversely, it often seems as though a lot of people will insist on how unstable Windows is, even with real life proof shoved in their face.
I've run XP on a number of machines for about 2 years, and haven't had a single crash that couldn't be directly attributed to crappy third-party device drivers. On the other hand, I can say the same thing of Linux.
There are a lot of things to complain about when it comes to Windows; these days, for all but the most critical of systems, stability really isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
So instead of spending money on copy protection, now software companies have invested in better ways of providing software
No, some companies have given up on copy prevention, but most of the ones I deal with haven't. Most games either require a CD key or the CD to be present in the drive, or both. A lot of professional software requries registration - Borland's JBuilder, for example, cannot be run until you've registered with them and received a licence file. I don't think I even have to mention MS's product activation stuff, and they're by no means alone in using that sort of thing to (try to) combat piracy.
The simple fact is that while these things cost money, and the vast majority of people are not wealthy beyond their ability to spend it, people will copy stuff, whether it be music or software. It will *always* be an arms race between the producers and the pirates.
Don't keep trying to prevent us from copying something that we are entitled to use!!
You're entitled to use it, but are you entitled to copy it? Here in the UK for instance, I'm not - technically, I can't create backups or even rip my music to electronic format without the copyright holder's permission.
Not open source in what sense? By the capitalsation, I assume that you're equating "Open Source" to be more than just "access to the source code", but that's adding more to the definition than is present in the words themselves.
You had the source of the program; I'd say it was open source. No, it wasn't GPL licensed (or BSD, or whatever), but it certainly wasn't "closed" either.
Silly perhaps, but I took my girlfriend and daughter to see the new Harry Potter film last night (opening night), and before it started there was a notice displayed on screen about the use of night-vision goggles, as well as the usual "do not record this, or else!" gumpf.
You know what? It didn't inconvenience me in the slightest. I saw no evidence of any such activity, no-one was stopped, questioned or searched; we all just enjoyed the film.
So as far as I'm concerned, if they want to pay people to watch a cinema full of people staring at the film, stuffing their faces with popcorn, they can. Yes, it's silly, and a waste of their time and money, but it is their time and their money. Until and unless they actually inconvenience the film-watching public, who cares?
Well, if you're going to be that paranoid, then you need some way of confirming that the code running on the machine you're about to cast your vote with is indeed the code that you have access to. Also, you need to know that the hardware isn't compromised.
a PII 450 MHz with 384mb ram for about two years doing high end 3d modeling and rendering
Well, I knew it would be slow when I saw the specs, but two years for some (admittedly "high-end") 3D rendering work? You really need a new PC!
Said company must allow you access to the source code of said program, by ether letting you download the source code, OR for a nominal fee (cost of a cd + shipping) provide the source code, but THATS ALL.
No. You forgot one very important consequence of the GPL - said company cannot prevent the recipients of its software from redistributing it themselves, whether for free or for money.
That is why it is so hard to sell GPL software, and why most that do (eg RedHat) actually sell something else with it, such as support or upgrades.
Microsoft offer a similar licensing scheme for their products, if you wish to buy them that way. Also, when you buy an MSDN subscription, you get new versions of the included products for as long as your subscription lasts, and have for as long as I've been aware of it.
RedHat are hardly unique in this respect.
Well, I'm a Brit who's been living here all his life (29 years), and I can assure you that I most certainly do have the right to defend myself.
The only time I might be in trouble is if it appears that either I did not believe myself to be in danger, or I used excessive or unreasonable force. Other than that, I have every right to defend myself, or those around me, if I believe there to be an imminent danger of being attacked.
No, you have the right to ensure your personal safety. Those "few swift kicks when he's in a puddle on the street" are almost certainly excessive force even if kicking the shit out of him isn't, and so may well land you in legal trouble (and rightly so - self defence does not mean teaching them a damn good lesson).
Touché. In this case, however, I'm appealing to the authority that actually determines what is and is not binding with respsect to these agreements. That's a little different to saying "these well known, intelligent people say so, although it's not up to them and they're not actually lawyers or judges".
Exactly what I was going to say. I know that apparently the majority of /. readers are in the US, but that still leaves a sizeable (and growing, I'd have thought) minority of us that aren't. That sort of comment doesn't exactly make me feel welcome, and adds nothing to the story.
A few years ago, I bought my first PC (second hand, from a friend of a friend). It came with a 600meg hard drive, which was plenty - even with a couple of games installed, I had space to spare.
Now, I have a 60 gig hard drive, and with UT2k4 ordered and on its way, I'm going to have to decide what to delete to make enough space for its 5.5gig install size. That's ignoring the 11gig or so of music I have.
Hell, for that matter, I remember the 50meg Amiga hard drives; I never bought one because I simply didn't have a use for that much space. Or the whopping 3 meg RAM upgrade I did splash out for for my Amiga; I was swimming in RAM! I had more than I knew what to do with! Nowadays, I view 512meg as an absolute minimum.
One final example: the laser was sat around in research labs for a decade or two before anyone thought of a practical use for it. Hands up who here doesn't have one? Thought so.
Basically, it all comes down to opinion. I actually agree with you in part, that Linux is more resistant to these things than Windows. However, I don't think that it's immune, and I don't think that the script kiddies, virus writers and crackers will just give up and find something else to do if Linux supplants Windows on the desktop. Only time will tell, however.
A few Britons were released from Guantanamo Bay and shipped back here. We don't appear to have had any bloodshed because of it.
Incaraceration is not proof of guilt; why is it so many people here forget about due process just because we're talking about terrorism, or one of the other cause celebres (eg paedophilia, spamming, etc)?
If you don't like what the government is doing, you can vote them out. Try that with a corporation.
You are kidding yourself if you think that people buy MS Office because they think it's the best choice or value around
I didn't say that that was what I thought - I was merely trying to point out that in the grand scheme of software pricing, MS Office is (relatively speaking) extremely cheap. No, it's not as cheap as Star/Open Office, but...
they may have to retrain their employees
To take a slightly extreme case, say my company migrated from MS Office to either Star or Open Office, and retrained us all. Now, I'm a programmer, so it's unlikely they'd retrain me (they don't seem too worried about training us full stop...), but let's say they do. I'm charged out to our clients at about 800GBP/day (roughly $1500USD/day). Let's say that we take a day out of that to do the training - by your figures, that just cost us the equivalent of about 3 copies of Office, or equivalently, 3 upgrades. Now, we're still using Office 2000, so on that kind of (non) upgrade cycle, you're looking at roughly a decade's worth of software cost spent to retrain me. That's ignoring the fact that a day's worth of retraining could only begin to point out the differences...
Also, while I realise that I referred to MS Office as "consumer software", it isn't really in the traditional sense. It's a sort of half-way thing, part way between consumer (eg DVD/media player, personal firewall, games, etc) and business. Compared to other consumer software, yes it's very expensive. Compared to other business software, it's very cheap indeed. Hell, there are third-party plugins for Visual Studio that cost a comparable amount!
I run JBuilder X Enterprise on a 3GHz machine with a gig of RAM, and as you'd hope, it's perfectly responsive. Previous to that, I ran JB 7 Ent on a 1.9GHz machine with 3/4 gig of RAM, and that too was perfectly responsive.
:-\ Fortunately we (eventually...) managed to persuade management that 3 year old machines that were mid-range when new, and bought to be essentially dumb terminals used for web browsing, email and telnet sessions to the dev server (for C/C++) were not up to the job of running JBuilder + resin + normal desktop apps.
JB 4 on a 400MHz machine, now that was slow
require hugely expensive software to work on
Hugely expensive software? MS Office? I have personally used software costing in excess of 100,000 GBP (roughly $180,000 USD). Every single day at work, I use software costing around 2,000 GBP (~ $3,600 USD).
And you think Office is "hugely expensive"? For the amount you get, it's actually comparatively very cheap. You should take a look at professional software prices, then see if you still think that consumer software is expensive.
Trust a programmer to count from zero...
Or pay someone to write a patch. I'll wager that it'd be cheaper than a SQL server license.
I wager you'd be wrong, if you actually hired someone to do it (as opposed to just offering a bounty of a couple of hundred dollars). Contractors are expensive; ones you'd actually trust to do something like this right doubly so.
in larger sites, esp. those that have site licenses for things like sql server and oracle, some developers will just install it because they think its what they need to do their job
No developer should ever install mission-critical servers or services. The company I work for has about 80 people (not counting the thousands employed by our owners, with whom we're busily merging), and we have two full-time DBAs. We (programmers) don't even get logins on the db boxes, or on the staging and live web servers. (Well, not the Linux ones - when it comes to Windows, our systems department suddenly becomes completely clueless... Even then, though, we don't set them up)
If programmers are installing anything important, then either they or the management that lets it happen need a damn good talking to.
Disney's films are just shiny enough to sucker little kids into building Disney themed Christmas lists.
Oh how right you are. I have a four-year old daughter, and she's simply nuts about Disney Princesses (Snow White, Belle, Sleeping Beauty, etc). It doesn't help that her mum is similarly taken with Disney films in general. Between that, and Barbie, I'm probably keeping a couple of executives in ivory back-scratchers...
Not to mention that the decryption key will probably be on an insecure web server.
That's hardly MS's fault; blame the "admins" that set the webserver up, and the "programmers" who wrote the application.
MS tends to be very wary of making changes that they know for certain will break a great many applications - if they do, they'll have a lot of people ripping in to them about it. Sure, we'll love it, but let's face it, the slashdot readership isn't exactly a large fraction of their customer base...
Expect it to be gone completely eventually, once people have had time to change existing apps. In the same way, I also expect XP's asinine "all accounts are admin and passwordless by default" behaviour to change, once enough home users get used to *having* an account, and programmers get used to not having write access to the entire hard drive. (Perhaps not in XP, but certainly in Longhorn)
Hardcoding connect strings is an unwise thing to do.
It's a bloody stupid thing to do - that sort of thing should be in one config file. Even with "old" asp, you could use the global.asa file for it. There's no excuse for peppering your code with db connection strings.
It seems that some people insist that Windows is rock solid even real life proof shoved in their face.
Conversely, it often seems as though a lot of people will insist on how unstable Windows is, even with real life proof shoved in their face.
I've run XP on a number of machines for about 2 years, and haven't had a single crash that couldn't be directly attributed to crappy third-party device drivers. On the other hand, I can say the same thing of Linux.
There are a lot of things to complain about when it comes to Windows; these days, for all but the most critical of systems, stability really isn't one of them.