None of those things were rights that were removed and then restored. They are all rights that had never existed, that were granted after varying degrees of protest, including outright civil unrest.
"Never" was a little strong; I'd have said "rarely" and added "without a fight".
If I create an app in RPM format that needs, say libgimp, then my package will depend on the _entire_ gimp package being installed.
Which, imho, is a real pain. Mandrake's KDevelop package "requires" Gimp to be installed. I didn't really want another 20+meg of data on my drive that I'm unlikely to ever use, so I used the --nodeps option to rpm - and it worked just fine. I can only assume that KDevelop requires icon editing software, or something, rather than the Gimp itself.
Another example is the development version of Qt3 that comes with the Mandrake KDE3 packages. It requires the MySQL and Postgres libraries, amongst others, which in turn require the rest of their respective packages. If you want to compile KDE3 apps on a Mandrake (8.2) system, you have to install not one but two databases.
Follow that sort of procedure for everything you want to install, and the amount of data that is installed that you don't want could well be larger than the amount that you do. I know that disk space is cheap these days, but it's still not free.
He was referring to the saying "May you live in interesting times", which is apparently of Chinese origin.
The idea is that, whilst that *sounds* good, if you think about it, "interesting times" are generally either full of danger or hardship (eg war, recession, etc).
That's because X still has control of the keyboard, and so the system cannot respond to your keypresses.
9 times out of 10, though, when X crashes (which is infrequent), I can ssh in from a friend's machine and kill it off. It's a bit of a pain, but as a programmer I realise that no software of even moderate complexity can ever be 100% bug free, especially something as large as X, that is used in such a wide variety of situations and on so many different types of hardware.
You can also put something similar in the system-wide login/profile file, so that *all* processes started by *all* users inherit a set of default limits.
Failing that (and I agree that it would be hard to come up with a sensible limit), I believe that you can enable kernel-level process accounting, whereby such things are enforced strictly by the kernel on a cumulative basis - ie each user gets an allocation of CPU time and memory. How they use that is up to them, but once they exhaust it, they can't have any more. I may be wrong, though - that may just be for logging their usage, for "charge-per-use" schemes.
In any case, the best that the memory manager could possibly do is reserve some percentage of the available memory for root, as is done with hard drive space. Of course, as X runs as root, (and has to in order to access the hardware, iirc) that wouldn't help. I'm not really very well versed with the internals of the Linux kernel, but I suspect that the memory manager "just" manages requests for memory, without regard to whether those requests are sensible. There's only so much a system can do to protect itself from malicious or badly written code that is running on it.
You can use the ulimit command to set an upper limit on the memory available to any process started by the shell under which it is issued.
Just putting something like ulimit -m 200000 in your startx script should limit X's memory usage to 200meg.
ulmit can also set upper limits on available CPU time, core file size, etc. Bash has a builtin version, so do man bash and look for ulimit for more details.
What do you mean, if? They already have been found guilty - everything that's going on now is to determine how they should be punished.
All of the arguing is over what they can and cannot be forced to do, both legally and technologically (eg is it technologically possible to force them to offer a "modular" version of Windows, etc)
You miss the point. The legislation requires that the information be kept for 7 years.
This is not a case of "if you keep it, we'll have the right to make you give us a copy of it". This is the UK government saying "you will keep this data, and surrender it on demand, and all at your own expense".
I doubt that the legislation will apply to "hobbyist" servers, but you can bet that there will be stiff financial and/or criminal penalties for "real" ISPs that refuse to implement the necessary data retention procedures.
Cheers,
Tim
Re:From the Amaya (w3 broswer) FAQ...
on
Return of the WaSP
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
On the contrary, this knowledge will merely make me whine and poke at Amaya too.
I work in a web agency, and have had real problems in the past with certain designers writing/editing pages that look fine in IE, but don't actually work in either browser (or, on occasion, display at all in Netscape). They then proclaim the page to be finished, never having checked it in Netscape (despite a contractual obligation to support it), leaving it for the rest of us to fix.
I would like to see a "debug mode" in all browsers, whereby any badly-formed HTML is clearly flagged as such. Then you could tell at a glance if there was a problem, and what it was.
You can install a fully-functional Mabdrake Linux 8.2 system off a single CD. The other 2 are for extra stuff that is not required for the system - eg a choice of mail clients, text editors, less commonly used window managers, etc. Most of the development packages (eg header files, etc - not gcc and other compilers) are also on the second and third CDs.
Whilst it is true that you can install Windows from a single CD, you don't get half as much as you do with a Linux distribution, even allowing for the (substantial) duplication of software.
As for the number of discs, if this really was a problem, I'm sure more distros would be offering a DVD option - the majority of new PCs these days come with DVD drvies, after all.
The numbering scheme currently used by AMD for their Athlon chips reflects the speed of the equivalently-performing Intel chip. ie the Athlon XP 2200+ performs at the same level as the P4 2.2GHz, despite running at a lower frequency.
If AMD just quoted the raw GHz figures, everyone would assume that they are significantly slower than they actually are. They would also lose out on price comparisons - on dabs.com, the Athlon 1900+ is only about £8 cheaper than the P4 1.5GHz. The P4 1.9GHz, however, is almost £60 cheaper, a much larger difference (just over a third of the total price of the P4, in fact).
(Note that I am in no way affiliated with dabs.com - they're just the first website I think of when looking at PC component prices.)
I talked to the system's marketing manager. He told me almost all of the people who got extra service were stealing it on purpose, which contradicted the installer's comments. I don't know who to believe, but I am suspicious.
Personally, I'd believe the installer. The marketing manager is a manager, and so a) may well not know what conditions are really like out in the field, and b) regardless, must reiterate the company's official stance.
The installer, on the other hand, is "just an ordinary joe", and (as long as he doesn't get quoted and named) can pretty much say whatever he wants.
How can you even bitch about product placement as a way for companies to make money? It's completely non-intrusive.
I challenge anyone to watch the Inspector Gadget movie and not cringe when the Yahoo! billboard falls on the car.
Besides, with more people becoming more aware of, and sensitive towards, advertisements, more people will find product placement intrusive. As other posters have also pointed out, product placement in cartoons, documentaries and fantasy programs simply will not work. What product could you possibly place non-intrusively in Lord of the Rings or Star Trek, for exmaple?
On the same note, programmers should get paid to write software. Not to just sit around and sell the same software over and over again.
You're not a programmer, are you? Not a professional one, I mean.
I am, and I can assure you that we do not get paid anything for repeat sales of the software we write. I do a 9 - 5:30 job, and get paid a set wage, just like anyone else in a "real" job. How my company makes that money, whether it be by creating bespoke applications or licencing shrink-wrapped ones, has no bearing on how we get paid. (FWIW, we mostly do bespoke work, but we do try to reuse/license as much as possible) If we stop working, and sit around doing nothing, eventually we'll be fired.
I really wish that certain people around here would stop equating "profesional programmer" with "lazy one-hit wonder that sits around living off the profits of as little work as possible". That may or may not be true for the companies for which they work, but it certainly is not true for the programmers, or anyone else working for the company. Even a company that makes all its money from licensing fees still needs to support the products, and release bug fixes and new versions. This all takes work.
In short, the day I stop working, whether it be on new code, bug fixes, enhancements, estimates, or whatever, is the day my company lets me go and gets someone else in, just like it is for every other professional programmer.
Yup, that's fine. Unauthorised copying and distribution of copyrighted works is, as you say, a crime.
What it is not, however, is anything at all like boarding and taking a vessel at sea by force, and robbing and probably killing its crew. That is piracy, this is merely copying stuff you're not supposed to.
I can't object to being called a criminal (and most of us are, in one way or another, at some point in our lives, even if it's just speeding a little because we're late), but I can and do object to being called a murderer because I copy stuff without permission from time to time.
with the class documentation open in a web browser at all times since it's so hard to remember the inconsistent naming
You really ought to get a decent IDE. A couple of reasonably good, free ones are AnyJ (http://netcomputing.de/), which is free as in beer for Linux but pay-for for Windows, and NetBeans (http://netbeans.org), which is free as in beer and speech (SPL, not GPL). (Standard disclaimer: I have nothing to do with either group or IDE, other products exist, etc)
I'm assuming that you use a text editor for coding; trust me, once you've used an IDE with built in compilation and debug support, and a CodeInsight-like feature (which suggests possible completions for what you are typing, either automatically or on demand - no more having to have the docs open to remember what methods a class has!), you won't want to go back.
The only downside is that, being pure-Java apps, you're going to have to have a reasonably beefy machine. JBuilder (commercial, expensive, what we use at work) performs adequately on a P3 450 with 384MB of RAM, most of the time.
Seriously, what else is your machine doing while you're playing Quake3 or similar? It's not like you think "Well, that's the compile started, what can I do while I'm waiting? I know, how about a quick game of UT!"
I remember seeing a post to a newsgroup (c.o.l I think) from someone who'd just installed a bunch of RAM and was wondering why it was all being used. One reply explained what it was being used for (buffers and cache, of course), and said "no point having it if it's not going to be used!" Same thing applies here.
Sure, it's a bit rough on those of us with lower-end PCs (I have a GeForce3 Ti200, but "only" a P3 700), but them's the breaks. Time moves on and machine specs increase. Are you saying that games makers shouldn't target the machines that are going to be being sold at the time the game comes out? We'd still be playing Pac Man and Space Invader clones if that were the case. (Hell, Pong for that matter...)
Besides, I can assure you that games coders aren't thinking "How can I waste a few more cycles and a bit more RAM?". They're thinking of all the cool things that they wanted to do in their last game, but couldn't because the target hardware wasn't up to it, and how best to optimise it so that it runs acceptably on this game's target hardware.
Now, if you were to argue that an increasing number of games companies appear to be using flashy graphics and sound as a substitute for good, old fashioned gameplay, you might be on to something, but that's a discussion for another thread.
doesn't seem to even know enough to differentiate between GB (gigabytes) and Gb (gigabits)
I live in the UK, and I have seen plenty of adverts for PCs, from brand name manufacturers (Time, Dell, etc) that purpotedly come with 40Gb hard drives, and 128Mb RAM...
Personally, I blame a combination of not-too-clueful PR/marketing people, and Word auto "correcting" the double capitals.
its not like CD's where you get something 'better' having an original...
Oh yes you do:
1) Guaranteed quality - no chance of an incomplete, low bit rate copy of a CD that skips part way through the track 2) Guaranteed availability - no searching for tracks, only to find that the host is too busy, just go to the website and there it is, quick 'n' easy 3) Peace of mind - no worries about getting busted for having illegal copies of music on your machine, no worrying about your ISP logging your activity, etc
Okay, so 3) is pushing things a little, but I'd pay for 1) and 2). In fact, I only started using P2P apps to find music when I was unable to find a way to legally, quickly obtain a certain song that I just had to listen to (I get like that sometimes). I couldn't even find anywhere online to buy a CD single of it, let alone download it.
20 minutes later, I'd installed Kazaa (yeah, I know now, and it's history), found it, and downloaded it. At the time, I would have happily paid 2 or 3 pounds sterling (roughly 3-5 dollars, or around 10 times as much as in the article) to have legally downloaded a high quality electronic copy.
Of course there will be people who will download illegal copies regardless of how cheap, quick and easy it is to buy them legally, but I think you'd be surprised how many people will think "how cheap? At that price, I might as well just buy it"
IANAGD (IANA Game Developer), but I imagine that a very large chunk of the work of creating a modern game goes into level design, graphics, sound, music, fmv, etc, and another chunk into gameplay. I would have thought that the actual coding involved, whilst certainly non-trivial and a large amount of work, probably makes up a relatively small amount of the effort.
Not only that, but if the code is well designed and modular, a lot of it should be pretty easy to port from one platform to another. The hard parts will be the bits that do hardware access, ie the graphics and sound routines. Id seems to have done pretty well on that score - just avoid any platform-specific libraries as far as possible.
Note that I'm not trying to say that releasing a game for multiple platforms is easy, just that it does not require four times the effort to release for four platforms as for one.
The ISPs you mention can all give away CDs because that's not what they charge for. They charge you for a service, namely, an internet connection. Without that, the CD is useless.
The analogy for the music industry would be to give away the music, but charge you for the use of equipment to allow you to hear it.
This isn't hypocrisy, this is the free market economy in operation.
Think about it - the whole point of the free market is that the cost of goods and services will reach the level that people are willing to pay for them. If more and more people are downloading, copying or otherwise getting their music for free, it appears that the market is saying that music is overpriced. Thus, the price should fall to a level which people are prepared to pay. (Note that there is no guarantee that this level is not zero)
By outlawing the methods by which people obtain music for free, you are in effect attempting to artificially keep the price of music higher than the market wants it to be, thus making the market less free.
Incidently, your comment about free speech is wrong. Freedom of speech guarantees just that - the freedom to say whatever you want. It does not, and should not, guarantee you an audience. In other words, you should have the freedom to speak, and I should have the freedom not to listen. I should also have the freedom to make whatever comments about what you say that I like, including calling it socialist propaganda:-)
You don't sound politically incorrect, you sound ignorant.
Most ISPs operate on a "cost sharing" basis, in that they charge each other for network bandwidth used. In practice, for two ISPs that peer with each other, the amount of bandwidth each uses on the other's network roughly balances out, so the one with the higher usage pays the other relatively little.
According to this article, American ISPs are not doing this with African ISPs. As the poster comments, that means that if an African ISP sends traffic over AOL's network, it pays, but AOL does not pay for traffic sent over the African ISPs' network.
Jesus, you didn't even have to follow the link to see that.
Slashdot Mirror
None of those things were rights that were removed and then restored. They are all rights that had never existed, that were granted after varying degrees of protest, including outright civil unrest.
"Never" was a little strong; I'd have said "rarely" and added "without a fight".
Cheers,
Tim
If I create an app in RPM format that needs, say libgimp, then my package will depend on the _entire_ gimp package being installed.
Which, imho, is a real pain. Mandrake's KDevelop package "requires" Gimp to be installed. I didn't really want another 20+meg of data on my drive that I'm unlikely to ever use, so I used the --nodeps option to rpm - and it worked just fine. I can only assume that KDevelop requires icon editing software, or something, rather than the Gimp itself.
Another example is the development version of Qt3 that comes with the Mandrake KDE3 packages. It requires the MySQL and Postgres libraries, amongst others, which in turn require the rest of their respective packages. If you want to compile KDE3 apps on a Mandrake (8.2) system, you have to install not one but two databases.
Follow that sort of procedure for everything you want to install, and the amount of data that is installed that you don't want could well be larger than the amount that you do. I know that disk space is cheap these days, but it's still not free.
Cheers,
Tim
He was referring to the saying "May you live in interesting times", which is apparently of Chinese origin.
The idea is that, whilst that *sounds* good, if you think about it, "interesting times" are generally either full of danger or hardship (eg war, recession, etc).
Don't worry, the poster wasn't being racist.
Cheers,
Tim
You can't switch to a virtual terminal, though.
That's because X still has control of the keyboard, and so the system cannot respond to your keypresses.
9 times out of 10, though, when X crashes (which is infrequent), I can ssh in from a friend's machine and kill it off. It's a bit of a pain, but as a programmer I realise that no software of even moderate complexity can ever be 100% bug free, especially something as large as X, that is used in such a wide variety of situations and on so many different types of hardware.
Cheers,
Tim
You can also put something similar in the system-wide login/profile file, so that *all* processes started by *all* users inherit a set of default limits.
Failing that (and I agree that it would be hard to come up with a sensible limit), I believe that you can enable kernel-level process accounting, whereby such things are enforced strictly by the kernel on a cumulative basis - ie each user gets an allocation of CPU time and memory. How they use that is up to them, but once they exhaust it, they can't have any more. I may be wrong, though - that may just be for logging their usage, for "charge-per-use" schemes.
In any case, the best that the memory manager could possibly do is reserve some percentage of the available memory for root, as is done with hard drive space. Of course, as X runs as root, (and has to in order to access the hardware, iirc) that wouldn't help. I'm not really very well versed with the internals of the Linux kernel, but I suspect that the memory manager "just" manages requests for memory, without regard to whether those requests are sensible. There's only so much a system can do to protect itself from malicious or badly written code that is running on it.
Cheers,
Tim
You can use the ulimit command to set an upper limit on the memory available to any process started by the shell under which it is issued.
Just putting something like ulimit -m 200000 in your startx script should limit X's memory usage to 200meg.
ulmit can also set upper limits on available CPU time, core file size, etc. Bash has a builtin version, so do man bash and look for ulimit for more details.
If they are found guilty
What do you mean, if? They already have been found guilty - everything that's going on now is to determine how they should be punished.
All of the arguing is over what they can and cannot be forced to do, both legally and technologically (eg is it technologically possible to force them to offer a "modular" version of Windows, etc)
Cheers,
Tim
You miss the point. The legislation requires that the information be kept for 7 years.
This is not a case of "if you keep it, we'll have the right to make you give us a copy of it". This is the UK government saying "you will keep this data, and surrender it on demand, and all at your own expense".
I doubt that the legislation will apply to "hobbyist" servers, but you can bet that there will be stiff financial and/or criminal penalties for "real" ISPs that refuse to implement the necessary data retention procedures.
Cheers,
Tim
On the contrary, this knowledge will merely make me whine and poke at Amaya too.
I work in a web agency, and have had real problems in the past with certain designers writing/editing pages that look fine in IE, but don't actually work in either browser (or, on occasion, display at all in Netscape). They then proclaim the page to be finished, never having checked it in Netscape (despite a contractual obligation to support it), leaving it for the rest of us to fix.
I would like to see a "debug mode" in all browsers, whereby any badly-formed HTML is clearly flagged as such. Then you could tell at a glance if there was a problem, and what it was.
Cheers,
Tim
You can install a fully-functional Mabdrake Linux 8.2 system off a single CD. The other 2 are for extra stuff that is not required for the system - eg a choice of mail clients, text editors, less commonly used window managers, etc. Most of the development packages (eg header files, etc - not gcc and other compilers) are also on the second and third CDs.
Whilst it is true that you can install Windows from a single CD, you don't get half as much as you do with a Linux distribution, even allowing for the (substantial) duplication of software.
As for the number of discs, if this really was a problem, I'm sure more distros would be offering a DVD option - the majority of new PCs these days come with DVD drvies, after all.
Cheers,
Tim
I'll bite.
The numbering scheme currently used by AMD for their Athlon chips reflects the speed of the equivalently-performing Intel chip. ie the Athlon XP 2200+ performs at the same level as the P4 2.2GHz, despite running at a lower frequency.
If AMD just quoted the raw GHz figures, everyone would assume that they are significantly slower than they actually are. They would also lose out on price comparisons - on dabs.com, the Athlon 1900+ is only about £8 cheaper than the P4 1.5GHz. The P4 1.9GHz, however, is almost £60 cheaper, a much larger difference (just over a third of the total price of the P4, in fact).
(Note that I am in no way affiliated with dabs.com - they're just the first website I think of when looking at PC component prices.)
Cheers,
Tim
I talked to the system's marketing manager. He told me almost all of the people who got extra service were stealing it on purpose, which contradicted the installer's comments. I don't know who to believe, but I am suspicious.
Personally, I'd believe the installer. The marketing manager is a manager, and so a) may well not know what conditions are really like out in the field, and b) regardless, must reiterate the company's official stance.
The installer, on the other hand, is "just an ordinary joe", and (as long as he doesn't get quoted and named) can pretty much say whatever he wants.
Cheers,
Tim
How can you even bitch about product placement as a way for companies to make money? It's completely non-intrusive.
I challenge anyone to watch the Inspector Gadget movie and not cringe when the Yahoo! billboard falls on the car.
Besides, with more people becoming more aware of, and sensitive towards, advertisements, more people will find product placement intrusive. As other posters have also pointed out, product placement in cartoons, documentaries and fantasy programs simply will not work. What product could you possibly place non-intrusively in Lord of the Rings or Star Trek, for exmaple?
Cheers,
Tim
On the same note, programmers should get paid to write software. Not to just sit around and sell the same software over and over again.
You're not a programmer, are you? Not a professional one, I mean.
I am, and I can assure you that we do not get paid anything for repeat sales of the software we write. I do a 9 - 5:30 job, and get paid a set wage, just like anyone else in a "real" job. How my company makes that money, whether it be by creating bespoke applications or licencing shrink-wrapped ones, has no bearing on how we get paid. (FWIW, we mostly do bespoke work, but we do try to reuse/license as much as possible) If we stop working, and sit around doing nothing, eventually we'll be fired.
I really wish that certain people around here would stop equating "profesional programmer" with "lazy one-hit wonder that sits around living off the profits of as little work as possible". That may or may not be true for the companies for which they work, but it certainly is not true for the programmers, or anyone else working for the company. Even a company that makes all its money from licensing fees still needs to support the products, and release bug fixes and new versions. This all takes work.
In short, the day I stop working, whether it be on new code, bug fixes, enhancements, estimates, or whatever, is the day my company lets me go and gets someone else in, just like it is for every other professional programmer.
Cheers,
Tim
Yup, that's fine. Unauthorised copying and distribution of copyrighted works is, as you say, a crime.
What it is not, however, is anything at all like boarding and taking a vessel at sea by force, and robbing and probably killing its crew. That is piracy, this is merely copying stuff you're not supposed to.
I can't object to being called a criminal (and most of us are, in one way or another, at some point in our lives, even if it's just speeding a little because we're late), but I can and do object to being called a murderer because I copy stuff without permission from time to time.
Cheers,
Tim
with the class documentation open in a web browser at all times since it's so hard to remember the inconsistent naming
You really ought to get a decent IDE. A couple of reasonably good, free ones are AnyJ (http://netcomputing.de/), which is free as in beer for Linux but pay-for for Windows, and NetBeans (http://netbeans.org), which is free as in beer and speech (SPL, not GPL). (Standard disclaimer: I have nothing to do with either group or IDE, other products exist, etc)
I'm assuming that you use a text editor for coding; trust me, once you've used an IDE with built in compilation and debug support, and a CodeInsight-like feature (which suggests possible completions for what you are typing, either automatically or on demand - no more having to have the docs open to remember what methods a class has!), you won't want to go back.
The only downside is that, being pure-Java apps, you're going to have to have a reasonably beefy machine. JBuilder (commercial, expensive, what we use at work) performs adequately on a P3 450 with 384MB of RAM, most of the time.
If you have the resources, why not use them?
Seriously, what else is your machine doing while you're playing Quake3 or similar? It's not like you think "Well, that's the compile started, what can I do while I'm waiting? I know, how about a quick game of UT!"
I remember seeing a post to a newsgroup (c.o.l I think) from someone who'd just installed a bunch of RAM and was wondering why it was all being used. One reply explained what it was being used for (buffers and cache, of course), and said "no point having it if it's not going to be used!" Same thing applies here.
Sure, it's a bit rough on those of us with lower-end PCs (I have a GeForce3 Ti200, but "only" a P3 700), but them's the breaks. Time moves on and machine specs increase. Are you saying that games makers shouldn't target the machines that are going to be being sold at the time the game comes out? We'd still be playing Pac Man and Space Invader clones if that were the case. (Hell, Pong for that matter...)
Besides, I can assure you that games coders aren't thinking "How can I waste a few more cycles and a bit more RAM?". They're thinking of all the cool things that they wanted to do in their last game, but couldn't because the target hardware wasn't up to it, and how best to optimise it so that it runs acceptably on this game's target hardware.
Now, if you were to argue that an increasing number of games companies appear to be using flashy graphics and sound as a substitute for good, old fashioned gameplay, you might be on to something, but that's a discussion for another thread.
Cheers,
Tim
Yes and no - there was also the fear that the system would crash, and crash, and crash... and so would the backup(s).
Multiple redunancy is useless if all the systems suffer from the same bug, that kicks in at the same time.
Cheers,
Tim
In the UK, the train movements from power stations etc. are available and are on regular schedules.
;-)
Really?
They should start carrying fare paying passengers - they'd make an absolute fortune
Cheers,
Tim
doesn't seem to even know enough to differentiate between GB (gigabytes) and Gb (gigabits)
I live in the UK, and I have seen plenty of adverts for PCs, from brand name manufacturers (Time, Dell, etc) that purpotedly come with 40Gb hard drives, and 128Mb RAM...
Personally, I blame a combination of not-too-clueful PR/marketing people, and Word auto "correcting" the double capitals.
Cheers,
Tim
its not like CD's where you get something 'better' having an original...
Oh yes you do:
1) Guaranteed quality - no chance of an incomplete, low bit rate copy of a CD that skips part way through the track
2) Guaranteed availability - no searching for tracks, only to find that the host is too busy, just go to the website and there it is, quick 'n' easy
3) Peace of mind - no worries about getting busted for having illegal copies of music on your machine, no worrying about your ISP logging your activity, etc
Okay, so 3) is pushing things a little, but I'd pay for 1) and 2). In fact, I only started using P2P apps to find music when I was unable to find a way to legally, quickly obtain a certain song that I just had to listen to (I get like that sometimes). I couldn't even find anywhere online to buy a CD single of it, let alone download it.
20 minutes later, I'd installed Kazaa (yeah, I know now, and it's history), found it, and downloaded it. At the time, I would have happily paid 2 or 3 pounds sterling (roughly 3-5 dollars, or around 10 times as much as in the article) to have legally downloaded a high quality electronic copy.
Of course there will be people who will download illegal copies regardless of how cheap, quick and easy it is to buy them legally, but I think you'd be surprised how many people will think "how cheap? At that price, I might as well just buy it"
Cheers,
Tim
IANAGD (IANA Game Developer), but I imagine that a very large chunk of the work of creating a modern game goes into level design, graphics, sound, music, fmv, etc, and another chunk into gameplay. I would have thought that the actual coding involved, whilst certainly non-trivial and a large amount of work, probably makes up a relatively small amount of the effort.
Not only that, but if the code is well designed and modular, a lot of it should be pretty easy to port from one platform to another. The hard parts will be the bits that do hardware access, ie the graphics and sound routines. Id seems to have done pretty well on that score - just avoid any platform-specific libraries as far as possible.
Note that I'm not trying to say that releasing a game for multiple platforms is easy, just that it does not require four times the effort to release for four platforms as for one.
Cheers,
Tim
The ISPs you mention can all give away CDs because that's not what they charge for. They charge you for a service, namely, an internet connection. Without that, the CD is useless.
The analogy for the music industry would be to give away the music, but charge you for the use of equipment to allow you to hear it.
Cheers,
Tim
This isn't hypocrisy, this is the free market economy in operation.
:-)
Think about it - the whole point of the free market is that the cost of goods and services will reach the level that people are willing to pay for them. If more and more people are downloading, copying or otherwise getting their music for free, it appears that the market is saying that music is overpriced. Thus, the price should fall to a level which people are prepared to pay. (Note that there is no guarantee that this level is not zero)
By outlawing the methods by which people obtain music for free, you are in effect attempting to artificially keep the price of music higher than the market wants it to be, thus making the market less free.
Incidently, your comment about free speech is wrong. Freedom of speech guarantees just that - the freedom to say whatever you want. It does not, and should not, guarantee you an audience. In other words, you should have the freedom to speak, and I should have the freedom not to listen. I should also have the freedom to make whatever comments about what you say that I like, including calling it socialist propaganda
Cheers,
Tim
At the risk of sounding like a flamer...
You don't sound politically incorrect, you sound ignorant.
Most ISPs operate on a "cost sharing" basis, in that they charge each other for network bandwidth used. In practice, for two ISPs that peer with each other, the amount of bandwidth each uses on the other's network roughly balances out, so the one with the higher usage pays the other relatively little.
According to this article, American ISPs are not doing this with African ISPs. As the poster comments, that means that if an African ISP sends traffic over AOL's network, it pays, but AOL does not pay for traffic sent over the African ISPs' network.
Jesus, you didn't even have to follow the link to see that.
Cheers,
Tim