Well, I think there's a fundamental difference between "we're crippling your hardware" and "we're putting in extra hardware that you can optionally purchase". Putting in extra CPUs, extra sticks of RAM, extra disk drives that you won't get access to until you pay more is fine, they didn't have to deliver that. I think an extension of that is putting in more powerful hardware or bigger drives than you've spec'ed, because it makes economic sense. You wanted 500 GB, they figured it was better to put in a 1 TB disk and give you half. If you flip it around, banning that practice would mean they can only sell it to you in big increments, all or nothing. The customers don't really want that because there's no such thing as free hardware. They'd like to pay for only what they use and no more. Consider it "gouging" if you will but there's nothing stopping you from buying whole CPUs and RAM sticks and drives. Just expect fhat for 100% of the hardware you'll pay 100% of the price even if you only use 30%...
Agreed. If anything I think we will be running into that wall slowly, simply by not having the year-over-year improvements like we're used to. I'd be very surprised if Intel just issues a press release one day that said "You know that 18nm process tech we've been working on? we've hit a brick wall and it's not going to happen."
Sometimes, sometimes it looks like they just duplicated effort moving at much slower speed like the radeon/radeonhd drivers. Branching is a quite necessary tool in OSS, diverging forks not so much. That usually just means there's too different goals or too much ego on one and the same project. That doesn't include the forks where pretty much all the development switches to a fork, like say xorg fork where the xfree project was essentially dead. Or some other not development-related stuff happening like MySQL getting bought out.
And I think you can extend that to names that don't actually infringe trademarks, but is sufficiently close that someone would make a trademark lawsuit. Very few open source projects have the resources to fight over a name, even if they would eventually get the case dismissed.
Excel and Powerpoint aren't great, but their main brand was Microsoft Office until they got brand recognition on their own. So:
Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice: 1/2-1/2 MSIE vs Firefox: Internet Explorer, hello? 1-0 Outlook vs Thunderbird: As a hint to the calendaring functionality. 1-0 Windows vs Ubuntu: Not great but what makes windows pop up on your machine. 1-0 Windows Media Player vs Amarok: Media player? 1-0 Photoshop vs Gimp? P-h-o-t-o-shop! 1-0 Quicken vs GnuCash - Agreed, 0-1 to free software here
Total score: 5.5-1.5
Maya is more what I'd consider a professional application at $3500 MSRP, names matter little and doesn't really belong. Twitter is not so much software as it is a service, not sure exactly what open source to compare against either. What's the OSS variety of Twitter?
If I was a boss, or it was my own company, I'd implement Linux. Period. If people complained, they can get either accept it or get the hell out.
Try that style in public management and you'll be on the street before you even got to sit in your office chair. In the private sector, you can often be a hardliner because of the bottom line says you're profitable, nobody say how you should run this business (or LOB, division, department) because you know that best. Public offices often deliver quite intangible services which generally aren't charged to the customers like a private company would. And when it comes to private companies, in practice it's a very narrow chain of command to argue with.
In the public sector, very often your job is to justify the number of employees and your budget necessary. Why do we need X people and X million dollars to run a city planning office? And everybody from the press to politicians to interest organizations will butt in on the process. In the end it doesn't matter how efficient you run, it's how efficient it seems to be run. You could run an extremely tight ship with ten people and a $1 million budget but if you've given the impression this can be solved by a handful people on a shoestring budget, you will fail. While if you've convinced them that it really takes 50 men and a $10 million budget, you're golden.
Particularly when it comes to politicians, they are press tools more than anything. If the press requests a comment on their "outrageous Linux spending" then 99 out of 100 politicians will find a way to put themselves on the attacking end as they seem aggressive against government bloat and wasted money, which everybody agrees there's too much of. Very few want to stand up for the project and say this is money well spent, because they know there'll be little proof to show they're right. I'm sure you've figured by now that TCO studies can be written to give pretty much the concolusion you want, so you can end up with a political diaster that "everyone" agrees was a bad decision. The kind of studies Microsoft loves to pay for and whoever punched through Linux can't afford.
It's YOUR money, you just agree to let them have a portion to support the social contract.
Don't abuse the words "social contract" as if it were an individual contact. If so, show me where I signed it. Nor did I vote for it, and even if I boycotted the election that is hardly consent. It is important in the sense that the right to govern is given by the people, not some divine right, royal heritage, nobility, military force or something like that but the people forces their will on the individuals. That I could escape the jurisdiction of the contract by leaving the country is not the same as being able to abstain from it, nor is it certain that I could, that any other country would accept me or that it'd be better there. Being the smallest evil does not make it voluntary.
Some don't recognize the contract at all (anarchists), some only recognize negative rights, some only at the most basic level of positive rights like the right to a fair trial (which would require neutral courts, which would require taxes). On the other extreme of the scale are those who'd give up all property rights and most any other right if the social contract required it, communists and Marxist socialists, with most people somewhere in between. You're beating down an open door, regimes without consent of the governed are universally despised. The question is rather how much the governed may impose on the individual, as opposed to individual freedom.
I live in one of the more socialist countries in Europe, and there's plenty that I would call undue meddling in my life. I can't go buy a beer in the shop on 7 PM on a Saturday, because the sale closes at 6 PM by law. I can't in any way complain about the democratic process (we're a monarchy, but it's not practically relevant), we have a good selection of political parties, regular and reliable elections every four years and while I in some cases can blame the government for running their own way in this case I'm convinced it's because we have too many busybodies and nanny state proponents in the people.
I just don't think it's right even if a majority thinks so, that kind of interference just shouldn't be part of the social contract. Who will stop the people from grabbing too much power? What stops the people from taking too much taxes, from taking your property simply because they're in the majority? There is a lot of talk of the balance of power within the branches of government, but there's very little balance outside it, the government is an instrument of the people over the individual. In some ways I guess I want it too, I wouldn't want every lone nut be able to do anything. But I definitively don't want too much of it either, and it seems the slope is only slippery in one direction...
Let me see if I understand your complaint - a rare bug with workarounds is given extremely low priority and that's indicative of a general problem with FOSS software? What do you propose as a change to the FOSS model of development to improve the engineering?
Well, first here we have a user. He sure as hell wouldn't have found the workaround. Then it gets reported to an administrator, who can't find any known bug (assuming he searched, but I would first) who then spends time building a test case. Then it goes to a bug triager who knows about five year old bugs and can identify this as a dupe and provide a workaround.
1. 99% of users would never find that workaround 2. After that effort by three people, nothing will really be done to fix it
Even better are the projects that drive down bug count by attrition, WINE is rather notorious for this I've noticed. Every few WINE versions - who are on a biweekly schedule - they'll ask you to retest even though there's been no patches towards the bug, so when you grow tired of that shit the bug is "solved".
As for rarity, any bug that doesn't happen on a developer's machine for a developer's use case is by assumption rare unless a real shit storm of complaints prove otherwise. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty much central to OSS that people fix the stuff they wanted fixed, no bug is too obscure if you're willing to fix it yourself. But it also very much creates an A-list and a B-list of bugs to get fixed, and you go in B. It's actually slightly easier with commercially paid support who don't really have an agenda of their own, what the customers most want fixed is their priority.
Of course no, a single anecdote from single project doesn't prove anything. Sometimes I've had good experiences, but also many bad. Most annoying ar those where a bug report only leads to more and more work until it far outweighs my interest in fixing the bug. I'm guessing that's often the case for the OSS developer on the other side of the table too, which is why he is pushing 90% of the work right back at me. Often the choices then end up: a) keep using buggy software, b) spend way too much time getting it fixed or c) buy something that works.
I wish there was more of an organized bounty system, you'd pledge towards some bug fix or feature request, then developers could take it on. The pledges would be kept by a trust until the developer claims to be done (or withdraw), then the pledgers vote to confirm / claim incomplete / reject that it has been done. You'd probably need to have some sort of arbitration system to deal with formal disputes, who could take a processing fee off the pledge. Combine that with an eBay-like reputation system and I think it should work out well without too much hassle. I know it sounds a little like rent-a-coder and I don't mean it like that, more of an organized way of doing small custom work inside existing projects.
You think like a nerd but you'll get nowhere in court. If you have copyrighted something, the court will protect it if it's converted to a number or hex or a wave file or split or obfuscated as long as the court is convinced the purpose is to distribute the work.
For a trivial example, you can make two files that'll XOR together to form a song, and both binary blobs will be pretty much random and contain "nothing" of the original. Try distributing two such files that just "happen" to make a copyrighted song, and see if you'll win. In nerd think that sounds like they've just copyrighted every arbitrary string of data, and in a way they have. Just like you can make an almost endless bunch of passworded zipfiles and password pairs that'll decrypt to the same file.
Which is another part that nerds don't "get", a nerd would say that two files with equal hash is identical. Legally, they might not be because it all depends on how you got those bits even if they are exactly the same. In particular, if you make a copy of an illegally copy or distribution your copy is illegal too. Even if you have a legal source that would produce something exactly identical, like shifting it from your own CD. Nonsense? Well, in a way but as long as you have a system of "authorized" and "unauthorized" bits that's how it'll be.
The time when you did security by making sure you've dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's should be long over. Anything built now should have some clear security layers that prevent input validation attacks, cross scripting attack, database injection attacks and so on. The application may be unfinished but most of those errors sounds like it'll be a steaming pile when it's done too.
Probably a good example of the difference between theoretical mathematics and practical reality. I really doubt there is a proof that the digits of pi are randomly distributed, so you could not with certainty say 50-50.
It has already been done, there were HDCP exploits before AACS was cracked which allowed people with DVI/HDMI input cards to make perfect digital copies for reencodes. It took a quite hefty raid array and hundreds of GB of space - and the input cards were rare and expensive too, but it could be done and was done. Or so I read about on a forum I visited;)
Seriously, if the company who made it and has most of the original developers can't figure the clusterfuck out, what's to believe that the community will fix it? If you can't run a sustainable business of it yourself, what's to think a third party will? I don't think it should be hidden under a chair that sometimes open sourcing it just a much nicer exit strategy than to stop selling the binary and leave your customers hanging. By giving away a code base (that was otherwise soon left unsellable) and dropping the price to $0 (technically not a requirement, but implied) you manage to make your product stay relevant a little longer, if you have other products to sell it gives brand and goodwill and you probably get some free maintenance done by the community. That doesn't really change that it failed in the market in the first place or that it's really being abandoned. I'm not saying the majority of open source projects are like that, but I can think of a few examples off the top of my hat that fit that description. I won't mention names due to the inevitable "I'm not dead yet" from both OSS developers who still care about it.
I've tried Left4Dead 2, and Team Fortress 2 in Wine, and both of them run about 25-35 fps slower than the native Windows client. That simply doesn't cut it. It's putting good hardware to waste. What you propose there is ludicrus. Native clients will always run faster than Wine.
The difference is not because you're running a non-native game, it's because Microsoft has put a lot more resources into DirectX than the open source community has been able to put into reimplementing D3D and 3D game optimizations in OpenGL. WINE is not an emulator, code runs at native speed so if you optimized the native performance to be on par with DirectX so would WINE. No, don't hold your breath for that though.
So while it might seem like a good short term idea to just make "wine compatible" games, what happens when the next wine version hits, and things aren't working properly anymore. Anyone who has used Wine enough will tell you that some older versions work better for certain games, etc.
WINE has to support many binary applications that depend on all sorts of quirky behavior in Windows, and that is hard. Also they're often doing black box debugging trying to figure out what went wrong. If someone takes a little effort with the source code, making it do things the "right" way and being able to trace what happens in the application too they can achieve much with little effort.
Don't get me wrong, I don't suggest WINE is a good place to start. But very often you have an existing Windows code base, or cross platform support has been scrapped in the initial release. I can kinda see they want to know if it's a hit or flop first in order to commit as little as possible, rather than having spent money on a flop and ports of it.
At least if you're talking about somewhat older games it's possible you have a newer graphics card where it doesn't matter that Linux is 30 fps slower because it's 30 fps slower than 200 fps. Not so great if you want the latest FPS to run at max speed, but many RTS/TBS/adventure/sim other games do fine with reduced performance.
Don't get me wrong, I want native games. But having some semi-official or official WINE support is a huge step up from not recognizing other OSes at all. Don't chew out the people that are at least trying to make a little effort for not doing enough.
(...) you can make the case that Canonical are much less profitable and don't have the sorts of clients which need to kind of support provided by having programmers which work on Linuxes core software.
I think the last bit is really important. A lot of the core kernel stuff that Red Hat does are things that aren't very relevant to the average desktop user like heavy multi-CPU/NUMA/virtualization/network/other server loads. The average *buntu user would be much better served if they e.g. funded a flash replacement or ran a laptop compatibility testing program or shaved 10 seconds off the boot process. Don't get me wrong, there's things in the core systems that would help the desktop too but I don't feel that's what is holding it back.
It's not freaking oxygen. Go without it. That's what voting with your wallet means - or should mean.
That would be the Soviet Russian version "voting with your rubles", either you take the one choice you get from the government or you go without. Want a car? It's Lada or nada. No, voting with your wallet is extremely tightly connected with the American idea of market economy, where many companies offer products and services and you as the consumer choose which of them succeed or fail in the marketplace. To the degree it applied to not buying at all, it would be because there's no product you'd want at a price you could afford. The way bands and movies become hits or flops are examples of a working market, but in how you get it delivered there's no competition at all. It's DRM or nothing.
Voting with your dollar has never been very successful against collusion and monopolies that make all your choices worse. By far the most successful boycotts have been when a competitor's product has been almost similar but differ in some critical aspect like not being from a specific country, not using animal testing, not using child labor or something like that. The difference between a Hollywood blockbuster and the closest independent film is way, way greater than between a real fur coat and an imitation. Of course if enough people boycotted for long enough it might work, but it's like driving in a nail with a screwdriver. It's not the right tool for the job, but if you beat it hard and long enough it might still work. Just don't pretend that's what it's supposed to be used for or what it's good at.
Of course we believe other countries should have freedom of speech, which is why we invade them. Obviously, it is even worth killing thousands upon thousands of people (or more) for it. Me thinks that this won't last, as any court in the US would see this as problematic. The 1st Amendment *clearly* is not limited to citizens.
True, but unless you are a US citizen or apply for a permit you have no right to be allowed into the US. Many, many people are turned away at the border or departed and it's not a breach of their rights in any way. And I don't know what if any international agreements the US has with the UK, but I'm quite sure they'd contain a provision to reject anyone they wish. So legally no, I don't think he's got a leg to stand on. Not because of his actions, but because he was never entitled to in the first place.
Do you seriously have to ask? Does the moderators really think this interesting? Hello, Intel is a HDCP licensee. That typically means you've signed one of the most anal contracts that make your standard EULA look like a saint. Intel would be sued for about a kazillion dollars for breach of contract if they ever did anything like that. No, they're not certifiably insane.
People want content, the hardware is just a means to that end. As long as the copyright holder can exclusively decide what DRM will be applied you have no possibility to vote with your wallet short of doing completely without it. Also it's practically impossible to avoid DRM-capable hardware, 99% of all computers today have a DVD drive and thus pay a CSS license and thus support DRM. All graphics cards from Intel, AMD and nVidia support HDCP. Same with any modern TV or monitor.
The only way people win is when DRM is broken, but they are committed to continue selling it. That is the only reason you can still buy DVDs, otherwise they would have moved to DVD 2.0 with new and better DRM long ago. I just hope the combined mass of cable boxes, TVs, recievers, graphics cards, monitors and so on now is big enough they will not be able to implement a new standard. That is how DRM dies, not trying to make them go for a DRM free platform. That we already know they won't.
This is not the key as much as it is the key generation matrix. I'm guessing it has been reverse engineered, otherwise it'd be the biggest leak ever as only the people issuing HDCP keys should have this - not even any of the HDCP-compliant device manufacturers. This is not the same as one device key that can be revoked, it is totally and irrecoverably broken. Now is only the question if they have the balls to try getting rid of all HDCP ports and push a new standard or not.
Horse armor (which didn't have an actual effect) is the kind of "I won't be buying it, but lol if you want to..." DLC and doesn't bother me at all. Regarding your other point, I'm guessing you played Dragon Age? What bothered me there was not that they had side-arcs for sale - there was quite many side quests to do anyway, I finished it at lvl 20 without getting any DLC - but that the damn salesmen were covert. Wasn't enough to piss me off into pirating it and still bought Awakening and will buy DA2, but seriously... that is plain rotten.
I have bills to pay. I know he does to. Obviously $2.99 covers the cost, so his bills are paid.
It seems you make the assumption that just because I'm selling it, I'm making money on it. That's quite naive, obviously I'm looking to make money overall but any particular sale might not be and even if I do make a margin on all sales the lower margin may not be enough to cover my fixed costs. I'll ignore the actual losses like loss leaders, promotional offers, clearance sales and so on since they're not very relevant to software, as the marginal cost is so low.
But to return to games, just because all games end up in the bargain bin does not mean they could have broken even on bargain bin margins alone. They've simply exhausted the market at full retail price and is scraping the bottom of the barrel. A book might need both hardcover and pocket book sales to break even. A movie might need box office sales and DVD sales and TV sales and merchandise and so on to break even. There's of course smashing hits and total flops that'd earn/lose money regardless, but they're the exception on the rule.
Obviously $3 covers the cost of the copy. But if you only looked at that cost, a pirated one at $0 also didn't cost him anything but it hardly pays his bills. Does $3 pay his bills? Well obviously that depends on what his sales figures and what his bills are, maybe it does but also maybe it doesn't. Maybe he needs $6 sales too to have an acceptable pay. Of course it's highly unlikely your $3 makes a difference, but a thousand people thinking like that will.
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Well, I think there's a fundamental difference between "we're crippling your hardware" and "we're putting in extra hardware that you can optionally purchase". Putting in extra CPUs, extra sticks of RAM, extra disk drives that you won't get access to until you pay more is fine, they didn't have to deliver that. I think an extension of that is putting in more powerful hardware or bigger drives than you've spec'ed, because it makes economic sense. You wanted 500 GB, they figured it was better to put in a 1 TB disk and give you half. If you flip it around, banning that practice would mean they can only sell it to you in big increments, all or nothing. The customers don't really want that because there's no such thing as free hardware. They'd like to pay for only what they use and no more. Consider it "gouging" if you will but there's nothing stopping you from buying whole CPUs and RAM sticks and drives. Just expect fhat for 100% of the hardware you'll pay 100% of the price even if you only use 30%...
No, it should be a boolean, inscribed to false in stone - or at least ROM, and none of the rewritable kind.
Agreed. If anything I think we will be running into that wall slowly, simply by not having the year-over-year improvements like we're used to. I'd be very surprised if Intel just issues a press release one day that said "You know that 18nm process tech we've been working on? we've hit a brick wall and it's not going to happen."
Sometimes, sometimes it looks like they just duplicated effort moving at much slower speed like the radeon/radeonhd drivers. Branching is a quite necessary tool in OSS, diverging forks not so much. That usually just means there's too different goals or too much ego on one and the same project. That doesn't include the forks where pretty much all the development switches to a fork, like say xorg fork where the xfree project was essentially dead. Or some other not development-related stuff happening like MySQL getting bought out.
And I think you can extend that to names that don't actually infringe trademarks, but is sufficiently close that someone would make a trademark lawsuit. Very few open source projects have the resources to fight over a name, even if they would eventually get the case dismissed.
Excel and Powerpoint aren't great, but their main brand was Microsoft Office until they got brand recognition on their own. So:
Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice: 1/2-1/2
MSIE vs Firefox: Internet Explorer, hello? 1-0
Outlook vs Thunderbird: As a hint to the calendaring functionality. 1-0
Windows vs Ubuntu: Not great but what makes windows pop up on your machine. 1-0
Windows Media Player vs Amarok: Media player? 1-0
Photoshop vs Gimp? P-h-o-t-o-shop! 1-0
Quicken vs GnuCash - Agreed, 0-1 to free software here
Total score: 5.5-1.5
Maya is more what I'd consider a professional application at $3500 MSRP, names matter little and doesn't really belong.
Twitter is not so much software as it is a service, not sure exactly what open source to compare against either. What's the OSS variety of Twitter?
Poor translating tools. This page gives me:
angefressen
eroded {adj} {past-p}
angefressen [ugs.]
pissed off {adj} [vulg.]
angefressen [Metall]
pitted {adj}
angefressen [fig.] [ugs.]
fretted {adj} {past-p} [annoyed]
angefressen [ugs.: verärgert]
peeved {adj} [coll.]
miffed {adj} [coll.] [not before noun]
Sounds like a fairly common use of the word. Half-eaten isn't even on the list...
If I was a boss, or it was my own company, I'd implement Linux. Period. If people complained, they can get either accept it or get the hell out.
Try that style in public management and you'll be on the street before you even got to sit in your office chair. In the private sector, you can often be a hardliner because of the bottom line says you're profitable, nobody say how you should run this business (or LOB, division, department) because you know that best. Public offices often deliver quite intangible services which generally aren't charged to the customers like a private company would. And when it comes to private companies, in practice it's a very narrow chain of command to argue with.
In the public sector, very often your job is to justify the number of employees and your budget necessary. Why do we need X people and X million dollars to run a city planning office? And everybody from the press to politicians to interest organizations will butt in on the process. In the end it doesn't matter how efficient you run, it's how efficient it seems to be run. You could run an extremely tight ship with ten people and a $1 million budget but if you've given the impression this can be solved by a handful people on a shoestring budget, you will fail. While if you've convinced them that it really takes 50 men and a $10 million budget, you're golden.
Particularly when it comes to politicians, they are press tools more than anything. If the press requests a comment on their "outrageous Linux spending" then 99 out of 100 politicians will find a way to put themselves on the attacking end as they seem aggressive against government bloat and wasted money, which everybody agrees there's too much of. Very few want to stand up for the project and say this is money well spent, because they know there'll be little proof to show they're right. I'm sure you've figured by now that TCO studies can be written to give pretty much the concolusion you want, so you can end up with a political diaster that "everyone" agrees was a bad decision. The kind of studies Microsoft loves to pay for and whoever punched through Linux can't afford.
It's YOUR money, you just agree to let them have a portion to support the social contract.
Don't abuse the words "social contract" as if it were an individual contact. If so, show me where I signed it. Nor did I vote for it, and even if I boycotted the election that is hardly consent. It is important in the sense that the right to govern is given by the people, not some divine right, royal heritage, nobility, military force or something like that but the people forces their will on the individuals. That I could escape the jurisdiction of the contract by leaving the country is not the same as being able to abstain from it, nor is it certain that I could, that any other country would accept me or that it'd be better there. Being the smallest evil does not make it voluntary.
Some don't recognize the contract at all (anarchists), some only recognize negative rights, some only at the most basic level of positive rights like the right to a fair trial (which would require neutral courts, which would require taxes). On the other extreme of the scale are those who'd give up all property rights and most any other right if the social contract required it, communists and Marxist socialists, with most people somewhere in between. You're beating down an open door, regimes without consent of the governed are universally despised. The question is rather how much the governed may impose on the individual, as opposed to individual freedom.
I live in one of the more socialist countries in Europe, and there's plenty that I would call undue meddling in my life. I can't go buy a beer in the shop on 7 PM on a Saturday, because the sale closes at 6 PM by law. I can't in any way complain about the democratic process (we're a monarchy, but it's not practically relevant), we have a good selection of political parties, regular and reliable elections every four years and while I in some cases can blame the government for running their own way in this case I'm convinced it's because we have too many busybodies and nanny state proponents in the people.
I just don't think it's right even if a majority thinks so, that kind of interference just shouldn't be part of the social contract. Who will stop the people from grabbing too much power? What stops the people from taking too much taxes, from taking your property simply because they're in the majority? There is a lot of talk of the balance of power within the branches of government, but there's very little balance outside it, the government is an instrument of the people over the individual. In some ways I guess I want it too, I wouldn't want every lone nut be able to do anything. But I definitively don't want too much of it either, and it seems the slope is only slippery in one direction...
Let me see if I understand your complaint - a rare bug with workarounds is given extremely low priority and that's indicative of a general problem with FOSS software? What do you propose as a change to the FOSS model of development to improve the engineering?
Well, first here we have a user. He sure as hell wouldn't have found the workaround. Then it gets reported to an administrator, who can't find any known bug (assuming he searched, but I would first) who then spends time building a test case. Then it goes to a bug triager who knows about five year old bugs and can identify this as a dupe and provide a workaround.
1. 99% of users would never find that workaround
2. After that effort by three people, nothing will really be done to fix it
Even better are the projects that drive down bug count by attrition, WINE is rather notorious for this I've noticed. Every few WINE versions - who are on a biweekly schedule - they'll ask you to retest even though there's been no patches towards the bug, so when you grow tired of that shit the bug is "solved".
As for rarity, any bug that doesn't happen on a developer's machine for a developer's use case is by assumption rare unless a real shit storm of complaints prove otherwise. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty much central to OSS that people fix the stuff they wanted fixed, no bug is too obscure if you're willing to fix it yourself. But it also very much creates an A-list and a B-list of bugs to get fixed, and you go in B. It's actually slightly easier with commercially paid support who don't really have an agenda of their own, what the customers most want fixed is their priority.
Of course no, a single anecdote from single project doesn't prove anything. Sometimes I've had good experiences, but also many bad. Most annoying ar those where a bug report only leads to more and more work until it far outweighs my interest in fixing the bug. I'm guessing that's often the case for the OSS developer on the other side of the table too, which is why he is pushing 90% of the work right back at me. Often the choices then end up: a) keep using buggy software, b) spend way too much time getting it fixed or c) buy something that works.
I wish there was more of an organized bounty system, you'd pledge towards some bug fix or feature request, then developers could take it on. The pledges would be kept by a trust until the developer claims to be done (or withdraw), then the pledgers vote to confirm / claim incomplete / reject that it has been done. You'd probably need to have some sort of arbitration system to deal with formal disputes, who could take a processing fee off the pledge. Combine that with an eBay-like reputation system and I think it should work out well without too much hassle. I know it sounds a little like rent-a-coder and I don't mean it like that, more of an organized way of doing small custom work inside existing projects.
You think like a nerd but you'll get nowhere in court. If you have copyrighted something, the court will protect it if it's converted to a number or hex or a wave file or split or obfuscated as long as the court is convinced the purpose is to distribute the work.
For a trivial example, you can make two files that'll XOR together to form a song, and both binary blobs will be pretty much random and contain "nothing" of the original. Try distributing two such files that just "happen" to make a copyrighted song, and see if you'll win. In nerd think that sounds like they've just copyrighted every arbitrary string of data, and in a way they have. Just like you can make an almost endless bunch of passworded zipfiles and password pairs that'll decrypt to the same file.
Which is another part that nerds don't "get", a nerd would say that two files with equal hash is identical. Legally, they might not be because it all depends on how you got those bits even if they are exactly the same. In particular, if you make a copy of an illegally copy or distribution your copy is illegal too. Even if you have a legal source that would produce something exactly identical, like shifting it from your own CD. Nonsense? Well, in a way but as long as you have a system of "authorized" and "unauthorized" bits that's how it'll be.
The time when you did security by making sure you've dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's should be long over. Anything built now should have some clear security layers that prevent input validation attacks, cross scripting attack, database injection attacks and so on. The application may be unfinished but most of those errors sounds like it'll be a steaming pile when it's done too.
Probably a good example of the difference between theoretical mathematics and practical reality. I really doubt there is a proof that the digits of pi are randomly distributed, so you could not with certainty say 50-50.
It has already been done, there were HDCP exploits before AACS was cracked which allowed people with DVI/HDMI input cards to make perfect digital copies for reencodes. It took a quite hefty raid array and hundreds of GB of space - and the input cards were rare and expensive too, but it could be done and was done. Or so I read about on a forum I visited ;)
Seriously, if the company who made it and has most of the original developers can't figure the clusterfuck out, what's to believe that the community will fix it? If you can't run a sustainable business of it yourself, what's to think a third party will? I don't think it should be hidden under a chair that sometimes open sourcing it just a much nicer exit strategy than to stop selling the binary and leave your customers hanging. By giving away a code base (that was otherwise soon left unsellable) and dropping the price to $0 (technically not a requirement, but implied) you manage to make your product stay relevant a little longer, if you have other products to sell it gives brand and goodwill and you probably get some free maintenance done by the community. That doesn't really change that it failed in the market in the first place or that it's really being abandoned. I'm not saying the majority of open source projects are like that, but I can think of a few examples off the top of my hat that fit that description. I won't mention names due to the inevitable "I'm not dead yet" from both OSS developers who still care about it.
Clever Clandestine, however hardly an actual practical possibility. These titles lack linguistic characteristics critical to the release recognition.
I've tried Left4Dead 2, and Team Fortress 2 in Wine, and both of them run about 25-35 fps slower than the native Windows client. That simply doesn't cut it. It's putting good hardware to waste. What you propose there is ludicrus. Native clients will always run faster than Wine.
The difference is not because you're running a non-native game, it's because Microsoft has put a lot more resources into DirectX than the open source community has been able to put into reimplementing D3D and 3D game optimizations in OpenGL. WINE is not an emulator, code runs at native speed so if you optimized the native performance to be on par with DirectX so would WINE. No, don't hold your breath for that though.
So while it might seem like a good short term idea to just make "wine compatible" games, what happens when the next wine version hits, and things aren't working properly anymore. Anyone who has used Wine enough will tell you that some older versions work better for certain games, etc.
WINE has to support many binary applications that depend on all sorts of quirky behavior in Windows, and that is hard. Also they're often doing black box debugging trying to figure out what went wrong. If someone takes a little effort with the source code, making it do things the "right" way and being able to trace what happens in the application too they can achieve much with little effort.
Don't get me wrong, I don't suggest WINE is a good place to start. But very often you have an existing Windows code base, or cross platform support has been scrapped in the initial release. I can kinda see they want to know if it's a hit or flop first in order to commit as little as possible, rather than having spent money on a flop and ports of it.
At least if you're talking about somewhat older games it's possible you have a newer graphics card where it doesn't matter that Linux is 30 fps slower because it's 30 fps slower than 200 fps. Not so great if you want the latest FPS to run at max speed, but many RTS/TBS/adventure/sim other games do fine with reduced performance.
Don't get me wrong, I want native games. But having some semi-official or official WINE support is a huge step up from not recognizing other OSes at all. Don't chew out the people that are at least trying to make a little effort for not doing enough.
(...) you can make the case that Canonical are much less profitable and don't have the sorts of clients which need to kind of support provided by having programmers which work on Linuxes core software.
I think the last bit is really important. A lot of the core kernel stuff that Red Hat does are things that aren't very relevant to the average desktop user like heavy multi-CPU/NUMA/virtualization/network/other server loads. The average *buntu user would be much better served if they e.g. funded a flash replacement or ran a laptop compatibility testing program or shaved 10 seconds off the boot process. Don't get me wrong, there's things in the core systems that would help the desktop too but I don't feel that's what is holding it back.
It's not freaking oxygen. Go without it. That's what voting with your wallet means - or should mean.
That would be the Soviet Russian version "voting with your rubles", either you take the one choice you get from the government or you go without. Want a car? It's Lada or nada. No, voting with your wallet is extremely tightly connected with the American idea of market economy, where many companies offer products and services and you as the consumer choose which of them succeed or fail in the marketplace. To the degree it applied to not buying at all, it would be because there's no product you'd want at a price you could afford. The way bands and movies become hits or flops are examples of a working market, but in how you get it delivered there's no competition at all. It's DRM or nothing.
Voting with your dollar has never been very successful against collusion and monopolies that make all your choices worse. By far the most successful boycotts have been when a competitor's product has been almost similar but differ in some critical aspect like not being from a specific country, not using animal testing, not using child labor or something like that. The difference between a Hollywood blockbuster and the closest independent film is way, way greater than between a real fur coat and an imitation. Of course if enough people boycotted for long enough it might work, but it's like driving in a nail with a screwdriver. It's not the right tool for the job, but if you beat it hard and long enough it might still work. Just don't pretend that's what it's supposed to be used for or what it's good at.
Of course we believe other countries should have freedom of speech, which is why we invade them. Obviously, it is even worth killing thousands upon thousands of people (or more) for it. Me thinks that this won't last, as any court in the US would see this as problematic. The 1st Amendment *clearly* is not limited to citizens.
True, but unless you are a US citizen or apply for a permit you have no right to be allowed into the US. Many, many people are turned away at the border or departed and it's not a breach of their rights in any way. And I don't know what if any international agreements the US has with the UK, but I'm quite sure they'd contain a provision to reject anyone they wish. So legally no, I don't think he's got a leg to stand on. Not because of his actions, but because he was never entitled to in the first place.
Do you seriously have to ask? Does the moderators really think this interesting? Hello, Intel is a HDCP licensee. That typically means you've signed one of the most anal contracts that make your standard EULA look like a saint. Intel would be sued for about a kazillion dollars for breach of contract if they ever did anything like that. No, they're not certifiably insane.
People want content, the hardware is just a means to that end. As long as the copyright holder can exclusively decide what DRM will be applied you have no possibility to vote with your wallet short of doing completely without it. Also it's practically impossible to avoid DRM-capable hardware, 99% of all computers today have a DVD drive and thus pay a CSS license and thus support DRM. All graphics cards from Intel, AMD and nVidia support HDCP. Same with any modern TV or monitor.
The only way people win is when DRM is broken, but they are committed to continue selling it. That is the only reason you can still buy DVDs, otherwise they would have moved to DVD 2.0 with new and better DRM long ago. I just hope the combined mass of cable boxes, TVs, recievers, graphics cards, monitors and so on now is big enough they will not be able to implement a new standard. That is how DRM dies, not trying to make them go for a DRM free platform. That we already know they won't.
This is not the key as much as it is the key generation matrix. I'm guessing it has been reverse engineered, otherwise it'd be the biggest leak ever as only the people issuing HDCP keys should have this - not even any of the HDCP-compliant device manufacturers. This is not the same as one device key that can be revoked, it is totally and irrecoverably broken. Now is only the question if they have the balls to try getting rid of all HDCP ports and push a new standard or not.
Horse armor (which didn't have an actual effect) is the kind of "I won't be buying it, but lol if you want to..." DLC and doesn't bother me at all. Regarding your other point, I'm guessing you played Dragon Age? What bothered me there was not that they had side-arcs for sale - there was quite many side quests to do anyway, I finished it at lvl 20 without getting any DLC - but that the damn salesmen were covert. Wasn't enough to piss me off into pirating it and still bought Awakening and will buy DA2, but seriously... that is plain rotten.
I have bills to pay. I know he does to. Obviously $2.99 covers the cost, so his bills are paid.
It seems you make the assumption that just because I'm selling it, I'm making money on it. That's quite naive, obviously I'm looking to make money overall but any particular sale might not be and even if I do make a margin on all sales the lower margin may not be enough to cover my fixed costs. I'll ignore the actual losses like loss leaders, promotional offers, clearance sales and so on since they're not very relevant to software, as the marginal cost is so low.
But to return to games, just because all games end up in the bargain bin does not mean they could have broken even on bargain bin margins alone. They've simply exhausted the market at full retail price and is scraping the bottom of the barrel. A book might need both hardcover and pocket book sales to break even. A movie might need box office sales and DVD sales and TV sales and merchandise and so on to break even. There's of course smashing hits and total flops that'd earn/lose money regardless, but they're the exception on the rule.
Obviously $3 covers the cost of the copy. But if you only looked at that cost, a pirated one at $0 also didn't cost him anything but it hardly pays his bills. Does $3 pay his bills? Well obviously that depends on what his sales figures and what his bills are, maybe it does but also maybe it doesn't. Maybe he needs $6 sales too to have an acceptable pay. Of course it's highly unlikely your $3 makes a difference, but a thousand people thinking like that will.