retrosteve writes: "Well, it's finally happened. Someone (Dave Barry) in the popular press has finally, explicitly and with a sense of humour, pointed out that Microsoft Windows doesn't get any more reliable or usable, no matter how many versions you buy."
if the same was said about linux, it would be taken as a threat, rather than a joke....
Furthermore, your analogy implies you think it's all a big game. Let's see. If the game is, first person to kill kz45 get's to fuck his mother, do I deserve to fuck her when I fill your head full of lead?
what the hell does this have to do with our discussion?
The point of that last paragraph is not to troll or insult you, but to demonstrate, albeit in an extreme way, that sometimes the rules of the game are not fair.
just because bill gates started out with money, doesn't mean the rules are not fair. His parents had to make the right decisions to keep that money.
IE. If I have a million dollars, and I have children, me giving my children money doesn't give them an unfair advantage against someone who doesn't have the money.
If you just bitch about life being unfair, you will never succeed.
You have yet to explain how he deserves what he has.
Because he successfully created an operating system that 99% of the population is using on their computers. What more reason does he need?
Microsoft (now) may or may not be abusing their power as a corporation. however, this is besides the point proving whether bill gates deserves hos fortune.
he didn't have any unusual advantages (he did, a wealthy background for one))
more hints of envy, I see. Just because his family is rich, doesn't mean he should be banished from ever making money again. It also doesn't automatically mean you will be successful, either. (if you quit bitching about others, and tried yourself, you might actually see my point).
So, perhaps he didn't deserve what he got, whatever you or anyone else has to say about it
if someone bets all their possessions in a high stakes poker game, and wins, do they not deserve the profits?
success is a mix between being at the right place at the right time, and skill.
You obviously have never experienced either of them. In practice they are completely different things. Communism is all about contorl of a single group. Open source is the exact opposite of that.
A rich man only makes one risk to become rich. I will use Bill Gates as an example. He took a risk when he first started Mircosoft. When he became rich he no longer had to make the kind of risk he made before.
From this statement alone, I can tell your are a complete moron. Do you realize how difficult it is to start a busineess and become rich? (90% of businesses fail).
A rich man doesn't take one risk to become rich. He usually takes 100's of risks, and fails at all of them except the one that made him rich. This doesn't equate to one risk.
When he became rich he no longer had to make the kind of risk he made before
This is true to a point, but money is finite.
The workers could all share public goods problems. If they all profit from their own work, they too can all share in the risk. Under Capitalism one man risks once to become rich and profits off others, thereafter. You are looking at Socialism with the precepts of Capitalism in your head. If there is ever true Socialism on this earth, then the rules of Capitalism would be destroyed and find Socialism in their place. In Socialism it would be possible for all workers to share in the risk of a company and to accordingly all take their own share of profit.
It's called public stock, and I believe there have been a countless number of millionaires from microsofts'.
In my opinion because Bill Gates took one risk he should not be allowed to profit off the work of thousands of his employees so he can add to his wealth of 80 billion. This is why I am Socialist and you are not, I do not feel it is some natural law, to allow these men to make so much off the work of others. Does Bill Gates not have enough money? Why could he possibly crave more?
Enjoy your life of envy.
Bill Gates gets what he deserves. He earned it, no matter what you or anyone else has to say about it.
You don't get it, do you? When some teenage haXXor goes and writes a Trojan, our grand justice system says lock him up with the murderers and pedophiles for the rest of his life. But if some "monied corporation" decides to covertly install spying software on all their consumers' computers, well, that's good for the economy! It maximizes their consumers' buying experiences! It provides value-added services for their responsible, commercial partners! To say otherwise would be un-american, anti-capitalist, and probably aiding some terrorists somewhere!
From your post, YOU obviously don't get it. When a teenager releases a trojan on the public, It causes millions and sometimes billions of dollars worth of damage.
I do feel people writing viruses should get community service / a hefty fine, rather than jail time.
Think about this: awhile back, I updated my linux server to the latest version of the kernal at the time. It corrupted my FS, and thus I lost months of valuable work. SHOULD LINUS BE RESPONSIBLE?
If the answer to this is yes, then software companies should also be responsible for releasing spyware.
It made perfect sense to me. If your product's license is not GPL-compatible (and that's not exactly difficult to achieve), you should stay away from looking at GPL code for ideas just as much as, for example, Kaffe developers must stay away from Sun's Java code. Otherwise, you open yourself up for legal action.
I don't agree with this. What about the other way around. (reverse-engineering). Taking a closed-source program, taking ideas from it, and releasing an open source equivalent. It's done all the time, and it's legal. Why shouldn't the opposite be legal as well?
I guess users should be able to charge the RIAA for distribution charges since they'll be using their own bandwidth and local machine's storage for the distribution of these silly.nap files, that is assuming, without having taken the time to read their new business model document, that this is still a file sharing peer to peer type system, but one which only hardcore capitalists will want to use.
Only if the RIAA can charge people for illegally sharing copyrighted materials.
Every linux distro that includes Samba is a potential lost sale for Microsoft. For every one of those lost sales, Microsoft has lost money. If one follows the logic train, RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, Debian, Slackware, Yellowdog, and countless others are stealing money out of Microsoft's pockets by costing them sales of Win2k.
This analogy doesn't make sense. If you are "pirating" microsoft's products, you obviously have a need for them, so by not purchasing a copy (and copying it instead), they DO lose money in the long run.
How about if GPL violations were rampant, and were supported by the majority of people. Does this make it "right"?
Large corporations won't stop needing software, and arguably, the quality of the software on the market may improve, since the money grubbers won't be around.
I think without the "money grubbers" around, the quality of software will decrease. Programmers will have NO incentive to continue working on something that has a few bugs here or there, if it's not bringing food onto the table. Take sourceforge as an example. I would say 90% of the software is either in beta stages, has serious work, or was discontinued due to lack of interest from the developers.
When you are charging for software, You will almost always have to stay one step ahead of your competition, otherwise people will not buy your product.
Well, I have news for you. It is a birth right. The number one thing that all of us do from the day we're born is copy, take in, and immitate. There is nothing inherently wrong, destructive, or self centered about copying
When it comes to copying something such as closed source software, "it's a birth right". But if I "copy" something such as the source to apache or bind, and use it in my corporate server (closed source), it's "a violation of our free rights". We have to draw the line somewhere. Freedom isn't selective.
Meanwhile, the Madonna's of the world lavish in wealth while being a relatively unproductive tiny minority. Not that I care about her wealth, but am pissed that it comes at the expense of screwing over productive people.
You're mixing two separate issues here. Mathematical formulas shouldn't be copyrighted, but music, I believe, should be. How is her talent and popularity a negative effect on someone else's? The reason it's a minority is also the reason she has so much money.
Exactly I mean if the software was $30, something everyone could afford I'd believe them. But when its $500 and its not worth $500, I'd sooner develop my own photoshop AKA gimp before paying for that.
if you feel it's not worth $500, they you shouldn't be "pirating" it wither. Otherwise you do have a need for it, and it is worth the pricetag.
If gimp was all that much better than it's win32 equivalent, there wouldn't be a piracy issue at all.
IT comes down to this, make money off of convience, not off of the product itself, its easier for me to go to a store and buy a CD, than to download it, burn it, etc etc. I'd pay to have it all done for me. I'll pay $10 and if its really good software, maybe $20, even $30, but theres no way I'm paying over $50 for any software nevermind $500.
Here is the problem. Companies shouldn't have to compete against people infringing on their copyrights. Coming back to your example, if you don't like the $500 pricetag on adobe photoshop, buy something else. (it's not like they have a monopoly over the entire market, a little program called photoimpact comes to mind. It's only $99, and it supports all adobe plugins).
Or how about this: Get a GNU/linux equivalent. They are free as in beer and speech.
The price of software isn't for you (individually) to determine. If they are selling it for $500, and it's a complete piece of shit, noone will buy it. (the price will also be lowered) If people are buying it, it must be a sign that the price is right.
Yes, it is illegal. But so long as companies like Microsoft abuse their position, lie to consumers, produce broken software, knowingly release bug-ladden insecure crap, and otherwise mistreat the public it is difficult to defend, on moral grounds, striking back at the evil empire.
Car companies do the same thing, do we call it our "right" to steal cars then? This is a bad example. If you feel a company is screwing the consumers, don't by their product.
Your microsoft FUD doesn't fool me:
if micosoft knowingly released bug-ridden software, why did they have a fix within a few days? I guess redhat does this too. As I recall, version 7 could be cracked into within 15 minutes of being connected to the internet. And don't even get me started on the linux kernel release with the FileSystem corruption bug. But I guess if you are releasing software for the good of the community, it doesn't apply.....
But there are those who pirate because they see it as striking at a morally bankrupt corporations heart.
Anyone who actually believes this, has not yet seen "the real world". Mostly people that are younger than 16 years old. if this were really the case, people should steal from 99% of the companies out there. The majority of companies have screws over someone else at one point in time. They just don't have something that can be inifinitly replicated.
The problem would be an unwillingness to go down to 20% profitability instead of 300%:) I mean if you're used to selling CD for $20 and it only costs $2.5 to print and $2 for artist/studio/percentage payoffs with everything above that going into "Profit Bin" why would you want to move your finger to change the situation?
you seemed to have left out the millions of dollars it costs for promotion. Maybe that should be split among the consumers of that CD.
As noted in this [oreillynet.com] editorial over at O'Reilley, how can you pull the plug on something that is decentralized? This is why people went to Kazaa and other P2P solutions after overly-centralized plump target Napster got emasculated. Long live P2P!!! Elvis has left the building!!!
explain how kazaa/morpheus is decentralized. (the media likes to use this buzzword, kinda like P2P) It is only decentralized for searches (the main server has no knowledge of the actual names of the files being shared, preventing liability of the server owner.
Downloading illegal music doesn't effect the artists at all. Who it does effect is the Recording industry, which already has more money than it knows what to do with. So it figures, hey.. having more money than all the third world contries combined isn't enough, let's start suing so we can make more, and see how easy it is to
I've herd this argument time and time again. "they have enough money, they don't need any more". W
Okay, so now we get into the real problem: Kazaa is unpoliceable.
If there were, for example, a road between Mexico and the US that had no checkpoints on it, it would be closed down. Similarly, Kazaa lets people exchange copyrighted material (a crime) and provides no means for police forces to catch them doing so. So it needs to be shut down.
unfortunatly, kazaa's cacheservers/headquarters reside in the netherlands, which CAN be controlled.
But I don't particularly support music companies because they regularly screw over artists. This is not justification for stealing music, just an interesting fact that no one is suing the recording industry for the theft they've done...
theft? THEFT? it's called BUSINESS. It happens ALL THE TIME. (that's why you get a lawyer to read through a contract, before signing it).
If you actually knew all companies were screwing "the little guy", you probably wouldn't buy very much in this world.
no, I just have knowledge of how the IP system works.
(unless kazaa has a secret cache server somnewhere), there is no way to know when a user will be around for routing. Otherwise, why use a centralized cache server at all?
It may work without the centralized server, but the average user (which makes up 99.9% of the 500,000 users connected ant any one given time) will not be able to do it. They will just move on to something with a type of "centralized" server. Such as gnutella,filenavigator,AG satellite, or Winmx.
Once all these type of services are gone, so is the vast amount of different files that you can find.
Your tangled mass of spaghetti code paths are probably full of almost incomprehensible little design decisions and seemingly out of place declarations and functions, but most of those were probably added as specific fixes for bugs encountered under real-world use.
This is a lesson to be learned. Engineer your code from the beginning. Use easy to understand commenting, and strucutured code. Although it takes some discipline, you will almost never have to reconsider "re-writing from scratch".
Slashdot Mirror
retrosteve writes: "Well, it's finally happened. Someone (Dave Barry) in the popular press has finally, explicitly and with a sense of humour, pointed out that Microsoft Windows doesn't get any more reliable or usable, no matter how many versions you buy."
if the same was said about linux, it would be taken as a threat, rather than a joke....
Furthermore, your analogy implies you think it's all a big game. Let's see. If the game is, first person to kill kz45 get's to fuck his mother, do I deserve to fuck her when I fill your head full of lead?
what the hell does this have to do with our discussion?
The point of that last paragraph is not to troll or insult you, but to demonstrate, albeit in an extreme way, that sometimes the rules of the game are not fair.
just because bill gates started out with money, doesn't mean the rules are not fair. His parents had to make the right decisions to keep that money.
IE. If I have a million dollars, and I have children, me giving my children money doesn't give them an unfair advantage against someone who doesn't have the money.
If you just bitch about life being unfair, you will never succeed.
You have yet to explain how he deserves what he has.
Because he successfully created an operating system that 99% of the population is using on their computers. What more reason does he need?
Microsoft (now) may or may not be abusing their power as a corporation. however, this is besides the point proving whether bill gates deserves hos fortune.
he didn't have any unusual advantages (he did, a wealthy background for one))
more hints of envy, I see. Just because his family is rich, doesn't mean he should be banished from ever making money again. It also doesn't automatically mean you will be successful, either. (if you quit bitching about others, and tried yourself, you might actually see my point).
So, perhaps he didn't deserve what he got, whatever you or anyone else has to say about it
if someone bets all their possessions in a high stakes poker game, and wins, do they not deserve the profits?
success is a mix between being at the right place at the right time, and skill.
stallman takes threatens to take me to court. It has happened in a countless number of cases.
BTW. If there is no control, it will not last.
You obviously have never experienced either of them. In practice they are completely different things. Communism is all about contorl of a single group. Open source is the exact opposite of that.
Really? What happens of I violate the GPL.
Hows that for NO control.
A rich man only makes one risk to become rich. I will use Bill Gates as an example. He took a risk when he first started Mircosoft. When he became rich he no longer had to make the kind of risk he made before.
From this statement alone, I can tell your are a complete moron. Do you realize how difficult it is to start a busineess and become rich? (90% of businesses fail).
A rich man doesn't take one risk to become rich. He usually takes 100's of risks, and fails at all of them except the one that made him rich. This doesn't equate to one risk.
When he became rich he no longer had to make the kind of risk he made before
This is true to a point, but money is finite.
The workers could all share public goods problems. If they all profit from their own work, they too can all share in the risk. Under Capitalism one man risks once to become rich and profits off others, thereafter. You are looking at Socialism with the precepts of Capitalism in your head. If there is ever true Socialism on this earth, then the rules of Capitalism would be destroyed and find Socialism in their place. In Socialism it would be possible for all workers to share in the risk of a company and to accordingly all take their own share of profit.
It's called public stock, and I believe there have been a countless number of millionaires from microsofts'.
In my opinion because Bill Gates took one risk he should not be allowed to profit off the work of thousands of his employees so he can add to his wealth of 80 billion. This is why I am Socialist and you are not, I do not feel it is some natural law, to allow these men to make so much off the work of others. Does Bill Gates not have enough money? Why could he possibly crave more?
Enjoy your life of envy.
Bill Gates gets what he deserves. He earned it, no matter what you or anyone else has to say about it.
If MS would let us look at their source code that would quickly settle this dispute. (but ohhh nooo, you cant do that becasue.. ... ... its a secret
this goes back to the old debate:
if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't mind the police searching through your house.
Microsoft doesn't want to release their source code, because it's their "right" not to. Or are rights only givin to people against business?
Maybe we should force coca-cola or pepsi to divulge their formulas, for the "good of man kind".
That the communist Chinese are doing a better job at creating a competitive market than the monopoly-friendly U.S.
who is the competition? linux and linux?
You don't get it, do you? When some teenage haXXor goes and writes a Trojan, our grand justice system says lock him up with the murderers and pedophiles for the rest of his life. But if some "monied corporation" decides to covertly install spying software on all their consumers' computers, well, that's good for the economy! It maximizes their consumers' buying experiences! It provides value-added services for their responsible, commercial partners! To say otherwise would be un-american, anti-capitalist, and probably aiding some terrorists somewhere!
From your post, YOU obviously don't get it. When a teenager releases a trojan on the public, It causes millions and sometimes billions of dollars worth of damage.
I do feel people writing viruses should get community service / a hefty fine, rather than jail time.
Think about this: awhile back, I updated my linux server to the latest version of the kernal at the time. It corrupted my FS, and thus I lost months of valuable work. SHOULD LINUS BE RESPONSIBLE?
If the answer to this is yes, then software companies should also be responsible for releasing spyware.
It made perfect sense to me. If your product's license is not GPL-compatible (and that's not exactly difficult to achieve), you should stay away from looking at GPL code for ideas just as much as, for example, Kaffe developers must stay away from Sun's Java code. Otherwise, you open yourself up for legal action.
I don't agree with this. What about the other way around. (reverse-engineering). Taking a closed-source program, taking ideas from it, and releasing an open source equivalent. It's done all the time, and it's legal. Why shouldn't the opposite be legal as well?
I guess users should be able to charge the RIAA for distribution charges since they'll be using their own bandwidth and local machine's storage for the distribution of these silly .nap files, that is assuming, without having taken the time to read their new business model document, that this is still a file sharing peer to peer type system, but one which only hardcore capitalists will want to use.
Only if the RIAA can charge people for illegally sharing copyrighted materials.
Tit for Tat
Every linux distro that includes Samba is a potential lost sale for Microsoft. For every one of those lost sales, Microsoft has lost money. If one follows the logic train, RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, Debian, Slackware, Yellowdog, and countless others are stealing money out of Microsoft's pockets by costing them sales of Win2k.
This analogy doesn't make sense. If you are "pirating" microsoft's products, you obviously have a need for them, so by not purchasing a copy (and copying it instead), they DO lose money in the long run.
How about if GPL violations were rampant, and were supported by the majority of people. Does this make it "right"?
Large corporations won't stop needing software, and arguably, the quality of the software on the market may improve, since the money grubbers won't be around.
I think without the "money grubbers" around, the quality of software will decrease. Programmers will have NO incentive to continue working on something that has a few bugs here or there, if it's not bringing food onto the table. Take sourceforge as an example. I would say 90% of the software is either in beta stages, has serious work, or was discontinued due to lack of interest from the developers.
When you are charging for software, You will almost always have to stay one step ahead of your competition, otherwise people will not buy your product.
Well, I have news for you. It is a birth right. The number one thing that all of us do from the day we're born is copy, take in, and immitate. There is nothing inherently wrong, destructive, or self centered about copying
When it comes to copying something such as closed source software, "it's a birth right". But if I "copy" something such as the source to apache or bind, and use it in my corporate server (closed source), it's "a violation of our free rights". We have to draw the line somewhere. Freedom isn't selective.
Meanwhile, the Madonna's of the world lavish in wealth while being a relatively unproductive tiny minority. Not that I care about her wealth, but am pissed that it comes at the expense of screwing over productive people.
You're mixing two separate issues here. Mathematical formulas shouldn't be copyrighted, but music, I believe, should be. How is her talent and popularity a negative effect on someone else's? The reason it's a minority is also the reason she has so much money.
Exactly I mean if the software was $30, something everyone could afford I'd believe them. But when its $500 and its not worth $500, I'd sooner develop my own photoshop AKA gimp before paying for that.
if you feel it's not worth $500, they you shouldn't be "pirating" it wither. Otherwise you do have a need for it, and it is worth the pricetag.
If gimp was all that much better than it's win32 equivalent, there wouldn't be a piracy issue at all.
IT comes down to this, make money off of convience, not off of the product itself, its easier for me to go to a store and buy a CD, than to download it, burn it, etc etc. I'd pay to have it all done for me. I'll pay $10 and if its really good software, maybe $20, even $30, but theres no way I'm paying over $50 for any software nevermind $500.
Here is the problem. Companies shouldn't have to compete against people infringing on their copyrights. Coming back to your example, if you don't like the $500 pricetag on adobe photoshop, buy something else. (it's not like they have a monopoly over the entire market, a little program called photoimpact comes to mind. It's only $99, and it supports all adobe plugins).
Or how about this: Get a GNU/linux equivalent. They are free as in beer and speech.
The price of software isn't for you (individually) to determine. If they are selling it for $500, and it's a complete piece of shit, noone will buy it. (the price will also be lowered) If people are buying it, it must be a sign that the price is right.
Yes, it is illegal. But so long as companies like Microsoft abuse their position, lie to consumers, produce broken software, knowingly release bug-ladden insecure crap, and otherwise mistreat the public it is difficult to defend, on moral grounds, striking back at the evil empire.
Car companies do the same thing, do we call it our "right" to steal cars then? This is a bad example. If you feel a company is screwing the consumers, don't by their product.
Your microsoft FUD doesn't fool me:
if micosoft knowingly released bug-ridden software, why did they have a fix within a few days? I guess redhat does this too. As I recall, version 7 could be cracked into within 15 minutes of being connected to the internet. And don't even get me started on the linux kernel release with the FileSystem corruption bug. But I guess if you are releasing software for the good of the community, it doesn't apply.....
But there are those who pirate because they see it as striking at a morally bankrupt corporations heart.
Anyone who actually believes this, has not yet seen "the real world". Mostly people that are younger than 16 years old. if this were really the case, people should steal from 99% of the companies out there. The majority of companies have screws over someone else at one point in time. They just don't have something that can be inifinitly replicated.
The problem would be an unwillingness to go down to 20% profitability instead of 300% :) I mean if you're used to selling CD for $20 and it only costs $2.5 to print and $2 for artist/studio/percentage payoffs with everything above that going into "Profit Bin" why would you want to move your finger to change the situation?
you seemed to have left out the millions of dollars it costs for promotion. Maybe that should be split among the consumers of that CD.
As noted in this [oreillynet.com] editorial over at O'Reilley, how can you pull the plug on something that is decentralized? This is why people went to Kazaa and other P2P solutions after overly-centralized plump target Napster got emasculated. Long live P2P!!! Elvis has left the building!!!
explain how kazaa/morpheus is decentralized. (the media likes to use this buzzword, kinda like P2P) It is only decentralized for searches (the main server has no knowledge of the actual names of the files being shared, preventing liability of the server owner.
Downloading illegal music doesn't effect the artists at all. Who it does effect is the Recording industry, which already has more money than it knows what to do with. So it figures, hey.. having more money than all the third world contries combined isn't enough, let's start suing so we can make more, and see how easy it is to
I've herd this argument time and time again. "they have enough money, they don't need any more". W
Okay, so now we get into the real problem: Kazaa is unpoliceable.
If there were, for example, a road between Mexico and the US that had no checkpoints on it, it would be closed down. Similarly, Kazaa lets people exchange copyrighted material (a crime) and provides no means for police forces to catch them doing so. So it needs to be shut down.
unfortunatly, kazaa's cacheservers/headquarters reside in the netherlands, which CAN be controlled.
But I don't particularly support music companies because they regularly screw over artists. This is not justification for stealing music, just an interesting fact that no one is suing the recording industry for the theft they've done...
theft? THEFT? it's called BUSINESS. It happens ALL THE TIME. (that's why you get a lawyer to read through a contract, before signing it).
If you actually knew all companies were screwing "the little guy", you probably wouldn't buy very much in this world.
no, I just have knowledge of how the IP system works.
(unless kazaa has a secret cache server somnewhere), there is no way to know when a user will be around for routing. Otherwise, why use a centralized cache server at all?
It may work without the centralized server, but the average user (which makes up 99.9% of the 500,000 users connected ant any one given time) will not be able to do it. They will just move on to something with a type of "centralized" server. Such as gnutella,filenavigator,AG satellite, or Winmx.
Once all these type of services are gone, so is the vast amount of different files that you can find.
Your tangled mass of spaghetti code paths are probably full of almost incomprehensible little design decisions and seemingly out of place declarations and functions, but most of those were probably added as specific fixes for bugs encountered under real-world use.
This is a lesson to be learned. Engineer your code from the beginning. Use easy to understand commenting, and strucutured code. Although it takes some discipline, you will almost never have to reconsider "re-writing from scratch".
neither is the cost of living, so it all wquals out in the end.