Yeah, it's been a long time since I had to deal with FORTRAN.
It's not clear whether the person who made that typo was at JPL at the same time as I was, but that was certainly the only place I've been that had aggressive FORTRAN language bigots.
Space cowboys abounded there, so I doubt there was ever code review or anything like that. If it compiles, Shoot it into Space! Would be nice to laugh at the managers who signed off on that though.
Best quote: Q: 'If I buy these songs on your service â" and they're locked to my phone â" what happens when I upgrade my phone in six months' time?' A: 'Well, I think you know the answer to that.'"
I had a phone crash that apparently only affected my memory stick. I lost stuff a lot more valuable than the stupid DRM'ed ring tones/music on it, but still. It's not the first time it's happened to me and... Nevermore...
I'm sure nearly every one of us has had it happen. All of a sudden your Windows PC slows to a crawl for no apparent reason.
"nearly everyone" on this, the so-called bastion of Linux bigotry?
I once suffered a software bug in a program we were developing at work where instead of exiting, the program would go into the background and hang in a spinning loop (don't ask why and not my code). I had hangs on my desk top from time to time, but I thought it was evolution being stupid (I hate that program). Come to find out that I had a load average over a hundred and had had it for an extended period of time. Nice to know that even an ancient RHEL can withstand that load without breaking down.
And you neglect to point out that it did nothing and that UNIX systems were the first to learn how to protect against worms as a result.
It did nothing except propagate, which was bad enough, but its primary entrance vector was sendmail binaries compiled with unfortunate debugging code that was effectively a passwordless root login.
So what was the primary lesson to be learned? Binaries distributed without source code and not rebuilt on a server under a watchful eye are a bad idea - true.
Windows Vista doesn't just cache more aggressively, though that's certainly one valid complaint. An OS generally should never page live VM pages out to disk except when there is memory contention. That means that prefetched data in the disk cache should drop to darn near zero before you start seeing paging traffic. If it doesn't, something is badly wrong. That said, this is just one of many significant memory problems with Vista.... The OS growing to consume all available memory is a virtue is only valid if the OS uses it sensibly. If it squanders it and then ends up ejecting useful pages as a result, that is not a good thing no matter how you look at it....
Ah, that sounds like you get it.
I was there when the accounting functions in Linux were changed to report O/S cached memory and in many respects, the subsequent bitching and whining was similar to what I've seen here with regards to Microsoft Vista usage.
Measuring true VM efficiency is a black art and is highly dependent upon the work load.
I won't offer any comment with regards to your Vista-specific comments, I do not do Microsoft Windows. Aggressive caching in memory is a VERY good thing. Unused memory is wasted memory. I suspect that as you guys grow your user base around Microsoft Vista, enough people will be around to calm down the Chicken Littles at least with regard to apparent memory usage.
Except that Vista does graceful caching and cedes RAM when an application wants it. Forgot that part, hm?
...
Specifically, this is one of the items Windows 7 should address. So your casual effort to make Windows look good completely ignores the fact your comment is not topical in the least and altogether ignores the central complaint.
We heard all the same sort of astroturfing here before and after Microsoft Vista's initial release. The folks who dared say something other than that Microsoft Vista was the greatest O/S tended to get flamed and modded down.
Vista has generated a ton of hidden revenue. I work for a very large company with a Microsoft site license that is presumably for Vista now, except that other than the team certifying it for enterprise use, no one uses it. It's rather a statement that people have paid a fortune for Microsoft Vista and are afraid to use it. The same will be true for Microsoft 7. I hardly see us skipping ahead to untested (by our guys) software.
This leads to your browser taking up to a minute or two to come back to usability.
O.K. so you have a large enough resident set size of currently running processes that you've exceeded available core and put the O/S into thrash mode. Any O/S will do that. RAM is fast, disk is slow.
Except it doesn't really, just like every MS VM it often decides that keeping system cache is more important than keeping applications in memory and so it decides to swap out "infrequently" used code and data.
O/S cache includes executable pages of memory. Poor decisions on what to keep in cache make and break performance nowadays when basic hardware speeds, primarily main memory and disk have not kept up with advances in CPU speed.
The problem is when you go to switch from your photo app to your browser after not having used the browser for 30 minutes Windows has to swap it back in, in the meantime it might have just been using that ram to hold autosave files that were never re-read.
The hardest problem a VM has to solve is what to do with anonymous VM pages, ie pure unsaved data that has no backing store on disk, as from say an executable image or data file. If you were modifying images in your photo app (and they may well be modified by the application before it hits main memory if you're dealing with a compressed format) you are looking at one of the worst-case scenarios for a VM to optimize - a memory hog. Those pages can only be written out to a swap file/partition and rarely can be written into congusous portions of the disk so that they can be paged back in quickly.
Ditto for the case of the browser, only more so, since web browsing has gotten sooooo expensive in this day and age of multimedia web browsing.
The distinction between anonymous VM pages and backing store VM pages is an important one. If there's backing store, then you can always optimize your disk to arrange for files, executables, etc. to have their blocks laid out on disk in some sort of optimal fashion for paging back into memory.
Modern Unix filesystems tend to do a pretty good of keeping things organized on disk until the disk gets extremely full. I gather the Microsoft Windows users are expected to do this themselves, but the point remains the same.
What you're _actually_ describing is a hardware limitation in dealing with memory hogs and if you are running into that sort of thing a lot, I would suggest you upgrade your hardware.
And to all the idiots who responded with "it's like instant on my machine", well duh! You're not running the same equivalent workload and have not approached the thrash threshold.
I would have loved to have seen something meaningful criticizing the Microsoft VM, but frankly you haven't described anything that any other virtual memory O/S is prone to.
Oh and if anyone attempts to patent defragging swap space, PRIOR ART. You heard it here first and it's an obvious concept.
(And yes, I am now in the habit of shutting down Opera before starting World Of Warcraft on my Mac, I get better frame rate that way).
Anyway, I'd hope to be able to help. Like I said, where do I sign up? Is it with Canonical, or is there a generic "Linux" marketing effort someplace?
The problem is that there is NO generic Linux effort. We all have our favorite projects that we work on and the sum total in a myriad of different varieties is the OS called Linux.
My suggestion would be to pick out a project that you particularly like and approach the developers on that project and offer your services. I would certainly have welcomed you particularly as few people understand what XEmacs really is.
You might even just try applying for work at Canonical. They have money and can pay you for your services.
the incompetent sub-humans who've been running our country for 8 years would never be able to manage it in a million years.
Your numbers are suspect. Subhumans have been running the USA for over a century. They have had more than enough time to learn how to cover their own misdeeds.
When the Patriot Act passed I said that even if you have no reason to distrust Bush, what about the person who comes after him?
Since the "Patriotic Act" was composed of pieces of stuff we successfully beat down that were proposed first during the Clinton administration, allow me to predict that Obama will bring no change to it.
You do realize that Nixon was never impeached nor convicted of anything right?
He resigned first and was pardoned by the first and only unelected President.
The lesson that he kept too many records was not lost on his successors.
It isn't like Nixon was another no eventful minor era in the history of the united states. You should at least have a basic understanding of it if your going to open your mouth on it.
Personal attacks aside, the point is that 700 days of email server records dont just vanish.
Of course not, but as the Clinton administration proved, it is not punishable - "no controlling authority". The Obama administration which is already starting out with corruption will do the same. Status quo.
They started to impeach Dick Nixon over too many records kept and the only reason it didn't stick was that he resigned first.
In a few years we'll be talking about missing emails from Obama's White House. Nothing to see, move along.
When you have not had an honest President since Taft over a century ago, it is in NO ONE's best interest to have accurate records.
Old timers crack me up. Ones that are skeptical of object oriented programming. Ones who think you can waterfall a huge project. I'd like just one of them to run a startup and waterfall Version 1.0 of their web-app (which, they wouldn't because the web is a fad, unlike their punch cards).
Hmmm. Old timer? Check. Skeptical of object oriented programming? Check (functional programming FTW!). Dislike the waterfall development model? Check.
If I had to lay blame on anything, I'd lay it on CS degree programs. I've seen too many clueless kids with fancy paper proclaiming them Highly Educated. Perhaps as much blame can be attached to fad languages. Perhaps there is a connection.
Oh well, as sarcastically as you put it:
soon enough we'll see the errors in our ways and go back to time honored methods like waterfall. We'll abandon "scripting languages" like Ruby or C and use assembler like god intends.
I agree with you in spirit (quibble - C is not a "scripting" language and is as much of a problem as an assembly language attitude). I hate the term "scripting language", by the way. Interpreted computer languages are not in the slightest inferior to compiled languages. _Real_ old-timers know that...
Now Get Off My Lawn and hand me that deck of punch cards over there son. I've got a SNOBOL program to finish debugging.
Hell, any half educated kid would have at least heard OF them, if not (knowingly) listened to them.
Charles Schultz is dead. I first heard of Beethoven as a kid reading Peanuts. I did not learn to appreciate his music for another decade or so.
Old as I am, I never heard any Beatles music while they were still a group. The lyrics are useful to know in Asian Karaoke bars, but other than that, I just do not care.
Do you actually understand how Neilsen ratings are obtained
Probably not.
For the offline games, I would suspect they ask selected people to fill out a diary, same as they do with TV ratings, and the numbers will depend on the honesty of the people being polled[1]. For the online games, Blizzard knows exactly how much connect time a given account uses, but would they tell? (And would the guys who are playing multiple accounts at the same time count extra?)
A number they do not give, is out of the console gamers, what _was_ the average number of minutes played per week? Particularly in comparison to the 11+ hours WoW got. Inquring minds want to know!
[1] I was not, the one time I got a Nielsen diary, I just filled in whatever show I thought deserved a ratings boost.
Corporations cost money to taxpayers to support. Roads, hospitals, schools, utilities, emergency services, military protection, etc. are all expected by corporations as part of local services.
Untrue for the most part and a sweeping generalization like that ignores the benefits of having a corporation do business in the local area (employment, etc.).
You are partially correct, in that if all profits, capital spending, payroll and (possibly) product sales is moved out of a taxation jurisdiction, then that jurisdiction will suffer. There needs to be some balance and you can look at the tradeoffs that were made in the automotive industry with Japan to see some of them.
Lower the taxes too far, and those huge business moving to your nation will bleed you dry.
No that's not a problem with taxation. Lower the taxes and EVERYONE will come.
There are many ways for politicians to come to terms with organizations who do business on their turf. In the 1970s, my parent's church wanted to buy some adjacent property and expand the church. The city of San Luis Obispo said "Yes, but... we want you to pay for a street extension along one side". So, they did.
I am far more distrustful of politicians who have only their own interests to attend to, than corporations who have to keep their consumers and employees happy.
Why is it that outrage over tax-evasion is focused only on big corporations for exercising legal choices while your neighbour may be "cheating" the government out of thousands in taxes each year?
It buys votes.
If the millions of individual taxpayers actually had to pay what they were supposed to, you would see an immediate change in how government spends money. Cheating only makes the problem worse!
Yes and no. There are too many taxes at all levels for full disclosure to be feasable (see my partial listing a few posts above). The people may want it, but legislators will NEVER vote for it.
No, because "cheating" does not make any difference in the end. Microsoft, as big as it is, could be taxed 100% and not substantially affect the US government budget.
I'm going to reword your last statement to bring this back on topic.
If the millions of individual computer users actually had to pay what they were supposed to for their software, you would see an immediate change in software licensing practices and software quality. Cheating only makes the problem worse!
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Yeah, it's been a long time since I had to deal with FORTRAN.
It's not clear whether the person who made that typo was at JPL at the same time as I was, but that was certainly the only place I've been that had aggressive FORTRAN language bigots.
Space cowboys abounded there, so I doubt there was ever code review or anything like that. If it compiles, Shoot it into Space! Would be nice to laugh at the managers who signed off on that though.
Best quote: Q: 'If I buy these songs on your service â" and they're locked to my phone â" what happens when I upgrade my phone in six months' time?' A: 'Well, I think you know the answer to that.'"
I had a phone crash that apparently only affected my memory stick. I lost stuff a lot more valuable than the stupid DRM'ed ring tones/music on it, but still. It's not the first time it's happened to me and ... Nevermore ...
I'm sure nearly every one of us has had it happen. All of a sudden your Windows PC slows to a crawl for no apparent reason.
"nearly everyone" on this, the so-called bastion of Linux bigotry?
I once suffered a software bug in a program we were developing at work where instead of exiting, the program would go into the background and hang in a spinning loop (don't ask why and not my code). I had hangs on my desk top from time to time, but I thought it was evolution being stupid (I hate that program). Come to find out that I had a load average over a hundred and had had it for an extended period of time. Nice to know that even an ancient RHEL can withstand that load without breaking down.
Cut & paste from top for posterity:
top - 10:54:37 up 36 days, 2:29, 30 users, load average: 113.60, 113.20, 112.
Tasks: 301 total, 113 running, 188 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 94.0% us, 4.8% sy, 0.2% ni, 1.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 1034520k total, 957552k used, 76968k free, 89720k buffers
Swap: 4192924k total, 2248672k used, 1944252k free, 154304k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
16348 steve 15 0 319m 177m 9552 S 58 17.6 3080:25 opera
(The rest of the process table was full of instances of the program under development).
It's kind of fun to know that one process can kill the King of the Desktop, and a hundred+ processes cannot kill the not-ready-for-the-Desktop.
You're comparing opening up regedit, browsing through a tree of values, and modifying one with brain surgery and rocket science???
Hey! `FOR I = 1 . 10' once crashed a space probe.
Apparently it *is* beyond rocket science.
Microsoft is the one who created a feature that is now an active malware infection vector.
Microsoft is the one who recreated a feature that is an active malware infection vector.
There, fixed that for you. Executing anything coming from the outside by default has ALWAYS been a horrible idea.
How many decades has it been since we all disabled uux and such from our UUCP configurations?
Now, GET OFF MY LAWN!
And you neglect to point out that it did nothing and that UNIX systems were the first to learn how to protect against worms as a result.
It did nothing except propagate, which was bad enough, but its primary entrance vector was sendmail binaries compiled with unfortunate debugging code that was effectively a passwordless root login.
So what was the primary lesson to be learned? Binaries distributed without source code and not rebuilt on a server under a watchful eye are a bad idea - true.
Windows Vista doesn't just cache more aggressively, though that's certainly one valid complaint. An OS generally should never page live VM pages out to disk except when there is memory contention. That means that prefetched data in the disk cache should drop to darn near zero before you start seeing paging traffic. If it doesn't, something is badly wrong. That said, this is just one of many significant memory problems with Vista. ...
The OS growing to consume all available memory is a virtue is only valid if the OS uses it sensibly. If it squanders it and then ends up ejecting useful pages as a result, that is not a good thing no matter how you look at it....
Ah, that sounds like you get it.
I was there when the accounting functions in Linux were changed to report O/S cached memory and in many respects, the subsequent bitching and whining was similar to what I've seen here with regards to Microsoft Vista usage.
Measuring true VM efficiency is a black art and is highly dependent upon the work load.
I won't offer any comment with regards to your Vista-specific comments, I do not do Microsoft Windows. Aggressive caching in memory is a VERY good thing. Unused memory is wasted memory. I suspect that as you guys grow your user base around Microsoft Vista, enough people will be around to calm down the Chicken Littles at least with regard to apparent memory usage.
Except that Vista does graceful caching and cedes RAM when an application wants it. Forgot that part, hm?
Specifically, this is one of the items Windows 7 should address. So your casual effort to make Windows look good completely ignores the fact your comment is not topical in the least and altogether ignores the central complaint.
We heard all the same sort of astroturfing here before and after Microsoft Vista's initial release. The folks who dared say something other than that Microsoft Vista was the greatest O/S tended to get flamed and modded down.
Vista has generated a ton of hidden revenue. I work for a very large company with a Microsoft site license that is presumably for Vista now, except that other than the team certifying it for enterprise use, no one uses it. It's rather a statement that people have paid a fortune for Microsoft Vista and are afraid to use it. The same will be true for Microsoft 7. I hardly see us skipping ahead to untested (by our guys) software.
First off ...
This leads to your browser taking up to a minute or two to come back to usability.
O.K. so you have a large enough resident set size of currently running processes that you've exceeded available core and put the O/S into thrash mode. Any O/S will do that. RAM is fast, disk is slow.
Except it doesn't really, just like every MS VM it often decides that keeping system cache is more important than keeping applications in memory and so it decides to swap out "infrequently" used code and data.
O/S cache includes executable pages of memory. Poor decisions on what to keep in cache make and break performance nowadays when basic hardware speeds, primarily main memory and disk have not kept up with advances in CPU speed.
The problem is when you go to switch from your photo app to your browser after not having used the browser for 30 minutes Windows has to swap it back in, in the meantime it might have just been using that ram to hold autosave files that were never re-read.
The hardest problem a VM has to solve is what to do with anonymous VM pages, ie pure unsaved data that has no backing store on disk, as from say an executable image or data file. If you were modifying images in your photo app (and they may well be modified by the application before it hits main memory if you're dealing with a compressed format) you are looking at one of the worst-case scenarios for a VM to optimize - a memory hog. Those pages can only be written out to a swap file/partition and rarely can be written into congusous portions of the disk so that they can be paged back in quickly.
Ditto for the case of the browser, only more so, since web browsing has gotten sooooo expensive in this day and age of multimedia web browsing.
The distinction between anonymous VM pages and backing store VM pages is an important one. If there's backing store, then you can always optimize your disk to arrange for files, executables, etc. to have their blocks laid out on disk in some sort of optimal fashion for paging back into memory.
Modern Unix filesystems tend to do a pretty good of keeping things organized on disk until the disk gets extremely full. I gather the Microsoft Windows users are expected to do this themselves, but the point remains the same.
What you're _actually_ describing is a hardware limitation in dealing with memory hogs and if you are running into that sort of thing a lot, I would suggest you upgrade your hardware.
And to all the idiots who responded with "it's like instant on my machine", well duh! You're not running the same equivalent workload and have not approached the thrash threshold.
I would have loved to have seen something meaningful criticizing the Microsoft VM, but frankly you haven't described anything that any other virtual memory O/S is prone to.
Oh and if anyone attempts to patent defragging swap space, PRIOR ART. You heard it here first and it's an obvious concept.
(And yes, I am now in the habit of shutting down Opera before starting World Of Warcraft on my Mac, I get better frame rate that way).
Anyway, I'd hope to be able to help. Like I said, where do I sign up? Is it with Canonical, or is there a generic "Linux" marketing effort someplace?
The problem is that there is NO generic Linux effort. We all have our favorite projects that we work on and the sum total in a myriad of different varieties is the OS called Linux.
My suggestion would be to pick out a project that you particularly like and approach the developers on that project and offer your services. I would certainly have welcomed you particularly as few people understand what XEmacs really is.
You might even just try applying for work at Canonical. They have money and can pay you for your services.
I suspect it is not lost.
Oh, I'm sure it's lost.
the incompetent sub-humans who've been running our country for 8 years would never be able to manage it in a million years.
Your numbers are suspect. Subhumans have been running the USA for over a century. They have had more than enough time to learn how to cover their own misdeeds.
When the Patriot Act passed I said that even if you have no reason to distrust Bush, what about the person who comes after him?
Since the "Patriotic Act" was composed of pieces of stuff we successfully beat down that were proposed first during the Clinton administration, allow me to predict that Obama will bring no change to it.
You do realize that Nixon was never impeached nor convicted of anything right?
He resigned first and was pardoned by the first and only unelected President.
The lesson that he kept too many records was not lost on his successors.
It isn't like Nixon was another no eventful minor era in the history of the united states. You should at least have a basic understanding of it if your going to open your mouth on it.
I agree, fully.
Personal attacks aside, the point is that 700 days of email server records dont just vanish.
Of course not, but as the Clinton administration proved, it is not punishable - "no controlling authority". The Obama administration which is already starting out with corruption will do the same. Status quo.
They started to impeach Dick Nixon over too many records kept and the only reason it didn't stick was that he resigned first.
In a few years we'll be talking about missing emails from Obama's White House. Nothing to see, move along.
When you have not had an honest President since Taft over a century ago, it is in NO ONE's best interest to have accurate records.
The only way this will change is if someone is held to account for it.
Dick Nixon was held accountable and all successive Presidents have learned from that lesson.
There is no way in hell the emails disappeared without the act being intentional (and thus in violation of the law).
Probably true, but what else is new?
George Bush needs to be held to account for this.
He'll be held as accountable as the Clinton administration was over its lost email messages. That is to say, not at all.
Old timers crack me up. Ones that are skeptical of object oriented programming. Ones who think you can waterfall a huge project. I'd like just one of them to run a startup and waterfall Version 1.0 of their web-app (which, they wouldn't because the web is a fad, unlike their punch cards).
Hmmm. Old timer? Check. Skeptical of object oriented programming? Check (functional programming FTW!). Dislike the waterfall development model? Check.
If I had to lay blame on anything, I'd lay it on CS degree programs. I've seen too many clueless kids with fancy paper proclaiming them Highly Educated. Perhaps as much blame can be attached to fad languages. Perhaps there is a connection.
Oh well, as sarcastically as you put it:
soon enough we'll see the errors in our ways and go back to time honored methods like waterfall. We'll abandon "scripting languages" like Ruby or C and use assembler like god intends.
I agree with you in spirit (quibble - C is not a "scripting" language and is as much of a problem as an assembly language attitude). I hate the term "scripting language", by the way. Interpreted computer languages are not in the slightest inferior to compiled languages. _Real_ old-timers know that ...
Now Get Off My Lawn and hand me that deck of punch cards over there son. I've got a SNOBOL program to finish debugging.
Hell, any half educated kid would have at least heard OF them, if not (knowingly) listened to them.
Charles Schultz is dead. I first heard of Beethoven as a kid reading Peanuts. I did not learn to appreciate his music for another decade or so.
Old as I am, I never heard any Beatles music while they were still a group. The lyrics are useful to know in Asian Karaoke bars, but other than that, I just do not care.
This is old news and was announced almost two years ago http://www.google.com/tisp/
outside of North America no-one really cares about what talk show hosts think or do.
Both Oprah and Jerry Springer are shown on Japanese TV. Or at least they were when I lived there.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
Are we really able to put a person on the moon but not properly dispose of their waste?
I would presume so. We can't make a zero-g toilet worth a damn either.
Do you actually understand how Neilsen ratings are obtained
Probably not.
For the offline games, I would suspect they ask selected people to fill out a diary, same as they do with TV ratings, and the numbers will depend on the honesty of the people being polled[1]. For the online games, Blizzard knows exactly how much connect time a given account uses, but would they tell? (And would the guys who are playing multiple accounts at the same time count extra?)
A number they do not give, is out of the console gamers, what _was_ the average number of minutes played per week? Particularly in comparison to the 11+ hours WoW got. Inquring minds want to know!
[1] I was not, the one time I got a Nielsen diary, I just filled in whatever show I thought deserved a ratings boost.
Firing bad employees has been done atleast by one company in times when they were not in financial trouble.
When I worked at TRW (defense systems) it was common practice to be laying off and hiring at the same time.
Corporations cost money to taxpayers to support. Roads, hospitals, schools, utilities, emergency services, military protection, etc. are all expected by corporations as part of local services.
Untrue for the most part and a sweeping generalization like that ignores the benefits of having a corporation do business in the local area (employment, etc.).
You are partially correct, in that if all profits, capital spending, payroll and (possibly) product sales is moved out of a taxation jurisdiction, then that jurisdiction will suffer. There needs to be some balance and you can look at the tradeoffs that were made in the automotive industry with Japan to see some of them.
Lower the taxes too far, and those huge business moving to your nation will bleed you dry.
No that's not a problem with taxation. Lower the taxes and EVERYONE will come.
There are many ways for politicians to come to terms with organizations who do business on their turf. In the 1970s, my parent's church wanted to buy some adjacent property and expand the church. The city of San Luis Obispo said "Yes, but ... we want you to pay for a street extension along one side". So, they did.
I am far more distrustful of politicians who have only their own interests to attend to, than corporations who have to keep their consumers and employees happy.
Why is it that outrage over tax-evasion is focused only on big corporations for exercising legal choices while your neighbour may be "cheating" the government out of thousands in taxes each year?
It buys votes.
If the millions of individual taxpayers actually had to pay what they were supposed to, you would see an immediate change in how government spends money. Cheating only makes the problem worse!
Yes and no. There are too many taxes at all levels for full disclosure to be feasable (see my partial listing a few posts above). The people may want it, but legislators will NEVER vote for it.
No, because "cheating" does not make any difference in the end. Microsoft, as big as it is, could be taxed 100% and not substantially affect the US government budget.
I'm going to reword your last statement to bring this back on topic.
If the millions of individual computer users actually had to pay what they were supposed to for their software, you would see an immediate change in software licensing practices and software quality. Cheating only makes the problem worse!
There, fixed that for you.