It mentions that fees and royalties would be required for this to work. Which means that the RIAA doesnt get to say no, but it does get to have some of our money out if
it. I dunno about the rest of you, but I'm sticking with my local trading groups and free things like audiogalaxy for now.
As will, I'm sure, so many of the people who claim they are willing to pay for music they can download online, if only the record companies would let them. At bottom, despite hyperbole here and elsewhere to the contrary, the reaction against the record companies battle against companies like Napster is less about outdated modes of distribution then it is about whether people are really willing to pay for music.
We only need one reform: incredibly short terms for patents and copyright. Although any decision is arbitrary, I think that 3 years is more than generous enough in the
case of copyright these days,
I am not concerned here about patents, but about copyright. What exactly do you mean by "more than generous enough" when talking about (say) someone's copyrights to their music or writing ? Is there some greater public function served by forcing someone to relinquish their copyrights to a song or artwork ? Does society NEED free unfettered 3rd party distribution of the latest Metallica CD (or the 3-year old Metallica CD) that badly ? While - arguably -the notion of IP in the patenting certain discoveries and innovation might be "ludicrous" to protect, what makes copyright of artwork so ludicrous ? Is it any more ludicrous then the copyrights attached to GNU software ? Should the latter copyrights expire as well ? And who are you to decide what is or is not "generous enough" ? Arbitrary, indeed.
Is it possible several Icemen went out on a hunt and this one got killed by an arrow gone astray ? Wouldn't that be as parisimonious as any of the scenarios presented (if it was a grudge/war, I think you might expect to see some sort of mutilation) ? Or does an accident just make less interesting copy ?
My money's on Apple's Integer Basic
on
ICFP 2001 Task
·
· Score: 2
Everyone knows that Integer Basic had much better performance than Applesoft, as long as you can tolerate only having integers.
10 COLOR=3
20 PLOT 10,10
umm, what else was the program supposed to do ?
I'm glad to see that while we're free to rail against the post-Columbine backlash against gaming, we're also free to take findings as out of context as "they" are.
Well said. Katz would certainly rail about any statistic demonstrating correlations between sociopathic behavior and Quake-playing, calling it post-Columbine hysteria, but is happy to trumpet apparent effects videogames might have on good things like concentration.
When I was in graduate school, I met another grad student who told me that she believed most characteristics were inherited, except for intelligence. I told her that if you think it possible some characteristics are inherited you must be at least open to the possibility all other characteristics are inherited as well, even if this is contrary to what you would hope would be true. Here too: if we want to even so much as entertain the possibility that video games can do good things, then we must be prepared to consider the possibility that they can do bad things - and not dismiss the latter out-of-hand as so many like Katz do.
At least here (Canada), more
affluent kids tend to play a lot LESS games...I've noticed a STRONG correlation when I browse the local garage sales. The better areas of the city tend never to have classic games or consoles for sale, it's all much
more expensive goods.
You figured out that affluent kids tend to play less video games just because there consoles are not for sale at their garage sales ? That constitutes absolutely no evidence at all. Did you consider the possibility that it might be beneath richer families to sell things like Nintendos, and/or that they are more likely to be able to afford having a PS AND a PS2 around ? Did you consider the possibility that maybe they're not selling their PS CDs because they're playing games instead on (more expensive) PCs ?
We all know that the reason the/. editor called the K5 article a "fabulous response" is that said response positively raves about the Open Content model.
Since the goals of the Nu/Wiki-pedia project are to create comprehensive encyclopediae,and the article's exponential projections suggestion this will be should be attainable in a few years, I wonder what the Open Content world will have to say if at such a time these encyclopedias are something less then the comprehensive and authoritative resources that Brittanica is. Because there are SO many reasons why Open Content encyclopedias might fail:
There are objective standards by which to judge a piece of code : for instance, whether it works or not, or whether it is secure. There are no objective standards by which to judge a historical essay. How are you going to get a collaborative process to generate consensus on a document on, say, "West Bank Settlements/Colonies" ? Sure, you could fall back on the possibility of having human editors as Nupedia does, but this nullifies much of the collaborative strategy. And with exponential growth, you need an exponentially large number of editors. Will these editors rewrite the articles to make them 'correct' or 'consistent' ? If so, then you basically have an old-style encyclopedia at heart. And if so, who will pay them ? How will they be credentialed ?
When I pick up the Brittanica I know that experts have written the articles, and I trust their facts. I know there has been rigorous fact-checking and editing, and this is key to Brittanica's authority. What's the nupedia equivalent ? Am I going to trust an article I essentially pick up off the web ? Does anyone else trust articles they pick up off the web so completely ? Do/.'ers trust political "facts" posted on Usenet, on web-sites, or even here ? I know the Web has taught me nothing if not a great deal of skepticism.
The probability that some number of editors are going to be able to maintain such a large body of work submitted essentially anonymously by so many people with such varying viewpoints seems improbable, to say the least. Sure, they say, you can always back out changes created by vandals, but sit back and consider the logistics: who's going to back out changes made over hundreds of thousands of articles by tens of thousands of submitters ? Who's going to monitor them ? Who's going to decide what constituted vandalism ? Who's going to check the facts ?
In short, while the idea is intriguing I highly doubt that this project is as plausible a project as any given Open-Source project. The latter has a finite number of contributors, working towards largely objective standards. Open Content encyclopedias do not. And if the latter fails to supercede paid-content encyclopedias, I wonder whether the "Open" community will be brave enough to face that fact fairly.
Secondly, do you REALLY believe that Gates didn't do some coding before hand
Of course he did. Wouldn't you? Whats that got to do with it anyway
Well, YOU were the one making the big deal about how "Gates hadn't coded in a decade". So when you made the point I assumed YOU saw the original relevance - presumably because you thought saying so might go some way to show Gates' wizardry ?
Even if he hadn't coded in a decade, I still don't know what significance beating some tech journalists necessarily means. Maybe they were journalists for something like a DDJ, but then again maybe they were journalists for a PC Week.
The significant distinction being that Paypal payments are just another shape for money. You can convert them on demand into cash.Gaming items are not demand
convertable into cash, they have to go through an extra step.
What do you mean I can convert them on demand into cash ? You mean I can convert them with Paypal to cash, don't you ? AFAIK, I can't go to the local 7-11 and pay for things with Paypal dollars or credits or whatever they call them. I can't use them to make a down-payment on a house. I can't use them to buy a soda downstairs.
In the example I made up, there was "work" being done (say, IT consulting for some guy I met over the Net, or putting up a web page that somebody thought they wanted to contribute to). For this work I "earned" something - say some Paypal payments. It's arguable that this is similar to some kid who "works" for a year on his computer (albeit playing D2) and "earns" things that are convertible into money (see item sales on Ebay). I f something is convertible into money than it is arguable that something is also "just another shape for money" - and though you are right that this does involve an extra step, this is no different than Paypal.
Luckily for Microsoft, Gates beat the journalists, coding in the new Visual Basic. The guy hadn't coded for over a decade....Microsoft products may suck, but at least Bill can code.
What a crock. Firstly, he beat a bunch of tech journalists. That's like being impressed if an NBA coach beat a bunch of local sports beat writers at making free throws.
Secondly, do you REALLY believe that Gates didn't do some coding before hand, if only to learn how Visual Basic worked ? If he HADN'T coded for over a decade, that would imply he HADN'T so much as used VB at all beforehand, which I seriously doubt (though other MS press conferences and such give me pause).
Thirdly, I bet you that the task was hand-picked to highlight VB's qualities. Maybe it was to whip up a pane with a picture and a button which when pressed printed "Hello, world". If anyone picked another language it would take forever...with VB it would have been simple, but that wouldn't make Gates a good coder by any stretch.
Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the
disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
I don't know. Would it be weird if you reported on a Paypal bug which resulted in some payments getting lost ?
Having said this, I must say I have little sympathy for users who lost stuff. It is a game, after all, and having played MUDs (mostly Isengard) for years, I know too well that the lords of these games frequently purge inventories and such, especially in response to rampant cheating. I remember one time when the game was loaded with high-level characters (including mine), the DMs were going to do a reinstall and they claimed they had to purge all players because (they claimed; I was skeptical) they were doing an upgrade and had no effective way to migrate characters (I believe they had to purge because of cloned items, too). I offered to write some scripts for them to save our characters but they demurred, and I lost a character whose name players today (and this is 5 years later) still grab whenever it comes available.
We all bitched to no end, swearing up and down that we would never come back. But surprises of surprises, almost everyone came back, and 3 weeks later everyone was pretty much back where they were. For my part, I am proud to say I stuck to my guns and pretty much gave up on MUDding.
People have to realize that this is a game, that certain shit will happen in the interests of game play over time, and sometimes for addicts shock-treatment is the only thing that will work. And if stuff like this diminishes player fanaticism just enough that people aren't spending ridiculous amounts of money on jacked up characters, or cloned items, this will all be a good thing. Maybe it will help bring a bit of perspective. I know it did for me.
I can't believe people pay that much money for such a crappy product. If Diablo2 came out from MS there would be post here every day using it as an example of
just how bad closed source software is.
This is so true it is sad, and is such an example of the tunnel-vision so many people have. I paid that money for Diablo II: hell, I was even on a local store's waiting list. And you know what ? In the context of the day, I found it to be a shitty game, very little better than its predecessor, which felt like a rip-off given how many years ago Diablo came out. Only the Mac version could even run at 800x600. DO YOU KNOW HOW CRAPPY THAT LOOKS ON A 19" MONITOR ??? The original Diablo was great fun, but this game was just squeezing the family jewels for every last drop of juice.
Not to mention multi-player on battle.net was awful for the first 3 months (I uninstalled the game afterwards I was so frustrated): games crashed all the time, I couldn't get into games when the servers weren't down, Blizzard pretty much kept all its users in the dark about system status, and the game play blew chunks. I feel like an idiot for having fell for the marketing hype, I still feel like an idiot when I again fall for more Blizzard hype when I see the new displays and think about buying the expansion pack (I won't), and I am going to be extremely suspicious and skeptical of Warcraft III (which I also anxiously awaited). Blizzard, you are close to leaving a formerly loyal customer.
When will people be able to short Mandrakesoft ? What are the rules on Euronext ? I like Mandrake and I use it at home and work, but I think these companies are lousy investments. I predict a brief jog up in price followed by a continuous slide downwards.
I just wonder how much of the google-lovefest here is due to the fact that they happen to be prominent Linux users. Say they happened to run NT instead...would Slashdotters rave about them if they got the same results ?
For instance, one of the dominant/. themes is the incessant railing about the evils of IP and patents. Yet google has what probably amounts to a boatload of patents, and they don't seem to get called on it (nor does Transmeta, or Tivo, for that matter). All the patents references I saw in the earlier comments were along the lines of "hmm, google has these patents, wonder if we're set for a big patent fight".
I bet if MS owned and operated google,/.ers would hate it and would never stop editorializing about the consequent coming of the Apocalypse.
They already have reality game shows in Japan in which the contestants get hurt.
You know what ? There's already lots of game shows in the West in which the contestants get hurt and where that constitutes a significant portion of the shows' appeal. Let me think...boxing, football, Ultimate Fighting...
What if you have a program which invokes some other GPL program (say, ls or bc) and uses its output ? The program is not 'linked' to it in the sense ordinary programmers use the term, and it is certainly arguable that the former program constitutes a separate entity from the GPL'ed program. But then again the programs are linked by their output and by their communication, and the former program relies on the GPL'ed program almost as surely as if the code was borrowed directly. Or does it ?
What about if you are distributing some commercial software, which runs on Linux ? Could you distribute Linux and your software at the same time, while keeping your software free of the GPL and without violating the GPL ? Here again you could argue that your software is a distinct entity from the GPL'ed Linux, but someone else could turn around and say that it depends on Linux (as it runs on it), and as such Linux constitutes a part of the program. Maybe you could get around this by distributing Linux separately from your program, but if this latter view is valid, would it even work anyways ?
Capitalism sucks when the people with the power aren't the ones with the money.
Ummm, is that a misprint? The problem is that the people with the power are the people with the money, and only the people with the money.
Actually the above is NOT a problem with capitalism, it IS capitalism. And if people really don't like the way things are sold/distributed, the best way to change things is by buying from companies that sell/distribute in some other way or make some other product. You are not entitled to buy the latest Metallica CD, and just because you don't like the way they choose to distribute their music does not give you the right to violate copyrights. If it's really important to you, in this case a conscientious consumer would buy his music from some other band/label, or just would not buy it at all.
GPL-defenders here constantly advise that if someone does not like the GPL or finds it unduly restrictive, then that person should not use the GPL'ed program - noone is forcing anyone to use GPL'ed software, after all. But why do so many of the same people find it justifiable that people rip and trade CDs just because they don't happen to like the licensing terms record companies and artists offer them ? Noone is forcing anyone to buy music, either. Why would these people be up-in-arms when people decide to violate the GPL (presumably because the violators don't like the licensing terms offered them) ??
Don't lots of users here claim they only download music for free because they 'only want to pay for a few songs on a CD', and 'there is no other way to download music', and 'the current music distribution system is outdated' ? If so, I would expect that these people should be willing to pay to download music, and it shouldn't matter whether it's in a proprietary format, unless players are not made widely available.
Because whether or not it is a proprietary format should have no bearing on whether it solves their alleged issues of outdated distribution methods, paying for songs they don't want to pay for, or whatever. In fact, I would expect that users who really want to pay for downloadable music should be largely indifferent as to whether the format is proprietary or not (again, assuming availability of players). Of course, I expect that most users here will NOT pay for a proprietary format, just as I expect most would also not pay for an non-proprietary format, because I strongly suspect the whole Napster/MP3 phenomenon is less about supposed 'civil disobedience' and claimed fair-use, then it is about getting something for nothing.
To those who say, "Hey, AltaVista is a business. Can you blame them?" Yes, we can blame them. Newspapers are a business, but you don't (well, you didn't once upon a
time) see them printing corporate press releases as news.
Do you look at stuff on Slashdot as 'news', or chauvinism ? Slashdot certainly bills itself as presenting news, but if another website constantly lathered itself in the same myopic tunnel-visioned puppy-love way over Microsoft or Sun products (or if it nearly exclusively ripped the many real shortcomings of Linux) it would get slammed as nothing more than a corporate mouthpiece.
But I think that IBM SmartSuite(TM) showing up on the Linux desktop would really make some
waves and drive acceptance of the Linux desktop.
Are you serious ? When SmartSuite was ported to OS/2, everybody hoped that it would make a difference to OS/2's fortune. This at a time (circa 1996 if I recall ?) when MS Office's hegemony was not what it is now (WordPerfect and WordPro were still viable options to Word, for instance). SmartSuite did nothing for OS/2 and in fact whimpered away shortly thereafter, seeming to exist now only as a fringe office suite given away with pre-configured computers.
Do you really think that Linux users are going to run and pay money for a copy of SmartSuite and swallow their feelings of entitlement to free software ? Do you really think that MS Office users are going to run and pay money for a copy of Smartsuite just so that they can stick it to MS ? I don't.
inside IBM, there's virtually NO Linux at all. Sounds like a giant PR move to me.
And I bet if you look inside Sony, you'd find relatively few PS2s on their desktops. You'd also find few PPC machines on IBM's desktops. So what ? As several of the/. queries pointed out, a significant problem with Linux is its relative inadequacy on the desktop - especially with regards to mail and Office-type applications. So what is IBM to do ? MS applications in the corporate world is a reality and IBM would be retarded to adopt other applications just because a tiny portion of their company is working with Linux. The real indicator of whether they "walk the walk" is looking to see whether or not they are contributing significant resources to Linux (they are), and whether they are releasing code to the community (they are) - not whether or not they decide to stupidly force many of their users to use Linux - as Linux stands now.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
As will, I'm sure, so many of the people who claim they are willing to pay for music they can download online, if only the record companies would let them. At bottom, despite hyperbole here and elsewhere to the contrary, the reaction against the record companies battle against companies like Napster is less about outdated modes of distribution then it is about whether people are really willing to pay for music.
I am not concerned here about patents, but about copyright. What exactly do you mean by "more than generous enough" when talking about (say) someone's copyrights to their music or writing ? Is there some greater public function served by forcing someone to relinquish their copyrights to a song or artwork ? Does society NEED free unfettered 3rd party distribution of the latest Metallica CD (or the 3-year old Metallica CD) that badly ? While - arguably -the notion of IP in the patenting certain discoveries and innovation might be "ludicrous" to protect, what makes copyright of artwork so ludicrous ? Is it any more ludicrous then the copyrights attached to GNU software ? Should the latter copyrights expire as well ? And who are you to decide what is or is not "generous enough" ? Arbitrary, indeed.
Wow, sounds like you have a great cell phone plan. Do you get local calls free too ? ;-)
Is it possible several Icemen went out on a hunt and this one got killed by an arrow gone astray ? Wouldn't that be as parisimonious as any of the scenarios presented (if it was a grudge/war, I think you might expect to see some sort of mutilation) ? Or does an accident just make less interesting copy ?
Everyone knows that Integer Basic had much better performance than Applesoft, as long as you can tolerate only having integers. 10 COLOR=3 20 PLOT 10,10 umm, what else was the program supposed to do ?
Well said. Katz would certainly rail about any statistic demonstrating correlations between sociopathic behavior and Quake-playing, calling it post-Columbine hysteria, but is happy to trumpet apparent effects videogames might have on good things like concentration.
When I was in graduate school, I met another grad student who told me that she believed most characteristics were inherited, except for intelligence. I told her that if you think it possible some characteristics are inherited you must be at least open to the possibility all other characteristics are inherited as well, even if this is contrary to what you would hope would be true. Here too: if we want to even so much as entertain the possibility that video games can do good things, then we must be prepared to consider the possibility that they can do bad things - and not dismiss the latter out-of-hand as so many like Katz do.
You figured out that affluent kids tend to play less video games just because there consoles are not for sale at their garage sales ? That constitutes absolutely no evidence at all. Did you consider the possibility that it might be beneath richer families to sell things like Nintendos, and/or that they are more likely to be able to afford having a PS AND a PS2 around ? Did you consider the possibility that maybe they're not selling their PS CDs because they're playing games instead on (more expensive) PCs ?
Since the goals of the Nu/Wiki-pedia project are to create comprehensive encyclopediae,and the article's exponential projections suggestion this will be should be attainable in a few years, I wonder what the Open Content world will have to say if at such a time these encyclopedias are something less then the comprehensive and authoritative resources that Brittanica is. Because there are SO many reasons why Open Content encyclopedias might fail:
- There are objective standards by which to judge a piece of code : for instance, whether it works or not, or whether it is secure. There are no objective standards by which to judge a historical essay. How are you going to get a collaborative process to generate consensus on a document on, say, "West Bank Settlements/Colonies" ? Sure, you could fall back on the possibility of having human editors as Nupedia does, but this nullifies much of the collaborative strategy. And with exponential growth, you need an exponentially large number of editors. Will these editors rewrite the articles to make them 'correct' or 'consistent' ? If so, then you basically have an old-style encyclopedia at heart. And if so, who will pay them ? How will they be credentialed ?
- When I pick up the Brittanica I know that experts have written the articles, and I trust their facts. I know there has been rigorous fact-checking and editing, and this is key to Brittanica's authority. What's the nupedia equivalent ? Am I going to trust an article I essentially pick up off the web ? Does anyone else trust articles they pick up off the web so completely ? Do
/.'ers trust political "facts" posted on Usenet, on web-sites, or even here ? I know the Web has taught me nothing if not a great deal of skepticism.
- The probability that some number of editors are going to be able to maintain such a large body of work submitted essentially anonymously by so many people with such varying viewpoints seems improbable, to say the least. Sure, they say, you can always back out changes created by vandals, but sit back and consider the logistics: who's going to back out changes made over hundreds of thousands of articles by tens of thousands of submitters ? Who's going to monitor them ? Who's going to decide what constituted vandalism ? Who's going to check the facts ?
In short, while the idea is intriguing I highly doubt that this project is as plausible a project as any given Open-Source project. The latter has a finite number of contributors, working towards largely objective standards. Open Content encyclopedias do not. And if the latter fails to supercede paid-content encyclopedias, I wonder whether the "Open" community will be brave enough to face that fact fairly.Of course he did. Wouldn't you? Whats that got to do with it anyway
Well, YOU were the one making the big deal about how "Gates hadn't coded in a decade". So when you made the point I assumed YOU saw the original relevance - presumably because you thought saying so might go some way to show Gates' wizardry ?
Even if he hadn't coded in a decade, I still don't know what significance beating some tech journalists necessarily means. Maybe they were journalists for something like a DDJ, but then again maybe they were journalists for a PC Week.
What do you mean I can convert them on demand into cash ? You mean I can convert them with Paypal to cash, don't you ? AFAIK, I can't go to the local 7-11 and pay for things with Paypal dollars or credits or whatever they call them. I can't use them to make a down-payment on a house. I can't use them to buy a soda downstairs.
In the example I made up, there was "work" being done (say, IT consulting for some guy I met over the Net, or putting up a web page that somebody thought they wanted to contribute to). For this work I "earned" something - say some Paypal payments. It's arguable that this is similar to some kid who "works" for a year on his computer (albeit playing D2) and "earns" things that are convertible into money (see item sales on Ebay). I f something is convertible into money than it is arguable that something is also "just another shape for money" - and though you are right that this does involve an extra step, this is no different than Paypal.
What a crock. Firstly, he beat a bunch of tech journalists. That's like being impressed if an NBA coach beat a bunch of local sports beat writers at making free throws.
Secondly, do you REALLY believe that Gates didn't do some coding before hand, if only to learn how Visual Basic worked ? If he HADN'T coded for over a decade, that would imply he HADN'T so much as used VB at all beforehand, which I seriously doubt (though other MS press conferences and such give me pause).
Thirdly, I bet you that the task was hand-picked to highlight VB's qualities. Maybe it was to whip up a pane with a picture and a button which when pressed printed "Hello, world". If anyone picked another language it would take forever...with VB it would have been simple, but that wouldn't make Gates a good coder by any stretch.
I don't know. Would it be weird if you reported on a Paypal bug which resulted in some payments getting lost ?
Having said this, I must say I have little sympathy for users who lost stuff. It is a game, after all, and having played MUDs (mostly Isengard) for years, I know too well that the lords of these games frequently purge inventories and such, especially in response to rampant cheating. I remember one time when the game was loaded with high-level characters (including mine), the DMs were going to do a reinstall and they claimed they had to purge all players because (they claimed; I was skeptical) they were doing an upgrade and had no effective way to migrate characters (I believe they had to purge because of cloned items, too). I offered to write some scripts for them to save our characters but they demurred, and I lost a character whose name players today (and this is 5 years later) still grab whenever it comes available.
We all bitched to no end, swearing up and down that we would never come back. But surprises of surprises, almost everyone came back, and 3 weeks later everyone was pretty much back where they were. For my part, I am proud to say I stuck to my guns and pretty much gave up on MUDding.
People have to realize that this is a game, that certain shit will happen in the interests of game play over time, and sometimes for addicts shock-treatment is the only thing that will work. And if stuff like this diminishes player fanaticism just enough that people aren't spending ridiculous amounts of money on jacked up characters, or cloned items, this will all be a good thing. Maybe it will help bring a bit of perspective. I know it did for me.
This is so true it is sad, and is such an example of the tunnel-vision so many people have. I paid that money for Diablo II: hell, I was even on a local store's waiting list. And you know what ? In the context of the day, I found it to be a shitty game, very little better than its predecessor, which felt like a rip-off given how many years ago Diablo came out. Only the Mac version could even run at 800x600. DO YOU KNOW HOW CRAPPY THAT LOOKS ON A 19" MONITOR ??? The original Diablo was great fun, but this game was just squeezing the family jewels for every last drop of juice.
Not to mention multi-player on battle.net was awful for the first 3 months (I uninstalled the game afterwards I was so frustrated): games crashed all the time, I couldn't get into games when the servers weren't down, Blizzard pretty much kept all its users in the dark about system status, and the game play blew chunks. I feel like an idiot for having fell for the marketing hype, I still feel like an idiot when I again fall for more Blizzard hype when I see the new displays and think about buying the expansion pack (I won't), and I am going to be extremely suspicious and skeptical of Warcraft III (which I also anxiously awaited). Blizzard, you are close to leaving a formerly loyal customer.
When will people be able to short Mandrakesoft ? What are the rules on Euronext ? I like Mandrake and I use it at home and work, but I think these companies are lousy investments. I predict a brief jog up in price followed by a continuous slide downwards.
Seems like a waste of a perfectly good first post to me. *Sniff*
For instance, one of the dominant /. themes is the incessant railing about the evils of IP and patents. Yet google has what probably amounts to a boatload of patents, and they don't seem to get called on it (nor does Transmeta, or Tivo, for that matter). All the patents references I saw in the earlier comments were along the lines of "hmm, google has these patents, wonder if we're set for a big patent fight".
I bet if MS owned and operated google, /.ers would hate it and would never stop editorializing about the consequent coming of the Apocalypse.
You know what ? There's already lots of game shows in the West in which the contestants get hurt and where that constitutes a significant portion of the shows' appeal. Let me think...boxing, football, Ultimate Fighting...
What about if you are distributing some commercial software, which runs on Linux ? Could you distribute Linux and your software at the same time, while keeping your software free of the GPL and without violating the GPL ? Here again you could argue that your software is a distinct entity from the GPL'ed Linux, but someone else could turn around and say that it depends on Linux (as it runs on it), and as such Linux constitutes a part of the program. Maybe you could get around this by distributing Linux separately from your program, but if this latter view is valid, would it even work anyways ?
I can't wait to see pigeons shitting on Microsoft's new bench. Hell, I might travel to Merry Olde England to take a dump on one, myself.
Ummm, is that a misprint? The problem is that the people with the power are the people with the money, and only the people with the money.
Actually the above is NOT a problem with capitalism, it IS capitalism. And if people really don't like the way things are sold/distributed, the best way to change things is by buying from companies that sell/distribute in some other way or make some other product. You are not entitled to buy the latest Metallica CD, and just because you don't like the way they choose to distribute their music does not give you the right to violate copyrights. If it's really important to you, in this case a conscientious consumer would buy his music from some other band/label, or just would not buy it at all.
GPL-defenders here constantly advise that if someone does not like the GPL or finds it unduly restrictive, then that person should not use the GPL'ed program - noone is forcing anyone to use GPL'ed software, after all. But why do so many of the same people find it justifiable that people rip and trade CDs just because they don't happen to like the licensing terms record companies and artists offer them ? Noone is forcing anyone to buy music, either. Why would these people be up-in-arms when people decide to violate the GPL (presumably because the violators don't like the licensing terms offered them) ??
Because whether or not it is a proprietary format should have no bearing on whether it solves their alleged issues of outdated distribution methods, paying for songs they don't want to pay for, or whatever. In fact, I would expect that users who really want to pay for downloadable music should be largely indifferent as to whether the format is proprietary or not (again, assuming availability of players). Of course, I expect that most users here will NOT pay for a proprietary format, just as I expect most would also not pay for an non-proprietary format, because I strongly suspect the whole Napster/MP3 phenomenon is less about supposed 'civil disobedience' and claimed fair-use, then it is about getting something for nothing.
Do you look at stuff on Slashdot as 'news', or chauvinism ? Slashdot certainly bills itself as presenting news, but if another website constantly lathered itself in the same myopic tunnel-visioned puppy-love way over Microsoft or Sun products (or if it nearly exclusively ripped the many real shortcomings of Linux) it would get slammed as nothing more than a corporate mouthpiece.
Are you serious ? When SmartSuite was ported to OS/2, everybody hoped that it would make a difference to OS/2's fortune. This at a time (circa 1996 if I recall ?) when MS Office's hegemony was not what it is now (WordPerfect and WordPro were still viable options to Word, for instance). SmartSuite did nothing for OS/2 and in fact whimpered away shortly thereafter, seeming to exist now only as a fringe office suite given away with pre-configured computers.
Do you really think that Linux users are going to run and pay money for a copy of SmartSuite and swallow their feelings of entitlement to free software ? Do you really think that MS Office users are going to run and pay money for a copy of Smartsuite just so that they can stick it to MS ? I don't.
And I bet if you look inside Sony, you'd find relatively few PS2s on their desktops. You'd also find few PPC machines on IBM's desktops. So what ? As several of the /. queries pointed out, a significant problem with Linux is its relative inadequacy on the desktop - especially with regards to mail and Office-type applications. So what is IBM to do ? MS applications in the corporate world is a reality and IBM would be retarded to adopt other applications just because a tiny portion of their company is working with Linux. The real indicator of whether they "walk the walk" is looking to see whether or not they are contributing significant resources to Linux (they are), and whether they are releasing code to the community (they are) - not whether or not they decide to stupidly force many of their users to use Linux - as Linux stands now.