Blizzard lost it LONG ago. I bought WC2 and found out that it wouldn't play in my computer beause I had a CD Burner and the copy "protection" wouldn't let it play. Their response, buy a new CD drive.
My response, gamecopyworld.com
Gamer: 1, Blizzard: 0
The same method worked on their next games, but I downloaded those. No reason not to wish for the bankruptcy of a company to whom my expenses obviously were irrelevant, despite being a direct result of their mistakes.
I can see the same attitude in WoW, honestly, an MMORPG that crashes that much when everyone raids in small (less than 500) player protected instances was programmed by a moron using VB. I've seen quake servers that offer a better MMORPG feeling. Their customer service takes this to the whole next level of blaming the customer, when they tell them anything.
Pah. They've simply got a more interesting game than EQ, but they don't have a clue about multiplayer (Look at StarCraft for proof, fun despite them, but buggy as hell even for an 8-player co-op game using sprites!) and they couldn't program a wet-paper bag to crumple if they used heavy rocks.
That would be the only fair way to do this. The only people Apple has any coercive right over are their employees, with whom they presumably entered into binding contracts. If anyone is going to be forced to testify, it should be the employees who were sworn to uphold these secrets, as opposed to innocent people who repeat rumours.
The blogger isn't going to be liable for releasing trade secrets unless, very unlikely, the employee who leaked the information also specifically notified them of the trade-secret status. Trade secret law can't compell silence in that case, so the blogger is likely "innocent". For the legal system to exert this pressure against an innocent person, in pursuit of Apple's agenda is outrageous.
So yes, as I see it, Apple's options are, lie-detector their employees, or suck it up.
Did the author know the information was a trade secret, as opposed to any other industry gossip? Otherwise they're not guilty. This has a real impact when you question them to obtain the name of someone else. They were relaying industry gossip legally and all of a sudden they're threatened with jail time if they don't turn a friend of theirs in for what they don't feel is a crime.
It may indeed be hard for Apple to weed out leaks without breaking this blogger, but is it really fair to do this to an innocent person? Does Joseph McCarthy himself have to be the judge before people realize this isn't workable?
It depends. Who ever talked to Madonna enough to be a loyal fan? By the time I heard of her she was big. She got there without me, and owes me nothing.
But some smaller bands who I've helped pack equipment, gone to crappy dives for shows when they were starting... There I'd say I might be a loyal fan, and that I'd expect something in return. "They" asked me to buy CDs, take a chance on their concerts, etc. It's only polite, and I only reward polite people, if possible.
Control over their creative works? No. Maybe I'd only like their old stuff, but if they can't come up with anything new in that style, I'd rather listen to the old stuff than water-down crap, so I'd prefer they go onto new stuff (even if I hate it).
But I'd expect a band that grew out of the help of not-rich fans to still offer shows in the range of those fans, at venues they can afford. Many bands do this sort of thing. Great Big Sea comes to mind, for playing cheap/free concerts in their home town.
Simple economics says self for as much as possible. But the second-order effects are the important ones to consider. Fans who are priced out of a concert are going to feel less interested in that performer. You might arrange a high-price function for the top.1% of your fan-base and find out that they're 5% by the end, because the rest has shrunk. You still filled your concert hall, but you've slashed merchandice sales to do it. Congrats. You, and all the other cheap MBAs have boosted this year's profits with no concern for future earnings.
Re:No language that I like better
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Try Ruby. It looks a lot like Perl in all the nice fast ways, it's got most of the shortcuts and power features. Most importantly, regexes are easy. It's got great OOP support and it's very clean.
I was a perl coder. Ruby is everything I loved and none of what I cursed.
We get that. But if you look beyond the instant you can see that rude and distrusting behaviour to an employee not only turns them off, but all of your current employees.
You've got self-interest, but the smart money is on enlightened self interest - you know, looking at the big picture. Do you cook or feed a golden goose?
Good logic, but you miss the point. An employee is no more likely to hurt you after giving you their resignation than before. They likely knew much sooner, so they've had all the time they needed to do anything. You're making up a risk, claiming it *could* cost USD 3.2 ho-jillions per second, and that having the employee killed is obviously a smart move, fiscally speaking.
If that employee was George from Seinfeld, controlled the world markets, and had just had a fight with his boss it might even be true. But really that person is moving, or found a better job, or has some totally non-hateful reason for leaving and planned to use the two weeks to wrap up their work, whose worst crime will be extra networking time with co-workers. Or, if they are malicious, they've likely got an IQ over 7 and they'll have already done whatever they were going to do.
In the end, you create a lot of ill-will within the professions that staff your company. That cog you fired can be replace with a call to HR, but that cog's co-workers and friends now don't see you as a good workplace. There appears to be a flood of tech workers, but some companies just can't seem to find anyone good... The real risk is that an overstuffed security nazi with a fetish for bureaucracy is destroying the assets of good-will, loyalty, industry reputation, and chasing away the R&D core of the business, those who should have the most invested in the company's future.
I've always given notice on a Friday, conforming for no real reason to the M-F business week, and I've cleaned up a bit. Nobody has been weird and canned me immediately, so no harm either way. But, listening to people like you has made me realize that the best time to give notice is monday at 11am, right after the weekend testers report and the project steering meetings, when I've got what feels like half of the shared files in the project open and checked out, and sixteen things and waiting on my simple yes-no. I figure, that way if you're nice, I keep working and wrap up everything happily, perhaps even trying to delay my new job to finish a project. But, if you aren't nice, I'm spared all the actual hassle of my week at work, still got the coffee and donuts, payed for the whole day, and I get to imagine you justifying the huge expense of everyone twiddling their thumbs because they're waiting on my bugfixes that I hadn't reassigned to anyone else, etc...
You see, these security nazis... their silly policies interfere with things they couldn't begin to contemplate, their interference can cause tons of PR problems, etc. Incalculable losses. Better to just fire them immediately. No thinking VP or HR manager ever keeps one of these loose cannons on staff. The potential liability is enormous.
Yeah, most companies hire talent (engineers, etc) and then spend the rest of their employment pissing all over them. Yeah, I get it, employees are the bottom rung, but if this person is important enough for you to pay a salary to in order to have them develop your product, maybe they know enought that you should listen to them.
You'll run a successful business someday if you don't already.
This isn't even a radical position. You have to disclose all details to get patent protection, why shouldn't you have to submit readable source code to get copyright protection?
We're considering making patent licensing mandatory - if you can't produce enough flu vaccine the gov steps in and licenses it to other companies, but pays you for each dose made. Would it be so far for the government to extend active copyright only as long as the work is on the market?
Besides, Microsoft could get this contract with the gov if they opened the file handling portions of their code years ago. Nobody really cares about seeing their internals; their quality isn't what we want to copy.
I totally agree, but that's not something covered by an install and benchmark test.
More importantly than time with one workstation is time with 1000 - Unix lets me write scripts that work on all the machines. Windows (without a ton of addons) does not. Clicky, clicky, and if you want to duplicate it, clicky clicky some more.
It is relevant to compare Win9x/2k/XP/2k3/LHbeta+IIS+MSSQL+Exchange with 'Linux'.
Linux is a technology, delivered by completely independent distributors. (Does second-sourcing mean anything to anyone anymore?) If you want tweaked performance for a group of identical machines, gentoo and the right X manager might save your company thousands. If you want rock-solid without much work, go debian. If you want to do web hosting, use a custom-built light kernel with XEN and let the clients pick their flavour for the virtual servers. If you serve a ton of prerendered web content and latency is an issue, use squid. Need a database, pick anything from a SQLLite to Postgres, Firebird, or one of the many fine contenders.
I'm a much happier admin when I can use the tools I want, not just what comes bundled with the distro. Especially a distro like MS sells, where extras cost more.
Good programmers are hard to find but they're there. I agree with a sibling poster, if you can't find them you probably aren't offering anything they want.
That said, I agree that there are far too few good programmers. It's not about knowing the latest whiz-bang languages or techniques, it's about believing in elegance and producing useful and maintainable code. It's about not optimizing without profiling. Not adding a feature without adding a few test cases.
I've seen a ton of really horrible programmers come out of the best schooling. Technically qualified, but unable to reason through the desired mechanics of the program - the ones who tweak blindly and wait for the right output, even if they got it for the wrong reason.
But, I can usually tell what someone is like if I ask to see a sample of one of their work (or equivalent open source, etc) projects, the CVS, documentation or at least comments, and test cases, bonus points for an automatic build/test procedure. If they've got a good grasp of the tools they probably understand the chaotic (butterfly effect - free a pointer one line too early and watch it crash six hours later, under load) nature of software and will at least be solid team members.
That Microsoft's release cycles are so slow isn't anyone else's fault. Admins aren't forced to make do with years-old technology, they can upgrade and patch nearly everything without killing the service or restarting the computer.
As people have been saying, the only true test is to take top linux guys and top windows guys and give each team a budget to build a server that meets a certain requirement (10k simultaneous web users, # of database queries per second, etc) in a given benchmark. The only restriction is the base OS, the Microsoft team must pick a released (Microsoft doesn't allow running Dev releases for non-dev purposes) version of Windows and the Linux team have to pick a Linux (BSD supporters should form a team!) flavour. It'd also be interesting to test the config MS would sell you - if you need a DB, it's MS, if you need a web server, it's MS, etc... This is probably more realistic because their prices always make this sort of this the best deal, and management will insist on using product they have licenses to...
I'd also include time, both the time taken to provide a solution, but the number of admin hours over that time, and the ammount of time it would take to roll the exact same thing, out to 10, 100, and 10k similar machines.
Many distribution contracts says that they own the work, and this may have made sense in the old days when printing/etc was new, but now it's clearly the author/artist who makes the book what it is, the publisher is merely the middle-man.
If your contract is worded this way, don't sign. You never need hosting or a printer badly enough to sign all your creative work away.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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Except that photographs are each given full-work copyright status, even if you blazed away at 5fps. In a movie, using a few full-res frames (screenshots) is very likely fair use in a review. Using five or six full-res photos in a review of a photographer's work won't be called fair use.
Photographs can be art (deliberate, etc), they can also be a random shutter press, full copyright status is given to both.
This is like following a poet around and copyrighting everything he utters, and individual words, so that "the" is one of his complete works.
Besides, copyrights should always remain with the people who commissioned the work. Anything else is just nuts. If you hire a builder to build a house, the house is yours. If you hire a wedding photographer to take your picture in your setting, your clothes, and your event, the photos should be yours.
Will people please STOP spreading this nonsense. EULAs are NOT valid.
You can safely ignore an EULA. It has *zero* weight. It's simple contract law, if you and I agree on something I can't go adding conditions later - it's not what you agreed to anymore. I can't sell you a car and then, after you've paid, tell you that you're only allowed to buy gas from me. That's what EULAs do. As a valid contract cannot do this, EULAs are not valid contracts.
This was all caused by a misinterpretation of copyright law as not allowing a program to be copied off disk and into ram, thereby requiring special permission of the author. This is obviously ridiculous for two reasons. First, by selling a product, you give your implied permission for the item to be used - the customer doesn't need permission. And second, copyright law was clarified to explicitly exclude copies made for the express purpose of using the work - as in, HD and RAM copies of the program. This was the only legal reasoning for the creation of EULAs and it isn't valid anymore.
Why are they still used if they aren't enforceable? You think they're enforceable, that's all that matters. As long as the companies don't investigate this too much, they can keep pretending they thought EULAs would be valid and enforce all sorts of weird shit with it. CPU limits?!
Proof? Why do you think Microsoft, Adobe, and others worked (bribery) so hard to push through the UCITA in some states, specifically giving EULAs some weight? Precisely because they didn't have any before - why would they have bothered otherwise? So yes, if you're in some states where the UCITA is, the state legislators have sold your right to expect a fair contract for a one-time industry cash bribe. Enjoy democracy.
"Think of the children" makes sense in some scenarios. "Should we go sky-diving?" "No, think of the kids, they don't have parachutes." It's only stupid when it's not a real concern: "Think of the children - they can't handle cartoons!"
"Think of the next generation - don't ruin the environment" - Makes sense. "Think of the kids - don't install all MS crap" - Makes sense.
I'd be pissy if I had to support MS and there weren't any open source tools - a scenario Microsoft has often said it's working towards. (You know, trying to get the US Gov to ban governmental use of open source, etc.)
It is a service to the country. The only difference between laying off workers and giving them the option to leave and help training for something new, is well, the choice, and the help. That it suits IBM too great. Enlightened self interest.
Because he had just watched the eleventy second guy explain it to someone else and is annoyed.:)
Seriously though, it's a problem in Slashdot. We all get stuck arguing the same point in ten parallel subthreads. We need a way of linking them back together.
As for my take on the case (ObPoint, so to speak) I think that the "But, Paintshop" argument, combined with Adobe's recent unpopularity being fresh in their minds will keep it from getting serious. It's too hard to prosecute and they'd have to club a baby seal in PR terms.
Today the Porsche company revealed a new product they were proud to introduce: "The Time Adapter, let's you use any old tires, like from your ford truck, on your Porsche. The cost savings could be immense!"
That'll run the day Apple switches to anything that's seen as the budget choice. Regardless of actual specs, it'd be an image killer.
Besides, Intel paid for the switch. It's a perfect counter to Microsoft. A *pretty* unix-based OS that has the reputation for being the easiest to use.
But, you'll see AMD Macs, there'll be a ton of unlicensed OS hacks and ROM images floating around on the net within three days of the release.
Not at all. Intel bought this deal. Intel has a lot invested into the x86 desktop cpu market, in whatever form it happens to take, which these days is being yanked around by Microsoft. Microsoft is going WalMart on the hardware, because they want to get the combined cost of a PC down and don't want their cut to lessen. I think Intel brought Apple into the x86 world to counter Microsoft. They shortcutted the "write a better consumer OS" step by 'buying' MacOS X for their CPU.
Apple didn't switch to AMD because AMD isn't offering them the few billion dollars that we'll soon see Intel is offering, in discounts, licensing fees, or whatever way the lawyers want to spin it.
Besides, Apple can't switch to anyone who is seen as the budget answer. Apple is about prestige. Porsche doesn't brag when the manage to cut costs from their suppliers, it'd give the wrong impression.
I think your US & Israel, buddies in killing brown people, thing is a bit out of line - in Israel's case...:)
All nations that face rampant terrorism become fascist in dealing with it, and few have had any luck at working to end terrorism. (The IRA is cooling down for now, but London is being targetted by new terrorists.) So, I don't think Israel is dealing that badly (except for parts of the settler issues) with a captive and hostile population, where neither side wants to be there.
I think the situation is analogous to the USA attacking Canada and being repelled, and losing Montana in the action. Then Canada finds that along with the regular residents, Montana was full of the USA's castoffs (illegal aliens, the french, etc) and the USA does not want to take them back. So Canada either retreats out of the area (allowing their position to weaken) or stays, but they obviously can't integrate the attackers religiously hostile people into their society, and nobody wants to take them back.
Add in religious hardliners on both sides, greedy political agendas, and egos on both sides, and it's easy to see how an already harm situation got where it is. But it certainly doesn't look like Israel wants this - if they could get out of this without feeling threatened (Honestly, does the area feel safer and more stable than the last few times they were suprise attacked by the combined forces of all the countries around them?) I'm sure they'd jump at the chance.
I'd really like to see any arab country open its doors to the Pallestinians. They sound like such allies when they use the Pallestinian's as a way to bash the jews, but when it comes to actually helping out... Oh, sorry, nobody home.
Look at Microsoft's past "peaceful co-existances" with other software projects...
I'd say it's fairly reasonable to say that we all win when MS loses, because they only win when we are forced to use their software. Bill's the one who defined the game - watch Revenge of the Nerds for the short form of it. We're not safe as long as he's got any leverage on the area.
In that sense, for *all* software companies that aren't on the "get bought by Microsoft" strategy, it's in your best interests to stab them in the back. Chaotic markets innovate more and favor the little guys. If they define running any product they don't control as stabbing them in the back - well, why not?
Slashdot Mirror
It's up a LOT more than any MMO and you aren't being griefed by the admins like in EQ, or the techs, like with WoW. I like that...
Blizzard lost it LONG ago. I bought WC2 and found out that it wouldn't play in my computer beause I had a CD Burner and the copy "protection" wouldn't let it play. Their response, buy a new CD drive.
My response, gamecopyworld.com
Gamer: 1, Blizzard: 0
The same method worked on their next games, but I downloaded those. No reason not to wish for the bankruptcy of a company to whom my expenses obviously were irrelevant, despite being a direct result of their mistakes.
I can see the same attitude in WoW, honestly, an MMORPG that crashes that much when everyone raids in small (less than 500) player protected instances was programmed by a moron using VB. I've seen quake servers that offer a better MMORPG feeling. Their customer service takes this to the whole next level of blaming the customer, when they tell them anything.
Pah. They've simply got a more interesting game than EQ, but they don't have a clue about multiplayer (Look at StarCraft for proof, fun despite them, but buggy as hell even for an 8-player co-op game using sprites!) and they couldn't program a wet-paper bag to crumple if they used heavy rocks.
That would be the only fair way to do this. The only people Apple has any coercive right over are their employees, with whom they presumably entered into binding contracts. If anyone is going to be forced to testify, it should be the employees who were sworn to uphold these secrets, as opposed to innocent people who repeat rumours.
The blogger isn't going to be liable for releasing trade secrets unless, very unlikely, the employee who leaked the information also specifically notified them of the trade-secret status. Trade secret law can't compell silence in that case, so the blogger is likely "innocent". For the legal system to exert this pressure against an innocent person, in pursuit of Apple's agenda is outrageous.
So yes, as I see it, Apple's options are, lie-detector their employees, or suck it up.
Did the author know the information was a trade secret, as opposed to any other industry gossip? Otherwise they're not guilty. This has a real impact when you question them to obtain the name of someone else. They were relaying industry gossip legally and all of a sudden they're threatened with jail time if they don't turn a friend of theirs in for what they don't feel is a crime.
It may indeed be hard for Apple to weed out leaks without breaking this blogger, but is it really fair to do this to an innocent person? Does Joseph McCarthy himself have to be the judge before people realize this isn't workable?
It depends. Who ever talked to Madonna enough to be a loyal fan? By the time I heard of her she was big. She got there without me, and owes me nothing.
.1% of your fan-base and find out that they're 5% by the end, because the rest has shrunk. You still filled your concert hall, but you've slashed merchandice sales to do it. Congrats. You, and all the other cheap MBAs have boosted this year's profits with no concern for future earnings.
But some smaller bands who I've helped pack equipment, gone to crappy dives for shows when they were starting... There I'd say I might be a loyal fan, and that I'd expect something in return. "They" asked me to buy CDs, take a chance on their concerts, etc. It's only polite, and I only reward polite people, if possible.
Control over their creative works? No. Maybe I'd only like their old stuff, but if they can't come up with anything new in that style, I'd rather listen to the old stuff than water-down crap, so I'd prefer they go onto new stuff (even if I hate it).
But I'd expect a band that grew out of the help of not-rich fans to still offer shows in the range of those fans, at venues they can afford. Many bands do this sort of thing. Great Big Sea comes to mind, for playing cheap/free concerts in their home town.
Simple economics says self for as much as possible. But the second-order effects are the important ones to consider. Fans who are priced out of a concert are going to feel less interested in that performer. You might arrange a high-price function for the top
Try Ruby. It looks a lot like Perl in all the nice fast ways, it's got most of the shortcuts and power features. Most importantly, regexes are easy. It's got great OOP support and it's very clean.
I was a perl coder. Ruby is everything I loved and none of what I cursed.
We get that. But if you look beyond the instant you can see that rude and distrusting behaviour to an employee not only turns them off, but all of your current employees.
You've got self-interest, but the smart money is on enlightened self interest - you know, looking at the big picture. Do you cook or feed a golden goose?
Good logic, but you miss the point. An employee is no more likely to hurt you after giving you their resignation than before. They likely knew much sooner, so they've had all the time they needed to do anything. You're making up a risk, claiming it *could* cost USD 3.2 ho-jillions per second, and that having the employee killed is obviously a smart move, fiscally speaking.
If that employee was George from Seinfeld, controlled the world markets, and had just had a fight with his boss it might even be true. But really that person is moving, or found a better job, or has some totally non-hateful reason for leaving and planned to use the two weeks to wrap up their work, whose worst crime will be extra networking time with co-workers. Or, if they are malicious, they've likely got an IQ over 7 and they'll have already done whatever they were going to do.
In the end, you create a lot of ill-will within the professions that staff your company. That cog you fired can be replace with a call to HR, but that cog's co-workers and friends now don't see you as a good workplace. There appears to be a flood of tech workers, but some companies just can't seem to find anyone good... The real risk is that an overstuffed security nazi with a fetish for bureaucracy is destroying the assets of good-will, loyalty, industry reputation, and chasing away the R&D core of the business, those who should have the most invested in the company's future.
I've always given notice on a Friday, conforming for no real reason to the M-F business week, and I've cleaned up a bit. Nobody has been weird and canned me immediately, so no harm either way. But, listening to people like you has made me realize that the best time to give notice is monday at 11am, right after the weekend testers report and the project steering meetings, when I've got what feels like half of the shared files in the project open and checked out, and sixteen things and waiting on my simple yes-no. I figure, that way if you're nice, I keep working and wrap up everything happily, perhaps even trying to delay my new job to finish a project. But, if you aren't nice, I'm spared all the actual hassle of my week at work, still got the coffee and donuts, payed for the whole day, and I get to imagine you justifying the huge expense of everyone twiddling their thumbs because they're waiting on my bugfixes that I hadn't reassigned to anyone else, etc...
You see, these security nazis... their silly policies interfere with things they couldn't begin to contemplate, their interference can cause tons of PR problems, etc. Incalculable losses. Better to just fire them immediately. No thinking VP or HR manager ever keeps one of these loose cannons on staff. The potential liability is enormous.
Yeah, most companies hire talent (engineers, etc) and then spend the rest of their employment pissing all over them. Yeah, I get it, employees are the bottom rung, but if this person is important enough for you to pay a salary to in order to have them develop your product, maybe they know enought that you should listen to them.
You'll run a successful business someday if you don't already.
This isn't even a radical position. You have to disclose all details to get patent protection, why shouldn't you have to submit readable source code to get copyright protection?
We're considering making patent licensing mandatory - if you can't produce enough flu vaccine the gov steps in and licenses it to other companies, but pays you for each dose made. Would it be so far for the government to extend active copyright only as long as the work is on the market?
Besides, Microsoft could get this contract with the gov if they opened the file handling portions of their code years ago. Nobody really cares about seeing their internals; their quality isn't what we want to copy.
I totally agree, but that's not something covered by an install and benchmark test.
More importantly than time with one workstation is time with 1000 - Unix lets me write scripts that work on all the machines. Windows (without a ton of addons) does not. Clicky, clicky, and if you want to duplicate it, clicky clicky some more.
It is relevant to compare Win9x/2k/XP/2k3/LHbeta+IIS+MSSQL+Exchange with 'Linux'.
Linux is a technology, delivered by completely independent distributors. (Does second-sourcing mean anything to anyone anymore?) If you want tweaked performance for a group of identical machines, gentoo and the right X manager might save your company thousands. If you want rock-solid without much work, go debian. If you want to do web hosting, use a custom-built light kernel with XEN and let the clients pick their flavour for the virtual servers. If you serve a ton of prerendered web content and latency is an issue, use squid. Need a database, pick anything from a SQLLite to Postgres, Firebird, or one of the many fine contenders.
I'm a much happier admin when I can use the tools I want, not just what comes bundled with the distro. Especially a distro like MS sells, where extras cost more.
Good programmers are hard to find but they're there. I agree with a sibling poster, if you can't find them you probably aren't offering anything they want.
That said, I agree that there are far too few good programmers. It's not about knowing the latest whiz-bang languages or techniques, it's about believing in elegance and producing useful and maintainable code. It's about not optimizing without profiling. Not adding a feature without adding a few test cases.
I've seen a ton of really horrible programmers come out of the best schooling. Technically qualified, but unable to reason through the desired mechanics of the program - the ones who tweak blindly and wait for the right output, even if they got it for the wrong reason.
But, I can usually tell what someone is like if I ask to see a sample of one of their work (or equivalent open source, etc) projects, the CVS, documentation or at least comments, and test cases, bonus points for an automatic build/test procedure. If they've got a good grasp of the tools they probably understand the chaotic (butterfly effect - free a pointer one line too early and watch it crash six hours later, under load) nature of software and will at least be solid team members.
That Microsoft's release cycles are so slow isn't anyone else's fault. Admins aren't forced to make do with years-old technology, they can upgrade and patch nearly everything without killing the service or restarting the computer.
As people have been saying, the only true test is to take top linux guys and top windows guys and give each team a budget to build a server that meets a certain requirement (10k simultaneous web users, # of database queries per second, etc) in a given benchmark. The only restriction is the base OS, the Microsoft team must pick a released (Microsoft doesn't allow running Dev releases for non-dev purposes) version of Windows and the Linux team have to pick a Linux (BSD supporters should form a team!) flavour. It'd also be interesting to test the config MS would sell you - if you need a DB, it's MS, if you need a web server, it's MS, etc... This is probably more realistic because their prices always make this sort of this the best deal, and management will insist on using product they have licenses to...
I'd also include time, both the time taken to provide a solution, but the number of admin hours over that time, and the ammount of time it would take to roll the exact same thing, out to 10, 100, and 10k similar machines.
Until then, Microsoft is still lying.
Many distribution contracts says that they own the work, and this may have made sense in the old days when printing/etc was new, but now it's clearly the author/artist who makes the book what it is, the publisher is merely the middle-man.
If your contract is worded this way, don't sign. You never need hosting or a printer badly enough to sign all your creative work away.
Yup. 2001.
i cleID=00060286-CB58-1315-8B5883414B7F0000&pageNumb er=1&catID=2
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&art
Except that photographs are each given full-work copyright status, even if you blazed away at 5fps. In a movie, using a few full-res frames (screenshots) is very likely fair use in a review. Using five or six full-res photos in a review of a photographer's work won't be called fair use.
Photographs can be art (deliberate, etc), they can also be a random shutter press, full copyright status is given to both.
This is like following a poet around and copyrighting everything he utters, and individual words, so that "the" is one of his complete works.
Besides, copyrights should always remain with the people who commissioned the work. Anything else is just nuts. If you hire a builder to build a house, the house is yours. If you hire a wedding photographer to take your picture in your setting, your clothes, and your event, the photos should be yours.
Will people please STOP spreading this nonsense. EULAs are NOT valid.
You can safely ignore an EULA. It has *zero* weight. It's simple contract law, if you and I agree on something I can't go adding conditions later - it's not what you agreed to anymore. I can't sell you a car and then, after you've paid, tell you that you're only allowed to buy gas from me. That's what EULAs do. As a valid contract cannot do this, EULAs are not valid contracts.
This was all caused by a misinterpretation of copyright law as not allowing a program to be copied off disk and into ram, thereby requiring special permission of the author. This is obviously ridiculous for two reasons. First, by selling a product, you give your implied permission for the item to be used - the customer doesn't need permission. And second, copyright law was clarified to explicitly exclude copies made for the express purpose of using the work - as in, HD and RAM copies of the program. This was the only legal reasoning for the creation of EULAs and it isn't valid anymore.
Why are they still used if they aren't enforceable? You think they're enforceable, that's all that matters. As long as the companies don't investigate this too much, they can keep pretending they thought EULAs would be valid and enforce all sorts of weird shit with it. CPU limits?!
Proof? Why do you think Microsoft, Adobe, and others worked (bribery) so hard to push through the UCITA in some states, specifically giving EULAs some weight? Precisely because they didn't have any before - why would they have bothered otherwise? So yes, if you're in some states where the UCITA is, the state legislators have sold your right to expect a fair contract for a one-time industry cash bribe. Enjoy democracy.
"Think of the children" makes sense in some scenarios. "Should we go sky-diving?" "No, think of the kids, they don't have parachutes." It's only stupid when it's not a real concern: "Think of the children - they can't handle cartoons!"
"Think of the next generation - don't ruin the environment" - Makes sense.
"Think of the kids - don't install all MS crap" - Makes sense.
I'd be pissy if I had to support MS and there weren't any open source tools - a scenario Microsoft has often said it's working towards. (You know, trying to get the US Gov to ban governmental use of open source, etc.)
It is a service to the country. The only difference between laying off workers and giving them the option to leave and help training for something new, is well, the choice, and the help. That it suits IBM too great. Enlightened self interest.
Because he had just watched the eleventy second guy explain it to someone else and is annoyed. :)
Seriously though, it's a problem in Slashdot. We all get stuck arguing the same point in ten parallel subthreads. We need a way of linking them back together.
As for my take on the case (ObPoint, so to speak) I think that the "But, Paintshop" argument, combined with Adobe's recent unpopularity being fresh in their minds will keep it from getting serious. It's too hard to prosecute and they'd have to club a baby seal in PR terms.
Today the Porsche company revealed a new product they were proud to introduce: "The Time Adapter, let's you use any old tires, like from your ford truck, on your Porsche. The cost savings could be immense!"
That'll run the day Apple switches to anything that's seen as the budget choice. Regardless of actual specs, it'd be an image killer.
Besides, Intel paid for the switch. It's a perfect counter to Microsoft. A *pretty* unix-based OS that has the reputation for being the easiest to use.
But, you'll see AMD Macs, there'll be a ton of unlicensed OS hacks and ROM images floating around on the net within three days of the release.
Not at all. Intel bought this deal. Intel has a lot invested into the x86 desktop cpu market, in whatever form it happens to take, which these days is being yanked around by Microsoft. Microsoft is going WalMart on the hardware, because they want to get the combined cost of a PC down and don't want their cut to lessen. I think Intel brought Apple into the x86 world to counter Microsoft. They shortcutted the "write a better consumer OS" step by 'buying' MacOS X for their CPU.
Apple didn't switch to AMD because AMD isn't offering them the few billion dollars that we'll soon see Intel is offering, in discounts, licensing fees, or whatever way the lawyers want to spin it.
Besides, Apple can't switch to anyone who is seen as the budget answer. Apple is about prestige. Porsche doesn't brag when the manage to cut costs from their suppliers, it'd give the wrong impression.
I think your US & Israel, buddies in killing brown people, thing is a bit out of line - in Israel's case... :)
All nations that face rampant terrorism become fascist in dealing with it, and few have had any luck at working to end terrorism. (The IRA is cooling down for now, but London is being targetted by new terrorists.) So, I don't think Israel is dealing that badly (except for parts of the settler issues) with a captive and hostile population, where neither side wants to be there.
I think the situation is analogous to the USA attacking Canada and being repelled, and losing Montana in the action. Then Canada finds that along with the regular residents, Montana was full of the USA's castoffs (illegal aliens, the french, etc) and the USA does not want to take them back. So Canada either retreats out of the area (allowing their position to weaken) or stays, but they obviously can't integrate the attackers religiously hostile people into their society, and nobody wants to take them back.
Add in religious hardliners on both sides, greedy political agendas, and egos on both sides, and it's easy to see how an already harm situation got where it is. But it certainly doesn't look like Israel wants this - if they could get out of this without feeling threatened (Honestly, does the area feel safer and more stable than the last few times they were suprise attacked by the combined forces of all the countries around them?) I'm sure they'd jump at the chance.
I'd really like to see any arab country open its doors to the Pallestinians. They sound like such allies when they use the Pallestinian's as a way to bash the jews, but when it comes to actually helping out... Oh, sorry, nobody home.
Look at Microsoft's past "peaceful co-existances" with other software projects...
I'd say it's fairly reasonable to say that we all win when MS loses, because they only win when we are forced to use their software. Bill's the one who defined the game - watch Revenge of the Nerds for the short form of it. We're not safe as long as he's got any leverage on the area.
In that sense, for *all* software companies that aren't on the "get bought by Microsoft" strategy, it's in your best interests to stab them in the back. Chaotic markets innovate more and favor the little guys. If they define running any product they don't control as stabbing them in the back - well, why not?