You need the full game to determine how good the gameplay is on the other 30-40 levels.
So you're saying that the gameplay changes with each level? It's Quake on level 1 and it PowerPuff girls on level 3? Doubt it.
Actually, yes. Take Q3test2 (The Longest Yard) and play it on a version of Q3 without the railgun. Or Q3Test1 and play it without the rocket launcher. Lacking one weapon could drastically change those levels.
In general, FPS games have to be very well balanced or you get a Quake1 situtation where only two weapons were ever used and where the levels were designed in such a way that you could, if you got a momentary break (good spawn spot) control the level, keeping your opponent from any armor or health, while running around stocked up.
That's an example of how the whole game interacts to make a less than perfect multiplayer situation. Quake1 was great because it was the first, by far, of the 3d modable shooters. But now, in the era of more thought-out games, if you bought a Quake1, you'd be pissed.
But, how would you know without playing the whole thing, or at a large sampling of it?
Did you read anything I said before? These things tell you nothing. Reviews are worse than useless, because often they're simply hype.
That's an opinion, not an actual fact. These things tell me nothing? Have you ever actually read an online review?
You most likely just have a grudge because one of the reviews gave a bad rating on your favorite game. Hey, they're only human.
No. Reviews are a bunch of opinions about the game from someone who isn't you. They can't describe the game in so much detail you know how it'll work without a huge essay, and if they don't, and just show a few pretty pictures and talk about some nice features, you don't know how the whole game works.
Now, if I do run it, play it for 1 minute, then delete it, is it theft?
Steal: to take and carry away without right or permission. -Webster's Dictionary
Stealing is taking something that's not yours. It doesn't matter whether you use it or not.
Unauthorized copying isn't theft. It's unauthorized copying. There are *civil* penalties, as in, you can be sued for damages. That's it.
It may not be polite, or 'right' as you define it, to use unauthorized copies of software, but that doesn't mean it's theft.
Suppose Microsoft use Linux code in their new os and didn't use the GPL. Is that not stealing? Or is it not a crime just because it isn't in the physical sense?
It's not theft, that's for sure. If you're serious about the GPL reference, ask RMS for his opinion.
If Microsoft just used GPL code in their products and didn't follow the rules of the GPL, it wouldn't be theft. It would be contract violation. I'd expect them to be sued.
The only way it would be theft is if they erased your version of that source code when they took theirs.
Before you reply...
Yes, I recognize the ethical issue in unauthorized copying. But, you don't do anyone a favour, on either side, by using terms like 'theft' that aren't appropriate in that context.
The software industry stands to benefit from people thinking any copying *they don't specifically allow* is theft. Much the same as the movie industry has a lot to be gained from getting people to think that watching a DVD in a non-authorized player is piracy. But they're both looking out for their own interests.
Hmmmm, good point. That would be like simply asking the NSA, or the equivalent in your country, to pay you a visit...
But, this could be fixed if the phone was just a general purpose computer, kind of like a winmodem(ick) and the smarts were stored programs. Especially if the brains of it were on swappable smart cards. Then the phone would be just the transport and display mechanism.
You could download a secure crypto module from the net from a trusted source PGP, Counterpane, etc, install it yourself. That'd free up the makers of the phone from any liability (I think).
Posting a link to a file is no different than saying "Go downtown, on the southside, to get drugs" or "Go to Russia, to Uzbeckistan, for nukes", or "So and So's book, _blah_ is banned in your country, but it's a good read, order it from Amazon, ISBN...."
Simply mentioning the existance of something 'illegal' can't be a 'crime' except in certain cases... If you wrote something 'illegal' in your home country, then shipped it off to a friend where it is legal, but linked to it, a judge might rule that it was still a problem, but if you didn't put the file there...
That's about as illegal as saying "Bob got arrested for drug dealing, his number is #..." and letting someone call him. Especially because if you gave someone a search engine link "Search for foo.bar at google.com" you're not even linking to the file, just someone who knows how to get the file...
Anyways. That British case involved slander or libel, and the British laws are stupid, truth isn't a defense, so no doubt the rest of their laws are boneheaded too. (Imagine, if Hitler came back to life and went to Britain, he could sue them all for Libel for saying he was a murderer...)
I'm a little converned with there being any circumstance in which you are compelled to give the government a way to decrypt your data.
And, there are forms of encryption designed to allow decryption of the cyphertext into two plaintexts, one decoy, and the other the 'real' plaintext. A user of this software could decrypt the cyphertext of him arranging for the sale of kiddyporn into him talking about church, mom, and apple pie. Or, to avoid suspicion, talking about slightly illegal things, like buying small quantities of dope, or something similarly mundane.
What would theoretically work is if there were two copies of the message made when the machinery was signalled to tap. One encrypted for decryption by the standard recipient, and the other for decryption by the government, and maybe another by the ACLU, or some other uninvolved third-party.
This would work if there was a machine the user didn't own, like in the days of AT&T rental phones. Now the user would simply use a phone that didn't have this hidden tap capability and the government would be SOL. The secret copies would have to be made before encryption, and because paranoid users would insist on rolling their own encryption, we could be pretty sure they wouldn't allow a machine they didn't control to have the unencrypted signal.
And relying on cell-phone makers to add this tech secretly for instance, will never happen. The DVD consortium couldn't keep DVDs secure and that involved reverse engineering. All it would take to ruin the tampered cell-phone idea would be to let the secret out somewhere along the line.
So, it's a good idea, but it'll never happen in hardware, and if you're ever forced to give up your secret keys it'll either 1) accomplish nothing because you'll BS about the real message, or 2) be a major privacy violation.
One problem... if you have encryption, wiretapping is irrelevant. Ideally, we could CC: everything to the 'bad guys' and they wouldn't be able to read it.
I'd imagine that as CPU power gets cheaper, encryption will start to pop up in more places. Currently, to serve every copy of Slashdot with public key crypto would be unfeasible. But in ten years, it'll probably be the default. Especially as the usability of things like PGP gets better. (ie, download encrypted data onto palmtop, run pgp there with smart-card crypto, upload back to 'unsecure' desktop if it's unimportant (ie, web surfing, etc)).
This crypto explosion will mean that the contents of most packets will be garbage to a snooper, and anonymous tunneling software could even hide most of the routing info...
So, by all means, let them implement a way to have 'tapped' packets being sent across a router duplicated in the logs on another machine. It'll be used for debugging more than wiretapping.
And, if it's default to sell 'phones' for VOIP that either don't encrypt, or only barely (CLIPPER, etc) encrypt, then this will allow wiretapping. Even if some restrictive country makes these phones mandatory, we're no worse off than we are now, with China, etc. And people in other countries would simply buy secure phones that encrypted the data, much like their email software would encrypt all email.
Hmmmm. In the future, because cell phones have such a huge ammount of memory (for a phone), maybe when you give someone your number, you can IR transfer it to them along with your public key and have *very* secure transmissions (regardless of the technology the telco uses to pass packets along.)
Well, right and wrong asside, a lot of people will feel like that poster, and probably do what he advocates for revenge.
If the industry hadn't been such pricks since day one, they might have more supporters.
Ditto with lawyers. Shooting lawyers might be evil, m-kay, but I can really sympathize with people who do it.
Hmmmm, maybe we could combine this and the gun thread... Is murder bad if it's just CEOs of companies that are walking over your rights, or is it good because you're defending yourself from an armed (with money and lawyers) attacker (of your rights)?
They don't even have to have communicated their desires to each other.
For those familiar with games theory, this is sort of like a prisoners dilema, except that this allows more than one decision.
They could try to fight it out, probably not getting rid of one another, and ending up with much lower profits, for a chance at being a monopoly which would bring government attention if the profits were increased much (ie, lose/barely-win) or they could take the middle ground and apply little pressure against each other, instead driving out the little guys who would lower their price to compete, ensuring that they both get a steady supply of golden eggs.
If Microsoft hadn't killed OS/2 by bringing out new Win32 APIs, they might have 'competition', even if only as much as Apple is to Intel, and have avoided this whole trial. (But have been able to charge mostly the same prices, etc) But they got greedy, wanted to get 100% of the market, and got caught.
Eventually MS would expand into markets it couldn't control, such as entertainment, or communications, and it would 'have competition'. It might even have minor competition in the form of another desktop OS, long after its proprietary APIs have locked consumers to Windows forever.
But, to stop the suit just because the circumstances changed would indicate that you can leverage a monopoly in one area to control all surrounding areas, control them for twenty years, then get out with a few hundred billion dollars, and not be punished.
It's like stealing from someone, they claiming you shouldn't be punished because you squandered the money and don't have it anymore.
Miscrosoft's competitors have usually had superior products that were cheaper, and Microsoft's illegal behaviour killed them before they could get a chance to compete.
The bug in Windows killing DrDos, the 'discounts' on Windows, if you didn't install competing OSes, etc..
Her philosophy might give lip service (Monica?) to being moral, and lying and stealing being bad, but there aren't any compunctions against the big guy blacklisting the little guy until he has to work for slave wages or starve.
Her rules are all against the little guy, because the big guy can apply pressure from many sides to get what he wants.
If you like Ayn Rand's words, you need to grow up.
The law would be fairly easy to fight except for the fact that money = victory.
You've paid for the right to view the information on the disk. That information is encrypted, so you have to decrypt it to view it. That *is* a step in defeating copy protection, but it's also a step in using the product.
Ditto with computers. You have to read a stream of digital information off of a disk and essentially decrypt it to play a game. Does that mean that a disk drive is a tool to defeat copy-protection?
But, the movie industry is rich enough they could manage to convict him of the Kenedy assasination, even if he was born in the 70s.
The easiest one first... We know there are hidden APIs because we can disassemble software and see what it does. Software calling documented APIs would call functions in a DLL only in certain ways, and we'd know which functions those were because we could call the same ones. But if that software called functions that weren't listed, we'd be seeing either 1) a bug or 2) an undocumented API function.
Now the question of why they should be required to document the APIs...
The OS is supposed to let you run programs, not keep you from running programs. Yet, if they don't document their APIs, they can make applications that use the undocumented features perform faster or better than ones that do. That means, if Word fares badly in a benchmark, they simply stick a busy loop in an API function that Wordperfect has to call to accomplish what Word does in a different way. And they'd handicapped Wordperfect, thus making themselves look better.
If Microsoft didn't make applications, and stuck just to the OS, and fairly essential tools (disk tools, virus scanning, etc) and used their undocumented API calls themselves, they'd have more justification. They could claim that the calls were low on error checking, and were okay for low-level system components to use, but not prime-time enough for a word processor. Much the same as BIOS/Direct video writes on older computers. One way was slow and steady, the other way much *much* faster, yet potentially incompatible. These arbitrary rulings would potentially hurt a word processor's performance, but it would hurt all of them similarly, and without bias.
But, Microsoft *does* make applications. There's no valid reason why a function called by one wordprocessor couldn't be called by another. Word isn't anymore of a system component than Wordperfect.
Now, MS would only go to the trouble of telling people in a different division about these undocumented features if there was a benefit. So MS programmers not only get preferantial treatment from the operating system, but they can also sabotage competitors if they need to make their products look better.
How does that compare to the perl books, and other similarly hot topics?
But, even if it was in the top 50 on Amazon, I wouldn't think too much of it, yet. Amazon is still where online types go to shop, and most online people who like UF would go to one of the big online stores to buy the book. It's the retail store sales that'll mean the most. Those will be the people who probably haven't read the comic online.
And, O'Reilly is taking a risk. Even if the UF book sells millions, they didn't know how it will do. Authors often find it nearly impossible to finda publisher for a new book, but publishers throw themselves at proven authors. It's great to have a publisher go against that trend.
Nope, but I can easily see the day when Linux is *under* everyone's desktop. Or, at least a goodly sized chunk of consumers.
If MS was forced to standardize and document the Windows APIs for competitors to copy, you'd suddenly be able to port to Linux very easily. And, now that nobody looks for a C:> who will care what's it's running on? Only techies, and the techies will appreciate that it's a stable *nix instead of a kludge.
I'd love the day when you could get the same apps on Be, MacOS, Linux, and even Windows. (and BSD, etc...)
You know. For many cartoons, you have to have the book to read them. Until recently, Calvin and Hobbes wasn't on the internet. Dilbert only is for a short period of time. But, Userfriendly started on the net, and has to stay that way (it's not in enough newspapers to make an attempt to go that way work.)
So, the book, a collection of comics, isn't really much more than a paper backup of the website, admittedly without banner ads.
But, most of us here could whip up a perl script to pull all the cartoons off the site, html them, and give us our own backup archive. So, the book is just ungreppable paper.
Now, I like to support people who do things and give them away. Like UF, or free software. But, for me it's much more convenient to do this via banner ads than by purchasing a book which I don't need.
I'd be a lot more likely to want a nice HTMLized downloadable collection that had all of the text transcribed, and keywords added, so that I could seach for favorites and view them on the computer.
But, I'm glad it was published. I don't think that O'Reilly did anything bad by breaking their tradition of publishing only tech book. This is most obviously not a manual, so you're not going to get people who buy it accidentally, and it does follow the O'Reilly tradition of going to the source. For a book on User Friendly, you can't go wrong with one written by Illiad... if a book is what you want.
It's good to see a company willing to publish a small run of books like this, it can only help the community, even if the topic of the book isn't one that everyone is fond of.
Buy or borrow any new HD. $200 USD will get you a 20GB HD... Find a friend, or someone at a local LUG willing to loan you one for a few hours if you can't afford it.
>>If the commercial entities were willing to >>redistribute the source for any changes they >>made, there would be no problem.
Wrong. Since this FS is linked against the kernel, they would also have to make their kernel source code available under the GPL (unless they obtain the source under different licensing - see above).
Again, the BSD folks are happy to redistribute the source for even their entire kernel, but because of the GPL restrictions (or features, as RMS would say), they cannot use this source in their product.
Actually, no. All they need to do are put stubs in the kernel that will call an exteral filesystem module. Then rewrite the filesystem code as an external module. It'd be slower, but that's the price they pay for their anti-GPL decision.
The are controlling who can use the currently-available source code. In particular, BSD folks cannot use it,
As the other respondant said, BSD *can* use the code. The only thing stopping them is themselves.
The GPL ensures that the Linux kernel will always be open source if the BSD guys want to look at a new FS to see how it was done. The BSD license does not ensure that BSD and its derivatives will always be open source.
Use junkbuster or WebWasher and block messenger.netscape.com
That'll fix it for ya.
You know, the solution to this whole Real Player GUID problem is an application-specific firewall. Simply don't let some apps connect to some sites on the net.
So why didn't they do it before? Why did they do it while using the threat of raising OEM prices to get companies to not install Netscape?
Having a browser ship with the OS makes sense. It's like a disk defragger. When HDs were rare, it would be a waste. Now that you can't buy a computer without one, they're essential.
But, to use anti-competetive practices to have an inferior product be used...
MS did it just for control. They can't let anyone else have a killer app.
Here's a company who has what ammounts to a patent on cookies, and we're happy that they're using free software that was created in the type of atmosphere they're helping to destroy with their blackmail.
It's too bad we can't remove the right to use free software from companies currently blackmailing other companies with patents or other similar behaviour.
I'd laugh if they had to run the pathetic company on NT using a webserver written in Visual Basic.
It is all they deserve after all, with their hostile behaviour.
I'm not saying that Winows is better than *nix, but it is more suitable for the beginners! Can ytou imagine a world where everyone ran linux? think of the incompetent newbies that wouldnt have a clue!!
Ok, so it's immediately obvious for Windows users how they go about editing the registry to remove programs that crash on load, yet aren't listed in Startup where you would expect them...
Windows is more obscure than Linux, except that there are literally thousands of books describing how to use it and that it comes preinstalled.
I'm not saying that there is nothing harder in Linux than in Windows, but the Linux installations until recently were geared towards ISPs and companies that wanted power, not ease of use. That's like giving a desktop user NT4 server and expecting them to make it work like Win95.
This thing about owing MS is complete bullshit. They did everything they did for their own pocketbook. They didn't integrate a web browser with the OS to get rid of kludgy proprietary help files or anything, they did it to kill a competitor.
The point is that some people will click a button just because it's there. If there are four buttons, three yes and one no, the extra two yes buttons will 'take' votes from the main yes and no buttons.
The 'right' way to do this is.
Do you think the government needs to intervene?
() Yes () No
If you answered Yes to the last question, how?
() Breaking up the company () Fines
etc
That way you get a more accurate sampling of the Yes/No vote, but also get a good idea of what the Yes voters want done.
These polls are written by people without any clue of how to write unbiased polls. It's really sad. You'd think CNN would have a contract with a public-polling firm to help them write unbiased polls. (Or, biased polls that are less obviously biases...:)
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying that the gameplay changes with each level? It's Quake on level 1 and it PowerPuff girls on level 3? Doubt it.
Actually, yes. Take Q3test2 (The Longest Yard) and play it on a version of Q3 without the railgun. Or Q3Test1 and play it without the rocket launcher. Lacking one weapon could drastically change those levels.
In general, FPS games have to be very well balanced or you get a Quake1 situtation where only two weapons were ever used and where the levels were designed in such a way that you could, if you got a momentary break (good spawn spot) control the level, keeping your opponent from any armor or health, while running around stocked up.
That's an example of how the whole game interacts to make a less than perfect multiplayer situation. Quake1 was great because it was the first, by far, of the 3d modable shooters. But now, in the era of more thought-out games, if you bought a Quake1, you'd be pissed.
But, how would you know without playing the whole thing, or at a large sampling of it?
That's an opinion, not an actual fact. These things tell me nothing? Have you ever actually read an online review?
You most likely just have a grudge because one of the reviews gave a bad rating on your favorite game. Hey, they're only human.
No. Reviews are a bunch of opinions about the game from someone who isn't you. They can't describe the game in so much detail you know how it'll work without a huge essay, and if they don't, and just show a few pretty pictures and talk about some nice features, you don't know how the whole game works.
Steal: to take and carry away without right or permission. -Webster's Dictionary
Stealing is taking something that's not yours. It doesn't matter whether you use it or not.
Unauthorized copying isn't theft. It's unauthorized copying. There are *civil* penalties, as in, you can be sued for damages. That's it.
It may not be polite, or 'right' as you define it, to use unauthorized copies of software, but that doesn't mean it's theft.
Suppose Microsoft use Linux code in their new os and didn't use the GPL. Is that not stealing? Or is it not a crime just because it isn't in the physical sense?
It's not theft, that's for sure. If you're serious about the GPL reference, ask RMS for his opinion.
If Microsoft just used GPL code in their products and didn't follow the rules of the GPL, it wouldn't be theft. It would be contract violation. I'd expect them to be sued.
The only way it would be theft is if they erased your version of that source code when they took theirs.
Before you reply...
Yes, I recognize the ethical issue in unauthorized copying. But, you don't do anyone a favour, on either side, by using terms like 'theft' that aren't appropriate in that context.
The software industry stands to benefit from people thinking any copying *they don't specifically allow* is theft. Much the same as the movie industry has a lot to be gained from getting people to think that watching a DVD in a non-authorized player is piracy. But they're both looking out for their own interests.
Hmmmm, good point. That would be like simply asking the NSA, or the equivalent in your country, to pay you a visit...
But, this could be fixed if the phone was just a general purpose computer, kind of like a winmodem(ick) and the smarts were stored programs. Especially if the brains of it were on swappable smart cards. Then the phone would be just the transport and display mechanism.
You could download a secure crypto module from the net from a trusted source PGP, Counterpane, etc, install it yourself. That'd free up the makers of the phone from any liability (I think).
Then the judge in question was a fool.
...."
Posting a link to a file is no different than saying "Go downtown, on the southside, to get drugs" or "Go to Russia, to Uzbeckistan, for nukes", or "So and So's book, _blah_ is banned in your country, but it's a good read, order it from Amazon, ISBN
Simply mentioning the existance of something 'illegal' can't be a 'crime' except in certain cases... If you wrote something 'illegal' in your home country, then shipped it off to a friend where it is legal, but linked to it, a judge might rule that it was still a problem, but if you didn't put the file there...
That's about as illegal as saying "Bob got arrested for drug dealing, his number is #..." and letting someone call him. Especially because if you gave someone a search engine link "Search for foo.bar at google.com" you're not even linking to the file, just someone who knows how to get the file...
Anyways. That British case involved slander or libel, and the British laws are stupid, truth isn't a defense, so no doubt the rest of their laws are boneheaded too. (Imagine, if Hitler came back to life and went to Britain, he could sue them all for Libel for saying he was a murderer...)
Good idea.
I'm a little converned with there being any circumstance in which you are compelled to give the government a way to decrypt your data.
And, there are forms of encryption designed to allow decryption of the cyphertext into two plaintexts, one decoy, and the other the 'real' plaintext. A user of this software could decrypt the cyphertext of him arranging for the sale of kiddyporn into him talking about church, mom, and apple pie. Or, to avoid suspicion, talking about slightly illegal things, like buying small quantities of dope, or something similarly mundane.
What would theoretically work is if there were two copies of the message made when the machinery was signalled to tap. One encrypted for decryption by the standard recipient, and the other for decryption by the government, and maybe another by the ACLU, or some other uninvolved third-party.
This would work if there was a machine the user didn't own, like in the days of AT&T rental phones. Now the user would simply use a phone that didn't have this hidden tap capability and the government would be SOL. The secret copies would have to be made before encryption, and because paranoid users would insist on rolling their own encryption, we could be pretty sure they wouldn't allow a machine they didn't control to have the unencrypted signal.
And relying on cell-phone makers to add this tech secretly for instance, will never happen. The DVD consortium couldn't keep DVDs secure and that involved reverse engineering. All it would take to ruin the tampered cell-phone idea would be to let the secret out somewhere along the line.
So, it's a good idea, but it'll never happen in hardware, and if you're ever forced to give up your secret keys it'll either 1) accomplish nothing because you'll BS about the real message, or 2) be a major privacy violation.
One problem... if you have encryption, wiretapping is irrelevant. Ideally, we could CC: everything to the 'bad guys' and they wouldn't be able to read it.
I'd imagine that as CPU power gets cheaper, encryption will start to pop up in more places. Currently, to serve every copy of Slashdot with public key crypto would be unfeasible. But in ten years, it'll probably be the default. Especially as the usability of things like PGP gets better. (ie, download encrypted data onto palmtop, run pgp there with smart-card crypto, upload back to 'unsecure' desktop if it's unimportant (ie, web surfing, etc)).
This crypto explosion will mean that the contents of most packets will be garbage to a snooper, and anonymous tunneling software could even hide most of the routing info...
So, by all means, let them implement a way to have 'tapped' packets being sent across a router duplicated in the logs on another machine. It'll be used for debugging more than wiretapping.
And, if it's default to sell 'phones' for VOIP that either don't encrypt, or only barely (CLIPPER, etc) encrypt, then this will allow wiretapping. Even if some restrictive country makes these phones mandatory, we're no worse off than we are now, with China, etc. And people in other countries would simply buy secure phones that encrypted the data, much like their email software would encrypt all email.
Hmmmm. In the future, because cell phones have such a huge ammount of memory (for a phone), maybe when you give someone your number, you can IR transfer it to them along with your public key and have *very* secure transmissions (regardless of the technology the telco uses to pass packets along.)
Well, right and wrong asside, a lot of people will feel like that poster, and probably do what he advocates for revenge.
If the industry hadn't been such pricks since day one, they might have more supporters.
Ditto with lawyers. Shooting lawyers might be evil, m-kay, but I can really sympathize with people who do it.
Hmmmm, maybe we could combine this and the gun thread... Is murder bad if it's just CEOs of companies that are walking over your rights, or is it good because you're defending yourself from an armed (with money and lawyers) attacker (of your rights)?
This is *exactly* the place to do this.
Those posters didn't send 'illegal' source code to Slashdot, they posted links. Big difference.
And, what should we do when we're threatened by lawyers? Roll over and play dead, or fight back in any way possible?
I'm all for fighting back.
If I was in a country that didn't have those laws, I'd host the project.
After all, they're using technicalities in laws, and laws they essentially bribed politicians to pass, and we're not supposed to fight back?
Their intent is to silence us. Hell no.
I think I'll post this on a few newsgroups so that all the archival sites like Dejanews have a copy, etc.
Then we'll see if the lawyers are so keen on attacking people with money.
They don't even have to have communicated their desires to each other.
For those familiar with games theory, this is sort of like a prisoners dilema, except that this allows more than one decision.
They could try to fight it out, probably not getting rid of one another, and ending up with much lower profits, for a chance at being a monopoly which would bring government attention if the profits were increased much (ie, lose/barely-win) or they could take the middle ground and apply little pressure against each other, instead driving out the little guys who would lower their price to compete, ensuring that they both get a steady supply of golden eggs.
If Microsoft hadn't killed OS/2 by bringing out new Win32 APIs, they might have 'competition', even if only as much as Apple is to Intel, and have avoided this whole trial. (But have been able to charge mostly the same prices, etc) But they got greedy, wanted to get 100% of the market, and got caught.
Well, yes. Partly.
Eventually MS would expand into markets it couldn't control, such as entertainment, or communications, and it would 'have competition'. It might even have minor competition in the form of another desktop OS, long after its proprietary APIs have locked consumers to Windows forever.
But, to stop the suit just because the circumstances changed would indicate that you can leverage a monopoly in one area to control all surrounding areas, control them for twenty years, then get out with a few hundred billion dollars, and not be punished.
It's like stealing from someone, they claiming you shouldn't be punished because you squandered the money and don't have it anymore.
Great post, except that it's mostly bullshit.
Miscrosoft's competitors have usually had superior products that were cheaper, and Microsoft's illegal behaviour killed them before they could get a chance to compete.
The bug in Windows killing DrDos, the 'discounts' on Windows, if you didn't install competing OSes, etc..
Where on the MS Campus are you posting from?
Ayn Rand was a fruitcake.
Her philosophy might give lip service (Monica?) to being moral, and lying and stealing being bad, but there aren't any compunctions against the big guy blacklisting the little guy until he has to work for slave wages or starve.
Her rules are all against the little guy, because the big guy can apply pressure from many sides to get what he wants.
If you like Ayn Rand's words, you need to grow up.
How much MS stock do you own?
The law would be fairly easy to fight except for the fact that money = victory.
You've paid for the right to view the information on the disk. That information is encrypted, so you have to decrypt it to view it. That *is* a step in defeating copy protection, but it's also a step in using the product.
Ditto with computers. You have to read a stream of digital information off of a disk and essentially decrypt it to play a game. Does that mean that a disk drive is a tool to defeat copy-protection?
But, the movie industry is rich enough they could manage to convict him of the Kenedy assasination, even if he was born in the 70s.
The easiest one first... We know there are hidden APIs because we can disassemble software and see what it does. Software calling documented APIs would call functions in a DLL only in certain ways, and we'd know which functions those were because we could call the same ones. But if that software called functions that weren't listed, we'd be seeing either 1) a bug or 2) an undocumented API function.
Now the question of why they should be required to document the APIs...
The OS is supposed to let you run programs, not keep you from running programs. Yet, if they don't document their APIs, they can make applications that use the undocumented features perform faster or better than ones that do. That means, if Word fares badly in a benchmark, they simply stick a busy loop in an API function that Wordperfect has to call to accomplish what Word does in a different way. And they'd handicapped Wordperfect, thus making themselves look better.
If Microsoft didn't make applications, and stuck just to the OS, and fairly essential tools (disk tools, virus scanning, etc) and used their undocumented API calls themselves, they'd have more justification. They could claim that the calls were low on error checking, and were okay for low-level system components to use, but not prime-time enough for a word processor. Much the same as BIOS/Direct video writes on older computers. One way was slow and steady, the other way much *much* faster, yet potentially incompatible. These arbitrary rulings would potentially hurt a word processor's performance, but it would hurt all of them similarly, and without bias.
But, Microsoft *does* make applications. There's no valid reason why a function called by one wordprocessor couldn't be called by another. Word isn't anymore of a system component than Wordperfect.
Now, MS would only go to the trouble of telling people in a different division about these undocumented features if there was a benefit. So MS programmers not only get preferantial treatment from the operating system, but they can also sabotage competitors if they need to make their products look better.
How does that compare to the perl books, and other similarly hot topics?
But, even if it was in the top 50 on Amazon, I wouldn't think too much of it, yet. Amazon is still where online types go to shop, and most online people who like UF would go to one of the big online stores to buy the book. It's the retail store sales that'll mean the most. Those will be the people who probably haven't read the comic online.
And, O'Reilly is taking a risk. Even if the UF book sells millions, they didn't know how it will do. Authors often find it nearly impossible to finda publisher for a new book, but publishers throw themselves at proven authors. It's great to have a publisher go against that trend.
Nope, but I can easily see the day when Linux is *under* everyone's desktop. Or, at least a goodly sized chunk of consumers.
If MS was forced to standardize and document the Windows APIs for competitors to copy, you'd suddenly be able to port to Linux very easily. And, now that nobody looks for a C:> who will care what's it's running on? Only techies, and the techies will appreciate that it's a stable *nix instead of a kludge.
I'd love the day when you could get the same apps on Be, MacOS, Linux, and even Windows. (and BSD, etc...)
You know. For many cartoons, you have to have the book to read them. Until recently, Calvin and Hobbes wasn't on the internet. Dilbert only is for a short period of time. But, Userfriendly started on the net, and has to stay that way (it's not in enough newspapers to make an attempt to go that way work.)
So, the book, a collection of comics, isn't really much more than a paper backup of the website, admittedly without banner ads.
But, most of us here could whip up a perl script to pull all the cartoons off the site, html them, and give us our own backup archive. So, the book is just ungreppable paper.
Now, I like to support people who do things and give them away. Like UF, or free software. But, for me it's much more convenient to do this via banner ads than by purchasing a book which I don't need.
I'd be a lot more likely to want a nice HTMLized downloadable collection that had all of the text transcribed, and keywords added, so that I could seach for favorites and view them on the computer.
But, I'm glad it was published. I don't think that O'Reilly did anything bad by breaking their tradition of publishing only tech book. This is most obviously not a manual, so you're not going to get people who buy it accidentally, and it does follow the O'Reilly tradition of going to the source. For a book on User Friendly, you can't go wrong with one written by Illiad... if a book is what you want.
It's good to see a company willing to publish a small run of books like this, it can only help the community, even if the topic of the book isn't one that everyone is fond of.
Buy or borrow any new HD. $200 USD will get you a 20GB HD... Find a friend, or someone at a local LUG willing to loan you one for a few hours if you can't afford it.
>>If the commercial entities were willing to
>>redistribute the source for any changes they
>>made, there would be no problem.
Wrong. Since this FS is linked against the kernel, they would also have to make their kernel source code available under the GPL (unless they obtain the source under different licensing - see above).
Again, the BSD folks are happy to redistribute the source for even their entire kernel, but because of the GPL restrictions (or features, as RMS would say), they cannot use this source in their product.
Actually, no. All they need to do are put stubs in the kernel that will call an exteral filesystem module. Then rewrite the filesystem code as an external module. It'd be slower, but that's the price they pay for their anti-GPL decision.
The are controlling who can use the currently-available source code. In particular, BSD folks cannot use it,
As the other respondant said, BSD *can* use the code. The only thing stopping them is themselves.
The GPL ensures that the Linux kernel will always be open source if the BSD guys want to look at a new FS to see how it was done. The BSD license does not ensure that BSD and its derivatives will always be open source.
Then you're just as ignorant as he is.
They're just OSes. If one offers a feature you need, use it. If not, stay with what you're using.
Use junkbuster or WebWasher and block
messenger.netscape.com
That'll fix it for ya.
You know, the solution to this whole Real Player GUID problem is an application-specific firewall. Simply don't let some apps connect to some sites on the net.
So why didn't they do it before? Why did they do it while using the threat of raising OEM prices to get companies to not install Netscape?
Having a browser ship with the OS makes sense. It's like a disk defragger. When HDs were rare, it would be a waste. Now that you can't buy a computer without one, they're essential.
But, to use anti-competetive practices to have an inferior product be used...
MS did it just for control. They can't let anyone else have a killer app.
Here's a company who has what ammounts to a patent on cookies, and we're happy that they're using free software that was created in the type of atmosphere they're helping to destroy with their blackmail.
It's too bad we can't remove the right to use free software from companies currently blackmailing other companies with patents or other similar behaviour.
I'd laugh if they had to run the pathetic company on NT using a webserver written in Visual Basic.
It is all they deserve after all, with their hostile behaviour.
I'm not saying that Winows is better than *nix, but it is more suitable for the beginners! Can ytou imagine a world where everyone ran linux? think of the incompetent newbies that wouldnt have a clue!!
Ok, so it's immediately obvious for Windows users how they go about editing the registry to remove programs that crash on load, yet aren't listed in Startup where you would expect them...
Windows is more obscure than Linux, except that there are literally thousands of books describing how to use it and that it comes preinstalled.
I'm not saying that there is nothing harder in Linux than in Windows, but the Linux installations until recently were geared towards ISPs and companies that wanted power, not ease of use. That's like giving a desktop user NT4 server and expecting them to make it work like Win95.
This thing about owing MS is complete bullshit. They did everything they did for their own pocketbook. They didn't integrate a web browser with the OS to get rid of kludgy proprietary help files or anything, they did it to kill a competitor.
The point is that some people will click a button just because it's there. If there are four buttons, three yes and one no, the extra two yes buttons will 'take' votes from the main yes and no buttons.
:)
The 'right' way to do this is.
Do you think the government needs to intervene?
() Yes
() No
If you answered Yes to the last question, how?
() Breaking up the company
() Fines
etc
That way you get a more accurate sampling of the Yes/No vote, but also get a good idea of what the Yes voters want done.
These polls are written by people without any clue of how to write unbiased polls. It's really sad. You'd think CNN would have a contract with a public-polling firm to help them write unbiased polls. (Or, biased polls that are less obviously biases...