Yes, but some of those idiots will pay 7000 if it's offered to them. So you get the maximum profit by doing price discrimination and offering a $7000 product, however insane it may be.
One $7000 idiot is worth more than 1400 $5 idiots.
I don't see anything wrong with what this guy is doing.
The fines should be large enough to compensate for his waste. If they aren't then they should be increased until they are.
The money from the fines should be used to improve the infrastructure, like waste treatment or desalination plants.
Same goes for MS: The fines should be large enough to compensate for the damage MS is causing and used to repair it. The fines should be large enough that the benefit MS obtains by continuing their behavior is smaller than the fines they pay.
overclockers mostly care about high performance, and sadly, via and performance are mutually exclusive
Oh, I don't doubt performance will be crap. It's just curiosity about how far you could push something that would be just fine with a heatsink, if it needs it at all.
It seems that it takes liquid nitrogen to really squeeze out everything possible out of a normal Intel/AMD, but that can't be kept up for very long, and is very expensive to try.
I wonder, how far can these things be overclocked? Certainly there shouldn't be a problem with cooling, so it should be possible to push these things to the maximum they're capable of.
The whole "multimedia" thing was quite hilarious. Everybody seemed obsessed with it, yet it didn't do much at all. Of course back then not everybody had a soundcard, so playing music was fairly impressive.
The funniest remainant of that I've seen is an UPS used by a co-worker: It's a "Multimedia UPS", whatever that means. As far as I can tell, it's a plain battery without anything very interesting. You'd think it'd play music when on battery or something of the sort (can't think of anything else as the explanation of what a multimedia UPS would be) but it doesn't even do that.
These "miniature cameras" you talk about don't produce an image worth downloading, let alone paying even $1 for. I've seen a bit of a bootleg once and it was PAINFUL to watch. I couldn't watch a whole movie like that unless you paid me for it.
No, the professionals don't do that sort of crap, as it'd be unprofitable. Professionals do one of these:
Option A: They copy your original DVD, remove crap from it (CSS, skip restrictions, etc), stamp it, and sell for a fraction of the original price, providing a better product overall. Not only it's cheaper, but it's less annoying to play as well as it won't be region locked and play on anything.
They're friendly too. I saw this in Russia years ago (I think it's not as balant now). They had a HUGE market where you could get lost easily. The seller will gladly tell you their opinion on the movie, will change your disc if it doesn't play (warranty!), and will even find something for you if you ask. They provide good service, unlike what you get when buying legally.
Option B: They get somebody with the access to the film and with a projection booth, and do a professional setup, filming the movie without an audience in the way, and with an exact copy of the audio.
How to solve this problem? My suggestions: 1. Drop the anti-piracy crap. No CSS, no region locking, no unskippable sections 2. I bought/paid to see the damn movie, I don't want to hear a word about anti-piracy moralizing. 3. I don't want to see any ads in the cinema, nor on the DVD. Only possible exception is optional trailers that you must specifically play, related to what the disk contains (eg, trailers of Miyazaki's anime, on the Nausicaa DVD) 4. Sell it cheaper, especially the music. Why can the soundtrack have the same price as the movie? It makes no sense.
You know, things like text documents, browser bookmarks, saved games, source code not committed to a source control system, applications settings, passwords (in files used by password managers), music, video, homework...
My $HOME is somewhere about 50GB in size. Important things are backed up of course, but I can't back up 50GB every day.
Now application binaries on a single user system are unimportant. So long you can keep your data, a full reinstall of system components could be done very quickly, unless you're running something like gentoo. Just backup your list of packages, batch install all of that, and if you kept your $HOME you can be back running in an hour or two.
This works OK for a multiuser system. If you run systems with 100 users on each and one gets their home directory hosed, you restore from backups and problem solved. Everybody else continues having uninterrupted service meanwhile.
But on a personal box everything of importance is in $HOME anyway.
What is needed is something like SELinux, which makes it impossible for applications to do things they shouldn't be doing.
I say "something like" because SELinux is a very complicated system and AFAIK still badly documented. But it sounds like a step in the right direction.
But used well, it can compensate for the lack of some things in C. For example, exiting nested loops. In Perl you can say "last NAME", where NAME is the name you gave to the loop, and exit from the outer loop directly.
In C, if you avoid goto what results is a check in every loop to determine whether the inner loop decided that we've got to bail out. This is much uglier than just using goto in the first place, and more error prone too.
Using goto is also handy for error handling: When you're allocating memory, goto allows jumping to the right point in the cleanup process, instead of duplicating bits of code everywhere.
It's my understanding that in kernel programming goto also has advantages in terms of speed over other alternatives.
That's not to say we should use everywhere. But IMO, what to use should be decided on the basis of what is the cleanest and less error prone option -- If goto results in cleaner code, then use it, if it doesn't then don't.
Option C: Correct, as the GPL isn't an EULA. Due to copyright you're not allowed to redistribute unless I allow it with for example the GPL, but whatever you do that doesn't involve distribution is completely outside of the scope of the license. But AFAIK, companies generally stay far away from this, as IF somebody, some day accidentally released it, it would be trouble.
Option D: Doesn't apply in the slightest. I said "if you want to use MY code". If you aren't using it, then I don't have anything to say about that in the first place, do I? If you aren't using my code, then whatever you're using whether open or closed is completely irrelevant for me.
But ignoring the above, I have absolutely no problem with option D. You seem to confuse me with somebody who wants OSS everywhere for some ideological reason.
And I don't really care how you call the GPL. Whether it's free, non-free, "true open source", "communism" or whatever else you want to call it is completely irrelevant semantics to me: it does exactly what I want, and that's the only thing that matters.
While I do enjoy coding, I don't do it for free. I have zero interest in effectively being an unpaid worker in some huge corporation. If you want to use mine, you have two options:
A. Comply with the GPL and pay me with your contributions. B. Hire me, or buy a license.
I write code for my own enjoyment. Here are my metrics:
My code is used, user complies with GPL, releases their improvements, and uses the code on a device where I can change it: Great My code isn't used at all: Neutral My code is used, but the device is locked down and I can't update my own code on it: BAD
My code not being used at all is preferrable to it being used in the wrong way.
The nuclear bomb thing is nonsense. The only thing that would release as much energy as a nuclear bomb would be an actual nuclear bomb.
Batteries and capacitors don't even approach the amount of energy in a gasoline tank at the time (a nuclear bomb has a really enormously larger amount of it than that), and how fast energy is released doesn't really matter for the comparison.
I don't submit patches to BSD licensed projects, then whine because my code is used in a way that I don't like. I just don't send any patches in the first place.
It should be noted that the purpose of the GPL isn't world dominance, so the fact that there are people who disagree with the ideas isn't a big loss.
Ok, so this situation results in that any KDE applications must either be GPLd (due to QT usage), or pay big $$$ to Trolltech. But unlike you I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.
This situation seems to result in that most software that runs on KDE will be GPLd, and a few big applications will pay Trolltech and be commercial. With a less restrictive license there'd be a Windows-like group of small commercial tools (compressors, etc).
But I don't really miss that utility group. In fact I use KDE in part because I utterly despise it. Getting things done on Windows involves downloading lots of tools like WinZIP and Acrobat Reader, each with some irritating behavior like loading stuff into the systray, checking for updates and nagging about getting registered. Such crap doesn't exist in OSS software as if somebody added it it'd be soon removed anyway.
Your opinion seems to be that KDE should strive for dominance. I don't really give a damn whether it's got a market share of 90% or 10%, it works great and even seems to effectively discourage the crap I have to put up with on Windows.
This is going to be a big deal for shared hosting environments for example.
If you can, as a normal user, execute something that lets you get root on the box, and there's nothing the OS can do to prevent it, then it's a seriously nasty situation for quite a few businesses.
I wouldn't be surprised if businesses like that started switching to AMD hardware.
Well, there's VIA as well, althought their stuff left a lot to be desired the last time I checked it out. Their mini-ITX stuff had potential -- small, low power usage, REALLY good crypto and video acceleration to compensate for the slow CPU. Unfortunately when I tried a Nehemiah board, it was very unstable.
First, the GPL isn't the problem. Even if the GPL didn't exist, Trolltech would still be free to invent it for QT, it's their stuff and they can license how they please. The inexistence or inexistence of the GPL is irrelevant, as by simply existing it doesn't do anything. It's the people who use it that matter.
Now, Trolltech will never, EVER release QT under the LGPL or anything similar. It's easy, while Gnome is an OSS project, Trolltech is a company interested in one thing: money. And if they let anybody link to their library, what exactly would their business case be? Hope people just donate because they feel like it?
For Trolltech, this is a great way to do it: By making it GPLd they get a large OSS userbase that uses the library in all sorts of ways, and helps find bugs and even provides improvements. Trolltech has an easy job convincing people their library is good: they only have to point at KDE. Programmers contributing to OSS projects get familiarized with QT for free, and that's quite a few of them. Now if you want to use it for a commercial project, that's where they make their cash by charging you $$$ for it.
I don't see this "suicide" you speak of. KDE benefits by getting to use a great library, Trolltech benefits as I explained above. Any why is it that you think that a programmer should be able to link to QT and sell their application, but Trolltech shouldn't be able to sell QT?
They won't give a damn about their reputation, lawsuits and patent licensing is how they do business. In fact, probably the more infamous they become the better, as companies would be more likely to just pay up.
What is needed is anti-patent troll legislation: If you don't make it, you don't get to own a patent on it.
There's a very easy solution to this problem: elemetary arithmetic.
Step 1: Get a weighting scale, certified for commercial usage. Step 2: Weight say, 100 pennies. Step 3: Spread the pile of cash on a table, and let everybody make sure there's just money there. Step 4: Weight the pile of cash. Calculate the total value from the weight. Step 5: To be really sure nobody has grounds to complain, add an extra 1% or so. Step 6: Revenge!
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Yes, but some of those idiots will pay 7000 if it's offered to them. So you get the maximum profit by doing price discrimination and offering a $7000 product, however insane it may be.
One $7000 idiot is worth more than 1400 $5 idiots.
And why should I care about MS' internal politics?
I don't care whether it's the marketing department, the lawyers, the programmers or the janitor who are at fault for MS releasing crap.
The fact is that they release crap far too often and that's the one thing I care about.
I don't see anything wrong with what this guy is doing.
The fines should be large enough to compensate for his waste. If they aren't then they should be increased until they are.
The money from the fines should be used to improve the infrastructure, like waste treatment or desalination plants.
Same goes for MS: The fines should be large enough to compensate for the damage MS is causing and used to repair it. The fines should be large enough that the benefit MS obtains by continuing their behavior is smaller than the fines they pay.
Oh, I don't doubt performance will be crap. It's just curiosity about how far you could push something that would be just fine with a heatsink, if it needs it at all.
It seems that it takes liquid nitrogen to really squeeze out everything possible out of a normal Intel/AMD, but that can't be kept up for very long, and is very expensive to try.
I wonder, how far can these things be overclocked? Certainly there shouldn't be a problem with cooling, so it should be possible to push these things to the maximum they're capable of.
The whole "multimedia" thing was quite hilarious. Everybody seemed obsessed with it, yet it didn't do much at all. Of course back then not everybody had a soundcard, so playing music was fairly impressive.
The funniest remainant of that I've seen is an UPS used by a co-worker: It's a "Multimedia UPS", whatever that means. As far as I can tell, it's a plain battery without anything very interesting. You'd think it'd play music when on battery or something of the sort (can't think of anything else as the explanation of what a multimedia UPS would be) but it doesn't even do that.
What bullshit.
These "miniature cameras" you talk about don't produce an image worth downloading, let alone paying even $1 for. I've seen a bit of a bootleg once and it was PAINFUL to watch. I couldn't watch a whole movie like that unless you paid me for it.
No, the professionals don't do that sort of crap, as it'd be unprofitable. Professionals do one of these:
Option A: They copy your original DVD, remove crap from it (CSS, skip restrictions, etc), stamp it, and sell for a fraction of the original price, providing a better product overall. Not only it's cheaper, but it's less annoying to play as well as it won't be region locked and play on anything.
They're friendly too. I saw this in Russia years ago (I think it's not as balant now). They had a HUGE market where you could get lost easily. The seller will gladly tell you their opinion on the movie, will change your disc if it doesn't play (warranty!), and will even find something for you if you ask. They provide good service, unlike what you get when buying legally.
Option B: They get somebody with the access to the film and with a projection booth, and do a professional setup, filming the movie without an audience in the way, and with an exact copy of the audio.
How to solve this problem? My suggestions:
1. Drop the anti-piracy crap. No CSS, no region locking, no unskippable sections
2. I bought/paid to see the damn movie, I don't want to hear a word about anti-piracy moralizing.
3. I don't want to see any ads in the cinema, nor on the DVD. Only possible exception is optional trailers that you must specifically play, related to what the disk contains (eg, trailers of Miyazaki's anime, on the Nausicaa DVD)
4. Sell it cheaper, especially the music. Why can the soundtrack have the same price as the movie? It makes no sense.
Actually, cat typing is quite predictable.
See http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/
Everything of importance == DATA.
You know, things like text documents, browser bookmarks, saved games, source code not committed to a source control system, applications settings, passwords (in files used by password managers), music, video, homework...
My $HOME is somewhere about 50GB in size. Important things are backed up of course, but I can't back up 50GB every day.
Now application binaries on a single user system are unimportant. So long you can keep your data, a full reinstall of system components could be done very quickly, unless you're running something like gentoo. Just backup your list of packages, batch install all of that, and if you kept your $HOME you can be back running in an hour or two.
Wouldn't change much really.
This works OK for a multiuser system. If you run systems with 100 users on each and one gets their home directory hosed, you restore from backups and problem solved. Everybody else continues having uninterrupted service meanwhile.
But on a personal box everything of importance is in $HOME anyway.
What is needed is something like SELinux, which makes it impossible for applications to do things they shouldn't be doing.
I say "something like" because SELinux is a very complicated system and AFAIK still badly documented. But it sounds like a step in the right direction.
IMO, goto has been demonized a bit too much.
Yeah, too much of it results in spaghetti code.
But used well, it can compensate for the lack of some things in C. For example, exiting nested loops. In Perl you can say "last NAME", where NAME is the name you gave to the loop, and exit from the outer loop directly.
In C, if you avoid goto what results is a check in every loop to determine whether the inner loop decided that we've got to bail out. This is much uglier than just using goto in the first place, and more error prone too.
Using goto is also handy for error handling: When you're allocating memory, goto allows jumping to the right point in the cleanup process, instead of duplicating bits of code everywhere.
It's my understanding that in kernel programming goto also has advantages in terms of speed over other alternatives.
That's not to say we should use everywhere. But IMO, what to use should be decided on the basis of what is the cleanest and less error prone option -- If goto results in cleaner code, then use it, if it doesn't then don't.
Like I said, good for you.
Option C: Correct, as the GPL isn't an EULA. Due to copyright you're not allowed to redistribute unless I allow it with for example the GPL, but whatever you do that doesn't involve distribution is completely outside of the scope of the license. But AFAIK, companies generally stay far away from this, as IF somebody, some day accidentally released it, it would be trouble.
Option D: Doesn't apply in the slightest. I said "if you want to use MY code". If you aren't using it, then I don't have anything to say about that in the first place, do I? If you aren't using my code, then whatever you're using whether open or closed is completely irrelevant for me.
But ignoring the above, I have absolutely no problem with option D. You seem to confuse me with somebody who wants OSS everywhere for some ideological reason.
And I don't really care how you call the GPL. Whether it's free, non-free, "true open source", "communism" or whatever else you want to call it is completely irrelevant semantics to me: it does exactly what I want, and that's the only thing that matters.
Good for you.
While I do enjoy coding, I don't do it for free. I have zero interest in effectively being an unpaid worker in some huge corporation. If you want to use mine, you have two options:
A. Comply with the GPL and pay me with your contributions.
B. Hire me, or buy a license.
I write code for my own enjoyment. Here are my metrics:
My code is used, user complies with GPL, releases their improvements, and uses the code on a device where I can change it: Great
My code isn't used at all: Neutral
My code is used, but the device is locked down and I can't update my own code on it: BAD
My code not being used at all is preferrable to it being used in the wrong way.
I meant that they could just comply with the GPL3 if KHTML ever switches to it.
So easy solution, Apple shouldn't use GPL code and write their own then.
If Apple isn't going to comply, then writers of GPL code aren't going to benefit from Apple's usage anyway.
Personally I don't give a damn about "bragging rights", contribution of code as mandated by the license is the one thing I care about.
The nuclear bomb thing is nonsense. The only thing that would release as much energy as a nuclear bomb would be an actual nuclear bomb.
Batteries and capacitors don't even approach the amount of energy in a gasoline tank at the time (a nuclear bomb has a really enormously larger amount of it than that), and how fast energy is released doesn't really matter for the comparison.
So if you don't agree with it, why contribute?
I don't submit patches to BSD licensed projects, then whine because my code is used in a way that I don't like. I just don't send any patches in the first place.
It should be noted that the purpose of the GPL isn't world dominance, so the fact that there are people who disagree with the ideas isn't a big loss.
Or they could just, you know, comply with the license.
Ok, so this situation results in that any KDE applications must either be GPLd (due to QT usage), or pay big $$$ to Trolltech. But unlike you I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.
This situation seems to result in that most software that runs on KDE will be GPLd, and a few big applications will pay Trolltech and be commercial. With a less restrictive license there'd be a Windows-like group of small commercial tools (compressors, etc).
But I don't really miss that utility group. In fact I use KDE in part because I utterly despise it. Getting things done on Windows involves downloading lots of tools like WinZIP and Acrobat Reader, each with some irritating behavior like loading stuff into the systray, checking for updates and nagging about getting registered. Such crap doesn't exist in OSS software as if somebody added it it'd be soon removed anyway.
Your opinion seems to be that KDE should strive for dominance. I don't really give a damn whether it's got a market share of 90% or 10%, it works great and even seems to effectively discourage the crap I have to put up with on Windows.
This is going to be a big deal for shared hosting environments for example.
If you can, as a normal user, execute something that lets you get root on the box, and there's nothing the OS can do to prevent it, then it's a seriously nasty situation for quite a few businesses.
I wouldn't be surprised if businesses like that started switching to AMD hardware.
Well, there's VIA as well, althought their stuff left a lot to be desired the last time I checked it out. Their mini-ITX stuff had potential -- small, low power usage, REALLY good crypto and video acceleration to compensate for the slow CPU. Unfortunately when I tried a Nehemiah board, it was very unstable.
First, the GPL isn't the problem. Even if the GPL didn't exist, Trolltech would still be free to invent it for QT, it's their stuff and they can license how they please. The inexistence or inexistence of the GPL is irrelevant, as by simply existing it doesn't do anything. It's the people who use it that matter.
Now, Trolltech will never, EVER release QT under the LGPL or anything similar. It's easy, while Gnome is an OSS project, Trolltech is a company interested in one thing: money. And if they let anybody link to their library, what exactly would their business case be? Hope people just donate because they feel like it?
For Trolltech, this is a great way to do it: By making it GPLd they get a large OSS userbase that uses the library in all sorts of ways, and helps find bugs and even provides improvements. Trolltech has an easy job convincing people their library is good: they only have to point at KDE. Programmers contributing to OSS projects get familiarized with QT for free, and that's quite a few of them. Now if you want to use it for a commercial project, that's where they make their cash by charging you $$$ for it.
I don't see this "suicide" you speak of. KDE benefits by getting to use a great library, Trolltech benefits as I explained above. Any why is it that you think that a programmer should be able to link to QT and sell their application, but Trolltech shouldn't be able to sell QT?
Shaming won't work against patent trolls.
They won't give a damn about their reputation, lawsuits and patent licensing is how they do business. In fact, probably the more infamous they become the better, as companies would be more likely to just pay up.
What is needed is anti-patent troll legislation: If you don't make it, you don't get to own a patent on it.
There's a very easy solution to this problem: elemetary arithmetic.
Step 1: Get a weighting scale, certified for commercial usage.
Step 2: Weight say, 100 pennies.
Step 3: Spread the pile of cash on a table, and let everybody make sure there's just money there.
Step 4: Weight the pile of cash. Calculate the total value from the weight.
Step 5: To be really sure nobody has grounds to complain, add an extra 1% or so.
Step 6: Revenge!
Problem solved.