But how is Memory Stick PRO Duo any more "proprietary" than Secure Digital?
From my POV? The fact I can only use it in other Sony stuff. Every flash-using gadget I own, from my HP calculator to an Eee PC, takes SD cards - except for our Sony camera. It's one standard for them and another for everyone else on the planet. That's not "more proprietary" in the strictly legal sense, but it's definitely more so in practice.
Unless the person that wants to use your code is writing a proprietary program, in which case they can't use your GPL code at all because linking it in would force them to open-source their product.
I have to admit a perfect lack of sympathy who want to take code freely-shared and lock it away so that no one else can use their changes to it. Authors using the BSD license etc. explicitly allow this, and that's fine because those were the terms they chose. Authors using the GPL explicitly do not allow this, and I'm pretty well unconcerned about people who find that inconvenient.
You use a product written by people who didn't foresee what you were going to use it for and they end up integrating changes to benefit someone whose use they didn't foresee. By keeping the code free over the long haul you get fascinating cooperation at the code level.
Yeah, I've told this before, but anyway: my company had an itch that needed to be scratched so I wrote a program to address it. My boss let me release it under the GPL since we had zero interest in profiting from the program. It exists solely to perform one specific task for us, and not so that we can sell or charge support for it.
As it turns out, that seems to be a fairly popular itch, and I've gotten requests from people all over the world to add new features or to handle special circumstances that never would have occurred to me. Everybody came out ahead on this! The world got a handy piece of Free software, and we got some new ideas that made it work better in its original role here in our office. To reword your statement:
You write a product used by people who don't use it the way you foresaw and they end up suggesting changes that benefit your own needs in a way they didn't foresee.
Let me summarize about a decade of real-life Python experience: whitespace scoping has theoretical problems that never, ever come up in practice. Seriously, it hasn't caused problems in the field in any project I've ever worked on. BTW, indenting with 4 spaces is nearly universal. On my system, of all the files named *.py, 472 have at least one line starting with a tab character and 16,220 have no such lines.
I'm sure other musicians don't make money from live performances but prefer to make money from recorded performances.
I prefer to make money from playing video games and drinking Dr Pepper in my living room all day. However, society doesn't see fit to finance that lifestyle choice, and is increasingly of the opinion that yours is also invalid. There is still room to make money by writing or performing music on contract, but I don't think more than a relative handful of artists can reasonable expect to make a living from sales of recorded music in the near future.
However, I am talking about a scenario where you have a copy of the CD and NOT the original (and have never owned the original, or have sold it).
Then you should have said so instead of starting with generalities and moving the goalposts as we went along.
However, I am talking about a scenario where you have a copy of the CD and NOT the original (and have never owned the original, or have sold it).
I'm 18 again and my girlfriend gives me a mix tape of songs that I have never purchased or otherwise acquired via authorized channels. Am I breaking the law?
Do you think owning a copy of that CD, not the original, would be OK ?
Yes. I just burned a copy of it which is wholly unauthorized and against the wishes of the copyright holder. Are you of the opinion that I broke a law?
Are you suggesting being in possession of copyrighted material without the copyright owner's permission is legal ?
Absolutely! I bought a used CD yesterday, and am certain that the copyright owner did not authorize or endorse that purchase. Yet, I am now the rightful, legal owner of that CD - their permission or desire to the contrary be damned.
As a practicing CS researcher and as a programmer, I sincerely feel that patent threats are the greatest limitation we face on software innovation. I can't begin to imagine that the benefits to our society are outweighing the costs.
Especially since they only affect us. The other 95% of the world's population couldn't care less about our patents.
rather than allowing the argument to be lead in the direction of a processor being the "specific machine" the "specific machine" should have been the algorithms used in the code.
Arguments like that are what make people want to slap said lawyers silly. "Specific machine" is clear to the 99.9999% of the planet who aren't patent lawyers.
Oh, and you can blame MS all you want but the truth is that Linux, if as widely adopted and used by ordinary computer illiterate users, and as targeted by the malware writers as Windows is, wouldn't be a whole lot batter.
Bullshit. After the Morris Worm got everyone's attention, how many mass Unix server hacks have you seen, then though Unix has the majority of the server space? Oh, let me guess: that's different, because only experts run servers, and never n00bs with a Ubuntu disk and a desire to learn PHP and MySQL who enable everything by default because it's confusing at first.
The "attractive target" myth is stupid and debunked, and only Microsoft apologists trot it around.
Then you obviously suck at installing free unixes on these machines.
OS 9 is much faster on that hardware than you'd ever be able to make Linux run. Cooperatively multitasking and unprotected memory suck for stability but are great for the performance of desktop apps. Don't believe me? Look back further to Mac OS and AmigaOS on late-'80s machines with sub-10MHz CPUs and half a meg of RAM. You could do fullscreen animation and sound editing on those systems. Could you truly get Linux to run that nicely on them?
What's destroying local knowledge is the video baby-sitters in the back-seat. When I was a kid we knew what our neighborhood LOOKED like.
When you were a kid, were you strapped into a government-mandated, reclined, winged cocoon? It's not so bad now that my kids are older, but I can't blame them for wanting to play their DSes during the 17-hour drive to the in-laws'.
I know far too many sportsman and outdoor enthusiasts who own a dedicated outdoor GPS but NO in car Sat-Nav for me to easily accept this without proof.
Anecdotally, I've never seen a GPS outside a car, therefore they must not be used elsewhere.
Truly, spoken like a man who has never tried phoning up a bank and getting hold of anyone above the level of "mindless drone".
Switch banks. I had occasion to call the bookkeeping department at mine for a problem I was having with their online banking.
Me: I've getting such-and-such error message.
Bookkeeper lady: Oh. Are you using a Mac? For some reason we're still having problems with Safari, but it should work if you try it with Firefox.
Me: Umm, wow. OK. Thanks!
BL: And the same for Linux.
Me: <too stunned to say anything but "thanks" and hang up>
Slashdot Mirror
Would you rather a public servant or an accountant decide your treatment?
Forced to decide, I'd pick the accountant every time. They're far easier to fire and/or sue if they screw up.
But if the company making a product makes claims that are untrue about said product it's False Advertisement.
So all those "male enhancement" commercials on TV are real, and portray real customers with satisfactory experiences?
This stuff is sleazy, but I don't see how it's inherently worse than other advertising we already tolerate.
But how is Memory Stick PRO Duo any more "proprietary" than Secure Digital?
From my POV? The fact I can only use it in other Sony stuff. Every flash-using gadget I own, from my HP calculator to an Eee PC, takes SD cards - except for our Sony camera. It's one standard for them and another for everyone else on the planet. That's not "more proprietary" in the strictly legal sense, but it's definitely more so in practice.
Unless the person that wants to use your code is writing a proprietary program, in which case they can't use your GPL code at all because linking it in would force them to open-source their product.
I have to admit a perfect lack of sympathy who want to take code freely-shared and lock it away so that no one else can use their changes to it. Authors using the BSD license etc. explicitly allow this, and that's fine because those were the terms they chose. Authors using the GPL explicitly do not allow this, and I'm pretty well unconcerned about people who find that inconvenient.
>
This usage became mainstream with "dot Net"
...and "dot com" a decade earlier.
You use a product written by people who didn't foresee what you were going to use it for and they end up integrating changes to benefit someone whose use they didn't foresee. By keeping the code free over the long haul you get fascinating cooperation at the code level.
Yeah, I've told this before, but anyway: my company had an itch that needed to be scratched so I wrote a program to address it. My boss let me release it under the GPL since we had zero interest in profiting from the program. It exists solely to perform one specific task for us, and not so that we can sell or charge support for it.
As it turns out, that seems to be a fairly popular itch, and I've gotten requests from people all over the world to add new features or to handle special circumstances that never would have occurred to me. Everybody came out ahead on this! The world got a handy piece of Free software, and we got some new ideas that made it work better in its original role here in our office. To reword your statement:
So, if your cat meows a lot, don't yell at him or squirt him because he then will continue to meow--he thinks you are talking or playing with him.
On the other hand, a soft air pistol convinced our cat to stay off the $#!()% counters when no amount of more gentle convincing was having any effect.
Let me summarize about a decade of real-life Python experience: whitespace scoping has theoretical problems that never, ever come up in practice. Seriously, it hasn't caused problems in the field in any project I've ever worked on. BTW, indenting with 4 spaces is nearly universal. On my system, of all the files named *.py, 472 have at least one line starting with a tab character and 16,220 have no such lines.
FreeBSD 7-STABLE already does. I'm running it on several machines with good results.
So it would be rather retarded for Apple to try and enter the PDA market, because there really isn't one.
Other than the 13 million iPod Touches, I'd agree with you. Seriously, if the iPhone is a phone + PDA, and you remove the phone...
the build times were a monotonously growing function of time when I left...
And I bet the monotony was monotonically increasing.
It's a concession.
I would personally be _surprised_ if being in possession of copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder is legal
Then be surprised. It's legal in every country, as far as I know.
I'm sure other musicians don't make money from live performances but prefer to make money from recorded performances.
I prefer to make money from playing video games and drinking Dr Pepper in my living room all day. However, society doesn't see fit to finance that lifestyle choice, and is increasingly of the opinion that yours is also invalid. There is still room to make money by writing or performing music on contract, but I don't think more than a relative handful of artists can reasonable expect to make a living from sales of recorded music in the near future.
However, I am talking about a scenario where you have a copy of the CD and NOT the original (and have never owned the original, or have sold it).
Then you should have said so instead of starting with generalities and moving the goalposts as we went along.
However, I am talking about a scenario where you have a copy of the CD and NOT the original (and have never owned the original, or have sold it).
I'm 18 again and my girlfriend gives me a mix tape of songs that I have never purchased or otherwise acquired via authorized channels. Am I breaking the law?
Do you think owning a copy of that CD, not the original, would be OK ?
Yes. I just burned a copy of it which is wholly unauthorized and against the wishes of the copyright holder. Are you of the opinion that I broke a law?
Are you suggesting being in possession of copyrighted material without the copyright owner's permission is legal ?
Absolutely! I bought a used CD yesterday, and am certain that the copyright owner did not authorize or endorse that purchase. Yet, I am now the rightful, legal owner of that CD - their permission or desire to the contrary be damned.
And lastly, a lot of good programmers want steady income to work on products, not occupy the lowest rung of the ladder/innermost circle of hell.
Something like 95% of programmers work on in-house projects for their non-software companies.
DRM works. It's not foolproof, but it does cut down on the piracy.
No, it doesn't. Not even a little bit. Not a smidgen. There is no credible evidence to support that position.
As a practicing CS researcher and as a programmer, I sincerely feel that patent threats are the greatest limitation we face on software innovation. I can't begin to imagine that the benefits to our society are outweighing the costs.
Especially since they only affect us. The other 95% of the world's population couldn't care less about our patents.
rather than allowing the argument to be lead in the direction of a processor being the "specific machine" the "specific machine" should have been the algorithms used in the code.
Arguments like that are what make people want to slap said lawyers silly. "Specific machine" is clear to the 99.9999% of the planet who aren't patent lawyers.
Oh, and you can blame MS all you want but the truth is that Linux, if as widely adopted and used by ordinary computer illiterate users, and as targeted by the malware writers as Windows is, wouldn't be a whole lot batter.
Bullshit. After the Morris Worm got everyone's attention, how many mass Unix server hacks have you seen, then though Unix has the majority of the server space? Oh, let me guess: that's different, because only experts run servers, and never n00bs with a Ubuntu disk and a desire to learn PHP and MySQL who enable everything by default because it's confusing at first.
The "attractive target" myth is stupid and debunked, and only Microsoft apologists trot it around.
Then you obviously suck at installing free unixes on these machines.
OS 9 is much faster on that hardware than you'd ever be able to make Linux run. Cooperatively multitasking and unprotected memory suck for stability but are great for the performance of desktop apps. Don't believe me? Look back further to Mac OS and AmigaOS on late-'80s machines with sub-10MHz CPUs and half a meg of RAM. You could do fullscreen animation and sound editing on those systems. Could you truly get Linux to run that nicely on them?
What's destroying local knowledge is the video baby-sitters in the back-seat. When I was a kid we knew what our neighborhood LOOKED like.
When you were a kid, were you strapped into a government-mandated, reclined, winged cocoon? It's not so bad now that my kids are older, but I can't blame them for wanting to play their DSes during the 17-hour drive to the in-laws'.
I know far too many sportsman and outdoor enthusiasts who own a dedicated outdoor GPS but NO in car Sat-Nav for me to easily accept this without proof.
Anecdotally, I've never seen a GPS outside a car, therefore they must not be used elsewhere.
Truly, spoken like a man who has never tried phoning up a bank and getting hold of anyone above the level of "mindless drone".
Switch banks. I had occasion to call the bookkeeping department at mine for a problem I was having with their online banking.
Me: I've getting such-and-such error message.
Bookkeeper lady: Oh. Are you using a Mac? For some reason we're still having problems with Safari, but it should work if you try it with Firefox.
Me: Umm, wow. OK. Thanks!
BL: And the same for Linux.
Me: <too stunned to say anything but "thanks" and hang up>