Do you suppose that MS Office does NOT have access to the most up-to-date source? And, advance warning when some new "feature" might break something?
Yes. Perhaps they might get marginally more than anyone else, but certainly not enough to matter in product cycles that last nearly a decade.
Let's say that a change in some API will break OpenOffice - when does OOo find out about it? Probably when OOo users complain, then they have to research, and find a fix.
No, they find out when that API is deprecated, which with Windows generally happens on the order of 5-10 *years* before it actually stops working.
Windows is not Linux. Legacy support is an *extremely* high priority, not a "hey, cool, it still works" comment at the end of a mailing list post.
Let's say that the same change in the same API will break something in MS Office. When do THEY find out about it? About 6 months before it is ever released to the public as a beta. That is to say, in plenty of time for MS Office and Windows teams to get together and fix the problem, before the public ever becomes aware that there MIGHT BE a problem.
On what basis do you make the claim that Windows APIs change that frequently ? How do you reconcile this with the demonstrably excellent legacy support in Windows that frequently results in programs decades old still working on the most current releases ?
Either Windows APIs are constantly changing to break everything that runs on Windows, or it's a stable API that endows excellent legacy support. You cannot have both. Actual reality demonstrates that the latter is true, so you need some pretty compelling evidence to make the former even pass the laugh test.
Redhat doesn't make a browser, nor does Suse, Debian, or any of the other Linux OS's.
They don't make OSes, either, so that's hardly a compelling argument.
A web browser is not necessary for an operating system to operate, period.
99% of the code that comes with an OS is not necessary for it to operate. Everything from the network stack to the command line are completely unnecessary.
That, however, does not imply they are unwanted.
There are any number of methods by which MS could offer a CHOICE of browsers, including the method used by Ubuntu: package half a dozen or more on the OS installation CD, and let the user CHOOSE which, if any, he wants.
Why should they be compelled to offer and support any browser but the one they want to ? Especially when end users can just install their own, preferred web browser with a few mouse clicks.
Good - you do admit that in one instance, at least, what's been good for MS has not been good for the advancement of computer sciences. Stockholders were quite happy with a substandard browser, and only opensource competition offered the stimulation to improve.
Wait, so "computer science" improved because other competitors appeared, or it stagnated because Microsoft stopped anyone else making a browser ?
MS Office was designed and built to integrate itself into the operating system, much as the web browser does.
How ?
Without the insider information available to MS Office developers, WordPerfect and others were left out in the cold.
The plethora of successful non-Microsoft software products on Windows demonstrate how laughably false this claim that only Microsoft has the ability to write good Windows software is.
What gives Microsoft the right to say what I may or may not install on their operating system? What gives them the right to say that I CANNOT use their API's, or their file system, or their office suite on Linux, OS2, Solaris, or whatever I CHOOSE?
They don't. They're not going to help you do it, however (which is what you really want).
MS never had the right to put a string into Windows that checked fro MS-DOS, then refused to install if the DOS was from some other company.
They do, however, have every right to say: "Our software may not work with versions of MS-DOS other than ours. We have not tested it, we will not test it and we are not responsible for it not working." Ie: What they actually they did.
Fraud, with a restaurant is self-punishing. Short of health violations, if the restaurant claims to be good and isn't, it'll lose enough business faster than any government can deal with them.
Only if that knowledge is spread sufficiently widely. In, for example, areas with a high volume of transient customers and/or concentration of restaurants (eg: anywhere with a lot of tourism) this is far from a given.
Unless you could show they were claiming something like genuine golden caviar, and substituting something totally different like pacific salmon roe; or grade B beef for genuine Kobe Prime; the market will take care of them much faster and more efficiently than government.
Only if the customers are able to discern the difference and act on it.
If you have a notebook, it makes a lot of sense to have a 3G connection built-in.
Not really. If you have a laptop, it's highly likely you have a 3G capable mobile phone with Bluetooth. When you can just "dial-in" via the 3G capable phone in your pocket (without even taking it out), why would you want that same capability in the laptop and the hassle of maintaining multiple phone accounts ?
Your software is copyrighted by you and you can release it under multiple licenses.
You say "multiple licenses", but I hear "the GPL sucks".
Releasing it under the GPL can give you a significan competitive advantage, as it is a practical way to popularize your code. But anybody who wants to make a closed-source implementation has to talk to you to get it under a different license.
If my business is selling software, how does that have any relevance ? If they can sell exactly the same product I can, but don't have to bear the costs of developing, maintaining and (to a degree) supporting that product, how have I not thrown away the competitive advantage my software gives me ?
The problem with the GPL is that it requires code be tied to some other product or service to even have the possibility of presenting a viable business opportunity. As such, it is unsuitable for any situation where that cannot be done, or where the ability to tie is limited - which encompasses a fairly large portion of the software industry.
But your competitive advantage should ALWAYS include the support you give to that software.
Why ? What if the nature of my product means its support costs will never be significant ?
By saying that someone will "steal" your code if you don't GPL it means that you are worried that with your code people can offer things that you cannot.
No, it means I am worried other people can offer the same things I can but without having to shoulder the the same costs of research, development and maintenance that I do.
If it's just a tool, the GPL makes sense, so you get contributions back.
The GPL doesn't make sense if your software gives you a competitive advantage, because by releasing your code under the GPL, you relinquish that competitive advantage.
The law is cause unto itself and thereby justification. You can argue that you don't like the law or that it needs changed, but until it is different, then the exclusive rights to copying and distribution is defined by law.
I *am* arguing the law is wrong, for the miniscule parts of this discussion that is relevant to that. The primary topic under discussion, however, is how physical property and copyrighted material are fundamentally different, and how your analogy trying to assert otherwise is broken.
As in all the other examples, If I could remove all the wear and tear, all the potential for things that never happened, and return the property before you would ever want to use it, it's still theft.
Well, duh. Of COURSE if you remove the differences between copyrighted material and physical property, your analogy that is broken because of those differences will work. That doesn't make your analogy any less broken, nor your arguments any less logical fallacies, however. You can't just wave a magic wand and make copyrighted material like physical property (not that anyone on the copyright gravy train would do that even if they could, since then they wouldn't be able to have their cake and eat it to, like they can now).
Wow, you seem to get it but then fail to see that when that artificial scarcity is removed by someone ignoring the law, the model breaks.
I understand perfectly. But I also realise that a model based almost entirely on arbitrary and artificial limits was never going to work once the handful of genuine limitations disappeared.
Or, to put it another way, as soon as copyrighted material became trivially separable from physical property - and thus was no longer (practically speaking) defined by it - it was inevitable that reality would step in and free market dynamics would take hold.
The model is broken by design, it's just that's only really been truly demonstrated in the last few decades, as the means of duplication and distribution have become cheap and common.
Now, suppose you hire an accountant, can you not pay him or her for services rendered? The accountant used your facilities, your computer, your books, your paper and provided nothing but their knowledge. Is their time and expertise their property or not?
No. It is not property. It's skills, experience and knowledge. Services rendered are not the same as copyrighted material, and neither are the same as physical property.
It's their right to trade it for money, your idea of nothing tangible being present breaks on this because it's all yours to begin with except for the mind of the accountant. They have a right to trade their knowledge for profit. The same right is created by copyright despite how much it would cost you to copy something.
No, they are different things. An accountant doing my tax is performing the same function as a carpenter making me a chair. A singer doing nothing while his song plays on my CD player, is a completely different situation.
What they may have no done in the future is ancillary to what has already taken place. When the law says you have exclusive control over the copying and distribution of something, regardless of anyone's intent, when it happens it is a lost profit.
No, it's not. There is no lost profit if there was no intention of purchase.
Copyright doesn't give you a right to sell something and make a profit. It gives you the right of control that can be sold for a profit.
No, it does not. It gives you the rights of distribution. Whether you are doing that for profit, for nothing or for a loss has nothing to do with copyright.
But they, or someone who gave it to them, has taken my exclusive control over the copying and distribution which I use to make a profit and assumed it for themselves for their own purposes. My ability to profit was taken when that act occurred independent of if they were going to buy it or not. The d
All of the above effectvely dictate a large increase in staff and lab resources to do testing. Since most testing is done under VMWare this also dictates new investment of equipment, time and training resources on Microsoft's virtualization platform. It also means I can't just use the same ESX server to do the testing that was already in place.
You're seriously suggesting you don't test your end-user desktop install images on real hardware, identical to what's in the production environment ? Somehow this:
This comes from someone who does large enterprise (15,000 - 75,000) infrastructure support at the architect level [...]
Except there will be no more small businesses, because they can't pay the taxes. Big businesses? No problem.
Right. Because if there's one thing those socialist paradises like France and Sweden are known for, it's their massive, out of control multinational corporations. Just the sort of huge businesses that couldn't exist in somewhere like America.
To be honest knowing which updates are available is a bigger concern to me than actually installing them.
Then subscribe to centos-announce. That's kind of the reason it exists. I'm sure Ubuntu has an equivalent.
When you see an update you want to apply to your servers, and have suitably tested it, copy it into your local yum repo/mirror. Then just configure your servers to update themselves from that automatically.
This is (basically) the system outlined in this post, which delivers pretty much all the functionality you want, minus the point-clicky web interface part.
Those are ancillary and after the fact. Your not going to get wear and tear by thinking about stealing a car, your going to do it after the law was broken and the theft occurred. So instead of worrying about something after your illegally driving down the street, we need to focus on the control and legal right to that control. That is what makes stealing a car illegal and that is what makes a lost profit when someone assumes that control and gives it away without the owners permission.
No. The law is not a justification unto itself. There's a reason theft is illegal, and it's not to do with hand-waving about "control rights", it's because physical property has fundamental scarcity, and if someone takes your physical property, you are deprived of its use while others have it. In addition it can be damaged, stolen, destroyed or otherwise rendered unusable while you do not have it, meaning you have suffered genuine, measurable and tangible loss.
None of these things apply to copyrighted material.
Yes, finally something we agree on.
Further, this is why the focus must be on the copyrighted material itself. The purpose of copyright is to apply arbitrary and artificial limitations on how copyrighted material can be distributed, so that it has some sort of scarcity and therefore can be treated in a similar fashion to physical property.
Back in the olden days, when copying and redistribution were relatively difficult and expensive, this mostly worked because each copy was, for all intents and purposes, a genuine piece of physical property (book, record, tape, etc). These days, however, when copying and redistribution facilities are ubiquitous and essentially free, the idea that copyrighted material can be treated like physical property is being graphically demonstrated as broken.
Why havn't they?
Because they may not have bought it otherwise. If you were never going to make a sale, you have suffered no loss of profit by someone making a copy.
To put it into a (somewhat tortured) analogy you will (hopefully) understand, what you are saying is like arguing that every person who wanders into a shop but doesn't buy something, represents lost profit.
I mean if the law give only me the right to copy and sell my new book, and you decide to do the same in violation of the law, why have I not suffered a loss in profit for every book I have the exclusive right to that you copy and sell or gave away?
Because those people may never have bought the book from you in the first place.
You possessing the book isn't what's exclusive to me, it's the copying and distribution that I have exclusive control over with a few exceptions. By the very nature of someone receiving a copy of the book from you instead of from me, I do not have my profit from that sale regardless of if you charged for it or not. It doesn't matter if the book is on paper, electronic bits, an MP3 of someone reading it or whatever, the construct of law makes the copying and distribution my legal right to control.
Copyright does not grant you a right to profit. You are assuming (and arguing) that it does.
So then it's ok to sneak into the movies?
No. I never said trespassing was ok, I said you seeing a movie you were never going to pay for doesn't represent lost profit.
Please stop trying to conflate morality ("X is ok") with legality ("X is legal").
It doesn't matter if they weren't going to go if the had to pay, what matters is that they went and took advantage of the services you offered and have a legal right to control without paying. You lost a profit.
No, I did not. By your own definition, there was never any profit to be had because you were never going to pay. I didn't lose anything because I would never have made it in the first place. If you are still having trouble with this concept, please refer to the analogy further up.
I'll give you some examples of what I found different and difficult because of changes to the explorer shell interface. Simple things like even finding things I knew how to do before and how they are now done and look makes using VISTA difficult versus how they were done in OLDER models of Windows (XP/2000/Server 2003) and there is little question of that much.
Different != impossible. Heck, they're not even that different.
Microsoft is making giant mistakes for a company that used to have 'backward compatible' at its heart, in changing the user interface for the operating system as different as vista is now versus its older predecessors.
There are no greater differences between Vista and XP as there were between, say, XP and Windows 9x. Heck, the fundamentals and basics of the Windows GUI are basically unchanged since Windows 95. Some aspects of it haven't changed since Windows 3.0.
The DRM crippling of musical formats[...]
What "DRM crippling" ?
OpenGL gaming is another sore point and one you will find is messed up badly (all so Directx can be 'king') that is a clear example of this since games that use it either will not insall on vista, or won't run at all (not without hacks to the OpenGL icd iirc and then? The games do not look as they should anyways IF you can get them to work at all if they use OpenGL).
What the hell are you talking about ? Microsoft don't provide accelerated OpenGL drivers because that's the job of your video card vendor.
The hosts file in vista also no longer can use a 0 based blocking ip address (versus 0.0.0.0 which vista still can use, but it is bigger and slower on/from disk to load because of this, and worse still using the default blocking loopback adapter address of 127.0.0.1) and this really bothered me because it is an evidence of taking something efficient and ruining it, by making it less efficient.
But probably more correct.
You appear to be someone for whom DOS and programs written in hand-tuned assembler would be ideal for. As such, neither Windows nor pretty much anything that runs on it, is aiming at your demographic.
Why? because it takes time. Usually companies have very specific procedures for quickly re-flashing using their existing boot firmware. However, if that boot firmware is modified (i.e. the device is 'bricked') then that procedure needs to be changed. In this case, the engineer would need to 'hack' their own device to get it up to usable standards again (i.e. 'unbricked').
I find it very difficult to believe that Nintendo (along with every other manufacturer of such devices) doesn't have a very straightforward "nuke the site from orbit and reinstall" procedure (if not appliance) that can be completed in a few minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you suppose that MS Office does NOT have access to the most up-to-date source? And, advance warning when some new "feature" might break something?
Yes. Perhaps they might get marginally more than anyone else, but certainly not enough to matter in product cycles that last nearly a decade.
Let's say that a change in some API will break OpenOffice - when does OOo find out about it? Probably when OOo users complain, then they have to research, and find a fix.
No, they find out when that API is deprecated, which with Windows generally happens on the order of 5-10 *years* before it actually stops working.
Windows is not Linux. Legacy support is an *extremely* high priority, not a "hey, cool, it still works" comment at the end of a mailing list post.
Let's say that the same change in the same API will break something in MS Office. When do THEY find out about it? About 6 months before it is ever released to the public as a beta. That is to say, in plenty of time for MS Office and Windows teams to get together and fix the problem, before the public ever becomes aware that there MIGHT BE a problem.
On what basis do you make the claim that Windows APIs change that frequently ? How do you reconcile this with the demonstrably excellent legacy support in Windows that frequently results in programs decades old still working on the most current releases ?
Either Windows APIs are constantly changing to break everything that runs on Windows, or it's a stable API that endows excellent legacy support. You cannot have both. Actual reality demonstrates that the latter is true, so you need some pretty compelling evidence to make the former even pass the laugh test.
Redhat doesn't make a browser, nor does Suse, Debian, or any of the other Linux OS's.
They don't make OSes, either, so that's hardly a compelling argument.
A web browser is not necessary for an operating system to operate, period.
99% of the code that comes with an OS is not necessary for it to operate. Everything from the network stack to the command line are completely unnecessary.
That, however, does not imply they are unwanted.
There are any number of methods by which MS could offer a CHOICE of browsers, including the method used by Ubuntu: package half a dozen or more on the OS installation CD, and let the user CHOOSE which, if any, he wants.
Why should they be compelled to offer and support any browser but the one they want to ? Especially when end users can just install their own, preferred web browser with a few mouse clicks.
Good - you do admit that in one instance, at least, what's been good for MS has not been good for the advancement of computer sciences. Stockholders were quite happy with a substandard browser, and only opensource competition offered the stimulation to improve.
Wait, so "computer science" improved because other competitors appeared, or it stagnated because Microsoft stopped anyone else making a browser ?
MS Office was designed and built to integrate itself into the operating system, much as the web browser does.
How ?
Without the insider information available to MS Office developers, WordPerfect and others were left out in the cold.
The plethora of successful non-Microsoft software products on Windows demonstrate how laughably false this claim that only Microsoft has the ability to write good Windows software is.
Microsoft has arguably done more to hold computing back than any other "entity".
Then, please, argue it. I could do with a laugh.
What gives Microsoft the right to say what I may or may not install on their operating system? What gives them the right to say that I CANNOT use their API's, or their file system, or their office suite on Linux, OS2, Solaris, or whatever I CHOOSE?
They don't. They're not going to help you do it, however (which is what you really want).
MS never had the right to put a string into Windows that checked fro MS-DOS, then refused to install if the DOS was from some other company.
They do, however, have every right to say: "Our software may not work with versions of MS-DOS other than ours. We have not tested it, we will not test it and we are not responsible for it not working." Ie: What they actually they did.
Fraud, with a restaurant is self-punishing. Short of health violations, if the restaurant claims to be good and isn't, it'll lose enough business faster than any government can deal with them.
Only if that knowledge is spread sufficiently widely. In, for example, areas with a high volume of transient customers and/or concentration of restaurants (eg: anywhere with a lot of tourism) this is far from a given.
Unless you could show they were claiming something like genuine golden caviar, and substituting something totally different like pacific salmon roe; or grade B beef for genuine Kobe Prime; the market will take care of them much faster and more efficiently than government.
Only if the customers are able to discern the difference and act on it.
What is wrong with "tell your friends they suck, don't eat there" and watch their business evaporate?
Because me and all the people who ate there are still out the large amounts of money paid.
You can't be serious that the government steps in for things like this!?
Why would policing and punishing fraud (which is only a short step away from outright theft) *not* be part of a Government's job ?
If you have a notebook, it makes a lot of sense to have a 3G connection built-in.
Not really. If you have a laptop, it's highly likely you have a 3G capable mobile phone with Bluetooth. When you can just "dial-in" via the 3G capable phone in your pocket (without even taking it out), why would you want that same capability in the laptop and the hassle of maintaining multiple phone accounts ?
Your software is copyrighted by you and you can release it under multiple licenses.
You say "multiple licenses", but I hear "the GPL sucks".
Releasing it under the GPL can give you a significan competitive advantage, as it is a practical way to popularize your code. But anybody who wants to make a closed-source implementation has to talk to you to get it under a different license.
If my business is selling software, how does that have any relevance ? If they can sell exactly the same product I can, but don't have to bear the costs of developing, maintaining and (to a degree) supporting that product, how have I not thrown away the competitive advantage my software gives me ?
The problem with the GPL is that it requires code be tied to some other product or service to even have the possibility of presenting a viable business opportunity. As such, it is unsuitable for any situation where that cannot be done, or where the ability to tie is limited - which encompasses a fairly large portion of the software industry.
But your competitive advantage should ALWAYS include the support you give to that software.
Why ? What if the nature of my product means its support costs will never be significant ?
By saying that someone will "steal" your code if you don't GPL it means that you are worried that with your code people can offer things that you cannot.
No, it means I am worried other people can offer the same things I can but without having to shoulder the the same costs of research, development and maintenance that I do.
If it's just a tool, the GPL makes sense, so you get contributions back.
The GPL doesn't make sense if your software gives you a competitive advantage, because by releasing your code under the GPL, you relinquish that competitive advantage.
The law is cause unto itself and thereby justification. You can argue that you don't like the law or that it needs changed, but until it is different, then the exclusive rights to copying and distribution is defined by law.
I *am* arguing the law is wrong, for the miniscule parts of this discussion that is relevant to that. The primary topic under discussion, however, is how physical property and copyrighted material are fundamentally different, and how your analogy trying to assert otherwise is broken.
As in all the other examples, If I could remove all the wear and tear, all the potential for things that never happened, and return the property before you would ever want to use it, it's still theft.
Well, duh. Of COURSE if you remove the differences between copyrighted material and physical property, your analogy that is broken because of those differences will work. That doesn't make your analogy any less broken, nor your arguments any less logical fallacies, however. You can't just wave a magic wand and make copyrighted material like physical property (not that anyone on the copyright gravy train would do that even if they could, since then they wouldn't be able to have their cake and eat it to, like they can now).
Wow, you seem to get it but then fail to see that when that artificial scarcity is removed by someone ignoring the law, the model breaks.
I understand perfectly. But I also realise that a model based almost entirely on arbitrary and artificial limits was never going to work once the handful of genuine limitations disappeared.
Or, to put it another way, as soon as copyrighted material became trivially separable from physical property - and thus was no longer (practically speaking) defined by it - it was inevitable that reality would step in and free market dynamics would take hold.
The model is broken by design, it's just that's only really been truly demonstrated in the last few decades, as the means of duplication and distribution have become cheap and common.
Now, suppose you hire an accountant, can you not pay him or her for services rendered? The accountant used your facilities, your computer, your books, your paper and provided nothing but their knowledge. Is their time and expertise their property or not?
No. It is not property. It's skills, experience and knowledge. Services rendered are not the same as copyrighted material, and neither are the same as physical property.
It's their right to trade it for money, your idea of nothing tangible being present breaks on this because it's all yours to begin with except for the mind of the accountant. They have a right to trade their knowledge for profit. The same right is created by copyright despite how much it would cost you to copy something.
No, they are different things. An accountant doing my tax is performing the same function as a carpenter making me a chair. A singer doing nothing while his song plays on my CD player, is a completely different situation.
What they may have no done in the future is ancillary to what has already taken place. When the law says you have exclusive control over the copying and distribution of something, regardless of anyone's intent, when it happens it is a lost profit.
No, it's not. There is no lost profit if there was no intention of purchase.
Copyright doesn't give you a right to sell something and make a profit. It gives you the right of control that can be sold for a profit.
No, it does not. It gives you the rights of distribution. Whether you are doing that for profit, for nothing or for a loss has nothing to do with copyright.
But they, or someone who gave it to them, has taken my exclusive control over the copying and distribution which I use to make a profit and assumed it for themselves for their own purposes. My ability to profit was taken when that act occurred independent of if they were going to buy it or not. The d
Nowhere did I say anything about not running HII testing or otherwise on physical hardware.
Since most testing is done under VMWare [...]
You're either testing with VMWare, or with real hardware. Make your mind up.
All of the above effectvely dictate a large increase in staff and lab resources to do testing. Since most testing is done under VMWare this also dictates new investment of equipment, time and training resources on Microsoft's virtualization platform. It also means I can't just use the same ESX server to do the testing that was already in place.
You're seriously suggesting you don't test your end-user desktop install images on real hardware, identical to what's in the production environment ? Somehow this:
This comes from someone who does large enterprise (15,000 - 75,000) infrastructure support at the architect level [...]
Seems a little unlikely.
Except there will be no more small businesses, because they can't pay the taxes. Big businesses? No problem.
Right. Because if there's one thing those socialist paradises like France and Sweden are known for, it's their massive, out of control multinational corporations. Just the sort of huge businesses that couldn't exist in somewhere like America.
To be honest knowing which updates are available is a bigger concern to me than actually installing them.
Then subscribe to centos-announce. That's kind of the reason it exists. I'm sure Ubuntu has an equivalent.
When you see an update you want to apply to your servers, and have suitably tested it, copy it into your local yum repo/mirror. Then just configure your servers to update themselves from that automatically.
This is (basically) the system outlined in this post, which delivers pretty much all the functionality you want, minus the point-clicky web interface part.
Exactly. This is basically your DIY RH Satellite server It's the model we use, although we don't have the Ubuntu machines to deal with.
Those are ancillary and after the fact. Your not going to get wear and tear by thinking about stealing a car, your going to do it after the law was broken and the theft occurred. So instead of worrying about something after your illegally driving down the street, we need to focus on the control and legal right to that control. That is what makes stealing a car illegal and that is what makes a lost profit when someone assumes that control and gives it away without the owners permission.
No. The law is not a justification unto itself. There's a reason theft is illegal, and it's not to do with hand-waving about "control rights", it's because physical property has fundamental scarcity, and if someone takes your physical property, you are deprived of its use while others have it. In addition it can be damaged, stolen, destroyed or otherwise rendered unusable while you do not have it, meaning you have suffered genuine, measurable and tangible loss.
None of these things apply to copyrighted material.
Yes, finally something we agree on.
Further, this is why the focus must be on the copyrighted material itself. The purpose of copyright is to apply arbitrary and artificial limitations on how copyrighted material can be distributed, so that it has some sort of scarcity and therefore can be treated in a similar fashion to physical property.
Back in the olden days, when copying and redistribution were relatively difficult and expensive, this mostly worked because each copy was, for all intents and purposes, a genuine piece of physical property (book, record, tape, etc). These days, however, when copying and redistribution facilities are ubiquitous and essentially free, the idea that copyrighted material can be treated like physical property is being graphically demonstrated as broken.
Why havn't they?
Because they may not have bought it otherwise. If you were never going to make a sale, you have suffered no loss of profit by someone making a copy.
To put it into a (somewhat tortured) analogy you will (hopefully) understand, what you are saying is like arguing that every person who wanders into a shop but doesn't buy something, represents lost profit.
I mean if the law give only me the right to copy and sell my new book, and you decide to do the same in violation of the law, why have I not suffered a loss in profit for every book I have the exclusive right to that you copy and sell or gave away?
Because those people may never have bought the book from you in the first place.
You possessing the book isn't what's exclusive to me, it's the copying and distribution that I have exclusive control over with a few exceptions. By the very nature of someone receiving a copy of the book from you instead of from me, I do not have my profit from that sale regardless of if you charged for it or not. It doesn't matter if the book is on paper, electronic bits, an MP3 of someone reading it or whatever, the construct of law makes the copying and distribution my legal right to control.
Copyright does not grant you a right to profit. You are assuming (and arguing) that it does.
So then it's ok to sneak into the movies?
No. I never said trespassing was ok, I said you seeing a movie you were never going to pay for doesn't represent lost profit.
Please stop trying to conflate morality ("X is ok") with legality ("X is legal").
It doesn't matter if they weren't going to go if the had to pay, what matters is that they went and took advantage of the services you offered and have a legal right to control without paying. You lost a profit.
No, I did not. By your own definition, there was never any profit to be had because you were never going to pay. I didn't lose anything because I would never have made it in the first place. If you are still having trouble with this concept, please refer to the analogy further up.
But the possession and control of them are
NT 4.x was when the "edition" forks started and everything started degrading from then on.
Eh ? Every version of Windows NT has had *at least* a "Server" and "Workstation" version.
"Any OS you want, so long as it's unix."
And is "revolutionize file access in branch offices" the filesystem MS promised for Vista, or is that still DOA?
Almost certainly it is improvements to DFS and DFS replication.
I'll give you some examples of what I found different and difficult because of changes to the explorer shell interface. Simple things like even finding things I knew how to do before and how they are now done and look makes using VISTA difficult versus how they were done in OLDER models of Windows (XP/2000/Server 2003) and there is little question of that much.
Different != impossible. Heck, they're not even that different.
Microsoft is making giant mistakes for a company that used to have 'backward compatible' at its heart, in changing the user interface for the operating system as different as vista is now versus its older predecessors.
There are no greater differences between Vista and XP as there were between, say, XP and Windows 9x. Heck, the fundamentals and basics of the Windows GUI are basically unchanged since Windows 95. Some aspects of it haven't changed since Windows 3.0.
The DRM crippling of musical formats[...]
What "DRM crippling" ?
OpenGL gaming is another sore point and one you will find is messed up badly (all so Directx can be 'king') that is a clear example of this since games that use it either will not insall on vista, or won't run at all (not without hacks to the OpenGL icd iirc and then? The games do not look as they should anyways IF you can get them to work at all if they use OpenGL).
What the hell are you talking about ? Microsoft don't provide accelerated OpenGL drivers because that's the job of your video card vendor.
The hosts file in vista also no longer can use a 0 based blocking ip address (versus 0.0.0.0 which vista still can use, but it is bigger and slower on/from disk to load because of this, and worse still using the default blocking loopback adapter address of 127.0.0.1) and this really bothered me because it is an evidence of taking something efficient and ruining it, by making it less efficient.
But probably more correct.
You appear to be someone for whom DOS and programs written in hand-tuned assembler would be ideal for. As such, neither Windows nor pretty much anything that runs on it, is aiming at your demographic.
Why? because it takes time. Usually companies have very specific procedures for quickly re-flashing using their existing boot firmware. However, if that boot firmware is modified (i.e. the device is 'bricked') then that procedure needs to be changed. In this case, the engineer would need to 'hack' their own device to get it up to usable standards again (i.e. 'unbricked').
I find it very difficult to believe that Nintendo (along with every other manufacturer of such devices) doesn't have a very straightforward "nuke the site from orbit and reinstall" procedure (if not appliance) that can be completed in a few minutes.
Wrong. Around 250 Euros it is in Germany.
Wow, they're even cheaper in Switzerland (ca. CHF320/EUR210). That doesn't happen very often...
Although I picked mine up duty free in London for ~155 quid (CHF260/EUR170). :)
What about Windows 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11?
You have to remember, that for a majority of /. these days, there weren't any OSes before Windows 95 because everyone was too busy fighting dinosaurs.
The idea of moving to an interface that can't do the things I can do now in Win2003...
For example ?