Again, and I will repeat, for the majority of routers available today, you have to explicitly change settings in order for someone to be able to "freeload" as you put it.
Again, the *mechanics* of what's happening are completely and utterly irrelevant. What is important - and what the law will care about - is the intent (both of the network owner and the freeloader).
Further, there are no legitimate reasons why one would have to make a wireless connection unencrypted except to make it more broadly available. Therefore, by making it unencrypted, like it or not, you are pretty clearly indicating a willingness to let others use it.
No, I am not. Unless you believe that the absence of a "no trespassing" sign in my yard is a clear indication that people should feel free to walk around my yard.
Broadcasting has different laws because it is not at all like physical property access. Treating an internet connection as something that can be trespassed upon is silly. If you were using a bank's Wi-Fi connection to break into their financial computers, that would be trespass, since those computers are obviously not intended for public use.
Please explain why connecting an open wifi point - and anything else accessible from it - is ok because it offers you an IP, but logging into a bank's server (say, by guessing the right username and password) is "trespassing". In both cases you're "asking for access" and "being granted access".
Using the Wi-Fi connection to browse slashdot, however, is no different than connecting to port 80 of a web server and getting a page. Would you have laws that require people to get permission from a website owner before going to the URL, too? You are consuming their bandwidth without their explicit permission. I fail to see any meaningful difference between these two things. A web server is set up to serve web pages, a Wi-Fi access point is set up to provide Wi-Fi access. You are using it as intended, as designed, etc.
You fail to see the (non-trivial) difference because you are conflating access to a wifi network and access to the resources on that wifi network.
I could, grudgingly, agree that connecting to an unsecured wifi network - in and of itself 0 is "ok" because it will give you an IP. However, you will need to do a great deal of work, indeed, to convince me that said IP grants implicit permission to access a) other hosts on that network and b) anything it acts as a gateway to (eg: the internet).
The true tragedy here is that society now apparently needs legislation to stop people acting like arseholes. Ask your Grandad what he thinks about using someone else's stuff without their permission.
No, but broadcasters do have to encrypt their signals or else the public is free to receive them. That was settled pretty soundly in the 80s. Like it or not, Wi-Fi hardware is just a special case of unlicensed radio broadcasting.
Freeloading off someone's wifi involves a lot more than just "receiving signals".
DHCP authorizes you to use the network. It is not necessary to use DHCP. If you want to set up a network using static IPs, nobody can legitimately claim that they were offered access to use the network. Heck, the DHCP term in question is "offer". You can't get any closer to the word "permission" than "offer".
DHCP does not authorise you to use the network. It gives you the technical capability to connect to it, nothing more.
You could - just barely - argue that getting a DHCP lease gives you implicit permission to connect to the *network*. You could most certainly not argue that it gives you permission to access a) other resources on that network and b) other resources for which that network is a gateway.
More than that, Wi-Fi provides two modes: a private network mode in which it is designed for use only by people who know about the network and a public network mode in which it transmits a beacon deliberately inviting computers to join the network. Again, you can't possibly get an more blatant about the network giving you permission to use it.
Again, you are concentrating on the technical aspects of how the connection is established and completely ignoring the intent of the person who owns the network. Both the law, and morality in general, are vastly more concerned with the intent, rather than the mechanics.
What you are saying, then, is that a system explicitly making an offer to me to allow me to use the network not once, but twice in two different ways should be considered private just because some idiot doesn't know enough to understand that it is doing so? I'm firmly of the opinion that people should not be protected from their own incompetence. If someone is not willing to learn even the most basic skills of how to set up an access point, they should not be running one at all.
Right. So if someone leaves the keys in their car, it's A-OK to drive it away because they were too stupid to lock it up ?
What I am saying, is that it is not reasonable to extrapolate the mechanics of how wireless networks work to the intent of the network owner. Let's say I SSH to a random IP and get a login prompt (that's already two "offers"). Then I guess a login and password and it lets me in (a third "offer"). By your logic, it's now fine for me to do whatever the hell I want with that machine. Heck, by your logic it's OK for me to run a brute force attack on to find a suitable login and password, since the machine itself already gave me two confirmations that it was fine to connect (the TCP handshake and the SSH connection).
We had a partial neighborhood blackout a couple of years ago, and those of us with power actually allowed our neighbors to do precisely that.
Presumably either they ASKED or you EXPLICITLY OFFERED, rather than them crawling around in the bushes with extension leads to plug into your sockets ? Do we understand the difference here between "can I please", "would you like to" and "I'm taking what I want" ?
Besides, you don't pay per kilobyte for data. It is a flat rate, and any excess bandwidth beyond what you are actively using is simply wasted bandwidth. So this is nothing like power or water. This is more like breathing your neighbor's air....
You know nothing about how the internet connection on the other end of a wifi access point is billed. Further, you know nothing about its bandwidth or QoS requirements. A successful wifi handshake tells you NOTHING of what you would need to know to reasonably assume whether or not it was ok to freeload off someone else's internet connection.
I have yet to see any argument justifying freeloading off someone's wifi network that cannot be used to justify hacking into private networks, cracking servers, theft of services or even just good old fashioned unlawful use of property.
Except those are metered and the freeloader is costing the real owner extra money. Internet connections are generally flat rate.
Even connections that are "flat rate" typically have download limits after which speed is throttled. Ie: they're "metred", just not in the way you are talking about.
Unless the freeloader is using large chunks of bandwidth, most WAP owners would not care.
And it's up to them to properly educate themselves about the things they employ in their everyday use (or consult someone who can educate them) before making invalid assumptions.
The only "invalid assumption" being made is that "DHCP IP" and "explicit permission to freeload off an internet connection" are synonymous.
No. DHCP tells you nothing about intent, it just gives you a means of accessing a network. It's a semantic issue.
Look, it's really simple. If you don't want other people using your wireless network, don't disable the encryption. Notice I said "don't disable". Most access points these days are shipping with encryption on by default, so the trend is moving towards the point where we'll be able to automatically assume that every unencrypted point was intentionally set that way. In ten years, the proposed law will be completely unnecessary and will just be a broken relic of days gone by.
No. The encryption is, again, a semantic issue. People shouldn't *have* to lock down their wifi networks just to stop arseholes freeloading off them (just like they shouldn't *have* to lock their doors to avoid being robbed).
Laws like this annoy the heck out of me, as they are caused by technological neanderthals trying to come up with ways to appear that they are doing something useful, all while creating a body of unnecessary laws that bog down the legal system.
No, they're caused by people freeloading off other people's resources.
In any case, I can say right now that I won't be traveling to Maryland if this happens. Life's too short to put up with getting arrested for sitting in your car outside a hotel checking your email for a couple of minutes.
So if you laid down on one of the sofas in the lobby for the night to sleep, you shouldn't get into trouble for that, either ?
The law is a blatant abuse of power, and ultimately, the FCC needs to put a stop to this by creating policy that trumps it. Unencrypted Wi-Fi should be considered free for public use, period, at least until the owner explicitly asks you to stop.
No, it shouldn't. Like any other service or property someone else has paid for, it should be assumed NOT free for public use, without the indicated consent of the owner.
I'm sure you'll agree your neighbours would be pissed off if you hooked into their electricity, gas and water supplies just so you didn't have to pay for your own. Why do you think they feel any differently about their internet connections ?
Since there is no groundswell of outrage from people who are providing bandwidth to their neighbors - unwittingly or not - you have to assume that the "victims" here are the ISPs:
Without knowing how many people are aware this is happening, you can make no such assumption.
Personally, I'd be willing to bet most people wouldn't like someone else freeloading off their internet connection. For much them same reason they wouldn't like them freeloading of their electricity, cable TV, gas and water connections.
Most of us have to use Microsoft products in one way or another. It would be nice if SlashDot wasn't so blatantly negative and biased towards them. Or can some one recommend a technology news site that gives me a fair assessment of cool stuff?
Ars Technica is probably one of - if not the - most objective tech news site out there.
I find this unhelpful. You seem to assume that the memory not in use right now is wasted, and that consuming it preemptively makes the computer run faster somehow. 'T ain't necessarily so.
Yes, it is.
Any memory the OS consumes is memory not available to a running application, current or future.
False. The cache is simply shrunk when necessary.
If the OS allows some of the memory it uses to swap out to disk, either it wasn't in use (IE not speeding up the system in the way you're talking about), or is actively slowing the system by causing swapping.
"Swapping" only slows down the system if it's thrashing. Swapping when the machine is otherwise idle does not. Further, pre-emptively swapping out idle processes will improve overall performance if those processes genuinely need to be swapped out at some point - because it's already happened.
If instead, it causes your application to use disk-based VM, then your application is slower. Wherein lies the speed increase there?
What makes you think it will use swap when loads of "free" memory (being used for cache) exists ?
You mention "maybe he only had 1GB of RAM". If so, then yes, he had a big problem. ANYTHING he does is going to be invoking non-RAM virtual memory. 2GB? You're going from having 1.6GB to 1.0GB for applications - losing about 40% of what space you had available. 4GB? about 20%. You make that up by swapping *something* to disk. And the more you're relying on the disk, the more thrashing you're going to do.
Blindly stabbing in the dark at memory usage figures is meaningless, just like saying "Windows uses X amount of memory straight after boot". You have no idea how much memory the OS "needs" just on its own.
Incidentally, Linux (along with any other current OS) does all of the above as well - because it's a good thing. So if you think Windows sucks, you think the same about all its alternatives.
And Apple buys a good amount of expensive quad core server chips as well.
I doubt that very much. Mac Pros aren't exactly a volume seller, and with only a single mid-range 1U server offering - and not an especially compelling one at that - Apple are far, far from a major player in the server market.
So financially, losing Apple would be a major hit for Intel.
No, they wouldn't A hit, yes, but not a major one.
Nobody would do this to any substantial degree. Without copyright, the incentive to dump resources into writing closed-source software disappears. There is nothing to gain by "hijacking" the software in this way, because there is no way to profit through the sales of the software itself.
Uh, of course there is. The incentive would be basically the same as it is today.
All that would happen is that software would become harder to pirate. Hardware dongles and "phoning home" would become a standard part of any piece of non-trivial software.
You don't seem to get it. The objectives of the GPL will be fulfilled the day copyrights are abolished.
No, you don't seem to get it. Without copyright, the GPL essentially becomes equivalent to the BSDL. Ie: incapable of ensuring further modifications are GPLed.
In fact, I'd argue that it is because of commercial software that the free versions lag behind. If a company can buy a program for $10k, they have no motivation to see that the free version is improved. They might not even want to see the free version improved because the high cost serves as an entry barrier into the field to help keep out competitors.
Correct. In particuar, the idea that one company would *help* a competitor by improving one of their tools is the kind of thing that gets you laughed out of the boardroom (and fired).
I loathe people who make this specious argument. If there were no copyrights, there would never have been a need for the GPL in the first place. There's a reason it's referred to as "copyleft" license; it's a direct attack on the evils of copyright.
No. Make no mistake. Without copyright, the goals of the GPL would be unattainable short of individual contractual agreements between developers.
If the objectives of the GPL are of significant importance to you, then you need to be a Copyright supporter.
Take software engineering for example. There are specialist software programs that are the product of many thousands of man years of engineering. These have been very costly to develop, but with the "no copyrights" model, they are worth no more than the cost of reproduction.
Then they will be tied to a hardware dongle, like they are now. (Apple, for example, understand this.)
There are other sorts of IP. Chip designs, for example. If there is no copyright, an unscrupulous fab owner can steal a design from Intel or AMD and start making identical chips.
You say this like every neighbourhood's "slippery Jim" has a chip fab.
Not to mention, why should the design of a chip be different from, say, the Chief Sales Manager ? If they can't keep ji, onboard, they deserve to lose him.
My point here is that if this truly is the information age, then we must have the notion of information as property.
Information is not property, and any laws (or business models) that treat it as such are doomed to failure. It's simply a matter of time (and Copyright had a pretty good run - 400-odd years before the Internet clearly exposed its brokenness).
"Ok, it makes a difference wether you share some music with your close friends or thousands of 'friends' over the net."
Why ?
I am completely serious here, and asking from both a legal and moral perspective. Why should the volume of copyright infringement matter ?
*Just a little example from Germany: [...] Therefore legislation has seriously considered to introduce an exemption, below which prosecutors don't act.
Goodness. The Law and Common Sense hand in hand. Who woulda thunk it. Next thing they'll be "exempting" anyone who is participating in non-profit copyright infringement.
Even using an anonymous Oyster card (if they continue to exist) topped up with cash will not allow you to hide - since every interaction with the transport system is timestamped, a simple CCTV crosscheck will provide a visual identification.
You can get anonymous cards ? My wife and I just bought a couple for when we're visiting (we're living in Switzerland at the moment and have friends in the UK) and have to give an address to be able to get Oyster cards. These were just some pay-as-you-go cards with 20 quid each on them. (We used our friends' address.)
They come in two flavours. One, *cough* anonymous, wihthout reduction and one, personalised, with 40% reduction. It appears anonymity comes at a price.
It's worth pointing out that there's no need to invoke Big Brother to explain this situation, as simple economics does a better job.
The thing I've come to find from vacation dining experience is that meat is pretty much the same round the world. Doesn't matter if its cow, horse, dog, goat, etc. If it's red meat from a mammal, it'll taste pretty close to beef, with maybe some variation in texture or aftertaste. White meat pretty much tastes like chicken no matter what bird or reptile it came from. And most anything that lives in or regularly dines from the water is going to taste fishy.
Well, not really. The flavour of, say, beef and pork is noticably different (to say nothing of other cuts like bacon). Similarly, with fowl, chicken and duck is different. On the fish side, reef fish tastes noticably different to deep sea fish which is different again to freshwater fish. Not to mention texture is at least as important as flavour and also varies widely between different meats (or even different cuts of the same animal).
Heck, I care about these things and I'm not even close to a "foodie". A genuine gourmet would probably have just about had a heart attack reading your post;).
If you want a good meal, the thing to remeber is that no matter the animal the quality and cut of the meat are just as important, if not more so, than species it comes from.
This is certainly true, but if I get a hankering for a nice piece of salmon, even the best lamb roast in the world isn't going to satisfy it...
<TROLL>Now vegies on the other hand, they all taste and feel the same (awful).</TROLL>
I know we are all against software patents... but these guys have been waiting for 9 years to be able to use this patent by the rules that everyone is supposed to play by. calling them Patent Trolls for standing by and watching while Apple used thier technology to make billions, is not quite accurate.
While it may be arguable that Apple is using the same kind of technology, the probability that Apple is actually using their technology is miniscule.
Patent laws were originally designed so that the little guys can get thier inventions out without being clobbered by the big guys. Granted they don't work that way in practice.
Patent laws are ostensibly there so someone cannot simply copy another invention and sell it as their own. Unfortunately, one of the foundations of patents is the ludicrous idea that multiple entities cannot come up with the same idea independently. It's quite arguable that this principle has been one of the driving behind the "patent everything" approach causing so much trouble these days.
It amazes me how many people get their history wrong on this stuff. WMP started competing with Real long before version 10. Real's seemingly nasty business practices were a response to Windows Media Player. Because WMP was so ubiquitous, Real had to take more drastic measures to make money. So they started branching out into new services and used their media player as a method of advertisement.
Bullshit. Real Player was an obnoxious piece of crap from its first release. The only reason it managed to get a toehold in the market *at all* was because it was one of the first forms of streaming video.
I've been on the Internet longer than most people (since 1991). I know the concepts and the goals of a lot of people who have used it and created it. Heck, I've downloaded music and movies, etc. too. But honestly, if now what we have is a bunch of people who think that stealing is ok because that is what the Internet was designed to allow us to do (see replies to this thread, then were we really so right to choose an open Internet?
All the internet is doing is helping to demonstrate how and why copyright is broken.
I don't have a clue huh? Another area of work? Why would I need to do that? I have had quite a few people tell me that Microsoft's failures have made them a lifelong career, and a profitable one at that.
If you're sufficiently morally bankrupt to make a living by peddling the lies and deceit in your original post, then I suggest you look into being a lawyer. Same type of attitude required, but a LOT more profitable.
It's not especially hard to run a managed Windows environment without security problems. You do it the same way you run any secure, managed environment.
I am in my 30's and I have been using Microsoft all my life, since I was about 9 years old (I started using computers when I was 7). I build their machines, I repair them, I even program them too. I also attempt to provide security on them as well. So I have been involved with Microsoft about as long as some people have been married.
Since you still don't appear to have much of a clue after 20 years, it might be time to start looking for another area of work.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, and I will repeat, for the majority of routers available today, you have to explicitly change settings in order for someone to be able to "freeload" as you put it.
Again, the *mechanics* of what's happening are completely and utterly irrelevant. What is important - and what the law will care about - is the intent (both of the network owner and the freeloader).
Further, there are no legitimate reasons why one would have to make a wireless connection unencrypted except to make it more broadly available. Therefore, by making it unencrypted, like it or not, you are pretty clearly indicating a willingness to let others use it.
No, I am not. Unless you believe that the absence of a "no trespassing" sign in my yard is a clear indication that people should feel free to walk around my yard.
Broadcasting has different laws because it is not at all like physical property access. Treating an internet connection as something that can be trespassed upon is silly. If you were using a bank's Wi-Fi connection to break into their financial computers, that would be trespass, since those computers are obviously not intended for public use.
Please explain why connecting an open wifi point - and anything else accessible from it - is ok because it offers you an IP, but logging into a bank's server (say, by guessing the right username and password) is "trespassing". In both cases you're "asking for access" and "being granted access".
Using the Wi-Fi connection to browse slashdot, however, is no different than connecting to port 80 of a web server and getting a page. Would you have laws that require people to get permission from a website owner before going to the URL, too? You are consuming their bandwidth without their explicit permission. I fail to see any meaningful difference between these two things. A web server is set up to serve web pages, a Wi-Fi access point is set up to provide Wi-Fi access. You are using it as intended, as designed, etc.
You fail to see the (non-trivial) difference because you are conflating access to a wifi network and access to the resources on that wifi network.
I could, grudgingly, agree that connecting to an unsecured wifi network - in and of itself 0 is "ok" because it will give you an IP. However, you will need to do a great deal of work, indeed, to convince me that said IP grants implicit permission to access a) other hosts on that network and b) anything it acts as a gateway to (eg: the internet).
The true tragedy here is that society now apparently needs legislation to stop people acting like arseholes. Ask your Grandad what he thinks about using someone else's stuff without their permission.
No, but broadcasters do have to encrypt their signals or else the public is free to receive them. That was settled pretty soundly in the 80s. Like it or not, Wi-Fi hardware is just a special case of unlicensed radio broadcasting.
Freeloading off someone's wifi involves a lot more than just "receiving signals".
DHCP authorizes you to use the network. It is not necessary to use DHCP. If you want to set up a network using static IPs, nobody can legitimately claim that they were offered access to use the network. Heck, the DHCP term in question is "offer". You can't get any closer to the word "permission" than "offer".
DHCP does not authorise you to use the network. It gives you the technical capability to connect to it, nothing more.
You could - just barely - argue that getting a DHCP lease gives you implicit permission to connect to the *network*. You could most certainly not argue that it gives you permission to access a) other resources on that network and b) other resources for which that network is a gateway.
More than that, Wi-Fi provides two modes: a private network mode in which it is designed for use only by people who know about the network and a public network mode in which it transmits a beacon deliberately inviting computers to join the network. Again, you can't possibly get an more blatant about the network giving you permission to use it.
Again, you are concentrating on the technical aspects of how the connection is established and completely ignoring the intent of the person who owns the network. Both the law, and morality in general, are vastly more concerned with the intent, rather than the mechanics.
What you are saying, then, is that a system explicitly making an offer to me to allow me to use the network not once, but twice in two different ways should be considered private just because some idiot doesn't know enough to understand that it is doing so? I'm firmly of the opinion that people should not be protected from their own incompetence. If someone is not willing to learn even the most basic skills of how to set up an access point, they should not be running one at all.
Right. So if someone leaves the keys in their car, it's A-OK to drive it away because they were too stupid to lock it up ?
What I am saying, is that it is not reasonable to extrapolate the mechanics of how wireless networks work to the intent of the network owner. Let's say I SSH to a random IP and get a login prompt (that's already two "offers"). Then I guess a login and password and it lets me in (a third "offer"). By your logic, it's now fine for me to do whatever the hell I want with that machine. Heck, by your logic it's OK for me to run a brute force attack on to find a suitable login and password, since the machine itself already gave me two confirmations that it was fine to connect (the TCP handshake and the SSH connection).
We had a partial neighborhood blackout a couple of years ago, and those of us with power actually allowed our neighbors to do precisely that.
Presumably either they ASKED or you EXPLICITLY OFFERED, rather than them crawling around in the bushes with extension leads to plug into your sockets ? Do we understand the difference here between "can I please", "would you like to" and "I'm taking what I want" ?
Besides, you don't pay per kilobyte for data. It is a flat rate, and any excess bandwidth beyond what you are actively using is simply wasted bandwidth. So this is nothing like power or water. This is more like breathing your neighbor's air....
You know nothing about how the internet connection on the other end of a wifi access point is billed. Further, you know nothing about its bandwidth or QoS requirements. A successful wifi handshake tells you NOTHING of what you would need to know to reasonably assume whether or not it was ok to freeload off someone else's internet connection.
I have yet to see any argument justifying freeloading off someone's wifi network that cannot be used to justify hacking into private networks, cracking servers, theft of services or even just good old fashioned unlawful use of property.
Except those are metered and the freeloader is costing the real owner extra money. Internet connections are generally flat rate.
Even connections that are "flat rate" typically have download limits after which speed is throttled. Ie: they're "metred", just not in the way you are talking about.
Unless the freeloader is using large chunks of bandwidth, most WAP owners would not care.
More with the bad assumptions.
And it's up to them to properly educate themselves about the things they employ in their everyday use (or consult someone who can educate them) before making invalid assumptions.
The only "invalid assumption" being made is that "DHCP IP" and "explicit permission to freeload off an internet connection" are synonymous.
You mean like DHCP?
No. DHCP tells you nothing about intent, it just gives you a means of accessing a network. It's a semantic issue.
Look, it's really simple. If you don't want other people using your wireless network, don't disable the encryption. Notice I said "don't disable". Most access points these days are shipping with encryption on by default, so the trend is moving towards the point where we'll be able to automatically assume that every unencrypted point was intentionally set that way. In ten years, the proposed law will be completely unnecessary and will just be a broken relic of days gone by.
No. The encryption is, again, a semantic issue. People shouldn't *have* to lock down their wifi networks just to stop arseholes freeloading off them (just like they shouldn't *have* to lock their doors to avoid being robbed).
Laws like this annoy the heck out of me, as they are caused by technological neanderthals trying to come up with ways to appear that they are doing something useful, all while creating a body of unnecessary laws that bog down the legal system.
No, they're caused by people freeloading off other people's resources.
In any case, I can say right now that I won't be traveling to Maryland if this happens. Life's too short to put up with getting arrested for sitting in your car outside a hotel checking your email for a couple of minutes.
So if you laid down on one of the sofas in the lobby for the night to sleep, you shouldn't get into trouble for that, either ?
The law is a blatant abuse of power, and ultimately, the FCC needs to put a stop to this by creating policy that trumps it. Unencrypted Wi-Fi should be considered free for public use, period, at least until the owner explicitly asks you to stop.
No, it shouldn't. Like any other service or property someone else has paid for, it should be assumed NOT free for public use, without the indicated consent of the owner.
I'm sure you'll agree your neighbours would be pissed off if you hooked into their electricity, gas and water supplies just so you didn't have to pay for your own. Why do you think they feel any differently about their internet connections ?
Really, what this law is is an attempt to criminalize a culture of sharing.
"Sharing" implies the explicit consent and knowledge of both parties.
Since there is no groundswell of outrage from people who are providing bandwidth to their neighbors - unwittingly or not - you have to assume that the "victims" here are the ISPs:
Without knowing how many people are aware this is happening, you can make no such assumption.
Personally, I'd be willing to bet most people wouldn't like someone else freeloading off their internet connection. For much them same reason they wouldn't like them freeloading of their electricity, cable TV, gas and water connections.
Most of us have to use Microsoft products in one way or another. It would be nice if SlashDot wasn't so blatantly negative and biased towards them. Or can some one recommend a technology news site that gives me a fair assessment of cool stuff?
Ars Technica is probably one of - if not the - most objective tech news site out there.
I find this unhelpful. You seem to assume that the memory not in use right now is wasted, and that consuming it preemptively makes the computer run faster somehow. 'T ain't necessarily so.
Yes, it is.
Any memory the OS consumes is memory not available to a running application, current or future.
False. The cache is simply shrunk when necessary.
If the OS allows some of the memory it uses to swap out to disk, either it wasn't in use (IE not speeding up the system in the way you're talking about), or is actively slowing the system by causing swapping.
"Swapping" only slows down the system if it's thrashing. Swapping when the machine is otherwise idle does not. Further, pre-emptively swapping out idle processes will improve overall performance if those processes genuinely need to be swapped out at some point - because it's already happened.
If instead, it causes your application to use disk-based VM, then your application is slower. Wherein lies the speed increase there?
What makes you think it will use swap when loads of "free" memory (being used for cache) exists ?
You mention "maybe he only had 1GB of RAM". If so, then yes, he had a big problem. ANYTHING he does is going to be invoking non-RAM virtual memory. 2GB? You're going from having 1.6GB to 1.0GB for applications - losing about 40% of what space you had available. 4GB? about 20%. You make that up by swapping *something* to disk. And the more you're relying on the disk, the more thrashing you're going to do.
Blindly stabbing in the dark at memory usage figures is meaningless, just like saying "Windows uses X amount of memory straight after boot". You have no idea how much memory the OS "needs" just on its own.
Incidentally, Linux (along with any other current OS) does all of the above as well - because it's a good thing. So if you think Windows sucks, you think the same about all its alternatives.
Free RAM is wasted RAM.
And Apple buys a good amount of expensive quad core server chips as well.
I doubt that very much. Mac Pros aren't exactly a volume seller, and with only a single mid-range 1U server offering - and not an especially compelling one at that - Apple are far, far from a major player in the server market.
So financially, losing Apple would be a major hit for Intel.
No, they wouldn't A hit, yes, but not a major one.
Nobody would do this to any substantial degree. Without copyright, the incentive to dump resources into writing closed-source software disappears. There is nothing to gain by "hijacking" the software in this way, because there is no way to profit through the sales of the software itself.
Uh, of course there is. The incentive would be basically the same as it is today.
All that would happen is that software would become harder to pirate. Hardware dongles and "phoning home" would become a standard part of any piece of non-trivial software.
You don't seem to get it. The objectives of the GPL will be fulfilled the day copyrights are abolished.
No, you don't seem to get it. Without copyright, the GPL essentially becomes equivalent to the BSDL. Ie: incapable of ensuring further modifications are GPLed.
In fact, I'd argue that it is because of commercial software that the free versions lag behind. If a company can buy a program for $10k, they have no motivation to see that the free version is improved. They might not even want to see the free version improved because the high cost serves as an entry barrier into the field to help keep out competitors.
Correct. In particuar, the idea that one company would *help* a competitor by improving one of their tools is the kind of thing that gets you laughed out of the boardroom (and fired).
I loathe people who make this specious argument. If there were no copyrights, there would never have been a need for the GPL in the first place. There's a reason it's referred to as "copyleft" license; it's a direct attack on the evils of copyright.
No. Make no mistake. Without copyright, the goals of the GPL would be unattainable short of individual contractual agreements between developers.
If the objectives of the GPL are of significant importance to you, then you need to be a Copyright supporter.
Take software engineering for example. There are specialist software programs that are the product of many thousands of man years of engineering. These have been very costly to develop, but with the "no copyrights" model, they are worth no more than the cost of reproduction.
Then they will be tied to a hardware dongle, like they are now. (Apple, for example, understand this.)
There are other sorts of IP. Chip designs, for example. If there is no copyright, an unscrupulous fab owner can steal a design from Intel or AMD and start making identical chips.
You say this like every neighbourhood's "slippery Jim" has a chip fab.
Not to mention, why should the design of a chip be different from, say, the Chief Sales Manager ? If they can't keep ji, onboard, they deserve to lose him.
My point here is that if this truly is the information age, then we must have the notion of information as property.
Information is not property, and any laws (or business models) that treat it as such are doomed to failure. It's simply a matter of time (and Copyright had a pretty good run - 400-odd years before the Internet clearly exposed its brokenness).
"Ok, it makes a difference wether you share some music with your close friends or thousands of 'friends' over the net."
Why ?
I am completely serious here, and asking from both a legal and moral perspective. Why should the volume of copyright infringement matter ?
*Just a little example from Germany: [...] Therefore legislation has seriously considered to introduce an exemption, below which prosecutors don't act.
Goodness. The Law and Common Sense hand in hand. Who woulda thunk it. Next thing they'll be "exempting" anyone who is participating in non-profit copyright infringement.
Even using an anonymous Oyster card (if they continue to exist) topped up with cash will not allow you to hide - since every interaction with the transport system is timestamped, a simple CCTV crosscheck will provide a visual identification.
You can get anonymous cards ? My wife and I just bought a couple for when we're visiting (we're living in Switzerland at the moment and have friends in the UK) and have to give an address to be able to get Oyster cards. These were just some pay-as-you-go cards with 20 quid each on them. (We used our friends' address.)
They come in two flavours. One, *cough* anonymous, wihthout reduction and one, personalised, with 40% reduction. It appears anonymity comes at a price.
It's worth pointing out that there's no need to invoke Big Brother to explain this situation, as simple economics does a better job.
So Samba 3.x is a better more modern NT4 than NT4 (which was I think his point).
So are Windows 2000 and 2003, so the point would be...?
Microsoft really hasn't shown any signs of innovation in a long time [...]
This statement is meaningless unless you define what you mean by "innovation".
Remember what they did with TCP/IP early on? Made their own stack that didn't quiet work with anything else but said it wasn't their fault.
No. Can you elaborate ?
The thing I've come to find from vacation dining experience is that meat is pretty much the same round the world. Doesn't matter if its cow, horse, dog, goat, etc. If it's red meat from a mammal, it'll taste pretty close to beef, with maybe some variation in texture or aftertaste. White meat pretty much tastes like chicken no matter what bird or reptile it came from. And most anything that lives in or regularly dines from the water is going to taste fishy.
Well, not really. The flavour of, say, beef and pork is noticably different (to say nothing of other cuts like bacon). Similarly, with fowl, chicken and duck is different. On the fish side, reef fish tastes noticably different to deep sea fish which is different again to freshwater fish. Not to mention texture is at least as important as flavour and also varies widely between different meats (or even different cuts of the same animal).
Heck, I care about these things and I'm not even close to a "foodie". A genuine gourmet would probably have just about had a heart attack reading your post ;).
If you want a good meal, the thing to remeber is that no matter the animal the quality and cut of the meat are just as important, if not more so, than species it comes from.
This is certainly true, but if I get a hankering for a nice piece of salmon, even the best lamb roast in the world isn't going to satisfy it...
<TROLL>Now vegies on the other hand, they all taste and feel the same (awful).</TROLL>
I know we are all against software patents... but these guys have been waiting for 9 years to be able to use this patent by the rules that everyone is supposed to play by. calling them Patent Trolls for standing by and watching while Apple used thier technology to make billions, is not quite accurate.
While it may be arguable that Apple is using the same kind of technology, the probability that Apple is actually using their technology is miniscule.
Patent laws were originally designed so that the little guys can get thier inventions out without being clobbered by the big guys. Granted they don't work that way in practice.
Patent laws are ostensibly there so someone cannot simply copy another invention and sell it as their own. Unfortunately, one of the foundations of patents is the ludicrous idea that multiple entities cannot come up with the same idea independently. It's quite arguable that this principle has been one of the driving behind the "patent everything" approach causing so much trouble these days.
It amazes me how many people get their history wrong on this stuff. WMP started competing with Real long before version 10. Real's seemingly nasty business practices were a response to Windows Media Player. Because WMP was so ubiquitous, Real had to take more drastic measures to make money. So they started branching out into new services and used their media player as a method of advertisement.
Bullshit. Real Player was an obnoxious piece of crap from its first release. The only reason it managed to get a toehold in the market *at all* was because it was one of the first forms of streaming video.
I've been on the Internet longer than most people (since 1991). I know the concepts and the goals of a lot of people who have used it and created it. Heck, I've downloaded music and movies, etc. too. But honestly, if now what we have is a bunch of people who think that stealing is ok because that is what the Internet was designed to allow us to do (see replies to this thread, then were we really so right to choose an open Internet?
All the internet is doing is helping to demonstrate how and why copyright is broken.
I don't have a clue huh? Another area of work? Why would I need to do that? I have had quite a few people tell me that Microsoft's failures have made them a lifelong career, and a profitable one at that.
If you're sufficiently morally bankrupt to make a living by peddling the lies and deceit in your original post, then I suggest you look into being a lawyer. Same type of attitude required, but a LOT more profitable.
It's not especially hard to run a managed Windows environment without security problems. You do it the same way you run any secure, managed environment.
I am in my 30's and I have been using Microsoft all my life, since I was about 9 years old (I started using computers when I was 7). I build their machines, I repair them, I even program them too. I also attempt to provide security on them as well. So I have been involved with Microsoft about as long as some people have been married.
Since you still don't appear to have much of a clue after 20 years, it might be time to start looking for another area of work.