The Crossover packages automatically downloaded and installed these (and other) programs from the Microsoft web site. They did so in an ethical way; all the EULAs were displayed, and the Crossover people warned you that you might be violating EULAs in the case of actual Windows components.
I suspect that they were pulled because they were being used by a program that let you use your (purchased!) Microsoft Office programs in a way of which Microsoft doesn't approve. (run them on a non-MS operating system).
Another great example of why free-as-in-beer isn't always so good. Ever hear of the King's shilling?
Anyway, as I mentioned above, I have copies of almost all of these font files (because of Crossover) and I can upload them if someone provides a mirror.
I have checked the MD5sums and I have perfect copies of all these files, with the exception of the last one, Aruniupd.exe. (what the heck is that?)
I don't have a place to host them, but I can upload them if someone does.
I'd post my email address but I don't want to drown in mail.... just reply to this post with an address where I can put them and I will do so today.
Re:What Lessig Doesn't Point Out.
on
Lessig @ OSCON
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· Score: 1
Back to the refrain... (from Lessig's presentation): the past always tries to prevent the future.
Yes, that will impact CD sales. But selling CDs is *not necessary*. You have the key to the whole thing right there, in the payment to the artist.
We don't need to pay the RIAA untold billions to package CDs when we can do it ourselves. In your scenario, we'd get more music, and the artists would probably make more than they make now. (almost nothing). The cost of music would drop to the point that nobody thought much about buying twenty albums a month. The only loser here is the old distribution system to move physical CDs around.
So of course the RIAA gets this, and they are fighting viciously. But their destruction or transformation is important. The cycle of capitalism IS creative destruction. We seem to have forgotten that lesson. There are no more buggy-whip makers. Either they figured out that they were actually in the transportation-acceleration business, or they died.
In the modern climate, we'd be passing laws against using cars because it would put the buggy-whip makers out of business.
And Lessig is right about this: we are LOSING. The buggy-whip makers are WINNING. We need to fight NOW.
One thing I really liked....
on
Lessig @ OSCON
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I really liked when he asked the audience.... (approximately): "who's donated to EFF?" "Ok, who has given as much money to EFF this year as they gave the cable monopolies for shitty bandwidth?"
I thought that was an awesome way to measure it. As far as I'm concerned, my bandwidth bill just doubled... any amount I spend on that, I'll match in donations to EFF.
Bandwidth means little without the freedom to use it.
I agree strongly. I think this whole thing is a non-issue, in both the case of the snipped VHS tape and the device that does filtering for you.
In both cases, the directors here are saying that you must watch what they want you to watch.. Their right of free expression, according to them, trumps your right to view what you please, how you please.
I could see their gripe as being, perhaps, somewhat legitimate in the case of CleanFlicks(if I remember the name correctly), where they rent edited tapes. However, these films aren't being represented as 'original'... the SELLING point is that they have been modified, and are clearly labeled.. And Albertson's E-rated films are similar.... yes, they are modified, but they have an "E" rating, for Edited. As long as the labeling is clear, and the consumer is not being deceived about what he or she is buying, this just does not seem like a problem to me.
'Censorship' only applies if it's an authority that is making decisions for you, whether or not you happen to agree with them. Modifying tapes you have bought, or watching DVDs using a device that removes things you don't like, doesn't fit that description. Personally, I'd call that 'freedom'.
No wonder they're up in arms. We can't people insisting on doing what they want, instead of what they're told. That's downright unamerican.
This change is probably invisible to software. Most likely, it'll relate to authenticating the hardware components against one another. I'm guessing that the new key or new encryption method would prevent the box from booting up at all. But once it boots up, the software probably won't see any of the changes in the next run of hardware.
Apple did that transition with a software emulation layer. The PPC was much faster than the 680X0 chips it replaced, and the 68000 instruction set is very clean, simple, and easy to emulate. The net effect was that Classic applications ran a little bit slower than they did on the older Macs, but only a little, and new binaries were shortly provided for the really performance-intensive apps.
Intel et al are in sort of a catch-22. They need a good emulator to transition away from their X86 cruft, but the X86 cruft makes an emulator nearly impossible. In essence, each new generation of chip has been a specialized emulation of the X86 core. Software is never as fast as specialized hardware; there's no way a software emulator could get even close to the insane speed of the modern X86 hardware emulators.
A hardware solution is required. But consider: for Intel to make Itanium really fast at X86, they'd have to implement as many transistors as they're using now in their P4 core, PLUS add a whole bunch more transistors to do the new instructions as well. They could use fewer transistors in their emulation layer, but that will slow it down. Most likely, the number of transistors being used now are truly required..... if it was possible to ship an X86 chip that was just as fast with half or a quarter as many transistors, you can bet someone would be doing it.
Intel is already competing with brutally fast X86 emulators. Duplicating all that work PLUS moving to a new instruction core at the same time is most likely impossible.
So they did what would probably be best, overall, for the market, and chose to switch to a new architecture. However, to all accounts, their implementation is dismal, and offers loads of pain in the transition without much visible benefit in exchange.
As some poster above mentioned... why on earth didn't they just get behind the Alpha and push? There was already an NT port, compilers were written, and the architecture was clean, powerful, and FAST. They had such a strong base there. Had they gone that route, I suspect AMD would be in serious trouble now. Instead, they ARE serious trouble, and Intel is hurting instead.
Just as an FYI for various passers-by.... I find that the KT333 chipset is wonderful. I'm running an Athlon 1900 with a GeForce4 under Windows 2000, and it's smooth as silk and utterly stable.
There have been many, many issues with older boards. You are indeed correct about sins of Athlon chipsets past. But the KT333 (as well as the KT266A) chipsets are wonderful.
In Win2k, do note that you have to install the VIA 4-in-1 drivers, as well as the AMD-supplied registry patch for Windows 2000. This fixes a bad assumption on the part of the Win2K kernel about caching and page sizes, or something like that. Apparently Linux was bitten by this bad assumption too. I assume it was fixed several revs back. And don't forget your eighty-seven service packs.:-)
Anyway, a big thumbs-up from this LONG-time PC user.... they've finally gotten it right.
right... so they DON'T DO THAT. Even 8X AGP is going to be very, very slow compared to the incredible speed of the RAM in most of the high-end video cards. There have been a few demos using AGP texturing, but all the real-life apps I'm aware of are carefully constructed to stay within that cache.
It may help doing background loads of 'seamless transition' games, but even so.... unless you're trying to stream all these textures out every frame, it's not likely to help much. AGP 4x can fill a 128MB card in 1/10th second; 8X can do it in 1/20th. Unless you get to the point of multiple updates per second, it's just not going to matter very much. Developers will use good caching algorithms and reasonably careful level design to work around AGP speed issues.
Streaming textures IS a pretty cool idea, and I would like to see games that use them. Maybe Doom 3 will, but it hasn't sounded like Carmack is trying to do anything like this yet.
The reason I was so acerbic in my original comment was that the website was talking like it mattered NOW, for the apps we have TODAY. (a whole 4.7% increase! in one benchmark! wow!).
In a nutshell: for everything out now and probably for another 18 months, AGP8X isn't going to matter a whit. Don't worry about it until 2004 sometime.
god, what are these people thinking?
on
AGP4X vs. AGP8X
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"[...]there's actually quite a bit of advantage with AGP8X especially at lower resolutions."
What are these people smoking? The vast majority of the tests are all but identical. The VERY BEST performance difference is 3DMark2001SE Pro at 800x600x16, and it shows a whopping 4.7% improvement.
Clue: In the current 3D world, AGP4X IS NOT a constraint. Even AGP2X is fine. Hell, there was an early version of the (TNT2 or GeForce 1, I forget which) that was *PCI*, for chrissake, and it was only a whisker slower than the AGP cards at the time.
Geometry transfer, it would appear, just isn't very bandwidth intensive. The only time the AGP rate is going to matter much is when doing very heavy texturing from main memory, but that just isn't happening. Instead, manufacturers are putting more and more RAM on the video card instead, and all the games are oriented around pre-loading all necessary textures in that specialized, super-high-speed RAM.
At the present 1.06 MB/sec transfer rate of AGP 4X, that means that the entire video RAM of a 128MB card be filled in roughly 1/10th of a second. If you spend all the time, money, and effort to upgrade to AGP 8X, you can improve your load time by 1/20th of a second.
Just think...if you played 50 levels of some FPS a day, every day, you'd save over 15 minutes in your first year alone!
Obviously, this is a very important technology we should all rush out to buy. Thanks, hardwarezone.com! I'll trust you for all my technology reviews in future.
----- AGP8X: Saving your time so efficiently, you won't even notice.
You know, I really hate the posts here that say "technology X doesn't suck, you're just using it wrong!"... but I'm forced, in this case, to say so.
In my experience, ACLs are a godsend. If done properly, they make extremely complex permissions structures simple and easy to maintain.
I have a system I use, under NT, that ends up assigning all the correct permissions in filesystems just by putting users in the correct groups. This takes some time to set up, but once the permissions are set correctly on the fileserver, you almost never have to touch them again... all permissions maintenance is abstracted into user maintenance tasks.
In the case of 'secretary A needs access to secretary B's files', that's not a failure of ACLs, that's a failure of policy. First, don't let users modify ACLs. Second, if your security policy is correctly implemented, then either Secretary A already has access to the files or doesn't, and will know better than to call you. If it's an emergency, then policies can be overridden by management, but that sort of thing is unavoidable and can happen in any system, ACLs or no.
And yes, there are cases where you do have to do quite a bit of security work to maintain ACLs, where new projects are being created on a fairly constant basis, but you'd have to do that work anyway, no matter what permissions systems you use. ACLs generally take a bit longer to set up but require much lower maintenance, so the bigger your filesystems get, the more time you save.
Basically, it strikes me that you're blaming a permissions system for organizational problems.
Re:You aren't going to be able to fix this locally
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Traffic Shaping on DSL?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
This really isn't true. This can be fixed locally.
Consider: his problem is that his upstream provider is deciding what packets to throw away, and is making bad decisions.
If he installs a local rate limiter, such that the upstream bandwidth is never oversaturated, the provider will no longer be making decisions about packet drops... he will be making them locally, and can prioritize them however he likes. Since he decides what gets dropped, he can pass the ACK packets first.
That said... doing this with Windows isn't easy. I'm not that familiar with it, but Routing and Remote Access Services *might* have something along this line. I'd suggest perusing the Microsoft web site to see if there's anything like that. (or someone else may post this info here on/.)
At work, we're doing bandwidth management on a 40 megabit connection, using software from www.etinc.com. It runs on Linux or FreeBSD. I'm mentioning it here not so much for this question, but as a general-purpose recommendation for people trying to do bandwidth management on large connections. This software costs about $700 and is closed-source, but it works really well. The earlier version we have totally choked and died, but the 3.21 version does exactly what it says it will.
I'm still not sure, offhand, how you'd use that software to solve this specific problem. You can prioritize and limit based on ports and source/destination, but I'm not sure offhand that you could use bwmgr to optimize based on packet payloads.
Basically, what it REALLY sounds like is that the connection is TOO asymmetric and that he might consider an alternate provider, if available.
Sure, but this is only a temporary gambit. Once you're hooked on Microsoft, getting yourself off it is terribly painful and difficult.
This is not a gift. It is a free sample from a drug dealer.
Consider... even if lots of countries start talking about Linux every time they want free software from Microsoft, there will eventually come a time when Microsoft will just chuckle and tell them to go right ahead. By then, they'll have built enough 'issues' into interoperability with free software that it will be difficult to make it work without totally ripping out the existing infrastructure... and very, very few politicians will have the guts to put their governments through that kind of pain.
I hope that Peru has enough foresight to ignore this 'gift'. Mr. Villaneuva shows extraordinary intelligence in his analysis of free software, which gives me hope that they may indeed see the iron fist under the velvet glove.
You might want to consider reading a bit more carefully. In your rush to bash Linux and promote OSX, you don't appear to have realized that I was talking about Linux in 1993-1994. It is NO LONGER THAT WAY.
At present, a Linux install can be exactly as painless as you describe, or you can take more control and manually partition and choose filesystems/RAID, etc. Mandrake's installer is particularly nice. At the moment, initial install is one of the strongest areas of Linux... there are always improvements to be made, but on the whole it's great as it is. I highly doubt OSX is any better.
Installation of new software is usually quite easy too. You can mostly just rpm --install or apt-get install. I have no idea how that compares with OSX, but compared with Linux of 1993, it's a dream.
I have been using Linux since waaay back when. The evolution of the desktop capabilities is nothing short of astonishing.
Folks here are griping about small things..... when I first installed Linux, I spent several DAYS getting XFree86 to run. Figuring out your monitor timings and building an XF86Config file was really, really difficult. And that was just X.... every other program I wanted to run would take large amounts of time. Most of the time, downloaded source code would fail to compile, and I am not a programmer. Figuring out and fixing errors in just the Makefile was hard, let alone errors in the program itself. Nowadays, anything you download just works... and with rpm and dpkg, you get everything pre-configured nicely to run well. Debian's package system is particularly wonderful in this regard.
No, Linux is not as easy or as polished yet as Windows. But it is also not endless frustration, either. You usually CAN do things now, generally with soem effort. Back in the day, there was a lot of stuff that flat WOULD NOT WORK EVER. It was easiest to count the number of things you COULD do with Linux. Now it is far easier to count the number of things you can't.
For the first time, I'm using a Linux desktop exclusively at work. I still use and prefer Win2K at home, but here at work a Linux desktop is preferable. And I'm very comfortable and happy with it on a day-to-day basis. I don't have problems with it, I can get everything done that I need to do, and I have incredible power available at the command line. It could certainly use some more spit-and-polish, but I LIKE it. And for years I thought it was a dismal desktop. Not anymore.
Two years ago I'd have installed Windows for sure..... today, I'm happy on Linux. Don't underestimate how fast progress is being made. If things continue at this speed, in another 2-3 years Linux will be BETTER as a desktop than Windows.
Kudos, btw, to Mandrake tor doing such a nice job on their 8.2 distro. If you haven't already, it's worth checking out.
I really didn't like the flavor of the question..... "how we can continue evolving it by any legal means."
It strikes me that open source software is about, as much as anything else, ethics. Open source licenses are legal encodings of ethical standards. The exact standards differ, of course, based on the different views of the creators... which gives you, the consumer, the right to pick and choose.
Laws aren't automatically "right" just by being laws, and there are many things that are "wrong" that couldn't easily be put into law. If you replace "legal" with "ethical" in your question, it becomes much stronger and more interesting. Instead of "can we get away with it?" the question becomes "is the the right thing to do?"
From my personal standard of ethics, I don't see anything wrong with an opt-IN adware system, with a note in the README or in the installer (if you ship a binary) that says "Hey, we could really use money to help support the software... if you could either write us a check or turn on the ads, we'd appreciate it very much."
But that's just my personal view.... you'll have to arrive at your own. It is, after all, your software.:-)
This is really NOT the forum in which you want to post this kind of question. It feels like you had already drawn a conclusion "users are dumb!" and you wanted support in that conclusion. You'll get plenty of it here, but I don't think it will be very useful advice.
A quick example... about three years ago, I commented that you should always use a UPS on a Linux box, because the ext2 filesystem was fragile. (there was much more to this, but in the interest of brevity I'll omit it.)
So what did I get in reply? "You're a moron, you should be manually editing your filesystem when it's corrupted and using backups of the superblock." And other posters appeared to agree with him. I don't think I got even a single reply in support of my stance... that I shouldn't have to, that a properly designed fileystem wouldn't have these problems. I'll not repeat the whole argument. Either you will understand why this was a ridiculous thing to say or you won't. But the blame-the-user mindset was firmly in place... it was MY fault because I didn't know enough, not the fault of the designer(s).
Read the book "The Design of Everyday Things". It is a great set of examples of how badly real-life things can be designed... and how a properly designed real-life thing should automatically guide the user into using it correctly. A door that pushes, for example, should NOT have a handle, it should have a push plate... and maybe a handle for the other side, because it pulls on that side.
According to research, there are two basic ways that humans organize data and navigate through the world: "knowledge in the head" and "knowledge in the world". People who use the former are Slashdotters... they use their memory as their primary navigation device. They tend to trust their own memories over things like street signs and maps.
The other type of thinker uses the world around him/herself to keep them organized. WHERE the piece of paper is tells them WHAT it is. They'll trust a street sign over their memory every time. They don't try to store the entire world in their head, and (this is the crucial part) they get confused when input isn't consistently mappable to output.
A car is easy to drive for everyone because inputs translate to outputs in a simple, direct way. There are only a few states and only about five main inputs. Anyone tall enough to see over the dashboard can successfully move a car with an automatic transmission.
For 'in the world' thinkers, however, a computer is a deep mystery. Inputs don't translate into outputs. In a car, if you push the accelerator, the engine revs up, and the car usually goes faster. On a computer, if you click the mouse, a zillion different things could happen, depending on where the pointer was, what mouse button you pressed, what program was running, or what the time of day was, or what have you. This means computers are HARD for 'in the world' types.
That is part of what was so successful about the Macintosh. One button. Short menus. It's still complex, but the inputs map more closely to the outputs, and the onscreen cues make it easier for externally-organized people. The internal states of the machine are more clearly reflected on screen.
Just because something is complex on the inside doesn't mean it has to be complex on the outside, too. A modern car is an exceedingly complex device, and it takes a lot of training to be able to repair one if it breaks... but pretty much any idiot can drive. (and, judging from what I see on the freeway every day, every idiot does.:-) )
Computers can be this way without sacrificing their power. But it's easy to blame the user and ignore the problem when the solution isn't easy. Look at my ext2 experience. Back then, it was my fault. Now that we have journaling filesystems, it's obvious that a well-designed filesystem doesn't need manual editing of the superblock after a power failure.
Likewise, we'll someday look back and realize that gadgets didn't have to be hard, we just made them that way. And it's nobody's fault but ours.
I think Yar's Revenge was the best game ever for the 2600. It was hypnotic and soothing, but still tense and involving.... a very simple design, but A LOT of fun. Basically you had to nibble away (literally... you looked like a mutant bee) at the shields of the enemy, um, fortress or something.... and eventually had to shoot the glowing thing in the center. Later on, your little shots wouldn't hurt it anymore, and you had to somehow trick the enemy fireballs into bouncing back, or something like that. I'm not entirely sure. It has been waaaay too many years since I've seen it.
Another one we spent tons of time on was Maze Craze. I bet we spent several hundred hours on that one game. Don't know why it was so addictive, but I think that was my first ever case of serious game-lock. Didn't have any idea what that was at the time, of course. I can still kinda hear the funny crunching noise it made when the enemies touched you and you died.
Games nowadays are unbelievably good in comparison, but I don't enjoy them as much.... maybe I'm just getting old. I still buy them, but don't really care for most of them anymore. Counterstrike was the last Truly Great game I've played.... and that one is, what, two years old? Long time.
Re:I got started on the original IMSAI...
on
IMSAI Series Two
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· Score: 2, Informative
I suspect that was the video chip in the TI 99-4, and later the 4/A. (which added an amazing, high-tech feature... lower case!:-) )
My memory may be wrong here, too. I keep thinking "TMS9900"... I wonder if the 99/4 used a lower-cost version of the chip you mention?
And yes it was a cool chip, but the interface to the CPU was a byte-wide gate with a toggle bit somewhere... 'there's new data for you'. Then you'd have to load another byte and flip the toggle, and load another byte and flip the toggle.
This pretty much killed the machine for any real gaming, although the chipset was powerful enough to do quite a bit of disconnected work. Sprites were the big thing on this chip... you could have 32 of them, all in automatic motion with collision detection. But it really didn't do bitmap-addressable graphics in any mode that was easily reachable to an ordinary programmer. Instead, it used character maps.... redefine what an A looks like and sprinkle them on the screen to make pictures. This was painful.
The main CPU was 3.54 mhz, 16-bit.... not very EFFICIENT, but still pretty fast even so. Hardware multiply and divide. If the gateway to video RAM had been anything reasonable, and if the bitmap graphics had been easier to get to (it DID have them, they were just deeply buried) the machine would have kicked serious ass.
Microsoft's empire is built on Word, not on Windows. It was Word that made Windows happen. Word, um, 2.0(??) for Windows 3 was wildly better than most of the other word processors at the time. It was fairly fast, quite easy, and very powerful. Its main competition was AmiPro (which was very nice but had a strange interface) and Wordperfect, which at the time hadn't yet been ported to Windows. WordPerfect was arguably technically better: it was much more stable, and you could write huge manuscripts with it. Word would choke past a certain point, but few people wrote documents that large, and it never became much of an issue. And WordPerfect's interface was abysmal.
Word cleaned their clocks, and sold A LOT of copies of Windows. Microsoft's later tendency to exploit their OS to muscle into new markets and extinguish any potential competitor is a relatively new development. At the time, they didn't have the market power to pull off that kind of move. It was Word that gave them that power.
People use Office because it is the standard, and it got to be the standard the old-fashioned way, by relatively fair competition in the marketplace. Microsoft has been coasting with Office for years now, but the original basis of their dominance isn't terribly shady. They won that battle fair and square.
Mind you, even back then, there were some undocumented functions being put into Windows that only Office could use.... but having been there at the time, it really felt like Word won through a MUCH superior interface and feature set, not because it ran a little faster. I was a mighty Wordperfect master, and also ran Word and Amipro regularly, and I honestly liked Word the best of the three.
I cannot argue, however, that their pricing is fair. It is monopoly-level pricing and is ridiculous. However they happened to get here, they're exploiting it ruthlessly now.
The classic example of wealth is a man stranded on an island. He must attend to his basic needs (hunting/foraging mostly) for most of his day, but can set aside a little spare food. In this most primitive scenario, the stored food (we'll pretend for the moment that it won't rot) is his wealth.
He can consume his wealth unproductively (by taking a day off) or by saving up food and then using the time he would be hunting to, say, make a better spear. If he invests his spare time into productivity, he can hunt faster, and generate more 'wealth'. Once he has stored up enough food to, say, not hunt for a month... maybe he can build a farm and increase his productivity again. Note that currency is not involved here in any way.
In a more complex example, you have a barter system, where each citizen specializes into something. People working exclusively on one job become better at it than generalists. This allows the society to create more goods per hour worked (productivity again). People can trade their goods for other goods. In very general terms, the cobbler can work a week on shoes, and then sell those shoes for enough food to eat for two weeks. The farmer who buys the shoes can focus on farming and can, in a week, generate enough food to feed himself and, say, three other people. He can trade his food for the goods they produce. The overall standard of living rises sharply.
The next development is some sort of currency. In the Austrian school of economics (which seems much more intelligent than other sorts I've looked into), money is simply the most marketable commodity... the one thing that people, in general, will be most likely to accept. On our world, that happened to be gold and silver. This was a HUGE advancement because it allowed the storage of wealth in a way that did not decompose. If someone worked for a long time, they could store up enough money to invest into large things that made big changes in productivity. This also made the process of trade itself much faster, because people didn't have to spend time finding someone who wanted their chicken in exchange for shoes.
The next major development was 'token' money, where gold and silver were stored in a vault someplace (which is convenient, because they are heavy) and lighter, smaller coins, or pieces of paper, were issued to indicate ownership of a portion of the gold.
This is where things start to get complex. The use of tokens to represent gold allowed the issuers of tokens to play games they had never been able to do before. Someone must have thought... 'gee, I have 1000 ounces of gold in my treasury, I could probably issue 1100 tokens, because they're not going to want to withdraw all their money at once.' This was a VERY BIG DEAL, because for the first time, 'currency' (tokens) became DIFFERENT FROM wealth (the most marketable commodity).
Over time, the amount of gold held in reserve became less and less. This resulted in huge multipliers in the amount of currency circulating. If you have a 10% reserve ratio, for every ounce of gold you take in, you can issue tokens for 10 ounces of gold. Our banks presently are required to hold something like 3% reserves, which means that currency is multiplied by 33 1/3 times.
Now we're getting into an area where I understand less, and where even experts disagree, so take what I say from here as partially fact and partially opinion. The above is pretty much all solid fact, but it gets murky from here.
The rise of fractional reserve banking was a huge change in economics, but it has been a mixed blessing. It allows the economy to expand at a much faster rate in good times, but when things go bad, it appears to make contractions much worse. When bankers see that the sun is shining, they tend to lend more, thus creating more currency (and the APPEARANCE OF WEALTH), but they *do not* create wealth in so doing. In essence, they themselves are borrowing against future production. By issuing new debt, they allow things to be built that otherwise could not have been afforded. This devalues the currency to some degree, and also tends to encourage the building of things that are marginally profitable. The bigger the boom, the more demand is magnified, and the more things are built that cannot be sustained in lean times. (malinvestment)
Eventually, either due to the malinvestment or due to other outside shocks (wars, for instance), times start to get harder. The banks become worried and lend less. The lowered availability of money removes currency from the market, making it more precious. This tends to make people spend less, and increases the risk of defaults on other loans, which in turn reduces the money supply even more. Thus, just like the boom was magnified, so is the bust. Businesses that would be perfectly profitable in 'normal' times can and do fail in 'busts', which destroys yet more wealth.
Eventually things start to look rosy again, the bankers do more lending, and another boom cycle ensues. The overall heights of the booms and busts are limited, primarily by the percentages required in fractional reserve banking. The commodity underneath the tokens restrains the worst of the potential excess; it keeps the economy on relatively honest footing.
Overall, it appears that fractional reserve banking seems to have more benefits than drawbacks. It also makes the bankers one hell of a lot of money (wealth, not currency!), so they have pushed hard for the practice to continue.
However, there has been a major change, quite recently by economic standards:
What if the currency isn't backed by
anything?
In 1971, Nixon took us off the gold standard. This set off a confidence crisis in the dollar, and the 1970s were a very unpleasant time. It is probably no coincidence that personal income peaked in the early 1970s, and has been on a steady slide downhill ever since.
What replaced gold? Nothing. Literally. The Federal Reserve could now create bank reserves by waving their hands. There was no limit on the amount of currency they could create; there was no fundamental check-and-balance there. The 1970s were a very un-fun time in the economy.
Starting in about 1980, Volcker restored confidence in the dollar by restoring the Fed to fiscal prudence. He did this by reducing the money supply growth rates to reasonable figures and by jacking up interest rates to the moon. Throughout the 80s, we had a pretty stable currency.
However, starting in the early 90s, the Greenspan Fed has been wildly profuse in its generation of currency. Anytime we have had a problem, it has just opened the spigots and let the money flow. Note that this is not related in ANY WAY WHATOSOEVER to actual wealth. It is just currency.
Because we were globalizing for the first time, there was an endless appetite for dollars overseas. This let Greenspan print money like mad without seeing many signs of inflation. (which is generally considered to be consumer prices going up, but this is a bad definition.) Instead of CPI gains, the inflation went into the stock market and, now, into real estate. This kind of inflation is seductive and terrible; it does enormous damage to an economy, while everyone LOVES IT and wants it to CONTINUE.
In essence, by taking us off the gold standard, Nixon has removed one of the fundamental checks on the power of the banks. As a result, the boom we had was titanic, extraordinary -- the biggest boom in the history of the world.
Likely outcome of the bust left as an exercise for the reader.
By your argument, I should go out and buy $1 bills for $3, hoping to push them onto another sucker for $5 sometime in the future. This is called the 'greater fool' theory. In the stock market, the greatest fools of all were the ones who bought Nasdaq in early March, 2000.
The last few years in the stock market have been a once-in-a-lifetime speculative mania. You should not extrapolate the behavior of the last few years as being even remotely correct. The second-wealthiest man in the world, Warren Buffett, refused to buy tech stocks because he saw that they were fundamentally overvalued. He didn't make all his billions by being wrong very often.
As he puts it, investing is the art of figuring out how much money a business can emit during its lifetime, figuring the current value of that money, and buying it for less. He thinks in whole companies, but the same logic applies to partial ownership (shares).
In other words, the true value of a stock is ultimately dependent on the dividends it pays. If a stock never pays dividends and never will, there is no reason to own it. It would be smarter to put the money into a bank account, even now, and get the crummy 2%.
You may make more by buying non-dividend-paying companies, but you are dependent on other people acting irrationally to do so.
As far as I know, they have no grounds to force you to do ANYTHING unless you have signed a bulk-license or site-license agreement. Those agreements generally give you access to the software for a lot less money, but in return you give up all protection against 'unreasonable search' -- part of the agreement you sign allows them to inspect your systems to make sure you are in compliance.
If you bought your software through normal distribution channels, chances are very good you can tell them to pike off. As far as I know, a click-wrap license DOES NOT allow a search, because they can't know whether you agreed to the license without searching you first. It's only when you signed another agreement, which they have on file, that they have you over a barrel.
I will add my voice to the many others here telling you to get the lawyers involved. The BSA plays serious hardball. These people survive and can continue to exist only by extracting large sums of cash from your organization, and will use any tactic required.
They are not your friends. They are active enemies and you should treat them as such.
Slashdot Mirror
The Crossover packages automatically downloaded and installed these (and other) programs from the Microsoft web site. They did so in an ethical way; all the EULAs were displayed, and the Crossover people warned you that you might be violating EULAs in the case of actual Windows components.
I suspect that they were pulled because they were being used by a program that let you use your (purchased!) Microsoft Office programs in a way of which Microsoft doesn't approve. (run them on a non-MS operating system).
Another great example of why free-as-in-beer isn't always so good. Ever hear of the King's shilling?
Anyway, as I mentioned above, I have copies of almost all of these font files (because of Crossover) and I can upload them if someone provides a mirror.
I have checked the MD5sums and I have perfect copies of all these files, with the exception of the last one, Aruniupd.exe. (what the heck is that?)
I don't have a place to host them, but I can upload them if someone does.
I'd post my email address but I don't want to drown in mail.... just reply to this post with an address where I can put them and I will do so today.
Back to the refrain... (from Lessig's presentation): the past always tries to prevent the future.
Yes, that will impact CD sales. But selling CDs is *not necessary*. You have the key to the whole thing right there, in the payment to the artist.
We don't need to pay the RIAA untold billions to package CDs when we can do it ourselves. In your scenario, we'd get more music, and the artists would probably make more than they make now. (almost nothing). The cost of music would drop to the point that nobody thought much about buying twenty albums a month. The only loser here is the old distribution system to move physical CDs around.
So of course the RIAA gets this, and they are fighting viciously. But their destruction or transformation is important. The cycle of capitalism IS creative destruction. We seem to have forgotten that lesson. There are no more buggy-whip makers. Either they figured out that they were actually in the transportation-acceleration business, or they died.
In the modern climate, we'd be passing laws against using cars because it would put the buggy-whip makers out of business.
And Lessig is right about this: we are LOSING. The buggy-whip makers are WINNING. We need to fight NOW.
I really liked when he asked the audience.... (approximately): "who's donated to EFF?" "Ok, who has given as much money to EFF this year as they gave the cable monopolies for shitty bandwidth?"
I thought that was an awesome way to measure it. As far as I'm concerned, my bandwidth bill just doubled... any amount I spend on that, I'll match in donations to EFF.
Bandwidth means little without the freedom to use it.
In both cases, the directors here are saying that you must watch what they want you to watch.. Their right of free expression, according to them, trumps your right to view what you please, how you please.
I could see their gripe as being, perhaps, somewhat legitimate in the case of CleanFlicks(if I remember the name correctly), where they rent edited tapes. However, these films aren't being represented as 'original'... the SELLING point is that they have been modified, and are clearly labeled.. And Albertson's E-rated films are similar.... yes, they are modified, but they have an "E" rating, for Edited. As long as the labeling is clear, and the consumer is not being deceived about what he or she is buying, this just does not seem like a problem to me.
'Censorship' only applies if it's an authority that is making decisions for you, whether or not you happen to agree with them. Modifying tapes you have bought, or watching DVDs using a device that removes things you don't like, doesn't fit that description. Personally, I'd call that 'freedom'.
No wonder they're up in arms. We can't people insisting on doing what they want, instead of what they're told. That's downright unamerican.
This change is probably invisible to software. Most likely, it'll relate to authenticating the hardware components against one another. I'm guessing that the new key or new encryption method would prevent the box from booting up at all. But once it boots up, the software probably won't see any of the changes in the next run of hardware.
Apple did that transition with a software emulation layer. The PPC was much faster than the 680X0 chips it replaced, and the 68000 instruction set is very clean, simple, and easy to emulate. The net effect was that Classic applications ran a little bit slower than they did on the older Macs, but only a little, and new binaries were shortly provided for the really performance-intensive apps.
Intel et al are in sort of a catch-22. They need a good emulator to transition away from their X86 cruft, but the X86 cruft makes an emulator nearly impossible. In essence, each new generation of chip has been a specialized emulation of the X86 core. Software is never as fast as specialized hardware; there's no way a software emulator could get even close to the insane speed of the modern X86 hardware emulators.
A hardware solution is required. But consider: for Intel to make Itanium really fast at X86, they'd have to implement as many transistors as they're using now in their P4 core, PLUS add a whole bunch more transistors to do the new instructions as well. They could use fewer transistors in their emulation layer, but that will slow it down. Most likely, the number of transistors being used now are truly required..... if it was possible to ship an X86 chip that was just as fast with half or a quarter as many transistors, you can bet someone would be doing it.
Intel is already competing with brutally fast X86 emulators. Duplicating all that work PLUS moving to a new instruction core at the same time is most likely impossible.
So they did what would probably be best, overall, for the market, and chose to switch to a new architecture. However, to all accounts, their implementation is dismal, and offers loads of pain in the transition without much visible benefit in exchange.
As some poster above mentioned... why on earth didn't they just get behind the Alpha and push? There was already an NT port, compilers were written, and the architecture was clean, powerful, and FAST. They had such a strong base there. Had they gone that route, I suspect AMD would be in serious trouble now. Instead, they ARE serious trouble, and Intel is hurting instead.
Not Invented Here syndrome strikes again.
Just as an FYI for various passers-by.... I find that the KT333 chipset is wonderful. I'm running an Athlon 1900 with a GeForce4 under Windows 2000, and it's smooth as silk and utterly stable.
:-)
There have been many, many issues with older boards. You are indeed correct about sins of Athlon chipsets past. But the KT333 (as well as the KT266A) chipsets are wonderful.
In Win2k, do note that you have to install the VIA 4-in-1 drivers, as well as the AMD-supplied registry patch for Windows 2000. This fixes a bad assumption on the part of the Win2K kernel about caching and page sizes, or something like that. Apparently Linux was bitten by this bad assumption too. I assume it was fixed several revs back. And don't forget your eighty-seven service packs.
Anyway, a big thumbs-up from this LONG-time PC user.... they've finally gotten it right.
right... so they DON'T DO THAT. Even 8X AGP is going to be very, very slow compared to the incredible speed of the RAM in most of the high-end video cards. There have been a few demos using AGP texturing, but all the real-life apps I'm aware of are carefully constructed to stay within that cache.
It may help doing background loads of 'seamless transition' games, but even so.... unless you're trying to stream all these textures out every frame, it's not likely to help much. AGP 4x can fill a 128MB card in 1/10th second; 8X can do it in 1/20th. Unless you get to the point of multiple updates per second, it's just not going to matter very much. Developers will use good caching algorithms and reasonably careful level design to work around AGP speed issues.
Streaming textures IS a pretty cool idea, and I would like to see games that use them. Maybe Doom 3 will, but it hasn't sounded like Carmack is trying to do anything like this yet.
The reason I was so acerbic in my original comment was that the website was talking like it mattered NOW, for the apps we have TODAY. (a whole 4.7% increase! in one benchmark! wow!).
In a nutshell: for everything out now and probably for another 18 months, AGP8X isn't going to matter a whit. Don't worry about it until 2004 sometime.
"[...]there's actually quite a bit of advantage with AGP8X especially at lower resolutions."
What are these people smoking? The vast majority of the tests are all but identical. The VERY BEST performance difference is 3DMark2001SE Pro at 800x600x16, and it shows a whopping 4.7% improvement.
Clue: In the current 3D world, AGP4X IS NOT a constraint. Even AGP2X is fine. Hell, there was an early version of the (TNT2 or GeForce 1, I forget which) that was *PCI*, for chrissake, and it was only a whisker slower than the AGP cards at the time.
Geometry transfer, it would appear, just isn't very bandwidth intensive. The only time the AGP rate is going to matter much is when doing very heavy texturing from main memory, but that just isn't happening. Instead, manufacturers are putting more and more RAM on the video card instead, and all the games are oriented around pre-loading all necessary textures in that specialized, super-high-speed RAM.
At the present 1.06 MB/sec transfer rate of AGP 4X, that means that the entire video RAM of a 128MB card be filled in roughly 1/10th of a second. If you spend all the time, money, and effort to upgrade to AGP 8X, you can improve your load time by 1/20th of a second.
Just think...if you played 50 levels of some FPS a day, every day, you'd save over 15 minutes in your first year alone!
Obviously, this is a very important technology we should all rush out to buy. Thanks, hardwarezone.com! I'll trust you for all my technology reviews in future.
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AGP8X: Saving your time so efficiently, you won't even notice.
You know, I really hate the posts here that say "technology X doesn't suck, you're just using it wrong!"... but I'm forced, in this case, to say so.
In my experience, ACLs are a godsend. If done properly, they make extremely complex permissions structures simple and easy to maintain.
I have a system I use, under NT, that ends up assigning all the correct permissions in filesystems just by putting users in the correct groups. This takes some time to set up, but once the permissions are set correctly on the fileserver, you almost never have to touch them again... all permissions maintenance is abstracted into user maintenance tasks.
In the case of 'secretary A needs access to secretary B's files', that's not a failure of ACLs, that's a failure of policy. First, don't let users modify ACLs. Second, if your security policy is correctly implemented, then either Secretary A already has access to the files or doesn't, and will know better than to call you. If it's an emergency, then policies can be overridden by management, but that sort of thing is unavoidable and can happen in any system, ACLs or no.
And yes, there are cases where you do have to do quite a bit of security work to maintain ACLs, where new projects are being created on a fairly constant basis, but you'd have to do that work anyway, no matter what permissions systems you use. ACLs generally take a bit longer to set up but require much lower maintenance, so the bigger your filesystems get, the more time you save.
Basically, it strikes me that you're blaming a permissions system for organizational problems.
This really isn't true. This can be fixed locally.
/.)
Consider: his problem is that his upstream provider is deciding what packets to throw away, and is making bad decisions.
If he installs a local rate limiter, such that the upstream bandwidth is never oversaturated, the provider will no longer be making decisions about packet drops... he will be making them locally, and can prioritize them however he likes. Since he decides what gets dropped, he can pass the ACK packets first.
That said... doing this with Windows isn't easy. I'm not that familiar with it, but Routing and Remote Access Services *might* have something along this line. I'd suggest perusing the Microsoft web site to see if there's anything like that. (or someone else may post this info here on
At work, we're doing bandwidth management on a 40 megabit connection, using software from www.etinc.com. It runs on Linux or FreeBSD. I'm mentioning it here not so much for this question, but as a general-purpose recommendation for people trying to do bandwidth management on large connections. This software costs about $700 and is closed-source, but it works really well. The earlier version we have totally choked and died, but the 3.21 version does exactly what it says it will.
I'm still not sure, offhand, how you'd use that software to solve this specific problem. You can prioritize and limit based on ports and source/destination, but I'm not sure offhand that you could use bwmgr to optimize based on packet payloads.
Basically, what it REALLY sounds like is that the connection is TOO asymmetric and that he might consider an alternate provider, if available.
I dunno, Blue Screen of Dents seems pretty funny to me. :-)
Sure, but this is only a temporary gambit. Once you're hooked on Microsoft, getting yourself off it is terribly painful and difficult.
This is not a gift. It is a free sample from a drug dealer.
Consider... even if lots of countries start talking about Linux every time they want free software from Microsoft, there will eventually come a time when Microsoft will just chuckle and tell them to go right ahead. By then, they'll have built enough 'issues' into interoperability with free software that it will be difficult to make it work without totally ripping out the existing infrastructure... and very, very few politicians will have the guts to put their governments through that kind of pain.
I hope that Peru has enough foresight to ignore this 'gift'. Mr. Villaneuva shows extraordinary intelligence in his analysis of free software, which gives me hope that they may indeed see the iron fist under the velvet glove.
You might want to consider reading a bit more carefully. In your rush to bash Linux and promote OSX, you don't appear to have realized that I was talking about Linux in 1993-1994. It is NO LONGER THAT WAY.
At present, a Linux install can be exactly as painless as you describe, or you can take more control and manually partition and choose filesystems/RAID, etc. Mandrake's installer is particularly nice. At the moment, initial install is one of the strongest areas of Linux... there are always improvements to be made, but on the whole it's great as it is. I highly doubt OSX is any better.
Installation of new software is usually quite easy too. You can mostly just rpm --install or apt-get install. I have no idea how that compares with OSX, but compared with Linux of 1993, it's a dream.
I have been using Linux since waaay back when. The evolution of the desktop capabilities is nothing short of astonishing.
Folks here are griping about small things..... when I first installed Linux, I spent several DAYS getting XFree86 to run. Figuring out your monitor timings and building an XF86Config file was really, really difficult. And that was just X.... every other program I wanted to run would take large amounts of time. Most of the time, downloaded source code would fail to compile, and I am not a programmer. Figuring out and fixing errors in just the Makefile was hard, let alone errors in the program itself. Nowadays, anything you download just works... and with rpm and dpkg, you get everything pre-configured nicely to run well. Debian's package system is particularly wonderful in this regard.
No, Linux is not as easy or as polished yet as Windows. But it is also not endless frustration, either. You usually CAN do things now, generally with soem effort. Back in the day, there was a lot of stuff that flat WOULD NOT WORK EVER. It was easiest to count the number of things you COULD do with Linux. Now it is far easier to count the number of things you can't.
For the first time, I'm using a Linux desktop exclusively at work. I still use and prefer Win2K at home, but here at work a Linux desktop is preferable. And I'm very comfortable and happy with it on a day-to-day basis. I don't have problems with it, I can get everything done that I need to do, and I have incredible power available at the command line. It could certainly use some more spit-and-polish, but I LIKE it. And for years I thought it was a dismal desktop. Not anymore.
Two years ago I'd have installed Windows for sure..... today, I'm happy on Linux. Don't underestimate how fast progress is being made. If things continue at this speed, in another 2-3 years Linux will be BETTER as a desktop than Windows.
Kudos, btw, to Mandrake tor doing such a nice job on their 8.2 distro. If you haven't already, it's worth checking out.
It strikes me that open source software is about, as much as anything else, ethics. Open source licenses are legal encodings of ethical standards. The exact standards differ, of course, based on the different views of the creators... which gives you, the consumer, the right to pick and choose.
Laws aren't automatically "right" just by being laws, and there are many things that are "wrong" that couldn't easily be put into law. If you replace "legal" with "ethical" in your question, it becomes much stronger and more interesting. Instead of "can we get away with it?" the question becomes "is the the right thing to do?"
From my personal standard of ethics, I don't see anything wrong with an opt-IN adware system, with a note in the README or in the installer (if you ship a binary) that says "Hey, we could really use money to help support the software... if you could either write us a check or turn on the ads, we'd appreciate it very much."
But that's just my personal view.... you'll have to arrive at your own. It is, after all, your software. :-)
Dear god, I hope he never got TILTOWAIT. :-)
A quick example... about three years ago, I commented that you should always use a UPS on a Linux box, because the ext2 filesystem was fragile. (there was much more to this, but in the interest of brevity I'll omit it.)
So what did I get in reply? "You're a moron, you should be manually editing your filesystem when it's corrupted and using backups of the superblock." And other posters appeared to agree with him. I don't think I got even a single reply in support of my stance... that I shouldn't have to, that a properly designed fileystem wouldn't have these problems. I'll not repeat the whole argument. Either you will understand why this was a ridiculous thing to say or you won't. But the blame-the-user mindset was firmly in place... it was MY fault because I didn't know enough, not the fault of the designer(s).
Read the book "The Design of Everyday Things". It is a great set of examples of how badly real-life things can be designed... and how a properly designed real-life thing should automatically guide the user into using it correctly. A door that pushes, for example, should NOT have a handle, it should have a push plate... and maybe a handle for the other side, because it pulls on that side.
According to research, there are two basic ways that humans organize data and navigate through the world: "knowledge in the head" and "knowledge in the world". People who use the former are Slashdotters... they use their memory as their primary navigation device. They tend to trust their own memories over things like street signs and maps.
The other type of thinker uses the world around him/herself to keep them organized. WHERE the piece of paper is tells them WHAT it is. They'll trust a street sign over their memory every time. They don't try to store the entire world in their head, and (this is the crucial part) they get confused when input isn't consistently mappable to output.
A car is easy to drive for everyone because inputs translate to outputs in a simple, direct way. There are only a few states and only about five main inputs. Anyone tall enough to see over the dashboard can successfully move a car with an automatic transmission.
For 'in the world' thinkers, however, a computer is a deep mystery. Inputs don't translate into outputs. In a car, if you push the accelerator, the engine revs up, and the car usually goes faster. On a computer, if you click the mouse, a zillion different things could happen, depending on where the pointer was, what mouse button you pressed, what program was running, or what the time of day was, or what have you. This means computers are HARD for 'in the world' types.
That is part of what was so successful about the Macintosh. One button. Short menus. It's still complex, but the inputs map more closely to the outputs, and the onscreen cues make it easier for externally-organized people. The internal states of the machine are more clearly reflected on screen.
Just because something is complex on the inside doesn't mean it has to be complex on the outside, too. A modern car is an exceedingly complex device, and it takes a lot of training to be able to repair one if it breaks... but pretty much any idiot can drive. (and, judging from what I see on the freeway every day, every idiot does. :-) )
Computers can be this way without sacrificing their power. But it's easy to blame the user and ignore the problem when the solution isn't easy. Look at my ext2 experience. Back then, it was my fault. Now that we have journaling filesystems, it's obvious that a well-designed filesystem doesn't need manual editing of the superblock after a power failure.
Likewise, we'll someday look back and realize that gadgets didn't have to be hard, we just made them that way. And it's nobody's fault but ours.
I think Yar's Revenge was the best game ever for the 2600. It was hypnotic and soothing, but still tense and involving.... a very simple design, but A LOT of fun. Basically you had to nibble away (literally... you looked like a mutant bee) at the shields of the enemy, um, fortress or something.... and eventually had to shoot the glowing thing in the center. Later on, your little shots wouldn't hurt it anymore, and you had to somehow trick the enemy fireballs into bouncing back, or something like that. I'm not entirely sure. It has been waaaay too many years since I've seen it.
... and that one is, what, two years old? Long time.
Another one we spent tons of time on was Maze Craze. I bet we spent several hundred hours on that one game. Don't know why it was so addictive, but I think that was my first ever case of serious game-lock. Didn't have any idea what that was at the time, of course. I can still kinda hear the funny crunching noise it made when the enemies touched you and you died.
Games nowadays are unbelievably good in comparison, but I don't enjoy them as much.... maybe I'm just getting old. I still buy them, but don't really care for most of them anymore. Counterstrike was the last Truly Great game I've played.
I suspect that was the video chip in the TI 99-4, and later the 4/A. (which added an amazing, high-tech feature... lower case! :-) )
My memory may be wrong here, too. I keep thinking "TMS9900"... I wonder if the 99/4 used a lower-cost version of the chip you mention?
And yes it was a cool chip, but the interface to the CPU was a byte-wide gate with a toggle bit somewhere... 'there's new data for you'. Then you'd have to load another byte and flip the toggle, and load another byte and flip the toggle.
This pretty much killed the machine for any real gaming, although the chipset was powerful enough to do quite a bit of disconnected work. Sprites were the big thing on this chip... you could have 32 of them, all in automatic motion with collision detection. But it really didn't do bitmap-addressable graphics in any mode that was easily reachable to an ordinary programmer. Instead, it used character maps.... redefine what an A looks like and sprinkle them on the screen to make pictures. This was painful.
The main CPU was 3.54 mhz, 16-bit.... not very EFFICIENT, but still pretty fast even so. Hardware multiply and divide. If the gateway to video RAM had been anything reasonable, and if the bitmap graphics had been easier to get to (it DID have them, they were just deeply buried) the machine would have kicked serious ass.
Microsoft's empire is built on Word, not on Windows. It was Word that made Windows happen. Word, um, 2.0(??) for Windows 3 was wildly better than most of the other word processors at the time. It was fairly fast, quite easy, and very powerful. Its main competition was AmiPro (which was very nice but had a strange interface) and Wordperfect, which at the time hadn't yet been ported to Windows. WordPerfect was arguably technically better: it was much more stable, and you could write huge manuscripts with it. Word would choke past a certain point, but few people wrote documents that large, and it never became much of an issue. And WordPerfect's interface was abysmal.
Word cleaned their clocks, and sold A LOT of copies of Windows. Microsoft's later tendency to exploit their OS to muscle into new markets and extinguish any potential competitor is a relatively new development. At the time, they didn't have the market power to pull off that kind of move. It was Word that gave them that power.
People use Office because it is the standard, and it got to be the standard the old-fashioned way, by relatively fair competition in the marketplace. Microsoft has been coasting with Office for years now, but the original basis of their dominance isn't terribly shady. They won that battle fair and square.
Mind you, even back then, there were some undocumented functions being put into Windows that only Office could use.... but having been there at the time, it really felt like Word won through a MUCH superior interface and feature set, not because it ran a little faster. I was a mighty Wordperfect master, and also ran Word and Amipro regularly, and I honestly liked Word the best of the three.
I cannot argue, however, that their pricing is fair. It is monopoly-level pricing and is ridiculous. However they happened to get here, they're exploiting it ruthlessly now.
The classic example of wealth is a man stranded on an island. He must attend to his basic needs (hunting/foraging mostly) for most of his day, but can set aside a little spare food. In this most primitive scenario, the stored food (we'll pretend for the moment that it won't rot) is his wealth.
He can consume his wealth unproductively (by taking a day off) or by saving up food and then using the time he would be hunting to, say, make a better spear. If he invests his spare time into productivity, he can hunt faster, and generate more 'wealth'. Once he has stored up enough food to, say, not hunt for a month... maybe he can build a farm and increase his productivity again. Note that currency is not involved here in any way.
In a more complex example, you have a barter system, where each citizen specializes into something. People working exclusively on one job become better at it than generalists. This allows the society to create more goods per hour worked (productivity again). People can trade their goods for other goods. In very general terms, the cobbler can work a week on shoes, and then sell those shoes for enough food to eat for two weeks. The farmer who buys the shoes can focus on farming and can, in a week, generate enough food to feed himself and, say, three other people. He can trade his food for the goods they produce. The overall standard of living rises sharply.
The next development is some sort of currency. In the Austrian school of economics (which seems much more intelligent than other sorts I've looked into), money is simply the most marketable commodity... the one thing that people, in general, will be most likely to accept. On our world, that happened to be gold and silver. This was a HUGE advancement because it allowed the storage of wealth in a way that did not decompose. If someone worked for a long time, they could store up enough money to invest into large things that made big changes in productivity. This also made the process of trade itself much faster, because people didn't have to spend time finding someone who wanted their chicken in exchange for shoes.
The next major development was 'token' money, where gold and silver were stored in a vault someplace (which is convenient, because they are heavy) and lighter, smaller coins, or pieces of paper, were issued to indicate ownership of a portion of the gold.
This is where things start to get complex. The use of tokens to represent gold allowed the issuers of tokens to play games they had never been able to do before. Someone must have thought... 'gee, I have 1000 ounces of gold in my treasury, I could probably issue 1100 tokens, because they're not going to want to withdraw all their money at once.' This was a VERY BIG DEAL, because for the first time, 'currency' (tokens) became DIFFERENT FROM wealth (the most marketable commodity).
Over time, the amount of gold held in reserve became less and less. This resulted in huge multipliers in the amount of currency circulating. If you have a 10% reserve ratio, for every ounce of gold you take in, you can issue tokens for 10 ounces of gold. Our banks presently are required to hold something like 3% reserves, which means that currency is multiplied by 33 1/3 times.
Now we're getting into an area where I understand less, and where even experts disagree, so take what I say from here as partially fact and partially opinion. The above is pretty much all solid fact, but it gets murky from here.
The rise of fractional reserve banking was a huge change in economics, but it has been a mixed blessing. It allows the economy to expand at a much faster rate in good times, but when things go bad, it appears to make contractions much worse. When bankers see that the sun is shining, they tend to lend more, thus creating more currency (and the APPEARANCE OF WEALTH), but they *do not* create wealth in so doing. In essence, they themselves are borrowing against future production. By issuing new debt, they allow things to be built that otherwise could not have been afforded. This devalues the currency to some degree, and also tends to encourage the building of things that are marginally profitable. The bigger the boom, the more demand is magnified, and the more things are built that cannot be sustained in lean times. (malinvestment)
Eventually, either due to the malinvestment or due to other outside shocks (wars, for instance), times start to get harder. The banks become worried and lend less. The lowered availability of money removes currency from the market, making it more precious. This tends to make people spend less, and increases the risk of defaults on other loans, which in turn reduces the money supply even more. Thus, just like the boom was magnified, so is the bust. Businesses that would be perfectly profitable in 'normal' times can and do fail in 'busts', which destroys yet more wealth.
Eventually things start to look rosy again, the bankers do more lending, and another boom cycle ensues. The overall heights of the booms and busts are limited, primarily by the percentages required in fractional reserve banking. The commodity underneath the tokens restrains the worst of the potential excess; it keeps the economy on relatively honest footing.
Overall, it appears that fractional reserve banking seems to have more benefits than drawbacks. It also makes the bankers one hell of a lot of money (wealth, not currency!), so they have pushed hard for the practice to continue.
However, there has been a major change, quite recently by economic standards:
In 1971, Nixon took us off the gold standard. This set off a confidence crisis in the dollar, and the 1970s were a very unpleasant time. It is probably no coincidence that personal income peaked in the early 1970s, and has been on a steady slide downhill ever since.
What replaced gold? Nothing. Literally. The Federal Reserve could now create bank reserves by waving their hands. There was no limit on the amount of currency they could create; there was no fundamental check-and-balance there. The 1970s were a very un-fun time in the economy.
Starting in about 1980, Volcker restored confidence in the dollar by restoring the Fed to fiscal prudence. He did this by reducing the money supply growth rates to reasonable figures and by jacking up interest rates to the moon. Throughout the 80s, we had a pretty stable currency.
However, starting in the early 90s, the Greenspan Fed has been wildly profuse in its generation of currency. Anytime we have had a problem, it has just opened the spigots and let the money flow. Note that this is not related in ANY WAY WHATOSOEVER to actual wealth. It is just currency.
Because we were globalizing for the first time, there was an endless appetite for dollars overseas. This let Greenspan print money like mad without seeing many signs of inflation. (which is generally considered to be consumer prices going up, but this is a bad definition.) Instead of CPI gains, the inflation went into the stock market and, now, into real estate. This kind of inflation is seductive and terrible; it does enormous damage to an economy, while everyone LOVES IT and wants it to CONTINUE.
In essence, by taking us off the gold standard, Nixon has removed one of the fundamental checks on the power of the banks. As a result, the boom we had was titanic, extraordinary -- the biggest boom in the history of the world.
Likely outcome of the bust left as an exercise for the reader.
By your argument, I should go out and buy $1 bills for $3, hoping to push them onto another sucker for $5 sometime in the future. This is called the 'greater fool' theory. In the stock market, the greatest fools of all were the ones who bought Nasdaq in early March, 2000.
The last few years in the stock market have been a once-in-a-lifetime speculative mania. You should not extrapolate the behavior of the last few years as being even remotely correct. The second-wealthiest man in the world, Warren Buffett, refused to buy tech stocks because he saw that they were fundamentally overvalued. He didn't make all his billions by being wrong very often.
As he puts it, investing is the art of figuring out how much money a business can emit during its lifetime, figuring the current value of that money, and buying it for less. He thinks in whole companies, but the same logic applies to partial ownership (shares).
In other words, the true value of a stock is ultimately dependent on the dividends it pays. If a stock never pays dividends and never will, there is no reason to own it. It would be smarter to put the money into a bank account, even now, and get the crummy 2%.
You may make more by buying non-dividend-paying companies, but you are dependent on other people acting irrationally to do so.
Caveat: IANAL.
As far as I know, they have no grounds to force you to do ANYTHING unless you have signed a bulk-license or site-license agreement. Those agreements generally give you access to the software for a lot less money, but in return you give up all protection against 'unreasonable search' -- part of the agreement you sign allows them to inspect your systems to make sure you are in compliance.
If you bought your software through normal distribution channels, chances are very good you can tell them to pike off. As far as I know, a click-wrap license DOES NOT allow a search, because they can't know whether you agreed to the license without searching you first. It's only when you signed another agreement, which they have on file, that they have you over a barrel.
I will add my voice to the many others here telling you to get the lawyers involved. The BSA plays serious hardball. These people survive and can continue to exist only by extracting large sums of cash from your organization, and will use any tactic required.
They are not your friends. They are active enemies and you should treat them as such.