For a purposely selected pathological case on a Pentium M 1.6 GHz laptop with little free RAM, I'd say that's not bad for a system that has specifically been chosen to support grouping, alternation, backreferences, conditional changes (case sensitivity, prematch, postmatch, etc) on only parts of the expression, greediness and nongreediness, lookahead, and lookbehind. Perl "regular expressions" are definitely not actually regular.
That's perl 5.12.0 BTW, which is much improved over older series (pre 5.10 anyway) of perl systems regarding regexes.
Note that if you're okay with intentionally trying and failing to get a case-sensitive rather than case-insensitive 'b' after your pathological quantifiers on the 'a' characters, then you have no such time problem.
There's usually little point in copyright for large custom projects anyway. The money is in the custom programming, and the project is tailored to a specific business process. Some companies might negotiate smaller up-front fees for program creation in exchange for a limit on the number of internal copies the client can use, but IME in custom programming that's the exception.
Your contract would have to include a solid NDA, a non-compete, and set a specific cost to the violations since there wouldn't be statutory damages. You could actually go after third parties partially. You could make the other party in the contract liable for contributing to further copies, but then you'd have to confirm who transferred a copy to the third party in question. You could also state in your contract that making use of the software is deemed consideration paid to the recipient of any copy, and that by making use of the software any recipient of any copy is taking you up on your open offer in the contract/license and owes you money. That's what a EULA is, basically.
There's a big "but" coming... The very idea of ownership of the intangible work is still necessary for any of that. That ownership is enforced currently in copyright. The intangible work contained on a medium is currently owned entirely separately from the physical medium on which it is contained. You can own a disc with MS Office, gcc, or Madden 2010 on it. Copyright is what means Microsoft, the FSF, or EA own the code. You can currently buy volume-license copies of Microsoft products with no license, but you are not licensed to use them without also buying a license to the copyrighted work. You can likewise get licenses to many works without owning a physical medium for them (not even on your own hard drive -- you can get licenses and run it on rented server time).
If ownership of the medium and ownership of the contents of the medium were still separate and there was no copyright, then you could only really license the use of the physical medium. The first sale doctrine for the physical medium would make it really easy for the first buyer to transfer it to another buyer unless your contract also overrode that, which is not possible in all jurisdictions.
It seems to me that you'd have to lease the software rather than sell the medium, but that has its own legal problems. I think the supposed utopia of everyone making their own copyright terms is fraught with peril, and would be more a dystopia for both the vendor and the customer. In the end, it'd prove infeasible. Either copyright of some form would be reinstated, or contracts voiding the rights of holders of physical copies would just be thrown out by the courts after some point, leaving companies to make money on the services of writing, customizing, supporting, and consulting.
So what you propose could work, for a while. I doubt it'd work for very long, the lawyers you hired would have to be very good at contracts, and the customers would often win on suit of unconscionable terms if you pushed things too hard. There's already a decent portion of the market that is motivated to deal with companies with customer-friendly licensing (like th GPL, Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses) whenever possible, and there are already companies comfortable making their money with those licenses. If there was no copyright, which at least standardizes the baseline for many parts of this mess, then there would probably be a cleaner delineation between fair dealing and abusive contracts. You just know the companies with void or questionable EULAs would be even more abusive if they could.
I don't give a fuck about the term, especially about when someone happened to mention it on Usenet. There were dedicated client programs and dedicated server programs before the buzzword.
I also don't care if a computer could be both a client and a server, as we're talking about the programming model and not dedicated machines in racks. "MS-DOS", "Windows", "Web", and "mobile" don't separate machines into desktop dedicated clients and rack-mounted dedicated servers, either, but DOS could be a client or a server, Windows is made for both, and the Web involves both.
Telnet involves a client and a server. You can't use two client programs together. FTP is the same way. IMS is a database server. INGRES is a database server. MRDS is a database server. CBBS is a BBS program. These all use a client/server model. They all predate MS-DOS.
RFC 189 was a job serving system called NETRJS. In the RFC, which you had a link to follow if you'd actually taken the time to read any of it, there is mention of needing a "user process" on the remote host to make use of the "server process" on the "server". That's client/server programming. A "user process" is also known as a "client".
Most of these were based on Multics or its descendant, Unix. Unix is what real computers ran when DOS came out. It's built to be a multi-user, multi-tasking, client/server system from the very beginning. Hence the Internet, which also predates DOS.
One could also get a foreign SIM and roam, or could get a satellite phone, or use Skype on a wifi device from outside a coffee shop. Oh, dear. I seem to have just convinced Shumer and Conyers to ban anonymous Net access.
Or it could open up a black market in phone theft and phone robbery, or more cloning of both registered and anonymous phones than there already is. Do you think most crimes committed with guns, cars, or planes are done by people registering them under their own names with the intent to commit a readily traceable crime? If you can get a multi-million dollar plane full of victims under your control with a few box cutters after a fairly strict security screening, then what's top stop you from getting a cell phone from one individual on the street?
The main problem with Video 8 and Hi8 were vendor tie-in, which can be tolerable when it's not abused if the format really works well for your needs.
The problems with MiniDisc were numerous. You already mentioned expensive home decks. It was also sometimes difficult to find a car deck, let along an affordable one. The discs themselves were expensive compared to the alternatives within just a few years of their launch. MD Audio and MD Data were mutually incompatible, unlike CD-R. The non-HD original lost audio data unlike DAT (a Sony development itself) and was usually discernibly worse than the PCM-encoded CD version. It wasn't used for the PSP, with the completely incompatible UMD being used rather than MD, mini-CD, or flash. Sony put an audio/data firewall on the original formats so that even if you hooked an external MD Audio recorder to a PC with a data cable, you could only move audio from the PC to the MD and not back again.
HiMD fixes most of the problems with the original formats, but it has come to the party a bit late. The media is pretty cheap for being a disc-based MO medium that's rerecordable, much cheaper than Zip and comparable to the pure-optical CD-RW. However, the drives are still, even in 2010, quite a bit more expensive even when you can find them.
Flash, external HDD enclosures, CD-R/RW, HDD docks, and DVD-R/RW have completely eaten MD's lunch by now. It was somewhat promising at one time. For the price it didn't meet people's needs any better than other, often cheaper, options.
The main problem with Video 8 and Hi8 were vendor tie-in, which can be tolerable when it's not abused if the format really works well for your needs.
The problems with MiniDisc were numerous. You already mentioned expensive home decks. It was also sometimes difficult to find a car deck, let along an affordable one. The discs themselves were expensive compared to the alternatives within just a few years of their launch. MD Audio and MD Data were mutually incompatible, unlike CD-R. The non-HD original lost audio data unlike DAT (a Sony development itself) and was usually discernibly worse than the PCM-encoded CD version. It wasn't used for the PSP, with the completely incompatible UMD being used rather than MD, mini-CD, or flash. Sony put an audio/data firewall on the original formats so that even if you hooked an external MD Audio recorder to a PC with a data cable, you could only move audio from the PC to the MD and not back again.
HiMD fixes most of the problems with the original formats, but it has come to the party a bit late. The media is pretty cheap for being a disc-based MO medium that's rerecordable, much cheaper than Zip and comparable to the pure-optical CD-RW. However, the drives are still, even in 2010, quite a bit more expensive even when you can find them.
Flash, external HDD enclosures, CD-R/RW, HDD docks, and DVD-R/RW have completely eaten MD's lunch by now. It was somewhat promising at one time, but for the price it didn't meet people's needs any better than anything they couldn't get cheaper.
I meant one of the low-draw ones that work on host power. They're not as common, but they are out there. They tend to work okay so long as you pay attention to the limitations of your USB subsystem.
A dock fits the bill just as well if not better, though, for a single system. You can have multiple drives you treat like media, and a device per system to host them.
Damnit... the Atari is a 600XL. "My" 800XL was borrowed from a friend who took it back eventually. He wanted to play Wizard's Crown on the original hardware.
Well, I have a c64c and an Atari 800 XL that both work, but they don't have CD-ROM drives. The Atari doesn't have a floppy or tape drive that works, but the system and the cartridge slot do.
Copyright protects the design. Yet to produce the knockoff of the design in clothing, one has to produce clothing. To knock off the design of software, one merely needs to make a digital copy. There is a very big difference in costs of capital and time.
Your condescension only shows you missed that very simple point the first time.
I'd be happy if copyright only covered source (you don't copyright a physical book, but the contents of the book), if the maximum copyright was something like 70 years (preferably 30 to 50), and if orphaned works no longer made available by the holder went out of copyright five or ten years after abandonment.
If you couldn't own it, the only reasons to ship only binaries would be to be a dick or to lock in your customer artificially... oh, but I repeat myself.
Besides, you could reverse engineer it without worrying about some damn EULA.
You can't limit people through a license on something you don't own. That's called fraud. If there was no ownership and no copyright of software, you could not enforce a contract on it.
What you could do, though, is freely copy it, disassemble it, alter it, port it, and everything else you wanted. That would be because you couldn't be limited by its creator, who would not own it.
The ramp-up to copy a new dress 50,000 times and ship it to market is a fair bit more than, say, the ramp-up to provide 50,000 downloads of an application.
If there was no copyright, you wouldn't knock off the application. You'd do a digital copy and offer digital copies. That's not possible when selling a physical product.
Movies and music often go out of fashion. A new pair of pants is certainly more functional and more secure if your old pair is falling off or is made for the wrong actual physical season. I don't want my balls to freeze off or to sweat too much in the summer, thanks.
I'd put little stock into a Sony format announcement until I see the specs, the marketing, the cross-licensing, and the support from other vendors.
They were instrumental in development or support for many successful open standards, like the 3.5" HD floppy, the original music CD, HDV, or compact cassette. However, just as often as supporting the format everyone is using, they try to push out a format they developed that has little or no support from anyone else.
Developing new, better formats is good. Pushing formats that aren't better just because you want to lock people in or because you're proud of your R&D team sucks. Sony's unfortunately mistaken the latter for the former too often.
You could get a USB or eSATA hard drive. That's sort of removable. I mean, it's external and all, but you can disconnect it and move it to another system without opening the case. That's what "removable" really means, not necessarily that it slides into a slot or sits on a tray.
I have a 286 @ 20MHz with 1 MB of RAM, a 40 MB hard drive, SB 16, EGA, both 3.5" HD (1.44 MB) and 5.25" HD (1.2 MB) and a 2x CDROM. The whole system still works. Ken's Labyrinth rocks!
Not only is that cost born by your customer considered for when to upgrade, either. It's also considered vs. the cost of jumping ship to another vendor's product. The former costs you money now. The second costs you money for a long time to come.
Not only will there be fixed bugs in the old software some of which will likely be bugs again in the new rewrite. There will probably also be bugs the customer got used to and maybe even thought of as quirks instead of bugs. By fixing some of those bugs in the new version, you'll be screwing your customers' workarounds.
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Actually, quite a few people have been known to enjoy that.
For a purposely selected pathological case on a Pentium M 1.6 GHz laptop with little free RAM, I'd say that's not bad for a system that has specifically been chosen to support grouping, alternation, backreferences, conditional changes (case sensitivity, prematch, postmatch, etc) on only parts of the expression, greediness and nongreediness, lookahead, and lookbehind. Perl "regular expressions" are definitely not actually regular.
That's perl 5.12.0 BTW, which is much improved over older series (pre 5.10 anyway) of perl systems regarding regexes.
Note that if you're okay with intentionally trying and failing to get a case-sensitive rather than case-insensitive 'b' after your pathological quantifiers on the 'a' characters, then you have no such time problem.
I'm sure the p5p would welcome a patch that delivers the promised matching semantics without performing so poorly on pathological cases.
There's usually little point in copyright for large custom projects anyway. The money is in the custom programming, and the project is tailored to a specific business process. Some companies might negotiate smaller up-front fees for program creation in exchange for a limit on the number of internal copies the client can use, but IME in custom programming that's the exception.
Your contract would have to include a solid NDA, a non-compete, and set a specific cost to the violations since there wouldn't be statutory damages. You could actually go after third parties partially. You could make the other party in the contract liable for contributing to further copies, but then you'd have to confirm who transferred a copy to the third party in question. You could also state in your contract that making use of the software is deemed consideration paid to the recipient of any copy, and that by making use of the software any recipient of any copy is taking you up on your open offer in the contract/license and owes you money. That's what a EULA is, basically.
There's a big "but" coming... The very idea of ownership of the intangible work is still necessary for any of that. That ownership is enforced currently in copyright. The intangible work contained on a medium is currently owned entirely separately from the physical medium on which it is contained. You can own a disc with MS Office, gcc, or Madden 2010 on it. Copyright is what means Microsoft, the FSF, or EA own the code. You can currently buy volume-license copies of Microsoft products with no license, but you are not licensed to use them without also buying a license to the copyrighted work. You can likewise get licenses to many works without owning a physical medium for them (not even on your own hard drive -- you can get licenses and run it on rented server time).
If ownership of the medium and ownership of the contents of the medium were still separate and there was no copyright, then you could only really license the use of the physical medium. The first sale doctrine for the physical medium would make it really easy for the first buyer to transfer it to another buyer unless your contract also overrode that, which is not possible in all jurisdictions.
It seems to me that you'd have to lease the software rather than sell the medium, but that has its own legal problems. I think the supposed utopia of everyone making their own copyright terms is fraught with peril, and would be more a dystopia for both the vendor and the customer. In the end, it'd prove infeasible. Either copyright of some form would be reinstated, or contracts voiding the rights of holders of physical copies would just be thrown out by the courts after some point, leaving companies to make money on the services of writing, customizing, supporting, and consulting.
So what you propose could work, for a while. I doubt it'd work for very long, the lawyers you hired would have to be very good at contracts, and the customers would often win on suit of unconscionable terms if you pushed things too hard. There's already a decent portion of the market that is motivated to deal with companies with customer-friendly licensing (like th GPL, Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses) whenever possible, and there are already companies comfortable making their money with those licenses. If there was no copyright, which at least standardizes the baseline for many parts of this mess, then there would probably be a cleaner delineation between fair dealing and abusive contracts. You just know the companies with void or questionable EULAs would be even more abusive if they could.
I don't give a fuck about the term, especially about when someone happened to mention it on Usenet. There were dedicated client programs and dedicated server programs before the buzzword.
I also don't care if a computer could be both a client and a server, as we're talking about the programming model and not dedicated machines in racks. "MS-DOS", "Windows", "Web", and "mobile" don't separate machines into desktop dedicated clients and rack-mounted dedicated servers, either, but DOS could be a client or a server, Windows is made for both, and the Web involves both.
Telnet involves a client and a server. You can't use two client programs together. FTP is the same way. IMS is a database server. INGRES is a database server. MRDS is a database server. CBBS is a BBS program. These all use a client/server model. They all predate MS-DOS.
RFC 189 was a job serving system called NETRJS. In the RFC, which you had a link to follow if you'd actually taken the time to read any of it, there is mention of needing a "user process" on the remote host to make use of the "server process" on the "server". That's client/server programming. A "user process" is also known as a "client".
Most of these were based on Multics or its descendant, Unix. Unix is what real computers ran when DOS came out. It's built to be a multi-user, multi-tasking, client/server system from the very beginning. Hence the Internet, which also predates DOS.
One could also get a foreign SIM and roam, or could get a satellite phone, or use Skype on a wifi device from outside a coffee shop. Oh, dear. I seem to have just convinced Shumer and Conyers to ban anonymous Net access.
Or it could open up a black market in phone theft and phone robbery, or more cloning of both registered and anonymous phones than there already is. Do you think most crimes committed with guns, cars, or planes are done by people registering them under their own names with the intent to commit a readily traceable crime? If you can get a multi-million dollar plane full of victims under your control with a few box cutters after a fairly strict security screening, then what's top stop you from getting a cell phone from one individual on the street?
The main problem with Video 8 and Hi8 were vendor tie-in, which can be tolerable when it's not abused if the format really works well for your needs.
The problems with MiniDisc were numerous. You already mentioned expensive home decks. It was also sometimes difficult to find a car deck, let along an affordable one. The discs themselves were expensive compared to the alternatives within just a few years of their launch. MD Audio and MD Data were mutually incompatible, unlike CD-R. The non-HD original lost audio data unlike DAT (a Sony development itself) and was usually discernibly worse than the PCM-encoded CD version. It wasn't used for the PSP, with the completely incompatible UMD being used rather than MD, mini-CD, or flash. Sony put an audio/data firewall on the original formats so that even if you hooked an external MD Audio recorder to a PC with a data cable, you could only move audio from the PC to the MD and not back again.
HiMD fixes most of the problems with the original formats, but it has come to the party a bit late. The media is pretty cheap for being a disc-based MO medium that's rerecordable, much cheaper than Zip and comparable to the pure-optical CD-RW. However, the drives are still, even in 2010, quite a bit more expensive even when you can find them.
Flash, external HDD enclosures, CD-R/RW, HDD docks, and DVD-R/RW have completely eaten MD's lunch by now. It was somewhat promising at one time. For the price it didn't meet people's needs any better than other, often cheaper, options.
The main problem with Video 8 and Hi8 were vendor tie-in, which can be tolerable when it's not abused if the format really works well for your needs.
The problems with MiniDisc were numerous. You already mentioned expensive home decks. It was also sometimes difficult to find a car deck, let along an affordable one. The discs themselves were expensive compared to the alternatives within just a few years of their launch. MD Audio and MD Data were mutually incompatible, unlike CD-R. The non-HD original lost audio data unlike DAT (a Sony development itself) and was usually discernibly worse than the PCM-encoded CD version. It wasn't used for the PSP, with the completely incompatible UMD being used rather than MD, mini-CD, or flash. Sony put an audio/data firewall on the original formats so that even if you hooked an external MD Audio recorder to a PC with a data cable, you could only move audio from the PC to the MD and not back again.
HiMD fixes most of the problems with the original formats, but it has come to the party a bit late. The media is pretty cheap for being a disc-based MO medium that's rerecordable, much cheaper than Zip and comparable to the pure-optical CD-RW. However, the drives are still, even in 2010, quite a bit more expensive even when you can find them.
Flash, external HDD enclosures, CD-R/RW, HDD docks, and DVD-R/RW have completely eaten MD's lunch by now. It was somewhat promising at one time, but for the price it didn't meet people's needs any better than anything they couldn't get cheaper.
I meant one of the low-draw ones that work on host power. They're not as common, but they are out there. They tend to work okay so long as you pay attention to the limitations of your USB subsystem.
A dock fits the bill just as well if not better, though, for a single system. You can have multiple drives you treat like media, and a device per system to host them.
Damnit... the Atari is a 600XL. "My" 800XL was borrowed from a friend who took it back eventually. He wanted to play Wizard's Crown on the original hardware.
Well, I have a c64c and an Atari 800 XL that both work, but they don't have CD-ROM drives. The Atari doesn't have a floppy or tape drive that works, but the system and the cartridge slot do.
Copyright protects the design. Yet to produce the knockoff of the design in clothing, one has to produce clothing. To knock off the design of software, one merely needs to make a digital copy. There is a very big difference in costs of capital and time.
Your condescension only shows you missed that very simple point the first time.
I'm sure Microsoft is going to send a representative out with a briefcase full of forms to every Best Buy. ;-)
Your proposal is only feasible for large custom projects, not for commodity software.
I'd be happy if copyright only covered source (you don't copyright a physical book, but the contents of the book), if the maximum copyright was something like 70 years (preferably 30 to 50), and if orphaned works no longer made available by the holder went out of copyright five or ten years after abandonment.
If you couldn't own it, the only reasons to ship only binaries would be to be a dick or to lock in your customer artificially... oh, but I repeat myself.
Besides, you could reverse engineer it without worrying about some damn EULA.
You can't limit people through a license on something you don't own. That's called fraud. If there was no ownership and no copyright of software, you could not enforce a contract on it.
What you could do, though, is freely copy it, disassemble it, alter it, port it, and everything else you wanted. That would be because you couldn't be limited by its creator, who would not own it.
The ramp-up to copy a new dress 50,000 times and ship it to market is a fair bit more than, say, the ramp-up to provide 50,000 downloads of an application.
If there was no copyright, you wouldn't knock off the application. You'd do a digital copy and offer digital copies. That's not possible when selling a physical product.
You think Quake I is in fashion at LAN parties still? What LAN parties do you attend?
Movies and music often go out of fashion. A new pair of pants is certainly more functional and more secure if your old pair is falling off or is made for the wrong actual physical season. I don't want my balls to freeze off or to sweat too much in the summer, thanks.
Sony... MiniDisc, UMD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick derivatives, BetaMax, Hi-8, Digital8 MicroMV, DVCAM, HiFD, Elcaset, Super Audio CD...
I'd put little stock into a Sony format announcement until I see the specs, the marketing, the cross-licensing, and the support from other vendors.
They were instrumental in development or support for many successful open standards, like the 3.5" HD floppy, the original music CD, HDV, or compact cassette. However, just as often as supporting the format everyone is using, they try to push out a format they developed that has little or no support from anyone else.
Developing new, better formats is good. Pushing formats that aren't better just because you want to lock people in or because you're proud of your R&D team sucks. Sony's unfortunately mistaken the latter for the former too often.
You could get a USB or eSATA hard drive. That's sort of removable. I mean, it's external and all, but you can disconnect it and move it to another system without opening the case. That's what "removable" really means, not necessarily that it slides into a slot or sits on a tray.
I have a 286 @ 20MHz with 1 MB of RAM, a 40 MB hard drive, SB 16, EGA, both 3.5" HD (1.44 MB) and 5.25" HD (1.2 MB) and a 2x CDROM. The whole system still works. Ken's Labyrinth rocks!
How about a five-year rewrite (Feb 2005 to early 2010) for a project to replace a five-year-old project?
Not only is that cost born by your customer considered for when to upgrade, either. It's also considered vs. the cost of jumping ship to another vendor's product. The former costs you money now. The second costs you money for a long time to come.
Not only will there be fixed bugs in the old software some of which will likely be bugs again in the new rewrite. There will probably also be bugs the customer got used to and maybe even thought of as quirks instead of bugs. By fixing some of those bugs in the new version, you'll be screwing your customers' workarounds.