The RIAA/MPAA's whole excuse for terrorism, creating censorship systems, and suing companies was they were losing money, so they have the "right" to do so. Should the guy who created BitTorrent be sued? Should users of BitTorrent be subject to DoS attacks? Should all computers be disabled so BitTorrent and other programs the MPAA disapproves of can't be run? I don't think so.
Oh yeah, and for a "special" bonus, they add a big "to be continued" message at the end of the movie. (I think they used some sort of replacement word for "continued", but you get the picture.)
The movie is just like what TV networks do during sweeps month. A bunch of cheap tricks to get people to see it. Nothing really good.
I wouldn't bother if I were you. The movie sucked. It wasn't nearly as good as the first one. It looks like the marketing people decided what to put in it. "Let's put in some porn, but we'll have to downgrade it so we can get an R rating. Then we'll add some karate moves and special effects, and we're done!"
In fact, just watch a porn movie, a kung-fu movie, and some computer generated images. You'll be much more satisfied.
They don't care. They just want to blame someone else for their problems. If they were caught trafficing drugs, they'd say it is the car's fault. If they jumped off a cliff and broke their legs, they'd probably try to sue the person who made the cliff!
So, would you want your company to be sued into the ground and lose your job because someone may possibly use the product you produce for some illegal purpose or it may harm someone? Would you want to be denied the ability to ever use the product or any similar one because someone may use it for an illegal purpose or it may harm someone?
This is exactly what the MPAA and RIAA are doing. I doubt you would like it if you were on the receiving end of their crap. Just about any product can be a scapegoat in this way. Even their movies and music. Some people claim sex and violence in movies and music cause real crimes. By the {MP,RI}AA's logic, they shouldn't be in business either.
Yeah, "Artists and musicians" have rights, but they don't have more rights than everyone else. They don't have the right to sue new technologies out of existence just because those techonolgies may be used for copyright infringement. They don't have the right to force an DRM censorship system upon everyone, just because it may stop some people from infringing copyrights.
Your right to defend yourself ends when it requires you to take away the rights of many innocent people.
That is, of course, exactly why disclosing evidence before trial is a bad idea. It gives the accused party a chance to concoct ways to conceal wrongdoing.
No, it allows the people who are unknowingly breaking the law to stop. Let's say a copper walked up to your door and told you that you were doing something illegal in your house. He wouldn't tell you what it was, but if you didn't stop, you'd be put in jail for a long time. What are you supposed to do? Just up and buy another house, then move somewhere else?
This sounds like a stupid "In Soviet Russia" joke. In Soviet Russia, you'll be arrested for doing something illegal, but you won't know what it is! Yuri, we've been in jail for thirty years. Anyone know why?
If we assume Linux never existed, MS would still have a similar problem--except with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BeOS, or whatever.
Also, the value lost to MS is much more than monetary. The fewer people running Windows, the more trouble they will have pushing people into their Palladium Censorship OS.;-)
If you want to understand more, listen to the song Do the Math by Mannequin Porn. Just substitute M$ where they say Juliet, and you'll have the solution!
this meant that independent films (that didn't have studio backing) would have a very hard time getting shown in cinemas nationwide.
How is this different from today? In my area, there are only 3 of about 25 theaters which show "independent" movies, and the MPAA members have their grubby hands into most of those "independent" movies. Not just any members either--the really evil ones (Disney and News Corp) are in control of the vast majority I've looked into. I even went to one thinking some small time company produced it, yet at the opening credits the Fox showed up in the henhouse in big bold letters.
Let's also not forget the MPAA have total control over the ratings system, and most theaters won't show any unrated/NC17 movie. I remember reading a story about a Troma movie, and how the MPAA upped the rating because a guy eating a taco was "really gross." I haven't seen the scene in question, but how could eating a taco earn a bad rating? Here is what Troma has to say about it. (Using the Google Cache because the troma.com server seems to be trashed.) This story goes into it a little...
Why? To waste processing time? Programmers should most certainly check beforehand if something catastrophic will happen...such as checking for NULL pointers, or making sure a drive head won't go too far and crash. But I don't see why they should have to predict if an error will happen beforehand for every case.
Sometimes a more elegant, efficient ior easy solution is to check afterward. Who even says the result will be wanted if an overflow happens anyway? The program may just end the function on an error, or pop up a warning box.
If needed, an increment can easily be undone, and overflow checking is far easier than comparing against the max value--which you'll have to figure out. Not easy if you don't know the size of the operand (such as with C and ints). Not easy if the size of the operand may be changed at a later date (you'll also have to change all your comparison code, or the max constant if you used one). This may not seem like a big deal, but it's one more thing to get wrong.
Some 80x86 assembly to illistrate how overflow works to the programmer's advantage:
inc al ; increment the al register
jo errorhandler ; if overflow, jump to error handler
; no error, continue on...
Without overflow:
cmp al,127 ; compare al against the max value of a byte
jge errorhandler ; if al is greater or equal to max, jump to error handler
inc al
Yeah, the extra cmp opcode may not look like much, but it does add to the code size, and will use additional processing time. Doing this a lot in a large program will add up--especially if it needs to be fast.
This was just a simple case for an increment. What about adds? The precheck will be much more complex than the previous example and probably use up an extra register.
No, I think what he's saying is, "Life isn't fair".
Carefully reread the parent post. Mink is clearly saying "idea men"--apparently people who don't do any work and have no skills whatsoever--not only get the money, but they deserve it and the cause works to be created. Apparently, "The people who actually do the art are the suckers who come a dime a dozen." Yeah right. It doesn't work that way.
I worked in a place where the management had that attitude. Eventually all the good workers got pissed off and left. The place went out of business. You can lie, cheat, steal, and treat people like shit and it may get you further ahead in the short term, but after a while you'll end up sleeping with the fishes.
It creates a huge problem in the long term when everyone is looking for easy money or the next scam and think they deserve it. It's not based on reality. Goods and services come from people working to create those goods and services.
Think about the dot coms. They said "we'll put up this website, it'll get lots of hits, and we'll make lots of money." Investers said "the dot com will put up a website and make lots of money." Very few of them ever considered the fact that the company needed to produce anything of value before they could make money. Then investors started realizing this, so they pulled out of the market, and the bust happened.
So what your're saying is: fuck the people who do the work, I should get the money they earned. This is exactly why the movie and music "industry sucks so bad in so many ways. This is why the US and various other countries are so screwed up these days. No one wants to work, so they try to take advantage of those who do, and if a hard working person tries to compete with their racket, they take that hard working person down.
This situation cannot continue forever. Eventually most of the workers will see no point in working and stop. The rest are slaves and will revolt. None of the essential services will be maintained.
Where do you think food comes from? How do you think your house or apartment or bridge you live in/under was built? How do you think your computer was made?
A thief economy never works. It just gives pain to everyone involved.
Which will show them for the terrorists they are. BitTorrent gets the original file from a centralized server. Their whole excuse for DoSing people was they supposedly couldn't track down the person distributing the supposedly "infringing work" and sue or DMCA them.
SCO clearly didn't consider all sides of the pro and anti GNU License issue carefully before entering the market.
I don't see how this is true. If I remember the chronolgy correctly, Caldera was a software company, they started a Linux distro (therefore benefiting from the GPL), then they bought SCO and took the name. They were already using the GNU license long before they acquired SCO, and I'm sure they understood the implications well.
If Linux developers took so much SCO code, then why didn't Caldera notice it right away? Their people had to be knee deep in Linux code. I doubt it would take them 2 years to figure out if there was so much SCO Unix code in Linux as they say. This leaves two possibilities:
SCO/Caldera is lying about the copyright / trade secret violations, or
SCO/Caldera knew about it, but did nothing. Hoping the code would become more entrenched, and they'd be able to sue for more money. Who knows, maybe they put the code in Linux or someone from SCO put Linux code in SCO Unix. Many of the clauses in the GPL were intended specificly to defend against this sort of thing.
Either way, I don't think SCO/Caldera deserves anything--except to get reamed.
It's pretty clear that with it's anti-business qualities, the GNU license (and any code under it) has to be handled with care.
I don't like the GNU license much, but it doesn't have "anti-business" qualities any more than anything else. Plenty of businesses use GPLed software just fine. Yeah the GPL is viral, but you can say the same thing about obvious patents and ethically bankrupt software companies.
At least the GPL doesn't take away your rights to use something you made, and many people made Linux. SCO's claim in their court papers amount to "all Linux developers are disorganized stupid incompetent back-wood hicks who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, so they must have stolen our code!" I not only find this insane, I find it insulting.
It's because recent versionf of KDE/GNOME are pretty much made for recent hardware?
Don't you mean they use up so many resources, they require "recent hardware"[1]? Even with recent hardware, they don't run very well. This is what the parent poster was complaining about, except for some strange reason, he blames it on X. ??? On a 8MB computer, X may be a problem, but it is clearly not on his 256MB computer.
I ran KDE 1.2 on my PowerPC 603e-based 180mhz Mac Clone fine with
48mb of ram.
(Emphasis mine.) Ha, that's funny. Reread my post. I have you beat with my 100Mhz 486 with 16MB of RAM. I'd rather use the extra reasources of my current computer for more important reasons than wasting it on buzzword libraries and making the GUI look more pretty--some other person's definition of pretty.
I don't care about buzzwords, and for the most part, I like the way my system looks now. The only problem is the blinding paperwhite colors, and the -rv switch or color settings will fix most programs, and they don't need extra megabytes to do this.
[1] "Recent hardware" meaning the latest, most expensive bleeding edge machine. Some people don't want to pay $2000(US) for a computer every year, nor should they. If Bill Gates and people like you didn't exist, I could probably buy a new computer for $100-200, and the $2000 ones would be used for rendering farms, video games in ultra high quality mode, finding the cure to SARS, or some other more useful venture.
in Gnome2 or KDE3... window responsiveness really starts to suffer. 256mb of RAM goes fast.
I think your problem is GNOME/KDE, not X. The machine I am using now has "only" 64 MB and runs fine with XFree86. Yeah, Mozilla starts up slow and uses lots of processing time / memory, but this is the application's fault, not X. All my other applications run great.
In fact, when I had a 100Mhz machine with 8 MB of RAM, X wasn't too bad at all--for a GUI anyway. Lots of swapping when trying to edit a large image with GIMP or when using bloated programs like Mozilla, but useable with many programs. Adding another 8MB helped.
Once you get beyond 32 MB, I don't see how XFree86 (or most other X servers) could possibly be a bottleneck. Rethink the programs you use. KDE/GNOME are hugely bloated by themselves. Much worse for many programs who use them. I don't know if it's poor design or too many cooks or what, but they suck bigtime.
It's not really a "third person action" game, but more like a shooter
I think this may be a strength, not a weakness. Maybe it's just because I'm tired of some of the situations with action / RPG / adventure type games. Like where you've missed that one item which will take you to the next level, so you have to go through the level several times pressing everything to find it.
The camera takes some getting used to, but after I got the hang of it, I didn't have any problems.
This seems to be the case with Capcom games. I have Resident Evil 2 and Dino Crisis, and the stationary camera can be really disorienting (for me anyway). I don't like the third person view much either. We have to take what we can get.
I haven't played it, but I like it because the gameplay seems more like an old fashoned arcade adapted for 3d. Yeah, I like the dance moves too. Not to mention the cute costume. I bet the cosplayers will be all over that.:-)
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The RIAA/MPAA's whole excuse for terrorism, creating censorship systems, and suing companies was they were losing money, so they have the "right" to do so. Should the guy who created BitTorrent be sued? Should users of BitTorrent be subject to DoS attacks? Should all computers be disabled so BitTorrent and other programs the MPAA disapproves of can't be run? I don't think so.
Oh yeah, and for a "special" bonus, they add a big "to be continued" message at the end of the movie. (I think they used some sort of replacement word for "continued", but you get the picture.)
The movie is just like what TV networks do during sweeps month. A bunch of cheap tricks to get people to see it. Nothing really good.
I wouldn't bother if I were you. The movie sucked. It wasn't nearly as good as the first one. It looks like the marketing people decided what to put in it. "Let's put in some porn, but we'll have to downgrade it so we can get an R rating. Then we'll add some karate moves and special effects, and we're done!"
In fact, just watch a porn movie, a kung-fu movie, and some computer generated images. You'll be much more satisfied.
They don't care. They just want to blame someone else for their problems. If they were caught trafficing drugs, they'd say it is the car's fault. If they jumped off a cliff and broke their legs, they'd probably try to sue the person who made the cliff!
So, would you want your company to be sued into the ground and lose your job because someone may possibly use the product you produce for some illegal purpose or it may harm someone? Would you want to be denied the ability to ever use the product or any similar one because someone may use it for an illegal purpose or it may harm someone?
This is exactly what the MPAA and RIAA are doing. I doubt you would like it if you were on the receiving end of their crap. Just about any product can be a scapegoat in this way. Even their movies and music. Some people claim sex and violence in movies and music cause real crimes. By the {MP,RI}AA's logic, they shouldn't be in business either.
Yeah, "Artists and musicians" have rights, but they don't have more rights than everyone else. They don't have the right to sue new technologies out of existence just because those techonolgies may be used for copyright infringement. They don't have the right to force an DRM censorship system upon everyone, just because it may stop some people from infringing copyrights.
Your right to defend yourself ends when it requires you to take away the rights of many innocent people.
This is certainly FUD. Especially considering Stallman doesn't have much to do with the Linux kernel.
How is Red Hat supposed to know if IBM or others misappropriated trade secrets and copyrighted code if SCO is keeping the evidence secret?
No, it allows the people who are unknowingly breaking the law to stop. Let's say a copper walked up to your door and told you that you were doing something illegal in your house. He wouldn't tell you what it was, but if you didn't stop, you'd be put in jail for a long time. What are you supposed to do? Just up and buy another house, then move somewhere else?
This sounds like a stupid "In Soviet Russia" joke. In Soviet Russia, you'll be arrested for doing something illegal, but you won't know what it is! Yuri, we've been in jail for thirty years. Anyone know why?
Is it just me, or are ACs getting more and more crazy?
We'll just have to say they're abusing their customers and everyone they come in contact with.
If we assume Linux never existed, MS would still have a similar problem--except with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BeOS, or whatever.
Also, the value lost to MS is much more than monetary. The fewer people running Windows, the more trouble they will have pushing people into their Palladium Censorship OS. ;-)
If you want to understand more, listen to the song Do the Math by Mannequin Porn. Just substitute M$ where they say Juliet, and you'll have the solution!
How is this different from today? In my area, there are only 3 of about 25 theaters which show "independent" movies, and the MPAA members have their grubby hands into most of those "independent" movies. Not just any members either--the really evil ones (Disney and News Corp) are in control of the vast majority I've looked into. I even went to one thinking some small time company produced it, yet at the opening credits the Fox showed up in the henhouse in big bold letters.
Let's also not forget the MPAA have total control over the ratings system, and most theaters won't show any unrated/NC17 movie. I remember reading a story about a Troma movie, and how the MPAA upped the rating because a guy eating a taco was "really gross." I haven't seen the scene in question, but how could eating a taco earn a bad rating? Here is what Troma has to say about it. (Using the Google Cache because the troma.com server seems to be trashed.) This story goes into it a little...
Well, if the Martians were really afraid of an Earthling invasion, they'd already have sent their nukes over here, now wouldn't they. ;-)
You call it contamination. I call it terraforming. ;-)
Why? To waste processing time? Programmers should most certainly check beforehand if something catastrophic will happen...such as checking for NULL pointers, or making sure a drive head won't go too far and crash. But I don't see why they should have to predict if an error will happen beforehand for every case.
Sometimes a more elegant, efficient ior easy solution is to check afterward. Who even says the result will be wanted if an overflow happens anyway? The program may just end the function on an error, or pop up a warning box.
If needed, an increment can easily be undone, and overflow checking is far easier than comparing against the max value--which you'll have to figure out. Not easy if you don't know the size of the operand (such as with C and ints). Not easy if the size of the operand may be changed at a later date (you'll also have to change all your comparison code, or the max constant if you used one). This may not seem like a big deal, but it's one more thing to get wrong.
Some 80x86 assembly to illistrate how overflow works to the programmer's advantage:
inc al ; increment the al register
jo errorhandler ; if overflow, jump to error handler
; no error, continue on...
Without overflow:
cmp al,127 ; compare al against the max value of a byte
jge errorhandler ; if al is greater or equal to max, jump to error handler
inc al
Yeah, the extra cmp opcode may not look like much, but it does add to the code size, and will use additional processing time. Doing this a lot in a large program will add up--especially if it needs to be fast.
This was just a simple case for an increment. What about adds? The precheck will be much more complex than the previous example and probably use up an extra register.
That's why you check the overflow flag. Why they left it out of C, I'll never understand.
Carefully reread the parent post. Mink is clearly saying "idea men"--apparently people who don't do any work and have no skills whatsoever--not only get the money, but they deserve it and the cause works to be created. Apparently, "The people who actually do the art are the suckers who come a dime a dozen." Yeah right. It doesn't work that way.
I worked in a place where the management had that attitude. Eventually all the good workers got pissed off and left. The place went out of business. You can lie, cheat, steal, and treat people like shit and it may get you further ahead in the short term, but after a while you'll end up sleeping with the fishes.
It creates a huge problem in the long term when everyone is looking for easy money or the next scam and think they deserve it. It's not based on reality. Goods and services come from people working to create those goods and services.
Think about the dot coms. They said "we'll put up this website, it'll get lots of hits, and we'll make lots of money." Investers said "the dot com will put up a website and make lots of money." Very few of them ever considered the fact that the company needed to produce anything of value before they could make money. Then investors started realizing this, so they pulled out of the market, and the bust happened.
So what your're saying is: fuck the people who do the work, I should get the money they earned. This is exactly why the movie and music "industry sucks so bad in so many ways. This is why the US and various other countries are so screwed up these days. No one wants to work, so they try to take advantage of those who do, and if a hard working person tries to compete with their racket, they take that hard working person down.
This situation cannot continue forever. Eventually most of the workers will see no point in working and stop. The rest are slaves and will revolt. None of the essential services will be maintained.
Where do you think food comes from? How do you think your house or apartment or bridge you live in/under was built? How do you think your computer was made?
A thief economy never works. It just gives pain to everyone involved.
Which will show them for the terrorists they are. BitTorrent gets the original file from a centralized server. Their whole excuse for DoSing people was they supposedly couldn't track down the person distributing the supposedly "infringing work" and sue or DMCA them.
I don't see how this is true. If I remember the chronolgy correctly, Caldera was a software company, they started a Linux distro (therefore benefiting from the GPL), then they bought SCO and took the name. They were already using the GNU license long before they acquired SCO, and I'm sure they understood the implications well.
If Linux developers took so much SCO code, then why didn't Caldera notice it right away? Their people had to be knee deep in Linux code. I doubt it would take them 2 years to figure out if there was so much SCO Unix code in Linux as they say. This leaves two possibilities:
Either way, I don't think SCO/Caldera deserves anything--except to get reamed.
I don't like the GNU license much, but it doesn't have "anti-business" qualities any more than anything else. Plenty of businesses use GPLed software just fine. Yeah the GPL is viral, but you can say the same thing about obvious patents and ethically bankrupt software companies.
At least the GPL doesn't take away your rights to use something you made, and many people made Linux. SCO's claim in their court papers amount to "all Linux developers are disorganized stupid incompetent back-wood hicks who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, so they must have stolen our code!" I not only find this insane, I find it insulting.
Well...it works for the MPAA and RIAA. I guess the "consumers" are catching up. ;-)
Substitute guys where you put girls. Guys like seeing semi-naked guys beat the crap out of each other. What do you have? Mainstream boxing.
Don't you mean they use up so many resources, they require "recent hardware"[1]? Even with recent hardware, they don't run very well. This is what the parent poster was complaining about, except for some strange reason, he blames it on X. ??? On a 8MB computer, X may be a problem, but it is clearly not on his 256MB computer.
(Emphasis mine.) Ha, that's funny. Reread my post. I have you beat with my 100Mhz 486 with 16MB of RAM. I'd rather use the extra reasources of my current computer for more important reasons than wasting it on buzzword libraries and making the GUI look more pretty--some other person's definition of pretty.
I don't care about buzzwords, and for the most part, I like the way my system looks now. The only problem is the blinding paperwhite colors, and the -rv switch or color settings will fix most programs, and they don't need extra megabytes to do this.
[1] "Recent hardware" meaning the latest, most expensive bleeding edge machine. Some people don't want to pay $2000(US) for a computer every year, nor should they. If Bill Gates and people like you didn't exist, I could probably buy a new computer for $100-200, and the $2000 ones would be used for rendering farms, video games in ultra high quality mode, finding the cure to SARS, or some other more useful venture.
I think your problem is GNOME/KDE, not X. The machine I am using now has "only" 64 MB and runs fine with XFree86. Yeah, Mozilla starts up slow and uses lots of processing time / memory, but this is the application's fault, not X. All my other applications run great.
In fact, when I had a 100Mhz machine with 8 MB of RAM, X wasn't too bad at all--for a GUI anyway. Lots of swapping when trying to edit a large image with GIMP or when using bloated programs like Mozilla, but useable with many programs. Adding another 8MB helped.
Once you get beyond 32 MB, I don't see how XFree86 (or most other X servers) could possibly be a bottleneck. Rethink the programs you use. KDE/GNOME are hugely bloated by themselves. Much worse for many programs who use them. I don't know if it's poor design or too many cooks or what, but they suck bigtime.
I think this may be a strength, not a weakness. Maybe it's just because I'm tired of some of the situations with action / RPG / adventure type games. Like where you've missed that one item which will take you to the next level, so you have to go through the level several times pressing everything to find it.
This seems to be the case with Capcom games. I have Resident Evil 2 and Dino Crisis, and the stationary camera can be really disorienting (for me anyway). I don't like the third person view much either. We have to take what we can get.
I haven't played it, but I like it because the gameplay seems more like an old fashoned arcade adapted for 3d. Yeah, I like the dance moves too. Not to mention the cute costume. I bet the cosplayers will be all over that. :-)