Alas, I am in the opposite position. I organise the e-mail for a local non-profit, and recently introduced an automated spam filter on all our incoming addresses. A month ago we were trapping under 100 spams a day across those addresses. Now it's well over 200, and rising fast.:-(
And best of all, a huge percentage of spam is now images that circumvent traditional text analysis.
Yep, I've seen plenty of that.
I can't help feeling that this is mostly a solved problem, though. OCR is pretty good these days, and the bad guys have been using text-recognition techniques to foil the more cleverly disguised text in captchas on web sites for a while now. The text in these e-mail images should be relatively easy (algorithmically speaking) to identify.
Of course, given the volume of spam and the processing time required to scan such images, this isn't a completely done deal. But just as things like SpamAssassin rules get updated fairly often to deal with changing trends, I can't help thinking there's a solution pretty close here with a realistic level of resources required.
The difference is that most uses of open source software don't seriously infringe people's rights. I'll bet you that most uses of this technology would.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but some of us really aren't switching because we don't want to. We write portable C++ here. You know the Visual Studio application the majority of our developers prefer to use? VC++ 6. You know, the ancient, pre-standard, poor-code-generating one. Why? Because we write portable C++. All the.net stuff in the world has zero value to us.
From our perspective, later VC++ versions have overall been one screw-up after another. The performance is abysmal; we don't care whether it's because they're written in.net, or because the architecture was changed to support all the other.net languages, we just see a UI that's slow to unresponsive way more than it ever used to be and a debugger that keeps screwing up when it used to be almost 100% reliable. We want help to show us the standard library calls and language rules, not a zillion.net-related buzzwords. We want the old source browsing features that just worked, not a new set of substandard not-quite-replacements that took three major releases to get and still can't do as much as we had in 1998.
It's not that there aren't good features in the more recent VS releases. Some of us even prefer to use those releases. But most of us don't, and it's got nothing to do with roll-out times and everything to do with the fact that they simply aren't as effective as tools that help us do our jobs. Please don't kid yourself that it's anything else.
We can and do take exactly the same view with operating systems. We will upgrade to Vista when there is some advantage in doing so. Right now, we run a heterogeneous network with many different versions of Windows, UNIX flavours, Linux, MacOS, etc. and it works. Based on our experiences upgrading OSes previously, changing desktops to a new version of Windows is risking a show-stopper for the entire development group until a patch to let our systems interoperate properly is released, which may take a considerable time and we can't control. No sane manager is going to authorise that, and again, it's not because we can't do it faster, it's because from bitter experience we just don't trust MS software to get it right until there's a lot of outside experience to say they have.
And it's the same deal with office suites, too. We could upgrade to Office 2007 pretty much as soon as it's released. We have sensible software management procedures in place, and global licensing arrangements with MS. But until we know we can open documents from older versions in 2007 and vice versa, which again was not the case with some previous upgrades causing us much pain, we aren't going to trust the upgrade. Even then, we're going to take some convincing that it's worth risking a hit for introducing the new UI, that there are new features to justify the upgrade (no point disrupting everyone for no benefit), etc.
Sorry to be such a downer, but I read some serious delusion in your post. People do avoid upgrading because the newer product is a risk and/or lacks obvious benefits, regardless of any delays caused by procedures in updating systems.
There is indeed a deep "programming philosophy" problem with the I/O streams idiom. However, it's got nothing to do with "abusing" the operator overloading. The problem is that it fundamentally ties up some data (the order of output elements) in code.
On a superficial level, this makes stream-based code harder to maintain. This is obviously a bad thing.
On a deeper level, it makes localisation a nightmare for those producing internationalised applications. I have worked on a few of these on varying scales, yet never seen a commercial application making serious use of all that locale-driven stuff in the standard library -- not once. However, these applications have invariably had powerful, home-grown string formatting and format customisation logic as part of their code base. In a world where huge amounts of end-user software is now distributed in multiple geographical locations and (human) languages, I view this as one of the biggest drawbacks of C++'s standard library, and an area where almost every other recent language has a better idiom.
So, while tipping my hat to those responsible for a neat idiom, I still think that in the 21st century that idiom should die, along with the entire C++ I/O stream and locale system. Scripters prefer printf. People writing serious, industrial-scale applications often prefer much more powerful and customisable frameworks. And there just aren't that many people in the programming world between those two groups who care about strings and such.
If you require a picture of all the available turns, then may I recommend looking through the glass area, which is carefully placed at the front of your cabin area in all our recent vehicles? This also has the value-added features of showing you where other vehicles and pedestrians are in real time, and of showing the junction layout in use today and not five years ago, both of which may assist your navigation.:-)
Tiny minority? Have you ever seen anyone buying an off-the-shelf OS upgrade? I haven't. Have you ever known a geek friend to upgrade their home Windows OS? I haven't. Do think the average punter who buys a PC from Best Buy or PC World even knows what an OS upgrade is? I don't.
You know, even though most of what you've said is completely true, it's not in any way going to stop everybody migrating to Vista the first opportunity they get, even if that means buying completely new hardware in order to do so.
That simply isn't true. I know of several local businesses, of varying sizes, that have never upgraded from their tried & tested Win2K systems to WinXP. Major PC manufacturers wanted to switch to supplying XP-only kit several years ago, but had to go back on that decision and continue supplying Win2K in the face of a customer backlash. It's only several years (and SP2) later, as support from Microsoft for the older software is falling away, that many of these places feel it's advantageous to them to move to XP.
Based on the comments from our IT guys at work, it doesn't look like we'll be upgrading to IE7 any time soon. If they won't even upgrade that (because they don't trust it not to break all our internal intranet sites based on initial testing runs) then I very much doubt we'll be a Vista-friendly organisation any time soon.
All you people claiming that nobody will "bother" with Vista when you know the opposite is true, and that you will probably be near the front of the line one night outside yout local PC store.
What a strange idea. I've never gone out and bought an OS upgrade. When I'm putting a new PC together, I generally buy an OEM copy of whatever is the standard Microsoft OS at the time and/or a recent Linux distro, and after that the only things that tend to get installed are patches. Perhaps if I'm buying a new PC next year I'll buy a version of Vista to go with it, but to be honest, I doubt it. Looking at the extra clutter with activating this, DRM that and security check the other, my perception of Vista is so negative at the moment that I'm more likely to shift my current non-OEM XP licence to any new machine and use it for games only, and just run Linux on my current system, since the apps I use often (Firefox, Thunderbird, TeX, OpenOffice, etc.) will run pretty much identically on both platforms.
Given this information, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that any operating system should not run very comfortably using a tiny fraction of my system's resources, no matter how many bells and whistles it has.
That doesn't make any sense. The more bells and whistles you throw in, the more power you will need to run the OS - by definition.
It makes perfect sense, if you note that I said "any operating system" and not "any application". If an operating system requires the kind of resources you're talking about, then it's doing far more than an operating system should be doing, and I suspect that most people just don't want or need that.
C++ is, by design, a language with a zero-overhead philosophy: if you don't use the extra features it offers over C, you shouldn't have to pay for them. Of course, not all implementations of C++ or its standard libraries are smart, but seriously, my hello world in compiled C++ is about the same size as my hello world in compiled C. Both are way larger than my hello world in assembly language, which comes in at 26 bytes; perhaps we should give up using any sort of higher-level programming language altogether and code in assembly instead?
I think you were trying to make a valid point about C++ libraries, many of which really are of very poor quality and completely bloated. Microsoft's own MFC is infamous as an example of poor design that happened to be in the right place at the right time, and the trend for "application frameworks" and "rapid application development" isn't helping. But that's not C++'s fault, it's because these things give businesses that don't care about bloat what they want.
Hint.. Load Ubuntu on a machine. Compare the included half-baked apps. Look for Wordpad and Open Office, MS paint and the Gimp, AIM and Gaim, Ekigaphone and Netmeeting (if installed), etc.
OK, I'll play. Hint... Load XP with some serious professional applications onto a machine. Compare the apps included with your average Linux distro with those serious professional counterparts. Look for MS Office and Open Office, Outlook and Thunderbird, Photoshop and the GIMP, serious CAD vs. anything that even runs on Linux, serious DTP vs. anything that even runs on Linux, serious games vs. anything that even runs on Linux and isn't just an emulated Windows environment, etc.
I'm sorry, but I meant exactly what I said in my original post. The vast majority of the applications that ship with any contemporary OS are half-baked and sub-standard. This isn't intended as some sort of insult to the OSS community; many of those applications serve their purpose well enough for some people and it's generous of them to give the apps away for free. But let's not kid ourselves: aside from a few rare pearls like Firefox or the TeX world, which really are as good as or better than the best commercial/professional alternatives, most apps bundled with Linux are far from class-leading, just like those bundled with Windows, MacOS and any other contemporary end user OS.
it's a brand new o/s, so it's not surprising that it requires fairly current hardware to run well.
Erm... Yes, it is.
An operating system is supposed to provide the low-level core of functionality necessary to run (and if necessary co-ordinate) other programs. Such functionality can be and has been written to run on systems with 1/1000th the processing power of today's multicore monsters.
Of course, today the term "operating system" refers, at least in common usage, to some sort of bundle that includes a kernel, various support libraries for networking, GUI, and other such stuff, some sort of shell, a whole bunch of tools of varying degrees of usefulness, and a whole bunch of mostly half-baked and sub-standard applications. (This description applies, to my knowledge, to pretty much every major desktop "OS" currently available, from Windows to Linux distros via MacOS and various other UNIX platforms.)
My current PC is now about four years old, but was a pretty high spec at that time. On this system, I can happily run full-blown applications for everything from editing high-res photos to playing games that do real-time 3D graphics pretty reasonably. Given this information, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that any operating system should not run very comfortably using a tiny fraction of my system's resources, no matter how many bells and whistles it has.
Now, according to Microsoft, my system just about meets the minimum standards to run the low-end versions of Vista, and isn't qualified to run the high-end versions for several reasons. I can only conclude from this that either Vista's code is poorly written and/or poorly organised, or that those higher-end versions of Vista are trying to do yet more things that are not really part of an operating system, and are probably better done by specialist standalone applications anyway. Either way, Vista is suffering from some serious bloat, and bloat means bugs, security flaws, performance problems and all the rest.
So yes, even if it's a brand new OS, it's still of concern that it requires such impressive hardware specs to run well. In fact, it's a pretty damning indictment of the product, and doesn't so much imply as outright prove that it's going in the wrong direction.
Yep, too right. A few months ago, I put my back out when a stair gave way under me. I literally couldn't stand up straight or walk unsupported for several days. Sleeping was also difficult, because I couldn't lie on my back, either side or front comfortably for more than a few minutes. Bizarrely, the one place that was perfectly comfortable was the sport-style bucket seat in the front of my Subaru Impreza. I could probably have driven completely normally (though I didn't risk it!) as I had no trouble moving any limbs once my back was supported by that seat.
Incidentally, while I certainly don't drive at the 135 degree angle mentioned, I do find it much more comfortable to drive with the seat somewhat reclined than completely upright. I also sit back at probably somewhere around the 105-120 degree range at work. I now have a chair that tilts and supports me in this position, but even on a cheapo office chair, I'm more comfortable sitting back like that (with basically no support under my lower back) than I am sitting bolt upright, even for quite extended periods. According to the current theories (give or take this article) I should probably have terrible back problems all the time as a result, but it just doesn't seem to happen (touch wood!).
If you are alleging fair use exemptions, you should be aware that you claiming fair use is not enough. [...] I would grant you that a judge would likely rule most (not all) of the above actions as fair and therefore not infringing, but until that happens you are a copyright violator.
I'm sorry, but I still think you're the one with the misunderstanding. I haven't broken any law until a court finds that I have. I don't even need a defence until there is a case against me to answer.
Also, bear in mind that I'm looking at copyright from an international perspective. Different jurisdictions have their own foibles when it comes to copyright law, so there's little you can state as an absolute truth without specifying whose law you're talking about. Again, the Happy Birthday example is pertinent: not everywhere recognises copyright in musical works for as long as the US now does.
Moreover, remember that a lot of the potential defences will depend on the details of the copy, intent in making it, etc. This is, after all, why things like fair use or fair dealing tend to be expressed in rather vague terms, and a court's decision is required on each specific case.
For example, if you quote from someone's Usenet post to give context in a reply, then it is entirely possible that a court would find you were not infringing the other poster's copyright because they had given implied consent for that customary use by posting in that medium in the first place. (If they had explicitly requested that their post not be archived, using a recognised convention such as the X-No-Archive header, this might be a different shade of grey.) Likewise forwarding an e-mail from one work colleague to another without explicit permission from the original author might well be considered an expected act, for which implied consent had been given.
Back-ups are a notoriously shaky subject. The law in most places makes explicit provision for back-ups of computer software, but often not for other content such as music supplied on CD. In this case, you would have to claim fair use in the US, though considering the four criteria, I don't see why genuine back-ups wouldn't qualify. I'm not aware that anyone's ever tested this in a US court -- perhaps one of our resident lawyers can fill us in? -- but if not, that probably tells us something.
As you've probably gathered, I'm not a lawyer (in any jurisdiction). I also draw your attention to my original reply, in particular the part where I said that context matters. But I stand by my claim that any of the things you mentioned could be legal in the right context and in at least some major jurisdictions. If you know of any counter-example where someone has lost in court, I'm happy to be proved wrong, but I haven't seen any such cases so far.
In that case, I wasn't thinking of the RIAA, but the British equivalent, the BPI. Earlier this year, they stated that they would not prosecute those who rip their CDs to PC or MP3 for personal use.
If you answered yes to these and any other of a multitude of things that people do everyday without a second thought, then you are a copyright infringer.
Except, of course, that I'm not. As with the other guy I already responded to, you clearly have no idea about what copyright does and does not cover, and the exemptions typically in place. Depending on the context, any of the things you mentioned might be legal in most places (though technically you're right about a public performance of Happy Birthday in the US, and this is the textbook example of why the repeated US copyright term extensions have been such a bad idea).
Apple claims to have sold 65,000,000 ipods. How many music tracks have they sold through itunes?
Well, given that they famously broke the 10M download barrier very soon after launching the service, and it's now been running for many times that long, I'm going to guess the answer is "lots".
How many other mp3 players have other brands sold that don't even have a legal distribution site?
I'm going to go ahead and guess not many, on the rash and entirely unsupported assumption that the people I know are in any way representative. In any case, there are plenty of legitimate channels to obtain MP3s, not least because format shifting is considered fair use (or whatever the local equivalent is) in many jurisdictions.
When you start considering burned CDs and DVDs, software, lyrics, guitar tabs, and everything else content producers figure only they should be be controlling that people are trading the evidence is overwhelming that the people just doesn't give a damn about copyright law anymore.
One of us has a distorted sense of scale here. I'm going to guess again and say it's not me. I don't think I've ever seen someone with a ripped DVD, other than those that were imported as pirate copies from other countries, which isn't very many for logistical reasons if nothing else. OTOH, I know plenty of people with extensive legitimate DVD collections.
Similarly with software, most of the people I know who would know how to source/copy desktop software illegally and circumvent things like MS product activation also choose to run OSS these days. The other big software copying thing used to be games, but with so much of the games market now moving to consoles, I doubt that's a particularly large part of overall copyright infringement any more.
I'm not saying that no-one does these things, but either your world is very different to mine (which is possible, of course) or it's nowhere near the kind of proportion you'd need to justify the claims in question.
But hey, whatever, you keep telling yourself what you want to believe on go on suing little old ladies.
What have little old ladies got to do with anything? I don't approve of the typical **AA tactics that are effectively barratry by another name, but not everyone who dislikes the **AA approach automatically disapproves of copyright in general, and not everyone who supports the basic principle of copyright supports abusive practices based on it.
If your "little old ladies" were deliberately and knowingly infringing, I don't much care if they do get sued. They're old enough to know better than to break the law and then cry foul when they're caught. If they weren't and they're being subjected to abusive and harrassing lawsuits, then that's unethical (and should be illegal) regardless of whether copyright itself is supported by me or anyone else.
Playing a CD in more than one device(car stereo then computer or home stereo) is infringment. Playing loud enough for people who didn't purchase the music is infringement(like at a party). Ripping to an Ipod is infringement. Borrowing a CD from a friend(not to copy, just to listen to) is infringement.
Actually, you're pretty much wrong pretty much everywhere on pretty much all of those counts, and even on some of those where you're not (for example format-shifting in some jurisdictions) there are already moves under way to change the law, and the recording industry has given a public statement that it will not prosecute those who do it.
Copyright law has become so ridiculously restrictive that it has become nearly impossible not to infringe.
How do you figure that? No copy, no infringement. It's not difficult, even in a world of DMCA, EUCD and the like. You might not like that situation, but it's hard to argue that you didn't know you were in it.
The majority of people just don't care about it anymore.
I rather doubt that the majority of people even understand basic copyright law. However, if they did, I'd be surprised if the majority objected to it. Contrary to popular culture around these parts, there is little if any evidence that today's widespread infringement has yet reached "majority" status, nor anywhere near it.
All of which would be a reasonable argument, if the RIAA were only going after people who were genuinely breaking the law. But, as NYCL and others have pointed out on several occasions, they're not.
Yeah. What's with all the "introductions you can't skip" crap lately?
I don't need to watch a copyright statement in ten languages, and which has questionable if any validity in my jurisdiction anyway, before getting to the main menu. Neither do I need to watch five minutes of trailers for other DVDs from the same distributor.
Like the parent poster, I now find myself looking up any DVDs I'm thinking of buying, and I don't bother if they have too much crap associated with them. Given the limited amount of time I spend in front of the TV, there are plenty of other films/drama series/documentaries/whatever for me to watch, without paying to have my time wasted.
It would be nice if a court could just rule that DVDs where you have a significant compulsory wait before you can get to the real content are not fit for purpose, and impose stupid punitive damages on the distributor. Do us all a favour and make them stop doing this! (Yeah, yeah, I know that this is just dreaming.)
For a lawyer, I'm afraid you don't make very convincing logical arguments!
For a start, you imply that copyright creates a public expense. This in itself is questionable. Certainly it creates no financial expense, since the public is under no obligation to pay for copyrighted works if they don't want them. Any expense must therefore be in terms of "lost art" that is protected by copyright, but as you yourself imply later in your post, it is likely that without copyright much of that art would never be created/distributed in the first place.
You then effectively claim that copyright's only value is financial. That's an odd claim on a forum full of GPL supporters, to be sure. Perhaps I'm missing something, or the law in the US is particularly unusual here, but as far as I'm aware there's nothing inherent in copyright law that says you can only use it to make profit.
I'm just going to gloss over the point about the law being fair. If you really take the view that the law is a blunt tool and fairness has nothing to do with it, we have so little common ground that it's not really worth pursuing this aspect any further.
As for me not thinking about copyright matters much, I'll simply say that you couldn't be more wrong. Copyright affects me directly and regularly in both my job, my volunteer work, and more than one of my major hobbies. I have spent a vast amount of time (probably more than a lot of lawyers) researching the field, from a wider range of perspectives than most people will ever see. I'll spare you the tedious details, but suffice it to say that I have made extensive representations to everything from government IP reviews to the organisers of a non-profit group with thousands of members on the subject. So call me arrogant, but I think I have a fair claim to understand what copyright is and isn't good for, and where the current system works and doesn't from different points of view.
Finally, you still don't seem to be able to understand that your personal view of copyright is not the only view, either ethically or indeed in law. As I noted before, in some countries, copyright is expressed in terms of artists' rights. This issue isn't nearly as clear-cut as you make out, and unless you're telling me the legal facts outside the US don't matter to this discussion, you are simply wrong to make the claims you do about things being indisputable. Random calculations with no mathematical basis do not change this.
The purpose, to use the phrase from the US Constitution, is to promote the sciences and useful arts.
I hate to break this to you, but the US Constitution did not invent the notion of copyright, nor is it particularly relevant to anyone outside the US. Moreover, the US is a signatory to international agreements on the subject, such as TRIPS, which again are not written in those terms. In several countries, the relevant law is phrased in terms of artists' rights, and that is the explicit intent.
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Alas, I am in the opposite position. I organise the e-mail for a local non-profit, and recently introduced an automated spam filter on all our incoming addresses. A month ago we were trapping under 100 spams a day across those addresses. Now it's well over 200, and rising fast. :-(
Yep, I've seen plenty of that.
I can't help feeling that this is mostly a solved problem, though. OCR is pretty good these days, and the bad guys have been using text-recognition techniques to foil the more cleverly disguised text in captchas on web sites for a while now. The text in these e-mail images should be relatively easy (algorithmically speaking) to identify.
Of course, given the volume of spam and the processing time required to scan such images, this isn't a completely done deal. But just as things like SpamAssassin rules get updated fairly often to deal with changing trends, I can't help thinking there's a solution pretty close here with a realistic level of resources required.
The difference is that most uses of open source software don't seriously infringe people's rights. I'll bet you that most uses of this technology would.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but some of us really aren't switching because we don't want to. We write portable C++ here. You know the Visual Studio application the majority of our developers prefer to use? VC++ 6. You know, the ancient, pre-standard, poor-code-generating one. Why? Because we write portable C++. All the .net stuff in the world has zero value to us.
From our perspective, later VC++ versions have overall been one screw-up after another. The performance is abysmal; we don't care whether it's because they're written in .net, or because the architecture was changed to support all the other .net languages, we just see a UI that's slow to unresponsive way more than it ever used to be and a debugger that keeps screwing up when it used to be almost 100% reliable. We want help to show us the standard library calls and language rules, not a zillion .net-related buzzwords. We want the old source browsing features that just worked, not a new set of substandard not-quite-replacements that took three major releases to get and still can't do as much as we had in 1998.
It's not that there aren't good features in the more recent VS releases. Some of us even prefer to use those releases. But most of us don't, and it's got nothing to do with roll-out times and everything to do with the fact that they simply aren't as effective as tools that help us do our jobs. Please don't kid yourself that it's anything else.
We can and do take exactly the same view with operating systems. We will upgrade to Vista when there is some advantage in doing so. Right now, we run a heterogeneous network with many different versions of Windows, UNIX flavours, Linux, MacOS, etc. and it works. Based on our experiences upgrading OSes previously, changing desktops to a new version of Windows is risking a show-stopper for the entire development group until a patch to let our systems interoperate properly is released, which may take a considerable time and we can't control. No sane manager is going to authorise that, and again, it's not because we can't do it faster, it's because from bitter experience we just don't trust MS software to get it right until there's a lot of outside experience to say they have.
And it's the same deal with office suites, too. We could upgrade to Office 2007 pretty much as soon as it's released. We have sensible software management procedures in place, and global licensing arrangements with MS. But until we know we can open documents from older versions in 2007 and vice versa, which again was not the case with some previous upgrades causing us much pain, we aren't going to trust the upgrade. Even then, we're going to take some convincing that it's worth risking a hit for introducing the new UI, that there are new features to justify the upgrade (no point disrupting everyone for no benefit), etc.
Sorry to be such a downer, but I read some serious delusion in your post. People do avoid upgrading because the newer product is a risk and/or lacks obvious benefits, regardless of any delays caused by procedures in updating systems.
There is indeed a deep "programming philosophy" problem with the I/O streams idiom. However, it's got nothing to do with "abusing" the operator overloading. The problem is that it fundamentally ties up some data (the order of output elements) in code.
On a superficial level, this makes stream-based code harder to maintain. This is obviously a bad thing.
On a deeper level, it makes localisation a nightmare for those producing internationalised applications. I have worked on a few of these on varying scales, yet never seen a commercial application making serious use of all that locale-driven stuff in the standard library -- not once. However, these applications have invariably had powerful, home-grown string formatting and format customisation logic as part of their code base. In a world where huge amounts of end-user software is now distributed in multiple geographical locations and (human) languages, I view this as one of the biggest drawbacks of C++'s standard library, and an area where almost every other recent language has a better idiom.
So, while tipping my hat to those responsible for a neat idiom, I still think that in the 21st century that idiom should die, along with the entire C++ I/O stream and locale system. Scripters prefer printf. People writing serious, industrial-scale applications often prefer much more powerful and customisable frameworks. And there just aren't that many people in the programming world between those two groups who care about strings and such.
If you require a picture of all the available turns, then may I recommend looking through the glass area, which is carefully placed at the front of your cabin area in all our recent vehicles? This also has the value-added features of showing you where other vehicles and pedestrians are in real time, and of showing the junction layout in use today and not five years ago, both of which may assist your navigation. :-)
Well, that narrows it down...
Tiny minority? Have you ever seen anyone buying an off-the-shelf OS upgrade? I haven't. Have you ever known a geek friend to upgrade their home Windows OS? I haven't. Do think the average punter who buys a PC from Best Buy or PC World even knows what an OS upgrade is? I don't.
That simply isn't true. I know of several local businesses, of varying sizes, that have never upgraded from their tried & tested Win2K systems to WinXP. Major PC manufacturers wanted to switch to supplying XP-only kit several years ago, but had to go back on that decision and continue supplying Win2K in the face of a customer backlash. It's only several years (and SP2) later, as support from Microsoft for the older software is falling away, that many of these places feel it's advantageous to them to move to XP.
Based on the comments from our IT guys at work, it doesn't look like we'll be upgrading to IE7 any time soon. If they won't even upgrade that (because they don't trust it not to break all our internal intranet sites based on initial testing runs) then I very much doubt we'll be a Vista-friendly organisation any time soon.
What a strange idea. I've never gone out and bought an OS upgrade. When I'm putting a new PC together, I generally buy an OEM copy of whatever is the standard Microsoft OS at the time and/or a recent Linux distro, and after that the only things that tend to get installed are patches. Perhaps if I'm buying a new PC next year I'll buy a version of Vista to go with it, but to be honest, I doubt it. Looking at the extra clutter with activating this, DRM that and security check the other, my perception of Vista is so negative at the moment that I'm more likely to shift my current non-OEM XP licence to any new machine and use it for games only, and just run Linux on my current system, since the apps I use often (Firefox, Thunderbird, TeX, OpenOffice, etc.) will run pretty much identically on both platforms.
It makes perfect sense, if you note that I said "any operating system" and not "any application". If an operating system requires the kind of resources you're talking about, then it's doing far more than an operating system should be doing, and I suspect that most people just don't want or need that.
C++ is, by design, a language with a zero-overhead philosophy: if you don't use the extra features it offers over C, you shouldn't have to pay for them. Of course, not all implementations of C++ or its standard libraries are smart, but seriously, my hello world in compiled C++ is about the same size as my hello world in compiled C. Both are way larger than my hello world in assembly language, which comes in at 26 bytes; perhaps we should give up using any sort of higher-level programming language altogether and code in assembly instead?
I think you were trying to make a valid point about C++ libraries, many of which really are of very poor quality and completely bloated. Microsoft's own MFC is infamous as an example of poor design that happened to be in the right place at the right time, and the trend for "application frameworks" and "rapid application development" isn't helping. But that's not C++'s fault, it's because these things give businesses that don't care about bloat what they want.
OK, I'll play. Hint... Load XP with some serious professional applications onto a machine. Compare the apps included with your average Linux distro with those serious professional counterparts. Look for MS Office and Open Office, Outlook and Thunderbird, Photoshop and the GIMP, serious CAD vs. anything that even runs on Linux, serious DTP vs. anything that even runs on Linux, serious games vs. anything that even runs on Linux and isn't just an emulated Windows environment, etc.
I'm sorry, but I meant exactly what I said in my original post. The vast majority of the applications that ship with any contemporary OS are half-baked and sub-standard. This isn't intended as some sort of insult to the OSS community; many of those applications serve their purpose well enough for some people and it's generous of them to give the apps away for free. But let's not kid ourselves: aside from a few rare pearls like Firefox or the TeX world, which really are as good as or better than the best commercial/professional alternatives, most apps bundled with Linux are far from class-leading, just like those bundled with Windows, MacOS and any other contemporary end user OS.
Erm... Yes, it is.
An operating system is supposed to provide the low-level core of functionality necessary to run (and if necessary co-ordinate) other programs. Such functionality can be and has been written to run on systems with 1/1000th the processing power of today's multicore monsters.
Of course, today the term "operating system" refers, at least in common usage, to some sort of bundle that includes a kernel, various support libraries for networking, GUI, and other such stuff, some sort of shell, a whole bunch of tools of varying degrees of usefulness, and a whole bunch of mostly half-baked and sub-standard applications. (This description applies, to my knowledge, to pretty much every major desktop "OS" currently available, from Windows to Linux distros via MacOS and various other UNIX platforms.)
My current PC is now about four years old, but was a pretty high spec at that time. On this system, I can happily run full-blown applications for everything from editing high-res photos to playing games that do real-time 3D graphics pretty reasonably. Given this information, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that any operating system should not run very comfortably using a tiny fraction of my system's resources, no matter how many bells and whistles it has.
Now, according to Microsoft, my system just about meets the minimum standards to run the low-end versions of Vista, and isn't qualified to run the high-end versions for several reasons. I can only conclude from this that either Vista's code is poorly written and/or poorly organised, or that those higher-end versions of Vista are trying to do yet more things that are not really part of an operating system, and are probably better done by specialist standalone applications anyway. Either way, Vista is suffering from some serious bloat, and bloat means bugs, security flaws, performance problems and all the rest.
So yes, even if it's a brand new OS, it's still of concern that it requires such impressive hardware specs to run well. In fact, it's a pretty damning indictment of the product, and doesn't so much imply as outright prove that it's going in the wrong direction.
Yep, too right. A few months ago, I put my back out when a stair gave way under me. I literally couldn't stand up straight or walk unsupported for several days. Sleeping was also difficult, because I couldn't lie on my back, either side or front comfortably for more than a few minutes. Bizarrely, the one place that was perfectly comfortable was the sport-style bucket seat in the front of my Subaru Impreza. I could probably have driven completely normally (though I didn't risk it!) as I had no trouble moving any limbs once my back was supported by that seat.
Incidentally, while I certainly don't drive at the 135 degree angle mentioned, I do find it much more comfortable to drive with the seat somewhat reclined than completely upright. I also sit back at probably somewhere around the 105-120 degree range at work. I now have a chair that tilts and supports me in this position, but even on a cheapo office chair, I'm more comfortable sitting back like that (with basically no support under my lower back) than I am sitting bolt upright, even for quite extended periods. According to the current theories (give or take this article) I should probably have terrible back problems all the time as a result, but it just doesn't seem to happen (touch wood!).
I'm sorry, but I still think you're the one with the misunderstanding. I haven't broken any law until a court finds that I have. I don't even need a defence until there is a case against me to answer.
Also, bear in mind that I'm looking at copyright from an international perspective. Different jurisdictions have their own foibles when it comes to copyright law, so there's little you can state as an absolute truth without specifying whose law you're talking about. Again, the Happy Birthday example is pertinent: not everywhere recognises copyright in musical works for as long as the US now does.
Moreover, remember that a lot of the potential defences will depend on the details of the copy, intent in making it, etc. This is, after all, why things like fair use or fair dealing tend to be expressed in rather vague terms, and a court's decision is required on each specific case.
For example, if you quote from someone's Usenet post to give context in a reply, then it is entirely possible that a court would find you were not infringing the other poster's copyright because they had given implied consent for that customary use by posting in that medium in the first place. (If they had explicitly requested that their post not be archived, using a recognised convention such as the X-No-Archive header, this might be a different shade of grey.) Likewise forwarding an e-mail from one work colleague to another without explicit permission from the original author might well be considered an expected act, for which implied consent had been given.
Back-ups are a notoriously shaky subject. The law in most places makes explicit provision for back-ups of computer software, but often not for other content such as music supplied on CD. In this case, you would have to claim fair use in the US, though considering the four criteria, I don't see why genuine back-ups wouldn't qualify. I'm not aware that anyone's ever tested this in a US court -- perhaps one of our resident lawyers can fill us in? -- but if not, that probably tells us something.
As you've probably gathered, I'm not a lawyer (in any jurisdiction). I also draw your attention to my original reply, in particular the part where I said that context matters. But I stand by my claim that any of the things you mentioned could be legal in the right context and in at least some major jurisdictions. If you know of any counter-example where someone has lost in court, I'm happy to be proved wrong, but I haven't seen any such cases so far.
In that case, I wasn't thinking of the RIAA, but the British equivalent, the BPI. Earlier this year, they stated that they would not prosecute those who rip their CDs to PC or MP3 for personal use.
Except, of course, that I'm not. As with the other guy I already responded to, you clearly have no idea about what copyright does and does not cover, and the exemptions typically in place. Depending on the context, any of the things you mentioned might be legal in most places (though technically you're right about a public performance of Happy Birthday in the US, and this is the textbook example of why the repeated US copyright term extensions have been such a bad idea).
Well, given that they famously broke the 10M download barrier very soon after launching the service, and it's now been running for many times that long, I'm going to guess the answer is "lots".
I'm going to go ahead and guess not many, on the rash and entirely unsupported assumption that the people I know are in any way representative. In any case, there are plenty of legitimate channels to obtain MP3s, not least because format shifting is considered fair use (or whatever the local equivalent is) in many jurisdictions.
One of us has a distorted sense of scale here. I'm going to guess again and say it's not me. I don't think I've ever seen someone with a ripped DVD, other than those that were imported as pirate copies from other countries, which isn't very many for logistical reasons if nothing else. OTOH, I know plenty of people with extensive legitimate DVD collections.
Similarly with software, most of the people I know who would know how to source/copy desktop software illegally and circumvent things like MS product activation also choose to run OSS these days. The other big software copying thing used to be games, but with so much of the games market now moving to consoles, I doubt that's a particularly large part of overall copyright infringement any more.
I'm not saying that no-one does these things, but either your world is very different to mine (which is possible, of course) or it's nowhere near the kind of proportion you'd need to justify the claims in question.
What have little old ladies got to do with anything? I don't approve of the typical **AA tactics that are effectively barratry by another name, but not everyone who dislikes the **AA approach automatically disapproves of copyright in general, and not everyone who supports the basic principle of copyright supports abusive practices based on it.
If your "little old ladies" were deliberately and knowingly infringing, I don't much care if they do get sued. They're old enough to know better than to break the law and then cry foul when they're caught. If they weren't and they're being subjected to abusive and harrassing lawsuits, then that's unethical (and should be illegal) regardless of whether copyright itself is supported by me or anyone else.
Blockquoth the AC:
Actually, you're pretty much wrong pretty much everywhere on pretty much all of those counts, and even on some of those where you're not (for example format-shifting in some jurisdictions) there are already moves under way to change the law, and the recording industry has given a public statement that it will not prosecute those who do it.
Care to play again?
What survey?
How do you figure that? No copy, no infringement. It's not difficult, even in a world of DMCA, EUCD and the like. You might not like that situation, but it's hard to argue that you didn't know you were in it.
I rather doubt that the majority of people even understand basic copyright law. However, if they did, I'd be surprised if the majority objected to it. Contrary to popular culture around these parts, there is little if any evidence that today's widespread infringement has yet reached "majority" status, nor anywhere near it.
All of which would be a reasonable argument, if the RIAA were only going after people who were genuinely breaking the law. But, as NYCL and others have pointed out on several occasions, they're not.
Yeah. What's with all the "introductions you can't skip" crap lately?
I don't need to watch a copyright statement in ten languages, and which has questionable if any validity in my jurisdiction anyway, before getting to the main menu. Neither do I need to watch five minutes of trailers for other DVDs from the same distributor.
Like the parent poster, I now find myself looking up any DVDs I'm thinking of buying, and I don't bother if they have too much crap associated with them. Given the limited amount of time I spend in front of the TV, there are plenty of other films/drama series/documentaries/whatever for me to watch, without paying to have my time wasted.
It would be nice if a court could just rule that DVDs where you have a significant compulsory wait before you can get to the real content are not fit for purpose, and impose stupid punitive damages on the distributor. Do us all a favour and make them stop doing this! (Yeah, yeah, I know that this is just dreaming.)
For a lawyer, I'm afraid you don't make very convincing logical arguments!
For a start, you imply that copyright creates a public expense. This in itself is questionable. Certainly it creates no financial expense, since the public is under no obligation to pay for copyrighted works if they don't want them. Any expense must therefore be in terms of "lost art" that is protected by copyright, but as you yourself imply later in your post, it is likely that without copyright much of that art would never be created/distributed in the first place.
You then effectively claim that copyright's only value is financial. That's an odd claim on a forum full of GPL supporters, to be sure. Perhaps I'm missing something, or the law in the US is particularly unusual here, but as far as I'm aware there's nothing inherent in copyright law that says you can only use it to make profit.
I'm just going to gloss over the point about the law being fair. If you really take the view that the law is a blunt tool and fairness has nothing to do with it, we have so little common ground that it's not really worth pursuing this aspect any further.
As for me not thinking about copyright matters much, I'll simply say that you couldn't be more wrong. Copyright affects me directly and regularly in both my job, my volunteer work, and more than one of my major hobbies. I have spent a vast amount of time (probably more than a lot of lawyers) researching the field, from a wider range of perspectives than most people will ever see. I'll spare you the tedious details, but suffice it to say that I have made extensive representations to everything from government IP reviews to the organisers of a non-profit group with thousands of members on the subject. So call me arrogant, but I think I have a fair claim to understand what copyright is and isn't good for, and where the current system works and doesn't from different points of view.
Finally, you still don't seem to be able to understand that your personal view of copyright is not the only view, either ethically or indeed in law. As I noted before, in some countries, copyright is expressed in terms of artists' rights. This issue isn't nearly as clear-cut as you make out, and unless you're telling me the legal facts outside the US don't matter to this discussion, you are simply wrong to make the claims you do about things being indisputable. Random calculations with no mathematical basis do not change this.
I hate to break this to you, but the US Constitution did not invent the notion of copyright, nor is it particularly relevant to anyone outside the US. Moreover, the US is a signatory to international agreements on the subject, such as TRIPS, which again are not written in those terms. In several countries, the relevant law is phrased in terms of artists' rights, and that is the explicit intent.