No, piracy is a word in the English dictionary, and its use in this context dates back to well before the **AA were around, as several other posters in this thread have already demonstrated.
Sorry, but you're wrong. You made the instantly fatal assumption that every person who "pirates" your software would have paid for it. You also assumed that everyone who pirates your software *won't* pay for it ever.
Sorry, but you are wrong. He made the not unreasonable assumptions that
someone who pirated his software would have paid for it (anyone, not necessarily everyone)
the number of people who pay for it only because they first pirated it is smaller than the number of people who don't pay for it only because they first pirated it.
I defy you to argue (with a straight face) that either of these assumptions is false.
Sorry, my mod points just ran out, or you'd have been (+1, Insightful). That was the most articulate debunking of the usual Slashdot "But it's not theft!" moaning that I've seen in a long time. I hope you get the +5 you deserve.
the funny thing is i heard google was recently sued by the owner of a porn site because their copyrighted images came back as results in googles image search
No, a porn site owner went after Google because searching came up with links to other sites' illegal copies of their copyrighted images, not to the originals.
If I'm understanding this right, someone forked a GPL'd project, but they're now claiming that the original project is being unethical in back-porting changes from the fork? That's crazy! Surely the whole point of the GPL, as opposed to say BSD-style licences, is that if you take GPL'd code you have to give back what you build on it? I don't see how the spin-off project have a leg to stand on, either morally or legally.
On the subject of obfuscation, it seems clear that they only have to give back the "finished product", and aren't under any obligation to allow access to development code. However, attempting to obfuscate the code given back also seems to be obviously contrary to the GPL, so the worst he can do once he makes a release is obfuscate the changelog as he suggested, which any decent diff tool will overcome in seconds for the original dev team.
Really, this just seems like exactly the kind of ego-promotion the GPL was intended to prevent. No-one forced them to take GPL'd code as the foundation of their spin-off project, but if you're going to take someone else's code, you have to do it on their terms, which in this case means "licensed under the GPL". If you don't like those terms, you're free to write your own code and release it under whatever licence you like...
No, you can't get an equally Free and legal copy of mainstream packages. Even if you don't pay for them, they are still not as Free as the GIMP.
I was talking about free-as-in-beer, as I'd hoped was obvious. Even if I had been talking about free-as-in-speech, your comment is only flamebait inviting someone to point out that the GPL's interpretation of "free" is considerably less free than, for example, BSD's. However, in this context, I couldn't give a **** about free-as-in-speech. I just want the best graphics package I can legally obtain to help me create the artwork I want.
I am not sure why you got a troll mod - Even with the subjective additions, the majority of your post is simply true.
I wouldn't have modded him troll, because I don't think he was trolling. However, I suspect writing things like "IDEs are lame" and then giving a strong feeling that your knowledge of IDEs is minimal and years out of date is unlikely to create a positive impression.
The two of you seem to share a slightly odd idea that to be a good programmer you have to use command-line tools. That simply isn't true. A good programmer will choose the best tools to help him do his job. For many jobs, the kind of portability you guys are so keen on is utterly irrelevant, while using a compiler like GCC and some generic cross-platform libraries will cripple your performance compared to a program built with Windows-specific optimisations using VC++ and Microsoft's own libraries.
I've noticed that there are quite a few complaints in this thread and the other one you linked to about how someone who's only used Visual Studio can't easily develop on other platforms, because their skills don't transfer. The complainants apparently miss the point that someone who has little knowledge of the specialist dev tools and libraries on a given platform will be slower at developing good code anywhere. There are far more platform-specific applications in the world than highly portable ones (and as mentioned before, I write this as someone whose current project ships on over a dozen platforms) so anyone making that complaint is simply on the losing side in the numbers game.
Speaking as someone who's spent most of this week trying to sort out compiler options for several new platforms we're about to start shipping on, I wouldn't be upset if every command-line compiler in the world disappeared tomorrow. Configuring in a GUI that describes what the options actually mean, groups them neatly, and provides on-line help is vastly easier than digging through Yet Another Man Page trying to work out which seventeen switches I need to set on this proprietary UNIX compiler.
I guess I just don't see how claiming any good programmer "must know" this stuff is any better an argument than claiming any good programmer "must know" assembly language. You can make the latter argument all day, but everyone else will just keep writing apps faster using higher-level languages, which usually generate better assembly output than hand-coded assembler anyway these days. IME, so it is with good dev tools as well.
Sarcasm aside, would it be reasonable for a violinist to expect to be proficient on every other stringed instrument the first time they pick one up?
No, but as someone who knows some very good musicians, I guarantee you that the ones who know two string instruments could pick up a third much easier than they'd pick up something brass or woodwind.
So it is with graphics packages. Personally I gave up on the GIMP on Windows the first time I tried it for two reasons, both as bad as each other to me. Firstly, the interface was so counter-intuitive that I couldn't achieve even simple web effects that I'd do in seconds on several other packages. Secondly, I literally couldn't run it for more than two minutes without a crash. Everything from a simple filter to saving a file took it out permanently.
Now, at that time, the Windows port looked like the *nix version, bizarre right-click menu and all. AIUI more recent versions of the GIMP on Windows have had a somewhat more usable interface. Still, you can get an equally free and legal copy of numerous other mainstream packages off any magazine cover disk, providing you only need the features they had in version ($CURRENT_VERSION - 2). That being the case, why would I bother going back and trying the GIMP again when it's obviously built on such a crappy foundation? More interestingly to this discussion, what if anything about Paint.NET would motivate me to try that instead of the established players; what's it's killer differentiator?
I don't disagree that the flash of studio isn't neat and perhaps "useful". I'm just saying it's not needed. Not even for productive work.
Fair enough, an IDE is certainly "useful" rather than "essential". I do find them very useful, though.
If you want a code graph and other cool tricks doxygen is a hell of a lot better. Sure it's not on the fly but it gives you call graphs, parameter/return comments, inline sourced with cross-referencing, etc..
Doxygen is good for what it does, and we do use it fairly extensively as part of our documentation system. However, as you say, it's not "real-time", and such it's a good solution, but to a different problem.
Re-factoring code is as much about good design as it is good tools. If you can't break a problem into several smaller problem/solution sets you don't deserve to wear a developers hat.
I'm talking about refactoring in the traditional sense of the word -- changes to improve the structure of your code without affecting the observable behaviour -- rather than anything to do with modular design principles. Things like automatically renaming a member of a class, and all its uses, without inadvertently renaming anything else of the same name as a global search and replace might. Another common one is pulling out a section of code into a separate function, and automatically generating the necessary code to pass the parameters and return values. This sort of thing can be a great time-saver when you're playing with a new design, or reviewing code quality prior to checking your changes into source control.
Skipping the debugger issue, where we seem to agree anyway, I think perhaps you're interpreting my final comment as referring to the "Intellisense" features Visual Studio and other IDEs have. This isn't actually what I meant; I was more thinking about the help for the vast array of libraries you might have installed these days. However, the Intellisense is useful too: that argument list you mentioned just pops up for me when I start to write a function call in the VS editor, along with any comment that might have been attached to the function in question. Again, it's nothing you couldn't do the hard way, it's just easier to have it around.
Apparently, someone was kind enough to shut the door on the way out.:-)
The facts that it would have been the fisheries ministers voting through the proposal (because there were only two meetings left before the presidency transferred, neither related to IT) and that it was becoming increasingly contentious in many member states (several of which have reversed their position since the first proceedings a few months back) illustrate just how silly this would have been if it had gone ahead.
That all said, there were already discussions underway about a legal challenge to the legitimacy of the vote had it gone ahead, so the door isn't that wide. It would have been more like a case that a lower court rules on in a silly way, knowing darn well that it just means a higher court will set the correct precedent after the inevitable appeal.
IDEs are lame. Sorry dude. I get syntax highlighting and multiple tabs with gedit. I get help from man and use multiple shells to help build.
Wow. Do you have any idea how much more than this a decent IDE can do for you these days? Here's a list of some useful, time-saving features that are currently found in the better IDEs (not necessarily just Visual Studio's):
code browsing -- navigation of caller graphs, class hierarchies, etc.
context-sensitive refactoring
integrated debugging -- some of the features of the Visual Studio debugger blow away any of the competition in terms of examining program state on the fly
context-sensitive help, properly linked to local help files and on-line systems with updates, with content that doesn't look and read like something 30 years out of date.
Of course you can manage without this stuff. As I said, we develop on zillions of platforms, and some of my colleagues are very experienced on several of them. We're well aware of how things like makefiles work, in something like 8 different variations as of today I think, together with the joys of keeping the make scripts co-ordinated with code under source control. In fact, we have one of the most advanced automated building, testing and reporting frameworks here of any project I've ever worked on, backed by an amazing array of scripts and scheduled tasks that our support guys have created for us.
But the simple fact is that both these approaches are useful, and they are complementary. You can have the most powerful scripted build-and-test set-up in the world, but you're still wasting time unnecessarily if you don't have a decent editor and debugger. So [tipping hat to your final paragraph] from my experience, most people who belittle developing using a good IDE do so without really exploring what it can do, and settle on an under-powered, second-rate solution using a random text editor and a skeleton debugger without ever really knowing what they're missing.
As someone who doesn't illegally rip material, I'm starting to find all the DRM stuff annoying.
I bought Dido's second album, for example, only to discover that you can only play it on a PC through a proprietary software player (assuming your OS will run it, naturally). That player sucks, and does annoying things like messing up my system-wide volume levels. I haven't tried personally, but I'm reliably informed that it doesn't work in some car CD players, either.
The point here is that what I bought was marketted as a CD. It was right there on the shelf in the CD section, next to other CDs, with nothing obviously saying that it wasn't. To be fair, there may have been a note about whether or not you could play it on certain computers visible in the small print; I can't remember and don't have it with me to check. But who reads all the small print when buying a CD from the CD section of a shop?
Now, "Compact disc" is a trademark of Philips, as is the CD logo you see on cases. Philips officially denies permission to use that mark to companies using technology that prevents playing the disc properly on standard equipment. (Google for this if you're interested.) Thus anyone marketting the material in the manner I saw it (be it a record shop, the music publishers, or whoever) is infringing on Philips' rights, and deserves to get smacked down for it.
It's a shame Philips don't seem to be pursuing this more aggressively, because preventing this kind of dilution of a mark is exactly what trademark law is for. I imagine that if all record shops were suddenly required to separate out normal CDs and copy-protected not-quite-CDs in an obvious way, sales of the latter would probably drop PDQ, and the problem would disappear just as fast. I can only assume that since everyone's doing it, they want a clear test case in their favour first to make it quick, easy, and most of all cheap to follow up with others. Maybe they're looking for such a test case and just waiting to make their move. Maybe they just don't care, but as one of the world's biggest manufacturers of CD/DVD burners, that seems unlikely.
Anyway, the bottom line is that I really haven't bought a new CD since that album. I was always fairly selective, but I did buy a few each year until that point. So they really have lost a genuine, paying customer in me. I don't find the loss has ruined my life; I listen to the radio if I want to hear some new music, and occasionally use a legal download service if I really like a track I've heard. Now I'm a living own-goal for the media industry's DRM technology. Anyone else?
3. Lack of good development environment. No good shell, no POSIX.1 and the MSFT tools [visual studio] are huge, slow and really specific to windows [what if I want to make a cross-platform GTK application?]
This is somewhat O/T, so I'll post this without the bonus, but I feel obliged to offer a view here.
There are many things you can justifiably attack MS for. The quality of their development tools is not one of them. Visual Studio is streets ahead of the competition in almost every meaningful area, and the 2005 beta I'm currently testing with is better still.
I work at a company that develops on more than a dozen compiler/OS combinations, including several versions of Windows, Linux, several UNIXes, and several versions of MacOS. Portability is one of the most important things to us. Developers are free to use (within reason) whatever hardware, OS and dev tools they want.
We've looked into plenty of alternative IDEs and such. Some of our guys are "guru status" on Linux/MacOS/whatever. We have experience with more C++ compilers than most people have ever heard of. And yet 95% of us use some version of Visual Studio on Win2K/XP as our primary development platform. The reason for that is simple: if you're writing cross-platform code, you don't use a lot of the features, but the remainder is still among the best tools for the job.
Of course it would be nice if some of the best bits weren't Windows-only or restricted to certain languages and/or.Net-based projects. Historically, these have often appeared on Microsoft's current "platform of the month" first, and then been supported more generally later. (A lot of things that were C#/VB.Net only in 2003 have C++ support planned for 2005, for example.) But even without these details, there are few alternatives even in the same league as Visual Studio, and I'm not aware that any bests it for my personal needs.
If the eds had used my submitted write-up instead (mumble, mutter) then you'd have known that this is only the second-highest court in the EU. Although the ruling was pretty damning, it's still possible that MS will appeal to the European Court of Justice, who could overturn the decision. Fortunately, given the feeling everywhere else in Europe, this doesn't seem likely, but the air isn't completely clean yet.
BTW, if it stands, this is a hit against MS on two major counts: the original ruling required them to open up various information for interoperability purposes, and to produce a version of Windows without Media Player integrated.
Once again, a service that's of genuine use for legal purposes (distributing OSS, for example) gets taken out for everyone because selfish people illegally ripping stuff on the same service provokes the wrath of the **AA...
how do you accidently type your password into a freaking google search box?
Some browsers/web sites switch contexts when they shouldn't. Firefox on Windows, for example, takes over the UI context (contrary to Windows UI standards) at times. Google has sites that take a second or so to load even on a high-speed link; start typing into a field in the Google Groups advanced search box, and then see the active field change so you're now typing into a different box when the page finishes loading, for example. These things are annoying at the moment, but potentially a huge liability in future if Google is picking up on every keystroke you type, and given the amount of other information they could potentially mine about you from the various services they offer.
You're talking about the US, home of Fox News. I'm talking about the UK, home of the BBC. Take a look at the coverage of the Iraq war on both sides.
BTW, the whistleblowers are alive and well in the UK, as MI5/6 are well aware after several very high profile cases recently. There's also been a lot of pressure about things like holding foreign suspects withot charge or trial at Belmarsh (our Gitmo), which in fact was ruled illegal by our highest judicial authority just this week. It will be interesting to see how our new Home Secretary deals with that one; having made a big thing about continuity of his predecessor's policies as he was appointed, that probably wasn't the best news he could have had on his first morning in the job...
Does everyone forget that Iraq violated the peace treaty signed after the gulf war in 1998, when they kicked out U.N. weapons inspectors.
No, but we do also notice that
that didn't cause two successive US governments to act before
the inspectors were back, and operating under far fewer constraints, before you guys started this war
several senior weapons inspectors have said, correctly, that there was insufficient evidence of violations to justify the war.
For heaven's sake, the "material breach" of the UN resolutions that the war-mongers were so keen to point out was the equivalent of having a water pistol that shot 5.5 metres, when you'd been told nothing shooting further than 5 was allowed in the playground. It wasn't NBC. It wasn't even something that could reach a whole load of targets that were out of range according to the rules they were given. The UN certainly doesn't get everything right, but apparently it was getting Iraq's WMD right until you guys waded in in your M1A2s.
And, last time anyone looked, Russia was the biggest polluter in the world, but you're speculative statements are interesting.
Not according to any statistics I've seen. Care to share?
(/me notes in passing that this doesn't diminish the argument that the US is polluting far more than it needs to, and in fact it's a prime example of the kind of argument given to "justify" not signing up to Kyoto.)
(Please note the ironic comment about having nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, and my new sig as of this morning, which is also related to the UK's anti-terrorism policies as advocated by DB.)
While I would welcome a major increase in the Parliament's powers, the EU executive is definitely held accountable. The current situation is not a "democratic deficit", but rather excessive powers in the hand of national heads of state.
It's not a wash-out, but it is a deficit. The indirectly-elected Council/Commission can walk all over the directly-elected Parliament. That's the wrong way around.
Slashdot Mirror
No, piracy is a word in the English dictionary, and its use in this context dates back to well before the **AA were around, as several other posters in this thread have already demonstrated.
Ah, it seems we can add "piracy" to "freedom" in the list of words the FSF defines differently to my dictionary for its propaganda purposes.
They're perfectly entitled to put forward whatever moral or legal arguments for the GPL they like, but they don't get to redefine English. Sorry.
Sorry, but you are wrong. He made the not unreasonable assumptions that
I defy you to argue (with a straight face) that either of these assumptions is false.
Sorry, my mod points just ran out, or you'd have been (+1, Insightful). That was the most articulate debunking of the usual Slashdot "But it's not theft!" moaning that I've seen in a long time. I hope you get the +5 you deserve.
No, a porn site owner went after Google because searching came up with links to other sites' illegal copies of their copyrighted images, not to the originals.
Damn, there should be a (+2, Hilarious) mod for that sort of post. Merry Christmas! :-)
If I'm understanding this right, someone forked a GPL'd project, but they're now claiming that the original project is being unethical in back-porting changes from the fork? That's crazy! Surely the whole point of the GPL, as opposed to say BSD-style licences, is that if you take GPL'd code you have to give back what you build on it? I don't see how the spin-off project have a leg to stand on, either morally or legally.
On the subject of obfuscation, it seems clear that they only have to give back the "finished product", and aren't under any obligation to allow access to development code. However, attempting to obfuscate the code given back also seems to be obviously contrary to the GPL, so the worst he can do once he makes a release is obfuscate the changelog as he suggested, which any decent diff tool will overcome in seconds for the original dev team.
Really, this just seems like exactly the kind of ego-promotion the GPL was intended to prevent. No-one forced them to take GPL'd code as the foundation of their spin-off project, but if you're going to take someone else's code, you have to do it on their terms, which in this case means "licensed under the GPL". If you don't like those terms, you're free to write your own code and release it under whatever licence you like...
I was talking about free-as-in-beer, as I'd hoped was obvious. Even if I had been talking about free-as-in-speech, your comment is only flamebait inviting someone to point out that the GPL's interpretation of "free" is considerably less free than, for example, BSD's. However, in this context, I couldn't give a **** about free-as-in-speech. I just want the best graphics package I can legally obtain to help me create the artwork I want.
I wouldn't have modded him troll, because I don't think he was trolling. However, I suspect writing things like "IDEs are lame" and then giving a strong feeling that your knowledge of IDEs is minimal and years out of date is unlikely to create a positive impression.
The two of you seem to share a slightly odd idea that to be a good programmer you have to use command-line tools. That simply isn't true. A good programmer will choose the best tools to help him do his job. For many jobs, the kind of portability you guys are so keen on is utterly irrelevant, while using a compiler like GCC and some generic cross-platform libraries will cripple your performance compared to a program built with Windows-specific optimisations using VC++ and Microsoft's own libraries.
I've noticed that there are quite a few complaints in this thread and the other one you linked to about how someone who's only used Visual Studio can't easily develop on other platforms, because their skills don't transfer. The complainants apparently miss the point that someone who has little knowledge of the specialist dev tools and libraries on a given platform will be slower at developing good code anywhere. There are far more platform-specific applications in the world than highly portable ones (and as mentioned before, I write this as someone whose current project ships on over a dozen platforms) so anyone making that complaint is simply on the losing side in the numbers game.
Speaking as someone who's spent most of this week trying to sort out compiler options for several new platforms we're about to start shipping on, I wouldn't be upset if every command-line compiler in the world disappeared tomorrow. Configuring in a GUI that describes what the options actually mean, groups them neatly, and provides on-line help is vastly easier than digging through Yet Another Man Page trying to work out which seventeen switches I need to set on this proprietary UNIX compiler.
I guess I just don't see how claiming any good programmer "must know" this stuff is any better an argument than claiming any good programmer "must know" assembly language. You can make the latter argument all day, but everyone else will just keep writing apps faster using higher-level languages, which usually generate better assembly output than hand-coded assembler anyway these days. IME, so it is with good dev tools as well.
No, but as someone who knows some very good musicians, I guarantee you that the ones who know two string instruments could pick up a third much easier than they'd pick up something brass or woodwind.
So it is with graphics packages. Personally I gave up on the GIMP on Windows the first time I tried it for two reasons, both as bad as each other to me. Firstly, the interface was so counter-intuitive that I couldn't achieve even simple web effects that I'd do in seconds on several other packages. Secondly, I literally couldn't run it for more than two minutes without a crash. Everything from a simple filter to saving a file took it out permanently.
Now, at that time, the Windows port looked like the *nix version, bizarre right-click menu and all. AIUI more recent versions of the GIMP on Windows have had a somewhat more usable interface. Still, you can get an equally free and legal copy of numerous other mainstream packages off any magazine cover disk, providing you only need the features they had in version ($CURRENT_VERSION - 2). That being the case, why would I bother going back and trying the GIMP again when it's obviously built on such a crappy foundation? More interestingly to this discussion, what if anything about Paint.NET would motivate me to try that instead of the established players; what's it's killer differentiator?
Fair enough, an IDE is certainly "useful" rather than "essential". I do find them very useful, though.
Doxygen is good for what it does, and we do use it fairly extensively as part of our documentation system. However, as you say, it's not "real-time", and such it's a good solution, but to a different problem.
I'm talking about refactoring in the traditional sense of the word -- changes to improve the structure of your code without affecting the observable behaviour -- rather than anything to do with modular design principles. Things like automatically renaming a member of a class, and all its uses, without inadvertently renaming anything else of the same name as a global search and replace might. Another common one is pulling out a section of code into a separate function, and automatically generating the necessary code to pass the parameters and return values. This sort of thing can be a great time-saver when you're playing with a new design, or reviewing code quality prior to checking your changes into source control.
Skipping the debugger issue, where we seem to agree anyway, I think perhaps you're interpreting my final comment as referring to the "Intellisense" features Visual Studio and other IDEs have. This isn't actually what I meant; I was more thinking about the help for the vast array of libraries you might have installed these days. However, the Intellisense is useful too: that argument list you mentioned just pops up for me when I start to write a function call in the VS editor, along with any comment that might have been attached to the function in question. Again, it's nothing you couldn't do the hard way, it's just easier to have it around.
Apparently, someone was kind enough to shut the door on the way out. :-)
The facts that it would have been the fisheries ministers voting through the proposal (because there were only two meetings left before the presidency transferred, neither related to IT) and that it was becoming increasingly contentious in many member states (several of which have reversed their position since the first proceedings a few months back) illustrate just how silly this would have been if it had gone ahead.
That all said, there were already discussions underway about a legal challenge to the legitimacy of the vote had it gone ahead, so the door isn't that wide. It would have been more like a case that a lower court rules on in a silly way, knowing darn well that it just means a higher court will set the correct precedent after the inevitable appeal.
Wow. Do you have any idea how much more than this a decent IDE can do for you these days? Here's a list of some useful, time-saving features that are currently found in the better IDEs (not necessarily just Visual Studio's):
Of course you can manage without this stuff. As I said, we develop on zillions of platforms, and some of my colleagues are very experienced on several of them. We're well aware of how things like makefiles work, in something like 8 different variations as of today I think, together with the joys of keeping the make scripts co-ordinated with code under source control. In fact, we have one of the most advanced automated building, testing and reporting frameworks here of any project I've ever worked on, backed by an amazing array of scripts and scheduled tasks that our support guys have created for us.
But the simple fact is that both these approaches are useful, and they are complementary. You can have the most powerful scripted build-and-test set-up in the world, but you're still wasting time unnecessarily if you don't have a decent editor and debugger. So [tipping hat to your final paragraph] from my experience, most people who belittle developing using a good IDE do so without really exploring what it can do, and settle on an under-powered, second-rate solution using a random text editor and a skeleton debugger without ever really knowing what they're missing.
As someone who doesn't illegally rip material, I'm starting to find all the DRM stuff annoying.
I bought Dido's second album, for example, only to discover that you can only play it on a PC through a proprietary software player (assuming your OS will run it, naturally). That player sucks, and does annoying things like messing up my system-wide volume levels. I haven't tried personally, but I'm reliably informed that it doesn't work in some car CD players, either.
The point here is that what I bought was marketted as a CD. It was right there on the shelf in the CD section, next to other CDs, with nothing obviously saying that it wasn't. To be fair, there may have been a note about whether or not you could play it on certain computers visible in the small print; I can't remember and don't have it with me to check. But who reads all the small print when buying a CD from the CD section of a shop?
Now, "Compact disc" is a trademark of Philips, as is the CD logo you see on cases. Philips officially denies permission to use that mark to companies using technology that prevents playing the disc properly on standard equipment. (Google for this if you're interested.) Thus anyone marketting the material in the manner I saw it (be it a record shop, the music publishers, or whoever) is infringing on Philips' rights, and deserves to get smacked down for it.
It's a shame Philips don't seem to be pursuing this more aggressively, because preventing this kind of dilution of a mark is exactly what trademark law is for. I imagine that if all record shops were suddenly required to separate out normal CDs and copy-protected not-quite-CDs in an obvious way, sales of the latter would probably drop PDQ, and the problem would disappear just as fast. I can only assume that since everyone's doing it, they want a clear test case in their favour first to make it quick, easy, and most of all cheap to follow up with others. Maybe they're looking for such a test case and just waiting to make their move. Maybe they just don't care, but as one of the world's biggest manufacturers of CD/DVD burners, that seems unlikely.
Anyway, the bottom line is that I really haven't bought a new CD since that album. I was always fairly selective, but I did buy a few each year until that point. So they really have lost a genuine, paying customer in me. I don't find the loss has ruined my life; I listen to the radio if I want to hear some new music, and occasionally use a legal download service if I really like a track I've heard. Now I'm a living own-goal for the media industry's DRM technology. Anyone else?
This is somewhat O/T, so I'll post this without the bonus, but I feel obliged to offer a view here.
There are many things you can justifiably attack MS for. The quality of their development tools is not one of them. Visual Studio is streets ahead of the competition in almost every meaningful area, and the 2005 beta I'm currently testing with is better still.
I work at a company that develops on more than a dozen compiler/OS combinations, including several versions of Windows, Linux, several UNIXes, and several versions of MacOS. Portability is one of the most important things to us. Developers are free to use (within reason) whatever hardware, OS and dev tools they want.
We've looked into plenty of alternative IDEs and such. Some of our guys are "guru status" on Linux/MacOS/whatever. We have experience with more C++ compilers than most people have ever heard of. And yet 95% of us use some version of Visual Studio on Win2K/XP as our primary development platform. The reason for that is simple: if you're writing cross-platform code, you don't use a lot of the features, but the remainder is still among the best tools for the job.
Of course it would be nice if some of the best bits weren't Windows-only or restricted to certain languages and/or .Net-based projects. Historically, these have often appeared on Microsoft's current "platform of the month" first, and then been supported more generally later. (A lot of things that were C#/VB.Net only in 2003 have C++ support planned for 2005, for example.) But even without these details, there are few alternatives even in the same league as Visual Studio, and I'm not aware that any bests it for my personal needs.
If the eds had used my submitted write-up instead (mumble, mutter) then you'd have known that this is only the second-highest court in the EU. Although the ruling was pretty damning, it's still possible that MS will appeal to the European Court of Justice, who could overturn the decision. Fortunately, given the feeling everywhere else in Europe, this doesn't seem likely, but the air isn't completely clean yet.
BTW, if it stands, this is a hit against MS on two major counts: the original ruling required them to open up various information for interoperability purposes, and to produce a version of Windows without Media Player integrated.
Quoth the AC:
Darn it, why doesn't anyone around here know the difference between "informative" and "insightful"? ;-)
Once again, a service that's of genuine use for legal purposes (distributing OSS, for example) gets taken out for everyone because selfish people illegally ripping stuff on the same service provokes the wrath of the **AA...
That's because on Macs, the spell-checking software actually works.
Some browsers/web sites switch contexts when they shouldn't. Firefox on Windows, for example, takes over the UI context (contrary to Windows UI standards) at times. Google has sites that take a second or so to load even on a high-speed link; start typing into a field in the Google Groups advanced search box, and then see the active field change so you're now typing into a different box when the page finishes loading, for example. These things are annoying at the moment, but potentially a huge liability in future if Google is picking up on every keystroke you type, and given the amount of other information they could potentially mine about you from the various services they offer.
You're talking about the US, home of Fox News. I'm talking about the UK, home of the BBC. Take a look at the coverage of the Iraq war on both sides.
BTW, the whistleblowers are alive and well in the UK, as MI5/6 are well aware after several very high profile cases recently. There's also been a lot of pressure about things like holding foreign suspects withot charge or trial at Belmarsh (our Gitmo), which in fact was ruled illegal by our highest judicial authority just this week. It will be interesting to see how our new Home Secretary deals with that one; having made a big thing about continuity of his predecessor's policies as he was appointed, that probably wasn't the best news he could have had on his first morning in the job...
I could tell you how to fix that, but then I'd have to kill you. Sorry!
No, but we do also notice that
- that didn't cause two successive US governments to act before
- the inspectors were back, and operating under far fewer constraints, before you guys started this war
- several senior weapons inspectors have said, correctly, that there was insufficient evidence of violations to justify the war.
For heaven's sake, the "material breach" of the UN resolutions that the war-mongers were so keen to point out was the equivalent of having a water pistol that shot 5.5 metres, when you'd been told nothing shooting further than 5 was allowed in the playground. It wasn't NBC. It wasn't even something that could reach a whole load of targets that were out of range according to the rules they were given. The UN certainly doesn't get everything right, but apparently it was getting Iraq's WMD right until you guys waded in in your M1A2s.Not according to any statistics I've seen. Care to share?
(/me notes in passing that this doesn't diminish the argument that the US is polluting far more than it needs to, and in fact it's a prime example of the kind of argument given to "justify" not signing up to Kyoto.)
Yes. I "suddenly remembered". :-)
(Please note the ironic comment about having nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, and my new sig as of this morning, which is also related to the UK's anti-terrorism policies as advocated by DB.)
It's not a wash-out, but it is a deficit. The indirectly-elected Council/Commission can walk all over the directly-elected Parliament. That's the wrong way around.