Is your car still your car when it's in a public parking garage at the airport 6,000 miles away on vacation? Even though you do not have possession of it? Of course it is.
Only because the law says so, i.e., because society collectively chooses to recognise that fact. If it didn't, anyone else could just take your car away, following the "possession is 90% of the law" idea.
This is why debates like this are always a bit silly. Any concept of ownership and rights to anything, beyond the level of forcibly defending possession of what you claim as your own, is an artificial concept created by agreement in society. It might makes sense to have different agreements relating to physical or knowledge-based commodities, but IP laws are no more inherently "unnatural" than laws about theft, trespass or any number of other things.
Patents require the holder to share the knowledge. The point is how you are allowed to use that knowledge during the time immediately following the grant of the patent.
If you look at History you will find many examples of information that was lost precisely because it was kept proprietary.
But this contradicts the very raison d'être of patents.
Patents are an exchange: in return for publishing the details of your research so that, in time, the whole world will benefit, you are granted an exclusive right to benefit from that research for a limited time. At the end of that time, your exclusivity stops, and the whole world can do with the information as they wish.
The alternative is that the big commercial R&D departments, academic researchers whose work is funded by industry, and others in a similar position would all try to keep their work as trade secrets. That would be the only way they could profit from it without aiding their competitors as well. Surely this approach would lead to more lost information than patents possibly can.
As with most IP regulation, the logic behind the current law is sound. The problems we have with some of it today is due to a very poor implementation, particularly in the US. If you took out the complex media monopolies who are fixing prices in spite of anti-competition laws, you'd get rid of most of the "problems with copyright". If you had competent people in the USPTO instead of people who are actively motivated to grant any patent no matter how absurd, then you wouldn't have patents used for infighting by big companies' legal departments, and the "problems with patents" are mostly gone too.
OK, I see your argument regarding the robbery analogy. It seems to me the problem here is that we have agreed no clear definition of what constitutes "making a copy" when the medium is electronic rather than physical.
To me, if we agree that downloading copyrighted material from a cracked system is copyright infringement, then downloading copyrighted material from a voluntary source must also be copyright infringement. The downloader is taking part in the copying process in either case.
The fact that in one case, there is a second crime being committed (cracking into the system to gain access to the material) seems to me to be independent of this. The fact that in the other, the source is offering the material voluntarily also seems independent.
Perhaps the most appropriate interpretation is that in each case, a copy is being made during the uploading/downloading process. In the cracking variation only the downloader is responsible for making the copy, while in the P2P case, both the uploader and the downloader are partly responsible. Thus in the first case, only the downloader should be held to be infringing copyright, while in the P2P case both parties should be. This interpretation seems to be a fair representation of what actually happens, and as far as I can tell is also a reasonable interpretation of the law on the subject, at least in the US and UK.
The term is a narrowly defined legal term. Changing a term does not ipso facto change the underlying discussion.
As others have pointed out, the above aren't strictly true. This doesn't exactly detract much from CiceroLove's point, though, which is that going after terms like this is the wrong battle to fight.
Then again, the original text by femto that started this article follows the standard "state opinion as fact" mantra. The law says that, under certain circumstances, intellect can be "owned" in a meaningful sense, and there are good reasons for that principle as has been discussed here numerous times before. If femto wants a phrase that implies that intellect cannot be owned, as he says, then it is he who is trying to come up with a misleading term to sway people's opinions away from the facts.
Perhaps those objecting would like the world to stop using "offensive" terms like "intellectual property" and "software theft", but these terms have been around for years, and while not strictly true in the physical sense, there certainly is an element of truth to them. If the best argument you've got for why these things are wrong is that the name is somewhat misleading then you really don't have much of a case at all.
Changing the terms "just because" is what leads to using "human resources" instead of the old-fashioned but perfectly acceptable "personnel" on the one hand, yet having "colleague announcements" instead of "staff announcements" over the tanoy in supermarkets on the other. (For those who didn't spot the irony there, consider whether each of these sounds more of less friendly than the other, and note that the answers are opposites.) The one thing they have in common is that they did away with perfectly good terms that have been in use for years, and replaced them with long-winded, irritating managementspeak.
In summary: if you don't like the ideas that terms like "intellectual property" represent, attack them on their merits (or not) and not because of the name someone happens to have given them.
If anybody cracks into your system, they are likely to be committing a criminal act which has, on its own, nothing to do with copyright violations; this is not related to P2P.
I agree entirely that the act of cracking is independent of copyright violation, but stop and think about that for a minute. Here's my argument step-by-step.
If someone has done this and copyrighted material has been copied as a result, then someone has broken the copyright rules.
There are only two people who could logically be named as the person breaking the rules here: the person responsible for the system where the legitimate copy of the data resides, and the person cracking that system who wound up with an illegal copy. (Let's exclude carriers etc. for now as they aren't really relevant.)
Since the person whose system was cracked did not intend to make the material available it is unreasonable to claim that they breached copyright.
Thus the only person who logically remains is the person who cracked the system and wound up with the copy, and that person must be guilty of copyright infringement.
Do you agree with this argument? If not, what do you disagree with?
If you agree with my reasoning so far, let's assume for the sake of argument that the downloader could reasonably be expected to know that the material in question was subject to copyright. In that case, how are they in a different situation, either morally or legally, whether they download from a P2P site or from a site they've cracked? How is it that they have made the illegal copy in one case, but, as I understand your claim, the person from whom they downloaded made it in the other and the downloader has no responsibility in that situation?
Your point about robbery is interesting, but IMHO not directly comparable. In that case, a copy hasn't actually been made during the robbery; it already existed.
About that Indians comment
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But hey, what are Indians good for? To them its that or literally scoop shit.
That was a pointless and ill-informed comment. India is the world's largest democracy, has a pretty well-educated population, has a stable economy compared to some in the West, and mostly has quite a high standard of living compared to many places in the world. Don't assume that because they don't drive around in snazzy US- or German-made cars, they are some third world backwater place.
In my experience, tech support that has been outsourced to places like India is usually very poor, and one of the things they are worst at. I've commented before on the relatively poor training they have compared to the West, and the fact that these people who get paid so much less to do the job than those in the US or Europe are also worth far less because they don't do it as well.
In general, however, outside of the knowledge-based hi-tech industries, there are far more constructive jobs in India than you appear to give them credit for. Why do you believe that Indians "scoop shit" any more than Americans or Europeans?
Windows XP or Linux or Shabadabadoo OS will lock up no matter what if the driver is bad, as it clearly is.
Yes, that was exactly my point. There was no blue screen. The system was screwed deeper than that in the particular cases I'm talking about, in one case with an outright reset, in the other effectively with a hang. We know exactly what caused the problem in both cases, and the dodgy driver and threading set-up code were both fixed as a result. My original point was correct, but for some reason I can't understand, a few of the people who replied telling me that I was being stupid and needed to switch off auto-reset now seem determined to tell me that I'm wrong and their explanation is the only one possible.
So they get the cushy corp. job sitting in their office calling me in for help and getting paid AT LEAST twice as much as me to be nothing more than a scheduler!
Congratulations, my friend, you've just been introduced to two vital concepts: managers, and why everyone else hates them.:-)
Critical faults weren't occuring at "too high a privilege level." Please.
Yes, they were. We spent around two weeks diagnosing that particular problem, including speaking to the team who wrote the code in question. At the end of that time, we knew exactly what was causing the problem and how to fix it. You are once again making assumptions about the situation, when you don't have the knowledge to know whether they are correct.
And if you're blaming it on drivers, it's not a problem with Windows XP, is it?
That rather depends on whether one of the drivers in question was written by Microsoft and shipped as part of the OS, and the corresponding driver that shipped with an earlier OS didn't have the same critical bug, doesn't it?
It's probably best you just never respond to this.
Why, because you need me to admit that a horde of ACs who have read page one of the book know more than a team of professionals who spent two weeks working on exactly this problem and who read the whole manual several times while working out exactly what was wrong? You have no idea what you're talking about, so you'd like to me to give up and let you have the last word so you can feel better.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but we know exactly what the problem was, and a bug-fixed version of the driver in question was subsequently released as a result of our input.
The fact remains that my original contention -- that it is quite possible to screw even recent Windows OSes without blue screening along the way -- is sound. We did know about the automatic reset switch and it was one of the first things we checked, but I appreciate the people who were trying to be helpful by telling me about it in case I didn't know.
However, people like you who are trying to be clever by using "you got schooled", "Please", "It's probably best that you never respond to this", "n00b" (that was a great one in another reply), and other such things are simply showing that they have no idea what they're talking about. They have too much ego to admit that someone else might know more than them, and there was a possibility they hadn't considered.
Incidentally, before someone tries to write a witty reply about how I'm describing myself there, consider this: if the only possible explanation is that the auto-reset option was switched on, how is it that we managed to blue screen that particular PC at several other points during the development of that product, without it resetting automatically? Perhaps there's another secret option we didn't know about, maybe labelled "Blue screen sometimes, but randomly reset on others to annoy people on Slashdot"? Then again, maybe you're just wrong.
Proof by intimidation isn't going to work on someone who actually has the facts, sorry.
Re:Learned Professionals?
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The only reason I would rather do technical work than brute labor, which at the very least improves your body unless it breaks it, is that it pays better.
I suspect that many people in the tech industry wouldn't be physically capable of shovelling the brown stuff for eight hours a day. They have nowhere near the level of physical fitness required, and it would take months or years to develop it. However, because they've never done it, they assume they could if they wanted to.
Obviously there will be some who could, and you may well be one of them for all I know. But the way many office workers look down on manual labourers is really patronising at times. Many of them would "break", as you put it, within hours of starting a manual job.
God, you're a dumbass. Nobody is "misunderstanding" you. There is no blue screen because you have auto-restart on.
<sigh> At least the other million people who assumed I didn't know what I was talking about and told me to switch off auto-restart had the sense to post their ill-informed and redundant advice anonymously.
There was no blue screen because critical faults were occurring at too high a privilege level, beyond the ability of the OS to catch. This is possible with certain device drivers, for example, if they screw up essential system resources. It's also possible for a Windows app to set the various priorities used in scheduling to levels so high that they actually outrank the UI code used, for example, to activate Task Manager and kill a runaway process. Thus while they don't actually blue screen the box, they are nevertheless effectively hanging the whole system.
If you're going to go calling people a dumbass, you really should do at least a little homework first. Better to leave your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt, eh?
I think you are misunderstanding. The reason there is no blue screen is that auto restart has been enabled.
No, sorry, I'm not misunderstanding anything. The hordes of ACs who all assume I'm incompetent and that I don't know about the auto-restart are the ones with the misunderstanding.:-(
You really should have a company-wide standard and that probably should be windows 2000.
Unfortunately, in a small company like ours, that simple isn't financially viable. Even if it were, not all of our PCs are used for the same purposes, so we wouldn't want them all to be the same, or even necessarily run the same basic software.
By the way, we develop software that ships on more than a dozen different platforms, including several flavours of Windows, several *nix variations, older non-UNIX'd MacOS versions and more. We're well aware of the strengths and limitations of these platforms relative to one another.
NT 4 is considerably less stable than 2000.
Several of my colleagues would disagree with you, from direct personal experience. For standard networked Dell boxes running Windows+Office and nothing else, sure. From personal experience, Win2K is generally more stable and the one they got right. But certainly for some machines, particularly those with any "unusual" hardware, it's quite common for NT4 to be more stable than 2000.
I would also tell you XP guy to turn off the auto-restart on blue screen so that he can actually see what it is saying.
I'm sorry, you misunderstand me. There is no blue screen. The system either locks up or resets, immediately. This is rare with the better Windows versions, but quite possible technically, and happening with monotonous regularity on this particular system. Or did you think that highly privileged code was immune from bugs that screw up the state of the floating point unit, and device drivers never set threads to run at the dangerously high priorities allowed by the Windows API?;-)
Um... They do tell you when it expires. Microsoft announce the dates when they will stop supporting their major products, and have done for quite some time. Someone already posted the link in this thread. Look for the post "Primary link at Microsoft" by LinuxParanoid.
I'm not convinced this is a good thing. While I generally think MS got Win2K right (though not XP), several people in my office still explicitly request NT4 on new machines. One guy who works on my team is considering this now, after spending a week chasing a bug somewhere on his WinXP box that causes it to reset without warning when running some essential software. Sometimes, better the devil you know really is good advice.
Still, it is the sharer who makes the conscious decision to *share* and make copies to whoever requests the copyrighted material.
Leaving aside the specifics of any given legal system for a moment, this argument has never made sense. If I cracked someone's system and copyright content that they legitimately held on it happened to wind up on my hard disk, would you argue that they had made the copy or that I had? (Clearly someone has, for a copy exists.) Thus I fail to see how whether or not the source of the material voluntarily offered it for copying has any bearing on whether or not the recipient is deemed to have made a copy.
Finally, you incorrectly state that "if you come to possess an item of stolen property, however innocently, you will still have to return it". This is absolutely not true. I am sure of this in the U.S. - the common law should be the same in the U.K. that if, e.g, I purchase a car from a used cars salesperson in good faith, and I have no reason to doubt the legitimacy of the transaction, and later it turns out that the purchased car was stolen by the dealer, I will not be required to return the car to anyone. In fact, the original owner, the victim will sue and recover damages from the thief dealer, not from me.
I believe you are mistaken about UK law here. Run a search on Google for "UK law buying stolen goods". While nothing on a government site comes up in the first few links, several sites all basically side with my version. In fact, one of the earlier links deals specifically with your example of innocently buying a second-hand car that has been stolen.
No, the underlying problem is that people are stupid and run executables they get from untrusted sources.
You can't blame the end users for the sort of screw-ups we're talking about. There is little need for any web browser or word processor to provide scripting facilities that can affect data on my hard drive anyway. Even if the facilities are there, the problem is that "autoexec" scripts for WP documents, or automatically rendering HTML e-mail as if it were a web page, scripts included, allow the end user to run executable code when they wouldn't expect to be doing so.
And if you're going to talk about liabilities, you might start with relying on a "standard" such as MIME types that is violated by large numbers of content providers, and by the browser that dominates the market. Such a standard isn't really standard at all, is it?
I'm sorry, but your whole argument is just aiming at the wrong target.
Well, I don't know what morals you are talking about, but I am having a problem with "legally speaking... in some jurisdictions" and "several other laws on related matters".
In the UK, for example, copyright law does not convey certain legal rights that would be present in the US. You don't automatically have the right to make copies of things for personal use (e.g., copying a CD you keep at home onto tape to play in the car). There is very little concept of what US law calls "fair use", though there are a few exemptions. I'm not sure you even have any automatic right to make back-up copies of things, though I doubt anyone has ever been or would ever be successfully prosecuted for using their common sense in this way.
The related matter that first came to mind was physical theft, where if you come to possess an item of stolen property, however innocently, you will still have to return it, and to prove that you came to possess it without knowing it was stolen. Obviously the returning part doesn't apply to IP, but the need to prove that you came to have it without realising you shouldn't is directly comparable.
So why not make arbitrary precision integer calculations and interval arithmetics part of the compilers?
I'm sure I've read about a language where there's basically one integer type, which normally maps to a typical 32- or 64-bit value on current machines, but is subject to over/underflow tests and switches to an arbitrary precision mode dynamically. As I recall, its efficiency was comparable to an average compiled language today unless it flipped over, and obviously after flipping it got the right answer where other languages simply hit error conditions. I think the language was probably cited in a Slashdot article. Can anyone else remember reading about this?
Not sure how well the same approach would work for floating point, but if you can do it reasonably efficiently for integral types, I guess why not?
I would really like to know, if there are real world engineering examples, where simulations produced dangerous products, because the simulation was inadequate because of numerical errors. Perhaps in aerodynamics, who knows how they perform their flight simulations.
I've worked on a couple of projects where this is very important. One was writing control software for metrology equipment, industrial strength QA kit that measured manufactured parts down to fractions of a micron or even nanometres to make sure they were in spec. Another was a geometric modelling tool used in CAD applications and the like.
In neither case am I aware of any physical real world failure caused by a problem with the floating point calculations. You do have to be really careful with manipulating the numbers, though.
For example, the loss of significance when you subtract can be horrible if you've got two position vectors close together, and you're trying to calculate a translation vector from one to the other. The error in that translation vector can be enormous if the points you started with were very close: you might get only one or two significant figures, when the rest of your values have 15 or more. If you're interested in the direction of the vector, that can give you errors of +/- several degrees!
Inevitably, there are always going to be bugs in complex mathematical software, and I've seen plenty of wrong answers from programs like the above. Fortunately, it's normally possible to have checks and balances that at least identify and highlight inconsistencies so, in the worst case, at least nobody relies on them. You can also use ruthless automated testing procedures, which run zillions of calculations every night and flag the smallest changes in the results, so no-one accidentally breaks a verified algorithm with a change later. The combination makes it reasonably unlikely that any algorithm would fail catastrophically with the sort of consequences you're talking about.
The possibility is always there, of course, because programming is subject to human error. However, FWIW, I've worked on software that's used to design cars, and software that controls the QA machinery to make sure they're put together right, and I still drive one.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Only because the law says so, i.e., because society collectively chooses to recognise that fact. If it didn't, anyone else could just take your car away, following the "possession is 90% of the law" idea.
This is why debates like this are always a bit silly. Any concept of ownership and rights to anything, beyond the level of forcibly defending possession of what you claim as your own, is an artificial concept created by agreement in society. It might makes sense to have different agreements relating to physical or knowledge-based commodities, but IP laws are no more inherently "unnatural" than laws about theft, trespass or any number of other things.
Patents require the holder to share the knowledge. The point is how you are allowed to use that knowledge during the time immediately following the grant of the patent.
Well... I agree with you, but you really come off as damned pretensious.
But this contradicts the very raison d'être of patents.
Patents are an exchange: in return for publishing the details of your research so that, in time, the whole world will benefit, you are granted an exclusive right to benefit from that research for a limited time. At the end of that time, your exclusivity stops, and the whole world can do with the information as they wish.
The alternative is that the big commercial R&D departments, academic researchers whose work is funded by industry, and others in a similar position would all try to keep their work as trade secrets. That would be the only way they could profit from it without aiding their competitors as well. Surely this approach would lead to more lost information than patents possibly can.
As with most IP regulation, the logic behind the current law is sound. The problems we have with some of it today is due to a very poor implementation, particularly in the US. If you took out the complex media monopolies who are fixing prices in spite of anti-competition laws, you'd get rid of most of the "problems with copyright". If you had competent people in the USPTO instead of people who are actively motivated to grant any patent no matter how absurd, then you wouldn't have patents used for infighting by big companies' legal departments, and the "problems with patents" are mostly gone too.
OK, I see your argument regarding the robbery analogy. It seems to me the problem here is that we have agreed no clear definition of what constitutes "making a copy" when the medium is electronic rather than physical.
To me, if we agree that downloading copyrighted material from a cracked system is copyright infringement, then downloading copyrighted material from a voluntary source must also be copyright infringement. The downloader is taking part in the copying process in either case.
The fact that in one case, there is a second crime being committed (cracking into the system to gain access to the material) seems to me to be independent of this. The fact that in the other, the source is offering the material voluntarily also seems independent.
Perhaps the most appropriate interpretation is that in each case, a copy is being made during the uploading/downloading process. In the cracking variation only the downloader is responsible for making the copy, while in the P2P case, both the uploader and the downloader are partly responsible. Thus in the first case, only the downloader should be held to be infringing copyright, while in the P2P case both parties should be. This interpretation seems to be a fair representation of what actually happens, and as far as I can tell is also a reasonable interpretation of the law on the subject, at least in the US and UK.
As others have pointed out, the above aren't strictly true. This doesn't exactly detract much from CiceroLove's point, though, which is that going after terms like this is the wrong battle to fight.
Then again, the original text by femto that started this article follows the standard "state opinion as fact" mantra. The law says that, under certain circumstances, intellect can be "owned" in a meaningful sense, and there are good reasons for that principle as has been discussed here numerous times before. If femto wants a phrase that implies that intellect cannot be owned, as he says, then it is he who is trying to come up with a misleading term to sway people's opinions away from the facts.
Perhaps those objecting would like the world to stop using "offensive" terms like "intellectual property" and "software theft", but these terms have been around for years, and while not strictly true in the physical sense, there certainly is an element of truth to them. If the best argument you've got for why these things are wrong is that the name is somewhat misleading then you really don't have much of a case at all.
Changing the terms "just because" is what leads to using "human resources" instead of the old-fashioned but perfectly acceptable "personnel" on the one hand, yet having "colleague announcements" instead of "staff announcements" over the tanoy in supermarkets on the other. (For those who didn't spot the irony there, consider whether each of these sounds more of less friendly than the other, and note that the answers are opposites.) The one thing they have in common is that they did away with perfectly good terms that have been in use for years, and replaced them with long-winded, irritating managementspeak.
In summary: if you don't like the ideas that terms like "intellectual property" represent, attack them on their merits (or not) and not because of the name someone happens to have given them.
I agree entirely that the act of cracking is independent of copyright violation, but stop and think about that for a minute. Here's my argument step-by-step.
If someone has done this and copyrighted material has been copied as a result, then someone has broken the copyright rules.
There are only two people who could logically be named as the person breaking the rules here: the person responsible for the system where the legitimate copy of the data resides, and the person cracking that system who wound up with an illegal copy. (Let's exclude carriers etc. for now as they aren't really relevant.)
Since the person whose system was cracked did not intend to make the material available it is unreasonable to claim that they breached copyright.
Thus the only person who logically remains is the person who cracked the system and wound up with the copy, and that person must be guilty of copyright infringement.
Do you agree with this argument? If not, what do you disagree with?
If you agree with my reasoning so far, let's assume for the sake of argument that the downloader could reasonably be expected to know that the material in question was subject to copyright. In that case, how are they in a different situation, either morally or legally, whether they download from a P2P site or from a site they've cracked? How is it that they have made the illegal copy in one case, but, as I understand your claim, the person from whom they downloaded made it in the other and the downloader has no responsibility in that situation?
Your point about robbery is interesting, but IMHO not directly comparable. In that case, a copy hasn't actually been made during the robbery; it already existed.
That was a pointless and ill-informed comment. India is the world's largest democracy, has a pretty well-educated population, has a stable economy compared to some in the West, and mostly has quite a high standard of living compared to many places in the world. Don't assume that because they don't drive around in snazzy US- or German-made cars, they are some third world backwater place.
In my experience, tech support that has been outsourced to places like India is usually very poor, and one of the things they are worst at. I've commented before on the relatively poor training they have compared to the West, and the fact that these people who get paid so much less to do the job than those in the US or Europe are also worth far less because they don't do it as well.
In general, however, outside of the knowledge-based hi-tech industries, there are far more constructive jobs in India than you appear to give them credit for. Why do you believe that Indians "scoop shit" any more than Americans or Europeans?
Yes, that was exactly my point. There was no blue screen. The system was screwed deeper than that in the particular cases I'm talking about, in one case with an outright reset, in the other effectively with a hang. We know exactly what caused the problem in both cases, and the dodgy driver and threading set-up code were both fixed as a result. My original point was correct, but for some reason I can't understand, a few of the people who replied telling me that I was being stupid and needed to switch off auto-reset now seem determined to tell me that I'm wrong and their explanation is the only one possible.
Congratulations, my friend, you've just been introduced to two vital concepts: managers, and why everyone else hates them. :-)
Yes, they were. We spent around two weeks diagnosing that particular problem, including speaking to the team who wrote the code in question. At the end of that time, we knew exactly what was causing the problem and how to fix it. You are once again making assumptions about the situation, when you don't have the knowledge to know whether they are correct.
That rather depends on whether one of the drivers in question was written by Microsoft and shipped as part of the OS, and the corresponding driver that shipped with an earlier OS didn't have the same critical bug, doesn't it?
Why, because you need me to admit that a horde of ACs who have read page one of the book know more than a team of professionals who spent two weeks working on exactly this problem and who read the whole manual several times while working out exactly what was wrong? You have no idea what you're talking about, so you'd like to me to give up and let you have the last word so you can feel better.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but we know exactly what the problem was, and a bug-fixed version of the driver in question was subsequently released as a result of our input.
The fact remains that my original contention -- that it is quite possible to screw even recent Windows OSes without blue screening along the way -- is sound. We did know about the automatic reset switch and it was one of the first things we checked, but I appreciate the people who were trying to be helpful by telling me about it in case I didn't know.
However, people like you who are trying to be clever by using "you got schooled", "Please", "It's probably best that you never respond to this", "n00b" (that was a great one in another reply), and other such things are simply showing that they have no idea what they're talking about. They have too much ego to admit that someone else might know more than them, and there was a possibility they hadn't considered.
Incidentally, before someone tries to write a witty reply about how I'm describing myself there, consider this: if the only possible explanation is that the auto-reset option was switched on, how is it that we managed to blue screen that particular PC at several other points during the development of that product, without it resetting automatically? Perhaps there's another secret option we didn't know about, maybe labelled "Blue screen sometimes, but randomly reset on others to annoy people on Slashdot"? Then again, maybe you're just wrong.
Proof by intimidation isn't going to work on someone who actually has the facts, sorry.
I suspect that many people in the tech industry wouldn't be physically capable of shovelling the brown stuff for eight hours a day. They have nowhere near the level of physical fitness required, and it would take months or years to develop it. However, because they've never done it, they assume they could if they wanted to.
Obviously there will be some who could, and you may well be one of them for all I know. But the way many office workers look down on manual labourers is really patronising at times. Many of them would "break", as you put it, within hours of starting a manual job.
<sigh> At least the other million people who assumed I didn't know what I was talking about and told me to switch off auto-restart had the sense to post their ill-informed and redundant advice anonymously.
There was no blue screen because critical faults were occurring at too high a privilege level, beyond the ability of the OS to catch. This is possible with certain device drivers, for example, if they screw up essential system resources. It's also possible for a Windows app to set the various priorities used in scheduling to levels so high that they actually outrank the UI code used, for example, to activate Task Manager and kill a runaway process. Thus while they don't actually blue screen the box, they are nevertheless effectively hanging the whole system.
If you're going to go calling people a dumbass, you really should do at least a little homework first. Better to leave your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt, eh?
No, sorry, I'm not misunderstanding anything. The hordes of ACs who all assume I'm incompetent and that I don't know about the auto-restart are the ones with the misunderstanding. :-(
Nope, sorry, it's perfectly possible to do everything I described with software alone.
Unfortunately, in a small company like ours, that simple isn't financially viable. Even if it were, not all of our PCs are used for the same purposes, so we wouldn't want them all to be the same, or even necessarily run the same basic software.
By the way, we develop software that ships on more than a dozen different platforms, including several flavours of Windows, several *nix variations, older non-UNIX'd MacOS versions and more. We're well aware of the strengths and limitations of these platforms relative to one another.
Several of my colleagues would disagree with you, from direct personal experience. For standard networked Dell boxes running Windows+Office and nothing else, sure. From personal experience, Win2K is generally more stable and the one they got right. But certainly for some machines, particularly those with any "unusual" hardware, it's quite common for NT4 to be more stable than 2000.
I'm sorry, you misunderstand me. There is no blue screen. The system either locks up or resets, immediately. This is rare with the better Windows versions, but quite possible technically, and happening with monotonous regularity on this particular system. Or did you think that highly privileged code was immune from bugs that screw up the state of the floating point unit, and device drivers never set threads to run at the dangerously high priorities allowed by the Windows API? ;-)
"I personally don't like it so it should be illegal for everyone" is not a very sensible way of making law.
Um... They do tell you when it expires. Microsoft announce the dates when they will stop supporting their major products, and have done for quite some time. Someone already posted the link in this thread. Look for the post "Primary link at Microsoft" by LinuxParanoid.
I'm not convinced this is a good thing. While I generally think MS got Win2K right (though not XP), several people in my office still explicitly request NT4 on new machines. One guy who works on my team is considering this now, after spending a week chasing a bug somewhere on his WinXP box that causes it to reset without warning when running some essential software. Sometimes, better the devil you know really is good advice.
Leaving aside the specifics of any given legal system for a moment, this argument has never made sense. If I cracked someone's system and copyright content that they legitimately held on it happened to wind up on my hard disk, would you argue that they had made the copy or that I had? (Clearly someone has, for a copy exists.) Thus I fail to see how whether or not the source of the material voluntarily offered it for copying has any bearing on whether or not the recipient is deemed to have made a copy.
I believe you are mistaken about UK law here. Run a search on Google for "UK law buying stolen goods". While nothing on a government site comes up in the first few links, several sites all basically side with my version. In fact, one of the earlier links deals specifically with your example of innocently buying a second-hand car that has been stolen.
You can't blame the end users for the sort of screw-ups we're talking about. There is little need for any web browser or word processor to provide scripting facilities that can affect data on my hard drive anyway. Even if the facilities are there, the problem is that "autoexec" scripts for WP documents, or automatically rendering HTML e-mail as if it were a web page, scripts included, allow the end user to run executable code when they wouldn't expect to be doing so.
And if you're going to talk about liabilities, you might start with relying on a "standard" such as MIME types that is violated by large numbers of content providers, and by the browser that dominates the market. Such a standard isn't really standard at all, is it?
I'm sorry, but your whole argument is just aiming at the wrong target.
In the UK, for example, copyright law does not convey certain legal rights that would be present in the US. You don't automatically have the right to make copies of things for personal use (e.g., copying a CD you keep at home onto tape to play in the car). There is very little concept of what US law calls "fair use", though there are a few exemptions. I'm not sure you even have any automatic right to make back-up copies of things, though I doubt anyone has ever been or would ever be successfully prosecuted for using their common sense in this way.
The related matter that first came to mind was physical theft, where if you come to possess an item of stolen property, however innocently, you will still have to return it, and to prove that you came to possess it without knowing it was stolen. Obviously the returning part doesn't apply to IP, but the need to prove that you came to have it without realising you shouldn't is directly comparable.
I'm sure I've read about a language where there's basically one integer type, which normally maps to a typical 32- or 64-bit value on current machines, but is subject to over/underflow tests and switches to an arbitrary precision mode dynamically. As I recall, its efficiency was comparable to an average compiled language today unless it flipped over, and obviously after flipping it got the right answer where other languages simply hit error conditions. I think the language was probably cited in a Slashdot article. Can anyone else remember reading about this?
Not sure how well the same approach would work for floating point, but if you can do it reasonably efficiently for integral types, I guess why not?
Bah, objects are just a poor man's closures. Or was it the other way around...
Either way, if the people I work with could make any of their objects function properly, it would make my debugging sessions much easier! ;-)
I've worked on a couple of projects where this is very important. One was writing control software for metrology equipment, industrial strength QA kit that measured manufactured parts down to fractions of a micron or even nanometres to make sure they were in spec. Another was a geometric modelling tool used in CAD applications and the like.
In neither case am I aware of any physical real world failure caused by a problem with the floating point calculations. You do have to be really careful with manipulating the numbers, though.
For example, the loss of significance when you subtract can be horrible if you've got two position vectors close together, and you're trying to calculate a translation vector from one to the other. The error in that translation vector can be enormous if the points you started with were very close: you might get only one or two significant figures, when the rest of your values have 15 or more. If you're interested in the direction of the vector, that can give you errors of +/- several degrees!
Inevitably, there are always going to be bugs in complex mathematical software, and I've seen plenty of wrong answers from programs like the above. Fortunately, it's normally possible to have checks and balances that at least identify and highlight inconsistencies so, in the worst case, at least nobody relies on them. You can also use ruthless automated testing procedures, which run zillions of calculations every night and flag the smallest changes in the results, so no-one accidentally breaks a verified algorithm with a change later. The combination makes it reasonably unlikely that any algorithm would fail catastrophically with the sort of consequences you're talking about.
The possibility is always there, of course, because programming is subject to human error. However, FWIW, I've worked on software that's used to design cars, and software that controls the QA machinery to make sure they're put together right, and I still drive one. :-)