Sigh. Pointing out the flaws in my argument is, indeed, a form of rebuttal. So far, that hasn't occurred. Look closely and you'll see that all that has been done is to argue about meaningless drivel, not any actual substantive concept. Why would I bother continuing that?
You used a propaganda term in an attempt to make copying seem unambiguously wrong. If you have a point that is correct or legitimate, you can make it using the correct words. I doubt you're even going to try that.
Please, englighten me - where did I use propaganda? I think you're twisting the meaning of the word to suit your own purposes.
If you have a point, make it. Don't keep on complaining about the words I'm using. Otherwise, yep, you're right - I'm not going to go any further. Feel free to say "I win", if you so desire.
Yes, he does. But the whole tone of the letter is abrasive, in an "I dare you" style.
I am tired of people who claim to speak for all geeks everywhere. It's insulting to me when you ascribe to me a set of ideas and principles with which I vehemently disagree.
Mr. Raymond, on the remote chance you read this, please don't claim to speak for all geeks everywhere, or claim "we all". You do not speak for me. This letter is anathema to many of my principles, and I do not wish to be included in this rabble.
"We" were not "absolutely unanimous against SOPA and PIPA". I will not "take it as (my) duty to ensure that you lose that battle again if you try to fight it again". "We" do not universally "think Big Entertainment is largely run by liars and thieves". And I personally will never "side with the content pirates as the lesser of the two evils" because I see that as cheating, as a cop out, and as wrong.
You may disagree with me, as may many people on Slashdot. Perhaps I am even an insigificant minority in the world of engineers and geeks. So be it. But please don't claim to speak for me when you do not, and especially when you espouse concepts which I loathe. That is more arrogant than anything I see coming from the media companies.
Semantics is the meaning of words. How can correctly defining words invalidate an argument?
It doesn't. But aruging about the meaning of words is avoiding making any cogent argument.
When I see someone complaining about "arguing on semantics" it's usually because they've used an incorrect word, either through ignorance or as propaganda, and can't bring themselves to admit they are wrong. After all, if their point was correct as stated, they could simply explain it.
My point is that if the person rebutting me has a point that is correct or legitimate, they should make that point instead of taking refuge in arguing about the meanings of words.
As for your sociopathy comment, someone disagreeing with you about what is wrong is not necessarily a sociopath.
Of course not. Someone who argues that they can do anything they like because it feels good and they don't care if society says it's wrong, however, is verging on being the definition of a sociopath.
At all? So someone who decides to murder a complete stranger, someone just riding the bus and reading their book, who is doing nothing other than sitting there, is not violating any morals in your opinion?
Sadly, Slashdot is a very piracy-friendly forum. There are vast numbers of people here with that entitlement complex, whether it be for free music, free movies, cheap broadband that is so unrealistically reduced as to be a cost for the provider, or anything else that (i) they want, and (ii) they don't want to adhere to laws of economics.
The other part (which the GP obliquely touched on without calling it this) is Supply Chain Management theory. If you don't know anything about SCM, it's a lot more mathematical and complicated than you might imagine.
this is Facebook we're talking about, so privacy usually has a different meaning to them
Sigh. The article says it better than I can:
It's the nature of the overexposed age that we make much more information about ourselves readily available and easily discoverable
Facebook can't share anything you don't put on there.
It's also worth noting the article talks a fair bit about how they push back and get into fights when they think someone's being too aggressive. (On the flip side, they have their own priorities - they get very uptight about acitivty that is fraudulent or endangering a child.)
Okay, fine. Let's go your way - you can buy both these blockbuster movies and your $2.16 McDonald's burrito/McDouble combinations for the same price as you pay for your meal at D'Arcy's. But you're missing the point (deliberately, I assume).
No, if there were no piracy whatever they'd come up with some other bogus "reason."
Possibly. But we'll never know, will we? The amount of piracy going on gives them all the ammunition they need. The end result is still that my experience on the web is getting rapidly choked because a bunch of geeks decide they're above the law.
...you'll find a whole bunch of stuff well under $20. Two of the most popular releases from 2010 - The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Two-Disc Special Edition) is $7.78 for the two-disc set and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is $4.99. (In fact, it was that price even before December - I bought it as a Christmas present.) New releases are going to be more expensive - you can't blame a for-profit industry from trying to make a bit more money from those people who've gotta have stuff now and are willing to pay a premium instead of waiting six months, can you?
I know people love to whine about how over-priced movies are, and how that justifies your piracy, but seriously, these are two block busters from 2010 for the price of a McDonald's meal. What's it going to take to stop you pirating this stuff?
As I commented in a previous story, people are bringing this on themselves, and also ruining the internet for the innocent bystanders like me.
By FAR the biggest need for drugs we have is for new antibiotics.
Err, no.
Where is our war on antibiotic resistant bugs?
The problem is we've thrown antibiotics at everything, in excess, for far too long. Why are there so many antibiotic resistant bugs? Because we've used antibiotics so much that it's been easy for bugs to adapt. We abused them.
Back on topic...this guy explains why medicines are so expensive. Producing a little pill isn't that hard - researching, developing, and failing many more times than you succeed, and taking the immense risk in today's litigious climate, is insane.
Starting your own computer consulting business is highly risky (as is starting any business), and it's certainly something that's been discussed on these pages many times, so readers should be familiar with just how horribly expensive and stressful it is. Now multiply that by some dreadfully huge number to take into account all the factors listed in that post I linked to. There's nothing easy or trivial about it.
And this guy points out why most/. posters won't get that, ever.
Not strictly the same - talking trademarks, not copyright - but as I recall the reason Intel switched to a name "Pentium" after a string of processors labeled with numbers (486, 386, 286, etc.) was because it was ruled they couldn't trademark or protect a number.
You're lucky. I signed up for a GMail account in 2009 (so I could use Google Docs with some other people on a small project). Used it for two weeks while we were on the project, never logged in since. I hardly ever use any Google apps - I don't use their search, I don't use their Maps, I don't use GMail, blah blah blah.
A few months ago I read about how to check your Google history, went in out of sheer curiosity, total shock at just how much stuff they'd collected on me. Deleted it and told myself I really wasn't paranoid after all.
I don't know how you got away with it, but I can tell you they had a huge amount of info about me, and I somewhat actively avoid Google services. I am generally pretty blase about online tracking and the like - but that one gave me a jolt.
Funnily enough, both of them seem to have my address, for what it's worth.
But even if I fix my issue, how many other problems are there around my area? Which will remain unfixed? Which still makes the navigation useless? I can't wait for everyone else to update their stuff.
I have multiple choices. MapQuest was updated years ago. So was Bing Maps. Yahoo Maps. Every mapping program I've tried, except for Google Maps. I didn't have to do anything to let them know I exist. It took a year, maybe two - but that I expect.
Google is behind the times for this, and I just don't care enough about them to be altruistic and help them catch up when I can use another service. Left behind by the competition and they'll still data mine every direction I seek and link it to my search results as well as hijack my Safari browsing for good measure - why do I want to use them, again?
I have another question to the anonymous devloper: Have you considered NOT being an asshole about it?
Ah, good, let's start off with a well-reasoned response.
This guy is part-owner of a small company. That means he's creating jobs. He's giving people something worthwhile to do. They're not yet profitable - that always happens with small companies, but he's plugging away. That means he's dedicated, motivated, hard-working, and again - providing jobs for other people.
In order to build up that brand loyalty which you assume is so easy, he needs to stay afloat at least long enough to get sufficient traction. In the real world, Junior, piracy doesnt just hurt big behemoth corporations. It also hurts the small business owner who's just trying to make a buck and help out some other guys. (What are you doing to provide jobs?)
And you dare to call him an asshole. When you are perfectly content with the idea of people stealing the results of his hard efforts and potentially driving a small business into the ground. Do you want the corporations to be the only ones who have a presence in the marketplace? What an asshole.
I didn't know it could do this. That's because after waiting seven YEARS for my street to show up on Google Maps correctly, I've long since given up using their sodding software.
Every other mapping app has had my street listed for ages. Google Maps is the only one that still can't find my address.
You do not realize just how many markets you're writing off here.
At the niche levels (e.g. something highly specialized, and/or that meets regulatory requirements), a company is paying to have the expert support and business knowledge. The company will be able to issue a patch quickly when you find a new scenario. They have a close relationship with the regulatory body in question. The GUI may be secondary to ensuring that the correct workflows are encapsulated within the system - if a number of use cases are missing or incomplete, the lawyers won't care how pretty it is.
Not that such conditions would stop most others from stealing it outright.
Therein lies the problem. There are other comments saying the guy needs to build up a solid customer base, needs to build up a reputation, etc. All the responses you'd expect from a piracy-friendly forum such as/. The submitter (to me, at least) comes across as someone who wants to do the best and most customer friendly thing. But getting to that point takes a lot of time and money. Piracy makes it awfully difficult to get to that point. It really could end up killing the next great genius idea.
But hey, you're okay - at least you get your stuff for free, right? And there's no cost to anyone, because you wouldn't have bought it in any case. Screw this guy if he goes bankrupt...
The first thing I did when I read this article was to time my iPhone. It's a corporate device, so has mandatory password protection. From off to being able to enter the password is 45 seconds.
Thank goodness it isn't a Blackberry. My old phone (as in early 2011) took something like 15 minutes to come up if I ever removed the battery (which occasionally I had to do because it crashed unrecoverably).
Splash screens were, as other posters say, a way to provide feedback that something was happening. Back in the days of ZX81 and Sinclair Spectrum games loading from tape, some clever designers came up with the idea of a very quick-to-load game that came up within a minute. You could then play that mini-game while the rest of the real game finished loading off of tape.
The submission starts off with the vague "Companies can..." and then makes a couple of similarly tenuous suppositions-masquerading-as-fact. No linked article linked about how this is a growing trend, or even a blog post from someone rampaging that their employer has just instituted this.
PMP is a globally recognized certification, true. And yes, experience is an asset, if it's in project management.
Managing software development projects is way easier than actually doing the development work yourself.
1. No, it's not. 2. If you've spent 20 years as a programmer and suddenly switch to an entirely different role, whatever that role might be, I doubt you're going to find it significantly easier than what you've spent two decades practicing and perfecting. 2a. But lots of people think it's easier. Until they try it. 3. No, it's not.
look like a hero when your projects are completed in less time than you originally budgeted
If this happens, yes, you'll look like a hero. It's really difficult.
A lot of people also assume that they can inflate the cost estimates, come in way under budget, and look like a super hero. Not necessarily. In many companies, what you've effectively done is tie up hundreds of thousands of dollars (if it's a small project. Millions or tens of millions if it's medium to large) that could've been used to fund another project that got killed last year because it didn't fit in the budget.
Project management can be a lot of fun and very rewarding, but you have different kinds of stress to deal with. Developers who go all prima donna on you. Buggy code. Scope creep. (That's the killer.) Inaccurate requirements. Changing requirements (because the regulatory requirements governing your industry changed). SMEs who turn out to be horribly wrong on their estimated work breakdown structure. Stakeholders who argue. Stakeholders who can't clearly define what they want. Vendors who suck so badly that you end up suing them. Etc.
Not meaning to put anyone off. But honestly, I've seen a lot of techs who look at project managers and think they have it easy, and then get a nasty shock when they try it themselves.
MSDN blogs are often very technically detailed, written by people who know this stuff from the inside, and if it's about a topic that's of general computing interest then it seems that's a good thing. And the blog in question is chock full of some really good detailed stuff about how they're doing performance testing, reasons why the lab is architected the way it is, detailed graphics on how they measure performance, how they analyze it...on and on.
Frankly, this seems more akin to old Slashdot than a lot of the nonsense we see here today. (That story the other day about a girl sent home from school because her lunch wasn't healthy, and then quickly called into question over what happened? Really? What was that topic even doing on Slashdot in the first place?) Whatever you think about Microsoft, having this extremely detailed look into how one of the world's biggest software vendors (or are they the biggest now?) goes about performance testing, and how they ensure consistent results, should be really, really interesting to anyone involved in IT.
Your comments about liquidity make me think you don't fully understand how banking works. Actually, it makes me think you have close to zero idea about how banking works. No liquidity = everything stops happening. Everything. Businesses shut down.
best thing about the "pirates" is that they are extremely resourceful and have many, many different outlets to get their files.
Also the worst thing. Someone has a sense of entitlement - "I don't want to pay for this, so instead of doing without or being responsible I'll just take it" - and so they make more and more run-arounds just so they can get their stuff for free.
Utterly predictable response - media gets very heavy and starts going after everything.
Net result for me, an innocent bystander who doesn't pirate stuff, because, you know, it's wrong - the internet gets more rules and becomes less useful.
So thanks a lot, pirates. (And I don't care if you call yourself a pirate, or insist it's copyright infringement, or whatever. That's all semantic nonsense. It's still wrong, it's still illegal, and it's still immoral. So stop arguing over what label you want to be applied to you.) You're ruining the internet for me.
What on earth do you expect the reactions of the media giants to be? Just roll over, shrug their shoulders, and say "oh well"? All the moaning about SOPA and whatever else - you brought it on yourselves and you deserve it, but you also brought it on everyone else. So thanks a lot. Jerks.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. Pointing out the flaws in my argument is, indeed, a form of rebuttal. So far, that hasn't occurred. Look closely and you'll see that all that has been done is to argue about meaningless drivel, not any actual substantive concept. Why would I bother continuing that?
You used a propaganda term in an attempt to make copying seem unambiguously wrong. If you have a point that is correct or legitimate, you can make it using the correct words. I doubt you're even going to try that.
Please, englighten me - where did I use propaganda? I think you're twisting the meaning of the word to suit your own purposes.
If you have a point, make it. Don't keep on complaining about the words I'm using. Otherwise, yep, you're right - I'm not going to go any further. Feel free to say "I win", if you so desire.
Yes, he does. But the whole tone of the letter is abrasive, in an "I dare you" style.
I am tired of people who claim to speak for all geeks everywhere. It's insulting to me when you ascribe to me a set of ideas and principles with which I vehemently disagree.
Mr. Raymond, on the remote chance you read this, please don't claim to speak for all geeks everywhere, or claim "we all". You do not speak for me. This letter is anathema to many of my principles, and I do not wish to be included in this rabble.
"We" were not "absolutely unanimous against SOPA and PIPA". I will not "take it as (my) duty to ensure that you lose that battle again if you try to fight it again". "We" do not universally "think Big Entertainment is largely run by liars and thieves". And I personally will never "side with the content pirates as the lesser of the two evils" because I see that as cheating, as a cop out, and as wrong.
You may disagree with me, as may many people on Slashdot. Perhaps I am even an insigificant minority in the world of engineers and geeks. So be it. But please don't claim to speak for me when you do not, and especially when you espouse concepts which I loathe. That is more arrogant than anything I see coming from the media companies.
Let me have my freedom.
Semantics is the meaning of words. How can correctly defining words invalidate an argument?
It doesn't. But aruging about the meaning of words is avoiding making any cogent argument.
When I see someone complaining about "arguing on semantics" it's usually because they've used an incorrect word, either through ignorance or as propaganda, and can't bring themselves to admit they are wrong. After all, if their point was correct as stated, they could simply explain it.
My point is that if the person rebutting me has a point that is correct or legitimate, they should make that point instead of taking refuge in arguing about the meanings of words.
As for your sociopathy comment, someone disagreeing with you about what is wrong is not necessarily a sociopath.
Of course not. Someone who argues that they can do anything they like because it feels good and they don't care if society says it's wrong, however, is verging on being the definition of a sociopath.
I just don't believe in absolute morals
At all? So someone who decides to murder a complete stranger, someone just riding the bus and reading their book, who is doing nothing other than sitting there, is not violating any morals in your opinion?
Sadly, Slashdot is a very piracy-friendly forum. There are vast numbers of people here with that entitlement complex, whether it be for free music, free movies, cheap broadband that is so unrealistically reduced as to be a cost for the provider, or anything else that (i) they want, and (ii) they don't want to adhere to laws of economics.
I.e. a simple hedging strategy.
The other part (which the GP obliquely touched on without calling it this) is Supply Chain Management theory. If you don't know anything about SCM, it's a lot more mathematical and complicated than you might imagine.
Yeah, I think stealing stuff is pretty bad because the one that had their property stolen loses it.
Copying, on the other hand...
When I see someone reduced to arguing on semantics ("what is stealing?") then I know they have no legitimate justification.
It's quite a different situation if a person doesn't believe that what they're doing is wrong to begin with.
Justification of sociopathy. Good one. That's pretty weak.
this is Facebook we're talking about, so privacy usually has a different meaning to them
Sigh. The article says it better than I can:
It's the nature of the overexposed age that we make much more information about ourselves readily available and easily discoverable
Facebook can't share anything you don't put on there.
It's also worth noting the article talks a fair bit about how they push back and get into fights when they think someone's being too aggressive. (On the flip side, they have their own priorities - they get very uptight about acitivty that is fraudulent or endangering a child.)
Nicely said. Two of the wisest sentences I've read on /. in a long time.
Okay, fine. Let's go your way - you can buy both these blockbuster movies and your $2.16 McDonald's burrito/McDouble combinations for the same price as you pay for your meal at D'Arcy's. But you're missing the point (deliberately, I assume).
No, if there were no piracy whatever they'd come up with some other bogus "reason."
Possibly. But we'll never know, will we? The amount of piracy going on gives them all the ammunition they need. The end result is still that my experience on the web is getting rapidly choked because a bunch of geeks decide they're above the law.
I'd still rather pay 10c for a fast and simple criminal service that treats me with respect
Right. Because stealing stuff shows immense levels of respect to the distributors and artists.
I'm showing my age, I know, but I still believe two wrongs don't make a right.
...you'll find a whole bunch of stuff well under $20. Two of the most popular releases from 2010 - The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Two-Disc Special Edition) is $7.78 for the two-disc set and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is $4.99. (In fact, it was that price even before December - I bought it as a Christmas present.) New releases are going to be more expensive - you can't blame a for-profit industry from trying to make a bit more money from those people who've gotta have stuff now and are willing to pay a premium instead of waiting six months, can you?
I know people love to whine about how over-priced movies are, and how that justifies your piracy, but seriously, these are two block busters from 2010 for the price of a McDonald's meal. What's it going to take to stop you pirating this stuff?
As I commented in a previous story, people are bringing this on themselves, and also ruining the internet for the innocent bystanders like me.
By FAR the biggest need for drugs we have is for new antibiotics.
Err, no.
Where is our war on antibiotic resistant bugs?
The problem is we've thrown antibiotics at everything, in excess, for far too long. Why are there so many antibiotic resistant bugs? Because we've used antibiotics so much that it's been easy for bugs to adapt. We abused them.
Back on topic...this guy explains why medicines are so expensive. Producing a little pill isn't that hard - researching, developing, and failing many more times than you succeed, and taking the immense risk in today's litigious climate, is insane.
Starting your own computer consulting business is highly risky (as is starting any business), and it's certainly something that's been discussed on these pages many times, so readers should be familiar with just how horribly expensive and stressful it is. Now multiply that by some dreadfully huge number to take into account all the factors listed in that post I linked to. There's nothing easy or trivial about it.
And this guy points out why most /. posters won't get that, ever.
Not strictly the same - talking trademarks, not copyright - but as I recall the reason Intel switched to a name "Pentium" after a string of processors labeled with numbers (486, 386, 286, etc.) was because it was ruled they couldn't trademark or protect a number.
You're lucky. I signed up for a GMail account in 2009 (so I could use Google Docs with some other people on a small project). Used it for two weeks while we were on the project, never logged in since. I hardly ever use any Google apps - I don't use their search, I don't use their Maps, I don't use GMail, blah blah blah.
A few months ago I read about how to check your Google history, went in out of sheer curiosity, total shock at just how much stuff they'd collected on me. Deleted it and told myself I really wasn't paranoid after all.
I don't know how you got away with it, but I can tell you they had a huge amount of info about me, and I somewhat actively avoid Google services. I am generally pretty blase about online tracking and the like - but that one gave me a jolt.
Funnily enough, both of them seem to have my address, for what it's worth.
But even if I fix my issue, how many other problems are there around my area? Which will remain unfixed? Which still makes the navigation useless? I can't wait for everyone else to update their stuff.
I have multiple choices. MapQuest was updated years ago. So was Bing Maps. Yahoo Maps. Every mapping program I've tried, except for Google Maps. I didn't have to do anything to let them know I exist. It took a year, maybe two - but that I expect.
Google is behind the times for this, and I just don't care enough about them to be altruistic and help them catch up when I can use another service. Left behind by the competition and they'll still data mine every direction I seek and link it to my search results as well as hijack my Safari browsing for good measure - why do I want to use them, again?
I have another question to the anonymous devloper: Have you considered NOT being an asshole about it?
Ah, good, let's start off with a well-reasoned response.
This guy is part-owner of a small company. That means he's creating jobs. He's giving people something worthwhile to do. They're not yet profitable - that always happens with small companies, but he's plugging away. That means he's dedicated, motivated, hard-working, and again - providing jobs for other people.
In order to build up that brand loyalty which you assume is so easy, he needs to stay afloat at least long enough to get sufficient traction. In the real world, Junior, piracy doesnt just hurt big behemoth corporations. It also hurts the small business owner who's just trying to make a buck and help out some other guys. (What are you doing to provide jobs?)
And you dare to call him an asshole. When you are perfectly content with the idea of people stealing the results of his hard efforts and potentially driving a small business into the ground. Do you want the corporations to be the only ones who have a presence in the marketplace? What an asshole.
I didn't know it could do this. That's because after waiting seven YEARS for my street to show up on Google Maps correctly, I've long since given up using their sodding software.
Every other mapping app has had my street listed for ages. Google Maps is the only one that still can't find my address.
You do not realize just how many markets you're writing off here.
At the niche levels (e.g. something highly specialized, and/or that meets regulatory requirements), a company is paying to have the expert support and business knowledge. The company will be able to issue a patch quickly when you find a new scenario. They have a close relationship with the regulatory body in question. The GUI may be secondary to ensuring that the correct workflows are encapsulated within the system - if a number of use cases are missing or incomplete, the lawyers won't care how pretty it is.
Not that such conditions would stop most others from stealing it outright.
Therein lies the problem. There are other comments saying the guy needs to build up a solid customer base, needs to build up a reputation, etc. All the responses you'd expect from a piracy-friendly forum such as /. The submitter (to me, at least) comes across as someone who wants to do the best and most customer friendly thing. But getting to that point takes a lot of time and money. Piracy makes it awfully difficult to get to that point. It really could end up killing the next great genius idea.
But hey, you're okay - at least you get your stuff for free, right? And there's no cost to anyone, because you wouldn't have bought it in any case. Screw this guy if he goes bankrupt...
The first thing I did when I read this article was to time my iPhone. It's a corporate device, so has mandatory password protection. From off to being able to enter the password is 45 seconds.
Thank goodness it isn't a Blackberry. My old phone (as in early 2011) took something like 15 minutes to come up if I ever removed the battery (which occasionally I had to do because it crashed unrecoverably).
Splash screens were, as other posters say, a way to provide feedback that something was happening. Back in the days of ZX81 and Sinclair Spectrum games loading from tape, some clever designers came up with the idea of a very quick-to-load game that came up within a minute. You could then play that mini-game while the rest of the real game finished loading off of tape.
Agreed...this question.
The submission starts off with the vague "Companies can..." and then makes a couple of similarly tenuous suppositions-masquerading-as-fact. No linked article linked about how this is a growing trend, or even a blog post from someone rampaging that their employer has just instituted this.
Slow news day, I guess?
PMP is a globally recognized certification, true. And yes, experience is an asset, if it's in project management.
Managing software development projects is way easier than actually doing the development work yourself.
1. No, it's not.
2. If you've spent 20 years as a programmer and suddenly switch to an entirely different role, whatever that role might be, I doubt you're going to find it significantly easier than what you've spent two decades practicing and perfecting.
2a. But lots of people think it's easier. Until they try it.
3. No, it's not.
look like a hero when your projects are completed in less time than you originally budgeted
If this happens, yes, you'll look like a hero. It's really difficult.
A lot of people also assume that they can inflate the cost estimates, come in way under budget, and look like a super hero. Not necessarily. In many companies, what you've effectively done is tie up hundreds of thousands of dollars (if it's a small project. Millions or tens of millions if it's medium to large) that could've been used to fund another project that got killed last year because it didn't fit in the budget.
Project management can be a lot of fun and very rewarding, but you have different kinds of stress to deal with. Developers who go all prima donna on you. Buggy code. Scope creep. (That's the killer.) Inaccurate requirements. Changing requirements (because the regulatory requirements governing your industry changed). SMEs who turn out to be horribly wrong on their estimated work breakdown structure. Stakeholders who argue. Stakeholders who can't clearly define what they want. Vendors who suck so badly that you end up suing them. Etc.
Not meaning to put anyone off. But honestly, I've seen a lot of techs who look at project managers and think they have it easy, and then get a nasty shock when they try it themselves.
MSDN blogs are often very technically detailed, written by people who know this stuff from the inside, and if it's about a topic that's of general computing interest then it seems that's a good thing. And the blog in question is chock full of some really good detailed stuff about how they're doing performance testing, reasons why the lab is architected the way it is, detailed graphics on how they measure performance, how they analyze it...on and on.
Frankly, this seems more akin to old Slashdot than a lot of the nonsense we see here today. (That story the other day about a girl sent home from school because her lunch wasn't healthy, and then quickly called into question over what happened? Really? What was that topic even doing on Slashdot in the first place?) Whatever you think about Microsoft, having this extremely detailed look into how one of the world's biggest software vendors (or are they the biggest now?) goes about performance testing, and how they ensure consistent results, should be really, really interesting to anyone involved in IT.
Your comments about liquidity make me think you don't fully understand how banking works. Actually, it makes me think you have close to zero idea about how banking works. No liquidity = everything stops happening. Everything. Businesses shut down.
best thing about the "pirates" is that they are extremely resourceful and have many, many different outlets to get their files.
Also the worst thing. Someone has a sense of entitlement - "I don't want to pay for this, so instead of doing without or being responsible I'll just take it" - and so they make more and more run-arounds just so they can get their stuff for free.
Utterly predictable response - media gets very heavy and starts going after everything.
Net result for me, an innocent bystander who doesn't pirate stuff, because, you know, it's wrong - the internet gets more rules and becomes less useful.
So thanks a lot, pirates. (And I don't care if you call yourself a pirate, or insist it's copyright infringement, or whatever. That's all semantic nonsense. It's still wrong, it's still illegal, and it's still immoral. So stop arguing over what label you want to be applied to you.) You're ruining the internet for me.
What on earth do you expect the reactions of the media giants to be? Just roll over, shrug their shoulders, and say "oh well"? All the moaning about SOPA and whatever else - you brought it on yourselves and you deserve it, but you also brought it on everyone else. So thanks a lot. Jerks.