Well crap. Isn't there a law against this??? I mean really - guys get grief all the time for cheating, looking at other women, etc - but this woman is clearly not only being unfaithful, but she'll pulling the same stunts, ruining all of these mens' lives.
What he is saying is that Joe Schmo with $20 who would not even have bothered to download the app if it weren't cracked still spends the $20. Copyright infringement, as much as you may want it to be, is not theft. He has not deprived them of the ability to sell that item to someone else. If he had done the reverse - stolen 4 mochas from Starbucks then spent the $20 on iTunes, then there is a net loss - it's less than $20 because:
1. The money changed hands. 2. There was a cost involved in selling the mochas, and those mochas are no longer available to be sold.
There is a distinct difference between the two. Like it or not, it's not theft. As long as people keep propping up the issue using incorrect terms like "piracy", "theft", and "stealing", the core issue will never be dealt with, and that is how copyright laws need to change to address current issues and standards.
You have 2 issues here - a legal one and an ethical one. If I download a cracked game, the person that cracked the game and the person providing the download are guilty of federal offenses. I myself may or may not be guilty depending upon fair use doctrine. Is what I did unethical?
THAT is what comes up for debate. If I downloaded it to try the software out because there was no demo available, I don't think so. You may think differently. Ethics are convoluted things.
Stomping up and down, screaming, yelling "THIEF!" and saying it's wrong doesn't address the fact that you think it is wrong, but the wrong end of the transaction is illegal.
Point 5 seems simple enough - no tyranny required.
Nice the application in the foreground to have high priority, renice everything not in the foreground behind it. Problem averted.
Am I missing something? I know that doesn't address RAM, but if one wanted to, they could load a small memory management daemon that matches RAM/swap use to the current nice states. Whatever is in the foreground can have physical memory, everything else goes to swap unless physical happens to be free and not in use.
I know there's at least one open source project that does what OSX does with it's.app bundles, but I'm really surprised that the.app way of packaging applications for drag-and-drop use hasn't caught on with the rest of the Unix-like OS community. The only reason I can think of off-hand is the architecture concerns - x86 vs x86-64 vs ppc vs arm, etc, but we already live with this today using things like apt and yum. Disk space is cheap, and largely, so is bandwidth. I really don't mind having 10 copies of a library so long as they're known to work with whatever version of application x I have, but not screw with application y. For userland applications, it would completely obliterate the concern for dependencies. The downside of course is that instead of `aptitude update && aptitude upgrade` going through and updating *everything* for you, you now have to either have your applications phoning home to check for new versions or the user has to keep up with the latest version themselves (a la VersionTracker for OSX).
I prefer unix personally, and all of my machines are some flavor of it - but man it would push adoption if applications where able to be installed by simply downloading, drag-and-drop. Either that or have it possible via a link to launch Synaptic and start the installation from the program's website. For the user's part, you've now actually made installation *easier* than Windows but the steps involved are similar.
Actually - that latter idea, has it already been implemented? If not, I need to go submit some enhancement requests.:P
And why on earth does OpenAFS never get a sniff? I know it's a pain to set up, but I would have figured by now that many would have taken it and run with it.
I have long boycotted EA - anything they make I won't buy, period. They mistreat their workforce, they use business practices that are borderline illegal to illegal (not paying aged football players for their rights and going around them), to just plain evil - like buying the exclusive rights to just about every kind of american football, and to the ESPN name just so they wouldn't have to compete with Visual Concepts/TakeTwo on Madden, after a sound trouncing from NFL2K5, then having the gall to have a shareholders meeting where the CEO says "we have to make sure this is not repeatable" about All-Pro Football 2K8 - essentially then making sure that VC/T2 can't resign those legends to do 2K9/2K10 (whichever release they managed to hit).
Enough is enough already.
It's getting more and more difficult to boycott them though. Not because they're making better titles, but because they own or are buying up just about everyone. Rock Band as their name slapped on it. Brutal Legend. I mean COME ON. They get their cut just about everywhere. BOOM BLOX. Freaking Boom Blox.
Thank you! Disclosure is happening - just in a way that proceeds with caution. If they said outright that it had to be dismissed and didn't say why *at all*, I'd be bothered. The judge is being told why. He can still say that the case will proceed.
If you're running what claims to be Windows 7, open a command prompt and run `winver`.
It is Windows 6.1. In other words, a dot release of Vista. The actual Windows 7 that was talked about after Vista was released was the complete re-write you're referring to, however after Vista bombed, they re-skinned Vista and touted it as Windows 7. Make no mistake, you all bought the same thing as the mac users going from 10.5 to 10.6. It's not a whole new OS - it's the same old OS shipping with a new skin, and few new minor updates. Nothing more, nothing less. The whole thing is a ploy to finally get people to move off of XP. If it succeeds, it's the ultimate example of sheeple-ship.
1. I have done the "try before you buy" via piracy and then bought. Not all of them, only the good ones.
2. See the first point.:P
One developer does not give you a good cross-section, because if it's not a good game, of COURSE no one will buy if after trying it.
Not saying that the game in question is bad, but it would make sense. I've "tried" about 10 different apps, and I bought 3 of them. The others are no longer on my phone.
So - which way is it? Does he love Vista or hate it? Makes no sense...
(bear in mind, I don't differentiate Vista from 7 any more than I differentiate 2000 from XP - they're the same OS at the core. Some security updates and minor changes, but the same OS)
Heh - as a very tangentially related item, am I the only one that when starting at a new business runs hijackthis to hunt down any and all background processes and kill them off if I don't explicity want it running?
Half the time there's something there. Be it malware, spyware in the sense that the boss wants to spy on you, or some other such nonsense (every ad-bar you can imagine).
Thankfully my current employer allows me to use Ubuntu on my desktop, but it helps that I'm the senior unix engineer. I've also owned my own company and my primary laptop has been a mac for almost 8 years now. But I swear - Windows machines are EVIL. Too many things hiding themselves away in the registry, as services, etc. I'll get the old "but it's not your machine" blah blah blah, but really. When I find a subversive VNC server that doesn't show up in the taskbar or systray - it's getting killed off. Sure, it *could* be for the benefit of IT to do remote support (unlikely that I'd ever call for it), and there's always RDP for that. You want to watch what I'm doing on that machine, come watch. Don't expect to be able to spy on me. If you have other employees that are okay with it, or are too ignorant to stop it, fine. Not me. You want to terminate me? Your call - but regardless of whether it's your machine or not, whether there's any "implied" sense of privacy in the workplace or not, I put my foot down there.
Then again, I also ssh -D (portnum) home.dom, use Firefox, tunnel over socks, and then go to about:config and set DNS to resolve via socks too. You won't be seeing my surfing habits or even my dns lookups. Again - you want to fire me over it, your call. So far no one has said boo. I do my job, and I do good work./rant over.
Y'know, I hadn't even thought about that. I'm just on the boderline between generations of users to where I learned to type on an electric keyboard, not a computer. You're right about boldface typing. I had completely forgotten about it. We were taught to type all-caps, then back up and typeover again, providing all-cap bolded text.
Well what do you propose? Cross platform GUI is always a thorn in a developer's side. Web browsers that conform to CSS and JavaScript are the most reliable fix unless you really want to do everything as a Flash app (not truly cross-platform in the sense that every platform can have it), or as a Java applet (see my argument about Flash).
It is an absolute crime that no one worked to perfect a synthesized version of Majelle Barrett-Roddenberry's voice prior to her demise. Should should have been the voice of all computers henceforth.:(
Slashdot Mirror
What part of 18% did you not understand? :P
Heck, I'd like to get my hands on one of those card skimmers they have hooked to iPod touches in the apple store! Dang the evil you could do...
Well crap. Isn't there a law against this??? I mean really - guys get grief all the time for cheating, looking at other women, etc - but this woman is clearly not only being unfaithful, but she'll pulling the same stunts, ruining all of these mens' lives.
The insanity must end!
T-Mobile is very much inverse. Not-so-great coverage and actual service, but customer service itself has been nothing but great.
What he is saying is that Joe Schmo with $20 who would not even have bothered to download the app if it weren't cracked still spends the $20. Copyright infringement, as much as you may want it to be, is not theft. He has not deprived them of the ability to sell that item to someone else. If he had done the reverse - stolen 4 mochas from Starbucks then spent the $20 on iTunes, then there is a net loss - it's less than $20 because:
1. The money changed hands.
2. There was a cost involved in selling the mochas, and those mochas are no longer available to be sold.
There is a distinct difference between the two. Like it or not, it's not theft. As long as people keep propping up the issue using incorrect terms like "piracy", "theft", and "stealing", the core issue will never be dealt with, and that is how copyright laws need to change to address current issues and standards.
You have 2 issues here - a legal one and an ethical one. If I download a cracked game, the person that cracked the game and the person providing the download are guilty of federal offenses. I myself may or may not be guilty depending upon fair use doctrine. Is what I did unethical?
THAT is what comes up for debate. If I downloaded it to try the software out because there was no demo available, I don't think so. You may think differently. Ethics are convoluted things.
Stomping up and down, screaming, yelling "THIEF!" and saying it's wrong doesn't address the fact that you think it is wrong, but the wrong end of the transaction is illegal.
Why do all hybrid vehicles come in the form of Gasoline / Battery ?
Why is it that there is no hybrid vehicle that is in the form of Diesel / Battery ?
Can anyone comment on why we still have such awful verbal 'ticks' in use around here? *shudder*
Point 5 seems simple enough - no tyranny required.
Nice the application in the foreground to have high priority, renice everything not in the foreground behind it. Problem averted.
Am I missing something? I know that doesn't address RAM, but if one wanted to, they could load a small memory management daemon that matches RAM/swap use to the current nice states. Whatever is in the foreground can have physical memory, everything else goes to swap unless physical happens to be free and not in use.
I know there's at least one open source project that does what OSX does with it's .app bundles, but I'm really surprised that the .app way of packaging applications for drag-and-drop use hasn't caught on with the rest of the Unix-like OS community. The only reason I can think of off-hand is the architecture concerns - x86 vs x86-64 vs ppc vs arm, etc, but we already live with this today using things like apt and yum. Disk space is cheap, and largely, so is bandwidth. I really don't mind having 10 copies of a library so long as they're known to work with whatever version of application x I have, but not screw with application y. For userland applications, it would completely obliterate the concern for dependencies. The downside of course is that instead of `aptitude update && aptitude upgrade` going through and updating *everything* for you, you now have to either have your applications phoning home to check for new versions or the user has to keep up with the latest version themselves (a la VersionTracker for OSX).
I prefer unix personally, and all of my machines are some flavor of it - but man it would push adoption if applications where able to be installed by simply downloading, drag-and-drop. Either that or have it possible via a link to launch Synaptic and start the installation from the program's website. For the user's part, you've now actually made installation *easier* than Windows but the steps involved are similar.
Actually - that latter idea, has it already been implemented? If not, I need to go submit some enhancement requests. :P
*Looks around*
Yup. We're geeks alright.
Sorry, helps to provide the site:
http://www.openafs.org/
What, no love for Unison?
And why on earth does OpenAFS never get a sniff? I know it's a pain to set up, but I would have figured by now that many would have taken it and run with it.
I have long boycotted EA - anything they make I won't buy, period. They mistreat their workforce, they use business practices that are borderline illegal to illegal (not paying aged football players for their rights and going around them), to just plain evil - like buying the exclusive rights to just about every kind of american football, and to the ESPN name just so they wouldn't have to compete with Visual Concepts/TakeTwo on Madden, after a sound trouncing from NFL2K5, then having the gall to have a shareholders meeting where the CEO says "we have to make sure this is not repeatable" about All-Pro Football 2K8 - essentially then making sure that VC/T2 can't resign those legends to do 2K9/2K10 (whichever release they managed to hit).
Enough is enough already.
It's getting more and more difficult to boycott them though. Not because they're making better titles, but because they own or are buying up just about everyone. Rock Band as their name slapped on it. Brutal Legend. I mean COME ON. They get their cut just about everywhere. BOOM BLOX. Freaking Boom Blox.
I. AM. SO. SICK. OF. EA.
E. A. Sports. We own the game. All of them.
ABSOLUTELY! Watch as Rupert Murdoch's publications slowly (quickly?) wither into obscurity as Google no longer returns results from those sites. :)
Go ahead Rupe. Block yourself. Let's see how that goes.
Yeah...it's called peer to peer networking and NAT. WTF?
Thank you! Disclosure is happening - just in a way that proceeds with caution. If they said outright that it had to be dismissed and didn't say why *at all*, I'd be bothered. The judge is being told why. He can still say that the case will proceed.
Keep in mind that Windows 7 *is not* Windows 7.
If you're running what claims to be Windows 7, open a command prompt and run `winver`.
It is Windows 6.1. In other words, a dot release of Vista. The actual Windows 7 that was talked about after Vista was released was the complete re-write you're referring to, however after Vista bombed, they re-skinned Vista and touted it as Windows 7. Make no mistake, you all bought the same thing as the mac users going from 10.5 to 10.6. It's not a whole new OS - it's the same old OS shipping with a new skin, and few new minor updates. Nothing more, nothing less. The whole thing is a ploy to finally get people to move off of XP. If it succeeds, it's the ultimate example of sheeple-ship.
Couple of things here:
1. I have done the "try before you buy" via piracy and then bought. Not all of them, only the good ones.
2. See the first point. :P
One developer does not give you a good cross-section, because if it's not a good game, of COURSE no one will buy if after trying it.
Not saying that the game in question is bad, but it would make sense. I've "tried" about 10 different apps, and I bought 3 of them. The others are no longer on my phone.
No it won't! The CIA is here to serve the American people. We^H^HThey would never do something so devious as to astroturf sites like Slashdot!
I vote marketing droid.
http://digg.com/tech_news/Dell_founder_attacks_netbooks_Vista
So - which way is it? Does he love Vista or hate it? Makes no sense...
(bear in mind, I don't differentiate Vista from 7 any more than I differentiate 2000 from XP - they're the same OS at the core. Some security updates and minor changes, but the same OS)
I'm happy for your Microsoft, and Imma let you finish, but Google had the best mobile launch of all time!
Heh - as a very tangentially related item, am I the only one that when starting at a new business runs hijackthis to hunt down any and all background processes and kill them off if I don't explicity want it running?
Half the time there's something there. Be it malware, spyware in the sense that the boss wants to spy on you, or some other such nonsense (every ad-bar you can imagine).
Thankfully my current employer allows me to use Ubuntu on my desktop, but it helps that I'm the senior unix engineer. I've also owned my own company and my primary laptop has been a mac for almost 8 years now. But I swear - Windows machines are EVIL. Too many things hiding themselves away in the registry, as services, etc. I'll get the old "but it's not your machine" blah blah blah, but really. When I find a subversive VNC server that doesn't show up in the taskbar or systray - it's getting killed off. Sure, it *could* be for the benefit of IT to do remote support (unlikely that I'd ever call for it), and there's always RDP for that. You want to watch what I'm doing on that machine, come watch. Don't expect to be able to spy on me. If you have other employees that are okay with it, or are too ignorant to stop it, fine. Not me. You want to terminate me? Your call - but regardless of whether it's your machine or not, whether there's any "implied" sense of privacy in the workplace or not, I put my foot down there.
Then again, I also ssh -D (portnum) home.dom, use Firefox, tunnel over socks, and then go to about:config and set DNS to resolve via socks too. You won't be seeing my surfing habits or even my dns lookups. Again - you want to fire me over it, your call. So far no one has said boo. I do my job, and I do good work. /rant over.
Y'know, I hadn't even thought about that. I'm just on the boderline between generations of users to where I learned to type on an electric keyboard, not a computer. You're right about boldface typing. I had completely forgotten about it. We were taught to type all-caps, then back up and typeover again, providing all-cap bolded text.
Oops. :P
Well what do you propose? Cross platform GUI is always a thorn in a developer's side. Web browsers that conform to CSS and JavaScript are the most reliable fix unless you really want to do everything as a Flash app (not truly cross-platform in the sense that every platform can have it), or as a Java applet (see my argument about Flash).
So yeah - everything does wind up in a browser. :\
I have no mod points. Therefore I can only say this:
W. T. F????
On a just barely tangentially related note -
It is an absolute crime that no one worked to perfect a synthesized version of Majelle Barrett-Roddenberry's voice prior to her demise. Should should have been the voice of all computers henceforth. :(