Some of the beta versions of win2k were really unusable, but i had one of the RC releases and it ran very well on my Thinkpad 600E... When i updated it to the full version, it never seemed to work as well as the RC...
Under true unrestricted free market capitalism things like patents and copyrights would not exist, so long as there were people out there with the resources to copy then there would be competition. It would mean software and other trivially copied goods would be completely unprofitable, and would either be community developed or developed as a loss leader to sell other product (eg hardware to run it on)... Hardware obviously couldn't be distributed for free because of the unavoidable costs of manufacturing it, so likely it would be priced at a point that it wouldnt be profitable for someone else to invest the up front costs to start producing it.
Patent restrictions are an artificial construct that is inherently incompatible with a free market. They are a form of government regulation which takes away freedom from the market.
The trouble with fines is that they just become another cost of doing business, and will get weighed up against the expected profits from actually doing the illegal activity in the first place. In other words, breaking the law is just business as usual only with a relatively low risk.
Punishments need to be far more damaging so that companies become unwilling to risk breaking the law, possibly even hold the owners personally responsible and throw them in jail.
If you were located in Saudi Arabia at the time you did it, sure. Otherwise it is up to the Saudi people to ensure they don't import anything from other countries which is illegal in their own. Just like it's not legal to import legally purchased canabis from Holland into most other countries.
Most of these laws were written a long time ago by people with no understanding of technology, so they don't take into account that someone can cause illegal activity to take place half way across the world without requiring a local agent in that area to carry out the crime on their behalf.
I wonder what the legal status of remotely controlled weapons being operated from a different country would be...
As for crimes committed in war, it is the dominant side who decides whats legal and whats not, the laws of the losing side don't count for anything because they're no longer in a position to enforce them.
That's a flawed payment structure then... Most mechanics i know here are paid an hourly rate for their labor, they don't even screw you on parts and will quite happily let you source the parts yourself if you think you can get a better deal.
There would still be plenty of research in the field, because video compression is only a tiny part of an overall market... There are plenty of organisations who would find video compression useful and would feel that a better codec would make their products more useful. And then there is always purely academic research.
It's not, there is plenty of pornography available which involves girls of legal age dressed as schoolgirls. Just because someone looks underage, doesn't make it illegal. Conversely, just because someone didn't look underage doesn't make it legal. You have to be careful, lots of underage people have fake ID these days which they use to buy alcohol and enter bars etc. Even buying a drink for them is illegal, let alone doing anything sexual.
The existence of child porn shows that children were abused in order to produce that porn... The existence of a manual explaining how to commit acts of terrorism does not prove that any terrorism was actually committed in order to write the book. Infact, there are countless movies and news reports available which may provide inspiration to someone wishing to commit acts of terrorism or other crimes - should these items be banned too?
Open source software even has motive *not* to over state its capabilities. Excessive/false advertising would result in lots of unhappy users complaining to the developers which is not what they want. Most OSS developers would rather attract competent users or fellow developers who can actually help them improve the software rather than becoming a support burden.
The software industry has it FAR too easy, they get away with things that you couldn't even dream of in any other industry...
Selling a product that cost nothing to duplicate, once your initial costs are recovered its 100% profit from there on out. Each product is a minor revision of the last, cuts that initial cost down massively. Selling products with absolutely no warranty. Imposing often extremely consumer-hostile terms on the customer post-sale through an EULA. Implementing "features" which provide zero benefit to the customer, while often being detrimental to them (license enforcement, wga etc). Being able to lock customers in by holding their data and networks to ransom with proprietary formats. Being able to sell proprietary products with no alternative source or backup plan (see lockin) - businesses or governments wouldn't stand for this in any other market.
Someone needs to bring some sanity back to the software market, vendors are taking the piss right now.
I don't think such laws will apply if a hobbyist gives away his program for free... It's only when something has been sold (note the first word in "Sale of Goods Act 1979") that this applies...
AT&T don't offer it, and i believe tmobile runs on different frequency bands while other networks don't even use the same network standards... Hardly the fault of Apple. Tethering works nicely in Europe and other places.
I carry a Linux Mint disc with me almost all the time. [Former Windows pirates] get legit and save money, and it easily supports what most people want to do with a home computer
Until they want to use the webcam they own (which happens not to be on Mint's HCL) or the WLAN or Bluetooth chip on the motherboard (which happens not to be on Mint's HCL).
If someone capable installs it for them then that competent person sets it up and loads the necessary drivers (which happens with windows too, 99% of users dont install it themselves)
surf the web
You can't if the kernel doesn't support your network card, can you?
see above
a little word processing and maybe some spreadsheet work
How well does OpenOffice.org run Excel spreadsheets with lots of macros?
how many home computer users do you know that have lots of macros in their spreadsheets?
listen to music
MP3 and M4A are patented. Is Linux Mint licensed? Or where do you live?
software patents aren't valid in most countries...
a few games
Except for the ones they happened to buy, which are unrated or garbage on Wine's AppDB.
most casual gamers primarily play simple flash games, or the odd game of cards... they won't go out and buy games, and selecting games from the repository is much simpler and safer than downloading arbitrary binaries from random websites. I know very few people who want to play big name games, and most of those have consoles.
In any traditional business, a huge increase in sales would result in more jobs... Like manufacturing, to significantly increase your output to handle the new sales you'd need to increase your manpower to handle it... Software on the other hand is not like that, most software companies could double their sales overnight without needing to take any new staff. If anything, they might need to buy another server or two to generate license codes.
Reducing piracy rates wouldn't create new jobs, the software market doesn't work based on supply and demand like that.. If the demand for legitimate software increased, the existing companies could meet that demand without having to employ any new staff therefore the only thing that would increase is their profits. They have no incentive to create more jobs, they would just pocket the increased cash.
Also a 10% reduction in piracy rates will not equal a 10% increase in sales, inevitably some of the former pirates will either do without the software or use free alternatives. I know many people who pirate photoshop because they think its the tool to have, but most of them do trivial tasks with it and if faced with the cost of buying photoshop most of them would seek cheaper or free alternatives.
You will find that software developers/publishers of all kinds try to avoid any kind of responsibility... In this case they're giving it you for free, so you have no real grounds for complaint if it doesn't perform as expected. There's nothing stopping you buying an appliance with mythtv or something similar already installed, and for an appliance i purchased i would expect it to do what its sold for. On the other hand, a purchased appliance is likely to be less flexible than mythtv primarily because the vendor doesn't want to support such a wide range of possible functionality.
Music as a service is actually well established and significantly predates music being sold as recorded media... Someone who plays live music for you is providing that music as a service, as is music which is broadcast on the radio...
Personally, i have no issue paying for someone who is providing a service, be it software based, music or whatever... And i have no problem paying for goods where the price is reasonable...
However, i STRONGLY object to being charged a ridiculous amount for something that was trivially duplicated, and then to add insult to injury - being inconvenienced by some draconian drm scheme. I find it a gross corruption of the free market concept that someone is able to get away with selling a good with extortionate profit margins disproportionate to the amount of work involved.
It's all down to the drivers... Most cards will go into monitor mode with the linux or bsd drivers. I have atheros, ralink, intel, prism2 (old), and realtek cards all of which are perfectly capable of monitor mode, i tend to keep away from broadcom cards but aparrently they can be made to do it aswell. Have a read of the kismet website sometime, it has a list of supported cards.
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Some of the beta versions of win2k were really unusable, but i had one of the RC releases and it ran very well on my Thinkpad 600E... When i updated it to the full version, it never seemed to work as well as the RC...
Under true unrestricted free market capitalism things like patents and copyrights would not exist, so long as there were people out there with the resources to copy then there would be competition. It would mean software and other trivially copied goods would be completely unprofitable, and would either be community developed or developed as a loss leader to sell other product (eg hardware to run it on)... Hardware obviously couldn't be distributed for free because of the unavoidable costs of manufacturing it, so likely it would be priced at a point that it wouldnt be profitable for someone else to invest the up front costs to start producing it.
Patent restrictions are an artificial construct that is inherently incompatible with a free market. They are a form of government regulation which takes away freedom from the market.
The trouble with fines is that they just become another cost of doing business, and will get weighed up against the expected profits from actually doing the illegal activity in the first place. In other words, breaking the law is just business as usual only with a relatively low risk.
Punishments need to be far more damaging so that companies become unwilling to risk breaking the law, possibly even hold the owners personally responsible and throw them in jail.
If you were located in Saudi Arabia at the time you did it, sure. Otherwise it is up to the Saudi people to ensure they don't import anything from other countries which is illegal in their own. Just like it's not legal to import legally purchased canabis from Holland into most other countries.
Most of these laws were written a long time ago by people with no understanding of technology, so they don't take into account that someone can cause illegal activity to take place half way across the world without requiring a local agent in that area to carry out the crime on their behalf.
I wonder what the legal status of remotely controlled weapons being operated from a different country would be...
As for crimes committed in war, it is the dominant side who decides whats legal and whats not, the laws of the losing side don't count for anything because they're no longer in a position to enforce them.
That's a flawed payment structure then...
Most mechanics i know here are paid an hourly rate for their labor, they don't even screw you on parts and will quite happily let you source the parts yourself if you think you can get a better deal.
There would still be plenty of research in the field, because video compression is only a tiny part of an overall market... There are plenty of organisations who would find video compression useful and would feel that a better codec would make their products more useful.
And then there is always purely academic research.
It's not, there is plenty of pornography available which involves girls of legal age dressed as schoolgirls. Just because someone looks underage, doesn't make it illegal. Conversely, just because someone didn't look underage doesn't make it legal.
You have to be careful, lots of underage people have fake ID these days which they use to buy alcohol and enter bars etc. Even buying a drink for them is illegal, let alone doing anything sexual.
The existence of child porn shows that children were abused in order to produce that porn...
The existence of a manual explaining how to commit acts of terrorism does not prove that any terrorism was actually committed in order to write the book. Infact, there are countless movies and news reports available which may provide inspiration to someone wishing to commit acts of terrorism or other crimes - should these items be banned too?
Open source software even has motive *not* to over state its capabilities. Excessive/false advertising would result in lots of unhappy users complaining to the developers which is not what they want. Most OSS developers would rather attract competent users or fellow developers who can actually help them improve the software rather than becoming a support burden.
Probably not, because a contract has to provide something to both sides...
Mozilla do not directly benefit from you downloading and using firefox.
Agreed...
The software industry has it FAR too easy, they get away with things that you couldn't even dream of in any other industry...
Selling a product that cost nothing to duplicate, once your initial costs are recovered its 100% profit from there on out.
Each product is a minor revision of the last, cuts that initial cost down massively.
Selling products with absolutely no warranty.
Imposing often extremely consumer-hostile terms on the customer post-sale through an EULA.
Implementing "features" which provide zero benefit to the customer, while often being detrimental to them (license enforcement, wga etc).
Being able to lock customers in by holding their data and networks to ransom with proprietary formats.
Being able to sell proprietary products with no alternative source or backup plan (see lockin) - businesses or governments wouldn't stand for this in any other market.
Someone needs to bring some sanity back to the software market, vendors are taking the piss right now.
I don't think such laws will apply if a hobbyist gives away his program for free... It's only when something has been sold (note the first word in "Sale of Goods Act 1979") that this applies...
AT&T don't offer it, and i believe tmobile runs on different frequency bands while other networks don't even use the same network standards... Hardly the fault of Apple.
Tethering works nicely in Europe and other places.
Proof:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3gs/tethering.html
I carry a Linux Mint disc with me almost all the time. [Former Windows pirates] get legit and save money, and it easily supports what most people want to do with a home computer
Until they want to use the webcam they own (which happens not to be on Mint's HCL) or the WLAN or Bluetooth chip on the motherboard (which happens not to be on Mint's HCL).
If someone capable installs it for them then that competent person sets it up and loads the necessary drivers (which happens with windows too, 99% of users dont install it themselves)
surf the web
You can't if the kernel doesn't support your network card, can you?
see above
a little word processing and maybe some spreadsheet work
How well does OpenOffice.org run Excel spreadsheets with lots of macros?
how many home computer users do you know that have lots of macros in their spreadsheets?
listen to music
MP3 and M4A are patented. Is Linux Mint licensed? Or where do you live?
software patents aren't valid in most countries...
a few games
Except for the ones they happened to buy, which are unrated or garbage on Wine's AppDB.
most casual gamers primarily play simple flash games, or the odd game of cards... they won't go out and buy games, and selecting games from the repository is much simpler and safer than downloading arbitrary binaries from random websites. I know very few people who want to play big name games, and most of those have consoles.
In any traditional business, a huge increase in sales would result in more jobs... Like manufacturing, to significantly increase your output to handle the new sales you'd need to increase your manpower to handle it...
Software on the other hand is not like that, most software companies could double their sales overnight without needing to take any new staff. If anything, they might need to buy another server or two to generate license codes.
Reducing piracy rates wouldn't create new jobs, the software market doesn't work based on supply and demand like that..
If the demand for legitimate software increased, the existing companies could meet that demand without having to employ any new staff therefore the only thing that would increase is their profits. They have no incentive to create more jobs, they would just pocket the increased cash.
Also a 10% reduction in piracy rates will not equal a 10% increase in sales, inevitably some of the former pirates will either do without the software or use free alternatives. I know many people who pirate photoshop because they think its the tool to have, but most of them do trivial tasks with it and if faced with the cost of buying photoshop most of them would seek cheaper or free alternatives.
Have you looked at the dreambox line? They run linux, support recording and media playback and some of them have modular tuners...
You will find that software developers/publishers of all kinds try to avoid any kind of responsibility...
In this case they're giving it you for free, so you have no real grounds for complaint if it doesn't perform as expected. There's nothing stopping you buying an appliance with mythtv or something similar already installed, and for an appliance i purchased i would expect it to do what its sold for. On the other hand, a purchased appliance is likely to be less flexible than mythtv primarily because the vendor doesn't want to support such a wide range of possible functionality.
no, ie5 for mac (the version that came with osx 10.3) was most definitely better than ie6... its css support for instance was far beyond what ie6 had
Music as a service is actually well established and significantly predates music being sold as recorded media... Someone who plays live music for you is providing that music as a service, as is music which is broadcast on the radio...
Personally, i have no issue paying for someone who is providing a service, be it software based, music or whatever...
And i have no problem paying for goods where the price is reasonable...
However, i STRONGLY object to being charged a ridiculous amount for something that was trivially duplicated, and then to add insult to injury - being inconvenienced by some draconian drm scheme. I find it a gross corruption of the free market concept that someone is able to get away with selling a good with extortionate profit margins disproportionate to the amount of work involved.
Get an alfa networks 500mw usb dongle... something like this:
http://www.wlanparts.com/product/AWUS036H/ALFA-NETWORK-WLAN-USB-80211g-up-to-500mW-AWUS036H.html?meta=GBASE&metacpg=AWUS036H&utm_source=gbase&utm_medium=CPC&utm_content=&utm_campaign=AWUS036H
It's all down to the drivers... Most cards will go into monitor mode with the linux or bsd drivers.
I have atheros, ralink, intel, prism2 (old), and realtek cards all of which are perfectly capable of monitor mode, i tend to keep away from broadcom cards but aparrently they can be made to do it aswell. Have a read of the kismet website sometime, it has a list of supported cards.
Can i get turbo with this one: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/wp-content/uploads/newegg-sells-fake-core-i7-cpus-9.jpg ???