The free market should define a work's worth, not the author backed up by arbitrary laws. Should i be able to copyright this post and demand $50 from anyone who reads it? That would just be stupid. If you write a book and try to charge $50 for it, and someone makes a copy and starts selling it for $5 that's just free market economics, and you need to reduce your price to compete. You don't have a right to a monopoly.
He could still earn money, just not as much because the books would need to be sold for a smaller profit. Noone will ever sell copies of his book at a loss, and everyone else he's competing with will still have production costs. Some people will still buy from him because he's the original author. Some people will want a book signed by the original author. He will have a head-start on everyone else anyway, since it will take some time for other organizations to start producing copies of his books. And finally, there isn't such a market for copied books anyway, so book authors would be less affected than movie/music/software authors. It costs a lot more to produce a book than it does a DVD, and yet books are cheaper. Books, being less overpriced to start with, provide less incentive for people to provide cheaper copies.
Aside from that, if he can't produce and sell enough books in a free market to justify the lifestyle he wants, then he's in the wrong business. He has no right to get free help from government to artificially inflate the prices of his books.
By selling them at a cost closer to their true production cost... People make money selling copied media, so why couldn't the original author make money selling media for the same cost? Book authors can also sell signed copies for more money, and those who like their work can attend live events where the author talks about his books and future ones he's working on.
As you say, the system is completely corrupt and favours those already powerfull. The use of government powers to artificially inflate prices is very much anti-capitalist, infact it's closer to fascism. Under a true capitalist system, there would be nothing to stop a third party coming along and producing cheaper copies of a work, thus driving prices down. If you can't produce content which is cost effective, then your business model is flawed and you deserve to go bankrupt. Actors earn far too much anyway, and most of them could go into theatre where they could easily compete on quality and price with other theatres. If you paid your actors less, and used more computer generated effects than expensive stunts you could produce movies a _LOT_ cheaper. And people would still do it, aside from the few rich con-artist actors, there are thousands of actors often more talented who make a lot less money already. Many people would produce movies at a loss because it would serve to increase their level of fame, as fame can bring many other opportunities. And with lower prices and competitive distribution, lots more people would see those movies. You could also distribute your movie in cinemas or on television before making them available on hard copy media. This would also create disincentive to stagger the releases, in this world of global communication foreign websites and friends of mine in other countries often ruin the plot of a movie because it's not on show here yet. Infact, a lot of movies already cover their production costs and generate a profit purely from cinema showings, any dvd sales are 99.5% profit.
Better yet, copyright should expire once a threshold of sales has been reached. The idea of copyright and patents were to allow someone to make money from them, once they have covered production costs and made a reasonable profit they should be forced to compete fairly with everyone else. Once the initial production costs have been met, selling additional copies effectively amounts to printing money. The law shouldn't allow companies to make absoloutely obscene levels of profit from a single work.
Or they will migrate to Linux with full disk encryption. All we need, is to produce distros that install in this way by default (otherwise encrypting the whole drive can be a pain to set up)
The fact that it's open source should be considered by any well managed business. Using proprietary software that locks you in to a single vendor is a HUGE BUSINESS RISK. It's highly dangerous to make your business dependant on a single organization or product, you should ALWAYS have a backup plan. With open file formats, you have multiple sources from which you can obtain software, and with open source you are guaranteed the ability to install additional copies (yes, we've had several situations where we needed additional licenses for a proprietary product but couldnt buy them), never forced to upgrade (for the same reason, sometimes we couldnt get licenses for our current versions and had to buy the latest incompatible version, which forced us to upgrade other systems too) and your never going to be totally without support (we can't get any support for some old packages AT ALL because the only organization capable of supporting it no longer does) since worst case, you can hire your own programmers.
Well to a certain extent i agree, far too much screen height is wasted... But sites which are written with a fixed pixel width really bug me too, properly written html should expand to take advantage of the extra width on a high resolution screen, i shouldn't waste my wide screen by only using a thin strip down the middle of it... A lot of news sites are especially guilty of this, putting text in narrow columns as if it was a newspaper.
Theft is also a much older crime, and has been considered illegal or bad for thousands of years, since your depriving someone of something. Copyright on the other hand, is a modern invention designed to maximise profits for a select few at the expense of the masses. If there was no copyright, then things would need to be sold at more reasonable prices closer to their production cost. If it really cost $15 to make a copy of a DVD, then it wouldnt be possible to buy third party copies for less than that. Copyright is actually very much anti-capitalist, since it makes it possible to subvert free market economics and keep a price artificially high. Using governmental power to artificially increase profits for a business is much closer to the original definition of fascism (yes fascism, not to be confused with nazism).
People should get paid for work they do... But if i produced a song 20 years ago, should i have the right to sit on my ass getting money for it for the last 20 years? Not doing any more work, just sitting back and letting the money roll in. That's out of order, people should have to continue working if they want to continue making money. Thats why i won't buy CDs, but i will quite happily pay to see a live show.
So, providing you don't make any financial gain from it (selling cds etc), nor do you download more than $1,000 retail price worth of warez each 180 days, your not actually doing anything illegal anyway? Downloading a few movies and games a month for personal use won't be covered under this definition.
However i believe the international laws on extending your sea borders precludes you from making claim to any additional land in the process. Also, Sealand existed before britain extended their sea borders, and they can't claim land that already belongs to another nation, the most they can claim is additional miles of international waters.
Civ4 especially annoys me... The 3D graphics bring nothing to the playability of the game, they're just fancy and superfluous eyecandy. But, their presence makes the game run rather slowly on my hardware. Instead, i just stick to freeciv. Tho some of the new playability features would be nice, i can't justify buying a new videocard. I like freeciv because it has low requirements, and will happily run alongside whatever else i might be doing on a business laptop (integrated video).
I don't disable affected features, i simply disable features which are not being used. And then i filter incoming security advisories according to where the vulnerability is, which means that i won't be bothered by advisories which are not relevant to my install.
Which is precisely what he was doing. Had you read the article you would have known that:
Other PS3 compatible distros (yellow dog, fedora) are compiled for a generic PPC not specifically for the PS3 He wasn't compiling gentoo from source, he was installing precompiled packages from a repository of packages which were build specifically for the PS3. For any package which has not been built by someone else for PS3 yet, he has the opportunity to easily compile it, as opposed to having to do without it or perform all the build steps manually.
Not any more... Games are just programmed through APIs and layers of abstraction nowadays, you can't make them do anything the API wasn't meant to do... The only way to really do that, is to hit the hardware directly, like people used to do in the days of the C64 and Amiga, people made those machines do all kinds of things commodore never expected.
And that's flamebait too... Config files that i've not modified since installation get updated automatically (from old defaults to new defaults) when i upgrade packages. Config files that i have modified can be left alone 99% of the time anyway. Are you claiming that any other distro wouldn't require you to modify your configuration files when performing a major update of a package? Or is it just that, once you've settled on a particular release of a distro like fedora you won't get any major version updates of packages unless you reinstall using a newer distro release?
Well said... I just bought a Macbook instead of a Macbook Pro, as it has an intel chipset instead of the ATI chipset present in the pro. I intend to dual boot OSX and Gentoo on it. I run a few fancy OpenGL screensavers on it, and it handles them just fine, i don't do anything else that would tax it at all.
Instructions should always be command line if possible... Explaining a graphical process through screenshots and/or animation is a pain, often difficult and time consuming to follow. Explaining a command line process is much easier, less prone to error (cut+paste) and faster to follow (cut+paste) and any errors returned will also be in textual form so they can be reported and queried. You don't need to know how or why the commands you paste work, just follow the guide and paste them in. Why does anyone have a problem with this? It's far easier and more effective to write instructions for a commandline interface than a graphical one, and surely the user has a specific task in mind and that's why they're following a guide, right? Surely they just want to get it done as quickly as possible with the greatest chance of success.
Most people give up too easily... Someone tells them gentoo is good, they try installing it, give up quickly and never look back. If you let them try it first, and they grow to like it, then they will have much greater incentive to complete the process when faced with the task of installing it. Also, they will know how it *should* work, so they will be more easily be able to tell if they botched the install. I've installed gentoo for a few people, most of them have since tried to install gentoo on other systems with much more patience and success than people who just tried to install it from scratch with no prior gentoo experience.
If you compile specifically for your CPU, then your programs will maybe average 2-3% more performance, they certainly won't perform slower. Some apps however, seriously benefit from being compiled for a specific CPU...
Since you mention sparc, the earlier sparc (v7) chips had no (i believe) long division instructions in their FPUs. Thus, code compiled for the most generic sparc chips will use other instructions to emulate a long divide. Calculations like this are common in encryption. Later sparcs (v8, v9/ultrasparc) included these instructions, so compiling for one of these more modern processors results in significantly improved performance. If you have a v8 or higher sparc, try it yourself... Compile OpenSSL for a generic sparcv7 and again for a sparcv8 or sparcv9/ultrasparc and compare the performance difference. A generic precompiled distribution for sparc usually includes binaries compiled for compatibility with sparcv7 systems, and thus performs very poorly on newer sparcs.
Another example, is the john the ripper password cracker... It has specially optimized routines for processors supporting MMX, SSE, SSE2 and Altivec, when using these routines instead of the generic ones performance improvements of 800% are not uncommon. Although obviously a distribution using binaries could not enable these options without breaking compatibility with older processors.
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It's utterly ridiculous to not display plain text email in a monospace font... Are there any broken mailer out there doing this by default?
The free market should define a work's worth, not the author backed up by arbitrary laws.
Should i be able to copyright this post and demand $50 from anyone who reads it? That would just be stupid.
If you write a book and try to charge $50 for it, and someone makes a copy and starts selling it for $5 that's just free market economics, and you need to reduce your price to compete. You don't have a right to a monopoly.
He could still earn money, just not as much because the books would need to be sold for a smaller profit. Noone will ever sell copies of his book at a loss, and everyone else he's competing with will still have production costs.
Some people will still buy from him because he's the original author.
Some people will want a book signed by the original author.
He will have a head-start on everyone else anyway, since it will take some time for other organizations to start producing copies of his books.
And finally, there isn't such a market for copied books anyway, so book authors would be less affected than movie/music/software authors. It costs a lot more to produce a book than it does a DVD, and yet books are cheaper. Books, being less overpriced to start with, provide less incentive for people to provide cheaper copies.
Aside from that, if he can't produce and sell enough books in a free market to justify the lifestyle he wants, then he's in the wrong business. He has no right to get free help from government to artificially inflate the prices of his books.
By selling them at a cost closer to their true production cost... People make money selling copied media, so why couldn't the original author make money selling media for the same cost?
Book authors can also sell signed copies for more money, and those who like their work can attend live events where the author talks about his books and future ones he's working on.
As you say, the system is completely corrupt and favours those already powerfull. The use of government powers to artificially inflate prices is very much anti-capitalist, infact it's closer to fascism. Under a true capitalist system, there would be nothing to stop a third party coming along and producing cheaper copies of a work, thus driving prices down.
If you can't produce content which is cost effective, then your business model is flawed and you deserve to go bankrupt. Actors earn far too much anyway, and most of them could go into theatre where they could easily compete on quality and price with other theatres.
If you paid your actors less, and used more computer generated effects than expensive stunts you could produce movies a _LOT_ cheaper. And people would still do it, aside from the few rich con-artist actors, there are thousands of actors often more talented who make a lot less money already. Many people would produce movies at a loss because it would serve to increase their level of fame, as fame can bring many other opportunities. And with lower prices and competitive distribution, lots more people would see those movies.
You could also distribute your movie in cinemas or on television before making them available on hard copy media. This would also create disincentive to stagger the releases, in this world of global communication foreign websites and friends of mine in other countries often ruin the plot of a movie because it's not on show here yet.
Infact, a lot of movies already cover their production costs and generate a profit purely from cinema showings, any dvd sales are 99.5% profit.
Better yet, copyright should expire once a threshold of sales has been reached. The idea of copyright and patents were to allow someone to make money from them, once they have covered production costs and made a reasonable profit they should be forced to compete fairly with everyone else. Once the initial production costs have been met, selling additional copies effectively amounts to printing money. The law shouldn't allow companies to make absoloutely obscene levels of profit from a single work.
Then the business model is flawed. Why should laws be made to prop up flawed business models at the expense of the consumer?
Or they will migrate to Linux with full disk encryption.
All we need, is to produce distros that install in this way by default (otherwise encrypting the whole drive can be a pain to set up)
Not to mention:
Anti virus
Anti spyware
Remote administration software (the default remote desktop has unfixed security flaws)
The fact that it's open source should be considered by any well managed business.
Using proprietary software that locks you in to a single vendor is a HUGE BUSINESS RISK. It's highly dangerous to make your business dependant on a single organization or product, you should ALWAYS have a backup plan.
With open file formats, you have multiple sources from which you can obtain software, and with open source you are guaranteed the ability to install additional copies (yes, we've had several situations where we needed additional licenses for a proprietary product but couldnt buy them), never forced to upgrade (for the same reason, sometimes we couldnt get licenses for our current versions and had to buy the latest incompatible version, which forced us to upgrade other systems too) and your never going to be totally without support (we can't get any support for some old packages AT ALL because the only organization capable of supporting it no longer does) since worst case, you can hire your own programmers.
Well to a certain extent i agree, far too much screen height is wasted...
But sites which are written with a fixed pixel width really bug me too, properly written html should expand to take advantage of the extra width on a high resolution screen, i shouldn't waste my wide screen by only using a thin strip down the middle of it... A lot of news sites are especially guilty of this, putting text in narrow columns as if it was a newspaper.
Theft is also a much older crime, and has been considered illegal or bad for thousands of years, since your depriving someone of something.
Copyright on the other hand, is a modern invention designed to maximise profits for a select few at the expense of the masses.
If there was no copyright, then things would need to be sold at more reasonable prices closer to their production cost. If it really cost $15 to make a copy of a DVD, then it wouldnt be possible to buy third party copies for less than that.
Copyright is actually very much anti-capitalist, since it makes it possible to subvert free market economics and keep a price artificially high. Using governmental power to artificially increase profits for a business is much closer to the original definition of fascism (yes fascism, not to be confused with nazism).
People should get paid for work they do...
But if i produced a song 20 years ago, should i have the right to sit on my ass getting money for it for the last 20 years? Not doing any more work, just sitting back and letting the money roll in.
That's out of order, people should have to continue working if they want to continue making money. Thats why i won't buy CDs, but i will quite happily pay to see a live show.
So, providing you don't make any financial gain from it (selling cds etc), nor do you download more than $1,000 retail price worth of warez each 180 days, your not actually doing anything illegal anyway?
Downloading a few movies and games a month for personal use won't be covered under this definition.
However i believe the international laws on extending your sea borders precludes you from making claim to any additional land in the process.
Also, Sealand existed before britain extended their sea borders, and they can't claim land that already belongs to another nation, the most they can claim is additional miles of international waters.
Civ4 especially annoys me...
The 3D graphics bring nothing to the playability of the game, they're just fancy and superfluous eyecandy. But, their presence makes the game run rather slowly on my hardware. Instead, i just stick to freeciv. Tho some of the new playability features would be nice, i can't justify buying a new videocard.
I like freeciv because it has low requirements, and will happily run alongside whatever else i might be doing on a business laptop (integrated video).
So you have to write your code specifically to do this... It's much easier to select processor type at compiletime.
I don't disable affected features, i simply disable features which are not being used.
And then i filter incoming security advisories according to where the vulnerability is, which means that i won't be bothered by advisories which are not relevant to my install.
Which is precisely what he was doing.
Had you read the article you would have known that:
Other PS3 compatible distros (yellow dog, fedora) are compiled for a generic PPC not specifically for the PS3
He wasn't compiling gentoo from source, he was installing precompiled packages from a repository of packages which were build specifically for the PS3.
For any package which has not been built by someone else for PS3 yet, he has the opportunity to easily compile it, as opposed to having to do without it or perform all the build steps manually.
Not any more... Games are just programmed through APIs and layers of abstraction nowadays, you can't make them do anything the API wasn't meant to do... The only way to really do that, is to hit the hardware directly, like people used to do in the days of the C64 and Amiga, people made those machines do all kinds of things commodore never expected.
And that's flamebait too...
Config files that i've not modified since installation get updated automatically (from old defaults to new defaults) when i upgrade packages. Config files that i have modified can be left alone 99% of the time anyway. Are you claiming that any other distro wouldn't require you to modify your configuration files when performing a major update of a package? Or is it just that, once you've settled on a particular release of a distro like fedora you won't get any major version updates of packages unless you reinstall using a newer distro release?
Well said...
I just bought a Macbook instead of a Macbook Pro, as it has an intel chipset instead of the ATI chipset present in the pro. I intend to dual boot OSX and Gentoo on it. I run a few fancy OpenGL screensavers on it, and it handles them just fine, i don't do anything else that would tax it at all.
Instructions should always be command line if possible...
Explaining a graphical process through screenshots and/or animation is a pain, often difficult and time consuming to follow.
Explaining a command line process is much easier, less prone to error (cut+paste) and faster to follow (cut+paste) and any errors returned will also be in textual form so they can be reported and queried.
You don't need to know how or why the commands you paste work, just follow the guide and paste them in. Why does anyone have a problem with this? It's far easier and more effective to write instructions for a commandline interface than a graphical one, and surely the user has a specific task in mind and that's why they're following a guide, right? Surely they just want to get it done as quickly as possible with the greatest chance of success.
Most people give up too easily...
Someone tells them gentoo is good, they try installing it, give up quickly and never look back.
If you let them try it first, and they grow to like it, then they will have much greater incentive to complete the process when faced with the task of installing it. Also, they will know how it *should* work, so they will be more easily be able to tell if they botched the install.
I've installed gentoo for a few people, most of them have since tried to install gentoo on other systems with much more patience and success than people who just tried to install it from scratch with no prior gentoo experience.
If you compile specifically for your CPU, then your programs will maybe average 2-3% more performance, they certainly won't perform slower.
Some apps however, seriously benefit from being compiled for a specific CPU...
Since you mention sparc, the earlier sparc (v7) chips had no (i believe) long division instructions in their FPUs. Thus, code compiled for the most generic sparc chips will use other instructions to emulate a long divide. Calculations like this are common in encryption.
Later sparcs (v8, v9/ultrasparc) included these instructions, so compiling for one of these more modern processors results in significantly improved performance. If you have a v8 or higher sparc, try it yourself... Compile OpenSSL for a generic sparcv7 and again for a sparcv8 or sparcv9/ultrasparc and compare the performance difference. A generic precompiled distribution for sparc usually includes binaries compiled for compatibility with sparcv7 systems, and thus performs very poorly on newer sparcs.
Another example, is the john the ripper password cracker... It has specially optimized routines for processors supporting MMX, SSE, SSE2 and Altivec, when using these routines instead of the generic ones performance improvements of 800% are not uncommon. Although obviously a distribution using binaries could not enable these options without breaking compatibility with older processors.