There is a difference between a public and a private cloud... If your data is sensitive in a government sense, then it falls into a few broad security classifications so you simply ensure your data is on a private cloud where all the data is of the same classification and all the users have sufficient clearance levels to see that level of data. You then get some level of savings, as you can share physical infrastructure costs with other government departments while having access to more processing power at the times you need it, eg the tax office will need extra resources just before the deadline for filing taxes etc.
No point every department running their own servers most of which will be idle most of the time except during one specific peak time when they cant handle the load, maintaining their own admin staff, data centers etc.
Cloud hosting is extremely useful some things, some of which i'd expect RMS to approve of. For instance, if you are hosting GPL code then hosting it on a public cloud service makes sense. So what if the NSA can access it, so can everyone else and the license terms explicitly allow that.
It's never helpful, your examples are just ones where it is less intrusive but none of those examples provide a better service than drm-free would, and none of those services prevent or even reduce piracy.
Because any content available on android is available elsewhere in a higher quality form? There is currently no incentive to crack drm schemes on android. Why pirate a low resolution video intended to be displayed on a phone screen, when you can pirate the bluray instead?
Being open source just makes it easier to do that... Closed source can be modified with a disassembler and a hex editor, it just requires a different skill set.
Counterfeit products only exist when the originals are overpriced relative to their material value, and only then because the counterfeiters feel they can make more money selling their product under a fake brand than selling the exact same goods under their own brand.
Same thing applies today... There is no point cracking a scheme unless it has exclusive content, or content made available before any other forms or in a higher quality. IE it must have a unique selling point to be worth cracking, if people can get a better quality version from somewhere else sooner they will.
So instead of making the product better so you pay, they want to make the alternatives worse... big win for society as a whole here.
The goal primarily is to greedily extract more money out of those who are willing to pay, those who aren't never will. Only by making such onerous drm schemes they actually decrease the number of people willing to pay as people feel screwed by such schemes.
And the humble bundles are not the only things posted to TPB, virtually every game that gets released is posted to TPB irrespective of wether it has DRM or not. The question that needs to be asked however, is what is the proportion of sales to torrent downloads? And also how well were the bundles promoted, some people wouldn't be aware of them and only find out the games even exist by seeing them on TPB.
Region locking? Call it what it really is, discrimination. What makes you as an australian less worthy of being able to view content than an american? And not only less worthy of being able to view, apparently your money is tainted so they don't even want that.
Thepiratebay isn't racist, they don't care where you come from.
Only movies don't really require all that much money to produce, the costs are massively inflated, primarily by greedy producers and actors with big egos.
SSH is secure against man in the middle attackers, it is not secure against someone who controls either endpoint. DRM is designed to prevent one of the endpoints from accessing the media in arbitrary ways, while allowing them to access it in specific restrictive ways. So all it really boils down to is obfuscation and its much harder to obfuscate something when you have the source code.
And many of us have such problems... Being able to download in the quality you desire and watch later is extremely useful, and is a feature which thepiratebay provides and netflix doesnt.
Connections with daytime bandwidth caps. Connections which are slow due to physical location (eg long line lengths etc). Connections which are slow at peak times (ie when you want to actually watch tv) usually due to congestion. People who are without connectivity, or with poor connectivity at certain times, and are usually bored during these times and might want to watch something (eg travellers) Travellers are also screwed by the regional racism employed by these various streaming services.
Thepiratebay lets me watch what i want, when i want, on whatever device i want. I would quite happily pay for such a service, but i won't pay for an inferior service nor will i give my money to someone who is trying to force an inferior service down my throat.
Free food, shelter and clothing would indeed be for the social good. Unfortunately these are physical items which are in finite supply. Information is not in finite supply, it can be infinitely reproduced. Information is more like sunlight or air, there is plenty of it.
Artists profited from their work long before copyright. They sold original works (actual originals, not infinitely reproduced copies) and gave live performances.
The Cyrix chips were supposed to be extremely unstable, and yet i had several linux systems running cyrix processors with uptimes exceeding a year. Perhaps they were only unstable when running windows?
As for the poor mp3 decoding performance, the cyrix chips were very good at integer code but lacked floating point capabilities... For most general use cases the better integer performance (especially for the price) outweighed the weak floating point.
Why would the score be higher for a server build? What use would a server have for a web browser? Surely they should be making more effort on the client version of the browser, where it might actually be used?
Well Apple are evil in a different market segment, one in which they are a significant player. They are still not evil in general computing because they don't have the market share to twist the market. OSX still has numerous areas where it's far more open than windows, both in terms of open source components and support for open standards within the bundled applications.
But it all goes to show that no single company should ever be allowed to have too much control, as none can be trusted.
In 2001 IE6 was a crude non standards compliant browser that just happened to be compatible with the crude non standards compliant websites in common use at the time... The early Mozilla betas had much better support for CSS for instance, as did the mac version of IE. IE6 couldn't even render the official w3c css page, it made a complete mockery of the rendering.
I'm all for more competition in the phone space, but ms have generated a lot of bad will over the years so i'd rather not have to deal with them at all. I'd like to see firefox, ubuntu, jolla etc take off and provide some real competition to ios/android. Also android in itself is significantly preferable to a more proprietary system, you are not stuck with the version dictated to you by google, you can create your own derivative, and the system is open enough you can even create a non android system which is compatible with android apps.
And yes companies seem grossly incompetent and negligent when it comes to computing in general... In any other area of the business they would demand second sources and exit strategies etc, and yet are quite willing to put important parts of their business in the hands of a single software provider with no easy migration route away. And then to make matters worse, don't learn from their mistakes and fall for the same obvious traps over and over again.
The childish curiosity to learn and explore tends to get beaten out of them by modern tech... Gone are the old days when a C64 would encourage you to learn to program and learn about the inner workings of the system. Now you have systems which actually try to prevent you getting to the internals, or systems which instil fear in an attempt to discourage it "this location contains system files, dont touch" etc. Many kids who start off eager quickly become scared of technology thanks to things like this.
Only while there may be people familiar with writing x86 asm, very few people will be used to programming the GPU directly... Most go through the various APIs provided, which always incur a fairly significant overhead. This might suffice at the start of a consoles lifespan, but developers will want to push the hardware further as it ages.
What awareness? A few news stories on geek sites where 99% of the readership are already aware of freebsd? It's not like the ps4 will display a freebsd logo when it boots, best case there will be an "about" option and after scrolling through several pages of eula, copyright notices and threats to discourage reverse engineering there might be an acknowledgement that code from freebsd was used. Most of the linux based devices i have are like this.
The users will have no idea that freebsd is being used, or what freebsd is. The same can be said of linux, and yet most people have multiple linux devices at home these days. I know several people who verifiably have more instances of linux running in their home than windows, and yet they know what windows is because its blatant in promoting itself.
Both Linux and BSD suffer from not running in visible locations... There are all manner of devices out there running them, but very few of them make it clear to the user what they're running, whereas windows despite being present on a relatively small subset of hardware types is blatantly in your face so people assume its more widespread.
Yes, the idea that chrome/webkit would become a monopoly is also disturbing, although that is considerably less unpleasant than IE being a monopoly...
Webkit is open source, so anyone is free to build it on their own platform - thus no computing platform is arbitrarily excluded from the web. Webkit is (or was) being actively developed by multiple large companies rather than just 1 (not sure what's going on with google's fork), so no one company has absolute control.
So while i won't rule webkit out, i do tend to favour firefox whenever possible.
I'm saying they should not support a browser/company that has a proven history of screwing both their customers and the market as a whole. Companies today are still suffering from the effects of the IE6 monopoly, as is most of south korea.
Blocking a conversation is obvious and the people know exactly where they stand... Allowing the conversation to take place, while secretly monitoring it could be far worse, people could receive subtle comeback for expressing their views and have no idea why its happening.
Which is exactly the point, if enough people start using IE again that competition is effectively eliminated they will almost certainly cease development while encouraging the creation of ie-only websites to lock users in. This is called "bad faith".
Having experienced this in the past, i have no desire to experience it again and thus won't use any version of IE wether it's a decent browser or not.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a difference between a public and a private cloud... If your data is sensitive in a government sense, then it falls into a few broad security classifications so you simply ensure your data is on a private cloud where all the data is of the same classification and all the users have sufficient clearance levels to see that level of data.
You then get some level of savings, as you can share physical infrastructure costs with other government departments while having access to more processing power at the times you need it, eg the tax office will need extra resources just before the deadline for filing taxes etc.
No point every department running their own servers most of which will be idle most of the time except during one specific peak time when they cant handle the load, maintaining their own admin staff, data centers etc.
Cloud hosting is extremely useful some things, some of which i'd expect RMS to approve of.
For instance, if you are hosting GPL code then hosting it on a public cloud service makes sense. So what if the NSA can access it, so can everyone else and the license terms explicitly allow that.
It's never helpful, your examples are just ones where it is less intrusive but none of those examples provide a better service than drm-free would, and none of those services prevent or even reduce piracy.
Because any content available on android is available elsewhere in a higher quality form? There is currently no incentive to crack drm schemes on android. Why pirate a low resolution video intended to be displayed on a phone screen, when you can pirate the bluray instead?
Being open source just makes it easier to do that...
Closed source can be modified with a disassembler and a hex editor, it just requires a different skill set.
Counterfeit products only exist when the originals are overpriced relative to their material value, and only then because the counterfeiters feel they can make more money selling their product under a fake brand than selling the exact same goods under their own brand.
Same thing applies today... There is no point cracking a scheme unless it has exclusive content, or content made available before any other forms or in a higher quality. IE it must have a unique selling point to be worth cracking, if people can get a better quality version from somewhere else sooner they will.
So instead of making the product better so you pay, they want to make the alternatives worse... big win for society as a whole here.
The goal primarily is to greedily extract more money out of those who are willing to pay, those who aren't never will. Only by making such onerous drm schemes they actually decrease the number of people willing to pay as people feel screwed by such schemes.
And the humble bundles are not the only things posted to TPB, virtually every game that gets released is posted to TPB irrespective of wether it has DRM or not. The question that needs to be asked however, is what is the proportion of sales to torrent downloads?
And also how well were the bundles promoted, some people wouldn't be aware of them and only find out the games even exist by seeing them on TPB.
Region locking? Call it what it really is, discrimination.
What makes you as an australian less worthy of being able to view content than an american?
And not only less worthy of being able to view, apparently your money is tainted so they don't even want that.
Thepiratebay isn't racist, they don't care where you come from.
Only movies don't really require all that much money to produce, the costs are massively inflated, primarily by greedy producers and actors with big egos.
SSH is secure against man in the middle attackers, it is not secure against someone who controls either endpoint.
DRM is designed to prevent one of the endpoints from accessing the media in arbitrary ways, while allowing them to access it in specific restrictive ways. So all it really boils down to is obfuscation and its much harder to obfuscate something when you have the source code.
And many of us have such problems... Being able to download in the quality you desire and watch later is extremely useful, and is a feature which thepiratebay provides and netflix doesnt.
Connections with daytime bandwidth caps.
Connections which are slow due to physical location (eg long line lengths etc).
Connections which are slow at peak times (ie when you want to actually watch tv) usually due to congestion.
People who are without connectivity, or with poor connectivity at certain times, and are usually bored during these times and might want to watch something (eg travellers)
Travellers are also screwed by the regional racism employed by these various streaming services.
Thepiratebay lets me watch what i want, when i want, on whatever device i want. I would quite happily pay for such a service, but i won't pay for an inferior service nor will i give my money to someone who is trying to force an inferior service down my throat.
Free food, shelter and clothing would indeed be for the social good. Unfortunately these are physical items which are in finite supply.
Information is not in finite supply, it can be infinitely reproduced.
Information is more like sunlight or air, there is plenty of it.
Artists profited from their work long before copyright. They sold original works (actual originals, not infinitely reproduced copies) and gave live performances.
The Cyrix chips were supposed to be extremely unstable, and yet i had several linux systems running cyrix processors with uptimes exceeding a year. Perhaps they were only unstable when running windows?
As for the poor mp3 decoding performance, the cyrix chips were very good at integer code but lacked floating point capabilities... For most general use cases the better integer performance (especially for the price) outweighed the weak floating point.
Why would the score be higher for a server build? What use would a server have for a web browser? Surely they should be making more effort on the client version of the browser, where it might actually be used?
Well Apple are evil in a different market segment, one in which they are a significant player. They are still not evil in general computing because they don't have the market share to twist the market. OSX still has numerous areas where it's far more open than windows, both in terms of open source components and support for open standards within the bundled applications.
But it all goes to show that no single company should ever be allowed to have too much control, as none can be trusted.
In 2001 IE6 was a crude non standards compliant browser that just happened to be compatible with the crude non standards compliant websites in common use at the time... The early Mozilla betas had much better support for CSS for instance, as did the mac version of IE. IE6 couldn't even render the official w3c css page, it made a complete mockery of the rendering.
I'm all for more competition in the phone space, but ms have generated a lot of bad will over the years so i'd rather not have to deal with them at all. I'd like to see firefox, ubuntu, jolla etc take off and provide some real competition to ios/android.
Also android in itself is significantly preferable to a more proprietary system, you are not stuck with the version dictated to you by google, you can create your own derivative, and the system is open enough you can even create a non android system which is compatible with android apps.
And yes companies seem grossly incompetent and negligent when it comes to computing in general... In any other area of the business they would demand second sources and exit strategies etc, and yet are quite willing to put important parts of their business in the hands of a single software provider with no easy migration route away. And then to make matters worse, don't learn from their mistakes and fall for the same obvious traps over and over again.
The childish curiosity to learn and explore tends to get beaten out of them by modern tech... Gone are the old days when a C64 would encourage you to learn to program and learn about the inner workings of the system. Now you have systems which actually try to prevent you getting to the internals, or systems which instil fear in an attempt to discourage it "this location contains system files, dont touch" etc. Many kids who start off eager quickly become scared of technology thanks to things like this.
Only while there may be people familiar with writing x86 asm, very few people will be used to programming the GPU directly... Most go through the various APIs provided, which always incur a fairly significant overhead. This might suffice at the start of a consoles lifespan, but developers will want to push the hardware further as it ages.
What awareness? A few news stories on geek sites where 99% of the readership are already aware of freebsd?
It's not like the ps4 will display a freebsd logo when it boots, best case there will be an "about" option and after scrolling through several pages of eula, copyright notices and threats to discourage reverse engineering there might be an acknowledgement that code from freebsd was used. Most of the linux based devices i have are like this.
The users will have no idea that freebsd is being used, or what freebsd is. The same can be said of linux, and yet most people have multiple linux devices at home these days. I know several people who verifiably have more instances of linux running in their home than windows, and yet they know what windows is because its blatant in promoting itself.
Because the Linux license terms required them to...
What makes you think they would ever contribute anything back to BSD?
Both Linux and BSD suffer from not running in visible locations... There are all manner of devices out there running them, but very few of them make it clear to the user what they're running, whereas windows despite being present on a relatively small subset of hardware types is blatantly in your face so people assume its more widespread.
Yes, the idea that chrome/webkit would become a monopoly is also disturbing, although that is considerably less unpleasant than IE being a monopoly...
Webkit is open source, so anyone is free to build it on their own platform - thus no computing platform is arbitrarily excluded from the web.
Webkit is (or was) being actively developed by multiple large companies rather than just 1 (not sure what's going on with google's fork), so no one company has absolute control.
So while i won't rule webkit out, i do tend to favour firefox whenever possible.
I'm saying they should not support a browser/company that has a proven history of screwing both their customers and the market as a whole. Companies today are still suffering from the effects of the IE6 monopoly, as is most of south korea.
Blocking a conversation is obvious and the people know exactly where they stand...
Allowing the conversation to take place, while secretly monitoring it could be far worse, people could receive subtle comeback for expressing their views and have no idea why its happening.
Which is exactly the point, if enough people start using IE again that competition is effectively eliminated they will almost certainly cease development while encouraging the creation of ie-only websites to lock users in. This is called "bad faith".
Having experienced this in the past, i have no desire to experience it again and thus won't use any version of IE wether it's a decent browser or not.