Point isn't to argue whether HTML/CSS/Scripts are software or not, but look at the way we perceive them, it's natural for webpages to be open source, it's natural for *NIX platform apps to be open source, it's unnatural for MS platform apps to be open source. Difference in culture and perception more than anything else.
And you're splitting hairs, in any other language the IP isn't IF{}, Public Sub, window.open or any other statement, it's the total functions that comes out of it. With HTML the IP is the appearance of a page (not counting contents here), yet few are terrified that someone would steal their design, they KNOW ppl can look at the source, and it doesn't bother most HTML coders, it's just the way it is. Those few that don't want to show their HTML code or images are told one thing, don't put it on the web. Imagine if we had the same idea when it came to "real" software, if you don't want someone to look at your source, don't distribute it.
If someone steals your site design by copying the HTML code, which is open source, then you can go through the legal system to take action, why must we treat software differently? Making source open does in no way mean you give up your rights to it, including copyright.
open source != free as in beer
open source != free as in speech
Open source means the source is open, yes, this means it might be used without permission. open source to me is sharing information, not giving away work for free. Allow people to view the sourcecode, but license and charge for the app.
Mostly like any HTML page is today. Design theft occurs occasionally, but still there are plenty of people who pay web developers to build a site for them. If HTML code was compiled and unreadable, what would the web be today? Didn't most of us learn website coding by copying HTML/CSS/Script snippets from other pages? Has the webdesign industry died because of it?
Problem is, we (as in MS developers) are used to HTML being open source, but anything else must be hidden or someone will steal it for sure! We need a change of culture and way of thinking is all.
Indeed, I use Visual Basic and ASP / VBScript on IIS calling a MS SQL Server or Access DBs a lot myself, is it the perfect solution and the best languages there is? Far from it. BUT, it gives functionality fast and at a low cost, which is what the guy paying me cares about.
But, here a lot of the OS zealots cry in pain, WTF?!! VB?! ASP?! VBScript?! IIS?!!! MS SQL Server?! Access?!! d0000d, they suxx0rz!11!!! C/PHP/Perl/Apache/MySQL rules!1!!! j00 suxx0r n00b!1!
That doesn't really help in convincing people that open source is a good idea, a lot of the people you see advocating open source will do so on the simple basis that MS technologies are evil and that they suck. But hey, they get the job done for me, I get payed, customer gets a working system, everyone is happy.
There is at the moment more people arguing that MS devs. should go Linux/MySQL/Apache than there are people arguing that MS devs. should just go open source. Linux != open source, A VB app can be as much open source as a C app can, just because it's MS platform only doesn't mean it can't be open source. Technologies, platforms, languages does not matter, what you produce and provide with them does.
What's needed is a change in the way MS developers think, with this I mean the people using Visual Studio etc to build solutions for the MS platform. If they start adapting Open Source more, then THEY will start pushing MS. With most MS platform developers being used to buying, and selling, their apps without source code and with a restrictive license, there's no demand on MS at the moment to go Open Source.
However, it's not likely to happen as long as Open Source is pushed by zealots (*cough* RMS *cough) who have nothing to say about MS (or M$) apart from some rant about how they suck, preferably in 1337 5p34k.
There are a lot of gains from sharing source and solutions, but, that culture just doesn't exist in the MS platform developers mind, thus there's little pressure on MS to even consider it as a policy.
I don't think the US aiding Europe was done totally out of kindness, the US could see the long term gains that would come out of a shorter financial penalty. And Sovjet dominance over europe would have been a very bad thing for both Europe and the US. Likewise in adapting an enviromental plan (not saying Kyoto is the plan to end all plans) that would reduce pollution it's a short term financial penalty with long term gains. I don't think anyone can say pollution is good, but yet people don't want to reduce it because it costs a bit.
And yes, if you want friends in Europe, then you pay for it as with the Marshall plan. If we want the US the be friends with us, we pay for it, simple as that, if we're to be allies, then we take turns picking up the tab.
Hehe, sorry for jumping on ya, just that it's fascinating to see the US perspective of things.
I'd rather say the steel industry is paying the price for the cheap labour they've had over the years. I imagine it is(and was) a hard job which took its toll on employees bodies. The money the business then saved by hard working conditions they have to pay now in the form of pensions, seems fair to me.
Actually, I am going to the US shortly, and no, I have no intentions of trying to impose my stupid rules. I would like to understand the american way of thinking, but it seems that it is impossible to get an american to share the basis for their views and thinking, they rather quickly resort to namecalling or childish arguments if anything about their lifestyle or system is questioned.
Yeah, how dare those pesky employees ruin their bodies working a company and then want to get a decent pension out of it? Don't they understand that it reduces the shareholders profits? Sounds very communistic to me, damn unions putting people ahead of profit, down right unamerican I say!.
Yes, a lot less security, when I'm hired here I can count on not being laid off with an hours notice because the boss had an off day. Independence? You mean those with money have choices don't you?
A booming economy is great, good for you, but as I said above, it has a price. I do like your american kneejerk response thoguh.
You see, the money to do all that will come from somewhere.Largely from money that would have been used to build and grow companies, and thus, employ more people...
Uhm, I think, a point is that a large part of money will be spent in another place. As in enviromentally friendlier businesses will grow, it's not wasted money, it's money moved away from traditionally powerful companies that wish to keep going about things the same way they have for 200 years. But then, of course they will make it sound as an impossible task and that the Kyoto treaty is unamerican and could also pose a threat to national security.
Yes, it will give the US an advantage, just as your low taxes (compared to Eu) promote buying the industries products, just like your labour laws give the employer a lot of security and the employee a lot less. Low taxes, few labour laws, few restrictions means industry can bloom and keep prices low, of course, it all has a price that might not be obvious at first.
Yes indeed, I had a similar experience a while back, friend is in the US, I am in Sweden:
A friend called me up, crying and said she had taken a lot of sleeping pills and just called to say farewell, she was rather hysteric and incoherent, but I managed to get through to her to call her best friend, then call me right back no more than 10 minutes later.
A few minutes went by, no call back, I call her but no reply, has she passed out? Has she left the apartment and drove off somehwere? That thought really scared me. I get on IRC, tell a friend in England who works for a company in the US that I need his help and I ask if he knows any way I can get in touch with US police (can't call 911 from abroad). He calls his company, tells a guy there what's going on, that guy in turn calls 911 and gives her address, 911 calls local police, local police calls apartment, no reply. So we keep this chain going for a while trying to convince the next link that this is actually happening.
Finally I get word that a patrol car and an ambulance are being dispatched to her apartment, we all hang up and just wait for something. Maybe 15 minutes later I call the apartment again, an unknown voice picks up, I ask for my friend and the guy tells me she's ok (well, "ok" as in not dead), but has been taken to hospital.
A while later another friend at the hospital calls me up and tells me she's gonna be fine. BIG! sigh of relief. And it smacked me like a 2x4 that IRC and modern international communications had probably saved her life.
Greetings, I would like to meet you both, since I only have a C64 I can't be online much, and MSNM, AIM and ICQ are very slow. So please email me with your home address, phonenumber and suggest a secluded place we can meet.
Love, Junis from afghanistan
So because it looks similar it should handle it? It's still not the same media. By that logic if I wrap a circular cheese slice in tinfoil it's a cd and thus should be handled properly. I can't agree, different media need different readers, unless a combined CD/Cheese reader is released.
Sorry, but that's just lame. You can explain anything with "this isn't a perfect world". Putting a 5.25 inch round plastic thing in a CD-ROM drive might make it spin for awhile and sound funny, but when I press the Eject button it had better pop that sucker back out and act as though nothing had happened.
That's what it should do if it was perfect, just like using a soundcard input interface which gets a 200watt feed from a guitar amp shouldn't kill my computer, but it probably will. There are things that a computer is designed to do, and that's what it should do, the fact that a user is easily mislead by these protected "cds" isn't the device makers fault imo. Just like I can't blame my puter maker for allowing me to feed 200w into the soundcard, it wasn't built for it, and it's not their responsibility to make sure I don't mess up. If I use non-standard equipment with my computer, then I also take a chance and assume the responsibility should it fail miserably. Just because the consumer is easily mislead doesn't mean that the maker is responsible.
imo the culprit here is 100% the cd maker, their cds shouldn't be able to do this to a machine. If a machine isn't capable of playing it as is intended, it should just appear corrupt or empty, not mess up the machine.
If we go back a few years when floppies were common, what if an app requires a boot from a floppy, but on boot, instead of running the app, it flashed the bios to corruptness (in an attempt to "upgrade" it of course) and deleted all partitions on all drives, is the fault the floppydrive makers, the computer makers, or the maker of the floppy disk?
I'd say the latter, I expect things to work a certain way, if I boot from floppy, I expect to be asked about any permanent changes, if I insert a cd-like media I expect that any cd-reading device can handle it gracefully by adhering to standard, if the reader can't actually read it, fine, but don't ruin my player because it can't handle it. Device makers trust media makers to not create media that is dangerous to a consumers equipment, and by that trust they also give responsibility to the media maker to NOT run any malicious code without the user approving it, which is the norm.
The alternative would be devices that won't run anything which isn't approved by the maker, home-made cds? Forget it, it might do naughty things to a machine and people would blame the device maker.
Yes, software should never crash, but sorry to say, this isn't a perfect world. Apples iMac, and most other CD readers are designed to read CDs, that's Compact Discs(tm), not compact discs.
Difference being that the CD(tm) has a defined format, a CD reader is as designed to read other similar discs as much as it's designed to read a cheddar cheese slice inserted to it. And if I insert cheddar cheese, I don't really expect the CD player to come up with a nice little box telling me it can 't read cheddar cheese.
Yes, it could possibly handle it better, but, it's not designed nor meant to be able to read those other compact discs.
Yes I am probably being a bit picky, but seriously, using M$ instead of MS is getting really old. If M$ is to be the way we spell it then I suggest spelling Linux as [h4h4h4, I pwnz0r j00 suxxz0rz!1!1!] *BSD should be: [j00 st00pid "h4h4h4, I pwnz0r j00 suxxz0rz!1!1!" n00bs! we pwn j00 4ll!!!11!111!!1!1]
This way it will be more consistent and easier to understand just which company or OS someone is referring to, thank you for your cooperation
Welcome to slashdot, where moderators with -1 offtopic rubber stamps run wild, 'tis a dangerous land for sure where triggerhappy moderators prey on those that dare stray from the path even by an inch.
So I'll use my +1 bonus on this just for the hell of it and watch as they get their panties in a bunch from the exitement of knowing that they may deal their fearsome moderation not once, not twice, but three whole times before this post draws it last breath and disappears into the unseen -1 land, let my demise serve as an example, fear the -1 offtopic modders!
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Point isn't to argue whether HTML/CSS/Scripts are software or not, but look at the way we perceive them, it's natural for webpages to be open source, it's natural for *NIX platform apps to be open source, it's unnatural for MS platform apps to be open source. Difference in culture and perception more than anything else.
And you're splitting hairs, in any other language the IP isn't IF{}, Public Sub, window.open or any other statement, it's the total functions that comes out of it. With HTML the IP is the appearance of a page (not counting contents here), yet few are terrified that someone would steal their design, they KNOW ppl can look at the source, and it doesn't bother most HTML coders, it's just the way it is. Those few that don't want to show their HTML code or images are told one thing, don't put it on the web. Imagine if we had the same idea when it came to "real" software, if you don't want someone to look at your source, don't distribute it.
If someone steals your site design by copying the HTML code, which is open source, then you can go through the legal system to take action, why must we treat software differently? Making source open does in no way mean you give up your rights to it, including copyright.
open source != free as in beer
open source != free as in speech
Open source means the source is open, yes, this means it might be used without permission. open source to me is sharing information, not giving away work for free. Allow people to view the sourcecode, but license and charge for the app.
Mostly like any HTML page is today. Design theft occurs occasionally, but still there are plenty of people who pay web developers to build a site for them. If HTML code was compiled and unreadable, what would the web be today? Didn't most of us learn website coding by copying HTML/CSS/Script snippets from other pages? Has the webdesign industry died because of it?
Problem is, we (as in MS developers) are used to HTML being open source, but anything else must be hidden or someone will steal it for sure!
We need a change of culture and way of thinking is all.
Indeed, I use Visual Basic and ASP / VBScript on IIS calling a MS SQL Server or Access DBs a lot myself, is it the perfect solution and the best languages there is? Far from it. BUT, it gives functionality fast and at a low cost, which is what the guy paying me cares about.
But, here a lot of the OS zealots cry in pain, WTF?!! VB?! ASP?! VBScript?! IIS?!!! MS SQL Server?! Access?!! d0000d, they suxx0rz!11!!! C/PHP/Perl/Apache/MySQL rules!1!!! j00 suxx0r n00b!1!
That doesn't really help in convincing people that open source is a good idea, a lot of the people you see advocating open source will do so on the simple basis that MS technologies are evil and that they suck. But hey, they get the job done for me, I get payed, customer gets a working system, everyone is happy.
There is at the moment more people arguing that MS devs. should go Linux/MySQL/Apache than there are people arguing that MS devs. should just go open source. Linux != open source, A VB app can be as much open source as a C app can, just because it's MS platform only doesn't mean it can't be open source. Technologies, platforms, languages does not matter, what you produce and provide with them does.
What's needed is a change in the way MS developers think, with this I mean the people using Visual Studio etc to build solutions for the MS platform. If they start adapting Open Source more, then THEY will start pushing MS. With most MS platform developers being used to buying, and selling, their apps without source code and with a restrictive license, there's no demand on MS at the moment to go Open Source.
However, it's not likely to happen as long as Open Source is pushed by zealots (*cough* RMS *cough) who have nothing to say about MS (or M$) apart from some rant about how they suck, preferably in 1337 5p34k.
There are a lot of gains from sharing source and solutions, but, that culture just doesn't exist in the MS platform developers mind, thus there's little pressure on MS to even consider it as a policy.
Welcome to capitalism my friend.
I don't think the US aiding Europe was done totally out of kindness, the US could see the long term gains that would come out of a shorter financial penalty. And Sovjet dominance over europe would have been a very bad thing for both Europe and the US. Likewise in adapting an enviromental plan (not saying Kyoto is the plan to end all plans) that would reduce pollution it's a short term financial penalty with long term gains. I don't think anyone can say pollution is good, but yet people don't want to reduce it because it costs a bit.
And yes, if you want friends in Europe, then you pay for it as with the Marshall plan. If we want the US the be friends with us, we pay for it, simple as that, if we're to be allies, then we take turns picking up the tab.
Hehe, sorry for jumping on ya, just that it's fascinating to see the US perspective of things.
I'd rather say the steel industry is paying the price for the cheap labour they've had over the years. I imagine it is(and was) a hard job which took its toll on employees bodies. The money the business then saved by hard working conditions they have to pay now in the form of pensions, seems fair to me.
Actually, I am going to the US shortly, and no, I have no intentions of trying to impose my stupid rules. I would like to understand the american way of thinking, but it seems that it is impossible to get an american to share the basis for their views and thinking, they rather quickly resort to namecalling or childish arguments if anything about their lifestyle or system is questioned.
Yeah, how dare those pesky employees ruin their bodies working a company and then want to get a decent pension out of it? Don't they understand that it reduces the shareholders profits? Sounds very communistic to me, damn unions putting people ahead of profit, down right unamerican I say!.
No, I'm european :p
Yes, a lot less security, when I'm hired here I can count on not being laid off with an hours notice because the boss had an off day.
Independence? You mean those with money have choices don't you?
A booming economy is great, good for you, but as I said above, it has a price. I do like your american kneejerk response thoguh.
Uhm, I think, a point is that a large part of money will be spent in another place. As in enviromentally friendlier businesses will grow, it's not wasted money, it's money moved away from traditionally powerful companies that wish to keep going about things the same way they have for 200 years. But then, of course they will make it sound as an impossible task and that the Kyoto treaty is unamerican and could also pose a threat to national security.
Yes, it will give the US an advantage, just as your low taxes (compared to Eu) promote buying the industries products, just like your labour laws give the employer a lot of security and the employee a lot less. Low taxes, few labour laws, few restrictions means industry can bloom and keep prices low, of course, it all has a price that might not be obvious at first.
You Sir, are my hero.
I will however, be forced to send you my medical bill for treatment of 4 ribs broken from laughing.
Get +5, get -1 Troll, get +1 Underrated = +5 Troll
Actually, it was an idea of Bill Gates' wife.
oh Wait.. nevermind
Yes indeed, I had a similar experience a while back, friend is in the US, I am in Sweden:
A friend called me up, crying and said she had taken a lot of sleeping pills and just called to say farewell, she was rather hysteric and incoherent, but I managed to get through to her to call her best friend, then call me right back no more than 10 minutes later.
A few minutes went by, no call back, I call her but no reply, has she passed out? Has she left the apartment and drove off somehwere? That thought really scared me. I get on IRC, tell a friend in England who works for a company in the US that I need his help and I ask if he knows any way I can get in touch with US police (can't call 911 from abroad). He calls his company, tells a guy there what's going on, that guy in turn calls 911 and gives her address, 911 calls local police, local police calls apartment, no reply. So we keep this chain going for a while trying to convince the next link that this is actually happening.
Finally I get word that a patrol car and an ambulance are being dispatched to her apartment, we all hang up and just wait for something. Maybe 15 minutes later I call the apartment again, an unknown voice picks up, I ask for my friend and the guy tells me she's ok (well, "ok" as in not dead), but has been taken to hospital.
A while later another friend at the hospital calls me up and tells me she's gonna be fine. BIG! sigh of relief. And it smacked me like a 2x4 that IRC and modern international communications had probably saved her life.
Greetings, I would like to meet you both, since I only have a C64 I can't be online much, and MSNM, AIM and ICQ are very slow. So please email me with your home address, phonenumber and suggest a secluded place we can meet.
Love, Junis from afghanistan
So because it looks similar it should handle it? It's still not the same media. By that logic if I wrap a circular cheese slice in tinfoil it's a cd and thus should be handled properly. I can't agree, different media need different readers, unless a combined CD/Cheese reader is released.
That's what it should do if it was perfect, just like using a soundcard input interface which gets a 200watt feed from a guitar amp shouldn't kill my computer, but it probably will. There are things that a computer is designed to do, and that's what it should do, the fact that a user is easily mislead by these protected "cds" isn't the device makers fault imo. Just like I can't blame my puter maker for allowing me to feed 200w into the soundcard, it wasn't built for it, and it's not their responsibility to make sure I don't mess up. If I use non-standard equipment with my computer, then I also take a chance and assume the responsibility should it fail miserably. Just because the consumer is easily mislead doesn't mean that the maker is responsible.
imo the culprit here is 100% the cd maker, their cds shouldn't be able to do this to a machine. If a machine isn't capable of playing it as is intended, it should just appear corrupt or empty, not mess up the machine.
If we go back a few years when floppies were common, what if an app requires a boot from a floppy, but on boot, instead of running the app, it flashed the bios to corruptness (in an attempt to "upgrade" it of course) and deleted all partitions on all drives, is the fault the floppydrive makers, the computer makers, or the maker of the floppy disk?
I'd say the latter, I expect things to work a certain way, if I boot from floppy, I expect to be asked about any permanent changes, if I insert a cd-like media I expect that any cd-reading device can handle it gracefully by adhering to standard, if the reader can't actually read it, fine, but don't ruin my player because it can't handle it. Device makers trust media makers to not create media that is dangerous to a consumers equipment, and by that trust they also give responsibility to the media maker to NOT run any malicious code without the user approving it, which is the norm.
The alternative would be devices that won't run anything which isn't approved by the maker, home-made cds? Forget it, it might do naughty things to a machine and people would blame the device maker.
Yes, software should never crash, but sorry to say, this isn't a perfect world. Apples iMac, and most other CD readers are designed to read CDs, that's Compact Discs(tm), not compact discs.
Difference being that the CD(tm) has a defined format, a CD reader is as designed to read other similar discs as much as it's designed to read a cheddar cheese slice inserted to it. And if I insert cheddar cheese, I don't really expect the CD player to come up with a nice little box telling me it can 't read cheddar cheese.
Yes, it could possibly handle it better, but, it's not designed nor meant to be able to read those other compact discs.
At http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex.htm, where you'll also find Einsteins and various others FBI acts.
Seems like a little?
Seems like a lot?
Glad an unbiased police is there to protect the citizens huh?
It's slashdot's way of circumventing the page widening bug, force a space into long unbroken textstrings.
Yes I am probably being a bit picky, but seriously, using M$ instead of MS is getting really old. If M$ is to be the way we spell it then I suggest spelling Linux as [h4h4h4, I pwnz0r j00 suxxz0rz!1!1!]
*BSD should be: [j00 st00pid "h4h4h4, I pwnz0r j00 suxxz0rz!1!1!" n00bs! we pwn j00 4ll!!!11!111!!1!1]
This way it will be more consistent and easier to understand just which company or OS someone is referring to, thank you for your cooperation
Welcome to slashdot, where moderators with -1 offtopic rubber stamps run wild, 'tis a dangerous land for sure where triggerhappy moderators prey on those that dare stray from the path even by an inch.
So I'll use my +1 bonus on this just for the hell of it and watch as they get their panties in a bunch from the exitement of knowing that they may deal their fearsome moderation not once, not twice, but three whole times before this post draws it last breath and disappears into the unseen -1 land, let my demise serve as an example, fear the -1 offtopic modders!
Too many indeed, the system is only safer if the person doing those 2 billion clicks actually knows what they are and what they're for.