Exactly because of the reason mentioned by the parent, I have doubt whether defragging the pagefile really has such a large performance gain. Anyway, on linux the swapfile is not fragmented, but the drive still seeks like crazy during swapping. More explanation is invited.
If the copyrighted work (such as a song or a movie) is not available for someone to buy, then it is not illegal to distribute the work to him during the unavailable period, for non-commerical purposes.
If the distributor deliberately restricted the way the work can be used, including restricting copying with DRM, it can be considered "unavailable to buy" (unless, of course, the distributor also provides unrestricted copies, for example I'm okay with unrestricted copies for sale and restricted copies for rental).
Of course, the price must not be exorbitantly high (e.g. the price of an ordinary DVD should be no more than $50 or $100) for the work to be considered available to buy.
Breaking DRM is not illegal in itself, though the user must still respect copyright (subject to the two rules above) whether or not he broke the DRM.
In my opinion, distributing something only in DRM'd form is similar to (though with a lesser extent) keeping a book out-of-print, in that it makes the work less useful to the public, even after the copyright expires. We cannot restrict the copyright holder's freedom to do it, but we can restrict the exclusive rights we give them if they decide to do that. In short, if you use DRM, make sure it works perfectly; the copyright law should not help you if it breaks.
I ported a Doom map viewer I wrote in C/GTK/Glade to Mono/Gtk#. It was about 20k bytes of C code. Converting it to C# took little effort, though being almost my first C# program I had some difficulty deciding between structs and classes for data structures (C# classes have significant overhead when there is only a few members, and C# structs doesn't seem to be as flexible as C structs). The resulting C# code was a little less verbose (about 20% fewer bytes) than glib-style C code, since I no longer need to call g_free()'s, and callbacks are more concise in C#. It worked perfectly under Mono.
My only gripe was the lack of a decent debugger (monodbg hardly worked then), but it was quite a while ago, and I hope someone would post their experience with a newer version of the debugger.
As a fairly advanced user myself, I frequently start vshtpd/httpd/squid (and open up the corresponding port in iptables) temporarily, to transfer a few files to my colleagues or something. It would be very inconvenient if I have to phone my ISP for this.
What's worse, when the next big P2P app comes out, expect the ISP support offices to be overloaded by open-port-requests. It would be costly, and you might not want the average support person to know what P2P app you use. Of course the net admin can know if he wants, but currently no one would care unless you use way too much bandwidth.
One workaround is to make the ISP's firewall settings configurable online by customers, but this might not be feasible now. Before that, I prefer to have the option of having all ports open and take all the responsibilieis myself, at no additional cost.
The parent is a valid and consistent opinion, even though many people may disagree. Personally, I think I would want academic standards of copyright protection, i.e. no outright plagiarism and give due credit when it is convenient to do so (unlike the old BSD license), unless the author gives permission to do otherwise. Higher levels of protection (e.g. no bootlegged CDs even when the buyer knows it is bootlegged, no unauthorized online distribution of Windows) might be okay with me, but I don't think I really need that.
AFAIK many of the widely-known GPL violations involve plagiarism in that they copied GPL code and claimed that all the code are written by themselves. Other cases (such as some binary drivers) are considerably more controversial, and I don't think the free software community would lose much if such behavior is legalized.
All these are in Chinese and I don't have time to translate them (though Babelfish helps a little), and they are from BBSs, so they might not be all that accurate. Also, given current events I'm not sure that these links will continue to work.
I don't think it is dangerous in any way to post these links here, even if the government is as oppressive as you seem to think. Heck, I'm just helping you get the facts straight.
For me (floating-point intensive C programs on a P4), ICC and GCC's performances are usually very close, unless autovectorization works for the most time-consuming loops (which is rarely the case in my program) or when a lot of sin/cos/exp functions are called (ICC has a very well optimized SSE-based math library which GCC lacks). Other differences in instruction scheduling, register allocation, inlining, etc. usually have significant effects only in very specific cases.
If you don't make your work public, other people can't see it whether or not it is copyrighted. If you do, I don't think copyright should help you keep your privacy --- once it is public, it is public forever.
Also, I think if the work is unavailable to someone at a reasonable price and with reasonable terms (no overly bad EULA or DRM stuff), they should be allowed to copy them (e.g. via ftp or P2P networks) as long as the unavailability persists, at least if no profit is derived. It is not strictly necessary to put the work into the public domain as soon as the work becomes unavailable. We can allow the publisher to resume their exclusive right as soon as they publish the work again; in this way copyright won't be accidentally lost forever if the publisher's employees had a one-week strike, and we also have a solution when some work is available to only part of the population (for example, region-coded DVDs).
The only people who should try to support the company making Nero are those who actually need to use it themselves --- this is as true for such non-free softare as for FOSS. For the rest of us, this is probably less useful than Emacs to a vi-fan, and we can whine all we want without affecting the company or anyone else in any way, as long as both sides keep facts straight (which seems to be mostly true here) so that new users are not misled. There is no point in arguing with personal opinions such as whether CLI or GUI is easier to use --- if enough users want Nero on Linux, good; if the number of users who prefer Nero to the competing FOSS solutions is too low to keep the company happy, they may well stop and it won't affect Desktop Linux much, as a whole.
Sometimes I even wish C would use different operators for signed, unsigned and floating-point multiplication (among others). In reality I have to use many typecasts to tell the language what I really mean, which is unclear and error-prone.
It is plagiarism (assuming CherryOS did copy a large amount of PearPC code). It is more serious than ordinary copyright infringement since it claims other people's work as one's own, and is unethical by most standards. If a substantial amount of code is copied into your program, I think credits should be given whenever possible even if you are not legally required to do so (e.g. the code is in the public domain). Most ordinary people will call this "stealing", but I agree that we had better call it the right name.
Given his enormous software knowledge, RMS can probably identify more prior arts in patent applications than the average patent examiner, thus striking down more of these applications.
Unfortunately, I think quite a lot of patent applications cover ideas that any expert can think of in three hours but were never used before because no one apart from the applicant bothered to use them, which means they probably have no prior art. A patent examiner cannot do much more than an ordinary citizen when the problem lies in the law itself rather than its enforcement.
There is a long list of claims which are essentially the same, except that the later claims are more specific so that they are less likely to be kicked out in court. Before someone actually get sued using this patent, most lawyers in the US could not be sure which claims are valid, which are not. However do you want the power balance between inventors and the general public to be (personally I think abolishing patents in most fields might be a good idea), this uncertainty is bad for everyone.
In many fields, including software, there are just so many potentially useful ideas that any idea is unlikely to be thought of (let alone published as prior art) beforehand, instead many of them are just discovered when one stumble upon a problem where such an idea is actually useful. For example, it may not be hard to see that it is a good idea to use data structure A in problem P, once one sees the problem, but probably no one will think of that idea before problem P actually becomes a problem that needs solving. In such cases, if the first user of the idea tries to patent it, there would be no prior art. Of course it is usually quite obvious, but obviousness is not something people can agree on. Even the most ingenious ideas/inventions are often obvious to those (like one of the GCC core hackers, including the inventor) who just have a better understanding of things, and people with ordinary skills in that field (like the average code monkey) simply don't understand things that thoroughly, so it is nonobvious to them.
Because of these reasons, patent law is awkward and vague and hard to enforce when applied to software and various other fields. It introduces much uncertainty, since the patent holder himself often do not have much confidence in whether their patent will be upheld in court. We do not need even to consider the balance of rights between inventors and the general public --- such uncertainty is bad for both parties.
So why don't we just scrap patents in such fields and use NDAs instead? After all, patents are supposed to be used against people who copies the inventions after seeing it (so you can in theory make them sign an NDA before letting them see the thing), and independent inventors really should not be punished. In fields such as pharmacy, where it is difficult in practice to make every buyer sign an agreement stating that they will not copy the medicine by analyzing the contents of the pills, patents might be somewhat more enforcable, but in other fields such as software, where NDAs are already a common practice and patents are awkward, it is hard to find a reason to allow for patents there.
The "rehuff" tool of Ogg Vorbis seems to have a similar idea, so it *might* be prior art...
The sick thing about patents is that an idea like this probably have been thought of by many of the experts in that technology (I mean one of the 100 or so people actually doing basic research on it), and they might have discarded it since it may be too computationally expensive and the improvement is marginal in the cases they care about, and the idea seems too trivial for them to even bother writing a paper about it. Then someone patents it, because the price/performance ratio of the idea seems to be better in his situation (maybe his computer is faster, his data size is different, or he cares for the 0.5% improvement that other experts find it too much trouble to bother). Since only a small number of experts know it already, the patent examiner can hardly reject the patent as being obvious, and it is of course novel since no one has bothered to publish any prior art. Then, when the idea actually becomes useful, no one can use it freely.
As a graduate student, a large percentage of the research papers I have read contains ideas just like this, e.g. reverting a performance-computation time tradeoff that an existing method has made. Such non-ground-breaking ideas are so many that it is not practical to ask the experts to publish them all (for that matter, there is only so much pages in an academic magazine, and if publishers publish too much for people to read they would lose money), but since such ideas are usually novel, non-trivial to everyone but the 100 or so best experts in the field, and useful (at the patent application time) in some very special cases that only the author can think of, such patents will probably be granted, and other experts who know the idea for a long time but didn't bother to put it on paper find that they can't use the trick anymore.
I agree with many slashdotters that copyright infringement is different from theft, so why do you call this "theft"? After all, the victim did not lose his identity, and if you consider the money as stolen (which may be true, but it is still somewhat different IMHO), it isn't the identity that got stolen...
I'm not condoning the behavior, I just don't like the wording.
It might not be the best behavior to do full disclosure and post exploits immediately after finding a bug, but he just did not think over the matter enough, and definitely shouldn't be punished by a lawsuit or jail time. After all, not everyone knows about the responsible disclosure process, and it isn't even universally agreed on.
Of course, if he posted an exploit without a warning that it is one, and make it look like something harmless, that would be spreading worms and can be punished.
The anti-social part is that non-free software generally disallows people to share the software with their neighbors, restricts their ability to help each other (e.g. by fixing the source code or hiring someone else to do it) when the software does not work perfectly for them, etc. In short, non-free software licenses usually forces people to be selfish.
That's IMHO why RMS condemns publicly distributed non-free software, while custom software that is never distributed to outsiders is okay to him. In the latter case, it might be better in some cases for the user to share the code with the world, but then it is the user's choice not to share it, and he would have made that choice no matter what. In the former case the license basically forced people not to share, unless they are willing to break the law, so it changes people's behavior for the worse, since in some cases it is very beneficial to share, but general disrespect of the law is undesirable for the society.
The "free" in "free software" means free as in speech, not price. However, the parent does have a point since non-geeks probably don't know the FSF definition.
In fact I think it is definitely unfair to sue P2P program developers, while suing users and torrent sites is more fair. If suing users means some bad publicity, they deserve it, just like drug companies suing African countries for violating their patents on some AIDS drugs deserve some bad publicity even though legally they may win. Otherwise it would be unfair to those who decides not to sue. And it should be up to RIAA and the likes to choose targets that gives them the most profit and hurts publicity the least. In this way, suing children is just stupid, while suing tool makers are plain unreasonable.
Neither Windows nor Linux are that hard to install on a new machine with supported-out-of-the-box hardware. I use linux mostly, but if my computer vendor preinstalls a copy for me, it is quite improbable that it would be the right distribution, the right selection of packages and the right configuration for me, so they would just spend the installation and support costs in vain.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly because of the reason mentioned by the parent, I have doubt whether defragging the pagefile really has such a large performance gain. Anyway, on linux the swapfile is not fragmented, but the drive still seeks like crazy during swapping. More explanation is invited.
- If the copyrighted work (such as a song or a movie) is not available for someone to buy, then it is not illegal to distribute the work to him during the unavailable period, for non-commerical purposes.
- If the distributor deliberately restricted the way the work can be used, including restricting copying with DRM, it can be considered "unavailable to buy" (unless, of course, the distributor also provides unrestricted copies, for example I'm okay with unrestricted copies for sale and restricted copies for rental).
- Of course, the price must not be exorbitantly high (e.g. the price of an ordinary DVD should be no more than $50 or $100) for the work to be considered available to buy.
- Breaking DRM is not illegal in itself, though the user must still respect copyright (subject to the two rules above) whether or not he broke the DRM.
In my opinion, distributing something only in DRM'd form is similar to (though with a lesser extent) keeping a book out-of-print, in that it makes the work less useful to the public, even after the copyright expires. We cannot restrict the copyright holder's freedom to do it, but we can restrict the exclusive rights we give them if they decide to do that. In short, if you use DRM, make sure it works perfectly; the copyright law should not help you if it breaks.My only gripe was the lack of a decent debugger (monodbg hardly worked then), but it was quite a while ago, and I hope someone would post their experience with a newer version of the debugger.
What's worse, when the next big P2P app comes out, expect the ISP support offices to be overloaded by open-port-requests. It would be costly, and you might not want the average support person to know what P2P app you use. Of course the net admin can know if he wants, but currently no one would care unless you use way too much bandwidth.
One workaround is to make the ISP's firewall settings configurable online by customers, but this might not be feasible now. Before that, I prefer to have the option of having all ports open and take all the responsibilieis myself, at no additional cost.
AFAIK many of the widely-known GPL violations involve plagiarism in that they copied GPL code and claimed that all the code are written by themselves. Other cases (such as some binary drivers) are considerably more controversial, and I don't think the free software community would lose much if such behavior is legalized.
All these are in Chinese and I don't have time to translate them (though Babelfish helps a little), and they are from BBSs, so they might not be all that accurate. Also, given current events I'm not sure that these links will continue to work.
I don't think it is dangerous in any way to post these links here, even if the government is as oppressive as you seem to think. Heck, I'm just helping you get the facts straight.
That's also my version of the fact.
I have seen their resignation letter. They resigned rather than got dismissed.
For me (floating-point intensive C programs on a P4), ICC and GCC's performances are usually very close, unless autovectorization works for the most time-consuming loops (which is rarely the case in my program) or when a lot of sin/cos/exp functions are called (ICC has a very well optimized SSE-based math library which GCC lacks). Other differences in instruction scheduling, register allocation, inlining, etc. usually have significant effects only in very specific cases.
Also, I think if the work is unavailable to someone at a reasonable price and with reasonable terms (no overly bad EULA or DRM stuff), they should be allowed to copy them (e.g. via ftp or P2P networks) as long as the unavailability persists, at least if no profit is derived. It is not strictly necessary to put the work into the public domain as soon as the work becomes unavailable. We can allow the publisher to resume their exclusive right as soon as they publish the work again; in this way copyright won't be accidentally lost forever if the publisher's employees had a one-week strike, and we also have a solution when some work is available to only part of the population (for example, region-coded DVDs).
The only people who should try to support the company making Nero are those who actually need to use it themselves --- this is as true for such non-free softare as for FOSS. For the rest of us, this is probably less useful than Emacs to a vi-fan, and we can whine all we want without affecting the company or anyone else in any way, as long as both sides keep facts straight (which seems to be mostly true here) so that new users are not misled. There is no point in arguing with personal opinions such as whether CLI or GUI is easier to use --- if enough users want Nero on Linux, good; if the number of users who prefer Nero to the competing FOSS solutions is too low to keep the company happy, they may well stop and it won't affect Desktop Linux much, as a whole.
Sometimes I even wish C would use different operators for signed, unsigned and floating-point multiplication (among others). In reality I have to use many typecasts to tell the language what I really mean, which is unclear and error-prone.
It is plagiarism (assuming CherryOS did copy a large amount of PearPC code). It is more serious than ordinary copyright infringement since it claims other people's work as one's own, and is unethical by most standards. If a substantial amount of code is copied into your program, I think credits should be given whenever possible even if you are not legally required to do so (e.g. the code is in the public domain). Most ordinary people will call this "stealing", but I agree that we had better call it the right name.
Unfortunately, I think quite a lot of patent applications cover ideas that any expert can think of in three hours but were never used before because no one apart from the applicant bothered to use them, which means they probably have no prior art. A patent examiner cannot do much more than an ordinary citizen when the problem lies in the law itself rather than its enforcement.
There is a long list of claims which are essentially the same, except that the later claims are more specific so that they are less likely to be kicked out in court. Before someone actually get sued using this patent, most lawyers in the US could not be sure which claims are valid, which are not. However do you want the power balance between inventors and the general public to be (personally I think abolishing patents in most fields might be a good idea), this uncertainty is bad for everyone.
Because of these reasons, patent law is awkward and vague and hard to enforce when applied to software and various other fields. It introduces much uncertainty, since the patent holder himself often do not have much confidence in whether their patent will be upheld in court. We do not need even to consider the balance of rights between inventors and the general public --- such uncertainty is bad for both parties.
So why don't we just scrap patents in such fields and use NDAs instead? After all, patents are supposed to be used against people who copies the inventions after seeing it (so you can in theory make them sign an NDA before letting them see the thing), and independent inventors really should not be punished. In fields such as pharmacy, where it is difficult in practice to make every buyer sign an agreement stating that they will not copy the medicine by analyzing the contents of the pills, patents might be somewhat more enforcable, but in other fields such as software, where NDAs are already a common practice and patents are awkward, it is hard to find a reason to allow for patents there.
The sick thing about patents is that an idea like this probably have been thought of by many of the experts in that technology (I mean one of the 100 or so people actually doing basic research on it), and they might have discarded it since it may be too computationally expensive and the improvement is marginal in the cases they care about, and the idea seems too trivial for them to even bother writing a paper about it. Then someone patents it, because the price/performance ratio of the idea seems to be better in his situation (maybe his computer is faster, his data size is different, or he cares for the 0.5% improvement that other experts find it too much trouble to bother). Since only a small number of experts know it already, the patent examiner can hardly reject the patent as being obvious, and it is of course novel since no one has bothered to publish any prior art. Then, when the idea actually becomes useful, no one can use it freely.
As a graduate student, a large percentage of the research papers I have read contains ideas just like this, e.g. reverting a performance-computation time tradeoff that an existing method has made. Such non-ground-breaking ideas are so many that it is not practical to ask the experts to publish them all (for that matter, there is only so much pages in an academic magazine, and if publishers publish too much for people to read they would lose money), but since such ideas are usually novel, non-trivial to everyone but the 100 or so best experts in the field, and useful (at the patent application time) in some very special cases that only the author can think of, such patents will probably be granted, and other experts who know the idea for a long time but didn't bother to put it on paper find that they can't use the trick anymore.
I'm not condoning the behavior, I just don't like the wording.
Of course, if he posted an exploit without a warning that it is one, and make it look like something harmless, that would be spreading worms and can be punished.
That's IMHO why RMS condemns publicly distributed non-free software, while custom software that is never distributed to outsiders is okay to him. In the latter case, it might be better in some cases for the user to share the code with the world, but then it is the user's choice not to share it, and he would have made that choice no matter what. In the former case the license basically forced people not to share, unless they are willing to break the law, so it changes people's behavior for the worse, since in some cases it is very beneficial to share, but general disrespect of the law is undesirable for the society.
The "free" in "free software" means free as in speech, not price. However, the parent does have a point since non-geeks probably don't know the FSF definition.
Of course this depends on a warez'd copy existing on the 'net in the first place...
In fact I think it is definitely unfair to sue P2P program developers, while suing users and torrent sites is more fair. If suing users means some bad publicity, they deserve it, just like drug companies suing African countries for violating their patents on some AIDS drugs deserve some bad publicity even though legally they may win. Otherwise it would be unfair to those who decides not to sue. And it should be up to RIAA and the likes to choose targets that gives them the most profit and hurts publicity the least. In this way, suing children is just stupid, while suing tool makers are plain unreasonable.
Neither Windows nor Linux are that hard to install on a new machine with supported-out-of-the-box hardware. I use linux mostly, but if my computer vendor preinstalls a copy for me, it is quite improbable that it would be the right distribution, the right selection of packages and the right configuration for me, so they would just spend the installation and support costs in vain.