"We are Microsoft. Lower your firewalls and surrender your servers. We will badly reimplement your technological distinctiveness in our own products. Your culture will be embraced and extended to service us. Resistance is futile."
All the high paid jobs that do NOT require physical presence to be possible to do are things like software development(...)
Please define 'require'. In my book there is no hard requirement to be physically present. However, I have noted that projects that I am involved in are more successfull if and when there are short and direct lines of communication between developers, testers, analysts, end-users, etc. Projects where there was much 'distance' seemed to foster a sort of 'us-and-them' (or rather 'us-against-them') feeling.
Human beings have evolved living and working in clans; we 'want' to belong to groups (even a lot of those who say they do not seem to hang out together). We are social beings. It is logical that we function at our best in a 'clan', which means we can see, smell, touch and hear the other members of that clan. Being 10000 km away from the rest of your team/clan makes us not 'feel at ease' in the primitive parts of our brains.
Yes, but you are looking at this from a wrong point of view. It is not about developing the people and nations of the so called third world, it is all about making a profit. The MS CEO does not care whatsoever about those people (apart from a PR point of view), he only cares about what his own company can sell them and how to make more profit doing that.
Rogelberg has delivered this insight in a talk called "Meetings and More Meetings," which he presented to a meeting at the University of Sheffield. He also does a talk called "Not Another Meeting!", which has been well received at two meetings in North Carolina.
But if Joe returns the player because it will not connect to his TV, then it will fail because of DRM.
I do agree with your point that the difference in quality will probably be lost on Joe; except maybe for bragging rights, there is no difference for him.
I hope neither will become dominant; I hope both will turn out to be big flops that the general public will avoid for all the DRM shit and the possibility of owning yet another betamax or V2000 system.
People do not want too bloody restrictive DRM, they do not want to make choices like "Shall I buy a player that plays movies from A, B and C or one that plays movies from X, Y and Z?". I hope a big, big flop for both Blue and HD camps will make that pretty clear for both hardware and content producers.
It is kind of sad when one of the most informative (and factual accurate) posts in this thread does not reach +5, and one response even calls on mods to mod it into oblivion.
You could also have mentioned that William would probably never have won if the English had not just returned from a bloody fight (which they won) before finding themselves in battle again against the Normans. Ah well, at least it left the world with a nice little tapesty:-).
But if you try to take away their picture shows. . ? Man, watch out!
Bingo! We have a winner. "Ad populum panem et circenses.". Just give the proletariate masses food and play, and you can be as corrupt as you like when you are in power.
It has been this way in the Roman Empire, just like it is right here right now. People just no not seem to care enough for things besides their own limited selfish lives, unless something very very bad happens.
Ouch, that's what you get when posting to an all English site while the language of your thinking processes is Dutch.
From 'Van Dale':
bannen (ov.ww.)
1 in de ban doen => verbannen
2 door bezwering verdrijven => uitdrijven
In Dutch the meaning is more: to drive out, to expel, to put in exile, to exorcise. That is how I read RMS words as well; I think he is outspoken enough to say we should have laws against non-free software if that is what he really means. I think he simply wants all people to stop using non-free software, and this is very much more consistent with his other statements on this issue than a 'outlaw non-free software' statement.
But you were indeed right on the ban == outlaw equality.
RMS states that from his POV one may use non-free software if one is working on a free replacement for that non-free software. Why is this inconsistent and/or hypocritical?
I think you are being unfair here: RMS clearly says that there is another valid reason to keep using non-free software for the time being: "If you participate in development of the free replacement for a program, then you can excuse temporarily continuing to run it."
No hypocrisy here. Please use appropriate and objective quotes before accusing someone.
I think both you and the grandparent are right: to me you seem to be discussing different things. Indeed we are seeing great advantage, but if mankind is still alive 750 years ahead in time, the humans living in that age will think we were a bit silly and 'medieval'.
If grantparent would have made the same argument in the middle ages, you could have succesfully made the same sort of counter argument: "Look at the cities, our churches! We have the Word of our Lord now! And we have a justice system!"
IMHO grantparent tries to look at how we are now through the eyes of someone from the future.
Yes. Please name the sources that you have consulted so that everyone here can see that your statements are fair, well-balanced and as close to the truth as possible.
patents exist for the benefit of both inventors and society
Sorry, but you are wrong. There is this case in old England about a glass-maker who invented a certain type of glass, which was very pretty or something. It had something unique. The king (probably a wise man) thought that if this glass-maker were to die, the knowledge how to make this type of glass would be forever lost. The glass-maker had no reason whatsoever to explain how he did it, because that would reduce his unique selling point.
So the king thought: if this man dies, the knowledge is lost. But if I were to say that he should properly document the process and that he would get an exclusive right to be the only one to make use of that process for, say, 20 years, then the glass-maker would not lose his unique selling point and the knowledge would not be lost to society! Chances are he would even be dead before the 20 years were over.
Simple and brilliant. Patents exist to promote the knowledge and wellbeing for the whole society. That is the goal. The means to that goal is to persuade the inventor to fully disclose the invention, in return for which the inventor gets a temporary monopoly.
Patents do not exist as a *goal* to benefit inventors. Patents exist as a *means* to benefit inventors, the goal is to get those benefits into society. when the goal is already reached (see somewhere else in a side thread: Coca Cola can still be bought in 100 years, there are enough sodas on the market, and the Coca Cola price is acceptable) there is no need for the means.
What strikes me is that you do not reply to my most significant argument, and that is that there is no benefit for society to have patents on recipes. In 100 years time people will still be able to buy Coca Cola. The price is not too high, because if the CCcompany pushes the prices up too much, they lose market share to other manufacturers/sodas.
So, Coca Cola will not be lost to society and there is enough competition in the marketplace to keep prices low. All without patents. Once again: there is no need for patents here. A patent would not have brought more benefit for society. You can quote all kinds of registered patents and international treaties, but that just shows that a *lot* of people just follow a means to an end instead of the end itself.
Actually the Coca-Cola as a trade secret is a great example of how keeping a secret and not disclosing could technically stifle innovation in the soda industry if other companies were already so prolific in the area anyway.
You mean to say that there Pepsi Cola, Herschi Cola, 7UP, Spa Green/Red, Tonic, Cassis, etc. could all be bought before Coca Cola existed? Or you mean to say that these other soda drinks are there because of the stiffling effect of not having a patent on Coca Cola?
It is a burger which would be easily rejected as a sum of its parts.
Yup. Just like reading one's email over a wireless link is not patentable, because it is just a sum of email and wireless, right?
Without this it would be a trade secret for all eternity and no one would ever know how it was made.
So what? Is it keeping back competitors? Is it limiting choice for consumers? Pepsi Cola does quite well. Do people have more choice? Yes: they can buy either Pepsi of Coke or any other smaller brand, all with their specific flavours. When a patent would have been granted on the early Coca Cola we would now be in the exact same situation: the 'original' plus a number of competitors with different (improved as you like it) flavours.
Once again: there is no *need* for patents for society on this point.
Really, you are WAY off base on this one. Go crawl back into your hole of paranoia
I am so way off base that you feel the need to resort into an attack on the person? Please keep the discussion on the *arguments* not on the *people*.
You set out to do something else, but you have just proven to me that the patent-idiocy is so wide-spread that it is even infecting ppl who otherwise are mostly modded positively.
Once again: it is a recipe. Coca Cola company *never* got a patent on cola; in fact their recipe is a closely guarded company secret. Why is that? McD's *never* had a patent on a Big Mac (do have trademark though). No Michelin-starred chef *ever* patented a new recipe. Why is that?
Patents are there only for the benefit of society. Let me repeat that: for the _benefit_ of _society_. Where is the benefit of granting patents on recipes? There is none. Normal market pressures will cause the smallest restaurants to the biggest food-multinationals to make new products *if the market demands it*. People want to taste something new, so they buy and taste it.
There is no need whatsoever to grant someone a monopoly on a 'new' recipe. Coca Cola company did not need it, Nestle should not need it.
It would have been trivially simple to implement an all inclusive filesystem, like '/' in unix; it could even have been done in the DOS days. In fact: it had already been done with UNC paths. Or you could simply define a drive letter that does not exist and put the drives under that root-drive as subdirs.
Deprecating support for the old naming scheme could be similar to the FCB/filehandle deprecation. Backward compatibility should not be used as an excuse in this case imho.
I am sure that Microsoft over the years has had much, much more money to spend on Windows than the linux camp had on linux.
That after all those years Microsoft still has drive letters with a dirty hack (my desktop / my computer/whatever) to 'unify' them, has only broken symlink functionality (shortcuts), and only now mentiones symlinks is quite pathetic, if you ask me.
But I am sure you could make the same kind of argument on linux vs. plan9:-).
Slashdot Mirror
(...) how they use Linux (...)
"We are Microsoft. Lower your firewalls and surrender your servers. We will badly reimplement your technological distinctiveness in our own products. Your culture will be embraced and extended to service us. Resistance is futile."
All the high paid jobs that do NOT require physical presence to be possible to do are things like software development(...)
Please define 'require'. In my book there is no hard requirement to be physically present. However, I have noted that projects that I am involved in are more successfull if and when there are short and direct lines of communication between developers, testers, analysts, end-users, etc. Projects where there was much 'distance' seemed to foster a sort of 'us-and-them' (or rather 'us-against-them') feeling.
Human beings have evolved living and working in clans; we 'want' to belong to groups (even a lot of those who say they do not seem to hang out together). We are social beings. It is logical that we function at our best in a 'clan', which means we can see, smell, touch and hear the other members of that clan. Being 10000 km away from the rest of your team/clan makes us not 'feel at ease' in the primitive parts of our brains.
A lot of fellow dutchmen make the same error, but actually it is spelled 'seksueel', no 'x' in there...
Yes, but you are looking at this from a wrong point of view. It is not about developing the people and nations of the so called third world, it is all about making a profit. The MS CEO does not care whatsoever about those people (apart from a PR point of view), he only cares about what his own company can sell them and how to make more profit doing that.
Rogelberg has delivered this insight in a talk called "Meetings and More Meetings," which he presented to a meeting at the University of Sheffield. He also does a talk called "Not Another Meeting!", which has been well received at two meetings in North Carolina.
Oh, the irony...
But if Joe returns the player because it will not connect to his TV, then it will fail because of DRM.
I do agree with your point that the difference in quality will probably be lost on Joe; except maybe for bragging rights, there is no difference for him.
I hope neither will become dominant; I hope both will turn out to be big flops that the general public will avoid for all the DRM shit and the possibility of owning yet another betamax or V2000 system.
People do not want too bloody restrictive DRM, they do not want to make choices like "Shall I buy a player that plays movies from A, B and C or one that plays movies from X, Y and Z?". I hope a big, big flop for both Blue and HD camps will make that pretty clear for both hardware and content producers.
It is kind of sad when one of the most informative (and factual accurate) posts in this thread does not reach +5, and one response even calls on mods to mod it into oblivion.
You could also have mentioned that William would probably never have won if the English had not just returned from a bloody fight (which they won) before finding themselves in battle again against the Normans. Ah well, at least it left the world with a nice little tapesty :-).
Looking at the url for that message we can see what will probably bee shared the most: www.webpronews.com
But if you try to take away their picture shows. . ? Man, watch out!
Bingo! We have a winner. "Ad populum panem et circenses.". Just give the proletariate masses food and play, and you can be as corrupt as you like when you are in power.
It has been this way in the Roman Empire, just like it is right here right now. People just no not seem to care enough for things besides their own limited selfish lives, unless something very very bad happens.
Ouch, that's what you get when posting to an all English site while the language of your thinking processes is Dutch.
From 'Van Dale':
bannen (ov.ww.)
1 in de ban doen => verbannen
2 door bezwering verdrijven => uitdrijven
In Dutch the meaning is more: to drive out, to expel, to put in exile, to exorcise. That is how I read RMS words as well; I think he is outspoken enough to say we should have laws against non-free software if that is what he really means. I think he simply wants all people to stop using non-free software, and this is very much more consistent with his other statements on this issue than a 'outlaw non-free software' statement.
But you were indeed right on the ban == outlaw equality.
RMS states that from his POV one may use non-free software if one is working on a free replacement for that non-free software. Why is this inconsistent and/or hypocritical?
I think you are being unfair here: RMS clearly says that there is another valid reason to keep using non-free software for the time being: "If you participate in development of the free replacement for a program, then you can excuse temporarily continuing to run it."
No hypocrisy here. Please use appropriate and objective quotes before accusing someone.
Do you mean to say that according to RMS, 'banning' equals 'outlawing'? Or is that your definition?
I think both you and the grandparent are right: to me you seem to be discussing different things. Indeed we are seeing great advantage, but if mankind is still alive 750 years ahead in time, the humans living in that age will think we were a bit silly and 'medieval'.
If grantparent would have made the same argument in the middle ages, you could have succesfully made the same sort of counter argument: "Look at the cities, our churches! We have the Word of our Lord now! And we have a justice system!"
IMHO grantparent tries to look at how we are now through the eyes of someone from the future.
A bit off topic, but funny: did you try to zoom in to maximum magnification? If not, please try. Humour seems to be appreciated at Google.
Anything else I can clear up for you?
Yes. Please name the sources that you have consulted so that everyone here can see that your statements are fair, well-balanced and as close to the truth as possible.
This is patently false, ho ho.
Nice pun :-)
patents exist for the benefit of both inventors and society
Sorry, but you are wrong. There is this case in old England about a glass-maker who invented a certain type of glass, which was very pretty or something. It had something unique. The king (probably a wise man) thought that if this glass-maker were to die, the knowledge how to make this type of glass would be forever lost. The glass-maker had no reason whatsoever to explain how he did it, because that would reduce his unique selling point.
So the king thought: if this man dies, the knowledge is lost. But if I were to say that he should properly document the process and that he would get an exclusive right to be the only one to make use of that process for, say, 20 years, then the glass-maker would not lose his unique selling point and the knowledge would not be lost to society! Chances are he would even be dead before the 20 years were over.
Simple and brilliant. Patents exist to promote the knowledge and wellbeing for the whole society. That is the goal. The means to that goal is to persuade the inventor to fully disclose the invention, in return for which the inventor gets a temporary monopoly.
Patents do not exist as a *goal* to benefit inventors. Patents exist as a *means* to benefit inventors, the goal is to get those benefits into society. when the goal is already reached (see somewhere else in a side thread: Coca Cola can still be bought in 100 years, there are enough sodas on the market, and the Coca Cola price is acceptable) there is no need for the means.
If Coca Cola doesn't have a patent, then why doesn't anyone else make a drink that tastes exactly the same?
Some try, but what's the point? People like 'originals'. That's why restaurants have different menus, soda's have different tastes. etc.
What strikes me is that you do not reply to my most significant argument, and that is that there is no benefit for society to have patents on recipes. In 100 years time people will still be able to buy Coca Cola. The price is not too high, because if the CCcompany pushes the prices up too much, they lose market share to other manufacturers/sodas.
So, Coca Cola will not be lost to society and there is enough competition in the marketplace to keep prices low. All without patents. Once again: there is no need for patents here. A patent would not have brought more benefit for society. You can quote all kinds of registered patents and international treaties, but that just shows that a *lot* of people just follow a means to an end instead of the end itself.
Actually the Coca-Cola as a trade secret is a great example of how keeping a secret and not disclosing could technically stifle innovation in the soda industry if other companies were already so prolific in the area anyway.
You mean to say that there Pepsi Cola, Herschi Cola, 7UP, Spa Green/Red, Tonic, Cassis, etc. could all be bought before Coca Cola existed? Or you mean to say that these other soda drinks are there because of the stiffling effect of not having a patent on Coca Cola?
It is a burger which would be easily rejected as a sum of its parts.
Yup. Just like reading one's email over a wireless link is not patentable, because it is just a sum of email and wireless, right?
Without this it would be a trade secret for all eternity and no one would ever know how it was made.
So what? Is it keeping back competitors? Is it limiting choice for consumers? Pepsi Cola does quite well. Do people have more choice? Yes: they can buy either Pepsi of Coke or any other smaller brand, all with their specific flavours. When a patent would have been granted on the early Coca Cola we would now be in the exact same situation: the 'original' plus a number of competitors with different (improved as you like it) flavours. Once again: there is no *need* for patents for society on this point.
Really, you are WAY off base on this one. Go crawl back into your hole of paranoia
I am so way off base that you feel the need to resort into an attack on the person? Please keep the discussion on the *arguments* not on the *people*.
You set out to do something else, but you have just proven to me that the patent-idiocy is so wide-spread that it is even infecting ppl who otherwise are mostly modded positively.
Once again: it is a recipe. Coca Cola company *never* got a patent on cola; in fact their recipe is a closely guarded company secret. Why is that? McD's *never* had a patent on a Big Mac (do have trademark though). No Michelin-starred chef *ever* patented a new recipe. Why is that?
Patents are there only for the benefit of society. Let me repeat that: for the _benefit_ of _society_. Where is the benefit of granting patents on recipes? There is none. Normal market pressures will cause the smallest restaurants to the biggest food-multinationals to make new products *if the market demands it*. People want to taste something new, so they buy and taste it.
There is no need whatsoever to grant someone a monopoly on a 'new' recipe. Coca Cola company did not need it, Nestle should not need it.
Now, ask yourself, is that obvious? I think this patent is perfectly acceptable.
No, IT IS A BLOODY RECEPY!
Since when has it become acceptable to grant patents on recepies? Even the Coca Cola Company does NOT have (and should not have) a patent on cola.
The american 'IP'-quest is getting more and more rediculous by the day.
It would have been trivially simple to implement an all inclusive filesystem, like '/' in unix; it could even have been done in the DOS days. In fact: it had already been done with UNC paths. Or you could simply define a drive letter that does not exist and put the drives under that root-drive as subdirs.
Deprecating support for the old naming scheme could be similar to the FCB/filehandle deprecation. Backward compatibility should not be used as an excuse in this case imho.
I am sure that Microsoft over the years has had much, much more money to spend on Windows than the linux camp had on linux.
That after all those years Microsoft still has drive letters with a dirty hack (my desktop / my computer /whatever) to 'unify' them, has only broken symlink functionality (shortcuts), and only now mentiones symlinks is quite pathetic, if you ask me.
But I am sure you could make the same kind of argument on linux vs. plan9 :-).