Wow, a well written, entertaining, somewhat original troll. +1, Troll
However, because some of these points are valid, I'm going to respond.
"When my Linux machine crashed and I was unable to mount my root partition..."
In terms of troubleshooting capabilities, Linux is the best OS I've ever used. When Windows dies, all the techs I know just reinstall the thing, and if that doesn't work, wipe the drive and reinstall. There simply aren't any good diagostic tools, and if a crash happens during startup...well, how the heck are you supposed to know what caused it? If I can view and edit my initscripts, I *can* fix this. The main problem is that while you *can* fix almost any problem in Linux, it's also not necessarily easy, and you may spend a while reading up on things.
IE 5 *for Windows* is not more W3C compliant than Mozilla, and IE 6 is worse.
As for an "American OS", I wouldn't be suprised if large chunks of Windows are developed in MS's software dev branch in India, though admittedly I don't know for sure, and MS may have a keep-the-crown-jewels-at-home policy.
Windows *does* provide good game support. Better than Linux. My productivity has climed a bunch since getting rid of Windows.:-) Also, there was a Win2k box at work that had a sound card that NT 4 supported but Win2k and above didn't (and the company was out of business, so no future support was going to happen). Linux has and still does support the thing fine.
As for NT and routing, my experience with trying to convince NT to handle Ethernet and a modem line at once have gotten me incredibly frusterated with Windows as a whole. The wizards are fragile (close a window when the wizard doesn't expect it and things start breaking, I reached a state where the entire networking component needed to be reinstalled or else it ignored all the numbers I was entering in to it...) Granted, the non-GUI wrapped interface to Linux routing is a little more complicated than in NT, but it's not that bad.
Um...for the past few years, the Dems have (in my eyes) favored tech (and freedom on the 'Net like no taxes and funding for public library/school Internet connections). Now, granted, this is almost entirely because of strong Clinton-era pro-Net policies, but even so...
That may be true, but I ran into this on a friend's computer...but wasn't a software problem. Either he had a remarked CPU or (very unlikely) heat problems or something else on his system (not RAM, tried that right off the bat) was marginal, because the problem went away when the CPU was underclocked.
Just pointing out that knowing the low-level cause (Ah, yes, that's when the network stack's detected an inconsistent internal state) may not be very useful in finding the high level cause.
At least what flooz was doing had some validity -- they *had* to build up their user base to become a usable currency. If they had pulled it off, then they start charging transaction fees. They were a long shot, but it also could have made them wildly wealthy.
They didn't trademark "Inside". They trademarked "Intel Inside" and a bunch of lawyers are feeling a bit insecure in the bad economy and are working on their job security.
I thought trademarks...were only applicable to a particular market
You're absolutely right. However, please consider that this is the same company that tried to trademark the number 386 and the letter I. It doesn't *hurt*, and maybe they get a home run.
Also, even under the "particular market" laws amazingly stupid things happen. Apple Studios, the scummsuckers that published the Beatles, kept going after Apple Computer after Apple Computer made it big and was a nice juicy target. Finally, they won millions of dollars after Apple introduced audio capabilities into their computers and Apple Studios claimed that Apple Computer was an infringing "audio company".
Well, because they're unlikely to actually make a $30 phone for one, and because it's almost certain that this is a pump and dump scheme to grab as much money as they can from stupid investors.
Actually, at least in the United States, I believe that that is not generally true.
However, my understanding is that reverse engineering for compatibility reasons is legal in the EU. I believe that at least a more limited version of this, reverse engineering for the purpose of circumventing copy control systems for the purpose of making two systems compatible over a network, is legal in the US.
Blizzard has some of the most aggressive copy protection code out there. It's kind of depressing, since I completely disagree with this sort of thing, but it seems that Blizzard is right and I am wrong -- most people don't know or care about the kinds of things they're doing.
Umm...yes, no one (well, few) is boycotting everything. Some people feel strongly enough about one issue to boycott some products, and other people other products.
Remember, there are a lot of people that read and post to slashdot, not one or two or three.
Heck, I think that the Blizzard thing is disgusting, and I'd boycott them too, but I didn't like their products in the first place, and have never bought any.:-) Plus, they don't make Linux versions.
I agree...my understanding is that Blizzard can ban someone from battle.net for cheating or whatever other issues they feel are a problem.
I will not accuse them of doing the wrong thing here -- cheating is a major issue that affects other players and the value of those players' purchase. However, there is nothing on the box that tells cheating users that this service that allows them to play the product multiplayer over the Internet may be simply revoked. They paid for the product with the expectation that they could use it.
bnetd allows people to set up their own servers, with their own rules for who to ban. If someone ticks off Blizzard, then they're SOL on the value of their product. Perhaps these players cheated once, got caught, and would have stopped...but they're banned and are out the value of their purchase. Perhaps they feel that cheating against people is legitimate behavior -- not a view that most people will agree with, but taking away the value of someone's purchase because they have different views has certain issues. It is not *illegal* to cheat, just against Blizzard's rules. Heck, someone could even be falsely accused of cheating and stripped of the value of their purchase.
I don't have a problem with Blizzard providing a premium service that removes cheaters or bad sports or whatever from the system *as long as there are other options for those people*. If you want a place to go where an effort to weed out cheaters has been made, then good, but do not eliminate the ability to play multiplayer for those cheaters.
AFAIK, Blizzard does not *guarantee* battle.net service to any of their customers, which gives bnetd value as a risk-eliminator -- if Blizzard goes under tomorrow, players can continue to play.
Also, I do not believe that guaranteed battle.net service is considered part of the product. If it were so, than I don't think that Blizzard can just strip players of their purchased product without giving them a refund -- suppose someone fires the thing up and cheats...Blizzard has the right to prevent them from playing further, but needs to give them their money back in return.
So if guaranteed battle.net service is not part of the product, then why is Blizzard claiming copyright circumvention issues? The key check is not to prevent you from playing the game -- the LAN and single player modes can testify to that. It's to keep unauthorized users from using battle.net. So they're claiming copyright infringement on an access control mechanism to multiplayer which is just a "free extra" and not even part of the sold package? Get real.
The DMCA is not without concessions to the little guy, otherwise it would never have been passed. Very few concessions, but there are a lot of totally wrong things about trying to apply the DMCA to bnetd.
* bnetd did not actually allow the behavior (piracy of W3) that Blizzard is claiming was the copyright issue at hand. Yes, code based on bnetd did, but that's not bnetd's fault at all (unless you're going to blame every Open Source project that has source code used in programs that could bypass copy protection). * bnetd has very significant non-circumvention uses, (some of which can be seen in the numerous experiences detailed here on Slashdot). * There are good arguments that even if somehow these other objections were bypassed, the reverse engineering for compatibility clause (I wonder why MS didn't buy off a few senators to cut this out) may be applicable.
Finally, your claim that "Blizzard develops good games" so we should let them do bad things is bogus. Even if I agreed with you, Viviendi is freaking large, and just because a few programmers and artists that work there happen to be talented is no reason to allow a bunch of scummy lawyers to ride roughshod all over the rights of some independent software engineers.
But the problem isn't whether you feel what Blizzard is doing is *reasonable*. It's whether it has any legal grounding or not. I and many others feel that it doesn't.
And that legal grounding can be very important. It protects the ability of people to write software without worrying that a few years down the road, some company that doesn't like it is going to manage to get it banned (and throw out months of man-work that you donated to the free software community).
Even if you think that it wouldn't hurt for bnetd to be banned, you have to consider the consequences of what would happen if precedent is set against it.
Remember when WinAmp supported converting WMA to other formats? MS did *not* like that -- it broke their file format monopoly. They went after Nullsoft right away. Now, Nullsoft crumbled (reasonably -- it's not worth it for a dinky company like them to take on MS) and removed export capabilities -- so you can export from anything but WMA -- but WinAmp didn't get banned. If there was precedent, MS would have loved to get WinAmp banned. It would have greatly strengthened the position of the software it pushes as an alternative -- Windows Media Player.
It's not financially feasible to have a one-time fee and then provide a service for perpetuity.
So Blizzard has three options:
(a) Assume that they will never hit a monentary crunch and will keep churning out games faster and faster and get hits that are bigger and bigger and keep expanding. At some point, the costs of bnetd support for Warcraft II will exceed the amount of money they made on the game, which means that they'd have to view Warcraft II as a liability, a sunk cost. This is like Social Security or another pyramid scheme -- you assume that you will keep growing and getting bigger forever fast enough to pay for your ever growing costs. A lot of gamers seem to think this is going to happen. (b) Blizzard starts charging money for battle.net. A lot of other gamers seem to think that this is likely. I'd say this is possible, but not likely. (c) Blizzard just drops support for a game a few years after they release it. I'd bet this is what they're going to end up doing.
You know all those times websites ask you for an email address for downloading a file or something else, which they can spam like mad? I've found that hotline@mpaa.org (the MPAA's piracy reporting hotline address) works nicely, but this Viviendi gentleman just handed us another nice email address to use as a junk address:
piracy@vuinteractive.com
The way I see it, let the spammers and the large copy control organizations duke it out. No matter who comes out on top, we end up winning.:-)
I think there's a reasonable argument that the usage patterns of the users are an issue.
If you're running a small dialup ISP, then there are going to be few users doing work at once, probably more POP3 than IMAP work, the transfer sizes are likely to be smaller and you aren't going to have large numbers of people cc:ing lists of other users on your server. This would probably not hold true for at least some office mail servers.
Of course, I've never admined a mail server other than the one on my desktop, so I don't have much room to make strong claims.
You know, there's a reason most people troll AC -- trolls lose a lot of force when anyone can see that every single comment you've posted historically is a troll.
Frankly, I'd think that having "Office experience" on a tech resume is just silly. What, are you not going to be able to operate Office?
I hadn't used Office until last summer, and had no trouble getting stylesheets and automated TOCs working. Word processors these days have pretty similar UIs.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, a well written, entertaining, somewhat original troll.
:-) Also, there was a Win2k box at work that had a sound card that NT 4 supported but Win2k and above didn't (and the company was out of business, so no future support was going to happen). Linux has and still does support the thing fine.
+1, Troll
However, because some of these points are valid, I'm going to respond.
"When my Linux machine crashed and I was unable to mount my root partition..."
In terms of troubleshooting capabilities, Linux is the best OS I've ever used. When Windows dies, all the techs I know just reinstall the thing, and if that doesn't work, wipe the drive and reinstall. There simply aren't any good diagostic tools, and if a crash happens during startup...well, how the heck are you supposed to know what caused it? If I can view and edit my initscripts, I *can* fix this. The main problem is that while you *can* fix almost any problem in Linux, it's also not necessarily easy, and you may spend a while reading up on things.
IE 5 *for Windows* is not more W3C compliant than Mozilla, and IE 6 is worse.
As for an "American OS", I wouldn't be suprised if large chunks of Windows are developed in MS's software dev branch in India, though admittedly I don't know for sure, and MS may have a keep-the-crown-jewels-at-home policy.
Windows *does* provide good game support. Better than Linux. My productivity has climed a bunch since getting rid of Windows.
As for NT and routing, my experience with trying to convince NT to handle Ethernet and a modem line at once have gotten me incredibly frusterated with Windows as a whole. The wizards are fragile (close a window when the wizard doesn't expect it and things start breaking, I reached a state where the entire networking component needed to be reinstalled or else it ignored all the numbers I was entering in to it...) Granted, the non-GUI wrapped interface to Linux routing is a little more complicated than in NT, but it's not that bad.
Um...for the past few years, the Dems have (in my eyes) favored tech (and freedom on the 'Net like no taxes and funding for public library/school Internet connections). Now, granted, this is almost entirely because of strong Clinton-era pro-Net policies, but even so...
That may be true, but I ran into this on a friend's computer...but wasn't a software problem. Either he had a remarked CPU or (very unlikely) heat problems or something else on his system (not RAM, tried that right off the bat) was marginal, because the problem went away when the CPU was underclocked.
Just pointing out that knowing the low-level cause (Ah, yes, that's when the network stack's detected an inconsistent internal state) may not be very useful in finding the high level cause.
At least what flooz was doing had some validity -- they *had* to build up their user base to become a usable currency. If they had pulled it off, then they start charging transaction fees. They were a long shot, but it also could have made them wildly wealthy.
This phone thing is just stupid.
Nuts, I was about to post precisely the same thing.
I wish I had an ISP without a tech support line. I think half my costs are spent subsidizing idiots who want to talk to someone on the the telephone.
Have a recording with all the important numbers and an option to cancel or add an account, and you're golden.
If I hear the stupid Linux 7.2 joke again, I think I'm going to scream.
For the 50% of slashdotters that do tech support, it *definitely* isn't funny, and the rest of us have already seen it way too many times.
They didn't trademark "Inside". They trademarked "Intel Inside" and a bunch of lawyers are feeling a bit insecure in the bad economy and are working on their job security.
I thought trademarks...were only applicable to a particular market
You're absolutely right. However, please consider that this is the same company that tried to trademark the number 386 and the letter I. It doesn't *hurt*, and maybe they get a home run.
Also, even under the "particular market" laws amazingly stupid things happen. Apple Studios, the scummsuckers that published the Beatles, kept going after Apple Computer after Apple Computer made it big and was a nice juicy target. Finally, they won millions of dollars after Apple introduced audio capabilities into their computers and Apple Studios claimed that Apple Computer was an infringing "audio company".
This is more egregious.
Indrema:
Stupid from a market dynamics point of view, but certainly technically possible
Transmeta:
Their product shipped. Sure, not as great as the claims, but they built the thing.
Well, because they're unlikely to actually make a $30 phone for one, and because it's almost certain that this is a pump and dump scheme to grab as much money as they can from stupid investors.
hyperintelligent shade of blue.
Actually, at least in the United States, I believe that that is not generally true.
However, my understanding is that reverse engineering for compatibility reasons is legal in the EU. I believe that at least a more limited version of this, reverse engineering for the purpose of circumventing copy control systems for the purpose of making two systems compatible over a network, is legal in the US.
Blizzard has some of the most aggressive copy protection code out there. It's kind of depressing, since I completely disagree with this sort of thing, but it seems that Blizzard is right and I am wrong -- most people don't know or care about the kinds of things they're doing.
Umm...yes, no one (well, few) is boycotting everything. Some people feel strongly enough about one issue to boycott some products, and other people other products.
:-) Plus, they don't make Linux versions.
Remember, there are a lot of people that read and post to slashdot, not one or two or three.
Heck, I think that the Blizzard thing is disgusting, and I'd boycott them too, but I didn't like their products in the first place, and have never bought any.
I agree...my understanding is that Blizzard can ban someone from battle.net for cheating or whatever other issues they feel are a problem.
I will not accuse them of doing the wrong thing here -- cheating is a major issue that affects other players and the value of those players' purchase. However, there is nothing on the box that tells cheating users that this service that allows them to play the product multiplayer over the Internet may be simply revoked. They paid for the product with the expectation that they could use it.
bnetd allows people to set up their own servers, with their own rules for who to ban. If someone ticks off Blizzard, then they're SOL on the value of their product. Perhaps these players cheated once, got caught, and would have stopped...but they're banned and are out the value of their purchase. Perhaps they feel that cheating against people is legitimate behavior -- not a view that most people will agree with, but taking away the value of someone's purchase because they have different views has certain issues. It is not *illegal* to cheat, just against Blizzard's rules. Heck, someone could even be falsely accused of cheating and stripped of the value of their purchase.
I don't have a problem with Blizzard providing a premium service that removes cheaters or bad sports or whatever from the system *as long as there are other options for those people*. If you want a place to go where an effort to weed out cheaters has been made, then good, but do not eliminate the ability to play multiplayer for those cheaters.
AFAIK, Blizzard does not *guarantee* battle.net service to any of their customers, which gives bnetd value as a risk-eliminator -- if Blizzard goes under tomorrow, players can continue to play.
Also, I do not believe that guaranteed battle.net service is considered part of the product. If it were so, than I don't think that Blizzard can just strip players of their purchased product without giving them a refund -- suppose someone fires the thing up and cheats...Blizzard has the right to prevent them from playing further, but needs to give them their money back in return.
So if guaranteed battle.net service is not part of the product, then why is Blizzard claiming copyright circumvention issues? The key check is not to prevent you from playing the game -- the LAN and single player modes can testify to that. It's to keep unauthorized users from using battle.net. So they're claiming copyright infringement on an access control mechanism to multiplayer which is just a "free extra" and not even part of the sold package? Get real.
The DMCA is not without concessions to the little guy, otherwise it would never have been passed. Very few concessions, but there are a lot of totally wrong things about trying to apply the DMCA to bnetd.
* bnetd did not actually allow the behavior (piracy of W3) that Blizzard is claiming was the copyright issue at hand. Yes, code based on bnetd did, but that's not bnetd's fault at all (unless you're going to blame every Open Source project that has source code used in programs that could bypass copy protection).
* bnetd has very significant non-circumvention uses, (some of which can be seen in the numerous experiences detailed here on Slashdot).
* There are good arguments that even if somehow these other objections were bypassed, the reverse engineering for compatibility clause (I wonder why MS didn't buy off a few senators to cut this out) may be applicable.
Finally, your claim that "Blizzard develops good games" so we should let them do bad things is bogus. Even if I agreed with you, Viviendi is freaking large, and just because a few programmers and artists that work there happen to be talented is no reason to allow a bunch of scummy lawyers to ride roughshod all over the rights of some independent software engineers.
But the problem isn't whether you feel what Blizzard is doing is *reasonable*. It's whether it has any legal grounding or not. I and many others feel that it doesn't.
And that legal grounding can be very important. It protects the ability of people to write software without worrying that a few years down the road, some company that doesn't like it is going to manage to get it banned (and throw out months of man-work that you donated to the free software community).
Even if you think that it wouldn't hurt for bnetd to be banned, you have to consider the consequences of what would happen if precedent is set against it.
Remember when WinAmp supported converting WMA to other formats? MS did *not* like that -- it broke their file format monopoly. They went after Nullsoft right away. Now, Nullsoft crumbled (reasonably -- it's not worth it for a dinky company like them to take on MS) and removed export capabilities -- so you can export from anything but WMA -- but WinAmp didn't get banned. If there was precedent, MS would have loved to get WinAmp banned. It would have greatly strengthened the position of the software it pushes as an alternative -- Windows Media Player.
Well, seems simple.
It's not financially feasible to have a one-time fee and then provide a service for perpetuity.
So Blizzard has three options:
(a) Assume that they will never hit a monentary crunch and will keep churning out games faster and faster and get hits that are bigger and bigger and keep expanding. At some point, the costs of bnetd support for Warcraft II will exceed the amount of money they made on the game, which means that they'd have to view Warcraft II as a liability, a sunk cost. This is like Social Security or another pyramid scheme -- you assume that you will keep growing and getting bigger forever fast enough to pay for your ever growing costs. A lot of gamers seem to think this is going to happen.
(b) Blizzard starts charging money for battle.net. A lot of other gamers seem to think that this is likely. I'd say this is possible, but not likely.
(c) Blizzard just drops support for a game a few years after they release it. I'd bet this is what they're going to end up doing.
You know all those times websites ask you for an email address for downloading a file or something else, which they can spam like mad? I've found that hotline@mpaa.org (the MPAA's piracy reporting hotline address) works nicely, but this Viviendi gentleman just handed us another nice email address to use as a junk address:
:-)
piracy@vuinteractive.com
The way I see it, let the spammers and the large copy control organizations duke it out. No matter who comes out on top, we end up winning.
I think there's a reasonable argument that the usage patterns of the users are an issue.
If you're running a small dialup ISP, then there are going to be few users doing work at once, probably more POP3 than IMAP work, the transfer sizes are likely to be smaller and you aren't going to have large numbers of people cc:ing lists of other users on your server. This would probably not hold true for at least some office mail servers.
Of course, I've never admined a mail server other than the one on my desktop, so I don't have much room to make strong claims.
You know, there's a reason most people troll AC -- trolls lose a lot of force when anyone can see that every single comment you've posted historically is a troll.
sendmail exploits?
"Bob, the mail server seems overly bogged down. Check it out!"
"Yes, sir!"
--two hours later--
"Well, sir, it appears that all the developers have been using it for all their builds on the sly."
nonflammable
Frankly, I'd think that having "Office experience" on a tech resume is just silly. What, are you not going to be able to operate Office?
I hadn't used Office until last summer, and had no trouble getting stylesheets and automated TOCs working. Word processors these days have pretty similar UIs.