quite a few of them use random services like download.com.
Download.com has been around since 1996. Editorisl reviews. User reviews. Screenshots. 100,000 or so downloads available - most targeting the non-technical end user.
I don't think the Linux Geek ever quite grasps how really, really, big a Windows repository can get - snd how little anyone cares whether a program is free-as-in-beer or free-as-in-freedom.
If GNU/Linux was the only operating system that had applications like Firefox, OpenOffice, VLC, and so on, I think it would be a much more attractive option than Windows is. Yet, we've ported some of our best applications to the proprietary Windows platform.
The "we" is often the corprate giant like Sun which underwrites and staffs projects like OpenOffice.org.
The corporate giant cares about market share on the desktop. Firefox draws in a big chunk of change through Google. The Moz Foundation also cares about market share on the desktop.
The obvious question is why don't the ISPs go and buy more upstream bandwidth (funded by people who are willing to pay extra for more downloads each month)
The obvious answer is that they can't deliver the downstream bandwidth - the last-mile bandwidth - at a price that anyone would be willing to pay.
You won't find dark fiber routed below every Elm Street.
Because the university put themselves directly in the middle of the situation by agreeing to act as *the* ISP for their students. They include the cost in tuition and provide the service for "free". The result is that the students have no choice but to pay the university for Internet service. Consequently, the university has a responsibility to protect those same students from the dangers of the net.
The service is provided to support the educational purposes of the university not to provide free entertainment for students who for generations had to make do with nothing more than campus radio.
There is no danger if you download from iTunes or a subscription service like Rhapsody - paying a monthly fee equivalent to the price of a six-pack and a pizza.
If the RIAA takes me to court and wants the $14 or so I might owe them for my illegally downloaded Three 6 Mafia album, they can have it. But that's not going to be very effective for them. Heck, it's going to cost them at least ten times that to even prepare something basic to send to me requesting that I pay up and stop infringing.
The RIAA's primary target is the uploader. Free distribution to ten million of your closest friends on the P2P nets.
But in sharing files you become an uploader.
Imagine that each download could be traced back to its source. Meaning you.
Imagine further that the RIAA offered you a choice: Settle for an arbitrary amount, say $3,000, and swear off P2P. Or be sued for the wholesale value of the distribution using numbers that would be persuasive to a judge and jury: 10,000 copies at $7 a copy.
Taking you out of the game begins to look worthwhile.
The two-legged robot, fitted with sophisticated sensors and high-resolution cameras, is capable of recording information and images using laser beams...Although it needs some more sophisitication the cost of it is less than $50,000. Now that a penny infront of the obscene amounts of money NASA spends every day.
It seems fair to ask how much this off-the-shelf robotic technology owes to the "obscene" amounts of money invested by NASA and others in R&D over the last half-century.
A list of people who have been sued for downloading songs when they didn't own a computer, know how to use one, weren't even 13, and had no clue as to either how to use a computer or the consequences of downloading. Hey, they've even tried to sue dead people!
Fair enough, I suppose.
But where on Wikipedia do I find the list of geeks who got caught with their pants down, knew damn well they didn't have a defense, and settled out of court without a whimper? Which list do you think would be the longer?
And yeah, copyright infringement is NOT theft. That's why it's CALLED infringement, NOT THEFT
The idea that copyright infringement is theft became entrenched in the popular mind while the Black Flag still flew over the Caribbean.
Your mates at Club Fed aren't going to give a damn whether your sentence on the felony charge was for blue-collar theft or white-collar copyright infringement.
I hijack your car. That's stealing. I COPY your book. That's infringement. (Notice how in all but one example you lose the ability to use the object? That is a key point)
Theft of intangible property is still theft.
You want to use my creation, you pay for the use of my creation, or go elsewhere. There is no free lunch.
If students get sued into oblivion, they can't pay tuition.
The student isn't sued into oblivion. He gets an opportunity to settle out-of-court. To structure his payments.
OSU can't be expected to provide its students blanket protection against civil liability. It can't be expected to carve out an exception for the file sharer.
Many federal programs that I think are just fine are, unfortunately, not constitutional. The states should be running these programs as they see fit, not the feds.
I'll take the odds that it was the utter incompetence, inaction or abuse of local authority - discrimination against the poor, against racial minorities - that drove the adoption of the federal programs you like.
A ton of people buy dells everyday and out of those, many are buying their first computer or are generally considered novice users.
My niece began with XP at age four. Her parents began with Win 3.1 fifteen years ago. Her grandparents with MSDOS twenty-five years ago. How many shoppers with no significant investment in Windows are out there?
There isn't much in FOSS of interest to the non-technical user that hasn't been ported to Windows or began as a native Windows app. You the brand-name app, you can get the brand-name app. You want the free alternative, you can get the free alternative.
No need to dual-boot, no need for WINE or Caldega.
Where the fuck do you think a large percentage of all that cash MS has came from?
It comes in part from being in the consumer market since the salad days of the eight-bit micro. If comes in part because the MSDOS and Windows PC has always been sold in dozens - perhaps hundreds - of useful coinfigurations. The PC for the shoproom floor, the PC for the office cubicle.
Open source is the same price the whole time: free.
The Windows PC market is solidly middle class. Free-as-in-beer invites suspicion more than trust. Paint Shop Pro at $70 can be easier to bear than the alpine learning curve of the GIMP.
Windows is cheaper than the free OS. That makes sense.
It makes perfect sense when you look at the realities of the market.
There are enormous economies of scale in the mass consumer market. Dell can contract for the entire annual output of a half-dozen Asian OEMs - image these consumer laptops with Windows - with perfect confidence that every one will be sold.
Even Walmart couldn't significantly undercut OEM Windows on price. Linux sales were disappointing. Maintaining a dual inventory and support structure cost money the chain no longer seems willing to spend.
The HP Vista Premium laptop at Walmart begins at $800 with a dual core AMD CPU, GeForce Go video, a wide screen display, a gigabyte of RAM, a 120 GB HDD, a DVD burner, integrated Wi-Fi and an integrated webcam.
For $13 the chain will throw in a gigabyte of ReadyBoost flash, for $120 a keychain USB HDTV tuner.
I agree that stealing bandwidth is wrong, the punishment certainly does not fit the crime. This type of thing should be a civil infraction, not a felony. People who steal actual physical goods don't even have to face the kinds of penalties this guy potentially could have.
I have come to think that the least appealing aspect of the Geek is his bedrock belief that the world owes him a lifetime "Get Out Of Jail Free" card.
It doesn't matter whether the story begins with an arrest for computer hacking, child pornography, theft of services, copyright infringement...
The argument will be made here that he doesn't deserve to do hard time.
I'd even question wether it's unethical. Embarrasing, yes, and telling, sure.
But unethical? If essays and theses are so easily manufactured, replicated and/or forged, perhaps it's time to reconsider the methods by which such academic achievements are evaluated.
The world still demands an occassional demonstration that you can be trusted to follow instructions, complete assignments, take pride in your own work. You won't always have a team to back you up. Particularly when you have got into the habit of letting someone else pull the oars.
Slashdot Mirror
Download.com has been around since 1996. Editorisl reviews. User reviews. Screenshots. 100,000 or so downloads available - most targeting the non-technical end user.
I don't think the Linux Geek ever quite grasps how really, really, big a Windows repository can get - snd how little anyone cares whether a program is free-as-in-beer or free-as-in-freedom.
The Microsoft platform can't be that shaky if Apple hasn't been able to get and hold 10% of the market in damn near twenty-five years.
In one line, the reason why non-technical users run screaming to the Mac and Windows.
The "we" is often the corprate giant like Sun which underwrites and staffs projects like OpenOffice.org.
The corporate giant cares about market share on the desktop. Firefox draws in a big chunk of change through Google. The Moz Foundation also cares about market share on the desktop.
The obvious answer is that they can't deliver the downstream bandwidth - the last-mile bandwidth - at a price that anyone would be willing to pay.
You won't find dark fiber routed below every Elm Street.
The original meaning of "Unlimited" in the U.S. was $20/mo for 24/7 access.
It was affordable flat-rate service not lightning speed or the promise of 20 GB downloads that brought 36 million customers to dial-up AOL.
The service is provided to support the educational purposes of the university not to provide free entertainment for students who for generations had to make do with nothing more than campus radio. There is no danger if you download from iTunes or a subscription service like Rhapsody - paying a monthly fee equivalent to the price of a six-pack and a pizza.
The RIAA's primary target is the uploader. Free distribution to ten million of your closest friends on the P2P nets.
But in sharing files you become an uploader.
Imagine that each download could be traced back to its source. Meaning you.
Imagine further that the RIAA offered you a choice: Settle for an arbitrary amount, say $3,000, and swear off P2P. Or be sued for the wholesale value of the distribution using numbers that would be persuasive to a judge and jury: 10,000 copies at $7 a copy.
Taking you out of the game begins to look worthwhile.
seems to me that makes an even stronger case for checking your spelling and grammar before posting.
It seems fair to ask how much this off-the-shelf robotic technology owes to the "obscene" amounts of money invested by NASA and others in R&D over the last half-century.
Fair enough, I suppose.
But where on Wikipedia do I find the list of geeks who got caught with their pants down, knew damn well they didn't have a defense, and settled out of court without a whimper? Which list do you think would be the longer?
And yeah, copyright infringement is NOT theft. That's why it's CALLED infringement, NOT THEFT
The idea that copyright infringement is theft became entrenched in the popular mind while the Black Flag still flew over the Caribbean.
Your mates at Club Fed aren't going to give a damn whether your sentence on the felony charge was for blue-collar theft or white-collar copyright infringement.
I hijack your car. That's stealing. I COPY your book. That's infringement. (Notice how in all but one example you lose the ability to use the object? That is a key point)
Theft of intangible property is still theft.
You want to use my creation, you pay for the use of my creation, or go elsewhere. There is no free lunch.
I have assume that National Geographic doesn't count as media because it devoted an entire issue to the decline of the world's fisheries....
# 13 # Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in U.S.
or the NY Times:
Halliburton Subsidiary Gets Contract to Add Temporary Immigration Detention Centers [February 4, 2006]
In the marine environment? Salt water? Rough seas? Coastal patrol or naval vessels?
If you don't want to pay for their product, don't download their product. Don't serve their product illegally to others. It is as simple as that.
The student isn't sued into oblivion. He gets an opportunity to settle out-of-court. To structure his payments.
OSU can't be expected to provide its students blanket protection against civil liability. It can't be expected to carve out an exception for the file sharer.
I'll take the odds that it was the utter incompetence, inaction or abuse of local authority - discrimination against the poor, against racial minorities - that drove the adoption of the federal programs you like.
My niece began with XP at age four. Her parents began with Win 3.1 fifteen years ago. Her grandparents with MSDOS twenty-five years ago. How many shoppers with no significant investment in Windows are out there?
There isn't much in FOSS of interest to the non-technical user that hasn't been ported to Windows or began as a native Windows app. You the brand-name app, you can get the brand-name app. You want the free alternative, you can get the free alternative.
No need to dual-boot, no need for WINE or Caldega.
It comes in part from being in the consumer market since the salad days of the eight-bit micro. If comes in part because the MSDOS and Windows PC has always been sold in dozens - perhaps hundreds - of useful coinfigurations. The PC for the shoproom floor, the PC for the office cubicle.
The Windows PC market is solidly middle class. Free-as-in-beer invites suspicion more than trust. Paint Shop Pro at $70 can be easier to bear than the alpine learning curve of the GIMP.
It makes perfect sense when you look at the realities of the market.
There are enormous economies of scale in the mass consumer market. Dell can contract for the entire annual output of a half-dozen Asian OEMs - image these consumer laptops with Windows - with perfect confidence that every one will be sold.
Even Walmart couldn't significantly undercut OEM Windows on price. Linux sales were disappointing. Maintaining a dual inventory and support structure cost money the chain no longer seems willing to spend.
The HP Vista Premium laptop at Walmart begins at $800 with a dual core AMD CPU, GeForce Go video, a wide screen display, a gigabyte of RAM, a 120 GB HDD, a DVD burner, integrated Wi-Fi and an integrated webcam.
For $13 the chain will throw in a gigabyte of ReadyBoost flash, for $120 a keychain USB HDTV tuner.
Sparta's police chief is answerable to Sparta. The geek from out of state he can - and will - ignore.
The machine isn't the one who has to answer to the judge.
The geek - the war-driver - who found an unprotected system is the one who has to answer to the judge.
The judge isn't being asked to decipher the geek's techno-babble, only his intent.
The burglar - the pro - doesn't get a free ride because his victims don't know how to install a high security lock.
I have come to think that the least appealing aspect of the Geek is his bedrock belief that the world owes him a lifetime "Get Out Of Jail Free" card.
It doesn't matter whether the story begins with an arrest for computer hacking, child pornography, theft of services, copyright infringement...
The argument will be made here that he doesn't deserve to do hard time.
But unethical? If essays and theses are so easily manufactured, replicated and/or forged, perhaps it's time to reconsider the methods by which such academic achievements are evaluated.
The world still demands an occassional demonstration that you can be trusted to follow instructions, complete assignments, take pride in your own work. You won't always have a team to back you up. Particularly when you have got into the habit of letting someone else pull the oars.
Yes they do. The problem is, that is mighty small number when you are tipping your toe into the mass consumer market.