So you're saying "these guys are not astroturfers because they are not astroturfing.
You don't appear to understand the meaning of astroturfing. Your post is meaningless as a result.
paranoid anti-MS posters are seeing astroturfers everywhere.
Ah yes, marketing 101. If you don't have a meaningful argument try to stick some dirt on the alternative viewpoint instead by using emotive words like "paranoid". Fact is, astroturfers are common on the net now and your pretence that it isn't is just sad. Just look at any website that allows customer comments (e.g. Amazon or EBay) and you'll see hundreds of obvious, and not so obvious, fake reviews and comments. Slashdot isn't mystically immune to these people and M$ has been caught on a number of occasions engaged in such fraud in the past. Astroturfers aren't stupid, they know blatant propaganda will be ignored so they try to be more subtle. The onus is on you to show M$ have stopped doing it, not vice versa. Their ethics as demonstrated during the OOXML saga and in recent court case email discovery would suggest they haven't.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
When they overstep their bounds like this ON TOP of an application(esp. a free software application) what might they be doing in their proprietary code under the application?
No, that's probably not the problem this time (though it is true that vendors get up to all sorts of shenanigans). The problems are:
Not informing the user/developer precisely what the addon does, and does not, do so the user can make an informed choice about whether to install it.
Not giving the user an obvious means of avoiding the firefox addon if they don't want it.
Not using the standard install/uninstall mechanism so the user can uninstall it in the obvious way if they decide they don't want it after testing.
Software packages interact in different ways all the time eg. shared default file types/extensions cause endless mischief. That's unfortunately common and no vendor should be blamed for it directly however the user must be given the information and the tools to make and effect informed choices.
You conveniently overlooked all the content free posts deriding Microsoft that get modded through the heavens. Who are those guys astroturfing for?
Didn't overlook them at all. What makes you think they are astroturfing? They are presenting their own opinions in the belief it will be of benefit to the reader, not paid marketers astroturfing in the belief it will benefit themselves.
This is a tech community website. It will reflect the diverse opinions of the tech community. Most of the time these opinions will not be in alignment with a company representing a very small number of people compared to total tech community. A few well-formed opinions are pro-M$ and, correctly, get voted up however I would be very suspicious of any website that pushes such a small group. Unfortunately though, company employees, in particular marketers, often can't see their own narrow bias living in their bubble day-to-day and paying only lip service to alternative points of view. Just witness the marketing zealots who claim that anybody who doesn't agree with them (e.g. isn't in it only for the money) is somehow a zealot. Being paid doesn't mystically make somebody a non-zealot.
In addition M$ is getting kickback. What do you expect? When microsoft.com etc. is unbiased (as if!) then maybe M$ can claim/. is biased. Until then/. is just adding some balance to the mix.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
No difference, you've missed my point entirely. Reread my post. Nobody's said anything about Windows NVidia drivers being open source, just the linux ones. Like most other linux device drivers.
In any case what the hell is wrong with people saying what they want? NVidia wants to be closed source (in my opinion for stupid reasons but there you go), others want their computer's graphics to be open source. Both positions are valid points of view. Both NVidia and linux users have to decide how far to compromise. Currently the balance is that NVidia does support the linux platform but only with low quality* closed source drivers. NVidia makes some hardware sales and gets *some* brownie points for limited Linux support and most linux/nvidia users use those drivers anyway but it doesn't mean they don't want to improve the situation.
* Low quality in the sense that it's closed source and unmaintainable, unportable and unauditable by third parties, not that the code NVidia is writing is necessarily buggy.
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I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
People who buy computers that come with the "OEM" versions tend to be unlikely to install Windows on another computer anyway, since anytime they get a new computer, they get another copy of Windows with it. Your "needs" do not represent the majority of Windows "OEM" users.
You're confusing cause and effect. They get another copy because that's the cheapest option available and because M$ has been very successful in conflating "Windows" and PC.
If consumers had the convenient option of saving a little money on a new computer while also maintaining all their familiar tools and settings over by imaging (e.g. ghosting, or moving the hard disk across) from their old computer across to their new, faster computer, most consumers, with the possible exception of gamers, would use it. I've done this for several acquaintances and they were amazed by the speedup (e.g. a small company accountant speed up their weekly run from 11 hours to 30 minutes) and very pleased to be using a system absolutely identical software-wise to what they were familiar with. A few device drivers required updating to handle the new hardware but it wasn't a big deal. It also has the additional advantage in that they don't need to do a big bang software change but can do things incrementally.
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Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
How much longer will it take to prove that your home-made system doesn't, for example, secretly delete emails sent to and from your personal broker?
If the auditor is honest, about the same amount of time as for any "standard" solution. If I wanted to game the system the first thing I'd do is get a "standard" solution and modify it. Better camouflage.
You seem to imply that the solution must be almost "perfect". However, as I've already intimated it's trivial to bypass and perfection is impossible. All you can do is go for is a high degree of confidence. An off-the-shelf package helps in that regard but it is only one tool amongst many to improve confidence. e.g. Many corporations have complex email setups due to mergers and acquisitions. How do they know that the off-the-shelf packages used by each division covers all possible email users? (e.g. blackberries, webmail, homeworkers, third world teleworkers, email gateways etc.) The internal/external auditor can't know, all they can do is talk to all the relevant people and make sure all email bases look like they are covered, whether off-the-shelf or bespoke.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
It's FUD to claim that SOX is important for the majority of email installs, FUD to claim that Exchange is in some privileged position with respect to SOX and FUD to claim that email SOX is difficult to implement.
As I've already said, it is trivial to implement all you've described on any centrally controlled email system. Record to write-only medium? Standard system function. Record every email sent? Trivial. Proof to auditor? Spend a few minutes explaining the controls and how it works. etc. etc.
SOX is not some mysterious alien technology, it is simply a requirement that all corporate communications be recorded in a form that can be used as evidence in possible court cases. It's not rocket science. Not necessarily useful either because bad guys will talk face-to-face but at least it might catch the sociopaths who think they're doing nothing wrong.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
FUD. The major expense is write-only media, a system function, and that has nothing to do with Exchange. Everything else is trivial to implement on all major email systems.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
They are treating all the operating systems exactly the same.
The Linux kernel developers treats all device vendors exactly the same too. Some device vendors are zealots, they want everything to be closed source and to have extra privileges.
See that works? Some bigots fail to see their own bigotry. The reality is that there is a complex set of competing interests.
Yes, it is actually. Any "story" that touches on an M$ product will have a number of content-free posts mysteriously modded up saying it's wonderful with no significant problems at all.
All real world products have both pluses and minuses. When you see any post claiming some commercial product is perfect it's likely to be an unethical marketer pushing untrustworthy propaganda while pretending to be an unbiased third party to gain trust.
As made apparent by the overwhelming bias of opinion in Microsoft's favour.
No, as made by the number of content-free posts that say M$ is generically wonderful while paying only lip service to alternatives and problems.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
Sarbanes-Oxley applies to the USA only. 95% of the world's population don't give a damn about Sarbanes-Oxley.
IN any case archiving is trivial and there is no need to duplicate system functionality in yet another application. Email logging is built into almost all email systems. Clustering is available in all major OS'. Setting up country applicable audit trails is trivial.
I'm not sure who you think you're arguing with. I was responding to the guy who was saying that it only costs $0.25 to produce a Windows CD.
It does. He said nothing about development costs which you are trying to dishonestly connect.
As to this notion that there is some ethical limit to the number of times an IP creator is rewarded, I think it's absurd.
Oh, so you're okay with piracy? All ethical reasons why you claim might some creator is "entitled" to unlimited rewards, not limited rewards, apply equally to pirates. Copyright and patents are artificial constructs that have been created to give some balance. Unlimited rewards are not balance. The natural state is no copyright privilege and people copy anything they like. As happened through most of history.
Of course, it has little to do with the RIAA anyway because they're not IP creators, they are IP investors. You don't have to trash artists rights to be against what the RIAA is doing.
It has everything to do with the RIAA. Both they and M$ are examples of organizations benefiting from the fact that intellectual property markets as currently structured are highly unstable, winner take all markets. When development costs are fixed, production costs are close to zero and development costs are amortized over each sale the only stable market is one with one player. Market failure in other words. We need to change IP laws to create functioning markets.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Yes, I'm sure the reason why they just fired all those employees was so they could funnel all the money Microsoft would have paid them into a giant pile of money for Bill Gates to sleep on.
Just maximizing shareholder profit at the expense of the staff. Also, the economic crisis is probably a good excuse to get rid of some of the dead wood at the company.
M$ has one of the highest net profits/staff member of any company anywhere in the world. If they wanted to they could increase their staff costs massively and still be profitable. They are getting $60,000,000,000+ per year with a staff of 90,000. That's $666,666+ per staff member.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
How is saying that you like your employer's product fraud? Used in this context it's certainly an undisclosed conflict of interests, but that's not illegal and certainly not fraud - just being an asshat.
Way to rationalize. They are pretending to be a third party. If it didn't matter they would be happy to put their company name on their post. They don't so clearly it does financially matter. That's fraud. People reading and believing such "third party" "reviews" may be naive but that still doesn't change the fact that the company is engaged in deception.
In addition, publicly traded companies are legally required to reveal to the stock exchange anything that might materially affect their stock price. By astroturfing they are deliberately deceiving the general public, and in particular the stock market, as to the quality of their products and consequently their stock price. If done on a large scale they should be delisted.
It's not like they're going around and one-starring their competitors products, which could be perceived as libel depending on the context and contents of the review. Unless they made false positive claims about the company ("not only did they restore my data, but they bought me a new computer and gave me a kitten for the inconvenience" kind of stuff), there's no legal wrongdoing here.
I didn't say it wasn't currently legally ambiguous. I said it's fraud, deception for profit, and the legal system and the stock market needs to catch up with these scum.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
The fact is that Symantec software is crap and he was in part responsible for that crap.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Re:Recessions are wonderful things
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe people will realize what an obscene waste of money and computing power and operating system like Windows Vista, which requires a gig of RAM to run, really is.
Hear, hear. To a lesser extent the same is true of all modern GUI's. Most GUI programmers today seem to have no clue how to write efficient, usable software. I am still waiting for GUI software that responds fast enough. I'm an experienced computer programmer/user and I'm endlessly irritated by the slow response of computers that are supposed to be operating in the GHz range.
Take gedit, the gnome notepad-like editor, as an example. On startup this opens almost 3000 files ("strace -t -f -o t.log gedit.bashrc;grep 'open(' t.log|wc") to edit a single (1) text file. That's insane.
It takes more than a second. That is way too slow and is the main reason why I still often use vi and nedit. Vi opens 58 files on startup. That's still too much but is still orders of magnitude faster than gedit and most GUI editors. nedit is an ancient GUI editor with not bad functionality including rectangular copies that opens ~200 files on startup.
Incidentally, I'm well aware that file opening is only one factor amongst many of things that slow programs down. It's good proxy for measuring poor programming practices though.
GUI programmers need to understand that for experienced computer users speed of response is a major factor in the usability of any program. A GUI with lots of prettyness is useless if it's not fast. And fast is not seconds. It is milliseconds.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
And you completely miss the point. "Improving profits" in this case is exactly the same as "reducing customer value". And in a monopoly situation this means all customers get a net product value approaching zero. M$ does well and everybody else just mark time.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Hey, if you know some programmers who are willing to work for a total $0.25 on a major project that follows my agenda rather than theirs I'd like to hire them.
M$ makes $40,000,000,000+ per year selling maybe twenty different programs plus many forms of crippleware that add no extra value and are just market manipulation. Say $1,000,000,000+ per programper year (excluding XBox etc). M$ is grossly overpaid for what they do and it's only a market failure (caused mainly by the economic network effect but also alleycat ethics) that let them get away with it.
Somehow I don't think they're hurting. If they were actually an efficient company in a functioning market their software would be in the dollars range, not the hundreds of dollars range.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I'm talking about the general concept. Many people on slashdot seem to think any form of IP is immoral, criminal, or wrong.
My point in part, probably badly expressed, was that there is no "general concept", despite what the patent lobby claim.
IP changes character completely depending on who you assign the ownership to (user, inventor, developer etc.), how far reaching each ownership grant is (all possible variations of an idea or just a particular example) and for how long it is (zero time or forever). Most people here would at least support what you probably regard as a weak concept of IP ownership, that of giving credit in perpetuity. Most also think that first mover advantage is sufficient reward for most forms of IP.
Others support assigning financial control on some combination, or not, of business processes, chemical processes, computer algorithms, mathematical algorithms and traditional machine patents. Some would support automatic patent assignment like copyright, others no. Others like you appear to support copy control with all financial rights assigned to the first person past the gate. Others support more limited rights like split ownership for bonafide independent re-invention. Some support the patent office bureaucracy as a means of assessing patents, others no. Other more blue sky variations include things like patents not applying to certain groups in society (e.g. children or researchers), patents having varying time periods depending on field, patents only having value to the extent that they are explicitly paid for, innocent until proven guilty for patent infringement, independent re-invention being a valid patent infringement defence, patents not given to the inventor but to the best exploiter, only a fixed number of patents given per year. patents not awarded for anything except things that can be explicitly and individually proved to have high research costs, independent reinvention invalidates a patent, different aspects of patents given to different entities etc.
All of these things change the character of IP completely. Patents as they are currently implemented are only one of a virtually infinite number of possibilities. People here typically disagree with the patent office way of doing things but I think most people here would agree that intellectual work should be rewarded while also saying that copying of ideas should be as liberal as possible. Personally, I find it strange that the legal system allows a single individual to restrict the use of an idea that could potentially be copied/used by billions. Patents made more sense when the population was smaller. In addition it seems that most of the ideas the patent office assigns ownership to are ideas whose "time has come", that in a population of billions will be independently re-invented many times, negating most of the ethical basis for patents.
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Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't the OS it is more who maintains the OS.
It is both.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
So you're saying "these guys are not astroturfers because they are not astroturfing.
You don't appear to understand the meaning of astroturfing. Your post is meaningless as a result.
paranoid anti-MS posters are seeing astroturfers everywhere.
Ah yes, marketing 101. If you don't have a meaningful argument try to stick some dirt on the alternative viewpoint instead by using emotive words like "paranoid". Fact is, astroturfers are common on the net now and your pretence that it isn't is just sad. Just look at any website that allows customer comments (e.g. Amazon or EBay) and you'll see hundreds of obvious, and not so obvious, fake reviews and comments. Slashdot isn't mystically immune to these people and M$ has been caught on a number of occasions engaged in such fraud in the past. Astroturfers aren't stupid, they know blatant propaganda will be ignored so they try to be more subtle. The onus is on you to show M$ have stopped doing it, not vice versa. Their ethics as demonstrated during the OOXML saga and in recent court case email discovery would suggest they haven't.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
When they overstep their bounds like this ON TOP of an application(esp. a free software application) what might they be doing in their proprietary code under the application?
No, that's probably not the problem this time (though it is true that vendors get up to all sorts of shenanigans). The problems are:
Software packages interact in different ways all the time eg. shared default file types/extensions cause endless mischief. That's unfortunately common and no vendor should be blamed for it directly however the user must be given the information and the tools to make and effect informed choices.
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Adopt an astroturfer. Make their life hell.
You conveniently overlooked all the content free posts deriding Microsoft that get modded through the heavens. Who are those guys astroturfing for?
Didn't overlook them at all. What makes you think they are astroturfing? They are presenting their own opinions in the belief it will be of benefit to the reader, not paid marketers astroturfing in the belief it will benefit themselves.
This is a tech community website. It will reflect the diverse opinions of the tech community. Most of the time these opinions will not be in alignment with a company representing a very small number of people compared to total tech community. A few well-formed opinions are pro-M$ and, correctly, get voted up however I would be very suspicious of any website that pushes such a small group. Unfortunately though, company employees, in particular marketers, often can't see their own narrow bias living in their bubble day-to-day and paying only lip service to alternative points of view. Just witness the marketing zealots who claim that anybody who doesn't agree with them (e.g. isn't in it only for the money) is somehow a zealot. Being paid doesn't mystically make somebody a non-zealot.
In addition M$ is getting kickback. What do you expect? When microsoft.com etc. is unbiased (as if!) then maybe M$ can claim /. is biased. Until then /. is just adding some balance to the mix.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
See the difference?
No difference, you've missed my point entirely. Reread my post. Nobody's said anything about Windows NVidia drivers being open source, just the linux ones. Like most other linux device drivers.
In any case what the hell is wrong with people saying what they want? NVidia wants to be closed source (in my opinion for stupid reasons but there you go), others want their computer's graphics to be open source. Both positions are valid points of view. Both NVidia and linux users have to decide how far to compromise. Currently the balance is that NVidia does support the linux platform but only with low quality* closed source drivers. NVidia makes some hardware sales and gets *some* brownie points for limited Linux support and most linux/nvidia users use those drivers anyway but it doesn't mean they don't want to improve the situation.
* Low quality in the sense that it's closed source and unmaintainable, unportable and unauditable by third parties, not that the code NVidia is writing is necessarily buggy.
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I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
People who buy computers that come with the "OEM" versions tend to be unlikely to install Windows on another computer anyway, since anytime they get a new computer, they get another copy of Windows with it. Your "needs" do not represent the majority of Windows "OEM" users.
You're confusing cause and effect. They get another copy because that's the cheapest option available and because M$ has been very successful in conflating "Windows" and PC.
If consumers had the convenient option of saving a little money on a new computer while also maintaining all their familiar tools and settings over by imaging (e.g. ghosting, or moving the hard disk across) from their old computer across to their new, faster computer, most consumers, with the possible exception of gamers, would use it. I've done this for several acquaintances and they were amazed by the speedup (e.g. a small company accountant speed up their weekly run from 11 hours to 30 minutes) and very pleased to be using a system absolutely identical software-wise to what they were familiar with. A few device drivers required updating to handle the new hardware but it wasn't a big deal. It also has the additional advantage in that they don't need to do a big bang software change but can do things incrementally.
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Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
How much longer will it take to prove that your home-made system doesn't, for example, secretly delete emails sent to and from your personal broker?
If the auditor is honest, about the same amount of time as for any "standard" solution. If I wanted to game the system the first thing I'd do is get a "standard" solution and modify it. Better camouflage.
You seem to imply that the solution must be almost "perfect". However, as I've already intimated it's trivial to bypass and perfection is impossible. All you can do is go for is a high degree of confidence. An off-the-shelf package helps in that regard but it is only one tool amongst many to improve confidence. e.g. Many corporations have complex email setups due to mergers and acquisitions. How do they know that the off-the-shelf packages used by each division covers all possible email users? (e.g. blackberries, webmail, homeworkers, third world teleworkers, email gateways etc.) The internal/external auditor can't know, all they can do is talk to all the relevant people and make sure all email bases look like they are covered, whether off-the-shelf or bespoke.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
I wouldn't call it FUD.
It's FUD to claim that SOX is important for the majority of email installs, FUD to claim that Exchange is in some privileged position with respect to SOX and FUD to claim that email SOX is difficult to implement.
As I've already said, it is trivial to implement all you've described on any centrally controlled email system. Record to write-only medium? Standard system function. Record every email sent? Trivial. Proof to auditor? Spend a few minutes explaining the controls and how it works. etc. etc.
SOX is not some mysterious alien technology, it is simply a requirement that all corporate communications be recorded in a form that can be used as evidence in possible court cases. It's not rocket science. Not necessarily useful either because bad guys will talk face-to-face but at least it might catch the sociopaths who think they're doing nothing wrong.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
forces us to do $5m worth of upgrades!"
FUD. The major expense is write-only media, a system function, and that has nothing to do with Exchange. Everything else is trivial to implement on all major email systems.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Quite simply put, you are wrong.
Quite simply put, you are wrong.
Which part of "I'm not going to telephone Mr Ballmer and asking for permission to put his product on my computer." do you not understand?
You call the MS activation #
Yes, massa, can I use the product I've already paid for massa? Oh, you are so generous massa!
OEM versions can't be moved,
The vast majority of retail consumer installs.
but OEM versions cost a fraction of the amount that retail versions do.
But "retail" (really, gold plated) versions cost much more than the "OEM" (really, retail consumer) version do.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
They are treating all the operating systems exactly the same.
The Linux kernel developers treats all device vendors exactly the same too. Some device vendors are zealots, they want everything to be closed source and to have extra privileges.
See that works? Some bigots fail to see their own bigotry. The reality is that there is a complex set of competing interests.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
Right, because /. is FULL of those.
Yes, it is actually. Any "story" that touches on an M$ product will have a number of content-free posts mysteriously modded up saying it's wonderful with no significant problems at all.
All real world products have both pluses and minuses. When you see any post claiming some commercial product is perfect it's likely to be an unethical marketer pushing untrustworthy propaganda while pretending to be an unbiased third party to gain trust.
As made apparent by the overwhelming bias of opinion in Microsoft's favour.
No, as made by the number of content-free posts that say M$ is generically wonderful while paying only lip service to alternatives and problems.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
I still can't believe that we're even debating if it's just a Vista rebrand/service pack.
M$ astroturfers. M$ is trying very hard to make people believe it's new, even when it isn't, for the obvious reasons.
The "debate" is simply marketing zealots trying to ram their propaganda down people's throats.
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Adopt an astroturfer. Make their life hell.
Actually you're the lame one, deliberately ignoring the fact that basic legal principles are being compromised by technical means.
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Adopt an astroturfer. Make their life hell.
There is also Sarbanes-Oxley and other issues.
Sarbanes-Oxley applies to the USA only. 95% of the world's population don't give a damn about Sarbanes-Oxley.
IN any case archiving is trivial and there is no need to duplicate system functionality in yet another application. Email logging is built into almost all email systems. Clustering is available in all major OS'. Setting up country applicable audit trails is trivial.
You're just FUD'ing.
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Adopt an astroturfer. Make their life hell.
It always amazes me that Steam is heralded as the future of PC gaming
Most are probably astroturfing marketing lowlifes. They lie through their teeth saying how "wonderful" it is.
There's many vested interests trying to get consumers to accept DRM rather than realizing what a scam it is.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
I'm not sure who you think you're arguing with. I was responding to the guy who was saying that it only costs $0.25 to produce a Windows CD.
It does. He said nothing about development costs which you are trying to dishonestly connect.
As to this notion that there is some ethical limit to the number of times an IP creator is rewarded, I think it's absurd.
Oh, so you're okay with piracy? All ethical reasons why you claim might some creator is "entitled" to unlimited rewards, not limited rewards, apply equally to pirates. Copyright and patents are artificial constructs that have been created to give some balance. Unlimited rewards are not balance. The natural state is no copyright privilege and people copy anything they like. As happened through most of history.
Of course, it has little to do with the RIAA anyway because they're not IP creators, they are IP investors. You don't have to trash artists rights to be against what the RIAA is doing.
It has everything to do with the RIAA. Both they and M$ are examples of organizations benefiting from the fact that intellectual property markets as currently structured are highly unstable, winner take all markets. When development costs are fixed, production costs are close to zero and development costs are amortized over each sale the only stable market is one with one player. Market failure in other words. We need to change IP laws to create functioning markets.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Yes, I'm sure the reason why they just fired all those employees was so they could funnel all the money Microsoft would have paid them into a giant pile of money for Bill Gates to sleep on.
Just maximizing shareholder profit at the expense of the staff. Also, the economic crisis is probably a good excuse to get rid of some of the dead wood at the company.
M$ has one of the highest net profits/staff member of any company anywhere in the world. If they wanted to they could increase their staff costs massively and still be profitable. They are getting $60,000,000,000+ per year with a staff of 90,000. That's $666,666+ per staff member.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
How is saying that you like your employer's product fraud? Used in this context it's certainly an undisclosed conflict of interests, but that's not illegal and certainly not fraud - just being an asshat.
Way to rationalize. They are pretending to be a third party. If it didn't matter they would be happy to put their company name on their post. They don't so clearly it does financially matter. That's fraud. People reading and believing such "third party" "reviews" may be naive but that still doesn't change the fact that the company is engaged in deception.
In addition, publicly traded companies are legally required to reveal to the stock exchange anything that might materially affect their stock price. By astroturfing they are deliberately deceiving the general public, and in particular the stock market, as to the quality of their products and consequently their stock price. If done on a large scale they should be delisted.
It's not like they're going around and one-starring their competitors products, which could be perceived as libel depending on the context and contents of the review. Unless they made false positive claims about the company ("not only did they restore my data, but they bought me a new computer and gave me a kitten for the inconvenience" kind of stuff), there's no legal wrongdoing here.
I didn't say it wasn't currently legally ambiguous. I said it's fraud, deception for profit, and the legal system and the stock market needs to catch up with these scum.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
This is Slashdot. No one cares about facts...
The fact is that Symantec software is crap and he was in part responsible for that crap.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Maybe people will realize what an obscene waste of money and computing power and operating system like Windows Vista, which requires a gig of RAM to run, really is.
Hear, hear. To a lesser extent the same is true of all modern GUI's. Most GUI programmers today seem to have no clue how to write efficient, usable software. I am still waiting for GUI software that responds fast enough. I'm an experienced computer programmer/user and I'm endlessly irritated by the slow response of computers that are supposed to be operating in the GHz range.
Take gedit, the gnome notepad-like editor, as an example. On startup this opens almost 3000 files ("strace -t -f -o t.log gedit .bashrc;grep 'open(' t.log|wc") to edit a single (1) text file. That's insane.
It takes more than a second. That is way too slow and is the main reason why I still often use vi and nedit. Vi opens 58 files on startup. That's still too much but is still orders of magnitude faster than gedit and most GUI editors. nedit is an ancient GUI editor with not bad functionality including rectangular copies that opens ~200 files on startup.
Incidentally, I'm well aware that file opening is only one factor amongst many of things that slow programs down. It's good proxy for measuring poor programming practices though.
GUI programmers need to understand that for experienced computer users speed of response is a major factor in the usability of any program. A GUI with lots of prettyness is useless if it's not fast. And fast is not seconds. It is milliseconds.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
This behavior is not the exception, it is the standard operating procedure for online retail, prevalent for the last 2-3 years.
So you are saying fraud by marketers is the norm? Most fraud is criminal, this should be criminal too.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
By having both, you improve your profits.
And you completely miss the point. "Improving profits" in this case is exactly the same as "reducing customer value". And in a monopoly situation this means all customers get a net product value approaching zero. M$ does well and everybody else just mark time.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Hey, if you know some programmers who are willing to work for a total $0.25 on a major project that follows my agenda rather than theirs I'd like to hire them.
M$ makes $40,000,000,000+ per year selling maybe twenty different programs plus many forms of crippleware that add no extra value and are just market manipulation. Say $1,000,000,000+ per program per year (excluding XBox etc). M$ is grossly overpaid for what they do and it's only a market failure (caused mainly by the economic network effect but also alleycat ethics) that let them get away with it.
Somehow I don't think they're hurting. If they were actually an efficient company in a functioning market their software would be in the dollars range, not the hundreds of dollars range.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I'm talking about the general concept. Many people on slashdot seem to think any form of IP is immoral, criminal, or wrong.
My point in part, probably badly expressed, was that there is no "general concept", despite what the patent lobby claim.
IP changes character completely depending on who you assign the ownership to (user, inventor, developer etc.), how far reaching each ownership grant is (all possible variations of an idea or just a particular example) and for how long it is (zero time or forever). Most people here would at least support what you probably regard as a weak concept of IP ownership, that of giving credit in perpetuity. Most also think that first mover advantage is sufficient reward for most forms of IP.
Others support assigning financial control on some combination, or not, of business processes, chemical processes, computer algorithms, mathematical algorithms and traditional machine patents. Some would support automatic patent assignment like copyright, others no. Others like you appear to support copy control with all financial rights assigned to the first person past the gate. Others support more limited rights like split ownership for bonafide independent re-invention. Some support the patent office bureaucracy as a means of assessing patents, others no. Other more blue sky variations include things like patents not applying to certain groups in society (e.g. children or researchers), patents having varying time periods depending on field, patents only having value to the extent that they are explicitly paid for, innocent until proven guilty for patent infringement, independent re-invention being a valid patent infringement defence, patents not given to the inventor but to the best exploiter, only a fixed number of patents given per year. patents not awarded for anything except things that can be explicitly and individually proved to have high research costs, independent reinvention invalidates a patent, different aspects of patents given to different entities etc.
All of these things change the character of IP completely. Patents as they are currently implemented are only one of a virtually infinite number of possibilities. People here typically disagree with the patent office way of doing things but I think most people here would agree that intellectual work should be rewarded while also saying that copying of ideas should be as liberal as possible. Personally, I find it strange that the legal system allows a single individual to restrict the use of an idea that could potentially be copied/used by billions. Patents made more sense when the population was smaller. In addition it seems that most of the ideas the patent office assigns ownership to are ideas whose "time has come", that in a population of billions will be independently re-invented many times, negating most of the ethical basis for patents.
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Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.