By putting a price of even a buck on it you cut out the majority of the world's population.
If you want to read Stanger in a Strange Land for free, whats stopping you from going to the library? If the $21 price tag on the Starship Troopers opus is too much, then head over to Amazon and get the novel for $5.
You're being parochial. The US is less than 5% of the world's population. The european population is more than double that but the entire western world is still less than 25%. Not to mention children and other members of western society who can't afford even $5. Why should they go without because of broken IP law?
This whole 'everything should be free' movement is weird.
Actually, this whole 'everything should be paid for again and again' movement is the weird one.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
"Half bad" is not the same as "not bad". Stop pretending it is.
And what on earth makes you think this isn't going to get worse in future? This change is itself worse than previous when flash wasn't used. Despite what you claim.
Google, like most large scale marketers, is just boiling the frog. They are going slower than many but they're still doing it.
This is not particularly ethical behavior, whatever marketers might claim.
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Advertising pays for nothing. "Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Whenever you see any article about a free/open software package that is a significant threat to some company's revenue stream e.g. OOo v. M$Office, Gimp v. Photoshop, Linux v. M$Windows, Firefox v. IE etc. you'll see lots of FUD comments about the free/open software package and positive comments about the competing proprietary package.
Marketing is about perception, not reality. If a product is perceived to be good, or good enough, it will be popular. It's almost a tautology. And the money's in what's popular.
Marketers of proprietary products live in fear that free/open software packages will gain a critical mass of people invested in them and growing them, causing the revenue stream of the proprietary product to start drying up. They will do anything in their power to stop that from happening. Marketers, "channel partners" (= paid subsidiaries), deluded non-marketing employees etc. they'll all FUD to greater or lesser degree.
There's always room for improvement but for the majority of people free and open software in most mainstream areas apart from games (and even there it's arguable depending on the genre) is not just adequate, it's good.
Despite the proprietary software marketing parasites never-ending FUD.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
So Google is supposed to take responsible for some people's pathological ignorance?
No, google is supposed to take some responsibility for most people's completely non-pathological naivety about search results.
"I thought buying Windows XP would let me fly! The fact that I'm a dumbass means it's FRAUD and it's WRONG and it's right for the FCC to go in and sue Microsoft!"
Irrelevant. It would be relevant if a majority of otherwise reasonable people did believe that. Partly depending on the reason for the belief (e.g. deceptive marketing material) M$ may or may not be responsible.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
When a sports team or race car has sponsors' logos all over their gear, does anyone doubt that there was a business arrangement?
Repeating: The reality not some marketing fiction, is that the majority of users can't tell the difference. That's fraud and the ACCC is right to intervene.
Your car example is irrelevant.
Google has two ethical choices; either educate users so they can tell the difference based on the cues that are there or improve the cues. They haven't done either.
"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Repeating: The reality, not some marketing fiction, is that the majority of users can't tell the difference. That's fraud and the ACCC is right to intervene.
Google is deliberately trying to make there ad's as similar to normal links as they think they can get away with, simply because it's profitable. Doesn't make it okay. They may be slightly more ethical about this than other search engines. Still doesn't make it okay.
Huh? If people are too dumb to be able to tell the difference between "sponsored" links and relevant sites returned from a search inquiry, then maybe they should ask someone else to find things for them.
No, this is a significant proportion of the population we're talking about, even the majority. When it's that many people it's a problem with google, not with the population.
Google's ads are pretty unintrusive but clearly marked - should they be blinking so people notice them more as advertising?
See my suggestions.
Just because somebody is naive and deception is easy doesn't somehow make the deception okay.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
The anti-Microsoft FUD was thoroughly debunked by numerous Slashdot posters.
Nonsense. More correctly, multiple astroturfers tried to spin doctor unauthorized updates.
It was also thoroughly debunked by numerous comments in reply to the various external sources cited in the older Slashdot article.
No it wasn't; bluntly, you're lying.
They updated Windows Update, when people explicitly visited the Windows Update site.
Oh, so you're trying to spin doctor unauthorised updates also? The options "Download but not install", "Notify but not download", and "Turn off Automatic Updates" are completely unambiguous. M$, and you, are engaged in fraud by pretending they aren't.
Claiming it wasn't the Automatic Updates module that was doing the updates is just deceptive nonsense. That is just manipulative language trying to hide the fact that the update was unauthorized and that users had the perfectly reasonable expectation that updates would not occur.
That is all. They are not pushing out updates to critical system files without any user intervention.
The three options said nothing about critical system files only. They said automatic installs were disabled. End of story. Stop trying to deceive.
Last time, several posters asked whether Slashdot would at least have the decency to correct the blatantly Microsoft-bashing headline/article.
Slashdot is not an M$ propaganda mouthpiece. Deal.
They didn't, they posted it again. Go Zonk!
Keep it up Zonk. We need to cancel out at least part of the river of deceptive and often outright lying M$ propaganda and astroturf.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Nonsense. Want to maximize profit? Use the OS with the lowest licensing fee. i.e. not QNX.
You are changing the subject. I was looking for anyone, who is currently doing something with a properly free OS, and who will not be doing the same with QNX due to the latter's more restrictive licensing. If you don't have such an example, you should not have followed up.
Okay, I'll spell it out: Anybody selling a large volume of something where the marginal cost of tweaking a free OS can be amortized over a large number of units. e.g. Tivo. Or organizations with more staff time than money e.g. Beowulf cluster. Or where they want to distribute the device for free to third parties including commercial e.g. OLPC. Or they want to do their own maintenance and modifications and sell the result. e.g. RedHat. Or a large company with deep pockets that doesn't to be beholden to a small company that might raise the price on them once they're committed. e.g. IBM
You especially should not have followed up, because you posted nonsense -- your statement would only be true, if the OSes being compared were otherwise equivalent. They aren't. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and for many paying QNX would be (far) less expensive, than keeping extra developers on stuff to deal with a free OS' idiosyncrasies.
Given the power and cost of hardware these days QNX and Linux are equivalent for almost all applications. The QNX company is probably feeling some pain because of this. QNX does have a niche but I suspect it's getting smaller all the time, particularly since QNX can't leverage the user/development base that linux and other free software can.
Don't get me wrong, I like QNX from a technical perspective but from the point of view of establishing a standard they blew it by overpricing and it's too late to change now. A company I worked for considered it once but rejected it at the time because of cost, lack of third party tools and various license restrictions that impacted our product.
Do try harder the next time around...
Please be more polite next time.
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Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
Bad TOS' is a strong indication of market failure. That means government intervention required. It happens more often than you might think. In a functioning free market there won't be bad TOS' because people will choose the good ones and the bad TOS vendor will go out of business. In the mean time we will continue to complain and maybe get some consensus on what can be done to fix things.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
If you take someone's money by using a pirated copy of Windows, that's theft of money.
Circular reasoning. Nobody's taking anybody's money if they never would have bought anything anyway.
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
As in a very small number of people make a very large sum of money while everybody else is screwed? Success is in the eye of the beholder.
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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.
Maybe he's an astroturfer who's annoyed because his propaganda piece, sorry "news release", got bounced for this.
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Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
Re:Back when people could actually code..
on
DOS 5 Upgrade Video
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· Score: 2, Informative
we no longer need to make space tradeoffs
Problem is, many programmers today fail to realize a space tradeoff is a time tradeoff as well.
Memory+disk is very slow compared to modern CPU's and this means that anything, including bloat, that pushes even one byte of core code out of the level one cache will cause the whole program to be an order of magnitude slower as the cache thrashes.
A user's time is important to them and all programs that interact with a user need to be as fast as possible. To put it another way; the computer is there to serve the user, not vice versa.
Programmers who don't understand this are a problem. It's only entertainment software that can rightfully waste a user's time and even then it has to entertain while it does it. Why do you think people are always complaining about bloatware? e.g. Do a system call trace on most "modern" applications and you'll see an amazing list of completely unnecessary file accesses drastically slowing startup.
You seem to have forgotten how horribly unstable most code was prior to the mid-1990s.
Actually, the reverse is true. Modern applications are what's unstable. Most programmers today wouldn't know what a race condition was if it jumped up and bit them. The complexity of interaction amongst all these mega-libraries is lots of fun (not!) also.
Stability was equivalently poor prior to the mid-1990's not because of coding practices but because a certain popular OS didn't have memory protection.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Have you run a software business? If so, you will know that if its trivial to steal your product, people do it,
True, some people do it.
and you end up flipping burgers for a living.
Complete and utter bullshit.
In a functioning society the vast majority of people want to do the right thing. Piracy mostly occurs amongst those who are time rich and money poor. Mainly people who wouldn't have bought the product anyway. Meaning no loss to the producer and a net gain to society.
Fanatics like you who instantly equate could copy with will copy are a large part of the DRM problem.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
If somebody can't tell by the colored box around the sponsored links, or hey, the text that reads "Sponsored Links", then what exactly could Google do to make it more obvious that these results are paid for?
The reality , not some marketing fiction, is that the majority of users can't tell the difference. That's fraud and the ACCC is right to intervene.
Answering your question: Google could use a different font, stop using weasily words like "sponsored" instead of "advertising", use more prominent colors, use more prominent boxes, use explanatory phrases like "these links are paid advertisements", even put ad's on a separate page.
Google makes their advertising links similar to the search results because it's profitable. A large part of the reason why it's profitable is because the majority of users can't tell the difference. Marketers love fraud because it's profitable. Doesn't mean the rest of us have to put up with it.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Ok, so they are talking about the "Sponsered Links" section. Well, it's in a beige background, different from the rest of the results. It does say "sponsered links", but granted, that is off to the right of the results.
Both above and beside. And the phrase "sponsored links" is in a small, light, unobtrusive font with the phrase itself being somewhat ambiguous. "Advertising links" and using the same font would've been less ambiguous. And they're using the same font for paid links that they using for the unpaid links. Funny that.
The reality is that for the average google user the things that google have done to distinguish paid advertising is not adequate. Surveys have been done (e.g. only 38% can tell) and the majority of users don't know the difference. That's fraudulent advertising and the ACCC is right to prosecute. The FTC's take on it is interesting.
We, as expert users, know the difference but if the average user doesn't then it needs to be fixed, both by educating users and by forcing Google and other search companies not to engage in deceptive business practices.
Fraud is profitable and advertisers are frequently trying to fraudulently mislead consumers. It's up to government and the law to stop as much of it as they can.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
I think MS were stuck, really. The new format had to be sufficiently similar to the old binary format to allow relatively simple conversion of files.
No "had to" about it. It was nothing more than convenient for them, and impossible for everybody else because of the proprietary dependencies, to do so.
They could've worked to fix the problems in ODF and used that.
where you steal from the rich and give to the poor
Your bias is showing. Somebody else might say the rich are currently stealing from the poor. Rich/poor wealth ratios appear to be growing. Pure capitalism is just warlordism, might makes right.
Successful real world societies have both competitive, non-sharing elements and cooperative, sharing elements. What is the best trade off between the two is still very much an open question.
The technique they're using, while interesting, needs more justification.
I'm wary when I see people doing any selection on random data because there's the problem of selection bias; throwing away the hundred results that don't match what they want and keeping the one that does. Just getting an image that seems plausible is not good enough.
Their quality measure isn't one I'd use. They should be comparing the technique-plus-low-resolution-optics against high-resolution-optics directly. That is, doing image differencing of images taken at the same time and seeing what differences there are. They may well have good reason for assuming it's all okay but until somebody does that test they cannot assume they've removed all the variability that the atmosphere provides; there could be all sorts of hidden biases due to various atmospheric, molecular and statistical effects.
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"Intellectual Property" is unspeak. All inventions are the result of intellect. A better name is ECI - easy copy items.
It's an anti-piracy feature. It prevents a business from firewalling the WGA server to get "genuine" status.
Guilty until proven innocent in other words. For millions. Again and again. Just the thing for the modern democracy.:-(
Remember there was an un-authorised software update site? If it works without the real MS saying it's OK, the anti-piracy feature does not work.
No, code signing is all that's needed to verify that updates are valid and approved by M$. The site that distributes the updates and Windows Disingenuous Disadvantage are both irrelevant.
M$ shutdown that third party update site because they wanted more control over the update process and their customers. In particular they probably wanted to be able to install spyware on individual PC's when needed. Third party update sites make that process more difficult.
Unfortunately for MS is this feature does not prevent users from migrating to the alternatives. It's hard to run a monopoly when Ubuntu is legal and free for the taking. If they had a choice, the first would be that I run Windows fully paid for. Second choice is that I run a pirated copy, but they are using WGA to prevent that to encourage me into the first choice, but the result is I have gone to their worst option.. I've gone legal to the competition. MS is helping themselves break their monopoly by reducing piracy.
Partially true. Format lockin, unethical business practices and huge economic network effects hinder people from moving to alternatives and that makes M$'s monopoly a lot easier to maintain than it might otherwise be. Particularly when you consider they are profiting tens of billions of dollars a year from the monopoly. Only a fraction of that is needed to manipulate and cross subsidize. Witness the current ISO OOXML manipulation. Those who have the gold often make the rules.
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Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies back door to every network connected country and business on earth.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this benefits only those who accidentally happen to have objectives similar to those of the trust.
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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.
Why does it have to be free?
By putting a price of even a buck on it you cut out the majority of the world's population.
If you want to read Stanger in a Strange Land for free, whats stopping you from going to the library? If the $21 price tag on the Starship Troopers opus is too much, then head over to Amazon and get the novel for $5.
You're being parochial. The US is less than 5% of the world's population. The european population is more than double that but the entire western world is still less than 25%. Not to mention children and other members of western society who can't afford even $5. Why should they go without because of broken IP law?
This whole 'everything should be free' movement is weird.
Actually, this whole 'everything should be paid for again and again' movement is the weird one.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
"Half bad" is not the same as "not bad". Stop pretending it is.
And what on earth makes you think this isn't going to get worse in future? This change is itself worse than previous when flash wasn't used. Despite what you claim.
Google, like most large scale marketers, is just boiling the frog. They are going slower than many but they're still doing it.
This is not particularly ethical behavior, whatever marketers might claim.
---
Advertising pays for nothing. "Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Be wary of astroturfers.
Whenever you see any article about a free/open software package that is a significant threat to some company's revenue stream e.g. OOo v. M$Office, Gimp v. Photoshop, Linux v. M$Windows, Firefox v. IE etc. you'll see lots of FUD comments about the free/open software package and positive comments about the competing proprietary package.
Marketing is about perception, not reality. If a product is perceived to be good, or good enough, it will be popular. It's almost a tautology. And the money's in what's popular.
Marketers of proprietary products live in fear that free/open software packages will gain a critical mass of people invested in them and growing them, causing the revenue stream of the proprietary product to start drying up. They will do anything in their power to stop that from happening. Marketers, "channel partners" (= paid subsidiaries), deluded non-marketing employees etc. they'll all FUD to greater or lesser degree.
There's always room for improvement but for the majority of people free and open software in most mainstream areas apart from games (and even there it's arguable depending on the genre) is not just adequate, it's good.
Despite the proprietary software marketing parasites never-ending FUD.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
So Google is supposed to take responsible for some people's pathological ignorance?
No, google is supposed to take some responsibility for most people's completely non-pathological naivety about search results.
"I thought buying Windows XP would let me fly! The fact that I'm a dumbass means it's FRAUD and it's WRONG and it's right for the FCC to go in and sue Microsoft!"
Irrelevant. It would be relevant if a majority of otherwise reasonable people did believe that. Partly depending on the reason for the belief (e.g. deceptive marketing material) M$ may or may not be responsible.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
When a sports team or race car has sponsors' logos all over their gear, does anyone doubt that there was a business arrangement?
Repeating: The reality not some marketing fiction, is that the majority of users can't tell the difference. That's fraud and the ACCC is right to intervene.
Your car example is irrelevant.
Google has two ethical choices; either educate users so they can tell the difference based on the cues that are there or improve the cues. They haven't done either.
Also see my other reply.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Repeating: The reality , not some marketing fiction, is that the majority of users can't tell the difference. That's fraud and the ACCC is right to intervene.
Google is deliberately trying to make there ad's as similar to normal links as they think they can get away with, simply because it's profitable. Doesn't make it okay. They may be slightly more ethical about this than other search engines. Still doesn't make it okay.
Huh? If people are too dumb to be able to tell the difference between "sponsored" links and relevant sites returned from a search inquiry, then maybe they should ask someone else to find things for them.
No, this is a significant proportion of the population we're talking about, even the majority. When it's that many people it's a problem with google, not with the population.
Google's ads are pretty unintrusive but clearly marked - should they be blinking so people notice them more as advertising?
See my suggestions.
Just because somebody is naive and deception is easy doesn't somehow make the deception okay.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
The anti-Microsoft FUD was thoroughly debunked by numerous Slashdot posters.
Nonsense. More correctly, multiple astroturfers tried to spin doctor unauthorized updates.
It was also thoroughly debunked by numerous comments in reply to the various external sources cited in the older Slashdot article.
No it wasn't; bluntly, you're lying.
They updated Windows Update, when people explicitly visited the Windows Update site.
Oh, so you're trying to spin doctor unauthorised updates also? The options "Download but not install", "Notify but not download", and "Turn off Automatic Updates" are completely unambiguous. M$, and you, are engaged in fraud by pretending they aren't.
Claiming it wasn't the Automatic Updates module that was doing the updates is just deceptive nonsense. That is just manipulative language trying to hide the fact that the update was unauthorized and that users had the perfectly reasonable expectation that updates would not occur.
That is all. They are not pushing out updates to critical system files without any user intervention.
The three options said nothing about critical system files only. They said automatic installs were disabled. End of story. Stop trying to deceive.
Last time, several posters asked whether Slashdot would at least have the decency to correct the blatantly Microsoft-bashing headline/article.
Slashdot is not an M$ propaganda mouthpiece. Deal.
They didn't, they posted it again. Go Zonk!
Keep it up Zonk. We need to cancel out at least part of the river of deceptive and often outright lying M$ propaganda and astroturf.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Frankly, I don't think $30 million is enough.
Some people may aim for the prize simply because it's fun. No other reason is needed.
Why climb a mountain? Why live? It's a pretty sad life that's only interested in putting extra zeros on a bank account.
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Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.
-- Mary Shafer, risks researcher, NASA
You are changing the subject. I was looking for anyone, who is currently doing something with a properly free OS, and who will not be doing the same with QNX due to the latter's more restrictive licensing. If you don't have such an example, you should not have followed up.
Okay, I'll spell it out: Anybody selling a large volume of something where the marginal cost of tweaking a free OS can be amortized over a large number of units. e.g. Tivo. Or organizations with more staff time than money e.g. Beowulf cluster. Or where they want to distribute the device for free to third parties including commercial e.g. OLPC. Or they want to do their own maintenance and modifications and sell the result. e.g. RedHat. Or a large company with deep pockets that doesn't to be beholden to a small company that might raise the price on them once they're committed. e.g. IBM
You especially should not have followed up, because you posted nonsense -- your statement would only be true, if the OSes being compared were otherwise equivalent. They aren't. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and for many paying QNX would be (far) less expensive, than keeping extra developers on stuff to deal with a free OS' idiosyncrasies.
Given the power and cost of hardware these days QNX and Linux are equivalent for almost all applications. The QNX company is probably feeling some pain because of this. QNX does have a niche but I suspect it's getting smaller all the time, particularly since QNX can't leverage the user/development base that linux and other free software can.
Don't get me wrong, I like QNX from a technical perspective but from the point of view of establishing a standard they blew it by overpricing and it's too late to change now. A company I worked for considered it once but rejected it at the time because of cost, lack of third party tools and various license restrictions that impacted our product.
Do try harder the next time around...
Please be more polite next time.
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Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
Bad TOS' is a strong indication of market failure. That means government intervention required. It happens more often than you might think. In a functioning free market there won't be bad TOS' because people will choose the good ones and the bad TOS vendor will go out of business. In the mean time we will continue to complain and maybe get some consensus on what can be done to fix things.
---
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.
If you take someone's money by using a pirated copy of Windows, that's theft of money.
Circular reasoning. Nobody's taking anybody's money if they never would have bought anything anyway.
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
As in a very small number of people make a very large sum of money while everybody else is screwed? Success is in the eye of the beholder.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nothing new? Two wrongs don't make a right. Basic ethics.
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Is your company ethical?
Nonsense. Want to maximize profit? Use the OS with the lowest licensing fee. i.e. not QNX.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
Maybe he's an astroturfer who's annoyed because his propaganda piece, sorry "news release", got bounced for this.
---
Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
we no longer need to make space tradeoffs
Problem is, many programmers today fail to realize a space tradeoff is a time tradeoff as well.
Memory+disk is very slow compared to modern CPU's and this means that anything, including bloat, that pushes even one byte of core code out of the level one cache will cause the whole program to be an order of magnitude slower as the cache thrashes.
A user's time is important to them and all programs that interact with a user need to be as fast as possible. To put it another way; the computer is there to serve the user, not vice versa.
Programmers who don't understand this are a problem. It's only entertainment software that can rightfully waste a user's time and even then it has to entertain while it does it. Why do you think people are always complaining about bloatware? e.g. Do a system call trace on most "modern" applications and you'll see an amazing list of completely unnecessary file accesses drastically slowing startup.
You seem to have forgotten how horribly unstable most code was prior to the mid-1990s.
Actually, the reverse is true. Modern applications are what's unstable. Most programmers today wouldn't know what a race condition was if it jumped up and bit them. The complexity of interaction amongst all these mega-libraries is lots of fun (not!) also.
Stability was equivalently poor prior to the mid-1990's not because of coding practices but because a certain popular OS didn't have memory protection.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Have you run a software business? If so, you will know that if its trivial to steal your product, people do it,
True, some people do it.
and you end up flipping burgers for a living.
Complete and utter bullshit.
In a functioning society the vast majority of people want to do the right thing. Piracy mostly occurs amongst those who are time rich and money poor. Mainly people who wouldn't have bought the product anyway. Meaning no loss to the producer and a net gain to society.
Fanatics like you who instantly equate could copy with will copy are a large part of the DRM problem.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
you think all software should be free
He didn't say that. You're a fanatic.
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DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
If somebody can't tell by the colored box around the sponsored links, or hey, the text that reads "Sponsored Links", then what exactly could Google do to make it more obvious that these results are paid for?
The reality , not some marketing fiction, is that the majority of users can't tell the difference. That's fraud and the ACCC is right to intervene.
Answering your question: Google could use a different font, stop using weasily words like "sponsored" instead of "advertising", use more prominent colors, use more prominent boxes, use explanatory phrases like "these links are paid advertisements", even put ad's on a separate page.
Google makes their advertising links similar to the search results because it's profitable. A large part of the reason why it's profitable is because the majority of users can't tell the difference. Marketers love fraud because it's profitable. Doesn't mean the rest of us have to put up with it.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Ok, so they are talking about the "Sponsered Links" section. Well, it's in a beige background, different from the rest of the results. It does say "sponsered links", but granted, that is off to the right of the results.
Both above and beside. And the phrase "sponsored links" is in a small, light, unobtrusive font with the phrase itself being somewhat ambiguous. "Advertising links" and using the same font would've been less ambiguous. And they're using the same font for paid links that they using for the unpaid links. Funny that.
The reality is that for the average google user the things that google have done to distinguish paid advertising is not adequate. Surveys have been done (e.g. only 38% can tell) and the majority of users don't know the difference. That's fraudulent advertising and the ACCC is right to prosecute. The FTC's take on it is interesting.
We, as expert users, know the difference but if the average user doesn't then it needs to be fixed, both by educating users and by forcing Google and other search companies not to engage in deceptive business practices.
Fraud is profitable and advertisers are frequently trying to fraudulently mislead consumers. It's up to government and the law to stop as much of it as they can.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
I think MS were stuck, really. The new format had to be sufficiently similar to the old binary format to allow relatively simple conversion of files.
No "had to" about it. It was nothing more than convenient for them, and impossible for everybody else because of the proprietary dependencies, to do so.
They could've worked to fix the problems in ODF and used that.
They chose not to.
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Is your company ethical?
where you steal from the rich and give to the poor
Your bias is showing. Somebody else might say the rich are currently stealing from the poor. Rich/poor wealth ratios appear to be growing. Pure capitalism is just warlordism, might makes right.
Successful real world societies have both competitive, non-sharing elements and cooperative, sharing elements. What is the best trade off between the two is still very much an open question.
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You communist! Breathing shared air!
The technique they're using, while interesting, needs more justification.
I'm wary when I see people doing any selection on random data because there's the problem of selection bias; throwing away the hundred results that don't match what they want and keeping the one that does. Just getting an image that seems plausible is not good enough.
Their quality measure isn't one I'd use. They should be comparing the technique-plus-low-resolution-optics against high-resolution-optics directly. That is, doing image differencing of images taken at the same time and seeing what differences there are. They may well have good reason for assuming it's all okay but until somebody does that test they cannot assume they've removed all the variability that the atmosphere provides; there could be all sorts of hidden biases due to various atmospheric, molecular and statistical effects.
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"Intellectual Property" is unspeak. All inventions are the result of intellect. A better name is ECI - easy copy items.
It's an anti-piracy feature. It prevents a business from firewalling the WGA server to get "genuine" status.
Guilty until proven innocent in other words. For millions. Again and again. Just the thing for the modern democracy. :-(
Remember there was an un-authorised software update site? If it works without the real MS saying it's OK, the anti-piracy feature does not work.
No, code signing is all that's needed to verify that updates are valid and approved by M$. The site that distributes the updates and Windows Disingenuous Disadvantage are both irrelevant.
M$ shutdown that third party update site because they wanted more control over the update process and their customers. In particular they probably wanted to be able to install spyware on individual PC's when needed. Third party update sites make that process more difficult.
Unfortunately for MS is this feature does not prevent users from migrating to the alternatives. It's hard to run a monopoly when Ubuntu is legal and free for the taking. If they had a choice, the first would be that I run Windows fully paid for. Second choice is that I run a pirated copy, but they are using WGA to prevent that to encourage me into the first choice, but the result is I have gone to their worst option.. I've gone legal to the competition. MS is helping themselves break their monopoly by reducing piracy.
Partially true. Format lockin, unethical business practices and huge economic network effects hinder people from moving to alternatives and that makes M$'s monopoly a lot easier to maintain than it might otherwise be. Particularly when you consider they are profiting tens of billions of dollars a year from the monopoly. Only a fraction of that is needed to manipulate and cross subsidize. Witness the current ISO OOXML manipulation. Those who have the gold often make the rules.
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Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies back door to every network connected country and business on earth.