In what way is it more "in place" to click on different tabs in a terminal window versus clicking on different sub-menus in an IDE?
An IDE is typically just a collection of specialised, tiled windows with some menus and buttons up the top. The specialisaton of each window has a downside in that it wastes precious screen real estate when you don't happen to be using those specialised functions. Personally, I prefer to be able maximise my code window and keep all the other junk out of the way as I find that maximises my productivity.
While a well designed IDE can help they are overrated as productivity boosters. Most of the productivity gains come not from the IDE per se but from the various tricks, noted by other posters, incorporated into it. Non-IDE programmers have their own bag of tricks e.g. Often writing small scripts to accomplish some repetitive function that might not be anticipated by an IDE designer, or taking advantage of a full OS of command line and GUI tools that an IDE can only dream about. Most IDE's have external tools functions but they are usually badly integrated.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
You haven't seen any actual games in action. You haven't seen what the street price will be. You haven't seen what games will be available on the platform. You haven't seen what the quality of the games will be. You haven't seen how many movies will be available and what sort of a movie player it will make. You haven't seen what the competition will be like at the time.
Basically, you don't know a damn thing.
You've made your decision based on content-free marketing drivel, lying astroturfers and rumor mongering by the competition. That's foolish.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are lying scum, misrepresenting company propaganda as a personal opinion.
Where do I claim this? I said it could equally be. The rest of your post is similarly logically fallacious. Please, if you're going to disagree with an argument at least try to respond to it.
The patent system is a massive and hugely expensive interference (costing billions) in the citizen's business. In a democratic system such massive interference requires massive justification - evidence in other words - and the default position should be no or at best minimal, low impact, experimental patent law. Some limited evidence might exist for drugs and high research investment industries (though the extraordinary inefficiencies and history of the drug industry puts lie to a large part of that). No such evidence exists for other industries.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
The usual meaningless patent rationalisation deliberately confusing cause and effect. It could equally be that productive economies tend to attract patent parasites.
The faulty logic and non-scientific rationalisation used to justify patents is atrocious.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
A lawyer is but a minion sent to do your dirty work if that is what they have been sent to do.
Being paid to do something unethical doesn't somehow make it ethical. Or to put it another way, the Nuremberg excuse "I was just doing my job" means nothing.
The party directing that an unethical action be performed and the party doing the unethical action are both responsible.
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Are you thinking long term? Just because a TCO may be good in the short term doesn't mean it's good in the long term.
Garbage collection can also lead to unpredictability.
I detest it when a GUI pauses for no good reason, just because the runtime library decided to do a garbage collection at that point. It breaks some of the cardinal rules of good interface design; predictability and responsiveness.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Use QFileInfo::isFile to determine if the file exists, then QFileInfo::size returns the file size in bytes, or 0 or if the size is 0 or if the size cannot be fetched.
This is buggy. It is a race condition. If the underlying file is deleted or renamed or is replaced by a named pipe in between those two calls the return from both calls is inconsistent.
This sort of error is unfortunately endemic in GUI code, not just qt, and is a large part of why GUI programs, are often flakey. GUI libraries usually have crappy kitchen sink API's that encourage bad programming practices; almost requiring numerous race conditions and potential security holes unless heroic programming efforts are made to avoid them. The kitchen sink API's are an attempt to improve productivity however a lot more care needs to go into their organisation to discourage bad programming practices, particularly race conditions. In this case they should've guaranteed the caching of all of QFileInfo so that all the information about the file is atomic, making race-free programming easier. Better, they should've had a handle to the file that guarantees that whatever operations are done on the file refer to the same file, including file operations outside of QFileInfo.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Who are you to lecture NVidia on whether open sourcing their driver code would make them sell more hardware?
They are a citizen in a free country, entitled to free speech and opinions as much as anyone else.
They obviously disagree,
At the moment. People are trying to convince them otherwise.
and they have every right and standing to do so (more standing than you, by far).
Yes, they a corporate citizen in a free country, entitled to free speech and opinions as much as anyone else.
And because they disagree, the OSS community bashes them at every turn.
Nonsense. I rarely see comments that could be interpreted as "bashing". Disagreement has nothing to do with bashing. Personally, I haven't seen a single argument for keeping there software closed source that makes much sense. Anything they release of any significance is going to be analysed and reverse engineered by their competition in hours anyway.
It is the OSS community that needs to grow up and get over itself.
Actually, some reasonable people think that maybe NVidia should grow up and get over itself.
Did you ever think that Nvidia doesn't want their hardware run by homebrew drivers, because they'll catch the flack when those drivers act whacky?Joe Blow buys some Lindows machine with some OSS Nvidia driver written by who-the-hell-knows, and when that driver acts up, Nvidia gets the blame. I understand Nvidia perfectly on this issue.
Only if they were foolish with branding and assignment of responsibility. They're not that foolish.
Just look at the reliability or otherwise of pretty much any other hardware subsystem on Linux to see what would actually happen in reality. If an OSS driver has problems or is incomplete I see no evidence that hardware vendors get blamed. In any case the closed source graphics drivers (both windows and linux) are flakey enough that any problems with OSS drivers would be a second order effect.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
No coherent vision with a bunch of competing vendors.
It's called a free and open market. Maybe you've heard of it?
One target needs to emerge with the kind of support that Windows has down the whole stack.
No it doesn't. Linux has plenty of support. And if you like the M$Windows version of support then I suggest you use M$Windows and stop wasting time on something you don't understand.
I've been hearing about Linux taking over this and that for 6 years now,
Nonsense. almost nobody has said linux is taking over. You're creating a straw man.
I only see it replacing UNIX.
Only if you think vendor sales are a good measure of free software use. Free clue: It's not a good idea to measure a phenomenon based around freedom in dollars. See my sig for another, equally [in]valid way.
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GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by google hits. M$ windows #2. Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2. Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2. Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2. Unfortunately firefox is still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch it grow.
I've gotten plenty of decades old, grungy C, Pascal and FORTRAN source code running on modern Linux systems. It's no big deal. Usually minutes, not hours.
The posix interfaces are very stable. Linux also seems to have an extensive set of backwards compatibility library calls available, inherited from most other unices including BSD.
Any complaints about keeping code up-to-date are highly exaggerated.
The media is the most common problem (DECtape? Where am I going to get a drive for that?). Generally there's only really a problem if it uses some oddball closed source library, typically to access unusual hardware. GUI code is the most fiddly thing to update but with the availability of OpenMotif, OpenGL and other toolkits it doesn't take long. Other problems include hard coded file/device names, minor source code syntax differences and simply buggy code.
True, this isn't as convenient as having an old binary run out of the box but the upside is that it's compiled with a newer compiler and is likely to go substantially faster and find plenty of latent bugs when compiler warnings are enabled. Besides, just how often do you run decades old binaries on modern systems anyway? Typically when you get a new system you get new application software with the spiffy new GUI anyway.
Oh, and a fucking cd burner that also burns dvds and doesn't just magically flake out on its own as if it had a personality.
What are you doing? I've been burning both DVD's and CD's with Nautilus under Ubuntu for some time no problem at all. K3b used to crash regularly but it didn't create coasters and only crashed when trying to burn more than one CD/DVD in the same session. I think both use the debian version of cdrecord under the hood. You may also have a driver bug - I'd suggest you try running cdrecord manually and see what errors you get. Also try setting the drive speed rather than relying on the auto speed detection - I've seen problems with that in the past.
"I believe it is time for the closed source community to grow up and find some common ground with Linux."
...the ant told the elephant.
Hardly an ant.
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GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by google hits. M$ windows #2. Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2. Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2. Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2. Unfortunately firefox is still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch it grow.
Why can't we judge the merits of software on the basis of its usefulness, effeciency, manageability, security, and support level offered with it rather than by looking at its skin color?
The license is part of the featureset of a program. Some people regard that feature as important, others less so. To assume that feature doesn't exist is disengenuous.
One of the many reasons I like OSS is that I know that because of the license and with a decent net connection I can get what I want, when I want, in seconds. Not so with closed source software, particularly when working in a large organisation that requires a paperwork trail to buy anything.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
No, your argument is meaningless because you are falling into the logical trap of assuming that the-law-as-it-is-currently-implemented is the only way maximising society's benefit. That's flat out wrong.
It's clear to me you didn't read my post very well, because I said, " you had said the application of the copyright laws have become more and more restrictive an in favor of corporations, I would have agreed with you." So, given you haven't paid attention to what I said, I don't know why you're responding, other than to hear yourself speak.
I paid attention to what you said. It's just that even with that proviso you're restricting the number of possibilities unnecessarily. Copyright law needs to be fixed for individuals as well as corporations.
Incidentally, who says you should be able to make a living from it?
I do.
Well you would, wouldn't you? You perceive current copyright law as benefiting you. Others perceive it as being at the expense of others in the community.
As does capitalism,
No it doesn't. Capitalism says nothing about this. Capitalism is merely private ownership. Maybe people should be able to own the copies they have and do whatever they like with them.
which you attempt to reference with your solipsistic 'supply and demand' reference.
Nothing solipsistic about it. Supply and demand varies depending on how the law and hence the market is structured.
Artists have as much a right to make a living from their work as does anyone else who works for a living, including yourself.
Nobody has the right to make a living by parasitising others. If what they are producing is not in demand because of a surfeit of availability then I'd suggest they start producing something that people do want.
Let's see you work for free for a while.
No thanks, I'm producing things in demand.
However, I see there is no need to go forward, as I am talking to a wall. Anyone who claims that the law is solely a "creation of the mind" is living on their own, lonely planet.
Since you've more-or-less ignored my main point and my sig (that current copyright law is only one of an infinite number of possibilities and that there is no reason to believe that current copyright law is the best alternative) then I suspect you are the wall. I also never said that law is solely a creation of the mind though whether you like it or not all law, like software, is a creation of the mind.
Please note that my main point is not that copyright should not necessarily exist, merely that the handwaving of people like yourself trying to justify the current law as the only possibility is just that. Handwaving. With little justification. It's time such wide ranging and major impact laws had a much more scientific and objective basis than "it feels good". It could well be that no copyright law, or something completely different like usage rights, contracts or DRM, might be a superior alternative.
Personally I'd like to see copyright law reduced to about 5 years (varying, depending on the form), requiring pro-active registration and renewal by the author (so that "can't locate author" doesn't stop a work from being used), expires on author's death, have a much more restricted definition of derived work (e.g. translations would be a new work), not valid for personal use for minors and the severely disadvantaged (for education), does not restrict the number of copies any one person can have (because they can only read/listen to one copy at a time), is invalidated if it becomes a standard (like trademarks), can be invalidated by a court of law if it can be proven the copy restriction is anti-competitive in any sense (e.g. by blocking reverse engineering and hence competition), exclusivity not transferable (meaning an author cannot give exclusive rights to a publisher though they can license publicati
Slashdot prints M$ marketing material practically on a daily basis. When microsoft.com does the same for OSS software then maybe you might have a point. M$'ofties really are such hypocrites sometimes.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
No, your argument is meaningless because you are falling into the logical trap of assuming that the-law-as-it-is-currently-implemented is the only way maximising society's benefit. That's flat out wrong. The RIAA likes to push this fallacy because they have an entrenched interest in maintaining the status quo but it's just self serving nonsense so they can maintain their parasitism.
In addition as history and the web has shown the reality is that people will continue to create regardless of what "protections" or otherwise that the law gives them.
Incidentally, who says you should be able to make a living from it? We now have sufficient books so that a person could read continuously for multiple lifetimes, there's simply not a big need for more books. Let's let supply and demand do it's thing.
The law is a creation of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. There are an infinite number of possible ways of balancing the rights of all citizens. Existing copyright is just one possibility of many and there is little evidence that existing copyright law is the best way to go. We should at least have some objective, scientific evidence for the net efficacy of whatever law is chosen.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
This is meaningless. The PTO has no way of objectively determining whether something is "specific" or not. It's quite arbitrarily defined by bureaucrats. They just handwave and gloss over that fundamental flaw at the core of patent law.
e.g. Take the simplest possible example, a simple linear, one dimensional "specificity". Maybe I patent something that requires a specific color. What range of wavelengths is "specific"? Is it 500nm +/- 0nm? That's physically impossible. 500nm +/- 0.0001nm? 500nm +/- 10nm? 500nm +/- 10%? 500nm +50nm -45nm? Aqua-green? Greenish? Green as defined in some arbitrary printing standard? Green as defined by some dye? 500nm with a standard deviation in a normal curve of less that 10nm?
When they can't even do that without being arbitrary to talk about specificity in ill-defined multi-dimensional, multi-factor, non-linear spaces is just silly.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
True. When an industry switches to selling looks, (warning, car analogy) like selling car radiator grills and cup holders, it's also a sign of a maturing market with less true product differentiation.
PC's are now powerful enough that for many people (not me!) increasing the performance further is pointless. Packaging, unfortunately, is where it's at now.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
then it is more cost effective to utilise those resources
Not necessarily. It depends on the time scale. Conversion costs are fixed. Infrastructure costs are ongoing. If the cost/benefit of the alternative is better at some point it makes economic sense to accept the short term pain of [partial] conversion for the long term gain of lower infrastructure costs.
This applies whether or not you can leverage existing resources. If you have existing resources available for the new task that means those resources were partially idle and being inefficiently utilized e.g. If the support contract does not increase in price when you take on the extra work that means you were paying too much before. Similarly if the existing box can support the new database without upgrade. New boxes are cheap incidentally.
Your argument makes some sense when considering economic network effects (e.g. 2 oracle DBA's may together give a better cost+benefit than a Oracle DBA plus a multi-vendor DBA) however this argument is often over-emphasised for typically one-off installations like databases. I've seen many businesses that spent way more than was necessary just to conform to an inefficient, self-imposed single-vendor restriction.
The argument also ignores the sometimes high cost of single vendor lockin. By having alternatives in your shop you can sometimes significantly improve the responsiveness and competitiveness of the vendor. It's no secret that vendors work harder for fence sitters than locked in customers.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Fanatics like you give copyright a bad name. Anybody would think you're a lying MPAA/RIAA astroturfer.
Since I did not say any point of view was in the majority your argument is pointless; a dishonest attempt to redirect the reader. And that's ignoring your meaningless numbers; very few people haven't "pirated" at some time in their lives.
Every law is balancing the rights of different groups of people. I'd suggest you show a little maturity and acknowledge that simple fact.
Copyright law as it's currently written is, like software, a creation of the mind, and is only one of an infinite number of possibilities. To pretend that the current law is the only possibility is dishonest. It's reasonable to discuss the many alternatives and to regard the current implementation as unfair and want to change it.
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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.
As far as what they actually are doing, well, it's theft, plain and simple.
Millions of people disagree. It isn't that simple. Stop pretending otherwise.
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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.
Slashdot Mirror
In what way is it more "in place" to click on different tabs in a terminal window versus clicking on different sub-menus in an IDE?
An IDE is typically just a collection of specialised, tiled windows with some menus and buttons up the top. The specialisaton of each window has a downside in that it wastes precious screen real estate when you don't happen to be using those specialised functions. Personally, I prefer to be able maximise my code window and keep all the other junk out of the way as I find that maximises my productivity.
While a well designed IDE can help they are overrated as productivity boosters. Most of the productivity gains come not from the IDE per se but from the various tricks, noted by other posters, incorporated into it. Non-IDE programmers have their own bag of tricks e.g. Often writing small scripts to accomplish some repetitive function that might not be anticipated by an IDE designer, or taking advantage of a full OS of command line and GUI tools that an IDE can only dream about. Most IDE's have external tools functions but they are usually badly integrated.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Why are you making any decision now?
You haven't seen any actual games in action. You haven't seen what the street price will be. You haven't seen what games will be available on the platform. You haven't seen what the quality of the games will be. You haven't seen how many movies will be available and what sort of a movie player it will make. You haven't seen what the competition will be like at the time.
Basically, you don't know a damn thing.
You've made your decision based on content-free marketing drivel, lying astroturfers and rumor mongering by the competition. That's foolish.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are lying scum, misrepresenting company propaganda as a personal opinion.
Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.
-- Mary Shafer, risks researcher, NASA
And how is your response any better than mine?
Where do I claim this? I said it could equally be. The rest of your post is similarly logically fallacious. Please, if you're going to disagree with an argument at least try to respond to it.
The patent system is a massive and hugely expensive interference (costing billions) in the citizen's business. In a democratic system such massive interference requires massive justification - evidence in other words - and the default position should be no or at best minimal, low impact, experimental patent law. Some limited evidence might exist for drugs and high research investment industries (though the extraordinary inefficiencies and history of the drug industry puts lie to a large part of that). No such evidence exists for other industries.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
The usual meaningless patent rationalisation deliberately confusing cause and effect. It could equally be that productive economies tend to attract patent parasites.
The faulty logic and non-scientific rationalisation used to justify patents is atrocious.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
A lawyer is but a minion sent to do your dirty work if that is what they have been sent to do.
Being paid to do something unethical doesn't somehow make it ethical. Or to put it another way, the Nuremberg excuse "I was just doing my job" means nothing.
The party directing that an unethical action be performed and the party doing the unethical action are both responsible.
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Are you thinking long term? Just because a TCO may be good in the short term doesn't mean it's good in the long term.
Garbage collection can also lead to unpredictability.
I detest it when a GUI pauses for no good reason, just because the runtime library decided to do a garbage collection at that point. It breaks some of the cardinal rules of good interface design; predictability and responsiveness.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Use QFileInfo::isFile to determine if the file exists, then QFileInfo::size returns the file size in bytes, or 0 or if the size is 0 or if the size cannot be fetched.
This is buggy. It is a race condition. If the underlying file is deleted or renamed or is replaced by a named pipe in between those two calls the return from both calls is inconsistent.
This sort of error is unfortunately endemic in GUI code, not just qt, and is a large part of why GUI programs, are often flakey. GUI libraries usually have crappy kitchen sink API's that encourage bad programming practices; almost requiring numerous race conditions and potential security holes unless heroic programming efforts are made to avoid them. The kitchen sink API's are an attempt to improve productivity however a lot more care needs to go into their organisation to discourage bad programming practices, particularly race conditions. In this case they should've guaranteed the caching of all of QFileInfo so that all the information about the file is atomic, making race-free programming easier. Better, they should've had a handle to the file that guarantees that whatever operations are done on the file refer to the same file, including file operations outside of QFileInfo.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Who are you to lecture NVidia on whether open sourcing their driver code would make them sell more hardware?
They are a citizen in a free country, entitled to free speech and opinions as much as anyone else.
They obviously disagree,
At the moment. People are trying to convince them otherwise.
and they have every right and standing to do so (more standing than you, by far).
Yes, they a corporate citizen in a free country, entitled to free speech and opinions as much as anyone else.
And because they disagree, the OSS community bashes them at every turn.
Nonsense. I rarely see comments that could be interpreted as "bashing". Disagreement has nothing to do with bashing. Personally, I haven't seen a single argument for keeping there software closed source that makes much sense. Anything they release of any significance is going to be analysed and reverse engineered by their competition in hours anyway.
It is the OSS community that needs to grow up and get over itself.
Actually, some reasonable people think that maybe NVidia should grow up and get over itself.
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DRM - destroying free markets one step at a time.
Did you ever think that Nvidia doesn't want their hardware run by homebrew drivers, because they'll catch the flack when those drivers act whacky?Joe Blow buys some Lindows machine with some OSS Nvidia driver written by who-the-hell-knows, and when that driver acts up, Nvidia gets the blame. I understand Nvidia perfectly on this issue.
Only if they were foolish with branding and assignment of responsibility. They're not that foolish.
Just look at the reliability or otherwise of pretty much any other hardware subsystem on Linux to see what would actually happen in reality. If an OSS driver has problems or is incomplete I see no evidence that hardware vendors get blamed. In any case the closed source graphics drivers (both windows and linux) are flakey enough that any problems with OSS drivers would be a second order effect.
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I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
No coherent vision with a bunch of competing vendors.
It's called a free and open market. Maybe you've heard of it?
One target needs to emerge with the kind of support that Windows has down the whole stack.
No it doesn't. Linux has plenty of support. And if you like the M$Windows version of support then I suggest you use M$Windows and stop wasting time on something you don't understand.
I've been hearing about Linux taking over this and that for 6 years now,
Nonsense. almost nobody has said linux is taking over. You're creating a straw man.
I only see it replacing UNIX.
Only if you think vendor sales are a good measure of free software use. Free clue: It's not a good idea to measure a phenomenon based around freedom in dollars. See my sig for another, equally [in]valid way.
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GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by google hits. M$ windows #2.
Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2.
Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2.
Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2.
Unfortunately firefox is still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch it grow.
I've gotten plenty of decades old, grungy C, Pascal and FORTRAN source code running on modern Linux systems. It's no big deal. Usually minutes, not hours.
The posix interfaces are very stable. Linux also seems to have an extensive set of backwards compatibility library calls available, inherited from most other unices including BSD.
Any complaints about keeping code up-to-date are highly exaggerated.
The media is the most common problem (DECtape? Where am I going to get a drive for that?). Generally there's only really a problem if it uses some oddball closed source library, typically to access unusual hardware. GUI code is the most fiddly thing to update but with the availability of OpenMotif, OpenGL and other toolkits it doesn't take long. Other problems include hard coded file/device names, minor source code syntax differences and simply buggy code.
True, this isn't as convenient as having an old binary run out of the box but the upside is that it's compiled with a newer compiler and is likely to go substantially faster and find plenty of latent bugs when compiler warnings are enabled. Besides, just how often do you run decades old binaries on modern systems anyway? Typically when you get a new system you get new application software with the spiffy new GUI anyway.
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Are you a creator or a consumer?
Oh, and a fucking cd burner that also burns dvds and doesn't just magically flake out on its own as if it had a personality.
What are you doing? I've been burning both DVD's and CD's with Nautilus under Ubuntu for some time no problem at all. K3b used to crash regularly but it didn't create coasters and only crashed when trying to burn more than one CD/DVD in the same session. I think both use the debian version of cdrecord under the hood. You may also have a driver bug - I'd suggest you try running cdrecord manually and see what errors you get. Also try setting the drive speed rather than relying on the auto speed detection - I've seen problems with that in the past.
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Keep your options open!
"I believe it is time for the closed source community to grow up and find some common ground with Linux."
Hardly an ant.
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GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by google hits. M$ windows #2.
Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2.
Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2.
Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2.
Unfortunately firefox is still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch it grow.
Why can't we judge the merits of software on the basis of its usefulness, effeciency, manageability, security, and support level offered with it rather than by looking at its skin color?
The license is part of the featureset of a program. Some people regard that feature as important, others less so. To assume that feature doesn't exist is disengenuous.
One of the many reasons I like OSS is that I know that because of the license and with a decent net connection I can get what I want, when I want, in seconds. Not so with closed source software, particularly when working in a large organisation that requires a paperwork trail to buy anything.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
It's clear to me you didn't read my post very well, because I said, " you had said the application of the copyright laws have become more and more restrictive an in favor of corporations, I would have agreed with you." So, given you haven't paid attention to what I said, I don't know why you're responding, other than to hear yourself speak.
I paid attention to what you said. It's just that even with that proviso you're restricting the number of possibilities unnecessarily. Copyright law needs to be fixed for individuals as well as corporations.
I do.
Well you would, wouldn't you? You perceive current copyright law as benefiting you. Others perceive it as being at the expense of others in the community.
As does capitalism,
No it doesn't. Capitalism says nothing about this. Capitalism is merely private ownership. Maybe people should be able to own the copies they have and do whatever they like with them.
which you attempt to reference with your solipsistic 'supply and demand' reference.
Nothing solipsistic about it. Supply and demand varies depending on how the law and hence the market is structured.
Artists have as much a right to make a living from their work as does anyone else who works for a living, including yourself.
Nobody has the right to make a living by parasitising others. If what they are producing is not in demand because of a surfeit of availability then I'd suggest they start producing something that people do want.
Let's see you work for free for a while.
No thanks, I'm producing things in demand.
However, I see there is no need to go forward, as I am talking to a wall. Anyone who claims that the law is solely a "creation of the mind" is living on their own, lonely planet.
Since you've more-or-less ignored my main point and my sig (that current copyright law is only one of an infinite number of possibilities and that there is no reason to believe that current copyright law is the best alternative) then I suspect you are the wall. I also never said that law is solely a creation of the mind though whether you like it or not all law, like software, is a creation of the mind.
Please note that my main point is not that copyright should not necessarily exist, merely that the handwaving of people like yourself trying to justify the current law as the only possibility is just that. Handwaving. With little justification. It's time such wide ranging and major impact laws had a much more scientific and objective basis than "it feels good". It could well be that no copyright law, or something completely different like usage rights, contracts or DRM, might be a superior alternative.
Personally I'd like to see copyright law reduced to about 5 years (varying, depending on the form), requiring pro-active registration and renewal by the author (so that "can't locate author" doesn't stop a work from being used), expires on author's death, have a much more restricted definition of derived work (e.g. translations would be a new work), not valid for personal use for minors and the severely disadvantaged (for education), does not restrict the number of copies any one person can have (because they can only read/listen to one copy at a time), is invalidated if it becomes a standard (like trademarks), can be invalidated by a court of law if it can be proven the copy restriction is anti-competitive in any sense (e.g. by blocking reverse engineering and hence competition), exclusivity not transferable (meaning an author cannot give exclusive rights to a publisher though they can license publicati
Slashdot prints M$ marketing material practically on a daily basis. When microsoft.com does the same for OSS software then maybe you might have a point. M$'ofties really are such hypocrites sometimes.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
No, your argument is meaningless because you are falling into the logical trap of assuming that the-law-as-it-is-currently-implemented is the only way maximising society's benefit. That's flat out wrong. The RIAA likes to push this fallacy because they have an entrenched interest in maintaining the status quo but it's just self serving nonsense so they can maintain their parasitism.
In addition as history and the web has shown the reality is that people will continue to create regardless of what "protections" or otherwise that the law gives them.
Incidentally, who says you should be able to make a living from it? We now have sufficient books so that a person could read continuously for multiple lifetimes, there's simply not a big need for more books. Let's let supply and demand do it's thing.
The law is a creation of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. There are an infinite number of possible ways of balancing the rights of all citizens. Existing copyright is just one possibility of many and there is little evidence that existing copyright law is the best way to go. We should at least have some objective, scientific evidence for the net efficacy of whatever law is chosen.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Or to put it more succinctly but less logically: If you throw enough dirt some of it is likely to stick.
As marketers and astroturfers have known for ages.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
This is meaningless. The PTO has no way of objectively determining whether something is "specific" or not. It's quite arbitrarily defined by bureaucrats. They just handwave and gloss over that fundamental flaw at the core of patent law.
e.g. Take the simplest possible example, a simple linear, one dimensional "specificity". Maybe I patent something that requires a specific color. What range of wavelengths is "specific"? Is it 500nm +/- 0nm? That's physically impossible. 500nm +/- 0.0001nm? 500nm +/- 10nm? 500nm +/- 10%? 500nm +50nm -45nm? Aqua-green? Greenish? Green as defined in some arbitrary printing standard? Green as defined by some dye? 500nm with a standard deviation in a normal curve of less that 10nm?
When they can't even do that without being arbitrary to talk about specificity in ill-defined multi-dimensional, multi-factor, non-linear spaces is just silly.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
True. When an industry switches to selling looks, (warning, car analogy) like selling car radiator grills and cup holders, it's also a sign of a maturing market with less true product differentiation.
PC's are now powerful enough that for many people (not me!) increasing the performance further is pointless. Packaging, unfortunately, is where it's at now.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
Nonsense. Linux is a viable alternative to vista for a lot of people. Not for everybody but he did not say that.
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Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
then it is more cost effective to utilise those resources
Not necessarily. It depends on the time scale. Conversion costs are fixed. Infrastructure costs are ongoing. If the cost/benefit of the alternative is better at some point it makes economic sense to accept the short term pain of [partial] conversion for the long term gain of lower infrastructure costs.
This applies whether or not you can leverage existing resources. If you have existing resources available for the new task that means those resources were partially idle and being inefficiently utilized e.g. If the support contract does not increase in price when you take on the extra work that means you were paying too much before. Similarly if the existing box can support the new database without upgrade. New boxes are cheap incidentally.
Your argument makes some sense when considering economic network effects (e.g. 2 oracle DBA's may together give a better cost+benefit than a Oracle DBA plus a multi-vendor DBA) however this argument is often over-emphasised for typically one-off installations like databases. I've seen many businesses that spent way more than was necessary just to conform to an inefficient, self-imposed single-vendor restriction.
The argument also ignores the sometimes high cost of single vendor lockin. By having alternatives in your shop you can sometimes significantly improve the responsiveness and competitiveness of the vendor. It's no secret that vendors work harder for fence sitters than locked in customers.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Fanatics like you give copyright a bad name. Anybody would think you're a lying MPAA/RIAA astroturfer.
Since I did not say any point of view was in the majority your argument is pointless; a dishonest attempt to redirect the reader. And that's ignoring your meaningless numbers; very few people haven't "pirated" at some time in their lives.
Every law is balancing the rights of different groups of people. I'd suggest you show a little maturity and acknowledge that simple fact.
Copyright law as it's currently written is, like software, a creation of the mind, and is only one of an infinite number of possibilities. To pretend that the current law is the only possibility is dishonest. It's reasonable to discuss the many alternatives and to regard the current implementation as unfair and want to change it.
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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.
As far as what they actually are doing, well, it's theft, plain and simple.
Millions of people disagree. It isn't that simple. Stop pretending otherwise.
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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.