Or are they truly unable to produce a profit without it?
It's not about sufficient profit. It's about profit maximization. They will keep pushing these things until the net value to the consumer approaches zero.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
No TV is not over.. it is over for many people.. like I have not even owned a TV in 8 years.. But large ammounts of people watch TV daily is going to be there for a long time atleast...
But the net value of TV to those people is approaching zero. The networks have optimised the business of keeping bums on seats with the absolute minimum entertainment necessary to show the maximum of ad's. The only people these days who say advertising funded TV is good are the marketing parasites.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
While there are obvious disadvantages to this (such as crappier, cheesier scripts), couldn't this be a good thing? I mean, wouldn't you guys like it if commercials were cut down signifigantly? I know that I would.
Doesn't matter where the ad is. The entire purpose of an ad is to steal my time and attention, wherever it is. They'll keep on doing it in every possible place until the net value of the entertainment to the viewer is zero. The Tivo is just a convenient, irrelevant excuse.
You also pay twice, once in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad and secondly in your time and attention.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Ah, you "intrinsic value" people are so cute. So convinced that goods and services are somehow worth some abitrary values based on what they should be worth, as opposed to what people are willing to pay for them.
He said nothing about "intrinsic value". If anything he was talking about the increasing disconnect there is between the cost of producing an item and the cost to the consumer. Whether or not we have efficient, low margin, commodity markets in other words.
If chinese Rolex knockoffs are achieving market parity with real Rolexes, it's because, for the people buying them, they're the same thing.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's simply the fact that the costs of being an informed consumer are too high to actually make it worthwhile. Question is, why might those costs be so high and what can be done about it?
Or, at least, the people buying them have decided they'd rather have 1,000 chinese "rolexes" over their lifetime than a single real thing.
Or possibly have made misinformed decisions. e.g. spyware
When you say the market is "broken," what you really mean is that the market is, well, the market. And that some (most) people disagree with your estimations of intrinsic value. In reality, the market can't be "broken" any more than the weather can be "broken" -- it's a complex system that may evolve in ways we don't like, but if people really didn't like it, they'd change their behavior and the market/weather would trend back to what people consider "normal."
There's this thing called "market failure." Maybe you've heard of it?
Markets in the real world fail for all sorts of reasons. They need regulation, everything from safety regulations to truth in advertising laws to cartel laws to racketeering laws to you name it.
Modern markets are complex balances between competition and cooperation with regulation to limit negative competition (e.g. fraud, theft, protection rackets, bait and switch etc.) and promote positive competition (e.g. optimal pricing, new products, new companies etc.).
Might as well declare that sports, music, or academia is "broken." Large, complex systems tend to evolve. Deal with it.
It's called market failure. Deal with it.
Or at least realize that your ideas of intrinsic value may not be shared by all 5 billion other people on the planet.
He said nothing about intrinsic value. It's obvious that different people have different values for the same thing, the basis of a free market.
What's becoming apparent, as the world's population increases and becomes increasingly interconnected, and individual products become increasingly complex with things like DRM, spyware and rootkits, for each individual it becomes harder to be fully informed about each purchase. This can lead to an increasing disconnect between buying/selling price the GP mentioned and reduced market efficiency.
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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.
In Massachussetts, what percentage of the people are using Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF, and what percentage of them are using software that support ODF?
So what you're saying is that because we use a closed format today we should use it tomorrow. And because we use it tomorrow we should use it the next day? And so on ad infinitum?
Sometimes you need to make a short term investment for long term gain. This is one of those times.
The same applies to any organisation with vendor lockin, on an upgrade train or lacking needed transparency.
In a world of 6,500,000,000+ people and where free software can be copied millions of times all it takes is 0.000001% of companies/people/users coding. It is a statistical certainty that this will happen.
Similar statistics and the economic network effect are the reason why M$ is able to tax the world the ridiculous sum of $40,000,000,000+ per year for basically ten programs and various forms of crippleware.
IP law is currently broken and is getting even more broken as the world's population increases.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Something being ignored is the limitation of a portable media player. You construed this into a laptop, but I will still argue that the term would have been defined in the art to exclude such an item
Apart from size a portable media player is a strict subset of the functionality of the average general purpose personal computer and is thus obvious to somebody versed in the art.
The fact that the USPTO are not competent enough to recognise even that simple fact speaks volumes about their general competence on anything to do with computers. I would've hoped the USPTO has not sunk so low as to award patents on size differences alone.
... most people do not know how to properly analyze a claim.
The "proper way" to analyze a claim being the USPTO's way no doubt. This self serving tunnel vision by the USPTO and people like you is a large part of the patent problem. Your other posts here about patent terminology are equally blinkered.
Please try to understand: most people here know the mechanics of how the USPTO works. Despite your attempts here to baffle people with bullshit so they, and you, miss the bigger picture.
The bigger picture here is that vast numbers of patents (=monopolies) are being awarded that protect nothing but a lawyer's pay check and are acting as roadblocks to innovation, competition and the free market. You can bullshit all you like about the mechanics of patents but the bottom line is you know it's true.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Not entirely true. It's a slow process but non tech savy people are gradually becoming educated. e.g. All my technically illiterate acquaintances are now running SP2/M$WindowsUpdate/AdAware/Spybot/Antivirus and/or Linux/Updates. They weren't before.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
I'm glad that I don't have to write a distributed physics engine for this thing.
Granted, it's harder to program on a multi-processor. But it's not that much harder, more just fear of the unknown.
Programmers are already multiprocessing bigtime to handle multiple IO devices and to watch the wall clock time (independent of the processing time) and it's a rare real world programming problem that can't be easily partitioned, usually geometrically. In the case of the physics engine I'd initially just put the physics engine on a separate CPU. If that wasn't enough I'd just use a farmer-worker paradigm to farm out the physics work to multiple CPU's.
Having said that I'm a little scared of the number of programmers out there who don't know what a race condition is and how to avoid it...
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Unrestricted DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
And before you jump on MS as the ones to blame, they're just the target.
M$ will continue to be 80% to blame until they stop distributing their default user=administrator install. Before SP2 it was 95% to blame.
In a society of billions it is a statistical certainty that a small fractiuon will be acting maliciously. M$ continues to distribute software assuming this is not the case.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
You'd think that "cooltechzone" might be a bit suspicious that units are not mentioned. Just a bit suspicious.
Probably a marketing front site. Many marketing parasites are far more devious and deceptive than even most/.'ers give them credit, let alone the general public.
It's common practice to create and maintain plausible looking "alternative viewpoint" websites designed to manipulate opinion. and to submit posts and moderate on sites like/.. Marketers aren't stupid, they're quite happy to put in strawman viewpoints and other material just to make their marketing propaganda look plausible. On/. a classic is "I like linux but..." and then proceed to trash any viewpoint except the one they're paid to push.
There's millions of dollars involved; do you think the ethics of a large percentage of marketing parasites is going to stop them from doing damn near anything they think they can get away with?
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
I have some code whose critical loop is unparallelizable.
What is it? Is that unparallelizable in theory, or practically speaking unparallelizable? I've yet to see a real world problem that couldn't be parallelized, at least in theory;-), and I'm curious to see one.
Not implying this is the case here but it's been my experience that non-CS scientists (e.g. physicists and chemists), while they are programmers, sometimes don't have a good grasp of just how much computation can be parallelised. Not surprising since it's not their primary area of expertese.
Agree with the other comments in this thread (sic) (sick!) about CPU performance.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
I honestly firmly don't care about music, songs, movies and enterntainment in general.
The moderator probably found that line unbelievable. Depends on your definition of entertainment I guess.
it is interesting that a statement (gp), which simply expresses a belief or a point of view is moderated down as to 'protect' the sensitivities of certain population of/. Since I am not new here I understand that it is not acceptible to express your own opinion on/. if it differs from the major line of thinking here.
Nonsense./. hosts a variety of pro- and anti-copyright opinions with moderations on both from -1 to +5.
A false dichotomy by the way, pushed by vested interests; copyright could vary continuously from zero time to forever. Personally, given current conditions I favour copyrights but only for fairly short periods and varying depending on the class of item.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Where are the incentives if all of your innovations are available to your competitors without compensation?
99% of software written today is in no realistic sense innovative. Just like most other areas of business.
Businesses copy, tweak and improve the approaches, techniques and even products of other businesses on a wholesale basis with no patents or copyrights involved. It's called competition, it works, deal with it.
Vendors would wind up competing solely on price, rather than on adding new features.
You have no evidence for that assertion. Consumers frequently pay top dollar for a name and nothing more. It's a well known economic fact that the lowest price is frequently not the best seller, it's much more complicated than that.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
If there is no copyright, then only secret information has any value. No copyright means less sharing of source code, because why would you surrender your secret information and void its value?
I am aware of the FSF's position, but I have never heard a decent response to the above argument.
Then you're not listening very hard. Economic network effects alone mean shared information can increase in value, to the benefit of both the originator and others. Information only has value when it's used and built upon. Keeping it secret is pointless.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
That is a real number. M$' 2004-2005 annual revenue is $40,000,000,000+. A little less for 2002-2004.
I also said nothing about linux; it's a fact that open standards will lead to a more open, competitive software market, reduced prices and reduced lockin for everybody, government included.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
That works just fine if you define your string with "char s[n];" where n > 1. If you use "char *s;" and later do a calloc() (or malloc() if you want to use uninitialized pointers), you're asking the compiler to keep track of all kinds of variables. That's not its job.
That's why I said "... likely knows...". I'm aware of the problems of variable tracking; I've written small compilers and studied large compilers myself.
In practice most uses of gets() etc. in legacy code I've seen do use static buffers - programmers smart enough to use the malloc() family are usually, though unfortunately not always, smart enough to recognise the problems of buffer overflow and basic memory management in general.
In any case smart compilers are already doing sophisticated variable tracking for the purposes of optimization. Carrying around a memory block size on a pointer variable with all the other information being tracked would actually be fairly simple, by compiler standards anyway. It could even be used for optimisation, with pointers to large blocks being cached more aggressively.
If you really want to do something, take calls like gets(), scanf(), and such out of the standard library and replace them with macros that give compiler errors. Those calls are only useful in controlled environments like academia (hmmmmm...). Put them in the real world, and you have all kinds of problems.
That is quick and a little dirty but may be a better way to go for new code. Like e.g. splint. I was thinking mainly of large legacy code bases that people don't want to touch.
You've got religion; repeating the feel-good PTO gospel without evidence.
I repeat: There is no scientific, objective evidence that patents overall do more good than harm. Given the billion dollar impact that patents have on industry that is criminal.
Stop thinking in terms of patents and not-patents, a false dichotomy. There is a universe of possibilities that we've barely scratched the surface of. IP law is a product of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right. Huge numbers of technology practitioners, not lawyers and PTO employees who have a vested interest, are saying that patents are broken. I think that's pretty good evidence for at least a fundamental rethink.
Yes, overly broad patents do cause more harm than good, but its a problem with the patent reviewers, not the overall system.
Nonsense. That is merely a small part of the overall problem. Even if it were the whole problem it is humanly impossible for a small government department to assess all human knowledge for prior art. Anybody who claims otherwise is lying. Only a scientist working in a very narrow area for a lifetime can do that and even then they make mistakes all the time.
Other fundamental problems with the patent system include the complete non-recognition of independent re-invention by the PTO, inventions whose time has come, the PTO's messed up understanding of what an idea is, their complete non-recognition of how much investment is required in an idea and their legal, category, all-or-nothing reasoning that maps poorly to real life.
Not really, computer chips have dozens of patents, cars have patents, even shampoo bottles and showerhead designs have patents. I wouldn't call these things niche products.
Yep, and those products progressed well long before the patent mafia got in on the act. A classic example being the Kilby patent where the industry was progressing massively before it was resolved. Patents do nothing now except act as road blocks to progress.
People think up new things all the time. The problem is getting that knowledge shared, and actually realizing those ideas as a product for public consumption. Often ideas will get to a point, then they require investment to be fully realized as an actual product.
Yep, and patents more often than not block the promulgation and spread of knowledge and investment. Most ideas have no patent protection and yet are invested in and spread just fine.
e.g. I have the idea of opening a hardware store in a particular small town. Nobody's had that idea before after some investment it turns out to be successful. I think I should get a patent on that idea so nobody can open a competing hardware store in that town or towns of that size. Why not?
Fact is, the mere act of investing in a product is often enough to deter copy cats. The originator is first in the market and can have dominant market share as a result. No government intervention in the citizen's business needed.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
fgets() instead of gets(), strncpy() instead of strcpy(), memset(), just to name a few)
What gets me is, why are these known "gotcha"s allowed to continue to draw breath? As soon as the vulnerability is discovered, it should not get past any new release of a compiler, no matter what warning level. To heck with backwards compatibility: if my code uses a known vulnerability, it is broken and I should fix it.
True. Even better, why doesn't the compiler automatically replace the call to gets() with fgets() and a warning? It likely knows the size of the buffer argument and is already doing wholesale replacement of many library functions with inlines anyway. Even display an error if it can't determine the buffer size. This way much legacy code could be improved with minimal programmer intervention.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Likely, at least some of the sales on eBay are astroturfing by M$ marketing.
Cheap advertising to put a product on eBay and easy to make it look interesting/valuable with stupid pricing so the real box price looks "reasonable". Quite likely many of the posts in this/. story and of course the story itself are plants by marketing parasites also.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Keep in mind that their primary interest is in making it as convenient as possible for you to watch what you want.
No, their primary interest is in maximizing their revenue stream.
To that end they will make the licensing as complicated and as confusing as possible so that people will make errors and pay extra to keep things simple. Exactly as happens with mobile phones now.
It's all about market manipulation; when you've got the technical means to manipulate your customer, i.e. to manipulate the free market, and the law can't keep up, unethical businesses go for it. Just look at pretty much any intellectual property based business today.
Slashdot Mirror
Or are they truly unable to produce a profit without it?
It's not about sufficient profit. It's about profit maximization. They will keep pushing these things until the net value to the consumer approaches zero.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
No TV is not over.. it is over for many people.. like I have not even owned a TV in 8 years.. But large ammounts of people watch TV daily is going to be there for a long time atleast...
But the net value of TV to those people is approaching zero. The networks have optimised the business of keeping bums on seats with the absolute minimum entertainment necessary to show the maximum of ad's. The only people these days who say advertising funded TV is good are the marketing parasites.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
While there are obvious disadvantages to this (such as crappier, cheesier scripts), couldn't this be a good thing? I mean, wouldn't you guys like it if commercials were cut down signifigantly? I know that I would.
Doesn't matter where the ad is. The entire purpose of an ad is to steal my time and attention, wherever it is. They'll keep on doing it in every possible place until the net value of the entertainment to the viewer is zero. The Tivo is just a convenient, irrelevant excuse.
You also pay twice, once in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad and secondly in your time and attention.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
China has nowhere near as many IP lawyers protecting their "valuable intellectual property" as the USA.
Ah, you "intrinsic value" people are so cute. So convinced that goods and services are somehow worth some abitrary values based on what they should be worth, as opposed to what people are willing to pay for them.
He said nothing about "intrinsic value". If anything he was talking about the increasing disconnect there is between the cost of producing an item and the cost to the consumer. Whether or not we have efficient, low margin, commodity markets in other words.
If chinese Rolex knockoffs are achieving market parity with real Rolexes, it's because, for the people buying them, they're the same thing.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's simply the fact that the costs of being an informed consumer are too high to actually make it worthwhile. Question is, why might those costs be so high and what can be done about it?
Or, at least, the people buying them have decided they'd rather have 1,000 chinese "rolexes" over their lifetime than a single real thing.
Or possibly have made misinformed decisions. e.g. spyware
When you say the market is "broken," what you really mean is that the market is, well, the market. And that some (most) people disagree with your estimations of intrinsic value. In reality, the market can't be "broken" any more than the weather can be "broken" -- it's a complex system that may evolve in ways we don't like, but if people really didn't like it, they'd change their behavior and the market/weather would trend back to what people consider "normal."
There's this thing called "market failure." Maybe you've heard of it?
Markets in the real world fail for all sorts of reasons. They need regulation, everything from safety regulations to truth in advertising laws to cartel laws to racketeering laws to you name it.
Modern markets are complex balances between competition and cooperation with regulation to limit negative competition (e.g. fraud, theft, protection rackets, bait and switch etc.) and promote positive competition (e.g. optimal pricing, new products, new companies etc.).
Might as well declare that sports, music, or academia is "broken." Large, complex systems tend to evolve. Deal with it.
It's called market failure. Deal with it.
Or at least realize that your ideas of intrinsic value may not be shared by all 5 billion other people on the planet.
He said nothing about intrinsic value. It's obvious that different people have different values for the same thing, the basis of a free market.
What's becoming apparent, as the world's population increases and becomes increasingly interconnected, and individual products become increasingly complex with things like DRM, spyware and rootkits, for each individual it becomes harder to be fully informed about each purchase. This can lead to an increasing disconnect between buying/selling price the GP mentioned and reduced market efficiency.
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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 isn't flamebait. The person who moderated this either had finger trouble or is a marketing parasite.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
In Massachussetts, what percentage of the people are using Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF, and what percentage of them are using software that support ODF?
So what you're saying is that because we use a closed format today we should use it tomorrow. And because we use it tomorrow we should use it the next day? And so on ad infinitum?
Sometimes you need to make a short term investment for long term gain. This is one of those times.
The same applies to any organisation with vendor lockin, on an upgrade train or lacking needed transparency.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
You are ignoring the statistics.
In a world of 6,500,000,000+ people and where free software can be copied millions of times all it takes is 0.000001% of companies/people/users coding. It is a statistical certainty that this will happen.
Similar statistics and the economic network effect are the reason why M$ is able to tax the world the ridiculous sum of $40,000,000,000+ per year for basically ten programs and various forms of crippleware.
IP law is currently broken and is getting even more broken as the world's population increases.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Something being ignored is the limitation of a portable media player. You construed this into a laptop, but I will still argue that the term would have been defined in the art to exclude such an item
Apart from size a portable media player is a strict subset of the functionality of the average general purpose personal computer and is thus obvious to somebody versed in the art.
The fact that the USPTO are not competent enough to recognise even that simple fact speaks volumes about their general competence on anything to do with computers. I would've hoped the USPTO has not sunk so low as to award patents on size differences alone.
The "proper way" to analyze a claim being the USPTO's way no doubt. This self serving tunnel vision by the USPTO and people like you is a large part of the patent problem. Your other posts here about patent terminology are equally blinkered.
Please try to understand: most people here know the mechanics of how the USPTO works. Despite your attempts here to baffle people with bullshit so they, and you, miss the bigger picture.
The bigger picture here is that vast numbers of patents (=monopolies) are being awarded that protect nothing but a lawyer's pay check and are acting as roadblocks to innovation, competition and the free market. You can bullshit all you like about the mechanics of patents but the bottom line is you know it's true.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Not to mention they accept this blindly.
Not entirely true. It's a slow process but non tech savy people are gradually becoming educated. e.g. All my technically illiterate acquaintances are now running SP2/M$WindowsUpdate/AdAware/Spybot/Antivirus and/or Linux/Updates. They weren't before.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
This week we like Sony?
This is probably Sony marketing 'droids putting out press releases to enhance Sony's "feel good" factor after it took a hit with the DRM crap.
The "feel good" factor is very important for most people when they decide what to buy and thus affects Sony's bottom line.
Expect to see lots of press releases masquarading as articles in the coming months about all the wonderful things Sony is doing.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
I'm glad that I don't have to write a distributed physics engine for this thing.
Granted, it's harder to program on a multi-processor. But it's not that much harder, more just fear of the unknown.
Programmers are already multiprocessing bigtime to handle multiple IO devices and to watch the wall clock time (independent of the processing time) and it's a rare real world programming problem that can't be easily partitioned, usually geometrically. In the case of the physics engine I'd initially just put the physics engine on a separate CPU. If that wasn't enough I'd just use a farmer-worker paradigm to farm out the physics work to multiple CPU's.
Having said that I'm a little scared of the number of programmers out there who don't know what a race condition is and how to avoid it...
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Unrestricted DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
And before you jump on MS as the ones to blame, they're just the target.
M$ will continue to be 80% to blame until they stop distributing their default user=administrator install. Before SP2 it was 95% to blame.
In a society of billions it is a statistical certainty that a small fractiuon will be acting maliciously. M$ continues to distribute software assuming this is not the case.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
You'd think that "cooltechzone" might be a bit suspicious that units are not mentioned. Just a bit suspicious.
Probably a marketing front site. Many marketing parasites are far more devious and deceptive than even most /.'ers give them credit, let alone the general public.
It's common practice to create and maintain plausible looking "alternative viewpoint" websites designed to manipulate opinion. and to submit posts and moderate on sites like /.. Marketers aren't stupid, they're quite happy to put in strawman viewpoints and other material just to make their marketing propaganda look plausible. On /. a classic is "I like linux but ..." and then proceed to trash any viewpoint except the one they're paid to push.
There's millions of dollars involved; do you think the ethics of a large percentage of marketing parasites is going to stop them from doing damn near anything they think they can get away with?
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
I have some code whose critical loop is unparallelizable.
What is it? Is that unparallelizable in theory, or practically speaking unparallelizable? I've yet to see a real world problem that couldn't be parallelized, at least in theory ;-), and I'm curious to see one.
Not implying this is the case here but it's been my experience that non-CS scientists (e.g. physicists and chemists), while they are programmers, sometimes don't have a good grasp of just how much computation can be parallelised. Not surprising since it's not their primary area of expertese.
Agree with the other comments in this thread (sic) (sick!) about CPU performance.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
I honestly firmly don't care about music, songs, movies and enterntainment in general.
The moderator probably found that line unbelievable. Depends on your definition of entertainment I guess.
it is interesting that a statement (gp), which simply expresses a belief or a point of view is moderated down as to 'protect' the sensitivities of certain population of /. Since I am not new here I understand that it is not acceptible to express your own opinion on /. if it differs from the major line of thinking here.
Nonsense. /. hosts a variety of pro- and anti-copyright opinions with moderations on both from -1 to +5.
A false dichotomy by the way, pushed by vested interests; copyright could vary continuously from zero time to forever. Personally, given current conditions I favour copyrights but only for fairly short periods and varying depending on the class of item.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Where are the incentives if all of your innovations are available to your competitors without compensation?
99% of software written today is in no realistic sense innovative. Just like most other areas of business.
Businesses copy, tweak and improve the approaches, techniques and even products of other businesses on a wholesale basis with no patents or copyrights involved. It's called competition, it works, deal with it.
Vendors would wind up competing solely on price, rather than on adding new features.
You have no evidence for that assertion. Consumers frequently pay top dollar for a name and nothing more. It's a well known economic fact that the lowest price is frequently not the best seller, it's much more complicated than that.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
If there is no copyright, then only secret information has any value. No copyright means less sharing of source code, because why would you surrender your secret information and void its value?
I am aware of the FSF's position, but I have never heard a decent response to the above argument.
Then you're not listening very hard. Economic network effects alone mean shared information can increase in value, to the benefit of both the originator and others. Information only has value when it's used and built upon. Keeping it secret is pointless.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Why not come up with some real numbers?
That is a real number. M$' 2004-2005 annual revenue is $40,000,000,000+. A little less for 2002-2004.
I also said nothing about linux; it's a fact that open standards will lead to a more open, competitive software market, reduced prices and reduced lockin for everybody, government included.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
But don't think for one minute that either your taxes are going to go down or things will improve for the tax payer.
Oh, I don't know. Not having to pay the $40,000,000,000+ per year M$tax simply to maintain interoperability and standardisation would be a good start.
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DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
That works just fine if you define your string with "char s[n];" where n > 1. If you use "char *s;" and later do a calloc() (or malloc() if you want to use uninitialized pointers), you're asking the compiler to keep track of all kinds of variables. That's not its job.
That's why I said "... likely knows ...". I'm aware of the problems of variable tracking; I've written small compilers and studied large compilers myself.
In practice most uses of gets() etc. in legacy code I've seen do use static buffers - programmers smart enough to use the malloc() family are usually, though unfortunately not always, smart enough to recognise the problems of buffer overflow and basic memory management in general.
In any case smart compilers are already doing sophisticated variable tracking for the purposes of optimization. Carrying around a memory block size on a pointer variable with all the other information being tracked would actually be fairly simple, by compiler standards anyway. It could even be used for optimisation, with pointers to large blocks being cached more aggressively.
If you really want to do something, take calls like gets(), scanf(), and such out of the standard library and replace them with macros that give compiler errors. Those calls are only useful in controlled environments like academia (hmmmmm...). Put them in the real world, and you have all kinds of problems.
That is quick and a little dirty but may be a better way to go for new code. Like e.g. splint. I was thinking mainly of large legacy code bases that people don't want to touch.
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Are you a creator or a consumer?
You've got religion; repeating the feel-good PTO gospel without evidence.
I repeat: There is no scientific, objective evidence that patents overall do more good than harm. Given the billion dollar impact that patents have on industry that is criminal.
Stop thinking in terms of patents and not-patents, a false dichotomy. There is a universe of possibilities that we've barely scratched the surface of. IP law is a product of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right. Huge numbers of technology practitioners, not lawyers and PTO employees who have a vested interest, are saying that patents are broken. I think that's pretty good evidence for at least a fundamental rethink.
Yes, overly broad patents do cause more harm than good, but its a problem with the patent reviewers, not the overall system.
Nonsense. That is merely a small part of the overall problem. Even if it were the whole problem it is humanly impossible for a small government department to assess all human knowledge for prior art. Anybody who claims otherwise is lying. Only a scientist working in a very narrow area for a lifetime can do that and even then they make mistakes all the time.
Other fundamental problems with the patent system include the complete non-recognition of independent re-invention by the PTO, inventions whose time has come, the PTO's messed up understanding of what an idea is, their complete non-recognition of how much investment is required in an idea and their legal, category, all-or-nothing reasoning that maps poorly to real life.
Not really, computer chips have dozens of patents, cars have patents, even shampoo bottles and showerhead designs have patents. I wouldn't call these things niche products.
Yep, and those products progressed well long before the patent mafia got in on the act. A classic example being the Kilby patent where the industry was progressing massively before it was resolved. Patents do nothing now except act as road blocks to progress.
People think up new things all the time. The problem is getting that knowledge shared, and actually realizing those ideas as a product for public consumption. Often ideas will get to a point, then they require investment to be fully realized as an actual product.
Yep, and patents more often than not block the promulgation and spread of knowledge and investment. Most ideas have no patent protection and yet are invested in and spread just fine.
e.g. I have the idea of opening a hardware store in a particular small town. Nobody's had that idea before after some investment it turns out to be successful. I think I should get a patent on that idea so nobody can open a competing hardware store in that town or towns of that size. Why not?
Fact is, the mere act of investing in a product is often enough to deter copy cats. The originator is first in the market and can have dominant market share as a result. No government intervention in the citizen's business needed.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
fgets() instead of gets(), strncpy() instead of strcpy(), memset(), just to name a few)
What gets me is, why are these known "gotcha"s allowed to continue to draw breath? As soon as the vulnerability is discovered, it should not get past any new release of a compiler, no matter what warning level. To heck with backwards compatibility: if my code uses a known vulnerability, it is broken and I should fix it.
True. Even better, why doesn't the compiler automatically replace the call to gets() with fgets() and a warning? It likely knows the size of the buffer argument and is already doing wholesale replacement of many library functions with inlines anyway. Even display an error if it can't determine the buffer size. This way much legacy code could be improved with minimal programmer intervention.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
WTF?!?
Likely, at least some of the sales on eBay are astroturfing by M$ marketing.
Cheap advertising to put a product on eBay and easy to make it look interesting/valuable with stupid pricing so the real box price looks "reasonable". Quite likely many of the posts in this /. story and of course the story itself are plants by marketing parasites also.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Keep in mind that their primary interest is in making it as convenient as possible for you to watch what you want.
No, their primary interest is in maximizing their revenue stream.
To that end they will make the licensing as complicated and as confusing as possible so that people will make errors and pay extra to keep things simple. Exactly as happens with mobile phones now.
It's all about market manipulation; when you've got the technical means to manipulate your customer, i.e. to manipulate the free market, and the law can't keep up, unethical businesses go for it. Just look at pretty much any intellectual property based business today.
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DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation